Managing your ads and ad breaks

How ads work in the Spotify Partner Program

If you’re approved to earn with the Spotify Partner Program, you can insert ad breaks in your episodes in which ads may play.

Ads may not always play for every listener or viewer, because they're subject to advertiser demand for your audience, and aren’t dynamically inserted when Spotify Premium subscribers in select markets* watch video episodes.

You can use other monetization tools alongside the Spotify Partner Program, such as podcast subscriptions, and you’re allowed to integrate your own creator sponsorships into your episodes as long as they comply with our terms, Spotify Partner Program monetization policies, advertising policies and promotional content guidelines.

Reasons ads might not play include:

• We currently support ad delivery through the Spotify desktop, iOS, and Android apps. If someone plays your show via another Spotify platform (e.g, web player, smart speakers, car, or TV), ads won’t play.
• We currently support ad delivery when the listener or viewer’s device is connected to the internet.
• If your ad break is inserted in the first 10 seconds of an episode, it may not play. We suggest placing an ad break after the first 10 seconds of your episode.
• If your video episode is streamed by a Spotify Premium subscriber in select markets*, we won’t insert dynamic ads into the episode.

*See Spotify Partner Program for a list of markets where Premium members can enjoy your video episodes uninterrupted by dynamic ads.

Automatic ad break insertion

You can automate your ad break insertion as a part of the Spotify Partner Program. This feature helps save you time by letting our systems automatically insert ad breaks into an episode at the appropriate timestamps, which can assist with streamlining ad break location and quantity to help support your earnings. You set the strategy and we’ll help manage the rest.

Note: Automatic ad break insertion only applies to newly uploaded episodes after you set your strategy. It does not impact ad breaks on older episodes.

Ad insertion strategies

• Standard: Insert ads across pre-, mid-, and post-rolls on each episodes
• Moderate: Insert pre- and post-roll ads on each episode
• Minimal: Only insert pre-roll ads on each episodes
• Custom: You tell us which type of ads (pre-, mid-, and post-rolls) you want in your episodes and the required spacing between mid-rolls

To adjust your ad strategy even further, you are able to set the minimum amount of time that must pass before another mid-roll ad can play as well as the maximum number of ads that can play in any ad break. And you can adjust the ad breaks manually before or after publishing.

How we manage pre- and post-rolls

We’ll insert a pre-roll ad break before your episode starts and a post-roll ad break after the episode ends. You can adjust the locations when creating a new episode or after it’s published.

How we manage mid-rolls

We use technology to help identify where ad breaks should go based on the episode’s audio. We look for the following signals:

• Pauses in speech
• Background music
• Speaker change

Mid-roll ad break insertion can take up to 3 minutes per hour of content that you’ve uploaded. Ad break insertion begins when your episode finishes uploading. You can publish your episode while the automatic mid-rolls are processing, and they’ll appear in your episode as soon as they’re ready.

You can set the minimum spacing between mid-rolls. We recommend a minimum of 15 minutes between each ad break. When inserting breaks automatically, we may not find a suitable location at the specified distance. If this happens, you may have fewer ad breaks than expected.

If you turn on automatic mid-rolls, consider taking longer pauses in conversation or adding background music to help us place your ad breaks in the perfect spots.

Setting up automatic ad break insertion

You can set up automatic ad break insertion at any time after you onboard into the Spotify Partner Program.

1. Log in to creators.spotify.com.
2. Go to the Monetize page.
3. Click the Manage section of the Spotify Partner Program tab.
4. Select your Strategy, which tells us about your preferred ad load.

For new episodes

1. Log in to creators.spotify.com.
2. Click New Episode.
3. Upload your episode or video.
4. On the Monetize step, you’ll see the option to adjust your ad breaks for the episode.
5. Once the ad breaks have been inserted, you can click Edit to review and adjust your ad break locations.

We recommend that you review your smart ad breaks locations if you integrate your own creator sponsorships into your episodes or videos, as smart ad breaks may inadvertently be placed within the baked-in ad.

For existing published episodes

1. Log in to creators.spotify.com.
2. Go to Episodes and select an episode or video.
3. Click Edit to review and adjust the ad break locations if you’d like to.

You can always publish your episode or video before ad breaks have been processed. Any ad breaks still in processing are automatically added to your episode once they’re available.

Turning off automatic ad break insertion

If you’ve set up an ad break strategy previously and would like to remove any automated ad insertion:

1. Log in to creators.spotify.com.
2. Go to the Monetize page.
3. Click the Manage section of the Spotify Partner Program tab.
4. Select Custom as your ad strategy

Uncheck Pre-roll, Mid-roll, and Post-roll under ad break locations

Inserting ad breaks manually

If you prefer to select your own time stamps for your ad breaks, you can manually select where you want ads to potentially play.

Manual ad break insertion is only available on the web version of Spotify for Creators.

When you upload or edit your episode on Spotify for Creators, you can use our waveform ad insertion tool to place ad breaks within your episode.

1. Log in to creators.spotify.com.
2. Click New Episode and then Select a file.
3. Upload your episode or video file.
4. Once the file has finished uploading, click Waveform editor on the Monetize step page.

You can insert up to five ad breaks per episode. Each ad break can be configured to play up to five ads.

Excluding ad categories

You can't select the exact ads that play in your episodes.

We provide tools to help support exclusions of certain categories of ads that may appear on your show:

1. Log in to creators.spotify.com.
2. Go to the Spotify Partner Program section of your Monetize tab.
3. Click Exclude categories.
4. Select the categories of ads you don't want to run on your episodes or videos.

Below are examples of top-level ad categories that you may exclude. Categories available for exclusion are subject to change.

• Ad categories you can exclude

You will find additional sub-category details in your Spotify for Creators account.

Note: Excluding categories may result in a reduction of the revenue you could earn from ads, as it can reduce the overall number of available ads that can run on your show.