Mediahuis, the parent company of NRC, takes a fifty percent stake in the small podcast producer The current. The two companies want to collaborate and invest to play a greater role in the booming podcast market.
De Stroom, a start-up that has only been in existence for a year and employs seven people, will remain editorially completely independent from NRC, assures Dominic Stas, general manager of NRC Media. NRC plays with well-listened podcasts like Today and The Hague Affairs already an important role in the Dutch podcast market and has its own podcast app, NRC Audio.
The founder of De Stroom is Kees de Koning, who started the record label Top Notch in 1995. “The knowledge he has of the audio market combines well with everything Mediahuis is doing,” said Stas, who is not only a director at NRC, but is also part of Mediahuis’ management. De Stroom makes podcasts with Arie Boomsma (About routines) and the rapper Hef (Smoked sausage), which are less journalistic in nature than those of NRC.
„There is still a very large market outside NRC and The Telegraph” (which also belongs to Mediahuis), says Stas, “and that is the audio market that interests us.” The intention is that, unlike NRC, De Stroom will also make podcasts for companies and institutions, so-called Branded Content.
Commercial Operation
Both partners mainly want to work together in the commercial field. The advertising department of NRC Media will be responsible for the commercial exploitation of De Stroom. They also want to collaborate in digital development and possibly share facilities such as studios.
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The two parties do not want to say how much money Mediahuis will pay for half of De Stroom’s shares. “But it is more about the money that we are going to invest together in the future, than about what is settled about the past,” says De Koning. He emphasizes that although the podcast market has grown strongly, it is still in an early stage.
In the past few years a number of independent podcast producers have been established in the Netherlands, while newspaper publishers and broadcasters have also started making podcasts on a large scale.
De Stroom is and will not be a competitor of the podcasts of NRC, says De Koning. “NRC is a purely journalistic company, we are not. We make journalistically driven podcasts like with tech journalist Daniel Verlaan, but also a talk show like Smoked sausage. We are of course competing for the ears of the listener.”
Mediahuis’ ambitions in the audio field were also apparent last year, when NRC Media took over the radio station Sublime.
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