SiriusXM has taken Giggly Squad off Acast, and the reported price resets what a podcast is worth

SiriusXM said on 16 September that it has signed a new multi-year agreement with Giggly Squad, the comedy show hosted by Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo, and that the arrangement took effect the following day. Under it SiriusXM distributes the podcast exclusively through the SiriusXM Podcast Network and sells its advertising globally, across both the audio and the video editions of the show.

Read on its own, that is a routine signing announcement with no numbers in it. What makes it bigger is where the show came from and what it apparently cost to move it. Giggly Squad had been with Acast since 2020, and Acast renewed an exclusive multi-year sales agreement with the hosts only fourteen months ago. Trade reporting says three companies bid to take it away, and that the offers ran to nine figures.

What SiriusXM has confirmed

The confirmed part is narrow and specific. In its announcement, SiriusXM says it has exclusive distribution rights through the SiriusXM Podcast Network and exclusive global advertising sales rights across the show’s audio and video editions, and that a slate of new exclusive programming is expected to roll out in 2027. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Scott Greenstein, SiriusXM’s president and chief content officer, said in the release that Giggly Squad “has already become a real force in podcasting” and that the company was “excited to welcome them to SiriusXM”. Berner and DeSorbo said in a joint statement that they were “so excited for this next chapter” and that the show “has grown beyond anything we could have imagined”.

Practically, very little changes for the people who listen. SiriusXM’s own listener page says new episodes continue to land every Tuesday and Friday, on the SiriusXM app, on YouTube and on the open podcast apps, with an ad-free version available to subscribers through SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts.

The scale figures in the release are SiriusXM’s, not an audited third party’s: more than 150 million combined downloads, the number one TV and film podcast in America, and a 43-city sold-out live tour that included two nights at Radio City Music Hall. Our reading is that the live and merchandise side matters as much as the download count here, because it is the part of a show’s business a distributor cannot easily replicate with a licence.

The numbers nobody will put their name to

Because SiriusXM disclosed nothing, every figure in circulation comes from trade reporting and unnamed sources, and those figures do not agree. The Ankler reported on 17 September that SiriusXM, Amazon and incumbent Acast were all in the bidding, that multiple offers landed around $150 million, and that the biggest offer did not necessarily win. Other outlets have described a four-year term at roughly $35 million a year, which works out at $140 million, while one account puts the total nearer $160 million.

Treat all of that as reporting rather than fact. The spread matters less than the floor: even the lowest number puts a creator-owned two-host comedy show, with no network parent and no television franchise behind it, into the same bracket as the largest podcast deals of the past three years.

The comparison is easy to make because SiriusXM made those deals too. It signed Call Her Daddy away from Spotify in August 2024 in a multi-year agreement reported as worth up to $125 million over a little more than three years, and it took SmartLess from Amazon in January 2024 for a reported $100 million over three years. If you want a sense of what that catalog sounds like now, our pick of the best SmartLess episodes covers the run either side of the move.

The detail worth holding onto is that the largest bid reportedly lost. That points to a market in which headline value is no longer the deciding factor, and in which terms, ownership of the back catalog, video rights and the scope of future commissions decide who wins. Nobody involved has confirmed what those terms are.

What Acast lost, and why it reaches beyond one show

Acast’s position was not a thin one. When it renewed the partnership on 2 July 2025, the agreement covered global sales for the audio podcast and the YouTube simulcast, plus advertising across the hosts’ social accounts, their newsletter and their live tours. Tiffany Ashitey, Acast’s US managing director at the time, described a show that had “consistently resonated with audiences and advertisers alike” since 2020.

Fourteen months later the show is gone. The likely lesson for the rest of the industry is uncomfortable for sales houses: representing a show’s advertising, even exclusively and even across every format it publishes in, is the least defensible position in podcasting right now. A sales partner can raise a CPM. A distributor can bundle distribution, a subscription tier, video inventory and money for new programs into one offer, and then point at the total.

That suggests the next few renewal cycles will be less about who sells your ads best and more about who is willing to commission something new alongside the show. Acast, Audioboom, Libsyn and the other independents will feel that pressure first on their largest titles, because those are the ones a distributor can afford to outbid for.

Video is inside the deal, not beside it

One clause in the release deserves more attention than it will get. SiriusXM’s global sales rights cover the audio and the video editions of the show. That means one seller for the YouTube inventory and the RSS feed at the same time, rather than a podcast sales house handling the feed while the video sits under separate YouTube monetisation.

For advertisers that is the simpler buy they have been asking for. For creators it is the harder question, because handing both formats to one partner concentrates the relationship: the same company now sets the price of the audio ad, the video ad and the ad-free subscription tier. Our reading is that this is the actual product SiriusXM is buying, and the celebrity signing is the way it gets built.

The 2027 programming slate is the other half of it. SiriusXM has not said what those shows are, how many there will be or who makes them, and until it does, the most honest description is that a distribution deal has an unspecified production commitment attached.

What it means if you listen, and if you make podcasts

If you are a listener, nothing breaks. The show stays open, twice a week, on YouTube and in whichever app you already use, and the only thing behind a paywall is the ad-free version. That is now the standard shape of a nine-figure podcast deal, and it is worth noticing that exclusivity has quietly stopped meaning “you can only hear it here”.

If you make podcasts, the transferable part is ownership. Berner and DeSorbo built the audience, the tour, the book and the social following themselves, and arrived at the table owning all of it. Two friends talking is not a new format, and plenty of shows built the same way sit on any list of the podcasts that defined the medium. What has changed is that a show like that can now be auctioned.

The thing to watch over the next year is whether this holds up as a template or reads later as the top of a cycle. Podcast talent money has run hot before and cooled fast, and the 2021 wave of nine-figure signings was followed by cancellations and write-downs across the same companies. What nobody has confirmed yet is whether the advertising SiriusXM has to sell against Giggly Squad can carry a figure in this range, and that answer will not arrive until the deal is a year old.

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