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“Spotify just hasn’t succeeded in leveraging the consumption of podcasts,” says Alice Enders at Enders Analysis. “It hasn’t had a meaningful impact – in fact, it’s had a highly detrimental impact on their bottom line.”

Spotify insists podcasts have helped to sustain revenues on its ad-supported tier. Yet advertising made up just 11pc of the company’s overall revenue in the first quarter. Losses at the start of the year narrowed from the previous three months, but still stood at a hefty €156m.



As Enders puts it, the podcast push has “spectacularly failed to deliver the anticipated financial rewards to shareholders”.

“Podcasts don’t really travel that well, ” says Enders. “It’s a cultural product. Joe Rogan is not a big star here, but he’s a big star in the US. He had Elon Musk on and they were smoking dope… it’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t really land a lot of punches here.”

Media analyst Claire Enders said talks were “very complicated at present”, adding that, as each organisation takes its own approach, a single commercial arrangement for media groups was unlikely and could be counter productive. 

Enders added: “Chatbots won’t be credible tools if they are literally trained primarily on the sewers of misogyny and racism that make up most of open, accessible text.”

For companies with progressive values, the context of where their advertisements appear matters greatly, and this context includes other advertisers in the space, according to Jamie MacEwan, the senior media analyst at Enders Analysis.

“I could see this being a sell to advertisers with high standards for context who prioritize publications that walk the walk and build a strong connection with their readers based on shared values,” MacEwan said.

Karen Egan of Enders Analysis, however, believes there are good reasons to allow the merger: "The negative financial spiral of [Three] and, to a lesser extent, Vodafone, indicates that the market is too crowded. Compared to 2015, the revenues of mobile operators , in real value, are down 20%," she underlines.

Karen Egan, an analyst at Enders Analysis, added the regulator had been “rather hawkish” in recent months, pointing to its decision to block Microsoft’s $69bn (£54bn) takeover of Call of Duty video games maker Activision.

Karen Egan, head of mobile at Enders Analysis, said: “They are certainly making a strong case for merger approval, focusing on the benefits of the quality of a combined network, and wanting to emphasise that they will continue to offer a range of tariffs, including social tariffs.

“We think that there is a very strong case for approval with traffic up tenfold since the last mobile merger was proposed and revenues down by 5 per cent over the same time. The economics of sub-scale nationwide operators is not viable any more. Whether the CMA will be convinced is another thing. It is going to be a long and tortuous road to approval, taking around 12 to 18 months.”