Spreaker is returning to its roots by allowing small independent creators to sign up for free, the podcast platform announced Friday.
Previously, only paying users could tap into the ad marketplace to make money on ads. Now, users with free accounts can access features such as monetization and unlimited podcast storage and downloads.
“When we started Spreaker, we intended for it to be free,” said CEO and Co-Founder Francesco Baschieri. “The original idea was to help creators and share the revenue on advertising sales, not charge for the product itself.”
Spreaker gets a 40% share of advertising revenue from podcasters on its platform. But the company, which iHeartMedia acquired in 2020, migrated to a freemium SaaS business model with tiered pricing plans when it exited beta in October 2010.
The move is part of Spreaker’s strategy to become the Google AdSense of the podcasting world. “What we’ve tried to do since the beginning is to separate the job of content creator from the job of a sales rep,” Baschieri said.
Like Google AdSense, Spreaker finds the best match between creators’ content and advertisers. It takes the ad-related administrative headaches off creators’ plates so they can focus on making content and growing their audiences.
To match podcasters with big brand advertisers, Spreaker relies heavily on programmatic technology (more than 90% of its revenue). To ensure a good experience for both creators and advertisers, it is investing in brand safety, ad quality and data.
Every show that enters the programmatic marketplace runs through transcription and other brand safety systems to check for negative keywords or sentiments. All shows are then checked by a human as well.
Spreaker also leans on technology to maintain ad quality. For instance, it adjusts ad volume to be consistent with the podcasts they’re on.
And Spreaker’s machine augmented guard for dynamic advertising (MAGDA) tech, which the company rolled out in November, does real-time transcription of programmatic ads in Spreaker’s ad marketplace.
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MAGDA not only automatically categorizes ads but also identifies miscategorized ads, like a political ad that’s categorized as a gardening ad, and alerts people to uncategorized ads.
“There’s not a lot of data in podcasting,” Baschieri said, but to accommodate enterprises so they can target messages to specific audiences, Spreaker has “invested in data pipelines and algorithms to extract first-party data from our inventory.”
In the short term, Spreaker will probably lose out on SaaS model-based revenue. But it remains bullish on its long-term prospects, given that “there’s a lot of untapped potential for new shows to come out,” Baschieri said.
The number of podcast listeners is growing in both the US and globally, and those listeners consume a lot of content. What’s more, much of what people listen to is “super niche,” Baschieri said.
That’s why Spreaker is happy to be “gambling big” by going after long-tail podcasters. Those bets include content creators who haven’t yet entered the podcasting market because they find the costs daunting.
“We want to expand the top of the funnel for this potential user base and see what happens,” Baschieri said. “The big shows of tomorrow, where tomorrow can be two or three years from now, hopefully will get started on Spreaker. We can establish a relationship with them at the beginning and grow with them.”
