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Spotify has agreed to buy podcast advertising and publishing company Megaphone to provide publishers with the option to monetise their podcasts via the streaming platform.
With the acquisition, the music-streaming platform aims to create targeted ads and make Spotify’s Streaming Ad Insertion available to third-party podcast publishers for the first time. The company said it will ‘soon’ make ad tech available after deal closes.
“We look forward to Megaphone joining Spotify on our mission to accelerate smarter podcast monetisation for advertisers and podcast publishers powered by a scaled audience and state-of-the-art technology,” Dawn Ostroff, Chief Content & Advertising Business Officer at Spotify said in a statement.
Spotify said that with this technology, podcast publishers will be able to offer more details about their audience to advertisers based on confirmed ad impressions, thereby earning more from their work.
The deal follows Spotify’s launch of Streaming Ad Insertion , a podcast ad technology that delivers metrics such as impressions and reach to advertisers. Spotify has been using this technology in its own podcasts since January.
Spotify has 320 million users, including 144 million subscribers and more than 1.9 million podcast titles. It earns revenue from paid subscriptions and showing ads to the non-paying users.
