Once you join the Acast Marketplace, ads will begin to be dynamically inserted into your show. Based on when and where your listeners press play, ads will be added or 'stitched' into your episode's audio file and served as one piece of audio.

This means it's good to understand the relative loudness of your episodes in relation to ads in the Acast Marketplace.

Acast ads are normalized to -18 LUFS, LUFS stands for “loudness units relative to full scale.” This is a unit of measurement that is a little more nuanced than using volume. It is intended to reflect the perceived loudness of an audio file.

We normalize all ads to keep a consistent level of loudness for your audience.

You might receive sponsorship opportunities for your show, where you record the message for the brand, which we will then dynamically insert into the episodes. Sponsorships are not normalized, and are used at the same loudness level as supplied to the Acast sales team.

If you produce your podcast episodes to a more negative value than -18 LUFS, then Acast’s ads may sound louder than the rest of your episode. Most editing software allows you to check the loudness of your audio file, such as Audacity and Adobe Audition.

If you've joined the Marketplace and you think there might be a big difference in the volume of ads and your show, consider setting the LUFS value of your show to -18.