The list of podcasters who’ve abandoned their shows is growing.
In January, we predicted podcasting would face a reckoning as the industry got more crowded and shifted more toward video. Now we’re seeing this start to bubble up.
Creators who have thrown in the towel recently include veteran YouTubers Rhett & Link, The Try Guys, Shelby Church and Barstool Sports personality Kevin Clancy, who started his podcast back in 2012.
A big part of the draw to podcasting has been that it appears wildly lucrative, at least when you look at the very top. Scott Galloway projects he’ll earn at least $25 million from podcasting this year, while Joe Rogan has a $250 million deal with Spotify. These success stories dominate headlines and fuel the perception that podcasting is a viable business for creators willing to put in the work.
But for the vast majority of podcasters, the math doesn’t add up, especially given the increased time, costs and logistics that the shift to video has added to producing a show.
The top 500 podcasts during the fourth quarter of 2025 accounted for nearly half of podcast ad spending in the US, with advertisers spending an average of $422,000 per month on those shows, per Magellan AI, which analyzes podcast advertising data. Spending dropped dramatically after that, with podcasts ranked 501 through 3,000 earning roughly one-tenth of that amount on average.
Even for creators who are making good money, the tradeoff isn’t always worth it. As the lines between video and podcasts have blurred, there’s now little difference between the two. Rhett & Link recently told us they decided to shut down their podcast “Ear Biscuits” because it was essentially another hour of their popular YouTube show.
Plus, the battle for guests has become even fiercer. Barstool’s Clancy put it this way to the Wall Street Journal: “We used to be able to get guests like an A-list star who’s promoting his Marvel movie. Now he’s gonna go on Travis Kelce, and there’s really no time left for us.”
Most of the podcasters who have ditched their shows so far are men. That’s likely because there are simply more men who have a podcast: Men host roughly two-thirds of top podcasts and make up nearly three-quarters of podcast guests, according to research from USC Annenberg.
But we ultimately expect the pivot to video to hit women and minorities especially hard. They’re not necessarily more likely than men to abandon a show once they’ve built an audience, but they could be discouraged from giving podcasting a shot in the first place.
Data supports this. Men are almost twice as likely as women to start a podcast, but women are slightly more likely to stick with it once they’ve started, per Sounds Profitable. That suggests there are other barriers to entry that women face.
Video is likely to be a major one. While it creates new opportunities to distribute shows and make money, it also opens up hosts and their guests to more scrutiny. That includes appearance-based discrimination and online harassment, which already disproportionately affect women and minorities.
It’s something we thought a lot about when we launched the Scalable podcast. We knew we’d have to be camera-ready every week and have a tough skin about potential negative comments online. We also saw how much more work goes into creating a video show than one that’s just audio.
In the end, we decided the benefits of video would outweigh the negatives. We hope more women and underrepresented creators feel the same and stick it out: Alternative media like podcasts have long been important channels for diverse voices and audiences.
🛍️Affiliate Marketing Is SO Back
Instagram creators can now tag up to 30 products in a Reel and earn commissions by adding affiliate links. Over on Facebook, creators can connect their accounts to affiliate program partners like Amazon and tag products directly in posts and Reels to earn a commission. Users make the purchase on the partner app.
Meanwhile, YouTube this week expanded access to its affiliate program to all creators in the YouTube Partner Program who have at least 500 subscribers.
These features are mostly geared toward small and mid-sized creators, who have become more popular partners for brands that want to drive direct sales and attribute them properly. Almost half of US influencer marketing spending will go to micro and nano-influencers this year, per EMARKETER.
Affiliate marketing has also been a boon for rivals like TikTok and LTK. The type of affiliate experience these companies offer is different: LTK’s is more curated while TikTok is about flooding the feed with trending content. On TikTok, for example, a user may purchase an item from a creator they’ve never even seen before, while on LTK or ShopMy, users tend to already follow these creators on social media and have more trust in their recommendations. But both options offer brands an easier way to manage affiliate partners at scale and centralize their efforts.
For Meta, the new program also allows it to drive more commerce on the platform, without hosting the experience itself. As the company has learned over the years, many people don’t want to buy directly on the platform. (Hear more about Meta’s complicated social commerce history in the video below.)
Still, creators are likely to be skeptical. In 2022, Meta shuttered its affiliate marketing program on Instagram. Most recently, the company came under fire for a “Shop the Look” button that added AI-generated recommendations to their content without their consent. Last month, Instagram told us it was a limited test and would take feedback from creators before rolling it out more broadly.
Meta Matters
Meta Platforms began laying off several hundred employees on Wednesday, including in recruiting, sales and its virtual reality division.
At the same time, the company is incentivizing its top executives to grow the company exponentially with a new stock option program, which could pay some of them hundreds of millions of dollars, the Wall Street Journal reported.
We covered more of Meta’s recent moves, from a new creator monetization program on Facebook to why it’s shutting down Horizon Worlds, in today’s podcast, embedded below.
More Shop Talk
The social commerce news hasn’t stopped this week, in part due to Shoptalk, the annual retail conference in Las Vegas.
Orca merged with fellow social commerce agency Sapphire Studios to form a new company called Third, which is backed by private equity firm Growth Catalyst Partners. Third’s offering will include shoppable livestreams, social commerce operations and affiliate marketing, in a bet that brands will want one place where they can build and grow sales across platforms like TikTok, Whatnot, Snap and Meta.
MagicLinks, a creator commerce company, launched AI Shelf, a tool designed to help brands better show up in AI search results. It works by analyzing creators’ sponsored YouTube videos, such as video titles and transcriptions, to assess how the brands’ products appear in AI-generated answers. The launch comes as more people turn to AI chatbots for product recommendations and as YouTube has become the top source cited by large-language models.
Amaze, a creator commerce company, launched a new media platform, which turns data from creators, storefront visits and purchases into information that brands can use to better target audiences and run their marketing.
What’s In A Name?
Picking a name for our company was one of the hardest decisions we had to make when we founded Scalable. Max Tcheyan, co-founder and CEO of a new food media company, explained how his team landed on the name Caper.
I must have had a list of about 80-something names and Caper just kind of kept winning out. It offered us a way to be a little more creative and less on the nose. The double entendre is a fun part of it.
A caper is a common ingredient in Mediterranean recipes, but it also means an escapade or adventure. That is exactly what Caper, which officially launched earlier this month, is trying to convey: It’s focused less on what’s on the plate and more on what’s happening in the restaurant industry.
Recent Caper stories have included a piece about a prominent New York restauranter appearing in the Epstein Files and a profile of a startup trying to take on Guiness beer. The company also tapped non-food journalists to help tell these stories, including Annie Armstrong, an art reporter.
“We want her to take her expertise and point it towards this world of food and restaurants and hospitality,” Tcheyan told us. “We think that's a really interesting lens to put on the space and put at the center of it.”
In today’s episode of Scalable, we speak with Tcheyan, who also co-founded media startup Puck, about his vision for Caper, AI’s impact on the media industry and what it was like raising funding at a time of industry upheaval.
Creator Moves
Genevieve’s Playhouse, a kids-focused YouTube channel with nearly 50 million subscribers, launched a line of toys in Walmart and other US retailers. Underscore Talent’s Shorthand Studios division is also helping the channel’s new animated series to be syndicated to streaming services.
Talent Tracker
Danielle Ito, the head of influencer at Notion, is leaving the productivity software company. She hasn’t yet announced her next steps.
Simon Bates, the head of content and general manager of TikTok Australia, left the company after more than 5 years. He joined Nine, an Australian broadcaster, to be director of social media and off platform.
