Today, we're excited to announce that Audiohook has acquired Podscan, one of the world's largest podcast intelligence and monitoring platforms.
Podscan ingests, transcribes, and analyzes more than 70,000 podcast episodes every day, creating an enormous source of data around what is being said across podcasts, how content is categorized, where brands are mentioned, and whether content is suitable for advertisers.
We've worked closely with Podscan for some time, and the more we used the platform, the clearer it became that Arvid Kahl had built something exceptional.
Now we're bringing Podscan into Audiohook, and we want much of that intelligence to be available to the entire podcast industry.
Making podcast intelligence more accessible
Podcasting produces an extraordinary amount of content every day.
That scale is one of the medium's strengths, but it also creates a challenge: understanding what is actually being discussed across millions of episodes is incredibly difficult.
Podscan helps solve that problem by continuously analyzing podcast content for signals including:
- Full episode transcripts
- Contextual categories
- Brand suitability
- Brand mentions
- Sentiment
Starting today, we're making much of that data available for free.
Creators, podcast networks, and publishers can access transcripts, contextual classifications, and brand-suitability analysis for the shows they represent.
Brands and advertisers can monitor where their companies and products are being discussed across podcasts and understand the context and sentiment surrounding those conversations.
Our goal is simple: give everyone in the podcast ecosystem better information.
Why Audiohook acquired Podscan
Audiohook has always been focused on making audio advertising more measurable, transparent, and performance-driven.
As we've expanded our contextual targeting and brand-suitability capabilities, understanding podcast content at scale has become increasingly important.
Podscan has built the infrastructure to do exactly that.
Combining Podscan's podcast intelligence with Audiohook's advertising and measurement technology gives us the ability to build better tools for advertisers while also giving publishers greater visibility into how their content is understood and categorized.
But we don't think this type of data should exist only inside Audiohook.
The more visibility brands have into where their advertising can run, and the more visibility publishers have into how their content is being evaluated, the better decisions everyone can make.
That's why we're opening much of Podscan's data to the industry rather than keeping it behind Audiohook.
Arvid Kahl is joining Audiohook
We're also excited that Podscan founder Arvid Kahl is joining Audiohook.
Arvid will continue working on Podscan, overseeing the technical transition and helping us build the next generation of the platform.
He has built an impressive product and infrastructure layer around podcast data, and we're excited to pair that technology with the resources, data, and engineering capabilities of Audiohook.
For existing Podscan customers, Podscan will continue operating as a product, with Audiohook investing in expanding its capabilities and accelerating its roadmap.
What's next
We think podcast intelligence has the potential to become an important infrastructure layer for the entire audio industry.
Better content understanding can improve contextual targeting, brand suitability, measurement, competitive intelligence, creator discovery, and many other parts of the podcast ecosystem.
Podscan gives us the foundation to build toward that future.
And we're just getting started.
Podscan by Audiohook is available today.