Podcast publisher iHeartMedia has acquired podcast advertising and analytics company Voxnest Friday for an undisclosed sum.
Voxnest manages a marketplace for podcasts and advertisers to partner as well as a suite of podcast analysis and management tools that give publishers insight into the market to help them serve more targeted ads.
IHeartMedia would not disclose the terms of the acquisition. Chairman and CEO Bob Pittman said in a statement the Voxnest buy is “an important addition to the iHeart digital product ecosystem.”
“The addition of iHeart’s offerings to Voxnest will ensure critical mass for the platform and accelerate its growth,” Pittman added. “As we continue to invest in podcasting and lead the industry, we anticipate this acquisition will have an important impact on iHeart’s ability to more fully monetize its podcast inventory, and will also benefit the other podcast publishers that are part of the Voxnest network and the advertisers who are using it.”
IHeartMedia owned a minority stake in New York-based Voxnest prior to buying the company. The companies did not say when the acquisition is expected to formally close.
“The podcast marketplace has been fragmented, with supply and demand spread across multiple platforms – creating scale challenges for marketers who want to buy podcasts,” Baschieri said in a statement. “Despite the massive growth of the podcast industry, with more than 100 million Americans listening to a podcast every month now, podcast creators and networks have not had an effective way to fully monetize their content and brands…. With this combination, for the first time, there will be one podcast technology platform that can bring together all of the demand sources with the largest supplier of podcast inventory.”
With hundreds of shows under the iHeart umbrella and a content team that has grown out of its 2018 acquisition of Stuff Media, the main driver behind its deal with Voxnest is ad tech. With this acquisition, iHeartMedia picks up Dynamo, Voxnest’s monetization platform. Its advertising technology capabilities include dynamic ad insertion, audience and content targeting, programmatic podcast buying across all audio sales platforms, and a full podcast analytics platform. Those capabilities mean iHeartMedia will be able to provide podcast advertisers with additional targeting capabilities at an even greater scale across an entire range of podcast inventory on the programmatic platform.
October 23, 2020
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