January Top 15: Skillshare learns podcast advertising

More than 3,000 brands have advertised on podcasts. Get a heads-up when new brands test podcasts as a marketing channel for the first time: learn more.

Skillshare

Skillshare has been slowly increasing their presence in the podcast space. We first picked up their ads in 2017, but by the end of 2018 they doubled the amount of ads they were running at the beginning of the year. In January we picked up 110 ads from our Top 2,000 podcast. The top podcast categories for these ads were Business, News & Politics, Society & Culture and Health across 17 different networks.

We picked up a mix of mid-roll and pre-roll ads for Skillshare. Although the ads were host read and contained the same talking points, the hosts included a personal anecdote as to why they like Skillshare. Each ad contained a vanity URL (e.g. https://www.skillshare.com/shapiro on The Ben Shapiro Show) that leads to a landing page that looks different than Skillshare’s homepage. Each podcast’s landing page, however, is identical to the next other than a banner at the top welcoming the listeners with a ‘click here to here to redeem’.

January 2019 Rankings

Magellan identified 12,051 pre- or mid-roll ads placed on the Top 2,000 podcasts in January 2019. Out of 1,399 brands or products advertised during the month, the Top 15 are listed below. Click to play a sample mid-roll or pre-roll ad for each advertiser:

The Top 15:

1. ZipRecruiter
2. Geico
3. Indeed
4. Squarespace
5. SimpliSafe
6. Quip
7. Robinhood
8. Zenni Optical
9. Madison Reed
10. Casper
11. Skillshare
12. ThirdLove
13. Care/of
14. Stamps.com
15. Progressive

Methodology

Every week, Magellan samples episodes from 2,000 shows that rank in the Top Podcasts view available through Apple Podcasts in the US. This sample includes episodes from shows that published new episodes in January 2019.

The brands listed above were ranked by the number of individual pre- and mid-roll ads that appeared in our sample. Podcasts advertising on other podcasts, foundations, and those advertising on only one show were excluded from the sample.

Note: this methodology previously inaccurately stated that we had sampled “up to two episodes” from shows that published new episodes during the month. This analysis includes ads on more than two episodes, if more than two were published for each show on the top 2,000 every week. We limited our sample to up to two episodes starting in March 2019.

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Interested in getting earlier access to this data? Magellan helps leading podcast networks like WNYC, Gimlet Media and Wondery win new business. Learn more.