Glassbox Media is “like a modern-day record company” says CEO David Segura

CEO and co-founder of Glassbox Media, David Segura is an accomplished entrepreneur and investor who is now immersed in the podcasting space.

His company is growing rapidly, and he took time out to tell us about it, and his vision to help podcasters scale and grow.

Growing up in El Paso Texas, David knew he wanted the big city life, so went to study in Chicago. He couldn’t get used to the cold climate there so moved to LA where he began working in the media, learning the content creation process and working with talent.

When things didn’t work out for the company he was working for, David set up his own, Giant Media. It was an early video advertising exchange and network.

Clients included Toyota, American Express, L’Oreal, and Dollar Shave Club. Launched in 2009, Giant Media was successfully acquired in 2014 by Adknowledge, an AdTech platform funded by TPG, JMI, and Nokia.

Following the sale, David moved to New York where he worked for two years before deciding to become a startup investor, which he did for around four years.

“Eventually I got that itch again, I decided I didn’t want to be a professional investor, so I decided to rebuild something,” David said. “In the middle of the pandemic in 2021, we got a lot of the people that used to work with us at Giant Media back together and amazing new people and built Glassbox Media, a new company in the podcast space.”

David describes the company as being like a modern-day record label which is looking for a certain type of podcaster they can sign and grow.

“We’re looking for folks who typically have at least a quarter of a million listeners, frequently are on the higher end of a million listens a month,” he says. “What we work to do is leverage our technology and our know-how, to figure out how to bring them brand advertising relationships, how do we scale them – grow the audience.

“What I think is unique to us too, is just like, very much our inspiration – people like David Geffen, Clive Davis – folks like that, who actually invest in creators for a minority share in their IP, their catalogue, and then will work tirelessly to do adaptations with them.

“That’s how we think about podcasting – we love podcasts and audio but think it’s more about building a media franchise and helping them make the most of their opportunity as creators.”

Since raising capital and launching in 2021 the Glassbox Media is now at break-even point and continues to grow even though there are some big players in this space.

David points out that they are not trying to compete with the likes of Spotify, which is a distribution business – Glassbox isn’t trying to create a platform for listening, in fact its distribution of consumption happens on Apple and Spotify who can make money out of them.

As with record companies, the big guys can always steal the better talent from the small guys, and David recognises it’s the same in podcasting.

“We had signed this podcast called Going West, an amazing podcast focusing on True Crime with around 40,000 monthly listeners. Less than six months later, mostly due to our hard work, they ended up getting to three million monthly listeners.

“When that happened, they signed with a major talent agency, who got a deal for them which was life changing, but I reminded them we had investors, we had a contract, we weren’t sure we could release them.

“We eventually came to something that worked really well for all parties which was a win, win, win and I told our team, and some of our shareholders said, it’s part of our model. We’re going to nurture folks but if someone does end up with an opportunity that we’re not going to match, we should let them go.”

So far, they have signed up 80 podcasts which collectively reaches around 12 million monthly listeners. Rather than concentrating on a particular category such as True Crime, they continue the business model of looking for podcasters who have built a substantial franchise but still need help to scale.

Recently, there’s been reports that podcasting has reached its peak and may even be in decline, but David doesn’t agree.

“We think that’s been a bit exaggerated,” he says. “We think about things like the recession, that has certainly had an impact, but it impacts this space a lot less.

“Advertisers like this space and there’s a lot of companies that haven’t entered it yet, so we believe there’s a lot of growth to be had. And of course, the greater economy, there’s a lot of opportunities that are related or derivative of these podcasts, so we think the sky’s the limit and the numbers are still there,” he adds.

David also believes more podcasts will have a second life with the likes of video, TV or books. He says that brand advertisers still see social as a main stay for them. Although they’ve been surprised by the growth of platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram are still a must buy, but it’s getting more expensive, and ROI is going down.

This is why he believes advertisers are choosing new platforms like podcasting and audio because they’re chasing ROI that’s been competed away, mainly by Google and Facebook.

Although his company is relatively new and based in New York, David says it has an international footprint – especially in the UK where they are continuing to make a concerted effort to sign more podcasters.

“We’ve had success signing people in major markets like London, New York and LA but we’ve continued to sign folks from middle markets and small cities who may need more support,” he says and adds: “We’ve signed a cluster of podcasters in Bristol, so we love the UK and we’re going to continue to invest very heavily there.”

You can find out more at the Glassbox Media website.