Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…What’s interesting, this is almost the like not what would have happened otherwise, but what will happen now. I do wonder if this is like the shot across the bow that wakes up some folks in the entrepreneurial and startup community to realize, “Man, there’s a big opportunity here,” and attempt to build, you know, what Stitcher tried to in the beginning. Yeah. David, it feels like you’re teeing me up a little bit. We actually gave this a go at Pioneer Square Labs and we were really interested in podcasting just based on the growth trajectory of the amount of people that have started listening to podcasts in the last couple of years. It’s still not a huge number of people but the growth rate is really good and one of the reasons, I mean, for all the reasons on this show that we’ve already talked about, we shied away from it where there’s only $30 million to $40 million spent a year on it, you can’t really stick your toe out with an MVP. You have to be the hosting, the analytics. You really have to have a client out there and your client has to have some reason to be better than Apple’s client because shipping with the platform is a huge advantage. There was one thing that we really wanted to do and that was dynamic ad insertion so that we could sell ads programmatically. One thing that we felt was super important was for the host to be able to read the ads because that’s been one of the things that commands the really high CPMs in the world today. One way that we were going to do that is have the host go through and record ahead of time the ad reads and then we could insert in the host’s own voice anywhere throughout the audio, the ads. Wow, that’s cool.…

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