Spotify acquires two podcast companies

Spotify has announced that it is acquiring two podcast companies during the announcement of its quarterly figures. It concerns the companies Gimlet and Anchor. The company gained more subscribers in the past quarter.

During the announcement of the quarterly figures, Spotify did not disclose any further details about the two acquisitions, such as the total acquisition price. Gimlet Media is being acquired because of the company’s popular podcast shows such as Homecoming and Reply All. Anchor helps people create their own podcasts.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek explains the acquisition of these two companies by pointing to the estimate that over time more than twenty percent of everything listened to on Spotify will not be music. In addition, the service wants to respond to the needs of content creators. Ek thinks that the industry to which Spotify belongs will grow even bigger if internet-level monetization is added, in other words, more money can be made from it.

In the past quarter, Spotify gained 16 million monthly active users, bringing the total number of subscribers to 207 million. The number of paying subscribers with Premium, Family or Student increased from 87 million in the third quarter of last year to 96 million today. Over the same period, the number of users of the free version grew from 109 million to 116 million, the company said.

Spotify closed the quarter with a positive operating profit for the first time. Where a loss of 87 million euros was incurred in the last quarter of 2017 and a loss of 6 million euros in the third quarter of last year, the company now records an operating profit of 94 million euros. Turnover amounted to almost 1.5 billion euros, an increase of 30 percent compared to the same period a year earlier.