Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…How much did Facebook acquire Push Pop Press for? We don’t know, but a lot less than that. Yeah. Midroll is a D for me. Of the two companies, Midroll is definitely my favorite, but God, that’s a high price tag. Stitcher, could they have bought anything else, I mean if there’s another podcast client out there? I guess Stitcher already has this ad pipeline built in that they wouldn’t have to sort of do themselves, but to me, just pointing Midroll’s ad sales at Stitcher, I have more faith in that as sort of a small business than I do of them executing the large opportunity of creating the top to bottom ecosystem successfully. So I’d say, I’d go a B on the Stitcher acquisition just because they’ve already got Midroll and they can point those ads into Stitcher and I’m sure make some money out of it and get their 4. 5 million out. But I don’t think they were going to pull this big shebang off. Yeah, the whole rodeo. I think I’m with you. Looking at them separately, I mean one of the things with Midroll, I’m not going to be as harsh as you, really even though the company was founded in 2010, like Midroll only started 2 years ago, so yes, that was a very healthy multiple, whatever their revenue was. It was a healthy multiple that they paid for it. But I’m sure it's growing very quickly and if they can start to get some of the big, big publishers and represent them, maybe there’s more to it. I’m not incredibly bullish but I’d give it maybe a C+ or B- now. You know, again, the real issue is TAM. The whole key to this is you have to unlock the TAM, the total addressable market, and you have to do that through an integrated platform. Which brings us to Stitcher, right? And we have been hating on Stitcher in this, probably with good cause in this episode. But again, what you were just saying, Ben, I think is interesting. Like who else were they going to buy? What were they going to do? They knew they had to have a client and this is Scripps that we’re talking about. And Midroll, well, a great company and a podcasting company, it's not a tech company. It’s an ad network and it’s a low-tech ad network, like spoken word. This is a people business, not a tech business. So they didn’t have anybody that they could build this internally and then who were they going to buy? They’re not going to buy Overcast which I use and love.…

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