Sounds Profitable

Pierre Bouvard, Chief Insights Officer at Cumulus Media, is on the show today to speak with Bryan Barletta about what podcasting can learn from radio and other legacy media. Bouvard develops media and marketing insights to support Cumulus's 1300+ media sellers. He works with brands and agencies to craft targeting and measurement solutions. As always, Arielle Nissenblatt joins Bryan at the top of the show to introduce the conversation. She then rejoins after the chat to break it all down, giving listeners actionable next steps. Listen in to learn about:

Here's our favorite idea from this conversation: The job of advertising is to help a brand or product be known before they’re needed. Links:

Credits:

Evo Terra is the executive producer of Sounds Profitable: Adtech Applied

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Download, Libsyn grows monetization, LinkedIn launches a podcast network, and what the new Privacy Sandbox feature for Android means for marketers. Let’s get started. Libsyn has bought another podcast representation firm, this time acquiring PAR - Podcast Ad Reps. With the acquisition LibSyn brings around 120 podcasts that were currently under representation with PAR under the LibSyn-owned AdvertiseCast banner, further building out the company’s monetization arm. According to Libsyn CEO Brad Tirpak in the official press release: “With the acquisitions of AdvertiseCast in June 2021 and now PAR, Libsyn is well-positioned to continue to rapidly scale in the podcast advertising market, which PWC estimates will reach around $3.5 billion by 2025. We plan to continue to invest in our award-winning hosting platform, expand both our host-read and programmatic advertising efforts, and look for new ways to make Libsyn the preferred destination for both creators and advertisers.” All of this continues to show another side of Libsyn, a company that previously swore it would never have a free hosting platform and was anti-targeted advertising is now a large, tech-focused ad platform. Australian podcast producer LiSTNR has branched out into audio fiction. From Radio Today’s Kim Napier: “LiSTNR is investing in audio fiction with book adaptations by Australian authors to bring audiences compelling audio stories, with Bryden Media casting Australian actors to deliver the stories in different podcast formats as episodic series or audio movies.” Both LiSTNR’s slated audio movies and standard serialized audio fiction podcast adaptations reflect a building synergy and momentum between podcasting and publishers, two factions that’ve circled each other since before the coining of the term podcast. Until now audio fiction as a genre has remained a largely under-utilized sector of podcasting. With industry moves like this, we could be seeing enough momentum building to change that for the better. Over on The Rebooting’s Substack newsletter, Brian Morrissey has published a piece titled “End of an era of ad targeting: Publishers will need closer ties to their audiences.” In addition to being an excellent overview of privacy on the web and how business has worked to take full advantage, Morrissey stresses the importance of adapting with changing tech. “Primary-engagement media will gain. As I’ve written, I believe the next phase of digital publishing will favor quality over quantity in terms of audiences. Those publishing brands that put community at their core will thrive since it easily lends itself to a direct relationship that will make those audiences far more valuable than a random collection of people who mindlessly tapped a link on their Facebook feed. There’s a reason that Squarespace found podcasts such an efficient way to acquire customers. The newsletter boom is a signal of where publishing is going.” Morrissey reflects on the very first ad sold on the internet circa 1994 as a reflection of how much online marketing has changed and what modern advertising can learn from the mistakes made back then that’re still made today. It’s time to update that profile you’ve been neglecting. Business-focused social media network LinkedIn launched a podcast network on Wednesday. The network has a dozen shows at launch that, according to protocol’s Veronica Irwin will, “...cover topics ranging from mental health to startup trends. With the announcement, LinkedIn joins the ranks of tech companies attempting to become the favorite hub of content creators and influencers.” The social network’s launch appears to have gone incredibly well, with their flagship show “Hello Monday,” gaining 4 million downloads in its first day. Over on Digiday, Ronan Shields and Seb Joseph have made a post aiming to decode the implications of Google’s nebulous new Android feature Privacy Sandbox for advertisers. “The main takeaway: Google says it will work with the industry to establish a set of technical standards that will enable ad targeting and measurement online after traditional targeting tools, like mobile identifiers, are retired on its Android devices. Why is this important? It’s pitched as the inverse of Apple’s own scorched earth plan to do something similar.” While Privacy Sandbox might be of some concern eventually, maybe, Shields and Joseph’s interpretation of existing news suggests: “...marketers needn’t panic over the latest announcement.” At the risk of this becoming a regular segment, we’ve got another article the staff of The Download recommend checking out. This week:  “What is Podcasting 2.0, and why is it important” by Podcode’s Mark Steadman. While ostensibly written for podcasters, namespace changes are something the people in the business of podcasting need to be aware of, if not outright adopt. Steadman’s primer on podcasting 2.0 is a great start. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Special thanks to Ian Powell for his audio prowess, and to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Download, Libsyn grows monetization, LinkedIn launches a podcast network, and what the new Privacy Sandbox feature for Android means for marketers. Let’s get started.

Libsyn has bought another podcast representation firm, this time acquiring PAR - Podcast Ad Reps. With the acquisition LibSyn brings around 120 podcasts that were currently under representation with PAR under the LibSyn-owned AdvertiseCast banner, further building out the company’s monetization arm.

According to Libsyn CEO Brad Tirpak in the official press release:

“With the acquisitions of AdvertiseCast in June 2021 and now PAR, Libsyn is well-positioned to continue to rapidly scale in the podcast advertising market, which PWC estimates will reach around $3.5 billion by 2025. We plan to continue to invest in our award-winning hosting platform, expand both our host-read and programmatic advertising efforts, and look for new ways to make Libsyn the preferred destination for both creators and advertisers.”

All of this continues to show another side of Libsyn, a company that previously swore it would never have a free hosting platform and was anti-targeted advertising is now a large, tech-focused ad platform.

Australian podcast producer LiSTNR has branched out into audio fiction. From Radio Today’s Kim Napier:

“LiSTNR is investing in audio fiction with book adaptations by Australian authors to bring audiences compelling audio stories, with Bryden Media casting Australian actors to deliver the stories in different podcast formats as episodic series or audio movies.”

Both LiSTNR’s slated audio movies and standard serialized audio fiction podcast adaptations reflect a building synergy and momentum between podcasting and publishers, two factions that’ve circled each other since before the coining of the term podcast. Until now audio fiction as a genre has remained a largely under-utilized sector of podcasting. With industry moves like this, we could be seeing enough momentum building to change that for the better.

Over on The Rebooting’s Substack newsletter, Brian Morrissey has published a piece titled “End of an era of ad targeting: Publishers will need closer ties to their audiences.”

In addition to being an excellent overview of privacy on the web and how business has worked to take full advantage, Morrissey stresses the importance of adapting with changing tech.

“Primary-engagement media will gain. As I’ve written, I believe the next phase of digital publishing will favor quality over quantity in terms of audiences. Those publishing brands that put community at their core will thrive since it easily lends itself to a direct relationship that will make those audiences far more valuable than a random collection of people who mindlessly tapped a link on their Facebook feed. There’s a reason that Squarespace found podcasts such an efficient way to acquire customers. The newsletter boom is a signal of where publishing is going.”

Morrissey reflects on the very first ad sold on the internet circa 1994 as a reflection of how much online marketing has changed and what modern advertising can learn from the mistakes made back then that’re still made today.

It’s time to update that profile you’ve been neglecting. Business-focused social media network LinkedIn launched a podcast network on Wednesday. The network has a dozen shows at launch that, according to protocol’s Veronica Irwin will,

“...cover topics ranging from mental health to startup trends. With the announcement, LinkedIn joins the ranks of tech companies attempting to become the favorite hub of content creators and influencers.”

The social network’s launch appears to have gone incredibly well, with their flagship show “Hello Monday,” gaining 4 million downloads in its first day.

Over on Digiday, Ronan Shields and Seb Joseph have made a post aiming to decode the implications of Google’s nebulous new Android feature Privacy Sandbox for advertisers.

“The main takeaway: Google says it will work with the industry to establish a set of technical standards that will enable ad targeting and measurement online after traditional targeting tools, like mobile identifiers, are retired on its Android devices. Why is this important? It’s pitched as the inverse of Apple’s own scorched earth plan to do something similar.”

While Privacy Sandbox might be of some concern eventually, maybe, Shields and Joseph’s interpretation of existing news suggests:

“...marketers needn’t panic over the latest announcement.”

At the risk of this becoming a regular segment, we’ve got another article the staff of The Download recommend checking out. This week:  “What is Podcasting 2.0, and why is it important” by Podcode’s Mark Steadman. While ostensibly written for podcasters, namespace changes are something the people in the business of podcasting need to be aware of, if not outright adopt. Steadman’s primer on podcasting 2.0 is a great start.

The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis.

Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable.

Special thanks to Ian Powell for his audio prowess, and to our media host, Omny Studio.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sean Howard, founder of Flightpath and of Fable and Folly, talks with Bryan about solving for pain points in adtech, collaboration with your competitors, and how we're truly only at the beginning of podcasting. 

Sean Howard of Flightpath

Credits:

Send us messages with Yappa!
Join the Podscape Podcast: https://bit.ly/3rHLxgD

Check out The Download: https://omny.fm/shows/the-download-from-sounds-profitableSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 overall podcast industry would benefit more from building a unified framework to tackle this problem than everyone splitting off and doing duplicate work to build their own solution. And partnership number two: iHeart is looking to broaden its global podcast outreach by partnering with Veritone to use their translation and synthetic voice AI tech to, as Brad Hill reports on RAIN News “translate and synthetically voice iHeart’s leading podcasts for Spanish-speaking markets.” With this Veritone partnership, iHeart is on track to be able to have their more popular podcasts available in global markets via synthetic translated voices. Our Valentine’s gift this year is an article from The Hollywood Reporter’s J. Clara Chan interviewing talent agents tasked with signing big podcasts. Podcasting is growing fast and a big sign of that is the prevalence of agents. Behind every big acquisition story is an agent getting into a relatively new field and helping the producer. With the industry growing at an exponential rate podcasting has a growing need for representation and agents seem to be stepping up to rep shows big and small. Chan reports: “As Hollywood fully buys into podcasting, multimillion-dollar deals are the norm for the crème de la crème of shows, while a growing audio advertising marketplace has allowed more podcasters to make a good living off their work as the industry is expected to exceed $2 billion in ad revenue next year. The major talent agencies have jumped on the train and are building out their audio divisions, with agents increasingly working on podcast deals with clients.” The big players in podcasting are chasing the new trend of acquiring IP to adapt, and agents are taking notice. Finally, the biggest news in podcasting this week: Spotify has purchased both Podsights and Chartable. With the acquisition, the podcast measurement service Podsights will remain available to the public. Quoting from Tech Crunch’s Sarah Perez: “After Chartable is fully integrated into Megaphone, Spotify will deprecate the standalone Chartable platform. Until then, however, it will remain available to both new and existing publisher and advertiser clients.” Here’s what Sounds Profitable’s own Bryan Barletta had to say in Podnews: “Third-party analytics and attribution are critical to a growing advertising ecosystem. In podcasting, Chartable and Podsights were two of the three core providers that helped drive that point home. Spotify has bought great technology and acquired an all-star technical and sales talent, but these companies are no longer third-party solutions due to Spotify’s role as a publisher, hosting platform, and ad seller. Just like with Adswizz’s attribution pixel and the Triton ranker, these solutions can still add value, but with this acquisition, they now lack the ability to be seen as truly neutral.” And finally, in a rare ‘honorable mention’ section, The Download tips its proverbial cap to Alyssa Myer. Thanks to her efforts, we’re seeing more detailed coverage of podcast advertising. If you haven’t checked out her coverage of advertisers experimenting with programmatic ads over on The Morning Brew. Get to it! The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Special thanks to Ian Powell for his audio prowess, and to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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% SuperListeners 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 overall podcast industry would benefit more from building a unified framework to tackle this problem than everyone splitting off and doing duplicate work to build their own solution.

And partnership number two: iHeart is looking to broaden its global podcast outreach by partnering with Veritone to use their translation and synthetic voice AI tech to, as Brad Hill reports on RAIN News “translate and synthetically voice iHeart’s leading podcasts for Spanish-speaking markets.” With this Veritone partnership, iHeart is on track to be able to have their more popular podcasts available in global markets via synthetic translated voices.

Our Valentine’s gift this year is an article from The Hollywood Reporter’s J. Clara Chan interviewing talent agents tasked with signing big podcasts. Podcasting is growing fast and a big sign of that is the prevalence of agents. Behind every big acquisition story is an agent getting into a relatively new field and helping the producer. With the industry growing at an exponential rate podcasting has a growing need for representation and agents seem to be stepping up to rep shows big and small.

Chan reports:

“As Hollywood fully buys into podcasting, multimillion-dollar deals are the norm for the crème de la crème of shows, while a growing audio advertising marketplace has allowed more podcasters to make a good living off their work as the industry is expected to exceed $2 billion in ad revenue next year. The major talent agencies have jumped on the train and are building out their audio divisions, with agents increasingly working on podcast deals with clients.”

The big players in podcasting are chasing the new trend of acquiring IP to adapt, and agents are taking notice.

Finally, the biggest news in podcasting this week: Spotify has purchased both Podsights and Chartable. With the acquisition, the podcast measurement service Podsights will remain available to the public. Quoting from Tech Crunch’s Sarah Perez:

“After Chartable is fully integrated into Megaphone, Spotify will deprecate the standalone Chartable platform. Until then, however, it will remain available to both new and existing publisher and advertiser clients.”

Here’s what Sounds Profitable’s own Bryan Barletta had to say in Podnews:

“Third-party analytics and attribution are critical to a growing advertising ecosystem. In podcasting, Chartable and Podsights were two of the three core providers that helped drive that point home. Spotify has bought great technology and acquired an all-star technical and sales talent, but these companies are no longer third-party solutions due to Spotify’s role as a publisher, hosting platform, and ad seller. Just like with Adswizz’s attribution pixel and the Triton ranker, these solutions can still add value, but with this acquisition, they now lack the ability to be seen as truly neutral.”

And finally, in a rare ‘honorable mention’ section, The Download tips its proverbial cap to Alyssa Myer. Thanks to her efforts, we’re seeing more detailed coverage of podcast advertising. If you haven’t checked out her coverage of advertisers experimenting with programmatic ads over on The Morning Brew. Get to it!

The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis.

Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable.

Special thanks to Ian Powell for his audio prowess, and to our media host, Omny Studio.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jordan Bentley, Founder of Audiohook, talks with Bryan about transparency, waterfalls, programmatic advertising, and how Podcasting still has a chance to start things the right way to lead to a better future.

Jordan Bentley of Audiohook

Credits:

Send us messages with Yappa!
Join the Podscape Podcast: https://bit.ly/3rHLxgDCheck out The Download: https://omny.fm/shows/the-download-from-sounds-profitableSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Download: Today: Amazon inherits a celeb-powered podcasting company, new ad revenue numbers forecast good news for podcast investment, and a new op-ed asks where has Facebook's fervor for podcasting gone?

Celebrity chat podcast Smartless, hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes, recently launched production house SmartLess Media. With former Jon Stewart-era Daily Show producer Richard Korson at the reins as president, SmartLess Media is poised to add multiple new stars to the relatively small constellation of Amazon-owned podcasts.

The new company has sprung into existence following a prior deal in which the trio of celebs licensed the podcast SmartLess to Amazon Music and Wondery in a deal, as reported by Deadline's Peter White, "thought to be valued at between 60 million to 80 million." According to White, this deal also extends to shows created by the fledgling production house, meaning SmartLess Media's promised slate of "weekly series, narrative, and limited podcasts," are subject to first-look exclusivity with Amazon.

It appears through careful future-proofing and investment during the licensing deal when SmartLess was just one podcast feed, the shopping and streaming conglomerate has inherited a celebrity-fronted production company wholecloth. And they continue to have rights to the original product's momentum, which currently fuels a cross-country live tour set to wrap up this weekend.

Speaking of Amazon: in a first for the company, Amazon has broken down its advertising revenue as a distinct category instead of bundling it with other earnings. The decision to do so now and not last year when they posted a ten billion profit increase from 2020 to 2021 remains unseen, but we'll take it. According to Business Insider "at $9.7 billion in the quarter, up 32% year-over-year, ad revenue was one of Amazon's fastest-growing areas."

With their fostering SmartLess from a simple podcast acquisition into a brand-new source of content production, Amazon appears to show no sign of slowing growth in media properties that can help fuel this advertising boom. Amazon's continued heavy spending in podcasting could be an indicator they believe in the medium's ability to help continue ad revenue growth.

Continuing the theme of growth: eCommerce is on the rise globally. Sara Lebow of eMarketer provides statistics breaking down the top ten countries with the biggest increase in ecommerce made over any internet-capable device that excludes travel, bill payments, gambling, food service, or anything that falls under the "vice good" umbrella.

To quote the article: "The Philippines and India will lead the world in retail ecommerce sales growth this year, with respective increases of 25.9% and 25.5%. Countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia will make up most of the top 10 list, while the last spot will go to the US, the only advanced economy to slide into the rankings, with 15.9% growth."

A significant portion of podcast advertising is still direct-to-consumer and significantly focused on the US. The country that's coming in tenth out of the top ten. That, combined with emerging podcast markets or strong pre-existing histories with audio in countries represented in the top nine shows podcast advertising has room to grow. Growth that might shift to bucking the existing status quo of purely targeting North American customers.

New podcasting app Fountain aims to make things easier...

Today on The Download: Today: Amazon inherits a celeb-powered podcasting company, new ad revenue numbers forecast good news for podcast investment, and a new op-ed asks where has Facebook’s fervor for podcasting gone?
Celebrity chat podcast Smartless, hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes, recently launched production house SmartLess Media. With former Jon Stewart-era Daily Show producer Richard Korson at the reins as president, SmartLess Media is poised to add multiple new stars to the relatively small constellation of Amazon-owned podcasts.  The new company has sprung into existence following a prior deal in which the trio of celebs licensed the podcast SmartLess to Amazon Music and Wondery in a deal, as reported by Deadline’s Peter White, “thought to be valued at between 60 million to 80 million.” According to White, this deal also extends to shows created by the fledgling production house, meaning SmartLess Media’s promised slate of “weekly series, narrative, and limited podcasts,” are subject to first-look exclusivity with Amazon.  It appears through careful future-proofing and investment during the licensing deal when SmartLess was just one podcast feed, the shopping and streaming conglomerate has inherited a celebrity-fronted production company wholecloth. And they continue to have rights to the original product’s momentum, which currently fuels a cross-country live tour set to wrap up this weekend.  Speaking of Amazon: in a first for the company, Amazon has broken down its advertising revenue as a distinct category instead of bundling it with other earnings. The decision to do so now and not last year when they posted a ten billion profit increase from 2020 to 2021 remains unseen, but we’ll take it. According to Business Insider “at $9.7 billion in the quarter, up 32% year-over-year, ad revenue was one of Amazon's fastest-growing areas.” With their fostering SmartLess from a simple podcast acquisition into a brand-new source of content production, Amazon appears to show no sign of slowing growth in media properties that can help fuel this advertising boom. Amazon’s continued heavy spending in podcasting could be an indicator they believe in the medium’s ability to help continue ad revenue growth.     Continuing the theme of growth: eCommerce is on the rise globally. Sara Lebow of eMarketer provides statistics breaking down the top ten countries with the biggest increase in ecommerce made over any internet-capable device that excludes travel, bill payments, gambling, food service, or anything that falls under the “vice good” umbrella.  To quote the article: “The Philippines and India will lead the world in retail ecommerce sales growth this year, with respective increases of 25.9% and 25.5%. Countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia will make up most of the top 10 list, while the last spot will go to the US, the only advanced economy to slide into the rankings, with 15.9% growth.”  A significant portion of podcast advertising is still direct-to-consumer and significantly focused on the US. The country that’s coming in tenth out of the top ten. That, combined with emerging podcast markets or strong pre-existing histories with audio in countries represented in the top nine shows podcast advertising has room to grow. Growth that might shift to bucking the existing status quo of purely targeting North American customers.  New podcasting app Fountain aims to make things easier for podcasters to receive tips from their audience in the form of Bitcoin Lightning, a system simplifying the process of transferring one hundred millionths of Bitcoin between users.  The biggest barriers to entry for such a scheme have been the need of a digital wallet, the process of buying crypto for said wallet, and the ID of another person’s wallet to be able to transfer the crypto to an intended recipient.  While those hurdles still exist for the person intending to send the money, startup Fountain solves the initial problems for podcasters on the receiving end of Value 4 Value transactions by creating a wallet on their behalf. Several larger podcasts have embraced the service, including Jack Rhysider’s Darknet Diaries. In this week’s Hot Pod Insider, Ashley Carman published an op-ed about Meta (nee Facebook), their profit woes, and the question mark that leaves for Facebook podcasting.  Carman writes: “I wondered if brands would start spending more money on podcast ads simply because Facebook’s aren’t as powerful. Maybe that’s worth another check-in, but instead, I’m now wondering how this tech informs Facebook’s decision to pursue podcasts on its platform.”  With the social media giant reporting a decline in users for the first time in its existence alongside declining profits, a second “pivot to video,” and a full-throated commitment to rebranding VR gaming headsets as office supplies, Facebook’s previous interest in embracing podcasts seems to have been lost in the shuffle. Quote “I’m unclear where that team stands or what they’re doing. Did they pivot to the metaverse?” The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable! Today's episode was hosted by Evo Terra and Manuela Bedoya. Bryan Barletta is the executive producer. Special thanks to Ian Powell for his audio prowess, and to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Claire Atkin, co-founder of the brilliant non-profit Check My Ads, talks with Bryan about disinformation, ad accountability, and the steps you should be taking to make sure your brand is being seen where you want it to.

Claire Atkin of Check My Ads

Credits:

Send us messages with Yappa!
Join the Podscape Podcast: https://bit.ly/3rHLxgDCheck out The Download: https://omny.fm/shows/the-download-from-sounds-profitableSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.