The sports activities media firm Additional time has seen three of its 4 athlete speak exhibits finish since January, when the writer first introduced its intention to develop its roster of exhibits to as many as 10 sequence and make investments hundreds of thousands into this system. The community initially launched final August.
“By September, we’ll most definitely double the dimensions of the community and make investments hundreds of thousands of {dollars} on this,” Additional time chief govt Dan Porter informed ADWEEK in January. “It’s been actually profitable, and we expect it’s the longer term. The most important problem is that manufacturers don’t perceive that that is the brand new tv talk-show format.”
Since then, sequence following the favored school athletes Shaddeur Sanders, Travis Hunter, and Flau’jae Johnson have ended. The remaining present, which follows school basketball participant Ian Jackson, continues to be producing new episodes.
A spokesperson for Additional time confirmed the conclusion of the three exhibits and the dearth of recent launches.
“We’re persevering with to lean into what makes Additional time distinctive—creating expertise, increasing unique IP, and deepening our connection to the communities that gas the way forward for sports activities and tradition,” the consultant shared in a press release. “We’re nonetheless in talks with professional athletes, increasing on the work we’ve already performed, so it’s not a step again—it’s a strategic evolution towards long-term progress.”
Its first spherical of offers had been structured as a mixture of minimal ensures with extra splits on high, in line with Porter. The contracts started as one-year minimums.
As a part of the mannequin, Additional time managed many of the workload for the athletes. It launched the channels, introduced within the sponsors, booked the company, helped craft the editorial, and equipped the studio tools.
“If we pay somebody a whole bunch of hundreds upfront and we don’t promote, that’s on us,” Porter stated in January. “You deal with your video podcasters as in the event that they had been entrepreneurs.”
Each Sanders and Hunter, whose sequence ended, left the College of Colorado and had been drafted into the NFL. Johnson and Jackson are nonetheless in school.
The conclusion of the three sequence partially displays the challenges of working with school athletes, in line with podcast analyst Nicholas Quah.
“[Overtime]’s struggles are just a little unusual as a result of the podcast enterprise is shifting on this course. Athlete speak exhibits are very talked-about proper now,” he stated. “However the creator economic system may be very bifurcated: the one ones that hit are the largest names, and Additional time doesn’t deal with the largest names. They deal with school athletes, that are definitionally individuals on the rise.”
Additional time is in energetic talks with skilled athletes to construct new sequence round them, in line with the corporate. It was engaged in related discussions in January, Porter stated on the time.
The podcast panorama has additionally been remodeled over the past 12 months by the speedy progress of video podcasts, or video variations of podcasts, into the medium.
The emergence of video in podcasting has opened the channel as much as bigger ad budgets—in 2024, video promoting was a $62 billion market, whereas podcasting introduced in $2.4 billion, per the IAB. However the frenzy to remodel podcasts into movies and movies into podcasts has additionally led to disruption.
On Monday, Amazon broke up operations of its Wondery podcast community as a part of a broader reorganization, eliminating 110 jobs and redistributing workers beneath Amazon’s Audible banner or into its newly created “creator providers” staff, in line with Bloomberg. The reorg was the newest in a sequence of cuts and pivots from main know-how platforms, together with Spotify and Audacy, as they attempt to navigate a quickly shifting panorama, together with video.
“Two issues may be true directly,” Quah, the podcast analyst, stated. “In the event you’re dashing to get into the video podcast house, you’re just a little too late. However the equally true lesson is that if you wish to get into the podcast house proper now, you need to be contemplating video.”
