Podcast and advertising company audioBoom has released its financial results from an extraordinarily eventful first half of its fiscal year. In the six months ending May 31, 2018, audioBoom posted a 43% increase in revenue to £2.6 million. The company’s adjusted EBITDA for the period was a loss of £2.2 million, compared with £2.6 million in H1 2017. Net cash at the end of the period was £300,000.
What do we mean by extraordinarily eventful? The financial news for H1 included calling off audioBoom’s planned merger with Triton Digital after a fundraising effort fell short. AudioBoom did successfully procure investments and fundraising in May and June, and has secured some stability for its future.
The company also shared performance metrics from the first half of 2018. Total unique file requests reached 372 million, up from 325 million in the year-ago period. Available ad impressions for the half totaled 1.241 million, compared with 789 million. In May 2018, audioBoom reported 87 million monthly unique users, up from 81 million in May 2017.
Chief Operating Officer Stuart Last wrote a blog post providing additional context for the results. It provides an interesting glimpse into audioBoom’s internal guiding metrics, and even a general sense of how — as Last says — “how a podcast company works.”
He noted that in the United States, audioBoom is making $19.03 from every 1,000 downloads of its content, surpassing the industry average of $10.85. That industry average is a fascinating benchmark, derived by Stuart Last a year ago and explained in a Medium article. The math is necessarily rough, but logical, and offers a guidepost of revenue per thousand downloads. Any kind of revenue-per-consumption metric makes an interesting marker for comparison, like miles-per-gallon in cars. We are hoping Stuart Last will update his analysis with mid-2018 knowledge of industry revenue.
Stuart Last also covered developments within the Audioboom Originals Network of original audio programming, which has yielded early success. “Our Audioboom Originals are already worth 11% of our gross profit just one year after launch,” Last said.
audioBoom is a UK-based company with a London HQ anchoring a global array of offices. According to Stuart last, 85% of the company’s revenue comes from the U.S., but the non-U.S. portion is growing, from 8% in the first half of 2017 to 15% in H1 2018.