Weekly Roundup – October 28th, 2025
Roundup Links
Why Podcast Advertisers Are Holding Back Close to $1 Billion
"While video podcasting is exploding in popularity, advertisers say they’re still holding back ad dollars due to the lack of clear measurement across the different mediums.
According to a survey from podcast advertising agency Oxford Road, 76 percent of brands said they would increase their podcast spend if YouTube attribution were standardized with audio, and close to a quarter would increase spend by 50 percent or more. In total, this could amount to an additional $1 billion in ad spend, as calculated by the agency.
The frustration comes as the advertising landscape for the growing medium has shifted. In the early days, direct-to-consumer brands were more likely to use promo codes on podcasts, which could then be easily tracked. Measurement improved more in the past several years, as advertisers could use pixels, or a URL embedded in the podcast’s RSS feed, to identify listeners and see whether they made a purchase. But as YouTube became the dominant platform for podcasting and as some platforms moved away from pixels, advertisers found they could not standardize how they measure ads across Apple, Spotify and YouTube."
Our Take: This is the fundamental dilemma of streaming. Virtually everyone streams but the fragmented nature of how one streams and on which platforms means that accurate ad measurement is hard to come by even if individual platforms have real-time user data. This impedes the path to general profitability for streaming as brands are hesitant to spend the big dollars on a medium with varying degrees of success and opaque ad performance metrics. Having a handful of mediums in the past meant that people were listening to AM/FM Radio in the car, watching Cable TV at home, and maybe reading the Newspaper in the morning. This was the gamut of daily media use. Today, the plethora of platforms and media types makes it almost impossible to track users as they weave their way through the web, leaving a serpentine digital footprint.
Left-wing ideas have wrecked Democrats’ brand, new report warns
"Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report shared first with Semafor.
The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings, including that 70% of voters think the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” Most voters, the group found, believe the party over-prioritizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” and “fighting climate change” while not caring about “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” (Welcome began as a PAC in 2022, then founded a nonprofit with the same name for political research.)
Elected Democrats will receive copies of the report after its Monday publication, followed by events to promote it in DC and New York. The report urges party members to abandon some of the progressive language about race, abortion, and LGBTQ issues that Democrats began using after the 2012 election — and recommends the nomination of more candidates willing to vote with Republicans on conservative immigration and crime bills."
Our Take: We have seen numerous ‘internal reports’ commissioned to address the Democrats’ defeat in the 2024 election and their prospects in upcoming national elections and they all seem to make the same point: to the lay voter, Democrats appear to prioritize the 'boutique' concerns of educated, affluent, white liberals, over working class voters who value public safety, a secure border, and the economy most. As Semafor writes, will they make a more centrist shift like they did under Bill Clinton, or continue to potentially siphon off minority groups and the working class (of all races and ethnicities) to Republicans?
Sports Leagues Feared a Betting Scandal Like This. Will Anything Change?
"The signs that gambling has become embedded in American sports culture are impossible to miss. Sportsbooks have set up shop at stadiums, televised games include prods to bet during the action and star athletes like LeBron James promote gambling companies as “talent ambassadors.”
In the seven years since a Supreme Court decision cleared the way for legalized sports betting, the major U.S. sports leagues have shed any hesitations they had about gambling. They are now profiting — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — from partnerships with sports betting companies.
Team owners have made the calculation that the financial upside is worth “the potential expected likely loss if some form of scandal were to come up,” said Marc Edelman, a law professor and director of sports ethics at Baruch College in New York. “But who’s to say whether or not that’s a rational conclusion?”
That is the question that American sports leagues are now reckoning with after federal authorities on Thursday revealed details in a wide-ranging criminal sports betting investigation nicknamed “Nothing but Bet.”"
Our Take: These scandals will continue to happen. It takes 5 minutes to fire up draftkings, create an account, and immediately start betting on games. An elite athlete simply having an expanded circle of family and friends means that someone is going to be betting on the game in which that athlete appears, and even perhaps unconsciously might be relying on some info they heard. The cat’s out of the bag. It’s not going back in. Wallstreet and Washington lobbyists have cemented mobile sportsbetting as an intrinsic feature of the sporting landscape. Which is somewhat absurd considering it’s only been in the past few years that it saw widespread legalization. In the past, betting in person meant an athlete and/or their friends and family had to go where it was legal, or to a bookie if they were sans scruples. That past friction was somewhat prohibitive. And while these recent NBA cases did not necessarily revolve around mobile betting apps, the rampant messaging imploring a viewer or listener to bet on a game creates a culture where sports betting is tacitly endorsed and encouraged. And to think that athletes themselves would be immune of this ubiquitous messaging is misguided.
In a shift, more Republicans now say calling people out on social media represents accountability
"A majority of U.S. adults (56%) say that those who call out others on social media for posts that might be considered offensive are mainly holding people accountable for their actions. A smaller share (40%) say those who do this are more likely to punish people who didn’t deserve it.
Both in 2022 and 2020, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to see users posting these callouts as mainly holding people accountable. Today, however, the partisan gap in these views has essentially disappeared."
Our Take: Americans, of any political stripe, seem to approve of what is colloquially known as ‘Cancel Culture.’ They might dislike the term but both sides see that public shaming, ostracism, and moral signaling as social enforcement mechanisms as largely positive. At least we have that in common!
