Why Audioboom Is More Than YouTube

March 11, 2015 - PRLog -- The status quo for emerging spoken audio platform from the United Kingdom can be considered laudable. Audioboom (LSE: BOOM) has barely spent half a decade in the industry and here it is now, publicly held, thriving, and following through on its promise to disrupt its niche.

What’s more indubitable about the latest social media brand is that its future looks bright—really bright, because it is beyond the fads once dictated by, say, Pinterest or StumbleUpon. It has created its own brand of trend, and seamlessly turned it into a lucrative niche.

Nobody took Audioboom seriously—or at least when it was tenfold smaller than it still-minuscule size now. It started out with plucky proclamations such as “disrupting the radio industry” (which they toned down to ‘reinventing radio,’ perhaps after realizing that it is indeed unfeasible) and ”YouTube of audio.”

The latter invites guffaw, capitalizing on someone else’s success. Though it was practiced by many successful brands such as Showtime on HBO (circa 1987), it isn’t really praiseworthy of a stratagem. But Audioboom proved all its naysayers wrong. With a current share price of 9.6p and a market value of £50million, who would say that Audioboom is just a fad?

Perhaps Audioboom was successful in utilizing whatever that made YouTube a successful online brand. In particular, using the tagline “YouTube of audio” is their own way of saying that they could be the go-to site of anybody who’s looking for content that is not video.

By no means has Audioboom shared the success YouTube already achieved in its nascent years. The video website was less than two years old when it was acquired for $1.65 billion nine years ago. Audioboom is already on its sixth year of being a corporation, and comparing its share and market price to other social media giants would make it worthy of being called small.

Moreover, Audioboom is not like YouTube because it was already publicly listed at a pre-revenue age, which is indeed a difficult thing to accomplish. Audioboom, unlike YouTube that became really big after the Google acquisition, capitalized only on what it believed it can do to its future brand partners, which is by simply clinging to spoken-word audio alone. In 2014, Audioboom was heralded as the only quoted social media company on AIM, a feat that sent alarm and excitement to both emerging and giant emerging online brands on the market.

It was the start of everything big for Audioboom
Since then, everyone saw Audioboom’s continuous partnerships with giant brands in and outside the United Kingdom. A quick glance at its current roster of collaborators would say it all: CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Vauxhall, Sky Sports, Audible, established football, rugby, and soccer clubs, radio and podcast networks, advertising firms—name it. With this immensity the company conceded that they may not be the “YouTube of audio” but instead the “Netflix of audio.”

Without borrowing brand reputation from YouTube and Netflix, Audioboom is still capable of making a brand for itself. Now, it is popularly known as the UK company that braved an unpopular segment and transformed it into one, big important niche.

The idea: Record a minute or two of a spoken-word content—a short interview from a chat show, an extracted audio conversation from a TV program, a direct phone recording of a voice, and so on—and disseminate it through various websites, especially social media networks. The one that could speak of its efficacy are the string of aforesaid gigantic companies and Audioboom’s soaring market price. Yes, giant brands bought the idea, and marketing through Audioboom is the newest thing today in the online advertising segment.

Now, the spoken-word audio company has tapped a representative that is very in keeping with its brand: Russell Brand. With the intelligent, witty comedian and social campaigner leading its arsenal of broadcasters, Audioboom clearly shows that it is serious to take over the online world. Nobody knows what Brand’s contract price is, but it sure says a lot about the company’s sincerity, as well as its willingness to spend millions (possibly) to enter the social media competition.

Hence, direct competitors (SoundCloud, Spotify) and indirect, future competitors (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), Audioboom says it all: beware of emerging companies.