Audio giant Spotify has announced a new partnership between podcast network Goalhanger and its podcast hosting and monetisation platform, Megaphone.
With this partnership, brands will be able to advertise on Goalhanger with host reads across its hit portfolio of podcasts including The Rest is Politics and Leading with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, and The Rest Is History with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.
Brands will also be able to advertise on the podcast through the Spotify Audience Network, the platform’s advertising marketplace which allows them to buy ads based on their target audience, further increasing Goalhanger’s revenue stream and monetisation opportunities. Spotify will also now host Goalhanger’s entire podcast network and will distribute its shows both on and off its platform.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Goalhanger to help them understand and grow their audiences and monetise their content,” said Spotify UK head of publisher partnerships Chelsea Bradbury. “We believe that our offering will enable them to scale and accelerate their growth in the years to come.”
“Over the past year, we’ve been focused on strengthening Megaphone by Spotify’s already robust offering to ensure it remains the best place for podcast publishers to understand and grow their audiences and monetise their content,” said Spotify global head of advertising business development and partnerships Emma Vaughn. “We are thrilled to partner with Goalhanger and we believe these tools will play a critical role in helping them accelerate their growth.”
The announcement comes just before the start of The Podcast Show, an annual festival celebrating podcasting by bringing together industry experts across the world for two days from 24 to 25 May. On Wednesday, Spotify will be hosting a session to discuss the partnership with Goalhanger founder Jack Davenport.
“We’re delighted to form a new partnership with Spotify,” said Davenport. “Over the past couple of years we’ve found significant new audiences for our shows and we believe that joining Spotify’s Megaphone will help us continue to grow.”
"We'd been with Acast for a long time and wanted to explore the marketplace," said Goalhanger co-founder Tony Pastor. "We felt that the Megaphone Spotify offer was the best for us at the current stage of our business. The potential commercial upside of the partnership is good.
"There's also a floor to it, which we liked as well. It's connected to how many downloads we deliver overall. We've had, over the last year, quite variable months. That hasn't always been related to how well we've done in terms of whether or not our downloads are strong. We wanted a more direct relationship between the commercial revenues and our own successes or otherwise."
Spotify’s Megaphone has partnered with a number of other podcast networks in the UK, including Immediate Media, which was announced in February this year. Immediate Media is a magazine publisher behind a number of hit podcasts including HistoryExtra and the Radio Times podcast.
During a previous PodPod episode, Immediate Media’s head of podcasts Ben Youatt spoke about the new partnership with Spotify and the decision that led the publisher to sign with the platform. Youatt highlighted that it was due to wanting to commercialise the podcasts in different regions, which Megaphone was “particularly strong at” and reaching Spotify’s global audience and active users which hit 500 million listeners monthly by March 2023.
“In our user demographic, the majority of our users have always historically listened on Apple Podcasts so for us, it was an interesting partnership to see how we could grow both commercially and in terms of audience development,” said Youatt. “The agreement that we've now with Spotify’s Megaphone really does suit us as best as any agreement could, and we're very happy with it.”
