Every sponsorship pitch deck in podcasting leads with the same numbers: follower count, average likes per post, comment volume, share rate. It's the language brands and podcasts have agreed to speak — more engagement, the thinking goes, means a more valuable audience.
Our research says that's not true.
The data
We surveyed 111 regular football podcast listeners and split them into high and low social-media-interaction groups — people who actively like, comment, and share podcast content online, versus people who don't.
Then we checked which group actually bought a sponsor's product.
The result: no meaningful difference.
In plain terms — statistically, this is a clean null result. Listeners who interact constantly with a podcast's social content were no more likely to buy from a sponsor than listeners who never interact at all.
Why this matters
If engagement drove purchases, the podcast with the loudest comment section would be the safest sponsorship bet. It isn't.
This lines up with what we found when we looked at trust instead — where the difference was enormous (80% of high-trust listeners purchased, versus 12% of low-trust listeners). Put the two findings side by side and the pattern is hard to miss:
| Metric | Predicts purchase? |
|---|---|
| Social media interaction frequency | No (p = 0.63) |
| Trust in the sponsoring brand | Yes (p < .001) |
Engagement is visible. Trust is what actually converts. The industry has been optimising for the wrong thing because it's the thing that's easiest to measure — not because it's the thing that works.
What this means in practice
Don't lead your sponsor pitch with your comment counts or how "active" your community is. It's not what's persuading anyone to buy. Lead with why your audience trusts you — tone, consistency, how you talk about brands, how long you've built the relationship.
A podcast with a quieter, less visibly "engaged" audience isn't automatically a worse bet. Screening for trust signals will tell you more about likely conversion than screening for engagement volume ever will.
The takeaway
Likes don't buy things. People do — and what moves them to buy is whether they trust the person recommending it, not how loudly they cheer them on online.
Curious where your own show stands?
Run the Sponsorship Readiness Scorecard →Based on independent-samples t-test analysis (n = 111, regular football podcast listeners) from the dissertation "How Independent Football Podcasts Use Digital Marketing to Drive Brand Partnerships and Revenue Growth" (2025). As with all single-study findings, this reflects one sample at one point in time — see the full research methodology for details and limitations.