CAA's podcast chief: video is the major inflection point, and every new show should have a compelling reason not to be on camera

CAA's podcast chief on video, live touring, and the independent creator shift

Josh Lindgren has spent twelve years building CAA's podcast department, starting from cold-emailing show hosts when the global podcast advertising market was worth around $45 million. Owl and Co. puts that number at $9.2 billion last year. He didn't expect that scale of growth — and the market is still moving.

Video is the default now

The clearest shift Lindgren identifies is video. It's not replacing audio — Edison Research data shows the majority of podcast consumers do both — but it has changed the economics and logic of launching a new show. Brand integrations look different on video, discovery works differently (clipping and social distribution replace the paid marketing spend that audio requires), and the bar has shifted. Any new podcast in 2026 should have a strong reason it isn't on camera. If that reason doesn't exist, it should probably be on camera.

The format definition question is becoming harder to answer cleanly. Oprah has moved her show to Amazon. Whether a viewer watching it on Prime Video is watching a podcast or a TV show is, in Lindgren's view, probably beside the point. The word "podcast" still has utility as shorthand, but the lines between podcast, YouTube channel, live stream, and serialised video series are blurring fast enough that forcing any of them into a box does more harm than good.

“If you're trying to break through with a new podcast in 2026, you should have a really strong reason why you're not a video podcast, or else you should probably have a video podcast... The global podcast advertising industry was worth about $45,000,000 [when I started]. Owl and Co. has put out a report that last year it was worth $9,200,000,000.”

Distribution deals and platform mismatches

The distribution deal market is hard to read because the buyers want fundamentally different things. Sirius XM has a satellite radio business to protect. Amazon is primarily an e-commerce platform. Netflix and Hulu are now entering. Each has different KPIs, which means the right deal for one creator is wrong for another. Lindgren sees that fragmentation as an advantage for representation — it creates room to match clients to buyers based on strategic fit rather than a single market rate.

Celebrity crossover and having a reason to exist

Not every celebrity podcast works, and Lindgren's read is that the ones that fail often lack a genuine reason to exist. Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Wiser Than Me worked because she wanted to have conversations with older women she felt were being ignored culturally — not because an agent told her she could monetise it. Smartlist worked because the three hosts wanted to hang out and create something for people locked at home during COVID. The throughline is purpose. Shows built around a clear, personal motivation tend to build the kind of audience that sustains a business. Shows assembled as commercial vehicles tend not to.

Live touring and audience depth

Lindgren's live touring instinct comes directly from his music background, and the data supports it. For niche shows, he's seen 50% of listeners in a given market turn out for a live show. Zip code analysis of ticket buyers shows substantial travel distances to attend. The underlying dynamic is that podcast listeners develop a relationship with hosts that feels genuinely personal — they've spent hundreds of hours with voices in their ears. Stuff You Should Know, one of his first clients, generated a moment he still cites: a 22-year-old fan at a Vancouver show, in tears at a Q&A microphone, explaining that Josh and Chuck felt like real friends. That depth of connection is what converts a listener into someone who will buy a ticket and travel four states to use it.

International markets

International touring exists but is still early. English-language markets like the UK and Australia are the natural first stops for American shows. Lindgren visited Sydney last year for South by Southwest Sydney and says the Australian podcast market feels like the US market ten to twelve years ago — undersaturated, with local advertisers still being educated about the medium. He calls India out specifically as the market he'd be looking at if he were an investor today, on the basis that there's less saturation and more room for extreme growth. The US ad market remains the anchor because American consumers are the target demographic that most global brands want to reach, but Lindgren expects more international markets to come alive as local brand spend follows local audience growth.

The independent creator case

For journalists and media professionals sitting inside large companies who have built an audience, Lindgren frames the decision simply: going independent is high risk, high reward. Owning your own show means owning the audience relationship and capturing a larger share of the revenue it generates. A smaller independent audience can be more lucrative than a larger employer-owned one. He's empathetic about the transition — losing a reliable paycheck is genuinely scary — and doesn't argue that legacy media is finished. But for anyone who is entrepreneurial and wants to build something, the upside is real.