Back in 2017, one of the startups in the first Techstars Music accelerator cohort was Pippa, a company focused on making podcasting “simpler, smarter, and more profitable by enabling targeted ads to be delivered dynamically to listeners”. Two years on, Pippa has been snapped up by one of the most established players in the podcasting world, Acast. The deal is all about improving the tech offered by Acast to help podcasters make money.
“Pippa’s simple, sleek, easy to use platform complements Acast’s depth of revenue solutions and pushes podcast creation and distribution to the next level,” as the press release puts it. The acquisition follows Acast’s $35m funding round in December 2018.
Elsewhere in podcastland, the launch of $100m-funded startup Luminary continues to be a bumpy one, with a number of independent podcasters withdrawing their shows from its app. “Podcasters noticed that Luminary was serving shows to listeners through a complicated linking system, depriving them of important listener data,” reported The Verge. “The platform also stripped their shows notes, which can be used to share sponsored links or other relevant information.” Luminary moved quickly to change this, but the company clearly has trust issues with the podcasting community already – a cautionary tale for Spotify, Pandora and other music-streaming services ramping up their efforts in this space.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools :: We Are Giant
With “fan communities” being on every artist’s team’s mind, we’re fans of the fact that…