Why SCA’s Financial Result SUCKS
Southern Cross Austereo finally turned a profit on its LISTNR podcast app.
$100K EBITDA off $22M in revenues, after spending over $70M in capex alone on the platform in the past four years.
That’s a margin of just 0.4%.
On top of that, they have ANNUAL non-revenue related expenses of $14M, mostly for the maintenance of the LISTNR platform.
With a $30 per CPM, and 2 ads per podcast, SCA needs 233M annual downloads per year just to cover this maintenance cost.
And according to Triton Digital, their entire network of podcasts generates 20M average downloads per month, or 240M per year, which basically covers just the maintenance costs on LISTNR.
And then there’s the opex cost… talent, production, marketing, and monetisation expenses which numbers in the tens of millions. 😵💫
As UFC fighter Georges St Pierre once said… “I am not impressed with your performance”.
In the evolving landscape of media, where AI is increasingly playing a central role in driving never-before-seen efficiencies — we’re talking margins of 80% or more, SCA’s result is far from impressive.
It’s more evidence of corporate bloat in legacy media and a disconnect from reality.
It’s why independent players and creators, who build AI-first companies on a blank canvas, are increasingly capturing a greater percentage of profits.
They can build super lean business models from day one, without the legacy overhead of hundreds of staff, office space, legacy infrastructure, relationships, office politics, and corporate regulators and shareholders watching their every move.
They don’t need to generate hundreds of millions just to break-even on maintenance — they get to profitability early, and inexpensively.
Sure, there’s an argument to be made for SCA’s top-line listener growth, and cutting costs over time, but that assumes that the rest of the market stands still, that AI won’t fundamentally shift the media landscape, and that people aren’t increasingly leaving legacy media players for independents — which they are.
I mean, imagine spending $70M over four years on capex — EXCLUDING your significant talent, production and marketing expenses — to make $100K.
I’ve made more from passive affiliate ads.
Not impressed.
