Spotify offers podcasters something that no other platform can offer: data on their listeners

It’s no secret that Spotify, one of the world’s largest music streaming platforms with over 200 million users, has been trying to get its foot into the podcast world for a while now. The platform recently introduced podcasts to its platform and now, is offering podcasters something they can’t get on any other platform: data.

Podcasters operate in something of a feedback dead zone. As The Verge notes in its report, barring Apple Podcasts, no other platform actually gives podcasters any data on who their listeners are. Podcasters, as with most other types of content creators, earn money from advertising. This advertising works best when you know who your target audience is, which is hard to gauge when all you get to data on is the number of times a podcast was downloaded.

[caption id=“attachment_7164241” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Spotify is offering podcasters detailed analytics on their listeners.[/caption]

As noted by The Verge in its report, Spotify’s dashboard gives podcasters demographic information as well as information on how long people spent listening to a podcast and more.

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Spotify says that while it has a lot of data on its users – given that Spotify users, unlike other podcast app users, need to sign up and provide data to use Spotify – only the most relevant and non-invasive data is shared with podcasters themselves.

Armed with this data, podcasters can seek better opportunities for monetising their podcasts.

According to The Verge, 100,000 podcasters have signed up for analytics access on Spotify.

Spotify still hasn’t said anything about options for monetising podcasts via Spotify directly, but such a feature might arrive soon enough.