Background Story: How Linn Dyveke Wilberg of NMA alumni team Lytt helps media outlets to surf the audio wave – from a small island in Norway. Just recently they launched an app for Hamburger Abendblatt.
Linn Dyveke Wilberg CEO and Co-Founder of Audio-Startup Lytt.
If that isn’t a big leap for mankind: recently, NASA received the first-ever audio recordings from Mars. All of us now can listen to “The Sound of Mars 2021” from 56 million kilometers away: a quiet noise, then a barely noticeable wind gust – that’s it.
Down here on Earth, we're used to so much more – in better quality. Right now, nothing in media is as popular as audio content. For Linn Dyveke Wilberg it’s clear: a new audio-era is on the horizon.
Linn is the CEO and co-founder of the NMA alumni Lytt - a startup that offers whitelabel audio solutions for publishers. She runs her company from a small island on the western coast of Norway, where she lives with her family. ”I could closely monitor from here how much more audio content is produced and consumed during the Corona Pandemic. This is of course a big opportunity to promote our white-label podcasting solution“, Linn says.
Good Prospects for Lytt: Audio is in everyone's Ears
At the beginning of the year, the audio-only app Clubhouse became a real hype and just now Twitter Spaces rolled out on a larger scale, supporting similar features as Clubhouse – at least here in Germany, a country where nowadays every second person listens to web radio (German study to be found here). Many people already tried to name the trend: Renaissance of Audio, Age of Voice, Audio Boom, … – just to name a few of many suggestions.
This trend witnesses what Linn believes: media companies should focus on producing audio content and they should cleverly monetize it. “We think that media companies should treat audio content the same way as written articles. They must take care of it, value it and most importantly take ownership of it”, the founder says. That’s why her startup offers a white-label solution, tested by companies like Schibsted Group and the Danish newspaper Politiken, that lets them stay on top of the distribution of their own audio content.
Hamburger Abendbaltt and Lytt co-create Podcast-App
Lytt provides publishers with customized audio apps or web players to distribute their podcasts while making some revenue from it. In Europe, most media houses now produce their own podcasts, trying to deliver their news non-linearly to the crowds. The big German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt just released a brand-new audio-app – made by Lytt. The founder of Lytt is excited: “We are very happy that a strong brand like Hamburger Abendblatt is convinced of our product and supports our mission!”
Berndt Röttger, Deputy Editor in Chief of Hamburger Abendblatt is convinced that staying in charge of their own audio content is the right step for publishers: ”If they don’t do, they would make the same mistake again: it would be like in the mid 1990s when publishers started to put their webpages online – and gave their product (news, analyses, reports etc.) to the audience and platforms like AOL, Google, Facebook for free.”
Lytt Podcast App: Curious what the solution looks like?
Go ahead and download the freshly launched Hamburger Abendblatt App powered by Lytt. And read all about the podcasting app in a recent article “Das Hamburger Abendblatt startet eigene Podcast App” of the publication [in German].
It’s very likely that most people use their smartphones to listen to the first audio from Mars. That little piece of audio content is historic, but let’s stay down to earth: every hour, creative minds are producing really useful, informative and entertaining audio pieces. And Lytt is ready to bring those to your ears.
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