The Ringer

Media companies buying media: the new acquisition playbook

Shaan frames a pattern: non-media companies acquiring media/community brands to own an audience. Examples include Robinhood buying Snacks, Stripe buying IndieHackers, HubSpot buying The Hustle, and Spotify buying The Ringer.

“Robinhood bought, uh, Snacks, which was like a kind of a media company. So Robinhood, this exchange, not a media company, buys a media company. Stripe bought IndieHackers, right? Stripe, not a media company, bought IndieHackers, this community of kind of makers. HubSpot buying The Hustle. And there's a few other ones that are actually somewhat prominent. Spotify buying, let's say, The Ringer or things like that.”

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Spotify didn't buy The Ringer for ad revenue, it bought exclusive content to cut churn

Shaan argues Spotify's ~$300M for The Ringer has nothing to do with podcast ad revenue: as an audio (not just music) company it buys exclusive key content like Bill Simmons so listeners switch to and stay on Spotify, the same content-wars logic as HBO and Netflix.

“it's like the HBO model or whatever, Netflix. They're all trying to do the same thing, which is how do we get the key content here so that our subscribers stay subscribers or new people become subscribers? And that's the math. And so it has nothing to do with what The Ringer can do in its own revenue. That's irrelevant to them. It's what they think they can do if they— the key content in the key podcast verticals.”