Former Amazon Studios FAST exec, former Variety VIP+ senior analyst.
Podcasting & Audio
Smart speakers were meant to become shopping machines. Instead people set timers and play music. Shipments are falling and makers are retreating — yet the growth forecasts for voice shopping haven't moved.
Podcasting & Audio
Automatically-sold podcast ad slots are multiplying faster than advertisers can buy them. Mid-sized shows take the hit while top shows stay protected — and pre-agreed deals hide the slide. We put $158m a year at risk.
Podcasting & Audio
Podcasting charges a premium for ads read by a trusted human host. Cheap voice cloning can now fake that voice, and no US law protects it. We see $194m a year at risk — and the market hasn't priced it.
Last week, agents got names of their own. This week, some of them got pocket money. On 13 October, Shopify opened its catalogue of more than a billion products, and its checkout, to any AI agent that can connect, with no partnership needed. Shop now lets a shopper give their agent a weekly
Blindside
5 structural threats the market isn't pricing — and where each one sits on the scale.
Podcasting & Audio
SiriusXM has lost paying subscribers three years running. Older listeners are leaving, younger drivers stream from their phones, and the cheap $8 plan meant to defend volume quietly cuts the average payment. The decline looks built-in, not temporary.
Podcasting & Audio
Machine-made shows are already about 35% of new podcast feeds, at $1 each, with no rule forcing anyone to say so. We see $196 million of yearly ad value at risk across a $3 billion market.
Podcasting & Audio
Congress pulled about $1.1bn from public broadcasting, and the fund that cushioned shortfalls is closing. The deeper threat: a listener base averaging 65.5 years old, with just 1% under 25, that is not being replaced.
Podcasting & Audio
Keyword filters meant for web ads are wrongly blocking news podcasts — $114 million a year is at risk. The same blunt tools that over-blocked news online now starve audio.
Podcasting & Audio
The slow decline of US radio is becoming a cull. About $1.1bn a year in AM/FM ad revenue is exposed as debt-loaded owners start shutting stations — and all three big owners have already restructured or gone bankrupt.
Blindside
4 structural threats the market isn't pricing — and where each one sits on the scale.
Last week, the machinery for running AI agents arrived. This week, agents started getting names of their own. On 7 and 8 October, three companies that weren't working together did the same thing at three different layers. Google introduced a Gemini agent that can join a team with its own w