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Been hearing a lot of responses to Spotify paying $340m for Gimlet + Anchor along the lines of, "it's a lot given the whole US podcast ad market was only $314m in 2017". (short thread)
You also hear about the monetisation gap: given the share of ear that podcasts get in the US compared to broadcast radio, they 'should' be making about $1bn. 
Both of these depend on the total market figure of $314m, which comes from a great IAB report (iab.com/insights/the-s…). This extrapolates from 15 podcast companies to the whole market. I don't know the full methodology but that extrapolation is always going to be uncertain.
Podcasting doesn't have reliable census-level consumption metrics (i.e. if you want to know how much people listen to podcasts, you have to ask them!). So the distribution of listening is not at all clear.
The companies surveyed probably don't have a perfect idea of how much time people spend listening to *their* podcasts, let alone how much of total listening they represent.
The report estimates those 15 podcast cos capture 82% of podcast ad spend. But what if it was 50%? That would put the 2017 total market at over $500m, probably pushing a billion last year.
That sounds unlikely to me, but the point is the total market figure is not set in stone. With the direct deals and fragmented buying and listening we see in podcasts, *nobody* has the perspective necessary to give a definitive market figure.
Why do I think $1 billion is unlikely? There likely is a per-minute monetisation gap with commercial radio, for good reasons: reach & frequency, ad load, demonstrated effectiveness, ease of buying, metrics. But we can't hang "Spotify overspent" on that $314m total market figure.
