Only the voice remains!

Audiya is a platform for publishing sound more simply and at higher quality — whether that sound is a podcast, an audiobook, the news, or music.

On that basis, Audiya aims to stand beside everyone who wants their voice to reach their audience.

To support content creators, Audiya focuses on two key capabilities. Alongside the technical infrastructure for proper distribution, monetization is the other capability Audiya is built around.

The path Newsha takes is sharing capacity. Different hosts, inside Iran and abroad, host the podcasts, audiobooks, media, and music of Persian-language creators. Each of those hosts can deliver ads to its own specialized audience. But the small scale of each one has made marketing and attracting ads harder. Audiya is a technical infrastructure so that different hosts can share these capacities. That same infrastructure also offers other technical services so that better-quality produced sound can reach listeners.

Monetization, on one side, helps voices last — because income gives content creators the chance to make more enduring sound. On the other side, it helps those who create economic value find their specific audience.

Ahead of us is a horizon in which, together, diverse voices will make one large orchestra.

Collaboration is the chance we give ourselves and one another to build a better world.

Audiya was built out of shared collaboration. Out of shared conversations shaped by the challenges we faced every day. With every problem, we shifted the original idea a little — until we arrived at Audiya.

One problem we had identified in Iran’s podcast market and in ad sales was that each Iranian or foreign host held only a small share of all audio files. A market of 100 million Persian speakers was spread across many hosts. That made it harder to run a truly wide commercial campaign. In other words, advertising companies cannot run a very large campaign through podcasts. Large city billboards or ads on home-video films were more attractive to advertisers than podcasts. And that meant there was not enough pull to sell Persian ads at a fair rate.

But that was not the whole story — only one of the problems. The same pattern exists for other audio products. Audiobooks, music, and media are likewise spread across many hosts.

The idea for Audiya came from that. If a platform defines its mission as sharing resources, it can solve part of the problem. When an order comes in, it can be distributed among different hosts — each hosting a share of Iranian podcasts — according to listenership.

Audiya also solved another problem. When a podcast is hosted on multiple platforms and each app hosts the file itself, a combined view of the numbers disappears. The podcaster does not know how many downloads they had last month. Worse, they have no oversight of how much the show was heard and how much advertising ran on it. Audiya can solve that too. It builds the infrastructure so a podcaster can see different playback stats in a single panel.

Then another temptation arrived. Audiya could also let creators upload and publish a podcast onto other hosts.

It got more complex when ads for listeners of Iranian apps had to differ from ads for podcatcher listeners.

There was a technical solution, and it was buildable — the thing that was built in Audiya.

Another required feature was that Audiya could receive and send its ad-playback stats via API. That kept numbers current and let the report produced by ad playback appear on whichever host placed the order. If a host brought its ads to Audiya for playback, Audiya could daily share play counts and other stats with the advertiser or the ordering host. Advertisers also needed a display panel.

Audiya could also make podcaster income more stable, because they can earn in dollars and in rials. Earning one does not block the other. Audiya does not put podcasters at a fork in the road — dollar income or rial income. Audiya has both at once.

To start, at least two partners were needed. Those two were Tehranpodcast and Newshacast. They were willing to share their advertising inventory. Each advertiser received a package that, on one side, included ad playback on podcasts hosted by Newshacast — provided those shows had agreed to rial monetization — and on the other, a package for ads on the TPod podcatcher and the Tehranpodcast site.

And it is not only those wallets. If tomorrow another host wants to join the platform, they can fund their own wallet. Then different ad companies can run the campaigns they have taken on various podcasts, each charging the podcaster’s wallet separately and transparently — and the podcaster can see clearly how much of their income came from which host or ad company.

In truth, Audiya was a technical-economic answer to a set of challenges and what-ifs.

Audiya was built out of shared collaboration. Shared conversations created this chance to work together. Amir is Newshacast’s technical director, and Tehranpodcast is Newshacast’s strategic partner. Audiya was a shared idea that took shape with the backing of Newshacast and Tehranpodcast, and with the leadership and execution of Amirhossein Ahmadi. A product that could have been a company product became, because of a belief in a larger future, an independent startup — with three co-founders: two corporate co-founders and one individual co-founder.

Audiya is built on collaboration and aims to grow on that same quality. That is why Audiya’s strategy is to shape the Persian-language audio ecosystem. An ecosystem in which podcasters, music groups and bands, audiobook publishers, and media can get their voice to their audience more effectively — and along that path, economic value-creators can address their potential customers.

On this path, Newshacast and Tehranpodcast also work to find potential voices, make room for them to grow, and help them on their way — until they again find co-founders to shape other parts of this ecosystem, and walk with them.