Audacy earnings: Macroeconomics, advertising pullback, and 2023 optimism

Audacy reported its fourth quarter earnings, and while earnings were up three percent for the year, expenses grew by twice that, pulling down the company’s EBITDA down six percent — “a far cry from what we had anticipated,” said Chairman and CEO David Field.

The Audacy podcast business delivered a nine percent increase in Q4 downloads compared to the previous year. U.S. listeners grew, too, by 15% — that translates to 43-million uniques in the quarter, 29-million of them in the U.S.

David Field noted that the company’s home-grown sports podcast network, 2,400 Sports, received “particularly strong growth,” with a seven-times increase in downloads from the previous year … “albeit from a small base,” he noted.

Digital growth as a whole tallied at two percent for the quarter, or 5% without the podcast part. On the flip side of that calculation, the podcast business separately was down 8%. Looking at full-year 2022, podcasting gained a single percentage point in revenue, while all digital was up 9%.

A revenue breakdown PDF is HERE.