Spotify has paid more than $ 100 million to editors and creators of podcasts since January, the company told the New York Times’s Dealbook.
Payment is the result of a program introduced in 2025 that opened new sources of income to eligible hosts. But it is also an attempt to attract more creators (and their audience) for Spotify, since the emergence of video podcasting has led many of them to YouTube.
The video has come to dominate podcasting. More than half of Americans over 12 years have seen a video podcast, but mainly on YouTube, according to an Edison Research Report in January. The service claims to reach one billion podcast consumers every month, which makes it the dominant platform for Podcasts, a king of the media and creator of kings, and leaving audio platforms at the time, such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts in the Dust. (Spotify introduced video podcasts in 2019)
Compared to YouTube, Spotify has become a helpless podcast, with approximately 170 million monthly listeners of podcasts among its total audience of 675 million. An indication of to what extent Spotify has to arrive to catch up with the best player: YouTube paid more than $ 70 billion to creators and media companies from 2021 to 2024.
The company informs the profits on Tuesday and is expected to obtain around 540 million euros in revenues before taxes about 4.2 billion euros in sales, according to S&P Capital IQ.
But Spotify, which appears in the New York Stock Exchange, but is based in Stockholm, It is still an important player in the industry thanks in part to his talent list: he distributes and sells advertising for the world’s largest podcast, “Joe Rogan’s experience.” And achieved its first full year of profitability in 2024 (Mr. Rogan’s podcasts are also available on YouTube).
The new partner program aims to give a place to the YouTube domain. Spotify previously paid creators only sharing advertising income with them, as did YouTube. Now it also gives them incentives to upload videos, with eligible creators who earn additional money based on many premium subscribers interacting with their videos.
The company is trying to attract more spectators. At the same time, that Spotify announced the association program in November, he announced that the subscribed signed in certain markets would have to do dynamic ads in video podcasts. Video consumption has already increased by more than 40 percent since January, according to Spotify.
The question now is whether Spotify can persuade creators to change priorities.
David Colles, host of the Podcast of Horror Fiction “Just Creepy: Scary Stories,” he said he is reassessing his “home platform” after his Spotify income recently exceeded his YouTube income. The last quarter, Mr. Colles said he received around $ 45,500 from Spotify. After joining the company’s new partners program, its quarterly Spotify income increased to approximately $ 81,600.
This increase can be equally more dramatic for larger shows and podcast companies, such as YMH Studios, a comedy network with 2.1 million youtube subscribers that produce popular podcasts that include “2 bears, 1 cave”. While declining sharing exact figures, YMH Studios said his quarterly Spotify income tripled after joining the partners program.
Although the creators emphasized that these are still the first days, Alan Abdine, the head of advertising income at YMH Studios, described the new payment program “A Change of Game” and “A very happy surprise.”
