SiriusXM announced on Tuesday 6 October that Serialously and 10 to Life, the two true crime shows made by the American host Annie Elise, have joined the SiriusXM Podcast Network. Both had been distributed and sold by Audioboom, the London-listed company that calls itself the UK’s largest independent podcast platform. Audioboom has made no announcement about the shows. On Wednesday 14 October it reports its third quarter to shareholders.
The timing is why this is bigger than one host changing sales house. In June Audioboom’s board turned down three takeover offers on the grounds that they undervalued the business, and asked shareholders to back it as an independent company. It is also the second time in four weeks that SiriusXM has bought a top-20 show from a rival with a British sales operation, after taking Giggly Squad from Acast in September. The pattern is worth understanding whether you own Audioboom shares or make a podcast it sells.
What SiriusXM has said
SiriusXM’s own announcement gives the scale. Serialously draws 4.2 million audio downloads a month and two million monthly YouTube views, and ranks 20th among US true crime podcasts. 10 to Life adds more than 1.2 million monthly downloads and over a million YouTube views. The audience is young and female: 43 per cent aged 18 to 34, 87 per cent women. SiriusXM says it now sells six of the top 20 true crime podcasts in the United States. Podcast News Daily reports that the agreement gives SiriusXM exclusive global advertising sales across both shows.
The move is already visible in the plumbing. The Serialously RSS feed that Audioboom hosted now redirects to Simplecast, the hosting platform SiriusXM owns, when checked on Monday morning. For listeners that means nothing to do: apps follow the redirect and the next episode arrives as usual, with the ads sold by a different company.
Both shows are recent Audioboom successes. Serialously was listed among the contracts Audioboom renewed in its July 2024 half-year report. 10 to Life only became an audio podcast a year ago: Audioboom launched it on 7 October 2025 as a companion to the YouTube channel, which at that point had 1.5 million subscribers. Twelve months on, both have gone.
What it means for Audioboom’s numbers
Audioboom’s last full set of figures, the half-year report of 15 July, showed revenue of $45.7 million, up 30 per cent, adjusted EBITDA of $3.2 million, up 80 per cent, and 183 million monthly downloads and video views across the network in the second quarter. The company said it had already booked more than $81 million of revenue for 2026, more than it made in the whole of 2025, and held $5.4 million of net cash.
Set the two shows against that. Their combined 5.4 million monthly audio downloads are, by our arithmetic, about three per cent of Audioboom’s monthly volume. That probably understates the revenue effect: true crime carries some of the highest advertising rates in podcasting, and a show with a young, largely female audience is exactly what brand buyers pay a premium for. Nobody outside the two companies knows the revenue share, and Audioboom has not updated its guidance.
The context that matters more is the strategic review that ended on 8 June. Audioboom said then that three parties had made indicative cash offers, each above the 540p share price before the review was launched in October 2025, and that the board had rejected them all because they “undervalue the Company and its prospects”. Our reading is that this makes Wednesday’s update a test of that judgement: having asked shareholders to trust the independent plan, the board now has to explain a visible loss of inventory, or show it has already replaced it.
Chief executive Stuart Last and finance director Brad Clarke will present the quarter live at 3pm on Wednesday on the Investor Meet Company platform, according to the notice Audioboom issued on Monday. Questions can be submitted in advance. Expect the booked revenue figure and any comment on creator churn to be the numbers people read first.
Why this matters in the UK
Audioboom has built its British position quickly. It bought Adelicious in 2025, signed RedHanded from Wondery in February 2026, and said then that the combination made it the UK’s largest independent podcasting platform. Its network carries No Such Thing As A Fish, Beyond the Grid, the official Formula 1 podcast, The Cycling Podcast and True Crime Obsessed. For a UK creator, Audioboom is one of a handful of realistic routes to American advertising money without signing with an American company.
That is the exposed flank. SiriusXM signed Giggly Squad with a four-year guarantee that trade reports put at around $140 million, and it is now using the same model, exclusive global ad sales with distribution on every platform, to pick off the top of the true crime chart. Acast lost Giggly Squad; Audioboom has lost Annie Elise. Our reading is that the British sales houses are not losing on service or technology. They are losing on the size of cheque a satellite radio company can write, and that will not change by Christmas.
The money behind the buying spree
Money is already concentrating at the top of the market. Magellan AI’s second-quarter benchmark showed podcast advertising spend grew 23 per cent while the brands doing the buying leaned further towards established shows. A guarantee big enough to move a host is only rational if the buyer believes the top 20 will keep taking a larger share of that spend. SiriusXM appears to believe it.
There is a British counter-move in plain sight. Goalhanger said on 2 October that it will bring all of its advertising sales in-house from January 2027, on the logic that a network with The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is History no longer needs a middleman. That is the opposite answer to the same question: if the big shows are the only ones worth paying for, the big shows will eventually sell themselves.
What changes for listeners, and what to watch
For listeners, the practical change is small. Serialously and 10 to Life stay on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and the rest. The ads will come from SiriusXM’s advertisers and, on past form, there will be more video. If you want to see where British listening actually sits, the UK’s 25 biggest podcasts are the place to start; the shows changing hands this month are American ones with British sales teams behind them.
What to watch on Wednesday is simple. Whether Audioboom names the loss, whether the booked revenue number moves, and whether it has signed anything since July that fills the gap. The thing to watch after that is harder: whether another of its top shows takes a call from New York. We would not assume the SiriusXM buying spree is over, and we doubt Audioboom does either.
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