The story
Liberated Syndication (shortened to Libsyn) was founded as WebMayhem, which was incorporated in Pittsburgh by students at the University of Pittsburgh David J. Chekan, Matthew T. Hoopes, Martin Mulligan, and David Mansueto. They established the company as Emayhem in 1998, as an art collective / publishing platform created for Pittsburgh artists and musicians to share their work online. They morphed that business into a web design firm called Webmayhem in 2000 and in 2004, they started the Emayhem Radio Podcast and created their first RSS feed. In an effort to save money, Mansueto leased some cheaper servers and laced them together, effectively creating a content delivery network (CDN). This CDN would become the first podcast hosting platform, allowing independent creators to upload media and syndicate it.
The founders named this new venture “Liberated Syndication” with the goal of allowing creators the freedom to have their voices distributed and heard everywhere. At around this time, they registered libsyn.com and libsyn.org.
Some of the early high-profile podcasting clients of the service included National Public Radio, Marc Maron, Senator Barack Obama, National Geographic, and Grammar Girl.
When Marc Maron interviewed President Barack Obama on his podcast WTF with Marc Maron in 2015, it was the first podcast episode ever to have more than 1 million downloads within the first 24 hours of its release.
Libsyn also served as an early host for video, Tikibar TV, making them the first, and still one of few podcast hosting companies that support video distribution. The company today supports distribution to YouTube.
In 2006, Wizzard Software Corporation acquired Libsyn — creating Wizzard Media. In 2012, Wizzard Software Corporation merged with Digital Entertainment International. In 2016, Libsyn was spun-off as an independent, public company.
Libsyn delivered more than 4 billion downloads for the Joe Rogan podcast — the first podcast to have over 1 billion downloads.
The company also delivered more than 1 billion downloads for the Dave Ramsey Show. Libsyn is the only host to have two different podcasts deliver more than 1 billion downloads from its servers.
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In 2020, Libsyn earned revenue of $25.8 million, nearly all of which was derived from the Company’s hosting business. In 2021, increased revenue by 63% to $42.1 million, which included approximately 37% from advertising sales. In 2022, Libsyn announced unaudited revenue to $58.7 million, including over 57% from advertising.
From Wikipedia’s article on Libsyn, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4