Spotify Enhances Creator Tools to Support Podcasters
India is witnessing a surge in the popularity of podcasts, ranking third worldwide with a staggering 150 million podcast listeners. Although the podcast trend began in 2005 with Indicast by Abhishek Kumar and Aditya Mhatre, it has gained immense traction with the advent of streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Amazon Music. In a recent move to support and equip podcasters, Apple introduced various creator tools, including Linkfire integration and subscriber analytics.
Now Spotify has followed suit, introducing podcaster tools on Wednesday at the Podcast Movement conference in Denver.
Spotify: new tools for podcasters
Spotify’s Podcast Product Director Austin Lamon announced new podcaster tools. According to a TechCrunch report, this update will now allow podcasters to customize their podcast landing page by adding information such as their bios, as well as external links to their social media handles. With the new preview option, hosts can now choose which part of their podcast they want to preview in the preview section, instead of automatically selecting previews.
In addition, the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard allows hosts to view their impressions analysis and check monthly impressions for each episode as well as for the entire show. Podcasters can also see how their content is being discovered and consumed. Hosts can also add “Creators Recommendations” where they can suggest other recommendations to new listeners and even give them advice on how to start a podcast.
For businesses, Spotify’s Megaphone platform also gets the Spotify Audience Network Performance Dashboard, which provides insights into listener impressions such as their region, episodes and shows listened to, and cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM).
Like Apple, Spotify Podcast also gets an analytics feature that helps content creators track their monetary profits from subscriptions and advertising revenue. The company also mentioned that the Automated Ads program for monetization, which is currently invite-only in the US, will also be rolled out in other regions such as Australia and the UK. According to Spotify, these new features will roll out to hosted and non-hosted podcasters during the fall season.