Disclaimer: This interview is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. In Practise is an independent publisher and all opinions expressed by guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of In Practise.

{audio:0:02:15} I’d love to hear about your background, both broadly and in the podcasting space, then we can walk into some of my questions about it. 

{audio:0:02:22} I started my career in the podcast industry in 2014. Podcasts, at that time, were not as big as today. The podcast wave started at the beginning of the 2000s, and it dropped a little, and then from 2010 to 2011, podcasts started to grow. I joined a podcaster company in 2014 and grew with the company in the podcast space. I worked with strategy, I worked with the finance part, and I also worked on how to grow the podcast revenue.

{audio:0:03:25} That's helpful; we'll tie it to a couple of my key topics. I'd love to start with a big picture question about podcasts. What surprises me is for the industry, it seems like the amount of revenue generated in podcast advertising is not nearly as much as it would be, looking at podcast engagement. The hours spent listening, compared to radio, are much more significant than the advertising dollars on podcasts compared to radio. Does that make sense?

{audio:0:04:07} Yes, it makes sense, and you are correct.

{audio:0:04:12} I’m curious as to why does podcasting not monetize nearly as well as it gains attention?

{audio:0:04:22} Podcast monetization is a complicated thing. It's not the same as radio. Radio has been there as a format for many, many years. It's a traditional media format, and people have grown into its buying behavior as a traditional buying behavior. If you compare it to radio, the percentage of podcast listeners is still smaller than that of radio listeners. Radio is still an existing format, whether it's live or on-demand. For the podcasts, the reason the revenue doesn't hit in the same way, as the attention has grown, is highly tied to a few different things. 

{audio:0:05:12} The first one is that the advertisers' behavior is very traditional. Even though they understand the podcast format, the buying behavior in podcasts takes a long time for any company in this world to motivate. The second issue is, how do you buy a podcast ad because a piece of content could be listened to worldwide, in different countries, and how can you make sure that the ad is distributed to the right target audiences in the right countries. It's the same case with the content you want to target. Let's say you have this content called My Dad Wrote a Porno, a content name, and you are listening from Sydney, but you don't want to hear the ad from London. Technically, you need a company or technology to insert ads targeting different regions to solve that. The advertising platforms I'm talking about are the ones that are professionally doing the advertising for the brands, and they are filtered. A few years ago, there was no such thing about podcast ads and podcast attributes in their filters; all of this was developed afterward.

{audio:0:06:45} But now, dynamically inserting podcast ads is relatively normal.

{audio:0:06:54} Yes. Now it becomes a bit more normal. Of the ads that still have the two formats, in my observation, the most popular format is still the host-read ads. And they are still expensive. People are still buying for the influence. 

{audio:0:07:26} So for host-read, it's harder to dynamically insert, though I think it's still possible. You're saying that it's a challenge to localize it.

{audio:0:07:41} Yes, it’s hard to scale.

{audio:0:07:44} What about capturing more of the long tail of the podcast ecosystem in a more programmatic way? How do you see that happening?

{audio:0:07:58} I think that's a smart way of doing the podcast ads because you can target the ads to an equal amount of people as you would want to have a host read ads, because you’re buying his influence. For targeting in terms of volume, you want to get the message heard by a lot of people, then the long tail market makes absolute sense. It's usually cheaper compared to the host read or sponsorship. 

{audio:0:08:26} It sounds like the industry is not fully programmatic currently. So what needs to happen to unleash that longer tail?

{audio:0:08:43} If you look at the value chain of this entire industry, you need the content. Everyone can become a podcaster – so that part you do have – and it's cheap to produce. Then you need to have a platform that can host all this content, and there are currently various platforms to host content in this world. Between all these platforms, they don't share the data. Then you have the podcast advertising companies doing monetization; they have different companies doing that in different ways. Then you have third-party sales platforms that need to accept all these attributes and have as much content as possible. For the ideal world, where you think the long tail market will be heavy lifted going forward, it will be in one place when it starts to happen. There needs to be a few strong players in the market who actually have the content in their platform and can monetize them.

{audio:0:09:58} The way it sounds to me, when you speak to people on programmatic advertising, is that it's a lot of small walled gardens where everyone has their private programmatic marketplace. Does one player need to emerge as dominant, or does there need to be an industry standard, or does someone have to create a marketplace? How do we move from this very siloed industry to something more akin to digital advertising, where I could buy any ad anywhere with three clicks of a mouse?

{audio:0:10:35} Two things happen. One is that there should be a unified industry standard. In the advertising world, you do have a unified industry standard, but I think it's getting better now for podcast ads. I think the IAB now has podcasts as one part of the standard, but I don't know how detailed it is. On the other hand, you need a few strong players to work together to create this kind of dynamic ad insertion and a community. You need an open platform where it's easy for these things to happen, like YouTube. 

{audio:0:11:24} When you look at the players' behavior in the space, it almost seems to be moving more away from open and toward walled gardens. Spotify continues to put content behind paywalls, and Sirius is moving in that direction. You see some light moves from Amazon as well, and it seems like the industry is moving further away from that open and programmatic future.

{audio:0:11:48} Yes, but I would challenge all your thoughts to think from the podcaster's perspective. What do the content creators want? Because without content, there’s nothing to sell, there’s nothing to listen to. The content creators want their content to be heard by as many people as possible. The second thing is, they enjoy doing this kind of job. If they want to continue doing this kind of job, they either have a second job that can finance them to do this hobby or want to turn this hobby into some sort of monetization, so they don't have to have a second job. For the second thing to happen, they need a platform to provide the revenue for them so they can rely on this. How does Spotify share the revenue with podcasters? It's from the premium subscriptions, but I can hardly believe that it would be as high, as all the players have attributes built, and all the content distributors can provide ad revenue. 

{audio:0:12:55} Spotify has also been doing some interesting things in their ad network recently. Have you been following that? They've been acquiring some attribution players. What do you think about that?

{audio:0:13:08} I have a biased or an unbalanced view about that, myself. Partly because I know their revenue model is a subscription model. I also know the percentage using subscription model, in terms of the entire Spotify users, is still relatively small. I think they're still heavily relying on the free version. I think it's a typical company that has a combination of these two models together, and I think they see the potential of the podcast advertising. They want to move into that industry, which means that the market the podcasters could rely on is not really the subscription model, it's the advertising model. I think that model will continue to push Spotify to develop more on their ad ranging.

{audio:0:14:16} I’m also curious about your views on podcast ad attribution, how listens are measured, and how effective that is.

{audio:0:14:38} When we started selling ads, it was hard to convince the podcaster what the return on investment was. But looking at the user profile attributes, we found out that the people who listen to podcasts are more highly educated, their income level is generally higher, and other profile data. Then you could target them geographically, by income level, agenda, interests and so on. When you get more use of data, it's easier to target and know more about your fans, based on your content as a podcaster. 

{audio:0:15:17} Then for the podcast advertising, how do you measure it? For the brands themselves it's hard to measure. That’s still a hard thing to crack. No company has figured out the perfect synergy. What sometimes brands will do is after the host-read ads, they will say the percentage or the code, and they can measure how many people purchase the product after that code. That's how you make the connection. You can also follow some things on social media, if the host read has said something, and you can see if there are any reactions on social media, but that's also a far-fetched reality. So that's still a challenge, but it's a universal challenge to be fair. How would you know that this brand who put a poster on a subway is getting the effect they wanted?

{audio:0:16:28} That's very fair, and I think with podcasts specifically, that's why, historically, it's over-indexed to direct to consumer companies because for them it's easy to say, here's a discount for buying this, and you can make it track their ROI.

{audio:0:16:50} But I would tell you one thing, an experiment, a few years ago because afterward the company didn’t do this kind of test. When we had the app before, you could track the user behavior much better and we inserted the ad link inside the content. So when you open the app, listen to the podcast, and when you come into let's say H&M fashion brand, and this skirt is so beautiful, you get the link pop up on your phone, and people would click or not click. When we experimented at that time and I found out the click-through rate is more than 4%. If you worked in that industry you would know that click-through rate is extremely high. Spotify doesn't even have that number, is not close to that number. This tells you one thing: it could be the ad or the fans' attributes at that time. Still, the podcast effect going into your ear, when people are highly concentrated, they're not passive when they receive the message; it makes a difference. 

{audio:0:18:09} It still seems like brands aren't as convinced, given that they are still underspending. It comes back to some of the limitations of the media, with RSS and the inability to say, okay, someone downloaded it, did they play it, did they play it to this point? How do you see those challenges in attributions to say the customer actually heard your ad?

{audio:0:19:16} It's a complicated matter to solve. As I said, for the distribution platform, the estimate is probably 5,000 to 7,000-ish kinds of distribution apps right now. These apps have their own measurements, and they don't share the data. But for some of the ones I’ve worked with, you do have a measurement because it's easier for you to generate the data if you're the hosting platform. So it depends on what value share and what company is playing, which decides what kind of data they can generate.

{audio:0:20:01} But as you said, it sounds like the hosting is very fragmented.

{audio:0:20:09} There are not as many hosting services in this world as compared to distribution apps.

{audio:0:20:15} I think podcasting is now in the low single-digit billions in advertising revenue. What would it take to get it to a high single-digit or 10 billion in advertising revenue? What needs to happen for podcasting to take the next step and become a more material part of advertising spend?

{audio:0:20:51} Speaking at the high level, the industry probably needs a better standard, a more unified standard, and the IAB movement is relegating that. I can see that podcasts have been a hot topic in IAB discussions. The second thing is going forward, you probably also need to think about the advertising industry, how the targeting is evolving, especially in recent years with the GDPR and stuff like that. If you're only targeting user data, it will become harder and harder. This is a universal challenge. I would say that the podcast is probably easier to get out of that zone because the podcast format is usually shorter and there is just text. 

{audio:0:21:52} Maybe the podcast industry could find a way to get away from these types of limitations like GDPR and find a way of doing the contextual advertising. This means they become the front leader of rethinking how advertising would be perceived, know how to make it more reachable, and get compliant with the GDPR, it will get its own light compared to video and music. I think the effectiveness with that is going forward with time and the development of advertising targeting. I'm a big believer in contextual advertising, and I think podcasting has an advantage.

{audio:0:22:47} That was one of my next questions, around contextual-based. So you are optimistic about contextual advertising? Do you think contextual is very important to move forward in advertising?

{audio:0:23:13} Yes, because as you also know, it's hard to know the data since no one is sharing it, and that also means it's hard enough to know who the users are for an advertising company. The attributes, even though you kind of generate those – for example, this person is interested in technology, so let's give him some technology ads and so on – but it's very linear. Maybe you have a family, maybe you have a kid, maybe a diaper ad would be interesting for you. Based on what you are listening to, they get all your social media, your information, so they know how to target you. But when you are actually inside the content, listening to a technology podcast, and they give you the right ad at the right time, contextual-wise, I think it's more effective. At least that's my belief.

{audio:0:24:31} If we looked at the podcast advertising issue as a whole, how much bigger do you think it will be in five years versus today? Let's say today it's $2 billion because I think that's the direction of the books.

{audio:0:24:54} The entire industry, in a year over year growth rate, my guess is it will be around, in five years' time, probably around 10bn, if they could crack the contextual advertising as well.

{audio:0:25:33} If they crack contextual, you think this industry is much larger in five years.

{audio:0:25:43} Yes, exactly, I believe so. But on the other hand, I also know there is a long way to go; compared to music and video, there is a difference in ad receiving. It also depends on where people spend their time in five years.

{audio:0:26:05} If we look out five years from now, obviously as you noted, there are several hosting players, several technology giants, and some will evolve in the space. There's a huge number of podcatchers out there, so it's still a pretty fragmented industry. If we look out five years, whom do you think are the likely winners in the industry?

{audio:0:26:38} What type of winners are you talking about? What are the segments or the value share that you’re talking about?

{audio:0:26:44} I would say that given that most of the revenue will come through advertising, who are the winners on the advertising side?

{audio:0:26:55} I believe the company I worked with still has a play because of the open platform. I think for the long-term market, that makes very good sense. 

{audio:0:27:12} The company you worked for, you mean Acast?

{audio:0:27:14} Yes, exactly. Because the long-term market has a hard time capturing the market the way it comes to revenue. You can't expect individual podcasters to do it themselves. That's the technology-based platform. The open platform winners will be there. Then you also have the next type of companies, like Gimlet Media. Those types of companies, Midroll, I know they're still operating, and they have a few podcasters who are very loyal to them because they provide really good sponsorship revenue. Sponsorship-wise, I don't think advertisers will move away from the influence. It depends on whether it's a big influencer or a micro-influencer – especially the micro-influencers – are still worth the money spent to make the marketing effective. A few more companies will do open platform advertising because it's a complicated thing to be integrated. And there will be a bunch of the sponsorship-driven revenue, like Netflix, who will be networks of the company.

{audio:0:28:50} Or something like Spotify.

{audio:0:28:54} Exactly, Spotify. And someone that has a lot of acquisition power will merge these networks because they want to have the content exclusively to themselves that they can sell. So there will be one category with strong purchasing power and acquisition power for the high-end content. Then you will have an open platform like Acast, with a longer tail. 

{audio:0:29:20} How do you think the market breaks down between the high-end premium paywalled content versus the longer tailed? If we're using that $10 billion purely as a placeholder, what percent of that flows to those high-end? The order of magnitude is great here. What percent flows to the higher-end kind of paywalled podcast versus the long tail?

{audio:0:29:47} Good question. Personally, my two cents is that most of this revenue will still be an influencer-based reach in terms of sponsorships; they still do the host-read ads. In my category, the host-read ads are still some kind of voice-based sponsorship. Then you have the long tail, that is dynamic ad insertion, it doesn't matter who reads the ads. By my estimate, that part will be around 40% maximum in five years because I would say it was 95% a few years ago. 

{audio:0:30:23} It's still mostly the bigger podcasts, but a significant portion of that revenue still goes to the long tail.

{audio:0:30:44} That makes sense. You mentioned you think Acast is one of the winners. Who else do you think is very competitive and wins in that long tail?

{audio:0:31:01} A few smaller companies are coming up, but I still don't think their tech capabilities are there. For example, it's not an open platform right now, but Art19 is owned by Amazon. Like always, Amazon is a muscle. If they open up, I believe they have some market play there. And they won't, there's just a focus on the advertising platform building, and they haven't focused on the content.

{audio:0:31:45} What about some of the radio companies, like an iHeart? They've made a significant acquisition with Omny and Triton.

{audio:0:31:56} I interacted with them a long time ago, and my feeling at that time, was they are still a very traditional company. For a traditional radio company to be innovative in terms of thinking in this industry will be very hard. And they produce their content, as well. So any company like iHeartRadio, when they produce their own content, you have a bias as to whether they should monetize more on their own content because it has a higher production fee, or do they open up for the long tail market. The play for that type of company will be challenging to become the leader of this industry because of maybe political issues, or whatever that reason could be. 

{audio:0:32:50} But they are, at least right now, number one in US podcast listens.

{audio:0:32:54} In terms of the listens, yes. 

{audio:0:32:58} Sirius owns Stitcher now. Do you see them as a big competitor?

{audio:0:33:10} I would say they are more like listening parts with a bigger distribution. But I haven’t seen them progressing a lot on the tech side compared to Acast. On the other hand, if you studied Acast, you would know that it doesn't matter whether the listens happen; the ad is inserted anyway.

{audio:0:33:38} What about Libsyn AdvertiseCast, do you see them as a player?

{audio:0:33:43} They are more like a hosting platform for me. I think they started with hosting. To build the tech capabilities to be integrated and have an open platform, yes, they do have a play if they have the muscle, but I don’t see that they have the revenue coming associated with that to support their goals. 

{audio:0:34:05} What is your thought on AudioBoom?

{audio:0:34:21} They were not doing very well a few years ago, and they made a lot of noise in the earlier stage. We looked at acquisition earlier to acquire them, but then we kind of let go, partly because a small company doesn't have enough money. But when you look at how they performed, I think they were performing in the UK, but they didn't perform very well in the other English-speaking countries.

{audio:0:34:55} If you look at their valuation, they’re trading at something like 5X 2022 revenues, and Acast is trading at 1.5X 2022.

{audio:0:35:15} There's a difference in how they operate, so you have to think about the long run and how to scale. Host-read ads are really hard to scale because you do need a script. You need a script for every country and for every brand. I feel that this works for premium networks and content because you don't need that many, and they will be surviving with revenue. But for the long tail market, it's hard, and you need someone that can bring a scalable solution into monetizing this type of content. It's a different market play with AudioBoom; they're still very reliant on the host-read I believe. 

{audio:0:36:10} Spotify owns Megaphone, one of the SaaS solutions here. Do you see Megaphone as a competitor?

{audio:0:36:18} I do think that Megaphone is a competitor. They have a better understanding of the strategy issues than others.

{audio:0:36:36} What needs to happen for Acast to be the winner, or one of the winners, in the open space in the next year. What does Acast need to do?

{audio:0:36:47} Continue to be an open platform instead of an invitation-only platform, continuously distributing the ads in the same way as they do now, to be on all the platforms. I believe that if Spotify were shut down they, Spotify, this type of player wants a clean feed over the content so they don't want the advertisement to be inserted. But the smaller podcaster will not be on Spotify from day one. So for Acast, I think they will be the perfect place for new, young, and innovative podcasters to come on the platform and grow with it. Hopefully, they will not easily leave the platform and sign the exclusive deal with Spotify. They will offer an open platform and encourage and grow the young stars of the podcasters and then grow with them to create podcaster loyalty so they won't leave the platform to sign an exclusive deal when they're big enough. 

{audio:0:38:10} Also the ad technology for the company needs to be as good as possible. That means that you can do the contextual advertising, which makes much more sense in the user experience. And then to be more innovative in thinking about the attributes, not just the contextual advertising. Maybe it’s about the mood matching; when you listen to a piece of content, you get the information, but on the other hand, you enjoy listening to that person for a reason. That's another area that I think is untapped when it comes to advertising. When it comes to contextual, when it comes to the part of the user data that you can generate directly, and you have the mood match, then the premium of the advertising CPM will be much higher than $25.

{audio:0:39:15} Acast is leaning hard into the contextual advertising.

{audio:0:39:24} I need to add one more thing. The feedback loop is a universal challenge. As we just discussed, it's hard to measure. But when you have more data than you can generate from the hosting services or generate yourself from different devices, I know that Acast worked a lot on integrating themselves with other apps to receive the data from them. But every app measures the listens differently. In the podcast movement, how we measure the listens has to be a unified element so that the industry has a good standard. What I measure as one listen is when you listen to content for the first one and a half or three minutes. These kinds of things need to be unified. Then there needs to be a clear way to measure the effectiveness of the advertising industry. As long as you can provide a little more data than the others, you are leading in this industry because you are more convincing with a little more data. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you have to have something. 

{audio:0:40:57} What do you think about YouTube in the space? They started making more noise about dedicated podcasting. I think one of the fears of the podcast industry is that someone will create the YouTube of podcasts for the long tail. Something super easy, self-serve, and automated for people to get paid will obsolete the larger business networks, something like what Acast has.

{audio:0:41:29} Yes, but on the other hand, if you look at podcasts, obviously, you can have YouTube for it. You can go on YouTube today without a camera, just an audio file; that's possible. But a company like Acast can't control everyone. If YouTube wants to go in with their muscle, with Google behind them, it can go in today. And maybe tomorrow, they'll already have a platform supporting the dynamic ad insertion for the podcast.

{audio:0:42:08} On the other hand, why? Why would YouTube want to do everything from scratch? If they build everything from scratch, they’ll have to solve the same challenges as Acast has gone through. They still need to solve the challenge of being in front, and if the podcast were to become a strategy play for YouTube, I’m not entirely sure.

{audio:0:42:33} It seems like in the last few years, every podcasting asset under the sun has been acquired by a tech giant, except for AudioBoom, which is now rumored to be in play, and Acast, which has remained independent. Why do you think Acast hasn't been acquired?

{audio:0:43:00} The valuation of Acast is quite high; that's one thing.

{audio:0:43:04} It's not, though; I don't know if you follow the share price.

{audio:0:43:11} Right now it's not very good. Their ideal hasn't been as successful as it probably could be. Another thing is probably that open play is not for everyone. In terms of the open platform, the ambition of this very early on, has been a big discussion inside the company for a few years whether it should go for a closed platform like Netflix, for example, or if it should go for a YouTube model. After a few years of discussion, even before I left Acast, the decision was to go for the open play. The open play strategy is not for every company. 

{audio:0:44:02} Switching gears to Acast-specific questions, could you speak about the culture you experienced at Acast and the relations among the employee base?

{audio:0:44:18} The culture is a different aspect when it comes to the advertisers, and it's more like a service-minded company. The podcasters are the first thing the company cares about because there is no way to insert the impressions without content, and there's no revenue. The second thing is that you want to build a tech-driven company, so Acast has been very much focused on technology and building up a real ad platform for many years. Then when it comes to the employees, you could say that it's star culture. People are hardworking and performing, trying to solve the challenges, especially the tech part.

{audio:0:45:15} On the other hand, when the company goes bigger, you'll have a mixed culture in terms of the work-life balance because many people have families, and it's a Swedish company. That part I think Acast did well, to integrate the Swedish culture into different markets.

{audio:0:45:06} What is your impression of Ross and Emily and the senior team?

{audio:0:45:54} I don't know Emily and Ross has deep knowledge of the content advertising industry, so he's the right person to take the company into this space. He is very clever and knows how to navigate this advertising field. In the senior leadership team, they have tech people, they have the CTO, who I worked with a little, but I think that he is a very good leader in tech because he understands the tech. Still, he also has a very strong business sense, and he's a supportive person of employee growth. He has many good followers in the company on the tech part.

{audio:0:47:00} Overall, you're broadly positive about the culture, working environment, and senior team.

{audio:0:47:09} For the company's ambition, I think the senior team is doing everything to bring clarity to the company and bring the people together. Obviously, when the company gets big enough, you have two voices. One part is that you want to grow the company from advertising revenue, and you keep talking about ads and generating ads. On the other side, you're thinking about how you can become strong enough, how your technology can become strong enough for as long as possible. Technology, as you know, will never be a sustainable advantage; someone will come in with 200 developers from day one to crack 24/7, and you lose the technology advantage. It's a relationship-building game in this industry. I think that Acast had that kind of relationship mindset from day one. 

{audio:0:48:14} If you were CEO of Acast, what would you focus on, or what would you do differently to give you the best chance of success over the next five years?

{audio:0:48:30} I would focus a lot on the product and how to make our ad targeting much, much better. It can be the contextual or the mood match; I would become super focused on that part to become the advertising industry leader. And I would also focus a lot on attracting and drawing more people into producing the content, looking at the long tail market and how to capture that market. Making Acast the first one to think of either if someone wants to start a podcast and someone who has 10,000 monthly listens.

{audio:0:49:22} I would build the brand among the podcasters as the number one brand to go to. If you think about publishing a video today, you think about YouTube most of the time. That's where I think Acast should be when it comes to podcasting, and I think they're getting there. There are a few small hosting services – such as like SoundCloud – who are still there. Product-wise, I would focus on the advertising platform. How to make the attributes better, building the team around that to educate the market continuously about the most effective way of doing advertising is to move away from the use of data because it's not going to be there forever.

{audio:0:50:42} It sounds like the company's doing a lot of the things you think they should be doing in terms of being podcast friendly and focusing on contextual. They're going for scale because the competitive advantage is being one of the biggest players in the marketplace, which they are in the UK and Sweden. 

{audio:0:51:05} What do you think has to happen in the US to replicate their position in the UK and Sweden?

{audio:0:51:16} The US is a hard nut to crack because you have so many great, premium networks in the market. I know that they have been trying a lot to formulate partnerships with the networks to provide ads for them, but I don't know. The synergies they proposed didn't work that well. The network itself has an advertising arm, so you don't want to have a competitor come in and take over all the impressions, so you don't have any impressions to sell. You then also have price competition. For the US, I think the first thing they should play is what they're good at, which is the open platform. To have a strong brand, at least for those types of players, the small podcasters and new podcasters. The ones who want to generate revenue but don't have the capabilities, or no one wants to present them, then that's the play they should continuously be strong as and that's where they are today.

{audio:0:52:34} On the other hand, when it comes to premium content, if they improve the attributes, they will find a way of having the content be, like the ads, somehow distributed by them. Their integration with different third parties, like the advertising platforms, is also helping them to provide the attributes to them so they could become a support for the networks to distribute ads. I'm not sure that they are very mature in that part yet, but I think that was an ambition they've had for some time.

{audio:0:53:41} I don't think they will eat up the market from day one. They should eat what they're good at first, then move to a partnership with the networks. If they have one or two really strong ones joining them, the others will follow, but I can hardly see that the PR experts will move to them completely since they have been independent for themselves for a very long time. It's going to be hard. But it depends on how you define it to capture the market. Right now, they should capture the content market, but then in terms of capturing the advertising market, it's a different play. You then need to go to the brands and have the open platform, and you can distribute ads because most of the brands they go for are international brands. That's a bigger play of convincing them that on the reach and on the attributes. But content play is going to be hard.

{audio:0:54:52} If it is hard, it’s what makes it a little more of an effective competitive market because you can build up both sides of that marketplace, both the content and the advertisers, then I think you have a much better spot.

{audio:0:55:11} And if the advertisers see the effectiveness of the ads in the long tail markets, and that it's cheaper and more effective, then they will go and spend more money there. That's where I think the competition goes, in the long tail market and in the premium market. Because in the end, the brands want to distribute their ad spend in different categories, and there will always be the premium play. But the premium play content pay will be a smaller and smaller percentage. I estimate that from 90 to 10 to probably in five years, a maximum of 45% percent will go for the long tail market, and I think that's a very high estimate. With Acast today, the speed is probably not going to get there alone, so with some other partnerships and movements, they'll probably get there somehow with their own company revenue.

{audio:0:56:12} Is there anyone out in the space that's still independent that you think makes sense for Acast to acquire? Who would be a good fit?

{audio:0:56:24} If they have a lot of money, I think acquiring some premium networks would be quite good because they could use the brand.

Acast, Spotify, & Podcast Monetization

Former Global Head of Strategy at Acast

inpractise.com/articles/acast-and-podcast-monetization

Executive Bio

Former Global Head of Strategy at Acast

Interview Transcript

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