The war over podcasting seems to be heating up. Today SiriusXM announced that it will acquire Stitcher by EW Scripps Company in a potentially worthwhile deal a whopping $ 325 5 million.
The move is clearly aimed at beefing up SiriusXM’s podcast offerings and making it more competitive against rivals like Spotify, iHeart Radio and even Apple. By shopping for Stitcher you also get SiriusXM, the Earwolf comedy network and Midroll Media, an extensive podcast ad network. All of that sounds like corporate mumbo jumbo, but it actually includes some high-profile podcasts that will now be under the SiriusXM umbrella. They include Conan O’Brien needs a friend, Radio Freakonomics, Comedy Bang! Explosion!, How was this done?and WTF with Marc Maron, among others.
As part of the deal, SiriusXM agrees to pay $ 265 million in cash up front, with the rest depending on the financial results of 2020 and 2021. It’s a neat profit for Scripps: it bought Midroll in 2015 for $ 55 million, and the Stitcher app a year later for $ 4.5 million. According to a Scripps Investor CallThe deal is worth 4.5 times more than Stitcher earned in revenue for 2019. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2020.
To be clear, while big-name podcasts are great, the ad network is probably what SiriusXM has really salivated about. Apparently more than two-thirds of Stitcher’s revenue comes from Midroll, according to a call from investors about the Stitcher acquisition. It also recently acquired Simplecast, a podcast management and analytics platform, and AdsWizz, an ad-technological and monetization platform. SiriusXM also owns Pandora, which bought for $ 3.5 billion in 2018. It’s unclear how exactly all of this fits into a new podcasting empire, but the bones are there. In any case, it’s a better foundation than the podcast channel SiriusXM is currently limited to. With that said, we’ll probably have to wait a bit to see what kind of podcast advertising technology Voltron SiriusXM brings together from its recent acquisitions.
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Podcasts have been a flourishing battleground in broadcast wars for some time. According to the Wall street journalThe podcasts generated a whopping $ 678.7 million in advertising revenue last year, and that number is expected to top $ 1 billion by 2021. That’s a lot of money at stake (and it’s always about the money).
Spotify switched to podcasts last year after acquired Gimlet Media, mixing them into music playlistsAnd generally, we remind you that you have plenty of podcasts with every new feature you implement. In May, he also blocked Joe Rogan’s podcast as a Spotify exclusive, making it clear that your podcast strategy will not go away anytime soon. Apple hasn’t done anything flashy with podcasts in a hot minute, but it’s still a great player just because at this point, it’s muscle memory for many people to head to Apple’s podcast app. That said, Sonos is also emerging as a new player in streaming audio content, launching its free show. Radio sonos feature that includes 60,000 stations in addition to the original content.
Just as media companies turned to mass video, it appears that the pivot of podcasts is underway. Unfortunately, this also means that you probably won’t be able to convince your dudebro friends that they shouldn’t convert their horrible idea. on a podcast.
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