One of the oldest podcast-specific companies in the business, Stitcher in its present iteration is an entity that does a bit of everything: it sells podcast advertising, it produces content, it houses the historically important Earwolf network, it owns some IP, it possesses key creative partnerships (most notably with My Favorite Murder), it manages talent contracts, it operates a listening app with a premium subscription component, it sells merch, and so on. For the television-centric Scripps, which had already committed over half a billion dollars toward acquiring several TV stations in early 2019, this swift context change all but took it out of the running to competitively spend on podcasting in the short-to-medium term.įurthermore, I’d say that Stitcher was in a uniquely tough position over the last year and a half, finding itself in something of an existential crossroads. The Swedish streaming platform would spend more than half a billion dollars on podcast deals over the next year and a half, dramatically increasing the spending levels expected from companies looking to compete in podcasting at scale. While Stitcher has grown reliably over the past few years - according to Scripps’ most recent annual report, the podcast unit brought in around $72.5 million in revenue last year, more than double what it made in 2017 - the market context around podcasting radically shifted in early 2019, when Spotify dove headfirst into the podcast industry and signaled its intent to heavily invest in the sector moving forward. I’d argue that the move makes considerable sense for Scripps. I’m told that the sale comes out of a competitive process, with a list of interested buyers extending well beyond those two companies, and that the shop-around process had been going on since well before the pandemic. Rumors that Scripps was looking to sell Stitcher off have been around for a few months, but it was officially confirmed several weeks ago by a report in The Information, which explicitly named SiriusXM and Spotify as possible suitors. That value makes this the biggest podcast acquisition to date. The Wall Street Journal’s Anna Steele had the scoop Monday night, reporting that SiriusXM will buy Stitcher from EW Scripps in a deal that’s valued at around $300 million, citing people familiar with the matter. And there you have it: Stitcher will have a new parent company.
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