Spotify Is Acquiring Two Major Podcast Surveillance Ad Tech Platforms

Ashley Carman, reporting for The Verge:

Spotify is making more podcast acquisitions. The company announced today it’s acquiring both Chartable and Podsights — two of the most prominent podcast marketing and ad attribution companies. The deal price hasn’t been disclosed, but this marks the first major acquisition the company has made this year in a long line of audio purchases.

Both Podsights and Chartable allow podcasters and networks to include tags in their shows that are used to track who listened, if they heard an ad, and whether they took action upon hearing it. [...] This deal is particularly critical for the company as it tries to make its ad platform the best and most powerful in audio.

Spotify isn’t just trying to become the biggest name in podcasting (which has heretofore been, but may no longer be, Apple). They’re trying to usurp podcasting as we know it — one of the last and brightest bastions of the open, simple, private, transparent internet — and turn it into a privately-owned, gated, complicated, invasive, utterly closed platform. Spotify is trying to do to podcasting what Facebook did to “having your own website”.

★ Thursday, 17 February 2022