How to Choose Ad Slots and Ads to Place in Them

With Captivate Marketplace, Programmatic Ads, and AMIE Campaign Management, it's never been easier to monetize your podcast, whether that's through direct ads with sponsors and advertisers, your own promos, or automated ad insertion based on your preferences.

To ensure you maximize your earning potential, here's how to use ad slots and the ads that go in them effectively.

The Difference Between an Ad Slot and an Ad

An Ad Slot is the position you're making available for an ad to be played in. This would be either your pre-roll, your mid-roll, or your post-roll. You can have as many ad slots as you wish, with up to 3 ads per slot.

An ad is the actual ad that is played in these slots - these can be your own promo ("sign up to my newsletter", "enroll in my course", etc), a direct ad where you're working with a sponsor or an advertiser through Captivate Marketplace, or an automated ad via Programmatic Ads based on your preferences. You can also mix and match ads, so your listener hears your promo and a sponsor message in the same ad slot, for example, and then an automated ad in a different ad slot.

How to Choose Your Ad Slots

Before you start selecting your ad slots and the ads that go with them, we recommend enabling Programmatic Ads on all your ad slots (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) - this ensures any empty ad slots will always have something play in them and earn you money (for when there isn't a sponsor message, for example).

You can do this in the Programmatic Ads section in the left hand menu of your dashboard (where you can also enable Programmatic if you haven't done this already).

Once done, you can then set up the ad slots you wish to use, based on the campaigns you've created and how you want those to run on your episodes.

Ad slots when creating/editing your episodes

When creating a new episode or editing an existing one, the ad slots will be determined by how you've set up your campaign(s). For example, if you have the following campaigns set up:

• pre-roll with 1 ad
• mid-roll 1 with 2 ads
• post-roll with 2 ads

This is 3 ad slots with 5 ads. Depending on what ads you've included in your campaign(s), this will determine what ads are inserted. Using the campaign example above:

• you have a sponsor message as the pre-roll ("this episode is brought to you by")
• you have an audio stinger and your own promo as the mid-roll
• you have the same sponsor message "this episode was brought to you by" as the first post-roll ad and then your own promo ("follow me on") as the second

These are the ad preferences that will always be inserted when you have the 5 ads above. If you want to change them up - so, maybe open up the mid-roll to have 3 ad slots with the new one being for Programmatic Ads - you can easily do that via the Bulk Ad Editor, and change every episode's mid-roll to 3 ad slots (or even just the episodes you choose).

Updated on: 26/06/2026