Joe Rogan podcast will move to Spotify exclusively

Spotify announced that week that Joe Rogan’s huge podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, will to Spotify-and only be available as a Spotify exclusive. This continues Spotify’s aggressive push into the podcast space, following blockbuster acquisitions of The Ringer and Gimlet.

This has helped Spotify surge into the most important player in the podcast space outside of Apple. And you have to give them credit for their choice of acquisitions. The Ringer and Gimlet have proven to be excellent podcast producers, so they’re buying talent that can develop shows and drive new content for Spotify.

With Rogan, Spotify grabs one of the top podcasts with 90 million downloads per month, and the exclusive nature of the deal will drive more downloads of the Spotify app. Spotify can sell ads on the show for users who down’t buy a subscription, but then can drive more subscribers by offering the show ad-free to subscribers. Frankly it’s a brilliant play and is money well spent.

Meanwhile, this deal is a huge blow to Libsyn, which will host the Joe Rogan podcast until September. Libsyn has been a hosting leader in the podcasting space, but now has many competitors and has lost their main source of downloads and prestige.

  

Will advertising rates crumble in podcasting?

microphone for podcasting

Those of us who remember the Web 1.0 world also remember when you could get decent CPM rates for banner ads. Yes, that seems like a lifetime ago, but prior to the Great Recession and the introduction of the iPhone and social media, website owners and bloggers could make decent money on internet advertising.

Tom Webster poses the question as to whether the same thing can happen in the podcasting business:

Great content is expensive to produce, and great advertising native to that content’s form and delivery is well worth a premium. But if several large players in the space start taking poorly executed, irrelevant ads at ultra-low (for podcasting) CPMs, that’s going to have repercussions on the economic feasibility of great audio content.

And that, my friends, is what worries me the most.

Ad delivery technology is progressing rapidly in podcasting, with companies like Megaphone leading the way with dynamic ad insertion and programmatic ads that make it easy to pump ads through tons of podcast episodes. Over time, ad rates for these ads will come down, and then we’ll see if podcasters can still command premium CPMs for host-read ads. So far, the intimacy of podcasting and listener loyalty to hosts has led to excellent performance for these ads. Time will tell . . .

  

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