Data and coverage

What SponsorHound's data is, where it comes from, and what it can't tell you.

Where it comes from

Public RSS feeds only: podcast feeds and newsletter feeds that anyone can subscribe to without an account. We read the text that publishers put in their feeds (episode descriptions, show notes and post text as the feed provides it).
Robots-allowed only: before fetching, our collector checks the site's robots.txt and skips anything it isn't allowed to read. It identifies itself as SponsorDataEngine, fetches each feed about once a week and uses conditional requests so unchanged feeds cost the publisher almost nothing.
No YouTube data is used in anything we serve. No private, paywalled or logged-in content, no web pages behind the feeds, no audio transcription.

What's in it

Brands	About 17,800 brands seen in sponsor reads, about 12,700 of them active in the last 90 days.
Shows	About 10,200 podcasts and newsletters with at least one sponsor read, mostly in English.
Evidence	For each sponsor read: the brand, the show, the episode or post, its date, and a quote of at most 240 characters with a link to the source.
Freshness	Refreshed about weekly. Every answer carries `data_version` and `as_of` (the date of the newest episode in the data).

Figures are approximate and change with each refresh.

How sponsor reads are found

Sponsor mentions are extracted from feed text by rules ("brought to you by", promo codes, sponsor sections and similar patterns). Brand identities are grouped by web domain or name. On an AI-labelled test set the extraction is right about 91% of the time; a human-checked sample is in progress. Expect some misses and some things that aren't brands.

Shows are matched to yours by the meaning of their titles and descriptions, so a good one-to-three sentence description of your topic, audience and language gives the best results.

What it can't tell you

An ad read shows that a brand advertised on a show on a date. It does not prove that the brand paid, what it paid, its budget, whether your audience fits, or that it is open to new deals.

No audience size, demographics, download numbers or ad rates.
No contact details for brands or their agencies.
Brands that only advertise in audio (and never in the feed text) are invisible to us.
A brand's score ranks results within one answer. It is not a probability.
Brands are grouped by domain or name and are not verified companies. Brand names and trademarks belong to their owners, and listing a brand doesn't mean it endorses or works with SponsorHound.

Corrections and removal

If a result is wrong (not a brand, the wrong brand, not a sponsor, stale, duplicate), tell us at support@sponsorhound.com with the data_version and the brand_id or observation_id. Brands, shows and publishers can ask to be removed: see opt-out and removal.