New Heights at $35M Forbes 2026 mark, the August 2023 Wondery / Amazon deal, and the two NFL careers that seed the podcast platform.
Travis and Jason Kelce launched New Heights in September 2022 under the Wave Sports & Entertainment umbrella as a weekly NFL-focused podcast co-hosted by two of the most decorated tight-end-and-center brothers in football history. Within eleven months the show's audience growth and cultural traction had produced one of the largest podcast-talent deals in the industry: in August 2023 the Kelces signed with Wondery (Amazon's podcast platform) at reported terms of approximately $100 million multi-year, moving the show under Wondery distribution while preserving Kelce-family ownership of the underlying operating vehicle. Forbes' August 2026 highest-paid-podcasters ranking placed New Heights at #7 with $35 million for the June 2025 – June 2026 period, tied with Mel Robbins and just below SmartLess. The August 2025 episode featuring Taylor Swift (Travis's wife per public reporting) drew approximately 1.3 million concurrent live viewers on YouTube — the largest concurrent audience for a podcast episode in the platform's history, subsequently inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records. The Kelce Brothers case is the reference archetype for the sports-x-entertainment crossover at the highest cultural intensity.
New Heights is the reference case for the sports-x-entertainment crossover at scale. The two Kelce brothers — both first-magnitude NFL careers, both with the earned-media credibility to attract A-list guest bookings, both with the brand-marketing capacity to command the largest podcast-talent deal in the industry short of Rogan / Bartlett-tier — represent one of the most successful athlete-founded media vehicles ever built. The Wondery / Amazon deal at reported $100M in August 2023 validated the sports-x-entertainment crossover as an institutional-grade category. The Swift-episode Guinness World Record establishes the cultural intensity that Sports Division commercial-partnership metrics do not fully capture.
Travis Kelce (b. 1989) was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in the third round of the 2013 NFL Draft and has played his entire NFL career with the Chiefs. He is a three-time Super Bowl champion (Super Bowl LIV in February 2020, LVII in February 2023, LVIII in February 2024), eleven-time Pro Bowl selection, and multi-time First Team All-Pro tight end, widely considered among the greatest tight ends in NFL history alongside Rob Gronkowski, Tony Gonzalez, and Antonio Gates. His career catch, yardage, and touchdown totals are on a Hall-of-Fame trajectory even before the media-and-podcast enterprise is factored in.
Jason Kelce (b. 1987) was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in the sixth round of the 2011 NFL Draft and played his entire NFL career with the Eagles. He is a Super Bowl champion (Super Bowl LII in February 2018), seven-time Pro Bowl selection, seven-time First Team All-Pro center, and is widely regarded among the greatest centers of his era — likely Hall of Fame first-ballot when he becomes eligible. He announced his retirement from the NFL in March 2024 after thirteen seasons.
The brother-partnership foundation predates New Heights by decades: Travis and Jason grew up as brothers in northeast Ohio, played college football at the University of Cincinnati (Jason 2007-2010, Travis 2008-2012, with some overlap in Jason's senior year and Travis's freshman year), and maintained a close personal and professional relationship throughout the parallel NFL careers.
Following his March 2024 retirement, Jason Kelce transitioned into a media career at ESPN as an analyst on Monday Night Countdown (the primary Monday Night Football studio program), replacing Robert Griffin III in the ESPN broadcast rotation. The ESPN role adds to Jason's post-retirement earning capacity and integrates his media presence with the Sunday-night and Monday-night NFL broadcast cycle that the New Heights podcast is temporally adjacent to.
New Heights launched in September 2022 as a weekly podcast under the Wave Sports & Entertainment (WS&E) production platform. WS&E provided the initial production infrastructure, distribution, and advertising sales; the Kelce brothers retained founder equity in the operating vehicle. The initial format was NFL-focused game recap and analysis, with Travis providing Chiefs-side and AFC-side commentary and Jason providing Eagles-side and NFC-side commentary. The show's differentiation was the authentic brother-dynamic banter combined with two first-magnitude NFL insider perspectives, and the audience-growth trajectory through calendar 2022 and into 2023 was rapid.
In August 2023, less than eleven months after launch, the Kelce brothers signed a multi-year deal with Wondery (Amazon's podcast subsidiary) at reported terms of approximately $100 million. The deal moved New Heights distribution to Wondery / Amazon while preserving Kelce-family founder ownership of the operating vehicle. The deal architecture is analytically important: it is a licensing / distribution deal (Wondery pays for exclusive distribution rights) rather than an equity acquisition of the underlying operating company, which preserves Kelce-family upside in the eventual next-generation transaction.
The $100M reported deal value placed New Heights alongside Rogan (Spotify 2020 at ~$200M) and Alex Cooper (Spotify 2021 at ~$60M, SiriusXM 2024 at ~$125M) as one of the largest podcast talent-and-distribution deals in the industry.
Forbes' August 2026 highest-paid-podcasters ranking placed the Kelce brothers at #7 with $35 million in aggregate earnings for the June 2025 – June 2026 period, tied with Mel Robbins and just below the SmartLess trio ($37M). The $35M annualized figure implies a run-rate consistent with the reported $100M multi-year Wondery deal architecture plus additional participation, advertising integration, live-event, and merchandise revenue.
The August 2025 episode of New Heights featuring Taylor Swift (Travis's then-girlfriend, now wife per public reporting) drew approximately 1.3 million concurrent live viewers on YouTube at peak — the largest concurrent audience for a podcast episode in YouTube's history. The episode was subsequently inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records for the concurrent-viewer metric. The Swift booking is the case study for how the cross-vertical family-brand cultural intensity translates into unprecedented single-episode metrics. Swift used the episode to announce the release of a new studio album, coordinating the promotional strategy across her Republic Records / UMG relationship, the New Heights platform, and her own social-media reach.
The Kelce Brothers case is the archetypal sports-x-entertainment crossover: both hosts are first-magnitude NFL athletes, both careers include Super Bowl championship equity, both have earned individual entertainment-industry cache through Saturday Night Live hosting appearances and podcast content that reaches audiences well outside the NFL fan base. The Institute lists the Kelce Brothers in both divisions: as a career athlete-founder case in the Sports Division and as a media-empire case in the Entertainment Division.
Travis Kelce's marriage to Taylor Swift creates one of the most significant cross-vertical family operating platforms in the industry. The composite Kelce-Swift family architecture spans: Travis's NFL career and endorsement portfolio, Jason's NFL career and ESPN broadcasting arc, New Heights at $35M / year, Kylie Kelce's (Jason's wife) Not Gonna Lie podcast on Wondery (December 2024 launch, top-charting on Apple Podcasts overall), and Taylor Swift's multi-hundred-million-dollar annual operating scale through Republic Records / UMG catalog, publishing, and the Eras Tour and successor tour architecture. The Institute's Kelce / Swift Family Office Reference walks the composite family-office-adjacent architecture in more detail.
Travis Kelce's tax residency has been Missouri (Kansas City area) throughout his NFL career; the specific arrangements for endorsement income sourcing, the Kelce podcast operating entity, and the eventual composite Kelce-Swift family estate architecture are not publicly disclosed. Jason Kelce's post-NFL residency has continued Pennsylvania-based (Philadelphia area). The framework for founder-equity in podcast operating vehicles, the character-of-income for licensing distribution payments (like the Wondery deal), and the pre-transaction estate-planning framework are covered in the Institute's Liquidity Event Playbook. The Institute's Athlete's Wealth Playbook covers the specific mechanics for active-athlete residency and jock-tax planning applicable to Travis's ongoing NFL career.
On 18 August 2026, Publicis Sports — the sport-and-culture marketing arm of Publicis Groupe (Euronext Paris FR0000130577, CAC 40) — and Travis Kelce announced TEKTA, a Name, Image and Likeness consulting and activation offering, with 3 Arts Sports as strategic operating partner. It is a Travis venture, not a brother venture, but it belongs on this page because it is the clearest evidence that the ownership logic the brothers established with New Heights is now being applied outside their own show.
The structure combines Publicis Sports' advertiser relationships, fan-intelligence data and measurement infrastructure with Kelce's commercial portfolio and 3 Arts Sports' relationships across universities, conferences and athletics departments. A limited group of Publicis Sports clients gets exclusive first access to a network the partners describe as 45,000 Division I student-athletes across 68 Power Four universities, activatable from national down to local market level, with a claimed 50–70% faster speed to market and one unified measurement framework. Activations are coordinated against institutional compliance and applicable conference and state requirements. Athletes are offered vetted national brand opportunities, transparent deal terms, financial literacy training, and career and brand development through 3 Arts Sports.
3 Arts Sports is the sports division of 3 Arts Entertainment, a Lionsgate company, formed after 3 Arts acquired A&A Management Group — founded in Cleveland in 2011 by brothers Aaron and Andre Eanes, now co-heads of 3 Arts Sports and partners of 3 Arts Entertainment. The Kelces are from Cleveland Heights and played college football at Cincinnati; the relationship is regional and long-standing, not newly brokered.
Every other item in the Kelce portfolio monetizes a Kelce name — Garage Beer, 1587 Prime, the endorsement book, New Heights itself. TEKTA monetizes other people's names. Travis is moving from the supply side of the endorsement market to the intermediary layer that decides which athletes brands hire and how that spend gets measured. It is the same structural move the Institute tracks on the Pat McAfee page and in the distribution-deal versus record-contract framework: talent income is bounded by the talent's own calendar and career length, platform income is not. For a 14th-season tight end, that distinction is the whole game.
The timing sits directly on top of the House v. NCAA settlement, which from July 2025 let schools pay athletes directly and pushed third-party NIL into the contested, compliance-heavy remainder of the market. The partners size that remainder at $4.5 billion, and cite Opendorse data putting student-athlete engagement at 5.7% against 1.9% for traditional influencers. A brand-side intermediary with a compliance wrapper and a measurement standard is precisely what a fragmented market of that size lacks. Whether third-party NIL grows alongside revenue sharing or gets crowded out by it is the live question, and it is not yet answerable.
Source: Publicis Groupe press release, “Publicis Sports and Travis Kelce's TEKTA Join Forces to Reimagine the Future of NIL Marketing,” 18 August 2026. Quoted participants: Suzy Deering (CEO, Publicis Sports), Aaron and Andre Eanes (Co-Heads, 3 Arts Sports), Travis Kelce.