The subscription podcast provider Quake Media, which launched three years ago, appears to have gone dark. The company that has worked with high-profile hosts including Soledad O'Brien, Mike Huckabee, Pete Rose, Gretchen Carlson, and Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, among others. It is also being sued by former radio and podcast host Laura Ingraham. She alleges she is owed at least $919,660 from the network.
Ingraham exited PodcastOne in late-2020 after she inked a deal to distribute her show with Quake Media with a deal that paid her $550,000 in guaranteed compensation according to a lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court last week. The arrangement required Ingraham to supply Quake Media with at least 94 original episodes of her show each year.
But her suit alleges that Quake failed to meet its obligations, paying only $516,663 in the first year of Ingraham’s contract in 2021. And it says it has paid none of the guaranteed compensation ever since. In fact, when a contract extension was signed in Oct. 2022, the guarantee agreed to rose to $800,000. But Ingraham alleges it only made a single payment of $50,000 in Dec. 2022.
Despite no money coming in, Ingraham’s own production company continued to produce her twice-a-week podcast for Quake until two months ago when her contact expired. In addition to what Ingraham says she is owed, her suit also asks the court to award her "reasonable and actual attorneys' fees.”
Quake Media has not yet responded to the suit. And its website has gone dark. Its status is unknown. The company was launched in October 2020 by former ESPN journalist Mike Morrell and one-time Spanish radio syndicator Doug Rosenberg with a reported $2.5 million in seed funding. In July the company announced it had raised an additional $3.5 million in funding.
After nearly two decades in talk radio, Ingraham announced in 2018 that she was stepping away from broadcast radio and instead creating a new daily podcast in a partnership with PodcastOne. Ingraham said then that the move was not a whack at AM/FM radio but the reality of being a working mother of three and hosting a top-rated Fox News Channel nightly program.