Spotify is expanding its Megaphone podcasting platform to select European markets.
Publishers in Germany, Spain, France, and Italy will not have access to Megaphone. It’s an all-in-one podcasting platform for publishing, analytics, and monetization. The company first launched in 2015 and since then, it has become a dominant force in podcast publishing.
More than 30% of the top 200 shows on both Spotify and Apple are hosted on the Megaphone podcasting platform. The platform also manages more than twice the number of top 200 shows than the next largest podcasting platform. The community of publishers working with Megaphone has grown over 50% in markets outside the United States.
Spotify says the formal expansion into these European markets allows Megaphone to help more local podcast publishers. Spotify says that’s because the Megaphone platform is built to scale with the success of a show as it finds its audience.
Megaphone expects podcast ad spending to grow by 50% to reach €200M by 2023. It features support for many types of advertising, including baked-in host reads or support for dynamic ad insertion.” Megaphone has all of the tools needed to help publishers earn more from their work,” the announcement says.
“Through Megaphone, publishers can accurately plan their inventory, manage individual advertiser campaigns, and analyze post-campaign performance. And as you grow your direct sales, you can feel confident in knowing that 100% of revenue earned from direct sales campaigns goes directly to the publisher.”
Spotify says this launch shows that it is committed to introducing more innovative monetization-focused solutions for podcasters.
Publishers can expect many new features to rollout to the Megaphone dashboard over the next few months. Those include audience-based insights, targeting capabilities for direct sales, and even new supplemental demand sources.
Podcasts are continuing to grow at a lightning pace across the world. Back home in America, around 41% of Americans say they listen to at least one podcast per month.
In 2021, that means around 116 million people are listening to at least one podcast. Podcast growth is happening fastest among older Americans, though. From 2020 to 2021, the percentage of Americans 55+ and older who listen to podcasts increased by 18%.