Podcasts used to be ad-free oases. Not anymore.

Advertisements took up an average of 10.9% of podcast airtime in the second quarter of this year, up from 7.9% in the second quarter of 2021, according to new research from marketing agency Oxford Road and audio measurement company Podscribe.

In 2024, podcasters will earn 6 cents from ads for every hour of programming heard by a listener, up from less than 5 cents in 2021 and 2 cents in 2015.

To some, these numbers represent a success for podcasting, a medium that has been steadily growing its audience for two decades, offering more personal experiences than other media, and that has only recently convinced major international brands to become advertisers.

Others, however, fear that the industry is becoming too greedy in the race for profits, which could end up killing value for advertisers and losing the intimacy of the listener experience.

“Some publishers have already shifted their ad load beyond where it needs to be,” said Dan Granger, CEO and founder of Oxford Road, which helps marketers create and buy ad time for podcasts. “That’s not going in a direction that’s going to end well for any of us.”

The first podcasts to sell ads often put one ad at the beginning of the show and another in the middle. Now it’s not uncommon for podcasts to air ads every 10 minutes, put two or three ads in between commercials, and play even more at the end of each episode. For example, a recent hour-long episode of Alex Cooper’s popular podcast “Call Her Daddy” featured eight ads in four slots.

Analysts say the increasing amount of advertising time in each episode — known in the industry as advertising load — is driven by both supply and demand trends.

Early podcast advertisers tended to be smaller companies that sold directly to consumers and couldn’t afford TV ads, and podcasters brokered deals, wrote scripts, and read ads themselves. House brands with big budgets began to join the medium as listenership grew and new podcast networks and automated bidding made it easier for marketers to buy time at scale.

The industry also faced pressure to make more money.

Audio-streaming giant Spotify has spent more than $1 billion buying up podcast studios like Gimlet and signing the likes of former President Barack Obama, but it has struggled to turn a profit on its investment and has laid off workers. A number of other podcasting companies and divisions, including Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries, NPR and New York Public Radio, have laid off workers in the past year in what Slate described as a “podcasting bloodbath” after several weak quarters in digital advertising. And podcasting company Paradiso Media filed for bankruptcy in July.

“You saw markets tightening while there were huge commitments to pay for Meghan Markle and Kim Kardashian,” Granger said. “You can’t just force advertisers to pay a premium because the business wasn’t growing in that direction, so they were forced to create new avenues to maximize their profits, and as a result we have a heavier advertising burden.”

Finding the skip button

Of course, the number of ads in podcasts is still relatively low compared to almost every other type of media, according to data from Emarketer. Some analysts believe that the most popular podcasts could use even more ads, given the historical ability of American consumers to endure commercial breaks on TV and radio. Only 10% of podcast listeners describe podcast ads as unbearable or barely bearable, while 42% find them “somewhat annoying but bearable,” according to SoundsProfitable, a podcast research and advocacy group.

But other podcast executives believe that adding more ads to podcast episodes would backfire. Research from Oxford Road and Podscribe found that the likelihood that a listener will respond to an ad—by visiting the advertiser’s website or making a purchase, for example—decreases as the number of ads per episode increases.

A listener might not bother to skip a single ad, but they might be more inclined to do so if they watch two minutes of ads at once, says Pete Birsinger, founder and CEO of Podscribe.

Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton, the comedians behind the podcast “Celebrity Memoir Book Club,” admitted that they tried multiple podcast ad networks to find a partner that wouldn’t pressure them to fill their episodes with as many ads as possible, especially ads produced by companies they don’t advertise themselves.

“We would rather work with a smaller number of brands that we really believe in and can sell to you successfully, rather than having these cheap ads in the background that people are fast-forwarding through,” Parker said.

In addition to selling ads through the Vox Media network, where the hosts eventually ended up, they make money by hosting shows in front of a live audience and by running a Patreon account, from which fans charge $5 or $10 a month for extra episodes and other perks.

Defector, an employee-owned sports and culture media company that makes podcasts like “The Distraction” and “Normal Gossip,” has opened up its shows to producer-produced ads sold through programmatic platforms. But the company is more concerned with the quality of ads than the quantity, says Jasper Wang, vice president of revenue and operations.

“If you feel you’re getting the right group of sponsors, then maybe you have a little more freedom to interact with the audience by adding a slot here and there,” he said.

Write to Katie Deighton at [email protected]