We are excited to share the news of Podsights’ acquisition by Spotify. You can read more about it, here. The founders of Podsights set off on a mission to build the tools and resources needed for Podcast advertising to be a top channel for brands to put ad dollars to work. The founders deeply believed in the future of the Podcast market, and they predicted that as listener interest quickly grew, advertisers would start to pay attention and need attribution and planning tools. These early predictions have turned out to be true, and we are very excited for the Podsights team to take this mission to the next level at Spotify.
We shared the team’s belief in the market potential, which stems from our thematic approach to investing at Newark Venture Partners. We had already developed an investment thesis around growth in the audio space, had made a handful of investments, and were actively looking for the enabling software companies that would be needed as the market grew. As a team, we spend a lot of time thinking about where value will be created over the next 5-7 years and which seed-stage segments of the B2B software market might benefit. We’re able to do this through primary research and the support of our corporate LP investors, who give us a great view into where enterprise technology is going.
As we wrote in our original investment highlight on Podsights, podcast advertising is just shy of $1B in annual spend, but it has seen 61% YoY growth since 2015. 25% of podcast advertisers are demanding attribution data today and that number is rising every week. It is expected that 50-60% of advertisers will demand attribution data by this time next year. There is a similar pull from publishers demanding attribution data because it exposes the supply of their content to new advertisers. This is the only media segment that is expected to see double-digit CAGR growth in the years ahead, while segments including TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines are expected to stay stagnant or decline.
When we first met the Podsights team, we were very impressed with their ability to execute. With confidence behind the team and market, in January 2021, we led a $4M financing alongside our friends at Greycroft, BDMI and Supernode who also share a thesis in the space.
Sean Creeley, Founder of Podsights said, “Newark Venture Partners’ unique understanding of the audio market and its rapid growth allows them to make bets inside of podcasting few others can. Podsights market and position were unproven when NVP invested, and we will always be thankful for Allison and the team’s support and guidance along the way.”
2022 is just getting started, but we believe that some major shifts in the soundscape are on the horizon. Not only are we proud of the acquisition, but our other audio portfolio companies reflect our continued belief in the market, including Veritonic providing marketing analytics software for audio, Sounder.fm addressing content discovery and monetization, Vydia helping creators to monetize, and ABF Creative, Sonoro and Meet Cute building scalable platforms for content creation.
