Voxalyze making listeners visible

Podcasts have become part of most of our daily routines. I, myself, listened to an average of two episodes per week (thank you, Spotify wrapped!). And just like that, Podcasts have really been exploding over the last few years, leading to newer opportunities within the growing market. When we first began speaking with the founders Alexis Hue (CEO) and Marian Zange (CTO) of Voxalyze, early November 2021, we were instantly captured by the current state of the podcast market. 

So let’s bring in the stats!

1. There are 424 Million¹ podcast listeners globally and 66 Million¹ episodes between 2.4 Million¹ podcasts.
2. On average until November 2021 ‘Super listeners’ consume close to 11.2 hours² of content per week with the highest consumption being 20-minute to 40-minute² formats. This number has further increased in the last one year with Chile having the highest y-o-y growth on podcast listeners.
3. Germany alone in 2022 had a 64%³ growth in podcast downloads - France at 379%³, Spain at 298%³ and Italy at 244%³.

All this momentum in the podcast space since the first ever podcast in 2008 and yet two decades later, podcast hosts have no visibility on who their audiences are and how listeners discover their content.

The Opportunity

Alexis and Marian recognised this opportunity and started to build Voxalyze.

Voxalyze is a podcast visibility and audience analytics platform providing insights on how listeners discover new content and podcast attribution on how to further improve listener growth. 

Podcast discovery today is mostly based on charts, recommendations from friends, promotions via social media and platform based discovery on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Google. 

Approximately six hours are spent per 20-minute episode by podcasters from recording until promotion and then try to to make podcasts discoverable. But the feedback loop on whether these SEOs, titles, descriptions are truly driving growth of episodes and podcasts still do not exist.

Using the data collected across listening platforms and enriched with other sources, Voxalyze is able to provide ‘visibility score’, highlighting the overall discoverability of a given show and help to further improve these rankings compared to similar podcasts. Further, by providing keyword ranking, podcasts can further improve their SEOs to become more visible. Rather than Podcasters using a gut feeling of what keywords click, they now have the advantage of ensuring their podcasts are discovered. 

Let’s also look at this from the feedback perspective: Voxalyze is now going to be changing the analytics game with further data points down to the granular levels which will also allow podcast publishers to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns in attracting new listeners across promotional channels such as email, social media, paid campaigns, etc. We’re just loving the data game here! 

Podcasters now not only have more granular visibility on their audiences, but also can further improve their discovery with data backed keywords, and then also get feedback on whether their efforts on discovery is actually working. On top of this, they get additional recommendations on how to further improve. Voxalyze is bringing in their edge to the podcast game similar to how SEO did for the World-Wide-Web!

The Team

Alexis is a serial entrepreneur (one also in the media space) with Voxalyze being his third startup. He previously led International Growth as a Director at Babbel and also been on the investing side as a VC himself.

Marian is also a serial entrepreneur, and now third time founder. His prior startups, Ezeep and Liquid Labs, have also had a heavy data edge and it’s no surprise that he is leading the technical topics at Voxalyze.

Being impressed by their prior experiences and the way they were able to find opportunity in the space, we decided to invest EUR 1.2m in a pre-seed round together with Seed+Speed.

With major platforms such as Spotify acquiring Podsights and Chartable, YouTube launching a dedicated Podcast homepage and launching its own podcast ‘Like and Describe’ and Apple Podcasts ramping its in-house podcasting efforts, we can’t wait to see how the overall macro dynamics will unfold with Voxalyze joining into the disruptive mix.

We are very excited to be able to work together with the founders and the team going forward on their opportunistic approach to the podcast market.

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References

1. https://www.demandsage.com/podcast-statistics/#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20Podcast%20Listeners,and%20504.9%20million%20by%202024.
2. https://www.buzzsprout.com/blog/podcast-statistics
3. ​​https://megaphone.spotify.com/learn/2022-podcast-trends-report 
4. https://podnews.net/update/german-podcast-statistics

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