More ways podcasting gets bigger ad budgets – The Short Stack

“Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” (Aristotle) 

Friends, 

We of the podcast technology set talk incessantly about the innovations that will bring more ad dollars to podcasting. Sorry, not sorry! Per the above quote, innovation needs to be accompanied by message consistency. With that, we’re talking a lot these days about how HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) will improve podcast delivery and, in turn, monetization and measurement.

First things first: for the less-technically inclined, what is HLS? Put simply, it makes podcast delivery smoother by breaking up episodes into small chunks before delivering to a listener, instead of trying to deliver a large, single file all at once. It gets the world closer to saying bye bye to buffering for good. 

Taking it a step further, those chunks can also be created at multiple bitrates, allowing delivery to automatically adjust based on the listeners given bandwidth – this is adaptive bitrate (ABR).

So the first beneficiary here is clearly the consumer. While the content itself is, of course, still king, a clean and clear listening experience is another big factor in a better listening experience. That keeps audiences coming back. More engagement with a show means a more popular show.

Which takes us to another beneficiary: the advertiser. Again starting simply, if podcasters can bring buyers a huge, loyal listening audience, that’s more chances for those listeners to turn into loyal brand customers. But it’s more than that.

The more efficient delivery that comes with HLS paves the way for more efficient ad delivery too. HLS Interstitial for example, which we also talk about a lot, puts the complexities of ad triggering, personalization, reporting, and more in the hands of the SSP or ad server – systems built for ad insertion. Better show delivery, better ad delivery, happier advertiser. One thing leads to another.

There’s more. No great mystery to anyone reading this, podcast measurement still has some challenges; if this space can’t neatly prove its effectiveness, advertisers will continue to tread a little too carefully. 

HLS can help. Back to those little chunks that HLS creates – per this great FAQ our CSO Rockie Thomas wrote, “we can glue all of those byte range requests together to get a complete picture of exactly how much content was delivered, and exactly which pieces of the content each individual audience member received.” This still respects IAB’s standards for counting ad impressions. Moreover, HLS will improve the accuracy of listen through rate (LTR), a key metric of consumer engagement with a podcast. 

We’re not going to stop talking about this and the myriad other ways this space can bring in the budgets. If you're going to Programmatic I/O (next week) and/or AWNY (the week after), let’s talk about it in person there.

Best,