WARC, the international marketing intelligence service, forecasts podcasts to account for 4.5 per cent($1.6bn) of global audio advertising spend by 2022, which his the double the expected investment of this year. The company said in a statement  that this forecast is almost double the $885m in expected investment this year. This expectation comes at the time when Spotify took recent podcast acquisitions.

Spotify’s recent acquisitions of podcast specialists reflect the potential of podcast spend to outpace the wider online audio over the coming years, the company said.The company said in the statement that Spotify is also investing in podcasting in its quest to become world’s largest audio platform.  Spotify is the third most-popular platform for podcasts, according to GlobalWebIndex, attracting 28.3 per cent of listeners. This compares to a 53.0 per cent share for YouTube, and a 28.8 per cent share of Apple.

According to WARC, one in three people now listen to a podcast each month and four in five podcast listeners do not mind ads as a means of supporting podcast content.  The US is by far the world’s largest market for podcast advertising, accounting for an estimated 61.8 per cent of the format’s global spend last year ($402m). The IAB expects this to grow 28.0 per cent to $514.5m this year.