Spotify to up its podcast game, and its ad revenues

By theCLIKK

February 25, 2020

Over the past several months, Spotify has been snapping up podcast networks like Parcast, Anchor and Gimlet. When it wraps up its acquisition of The Ringer, it will have invested about $582 million in this venture.

Spotify’s goal is to increase the number of original and exclusive podcasts on its platform. The reason? We’re talkin’ dolla’ dolla’ bills, y’all.

Lend me your ears

As the Drum reports, Spotify plans to monetize its podcasts thanks to a new tool called streaming ad insertion (SAI). These are personalized ads dynamically inserted into the podcasts.

With SAI, a host records a number of reads. An editor then inserts the ads into the podcast. The goal is to do so as smoothly as possible to preserve an “intimate feeling.” It’s not easy, but the beauty of this process is that ads aren’t permanently “burned into” the podcasts. Thanks to streaming technology, they can be swapped out as appropriate.

Spotify already does SAI for its owned and exclusive content—thus the push to amp up those offerings. But eventually, it hopes to bring SAI to its table of third-party podcasts, which will open up a tremendous amount of ad inventory. Spotify has ~200 original and exclusive podcasts using the new ad tool while they have over 700,000 podcasts on the platform.

theCLIKK’s Take: This looks promising for digital advertisers looking to diversify their traffic portfolio in the world of the Facebook/Google duopoly. Is there a self-serve podcasting ad platform on the horizon from Spotify? We sure hope so.