Podnews Daily - podcast industry news: Acast grows in the US on Steno.fm

Acast released its Q3/24 financial report. Sales grew by 12% year-on-year to US$45.6mn, including North America growing at 29%; Europe as a whole saw just a 3% growth, and comments from Ross Adams seem to suggest Acast UK is finding it especially tough. The company remains on track for “positive EBITDA” for the year, though made a loss of US $0.6mn in the quarter.

Acast shows are getting more ad-heavy, though. “In Q3, we introduced an additional ad marker, allowing podcasters to add a second midroll ad slot into their episodes, boosting their monetization potential with increased ad inventory.”
Acast blames Apple’s iOS 17 changes for a drop in listens of -15%. A decrease of -15.2% was also reported by Podtrac earlier in the year. We covered the iOS 17 changes in full.

Spotify will announce a new tie-up with airline Emirates today, with promotion on the airline’s in-flight front page for Trevor Noah’s podcast, and a mix of podcasts and music playlists on the system. Our Editor spotted the collaboration earlier this week.

Emirates, which carried 51.9mn passengers last year, uses spafax for its IFE content; our sister publication the Podcast Business Journal spoke to the company about how to get your content there too.

PodX-owned Platform Media have acquired a majority stake of the world’s biggest rugby show, The Good, The Bad and The Rugby. Platform Media has produced and commercialised the show since its inception.