More users, more profit, but less Spotify ad revenue

Spotify released its Q2/25 financial report. Year-on-year, the company made 53% more income, and 19% higher profit. It now has 696mn monthly users (up 11%).

Spotify’s revenue from ads decreased by 1% to €453mn (US $523mn). Daniel Ek tackled this head on in his opening remarks: “The one area that hasn’t yet met our expectations is our ads business – we've been moving too slowly and it’s taking longer than expected to see the improvements we initiated take hold. It’s really an execution challenge, not a problem with the strategy. While I am unhappy with where we are today, I remain confident in the ambitions we laid out for this business… we are working quickly to ensure we are on the right path.” Spotify’s VP of Global Advertising, Lee Brown, is to leave the company by what’s described as a mutual agreement.

How is video working on Spotify. In Dec 2023, the company only had 100,000 video podcasts on its platform; now, according to Gustav Söderström, there are “more than 430,000 video podcasts on Spotify and video continues to outperform with consumption trending higher and higher - growing 20x faster than audio-only consumption since 2024. More than 350 million users have streamed a video podcast on our platform, a 65% increase year over year.” These figures look impressive; but Spotify only launched their big video push in Nov 2024 - and many larger video podcasters are quietly given $5,000 of advertising to kick things off, which might mean only a temporary uplift. Later, in the earnings call, Alex Norström added that “Users who watch a podcast consume 1.5x more than users who just listen”.