Amazon acquires Art19, a podcast hosting platform

Amazon acquires Art19, a podcast hosting platform
Amazon acquires Art19, a podcast hosting platform

It seems Amazon Music is getting more and more serious about its podcast endeavours. According to the last news, today, the company announced that it is acquiring Art19. Art19 is a podcast hosting and monetization platform. As of now, the value of the deal has not yet been disclosed.

It means Amazon will now have a hand in hosting podcasters’ shows and will eventually have a hand in selling ads against them because Art19 operates in an ad marketplace that targets and inserts ads into programming. As per an Amazon Music spokesperson, nothing will immediately change on the Art19 platform.

Amazon acquires Art19, a podcast hosting platform
Amazon acquires Art19, a podcast hosting platform

Notably, this can be marked as the first major step taken by Amazon to dig deeper into the podcasting world. From last September, Amazon Music started offering podcasts. Since then, Amazon Music has acquired a major independent podcast network, Wondery.

Today’s acquisition gives it a broader aspect. Now, it will not only make content through Wondery and distribute shows through its app but also host those podcasts and third parties and sell ads against them. It is worth mention that it will give Amazon more data about what’s happening both inside and outside its app.

As far as a business strategy is concerned, recently, we have seen the same already play out with Spotify. Spotify started making content based acquisitions like Gimlet Media and Parcast but also acquired Megaphone lately.

Spotify has focused on bringing a proprietary ad-serving technology to the platform dubbed Streaming Ad Insertion to encourage podcasters to move over to the hosting service and take advantage of its ad marketplace. Surprisingly, other companies in the space are also following the same trend. Recently, iHeartMedia acquired Triton Digital and SXM Media acquired Midroll.

It seems the podcasting business is not only about flashy exclusive content deals but who can sell and monetize more shows.

Key: Amazon

Maria Janulis
Maria is a Florida-based columnist, working in the Journalism industry for the last five and a half years. She spends most of her time interacting with the like-minded group of people on social media.