Amazon’s potential acquisition of Wondery puts podcasting on a path towards a crossroads the next couple of years are going to be very interesting.This past June, Wondery founder and CEO Hernan Lopez told Variety that the company had about 20 million monthly unique listeners.Īfter Amazon’s deal for Wondery closes, Lopez will step down as CEO to focus on his recently announced Hernan Lopez Family Foundation and Wondery COO Jen Sargent will take over day-to-day operations, according to Amazon.
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If any of this happens, we’ll have a podcasting world that looks more like television, with its tiers of free broadcast, basic cable, and premium cable channels, instead of the world of digital music where all of the services offer more or less the same enormous catalog of content. To the extent antitrust law allows it, podcast publishers could require Spotify or Amazon to offer less popular shows as a condition of offering the big hits. Conversely, shows published by iHeart, NPR, or other publishers may be so popular that they are “must-haves,” in which case the money could flow in the opposite direction, as it does in cable TV. One or both of them could de-emphasize iHeart’s or NPR’s podcasts in their search results, make them more difficult to subscribe to, or require them to pay fees to be available on their apps. In other words, Spotify and Amazon have increasing amounts of leverage against other podcast publishers. 3.) Amazon Music is likely to climb that list in the coming year or two.
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(Google Podcasts, standard on Android devices, is now No. market, having recently leapt ahead of Apple Podcasts. iHeart and NPR are increasingly dependent on Spotify for distribution, because Spotify is now, according to Statista, the most popular podcast app in the U.S. This could put the iHeart/NPR axis on a collision course with the Spotify/Amazon axis. Recent research from Veritone shows that such ads are not as effective or appealing to listeners than the less-scalable host-read ads that podcasts have become known for. As we’re especially hearing on many of iHeartRadio’s shows, pre-recorded third-party ads placed on these podcasts make them sound more and more like commercial radio. Although the latter is a nonprofit and the former is not, they both have the same fundamental strategy: to distribute their shows as widely as possible and maximize revenue from ads and sponsorships. The two biggest podcast publishers today, by a wide margin, are iHeartRadio and NPR. With Amazon and Spotify pursuing walled-garden strategies for podcasting, we’re likely to be headed for a bifurcated podcasting world, where one axis of companies pushes for exclusivity and walled gardens while the other pushes for ubiquity and ad revenue. 2 behind Spotify (the study doesn’t measure YouTube for music) and ahead of Apple AAPL Music. According to the Infinite Dial research study from Edison Research and Triton Digital, Amazon Music is the fastest-growing on-demand music service it’s currently No. Amazon is also likely to promote Wondery’s podcasts through its Alexa-based smart speaker ecosystem. If Amazon completes the deal, it’s inevitable that Amazon will follow a path with Wondery that’s similar to the path that Spotify is on with its podcast acquisitions and licensing deals: gradually make them exclusive to Amazon Music (and possibly Audible), to increase the attractiveness of those audio content platforms.
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