I rarely get a WhatsApp from Luke Shipley, so when I do, I take notice.
$60m in ad revenue?
I looked into it, and yes, the Acquired guys are printing money:
• They own 100% of the business
• There is only two of them (plus an editor)
• Their costs can’t be greater than $1m per year
My research suggests they are on approx. $20m per year in revenue with $18m in profit.
I would not be surprised if Ben and David are pulling out >$5m per year from the biz
🤑
Right now they are charging between $1m-1.5m to sponsor a season (a season is six months) which would include exposure in 2 episodes.
They can do this as they’re hitting over 1 million listeners per episode and state “we have the most valuable audience in the world”.
Assuming 8 sponsors a season = 8 sponsors multiplied by 2 seasons multiplied by an average of $1.2m per sponsor = $20m.
They’ve obviously only recently got to these levels after a decade of iterating on their content creation process.
Their costs?
• Editor
• Hosting
• Salaries
• Hosting events
I can’t find a good argument against them being on 90% margins.
Rough timeline:
• 2015 - show launches
• 2018 - start monetising
• 2021 - David goes full time and they nail the format (evergreen business stories)
• 2024 - Ben goes full time
Here is the audience growth:
Assumed revenue and profit growth:
They started with analysis of successful silicon valley acquisitions, then pivoted to stories of tech companies… and most recently pivoted to stories of timeless businesses.
They also started to not share what each of them have found prior to recording… they used to. This gives real emotion during recording.
They also research for months, speak with many sources and record for 8-9 hours, initially cut that down to 3-4, then do more rounds of cuts to get it down to 2.5-3 hours.
They do single ad reads for each episode, and tie it in with the story. They are also available to go to sponsor events to give talks or to interview their CEOs. In other words, the sponsorships are more of a partnership e.g. the sponsor gets Ben and David’s endorsement.
These are essentially real partnerships with businesses they love, and think will be successful (see “What is the cashflow being used for?” section below!), it enables them to charges premium.
Now they have a big audience, every episode they create is more valuable.
This means that they have a BIG value multiplier on the effort they put into each episode, so they go hard.
In 2025, they did 3 episodes on Google, for that series, they spoke to 40 sources and each of them spent months doing research. They also get access to sources other podcasters wouldn’t be able to get, this is a competitive advantage.
VC investing, mainly into their sponsors.
Another intelligent move, the effort they put into sourcing and then closing their sponsors, they double up to use that as a pipeline for the VC fund they have seeded (Acquired Capital). Presumably with Acquired profits, the fund is $30m, I would love to know how much they put in.
Here’s the loop:
• Create great content
• Attract high calibre sponsors
• Generate big profits
• Invest those profits back into the sponsors
• Get even richer
To win in the media game you need to create better content, and it may take years of iteration to do just that.
Thanks for reading.