Megaphone
Address: 
150 Greenwich St, New York, NY 10006, USA
A simple, powerful way to take your podcast business to the next level—and beyond
Website: megaphone.spotify.com
Owned by: Spotify
Megaphone is IAB Certified
It was certified for v2.2 of the IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines on Nov 12, 2025.
It is certified for Download, Ad Delivery and Listener. Learn more
Latest news
- Aug 24: We've had more email about Megaphone woes. One large publisher tells us: "We've experienced a complete outage of ad plays, ads repeating back-to-back and who knows what else we haven't discovered yet. We've had to re-write orders and move ads to different ad slots to get them to play. Discovering and remediating these issues has been an entirely manual process, with little active support from Megaphone. This not only costs the industry ad dollars but also redirects countless hours of labor toward remediation." Another publisher tells us: "It was a bad summer working for Spotify and their Megaphone support team (unpaid) while we spent a month asking why things were not delivering. We learned we could no longer have the same order run in multiple countries - each would require its own order. A true pain for those along the border in the Canada and USA who still want to market to one another. One Star Spotify Summer. Do not recommend." We've approached the company for comment.
- Aug 21: Good news: lots of people are sharing their Megaphone stories with us (or with Flightpath) so we can come back to this story on Monday. Use us - editor@podnews.net - if you want to keep your name out of it: and let's not just sit this one out. Also good news - your 50,000-view, 150-video podcast on YouTube wasn't automatically removed this week for no reason whatsoever! On Monday, we'll cover someone's channel which has. But - good news -we're not covering that today!
- Aug 20: Returning to our top story: and Podnews will call the company out by name: it's Megaphone. Yesterday, we covered issues that some publishers have had with Megaphone: bugs and breaking changes without documentation that have left publishers scrambling to catch issues. Today, we've evidence that competitive separation - which is now unilaterally enforced by Megaphone - means for some niche shows, different ads are fighting with themselves to be heard (or, fighting with network ads sold by Spotify). For example - if you're a financial podcast, and you have two financial services advertisers, these new rules mean they'll not be allowed in the same ad break, irrespective of what you want as a publisher. However, a workaround to change one advertiser's category doesn't work, because, says Megaphone support, "there is an active bug where existing campaigns continue to carry their previously set advertiser category". (This isn't documented).
- Aug 19: Spotify's Megaphone is silently adding geographic restrictions to block some publisher-sold advertising campaigns, warns Marques Pfaff of Amplitude Media Partners. The company has told him that it was done for legal reasons: but there is no documentation from Megaphone with any details.
- Aug 12: Podcast marketplace Acast has acquired Backyard Ventures, a US-based podcast network, for US $20mn. Backyard Ventures is home to podcasts like Piers Morgan's Uncensored, Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic, and audiences of more than 230 million. The team from Backyard Ventures will stay with the business; the brand will be retired as the company is integrated into Acast. Backyard shows are currently hosted and monetised by ART19 and Megaphone.
Data credits: Google Maps, IAB, Podnews newsletter