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NYT buys The Athletic + 4 more stories on The Download for Jan 7, 2022
Episode 4
This is The Download from Sounds Profitable, the most important business news from the world of podcasting, I'm Bryan Barletta.And I'm Evo Terra. Today, The New York Times Bets half a billion on sports, NPR doubles down on paid subscriptions, Spotify goes all-in on in-app digital ads, and I'm clearly making too many gambling references. Let's get started.NYT buys The AthleticThe New York Times has agreed to purchase the sports news company, the Athletic, for $550m. The six-year-old company, which raised $50m in 2020 at a $500m valuation, was originally in talks to sell to the New York Times last summer, but the deal fell through due to disagreements on price. With the New York Times focusing heavily on subscription content and on audio with their new app, called obviously enough "New York Times Audio", acquiring the Athletic with their 1.2m paid subscribers, which is 1/8th the total subscriptions the New York Times has, puts them on track to easily exceed their goal of 10m subscribers.Currently, the Athletic is hosted on Megaphone, part of Spotify, and participates in the Spotify Audience Network. The New York Times hosts on Simplecast, part of Adswizz, which also offers a competing monetization product. Whether we see The Athletic migrate to Simplecast or not likely depends on how integrated the two companies will be with each other.AdvertiseCast has updated their Industry Average Podcast Advertising Rates page as of January 1st, 2022. AdvertiseCast has been tracking the average CPM rates for their client podcasts since the beginning of 2020, grouping the rates charged by podcasts into three buckets—shows getting less than 10,000 downloads per month, shows getting between 10,000 and 100,000, and those seeing more than 100,000 downloads per month.And it's good news, with the average CPM of all groups at just under $24, up nearly 6% comparing December 2021 to December 2020. And the biggest shows saw an even higher increase, jumping up by more than 8% year over year.The takeaway here is clear: The actual value—not just the perceived value, but the actual value paid by advertisers on 2,412 podcasts in this sample size, is going up for podcast advertising.
Reviewing the programmatic mergers and acquisitions that James Hercher of AdExchanger pointed out this week, there’s a lot of trends happening in channels outside of podcasting that bode well for our industry.Hercher writes:“Historically, DSPs and SSPs have been kept separate from ad server businesses. Ad servers are the source of reconciliation data, meaning they decide whether ads were served or visible and whether advertisers should pay for an impression. Although walled gardens can often get away with bundling an ad server and grading their own homework, open programmatic companies generally could not. But SSPs need an ad server for CTV.”This need has been echoed in podcasting for quite some time. Companies like Triton Digital and Adswizz offer publishers both adserving and SSP capabilities in one package.Similarly, verification vendors lik
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