Podcast Advertising Costs in Canada

How much does podcast advertising cost in Canada?

No Canadian sales house publishes a rate card or CPM range. Not The Podcast Exchange, not Curiouscast, not CBC. IAB Canada publishes revenue, not pricing. We looked hard, and the honest answer is that Canadian podcast pricing is entirely negotiated.

The CPM figures that surface when you search for this are almost all from marketing blogs with no disclosed methodology and no Canadian sample. The one figure from an actual sales house is Acast's global guidance — pre-recorded and network ads at US$15–30, host-read sponsorships at US$25–40, niche business and finance above US$40 — and that page is bylined November 2023, carries no Canadian breakout, and should be read as directional US and global context only.

What we can tell you is what moves the number in this market: whether the read is host-voiced or pre-produced, whether it is baked into the episode or dynamically inserted, the position in the episode, the genre, and whether you are buying a specific show or a run-of-network audience.

How many Canadians listen to podcasts?

46% of Canadian adults monthly — up from 39% the previous year, which Triton Digital describes as the largest single-year increase ever recorded in the Canadian series.

The French-language growth is even sharper: 33% of French-speaking Canadians monthly, up from 24%. That is a 9-point jump in a single year and it materially changes what a Quebec audio plan can be built on.

Triton Digital Canadian Podcast Report via Broadcast Dialogue and Marketing News Canada, June 2026. Share of ad-supported audio time from Signal Hill Insights, fielded May–June 2026.

That Canadian content figure — 43% against 41% for US content — is the widest lead in seven years, and it is the strongest argument for buying Canadian shows rather than treating Canada as spill from a US network buy.

Is podcast advertising video now?

Partly, and this is the biggest structural change in the medium. YouTube is now the primary podcast platform for 40% of Canadian consumers, ahead of Spotify and Apple combined.

Of Canadian podcast consumers, 51% both watch and listen, 24% watch only, and 25% listen only. Separately, Signal Hill found 24% of Canadian monthly podcast users consume podcasts exclusively in video form.

For an advertiser this changes the creative brief, not just the media plan. A host-read audio spot reaches the quarter of the audience that is audio-only. It reaches the video-first quarter as a voice over a static frame, which is a weaker execution than the format allows.

It also complicates measurement. A podcast bought on YouTube is measured as YouTube; a podcast bought through a network is measured on downloads and impressions. Those two datasets do not reconcile, and a plan that adds them together is overstating reach.

Who sells podcast advertising in Canada?

A short list of networks and sales houses, with CBC the clear leader by audience.

Compiled by Simplicity Media, September 2026. Download figures from Triton Digital via Broadcast Dialogue.

Which podcast audiences are worth buying in Canada?

The genre data is unusually actionable here, because Canadian podcast audiences skew hard by category rather than clustering around a national average.

• News is 29% of Canadian podcast downloads, by some distance the largest genre. True crime is 15%, comedy 12%.
• Sports podcasts run 78% male. True crime and health and fitness run 65–68% female. These are among the sharpest demographic skews available in any Canadian medium.
• Business podcast listeners are 47% university graduates and 38% earning over $100K — the closest thing Canadian audio has to a clean B2B audience.
• Comedy over-indexes 18–34.

One structural warning: podcast-to-podcast discovery in Canada has collapsed from 22% in 2020 to 13% in 2025. Audiences are arriving from social and video platforms rather than from other podcasts, which means a podcast campaign increasingly needs support from outside the medium to build reach.