Amazon cuts Wondery: 110 jobs to go

• One of the biggest and most successful podcast producers, Wondery, is to be restructured by Amazon, laying off a reported 110 people including the company’s CEO, Jen Sargent. Wondery was bought by Amazon at the end of 2020 for $300mn, then doubled its staff. It currently has around 360 published shows.

  • Wondery’s narrative podcast studio will be combined with Audible. Marshall Lewy, Wondery’s Chief Content Officer, will also join Audible. The company’s creator-led shows (New Heights, Armchair Expert, etc) will be merged with the existing Talent Services team, rebranding to Creator Services. Ads and sponsorship will merge with a team at Amazon Music. Ads and sponsorship will create an entirely new team that includes the existing ad-sales team at Amazon Music.
  • The story was broken by Bloomberg in a paywalled article. (Podnews readers can save on a subscription). Business Insider carries the memo from Steve Boom explaining the changes, and noting that podcast revenue has grown by 4x since the company was bought by Amazon.

• Why the change? Video killed the owl, it seems. The memo reads: “The podcast landscape has evolved significantly over the past few years. As video podcasting has grown in popularity, we have learned that creator-led, video-integrated shows have different audience needs and require distinct discovery, growth and monetization strategies compared to audio-first, narrative series. The rise of video has also blurred the lines on what it means to be a podcast creator.”

  • Amazon’s decision should be read alongside the performance of its other podcast acquisitions. Amazon bought podcast hosting company ART19 in June 2021, which has never achieved more than a 1% share of total episodes published, and currently hosts 3,900 shows (other enterprise hosts like Megaphone, Simplecast or Triton/Omny each host around 20,000). Amazon splashed $80mn on the SmartLess podcast: but that deal only lasted three years. Last year it spent $100mn for New Heights, promising international audio adaptations (which haven’t happened) and live events - there hasn’t been a live event for the show since Amazon’s ownership. Amazon Music started slowly adding podcasts in 2020; it has a 13% market share for music in the US, but achieves just a 1.6% share of US podcast downloads.

• If you’re affected by recent layoffs at Wondery, Pineapple Street Studios or public radio, Podcast Movement is offering a limited number of complimentary passes for its event in Dallas later this month. Email support@podcastmovement.com to get connected with the team.

  • Podnews has a free jobs board, and if we can help in any way, just reply to this email.

• iOS podcast app Castro has launched an iPad app - and optional device sync for Castro Plus subscribers. The announcement teases future releases that are “outside the Apple ecosystem”.

• XSLT is the technology that makes some podcast RSS feeds look nice if you click on them inadvertently. The steering group behind HTML is wondering if it’s time to stop supporting it.

• The LA Times reports that music artists are boycotting Spotify after Daniel Ek invested in AI weapons (a story we reported in June).

• A new app called Mailpod lets you “summarize your daily emails into a podcast”.

• Spreaker saw another record figure for share of podcast episodes released in July.

• Just a note that we hope will reach the right people. Podnews doesn’t link much to Audible shows. We wish we could do so more, but since Audible doesn’t use RSS and our Editor has highlighted it uses different links in every country it operates in, it makes it impossible to link without essentially giving our audience a broken experience. We have repeatedly raised this issue with a number of Amazon and Audible employees.

Podcast News - with Airwave

From Airwave: The Webby Award-winning Box of Oddities is a podcast that delves into the strange and mysterious aspects of our world, exploring topics ranging from bizarre medical conditions to unsolved mysteries, and from paranormal phenomena to strange cultural practices from around the world.

Wondery’s Dying For Sex recently scored nine Emmy nominations for its FX podcast-to-TV adaptation. That’s a record for Wondery, and as far as we can tell, a record for any podcast to TV adaptation ever. The show deals with healing, forgiveness and what do we do with the time we have left.

Wondery’s Dr. Death launched in 2018, focusing on an investigation into a doctor who has injured multiple patients on the operating table. Its international translations hit #1 simultaneously, a week after the company announced their release at Podcast Movement in Orlando.

Wondery’s Lawless Planet debuted at the end of last week. It’s a new true-crime podcast uncovering the hidden world of environmental crime and corruption, hosted by Emmy Award-winning host Zach Goldbaum: a bold, narrative-driven series that uses Wondery’s trademark immersive style to confront the urgency of the climate crisis.

Wondery’s Nick Cannon @ Night, a “reimagined talk show”, launched a few weeks ago. Nick opens up his DMs, creating his own version of the old school relationship advice call-in show, and responds to listeners’ most intimate love, sex, relationships, and dating questions.

Wondery’s Flesh and Code launched on open RSS in mid July; with RedHanded hosts Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala exploring the incredible true story of a man who fell in love with an AI chatbot. It’s the inside story of the dark side of AI love: and how AI businesses exploit your deepest emotions.

Wondery’s Liberty Lost investigates maternity homes - a practice that some may think we left behind in the 1950s, but are on the rise - a 23% increase since the Dobbs decision. This podcast covers the startling true story of Liberty University’s Godparent Home, a maternity home for unwed mothers that opened in the ‘80s and is still operating today. It was released in mid-June.

Podcast Promotion in the wild

• Wondery and Loftus Media’s Terribly Famous got the Times Square treatment in June 2024. The show won a silver in the British Podcast Awards that year.

Podcasting will grow more if we market it more. Seen a podcast being promoted somewhere in the wild - other than on a podcast? Let us know by hitting reply.