Spotify has paid over $ 100 million to the publishers and creators of Podcast since January, the company told the New York Times's Dealbook.
Payment is the result of a program introduced in 2025 which opened new flows of admissible hosts. But it is also an attempt to attract more creators (and their audience) to Spotify, since the rise of the podcasting video has pushed many of them on YouTube.
The video came to dominate podcasting. More than half of Americans over the age of 12 has seen a video podcast, but mainly on YouTube, according to a January Edison's research relationship. The service claims to reach 1 billion podcast consumers every month, making it the dominant platform for the media podcasts and a kingmaker-e leaving only audio platforms such as Spotify and Apple podcast in the dust. (Spotify introduced Podcast video in 2019.)
Compared to YouTube, Spotify has become a podcast loser, with about 170 million podcast listeners between its total audience of 675 million. An indication of up to what point Spotify should go to reach the best player: YouTube has paid more than $ 70 billion to creators and average companies from 2021 to 2024.
The company reports profits on Tuesday and should earn about 540 million euros of pretax income with 4.2 billion euros in sales, according to the qi of the capital s & p.
But Spotify, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange but is based in Stockholm, It remains one of the main actors in the sector thanks in part to its list of talents: it distributes and sells advertisements for the largest podcast in the world, “The Joe Rogan Experience”. And he reached his first whole year of profitability in 2024. (Mr. Rogan podcasts are also available on YouTube.)
The new partner program aims at chips to YouTube domain. Spotify has previously paid the creators only by sharing advertising revenues with them, just like YouTube. Now it also gives them incentives to upload videos, with suitable creators who earn additional money based on the amount of premium subscribers interacts with their videos.
The company is trying to attract more spectators. At the same time that Spotify announced the partnership program in November, announced that paid subscribers in some markets should not have watched dynamic ads in video podcasts. Video consumption has already increased by over 40 percent since January, according to Spotify.
The question is now if Spotify can convince creators to move priorities.
David Coles, conductor of the “Just Crepy: Scary Stories” Fiction Podcast, “he said he is re -evaluating his” domestic platform “after his revenue Spotify have recently passed his YouTube revenues. The last quarter, Coles said he received about $ 45,500 from Spotify. After joining the company's new partner program, its quarterly income Spotify went to around $ 81,600.
This increase can be even more dramatic for larger shows and podcast companies, such as Ymh Studios, a comic network with 2.1 million YouTube subscribers that produces popular podcasts including “2 bears, 1 cave”. While refusing to share exact data, Ymh Studios said that his Spotify quarterly revenues are more than tripled after joining the partner program.
Although the creators have underlined that they are still first days, Alan Abdine, the head of the advertising revenue of the Ymh Studios, has defined the new payment program “a turning point” and “a very happy surprise”.