NEW YORK & LOS ANGELES—Fox has announced that its newly established Fox Audio Network has inked a comprehensive advertising and distribution deal with Megaphone, a Spotify company as the exclusive hosting platform for their growing slate.
The Fox Audio Network brings together all of Fox’s news, sports, and entertainment podcasts and is part of a push by Fox to expand its already considerable podcast operations in the rapidly growing podcast market.
“The establishment of the Fox Audio Network provides unique opportunities for advertisers to reach a broad audience of our loyal podcast listeners across a diverse range of programming genres from our entire portfolio,” said Dan Realson, senior vice president, digital ad sales, Fox News Media. “Podcasts continue to be a popular and rapidly growing medium and we’re excited to collaborate with Spotify’s Megaphone to bring this opportunity directly to the advertising marketplace.”
Fox Audio Network advertising will be managed by the Fox Ad Sales team with additional inventory being sold through the Spotify Audience Network.
Megaphone, a major podcast publishing platform owned by Spotify, will help Fox Audio Network monetize, measure, and grow Fox’s podcast content and audiences with its publishing and monetization tools. Megaphone manages more than twice the number of the top 200 shows than the next largest podcasting platform.
The rapidly expanding Fox Audio Network portfolio features over forty Fox News podcasts, including “The Fox News Radio Hourly Newscast,” “Bret Baier’s All-Star Panel,” “The Will Cain Podcast,” “The Untold Story with Martha MacCallum” and “The Five Podcast,” which collectively delivered nearly 180 million unique downloads and 29.9 million unique listeners in 2021, up 18% and 15% respectively from the prior year and a record high.
A new addition to the Fox News podcast slate, “The Fox Business Tax Tips Podcast” debuted on March 2.
Next up from Fox Sports podcasts, is the new “What’s Wright with Nick Wright,” featuring the veteran host of Fox Sports’ morning show “First Things First,” which will debut March 15.
The lineup of Fox Sports podcasts saw over 60 million downloads in 2021, led by “Club Shay Shay,” hosted by Shannon Sharpe, which was up 270% YOY and ranked as the #2 podcast in U.S. Sports on Apple Podcasts.
Other new and upcoming Fox Audio Network offerings include “It’s Tricky with Raquel Harper,” featuring longtime host and news producer Raquel Harper interviewing the most newsworthy names in black culture from TMZ and “Outkick The Show with Clay Travis” and “Outkick 360,” which bring Outkick’s signature fearless and unique voice to the intersection of sports, politics and entertainment. “Wesley,” a serialized podcast narrated and directed by Tom Rinaldi will debut in April from Fox Sports followed by the Fox Weather podcast later this year.
