Acast has new updates for its Acast Open platform that will provide further support and revenue opportunities to local, independent podcast creators.
The announcement comes as the local podcast market continues to boom, with Acast hitting a record 25.3 million listens in Australia last month.
Acast Open provides a platform for new and independent podcasters to capitalise on this remarkable audience growth, while generating new revenue opportunities from ads via Acast Marketplace.
Acast’s co-founder and CPTO, Johan Billgren, said: “We launched Acast Open to put the same tools we built for the world’s biggest and best podcasts and publishers into the hands of every podcaster on the planet.”
“Now we’re further democratising podcasting, opening up the possibility for anyone on Acast Open to monetise across any and every podcast player there is — so they can start seeing financial payback for all the efforts they’ve made to build dedicated, engaged audiences around the world. We’ll continue to do everything we can to support their love of storytelling and the incredible audio content they work so hard to put out.”
Speaking of what these advancements mean locally in Australia, Henrik Isaksson, Managing Director for Acast Australia and New Zealand, said: “More than ever before, people talk to us about wanting to start a podcast. Now, with Acast Open, we not only have an incredible, easy-to-use tool that provides access to the best tech in the industry, we can also tell all these potential podcasters that they could make money from their show. It feels great to be able to support local creators.”
Acast has also officially hit the launch button on their new Supporter feature.
Supporter lets listeners support podcasts through one-off payments. There’s no regular subscription or commitment, and they can give whatever they like.
A message in the Create dashboard offers to enable Supporter, click this to opt in and follow the instructions, and Acast will automatically add a link to the show and episode descriptions.
Listeners can also be pointed to that link via things like social channels.
The Supporter landing page can be customised, and users can record a promo that will be dynamically inserted across every episode the shows.
Each payment will be subject to a 12% charge, covering the standard transaction fee charged by Stripe, the platform being used to process payments, and a small fee recouped by Acast to cover the handling and infrastructure costs needed for the product to run.
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