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News broke this week that Amazon would be “reorganising” its audio business, effectively closing its subsidiary, Wondery. “The podcast landscape has evolved significantly over the past few years,” Steve Boom, the company’s VP of audio, Twitch and games, told staff. “The rise of video has also blurred the lines on what it means to be a podcast creator.” This means that Wondery, a company which Amazon paid roughly $300m for in 2020, will be folded into its audiobook business, Audible, and music service, Amazon Music. Bloomberg reports that about 110 people will lose their jobs as part of this “reorganisation” (the sort of reorganisation that would make Marie Kondo look like Howard Hughes).
Since the news began to trickle out, Amazon have attempted some damage control. The move — they told TechCrunch — will retain parts of the Wondery brand but increasingly elide the operational difference between its narrative shows (like Dirty John or The Shrink Next Door) and its “creator-led” ones (like Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky or New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce). For any other company, this distinction might seem a fairly academic one, but for Wondery it is the difference between its legacy and the external pressures that have been brought to bear on the industry.
Wondery was founded in 2016 by Hernan Lopez, a Fox exec who saw the potential in long-form narrative podcasting. This was an industry still operating under the oppressive shadow of Serial, the This American Life spin-off which had demonstrated, to the masses, that podcasts could be a topic of water cooler chitchat. Wondery’s first mega-hit was Dirty John, a documentary about a family menaced by a fraudster. It set the mould for future series which focused largely on mass-market true crime. Shocking stories told in the bouncy, playful tones of American radio. Dr Death, The Shrink Next Door, Harsh Reality: the Story of Miriam Rivera, and Kill List have all owed a debt of gratitude to that original idea of a limited series that would get people talking.
Over time, this model evolved into shows — like American Scandal, Business Wars and RedHanded — which maintained some of the documentary format that early podcast converts prized, whilst moving to the “always on” model that advertisers privileged. It was probably, in hindsight, the sign of an unrealised tension between the old and emerging models. And then, in 2020, Amazon bought Wondery — a small power play at a time when Spotify was hoovering up content businesses like Gimlet, Call Her Daddy and Joe Rogan. “We’re in the conversation,” they screamed.
But were they? Amazon has always had a problem, in the podcast space. When competition was ramping up between Apple and Spotify, they were well-positioned to challenge. They had two relatively mature businesses that could pivot into podcasts. Amazon Music, their Spotify dupe, had never performed as well as Jeff Bezos might have hoped, but still had around 55m subscribers back in 2020. Then there was Audible, the market leading audiobook service, which Amazon had purchased in 2009. Both were podcast-adjacent but, crucially, not podcast platforms. In the past few years, both have attempted to pivot towards podcasting, with limited success. Amazon Music, at present, notionally boasts 80m subscribers, though most of these seem to have arrived via a package with Amazon Prime. Audible, meanwhile, has trended steadily upwards, even after Spotify announced their own audiobook service, but its original podcasts have scarcely contributed to that success.
How did Wondery fit into this puzzle? Well, Wondery produced content for Amazon’s proprietary services. But that function — as a content business — is not really what Amazon were paying $300m for back in 2020. After all, Amazon has plenty of studio capacity internally. They believed that Wondery would bring existing credibility in the space, and a number of shows that could be mined to create a new podcast strategy. Half-content factory, half-massive data set, half-technology firm (“Doctor, we seem to have too many halves…”). The existence of Wondery Plus, a hard-paywalled app outside of Amazon’s existing ecosystem, only increased the fragmentation of their audio offering.
And so, Point Number One, Amazon is probably looking to consolidate that nightmarish maze of different operators. Audible continues to feel like the most thriving audio brand for Amazon, but uptake of its current podcast catalogue has been tepid. Amazon will also be keen not to depreciate their current payments system there, where individual audiobooks are, essentially, priced at a month’s subscription cost (£7.99 for the middle package). That’s a phenomenal return, based on the content being consumed, compared with podcasts, video streaming, or really any digital media. Swamping the app with free-to-listen content possibly runs contrary to that pricing model. After all, Audible introduced the Plus Catalogue in 2021 (a selection of titles available in the all-you-can-eat buffet format of Netflix) but has slowly inched it out of the limelight. Audiobook consumers, they seem to have realised, don’t consume with the indiscriminate abandon of TV watchers; they are more discerning, and will pay for that discernment.
And so, I’m not sure that it will ultimately come to pass that Amazon rolls Wondery — read: its original podcasting ops — in with Audible. In fact, I find it more likely that Amazon will basically exit the podcast market altogether.
The key is partly in Mr Boom’s statement. Video has “blurred the lines” for podcasting, which likely means that Amazon still views Prime and Twitch as bigger opportunities. 2025 seems to be the year that Big Tech, as a whole, turns its focus to hunting down YouTube (just as the digital media trackers picked through the footprints and scat of Apple’s podcasting hegemony a few years back). Spotify clearly believes that, in specific markets, it can be competitive with YouTube, while Instagram is, increasingly, the value extracting jewel in Meta’s crown, as Facebook (the world’s most used social media platform) drifts ever more into being a messaging service (be that direct or community messaging). Twitch has been focused on live broadcasting, but does have native playback functionality. Perhaps, if I were Steve Boom, I’d see a chance for Twitch to be more of a presence in this space.
Whatever — the idea that Amazon’s video strategy precludes the existence of Wondery is for the birds. Wondery is less than a rounding error for Bezos’s everything store. Amazon employs an estimated 1.56m full and part time workers globally. The 110 people at Wondery who are losing their jobs constitute 0.00705% of that total workforce. But Amazon doesn’t show much mercy when it comes to shitcanning its subsidiaries. A9, Quidsi, 365 by Whole Foods: all have been axed. And most of Amazon’s high-profile subsidiaries are worked hard. MGM Studios has been put to work on a bunch of profitable dross (Red One, The Beekeeper, The Accountant 2 etc) while Twitch and Audible are run very leanly for Big Tech companies. No, there’s little time for sentimentality here.
The comparison one might be tempted to make is Jeff Bezos’s acquisition of the Washington Post. This is a private purchase — the paper is not owned by Amazon — but demonstrates the different length of leash afforded to a legacy title with soft power influence. Bezos instinctively understands the value of branding, and the Washington Post is a brand with huge clout. Wondery, meanwhile, means something to podwatchers, but it doesn’t signify anything particular to most people outside this space. True crime? Sure. Glossy production? Right. TV adaptations? Maybe. But nothing concrete, nothing that sound Madison Avenue hotshots couldn’t replicate fairly easily. And certainly a lot less than that single word: Amazon.
And this is, again, a weakness of podcasting, at a structural level. The industry has failed to create many coherent brands. Wondery looks like it will be going the way of Gimlet and Luminary — companies that created great content, but could never create any real brand value for listeners. Here in the UK, Goalhanger have done as good a job as anyone of meeting this challenge, but their brand equity is split (maybe 20:80) between Goalhanger, as a brand, and The Rest is… title format. Again, one could easily conceive of a world in which an acquisition squeezes the former out, just as it looks like Wondery will disappear, even from its celebrity-led shows. And that does make sense: why wouldn’t Armchair Expert with Dax Shepherd be marketed as an Amazon podcast? Why shouldn’t Baby, This is Keke Palmer be stamped with Amazon’s orange arrow logo? If Amazon wants to come to the table, why wouldn’t they take the seat by their place setting?
But Amazon doesn’t really give a stuff about podcasting. There is still enough value to be extracted from celebrity-led podcasts that they will continue that, for a while. It’s a relatively low cost endeavour and has natural synergy with Prime Video. But other than that, podcasting has proven an expensive and low-yield bunfight in recent years, and the battle seems to have migrated to social video without Amazon ever becoming a significant player in podland. Time for them to move on, I suspect.
But Wondery was an important last preserve of the podcast business model 1.0. It represented the idea that you would make a show with the intention of creating something mass market, global and with socio-cultural salience. How you extracted revenue from that was always a secondary concern. But as podcasting has become ever more focused on revenue, it has become more and more skittish about this type of programming.
Advertisers want to know how big an audience is, where they’re located, who they are and how they listen. They want to know this before they commit to expensive advertising. The limited series format has struggled to provide these assurances ahead of time, and so the “always on” podcast (a type of show that can offer reliable data) has predominated. Obviously, speculative media is nothing new (Disney cannot be sure how many people will go see the new Marvel movie before it commits to make it; the gamble is factored into the commissioning decision) but has always focused on direct sales. Make a movie, publish a book, record an album: then sell those to consumers. Ultimately, the number of sales will reflect a coalition of the campaign’s marketing prowess and the quality of the product. But with podcasts it’s different. Firstly, people are used to them being free and have always been far more reluctant to pay for them than other media forms. Secondly, limited series have consistently proved less good at direct revenue extraction than always-on shows, because they have to convince listeners to make a down payment against an unknown, whereas always-on listeners tend to reward familiar content with an upgrade. So both major revenue sources have shown a clear industrial preference for celebrity-led, always-on talk shows.
It is really difficult to imagine how one might get a high-quality, investigative, limited documentary podcast funded in the current climate. Look at Hysterical, one of the most acclaimed documentary podcasts of the past year, hosted by Dan Taberski (who hosted The Line podcast for AppleTV+). That show was made as a partnership between Wondery and Pineapple Street Media, probably the two companies most embedded in the concept of American prestige podcasting. In June this year, however, Pineapple Street’s owner, Audacy, announced it would close the studios. “This difficult decision aligns our resources with our core strengths and the most promising growth areas for our podcasting business,” Audacy said, via a statement. Perhaps Steve Boom was reading along, learning about how to deploy a successful corporate euphemism.
The end of Wondery is indicative of three things. Firstly, that there is no podcast brand that is too big to be disappeared by random corporate interests. Secondly, that the age of the limited series podcast is resoundingly over. And, thirdly, that Big Tech companies see challenging YouTube as the next frontier.
That means that 110 people are losing their jobs because the High Priestess has read a pattern in the clouds, and sacrifices must be lowered into the volcano. Who knows whether this will be enough to placate the fickle media Gods, but there are doubtless other oracles and augurs reading the same messages in the entrails of owls, preparing to make their own — management consultant approved — offering to the heavens.
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Writer. Media entrepreneur. London. Interested in technology and the media. Co-founder podotpods.com Email: nick@podotpods.com.
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