(1) This story starts from elsewhere: Digiday had an interesting piece last week on Bloomberg’s podcast and text-to-audio products. Two things to note: “The company said that audience downloads for its some 25 podcast have increased 35 percent year over year, but was unwilling to give exact numbers” and its text-to-audio offerings are now apparently the “second-most popular media type on the app (behind live TV).” What wasn’t mentioned in the write-up, but is totally worth flagging, is this data point: Bloomberg uses Amazon Polly for those text-to-audio conversions, according to TechCrunch.
(2) Meanwhile, Amazon is now building out a line of affordable bed-in-a-box mattresses through its AmazonBasics brand, establishing a new front of competition for companies like Casper and Helix Sleep, which are active direct response podcast advertisers. Hat tip to my boy Gabe Bullard:
If Amazon puts internet mattress startups out of business, what will happen to the podcast industry? https://t.co/4NeRw0umBK
— Gabe Bullard (@gbullard) October 1, 2018
Truly, the Bezos comes for us all.