Opting Into Spotify Video Could Harm Your Podcast Analytics, Podscribe Warns

Podcast analytics provider Podscribe has issued a stark warning to podcasters: opting your show into Spotify Video may significantly damage your measurements and reporting across platforms unless you take special steps to mitigate the impact. This alert comes as video podcasting grows rapidly on Spotify — but measurement systems have not all kept pace.

Why Spotify Video Changes Affect Measurement

Spotify’s support for video podcast episodes means creators can upload visual versions of their shows alongside traditional audio. While this presents new creative opportunities and engagement formats, it also breaks the way many existing analytics tools track podcast performance.

Podscribe’s help documentation explicitly warns that if a show opts into Spotify Video, neither it nor many third‑party analytics services can perform accurate attribution for any Spotify listens — neither audio nor video plays are measurable by default. That’s because Spotify delivers the audio portion of a video episode in a way that bypasses the usual measurement hooks used by analytics tools. This can leave a major blind spot in your data if you rely on those platforms for advertising metrics or performance reporting.

What Gets Lost When You Switch to Video

The impact goes beyond basic play counts:

Audio plays served as video: Even listeners who choose only the audio of a video episode can be unmeasured in many third‑party dashboards, because Spotify serves the audio track from the video stream rather than the traditional RSS audio file. This means podcast analytics tied to RSS feeds or pixel tracking are left blind.
Rankers may not include your show accurately: Independent rankers like the Australian Podcast Ranker rely on log file or download‑based measurement that counts traditional audio downloads. Podcasts that go full video on Spotify risk disappearing or dropping in those lists, as recently reported when Shameless Media withdrew from the Australian ranker after shifting into full‑length Spotify video distribution.
Third‑party analytics services fail to track plays: Tools like OP3 — which uses prefix redirects on RSS feeds to count downloads — are unable to measure plays for Spotify episodes opted into video, because the traffic no longer follows the same measurable route. This means key metrics like downloads and impressions may be absent or understated in analytics that advertisers and creators depend on.

The Revenue Implications

Beyond pure measurement, opting into Spotify Video can also affect monetization:

Dynamic ad insertion becomes problematic: Since many hosting providers can’t insert ads into video episodes the same way they do for audio, creators may lose the ability to serve dynamic ads — an income source for shows monetized via host or platform systems. This can significantly reduce revenue, especially for shows that rely on dynamically inserted sponsorships.
Advertiser reporting gets murky: Without accurate measurement, reporting back to advertisers becomes difficult. Budgets may be harder to justify, ROI harder to prove, and campaigns risk being undervalued simply because video streams aren’t captured in standard analytics exports.

What Podscribe Says You Can Do

Podscribe’s platform has rolled out a Spotify Video performance modeling feature designed to help reincorporate Spotify video view counts into cross‑platform dashboards, similar to how it models YouTube video performance. However, this requires publishers to opt into a special integration that allows the platform to count video views and estimate performance based on shared Spotify dashboard data — and even then it remains modeled rather than raw measured data.

Even with this integration, Podscribe’s documentation clearly notes that opting into video still sets back measurability compared with traditional audio-only tracking — meaning creators must choose consciously and understand the trade-offs before making the shift.

Weighing Creativity Against Measurement

The rise of video podcasting reflects broader trends — platforms like Spotify report hundreds of thousands of video podcasts and rapidly increasing consumption of visual content. For creators, video can unlock new audience engagement and discoverability.

However, measurement and monetization infrastructure have lagged behind distribution formats, leaving many creators to choose between broader creative options and clear, reliable analytics. Unless platforms and analytics systems evolve to fully support video formats with clean, standardized measurement, opting all episodes into Spotify Video remains a decision that could harm your ability to understand, monetize, and benchmark your show.