Why Gimlet sold to Spotify
It’s bigger than podcasts or streaming music
If you’re a podcast nerd, the news of Spotify acquiring Gimlet Media was probably the biggest news to come out of the industry since Serial blew up.
The interesting question to me is, what prompted this marriage?
This reminds me of the crucial business question: What industry are we in? This is an important question because it determines your business direction for the future.
For example, 150 years ago, railroad companies could have asked, are we in the railroad business, or are we in the transportation business?
If their answer was the latter, then they could have evolved to compete with automobile companies before the world changed and Ford and other car companies ate up all their business.
The same could be said for newspapers back in the early 2000s. Were they in the newsprint business, or in the news business?
I worked for a newspaper in the early 2000s, and their answer at the time was we’re in the newsprint business. Their response to the declining readership lost to the Internet was to create a print weekly aimed at 20-somethings. They weren’t alone in that strategy, either. All newspapers seemed to have a weekly run by younger reporters and editors.
