{"id":109374,"date":"2020-11-10T22:20:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-10T19:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/spotifys-latest-acquisition-is-all-about-your-data\/"},"modified":"2020-11-10T22:20:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T19:20:00","slug":"spotifys-latest-acquisition-is-all-about-your-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/spotifys-latest-acquisition-is-all-about-your-data\/","title":{"rendered":"#Spotify’s Latest Acquisition Is All About Your Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Spotify’s Latest Acquisition Is All About Your Data
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Another day, another Spotify acquisition. This time, it\u2019s podcast advertising platform Megaphone, which the music streaming giant announced<\/a><\/span> it was buying earlier today, in an attempt to beef up its advertising chops as it expands its roster of podcast programming.<\/p>\n

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The acquisition accomplishes a few things for both the buyer and buy-ee. On Spotify\u2019s end, the acquisition allows the major brands<\/a><\/span> currently working with Megaphone to funnel some of their major brand bucks through Spotify\u2019s systems, which will help Spotify pinch off a bigger chunk of the roughly $1 billion dollars worth of podcast advertising expected to be spent by the year\u2019s end. Thanks to the acquisition, Spotify\u2019s podcasters will also get the ability to \u201copt in\u201d to having their shows monetized.<\/p>\n

Aside from opening those floodgates, podcasters currently monetizing through Megaphone will get access to Spotify\u2019s proprietary ad-serving system, called Streaming Ad Insertion<\/a><\/span>, to target listeners with ads served in real-time, based on everything from the artists that they stan<\/a><\/span> to their zip code<\/a><\/span> or gender<\/a><\/span>. This ad-insertion tech also tracks how many people hear these ads, and how often a single person tends to hear them.<\/p>\n

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As is the case with most things adtech<\/span>, it can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around why a podcast-based-ad-platform like Megaphone would be worth much of anything, let alone the reported $235 million dollars<\/a><\/span> that Spotify paid in the deal. In short, the answer is data. Back in 2017, Megaphone\u2014then called Panoply\u2014partnered<\/a><\/span> with the data brokering giant<\/a><\/span> Nielsen to become one of the first companies that gave podcast advertisers the same, well, kinda creepy<\/span> targeting abilities companies had everywhere else on the web. If an advertiser wanted to know what podcasts a middle-aged divorc\u00e9e in Utah was listening to while she drove out to buy groceries, chances are, Megaphone would be able to suss it out with the tens of thousands<\/a><\/span> of bits of data it collected across the over 900 shows <\/a><\/span>that were plugged into its platform, as of the middle of last year.<\/p>\n

Spotify largely allowed its users to be tracked and targeted based on the genre of podcasts they listened to until now\u2014but even that was pretty basic, at least according to Spotify\u2019s own description<\/a><\/span>. On its own, Spotify might<\/span> be able to tell advertisers that I was the type of person who binged comedy- and history-related podcasts on the regular, but any other demographics were typically inferred. Acquiring Megaphone is Spotify\u2019s way of collecting more precise data on its rapidly growing<\/a><\/span> listener base, so that base can be better targeted by data-hungry<\/a><\/span> troves of high-paying advertisers.<\/p>\n