To acquire Triton Digital, iHeartMedia is paying a hefty sum of $230 million in an agreement with the E.W. Scripps Company.
An Advertisement Technology SaaS platform, Triton Digital, operates in more than fifty countries, conducting podcasting, audio streaming, and metrics that give a monetization opportunity to publishers.
The industry has recently experienced quite a bit of podcast acquisitions in the audio and music space, with Spotify conducting a payout of over $800 million on such buyouts in the previous two years.
Sirius XM bought the cast platform Stitcher for approximately $325 million, while Amazon music brought the Wondery podcast production house for $300 million.
Triton has two parallel business lines, focusing on measurements and advertising infrastructure, including audience tracking and rating reports from its measurement business and content delivery system that insert ads while distributing podcasts and digital audio streams to listeners.
While customers get to enjoy measuring audiences, Triton Digital claims that they operate “the world’s first programmatic marketplace for digital audio programmatic ad-buying and Yield-Op”, which is described as “Supply Side Platform (SSP) that specializes in Audio and enables programmatic audio advertising.”
Over the past three years, iHeartMedia has acquired Voxnest, a marketplace for providers of podcast analytics and podcasts, programmatic integration, enterprise publishing tools, and targeted ad serving. They have also acquired Jelli Inc, the technology foundation for programmatic buying and selling of broadcast radio, creative optimization, and data targeting.
iHeartMedia subsidiary RCS also acquired Radiojar, the cloud-based centralized audio playout platform.
Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia stated, “Adding triton digital and its industry leading services to the iHeartMedia audio ecosystem establishes iHeartMedia as the only company with a total audio advertising technology and data solution.”
Neal Schore from Triton Digital stated, “iHeart, with our strong leadership position in podcasting, digital radio and broadcast, already provides cutting edge audio management, programmatic and data solutions for the broadcast radio, digital audio and podcasting industries, and this acquisition further strengthens our position as the No. 1 audio company in America and provides unique – and critical – solutions for the industry and for advertisers.”
He continued, “We remain deeply committed to providing the world’s broadcasters, podcasters, and online audio publishers with continuously innovated, best-in-class solutions and services for online audio management, advertising, and consumption data, and are well positioned to enhance iHeartMedia’s value proposition to audiences and advertisers.”
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