a16z Podcast Market Overview

Pandora Podcasting Features Features: Personalized podcast discovery: "The key goal for our podcast launch was to solve the user question of 'What podcast should I listen to?"" Powered by Podcast Genome Project: Evaluates content based on a variety of attributes spanning content categories, as well as user signals including thumbs, skips, collects, and plays. System learns user preferences using natural language processing, collaborative filtering, and other machine learning approaches, coupled with in-house curation P Unclear plans around monetization: "Pandora is also looking to offer podcasters monetization options that will be superior to the current state of podcast advertising." (Variety). CEO Roger Lynch has said that host-read direct response ads are "not the most effective advertising model." M&A: Acquired AdSwizz in March 2018, which offers programmatic ad buying for audio advertising, interactive audio ads, and dynamic ad insertion for podcasts, for $145M in cash and stock. Adswizz partners include Spotify, Deezer, iHeartradio and Tuneln Acquired by SiriusXM in January 2019. Combined entity to be led by Sirius CEO Jim Meyer. Sirius has 36M subscribers in North America and 23M annual trial listeners Source: Variety © 2019 - Andreessen Horowitz 24

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