Podcasts have grown into a full media channel. Most Czechs listen to them. The market now has its own data and tools for buying and measuring, and it offers brands what is hard to buy elsewhere: attention and trust. The Jak na podcast brunch showed this too. People now spend the most time with online video, and audio comes right after it. Advertising budgets, however, still flow mainly to traditional television. Between where people are and where brands send their money, a large space remains unused.
The market matures and sorts hard
As of 1 January 2026, the České podcasty catalogue listed 9,029 podcasts, and 3,872 of them released at least one episode during 2025. Creators published 207,676 episodes over the year, 94.4% more than the year before, and established shows are driving the growth. About half of newly founded podcasts stop publishing within their first year, most often 80 to 100 days after launch. Some of them are not failures, though, but deliberately closed series with a set number of episodes. For creators, this means regularity and staying power, not a one-off attempt.
The audience is growing too. According to research by Český rozhlas and the Median agency, 63% of Czechs aged 15 to 70 listen to podcasts at least once a month, roughly 4.8 million people. 44% listen every week, eight points more than in 2023, and more than half of listeners spend over two hours a week with them.
This is good news for advertisers. It pays to look beyond current numbers and at a show's stability: how long it has been running, how regularly it publishes and how well it keeps its listeners. Publishing once a fortnight used to be enough. Today, successful podcasts come out every week.
The route people take to podcasts is changing too. The first contact often happens not in a podcast app but through a short video on Reels or Shorts. Cutting out a random section of an episode is not enough, though. Even a short video needs a script, a clear opening and a point. It must stand on its own and only then lead people to the full episode.
The power of a podcast lies in the relationship
Podcasts are built on closeness. Listeners form a personal bond with the show, with the host and with the way they speak, and they come back for authenticity. That is why the biggest podcasts, both here and abroad, rest on a simple principle. The listener feels that the creator is speaking directly to them, and wants to come back.
The same shift is visible worldwide. At this year's Cannes Lions, creators were given their own programme and their own award category, and brands came to sign multi-year deals with them. The global podcast economy grew by 23% in 2025 to a record $9.2 billion. The Czech podcast is one form of the same trend, in which creators become full commercial partners.
This matters a lot for advertising. A brand in a podcast does not just enter an ad break. It enters the relationship between creators and listeners. An ordinary spot that a person would skip elsewhere does not use the power of a podcast. The British podcast DISH from Waitrose shows the opposite. There, the brand is not just a sponsor at the start but a natural part of the content.
Attention cannot be forced
Petr Machovec of EP Media built on all this with a concept that may become the yardstick for the next season: deliberate attention. The question is not whether someone glimpses the content or plays it for a few seconds, but whether they actually pay attention to it.
In an hour, a person can scroll through dozens of short TikTok videos but may only get through one podcast episode. Audio has a better chance of keeping them with one topic, brand or story for longer. In the fight for focus, it offers what is scarce today: a listener's genuine interest.
According to Machovec, a podcast works best where a brand does not need an immediate click but time, trust and a relationship. It makes sense for products and services that people take longer to decide on. It will not carry a quick clearance sale. Its strength lies not in chasing an instant conversion but in building a relationship step by step.
Target, measure, monitor
Podcast advertising can do more than people expect. Thanks to dynamic ad insertion it does not age: a new campaign can run in episodes published months or years ago. Spots can be targeted by location, time, context or audience type, and frequency can be capped so that one listener does not hear the same ad over and over.
Placement matters too. A pre-roll ad has the greatest reach, and other positions make sense depending on the campaign goal. Brands can buy directly, with more control over the show and the creative, or programmatically. Not every podcast suits every brand, though, so brand safety, meaning monitoring of the content next to which a brand appears, is essential.
The advantage of media houses is journalism
Martin Bartkovský of Reflex added a view from inside the newsroom. As he puts it, the easiest thing in the world is to make a podcast, and the hardest is to make a good one. Media houses have an advantage here. Their shows are made in an editorial environment where information is routinely verified and sources are handled carefully. Independent creators can do this brilliantly too, but neither the listener nor the brand knows in advance how carefully they handle information.
Media no longer have such a strong role in deciding what the public should pay attention to. Information, opinions and creators are endlessly abundant, and everyone assembles their own picture of the world. That makes a podcast that listeners trust all the more valuable.
And what AI does with all of it
Ondřej Výšek of SoftwareOne showed that AI is not just a tool for writing text or generating images, but a whole working ecosystem. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, that means a network of agents that learn from how a person works and help them more and more efficiently.
AI can save creators a lot of time. It can help with researching a guest, structuring an episode, post-production and dubbing into other languages, which makes Czech content easier to take beyond the border, especially for more specialised mini-series. A successful podcast, however, is not something AI can invent on its own. It does not know what will move listeners or why they will come back. The people who make the content and know their audience do.
What remains is agreeing on measurement
One thing the market still lacks. A unified standard for measuring podcast listening in Czechia does not yet exist, unlike Radioprojekt for radio or NetMonitor for the web. Current data, moreover, often invites comment only on how many shows end, rather than showing that some of them are completed series. That is exactly why it is time to find shared metrics. In February 2026, Radia.cz joined SPIR with the aim of pushing for transparent and unified measurement of online streams and podcasts. Without a common yardstick, brands decide less well, and part of the budgets stays elsewhere.
The doors are open
One thing is certain. Podcasts are no longer a niche format for a handful of enthusiasts. They are a full advertising medium that can be targeted, measured and woven naturally into a campaign. Their greatest strength lies elsewhere, though. They offer the listener's time and trust, which are getting harder and harder to win in advertising. People stay longer with podcasts, come back and build a relationship with creators and their content.
Meanwhile, the market has matured. Data, buying tools and measurement all exist, and brands have plenty to choose from. The question is no longer whether podcasts work, but whether a brand will use them before its competitors do.
Comments