Stitcher

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

~ the last words ~

stitcher was the kind of app the american commute had. talk-radio replacement for a 45-minute car ride between suburb and office. turkey did not run on that schedule. ankara traffic was bad enough to lose two hours a day in, but the podcast layer arrived here much later, mostly through spotify and youtube, and never built a stitcher-shaped product. when noah shanok and his cofounders shipped the app in august 2008 it landed in a market i was nowhere near.

the company bounced through four owners. deezer bought it in 2014. ew scripps bought it from deezer in 2016 for 4.5 million. the parent company eventually reorganized so that stitcher sat above midroll media and earwolf, which is how marc maron's wtf and how did this get made plugged into the same corporate tree. then siriusxm bought the whole thing in july 2020 for 325 million, betting that podcasts were the next subscription tier.

that bet did not pay back. siriusxm shifted its podcast strategy toward pandora through 2022, folded stitcher exclusives into pandora plus, and announced the app would shut down on august 29, 2023. the production side, earwolf and stitcher studios, kept running. the listener-facing app went away. anyone still using stitcher had to migrate to apple podcasts, spotify, overcast, or pocketcasts on roughly six weeks of notice.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

a podcast aggregator with a recommendation system and android support before apple's podcasts app went cross-platform. for years the only reason a non-iphone listener had a real podcast workflow was stitcher.

~ the fall ~

spotify going all-in on podcasts in 2019 with the gimlet and anchor acquisitions took the middle of the market. apple podcasts owned the iphone default. stitcher was caught between two ecosystems that did not need a third-party app to make their podcast strategy work. siriusxm tried to merge the asset into pandora rather than competing as a standalone, and that meant the brand had nowhere to go.

~ the legacy ~

midroll's ad network shaped the modern podcast monetization layer. dynamic-ad-insertion as a business category basically came out of midroll's growth between 2013 and 2018. that infrastructure is what powers most podcast ads today, even on apps that did not exist when stitcher launched.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »