Tuesday, October 27th, 2026 – 9:00 am
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Content discovery has moved away from the channels controlled by publishers and their audiences.
People just don’t go to websites like they used to, which has some media industry insiders declaring that the pageview era of digital publishing is dead. Meanwhile, search, social media and AI chatbots are beholden to the algorithmic whims of Big Tech.
Which leaves the email inbox as one of the last remaining bastions where users curate their own content preferences. Beehiiv wants to capitalize on the inbox’s direct connection to audiences as it builds an all-encompassing content and monetization platform, including services for newsletters, websites and podcasts.
To round out the podcast offering it introduced this Spring, beehiiv announced Tuesday it’s adding dynamic audio ad insertion to its programmatic platform.
Beehiiv’s platform serves the gamut of publishers, from single-operator newsletters and local publications run by relative unknowns to startups launched by nationally recognized reporters like Oliver Darcy’s Status. It also works with big media brands, including Newsweek and TIME.
Now, any of those publishers can open their podcast inventory to programmatic demand to complement their direct-sold host-read ads and more effectively monetize their back catalogs, Ainsley Rossitto, head of podcast at beehiiv, told AdExchanger.
Courting creators with programmatic
The shift in content consumption has been a boon for newsletter-native platforms like beehiiv and its competitors Substack and Ghost. As some writers have recently noted, it feels like everyone has glommed onto the idea that audiences don’t want to engage with content unless it arrives in an email or gets served to them on social.
With that shift in mind, building a podcast offering has long been on beehiiv’s road map as a way to complement its newsletter, social networking and website development tools, Tyler Denk, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told AdExchanger.
The company’s decision to bring in Rossitto to head up its podcast business – she joined in May after stints managing podcast ad strategy for NPR and Paramount – shows how serious beehiiv is about this fast-growing part of its portfolio, Denk said.
Beehiiv currently has more than 13,000 publishers in its network and delivers about $1 million in monthly revenue to its clients.
More than 2,100 of these publishers rely on the platform to manage their podcast distribution across major platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And the number of publishers using beehiiv for podcasting has grown about 20% each month since the company launched its podcast offering back in April, Rossitto said.
Beehiiv sees introducing dynamically inserted podcast ads as a way to coax more high-profile creators to its platform, Denk said. The lack of dynamic ad insertion has been cited by some big-name creators as a reason for why they’ve chosen other platforms in the past, he added.
“Most larger, serious podcasts are using some form of dynamic ad insertion to monetize, and we will not win their business to migrate their podcast over until we had a competitive feature set,” he said.
Filling the whole catalog
Although dynamically inserted programmatic ads tend to sell at lower prices than direct-sold ads, they offer publishers a way to continue to monetize their back catalogs and other inventory that gets left out of direct deals.
For programmatic podcast ads, publishers keep 50% to 60% of the revenue, with beehiiv taking the remaining cut. And there’s no impression or download minimum for publishers to participate in any of beehiiv’s programmatic ads. (For comparison, beehiiv takes about a 20% to 25% cut of programmatic display ads, Denk said, and it takes no revenue share on direct-sold ads.)
Beehiiv now gives publishers two ways to monetize their podcasts with ads, Denk said.
They can use beehiiv’s ads manager to manage their own direct-sold inventory. Or they can opt into programmatic monetization and have beehiiv and its audio ad serving partner, AdsWizz, fill the inventory for them. Either way, beehiiv offers analytics tools for tracking performance for both programmatic and direct-sold campaigns.
Publishers can place their own ad slots inside their podcasts at the episode level, or they can opt into allowing beehiiv to mass-apply placements across their catalog, Denk said. AdsWizz can serve ads into third-party podcasting platforms using the podcasts’ existing RSS feeds.
Beehiiv is not dictating the number of ad breaks publishers can insert per episode, Rossitto said. However, to keep the ad saturation in check, beehiiv is capping its podcast ad load to 10 different ads per break, she said. It’s also publishing some best practices and guidance for podcasters.
Publishers categorize their own programmatic inventory using the IAB’s standard content taxonomy, and also according to how they categorize their content on Apple Podcasts, Rossitto said.
They can also pick which categories of advertisers they want to see demand from, Denk said. And beehiiv offers a “prioritization waterfall” so that programmatic demand doesn’t take precedence over the publisher’s direct deals, he said.
Buyers can target ads contextually. But, in another evolution for beehiiv, Denk said, the company is expanding its ad targeting capabilities beyond its initial focus on contextual to also incorporate behavioral data, which is tied to the user’s email login. That way, for instance, advertisers can target people who are interested in technology while they’re also engaging with sports content.
Video and omnichannel plans
In early use cases, beehiiv has seen publishers pursue a variety of podcast monetization strategies, Rossitto said.
For some, she said, programmatic has opened up an additional channel for them to earn revenue that they can set up quickly. For others, they’re incorporating podcast ads into larger direct-sold deals and charging higher CPMs for omnichannel sponsorship packages.
Speaking of omnichannel opportunities, the next move on beehiiv’s podcasting road map is to add distribution support for video podcasts, likely by the end of the year, Denk said.
It’s a tricky proposition, since emails do not support embedded video, whereas they can support audio formats, he noted. But beehiiv plans to manage video podcast distribution on YouTube, Spotify and other platforms, similar to how it currently handles audio distribution on third-party platforms, he said.
No matter how they reach their audiences, Denk feels strongly that publishers have to be omnichannel these days.
“The most successful content creators today are not single channel, but multichannel,” he said. “Rather than just being active on TikTok or having a podcast or having a newsletter, they usually have more than one of those. And that’s also why we’re launching community features and website digital products as well.”
It all goes back to helping publishers navigate a new online ecosystem in which they have to meet audiences where they are, Denk said, rather than pulling them into their preferred properties.
