The U.S. podcast ad marketplace is projected to expand 110% through 2020, when it will represent $659 million in annual ad revenues, according to estimates released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Direct response ads continue to make up the majority of category revenue; however, they decreased from 73.0% of total revenues in 2016 to 64.2% of total revenues in 2017.

The expanding supply of -- and appetite for -- video content will account for 85.6% of all digital data consumption going to the media format by 2022, according to new estimates released as part of PwC's Global Entertainment & Media Outlook, 2018-2022. Fueled by "robust competition among the leading mobile providers," including unlimited mobile data plans from T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, big MVPDs Comcast and Charter are expected to follow suit, driving a 22.3% expansion on in data traffic levels per year through 2022, when it is projected to reach 397.8 trillion megabytes.

With about 93% of Americans getting at least some of their news from online sources, the Pew Research Center has been tracking a composite of pure-play "digital-native" news outlets -- publishers like Business Insider and Buzzfeed that were created online vs. print news publishers that migrated online. The composite representing the 35 most trafficked digital native news sites, according to comScore, appears to be plateauing in reach, and actually declined (by an aggregate 1.1 million monthly uniques) in this year's analysis vs. last year's.

When Nielsen queried 3,000 brand contacts for its just-released "CMO Report 2018" on their media spending plans for the next 12 months, they not surprisingly projected big increases for digital media outlays, and not-so-much for traditional ones. "Respondents expect, on average, a 49% increase in digital media budgets in the next 12 months. And some respondents reported even higher increases," Nielsen notes in the report.

Industry-shifting M&A deals don't happen every day, so when something like AT&T's proposed takeover of Time Warner comes along, it bears some scrutiny on the potential impact on the rest of the industry. That's exactly what the equities research team at UBS has done in an excellent report breaking down various scenarios for the court's June 12 ruling on the deal. This "decision tree" shows how the UBS team handicap the positive, neutral and negative impact each ruling scenario might have on the stocks of other major industry stakeholders likely to be affected.

More than three in four American voters believe Roseanne Barr's tweet that led to ABC canceling the revival of "Roseanne" was racist, according to results of a Politico and Morning Consult poll of 1,190 registered U.S. voters. The tweet directed at former Obama Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, an African American, compared her to the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes. Remarkably, 13% responded it was not racist, while 10% said they weren't sure.

During Tuesday's White House press briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders snapped back after reporters challenged the veracity and credibility of the White House's statements, asserting, "Frankly, I think my credibility is probably higher than the media's." Turns out, she was right, albeit by a small margin. Asked who is more credible, 51.6% of American adults surveyed by Research Intelligencer and Pollfish said Sara Sanders is vs. a close minority of 48.4% who said the journalists who cover the White House are.

If the past is prologue, and Apple once again contributes to a paradigm shift in media consumption then the next new thing will be ambient media. That's the conclusion of the equities research team at UBS following Apple Inc. In a new report, "Apple in Pictures," the analysts use a picture (the infographic pictured here) to tell the next story in Apple's progression. "The Ambient Paradigm is on the horizon," the analysts predict.

Forty-six years after comedian George Carlin indelibly etched "seven dirty words" as a line in the sand for what is not permissible to say on TV, a majority of American adults feel most of them still are inappropriate to utter, even on a cable TV comedy show. The survey, conducted this weekend in the aftermath of Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a "feckless" C-word on her TBS show, "Full Frontal," suggests that word still represents a line in the dirt for most Americans.

One of the most significant pieces of data in Kleiner Perkins digital analyst Mary Meeker's 2018 "Internet Trends" report is a table on page 81 showing a sampling of leading online subscription services and their 2017 growth. The table is telling for several reasons, one is it is signals the appetite of consumers to pay for non-ad-supported (or only partially ad-supported) subscription media services, something industry pundits like Publicis Chief Growth Officer Rishad Tobaccowala predict will continue to grow as a percentage of the media consumers use, creating attrition in the supply of advertising impressions that an reach them.