Spreaker wants to be the Google AdSense of podcasts

Spreaker is going back to its roots by allowing small independent creators to sign up for free, the podcast platform announced on Friday.

Previously, only paying users could use the ad marketplace to earn money from ads. Now users with free accounts can access features like monetization and unlimited podcast storage and downloads.

“When we launched Spreaker, we wanted it to be free,” said CEO and co-founder Francesco Baschieri. “The original idea was to help the developers and share the revenue from advertising sales, rather than charging for the product itself.”

speaker gets a 40% stake advertising income of podcasters on its platform. But the company that iHeartMedia The company, acquired in 2020, transitioned to a freemium SaaS business model with tiered pricing plans after exiting beta in October 2010.

The move is part of Spreaker’s strategy to become the Google AdSense of the podcasting world. “From the beginning, we tried to separate the content creator job from the sales rep job,” said Baschieri.

Like Google AdSense, Spreaker finds the best match between content creators and advertisers. It relieves creators of the administrative burden of advertising, so they can focus on creating content and growing their audience.

To bring podcasters together Big Brand AdvertisersSpreaker relies heavily on programmatic technology (more than 90% of its revenue). To provide a good experience for both creators and advertisers, the company invests in brand safety, ad quality, and data.

Every show entering the programmatic market goes through transcription and other brand security systems to look for negative keywords or sentiment. All shows are then also checked by a human.

Spreaker also relies on technology to maintain ad quality. For example, ad volume is adjusted to match the podcasts they are on.

And Spreaker’s Machine Augmented Guard for Dynamic Advertising (MAGDA) technology, which the company launched in November, handles real-time transcription of programmatic ads on Spreaker’s ad marketplace.

MAGDA not only automatically categorizes ads, but also identifies incorrectly categorized ads, e.g. For example, a political ad categorized as a garden ad and draws people’s attention to uncategorized ads.

“There’s not a lot of data in podcasting,” Baschieri said, but to accommodate businesses and target their 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 likely lose revenue from SaaS models. However, the long-term prospects remain optimistic as “there is still a lot of untapped potential for new show releases,” Baschieri said.

Podcast listeners are growing both in the US and globally, and these listeners are consuming a lot of content. Additionally, a lot of what people listen to is “super niche music,” Baschieri said.

Because of this, Spreaker is more than willing to wager “big bucks” by chasing long tail podcaster. These bets include content creators who have not yet entered the podcasting market because they find the cost a deterrent.

“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, which may be two or three years from tomorrow, will hopefully start on Spreaker. We can build a relationship with them from the start and grow with them.”