On Tuesday, SiriusXM announced a strategic shift away from its digital offerings and a renewed focus on its satellite radio offerings. CEO Jennifer Witz says the company isn’t completely abandoning digital audio, however.
The SiriusXM CEO called the “investments” it made in the digital audio space by prioritizing its app in its market efforts “have not produced the results that we were hoping for.” She added that company was going to take a “more analytical, RIO-driven focus” heading into 2025.
However, despite the change in focus, Witz added that the company still views the podcast space as a frontier it can compete and win in.
“It provides the best opportunity for us to monetize through advertising, so I’d expect that to be our strategy going forward. Much of the talent wants that as well,” Witz said while speaking at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York. “On the podcasting side, we can look to pursue a slightly broader set of audiences, because we’re selling to advertisers across audiences and they want to make sure they have younger audiences as well.”
SiriusXM now has podcast deals with talents like Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy and Ashley Flowers of Crime Junkie in its podcasting portfolio. And the increased inventory in those shows has been a bright spot in the advertising efforts. But Jennifer Witz shared she was aware that you can overload a podcast with ads, equalling a tune-out for listeners.
“Obviously we don’t want to increase ad load too much to detriment the listener experience,” she concluded. “We don’t really want to drive ad load anymore in podcasts, but with this added inventory we have a much more robust offering, and that helps the overall portfolio.”
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