The New York Times strategically acquired an article-reading startup
That New Yorker subscription you pay for... but only read the cartoons? There's a fix. The New York Times just acquired Audm, a subscription app that turns longform articles into audio. For $9/month, Audm gives subscribers audio versions of way-too-long articles so that you can feel enlightened while cleaning out your closet.
- Out of all the services that turn articles/stories into audio, Audm caught the NYT's eye because of the Hollywood-ish flare it adds: in the past it crowdsourced narration with plain old voices. But after growing tired of dogs barking in the background, it landed on...
- Using pro voice actors to narrate articles — these literary "celebs" make listening to a 6-million-word article more enticing. Audm works with outlets like The Atlantic and Vanity Fair to voice-ify their writing.
Double-down on the "pod boom"... The NYT learned, maybe from its own article on the topic, that podcast growth in the US is popping. In November 2019, a whopping 62M Americans listened to pods each week, up from 19M in 2013. The Times' "Daily" pod is already the top daily pod on Spotify, but it wants an even bigger share of America's ears — so it's audio-fying its articles.
This 1 acquisition basically doubles the Times' content... The NYT already has the raw news content — that's the most time/research-intensive part of journalism. But now for each 12-page article it churns out, it can expand reach (and earn more money) by converting it to another medium (audio). Since media is a combo of "Content" + "Distribution," the more distribution channels a quality publisher has, the greater their reach.