Mevio

» see mevio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard the word "podcast" was around 2005 in a wired article about adam curry, who had been a mtv vj i vaguely knew about from the european mtv rotation in the 90s. curry had left television and was pushing what was then a very small format, essentially rss feeds pointing at mp3 files. podshow was his company. from ankara on ttnet broadband i could see the coverage but the medium itself did not really reach turkey in that window. turkish audio content was on radio stations and forum-attached mp3 uploads, not podcast feeds you subscribed to in itunes.

podshow inc. was founded on 1 october 2004 in san francisco by curry and ron bloom, a music-industry veteran. the pitch was to be the network layer for a whole new medium. curry produced the daily source code, a near-daily conversational show that had already built an audience through 2004. bloom brought the ad-sales and label-relations background. the first outside money came in august 2005: $8.85 million led by kleiner perkins and sequoia, with sherpalo also participating. this was serious silicon valley money for a format most people had never listened to.

follow-on rounds landed in september 2006 ($15 million from dag ventures) and july 2008 ($15 million from crosslink capital), bringing the total to just under $39 million. the 2008 round came with the podshow-to-mevio rename, which reflected an internal pivot toward video content and a broader entertainment brand. by then the network was hosting the dawn and drew show, geekbrief tv, no agenda, pop17 and about a dozen other titles.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

mevio's model was straightforward on paper. sell display and mid-roll ads across a curated network of shows, share the revenue with the creators. the market it was betting on was that podcast advertising would grow at the rate podcast listening was growing. listening did grow but ad spend did not, at least not at network-scale pricing. through 2009 and 2010 the venture-funded structure needed either scale or acquisition, and neither showed up.

~ the quiet end ~

in december 2012 mevio spun off a subsidiary called bitesize entertainment to try a media-production model instead of the network model. the parent company kept running the ad-supported podcast side but with a shrinking staff. by april 2014 mevio simply stopped operating. current show hosts got a message informing them of a ten-day window to migrate their rss feeds and move any archived files. there was no formal press release. gigaom noticed and posted a small obituary that ran a couple hundred words.

~ what replaced it ~

adam curry kept producing no agenda outside the network for over a decade after mevio closed. the shape of the podcast business shifted through the 2010s toward host-read ad sales handled by the shows themselves, plus a handful of network-scale acquirers like spotify. mevio had been the first serious attempt at podcast-as-network and it built out the ad-sales machinery a decade before the market was ready to pay for it. the second attempt at the same shape was anchor.fm ten years later. spotify acquired that one in 2019.

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