SiriusXM Media used its second annual Built With Audio event in New York on October 6, 2026 to put a first number on its exclusive resale of YouTube's audio inventory in the United States. According to SiriusXM Media, adding YouTube Audio to beta campaigns expanded advertisers' total unique reach "by up to 91%." The company also said its reach has grown from 170 million monthly listeners at last year's event to approximately 255 million unduplicated monthly listeners, nearly 90% of the US population aged 13 and over. No campaign count, measurement provider or methodology accompanied the reach figure.

In Short

SiriusXM Media, which sells ads on Pandora, SiriusXM, SoundCloud and podcasts, now also sells the audio ads people hear on YouTube and YouTube Music in the US, and at a New York event it said early test campaigns reached up to 91% more unique people when YouTube was added. Advertisers who buy audio care because YouTube is where a large share of podcast listening already happens, and until this year that audience could not be bought through an audio seller. The 91% is a best case from SiriusXM Media's own beta tests, and SiriusXM's finance chief has said the deal will not make meaningful money until the second half of 2027.

What happened at Built With Audio

The event took place at the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) in New York. According to SiriusXM Media, the release went out at 6:00 PM EDT on October 6, 2026, after an evening that featured Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo of Giggly Squad, MrBallen, Katie Nolan, Trixie, Stavros Halkias, Sona Movsesian, The Deep 3, Dave LaGreca, and Nikki and Brie. Grammy Award-winning artist Leon Bridges closed the night with a performance.

The talent list is not incidental. Several of the names on stage belong to shows whose advertising SiriusXM Media now sells exclusively in both audio and video form. SiriusXM signed a multi-year exclusive deal with MrBallen on October 27, 2025, covering his podcast and YouTube channel, with exclusive ad sales across audio and video versions. On July 21, 2026, it signed a three-year agreement for "The Bald and the Beautiful," the podcast co-hosted by Trixie Mattel, again with exclusive ad sales rights for both editions. The Deep 3 Podcast was one of six shows in SiriusXM's non-exclusive video podcast deal with Tubi, reported on June 2, 2026, in which ad revenue is split between Tubi and SiriusXM Media.

The release also referred to "SiriusXM's new partnership with Giggly Squad's Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo," without giving its length, financial terms or the rights it covers. PPC Land's archive holds no earlier article on that agreement.

SiriusXM Media framed the event as a follow-up to the 2025 edition, when it "challenged the industry to put Audio In Every Media Plan." This year's version was pitched as evidence of scale. According to SiriusXM Media, the evening "demonstrated how audio is increasingly extending across video, social and live experiences."

The YouTube numbers

The center of the announcement was YouTube. SiriusXM Media described its role as "the exclusive reseller of YouTube and YouTube Music audio-first U.S. inventory," an arrangement the release says was "announced last April."

PPC Land reported the deal at the time. When SiriusXM and YouTube disclosed the partnership on April 22, 2026, the inventory was defined through behavioral signals: the Trending 20 playlist, smart speakers, minimized desktop video podcasts and backgrounded mobile apps. Formats were set at 15 and 30 seconds, with a full-screen companion visual when the screen is active and none on smart speakers. Targeting draws on Google's first-party signals. Terms such as revenue share, minimum spend and the duration of exclusivity were not disclosed then, and the October release does not disclose them either. YouTube's broader video ad marketplace stays with Google.

Up to 91%, from beta campaigns

SiriusXM Chief Ad Revenue Officer Scott Walker shared the stage with Bo Pulito, Head of Ad Platform Partnerships at YouTube, to present early campaign results. According to SiriusXM Media, "across beta campaigns, adding YouTube Audio has expanded advertisers' total unique reach by up to 91%."

That sentence carries several limits. "Up to" marks the figure as a ceiling, the best result in an unstated range rather than an average. The release does not say how many campaigns ran, which advertisers took part, which categories they represented, what the baseline audio plan contained, or who measured the overlap between YouTube listeners and the audiences already reached through Pandora, SiriusXM and podcasts. It is a vendor-supplied figure from the seller of the inventory, presented without third-party verification.

There is also a structural reason a large number is plausible. Incremental reach depends heavily on how small and how overlapping the original plan was. A campaign running only on one streaming music service has more room to grow its unique audience than one already spread across several. A ceiling of 91% says more about what the best-case campaign started from than about what a typical buyer can expect.

Walker's own description was more measured than the number. "At last year's Built With Audio, we made the case that audio remained underleveraged relative to the time and attention it commands. This year, we showed how brands can act on that opportunity," Walker said. "YouTube brings millions of incremental listeners and audio-first moments that advertisers may not have been reaching before. Combined with Apple's evolving podcast experience and our premium content and technology, we are making that opportunity easier to access, activate and measure across the media plan."

170 million, 160 million and 255 million

According to SiriusXM Media, the YouTube agreement "expands SiriusXM Media's reach from 170 million monthly listeners at last year's Built With Audio to approximately 255 million unduplicated monthly listeners today." On those two figures, the difference is 85 million, a PPC Land calculation rather than a SiriusXM number.

The baseline needs care. When Amazon Ads and SiriusXM Media integrated with Amazon DSP in September 2025, the reach cited was 160 million monthly digital listeners, according to Edison Research. The 170 million in the October 2026 release may use a different scope, for example by adding satellite listeners to digital ones, but the release does not define it. The two numbers are close in time and differ by 10 million.

The 255 million figure itself is not new. It appeared in April 2026 when the YouTube deal was announced, and SiriusXM repeated it in its first-quarter results on April 30, 2026. What changed between April and October is that the inventory moved from a contract to live beta campaigns.

PPC Land's April coverage also recorded the research behind the figure: a SiriusXM Media and Edison Research study found 212 million monthly US listeners engage with audio-first content on YouTube, 48% of them while video is minimized or in the background, and 84% of US adults aged 18 to 24 consume YouTube audio. Those were commissioned figures as well.

Why YouTube matters to audio buyers

The scale argument rests on where listening has moved. Edison Research's Share of Ear data placed YouTube at 32% of US podcast listening time in the fourth quarter of 2025, ahead of Spotify at 25% and Apple at 20%, as PPC Land reported in May 2026. That is a share of podcast listening, not of all online audio. Before April, a buyer who wanted that audience through an audio seller had no route. Google sold YouTube inventory as video.

The deal therefore changes a structural fact about the market: the single largest podcast platform by listening time now has an audio-specific sales channel in the US, and that channel is owned by a competitor to Spotify and iHeartMedia. Spotify has no comparable third-party audio sales arrangement, as PPC Land noted in April.

When the money arrives

The event set out ambition. SiriusXM's earnings calls have set out timing, and they are less immediate. On its second-quarter call on July 30, 2026, management described the YouTube period as "test and learn." The chief financial officer said the company expects no meaningful financial contribution for the rest of 2026 or the first half of 2027, with more significant revenue and earnings in the second half of 2027. Management also said the deal carries healthy contribution margins.

The base it would add to is sizeable but slow-growing. SiriusXM's second-quarter advertising revenue was $454 million, up 5% from $432 million. The Pandora and Off-platform segment contributed $413 million of that, up 5%, with growth from podcasting, programmatic demand and technology fees, partly offset by softer streaming music demand. Podcast revenue rose 30% year over year in the second quarter, after 37% in the first quarter and 41% for full-year 2025.

The October release contains no revenue figures and no update on that timetable. Beta campaigns producing a reach number is consistent with the "test and learn" description. It is not evidence that the 2027 schedule has moved.

AdsWizz and the plumbing

Underneath the reseller deals sits AdsWizz, which Pandora bought for $145 million in cash and stock in 2018 and which came to SiriusXM with Pandora. SiriusXM Media described it as an "open audio advertising technology platform" connecting premium publishers and creators with programmatic demand, audience intelligence and measurement. AdsWizz handles buying for the YouTube arrangement, as PPC Land reported in April.

SiriusXM Media put two numbers on AdsWizz. According to the company, AdsWizz "powers one in four audio ads across the global open ecosystem and has monetized more than 1.3 trillion streaming and podcast impressions over the past decade." Neither figure comes with a source or definition. The release does not say what counts as the "global open ecosystem," whether it excludes walled gardens such as Spotify's own ad stack, or whether "powers" means ad serving, ad insertion, the supply-side platform or any of these. Spread evenly over ten years, 1.3 trillion impressions would be about 130 billion a year, a PPC Land calculation that ignores the obvious skew toward recent years.

Those figures sit alongside others AdsWizz has published. Its State of Audio Adtech Report 2025, covered by PPC Land in July 2025, reported 4 billion monthly impressions sold via third-party DSPs and 2 billion through the AdsWizz Marketplace, and found that audio takes 31% of consumers' media time but receives 9% of advertising budgets. That 22-point gap is the argument behind Walker's "underleveraged" line.

Sherene Hilal, identified in the release as Senior Vice President and Chief Advertising Product Officer, SiriusXM, gave the platform pitch. "Listening and viewing are converging, but advertisers should not have to rebuild their media workflows every time consumer behavior changes," Hilal said. "AdsWizz is designed to meet audiences wherever they listen - across publishers, creators, platforms and formats, now and in the future - giving advertisers one access point to premium audio and multimodal media that is easier to buy, more relevant and as measurable as the rest of the digital media plan."

Product leadership around AdsWizz has shifted recently. On September 8, 2026, SiriusXM promoted Sean Gibbons to Senior Vice President, Chief Product and Technology Officer, placing advertising technology under the same executive as product, technology, automotive and streaming distribution. The October release does not mention Gibbons, and does not explain how Hilal's advertising product role relates to his remit.

The interoperability claim

According to SiriusXM Media, AdsWizz's "interoperable infrastructure enables advertisers to work with their preferred data, buying and measurement partners." The release then lists, as achievements since the 2025 event, five integrations that make that claim concrete:

  • YouTube audio, the exclusive US resale arrangement.
  • Apple podcast video, where SiriusXM Media says it became "one of the first partners integrated."
  • Amazon DSP, which SiriusXM Media says it expanded into.
  • LiveRamp and RampID, a deepened partnership.
  • Barometer, for "audio-native brand-suitability signals at the podcast episode level."

Each has a history in PPC Land's archive except the last.

The integrations, one by one

Apple and HLS video

Apple opened HTTP Live Streaming video podcasts on February 16, 2026, naming four launch hosting partners: Acast, ART19, Triton's Omny Studio and SiriusXM, including SiriusXM Media, AdsWizz and Simplecast. HLS lets creators insert video ads dynamically, including host-read spots, inside Apple Podcasts. Apple said it would not charge hosting providers or creators for distribution, but would charge participating ad networks an impression-based fee for dynamic ads in HLS video, starting later in 2026. Rates were not published.

SiriusXM Media's "one of the first partners" is accurate on that record, since it was one of four named at launch. But the first brand campaigns to run publicly on the format were Acast's. On May 13, 2026, Acast ran video ads on Apple Podcasts for State Farm and T-Mobile, with 117 shows enabled and more than 1,000 video episodes. The October release gives no comparable count of SiriusXM shows or campaigns on Apple HLS video. Walker's reference to "Apple's evolving podcast experience" is the only other mention of Apple in the release.

Amazon DSP

The Amazon DSP integration, announced on September 16, 2025, opened Pandora and SoundCloud inventory through the AdsWizz supply-side platform, with programmatic guaranteed and preferred deals alongside auction buying and implementation for select advertisers from the fourth quarter of 2025. The SiriusXM Podcast Network was to follow on an unspecified date. The October release describes the step only as "expanding into the Amazon DSP" and does not say whether podcast inventory is now live there, or whether YouTube audio inventory is available through it.

LiveRamp and RampID

On May 28, 2026, SiriusXM Media and AdsWizz extended LiveRamp's RampID and Authenticated Traffic Solution across streaming and podcast inventory, including Pandora, and to US AdsWizz publishers, in a "multi-ID" framework. RampID is LiveRamp's people-based identifier. The deal came ten days after Publicis agreed, on May 18, 2026, to buy LiveRamp at a $2.167 billion enterprise value. That pending ownership change was not addressed in the October release, which calls the relationship a deepened partnership.

Barometer and episode-level suitability

Barometer is the one partner named without prior PPC Land coverage of its SiriusXM work. The release says only that SiriusXM Media is "working with Barometer to bring audio-native brand-suitability signals at the podcast episode level." It gives no launch date, no indication of whether scores apply to back catalog as well as new episodes, and no detail on how the signals reach buyers.

Barometer's earlier deal with a competitor offers the closest comparison. In January 2026, Acast and Barometer launched pre-bid targeting at the episode level: Barometer's AI scores each episode at upload against IAB categories and its own long-form audio definitions, covering new episodes and back catalog, and brands set their own brand suitability parameters before bids execute. Whether SiriusXM Media's version works the same way is not stated. The practical difference for buyers is between excluding a whole show because one episode might be unsuitable and excluding only that episode, a distinction that matters most for talk, comedy and news programming where tone varies from one episode to the next.

Creators as franchises

The release's third section moved from technology to talent. According to SiriusXM Media, leading creators "are expanding beyond individual shows and feeds to build franchises and communities across podcasts, video, social media and live experiences."

SiriusXM President and Chief Content Officer Scott Greenstein tied that to the Giggly Squad agreement. "The strongest creators are building multi-platform businesses for their audiences and our role is to help support and grow their distinctive communities, while protecting the authenticity and trust at the heart of those relationships," Greenstein said.

The commercial logic is visible in the earlier deals. In both the MrBallen and Bald and the Beautiful agreements, SiriusXM Media took exclusive ad sales across audio and video, which means the company sells the same creator's audience whether it is heard on Pandora, watched on YouTube or streamed through Apple's HLS player. Owning sales rights on both formats is what lets a single seller offer a creator's full audience to a buyer, rather than only the audio share.

That model overlaps with YouTube in an interesting way. YouTube audio-first moments, as defined in April, include minimized desktop video podcasts. A creator whose YouTube channel SiriusXM already represents could, in principle, appear in both the creator deal and the YouTube resale inventory. The release does not address how such overlaps are counted in the 255 million unduplicated figure, though "unduplicated" implies they are removed.

What the release does not say

Several things a buyer would want are absent. The release gives no pricing, no CPM ranges and no minimums for YouTube audio. It gives no breakdown of the 255 million figure by platform. It does not say whether YouTube audio is sold only through guaranteed deals, as the April announcement indicated for the fall launch, or also through programmatic channels. It does not name a measurement partner for the 91% figure or for the "unduplicated" reach number. And it does not update the revenue timetable SiriusXM gave investors in July.

The closing paragraph contains the clearest statement of intent. According to SiriusXM Media, the combined capabilities "position SiriusXM Media to capture a greater share of advertising investment as audio, video and creator-led media continue to converge." That is a forward-looking claim, and the release's own disclaimer lists, among risk factors, that "failure to successfully monetize and generate revenues from podcasts and other non-music content could adversely affect our business" and that the Pandora ad-supported service "has similarly experienced a loss of monthly active users."

Why it matters for marketers

Audio buyers have spent years hearing that the channel is underfunded relative to listening time. PPC Land has tracked that argument from AdsWizz's 31% versus 9% gap to the Video Advertising Bureau's September 2026 report, which cited eMarketer projections of $8.02 billion in US digital audio ad spend in 2026 and audio podcasts' share rising from 42% to 48% of that by 2030. The same VAB report found 88% of weekly podcast consumers reach shows through video platforms.

The October event shows SiriusXM Media's answer to that shift: sell audio wherever audio is consumed, including inside video platforms, and sell creators across every format they publish in. For buyers, the concrete change is consolidation. YouTube audio, Pandora, SoundCloud, SiriusXM podcasts and Apple HLS video podcasts from SiriusXM shows now sit behind one seller and one ad tech stack, with access through Amazon DSP and identity through RampID.

Consolidation carries its own questions. A single seller representing the largest podcast platform by listening time, the largest US satellite radio service and a major independent ad server also controls how reach, overlap and incrementality are reported across that inventory. The first published result, "up to 91%," arrived without the detail needed to check it. Until SiriusXM Media or YouTube publishes campaign counts, baselines and a measurement partner, the number describes the best case of a beta, and SiriusXM's own finance team has placed the commercial payoff in the second half of 2027.

Timeline

Summary

Who: SiriusXM Media, the advertising arm of Sirius XM Holdings, with SiriusXM Chief Ad Revenue Officer Scott Walker, Senior Vice President and Chief Advertising Product Officer Sherene Hilal, President and Chief Content Officer Scott Greenstein, and YouTube's Head of Ad Platform Partnerships Bo Pulito. Creators on stage included Giggly Squad's Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo, MrBallen and Trixie.

What: At its second Built With Audio event, SiriusXM Media said adding YouTube Audio expanded advertisers' total unique reach by up to 91% across beta campaigns, put its reach at approximately 255 million unduplicated US monthly listeners, up from 170 million a year earlier, and said AdsWizz powers one in four audio ads in the global open ecosystem with more than 1.3 trillion impressions monetized over a decade. No campaign count, baseline or measurement partner was given.

When: The event took place and the release was issued on October 6, 2026. The YouTube agreement dates from April 22, 2026, and SiriusXM expects its meaningful financial contribution in the second half of 2027.

Where: The Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York. The YouTube inventory and the reach figures cover the United States.

Why: SiriusXM Media is positioning itself as a single access point for audio wherever it is consumed, including inside YouTube, Apple's HLS video podcasts and creator video, in order, according to the company, "to capture a greater share of advertising investment as audio, video and creator-led media continue to converge."