The Download (Premiere Episode)

• Hosted and Produced by Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra
• Audio Engineering by Ian Powell

This is The Download, the most important business news from the world of podcasting, I'm Bryan Barletta.
And I'm Evo Terra. Today we're covering the entirety of the podcast acquisition and funding that happened in 2021. Let's get started.
Libsyn, the public podcast hosting platform founded in 2004 had an incredibly active year. They started by raising 25 million dollars and they definitely put it to work, buying podcast creation platform Auxbus, subscription and membership platform Glow for 1.2 million dollars, host and announcer read self-serve advertising marketplace Advertisecast for 30 million dollars, and longtail podcast advertising marketplace PODGO. With the leadership team from Advertisecast taking a more active role, and former board chairman and investor Brad Tirpak coming on as CEO, Libsyn has a chance to really upgrade their image if they can match the momentum of their competitors and integrate a non-trivial amount of companies into one of the oldest podcast platforms still active.
Audacy, started the year as Entercom, and after 53 years, rebranded. Kicking it of by acquiring longtail self-serve ad marketplace Podcorn for $22.5m. Podcorn gives Audacy micro-influencer reach contrasting with their higher-profile owned and repped shows. For $40m, they also bought “an exclusive, perpetual license of WideOrbit’s digital audio streaming and podcasting technology and related assets and operations. Audacy will continue to operate WO Streaming under the name AmperWave.” Today, Audacy builds and hosts their radio broadcast to podcasts solution with Triton Digital’s Omny Studio, owned by close competitor iHeartMedia, while hosting their Cadence13 and Pineapple Street Media shows on Spotify’s Megaphone. For a company reporting around $16m in revenue per quarter from podcasting alone, expect to see them fully migrate to AmperWave and bulk up the public offering for the platform.
While Global, the UK-based media & entertainment group and parent company of DAX Digital Ad Exchange does offer podcast hosting capabilities, their main appeal for publishers has been monetization opportunities. So acquiring podcast hosting, analytics, and monetization platform Captivate, which is IAB certified and has strong brand appeal for indie podcasts, shows Global's drive to be more accessible. Ad exchanges thrive on inventory, so the purchase of Remixd, which “automatically converts text articles into audio files” provides Global a quick path to more ad supply. With Captivate off the table, hosting platform Buzzsprout, that serves over 100k podcasts, becomes even more appealing for a longtail inventory play.
Earlier in the year, iHeartMedia acquired audio ad technology company Triton Digital for 230 million dollars from E.W. Scripps, which purchased Triton Digital for 150 million dollars in 2018 and Omny Studio, part of Triton Digital, in 2019. Like Audacy, iHeart currently uses Spotify’s Megaphone to host their podcasts. Getting all their assets to their own platform is clearly on the horizon for iHeart, especially with Triton Digital offering radio broadcast-to-podcast capabilities. Coupled with iHeart’s acquisition of Voxnest/Spreaker in 2020 and the announcement of their ad marketplace in both 2020 and 2021, the only offering iHeart currently lacks to compete with their direct competitors, is an attribution product. Will they build it internally like Adswizz or will they acquire a solution?
With over 70% of podcasts on Spotify serving from their hosting platform Anchor, Spotify continues their plans of going wide on audio by buying audiobook distributor Findaway and podcast hosting platform Whooshkaa, which specializes in creating podcasts from radio broadcasts. Whooshkaa will be integrated into hosting platform Megaphone, which Spotify purchased last November for 235 million dollars. While Spotify is unlikely to retain Audacy and iHeartMedia as clients, as both purchased their own radio broadcast-to-podcast technology this year, Spotify will continue to attract publishers looking for those features as part of a complete offering. With Whooshkaa acquired, RedCircle is the last independent hosting platform with dynamic ad insertion and programmatic offerings. And SGRecast from StreamGuys is the only independent company offering a broadcast-to-podcast technology. How long either will remain independent is a very good question.
Acast started the year by acquiring US podcast technology startup RadioPublic. Keeping inline with their creator-focused image, the main appeal was “RadioPublic’s Listener Relationship Management platform, which allows podcasters to foster even deeper relationships with fans”, which played nice with the beta launch of Acast+, their subscription offering. Over the summer, Acast went public, which is it’s own kind of acquisition.
And though it falls slightly outside of 2021, when Podnews editor James Cridland announced Amazon’s late December 2020 acquisition of Wondery for around 300 million dollars, he made the prediction that ART19 would be the logical next acquisition. After all, former CEO of Wondery, Hernan Lopez was an investor in the platform and all Wondery shows were hosted on ART19