Spotify continues podcast takeover with ad and analytics company acquisitions

Spotify continues to push deeper into the podcasting industry. The company today announced that it is acquiring Chartable and Podsights, two of the most popular and powerful podcast analytics and advertising tools on the market. Spotify says that it will use the technology from Podsights and Chartable to power multiple aspects of its advertising business.

Spotify offers some context on the unique skills of both these companies:

Podsights is a leading podcast advertising measurement service that helps advertisers better measure and scale their podcast advertising. Chartable is a podcast analytics platform that enables publishers to know and grow their podcast audiences through promotional attribution and audience insight tools.

Spotify, however, says that it plans to use the Chartable and Podsights technologies beyond just podcast advertising. The company says that “over time” it plans to “extend these measurement capabilities” to audio ads for podcasts and music, as well as video ads and display ads.

And now with the acquisition of Chartable, we will be further enhancing Megaphone’s suite of tools with the integration of Chartable’s audience insights and cutting-edge promotional tools, SmartLinks and SmartPromos. These tools will make it easier for publishers to turn audience insights into action and expand their listenership while ultimately growing their businesses.

This is far from Spotify’s first acquisition in the podcasting industry. In 2020, Spotify acquired the podcast hosting company Megaphone, and in 2019 it acquired the podcast creation platform Anchor.

Apple, meanwhile, continues to take a far less aggressive approach to podcasting. In fact, many of the features of Chartable and Podsights are features that the Apple Podcasts platform purposefully lacks in an effort to maintain an RSS-based, hands-off approach to podcasting.