The Download (Premiere Episode)
Episode 1
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
Published on 3 years, 4 months ago