SiriusXM paid $325M for Stitcher — a quarter of staff and its biggest shows left

In 2020 SiriusXM bought Stitcher — parent of the beloved comedy network Earwolf — from E.W. Scripps in a deal worth up to $325 million. By The Verge's count a year and a half later, more than a quarter of Stitcher's roughly 145 employees had left, including CEO Erik Diehn, CRO Sarah van Mosel, CFO David Murray and CTO Peter deVroede. Shows left too: Hollywood Handbook went independent on Patreon, Homophilia moved to World of Wonder, and Yo, Is This Racist? left over lack of support — enough that the network's fan subreddit filled with threads asking what happened.

The integration fumbled from the start. Stitcher employees first heard about the acquisition through press reports; management delayed all-hands meetings and then confirmed the sale with little detail. Inside SiriusXM, former employees said, there was no fully baked podcasting plan — 'Yeah, let's do all that' was the approach to whether podcasting would be an ad business or a subscription one. New arrivals had to explain basics ('they don't understand the difference between radio and podcasts').

Radio-grade controls chafed: SiriusXM at times required pre-approval of host-read ad audio, imposed minimum ad spends that strained cross-promotion partners, and told Stitcher's marketers never to spend another dime advertising on Spotify. Asked in an HR survey about diversity concerns, employees said they were told the company couldn't have diversity issues because it employed a female CEO. SiriusXM disputed several accounts, saying pre-approval is 'not our policy', that marketing may buy ads through Spotify's Megaphone, and that a name change for Yo, Is This Racist? was never discussed.

The rot predated the deal: a month before it closed, more than 40 Earwolf hosts and creators — including Chris Gethard, Jason Mantzoukas and Nicole Byer — signed a letter saying Stitcher's ad-sales model 'actively penalizes any medium or smaller shows', with an all-white sales team leaving hosts of color especially under-served. SiriusXM says it extended offers to everyone at closing and committed extra revenue guarantees and six figures in marketing to smaller shows, but by March 2022 the network's talent was still bleeding.

Over a quarter of Stitcher's ~145 staff left, including the CEO, CRO, CFO and CTO; shows like Hollywood Handbook and Yo, Is This Racist? went independent

SiriusXM paid $325M for expertise and community, then treated the experts as people who 'don't really understand how any of this works'.

Employees learned of the acquisition from the press, seeding mistrust before day one.

Radio-grade controls — pre-approved ad audio, minimum spends, a Spotify ad ban — broke the informal mechanics podcast networks ran on.

The ad-sales model had already alienated mid-sized hosts before the deal, so the acquisition inherited a mutiny and made it worse.

Buying a creative community and running it like a radio division wastes the premium you paid: the talent was the asset, and it could walk.

By March 2022 the departures were still mounting and fans were openly asking what was wrong. 'You either have to be very small or very big,' one person familiar with Stitcher's strategy told The Verge. 'It's really hard to exist in the middle — and we were choosing to go big.'