Good morning! Paramount and Trump yet to reach settlement over CBS News lawsuit, Kathy Warden’s Northrop Grumman invests in rocket developer startup, and the top female podcaster in the U.S. thinks you’d like true crime—even if you don’t already listen.
– Listen up. In an average week during the first three months of this year, 6.4 million Americans listened to Crime Junkie. That’s the true crime podcast hosted by Ashley Flowers, who over the past seven years has built an Indiana-based audio empire—and now has ambitions to turn it into a true media empire.
Crime Junkie‘s listener stats make it the No. 2 podcast in the U.S.—and make Flowers the nation’s top female podcaster. (Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy is No. 4.) “I’ll get Joe Rogan one day,” Flowers joked when I spoke with her backstage at one of her live shows in Seattle last month. Thousands of fans had driven hours to see Flowers in person, where she told the story of an unsolved 1987 Colorado murder and the wrongful conviction that followed. She has even mobilized her audience to take action, encouraging them to contact the state’s attorney general.
Flowers is the creative force behind her show, but the 36-year-old has also been balancing a second job as CEO of parent company Audiochuck, which has 70 employees and 20 podcasts. “I didn’t come from a media background,” says Flowers, who before launching Crime Junkie did business development for a software company. “I was just scrappy and wore so many hats.” She typically arrives at the office by 4:30 a.m. to accomplish those dual roles. The hard work has paid off with Audiochuck earning $45 million in profit last year, according to Bloomberg (Flowers credits low overhead costs in Indiana for allowing that number), and a valuation of $250 million. Flowers has published two mystery novels (the second, earlier this month) and has her own channel on SiriusXM, too, which also handles advertising for the Audiochuck podcast network.
She’s obsessed with true crime and says she remembers the facts of every case she’s ever worked on—across hundreds of podcast episodes. “It’s just human nature for us to want to make sense of things that don’t make sense,” she says. “Solving puzzles—your brain tries to fit the pieces together.”
Flowers is now bringing on a new CEO, Fortune is the first to report. Matthew Starker arrived from Endeavor Streaming, where he was chief business officer. He joins Audiochuck after a $40 million investment from the Chernin Group in February—and is tasked with bringing to life Flowers’ thesis that the audience for true crime is much bigger than even the 6.4 million who listen to Crime Junkie. Starker says the total addressable market for true crime fans worldwide is 230 million. “If you enjoy someone telling you an amazing story with edge-of-your-seat twists and turns, you’re going to like Crime Junkie,” Starker says.
Audiochuck aims to move into film and television—which prompted Flowers to bring on outside investment to help her navigate new industries. “Taking the assets and the IP that they’ve built out and expanding that into video and television, there’s just so much potential,” Starker says. Some of that will still be true crime—a TV adaptation of Crime Junkie might look something like a modernized Dateline–but it will also pursue scripted content in the mystery and thriller genres. (Under what name—Audiochuck? Crime Junkie? Flowers’ herself?—is still TBD.) “What Blumhouse is for horror, I want Audiochuck to be for mystery and thriller,” Flowers says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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