Besides the recent school shootings, one of the biggest news to hit the US was the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon. The tragedy, which took the lives of three people and injured more than 260 others on April 15, 2013, was newspaper headlines for days.

In minutes after the bombs that Chechen brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsamaev planted exploded at 2:49 pm EDT, Guardian reporters and other journalists who were covering the marathon informed the world of the tragedy that hit the marathon.

The Guardian journalists uploaded their audio report to the Audioboom platform and tweeted the link to their audio reports. Their reports got over 400,000 listens in 24 hours, according to a report by Arden Partners, which made a buy recommendation for Audioboom Group PLC (LSE: BOOM.L).

Audioboom has been called the YouTube of radio, referring to the most popular video-sharing site on the Internet that attracts millions of viewers everyday and revolutionised video viewing and sharing globally.

Its SaaS content platform is hosted by Amazon and created using the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on rails open source framework, considered well-suited to the development of agile, scalable web applications.

It is made up of modules that capture audio and allow it to be published on channels of content providers, inserted advertising on pre and post listen and publish links to the content in channels such as the Web site of the content provide, Twitter or Facebook feeds and provides analysis and reporting of the audience the content reaches.

The Arden report noted that the length of the audio content posted using the platform usually is just more than two minutes, often an interview of a topical news story, celebrity or athlete.

On the other hand, the typical user spends 18 minutes listening to the content per visit, higher than the level of engagement in other forms of social media.

Among the users of the Audioboom platform are news organisations such as BBC, Telegraph, Guardian, Le Monde and The Washington Post; sports channels such as Sky Sports News, talkSport, AFL and ESPN; and entertainment sites such as NME, Empire, Kerrang and Comedy Central.

The content providers have several options on how they publish and promote their content such as embedding it on their Web site, spread through the Audioboom Web site and app, or both. They can also opt for their own branded channel on the Audioboom platform for a fee, which is what BBC did.

The British news broadcast has over 60 such channels. For example, it has a specific channel to cover its Today programme and another for 5live.

As of May 2014, Audioboom has over 800 content providers, with 300 added monthly.

More content providers are convinced of the benefits of using the Audioboom platform because it helps widen their audience base, saves them money if they would develop, host and update their own platform and the potential to monetise their content by selling advertising on their Web site or a revenue-sharing deal with Audioboom if published on the London-based company's Web site and app, the report said.

From the initial 19 channels during the platform's launch in March 2013, Audioboom currently has about 2,000 content channels, disclosed Rob Proctor, CEO of Audioboom, which so far has 2.5 million registered users and 12 to 13 million monthly active users across platforms.

Here is the BBC report on the Boston Marathon bombing.

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