Audioboom CEO Stuart Last on Quarterly Earnings and the Future of Podcasting

 Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription software errors.

Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives, how can independent podcasters make more money from their content?

Stuart Last: Just be consistent. Release weekly episodes, same time, same place. Talk to your audience. Get involved in podcast community.

Jeff Umbro: Joining us today is Audioboom CEO Stuart last. Audioboom is one of the last remaining independent podcast networks out there and has the advantage of being publicly traded, which means they have to share earnings reports. Stuart has more than 15 years of media experience working at places like BBC and Voxnest, and under his leadership, Audioboom has achieved remarkable growth, boasting over a hundred million audio and video downloads per month and supporting more than 8,000 podcasts.

The platform has generated more than $250 million for independent creators. Today, we talk through the future of video and podcasting, the different tech constraints that Audioboom has think about and consolidation in the industry.

Welcome to the show, Stuart.

Stuart Last: Hey Jeff. Thanks for having me.

Jeff Umbro: I think that what you guys are doing is fascinating and I think that it is kind of illustrative of where most of the industry, both was 10 years ago, and is going in the future, and you're just a little bit of a time capsule in a good way of the industry as a whole.

To start, who are you and what does Audioboom do?

Stuart Last: Well, I am Stuart last the CEO of Audioboom. And you know, I think key to what you just said, Jeff, is the fact that Audioboom is one of the only publicly traded companies in the podcasting space. And really what that means is every three months we have to put out our financial results and a ton of data that you otherwise don't get to see.

So every time I see someone else in the industry, they just say thank you. We get to see all of your data. We get to see how we're comparing and we get some great insights into what a podcast company does. 

But what is Audioboom? Audioboom is a creator platform. We power podcasting for creators. Our mission is to provide independent creators with all the tools necessary to do their jobs.

So they focus on great content creation. We give them our, the everything else, the content management, the publishing, the hosting, the distribution, the marketing, and probably most importantly, so they can keep doing what they love, the monetization. So ad sales for their podcast, and we've been super successful at this.

We've generated more than $250 million for podcast creators over the last 10 years, which I think is just an amazing thing for us to done. Really, just really proud of the way we are able to support independent creators that way. We are, depending on the ranker that you look at, either the third, fourth, or fifth largest podcast publisher in the US, but we have a bit of a global footprint.

We are at heart a UK company. Even though we're focused on US growth, we also operate in Australia and in Canada. You'll see us in the various rankers for those territories as well. But yeah, Audioboom is a successful and fast growing podcast platform.

Jeff Umbro: The four countries that you just called out are all English speaking nations. Are you planning to work in non-English speaking territories ever?

Stuart Last: Not as to today. We don't have a, the strongest balance sheet that will allow us to go and invest and put money into non-English speaking territory. So, you know, our view very much is we have to be efficient. That means partnering with English speaking podcasts and then exploiting the consumption that happens in other English speaking territories.

So work with American podcasts, but then we'll just optimize for Canada, Australia or England if we work with a UK based podcast. Again, it's just optimizing those other territories.

Jeff Umbro: You guys released earnings last week for Q1 of 2025. Would you like to share just some of the high level bullets from that?

Stuart Last: We did. Yeah. And that was one of the quarterly updates I mentioned earlier, and Q1 was a really good quarter for us. We delivered $17.3 million of revenue. And oh $0.7 million of EBITDA profit. So good growth there. Particularly on the EBITDA profit side, 10 times the profit levels of the same period a year ago.

So from the financials, a good strong period for us. Our market expectation, our guidance to the stock market is for us to deliver $80 million of revenue this year and four and a half million dollars of EBITDA profit. So we're making good steps towards that. As anyone in this space knows, Q1 is seasonally the weakest month for revenue and profit, and it drives across the year really ramping up into Q4 because of, yeah, Thanksgiving and Black Friday and the holiday season, and the NFL season and the English Premier League in the UK.

So you'll see that revenue number, that quarterly revenue number drive forward, and we have that pathway to the $80 million we have as of today, around $64 million on the books for the year. So you can see, you know, we have 16 million to go and we'll keep adding across the year to get to that number.

Jeff Umbro: You touched on this already, but there really are only a handful of publicly traded podcast companies. Acast, Podcast One. To an extent you also have like Spotify, iHeart, SiriusXM, but Odyssey, but they don't always break out their numbers for digital. So as compared to some of these other platforms, you're on the larger end of things and it's kind of fun to use you guys as a bellwether for where the industry is heading. You can kind of extrapolate some more info for the rest of the industry. 

I'm curious, because you all have a hosting platform as like, so you have a tech solution for your podcasters in addition to your ad sales platform or the team of folks that are selling ads on behalf of all the shows that you represent. 

How do you kind of see yourself? Is it more so as a creator led network we're assisting monetization efforts, or is it more so a creator led network? We're assisting with the technology behind their ability to make money.

Stuart Last: I think we've always come at this thinking about both and doing a good job at both. You know, the ones that we don't ever wanna be and we've done a good job of not being is just an ad representation business and see that there is great long term value in purely selling ads on behalf of somebody else. We want those relationships, those partnerships, to be much deeper than that.

We do that through many different forms, like you just said. Like one is the technology and the distribution and the creation of these really important tools that allow the podcast to do more on Audioboom than they can somewhere else. Like one great example of that, Jeff, is a tool we have called Ad rip.

So you have a baked in ad within your podcast. Ad rep after 30 days or 60 days, whatever setting you put on that will automate the removal of that ad. You don't have to do anything else. And then it will provide second window monetization. So we build these tools around the need of the podcaster and support them additionally, that way.

But then we also are involved in the production. So we have a production team here in New York, one in London for some partners like Formula One with the official production partner for Formula One and their podcast. So we are producing beyond the Grid and a couple of other of their podcasts at that level.

But then we will also use our production team to really add deeper value to our partnerships. So if we have a large partner that wants to create a spinoff podcast, but they don't have the resources within their own production team, we will add our production into that and we'll help them create additional content, spinoff content on top of their main podcast.

So all of these ways that just provide deeper, stronger partnership value, and that's why we've been very successful over the years of creating these long-term partnerships. You know, one of our biggest UK shows is No Such Thing As A Fish, incredible podcast, you know, legendary podcast in the UK. We've worked with those guys at this point for nearly 10 years because of that value that we bring to them.

And that's it really. We've really have just focused on being more than an advertising sales company.

Jeff Umbro: As part of that, something that we've seen with the past consolidation, for example, Spotify buying Megaphone and then also buying Anchor, which is now Spotify for Creators. There seems to be kind of a tiered approach that a lot of these folks are using where they're looking for sheer scale with creators and then they have kind of like their preferred creators that can command large audiences and mass large dollars.

Is that what you guys are doing to an extent?

Stuart Last: It's built into what we do for sure. So across the platform we have around 8,000 podcasts. The top 200 of those are really where our focus is in terms of building out those new tools to suit the work of those top 200, those are the top 200 that, that drive the biggest audience, that give us the best revenue opportunities.

One thing about selling and delivering host advertising is that it's a very heavy lift and you can't do that across 8,000 podcasts. So we see the top 200 as being the area where we are going to focus on that. Premium sales, the premium host endorsement sales, but we've also built a platform that is fantastic for podcasters at all levels.

So you, we can still monetize the entire 8,000. We connect those to our advertising marketplace called Showcase, and we can deliver revenue to them that way. So, you know, everyone has an option with Audioboom. You can, even if you don't want advertising, you can come in, you can pay us $10 or $20 a month and just use our professional level tool set as a publishing tool.

So three or four different ways you can work with Audioboom.

Jeff Umbro: Is 200 the number that you guys have set based on just how you can properly service the shows?

Stuart Last: It's a soft limit, but you know, every time we go over it, we find ourselves that that little bit more stretched. The key thing that allowed us to even get to 200. Was the building out of a new CRM based on the Salesforce platform. And we launched this around five years ago. Before that, we were working with Google Sheets and everyone's experienced it, but we were able to move on from that a few years back and that really was a game changer for us.

So we built a platform on the Salesforce build and that really is just end-to-end management for us. So, you know, when Brian comes to us and says, we have this campaign opportunity, we are able to ping that opportunity out and vet. 200 podcasts in an instant. Through, through, through that technology, it within their Audioboom dashboard, they see that ad opportunity.

They say, yeah, I want to work with this advertiser, or, no, I don't. We collate all of those answers back within our system. We tell the brand which shows wanna work with them, the brand, then books. They deliver the creative for the ad. We distribute the creative for that ad through our system, out to the podcaster, sits in their dashboard.

They see which ads they need to deliver. In that episode, the creative and the bullet points for delivering that ad sit there within their dashboard. They can see how much money they're being paid for each one of those ads. They deliver that ad as part of the episode and publish that episode. Our system then picks up the time codes from that ad, pushes it back out to the advertiser.

The advertiser can check that ad was delivered correctly. They can sign off on that ad. The moment they sign off on that ad, our system invoices them. We get paid pretty quickly and the whole change is kind of complete. So that automation that we built into the business has really enabled us to do this for 200 podcasts.

I think we could push higher, but then we get into the space where, yes, our processes work great for more than 200 podcasts now we need a bigger sales team. So we now have to go and hire more salespeople, which we will do and we are doing, but there's constant challenges and things to navigate as we grow.

Jeff Umbro: I actually remember when you guys implemented that. You put out a press release. And my brother does Salesforce implementations as a job and I sent that to him and I was really excited to send it to him and he just started laughing and he was insinuating basically that in any other industry, this is not press worthy.

Having been there myself and like understanding where podcasting is, it's huge. I'm curious because you once told me that you have about two people who are like full-time engineering techs on your team. Is that correct?

Stuart Last: We have a small team, three techs, UK based. Running a platform that delivers $80 million of revenue and a hundred million plus downloads every month, and also building new tools on top of just keeping that thing running. So I think we're incredibly efficient. We only have 40 people in the entire business.

It's this automation that we build in that's just allowing us to deliver those financial results that we talked about at the top.

Jeff Umbro: I think it's a beautiful system that you built, and the reason I ask about that is that implementing Salesforce, creating showcase, building your ad rep technology. You have a lot of things that you have to kind of divide the focus of those few people with, and I'm just kind of curious how you think about it as the leader of this company, how do you determine like where you're implementing the limited resources that you have in order to have the biggest impact?

Stuart Last: I think the first thing is that we took a position pretty early here that we were not gonna be the ones that pushed the envelope in anything we do. We're not big enough to do that. We don't have the balance sheet, the resource to, to do that. So really what we've spent the last 10 years doing is watching where others have pushed forward and succeeded or failed. And you know, replicating parts of that and moving into those areas where we see opportunities that really does work. 

And that's really been part of all aspects of Audioboom over over that time. So, yeah, we're not here, I don't think, to push the envelope and it's very easy to be critical of that. Right? Are we doing enough to drive this industry forward? I don't think my role is to drive this industry forward. My role is to do what I said at the top. My, my mission, my role here is to deliver value for podcast creators. Allow them to do the thing that they are passionate about. 

So that was the position we took right from the start. But what we make sure that we do within that have conversations and we have great relationships with our podcasters. They can pick up the phone to our team anytime they want, and that's very unusual, that platform or a network of this size. But those podcasters, they talk to us. They tell us what they need, what they like, what's not what working for them.

We just make sure that we are focused on those conversations and take key parts of those conversations to build new tools, to see what they need, help with, what's going wrong for them, where we can improve. And I think that has led us to these tools like AdRip that, that nobody else has. It's just an Audioboom tool that nobody else has that advantage.

And that's been the focus. So just ensuring there's a little bit of time and a little bit of thought going into that, but, but that's for our creators, that's not for the industry as a whole.

Jeff Umbro: I really like that answer, 'cause I think as we'll discuss in a second with video, it's obviously a very important part of the future of this industry, but it's also a lot of people chasing the shiny object. You know? 

Stuart Last: There's a lot of people out there that are way smarter than I am that can push this industry forward, right? People with bigger voices, with smarter ideas that can be up on stage at podcast movement and make their voice count and get people thinking about what the future needs to look like and to do new things and to drive things forward.

They're bigger. They're smarter than I am. Let them do that. I will drive this thing for creators.

Jeff Umbro: I may disagree with you a little bit there, but also there are a lot of smart people. So I wanted to ask briefly, 'cause I don't imagine this will be a big topic, but tariffs. You guys are a UK based company that operates in the US quite a bit. Will you be impacted at all by any of the US government policies that are coming out right now?

Stuart Last: Not directly from the tariffs. We're a services company really, rather than a product company, so I think that's the first thing. But then we also create and sell within the individual territories from entities that are incorporated in those individual territories. So, you know, a US inventory that's created with selling that in the US through our US entity, our UK, and others. So there's no direct impact.

Jeff Umbro: Other than maybe your bookkeeper. Yeah.

Stuart Last: Yeah, we don't have to deal with additional costs when it comes that we have to

find a way to pass on to our customer. That one's not the issue. Where we, I think, continue to watch and wait and have some nervousness around is what these tars do to the overall economy, whether this creates an inflationary environment, whether that leads to negative consumer sentiment, decreased consumer spending.

In that way, that can only ever lead to a negative ad market, and that's the biggest concern for us, what that does to the ad market. We've just. Lived through an ad market recession. We do not need another one coming 12 months later because it was brutal for 12 to 18 months. You'll have seen that in our numbers as you said. You know, we are that age of what the industry is doing. 

Many others were feeling the pain between 22 and 23. We felt the pain and we went backwards in in 2023 and I went back into loss making territory and our revenue went down 'cause of that market recession. We're on the way back up. We're seeing growth again, but we are nervous.

That could be shortlived.

Jeff Umbro: I think all of us are a little bit nervous. 

So my next question is going to be about video. I know it's everybody's favorite topic.How are you guys at Audioboom thinking about video? Are you able to sell it?

Stuart Last: We monetize it and we sell it as an audience extension of the RSS distribution. We never really switched to a DAI host endorsement model, we stuck with a baked in host endorsement model, 'cause we believe in the ROI that it generates and it's a, has been a point of difference for us over the past few years since some of the bigger networks that are shifted to that DAI delivery mechanism.

And that has allowed us to monetize video content. So effectively, if a podcast has 700,000 downloads per episode on the RSS feed and 300,000 video views on the, the YouTube version, we will sell that at a million downloads and views at whatever CPM that works for the advertiser. So we blend those two things together, sell it as that packaged audience extension, and they've done a good job of monetizing video to this point.

Jeff Umbro: That's a really big, bright spot right now in in the industry. In your example, when a show has 300,000 video views, are you essentially just taking the conservative average of the last few videos?

Stuart Last: I will take the conservative average. We'll, you know, remove some for various kind of geo splits depending on whether it's heavily weighted in the US or whether it's a little more fragmented than that. So we have a, you know, a bunch of different formula that that takes that into account and finds a number that still works for advertisers, but allows us to see some good value from it.

Jeff Umbro: With Spotify entering the space, specifically the Spotify partner program or SPP, am I correct in saying that you guys are opted into that?

Stuart Last: We're trying to understand, I think, what Spotify's goals are here and how that would impact our main business with our podcasters. The key thing, one of the key protections in the contracts that we have with our podcasters is that they have to deliver X number of downloads, views to us, and that nothing that they do can interrupt the RSS feed distribution.

Now, one of the challenges with Spotify, of course, is that the video version can will, it will default to the video version of that piece of content and that can obviously decrease, therefore, the RSS feed consumption to that podcast. So that's problematic to us. 

We are happy monetizing through baked in advertising, but we also want to be able to monetize through DAI advertising, which is obviously RSS feed only based so that would be a problematic setup to us. So we're navigating that a little bit, but obviously, you know, we have protections in our partner contracts that prevent that. And then secondly, again, we are trying to understand what value there is for podcasts on Spotify to see revenue from the, those video versions.

You know, we've seen some numbers that have been put out by Spotify. We don't know much about that. We don't know what timeframe that was over. We don't know how much inventory that was based around. We know that for podcasts that switched back to just RSS feed distribution via Audioboom, we were able to deliver $50,000 a month extra to them versus what they had been receiving Spotify video program.

So right now for them, and it's obviously a network of, of four shows, this may not be the same for everyone. There was more value in their advertising, fueled inventory being exploited at a hundred percent rather than putting, you know, negating some of that in order to get video. So, you know, we feel we're in a place and our monetization engine is still currently the more optimal setup.

Jeff Umbro: In that example where four shows opted into SPP, does Audioboom make a commission on any of that revenue?

Stuart Last: No, that would be carved out in the contracts that, that we have. If Audioboom is not doing anything to add value, which we wouldn't be in in that scenario, you know, we understand and we're comfortable with the fact that would, there's nothing in that for us.

Jeff Umbro: Got it. So what is a podcast?

Stuart Last: Ah, yeah. Good question. You know, I know what it's been to me over the past 15 years that I've been working in podcasting, and I know what it's gonna be more of in the future, and clearly it's gonna be more video alongside the audio in the future, and that is what a podcast is going to be. I think fundamentally, it's not about the format that's delivered in, it is more to me about the connection with audience that is so special to podcasting and that's going to remain. 

And what I mean by that is, you know, we know podcasting, what we know, what podcasting isn't, right? It's not linear, it's on demand. It's not full of 28 minutes of ads per hour like radio. It's a much better listening experience. We know it's a lenient medium where you tune in to listen to the people that you love.

You don't have it on in the background. So we know all the things that it's not and what it is. The format that it's delivered in, you know, we'll all adapt and, and it will evolve over time.

Jeff Umbro: So I am very curious. You mentioned in a previous earnings report that you think that your avenue to the next 100 million downloads is going to be through some kind of acquisitions. And you mentioned earlier on this call that you think the future of the industry is going to involve a lot of consolidation, especially in like the mid-market networks.

Can you speak more to that, how you are thinking about that as one of these powerhouses within the mid-market?

Stuart Last: I think there are four clear large companies in podcasting at the top of this space, Wondery, which is Amazon, SiriusXM, iHeart Media, Spotify. Those guys have deep audio businesses or very wide ranging advertising sales teams that have a lot of leverage with the agencies, with brands at a global level. That's gonna make it over time very difficult for any independent business to compete in the podcasting space. Set up, I guess, in many ways to the music industry, right, with three or four giants, whatever that looked like over time.

And I think what it really needs is the independent sector to come together and to leverage the best of the technology that the independent sector has, the best sales mechanisms that the independent sector has. Bring those things together, you know, grow together, consolidate, have more power, and be more competitive at the top end, 'cause I don't think any podcaster, any independent podcaster wants their only options to be these giant companies. They want something a little bit different. Podcasting's always been an open space. It's always been a very democratic form of media. No one wants that to stop. 

So I think we do have to think about what consolidation looks like. I think Audioboom is well positioned to be a part of that. We've built a platform business that we can look to acquire smaller networks, smaller podcast production companies, put them on top of the Audioboom platform, let our engine do its thing and supercharge what they do. They, again, they can focus on the quality of their content or the network that they're building out. Our sales mechanism, our sales engine behind that, our distribution engine behind that can power it. 

So that's one form of consolidation, which would roll up strategy for Audioboom to grow. I think there needs to perhaps be something bigger than that. If you look at whatever the mid-tier looks like, Audioboom, Acast, Libsyn, there'll be some others that I miss out, but that real midfield, possibly there's a world in which we all need to do more together to combat the big four a little. 

Jeff Umbro: I'm on the one hand like very excited because I love shakeups, and on the other hand I'm just like, is that just creating a fifth large entity that everybody's gonna have to compete against, and maybe, who knows? 

So I wanted to ask you about one particular carve out from your quarterly earnings report. You guys had a pretty decent jump into RPM, revenue per meal. So basically how much money you guys make for every thousand downloads. It's now over $60. 

Can you walk through where that number comes from and why it's heading up? And I'm hoping that the reason is that we have a really healthy industry here.

Stuart Last: Yeah, so RPMs are an optimization metric, right? It's how much value we can extract from, from every 1000 downloads that we have running through the platform. Now, if that's going in the right direction, you would assume that everything's super healthy in the industry. That's not the case, but there's a little more to it than that.

So we've gone from, when we first launched this metric, $13 per thousand downloads.

Jeff Umbro: Wow. I didn't realize that's, that was the start.

Stuart Last: The charts don't go back as far as 2019 on our own. If we were to show that it would be $13 in 2019.

Jeff Umbro: Well, extra congratulations then.

Stuart Last: Thank you. A yearly average was around, was over $60, but we have been as high on a quarterly basis in Q4 of last year of $78, so we can take it even higher. Really, when you think about what that means, what that metric is, RPM, it's a combination of four things.

It's the amount of inventory that you create per download, so how many ad slots per download. It is then how many of those that you sell, so, fill rate, and then it is of course pricing. So those three things combined give you your RPM. All of those are fluctuated over time, right? So pricing was very high in 2022, came down across the ad market recession in 23, and is now in a healthy place again.

But we've continued to be steady and solidify. I think that pricing. Fill rate has been relatively steady in, in that time, so we've always made improvements to that fill rate. It's slowly improved over that time. We add more sellers, we work with more brands, more customers, improves that, that, that fill rate.

It also creates a bit of competitive tension around pricing and allows us to sell things at a slightly higher rate as well. So those two kind of, those two things work together, and as we improve our monetization engine, build our sales team out, both of those things grow. I think the key part, you can see this as the positive or the negative for the industry, Jeff, is how many ad slots are made available per episode as being the other key driver here.

So if I rewound just three years, we would be making available to sell around five and a half ads per download or per episode. So five ad slots, that's pre-roll, mid-rolls, post rolls, just five and a half of those. Today we make available 12. So you can see the a hundred percent extra inventory, pretty much from the same piece of content or from the same singular download.

Now, is that a good thing? Well, it's great for driving revenue. As you can see, the RPMs going up, revenue's going up. We are extracting more value from each one of those downloads. Is it such a good user experience, listener experience? I think we're still in the realms of it being okay, but how much further we can take it, I don't know.

You know, 12 ads per episode could potentially be up to 12 minutes of advertising. It could also be much lower than that because we have 30 second ads and not all of those ads slots get filled, of course, but we are certainly pushing that high and we are not the only ones doing it. You know, I think other big networks are doing it. There are worse offenders than us out there when it comes to the number of ads per episode. 

But to your point, it's a key one to look at and keep looking at, right? How many ads being made available, whether we're over doing this. I mentioned earlier on in the interview, we don't want to be a format where there's 28 minutes of ads per hour of content, 'cause that is a terrible listener experience. We also needed to extract more value as an industry from listeners, and that is one of the ways we are doing it. But we gotta be careful it doesn't go too far.

Jeff Umbro: For free versions of a show, fill it with ads, give the creator more money so they can make the show better, and foster a community where you can like sell ad free at a premium or something. I know that's way easier said than done and it doesn't work for every show, but that is my kind of guiding principle.

Obviously we don't want 28 minutes of ads, but 12 minutes of ads for an hour of audio, in my mind, not a huge deal. 

So my last question for you is how you see the industry evolving, what your expectations are? You know, if we sit down five years from now, what are we gonna be talking about?

Stuart Last: We're gonna say what is a podcast? And still not have the answers to that. We are going to say, did we do a good job here on figuring out video? And we'll be interested to see what the answers are there. We are gonna say, did you all consolidate in the midfield? And did Audioboom figure that out? And hopefully I'll say, yeah, we did the right things here and the industry is in a healthier place because of it.

I think the guiding line to all of that from my end is just ensuring that in five years time, this is still a creator led industry, 'cause that's the beauty of what we do. So everything that Audioboom, most of what Audioboom will be focused on over that time, will be powering podcasting for creators. So I don't know what that looks like and what changes happen in that time, but I think the one thing that I really do want to ensure is still in place in five years time is that role of the independent creator and podcasting.

Jeff Umbro: Well, thank you Stuart. Really appreciate you joining.

Stuart Last: Thank you, Jeff. Anytime. Thank you for having me.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much to Stuart for joining us. You can find him on LinkedIn and you can find your next listen at audioboom.com.  

For more podcast related news, info, and takes, you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of The Podglomerate.

If you're looking for help producing, marketing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at Podglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com, or follow us on all socials at @podglomeratepods. 

This episode was produced by Chris Boniello, and myself, Jeff Umbro. This episode was edited and mixed by José Roman. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Perri Gross. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. 

Thank you for listening and I'll catch you all in a few weeks.