Case Study: Southern Cross Austereo achieves 5x LiSTNR reach and 20% subscriber growth with Elastic (Elasticsearch on Google Cloud)

Southern Cross Austereo amplifies LiSTNR podcasting platform reach by 5x with Elasticsearch on Google Cloud

Southern Cross Austereo’s LiSTNR is Australia’s leading digital audio and commercial podcast network — reaching 8+ million monthly listeners with 900+ podcast titles and 99 radio stations — but as its catalogue and audience grew the platform struggled with search accuracy and “No Results Found” pages that hurt discovery and retention. The team lacked in-house search expertise, which made it hard to match listener queries to content and risked losing audience during high-profile moments like the Ashes series.

SCA migrated to a managed Elasticsearch deployment on Elastic Cloud via Google Cloud and updated its CMS so the content team could add synonyms, fix misspellings and manage search directly. The change dramatically improved search relevance (virtually eliminating zero-result pages), boosted discoverability (helping amplify reach by 5x), increased subscribers by 20% to about 1.8 million, reduced pressure on DevOps, and set the stage for further personalization using vector search and generative AI.

Southern Cross Austereo

Leon Kelly

Head of Digital Technology