In his February 14 appearance on the Bill Simmons Podcast, Ben Thompson, the expert analyst behind the Stratechery website that covers e-commerce and media, posed a couple ideas related to podcasting and streaming audio that should be further scrutinized.
Thompson mentioned Spotify’s acquisition of Wondery and The Ringer and its increasing library of podcasts, but he was speaking to Simmons, the head of The Ringer, and Thompson was praising the strategy, saying it put Spotify ahead of Apple Music, Amazon and other platforms in the podcast space. Thompson also put forward the idea that podcast aggregation can work much better than news media aggregation, as Apple has also tried to do with Apple News, and Vox, BuzzFeed and Vanity Fair are all doing, and may be doing more of going forward.
Simmons and Thompson both commented that more successful outlets like New York Times and Washington Post aren’t going to want to integrate with other news outlets because they have millions of subscriptions and would be cannibalizing their value by participating in aggregation.
It was hard to tell if Thompson (and Simmons) is fully committed to the idea that podcasting is more amenable to integration than legacy print news media because the discussion bounced around so much between topics and often let go of threads before reaching complete conclusions. Reflecting on their observations, however, it seems that podcasting might actually be less amenable to integration when niche aggregators like Stitcher and Luminary have a more challenging time, at least in terms of commanding a higher subscription rate. As with the New York Times and Washington Post, the biggest podcasters (like Joe Rogan and Adam Carolla) aren’t going to participate in someone else’s aggregation, since they have better value to protect.
One can also see how Simmons is effectively voting with his feet on these issues. Simmons threw a couple bones to Luminary with specialized niche podcasts like “Rewatchables 1999” and “Break Stuff,” but is now putting the Ringer’s bigger and broader ideas, like the “Music Exists” show, on Spotify. Luminary found that its subscription rate had to be closer to Stitcher’s $3 or $4 a month, because demand for its offerings just wasn’t high enough to command $8 or $10 a month.
The question now may be whether Spotify ends up crowding out or dominating the landscape and making it even harder for niche aggregators featuring specialized content to keep enough of an audience to sustain themselves.
