Couldn’t make it to Evolutions by Podcast Movement last month? The Podcast Movement YouTube channel has uploaded videos of all five keynote speeches to the official keynote playlist. The 2024 section of the official playlist kicks off with Tom Webster’s keynote in which he starts off with a slide from Sounds Profitable’s latest podcast advertising study The Ad Bargain, before branching out to key relevant data from previous studies. Webster gives a bigger picture of the podcast advertising landscape and what the industry can do to grow. [Source]

Recently The Breakfast Club served as an example of how podcasts can be an effective tool for hard-hitting journalism. Last week the show interviewed embroiled New York City mayor Eric Adams, known for his tendency to avoid complicated conversations with journalists. Seizing the opportunity, The Breakfast Club brought on a public defender at the Legal Aid Society to run a hard-hitting interview with statistics to back up questions. While successful, the move does trade on the fact The Breakfast Club is a live radio show first and podcast second. It’s harder to avoid negative PR walking out of a live interview than it is to simply close a Zoom call or walk out of a podcast studio. If journalistic podcasts are to survive outside of softball questions, they need the financial backing of brands to have the confidence needed for challenging questions that have the potential to turn a 50 minute interview into a 5 minute one. [Source]

While it’s impossible to precisely predict when conditions will be just right for another big wave of mergers and acquisitions, a key factor is the cost of borrowing money. Potential political shakeups to the FTC after the 2024 presidential election also present an uncertain future for how M&A might evolve over the next few months. While there are still sizable deals happening, like Walmart’s acquisition of Visio or Triton Digital’s acquisition of Sounder, all signs point to investors going back to basics. We are past the days of inefficient tech companies fetching big price tags purely because they managed rapid growth in a short amount of time. [Source]

…as for the rest of the news:

• Chicago Public Media has announced a 15% layoff that includes scaling back WBEZ’s podcasting unit and the cancellation of “non-newsroom” podcasts.

• Several sports podcasters have broken the news that SB Nation has cut their entire podcast arm.

Research Database Snapshot

What it says: Of the three advertising mediums being compared, respondents who have consumed that medium in the past week have a much higher chance to be more likely or (at worst) unaffected by advertisements.

What it means: Podcasts come out on top when it comes to audiences being more likely to purchase a product advertised on the medium in comparison to YouTube and streaming TV.

Why it’s cool: While the parts of the graph representing more likely to purchase are good signs, the more eye-catching section is the very bottom. This shows only 9-10% of Americans are cranky about ads.

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