Buying ads on podcasts are a PITA, regardless if you’re a buyer, a supplier, or someone in the middle. It sucks.

It sucks for a few reasons: 

• The staple of podcast advertising, the host-read baked-in ad, cannot be scaled.
• Podcast advertisers are lazy and spend money where it’s easiest.

To make it easy for advertisers to spend money on your podcast and spread the wealth, you have to utilize DAI—dynamic ad insertion— to turn your episodes into “addressable inventory”. 

In the past, I’ve told you to ignore advertising unless you’re getting 50,000 downloads per month. I’m revisiting that advice in light of the maturation of our industry. 

Even if your episodes only see a few thousand or a few hundred downloads in the course of 30 days, I still think you should open your episodes to DAI placement. As Bryan Barletta said in this week’s edition of the weekly adtech newsletter Sounds Profitable: If your media hosting provider doesn't at least have a plan to roll out DAI in the next few months, migrate away from that podcast hosting company.

Now, that's going to be a challenge. It’s a snap to seamlessly switch to a new host without impacting your show’s current subscribers/followers. The real headache is updating all of the embedded media players on your website, perhaps going back hundreds of episodes. Oh, and the non-trivial effort required to mark each episode for dynamic placement.

But it's a necessary and overcomeable obstacle if you’re going to help solve podcasting’s advertising problem. The good news is this is totally an outsourceable issue. If you turn it over to someone who’s careful and knows what they are doing, it can all happen behind the scenes with minimal involvement from you and zero impact to your listeners. Get in touch with me if you want to discuss that in more detail. 

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Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

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Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.