Launching today
SpotsNow
Track who's advertising across podcasts w/ campaign insights
605 followers
Track who's advertising across podcasts w/ campaign insights
605 followers
Track who's advertising on every podcast, what they're spending, and where their campaigns are running — then buy open inventory directly from publishers, all in one place. The competitive intelligence layer for podcast ads.
Hey Product Hunt 👋 Cam here, founder of SpotsNow.
Here's a thing that's always bothered me about podcast advertising: it's one of the only major ad channels where you can't easily answer the basic competitive questions. Who's advertising on my favorite show? What's BetterHelp actually spending on podcasts this quarter? Which new brands just started testing the channel? Which shows are over-indexed on CPG vs. fintech vs. DTC?
The data exists. But it's been locked behind enterprise contracts, the UIs feel like 2014, and there's no way to act on what you learn without leaving the tool and writing a bunch of emails.
SpotsNow is the version I wanted: Free access to podcast ad spend data across 60,000 shows, with a modern interface that doesn't make you fight it, and (the part I'm genuinely most excited about) a built-in marketplace of open inventory so the second you spot a show that fits your campaign, you can actually request a spot from the publisher right there.
A few things we'd love help with today:
1. If you research podcast ads: spotsnow.io is open. Pull up your favorite advertiser or your own brand. Tell us what you wish were there.
2. If you've built Competitor Intelligence tools: I'd love your read on our category taxonomy and confidence scoring - that's where we're investing next.
3. If you run a podcast or network: there's a free way to list open inventory and reach the buyers who are already researching shows like yours.
Huge thanks to the early users who stress-tested this when the dataset was a tenth of its current size. Today it goes wide. Roasts, questions, feature requests, all welcome. 🙏
@campritchard this is useful angle for podcast ads. The hard part is not only seeing who is advertising where but understanding whether a show is actually a good fit before reaching out. I like that you connect the research side with open inventory. How do you currently estimate fit or confidence for a brand/category match across different podcast shows?
@campritchard Cam, Jeremy, and the SpotsNow team, many congratulations on the launch. :)
How I met the makers
I first met the SpotsNow team on a call where they walked me through the product in detail, and it quickly turned into more of a deep-dive than a demo. Their clarity of thinking around podcast ads and the ambition they brought to the roadmap stood out immediately.
What is SpotsNow
SpotsNow gives you competitive intelligence on podcast ads: you can see who’s advertising on which shows, what they’re spending, and how campaigns are distributed across podcasts.
On top of that, it lets you move from research to action by buying open inventory directly from publishers in the same interface.
Why I endorse it
During the walkthrough, I asked if we could plug SpotsNow’s data into models like Claude to ask specific questions and surface podcast ad opportunities faster... the team confirmed it’s not just possible, it’s very much how they think about the product’s future.
The combination of rich data, a clean experience, and a team that’s both ambitious and execution-focused made it an easy decision for me to hunt this product. I’m genuinely happy to see the Product Hunt community responding so well to the launch.
All the best! :)
Congrats on launching, Cam! Not coming at this as someone who's built competitive-intel tools, more as the "researches podcast ads / pull up your brand" person you mentioned. I'm getting an iOS app ready to launch and came at this as a would-be buyer: pulling up specific brands and shows works very well. And I'm excited to try the marketplace features too.
One observation that might be relevant to the taxonomy work you said you're investing in: my instinct as a buyer was to navigate by theme — "relationships," "dating," "wellness" — to find shows that fit my app. That's not how the tool thinks (it's organized around industry tags / specific advertisers, which makes sense once it clicks).
Station
@ferdi_sigona Hey Ferdi,
we have the audience interest based campaign generation as well as their discovery for the discounted spots, you can either auto generate the campaign for you brand based on your website and demographics + audience interest on https://spotsnow.io
or you can discover the discounted spots in here https://spotsnow.io/browse
Very interesting! Can I see not just where a specific company is advertising, but where companies in a whole industry are advertising? In particular, I need to understand where travel startups place their ads and which exact ones they use. Is that possible?
SpotsNow
@natalia_iankovych Yes, totally. You can search by brands, industries, or podcast categories — whatever fits your use case.
For travel startups, you can see which companies are advertising, where they’re placing ads, and the specific podcasts they’re using.
Here you can find the top brands spending in this category:
https://spotsnow.io/industry/leisure,%20travel%20&%20tourism
And here are the top podcasts and YouTubers in the leisure category:
https://spotsnow.io/top-podcasts-&-youtubers/leisure
You can also enter your own brand and create a campaign. We’ll analyze your brand and help find the best podcasts for you to advertise on
@abhishek_thory Very cool! Once we launch our own startup, we’ll become your clients ;)
SpotsNow
@natalia_iankovych We’ll be ready for you when you launch. Good luck with the startup. And feel free to reach out anytime if you want to explore podcast ads early.
Also from my side, congrats on the launch, Cam! I agree, the marketplace angle is what makes this genuinely different
Quick question: how do you handle attribution for shows that don't use promo codes? Curious if you rely on self-reported data from brands or if there's some crawling/inference magic happening under the hood.
@yannikga great question - we have built in audio pixels. So you can track to the dollar. The pixels are what makes podcasts incredible to advertise on vs. other influencers. Shows put the pixel into the audio file and you just add them to your website (like Meta pixels).
Sharing a couple of product shots.
Station
@lakshminath_dondeti Yep, we already support this. SpotsNow has tracking system that you can configure directly inside the platform. The goal is to make attribution and performance tracking seamless!
SpotsNow
@olivier_jury Merci, Oliver. Nous disposons d'un processus complet de vérification et de gestion des créateurs. Ainsi, les créateurs procèdent d'abord à leur vérification, après quoi ils ont accès à la plateforme.
The "data exists but was locked behind enterprise contracts" framing is exactly the gap I keep seeing in adjacent markets too. Coming from finance content creation — I run the ModeLoop Podcast on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/0m1oR8AyQv17DVpc5MmirG) — the thing podcasters in any niche struggle with isn't measuring downloads, it's understanding the competitive ad picture in their category. SpotsNow giving the publisher side the "who else is being advertised on shows in your topic" view would be a meaningful unlock — and the open-inventory marketplace closes the loop nicely. Curious if you're planning category-level benchmarks (e.g. average CPM ranges by topic vertical) for smaller publishers who don't have direct comps.