With its new Spotify video podcast experience, Spotify is making is podcast ambitions clear: It wants to be YouTube for podcasts, and it’s all about the ads.
Spotify announced today that it would start offering its podcast listeners something new: The ability to watch their favorite podcasters while they listen to them. According to the company, this allows fans to “get to know their favorite podcast hosts even better, and creators can more deeply connect with their audiences.” While hardly the first streaming music service to offer video (Apple Music and Tidal both have extensive video collections), you can bet that Spotify’s video strategy is less about creating a multimedia experience, and more about creating a monetized experience. See, Spotify has already made it crystal clear that podcasts are a huge, untapped resource when it comes to advertising. “There’s been no unified business here, everyone is out selling their podcasts individually,” Dawn Ostroff, Spotify’s chief content officer, told a reporter recently, “we don’t even have a unified metric system.
