Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
Amazon Exclusivity Deals Galore + 4 more stories for Feb 18, 2022
Episode 9
Today on The Download, Amazon continues their streak of signing exclusivity deals, agents are becoming more of a common site in podcasting, and Spotify buys both Podsights and Charitable. Good news for those who missed Ad Result Media and Edison Research’s big webinar on 2021 data from Super Listeners: Caila Litman live-tweeted the event! Litman, author of Sound Profitable’s column #GoodData, posted a thread of 17 tweets containing screenshots and quotes full of juicy data. According to the thread, podcast power users are eagerly engaging with podcast advertising. 74% Super Listeners are visiting a product or service’s website after hearing it promoted on a favorite podcast. 53% of those listeners agree they have a more positive opinion of a company when it’s mentioned on a podcast they regularly listen to. A 9% increase from 2019 data on the same question. After last week’s Amazon-heavy coverage we’re mixing things up with... another Amazon acquisition! Amazon Music and Wondery have signed How I Built This with Guy Raz. The deal gives Wondery exclusive ad sales and YouTube distribution rights for simulcasts while all new podcast episodes will have Amazon Music exclusivity for one week. Meanwhile, NPR keeps radio distribution rights and underwriting credits. In addition, How I Built This will ramp up to a twice-weekly upload schedule. Amazon’s just getting started in podcasting and deals like this indicate podcast ads are clearly working for them. In addition, their premium Wondery+ subscriptions in their own bespoke app and through Apple Podcast subscriptions are working well enough to continue obtaining more timed exclusive content. Now we find Amazon at an interesting moment in regards to acquisitions. They’ve got Art19 for tech, Amazon Music for distribution, and Wondery to produce and publish content. Their biggest space for growth is ad sales, something that might change if their offer to buy Audioboom is chosen over competitor Spotify. If big green gets the company, they effectively buy a company that does something they can already do well. Buying Audioboom would effectively eliminate competition in their field. If Amazon gets the purchase they get closer to a full package of podcast monetization that will become incredibly hard to compete with. For brevity’s sake, we’ve combined two stories into one segment, as iHeartMedia appears to be in the mood to form partnerships this week. Partnership number one: iHeart partners with Sounder to bring brand safety to audio. At the moment, all current brand safety and suitability solutions are built for text. If one wants to turn one of those services on for podcasting, the podcast has to be transcribed. This partnership provides similar value to what Adswizz and Acast implemented with Comscore to contextually categorize their inventory for targeting and brand suitability. This is just a first step, though, as the data has to be actionable by buyers, sellers, and planners in their tools directly. As things currently stand, it feels like the overa
Published on 3 years, 4 months ago