Welcome to the fourth edition of POD FUTURE, a weekly newsletter covering the podcast industry, with a focus on business news and analysis. If you like what you read, please subscribe on Substack, follow on Twitter, and share with your colleagues 🙏

🚨 SPOTIFY TO BUY GIMLET

News broke last week that Spotify is in talks to acquire Gimlet for north of $200MM, marking a rare big media exit in an otherwise hostile climate. This comes as Spotify leans hard into the podcasting space, going so far as to updates its App Store listing to mention podcasts as a core offering.

While Spotify enjoys pole position among music streamers globally, it faces increased competition from deep-pocketed competitors like Apple, Google, and Amazon in the platform game of thrones. Growth is slowing, aggressive user acquisition ploys like discounted student/family plans and bundles with other media offerings have eaten away at ARPU (down to $5.50 from a 2016 peak of $7.64), and the stock is down 31% from it 52-week high.

So why is Spotify betting big on pods? Because music is expensive! Spotify has to return over 50% of revenue per music stream back to rights holders, making for razor thin margins. Pods, on the other hand, don’t command exorbitant overhead, so are relatively inexpensive. Add in long runtimes, valuable new blocker-proof ad inventory, and a high-potential new market and pods start to look like a no brainer as a hedge against the expensive core music biz.

In the all out war against Apple Music for market share, exclusive premium content is a powerful differentiator. Going vertical with its content offerings makes sense for Spotify in the same way it did for Netflix and HBO, two other media giants who built businesses on the back of third party content before verticalizing to lock in users. Apple is slower to move here, preferring to silo pod content in a standalone app. By virtue of its prime iOS real estate, Apple Podcasts owns over half the distribution market specifically for pods, so execs might be reluctant to combine it into Apple Music. That may change as Spotify’s pod strategy becomes more sophisticated and Apple enters the original content game to keep pace.

With the Gimlet purchase, Spotify absorbs not only a library of premium, mostly evergreen, advertiser-friendly content, but a battle-tested team that could help tip the scales in the escalating pod wars.

Prediction: More big content acquisitions in the next 12 months. Crooked and Ringer are the next to go and will be acquired by Apple, Spotify, or Amazon. (Is it just me, or is that WSJ Ringer feature I covered last week starting to look like a giant for sale sign? 🤔)

Spotify’s Q4 earnings call is Wednesday, so more news next week.

⚠️ EXTREMISM ON POD PLATFORMS

Election meddling on Facebook. Harassment campaigns on Twitter. The “Adpocalypse” on YouTube.

Tech platform content moderation is now a mainstream issue. While researching my previous pieces on moderation drama at Patreon and Barstool, I came across this article by Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch, which reveals several major pod platforms hosting neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Even though the article was published five months ago and the platforms were notified, the offending content remains on Libsyn and ZenCast. Spreaker, for its part, has taken action.

Inspired by Holt and frustrated by the indifference of Libsyn and ZenCast, I decided to do some research of my own. I started with a quick Google search for the one Nazi podcast I knew of. It’s called “Radical Agenda” and is hosted by Christopher Cantwell, better known as the “Crying Nazi,” most famous in mainstream circles for his featured appearance in Vice’s Emmy-winning doc filmed at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. To be clear, Cantwell isn’t some alt-lite pundit with a few fringe ideas. He’s a full stop, card carrying, flag waving white supremacist.

My search brought me to Podbean, where I found a fully updated channel for “Radical Agenda.” Immediately, I tweeted at them:

To my surprise, they replied:

Great, I thought. They’ll research this guy and his pull his show, like dozens of other platforms already have. Nope. A week later, it’s still there. (As a point of reference Cantwell launched a Twitch channel this past weekend, which Amazon suspended almost immediately.)

In the haste of my angry tweet, I accused Podbean of being the “only" platform to host Cantwell. Sadly, that’s not true. Further research led me to channels on Castbox, Breaker, TuneIn, Radio Public, and Google Podcasts.

That’s when I realized this is a systemic, cross-platform problem worthy of a closer look, so I put on my deerstalker cap and started sleuthing. I identified five of the most popular extremist pods and searched for them on thirteen leading distributors, not including Libsyn and ZenCast, which clearly don’t care. The results are screencapped below and linked here.

I get it. Moderating UGC content is hard. Without the scale and resources of a Google or Amazon, it’s impossible to screen all content proactively. Even with those resources, Google/YouTube still can’t figure it out. But if I can spend 30 minutes and find the worst of the worst, these venture-backed companies can too.

We’re seeing in real time the consequences of this type of extremist online media. A shooting in a Washington pizzeria. Eleven dead in Pittsburgh. God knows what’s next. The unmitigated propagation of conspiratorial, deliberately false, and radicalizing content across all UGC platforms underlies so many of the issues that divide the nation. Platforms must do better. Proactive moderation of this strain of content should be a primary concern for all of them, if not for moral reasons, then for business ones. The market has proven it can successfully organize against media companies, platforms, and advertisers that overlap with extremist or supremacist ideas. (See: Tucker Carlson, Gab, Breitbart, etc.) Pods may fly under the radar for now, but that won’t stay true forever. All moral considerations aside, Libsyn, ZenCast, and Podbean are exposing themselves to risk by willfully refusing to enforce their own terms of service.

Clean it up!

⚡ QUICK NEWS

Digiday talks revenue. // Digiday

Fashion brands are jumping on the pod bandwagon. // Business of Fashion

Karina Longworth’s superb pod “You Must Remember This” is going on indefinite hiatus. This is a huge personal loss for me! // Vanity Fair

Castup is a player in the pod service sector that handles editing, transcripting, and ID3 tagging for creators. // Castup

We’ve talked about audio as a tool for internal comms a couple times already. A new platform, Storyboard, is focusing on this niche. // Storyboard

💼 AUD JOBS

👽 GREETINGS

podfuturenews@gmail.com

@pod_future