This week on The Download: Acast buys Podchaser, PodcastOne strikes out on their own, SiriusXM and Comscore expand their deal, Disney’s integrating with The Trade Desk , and Podnews caught 240 spam emails.

This Monday Podnews started off the work week with a big announcement: Acast is acquiring Podchaser in a $34 million dollar deal. 

“Podchaser, which will continue to operate as a separate brand and independent business, was founded in 2016 and is home to the leading global podcast database, covering more than 4.5 million podcasts and more than 1.7 billion data points — including hundreds of thousands of ratings and reviews, and the advertisers of the world’s top 5,000 podcasts. This unique, proprietary data — which will also remain open to all — spans and powers the entire open podcast ecosystem, and is used by listeners, podcasters, advertisers and industry professionals.”

Podchaser has created strong integrations with hosting platforms to receive data, exported data to podcast apps and hosting platforms, and has a competitive intelligence tool built to enable publishers and buyers alike to improve their revenue streams. 

General industry sentiment of Acast currently is a bit lukewarm unless you’re actively working with them as a publisher or a buyer. As previously reported, Acast has—or at least had— a marketing strategy involving unrelenting spam emails encouraging podcasters to switch to their services. With mass emails to RadioPublic users and their siloed relationships with partners like Patreon, it’s hard for some podcasters to give this deal the benefit of the doubt. 

We’re very happy for our sponsor Podchaser, and the entire team there, and truly hope the independent nature is maintained. We still question the comfort of existing and new integrated partners providing data to a competitor.

Last Friday LiveOne issued a press release announcing that their company PodcastOne, having just raised 8.1 million in funding, is looking to separate and become an independent company. 

“PodcastOne is the leading advertiser-supported on-demand digital podcast company, offering a 360-degree solution for both content creators and advertisers, including content development, brand integration and distribution. Acquired by LiveOne in 2020, PodcastOne has had more than 2.1 billion downloads a year since its acquisition, across the more than 350 weekly episodes it distributes.”

Their talent stable includes names like Jordan Harbinger, Adam Carolla, and T-Pain. In the press release PodcastOne president Kit Gray said: 

“The podcasting business has exploded over the past five years and PodcastOne is one of the largest independent podcast companies in the world. The company is one of only two independent podcasting publishers in the top 10 of Podtrac's list of Top Publishers. We believe that by trading as a separate public company, PodcastOne will have the opportunity to access the public capital markets as well as be better positioned to both acquire podcast platforms and attract significant podcast talent.” 

PodcastOne offers its own self-built platform and operates as an ad sales network for its publishers. It’s weathered a lot of storms in podcasting and investment like this during a recession shows confidence in the ability for them to stand on their own. It will be interesting to see how their products and services come to market faster, and who they cater toward. Much like the acquisition last story, this announcement shows podcasting deals aren’t going stale.

Last Thursday SiriusXM and Comscore announced the expansion of their collaborative agreement to bring predictive audience targeting to podcasts. This new expanded agreement will bring Comscore Predictive Audiences to both AdzWizz and SXM Media clients. General Manager of Comscore activation services Rachel Grant said: 

“With podcast consumption skyrocketing and the regulatory environment still very fluid, it’s critical to give advertisers the ability to develop privacy-forward and future-proof audience targeting on podcasts” 

Prior to this AdsWizz was already working with Comscore for their contextual targeting based off of keywords for the Podscribe tool (not to be confused with the company Podscribe). The new deal expands into a targetable dataset for those buying through Adswizz programmatic offerings, either as a buyer using their demand side platform to buy anywhere in podcast programmatic, or buying directly into their open marketplace Podwave. 

The continued highlighting of it being privacy-first is a bit misleading. AdsWizz is still providing the IP address to match off of, which we at Sounds Profitable do not find to be an issue.

That Comscore has built a new dataset not built on cookies is a step towards the aforementioned future-proofing. The dataset looks to come from Comscore opted-in panels, which is different from universal ID solutions looking to match first party data. While podcasting is always probabilistic matching - as it's based on IP address - this is also probabilistic targeting. 

It’s neat to see Comscore focusing a bit more on podcasting while many other major data partners are snoozing on it.

In a rare twist we only have one article posted on a Tuesday for you this week. Last Tuesday AdExchanger’s James Hercher published “Disney Integrates With The Trade Desk And UID2 In Pursuit Of Better Addressability.”

“This new integration with The Trade Desk, which was born from recent meetings in Cannes, will accelerate Disney’s ambition to automate and target more of its overall pool of data, Barnes said. Advertisers will be able to more effectively find their audiences across Disney inventory and the added precision should help improve ROI and post-campaign results.”

Disney is a major player in podcasting, both directly and through partnerships. So much of what Disney does today uses programmatic for efficiency’s sake. A company of that size can’t easily do manual IO’s for every cookie-cutter campaign. As Disney continues to invest and grow their podcast offerings creates synergy with the majority of podcast SSPs being configured to purchase from The Trade Desk. There’s  real potential for further increase in podcasting programmatic as the industry takes care of the small discrepancies and differences that stand in the way of podcasting as a main advertising channel. 

While the article is worth engaging with on its own merits, script writer Gavin Gaddis wishes to spotlight the piece’s cartoon of Toy Story stars Buzz and Woody selling ads with the caption ‘to automation and beyond.’

Three months ago Podnews editor James Cridland laid a trap to learn more about the methods and companies using shady tactics to cold-call podcasters via email. On Wednesday he published the results in “the podcast industry’s biggest spammer.” 

“In May 2022, we amended Podnews’s podcast RSS feed to produce a near infinite amount of trackable email addresses as a kind of spamtrap. We wanted to discover who was scraping our RSS feed for emails; what user agent they were using, when they scraped it, what tag they scraped it from, and whether the messages were legal under the FCC’s rules (the so-called CAN-SPAM Act).” 

Cridland’s honeypot strategy attracted 240 emails over the three month period. Some fall within the boundaries of CAN-SPAM, some seem pointed in their lack of transparency. 

The specific companies involved are not necessarily important to the overall story. Podcasting needs good governance as growth continues and the industry constantly redefines what constitutes ‘normal’ business practices. It’s on those within the industry to make podcasting better through what’s considered an acceptable marketing strategy. It’s perfectly legal to scrape email addresses from RSS feed tags and send them unsolicited emails as long as they follow loose FCC and other governmental regulatory rules. In an industry growing as fast and consistently as podcasting one has to question if it has a place for an antiquated cold-calling strategy perfected in the late 90s. 

Finally, it’s time for our semi-regular roundup of articles we’re calling Quick Hits. These are articles that didn’t quite make the cut for today’s episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week’s two Quick Hits are 

content.com/the-most-important-things-weve-learned-about-successful-branded-podcasts-c9e52f643c8f">The Most Important Things We’ve Learned About Making Successful Podcasts with Brands by Dan Misener. Misener, formerly Director of Audience Development at Pacific Content, provides a great list of learnings on his way out the door. One of the greatest minds at Pacific, Misener has been skilled at breaking down complex data and making it accessible to the masses. His heart has always been focused on growing all of podcasting and Sounds Profitable fully supports him in whatever he’s doing next. We know it’ll have an impact. 

And secondly: a press release from Pushkin media: Pushkin Industries Expands Production Capacity With Acquisition of Creative Podcast Company Transmitter Media. Here we have yet another example of a podcast production company growing to the point they need to buy another podcast production company. 

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 our media host, Omny Studio.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.