Cheat Sheet: Why Amazon sold Art19
June 28, 2021 by Max Willens
Add scaled podcast ad inventory to the lengthy listing of things Amazon will at final be ready to present to advertisers.
On Friday final week, Amazon presented it could variety Art19, the podcast web hosting and monetization platform faded by publishers ranging from Wondery to NBCUniversal. Art19 is the second podcast-centered acquisition Amazon has made in the previous yr, part of a string of strikes it has made to diversify the roughly media it goes to offer to advertisers.
The principle minute print
- Art19 provides advertisers each top price, host-learn adverts for a elevate listing of podcasts, as successfully as a network of hundreds of a bunch of podcasts that will settle for dynamically inserted pre-made adverts.
- Art19 shall be housed internal Amazon Tune, which is additionally the assign Amazon stashed Wondery, the podcast studio in the serve of hit displays equivalent to “Soiled John,” which it obtained on the discontinue of 2020.
- Terms of the deal had been no longer disclosed. Since its open, Art19 had raised $7.5 million in mission capital, as successfully as a separate, unspecified quantity of debt from one of its founders, BDMI, in 2019, in maintaining with Crunchbase.
Channel altering
Amazon has been on the hunt for more inventory it goes to offer advertisers, each internal and delivery air the walls of its luxuriate in ad ecosystem. Digiday reported earlier this yr that the e-commerce platform plans to open an identifier that will enable advertisers to spend customers’ actions across Amazon’s rising media ecosystem, which contains no longer excellent the retail media available internal its web space but additionally adverts shown on Twitch, internal High Video and internal Amazon Tune, its streaming tune platform.
Podcasts, which about 80 million American citizens listen to every week, symbolize one more channel for advertisers to spend in multi-channel campaigns.
Sound clash
In plenty of suggestions, Amazon’s acquisitions are excellent about maintaining up with the joneses. After years of being mostly indifferent to podcasts, the sector’s tech platforms — as successfully as the most effective terrestrial radio broadcasters — trust grown attracted to them as they strive in opposition to on every front of the digital ad market.
Spotify, which started looking out out for out long-established podcasts serve in 2017, has seen the medium turn out to be a key source of ad earnings and client exclaim; it’s expected to surpass Apple because the most effective source of podcast consumption this yr. Google’s podcast app has been downloaded over 100 million instances.
Those battles trust intensified because the budgets that producers and companies are committing to podcasting trust grown. Final yr, Omnicom Media Crew made headlines when it presented it had dedicated to spending $20 million on podcast adverts with Spotify.