A software update by Apple turned down the volume at Audioboom last year, with the podcast platform yesterday spelling out the effects of the change on its download numbers.

In a trading update, the London-listed company said it had made revenue of $19.2 million in the last three months of 2023, up 37 per cent on the previous quarter and 5 per cent year-on-year. However, it is expected to make only $65 million in revenue for the entire year, compared with $74.9 million the year before. It also revealed an underlying earnings loss of $1.5 million in 2023, down from a $3.6 million underlying earnings profit in the previous year.

The announcement wiped 10 per cent, or 32½p, of Audioboom’s shares, which closed on 292½p last night.

The company, founded in 2009 and floated in 2014, is the fifth largest podcast publisher in the United States and produces shows such as Sue Perkins: An Hour or So With…, Crime Weekly and Dead Man Talking. Nicholas Candy, 50, the property tycoon, owns almost 15 per cent of the business through his investment vehicle Candy Ventures.

Audioboom blamed Apple’s iOS17 update — which was released in September and which removed the auto-downloading of back-catalogue episodes through the Apple podcast app — for lowering monthly download numbers to an average of 110.1 million. However, it said things had been looking up towards the end of the year as the average revenue per 1,000 downloads increased in the last quarter and as the business returned to an underlying earnings profit of $200,000, compared with a $1.9 million loss in the previous quarter.

Stuart Last, the chief executive, said: “I am buoyed by a more positive sentiment in the advertising industry, with brands making strong budget commitments during the upfronts booking season, resulting in us contracting more than $47 million of revenue for 2024 through advance bookings.”

In 2022, Audioboom blamed an almost 20 per cent revenue decline on a poor advertising market and the loss of Morbid, a popular true crime podcast, to Wondery, a rival American network.