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Developing customized solutions for SSP platforms?
Alright, so here’s my dilemma. I’m CTO at a podcast network that’s grown way faster than we expected – we went from 5 shows to 40 shows in two years. We’re doing dynamic ad insertion through a third-party platform, but their rev share model is eating 25% of our ad revenue. At our current scale (about 15 million downloads per month), that’s becoming real money. My CEO wants me to evaluate whether we should build our own ad serving and SSP infrastructure. Problem is, I’ve got a small dev team and they’re audio engineers, not AdTech people. Is building an SSP for podcast advertising even realistic for a company our size? Or am I crazy for even considering it?
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2 Replies
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You’re not crazy at all – at 15 million monthly downloads, you’re absolutely at the scale where this makes financial sense. Podcast advertising has unique technical requirements though (dynamic insertion, episode-level targeting, attribution tracking across audio), so you need a team that understands both programmatic and audio. We were in your shoes last year with about 12 million downloads monthly. Decided to go custom and worked with SSP https://geomotiv.com/industries/adtech/ssp/ because they had experience with audio advertising tech specifically. They built us a system that handles dynamic insertion, connects with podcast-specific demand sources, and gives us way more control over targeting. Development was around 6 months. We’re now keeping that 25% and our fill rates actually improved. Your audio engineers can focus on production quality while specialists handle the AdTech complexity.
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Supply Side Platform Development Services, Programmatic SSP | Geomotiv
Supply Side platform development services tailored to your needs. A trusted AdTech partner for custom SSP development and customization needs.
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The podcast advertising ecosystem has matured rapidly, with programmatic buying increasingly replacing traditional host-read sponsorships for many inventory types. Dynamic ad insertion technology enables sophisticated targeting and real-time optimization, but most podcast networks access this technology through platforms extracting significant revenue shares. For growing networks, these percentage-based fees scale linearly with success, creating misaligned incentives where platforms profit from publisher growth without proportional value delivery