Spotify is lowering its eligibility criteria for podcasters to monetize their videos on the platform, dropping the minimum episode requirement to three, minimum consumption hours to 2,000, and engaged audience member threshold to 1,000 over the last 30 days.
When the company introduced its partner program to monetize video content last year, creators needed to have published 12 episodes, hit 10,000 consumption hours over the prior 30 days, and had at least 2,000 people stream their content in the last 30 days to be part of the program.
The program pays podcasters according to the number of premium users who watched their videos on Spotify, alongside a share of ad revenue earned from users on the free tier.
The company is also introducing new sponsorship tools that would allow creators to update, schedule, and measure sponsorship spots read by hosts in video ads. These tools are coming to the Spotify for Creators app, and Megaphone, the company’s podcast hosting and monetization suite, in April.
Doubling down on its video strategy in a bid to compete better with YouTube, Spotify is now launching a new API that would let creators use their existing platforms to publish and monetize video podcasts on Spotify. At launch, tools like Acast, Audioboom, Libsyn, Omny, and Podigee have adopted this API, the company said.
The new moves come as Spotify’s been looking to new avenues to attract users and build on its streaming subscription revenue. The company said since the launch of the partner program, the consumption of video podcasts on the app has nearly doubled, and that the average Spotify podcast user streams twice as many video shows per month as they did before the program was launched.
But that could simply be a result of the streaming service surfacing more video content.
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The company is also opening a studio for recording podcasts and videos in West Hollywood. Spotify said the studio would serve as a base for the Ringer podcast network, and it would open up the studio to select creators from the partner program. The company already has studios across the art district in LA, New York, Stockholm, and London.
