Sweden's Acast is buying something it had only partly built for itself over the years: an American team that can sell a single advertising campaign across audio, video, social media and newsletters.
Structure of the payment
Acast, an advertising and hosting company for podcasts listed on Nasdaq Stockholm, announced on 11 August 2026 the acquisition of the Austin studio Backyard Ventures. For the creator network it will pay $16 million in cash at closing and a further $4 million in shares. Backyard will receive 1,005,671 new shares on deferred payment, half after two years and half after three, which dilutes existing shareholders by about 0.6%.
Deferred payment keeps the sellers at the table. Backyard's team has a reason to stay and integrate, not to collect and leave.
The roster and its numbers
Backyard brings together more than 200 creators and in 2025 reported revenue of $16.1 million, with 65% annual growth since 2023 and an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 12%. Its catalogue includes shows such as Piers Morgan's Uncensored, The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday, Deep Questions by Cal Newport and Solved by Mark Manson.
Those numbers explain why Acast is paying. The roster generates 11.5 million listens a month, 46 million concurrent views and 230 million monthly views on YouTube, and reaches 35.5 million newsletter subscribers. At about 1.2 times annual revenue and roughly ten times EBITDA, this is a bet on integration, not on an immediate margin.
One package across formats
Acast is not buying listenership. It is buying a team that for years sold advertising in all these channels at once. “This is the future of podcast monetization, and we're building it now,” said CEO Greg Glenday, explaining the logic of the deal. Backyard brings people who put together a sales offer as a single package. Acast adds ad technology, programmatic demand and global reach, which a smaller network could not build on its own.
For a brand that is buying a podcast campaign today, this changes the offer. Instead of advertising only in audio, it receives a package in which one deal covers host-read audio, mid-roll video on YouTube, a newsletter placement and a social media clip. Acast has so far been buying that capability only piece by piece.
A European platform in the US market
Austin gives Acast a physical base in the American market, from which it had mainly sold remotely, and brings it closer to the budgets it competes for with Spotify and iHeartMedia. The move has a European dimension that gets lost in the American headlines. A European platform is buying American expertise in selling across formats and a US base, not the other way round.
It fits a broader wave in which podcast networks and creator agencies are becoming companies with their own catalogues, sales teams and audience data. Hosting and distributing episodes is no longer enough. The value of the podcast business is shifting from hosting to selling attention across formats.
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