Wizzard Loses A Kajillion Smackers During Q4 2008
Apr 3rd, 2009 | By Elisabeth Lewin | Category: Making Money with Podcasts, Podcasting, Podcasting Networks 
Podcasting network Wizzard yesterday reported a 2008 fourth-quarter loss of $1.8 million, or 10 cents per share.
For all of 2008, the podcasting and speech technology company reported a nearly $7.7 million loss, or 23 cents per share, on revenue of $6.1 million. On the positive side, Wizzard also recently reported a record 307 million download requests during the fourth quarter of 2008, contributing to a record 1.2 billion requests throughout the past calendar year.
Another positive fact to note is that the 2008 $6.1 million revenue figure is also a record amount, and an 18% increase over their Wizzard’s 2007 totals.
CEO Chris Spencer told investors in a conference call Wednesday that the company, which went public in 2008, was “working aggressively to reach profitability.”
For the fourth quarter of 2008, revenue dipped year-over-year 6 percent to $1.4 million. (One might note that this fall in revenue coincided with a general real estate and stock market meltdown during the last several months of the calendar year.) For the total year, revenue rose 18 percent, from $5.16 million in 2007 to $6.1 million in 2008.
If you read the SEC filling it appears that they only have 533 shows on ad buys of the thousands of podcast that are hosting over there. More surprising is that they only had advertising revenues of 440k for the entire year.
This is pretty poor performance considering the number of podcasts they have access to.
I predict Wizzard dead pool by the end of the year. There is no way they can sustain these types of losses.
Jim