UK advertising market ‘slow’ to recognise potential of podcast space, claims Goalhanger’s Tony Pastor

Advertising revenues for podcasts in the US have reached US$2.4bn

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The UK advertising market “hasn’t woken up” to the potential of podcasts to engage Millennial and Gen-Z consumers, with commercial investment lagging far behind the US, says Goalhanger co-founder Tony Pastor.

Pastor runs the podcast prodco alongside Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker and former ITV controller of sport Jack Davenport. The London-based company’s shows such as The Rest is Football, The Rest is Politics and The Rest is History reach over 40 million people each month.

YouTube now has more than 1 billion monthly viewers for podcast content worldwide, according to the Google-owned video sharing platform. In 2024, users watched more than 400 million hours of vodcasts (the video version of podcasts) monthly on living-room devices, it claims.

In the US, advertising revenues for podcasts reached US$2.4bn, dwarfing the UK figure of £80m.

However, Pastor claims that those statistics don’t tell the full story and that the UK ad sector has failed to exploit the worldwide popularity of the genre.

“That £83m in UK advertising spend is actually very small,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show. “If you work it out, that means that US$1.60 was spent for every person in the UK on podcast advertising, while the same number in the US was US$7.

“The disproportionate state of play just shows how mature their market is and how immature ours is, I’m afraid.

“I think that the ad market in the UK is very traditional, it’s still trading deals between ad agencies and companies that have been around for a long time, like ITV.

“The ad world hasn’t really woken up and realised that the podcast audience is super engaged. That message hasn’t got through. Only something like 18% of brands have ever considered advertising on a podcast, it’s really quite a low number.”

Goalhanger was originally launched as a traditional TV prodco, making sports-skewing programming like Football, Prince William and Our Mental Health for the BBC, and Keane & Vieira: Best of Enemies for ITV.

The explosion of interest in shows such as The Rest is Football prompted Goalhanger to shutter its TV production arm last November and focus on its podcast output.

Media audience measurement firm Nielsen says that YouTube is now the most streamed service on smart TVs in the US, while the platform’s chief executive Neal Mohan last month said TV screens had officially overtaken mobile phones and desktop computers as the primary device for viewing the platform’s content Stateside.

Goalhanger is pivoting to tap into the lucrative US market through a transatlantic partnership with media group Wheelhouse. The companies will jointly develop projects based on The Rest is History, which now spans more than 600 episodes, delving into historical events, topics and figures.

‘If you can conquer the US it makes a lot of business sense, as each listener or viewer in the US is worth about four times a Brit,” Pastor said. “We’ve tried to establish the idea that our content works on either side of the Atlantic by using some US-based hosts on our shows, such as Anthony Scaramucci on our politics podcast and David McCloskey on The Rest is Classified.

“Two-thirds of our audience is under the age of 43-years-old, so it’s a very attractive audience.”

The shift in consumption from audio podcasts to visual vodcasts has seen music streaming service Spotify expand its focus on the latter, by offering creators tools to integrate video into their existing audio shows.

Netflix too is reportedly eager to capitalise on the trend and is considering hosting vodcasts on its platform.

“My theory is that it’s to do with the concept of time spent on a platform,” Pastor told The Media Show. “People consuming podcasts spend between 40- and 45-minutes listening or watching. Netflix has seen this happening and wants to capture that attention span.”