On Wednesday, after weeks of flirtation, Spotify and The Ringer made it official: The Swedish audio giant is acquiring Bill Simmons’s sports and entertainment website for an unspecified sum, almost certainly in the hundreds of millions of dollars. “What we really did with The Ringer, I think, is we bought the next ESPN,” Spotify’s CEO, David Ek, said triumphantly on an earnings call. Ek was certainly exaggerating (and possibly feeding Simmons’s ego, given his high-profile departure from the sports network in 2015). For a website, The Ringer is a juggernaut, with a podcast operation that raked in $15 million last year. ESPN, even in the age of cord-cutting, brings in billions.

Elk’s point was that he had just bought a company whose importance to sports audio was comparable to what ESPN did for sports video. “We look forward to putting the full power of Spotify behind The Ringer as they drive our global sports strategy,” Spotify’s Chief Content Officer Dawn Ostroff said in a statement. Now that Spotify, originally a streaming service for music, has quickly established itself as a formidable player in podcast media, it is inarguably the most significant company in audio.



But in acquiring The Ringer, Spotify is also getting an old-fashioned editorial operation. Both Spotify and Simmons are insistent that nothing will change on the editorial side of the equation. Simmons tweeted that the site will remain the same “in every respect,” while there are signs that Spotify intends to increase The Ringer’s already sizable staff (the site, as of acquisition, has about 90 employees). Still, the deal highlights a fraught moment in online media, in which websites are increasingly moving further away from text.



Despite its significant editorial presence, The Ringer is, in many ways, an inversion of a traditional media company: It is a podcast company first and an editorial one second. The majority of its revenue comes from its 40 or so podcasts. Its website is visited by around three million visitors a month, but its podcast audience is more than 10 times larger. And while the majority of its staff contributes to the website, the written work is really a sideline—a feeder system for The Ringer’s diverse array of sports and pop culture podcasts.



Having a podcast empire is arguably the best way to fund an editorial company in 2020. Facebook and Google have destroyed the digital advertising market for publishers, forcing them to look for other sources of cash. Subscriptions and paywalls are always an option, of course, but reading ads from MeUndies and Casper mattresses to millions of listeners is much easier and more lucrative, particularly for companies that aren’t The New York Times. There’s a reason why every major publication, legacy or digital-only, is investing heavily in podcasts, from the Times to Slate. (The New Republic launched its first podcast, The Politics of Everything, this week.)

