As news media companies develop their reader revenue strategies, more and more are looking at how their audio content plays into the mix.

“Sweden is the most podcast-intense country in the world,” Pia Rehnquist, publisher at Bonnier Local News, told attendees during a recent two-day study tour in Stockholm as part of the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit. “We do lot of podcasts … but we don’t yet have the business model for podcasts.”

Many media companies on the study tour focused on the promise of monetising podcasts, yet most lack the infrastructure to lean into audio. So many outsource the non-journalism parts of podcasting. 

The lack of a podcast business plan isn’t uncommon among news media publishers, according to Emily Villatte, CEO at Acast. Founded in Stockholm in 2014, Acast is the world’s largest independent podcast company, with 400 million monthly listeners. 

“A recurring theme we hear is, ‘We need help growing our audience and making money,’” Villatte told the study tour’s 55 attendees, representing 27 companies and 17 countries. “You own that IP, you create your own content. We work with advertisers and listeners to help podcasters monetise content. We help with the creation of podcast, but we’re mainly focused on … research, hosting, and distributing your podcast so it can be consumed on any app out there.”

Podcast research

Podcasts are one of the fastest-growing consumed mediums. Acast works to balance the revenue mix with sponsorships, branded content, audio ads, and subscriptions, offering tools to help media companies like the Financial Times, The Guardian, BBC, Vice, and PBS grow their podcast audiences, as well as analytics to make sure they know who is listening. Podcasts are added to the value-add mix, offering users ad-free content.

“One of the key KPIs is how well we monetise each podcast,” Villatte said. “When we make more money, you make more money. It’s a revenue share. It’s harder to get new paying members, but those who have discovered the medium understand its power and are doubling down. Last year we passed €200 million in paying out money to our podcast creators.”

Acast research shows:

• 25- to 34-year-olds index 75% higher for podcasts than news Web sites.

• Average conversion rates for podcast subscriptions are 2%-5%.

• Most people listen through headphones.

• Podcast peak pre-COVID was in the morning and afternoon when people were commuting; now there are the same number of podcast listeners but when they listen is spread throughout the day.

In addition, more than 70% of news publishers plan to invest in audio as a new way to engage subscribers, according to the BeyondWords 2023 Audio Engagement Report.

“We try to treat audio like we treat video or text,” said Niklas Forsberg, partner manager at Schibsted Marketing Services, an Acast client. “You have to integrate the audio in the business. Our first real breakthrough was in November 2021 when we released our own in-app [product]. We broke even last year. We’ve had good growth this year with a very good margin orf40%-50%.”

The original founders of Acast now own Sesamy, another stop on the study tour. Sesamy’s speciality is single-purchase revenue.

Podcasts behind the paywall

“The paywall is just the beginning [of subscription revenue]. You have to do other things for it to work,” said ​​Måns Ulvestam, Sesamy co-founder and CEO. “It’s the same journey for podcasts subscriptions as newspaper subscriptions with onboarding. When they cancel, we query them: ‘Are you sure you don’t want a reduced price for the next month?’

“This is different from how everyone else is treating podcasts, and I think this is the right way actually. You can lock in a whole episode, an extra episode … you can do bundles. I think you should be able to purchase it many different places and listen to it many different places.”

Kvartal

Founded in 2016, Kvartal is a small, online magazine and podcast publisher, creatinh in-depth articles and hourlong podcasts. The average reader is a 50-year-old man, highly educated, with a high income, a decision-maker in the corporate world, and “quite tired of big Swedish traditional media,” CEO Ludde Hellberg said. 

In one podcast, those listening for free missed a segment in the middle only open to subscribers. 

Kvartal has a 200,000 monthly users, 700,000 podcast listeners, and 8,000 paid subscribers. The company switched from a donation revenue model to a subscription model, and its podcasts are a key part of its reader revenue strategy.

Stampen Media

A few years ago, Stampen title Gotesborgs-Posten launched an investigative podcast about prostitution among young women. The journalist working on the story asked the women he interviewed for their favourite music and incorporated that into the podcast series. 

The series got +700,000 plays, 1,000+ new subscribers, of which 69% were women, most under 35. 

In 2022, the company launched a live podcast called Nyhetsshowen from 7 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. each morning. The show is about serious news but has a sense of humor. The average listeners tunes in for more than 80 minutes; 67% are women, 46% are between the ages of 28 and 24. 

Svenska Dagbladet

Three years ago, Schibsted’s Svenska Dagbladet didn’t even have a podcast. In February of this year, they launched Dynastin, their most successful release ever. 

The episodes about financier Jan Stenbeck and his children were released in the morning and were a hour long. The first two episodes were free, the last four were only available to subscribers. 

“About 10 or 11 a.m., people started buying subscriptions,” said Managing Editor Martin Ahlquist. “I thought, ‘Don’t you have to work? You’ve listened to two hours already and now you want to subscribe?’” 

The articles related to the podcast did not drive the subscriptions; 90%-95% came from the podcast itself. 

“We had one producer and one reporter working full-time on this for a year,” Ahlquist said. “It’s our biggest journalistic investment for many years.”

SvD outsources its podcast technology. The series was promoted on social and through media interviews. 

“We were a bit surprised and we’re humbled,” said Anna Careborg, CEO, editor-in-chief, and publisher. “We’ve never seen such a success. More than 80% were new subscribers who had never been to SvD before.”

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