A graph showing increase in Spotify's MAU figure
Spotify

Spotify’s podcast reorg cost $57mn

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  • Spotify released its financials for Q2/23. Monthly Active Users grew 27% to 551mn. Paid subscribers also grew 17% to 220mn.

    • The company lost US$272mn in the quarter. Part of that loss was $45mn in “content asset write offs and contract termination and related costs in connection with rationalizing our podcast content portfolio”, and a further $12mn in “severance charges incurred primarily in connection with streamlining our podcast operations”.
    • Podcast ad revenue was up 30+% year-on-year, “with sold impressions across Original and Licensed podcasts and the Spotify Audience Network hitting an all-time-high, partially offset by softer pricing.” Podcasts showed improved profitability.
  • In further reading about Spotify’s results:

  • Lining up against Spotify and Audible, an audiobooks app which promises to share its profits with independent bookshops has been launched internationally. Libro.fm also offers monthly memberships.

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Daniel Ek on Spotify’s podcast strategy

The biggest shift in our strategy is really around the more streamlined operations and that we’re being more careful about, now that we have a lot more data around, doubling down and renewing the things that did work and stop doing the things that didn’t work. That’s the primary consideration that we’re going through.

I think the most interesting thing from my vantage point is how the number of podcasters is growing. Unlike before where perhaps we saw people in the very early innings that were native to podcasting and didn’t do any other form of media, then when we kind of made the announcement, we brought new talent to the platform. Now we’re seeing a lot of Internet native creators who are creating new podcasts for it. And I think our video podcasting is a great example of that where we’re seeing podcasters now realizing that they have one video feed on Instagram and YouTube and all these other platforms and now uploading more long-form content on Spotify with great success.

So we are very much tailoring on the content type to these new creators and broadening the base of podcasters. Feel really good about that. And then on the consumer side, that tend to lead to much younger consumers getting in and starting to realize that podcasting is not just something for older consumers, but it’s something that has a lot of appeal. It could be funny. It could be not just facts, but you’re seeing, Call Her Daddy, a great example of younger women taking up to podcasting and loving the format. And we’re seeing, obviously, something like Call Her Daddy also then cross referenced when Alex Cooper brings musical artists onto the show, you’re seeing great results in music streams as well.

… We have a lot more data across the millions of podcasts we already have about what that does to new user acquisition, to retention, to conversion, to subscribers, et cetera.

And not surprisingly, what we’re finding is that some of these shows work really well with our audience. Some of them don’t work well. Some of them work well, but during a different cost structure as we probably overpaid relative to what we should have done. And so we’re coming at this with the process of rightsizing some deals, doubling down on some of the things that worked really nicely and then stepping out of some deals and relationships that hasn’t worked out.

But I think this is very normal given that we kind of went in, in order to get -- to really win the space and to gather as much data as we could in a short period of time. And so the data we have now is very rich and allows us to make much better decisions than we obviously could four years ago

Moves and hires

Tips and tricks

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Companies mentioned above:
Audible logoAudibleAusha logoAushaBarometer logoBarometerBlubrry logoBlubrryCoHost logoCoHostEdison Research logoEdison ResearchOxford Road logoOxford RoadPodcast Movement logoPodcast MovementPRX logoPRXQuill logoQuillSounder logoSounderSpotify logoSpotifyYouTube logoYouTube

Podcast data for Jul 26

#1 in Apple Podcasts
US flag The Retrievals (Serial Productions & The New York Times)
GB flag The Girlfriends (iHeartPodcasts & Novel)

#1 in Spotify
US flag The Joe Rogan Experience (Joe Rogan)
GB flag The Joe Rogan Experience (Joe Rogan)

Over the last week, 194,900 podcasts published at least one new episode (down 0.6%). source

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