iHeartMedia in Amazon DSP: What the Inventory Actually Looks Like

Who should buy this

• You want broad US audio reach without device gaps. iPhone and Android both show up in real volume, which is not true of every audio source here.^[2]
• You already buy Amazon DSP. iHeart adds a large US audio environment to a plan you have open, with Amazon shopping audiences on top and no new platform to learn.
• You want the cheap end of premium audio. Streaming comes in at the cheaper end of the US audio floors we can buy.^[1]
• You want to buy a slice, not a blob. Sport, Spanish language, adults 21+, run of network and device cuts are all separate deals.

Who should skip this

Anyone who needs broadcast radio. It is the single most common reason to be looking at iHeart at all, and it is not in the deals we can buy. More on that below.

Anyone who needs reach outside the US. US only in practice, with a small percentage in Mexico and Canada.^[2] iHeart is a US company and this is a US buy. Treat anything else as incidental rather than as a market.

Anyone who assumed the podcast deals would be cheap.

Who you reach, and on what device

Audio inventory in Amazon DSP has a habit of quietly being one platform or the other. This is not that.^[2]

Amazon and iHeartMedia announced their Amazon DSP integration on 6 November 2025: iHeart's streaming music and live streaming radio were available then, with iHeartPodcasts and broadcast radio to follow in 2026.^[3] That is the announcement. Below is what the deals actually expose once you go looking for them in your own account, which is a different and more useful thing.

What it costs, and the two prices

iHeart does not publish a rate card for programmatic, so the honest way to answer this is to go and look at what we can buy. Doing that turns up the finding this post exists for: iHeart in Amazon DSP is not one product with one price. It is two.

What the deals actually are

Everything in this section is what we found running Amazon DSP ourselves, rather than what the announcement said.

The half that is not here yet

iHeart's case for itself rests on broadcast radio. It says its broadcast reaches nine out of ten Americans a month.^[4] That reach figure is iHeart's own, but the footprint behind it is checkable: in its annual report to the SEC, iHeart runs more than 860 broadcast radio stations across about 160 US markets.^[5] That is the scale that makes iHeart interesting, and it is the thing most buyers will come to this integration looking for.

It is not in the deals we can buy. Every iHeart deal in our account is streaming or podcast. Amazon and iHeart said in November 2025 that broadcast radio would follow in 2026.^[3] As of our last check it had not arrived. We are reporting what we can see rather than predicting a date, and an announced plan is not inventory.

This matters for how you size the line. Plan iHeart here as a US streaming audio buy that happens to carry a strong brand name, not as access to American radio. If broadcast is genuinely the brief, this is not yet the way to buy it.

What iHeart claims, and what is actually checked

iHeart's audience numbers are iHeart's. We are relaying them because they are the figures that exist, not because they have been independently established. Read them as a seller's case for itself.^[4]

• Broadcast radio reaching “9 out of 10 Americans” monthly
• A larger US audience than any other media outlet
• The largest podcast publisher “according to both Podtrac and Triton”, with more downloads than the next two publishers combined

The third one deserves a note, and it is not a gotcha so much as something a buyer should simply know. iHeart owns Triton. It bought the company from E.W. Scripps for $230 million in 2021.^[6] So of the two independent measurement services named in support of iHeart being the largest podcast publisher, one is iHeart. The claim may well be true. Podtrac is a real third party and the margin claimed is not narrow. But "according to Podtrac and Triton" reads as two outside confirmations and is really closer to one and a half.

The same ownership explains the plumbing we see in our own account: iHeart inventory reaching Amazon DSP over the Triton exchange is iHeart selling through its own pipe, which is a perfectly normal arrangement and worth understanding rather than worrying about. It is also why the exchange column tells you less than you would expect here.

Where it fits in your audio plan

Spotify joined Amazon DSP in October 2025 and iHeart followed in November. With SiriusXM already there, the US audio pool inside one workflow is now genuinely deep, and iHeart is the broadest of them on device. If you are working out how the streaming platforms fit together more widely, we cover that in how to advertise on Netflix, Spotify and Roku.

The structural argument for audio has not changed: it takes 21.4% of media time and 4.5% of ad budgets,^[8] and programmatic still accounts for only about three in ten digital audio ad dollars,^[7] against roughly nine in ten for display. iHeart arriving in Amazon DSP moves a large piece of US audio into the programmatic column. The piece that would move the most is still the broadcast one.

How to add it to a plan

Before this integration, buying iHeart programmatically meant a deal through Triton or a direct conversation. Now it sits inside the same Amazon DSP workflow you already use. Every deal is a private auction on a floor rate, so adding it is a deal selection rather than a negotiation. The one real decision is the one this page is about: plan the two products as two lines, at their two prices.

In the Amazon DSP interface

Deals live in the deals inventory list. Once you create a campaign and ad group in your Amazon DSP account, open the ad group's inventory, search for iHeart, and add the deals you want. That is the whole step. The catch is the one from the deals section: tell streaming and podcast apart by the format in the deal name, not by the exchange they arrive on, or you will file four streaming deals as podcast and bid the higher price for them.

With VICTOR.AD

VICTOR.AD builds the Amazon DSP media plan end to end, exports a slide deck for client approval, and on paid tiers pushes the plan into your Amazon DSP account as a draft line item. When a plan calls for iHeart, it plans the streaming and podcast deals as the two separate lines they are, so you do not blend the two prices into one and under-bid the podcast deals into never serving. Free to start.