Knight Foundation invests $1M in podcast collective Radiotopia | Hacker News Reader

Knight Foundation invests $1M in podcast collective Radiotopia

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54 pointssamsolomon17 comments

This is great news. 99% invisible is an excellent podcast. I love seeing podcasting becoming more embraced as a legitimate form of media.

99pi is great. I've also been really enjoying The Allusionist: http://www.theallusionist.org/

History buffs, check out http://www.dancarlin.com/hh-55/

All the upvotes for Hardcore History. Even if you're not into history, the story telling is amazing.

Podcasting has been an accepted form of media since at least 2011 with the success of The Adam Carolla Show.

This sounds very similar to the Gimlet Media (http://gimletmedia.com/) / Startup story (http://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/). I wonder if we're going to start seeing lots of VC investment in podcast production companies. I sure hope so!

Edit: add links

I kinda hope NOT. VC money is the exact opposite thing that most podcasts need. Podcasts have sprung up as a wonderfully organic medium precisely because, unlike basically all other media, they aren't beholden to corporate interests that try to water them down, tell them what they can't say, or wedge them into some round peg shaped hole.

I think it's unlikely for a while. Content businesses are historically tough sells for VC investment. They've become more common in recent years, e.g. Vox, Bustle, etc. That's in large part due to the maturity of the advertising technology ecosystem which has made content more scalable/programmatic.

We're no where near this point with audio yet. Podcast ads still sold by human agents, burnt into episodes in the form of live reads. It makes for attractive lifestyle businesses and some companies have bootstrapped impressively, but it's hard to see sightlines to a billion dollar plus startup.

I think you could see investments in platforms, a la Sound Cloud, or podcast AdTech, but we'll need to see more growth in the medium on the scale of Serial to make it a reality.

Full disclosure, I work for a VC firm that was featured on the first season of the Startup Podcast.

That is almost the opposite of I would expect.

Podcasts have a clear analouge in radio, and radio made lots of money for advertisers for many decades. It is much more difficult to tune out ads when listening.

Although, perhaps the profitability of radio was an artifact of supply restriction. Podcasts are easy enough that anyone can do them, and when you have more supply much harder to stand out and make money.

But has anyone really figured out web advertising on random content yet (sites on which there is no purchasing intent, and no logged in user)? Is there information out there on how a site like Vox is really doing?

You hit the two most important themes. It's a great biz, but not necessarily a venture scale biz. The supply restriction is really important. If there are only a few dozen frequencies in any metro, you can capture large numbers of people, and there are few substitutes (e.g. no iPods) and the cost to broadcast on is prohibitive, you become quite a bit more valuable.

Web advertising has a lot of problems, but it does have scale and plenty of sites are making great revenues. Even then, content is still a relatively tough business to get VCs excited about.

Planet Money did an episode about VC, where the host pitched a podcast business to a VC and got shot down.

I hope so, too, but in this case we're talking about a grant rather than a VC investment.

you can see all the podcasts here: http://www.radiotopia.fm/

I thought the Knight Foundation was working on highly intelligent Drone Auto Vehicles with AI - Project KITT and a mysterious guy called Michael Knight, no?

Knight-Rid(d)er?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Ridder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider

They had the first smartwatch too.

They've had a slight setback with the prototype.

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