Photo Credit: Fringer Cat
Spotify invites broadcasters to try their ‘broadcast-to-podcast’ technology, converting existing content into podcasts and generating new ad revenue.
Spotify unveils an update to make converting radio shows into on-demand podcasts easier, offering radio broadcasters a new source of ad revenue for existing content. As of late last week, Spotify’s “broadcast-to-podcast” technology is now fully integrated into Megaphone, the podcast ad tech and hosting platform Spotify acquired in 2020.
Publishers can use Megaphone to input the URL to a live stream of their broadcasted content and automatically create a podcast from that programming. The “broadcast-to-podcast” conversion technology — deriving from Australian podcasting platform Whooshkaa, which Spotify acquired in 2021 — will automatically identify ad marker locations.
Those ad markers enable publishers to remove the ads originally aired on the live version of the program and dynamically replace them with new ads, generating new revenue. Companies can continue to sell their own ad inventory and, soon, can do so through Spotify’s Audience Network, the platform’s ad marketplace.
“These publishers obviously have a ton of content that they create. The libraries are massive, (but) they don’t always have a full podcast operation that’s set up, (so) creating podcast-only content might not make sense for them,” says Emma Vaughn, Spotify’s global head of advertising business development and partnerships. “That’s where ‘broadcast-to-podcast’ comes in because it’s seamless and allows them to join the ecosystem.”
“More and more people are listening to content via these digital channels,” Vaughn continues. “So it’s going to be able to bring some of this broadcast content that was maybe more isolated to a certain type of demographic to the Spotify demographic and to these young audiences that they haven’t been able to capture before.”
Vaughn notes that the goal is to attract publishers and broadcasters worldwide that “previously weren’t able to access Megaphone and access the podcast ecosystem. That said, the initial rollout will see publishers with an existing advertising and distribution deal with Megaphone use the conversion technology to create on-demand podcasts from the broadcaster’s radio programming.
