How to make money podcasting in 2026

Podcasts make money in five ways: advertising (sponsors you sell yourself, or ads your host or Spotify inserts), listener support (paid subscriptions and memberships), platform payouts for video episodes on YouTube and Spotify, affiliate links, and selling your own things: products, services and live shows. Most shows combine several, because each pays on a different part of the audience.

Advertising is the best-known way. US podcast ad revenue reached $2.9 billion in 2025, up 17.6% on 2024, according to the IAB and PwC's annual internet advertising report. An ad gets into your show in one of three ways:

• Host-read sponsorships. You read the ad in your own words, usually 30 or 60 seconds before or during the episode. They carry the highest rates in Libsyn's table below. You sell them yourself, through an agency, or through your host.
• Dynamic ad insertion. Your host stitches ads into the audio when someone downloads or streams an episode, so the same episode can carry this month's ad today and a different one next year, across your whole back catalog. The ad can still be read by you, or be a produced spot. The IAB's 2023 study found dynamic insertion carried 92% of US podcast ad revenue in 2022.
• Programmatic ads. Produced ads an advertiser buys across many shows at once, by audience rather than by show. They need no selling on your part and pay the least in Libsyn's rates below.

Ads are priced by CPM: the cost per 1,000 downloads. Libsyn Ads, the ad network of the podcast host Libsyn, counts the downloads a new episode gets in its first 30 days and multiplies them by the CPM. Its 2026 rate guide lists:

A worked example, with an assumption you should replace with your own number: if a new episode gets 5,000 downloads in its first 30 days (assumed), a 60-second host-read ad at $25 CPM is worth 5,000 ÷ 1,000 × $25 = $125. Sell 2 spots in each of 4 weekly episodes and that's $1,000 a month, if every spot sells, which for a new show it often won't. These are rates as one network reports them; what you get depends on your topic, your audience and how well you sell.

Getting ads through your host is the easiest start, and each sets its own bar. Acast lets shows with 1,000+ monthly listeners apply to its marketplace and says most start seeing revenue around 5,000 a month. Buzzsprout Ads opens at 1,000 downloads in 30 days (on a paid plan, with five episodes of 23 minutes or more), but its ads are promotions for other podcasts, paying 0.7 to 1.4 cents a download. Libsyn's programmatic ads have no minimum and pay 50% of the revenue (60% from 50,000 downloads a month), while its host-read marketplace asks for 20,000 downloads per episode.

A small share of your listeners will pay for more of the show: bonus episodes, an ad-free feed, early access, a community. You can sell that in the apps they already use, or on your own platform:

• Apple Podcasts Subscriptions. Join the Apple Podcasters Program ($19.99 a year in the US), set your own monthly or annual price, and offer free trials if you like. Apple says you receive 70% of the price at each billing cycle, minus taxes, and 85% once a subscriber has a year of paid service; your ads and other income stay yours. It pays monthly. Subscriber episodes go out through Apple Podcasts Connect or a host that supports it. They're audio only for now: Apple said on September 22, 2026 that video is coming to subscriptions.
• Spotify Memberships. On October 20, 2026, Spotify's Podcast Subscriptions became Memberships, for shows hosted on Spotify for Creators or Megaphone in 34 countries. You set up to 3 tiers, each with its own price and benefits, like bonus or member-only video episodes, fewer ads, or early episodes, and you keep 90%: a 10% platform fee covers processing, currency and payout fees. Shows created from October 20 need 3 episodes, 100 listeners or viewers and 100 hours on Spotify in the last 30 days; shows that already offered Subscriptions stay eligible. The rest of what Spotify pays is in how much Spotify pays podcasters.
• Patreon or your own membership. Members pay you monthly for extras, whatever host and apps you use. Patreon's standard plan, for pages published after August 4, 2025, takes 10% plus payment processing. Memberships bought inside Patreon's iPhone app also carry Apple's App Store fee (30%, then 15% after a year of billing); Patreon's default raises iPhone prices so you earn the same, and US fans can join on the web instead.

What sells is more of what people already like, not something different. A bonus episode a month, the ad-free version of every episode, or early access are the simplest to keep up, because they come from work you're already doing.

Two platforms share their own ad revenue with podcasters: YouTube, for video, and Spotify, for audio and video. If you haven't filmed an episode yet, start with how to start a video podcast.

YouTube. Full episodes are long videos, and watch hours on them, podcasts included, count toward the YouTube Partner Program. For ad revenue you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours in the last 12 months, or 10 million Shorts views in 90 days. YouTube then pays you 55% of the net ad revenue on your long videos. Channels that apply from February 1, 2027 need 8,000 watch hours in 365 days or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days instead; channels already in aren't affected. The full rules are in how to get monetized on YouTube, what views pay in how much YouTube pays, and you can try your own numbers in the YouTube money calculator. Full episodes help here: an hour of video earns watch hours quickly.

Spotify. The Spotify Partner Program, launched in January 2025, is open to shows hosted on Spotify for Creators with a legal address in an eligible country, at least 3 published episodes, and at least 2,000 consumption hours and 1,000 audience members on Spotify in the last 30 days. Spotify lowered those bars in January 2026 (from 12 episodes, 10,000 hours and 2,000 listeners). Members earn:

• 50% of ad revenue each time an ad Spotify sells plays in your episodes, on Spotify or off it.
• Premium video revenue when Premium subscribers in select countries watch your video episodes, which they see without Spotify's inserted ads. Spotify pays it by its own formula, based on things like how much Premium members watch and where they are, and doesn't publish a rate.

Both need at least one ad break in the episode. Spotify pays monthly once you're owed $10, and to stay in, a show must publish an episode and earn $10 in any six months. It runs in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and much of western and northern Europe. On September 17, 2026 Spotify announced it would add 37 more countries this fall, among them Italy, Spain, Poland, Mexico and Brazil, and its help center gives October 20, 2026 as the date they join. Spotify says it paid podcasters and publishers more than $100 million in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

These don't depend on any platform's program, and some work from the first episode:

• Affiliate links. Recommend the tools, books or gear you actually use, with a link from the store's own affiliate program in your show notes and a short code people can remember. You earn a commission on each sale. It suits shows about a skill or a hobby, where listeners are already looking to buy.
• Your own services. A podcast is a long, free sample of how you think. For a consultant, coach, lawyer or agency, one client a month from the show can be worth more than any ad deal, at almost any audience size.
• Your own products. A course, a book, templates, a paid newsletter, merch with the show's inside jokes. You keep most of the money, but you have to make and support them.
• Live shows. Recording an episode in front of an audience sells tickets and makes an episode. It works when enough listeners live near one venue to fill it, which your listener stats by country and city, where your host shows them, can tell you.

There's no single number. The platforms' own bars give some fixed points, and the rest is a rule of thumb. This table is a rough guide from those bars, not data on what shows earn:

Topic matters too. Libsyn Ads' host-read rates run from $30 CPM for business shows down to $22 for games and leisure, and a show with a clear audience (dentists, founders, golfers) is easier to match with a sponsor who wants exactly those listeners.

Every way to earn above multiplies your audience by a rate, so the biggest lever is the audience. And podcasts are hard to discover: an episode reaches the people who already follow the show. A clip reaches people who don't. TikTok, Reels and Shorts show clips by what people watch, not who they follow, so forty seconds of your best story can put the show in front of strangers every day, and each clip points back to the full episode. The plan for that is in how to grow a podcast with clips, and picking the moments is in how to clip a podcast.

By hand, a week of clips means watching the episode again to find the moments, cutting each one, reframing two or three people into a vertical frame and captioning every word, on top of editing the episode itself. That's the part Clyper does. Paste the episode's YouTube link or upload the video (up to 4 hours), and it reads the transcript to find the moments that stand on their own, cuts each on whole sentences, frames whoever's talking and switches as the speaker changes, and captions every word in one of 5 styles. You choose how many clips you want, up to 30 from an hour-long episode, which uses 60 credits, and download 1080 × 1920 MP4s with no watermark. More in podcast clips with Clyper. Audio-only show? Turn moments into audiograms with the free audiogram maker.