Mark your calendar for Mediaweek, October 29-30 in New York City. We’ll unpack the biggest shifts shaping the future of media—from tv to retail media to tech—and how marketers can prep to stay ahead. Register with early-bird rates before sale ends!
Crooked Media, home to podcast Pod Save America, and language learning platform Duolingo are teaming up to launch a new podcast on Nov.15 for language lovers, an eight-episode weekly series called Radiolingo.
Radiolingo will cover all things linguistics, from curse words to the phenomenon of subbing and dubbing different languages, according to Crooked Media executive vice president Sandy Girard. The podcast will be hosted by journalist Ahmed Ali Akbar, former host of Buzzfeed’s See Something Say Something, a show centered on the Muslim American experience.
“There’s a lot that linguistics, as a discipline, can teach us about the human experience and how bias plays into it and how we’re all connected also through language,” Akbar told Adweek.
Podcast ad revenue continues to grow faster than the total internet advertising revenue market at 72% year-over-year, compared to 35% year-over-year, per Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). But it’s from a smaller base. Further, concerns about a potential recession have some wondering how buoyant podcast ad revenue will remain.
One episode of Radiolingo will feature a couple from TLC’s reality show 90 Day Fiancé talking about the cultural challenges of being in an intimate relationship and trying to understand what your partner is trying to convey.
Duolingo isn’t new to podcasts. In 2021, its Duolingo Spanish podcast won a Webby Award for best Science and Education podcast. Across its handful of podcasts, Duolingo has 4 million monthly listens, the company said, and most of these are subscribers to the platform, according to Shey. Duolingo has 49.5 million monthly active users and 7% are paid subscribers.
“Our tagline is that Radiolingo is about how language shapes our world, and how our world shapes language,” said Duolingo vice president and head of studios and content Tim Shey. “It’s really just an opportunity for us to dive headlong into all the interesting topics around language and culture and science that we actually talk about here in the office a lot, but never really get to talk about in this much detail or this much depth.”
There are no plans to include ads from other brands in its first season, Shey told Adweek. But it does plan to amplify the podcast across Crooked and Duolingo’s suite of shows. A dynamically inserted host-read ad from Akbar will also run in shows.
Previously, Crooked Media has worked with studios like Dustlight and Pineapple Street Studios for podcast series like Wind of Change. But this partnership with Duolingo will be the first branded podcast for the media company.
In March, Crooked signed a multiyear ad sales deal with audio giant SiriusXM Media, giving SXM Media, the advertising-sales arm of Sirius XM Holdings, exclusive global ad sales rights to Crooked Media’s lineup of podcasts.
The year-long production was more of a collaborative effort rather than a brand stickering its name to content, using Duolingo’s team of linguistic experts and Crooked’s production efforts, Girard told Adweek.
“Some of the consumer perceptions might be like, no one likes to feel like they’re listening to spon-con… that’s what’s so exciting about our partnership with Duo, we really play into each other’s strengths,” Girard added.
