Kevin Dede: Okay. But I guess — I apologize, Rob, but I guess the ones that you’re targeting are discounted because they don’t have that sophisticated back-end and access, and maybe that’s where I heard the 1 time revenue number that you threw out.
Rob Ellin: Yes. These are businesses that don’t have any technology, right? They have some creators on the platform — some amazing creators on the platform, but they don’t have it. The second thing that’s happened is the market’s collapse, right? There is no venture capital money or private equity money going into these because they’re too small right for the focus — for people to focus on it, right? And so like all industries, when it has that run up, you’re going to have this little break that is going to be anywhere from nine months to two years. It’s just a fantastic opportunity. The pipeline of acquisitions as well as the pipeline of just creators who are going to leave the bigger platforms because they’re just not meaningful enough to them where they’re so meaningful to us, right, because we’re a hands-on white-glove relationship with our creators, it’s just a — it’s a very unique opportunity right now.
We have over 100 pipes — in the pipeline right now over 100 podcasts alone, yet acquiring businesses to acquire podcasts that are becoming free agents.
Kevin Dede: Can you talk a little bit about how the integration between PodcastOne and Slacker has reflected on your membership growth?
Rob Ellin: Yes. I mean, just to start with, just think about — and I apologize, we’re always going to talk about this amazing relationship with Tesla that’s now going on 10 years. But for the first time ever, we now have over 100 podcasts inside of Tesla cars, right? So, it’s a whole new revenue stream that comes through, right, our combination across it, right? When we did Adam Carolla’s first show, we surprised him and put I think it was two or three of his favorite artists on to his live show, and we had over 1 million people watching. So the combination of music and pop culture and combining across podcasting and music is obviously very powerful. And both keeping new subscribers as well as growing new subscribers, and we’re really in the infancy stage of that, right?
It took time to consolidate. This was hard with COVID, right? We’ve just gotten these teams together. And I couldn’t be happy the relationship between Brad and Kit is so powerful. The relationship between our tech teams and our media has come together. And I think this is a year that we really have an opportunity to knock the cover off the ball and continue to grow with the rapid and record-breaking paces both sponsorship as well as membership.
Kevin Dede: Do you expect to continue that trend of integrating podcast content into Slacker?
Rob Ellin: Absolutely.
Kevin Dede: With a new acquisition…
Rob Ellin: Yes, absolutely. I mean just — again, we’re a creator-first platform, right? The more original program we put on, right, the stronger our offering is. And as I articulated on the call, we’re the lowest cost provider. So we’re one-third of the price of our competitors. In some cases, we’re one-tenth of the price, as you know, with Sirius Radio. So we’re an average of under $3.5 a month. And the reason we can do that is because we have so much original programming. The more original program we come on, the better margins we’re going to have. The more revenue streams that we can drive from the same piece of content, right, the more money we can make. When we see that Adam Carolla and we go from, right, he is a — he started as a radio guy, radio to podcasting to pay-per-view, right, now add into that, and merchandising.
