Host-Read Podcast Placements, Bought Show by Show

Downloads are not listens, and the gap widened in September 2023 when Apple stopped automatically downloading episodes for followers who had not played a show recently. Shows that never re-baselined were still selling against pre-iOS-17 numbers a year later. We buy on a download figure certified against the IAB Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines and dated within the last ninety days, and we ask for the host's raw dashboard rather than a media kit PDF. What we buy: Host-read, baked into the episode, placed between 30 and 45 percent of runtime, sixty to ninety seconds. Not pre-roll, which a developer audience skips by reflex. Not dynamic insertion, which drops a stranger's voice into a show the listener trusts and can be served into episodes recorded before your product existed. How the read gets written: The host writes it. We supply one page: the claim, the single thing we want a listener able to repeat afterwards, the words that create a regulatory problem, and the disclosure. Before that, the host receives the product with an account provisioned properly and enough time to use it, two weeks minimum for developer tools and a full week for anything a family has to live with. A host reading about software they installed the night before is audible. We approve the claim, not the wording, and we do not ask for a second take to make it sound warmer. Attribution, honestly: Podcast attribution is the weakest measurement in creator media and anyone selling you certainty is selling you a model. We run four signals and read them together: a vanity path unique to each show, a promo code the host says out loud, a Podscribe-style pixel where the network supports one, and an open-text where-did-you-hear-about-us field at signup or checkout. That last field regularly surfaces shows the pixel misses. Above a certain spend we hold one show or one market out for four weeks to get an incrementality read rather than a correlation. What is not included: Network-negotiated slate buys. We buy shows one at a time and can name the reason for each. Programmatic audio. Ad creative production, since there is no creative here beyond the brief and a produced spot in a host-read slot is the fastest way to sound like an interruption. Guaranteed download numbers. What we refuse: Scripted reads. Requests to move the disclosure to the end or remove it. Inserting an existing read into back catalogue episodes without the host agreeing. Buying a show on download volume when the audience is wrong, since a 60,000-download general business show usually sells fewer developer seats than a 6,000-download show whose host writes code on the weekend. Where we work: Developer tooling shows, and parenting and family shows where the host is talking to the person who pays. In both, the listener has chosen a voice and stayed with it for years, and the endorsement borrows that. This is also why a bad read damages more than it costs. Not a fit: Products that need a demonstration to make sense. Anyone who wants a host to state a performance figure we cannot evidence. Campaigns with less than five weeks of lead time, because a baked-in read has to be used, written, recorded and scheduled around a calendar that already exists, and rushing it produces the flat hurried version everybody has heard and skipped.