One company is trying to corner the podcast market
E.W. Scripps has acquired streaming audio platform Stitcher in a $4.5 million deal meant to bolster the company's position as one of the leaders in the podcast market.
Stitcher will be folded into Midroll Media, but the public-facing brand will remain. Stitcher's staff of 12 employees will become part of Midroll, and Stitcher head of product will join Midroll as well.
Bought by Scripps in July 2015, Midroll now boasts more than 200 podcast partners including some of the most popular titles: the Bill Simmons Podcast Network, WTF with Marc Maron and Nerdist.
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Stitcher, meanwhile, has grown into one of the most ubiquitous spoken-word platforms not named iTunes. While Apple is still the biggest podcast distributor, Stitcher has carved out a sizable niche -- most notably by integrating into cars. Its app can be found in the dashboard computers of more than 50 different car models.
Adam Symson, chief digital officer for Scripps, said that this proved a tempting way to find new audiences for Midroll's podcasts.
"If you go back through the history of connected cars, you'll see that Stitcher is right there and is still the number two most deployed brand within the connected car space," Symson told Mashable.
Stitcher had been a part of music streaming service Deezer, which bought the platform in 2008.
The podcast market remains mostly hypothetical. Edison Research found in 2014 that podcasts only accounted for 2% of all time spent listening to audio, the AM/FM radio taking up 56%.
Podcasts had remained a small niche until 2015 when Serial blew up into a pop culture phenomenon. Podcasts in general had been growing, but none had entered the public consciousness in quite the same way.
The scale isn't quite there yet, but the business case for podcasts is already better than other forms of digital media. Podcasts tend to attract far more money per listener from advertisers.
One of the main problems for podcasters has been making it easy to find their content. Aside from being featured on the front page of Apple's iTunes, there's not all that many ways to gain quick exposure.
Symson said that he sees Stitcher as a way to address that problem.
"We see stitcher for us also as key to solving one of the major issues with the podcasting business and that is content discovery," he said. "The Stitcher platform does a really great job for listeners of identifying the content they listen to, finding in-kind content and helping them develop a much more personalized and curated experience."
Jason Abbruzzese is a Business Reporter at Mashable. He covers the media and telecom industries with a particular focus on how the Internet is changing these markets and impacting consumers. Prior to working at Mashable, Jason served as Markets Reporter and Web Producer at the Financial Times. Jason holds a B.S. in Journalism from Boston University and an M.A. in International Affairs from Australian National University.
