Presenting Sponsorship of One Podcast Season, Negotiated

A season sponsorship earns its price when two things are in the contract: the host reads live, and your category is locked for the run plus sixty days after it. Both are negotiable with every German network we deal with, and most buyers never ask for either. We buy runs of eight to twelve episodes on that basis and walk away from shows that offer only dynamically inserted spots. What we look at before we bid: Last season's downloads at day seven and day thirty under IAB v2, not lifetime totals, which flatter old shows and hide dying ones. The Spotify to Apple follower split, because it tells you whether the audience is habitual or algorithmic, and those two audiences respond to completely different reads. Completion rate at the midroll marker: a show that cannot produce that number does not get a midroll price from us, it gets a pre-roll price. And four episodes of actual listening, one of them from before the show carried any sponsor at all, because the voice you are buying only works if it survived advertisers arriving. Who we buy from: Podstars by OMR, Julep Media, Studio Bummens, Auf die Ohren, Seven.One Audio and the RTL Deutschland audio side, plus independent shows where the host still owns the feed and the RSS. Off-network hosts are usually the better buy and always the slower negotiation, sometimes six weeks for a season that a network would sign in four days. The read: Sixty to ninety seconds, midroll, live host read, briefed rather than scripted. The brief carries three facts, one claim the host can verify themselves, and one thing they are free to say they dislike. That last item is the mechanism, not a flourish: an audience that has heard the host say something critical believes the rest of it. We hear the first read before the episode publishes, and when it is wrong we change the brief rather than the host. For health and wellness clients there is a hard limit. A host improvising around a supplement or a device can produce a claim the Heilmittelwerbegesetz does not permit, and the exposure lands on the advertiser rather than the show. So health briefs are bounded, permitted and forbidden formulations go into the sponsor agreement itself, and that segment is recorded to a tighter brief. A brand that wants a host sounding spontaneous about a health claim should not book this. Delivery and money: Guaranteed delivery reconciles at day thirty against IAB v2 numbers from the network's certified reporting. A shortfall inside ten percent we take in bonus placements on the same show. Beyond ten percent we take the money back, and holding the budget in escrow makes that a mechanical conversation rather than a relationship one. What we refuse: Dynamic insertion into back-catalogue episodes. Anything older than ninety days delivers impressions long after the offer changed, into a promo code that expired and a landing page nobody updated. Pre-roll-only packages sold at midroll prices. Category exclusivity drafted to exclude only exact competitors while the adjacent ones walk in. And any deal where we are not permitted to speak with the host before money moves. Who this is not for: Anyone testing podcast advertising with a single episode. A season is the unit that works, and a one-episode test measures the wrong thing well. Anyone whose success metric is promo code redemptions alone. And any brand whose legal review must approve the exact words a host will say, because the moment a read is word-perfect it stops sounding like the show and starts sounding like an ad, which is the sound the audience trained itself to skip.