With Spotify on pace to cross $1B in ad sales this year, a look at its growing ambitions in advertising and its plans to become the YouTube of podcasting
Millions of people watch videos of Joe Rogan's podcast. They used to do that on YouTube, where Rogan posted full episodes. Tweets: @lucas_shaw and @lucas_shaw See also Mediagazer Tweets: Lucas Shaw / @lucas_shaw : Spotify is adding videos to its app for the third time. I wrote about its growing ambitions in advertising — and a subtle shift in its podcast strategy. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Lucas Shaw / @lucas_shaw : Wall Street saw Spotify's push into podcasting as Netflix 2.0. But the company is starting to sound a lot more like YouTube. This week's newsletter, with comments from @eldsjal. (He says it's a bit of both.) https://www.bloomberg.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Spotify's podcast build-out has been running since at least January, when it counted ~2M shows and 20% of users listening in a push framed around profitability. Video is the recurring subplot: it tested video podcasts with two YouTube stars back in May 2020 (first attempt), and the same month reports surfaced that Rogan's scale could be used as leverage against music labels while seeding an ad network.
What changes now is the framing. Wall Street had cast the podcast spend as Netflix 2.0 — exclusive content behind a subscription — but Spotify is on pace to cross $1B in ad sales and is adding video to its app for the third time, recasting the strategy as an ad-supported, creator-driven platform. The later reports of Spotify offering video creators seven figures to distribute alongside YouTube show where that repositioning leads.
First-order effects
- Spotify gains a second revenue engine: $1B+ in ad sales means podcast monetization no longer depends solely on converting listeners to subscriptions, easing the profitability math that drove the original podcast push.
- Joe Rogan's audience watching full video episodes now does so inside Spotify's app rather than on YouTube, moving watch time and the ad inventory attached to it onto Spotify's own platform.
Second-order effects
- YouTube loses its default position as the video home for top podcasts, and Spotify's ad sales growth gives advertisers a single buy spanning music, podcasts, and video — pressuring YouTube's podcast ad inventory and pricing.
- Rivals building podcast catalogs, including Amazon's Audible and Amazon Music efforts reported earlier, face a competitor that can bundle audio exclusivity with a video platform and an ad network rather than selling shows individually.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, podcasting consolidates around video-first, ad-funded creator platforms rather than subscription-exclusive audio, forcing every audio streamer to choose between licensing content and operating a full creator economy.
- The Netflix 2.0 framing gives way to a two-sided marketplace model in which Spotify's leverage over creators — and potentially over music labels, per the earlier Rogan-scale reporting — comes from ad dollars and distribution scale, not content ownership alone.
The trend: Audio subscription platforms are converging on YouTube's ad-funded, creator-video model, with podcast exclusives becoming the entry point rather than the end state.