Nordic Podcast Sponsorship Buying, Show by Show

A host-read mid-roll on a named Swedish or Norwegian show prices between EUR 28 and 45 per thousand IAB 2.1 downloads. Run-of-network inventory from the same sales house prices at 6 to 12. We buy the first and decline the second, because across the accounts we have run the cheap unit has never produced enough surveyed customers to survive its own reporting. We buy shows. We do not buy networks. How a show gets bought: We listen to four episodes before we ask for a price. What we are listening for is whether the host reads or talks. Ninety seconds of unscripted speech that names one real detail about the product, placed after the episode has made its first argument, behaves nothing like a thirty-second announcer spot at minute three, and the two are sold at similar rates by people who know the difference. In pets this stops being a matter of taste. If the host does not have the animal, the read does not work, and we will say that rather than take the budget. Where we buy: Acast, Podme, Bauer Media's Podplay and PodX across Sweden and Norway, Munck Studios and the Danish independents, and direct with English-language shows or their own networks rather than through a marketplace layer. Direct terms are usually worse on price and better on everything that matters afterwards: slot position, script approval, a host who will re-record, and a make-good when an episode slips a week. Measurement, and its Nordic limits: Delivery is counted on IAB Tech Lab Podcast Measurement 2.1 certified prefixes on the 30-day window, and reconciled against the seller's dashboard before you pay. Attribution runs on three instruments: a vanity URL with a server-side redirect, a code the host has to say aloud rather than bury in show notes, and a post-purchase survey through Fairing or KnoCommerce. The survey is the primary instrument here, not the fallback. Pixel attribution through Podscribe or ArtsAI we run where the listening app's consent state supports it, and in Sweden that is a materially smaller matched set than the same buy in the United States. We plan the read around the spoken code because of it, instead of discovering the gap in month three. The kill rule: Every show carries a threshold agreed before the first flight, written in surveyed customers rather than downloads. A show that misses it across two flights comes out and the money moves. We do not renew a show because its audience flatters the brand. What we do not do: We do not buy run-of-network, and we do not open a show with dynamic insertion into its back catalogue. We take no rebate from a sales house and will show you the invoice they send us. We do not write a script for the host to perform word for word; we write the brief and the three facts that must survive, then approve what comes back. We do not buy sponsorship of shows we would not put in front of your legal team, which rules out most true-crime inventory for pet and marketplace brands however well it indexes. Who this is not for: Budgets under EUR 8,000 a month in this channel, where the flight is too short to read. App installs judged on last click. Anyone wanting a single four-week test to decide whether podcasts work; at that length the answer is noise, and we would rather you spent the money somewhere it can be read. What you receive: A shortlist with the reason each show is on it and the reason four others were cut, negotiated rates and slot terms in writing, briefs and approved reads, delivery reconciled against certified prefix numbers, and a monthly read on surveyed acquisition by show with a recommendation to hold, raise or cut.