No more wasted time searching for the best spots for mid-roll ad breaks in your episodes. Plus, we’ve improved editing and monetization controls with draft episodes.
We’re excited to announce several platform upgrades that both enhance your podcast monetization and optimize your workflow experience. If you head over to your Sounder account, you’ll find these new features available. You can now:
- Turn on automatic mid-roll ad insertion for all of your future episodes in a few clicks
- Set up episode monetization settings, now before and after publishing
- Save any episode as a draft so you can prepare content in advance of its release date
Let’s dive in!
#1 Introducing Auto Mid-Roll Ad Placements
Mid-roll ads are a key revenue generator for podcasters. As the name implies, mid-roll ad breaks are typically set in the middle of an episode. These ads can drive more revenue for your catalog as valuable spot for dynamic ad insertion. Many advertisers believe that when an ad is placed in the middle of an episode that it reaches more listeners as few choose to skip. In turn, the CPM of mid-roll ads are usually double or triple that of pre-roll or post-roll.
Until now, it’s been time consuming for creators to search for the best places to insert mid-roll ads in their episodes. The process is such a challenge that it’s led to many creators skipping mid-roll ads altogether—and, in turn, we believe creators are missing out on making up to 30% more revenue on their catalog!
It’s a big issue to solve, and this release is one major step in that direction.
Our new beta tool makes setting mid-roll ad breaks easier for creators.
Benefits of Auto Mid-Roll Recs
- Sounder identifies the natural moments in your episode for a mid-roll ad to appear — Trained on millions of podcast episodes, our automatic mid-roll technology can now interpret where to place an ad break. A good mid-roll placement should exist at a point of rest of topic transition. That said, if your episode is shorter than 20 minutes, no mid-roll ad breaks will be identified.
- Sounder automatically inserts ad breaks into these moments or surfaces timestamps for you to do it yourself — Save hours of time by no longer having to figure out the timestamp for your mid-roll ad break. It allows you ensure every future episode is monetized to its fullest.
- Sounder allows you to set up your ad placements before publishing your content, ensuring you never miss the opportunity to monetize your engagement — Before you hit publish, you can customize your monetization preferences. Plus, you can even set automatic monetization settings. That means you can have say three pre-rolls, intelligently chosen mid-rolls, and two post-rolls every time you publish a new episode.
Coming soon, our team is working on having automatic mid-roll ad break identification work for your back catalog.
#2 Introducing Draft Episode Management
We’re also thrilled to launch draft episodes—a long requested feature—giving you more control over your episodes and RSS feed. When creating and publishing new episodes, you can now save your work as a draft at any stage of the process, helping you prepare your content well in advance of publishing.
Draft episodes are also useful way for creators to take an episode offline but not delete it. Now, you can simply revert a published episode back to draft and keep it archived.
For creators who import their content to Sounder, you can switch all episodes to draft using bulk-episode selection. Then you can publish all episodes at a later date when you’re ready to go live and set the 301 redirect on your old host.
As mentioned earlier, you can also control your monetization settings, including auto mid-roll insertion, from the draft episode page.
Been thinking about migrating to Sounder?
Setting up a new account and migrating your content has never been easier. You can import your podcast and test out all of our features before making your content live with Sounder. For podcasters and networks with 50K+ streams/mo, reach out for early access to host-read DAI opportunities across your full catalog.
Let us know what you think!
We hope you love the added horsepower to the day to day operations of running your podcast. At Sounder, we plan our upgrades around our creators. Please, share your feedback on the feature with us via support@sounder.fm.
Happy Podcasting!
