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Acast has opened its London studios, in the heart of London’s Old Street. The space includes an Amazon Music branded studio, free to emerging and brand-new creators; and has four multimedia studios. Acast podcasters can use the studios for free from early next year.

Day passes for The Podcast Show 2025, in London, are now available. This time round, the show will include an “Independent Podcasters Hub”, connecting independent podcast creators with a range of talks and networking moments; and two new stages - The Content Creator Stage, focusing on multi-format content creation, and The Open Forum Stage, dedicated to open debate and discussions around the hottest topics in podcasting. The event is on May 21-22.

After a launch of Spotify’s video ambitions earlier in the month, industry observers are increasingly asking... why has Spotify’s Head of Podcast Monetization and Innovation so publicly decided not to back it? First spotted by Chris Petersen and again earlier this week by John McDermott, while you can watch this episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast in full video on YouTube, you can only listen to the same episode on Spotify. The Ringer isn’t posting video on Spotify for many of their shows, including ones specifically about video, like The Big Picture, The Rewatchables, The Watch, and The Prestige TV Podcast; and many sports shows - like The Ringer NBA show, which again posts full video on YouTube, but only audio on Spotify. Given Spotify has been shouting about video since June last year, we’re curious as to The Ringer’s reticence.

Be grateful to Californian Governor Gavin Newsom, who gave an official pardon to Earlonne Woods, one of the hosts of Ear Hustle.

Edison Research published the top 25 UK Podcasts for Q3/24. Goalhanger celebrate improvements in placing for all of its four top-25 shows, including The Rest is Politics, which makes it to #2 in the country, behind the US-made Joe Rogan Experience. There are only two shows from the US in the chart. Acast hosts nine shows, Megaphone hosts seven, and the BBC hosts five.

If you’re looking for new podcasts, we’d recommend following the New Podcast Trailers show in your podcast app.

Exclusive: Evergreen Podcasts has acquired Rhapsody Voices. The deal unites the teams, talent, and assets of both companies; Rhapsody Voices founder Mike Jensen becomes Chief Business Officer at Evergreen.

The 2024 Australian Podcast Awards took place last night in Sydney NSW. We have a full list of the winners: Podcast of the Year went to Ladies, We Need to Talk (above), while the listeners’ choice went to Toni & Ryan.

Amelia Coomber told Podnews that “audio is not a medium to be taken lightly. With all the stuff going on in the industry right now, I think (the report) is a shining light to speak to the exciting opportunity that is in front of us.”

Apple Podcasts shared the “most popular podcasts of 2024”. There’s more to the lists than just the US, though - we’ve compiled a list of the top shows in most English-speaking countries; plus, a way for you to view the top charts for 33 different places.

First look: In a move that could be targeted at Spotify, Amazon Music is adding the entire Audible audiobook catalog to its app. Unlimited subscribers in the US, UK and Canada can now listen to one Audible title for free each month (of any length), alongside more than 100 million songs in HD Audio, and a range of ad-free podcasts. Audible is the best-known brand for audiobooks (and lays claim to be an early podcast company, too): this offer also includes the company’s original productions. We’ve analysis, below.

Just days after Spotify’s video announcement, YouTube has announced that it is to run an online Q&A session on Dec 12. Kai Chuk, Global Head of Podcasting, and Steve McLendon, Podcast Product Lead, will be “spilling the tea on platform updates and answering your burning questions”. The session is free; they’ll be joined by Stephanie Chan, a Strategic Partner Manager for YouTube Podcasts.

Edison Research has released a study showing the comparative difference between Trump and Harris appearances on podcasts before the election. Trump spoke to over three times the number of listeners, says the data.

The event happened in Spotify’s Los Angeles studios, in front of around 150 creators including Stephen Bartlett, Meghan Trainor, Jay Shetty, Emma Chamberlain and Don Lemon. Halsey played an acoustic set and there were a number of sessions. In one of them, when asked what his favourite thing about podcasting was, Geoff Chow, Head of Podcast Studios at The Ringer, said that it was that podcasts are open. (Admittedly, after saying that his favourite thing about podcasting was Bill Simmons.)

The Podcast Hall of Fame has announced a new board of governors. The organisation, which honors excellence and creator success stories in podcasting, has also published its eligibility guidelines; the next Podcast Hall of Fame induction ceremony will be on Fri Jan 17 at Podfest Expo in Orlando, Florida.

Audio marketers RadioActive Media has launched a billboard campaign across Southern California. The company uses personalities like Michael Smerconish, Bill Maher, Brian Kilmeade, and Chris Cuomo to voice audio spots.

Exclusive: Podpage has added a listener survey tool for anyone using its podcast website service. It uses standard questions inspired by Tom Webster’s The Audience is Listening, and you can add your own questions should you require.

Routes is a new podcast that launched yesterday in the UK, for train company LNER. Hosted by Clara Amfo, the way the podcast is being marketed is just the ticket for the railways - on large billboards on the way to railway stations and inside them, plus seat-back QR codes on board; it’s playable on the LNER app, and is even being promoted to travellers on railway station tannoy announcements. See it, say it, sorted: it’s produced by Leeds-based Distorted.

Updated earlier this week with all the latest, our article on how to understand podcast stats delves into what you really need to know about your numbers - and where to find them.

Acast blames Apple’s iOS 17 changes for a drop in listens of -15%. A decrease of -15.2% was also reported by Podtrac earlier in the year. We covered the iOS 17 changes in full.

Only 5% of the top 100 business podcasts release in seasons, says new data from One Stone Creative. The State of Business Podcasting 2024 examines the top 100 business shows, and what we can learn from them; other pieces of data include show formats, monetisation techniques, and artwork: most have a picture of the host, and the most popular artwork colour is teal. It’s a free report.

Spotify appears to have quietly changed its language about its analytics, dropping the claim that its definition of streams “align to the IAB definition of a download”. Specifically, stats for “streams” in Spotify are not de-duplicated by unique listeners - listen three times to an episode (from the same device), and you’d count for three “streams” but would be one IAB “download”. A “listener” in Spotify is de-duplicated through the life of your podcast; a “listener” according to the IAB guidelines works very differently. We’ve updated the section on Spotify’s stats in our article about how to understand podcast stats, as well as making other improvements to the article - feedback is always welcome.

The UK’s Daily Mail is expanding its podcasts into the United States. Head of Podcasts for owner DMG, Jamie East, tells the Podnews Weekly Review that podcasts like The Trial of Diddy are showing that expansion into the US will work well. “We’ve got the facilities to do it, we’ve got the people, we’ve got the willing and the desire.” And, he says, there are wider opportunities, too. “If you’ve got someone based in Melbourne or Sydney, and New York and London, there’s not an hour where where you can’t have a team working away.” The full interview is in the Podnews Weekly Review this week.

A new ten-part podcast about NASA’s Space Shuttle era, 16 Sunsets, has been announced with Acast. The show is from TellTale Industries and Antica, the team behind 13 Minutes to the Moon - for which this show appears to have been planned as a third season in 2023 by the BBC - but which never happened, for some reason. The show raised £97,274 (US $125,000) on Kickstarter: the notes there say: “this time the series is not affiliated with the BBC”.

Exclusive: Spain’s Hoy en EL PAÍS has been claiming impressively high download figures; yet today, Podnews can reveal that many of the downloads were never heard. The 14MB podcast was observed automatically downloading, without user intervention, in a browser using an iPhone user-agent - just by visiting the elpais.com homepage.: thus artificially growing the download numbers from every mobile visitor to the website. El País got over 118mn visits in September, according to similar web, making it the largest Spanish newspaper online. It’s owned by Prisa. The podcast is apparently the 12th biggest show, by downloads, on Triton’s Latin America Podcast Ranker, and 45th in Podtrac’s estimated Spanish podcast ranker - the show, hosted by Triton Digital, also appears to contain a spot for programmatic advertising.

Top shows include The Rest Is Politics in the UK; All Ears English in Saudi Arabia; O Assunto in Brazil, and Conversations in Australia. The UK chart has three shows from the BBC in the top ten, and four from Goalhanger - Joe Rogan is the top US show at #10.

Podcast platform RSS.com has been awarded a patent for AI-driven, scalable ads. The AI-powered technology replicates a host’s authentic voice and style for ads that can be customisable in real-time using contextual data.

The Signal Awards have announced Esther Perel, Matt Rogers & Bowen Yang as inaugural recipients of a Special Achievement Award. The award aims to honour Where Should We Begin? & Las Culturistas as two podcasts that define culture.

In an award ceremony last night in London, It’s a Continent won three awards, including the coveted Podcast of the Year, at the Independent Podcast Awards. The hosts, Chinny Ukata and Astrid Madimba, were handed the award for Educational: World, Business and Financial by our Editor; before winning the Best History Podcast category, and then the biggest award of the night. The judges said the podcast is “instantly interesting, the hosts are charming and fun, and each episode was fascinating and well researched”.

Oxford Road and Veritone One are to combine to form the world’s largest podcast agency. For now, both companies will continue to trade independently. “With Veritone One’s industry-leading tech and data platform, in combination with Oxford Road’s innovation on behalf of brands, we’re creating an agency that sets a new standard,” says Dan Granger, who is CEO of the newly combined organisation.

Podcast Days took place in Madrid, Spain. It was held at the College of Architects of Madrid, and contained panel sessions, awards and announcements.

The winners of the Women in Podcasting Awards were announced. Over 15,000 listeners participated in the voting process; and there were almost 400 nominees. Our analysis shows that Buzzsprout has the most amount of winning entries.

Awards: The Canadian Podcast Awards are open for entry. The awards started in 2018, and now have 31 categories.

This American Life switched to ad sales by National Public Media from August. It had been represented by the New York Times.

Libsyn has announced a new CEO - and it’s an impressive hire: the co-founder and former CEO of podcast host Megaphone, Brendan Monaghan. Megaphone was bought by Spotify in Nov 2020; Monaghan left the company in Feb 2022.

Audioboom released its Q3/24 trading update. The company saw revenue up 34% y-on-y to $18.8mn; and a record eCPM (revenue per thousand downloads) to $66.06, up 79% from last year (and up 9.9% from last quarter). The company made $1mn EBITDA profit.

Podcasting Made Simple Live is a virtual event taking place this Thursday, from 11.30am to 4pm Eastern. There are a number of speakers aimed to help podcast creators grow influence, revenue, and expertise. Tickets are normally $97, but follow this link to get in, free, thanks to Podnews. (You’ll even get replay access, too!)

Last week, we spoke with Spotify’s Maya Prohovnik - this week, it’s the turn of YouTube’s Sandy Wilheim to answer questions like... what is a podcast? Do I have to do video now? And how important is RSS to YouTube? You can read the answers here, or listen to the Podnews Weekly Review.

Above, a live show for The Rest is Politics, in Brighton, UK. The Goalhanger show is doing a tour of the country; the show in Brighton, above, was the first of the tour; the auditorium fits up to 4,500 people.

DeepCast has been officially launched (though you’ll have seen the company in our supporters list for a while). The website helps listeners search and discover the most relevant podcast content, guests, topics with key insights and meaningful excerpts.

Audacy has signed a sales representation and distribution deal for Max Cutler’s PAVE Studios.

Kamala Harris, the current Vice President of the US and a Presidential candidate, did a guest appearance on Call Her Daddy.

Exclusive: What’s the future of podcasting in Spotify? Is video necessary for every show? Why is Spotify so successful? And how important is open RSS to Spotify? We had questions for Spotify’s VP of Podcast Product, Maya Prohovnik; and she had answers.

Exclusive: We’ve an interview with Spotify’s VP of Podcast Product, Maya Prohovnik, in the Podnews Weekly Review tomorrow.

Esther Manito, a British Lebanese comedian and podcaster, is to host the Independent Podcast Awards once more this year, it’s been announced. More than 450 entries were received this year; the event is in London in three weeks, on Oct 23.

In Dubai, podcast hosting and distribution platform Podeo announced the completion of a $5.4mn funding round. The Middle Eastern podcast company aims to invest in its global expansion plans, and grow its AI capabilities.

Dubai Podfest is in progress, organised by the Dubai Press Club. There are a number of speakers from the region’s podcast industry, and the event is highlighting podcasting success stories and explore key factors behind the popularity of some well-known Arabic shows. Our Editor, James Cridland, delivered the opening keynote.

Exclusive: Spotify is to close the podcast analytics platform Chartable, as part of a re-focus at the company. Chartable users will receive an email a little later today detailing next steps. The tool, bought by Spotify in Feb 2022, offered “SmartLinks and SmartPromos” attribution tools; which we reported in 2022 were to be incorporated into Megaphone. That’s still the plan for Megaphone-hosted customers; though Spotify has also recently announced generally available attribution tools similar to SmartLinks for the Spotify app. Chartable’s co-founder Dave Zohrob left Spotify in July; Spotify’s other purchase at the time, Podsights, was integrated into Spotify Ad Analytics in June last year.

The New York Times is to make its premium, paid podcasts available for NYT subscribers on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Spotify and Apple Podcasts listeners can connect their subscriptions wherever they bought NYT access. It’s in addition to the NYT Audio app - you can subscribe separately to just the podcasts if you’d like. It’s reported that most archive editions of the podcasts will go behind the paywall. We corrected an earlier version of this story about connecting your subscriptions within Apple Podcasts. It works however you purchased your NYT subscription.

Earlier this week, we covered the launch of transcripts on Pocket Casts. It’s one of three Podcasting 2.0 features supported by the popular app, on Android and iOS. To celebrate, we’ve sorted out a free year of Pocket Casts Plus for every Podnews reader so you can give it a go for yourself. (Get it by Oct 9).

Exclusive: Two million Australians listen to podcasts daily, according to a new survey: PodPoll 24, which will be fully revealed tomorrow. The data, from Deadset Studios and Insightfully, contains a lot of useful data about the types of show people want to hear, and also reveals:

Acast has partnered with /influx, a French podcast producer. “Together, they will maximize the reach and profitability of content created by /influx talents, by integrating tailor-made audio and video solutions.”

Podcasting’s deals this year are smarter and more sustainable, says Will Pearson of iHeartPodcasts. He was speaking with Julie-Anna Needham for Podnews, as part of a long-form analysis of this second wave of M&A activity.

In the US, podcasts are the most trusted media source for registered voters - beating newspapers, TV, AM/FM radio or social media. That’s according to new research from Voxtopica - which also says that 63% of registered voters say that podcasts change their opinions on issues or topics in the news. Nearly half of all registered voters in the US listen to podcasts each week.

Spotify’s global ad revenue is set to reach $2.1bn in 2024. Data from WARC’s Platform Insights report points to growth coming from Spotify’s video podcasting, quoting Spotify research that audio+video ads work 66% better than audio ads alone.

After the company closed earlier this year, two former Pacific Content leaders have officially launched a new podcast production studio, named Sequel. Tori Allen and Andy Sheppard recruited former Pacific Content colleagues and started production in July; Sequel will serve existing and new clients.

The Acquired podcast filled San Francisco’s Chase Arena with more than 6,000 fans last week. Guests for the show included Mark Zuckerberg, Emily Chang and Daniel Ek. Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor (which hosts the show) was there and took a bunch of photographs. If ever you need a concrete example of the power of podcasting, this was it.

The BBC is doubling-down on its podcast windowing strategy. It’s to make more of its podcast episodes available exclusively first behind a registration wall on the BBC Sounds app - usually for a week (seven days) or a month (28 days) - and only then publish on open RSS. The BBC claims a successful 18-month trial, which it says attracted 218,000 listeners to use BBC Sounds (4.3% of the total audience); but it also admits that the majority of listeners still use open RSS to listen. The BBC was the first UK broadcaster to embrace podcasting, in November 2004, but has since retreated from the open internet.

Buzzsprout have rolled-out redesigned podcast websites - “to give (their) podcasters a professional site without the hassle.” New features include contributor bios (of guests as well as hosts), fan mail messages, recommended podcasts, and additional features. The Podnews Weekly Review is hosted (and sponsored) by Buzzsprout.

Customers may be taking flight after live streaming and recording tool Streamyard increased its monthly pricing by 80%, and will automatically apply that price to existing subscribers next month. Pricing has moved from $25 to $44.99 a month; the company removed its pricing from its public website in July.

The release of iOS 18 has been announced for next week. New in Apple Podcasts - hold down the playback bar to scrub forward and back, and you’ll notice that you can now see chapter points and chapter titles. More reason to add chapters to your shows before next week when everyone will see them: many podcast hosts have direct support for them, or you can use tools like Forecast or Hindenburg to add them.

In Australia, podcast survey PodPoll is to return for 2024. The survey data will shed light on emerging trends and several untapped opportunities in the podcasting landscape.

Lateral, a comedy panel game podcast hosted by YouTuber Tom Scott, about weird questions with wonderful answers, has posted its 100th episode (with guests from No Such Thing As A Fish). The show is live on stage for the first time next month; and the podcast releases a book with Pan Macmillan in early November.

An original kids’ podcast from Podster will be published in print in Denmark next year. The World’s Wackiest Bandits features stories about the smartest, dumbest, most charming and strangest criminals. It is released on Nov 1, just in time for Christmas.

On Friday in Podnews: what is “gone quiet”?

Podcast Day Asia took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Speakers included Emily Kwong from NPR who explained the process behind Inheriting, our Editor James Cridland, who was part of a session about podcast consumption, and Emma Lawson from the ABC in Australia, who spoke about visualising podcasts, highlighting the video versions of If You’re Listening. Part of Radiodays Asia, the event had more than 300 attendees; the speaker schedule was programmed by Podnews.

Podtrac is now measuring over 14% of all new episodes, another record for the company, says Livewire. The second-largest, Chartable, slipped down to 6.7% last month. Chartable’s analytics was down for almost three weeks, but its analytics dashboard has now been restored.

Podcast listening is bigger than ever in Australia, according to a new report from Commercial Radio & Audio and Triton Digital. The free report is full of data with detail of how Australians listen, and what to; listeners grew 9% in the first half of this year, though it also suggests that growth is slowing.

Edison Research published the top 25 podcasts in the UK for Q2/24. It was Goalhanger’s time to shine - The Rest is Politics remained at #4, with TRI Football and TRI History both gaining in the charts, and TRI Entertainment a new entry at #17. It’s also the first time that a BBC podcast has made it into the top 10 (in this General Election period, Newscast made it to #9). Acast and Megaphone both host 8 of the top 25; the BBC have five.

The rumours back in May were true: New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce has been acquired by Amazon’s Wondery. The deal is said to be worth more than $100mn over three years.

Joe Rogan has three times the number of followers than the next biggest show on Spotify, according to new figures from Rephonic. The service uses Spotify’s published follower figures. Interestingly, given data we published earlier this year showing that Spotify is #1 in most countries outside the US and UK, 76% of the top shows are in English.

True-crime podcast Serial is almost ten years old, and Sarah Koenig is interviewed for The Guardian in the UK. She had never listened to a podcast before making it; she didn’t pay any attention to social media while making it; she also says that very few people noticed season four; and that the current podcast industry is in “a very worrisome cycle”.

Podcast Movement posted the highlights reel from the event which concluded yesterday. Good news: no Podnews Editor in this reel. Good news also: puppies!

Horses in the Morning just hit 3500 episodes. One of the longest running daily shows in the world, published since Nov 1, 2010, it’s the only daily show in the horse world and is still hosted by the original hosts Jamie Jennings and Glenn Hebert. They have interviewed over 6,000 guests, done over 10,000 ad spots and given away over $75,000 in prizes.

Exclusive: Podcast hosting company Ausha has launched an AI tool, “Ausha Intelligence”. The CEO Maxime Piquette, above, will unveil the tool later today at Podcast Movement. The tool has flexible AI that use Ausha’s understanding of podcast search-engine optimisation to produce metadata that’s customisable and designed to drive discoverability of new episodes.

This means that Apple Podcasts is now available for the first time on Android devices. While it isn’t an app in the Play Store, it’s now easy to install Apple Podcasts on any Android phone. As a side-effect of being a web app, premium subscriptions aren’t subject to revenue share with Google.

A new music library is launching at Podcast Movement for podcasters and documentary makers. Thrumm is from Lindsay Graham (no, not that one), specifically produced in complementary keys and tempos to allow you to transition neatly between tracks to tell your story. Thrumm is at booth 512 at Podcast Movement from tomorrow - we’re using some of the library today in our podcast. (Booth #512)

A new podcast festival has been announced for Oct 4 in Waukesha WI, USA. Podcast Town Festival will have ten live shows on stage, with networking and interactive sessions.

Edison Research revealed the Top 50 Podcasts in the US measured by weekly audience (and done through a survey, so every podcast gets measured). There’s no change in the top three: The Daily at #3, Crime Junkie at #2 and Joe Rogan at #1. 24 shows are hosted on Megaphone; 9 on Simplecast.

The Triton Digital Australian Podcast Ranker was released for July. Podnews analysis reveals an increase of more than 10% new episodes in this period. Monthly downloads were up 7.7%; listeners up 2.4%. The average number of top 200 shows per listener has also slowly increased from April, from 2.61 to 2.72. The list measures participating publishers only, over a calendar month. (There were 15% more weekdays in August vs July, making monthly comparisons not the best).

Podnews has a free jobs board. New jobs are posted below every day. We can link to your jobs board, too. Please let your HR person know!

Podcast growth agency Bumper has announced the Bumper Dashboard, a measurement tool that combines podcast data from a number of different sources. It allows Bumper’s clients to see numbers of verified listeners, total listen time, and more statistics across platforms. Curious to know what it looks like? We were given access - see what we learnt about Podnews podcasts in the Bumper Dashboard.

Ad analytics service Podscribe is now IAB v2.2 compliant. It gained compliance on Tuesday. We list all IAB certified podcast companies.

Podcast marketing agency Podcast Discovery has launched the Virtual Studio - a full, bespoke 3D modelled virtual studio, and a camera/lighting kit for each contributor. The company says that clips that are shot professionally are more than twice as likely to go viral than clips shot on a webcam.

Data that Podnews published a year ago suggested that some brand safety tools incorrectly categorise Black-hosted podcasts as risky, because of a lack of nuance and cultural understanding. Today, Barometer and DCP have partnered to create the Black Podcast Coalition - a collective of influential Black networks and shows. Shows will be tracked and certified for brand safety. The group suggests that these shows “are actually more suitable and less potentially risky than the average show in the Edison top 50.”

UK podcast producer Goalhanger is celebrating record numbers for its shows, with tens of millions of downloads and YouTube views for its politics and football shows. The country has just been through an election and the Euros football championship.

Wondercraft has launched Ad Studio, which writes, translates and produces studio-quality audio ads. We gave it a go today to create an ad for Podnews; you can hear it within the press release. It joins tools like ENCO’s SPECai, Futuri’s SpotOn and Adthos.

SiriusXM is to launch SiriusXM Podcasts+, a premium podcast subscription, through the SiriusXM app but also within Apple Podcasts. This link will let you purchase via Apple from Monday. It uses Apple’s connected subscriptions product, which launched last October.

Megaphone is now IAB certified under v2.2, says an email to customers. They’re the second company to certify to the new v2.2 standards; the first was Captivate. Megaphone was one of three Spotify companies who quietly withdrew from IAB certification at the beginning of the year, as Podnews reported in April; after criticism from customers, that decision was changed in early June.

Suzy Grant has been promoted to Head of Visualised Podcasts at UK production company Listen. It’s part of a strategy to develop “the middle ground between TV and podcasting”, focusing on video.

Google is helping users who haven’t yet migrated their podcast subscriptions out of Google Podcasts by giving them an extra month to do so.

Exclusive: The Canadian podcast producer Pacific Content has been sold to the UK’s Lower Street. A number of Pacific Content employees will be joining Lower Street over the coming weeks. Lower Street founder Harry Morton praised Pacific Content, saying that the company’s podcasts are “legendary - super-creative, and expertly produced”. Terms were not made public.

Exclusive: A podcast app that skips ads has been launched. Adblock Podcast is built by Micah Engle-Eshleman, who charges listeners to skip ads, and shares that revenue with podcast creators. The service also caches audio to avoid negatively impacting advertisers who pay per impression. We have the first interview with Micah in today’s edition of the Podnews Weekly Review, to learn how it works, and what its future is.

Magellan AI has announced support for UID2 and ID5, to help advertisers measure their campaigns. Replacing things like cookies and IP tracking, UID2 and ID5 are centrally-administered personal identifiers, which allow advertisers to recognise individuals and serve them targeted ads.

A reminder that Spotify for Podcasters has a free masterclass on Thursday about how to use video.

Growth-oriented podcast hosting platform Captivate is the first podcast host to achieve IAB v2.2 Certification for Podcast Measurement. The company supports IPv6 and has a self-auditing spike detection system for accurate and reliable data. v2.2 of the podcast measurement guidelines were released in May.

Podcast production company Paradiso Media has started bankruptcy proceedings in a French court. The company was founded in June 2019, and acquired competitor Binge Audio in May 2023: at the time it had 170 shows and 50 employees, based in Paris, Los Angeles and New York. Paradiso raised $5.9mn in investment in Sept 2021. We understand that Binge Audio, still a separate company, continues its operations.

Tink Media is five years old today. The growth and discovery company is celebrating with a free webinar - How to make podcast friends - and a discount on the popular Podcast Therapy consultancy sessions.

Exclusive: Do keyword-based brand suitability tools mean news podcasts aren’t getting the ad revenue they deserve? Writing for Podnews today, Seekr’s Pat LaCroix shares ten popular news podcasts which are flagged by blunt keyword-based tools as being a risk to advertisers - yet gain high ‘civility’ scores. There’s more at Oxford Road’s annual CAO Summit today.

Ashley Carman’s scoop almost a month ago was correct - Office Ladies has moved from SiriusXM to Audacy in a deal which also covers The Lazy Genius Podcast. Terms weren’t given; the show launched in Oct 2019, and is a top 25 podcast in the US.

The deadline for the Women in Podcasting Awards is fast-approaching; you’ve until Jul 31 to submit your entries. The awards are run by the Women in Podcasting Network, to honor the creativity and dedication of women podcasters. Podnews is a media partner.

Dave Jackson has left Libsyn. One of the most respected podcast consultants and trainers, Dave had worked with the Libsyn team for eight years. But it’s him, not them. “There is nothing wrong with Libsyn”, he said, adding “when you hear where I’m going you’ll see it’s simply a better fit for my educational skillset”. We get to find out where on Jul 29 - in, of course, the School of Podcasting podcast.

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard has signed with Wondery. The show became a Spotify exclusive in Jul 2021, becoming available everywhere in Aug 2023; the new deal starts on Sept 1 and will include video shows for the first time (and merch rights). Wondery+ subscribers will get it a week early.

Get ready for a brand new rewrite and redesign of popular independent iOS podcast app Overcast, according to developer Marco Arment on the latest Under the Radar podcast. It’s due to be released before Overcast’s tenth birthday, on July 16 - with a different look and feel.

Unlike Apple Podcasts reviews, all Comments are private, and you choose to make them visible - plus, you can publicly reply to them, and you can block accounts to help fight online trolls. You can turn off Comments altogether too, in the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard or in the new app - they’re all features requested in comments to our Report Card earlier on this year, which we shared with Spotify directly. Our comments are open, though, so if you can, leave us a comment.

Who uses what equipment to make their podcast? The Podcast Host has run their 2024 Podcaster Gear survey. The most popular microphone is a Blue Yeti; but those who have been podcasting more than five years gravitate to a Shure MV7, SM7B, or SM58. (We currently use a Lewitt Audio Ray, since you’re asking.)

Happy 100th birthday, WNYC. The New York radio station went on air from the Municipal Building, above, on Jul 8 1924 at 8.54pm. There will be a re-enactment of that first broadcast at 8.54pm tonight, and the Empire State Building will be bathed in WNYC red this evening. There is special programming throughout the month, and the station is looking for New York stories. It produces a number of popular podcasts including On The Media and Radiolab.

AI audio platform Adthos has added a number of new voices to its tool. There are now 4,600 voices available in the platform’s library, in 200 languages.

The Asian Podcast Awards are now open. The awards are open to anyone who produces a podcast in Asia or the Pacific, in any language. Winners will receive recognition in radioinfo and Podnews, and the overall winner will be flown to Kuala Lumpur in September to attend the Radiodays Asia conference.

How much do you get paid? Audio professionals in the US are invited to help the AIR 2024 Rate Card Campaign, by giving the organisation your current compensation data to reflect the latest trends and best practices.

Libsyn Ads released its June 2024 ad rates - average CPMs were $21.90, up 1.2% from May, and down 0.3% from last year. Technology podcasts pay the most; fiction podcasts are “more accessible”, the company says.

Buzzsprout has rolled out a “fresh new look” - for its customers only, for now. Expect a greener green, a crisper and more modern feel, and... the company’s new logo. Here’s a sneak peek. The new font family for the company is Graphik.

In the UK, since the general election was announced, there has been a 53% increase in unique listens to politics podcasts, according to Acast and Podchaser data. The company is marketing shows across its network and out-of-home.

Podcast curation platform Hark Audio has announced The Conversation, an easy way for listeners to discover podcast conversations happening around trending topics. The first Conversation to be added is one around the US elections, with clips from a wide range of shows focusing on the campaign trail - some you’ll know, some you won’t.

The New York Times is planning to put many of its podcasts behind a paywall, according to The Wall Street Journal. Archives of The Daily, and first-access to new shows from Serial, are to be available to subscribers only. The Economist did the same last year.

Buzzsprout has launched its Android app. It launched an iOS app a few months ago; it offers a number of features including analytics, publishing and “fanmail”. The app is free for Buzzsprout creators.

Google Podcasts, which closed on April 2 in the US, was scheduled to finally close globally yesterday. Founder Zack Reneau-Wedeen left in Sept 2021, and the app has had no feature updates since. Google Podcasts started making its way to the Google Graveyard in Jan 2023, when Google Podcasts was removed from Google Search. The third attempt at a podcast player from Google, it was almost six years old.

Riverside’s Kendall Brietman is on the Podnews Weekly Review this week to explain more of the features.

Spend $1 on podcast advertising, and get back $4.90 in increased sales. So says media agency OMD and podcast company Acast, after a study in Sweden of more than $192mn of adspend. At 4.9%, podcast advertising gives the highest long-term return on ad spend (ROAS) of any media tested, including ads on social media and radio, according to the study with OMD's analytics division Annalect.

Nick Castner is the new Director of Marketing at Atomic Entertainment. He joins from Glassbox Media and Hurrdat Media.

The first AI-powered podcast marketing tool, Capsho is to launch Capsho NextGen in open Beta. The tool includes self-learning, more flexibility and a custom tone of voice.

The first four podcasts to be live on stage as part of PodParis have been announced. The event is in October.

Spotify for Podcasters has released a new set of terms and conditions, which are relevant for those hosting on Spotify or just distributing podcasts on it. In an email, Spotify has run through some of the changes; we examined the terms of use to see what’s been deleted (red) and what’s new (blue). There are no big changes; but things that we’ve spotted:

68% of people listened to some or all of the podcast ads in the last episode they listened to, according to Ad Nauseam, new data released yesterday from Sounds Profitable. The US data suggests that while ad-skipping does happen, podcasting performs better than radio or YouTube. It also gives insight into how many ads listeners tolerate.

Edison Research will unveil The UK Podcast Consumer 2024 on Jun 25. It’s the first time the research has been undertaken in the UK; the US data contains useful information to attract advertisers into the medium.

Exclusive: Jemma Rose Brown has been named as the new General Manager of The Signal Awards. She joins from work x work, and was Director of On Air Fest, the creative festival for podcasters. Submissions are open for this year’s awards; the closing date is Jun 28.

Spotify now allows you to upload videos for podcasts that are not hosted on its platform. We reported this in June last year; but the feature hasn’t been available to many creators until a partial roll-out last week: we’re now seeing it for some of our shows.

A science show with two versions - one for adults, one for kids - is being launched by Podster.

Edison Research released the top 25 podcasts in the UK for Q1/24. The top BBC show is at #15; Acast is the biggest publisher, with eight of the top 25. Our list includes links, hosting companies and an OPML file to import the top 25 into your podcast player.

A brand new advertiser comes to podcasting this week, as Colgate launches its first-ever podcast advertising campaign in the UK with Diary of a CEO. Wavemaker UK and Adelicious co-ordinated the deal.

Average CPM at Libsyn Ads dropped 7.4% year-on-year in May, according to new data released from the company. The average, $21.63, is down 1.2% from April.

Exclusive: Spotify’s Megaphone is working to be recertified to the IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines. Earlier this year, Podnews revealed that the company had pulled out of IAB membership, and its companies had been removed from IAB’s certification program. Now, in a welcome move, the company’s enterprise podcast hosting platform Megaphone says it is working to regain certification. A Spotify spokesperson told Podnews: “We have remained committed to IAB's mission, have maintained compliance with the IAB guidelines, and are currently working with the IAB on the v2.2 certification of the Megaphone platform.”

Pocket Casts is looking to add transcripts to their popular podcast app, according to Ellie Rubenstein in an interview today in the Podnews Weekly Review. “We're tailoring the UI and overall experience to make sure that transcripts feel natural and intuitive within Pocket Casts,” she told us. The app is also going to add “podrolls”, showing creator recommendations for other shows to listen to. Transcripts are also supported by Apple Podcasts and 17 others.

Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO has launched as a 24/7 streaming channel on Samsung TV Plus, the first podcast to do so. The deal is exclusive: no other podcasts can launch on Samsung TV Plus this year, and the show will not launch on any other FAST service.

Todd Cochrane’s New Media Productions is hunting for new studio space, after his lease was terminated by a new building owner. Geek News Central and The New Media Show have come from the studio in Coldwater MI, USA since July 2019. The studio space cost $25,000 to convert.

Canadaland’s Alan Black and Story Studio Network’s Erin Trafford have been confirmed for a session at next weekend’s Podcast Power-up Summit in Toronto. The event is Sunday afternoon in downtown Toronto; other speakers include Laura Mayer, Eric Nuzum and our Editor, James Cridland.

Podcast Day Asia has been announced as taking place on Sep 3 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Programmed by Podnews, the day includes a keynote from NPR’s Emily Kwong, as well as experts from across the region. Tickets are just $99.

The Podcast Show, which took place over the last two days in London (and continues with live shows tonight and tomorrow), is on track for total attendance of 10,000 people across the festival according to organisers. Jason Carter, Festival Director told Podnews: “We have been absolutely blown away by the last two days. To feel the energy and warmth of the thousands of delegates coming together, from across the international podcast community, has been truly inspiring. This third edition of The Podcast Show London has been the best yet and it has firmly placed the event at the centre of the industry's calendar. Roll on London 2025!”

Libsyn Studio, the company’s online recording tool, has suddenly closed. An email to customers said it was a “difficult decision”. No alternative tool was offered; we’d recommend Podcastle, and other alternatives include Alitu, Riverside and Descript.

Data shows Spotify is dominant outside of the US and UK, according to analysis presented this morning at The Podcast Show in London. The numbers from OP3 also suggests that the UK uses the most non-Apple/Spotify apps; and that Spotify has significant usage on iOS.

Podcasting is converging at The Podcast Show in London, which starts tomorrow morning. (PODNEWS10 will still save on selected last-minute passes). The full speaker schedule and the app is now available. Our Editor, James Cridland, will be delivering the opening keynote at 9.20am in The Origin Theatre, with a look back at the last year and some exclusive data focusing on consumption in the UK and international markets.

Audio production tool Wondercraft has announced a new feature, “parrot mode”, which enables users to tell AI voices exactly how to deliver lines. (We’ve a video of the tool in the press release). The selected AI voice will precisely mimic the user’s desired tone, pace and intonation.

Edison Research released a new study, The Podcast Consumer 2024. The study contains benchmark data on US podcasting, ideal for advertisers to know about the podcast landscape - podcast listeners are more affluent and educated than the general population, the study says.

Spotify’s Megaphone podcast host, which is no longer IAB certified, has sent an email to publishers with the news that they will no longer be able to set minimum prices, or “price floors”, for ads sold by the Spotify Audience Network (SPAN). “The current ad ecosystem on Megaphone operates as a waterfall, with each ad request hitting direct-sold, then SPAN, then VAST/programmatic,” explains podcast ad-tech newsletter The Download: its publisher Bryan Barletta says the move may let SPAN take more inventory, and prevents a publisher from maximising their revenue.

Edison Research has published its Top 50 Podcasts in the US for Q1 2024. There’s a new entry at #4: New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce. Our list includes hosts (Megaphone host 22 of the top 50) and links to each, with trailers where posted.

The Webby Awards took place last night. We’d already covered the podcast winners; the ceremony’s famous five-word speeches included one from Lemonada Media’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus, winning podcast of the year for Wiser Than Me: “Listen to old women, motherfudgers”. (Some words may have been changed to ensure delivery of this email.) You can watch highlights at The Webby Awards website.

Just a week or so to go until The Podcast Show in London. Our Editor will be revealing some brand new data in his opening keynote on the first day - it turns out that the UK is leading the world in one podcast metric. PODNEWS10 will save on selected passes.

“After much reflection, meditation, and prayer, I have decided to extend my work week to two days.” Jon Stewart is to launch a new podcast, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, next month. The show, from MTV Entertainment Studios, will be produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

Breaking: A slow-down at mid-tier companies has resulted in US podcast ad revenue growing 5% in 2023, according to the eighth annual US Podcast Advertising Revenue Study from the IAB and PwC, published minutes ago. The figure hit $1.9bn, missing a widely-expected $2bn figure; growth was out-paced by digital overall (+7.3%).

Yesterday: You got your email from Podnews late yesterday. It wasn’t you, it was us. Sorry.
Tomorrow: we may delay 90 minutes so we can carry the IAB US Podcasting Advertising Report data._

The number of listens dropped 12% year-on-year, attributed to changes in iOS 17. However, average revenue per thousand listens increased to $34.30 (up year-on-year from $24.10).

Someone has been taking the podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs and, without credit, translating it into French for nearly two years, says the host, earning money from it, too. Andrew Hickey, who hosts the podcast, warns “I am going to give him until Monday to take all those episodes down and post an apology before I contact a lawyer”.

The IAB has released v2.2 of the Podcast Measurement Guidelines. It’s the first new set of guidelines in over three years. To help understand what’s changed, we’ve prepared a summary of changes between v2.1 and v2.2, and between the public consultation vs final. One change is the removal of Spotify as a contributing company: Spotify left the IAB earlier this year.

We have a date: Google Podcasts is to close, globally, on June 23 (according to an email sent to a UK user). July 29 is the end date for users to export subscriptions.

When listening to ad-supported audio, Americans are spending more than three times longer with the radio than with podcasts, according to “The Record”, new data from Nielsen and Edison Research. However, for younger listeners (18-34), time spent with podcasts and radio are nearly equal, at 37% vs 45%.

SiriusXM’s President & Chief Content Officer Scott Greenstein will be in conversation with James Corden at The Podcast Show. It’s the latest announcement from the show, which is in London on May 22-23. More than 15,000 delegates are expected from around the world. Tickets are here - use PODNEWS10 to save on selected passes. Our Editor is also speaking at the event.

Three US presidents are united on an episode of SmartLess available today. Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes were joined by Presidents Biden, Obama and Clinton in New York City. The episode was available early on Amazon Music and Wondery+. The show switches to SiriusXM later this year.

TWiT is to close its studios in Petaluma in the next six months, Leo Laporte said in Macbreak Weekly. “Every little bit counts,” he said, referencing the environmental benefits. ”Our 15 employees won't be driving all the way to Petaluma anymore. They will be staying home.” TWiT made staff layoffs late last year.

Acast is celebrating its tenth birthday today, with a number of video messages from podcasters, and events across the world. We’ve a few of the videos on our website. The company was recently highlighted by Podtrac as the world’s largest podcast company.

Podcast analytics and insights platform CoHost has announced the publication of its second annual State of Podcast Agencies report. The biggest issue for podcast agencies? Trackable ROI, which impacts 33% of agencies.

EXCLUSIVE: The Webby Awards will announce the winners of the 28th annual awards later today. Podnews can reveal that Julia Louis-Dreyfus will receive the Webby Podcast of the Year Award for Lemonada Media’s Wiser Than Me and her embrace of the internet as a platform for connecting generations through meaningful, funny and important conversations with unforgettable women. The Webby Podcast Company of the Year goes to iHeartMedia. We’ve details of 14 more awards, ahead of the release of the full list.

EXCLUSIVE: Spotify is no longer a member of the IAB, having quietly ceased its membership in the last three months. After a press enquiry from Podnews, Spotify’s Megaphone, Chartable and the Spotify for Podcasters host formerly known as Anchor were removed from the published list of compliant companies for podcast measurement. They last underwent certification in 2020.

The subject of Bone Valley, Leo Schofield, has been granted parole, and will leave prison on April 30.

A brand new microphone, the Lewitt Audio Ray, has been launched... with a laser. The microphone has what it calls “autofocus” for sound, tuning the voice depending on how close, or far away, the person is from the microphone. It’s a new and novel idea; our review says it could be an excellent guest microphone, or for use on camera.

Parcast founder Max Cutler has announced the launch of a new media company, Pave Studios. “Positioned across video, audio, books and entertainment”, the release appears careful not to use the word “podcast” (though the video does).

EarBuds shares five episodes of Podcasts About AI in Politics & Democracy. They’re the choice of Mila Atmos, producer and series host of Future Hindsight ... Emily Rudder from Wonder Media Network shares her podcast playlist with Pocket Casts.

Podcast monetisation company Audioboom released its Q1/24 financial results. The figures show an 11% year-on-year growth in revenue, continued EBITDA profit, and eCPM (revenue per thousand listens) of a record $52.17.

Hot Pod, one of the longest-running newsletters about podcasting, is to suspend publishing. Lead reporter Ariel Shapiro has announced that her last week with its owner, The Verge, will be next week; Deputy Editor Jake Kastrenakes adds: “We won’t have a new writer in place by next week, so we’re planning to put Hot Pod on hiatus while we figure out next steps.” The publication’s writers, Ariel Shapiro, Ashley Carman and Nick Quah, have been a vital part of the industry since 2014 and inspired Podnews to produce this daily newsletter in 2017. We hope the publication is back soon.

The winners of the Spanish-language Global Podcast Ondas Awards 2024 were announced, including comedy podcast Malas Personas, above. Our list includes the judges’ reasons for each, plus hosting companies and an OPML file to import them all into your compatible podcast player.

Steven Barlett has launched Flight Studio, a podcast media and technology company. Flight Studio will be led and co-founded by Georgie Holt, Acast’s former Regional Managing Director for the Americas, and former US Head of Sales and Brand Partnerships, Christiana Brenton (both pictured above). The company launches with a number of new video podcasts, which will be translated into multiple languages, and will also represent Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO; Flight Studio will have global production studios based in London, Manchester, New York, Boston and Los Angeles. Diary of a CEO is the #2 show in the UK; Barlett is also one of the investors in the UK version of Shark Tank, Dragon’s Den.

Sony Music has acquired podcast production company Neon Hum. Neon Hum’s founder and CEO Jonathan Hirsch is now VP Global Podcasts and Head of US Creative for Sony Music’s Global Podcast Division.

Apple Podcasts has added transcripts to its macOS app. Transcripts look like this: to get to them, hit the “...” menu button next to any episode, or the player, and choose “View Transcript”. Unlike the iOS app they don’t display in real time and nor can you use them to navigate the show; but they are searchable. Here’s how they work.

Chart-topping UK podcast The News Agents is no longer being produced by Persephonica, the production company owned by Dino Sofos (above, right). The show is, says Edison Podcast Metrics, the #14 show in the UK. Deadline suggests that there had been a breakdown in relations after the launch of Political Currency, which Global saw as a rival show.

In Chicago, WBEZ is to lay off 14 staff, in part resulting in a reduction of its podcasting unit. It will stop making what it calls its “non-newsroom” shows, including Nerdette and When Magic Happens.

In Sweden, Podspace is now the second largest podcast platform and ad network. The company’s shows have more than a million weekly listeners.

Downloads from Apple Podcasts are down 39% year-on-year for Buzzsprout podcasters, according to new Buzzsprout data released for March 2024. Spotify is also down by 11%. While the number of active podcasts on Buzzsprout is only down 1%, Buzzsprout customers published 12% fewer episodes, and data we shared last week from Podtrac showed an overall drop for larger shows of around 15%.

At Podcast Movement Evolutions, YouTube announced a YouTube Podcasting 101 workshop, to take place on Apr 26. It’s the first of a number of workshops, the company said. A new “Podcasts for you” rail in YouTube was shown, using square show art; unspecified enhancements to the podcast experience in YouTube Music were also teased.

US podcast listening has hit an all-time high, according to a new study from Edison Research announced yesterday at Podcast Movement Evolutions. 47% of the US population 12+ has listened to a podcast over the past month, up 12% year over year. Women listeners are up 19%. We link to the whole data.

The Podnews Report Card shows that Apple Podcasts is still our most favoured podcast platform; but all the scores for the major platforms have slipped since last year. We’ve published a full list of the results of the Report Card over here; and we’re sharing it with the platforms.

Exclusive: How much are podcast downloads down year-on-year following the changes in Apple Podcasts? For Podnews, the leading podcast metrics company Podtrac has analysed more than 2.7bn downloads; and some individual categories fared very differently.

Podcast Movement Evolutions starts later today in Los Angeles. The first session is the orientation event for new and veteran attendees. The AMBIES awards take place at 6pm PT / 9pm ET tonight: here’s a live video feed for you to watch the ceremony wherever you are (or see your email from Podcast Movement to RSVP). We’ll have a full list of winners tomorrow morning; and some exclusive data ahead of the unveiling of the Podnews Report Card 2024 at 9am.

Adobe has launched Adobe Podcast Studio in beta to selected users. The tool looks similar to Descript, and allows you to “record, edit and enhance” in your browser.

In future, Cadence13 is to be known as “Audacy Podcasts” as part of a reorganisation. Podnews spotted in October that Audacy had stopped using the Cadence13 brand; that’s now official, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

First look: RSS.com has bought Mexico City podcast production company Vandi Media. It is set to enhance RSS.com’s production capabilities and ad sales opportunities. RSS is already highly active in Mexico with a number of large shows and agreements with Grupo Fórmula.

Podcast ad-skipping company Auddia has raised a further $3.5mn to improve faidr, its app.

Blubrry has launched Vid2Pod, a service to turn YouTube videos into open RSS audio podcasts. Post a new video on YouTube, and Vid2Pod automatically publishes an audio version for Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other services. (Here’s a demo video of the tool in action).

Another place to find new podcasts? Wondery is adding some of its sports podcasts to Amazon Prime Video, starting today. Wondery Chief Content Officer Marshall Lewy said that “being on Prime Video will help them connect with even more sports fans”. The shows continue on YouTube, Wondery+, and open RSS.

Ausha has published a study about the Apple Podcasts search algorithm, including gains for podcasters who use their keywords in podcast titles and descriptions. We link to the full infographic.

An interesting example of good podcast ad-targeting on entertainment business podcast The Town (from Puck and The Ringer) - an ad targeting Disney shareholders telling them who to vote for in an upcoming AGM. (Thank you for the spot, Gene Monterastelli)

Sesamy, a monetisation tool for publishers, has released a case study showing how its tool has “partially paywalled” podcasts of Kvartal, a Swedish magazine, and other clients in the UK and and Italy. There is much to learn: buying a whole season in advance seems to work well (only 15% want to pay monthly); conversion-rate was, surprisingly, over 10% of subscribers; and 70% of users wanted to pay with Swish, a mobile payment system popular in Sweden, rather than using card payments.

The iHeartPodcast Awards took place at SXSW in Austin, TX. Podcast of the Year went to New Heights; iHeart won seven of the thirty awards (including the international winner from iHeartPodcasts Australia); SiriusXM’s Simplecast hosted nine of the winners; iHeart’s Omny Studio hosted eight. We’ve a full list of the winners here, and video of the event.

Episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast are now available, in full, on YouTube - after the podcast ended its exclusivity deal last month with Spotify. Some industry observers had expected the video version to remain exclusive on the Spotify platform. However, the biggest podcast in the world is not marked as a “podcast” within YouTube Studio, and therefore doesn’t appear on the YouTube Podcasts index page.

A female indie podcaster has won a trademark case against another podcaster who used the same name. On Monday, a judge ordered Canna Campbell to pay AUD$114,000 (US $75,000) in legal costs after infringing the name of Rhondalynn Korolak’s Financial Foreplay podcast. It was registered as a trademark.

Exclusive: A trigger-happy algorithm at Spotify managed to delete one creator’s show on Spotify for Podcasters, losing every follower, every paid subscriber, and her revenue. Could it happen to you, too?

We’ve a comprehensive look at the feature - how it works, what to expect, and how to supply transcripts directly.

Trixie Mattel has been announced as the host of The Ambies, the Awards for Excellence in Audio. They’ll take place on Mar 26 at the JW Marriott LA Live, as well as online.

Buzzsprout has released an app for iPhone, allowing Buzzsprout customers to manage their podcasts, wherever they are. The app enables everything from ad management to correcting typos in episode descriptions. An Android app is coming soon; the iOS app, which is free, is in the App Store now. (Buzzsprout sponsors the Podnews Weekly Review).

It’s ten years since Serial started - and this month, it’s coming back. The fourth season features Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis, telling the history of Guantanamo through the personal stories of those on the ground who know things the rest of us don’t. It’s out on Mar 28 on the NYT Audio app and everywhere podcasts are.

The British Podcast Awards are open for entries. The awards will take place on Sep 26; you’ve until May 9 to enter. This year you can also nominate a judge.

EXCLUSIVE: Podcast host Ausha has released its Podcast Search Optimisation tool for podcasts on all hosting platforms. After more than 700 people attended the company’s webinars on podcast search optimisation, the tool is now available to all podcasters.

The Podcast Show London is to return this May, and the event organisers have released the first set of speakers and more detail on the event. A new feature this year will be The Creator Village, sponsored by Spreaker: a special space for creators including a pop-up podcast studio, a business advice and feedback hub, and a Creator Stage with talks. PODNEWS10 saves money on selected delegate passes.

Podcrushed and Threedom have been signed by Lemonada Media. Both shows were with SiriusXM’s Earwolf; one of the co-hosts of Threedom, Scott Aukerman, launched Earwolf in 2010. Other Earwolf shows have left the network in the past year, to Sony, AdvertiseCast, and Lemonada.

v2.2 of the guidelines add a requirement for companies to be clear whether they use a fixed or rolling 24-hour window for measurement; a requirement to update “safe” IP address lists such as those for known large corporations or universities; clarification that an ad can only be considered to be “delivered” if the overall episode download was valid; and a requirement for “practices to be put in place to account for mass market technology changes in measurement reports” (possibly the result of Apple’s changes in iOS 17).

The #1 podcast among Black listeners in the US is the one you’d probably expect: Joe Rogan. However, six shows in the top ten have Black hosts, including The Breakfast Club with Charlamagne Tha God at #2, says Edison Research in the company’s weekly insights email. (That show is also broadcast on 152 US radio stations).

The Independent Podcast Awards are to return later this year, organisers have announced. The awards will take place in London on Oct 23. Entries open in the next few months. (You can hear last year’s winner in the Podnews Weekly Review).

A new place to listen to podcasts? Podcast host Podeo is to distribute its podcasts in imo, a call and message app used by more than 200 million people. The app also has audiobooks and more content in Bengali and Saudi.

From down under to the Big Apple, BIPOC-led, women-owned podcast agency The Peers Project has raised investment to launch into the US market. The company will open offices in New York later this month.

The iOS 17 changes to Apple Podcasts have meant podcast ads are more effective, new data from Podscribe has revealed. As part of Podscribe’s performance benchmarks, we learn that ads have driven a higher amount of visitors and conversions since Apple Podcasts changed how auto-downloads work.

By 2027, there will be more podcast listeners in Latin America than anywhere else in the world. In the latest of our global podcast market spotlights, David R. González from Genuina Media looks at The State of Podcasting in Latin America, with data from across Latin America and beyond.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has signed with Lemonada Media - to both distribute the first season of her Archetypes podcast on all platforms for the first time, but also to develop a new show with the podcast network.

Google is telling subscribers to its Google One service that there has been a data breach at Apple Podcasts, which has shared email addresses. That’s not true; part of a large combination of files, and nothing more than someone who’s gone through open podcast RSS feeds, scraping for email addresses: it’s not from Apple servers. (In any case, Apple don’t need, nor use, email addresses in your RSS feed).

AntennaPod, an open-source podcast app for Android, has hit 150,000 monthly active users on Google Play. As can be seen above, the app saw significant growth on Sep 26, the day that it was announced Google Podcasts is to close. Much of this growth has been in the US, according to data seen by Podnews. “While we undoubtedly have a small market share, we're proud of this increase,” says @keunes, one of the volunteer project maintainers.

The Infinite Dial 2024 (for the US) will be unveiled at Evolutions by Podcast Movement in Los Angeles on Mar 28. The gold-standard study from Edison Research is America’s longest-running survey of digital media consumer behaviour. This year, it’s with support from Audacy, Cumulus Media, and SiriusXM Media.

As trailed late last week, The Joe Rogan Experience is now available via open RSS - the feed lists 2,258 episodes.

Spotify released its Q4/23 results. Total revenue grew 16% Y/Y to US$3.9bn; all the company’s figures met or exceeded expectations, with the company now having 602mn monthly users. The company lost $81mn in the quarter, a better figure than was flagged in December.

AI-powered podcast search tool Dexa has raised $6mn in seed funding, and announced a partnership with Huberman Lab. You can give it a go here.

Spotify tells Podnews that The Joe Rogan Experience podcast saw a 45% increase in revenue in 2023; and since the podcast went exclusive to Spotify, overall podcast consumption on the platform has increased by 232%. The company also tells us that: “his guests, often fellow podcasters, have seen on average a 47% increase in engagement on their own podcasts following their appearance on JRE”.

The Podnews Report Card would like to capture your thoughts on the big podcast platforms. It’s our third year of compiling this data, which we anonymise and feed back to Apple, YouTube, Spotify and Amazon - and we’re keen to know what’s changed. Please take part today; we’ll reveal the results at Evolutions by Podcast Movement in March.

Call Her Daddy is no longer a Spotify Exclusive - and is now available on all platforms. Video remains exclusive to Spotify. The podcast had been exclusive since July 2021, in a deal worth $60mn; it’s part of an apparent strategy change by Spotify to open up its programming to all podcast apps to benefit from increased ad sales.

Exclusive: Acast is blocking YouTube from ingesting Acast podcasts via YouTube’s RSS tool. An email from Acast’s support team seen by Podnews points out that YouTube requires all submitted podcasts to be ad-free; that creators will be unable to make money from listens on YouTube; and cites concerns that YouTube will divert listeners away from podcast platforms. “Acast has exclusive monetization rights to podcasts hosted with them,” it adds.

SiriusXM has signed a multi-year agreement with SmartLess. The deal is reportedly worth $100mn over the next three years. New episodes of SmartLess will not be exclusive, but will publish one week early on the platform, as in the previous deal with Amazon’s Wondery, who spent around $80mn in June 2021. The deal was, again, brokered by CAA.

Podcast production company Broccoli Productions is to close this week. The company, which lists six members of staff on its website, says its partnership with Sony Music Entertainment ended early - the joint venture was announced in October 2019. Sony made a number of redundancies at the end of last year; and closed an earlier JV with Three Uncanny Four in Jan 2022.

We’ve spent the last twelve hours working on a full, detailed FAQ for the feature, including a video of it working, and all your questions answered.

The New Zealand Podcasting Summit 2024 has been announced: it’s on May 11 in Auckland. The speaker list includes a number of podcasters from across Aotearoa, including MediaWorks, NZME, RNZ and Stuff Audio - and a number of independent producers. Podnews’s Editor spoke there last year and would recommend it; tickets are here.

US broadcaster Audacy, which recently filed for bankruptcy protection, has a new business plan which includes an audio subscription service, according to iHeart-owned Inside Radio. Audacy says it could deliver “as much as $20 million in revenue by 2027”. The company owns a number of podcast companies including Cadence13 and Pineapple Street.

From one type of award to another - Podcast growth agency Bumper has analysed 28.5mn Apple Podcasts star ratings (in the US store) to learn how they work. Crime Junkie has the most US ratings, at 344,000; but only 28% of shows have any star ratings at all. (Star ratings have no effect on the recommendation algorithms.)

Australian news outlet news.com.au is using AI voices to bring the latest news headlines to podcast ads. The tools, from Creative Fix and Audiostack, allow advertising to be updated in real time. Hear what the ads sound like in the Podnews Daily podcast.

Amy Poehler has been confirmed as a speaker at Evolutions by Podcast Movement, in Los Angeles this March. The stand-up comedian and Emmy Award winner hosts Say More with Dr? Sheila (for legal reasons, Dr? must be said in the form of a question), and is known for her work on SNL and Parks & Recreation. Discounted tickets are here.

Half of US podcast listeners say they would like to watch a TV show based on their favourite podcast; and have discovered new TV shows by listening to podcasts. The data is part of research by Hub Entertainment Research, which suggests that TV networks should take podcasts seriously as a marketing and audience-growth medium.

When was the last time you checked your stats? Today? Yesterday? An hour ago? Just before reading this? Podcaster and consultant Mark Steadman is inviting you to “regain a more balanced attitude to your creativity, focus on what matters, and raise a little for charity”. You can join The 90-Day No-Stats Challenge today.

As the US’s first election contest of 2024 takes place, news podcasters have flocked to Des Moines IA, like Brad Mielke, the host of ABC News’ flagship daily podcast Start Here, seen here recording yesterday’s episode from his hotel room “studio”. It’s said that podcasting will benefit with increased ad revenue during the election period; if this image is anything to go by, so will pillow manufacturers. Elections are also planned this year in the UK and India.

In Australia, Josh Withers wants to be the ABC’s Head of Audio on Demand. His job application is... a piece of audio on demand. Nice! Give him an interview on that alone, surely?

History: Dave Winer shared a blog post from 23 years ago, 11 January 2001, talking about “payloads for RSS”, which you and I know today as the thing that powers podcasting. We’ve a set of articles about podcasting’s history.

The 2024 Podcast Hall of Fame inductees have been announced, ahead of the induction ceremony at Podfest Expo. The eight inductees are Adam Carolla, Aaron Mahnke, Daniel J. Lewis, Doug Kaye, Jesse Thorn, Laurie Sims, Maria Hinojosa, and Michael Butler.

PRX is to distribute Condé Nast’s podcasts, including brands like WIRED, Vogue, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Condé Nast and PRX will also collaborate on advertising initiatives.

First look: Are news podcasts a brand-safe place to be? Analysis from Sounder suggests that over 80% of NPR’s news shows were classified as safe for brands to advertise in - significantly better than all news podcasts, where that figure drops to 54%.

The organisation also now requires companies to recertify anually. However, of 28 compliant companies, only 6 have recertified in the last twelve months. An IAB spokesperson told Podnews last month that “We do have several companies in process of recertification and we do expect them to be completed by the end of the year. We will offer a little flexibility to these companies if these are not entirely complete by 12/31 so they won’t lose certified status.”

Which podcast apps collect the most personal user data? A new report from Surfshark tells us the unsurprising answer: Spotify, which - says the company - shares data like your email address, phone number, product interaction, and advertising data, with third parties.

PodPros has published the Actively Established Podcast Report for January 2023. Alex Sanfilippo tells Podnews the data says that: “Starting a podcast during November for the first time drastically decreases your chances of success. Starting within eight weeks of the holidays means podcasters don't have time to create a rhythm, systems or automations before taking a break.” The data also says that there are 310,000 fewer active podcasts than there were in 2020.

The average cost-per-thousand for podcast ads in 2023 was $22.58, says Libsyn’s AdvertiseCast. That represents a 6% drop year-on-year - a “relatively small decrease which demonstrates the resiliency of the podcast advertising ecosystem.“

Thank you to Podscribe, the independent verification and attribution platform, for becoming our newest gold supporter. Podscribe has been a long-term supporter of Podnews, which helps our journalism by lessening our reliance on advertising. If you’d like to help support us in 2024, here’s where to do it.

Amazon Music has awarded RedHanded its British Podcast of the Year for 2023. The three-time British Podcast Awards winner is published by Wondery.

In the Podnews Weekly Review this week, hear from 21 people across podcasting about their highlights of 2023, and predictions for 2024. More consolidation for podcast publishers, diversity in monetisation techniques, big-name retirements as podcasting reaches 20, and the benefit of multi-platform podcasting, it’s all in this episode: speakers include Acast’s Ross Adams, Vox Media’s Nayeema Raza, Skye Pillsbury from The Squeeze, Ausha’s Jennifer Han, and many more. Listen here.

Spotify now has more than 100,000 video podcasts on its platform, according to TubeFilter. They claim, as we covered on Nov 9, that video is more popular in the evenings, while audio is used more during the day. Spotify faces significant competition for video podcasts as YouTube Music ramps up its podcast aspirations.

“Things ‘dun changed”, says Ozeal Debastos. Writing for Podnews, the founder of Pod Houston shares his predictions for 2024 - including live streaming, video recording and improvements in analytics.

A nice idea to keep your shows going over a holiday period, and help promote others: daily tech news podcast the Techmeme Ride Home podcast is currently running bonus episodes of all the times the host, Brian McCullough, has appeared as a guest on other shows, as feed drops. Worth a go for next year?

Thanks, too, to Harris from Calm History who likes the Podnews Daily. Thanks, Harris!

Fountain has published v1.0 of its podcast app, with a refreshed design, a new clip editor, home feed, and other improvements. It also has added a payment connection with the Strike app. Co-founder Oscar Merry is interviewed on the Podnews Weekly Review about the changes this week.

Podimo has just announced that it has raised €44mn (US $48mn) in funding. Morten Strunge, the CEO, says it will allow the company, which offers subscriptions to a premium podcast platform, to continue growth while orienting it towards profitability.

Podcast and audiobook subscription service Podimo has released Podimo Reflect, a look back for subscribers to see what they listened to in 2023. Insights include a decline in popularity from true crime in Finland and Norway, growth in news and politics for listeners in Spain and the Netherlands, and a feast of filth for naughty Germans.

First look: Magellan AI has launched podcast-to-podcast attribution as part of its measurement suite. The service will be able to tell you how many new listeners came to a podcast after it was promoted on other podcasts (and even whether they turned into repeat listeners).

Netflix published consumption data for more than 18,000 shows for Jan-June 2023. We pulled the data in, and wondered how podcasts compare. So to compare your podcast to a Netflix show, we have written a quick comparison tool. You might be surprised at how big you are.

Mailchimp is now owned by accounting software firm Intuit, which owns QuickBooks and TurboTax. Intuit has spent more than $2.8mn this year lobbying the US government to make filing taxes difficult enough to require software - something it’s lobbied for more than twenty years. If you’re interested, Podnews uses Sendy (affiliate link) to send email; other hosted alternatives are EmailOctopus or Beehiiv.

Flagged in October 2019, NPR has closed the NPR One app to simplify its offerings in app stores, moving NPR One’s functionality to the main NPR app. The new NPR app offers podcasts, the NPR One personalised radio flow, curated stories and access to flagship news shows. You can listen to Podnews’s daily updates there too.

On Musk with Walter Isaacson launches today on open RSS in most markets from iHeartPodcasts and Kaleidoscope (as below) - but in an interesting development, the show will be exclusive on Podimo in five European markets (Denmark, Norway, Germany, The Netherlands, and Finland).

TWiT, one of the oldest podcast networks, has made a number of layoffs “in order to keep operating without a loss”. Hosts Jason Howell and Ant Pruitt and editor Victor Bognot have left the company. TWiT was projected to lose $1.1mn next year. We’ve a full transcript of Leo’s announcement.

Acast Australia and New Zealand has revealed that the company has paid AUD $31mn (US $20mn) to local podcasters since the company’s local launch in Aug 2017.

The instructions page is only available for US users. Here’s a PDF of that page that everyone can access, and a sample OPML file from Google Takeout, for testing.

Exclusive: A copyright enforcement company is sending demands for money to podcast directories for reproducing thumbnail images from RSS feeds. Instead of contacting the podcaster or podcast host, as the law allows, they are coming after podcast directories like ours who rely on the open nature of RSS. At stake - a whole lot of money. This story is three months in the making - read it in full.

First look: Doja Cat and Ice Spice are on the first edition of Close Friends Only, the first podcast from Instagram. The branded show has the two icons diving deep on Instagram - from crazy memes to content from creators they love. It’s produced by Sun-ny Side Up, in collaboration with The Unwell Network; and it’s out tomorrow.

We don’t yet know where the cuts are coming from, though this message from Megaphone’s support team is ominous.

Podcast app Castro is “actively seeking a new home with new owners”. Last week, we reported that Mohit Mamoria, a former Castro employee who works for Tiny, Castro’s current owners, said it was to close; but “any communication or publication regarding the app's future is not official and does not represent Castro’s views” said the blog post. The blog post was the first for three years, and did not have a named author. (The app is now working again after an extended outage last week.)

Libsyn’s AdvertiseCast suggests that in 2024 advertisers will get more comfortable with brand safety in podcasting; and that more precise regional and local targeting will mean a boom in that sector of advertising. The predictions are made alongside the company’s average CPM for November, which rose 2.6% month-on-month to $22.96, though is down more than 6% year-on-year.

We've an interview tomorrow with Anna Sian, Head of Marketing at Spotify for Podcasters, in the Podnews Weekly Review: she advises checking your podcast page on Spotify to make sure your data is all up to date.

Podnews has published Apple's top shows for 14 different countries, and analysed the results. From the 140 awarded shows, "true crime" and "culture" were the most popular categories. Megaphone hosts the most popular shows, with 15; Simplecast and Acast both host 13. The Huberman Lab was the only show to have made it to three country lists. You can also compare the lists from 2022.

Auddia has announced it will automatically remove ads from podcasts in its app, called faidr, in early 2024. The company says it will launch with the top 200 most popular shows, and will initially bundle ad-free shows into its $5.99/month plan. Users can also request additional shows for future commercial-free listening.

Exclusive: The UK podcasting ad market is just a fifth of the size it should be; and Australia's isn't much better. Writing for Podnews, Will Page looks at the gap in the numbers and explores why all the podcasting money is in the US.

One Podnews reader points out that the decrease in podcast downloads seen by most rankers and hosts over the past few months may have a knock-on effect: more makegoods, as advertisers don't hit the numbers they were expecting. Makegoods - free spots to make up for lower than expected numbers - tie up future inventory. "This drop is not-nothing", our reader points out.

The winners of the 2023 Audio Production Awards were announced in London. Based in South Wales, Overcoat Media won Production Company of the Year, while Reduced Listening's Anishka Sharma won Producer of the Year. We've a full list of the winners.

If you're a podcast host, and able to calculate total figures for Apple Podcasts for August and October? We'd love to compare them to help the industry. editor@podnews.net

In an award ceremony in Sydney, the winners of the Australian Podcast Awards 2023 have just been announced. Podcast of The Year went to true crime podcast The Lawyer, the Sniper & the NSW Police. We've a full list of the winners and nominees, including trailers and hosting companies.

Popular podcast app Goodpods added AI-generated additional descriptions to thousands of podcasts without telling creators, or getting their consent. Some of the descriptions were inaccurate and misleading; the company withdrew the feature, after Podnews asked the founders for a statement.

Audio equipment manufacturer CEntrance launched "The English Channel", which is a part of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Southern England from northern France a portable, analog channel strip for recording on the road. It features a mic pre-amp with dynamics, a parametric EQ, and an audio interface with online streaming capabilities.

First Look: Podchaser has unveiled Performance+, which it calls the Podcast Industry's First Recommendation Engine for Direct Response Campaigns, a tool to identify the most effective podcasts for performance and direct response campaigns for advertisers.

First look: The UK’s largest radio and outdoor media company Global has signed an exclusive platform distribution and ad sales deal with the US's iHeartMedia. Global and iHeartMedia will license, distribute and represent each other’s podcast portfolios. Global currently owns just under 15% of iHeartMedia.

Johnny Jet, a travel blogger, is the latest victim of a scam aimed at podcasters. It was a Facebook hack, where someone promised to pay a guest fee of $3,000, and gained control of his Facebook page under the guise of setting up a live event. Here's someone else reporting the same thing; and Podnews knows of a very high-profile podcaster who fell for a similar scam in September (being promised $2,000 to remotely speak). He told us: "We should warn podcasters about this. They’re PHISHING, but targeting podcasters specifically. This pitch was tailored to me personally."

The winners of the Association for International Broadcasting awards were announced. Nicky Woolf, the presenter of The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome, won the audio Presenter of the Year award. Winners and commendations for podcasts included ITV, the BBC, RTÉ, and Project Brazen.

Spoken Word audio is now more popular than ever. Data from NPR and Edison Research suggests that both audience size and listening time are the highest they've ever been for spoken word content.

While daytimes are for audio podcasts, evenings are when people seek out video podcasts, according to new consumption information from Spotify. Spotify's podcast edition of its Fan Study 2023, published today, contains data-driven insights from the platform. The data also says that 54% of people find new podcasts by hearing about them on a show they already listen to.

Total listens dipped in the quarter (Jul/Aug/Sep) by 2.9%. Acast CEO Ross Adams blamed a decrease in listens on changes in download behaviour by Apple Podcasts in iOS 17. But, iOS 17 was only released on Sep 18, and only 16.7% of iPhones had installed it by the end of September, an adoption rate that Cult of Mac calls "a trickle". Too early to blame Cupertino?

Edison Research announced the top 50 podcasts in the US for Q3/23, based on reach. Former Kast Media show This Past Weekend with Theo Von made a top 10 debut at #5, Distractible made a top 20 debut at #15. Joe Rogan is still #1 for podcasts.

Podhome, a new podcast hosting platform, has launched. The service offers transcripts and AI suggestions; support for Value4Value and other new "Podcasting 2.0" features like the ability to host music shows; and also offers team members, embedded players and podcast websites. The founder and lead developer is Barry Luijbregts, who gives us the code Podnews (it's case sensitive) for two months free.

PRX has published its annual report. 80 different organisations use its Dovetail podcast tools; 99% Invisible's Roman Mars donated more than $100,000 to the organisation, while Google donated more than $1mn. The organisation made $12.8mn in underwriting.

Tenderfoot TV has acquired Resonate Originals, the podcast division of Resonate Recordings. It's the first acquisition by Tenderfoot TV. No terms were given.

The Independent Podcast Awards took place on Monday evening. We have a full list of the winners, including links to trailers and hosting details. Pod Bible sent a reporter. The winner of the Independent Podcast of the Year was Celebrity Catch Up: Life After That Thing I Did.

Back in December 2021, the National Association for the Deaf and Disability Rights Advocates sued SiriusXM for "failing to provide podcast transcripts for deaf users"; a request SiriusXM's lawyers called "misplaced and completely unreasonable" in August 2022. The case is due to reach a deadline on Dec 8; last week, Disability Rights Advocates wrote to the judge suggesting that SiriusXM may be working on "accessibility aids on the podcast content available on their platforms".

Hark Daily is celebrating its 500th edition today. It's a show that shares the most interesting conversations, stories and ideas from podcasts, and is available within the Hark podcast discovery app.

Almost half of children (48%) in the US are listening to podcasts weekly, according to a new study from talent agency UTA (asking 5,000 US parents). Two-thirds listen monthly. The company says that "podcasts are a huge part of family media".

In France, Acast has given more than 9 million euro to podcasters in the country (US$9.5mn) since launching in 2019. The company says Apple Podcasts is #1, seeing three times the downloads per user than Spotify.

We hear that Spotify is testing public comments for podcasts. For select shows, all listener responses from the proprietary Q&A feature will be made available on the show’s episode page on Spotify, as long as they meet Spotify’s content guidelines. Spotify tells Podnews that "Participating creators will continue to have full control over questions and responses — they can publish or unpublish any response, or edit or remove Q&A prompts, through the interact tab of the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard." (By way of comparison, reviews left on Apple Podcasts are not editable by creators.)

Wondery is turning its podcasts into three TV channels on Amazon Freevee. The Amazon-owned podcast publisher will be the first podcast video channels on Freevee, featuring over 20 Wondery series, centered around True Crime, Sports, and Entertainment & Pop Culture.

The nominations were announced for the UK's Audio Production Awards. The hosts of the event, on Nov 22, were announced as Pod Save the UK's Nish Kumar and Coco Khan. The awards are organised by AudioUK, the trade body which provides business support and growth to people who make podcasts, radio and audiobooks.

Headliner's editing tool Eddy now gives podcast creators a "promo pack" for every show, which consists of downloadable files that contain +10 keywords, 5+ direct quotes, 3 summaries/show notes with chapters, and, now, a references page. They ran the tool on this episode of the Podnews Weekly Review, and it produced these keywords, quotes, references, and shownotes.

A new denoiser tool has been launched - but one with a difference. Tape It's Denoiser, which is free on the web, works with music - single tracks, full songs, or field recordings. We link to a video demo from the company's press release.

Podcasters are the most trusted media personalities in the US, according to a new study. The second most-trusted are YouTubers (many of whom are, of course, podcasters). The data was released by Acast.

How can you make a whole podcast just using AI - no microphones required? Paul McNally produced a podcast with three hosts chatting about the news, entirely AI generated. He writes how he did it, and produced the Develop AI podcast which is impressive (try episode 1 for an episode based on his blog post). McNally founded Develop AI, an AI training and strategy company, and runs podcast producer Develop Audio.

Exclusive: Ausha is launching a Podcast Search Optimisation tool today. The tool monitors and optimises show appearance in podcast app search results, suggests keywords to rank for, and monitors Apple Podcasts and Spotify to measure the effect of any change. It's available in beta for selected customers today, before a full launch later in the year.

Pix is an AI-powered personal podcast recommendation engine. Its data doesn't stop in 2021, either - the company behind it says it is right up to date. You can text Pix, email Pix, call Pix or chat on the web. We tried it: it's very impressive, but um, oh.

UPDATE: The company made some changes - see our fourth story here.

The Signal Awards announced the 2023 winners. Audible won the first-ever Signal Company of the Year. Podcast fans cast over 130,000 votes in the public voting stage.

Podcasts are launching on YouTube Music in the UK today, the second-largest podcast market in the world. We're told there will be a podcasts destination page within the YouTube Music app (normally pre-installed on all modern Android phones). The company also reaffirmed that "Later this year, we'll offer support for creators to directly submit their RSS feeds to YouTube to distribute their audio podcasts." YouTube UK Lead Alison Lomax said: "We’re thrilled to be launching podcasts in the UK on YouTube Music. Podcasts have soared in popularity in recent years among all age groups, particularly Gen Z users, and there is clearly an appetite for this longer–form audio visual content."

The October issue of The Podcast Sessions magazine was released, free - focusing on podcasting in Africa. Cover stars Lydia K.M and Murugi Munyi are hosts of The Messy Inbetween, hosted on Spotify for Podcasters - a podcast about "life as it is".

Kagi, a paid-for, ad-free search engine, has a permanent Podcasts tab, we notice. It looks like this; links are to the Apple Podcasts listing for the podcast, not direct to the episode, disappointingly.

Amazon has closed its streaming "radio" service Amp. The service launched in March last year; and reportedly fired half its staff twelve months ago.

Libsyn's AdvertiseCast unveiled its September 2023 podcast ad rates. The average CPM rate was $22.91, up 3.8% month-on-month. The company also highlighted their brand safety tools from ComScore.

Adam Bowie writes more about Edison Podcast Metrics, after listening to our interview on the Podnews Weekly Review.

The winners of the Black Podcasting Awards were announced in New York. Black Love Inc, who's founder and CEO Codie Elaine Oliver is pictured above, won six separate awards. Our list includes publishers and hosting companies.

In London, the winners of the British Podcast Awards were announced. Podnews's Sam Sethi handed the Gold award for Best News & Current Affairs podcast, supported by Campaign, to The Guardian's Today in Focus. Podcast of the Year was awarded to the BBC Radio Wales show A Positive Life: HIV from Terrence Higgins to Today, hosted by singer-songwriter Sam Smith.

OMG, Podchaser is slaying the podcast game by dropping a new feature that's fire: "predictive demographics". It's so low-key cool! It's basically AI that listens to podcasts to suss out the age and gender of the audience from the language used. Girls, they say it's the first time anyone's done this in the industry! It's pretty lit!

Google Podcasts is to close, the company has announced. The news confirms Podnews's coverage in August that YouTube Music will allow you to add any RSS feed to the app, so you can continue to listen to your favourite shows in YouTube Music as a replacement. The company is working on a migration tool. They've also communicated the upcoming closure to listeners.

This isn't a new technology. Hear our Editor translated into Spanish in the Podnews Daily podcast today - from almost two years ago.

The first ever podcast ranker for the UK was published by Edison Podcast Metrics UK, and covered in The Observer. The BBC has just one show in the top 10, though is the largest publisher in the top 25.

Acast's Ross Adams and Podscribe's Pete Birsinger are the guests on the Podnews Weekly Review this week, explaining Acast's recent decision to stop accepting Spotify Ad Analytics and instead to offer Podscribe for free, along with using a number of other attribution partners. Ross tells us: "Relying solely on a one-publisher environment for data aggregation could, we believe, introduce bias and self-promotion. That hinders the objective analysis of data. Podscribe, it's worth noting, doesn't sell media. Spotify does." The interview is in full in the Podnews Weekly Review.

Headliner has added a free transcription service into Make, the company's audiogram and video tool. Once you log in, look for the big pink transcribe button. The product, called Eddy, also allows you to edit a podcast as if it's a word document. (We were given a complimentary subscription to Headliner to publish the Podnews Weekly Review on YouTube.)

Sony Music is to lay off "a significant percentage" of its podcast division, according to a report in Bloomberg. The company is also to cancel High Low with EmRata, its celebrity podcast with Emily Ratajkowski.

iOS 17 has been released for iPhone and iPad. A free update, it includes significant changes for Apple Podcasts, unlocking episode art and a new Now Playing experience among other features. Episode art is already supported by Spotify, Pocket Casts and other large apps: you'll find it in our daily and weekly podcasts.

A simple, straightforward way to promote your podcast? Embedding your audio in an email - so it plays right in the email app. We tested using the HTML audio tag in email and learnt that it is an effective way to promote your show - it works for much of your audience, and degrades gracefully for those where it doesn't. See all the details in our full report.

Podnews first reported the Kast Media story in July. This week has seen further reporting from HotPod and Bloomberg.

Have you heard of an Aperol Spritz? 50% of all consumers haven't: but almost every marketer knows about the Italian wine-based cocktail. It's one example, according to new research from Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia, of marketers increasingly not understanding the consumers they're trying to reach. The data claims that marketers often chase the ‘shiny and new’ at the expense of reflecting the values and priorities of real consumers.

Marketing data company Claritas has acquired adtech service ArtsAI. Claritas runs an "identity graph" which lets advertisers target consumers based on what else they do on their devices; ArtsAI uses AI to optimise advertising delivery. Terms of the deal weren't given. ArtsAI's CRO, Erik Lundberg, told Podnews: "When you start thinking about the possibilities of merging our advanced AI personalization with their identity and data graph, it's really phenomenal."

Alex Estrada has a question to ask in a new podcast from Sonoro and Tenderfoot TV - was his dad involved in a murder? Fifty years after a 34 year-old man was killed, The Estate blends true crime and family memoir to look at the complicated legacy we are left with when people die. It's out tomorrow.

A new magazine is getting ready for launch: Sound Sourceresses will showcase the talent and innovation of women working in audio storytelling.

Edison Research released the shows with a highest concentration of listeners in households earning $100,000+. Gimlet and The Wall Street Journal's The Journal is #1.

"Podcasts don't need ads", said Luminary in a criticised, and since-deleted, tweet when it launched. Today, Luminary has partnered with Acast to make six of its exclusive shows available wherever you get your podcasts - monetised by ads. The company will also use Acast+ Access to give access to its paid subscription content in any app: the company also uses Apple Podcasts's paid subscriptions.

Podcast Day Asia took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Guang Jin Yeo (above), presented data from his research for Podnews's Podcasts in Asia series; Kellie Riordan shared data from Australia; Acast, Audacia Audio and MeaVox Live spoke to our Editor about podcast monetisation opportunities in the region; and the winners of the RadioInfo Asia Podcast Awards 2023 were announced.

Part of the Airwave Podcast Network: Stay up to date on the latest business news and stock market happenings—and how they affect your financial life with the SoFi Daily Podcast

Another former Kast Media creator has spoken out against the company. Hawk vs Wolf's Jason Ellis posted on Instagram that the company "had decided to not pay us the money that they owe us".

AdvertiseCast unveiled the average CPM in August was $22.14, fairly flat against last month.

On Air Fest has announced On Air LA Annex 2023, a four day festival presenting live podcasts in Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles.

Five US late-night hosts are producing a limited series podcast to raise money for their out-of-work staff during the WGA strike. Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver are making Strike Force Five, a limited series ("at least twelve episodes"), with Spotify.

Tink Media's Lauren Passell asked people at Podcast Movement last week what they were listening to and released a great list. Michael Osborne, from Famous & Gravy, shares our Editor's choice; disappointingly, nobody mentions the Podnews Weekly Review, but we'll forgive you all. (Next week we'll have an interview with Greg Glenday, the new Chief Business Officer of Acast).

Launched Sept 2020 in Podnews, NPR ends localised versions of the Consider This podcast this week, which they claimed at the time was the "first localised daily news podcast". Localisation "did not prove sustainable", said a spokesperson; Current reports that the production process wasn't scalable; audiences didn't value it much anyway; and NPR is moving to Megaphone which means the use of different tools. Consider This continues, with national content (featuring anchors like Mary Louise Kelly, above)

What happens when Elon Musk mentions your podcast? Last week, a day after we mentioned it in Podnews, apparent Podnews reader Elon Musk (hi Elon) tweeted about Airwave's The Explorers Podcast, in a tweet that got 18 million views. Rephonic looks at the numbers to see what happened next.

At Podcast Movement, it was announced that Podcast Radio is to launch on FM/AM stations in North America from September, including two top 20 markets. Podcast Radio in the UK carries Podnews podcasting news headlines in audio form.

YouTube will fully support ingestion of RSS feeds for podcasts by the end of the year, it was announced at Podcast Movement by the Product Lead Podcasting at Google, Steve McLendon, speaking to Ausha's Jennifer Han. He also made the first public acknowledgement of the ongoing beta testing that we reported on in May. (It ingests RSS audio feeds and turns them into YouTube-hosted video, like CNN One Thing which we understand is using it.)

The Podnews Puppies: at Podcast Movement, lunchtime is playtime! Find the Podnews Puppies in front of our booth between 12.30pm and 2.30pm today. We've partnered with MaxFund, an animal adoption centre in Denver.%%promo-end%%

Waggy news: introducing the Podnews Puppies! Partnering with MaxFund, an animal adoption centre in Denver, Podnews brings you lunchtime playtime with the Podnews Puppies on the Podcast Movement expo floor! Find the Podnews Puppies (and their schedule) in front of our booth. Unlimited pats and strokes on us!%%promo-end%%

A podcast network based in Dubai in the UAE, Kerning Cultures has suspended operations and laid off staff, apparently due to lack of funding. The female-led Arabic and English network was eight years old; the website lists 33 staff. They were a partner with Acast.

In a social media post, Glenn Beck said Apple Podcasts had removed The Glenn Beck Program - falsely claiming it was political censorship by the company.

The Podnews Weekly Review this week will have an interview with Squadcast CEOs Zachariah Moreno and Rockwell Felder.

Podcast spend in Australia for Q2/23 was up by 64% year-on-year, according to ARN's iHeartRadio Australia and Magellan AI. The top 3 advertisers were health insurance company NIB, McDonald's, and Amazon.

Last week, Audacy's financial results included note of "an early exit to an onerous podcast ad representation contract". They didn't say who at the time; The Verge reports it is this agreement with APM. The final para of the press release: "UTA brokered the deal on behalf of American Public Media."

How much do your listeners want to promote your show? A Canadian politics show is paying people to get a tattoo of their podcast artwork. Kyle in Edmonton did it - find a picture and video in the link.

You can support Podnews via Patreon, as the fine people below all do: your support funds our reporting and tools for the whole industry.

Interview Valet has bought Podchaser Connect, a database used to book guests on podcasts, from Acast. Interview Valet will integrate Podchaser Connect into its service. Podchaser launched its guest placement platform in 2020.

The Locarno Film Festival has abruptly walked away from a podcast contract with producer BrandAudio. The festival cancelled the agreement within a few weeks of this year's event. “We found the festival’s unexpected and abrupt cancellation of our valued co-production relationship most peculiar", said BrandAudio’s Managing Partner Darryl von Däniken; the company still jointly owns the IP in the podcast's name and format.

The Rest is Football is launched today by Goalhanger Podcasts, which already makes two of the UK's most popular shows. Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards will host the show; Lineker owns Goalhanger Podcasts, which has 17mn downloads a month.

iHeartMedia has launched a new sports network with Michael Smith and Terrence Williams. The Inflection Network includes Comeback Stories, and more to come.

Scripted podcast company Realm has acquired kids production company Pinna and podcast producer Lipstick & Vinyl. Terms were not disclosed. The company will also represent shows from Rebel Girls and GoKidGo.

Some brand suitability tools are making it impossible to monetise podcasts from Black creators because they don't understand the culture, new research says. Solutions just using a standard keyword blocklist claimed that 92% of Urban One's podcast content was so potentially problematic it couldn't be advertised on - but the tools didn't understand that words like "bomb" mean "cool", not an explosive device, or simply didn't understand the accent and got the transcripts so incorrect they were then flagged as shows to avoid. Sounder's AI-based tool, however, only flagged 10% as problematic: dramatically improving the monetisation for content from Black creators.

The Black Podcasting Awards has announced Erica Cobb as its inaugural lead judge. She is co-host of TEGNA’s popular TV show 'Daily Blast Live’. Applications now close on Aug 7 - COBBLER is a discount code to save you $10 on your entry.

Adam Curry has launched a music podcast, called Boostagram Ball.

"What I was naïve to - and perhaps we all were - is that corporate dollars will inherently change how we do things, how we make things, what gets made, why things get made. I saw a lot of that money that people were investing in podcasts was going towards people who hadn't made podcasts - and then they hired the people who had made them to work for those people. And now, however, many years later, the rent is due and it didn't pan out." Rebecca Sananès is on the Podnews Weekly Review this week, following her article in Vanity Fair; you'll hear how she was hired to work with Harry and Meghan, why there aren't enough women in podcasting, and what she wants to do next.

Triton Digital's Canada Podcast Ranker was released for June. As our graph of the year shows, Wondery appears to be showing significant growth.

Lining up against Spotify and Audible, an audiobooks app which promises to share its profits with independent bookshops has been launched internationally. Libro.fm also offers monthly memberships.

Riverside has launched Magic Clips, an AI-enhanced tool to generate short-form clips from long-form content.

Cornette alleges that all of Kast Media's sales team have left the company. Podnews has noticed that a number of Kast Media staff are indeed posting on LinkedIn that they are "open for work", while others left the company a few months ago. Notably, Mike Jensen, the company's former Chief Business Officer, launched Rhapsody Voices, his own podcast network, in June. Jim Cornette's shows are now represented by Rhapsody Voices.

Oprah's Super Soul, which she plays excerpts from in the Starbucks app, focuses on Abraham Verghese's work and is a six part series.

Spanish-language podcast platform iVoox has released an annual report into the state of podcasting in Spanish. Podnews has an English translation; the Spanish version is on the iVoox website. A third of all Spanish podcasters started their show in the last year; over a quarter of shows include video; and almost 20% are earning revenue from their podcasts.

Amanda Montell of Sounds Like A Cult has sued her co-host Isa Medina for half a million dollars alleging bad behaviour. The show announced it had moved to Exactly Right in November, but the network dropped the show within two weeks.

Exclusive data: Australian podcast production house Deadset Studios and market research agency Insightfully will release the findings of a new annual podcast survey tomorrow at Mumbrella360 in Sydney. The study, PodPoll 2023, surveyed over 2,000 monthly podcast listeners. Podnews has been given exclusive access to data from tomorrow's report, showing regular podcast listeners are most likely to be people who are eager for new knowledge and skills - and keen to try new shows.

After Hollywood writers started a strike in early May, the actor union Sag-Aftra joined the strike on Friday for what they call a fair contract. The union also represents some journalists, radio personalities, broadcasters and voice actors. It is likely to put a hold on some podcast production, since it includes voice acting and narration. It's the first time both writers and performers have been on strike simultaneously for 63 years. (And yes, there's a podcast for that: Deadline's Strike Talk).

'Podcasts' here refers to shows uploaded directly to YouTube; it doesn't yet support its trialed RSS ingestion.

Seekr and Oxford Road have launched what they call the first-ever "civility score" for podcasts. Using AI, the tool scans podcast episodes in their entirety, enabling it to spot instances of ad hominem attacks that occur at any point in a program, so brands can avoid getting caught in the crossfire. "Now, we can reward the most responsible voices, rather than those that are simply the loudest", says Oxford Road CEO Dan Granger.

Podcast host Libsyn has published its latest platform stats. Spotify is showing a record number of downloads on the platform. (In March, Spotify released "Auto Play for Podcasts", which plays other relevant episodes after one finishes; and its new scrollable interface for podcasts)

Veritonic announced this morning a set of products focused on branded podcasts, promising "data and analytics meticulously designed to aid in the creation and optimization of branded podcast initiatives". “Branded podcasts are an incredibly effective vehicle for telling a brand’s story and increasing its reach,” says CEO Scott Simonelli.

Exclusive Lemonada Media has signed a distribution and monetisation partnership with José Andrés Media, the multimedia platform led by the world-renowned chef. Two shows join the chart-topping Lemonada Media lineup today.

42% of Americans now listen to a podcast monthly

Aussie podcasters Toni and Ryan are to embark on a marathon 50+ hour livestream: one minute for every new Patreon member. The podcast, a Spotify exclusive, gets more than a million downloads a month.

Audm, the article narration company bought by The New York Times in March 2020, has been closed. As of July 1, the website redirects to a promotion for the New York Times Audio app, and the Audm app is no longer available for download. The company last tweeted in July 2021; and last updated its Facebook page in September 2019.

Podcast listeners are comfortable with AI tools being used in podcasting, says a new study from Acast. Uses of AI most welcomed by listeners include sound enhancements, translated captions and AI-generated transcripts: the study claims that 79% of podcast listeners want transcripts for searching, and 78% want closed-captions.

Lava For Good, and the project's co-founders Jason Flom and Jeff Kempler, were honored with the Champion of Justice Award by the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project.

Android is still highly fragmented for podcast apps, according to data from the Open Podcast Prefix Project, analysed by Podnews. Data from 4.75mn downloads in May suggests that, while Spotify is the clear leader, the app ecosystem on Android remains significantly more fragmented than that of Apple - even when combining downloads from iOS, iPadOS and macOS.

Meanwhile, YouTube still has to launch their podcast offering outside the US (where they launched in April). The company hasn't completed its RSS ingest trial, either, and consumption numbers are low. Meanwhile, YouTube is under fire for what some are calling "fraudulent conduct", after Adalytics researchers suggest as much as 80% of YouTube's video ads on third party sites are hidden and muted.

One of the oldest podcast apps, Stitcher is to close on Aug 29. An internal memo, seen by Podnews, says that the "scale and reach of our widely-distributed podcasts has been and remains a crucial accelerant for our advertising sales business". In January, Stitcher was the sixth-biggest podcast app in the US, according to Podtrac - though it had lost a quarter of its users in two years, and had only 1.3% of the market.

Acast has launched a self-service podcast advertising platform for host-read advertising, in addition to pre-recorded ads. The tool also includes AI-driven tools to help advertisers discover new podcasts to advertise with.

Entries open today for the 2023 International Women's Podcast Awards. You've until mid-September to enter; the awards will be held in London on Nov 6.

A new podcast app for kids has been launched. KidsPod includes more than 300 shows, and an in-app coloring book. It's claimed to be the first of its kind to present over 300 kids’ podcasts in a visual, intuitive and safe way.

Just announced: Sprinklr Insights, an AI-powered social monitoring product, is now using Podchaser's API to listen to and measure conversations happening on podcasts.

Podcast Day Asia has been announced in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Sep 6. A preliminary schedule has been announced, and features Podnews writer Guang Jin Yeo, our Editor James Cridland, Podbean's Norma Jean Belenky and others. It's part of the Radiodays Asia conference.

On our story on Meghan Markle's Archetypes, which was produced by Archewell and Gimlet: Andy Scott, a former Gimlet staffer, tweets: "We did occasionally have producers do interviews, though never the main ones, and we never edited her asking questions into interviews that producers conducted."

Meghan Markle's podcast produced just twelve episodes in a $20mn contract. The Wall Street Journal suggests that she may not earn the full amount after not meeting productivity clauses. Podnews has heard from multiple sources that some interviews on the show were done by other staffers, with her questions edited-in afterwards.

Gen Z podcast listeners discover shows through social media, according to a new study from Edison Research and SXM Media. The study also discovers that those who started listening as kids are consuming 10.6 hours of podcasts a week.

Logitech's Streamlabs has launched podcast editor software. The software allows you to edit words not waveforms, and includes video. The tool has a free tier, an AI-powered highlight tool, and creates clips for all social platforms. The company also owns the Yeti microphone brand.

Auphonic has launched an AI-powered automatic generator for shownotes, summaries and chapter points. It's competition for Buzzsprout, who partnered with Podium, and Capsho. Auphonic's API is used by many podcast hosting companies.

Breaking: Spotify has just announced Spotify Ad Analytics, a free measurement, attribution and brand-lift tool. Using first-party data and "the Spotify pixel", it allows advertisers to understand if consumers heard an ad and then took an action, and works for music and podcast advertising on and off the Spotify platform. There are more details on the product's website.

First look: Podcast hosting company RSS.com has launched PodViz, an in-house visualisation tool to produce videos from audio podcasts for services like YouTube. The service supports chapter art and YouTube metadata; an example is here. It's not limited to the company's hosting customers: any podcaster can try it here.

Spotify is to run a free masterclass next week on "unlocking your podcast potential". One of the speakers is Maya Prohovnik, VP of Podcast Product at Spotify, as well as Jordan Newman, Spotify’s Head of Podcast Partner Management, and Gael Aitor from Teenager Therapy.

Triton Audio Marketplace now lets advertisers book ads on broadcast radio and streaming alongside podcasts. The company claims it as an industry first; broadcast radio inventory includes iHeartMedia's 850+ stations, and will shortly add 3,400+ stations represented by Katz Media. The company suggests that making advertising easier to buy will benefit all parts of the industry.

Long read: In our latest look at podcasting in the East, we visit Vietnam - a country where audiobooks are surprisingly popular, and where the roads aren't ideal for podcast listening. Guang Jin YEO also looks at the history of podcasting in the country. It's another fascinating read.

"Apple Podcasts will support episode artwork for all shows." (See our episode artwork on the Podnews Daily). Episode artwork is already supported by Spotify and Pocket Casts.

Jemele Hill is "to leave Spotify" (Bloomberg), and is looking for a new home for her podcast (Hollywood Reporter), but "a lot of what’s been reported just isn’t true" (Jemele Hill via Twitter). Her show is exclusive on Spotify. In June 2021 Hill announced The Unbothered Network, which launched two shows in Oct 2022: Sanctified and The Black Girl Bravado.

Inaugural member of the Podcasting Hall of Fame Scott Sigler has been signed by the Realm Podcast Network. He brings his entire back catalog to the service.

"If you’re not white, or a man, you’re earning less than you were three years ago." That's the finding of the UK Audio Network's State of the Audio Industry Survey 2023. As part of a second phase in the Equality in Audio Pact, a number of content creators have published an open letter to the podcast industry calling for action.

Listen, a major podcast producer based in London, has been acquired by PodX Group. No terms were given; the deal is described as a "milestone" acquisition for PodX, and is the largest deal in the UK podcast industry since Sony bought production company Somethin' Else in 2021.

We review the ALABS IRON MINI-WL microphone, a USB wireless condenser microphone. It's an interesting idea - at a low price point.

Hayti, a Black-owned news aggregation app, claims it is now the largest source of podcasts led by Black hosts. The app lists more than 2,000 shows.

Buzzsprout and Ausha have both launched AI tools to help podcasters when publishing new shows. Buzzsprout's tool automatically builds episode titles, descriptions, chapter markers and transcripts; while Ausha has added ChatGPT to help produce social media posts. Both services are available to all customers, joining other services like Capsho.

At The Podcast Show 2023 in London, it was announced that Edison Podcast Metrics are coming to the UK. Edison Podcast Metrics UK will be the first podcast ranker in the country, and will use a quarterly survey of at least 2,000 weekly podcast listeners. The company's release includes indicative data of the top five shows (none of which are from the BBC); the first full set of data will be unveiled for subscribers in Q3.

Exclusive: Podnews has obtained a document with full details of a YouTube "RSS Ingestion" pilot that it is running with some partners. The service pulls new audio from an RSS feed to upload it to YouTube, complete with a static image of the show art. Shows already using it are CNN's One Thing and CityCast Pittsburgh.

Spotify is building AI versions of its hosts for ad reads, according to The Bill Simmons Podcast. "There is going to be a way to use my voice for the ads," he says, before adding that he would need to give approval first.

"I'm never going to click a podcast app to try and get into podcasting [for the first time]." Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek spoke to the Acquired podcast in a Spotify studio in Stockholm, and focuses on podcasts. Ek describes why podcasts are in the main Spotify app, rather than in a separate one; and when asked if Spotify should pay podcast creators, he replies that the company's goal is to be "the best partner for creators". (It's also in video).

The International Women's Podcast Festival has been postponed, due to what the organisers call a systemic lack of industry support.

Good Tape, a new printed magazine, is on the way for audio professionals, creators and their fans. It's founded by Dane Cardiel, who says: “There’s a real need for dedicated culture writing that intelligently covers our industry — especially one that understands the importance of design and centers our behind-the-mic creative community.” The code PODNEWS will get you a discount.

A profitable podcast is for sale for $15.5m - the website doesn't give its name, but gives a lot of detail: with five staff, it makes more than $100,000 in profit every month. We think (no spoilers!) it's this - and if we're right, we thank the host for being a personal supporter of Podnews since Nov 2019. (You can too!).

Let's get ready to Rumble; the online video platform is getting into podcasting with the acquisition of Callin, a social podcasting and live streaming platform. No terms were disclosed. Rumble hosts Donald Trump's Truth Social network, and the video platform is popular among American right and far-right users. Its competitor YouTube added podcasts last month.

iHeartMedia announced Ruby, a branded podcast unit that's already working with Quickbooks and IBM. Lst week SMI said that US spending on branded podcasts was up 51% year-on-year in Q1.

The US podcast ad market is now worth $1.8bn, according to new data from the IAB and PWC. Revenue grew 26% last year, twice as fast as total internet ad revenue: however, the company saw a significant slow-down in Q4/22. News has also dropped from its place as the top genre for ad revenue: the sports category is now #1, with a 15% share. The IAB predicts the market will be $3.9bn by 2025.

A correction to our coverage of Acast's Q1 financials yesterday: the announcement of a 15% staff reduction last year was, we're told, based on staffing levels in Q2, excluding Podchaser. By Q1/23, Acast staffing had reduced by 83 people, a 19% reduction. We're grateful for the correction.

DR, the public broadcaster for Denmark, is to remove some of its popular podcasts from open platforms. New episodes of Sara & Monopolet will only be available in DR LYD, the broadcaster's own app, and other shows will follow. Tine Godsk Hansen from the broadcaster claims podcast apps "favour paid content", and says it's an opportunity for Danes to discover more from DR. Read our opinion

Our Editor, James Cridland, will be the opening speaker at The Podcast Show 2023 in London. He will speak at 9.10am on Wednesday, in the 400-capacity Amplify Theatre, in association with Amazon Music / Wondery and IAB UK: focusing on the last year in the podcast industry and the years to come. His speech will be followed by Crime Junkie host Ashley Flowers. (You can still buy tickets for the event - the code PODNEWS will get you a discount)

In the latest in the fight for podcast listening apps, Amazon Music is paying some Australian listeners AUD$5 (USD$3.39) in vouchers just for listening to a podcast on the platform. The offer is targeted, and we're not eligible. But if you are, a reminder that Podnews Daily is just five minutes long…

Want some more numbers? The Podnews Daily podcast did 70,427 downloads in April on podcast platforms; and got 653 views on YouTube (an additional 0.9%). More than Spotify, though - it might be the biggest podcast platform by reach, but we had just 492 "starts" according to the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard.

The team that brought us Pod Save America launches Pod Save the UK today, hosted by comedian Nish Kumar and journalist Coco Khan. Produced by Crooked Media and Reduced Listening, it's one of the biggest UK podcast launches to date.

Podcast Network Builder has been launched by Podmachine and Podcast Network Asia. The tool is designed to help brands and companies build their own podcast networks.

Data: iHeartRadio shares State of Podcasting 2023, with data from Edison Research, Scarborough, and eMarketer.

Exclusive: Podnews has reviewed the Nomono Sound Capsule, an ingenious field-recording tool from Norway. What does it do - and who would benefit from it the most?

YouTube Music has officially launched its podcast service in the US. They have posted this advice for podcast creators, and badges (which, we note, talk about "listen on YouTube Music", despite the company suggesting we don't say that). It looks identical to our examination of the web version earlier this week. Two notable quotes:

Exclusive: Indonesia is going through a period of real and exciting change - some would even argue that it's reaching an inflection point. In our study of podcasting in Indonesia, we discover the Joe Rogan of the country, why many Indonesians confuse a YouTube video with a podcast, and the history of the medium.

YouTube Music now has podcasts - on the website version only for now. Use a US VPN, and you'll see a podcasts tab top left. Click it to see recommended episodes (Podnews Daily as #1 probably suggests it's personalised), and beneath, a list of featured podcasts showing the square images, like comedy and business. Searching for a podcast, like Podnews Daily, returns a list of podcasts and episodes. Podcast pages allow you to "add to library" (no subscribe or follow button here); and pressing play gives you the option of audio-only or video, as is standard with YouTube Music. The player automatically plays "similar content", which are not in any specific order; there's skip-forward 30 seconds and skip-back 10 seconds buttons (which aren't there for music). YouTube Music's web version is usually very similar to the app in UX and featureset; so podcasts through the app is presumably coming very soon.

A podcast in Ireland made €190,000 (US $210,000) in profit last year, according to financial reports. Lightning Seeds Ltd is owned by Irish broadcaster Laurita Blewitt, a host of Tommy, Hector and Laurita, an Irish Podcast Awards winning show. The success of the podcast has also benefited co-host Hector Ó hEochagáin’s own media firm, Low Profile Ltd. The show uses advertising, the Acast+ subscription tool, and sells merch.

The UK Managing Director of YouTube, Alison Lomax is to speak at The Podcast Show in London. “I look forward to discussing our plans to make it even easier for creators and artists to showcase their podcasts on YouTube”, she's quoted as saying.

The Nomono Sound Capsule was launched yesterday and is now shipping. The device includes four wireless lavalier mics and a spatial audio microphone array, and includes a cloud editor and enhancer. It's priced at $2,490 with an additional, optional, monthly subscription to the cloud editor.

Spotify's All Ears summit is taking place in Berlin, Germany. The largest German podcast summit, the event features six simultaneous tracks including keynotes and panels, and has 1,800 people attending today, including all major publishers - "an open event just like we're an open platform", Spotify's GM for Europe, Michael Krause, told Podnews. Javier Piñol, Global Head of Markets for Talk Content at Spotify, is interviewing our Editor, James Cridland, on stage later.

Data: The Pew Research Center has released a study examining podcasts as a source of news and information. The study suggests that two-thirds of all podcast listeners have heard news discussed on the podcasts they listen to; and almost all of them expect that news to be accurate. However, few directly listen to podcasts from a news organisation. The full study is here.

Deals: ARN's iHeartPodcast Network Australia has renewed its representation deal with Audioboom as a "multi-year partnership". … PodcastOne has acquired two shows - a hit rewatch show Causing a Scene, previously known as The Netchicks on Libsyn, and I've had it, which was formerly on Podbean … Syntax has been acquired by Sentry, a code analytics product, on the occasion of its 600th show. "We personally loved Scott and Wes’ ad reads for Sentry, but going forward the podcast will be free of paid advertising".

Chartable is to remove its integration with Apple Podcasts Connect from Jun 1 according to an email to customers. Apple-specific consumption data for your podcasts will no longer be available within Chartable, though Apple's trending charts will continue. Apple Podcasts does not offer a method to programmatically export podcast consumption data to other services.

Acast is using its Acast+ one-time payment tool to produce an exclusive podcast mixtape, with proceeds going directly to two mental health and mindfulness charities. Exclusive content has been produced by UK and Irish podcasters for the "Mindful Mixtape".

Which were the biggest new shows in 2022? Edison Podcast Metrics reports that the three biggest launches last year were The Deck (launched Feb 2, audiochuck); Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade (launched Jan 12, Cadence13); and True Crime with Kendall Rae (launched Apr 22, Mile Higher Media/Audioboom Studios)

Elsewhere in kids podcasts, APM's kids and family shows are now available on the Yoto player, a screen-free player for kids.

Could podcasting get someone else out of prison? The subject of the Bone Valley podcast from Lava for Good, Leo Schofield has had his parole hearing set for May 3 in Tallahassee FL, USA. The show unearthed what it calls overwhelming evidence of his innocence of committing murder, as well as highlighting the alleged real killer.

Podnews has acquired Podcast Business Journal, a well-respected podcast newsletter. Podcast Business Journal will publish a weekly roundup of news, podcast business data, and a long-form interview every week. You can sign up for free here.

YouTube's "podcast" tab, which we reported on Monday, appears to have globally rolled out as promised in its apps (iOS and Android). Here's what it looks like. Meanwhile, Headliner has now generated more than 1.7mn full episode audiograms to places like YouTube. The company produces audiograms including automated uploading.

In Los Angeles CA, USA, Entropy Media has been launched by Hollywood executive Anjay Nagpal, working with talent from Gimlet, Serial Productions, VICE, and Wondery. We've the video trailer for their first release, Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles.

13, the biggest Taylor Swift podcast in the world, did a live recording with more than 300 fans before a Taylor Swift concert over the weekend in Arlington TX, USA. The show is from YEA Networks.

Adthos has announced a self-service, 100% AI-generated audio ads generator. The company "will generate a script, adding AI voices, sound effects and music, resulting in a fully AI-produced ad that’s available to be played out instantly".

Happy Adopt-a-Listener Month! "If we want the podcast industry to grow, we need to turn those non-podcast listeners into podcast listeners," says Tink Media, and they have audio and scripts for your podcast too. Hear one today in our daily podcast.

Capsho has launched v2.0 of the company's platform, which allows podcasters to turn their podcast episode’s audio or video recordings into marketing content designed to help amplify and promote their message. The service also writes your show notes for you, and even researches your guests.

In the latest of our series of deep-dives into East and South East Asia, Guang Jin YEO looks at podcasting in South Korea. Think that podcast consumption in Korea is massive? That might not be the case any more… discover the history of podcasting in Korea and a warning to the rest of us about closed platforms and competition from others.

Remote recording tool Riverside has unveiled a significant update adding text-based editing and AI transcription features.

First look: A new grassroots industry coalition, the Podcast Standards Project, has been launched to advocate for open podcasting. The group includes podcast hosting companies like Buzzsprout, Red Circle, Captivate and Acast; and podcast players like Pocket Casts and Podverse. The group's initial blog post highlights why open podcasting is better for listeners and creators alike.

In Prague, Radiodays Europe started yesterday with a number of summits. In the data summit, the team from Podimo presented a new podcast discovery algorithm built for the Podimo app, which uses term extraction (photo); a separate podcast summit included tips on pitching your podcast from the BBC's Leanne Alie. DW Akademie also ran a workshop to help podcasters streamline their creation process. Our Editor also spoke; the conference continues today and tomorrow.

As announced in February, NPR has made 10% of its workforce redundant in a cost-cutting move. The cost-saving has also impacted NPR's podcasts, with Invisibilia, Louder Than A Riot and Rough Translation, as well as a short-form comedy show Everyone & Their Mom, all stopping production. The Embedded podcast will also absorb a number of other narrative series; no radio shows were cancelled. The equivalent of 150 job losses, it's the largest job reduction at NPR for fifteen years.

In 2021, Podnews highlighted many big shows that Spotify had announced but never got round to launching. Spotify Hi-fi was also announced in Feb 2021, but hasn't yet materialised.

YouTube also claims "podcast specific analytics", saying "this is distinct from current analytics offered". In case you wonder what they look like, Podnews Daily's data has an overview, a content screen, and audience; a revenue screen is also available to podcasts large enough to get access.

A new noise-reduction app is now available on the Mac app store. Hush uses AI to remove background noise and reverb from spoken audio, "with greater precision and fewer artifacts than previous approaches", says the developer.

The Earbuds Podcast Collective this week focuses on Women's History Month, and is a compilation of some of the favourite female podcasters from Tara Clark of Modern Mom Probs.

Scripted podcast network Realm has announced new partnerships: the network now covers more than 120 shows.

Nomono has been named the 2023 SXSW Innovation Award winner in the “Audio” category. The company produces a cloud-connected, self-contained recording kit for capturing audio recordings in the field.

The iHeartPodcast Awards were announced in New York, hosted by actor and comedian Brian Baumgartner. The Podcast of the Year Award went to Las Culturistas, but in our list of the winners, which includes links, production companies and podcast hosts, you'll see that out of 28 awards, iHeart won four (similar to last year). Unlike last year, no Spotify shows won any award; only two were nominated.

Spotify has lost another exclusive podcast. Where Should We Begin, with Esther Perel, which became a Spotify Original produced by Gimlet in 2019. The show has found a new home at Vox Media. It will become a weekly, always-on show from Q3. The company laid off 7% of its staff in a cost-cutting move in January.

Data: Exclusive: Who's biggest? Spotify is biggest for total listeners to podcasts, but Apple is biggest for downloads, according to new US data from Podtrac. The company also reveals that Spotify has the lowest number of episode requests per listener, at just three: Apple Podcasts users download more than nine times as many.

Our Editor James Cridland shared the results of the Podnews Report Card at Podcast Movement. We'll have this data in full in Monday's Podnews; but overall, Apple has increased its lead over Spotify as the most favoured podcast platform used by podcast creators. YouTube is eagerly awaited by many publishers; and Google Podcasts saw a disappointing fall in ratings from those in the industry.

Podbean has announced a new invitation-only VIP platform for podcasters with larger audiences, to connect them to the company's ad marketplace.

The winners of the Ambies Awards were announced at The International Theater in Las Vegas, hosted by Larry Wilmore. The awards for excellence in audio, the winner of the podcast of the year went to Chameleon: Wild Boys.

SiriusXM is to make 475 people redundant, representing 8% of their workforce. A note from CEO Jennifer Witz was shared with staff. Blaming economic uncertainty, the note says that "nearly every department across SiriusXM will be impacted".

Podcast host RSS.​com is the first podcast host to have released fully free automatic transcripts for all its customers. The transcripts appear on episode pages on the RSS website, and should also appear within supporting podcast apps (like Podverse, Podbean or PodcastAddict). Users can choose different qualities, depending how fast they want the transcripts adding, and can also edit them before publication. The tool was built in-house and has been under development for a year; initially transcripts are available in English, Spanish, Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese and Turkish.

Podcast hosting company Spreaker is now free, claiming that it is "the first ever professional-level podcast platform" to be available at no cost. Features like unlimited storage and programmatic monetisation, previously only available in an enterprise package from the iHeart-owned platform, are now free for all podcast creators. The release describes existing free alternatives as "mediocre" and "very basic". Here's a deep-dive into their platform from Sounds Profitable.

(How long should a podcast be, anyway?)

Spreaker has partnered with Musixmatch to offer transcriptions for podcasts. Creators hosted on Spreaker will be able to automatically transcribe their podcasts; it uses the podcast:transcript feature to appear in supporting podcast apps.

Today is your last day to fill in the Podnews Report Card. This year, we're giving direct feedback to all the major podcast platforms about what you think; as well as reporting at Podcast Movement about who's improved and who hasn't in the past year. Please take part: it'll take less than five minutes (unless you're really slow at typing).

Podnews is to launch a series of local day-long conferences, starting with Podnews Live - North, an event on June 13 at the Lowry Centre (above) in Salford, Gtr Manchester, UK. Among the speakers will be Sophie Hind from Voiceworks, Ian Forrester from BBC R&D, Kate Cocker from Everyday Positivity, and our Editor, James Cridland. Built to help those in the business of podcasting effectively network, tickets are now on sale (at an early-bird price); and a further event is planned in London the day before the British Podcast Awards.

Anchor has changed the eligibility for Ambassador Ads, the company's paid ads program to promote Anchor itself. Previously, you needed 50 listens to qualify; now you need 100 listens within the last 60 days, and need to have posted at least one episode in that time.

Few people listen to podcasts in Japan. Why is that - and what kind of shows could work well in the country? In the first of our deep-dives into different podcast markets across East and South East Asia, Guang Jin YEO looks at the Japanese market: where Twitter is popular, copyright laws differ, and Amazon Music is #3.

Maxine Watson and Pat Younge have joined UK audio company Unedited, as part of a push to grow the company's formats and IP.

images of the YouTube podcast test that we reported on yesterday.

You don't need video to be highlighted on YouTube's podcast homepage, we notice - like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, which is just a static thumbnail. On the page, YouTube appears to have rolled out v3 of their podcast icon, which is blue now.

This is also the release that finally removes the AppleCoreMedia user agent from Apple Podcasts, which will significantly improve the accuracy of podcast stats. The new code in iOS to achieve this was announced in June last year: most other podcast apps have put it in place.

Podcast advertising in Australia in Q4/22 increased by 36% y/y, according to new data from Magellan AI and ARN's iHeartPodcast Network Australia. Amazon, Maccas and Paramount+ were the top three advertisers.

In Toronto ON, Canada, the police have made 24 Shades of Blue, a podcast giving the Toronto community a behind-the-scenes view of police activities. A CBC investigation has discovered that the interview show, produced by Obie & Ax Inc ("North America's leading podcast production firm"), has cost more than $330,000 so far in a sole-source contract. That money hasn't gone on hosting though: Podnews can tell you that the show's on Spotify's free podcast host Anchor.

One of the original podcasts, Trade Secrets with Dave Winer and Adam Curry, has returned to podcast apps. The podcast ran from Sept 2004 to Jan 2005, and includes discussions about the name "podcasting", iPodder, the open nature of the medium, and old-fashioned cellphones. With the permission of both Dave and Adam, to preserve our history we've given it a modern RSS feed, so you can listen in your own podcast app. (It's also available in any new podcast app that uses the Podcast Index).

Podnews has an exclusive review of the new version.

Speaking in the Podnews Weekly Review this week, Novel's founder Sean Glynn says that podcasting is in good shape, even after the advertising downturn. "I think it's going to bounce back a lot quicker than what people are saying. I think recent economic output and data from the US is much more promising than what people would have thought. The obvious thing about there being fewer feeds, but listenership still going up regardless - I don't think it's as dire as what some predict it could be."

The Podcast Show 2023 in London has announced its first set of speakers, and tickets are now on-sale. The event takes place on May 23-25. Ashley Flowers, Jordan Harbinger and Hala Taha are among the speakers announced so far.

Freakonomics Radio has announced a new YouTube channel with its podcasts. The network also plans to experiment with short- and long-form video, and animation. It claims the partnership will help with searchability for their shows, and will make the content more accessible, with captions and transcripts.

After our exclusive last month about Google removing podcasts from Google search, Google has confirmed the move in an announcement in Google Podcasts Manager. Additionally, the tool will no longer give any data under "how people find your show" from Feb 13, meaning an end to the research tool. Podcasts continue to appear in Google search results, but not linked to Google's own player; we've reached out to Google for comment.

And, talking about trailers, we're told that the latest episode of the BBC Screenshot podcast is a good listen: it's about movie trailers, but contains lots of information for those who make trailers for podcasts too.

Companies like Spotify and Amazon are "ultimately bad for podcasting," according to "Chief TWiT" and longtime podcaster Leo Laporte. Speaking in today's Podnews Weekly Review, he says: "Their complete model is to get you to listen in their app so that they know everything about you. They know exactly what you listen to, when you listen to it, how many times you listen to it, and which ads are listened to, and they want to sell that information ... Advertisers foolishly, I think, want that information." You can hear his interview in full.

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Exclusive: Podnews today starts a series of articles about podcasting in East and South East Asia. Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam have a total population of 734m, making it more than twice the size of the US; and we can expect podcast listening to grow much faster in many of these countries than in the US. Written by Guang Jin YEO for Podnews, we're delighted to help podcasters everywhere understand the opportunities in these countries.

Edison Research is to release two new podcast listener studies this quarter. Hit Play, Boomer: Podcasting’s 55+ Opportunity and The Gen Z Podcast Listening Report will focus on podcast habits, motivations and behaviours of these two groups, and will be the most detailed data about these listeners to be published.

Covered by Podnews on Jan 18, Libsyn has officially announced Libsyn Connect, a browser-based remote recording tool, and a number of other creator offerings, at Podfest in Orlando.

Podcasts are doing just fine, says Acast's Podchaser. "While the biggest players in the podcast industry have expanded and contracted wildly over the past few years, the podcasting middle class has quietly and consistently grown." Yesterday, we highlighted that the "80% drop in new podcasts" headlines were wide of the mark.

The number of new podcasts has dramatically dropped by 80% in two years, according to data reported this week. Except… as we explore today in a deep-dive article, that data point doesn't tell the whole story. In fact, podcasting is in a much better place once you understand what that number is really measuring.

Buzzsprout has announced a podcast subscriptions tool. You can choose from recurring support, or premium content only available to your supporters; the company takes a fee of 15%. The Podnews Weekly Review has added the opportunity to become a PoWeR supporter if you'd like to see it at work.

Seven audio workers have been laid off by Vox Media, reports Vox Media's Hot Pod, including the team producing Cover Story. Vox Media declined to give exact figures. Around 130 people were laid off in total, or 7% of the workforce. Spotify is also to cut staff this week, according to Bloomberg.

Acast has partnered with podcast production company Tonny Media in the Netherlands.

Children's radio station and podcast network Fun Kids has launched a 33-title podcast subscription service. It works in both Apple Podcasts and other platforms including Spotify and Google Podcasts.

In April 2018, Google started showing individual podcast episodes and play buttons in Google Search, which opened a Google Podcasts branded player. Now, a Google search for a podcast no longer shows any play buttons linking to the service, or any links to Google Podcasts itself. A search for "history podcasts" lists a number of shows, but links to reviews, Apple Podcasts pages and other platforms.

Total downloads are one thing, but what podcast categories are listened-to longest? Apple Podcasts data supplied to Podnews tells us the top five categories with the longest overall global listen time, are: (1) Society and Culture, (2) Comedy, (3) News, (4) True Crime, and (5) Health and Fitness. That data is for December, but is much the same for the last half of the year, with Health and Fitness occasionally making it to #4.

Spotify reckons it now has 5,523,475 podcasts, according to an app notification on Jan 13; the Podcast Index is on 4,113,645; and Apple is on 2,528,530 suggests Podcast Industry Insights.

A cloned voice, powered by AI, meant that a German media publisher doubled the amount of daily tech news podcast episodes, leading to increased revenue. Isabel Grünewald had her voice cloned for new episodes of Kurz Informiert, increasing total plays of the show by 37%. The company doing the voice cloning was Aflorithmic, based in Barcelona and London.

Exclusive: Paul Riismandel has joined Signal Hill Insights as the company's Chief Insights Officer. One of the first researchers in podcasting advertising, Riismandel had worked with Midroll Media (acquired by SiriusXM/Pandora) since 2014, working on hundreds of ad effectiveness studies. He's written a blog post for his new employer, highlighting the benefit of third-party research.

Britain's former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been revealed in a podcast as joking about flouting distancing rules: even as he publicly claimed he was unaware rules had been broken. The revelation comes from the UK's ITV News in a new podcast launched today, called Partygate: The Inside Story.

Podnews's podcasts are available ad-free as an Apple Podcasts Subscription.

Is the listener to your true-crime podcast the person who actually did the crime? Narratively looks at the story behind one listener of The Trail Went Cold - who is now in prison.

Just days after Shameless Acquisition Target's RSS feed was bought, its host Laura Mayer has been announced as the new executive producer of Podcast Programming at ABC Audio. She joins from Three Uncanny Four Productions, Stitcher and Slate (where she was Panoply's first employee).

The BBC says that the most listened-to podcast on BBC Sounds over the festive period (Dec 20-Jan 2) was Newscast; and that the service saw 9% more listens over the holidays this year (57.7m, including live/catch-up radio).

PRX has launched 'Value 4 Value' micropayments as a way to support its podcasters. The company is using the podcast:value tag from the new podcast namespace in shows like Song Exploder, but is not using the current Bitcoin over Lightning payment method, favouring a proposed W3C webmonetization payment standard instead. The PRX embeddable player also supports it. One limitation, however, is that it's streaming support only, not so-called "boosts"; and the rate isn't able to be changed by the listener.

Exclusive: Spotify appears to have enhanced chapter support within the Spotify podcasts app. Nic Ivanov, founder of Vizzy, notes that there's a new Chapters section in an episode page, and chapter marks and titles within a new player which is rolling out to both iOS (above) and Android. However, Spotify isn't supporting either ID3 embedded chapters, nor chapters via the new podcast namespace: instead, Spotify uses timestamps in the episode description, much like YouTube. See these chapters in action on Spotify in the Decorating by the Book podcast, which Vizzy has helped build.

You can remove ads in the Podnews Daily podcast by subscribing in Apple Podcasts.

We covered it back in 2019, but Fourble is a nice service that makes possibly-naughty MP3 files on the internet into podcasts. /ht Evo Terra

What does Apple know about me? wonders our Editor in a personal blog post. It turns out Apple Podcasts keeps a document (called Podcasts Playstate) showing what podcasts you listened to.

Wondering how the TV networks seem to get better images on Zoom calls? VOA's Steve Herman posts the image that BBC World News sends back to him - a black and white still caption telling him to look at the camera.

Hark Audio, a podcast discovery app, is publishing its editors' Top Moments of 2022. We're promised, among other things, a chicken who plays tic-tac-toe.

In Dec 2021, Adobe revealed Project Shasta, which we noticed in Oct 2022 had rebranded to Adobe Express Podcast. It's now branded Adobe Podcast beta, and offers a mix of Descript-like "Edit words, not waveforms", SquadCast-like "Remote recording", and Auphonic-like "AI-powered audio" - and there's a waitlist on the website. But how does it compare to the market leaders? From Castos, Matt Medeiros gives it a full review.

Christmas comes early part 1: In October, RØDE launched a games division, including streaming software Unify. Costing $69 a year, it was given away for $1 at the end of November, but in an email sent to customers and seen by Podnews, the software is now free. It will only work with RØDE microphones from now on; but the company is to send a free XCM-50 microphone to every former subscriber. /ht Neal Veglio

The Briefing, a podcast about intellectual property, has released its 100th episode. The episode looks at golfer Jack Nicklaus, who was taken to court by his own company in a dispute over whether he could use his name or not.

Among other potential changes: polls and interactivity could be added by podcasters on any host: that's currently only available on Anchor. One screenshot sent to us suggests that video on Spotify could be available to anyone, wherever they host; another screenshot suggests video podcasts may stay with Spotify-hosted podcasts only, a tier dubbed Creator Studio Plus.

Here's one bill you won't need to pay again: PodcastStudio Pro™ a web-based planning and organisation app for podcasters, is removing its paid subscription and going free and ad-supported.

iHeartMedia announced the nominations for the iHeartPodcast Awards 2023. They'll stream on Mar 14. Our list of nominations shows just 17 of the 143 nominations are from iHeartRadio.

Get in front of 25,500 podcast professionals every day in January - as the title sponsor for Podnews. Your message could be in everyone’s inboxes every weekday for a month, and to thousands more as the sponsor of our popular daily podcast. We can even change the message every day to suit you. Want to know more? Contact Kristy Scott at sales@podnews.net%%promo-end%%

Rusty Quill has published a long article tackling allegations made in an opinion piece that we covered yesterday by Newt Schottelkotte, which the company calls "unprofessional misinformation".

After we contacted the company, Rusty Quill CEO Alex J Newall gave Podnews a statement. In part, he says the article is "full of provable factual inaccuracies", noting that "its writers include individuals that hold senior positions at competitor companies that stand to monetarily gain from a reputational attack". A disclosure of Schottelkotte's freelance role at audio drama producer Fable & Folly was only added after initial publication; the named editors of the piece have not disclosed their affiliations.

Ausha tells Podnews the podcast hosting company now has more than 10,700 podcasts on the platform, and achieved 167m downloads in 2022.

In Australia, ARN's iHeartPodcast Network Australia claims the platform is outperforming the global conversion rate. Data from Podsights also shows ad spend is up 54% year-on-year.

PodX Group has acquired a majority stake in Posta, a podcast production company in Argentina. The acquisition will help PodX expand in Latin America and the US's hispanic market; PodX has recently invested in podcast companies in France and the UK.

RadioPublic Pro is to discontinue. For $12/month, the product offered enhanced podcast websites, an enhanced embedded player, and a tipping service. The free service RadioPublic Basic will continue; the company has been owned by Acast since Feb 2021.

At one point, Samsung Free's automated podcast plays were responsible for more than 1-in-10 podcast downloads, Podtrac tells Podnews today. The problem first appeared around November 14, and peaked at 10.7% of all daily downloads on Nov 27. According to Podtrac data, the issue appears to have been corrected. Podtrac will temporarily remove all Dalvik counts from its monthly podcast and publisher rankers for November.

Spotify has launched 2022 Podcaster Wrapped, "a treasure trove of growth insights and data" about your podcast - and offers plenty of bragging rights. (For seven people, the Podnews Daily is their most listened-to podcast, apparently.)

Podtrac published its top 25 new podcasts of 2022 by average downloads per episode. The Trojan Horse Affair, from The New York Times, is #1. It measures participating publishers only.

First look: Podcast listenership among women in the US is up, says a fact sheet from The Women's Podcast Report 2022, released today by SXM Media and Edison Research. 47 million women have listened in the past month: 35% of all women aged 18+, a figure that's grown by 67% over the past five years.

First look: Acast has launched a self-serve platform for podcast advertising. The platform allows brands of any size and budget to start advertising for as little as $250.

The Samsung Free podcast app will "soon be updated", according to a communication from Acast to its podcasters, to remove the cause of a significant increase in downloads from automatic plays. (See yesterday's Tech Stuff for more). In the meantime, Acast has demonetised listens coming from the Dalvik useragent "to protect our advertisers"; and notes that "under IAB guidelines, these listens are considered valid". (Also considered valid downloads: those podcast plays bought in games apps)

In January 2001, Adam Curry wrote a blog post discussing how an always-on connection could download entertainment to "have the show ready for me when I am". It was the blog post that turned into a meeting with Dave Winer, which turned into podcasting; but it's been lost for years: until now. Read ”The Last Yard” - the blog post that started it all.

The Podcast Show in London has announced its return, on May 24-25 in Islington. The organisers have announced new features and events for the two days, including a preview night.

Audiobooks are now available on Spotify in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. They'd launched in the US in September.

Libsyn has closed its free podcast hosting platform, Libsyn Studio. Launched nine months ago, it offered ad-supported free podcast hosting: the recording tool is now a feature for all paid Libsyn plans. The service lets you record directly from your computer into Libsyn, and assemble a show with custom intro and outros. Libsyn Studio accounts have been migrated to Libsyn 5.

Targetspot has sold its digital audio business to Azerion, a Netherlands-based "high growth digital entertainment and media platform", for US $30m. Targetspot will retain ownership of Winamp; their adsales business, and streaming company Shoutcast, will be now owned by Azerion.

In Australia, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has placed its true-crime podcasts in a new "early, exclusive and ad-free" paid subscription on Apple Podcasts.

Spotify has signed another exclusive: Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain, described as one of the world’s most listened-to podcasts, will be exclusive on Spotify early next year. The deal includes video podcasts. The show was with UTA and Cadence13's Ramble Podcast Network, and is another loss for owner Audacy which is threatened with stock market de-listing.

Comparisons: YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly logged-in users; Spotify has 456m. YouTube Music has now hit 80m paid subscribers, growing 60% year-on-year. Spotify has 195m paid subscribers, growing 13% year-on-year. In a year, YouTube paid $6bn to the music industry (Jul21-Jun22); Spotify paid $7bn (2021). YouTube's podcasting front page is still only in one country, the US; yesterday, Spotify released video podcasting to 180 global markets.

Spotify has released video podcasts everywhere - "in 180 global markets". Spotify and Anchor's blog posts, made in July, have been updated. Until now they've only been in twelve markets; the proprietary service launched in April.

Exclusive: Apple's topic tags are invisible to humans, and hide in the Apple Podcasts web code - until now. Podnews has built an Apple Podcasts episode topic viewer to let you see what topics Apple has chosen for podcast episodes. (Give it a go!)

Correction: Following our piece about the IAB now requiring annual re-certification for podcast measurement, the IAB's PR company has clarified pricing has changed, "to make certification more accessible to the wide Podcast measurement community". Rather than being $45,000 for certification for an IAB member, new certification costs $12,500, with renewals costing $6,250. We've updated the original piece.

The last word in podcasting news: announcing the Podnews Weekly Review, with James Cridland and Sam Sethi. This week: a look at the financial reports from big podcast companies, and an interview with Vizzy co-founder Nic Ivanov. %%promo-end%%

Open, transparent alternatives for download measurements proposed by others have included ODL from Podsights and OP3; alternatively, RAD from NPR and the podcast:events tag could measure plays, rather than downloads. Here's much more on podcast stats.

Team Coco, the Conan O'Brien-led podcast network, is to launch a comedy channel on satellite radio service SiriusXM.

AdLarge has published its 2022 Podcast Buying Guide. The fifth edition focuses on brand alignment, ad quality, and the evolution of the marketplace, and is great for anyone getting into the medium.

The winners of the Canadian Podcast Awards were announced. The People's Choice awards went to Frequency's Parkdale Hunt.

Amazon Music Prime users, and Amazon Music Unlimited, now has thousands of ad-free podcasts from Acast. Acast will share revenue from the agreement with creators. This news builds on Amazon's announcement earlier in the week that they would offer ad-free podcasts for Prime users.

US President Joe Biden appears in an episode of SmartLess released today. The show, recorded on Oct 13 in Los Angeles, is available now.

In Australia, reflecting the growth of its podcast unit, SBS Radio is to become SBS Audio in 2023. The multilingual public broadcaster also released their podcast download figures, and will offer pre-roll/mid-roll advertising.

Data: In New Zealand, 79% of media agencies have used podcast advertising in the last twelve months, growing significantly from 60% in 2021. NZ media buyers are buying more podcast advertising than those in Australia, according to a study by IAB NZ.

Following a growing issue with spam email to podcasters, and after Apple said they no longer needed emails in feeds, Buzzsprout has become the first major podcast host to remove email addresses from RSS feeds. (They'll give the ability to add them back in temporarily to help claim shows).

Spotted: Adobe's Project Shasta, which we first spotted in Dec 21, appears to now be called Adobe Express Podcast. It's a podcast editor that lets you "edit words, not waveforms", and is in early preview.

Privacy exclusive: In a Podnews investigation, we discover Rova, a popular podcast app in New Zealand from MediaWorks, has been sending details about their listeners to any podcast publisher: including geo-location and a unique listener identifier. We've full details, including what they told the Google Play Store about their privacy practices, and what the company plans to do now.

In Sounds Profitable with Podsights Advisor this week, Bryan Barletta looks at the transparency issues around podcast downloads brought up by the recent revelation that podcast publishers have been buying plays in mobile games. "It’s clear that we are reaching a breaking point of confidence in the download," he says.

Audry, a community of podcasters, is to close on Nov 15 "due to various factors".

Data: In Saudi Arabia, Samawah Media published data on the Saudi podcast market. There are 573 podcasters in the fast-changing country, the company says: 33% make shows using video. Here's a translated version of its initial findings.

The UK's Podcast Radio could be coming to the US, after an announcement this week at the NAB Show New York. The format will be available for radio stations to rebroadcast on AM/FM and HD.

A Canadian politics podcast is releasing a special episode on cassette only. Just fifty will be made. The show is 48 minutes long: based on our extensive knowledge of cassettes, it looks like after 24 minutes you'll need to turn the tape over to keep listening.

Podtrac has launched a new Podcast Sales Network Ranking. The initial ranking, for September, places Wondery at #1, with a US monthly audience of 25 million. Others in the ranking include Podcast One, and new to Podtrac's measurement, Acast and Libsyn's AdvertiseCast - we understand more sales networks are lined-up to be included.

Spotify has added free access to Podsights and Chartable for Megaphone customers in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The company has also announced that Reach plc is the latest publisher to join Megaphone and the Spotify Audience Network.

Social media app TikTok is preparing to launch a podcast app. Podcast hosting company Audiomeans has told Podnews that it spotted a "new bot that is scraping our feeds, starting October 11", and they've tracked it back to TikTok: more on the bots in our "Tech Stuff", below.

Evergreen Podcasts is making popular HR podcast The Chad and Cheese Podcast in four additional languages: French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.

Podcaster Alex Jones has been told to pay $964.2m in damages after repeatedly telling harmful lies. Alex Jones's show Infowars was removed from Apple, Spotify, YouTube and Facebook in 2018 for promoting violence and hate speech, though is still available via RSS. He's indicated he'll appeal; his company has filed for bankruptcy.

Adnan Syed is innocent. After spending 23 years behind bars, all charges against him have been dropped. His innocence will be formally certified. His case was followed by Serial and Undisclosed.

Fun fact: in the US since Sep 22, Joe Rogan has only been #1 in Spotify for three days. Rogan's deal with Spotify expires at the end of 2023.

"Spotify invested zero in building the show's audience, then forced us to go exclusive to Spotify, and then cancelled it because it didn't build a big enough audience…" - a tweet from Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, former co-host of the now-cancelled How To Save A Planet

Exclusive: Launched in September 2020 by Spotify, Sex, Lies and DM Slides appears to have relaunched with new hosts - without the knowledge of the podcasters who say they created the show. Gizzi Erskine has posted on Instagram that the show, made by Spotify UK, "is being made again without us". "If Spotify don’t want to make it with us - then that’s fine, but DO NOT STEAL our format and name. WE created it (the format and name) in MY kitchen over a series of months. Spotify just paid for it to be made. I am absolutely up to my […] eyeballs at being exploited by the big corporations and money people. We are SO angry and upset", she continues in the post, noting that the original shows have been removed.

In the company's top US podcast ranker, Serial made a re-entry following its new episode last month. The top five were unchanged.

First look: Triton Digital has just revealed an update to theitsir TAP advertising platform. The tool allows advanced ad separation, expanded targeting, and new management of creative.

Podnews returns to full length tomorrow

The winners of the 17th annual People's Choice Podcast Awards were announced. 5.7 million listeners participated. The winners of the Gotham/Variety Audio Honors were also announced.

The winners of the International Women's Podcast Awards were announced. Our list of the winners includes judge comments and podcast hosting companies.

After announcing a move to Times Radio earlier this week, podcast and radio presenters Jane Garvey and Fi Glover have been confirmed as speakers for next Tuesday's Podcast Day 24 in London. Podcast Day 24 in Sydney will also include Spotify's new signings Toni and Ryan, and Waleed Aly. Tickets to each event include catchup from the other side of the planet: PODN1215 will get you around half price.

Exclusive: Are these plays counting for iHeart's "#1 for podcasting" Podtrac ranking? Podnews analysis confirms that the embedded podcast players used, as documented by DeepSee, make a call to Chartable and a call to Podtrac. Unless Podtrac filters out this traffic, the plays will count for iHeart's ranking: we've asked Podtrac for comment. In 2018, Podnews discovered that iHeartMedia was embedding podcasts on their radio station websites, leading to inflated play counts.

First look: Ad tech company Gumball has just announced Gumshoe, a real-time tool to measure ad impressions from host-read podcast ads. The solution includes audience demographics, brand category exclusivity and a booking tool.

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The first-ever live recording of Marc Maron's WTF in the UK has been announced for Oct 19 in London's Bloomsbury Theatre. David Baddiel will be the guest. Tickets went on sale at 10am: WTF are you waiting for?

We've also updated our page How long should a podcast be? with this new data

First look: Podcast hosting company Captivate has just announced v2 of their dynamic content and monetisation engine AMIE. The tool includes new slot management, interface upgrades and tagging to allow podcasters to manage dynamic content quickly and at scale.

Adnan Syed is now out of jail and in home detention, having had his murder conviction quashed by Baltimore Circuit Judge Melissa Phinn after 23 years in prison. Now aged 41, Syed is not officially innocent: he faces a new trial into whether he was guilty of the death of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. A new episode of Undisclosed was released last week after the prosecutors asked for this new trial; host Rabia Chaudry highlighting that Serial's reporting was unreliable. A new episode of Serial is due today.

Here's more history: the first podcast feed, and the history of the word podcast.

Why? An investor tells Podnews that financial markets are increasingly preferring profitability over growth; and while Acast has spare cash, it is currently making a loss with profit margins of -31%; that's leading to a very low valuation in comparison to other audio businesses. These layoffs should speed up their path to profitability, which will also reduce any risk of running out of cash in a recession.

Research from Amplifi Media and Podnews recently showed that there are only 155,000 regularly-updated podcasts (more than 10 episodes, updated in the last ten days): but what category are they in? We worked on the data to show the most, and least, crowded active categories.

Podcast discovery tool Goodpods has launched a website. The website includes charts, user reviews and supports episode images: here's Podnews in Goodpods; we'll add links from our podcast pages from today.

Spotify's Megaphone, a podcast hosting company, was down again for two hours yesterday. It was previously down on Sep 2, in early August, and in May it broke for nine hours.

In the UK, the Audio Production Awards has announced a "Pay What You Can" scheme with Amazon Music and Wondery. Entrants and attendees who would otherwise be unable to enter can choose to pay what they can afford.

Following April's launch of PodX, a Swedish podcast investment company, Bloomberg's Ashley Carman has talked to the organisation to learn more.

The UK government is reportedly blocking The Rest is Politics, a popular political podcast, from being downloaded using a government department's wifi. The podcast, hosted by two former political figures, is regularly critical of the government's record.

Podnews did some research on what podcast search engines actually index.

The BBC Global News Podcast's presenter Jackie Leonard, and producer Karen Martin, spoke at Radiodays Asia in Malaysia. The show, which is also recording a special edition at the event, is one of the top-rated shows in many Asian countries, with 33m downloads a month. Unusually, the BBC shared daily download data, the show's audience profile and a comparison to other podcasts from World Service English.

The Daily Mail, a UK newspaper, suggests that Spotify's podcast chart may be being manipulated to keep Meghan Markle's podcast at #1. The newspaper compares Spotify's "top podcasts" list - which, like Apple, includes recent listener activity as a score - and their "top episodes" list, which doesn't. We have more information on podcast stats, and how the Spotify charts actually work.

With Lemonada Media: TikTok superstar V Spehar sometimes needs more than a minute to bring you the news! The Under the Desk News creator offers funny, insightful commentary every Tuesday and Friday on V Interesting.

The Podcast Host claims that new research has revealed "the perfect podcast artwork". Reporting on work done in the Netherlands which Podnews reported on earlier, the article also links to artwork resources.

Thank you to Buzz Knight for becoming our latest personal supporter. We're grateful for your support of our independent journalism. You can be like Buzz and support us in a number of different ways.

The subject of The Teachers Pet, Chris Dawson has been found guilty in the Australian Supreme Court of murdering his first wife, who vanished more than four decades ago. Hedley Thomas, an Australian journalist, investigated the case in a successful 14-episode podcast containing what he claimed was new evidence. It was published in 2018 at the same time as NSW police had started re-investigating Lynette Dawson’s disappearance. Dawson, 73, will be sentenced later.

One of the biggest podcasts in the US and Canada, Dateline NBC, is to launch a new premium subscription on Apple Podcasts with exclusive content for true-crime fans. Premium listeners will get shows before anyone else, as well as ad-free content. Dateline's 31st season premieres on NBC Friday Sep 16.

YouTube says that its new podcasts section will be enhanced later this year. "We will continue iterating on the current destination page and plan to launch new features meant to enhance the podcast listening experience for our users within the coming months," the company tells Podnews. It's currently available for US users only.

At Podcast Movement, Evergreen Podcasts and Big Whig Media have launched Big Whig Podcasts, a distribution channel to enable a seamless process for DC-based corporate and advocacy organizations to produce and distribute podcasts. The partnership was first announced in June.

Libsyn will today be announcing a new programmatic ad solution for Libsyn-hosted shows. The beta program for Libsyn's Auto Ads, which allows pre, mid and post-roll, is now open for application. Additionally, the company has announced it has made more than $50m in advertising earnings for podcasters.

YouTube appears to be rolling out YouTube Podcasts in the US. Available from the explore page, the podcast front page contains popular episodes, playlists and recommendations, then a list of creators and categories like true crime, sports and music. It's unclear how shows been chosen; NBC News bulletins appear in the list for some reason; Podnews doesn't.

How many podcasts are still in production? A surprisingly small number, according to research from Amplifi Media and Podnews. (Amplifi Media's Steven Goldstein is at Podcast Movement)

Exclusive: Back in Dec 2021, SiriusXM were sued by the National Association of the Deaf and Disability Rights Activists, for not providing podcast transcripts. Almost eight months later, lawyers acting on behalf of SiriusXM have responded with an aggressively-worded 32-page document, which Podnews has obtained, calling the filing "unnecessary", a "public assault", and "a cudgel to tarnish responsible companies". The request for transcripts for all shows on the platform is "misplaced and completely unreasonable"; and the whole filing is just "a public relations campaign".

Megaphone clients will get free access to both Chartable audience insights and the starter plan for Podsights ad attribution from September, Spotify has announced.

Libsyn is expanding to Europe by acquiring German podcast company Julep Media. The company is Germany’s largest independent platform for podcast advertising, and gives Libsyn opportunities across Europe: adding to the company's other advertising acquisitions of AdvertiseCast in April 21, Podgo in Nov 21, and Podcast Ad Reps in Feb 22.

The person behind Darknet Diaries, Jack Rhysider, has been interviewed by Apple Podcasts. He now has 2,200 paid subscribers, earning almost $11,000 a month.

Congratulations to The Moth, which has hit 100 million downloads this year. It's The Moth's 25th anniversary year, recently releasing a best-selling book; later this year you'll be able to get a card game, and the show goes on a pop-up porch tour.

Legal trouble #1: The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a complaint made against Huel and The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett that a host-read podcast ad was not identified as an ad, and that it was "in a similar style and tone to the editorial material and therefore not differing significantly between the two". As PodMov Daily suggests, the ruling is worth taking note of.

Jam Street Media has announced a number of new consulting partnerships, and a deal with the fast-growing audio platform Sounder.

Daniel Karlsson has been made Vice President of Market Development & Global Strategy at Triton Digital. He started work at Triton Digital in 2008, and has been with the company a total of thirteen and a half years.

Podtrac is to add a Sales Network Ranker report in Q3 this year, according to emails from ART19 to some of its customers.

Does it make a difference? In November last year, Steffan Garrero got into the top 50 using social media; but it had no effect on his overall downloads. Here's more about how the charts work.

Podnews's Editor, James Cridland, will be speaking at Podcast Movement 2022 on how podcasters can effectively boost discoverability. The session is part of Quill Inc. and CoHost’s Growth Track, which will cover various sessions around growth, audience engagement, podcast analytics, and maintaining motivation.

One subject of her report, podcast guest booking platform Guestio, has posted copy denigrating industry newsletters on their front page. In a coincidence, Ashley Carman is also to launch Soundbite, an industry newsletter with more in-depth reporting about the podcast and music industry.

Online studio Cleanfeed has won an Emmy Award for Engineering, Science & Technology. The award is for the tool's role in the creation of the audio tracks for television series such as Star Trek: Discovery, The Crown and The Flight Attendant; Cleanfeed is also used by many podcasters for live studio links (including the podfather himself, Adam Curry). Mark Hills tells Podnews: "Thank you to the community of podcasters who have been a major influence on Cleanfeed. Ideas originating from podcasting and audio drama have been an important part of the innovations in Cleanfeed that contribute to this Emmy Award."

Libsyn's AdvertiseCast reports that the average CPM for their marketplace for July was $23.60, up slightly from a year ago. The highest CPM category was technology, at $28.

Paranormal and true crime podcast And That's Why We Drink are running their second annual Cryptid Poetry Slam virtual live show on Sat Aug 13. All proceeds will be donated to The National Abortion Federation.

In just the first 48 hours, the Irish Podcast Awards have seen more than 10,000 votes for its Listener's Choice Award. Voting remains open until mid September.

Exclusive: Jim Ballas has joined Magellan AI as Head of Publisher Partnerships. Ballas was CTO and VP of Operations at PodcastOne.

Cavalry Audio is running a hidden treasure hunt as a podcast. Buried in the episodes of X Marks the Spot: The Legend of Forrest Fenn lie clues to $50,000 of treasure. The podcast was launched in June; but only now has the company unveiled the existence of the hidden treasure. The show follows the history and subsequent controversy surrounding Forrest Fenn, a New Mexico art dealer who, in 2010, reportedly buried $2 million in gold somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.

Was the much-loved comedian and actor Robin Williams the first podcaster? We've unearthed some compelling evidence that shows that yes, he might well have been. (Hit reply if you've a strong view either way).

The British Podcast Awards 2022 winner's ceremony took place on Saturday. Podcast of the year was Dear Daughter from the BBC World Service - a show hosted by Namulanta Kombo, the Kenyan winner of the BBC World Service International Podcast Competition which we covered last year. We've a full list of the winners including a full video and photographs from the event.

Edison Research says that podcast listening has rebounded since the slightly disappointing Infinite Dial numbers released earlier this year. Gabriel Soto reports a sizeable increase in younger audiences. He'll be at Podcast Movement. (So will we!)

NYT best-selling author Heather McGhee is to host The Sum of Us, a new podcast on Spotify from Higher Ground. The show is a road trip from rural Maine to the California coast, looking at the real impact of inequality and racism on everyday Americans. It's one of the remaining shows on Spotify from the Obama's production company; they signed a deal with Amazon's Audible in June.

Which company is sending the most unsolicited commercial email to podcasters, by scraping your RSS feed to gather your email? We have been running a spamtrap on our podcast feed for the last three months, and today, we reveal the podcast industry's biggest spammer. (No, it doesn't start with an "A").

Pushkin Industries has purchased podcast creator Transmitter Media. Transmitter's founder and CEO, Gretta Cohn, will join Pushkin's senior leadership team. Terms weren't given.

Acast is to acquire Podchaser, the "world’s most comprehensive and authoritative podcast database" in a deal worth $34m. Podchaser, which is expected to make a profit next year, will continue to operate as a separate brand: it contains data of more than 4.5m million podcasts, including advertising information. The integration will bring additional data to Acast's advertisers.

The robots are coming to take our jobs - kind of: The A.I.M.E.E. Allen Show has launched, hosted by a sentient robot interviewer (who we suspect has more humanity than the company is revealing). The show is from Wonkybot.

Libsyn's Glow, the company's podcast monetisation platform, has seen a 167% revenue growth since its acquisition in April 2021, the company says. The product lets podcasters sell subscriptions and accept monetary support.

Max Cutler has published the book Cults: Inside the World's Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them, based on the Spotify/Parcast original podcast Cults. The book has already received critical praise across industry trades; tonight he's in conversation with Crime Junkie's Ashley Flowers at Spotify's LA Campus.

Hey, weirdos! Morbid, which recently switched from Audioboom to Wondery, has debuted at #2 in Podtrac's top 20 US podcasts chart for June, its first month with the network. Its old home, Audioboom, doesn't participate in Podtrac.

Think Spotify has stopped signing new shows? Think again - the company has signed up Toni and Ryan as an exclusive show for the platform in "a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract"; the Aussie show becomes exclusive on Aug 8, and they'll also produce some shows in video, after seeing rapid increases in audience. The duo are represented by Marchmedia.

Acast has announced a new series of articles, Behind The Podcast, which will "share stories from the diverse mix of people and roles working within podcasting". It focuses on Karla Patella, sound designer of Sweet Bobby.

Podcast Day 24, the 24-hour podcast conference in Sydney, London and New York, has put tickets on sale and announced its first speakers, including Marc Fennell, Eric Nuzum and John Russo. The event is on Oct 4.

The Podcasting, Seriously Awards Fund has expanded to include reimbursements for education and training for BIPOC and LQBTQ+ independent producers, editors, and other creators.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world, is to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary later this year with four live shows across the UK and Ireland.

Mashable covers the use by podcasters for reproductive rights activism. Mentioned in Podnews last Monday, the campaign now has its own website.

Edison Research released the Infinite Dial Canada. Forty-three percent of Canadians 18+ listen to podcasts monthly, up five percentage points from 2021, which means that Canadians now outpace Americans (38%) and Australians (40%) for monthly podcast listening. Downloads here.

Deborah James, the host of the BBC's podcast You, Me, and the Big C, has died. Dame Deborah James had been receiving end-of-life care for bowel cancer at home and had raised more than $8.5m for cancer research. She was 40.

We have updated our podcast market data slides.

The number of open video podcasts are on the rise. In November last year, Podcast Index listed 39,194 video podcasts. As of June this year, Podnews can reveal the number had grown by over a quarter to 50,863. We measured these by looking for enclosure files with the extension mov, mp4 or m4v, the three filetypes Apple Podcasts supports. Apple has recently put video podcasts in the spotlight again; Spotify launched its own proprietary video podcasts tool in April (which we can't measure).

Arielle Nissenblatt writes for Podnews: "When I read the news about the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, my heart sank. But then I thought that, as an industry, there's something we can do: use our platform to share resources, come together, and help those who are (or will be) at risk. We quickly organized, creating suggested language for host-reads that can be placed as pre-roll ads on your podcast as a way of voicing our opposition to this decision. To take part read this document, record a pre-roll for your next episode, share that episode with me so we can credit you, and let me know if you have questions."

Cinedigm has announced new shows for its podcast network, which has reached 50 million downloads … PodcastOne has announced 14 additional shows … YR Media and Critical Frequency are partnering for a new season of Inherited … Kate Mara is to star in a supernatural audio drama, Necropolis, from podcast studio Echoverse; no release date was given … Sound Talent Media's partnership with Evergreen Podcasts has expanded with three new shows: 3am Scary Stories, music show One Two Me You, and a show exploring bands who had only one big song, One Hit Thunder.

Spotify has announced that there will be a season two of Batman Unburied. Speaking in a panel "live from Spotify Beach at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity", Spotify's Chief Content and Ads Business Officer Dawn Ostroff (above, right) announced that a second series had received a greenlight from the company. The first season was made available on May 3 in nine languages, and quickly hit the #1 spot in eleven markets for more than two weeks. Ostroff described podcast storytelling as "an incredible experience - calling upon each person to be more engaged".

Podcast app Fountain is now rewarding people for listening to shows with Bitcoin, which they can then share with their favourite podcasters as "value4value". They more people listen, the more they get - and the more they can share.

Almost half of UK podcast listeners only started listening in the past year, according to research from Acast and Nielsen. A third say they'll listen more in the next six months: outpacing streaming music and video, according to an email from the company.

In March, Podnews posted leaked plans from YouTube's presentation to some podcast partners. We're expecting more news sometime over the next two months: YouTube was very visible at the recent Podcast Show in London.

Edison Research and NPR released The Smart Audio Report. 62% of American adults use a voice assistant; 35% now own a smart speaker; 47% purchased them, in part, to listen to podcasts (and 39% of people use their smart speaker to listen to podcasts in a typical week). Two-thirds listen to news on their device (like Podnews).

Podcast Movement 2022 has made some speaker announcements, including Dallas Taylor from Twenty Thousand Hertz, Robert Riggs from True Crime Reporter, and Fireside Chat's Mark Cuban and Falon Fatemi, returning to speak about "The Power of Web3 and Metaverse: The Future of Podcasting, Media, and Entertainment". We'll be at the event too.

In July last year, Podnews published data showing what metadata different podcast apps use: noting that Apple Podcasts does not search podcast (or episode) descriptions.

Spotify has acquired Sonantic, a "a dynamic AI voice platform that creates compelling, nuanced, and stunningly realistic voices from text" (hear a clip in our podcast today). No terms were given.

New podcast app Fathom, designed for better podcast discovery, has been launched on iOS and in-browser. We're listed. Jason Calacanis is one of the seed investors. It promises you can "ask any question and hear answers from your favorite podcasters and their guests."

"30% of our monthly active users engage with podcast content". That figure hasn't been disclosed for some time, and grew from 16% (Feb 20) to 22% (Oct 20).

Crooked Media and Adobe have partnered to add closed captions to their podcasts on video platforms.

Gumball has signed Almost Adulting with Violet Benson to its roster.

Better data is coming to every podcaster. As we've documented in the past, many different apps use a useragent called AppleCoreMedia to request podcasts, making it hard for podcasters, and podcast hosting companies, to know which app is really downloading them. iOS 16 will fix that: AVURLAssetHTTPUserAgentKey has just appeared in Apple's documentation for the next version of iOS, allowing all podcast apps to correctly state their user agent. Developers can adopt this today; there will be a public beta in July; and this will roll out for everyone in Q3. Expect us to grumpily highlight apps who don't bother with it.

First look: Buzzsprout, the world’s second largest podcast host, has just formally announced Buzzsprout Ads, letting podcasters buy adverts for their shows (and other podcasters to earn revenue).

Exclusive: Spotify has quietly changed its platform rules to add a section prohibiting promotion of "violent extremism". The updated rules also ban content with "instructions or instruction materials to commit an act of violent extremism", as well as content containing financial requests for funding such groups. A definition of violent extremism isn't given, but it comes after more than two hundred mass shootings in the US so far this year. The bottom of the updated rules page also links to what actions may be taken if you don't follow the rules - until now, a hidden page discovered by NiemanLab in April.

Focusrite launched the Vocaster: a dedicated podcasting audio interface for podcasters. The device is designed explicitly for podcasters, offering auto-gain and voice presets. (There's a video, and more pictures, in the press release).

Amid concern about inflation and energy prices, Libsyn's AdvertiseCast report that May's average CPM rate was $23.77 for podcast advertising. That's remarkably stable - down less than 1% from April's $23.94, and almost identical to May 2021's $23.81. Libsyn bought AdvertiseCast one year ago.

One of podcasting's largest hosting companies, Megaphone, was down for more than nine hours. All the Spotify-owned company's audio and RSS feeds disappeared at 8pm Eastern on Monday, after a certificate expired. In our tests, the feeds were restored at 5.39am Eastern this morning; the status page notes it fixed at 5.54am. Spotify hasn't returned our requests for comment.

iHeartMedia and Bloomberg Media have announced an upcoming slate of new shows. The first will be a daily podcast about crypto, Bloomberg Crypto.

At 3.30pm on Thursday, The Podcast Show in London had 5,296 delegates over the two days. There's an interview with Jason Carter in the latest Podland podcast.

Breaking: At The Podcast Show, Audio UK has just launched a new partnership agreement template to make it easier for independent podcast and radio producers to work on projects together. It's been prepared by legal experts.

The Podcast Show has started, in Islington, London. Event organisers tell Podnews they're expecting 2,400 visitors today and again tomorrow; the show has had high-profile advertising on national radio.

Campari Group has suspended all advertising with Spotify, following an error we reported yesterday promoting Campari's Wild Turkey whiskey brand on a number of podcast pages. In the company's statement, it says "We are disappointed that the implementation of the campaign by Spotify was inconsistent with our advertising code and have paused all media with Spotify pending results of the investigation".

Exclusive: Podcasts promoting call girls are appearing within Spotify, as free plans from podcast hosting companies flood platforms with advertising for sex workers. We've a list of more than five hundred shows, many still live. RSS.com has implemented an automated process to combat these podcasts; however, shows are still on many other hosting companies. Apple Podcasts, which operates an approval process for new podcasts, is not showing these podcast titles. Spotify did not respond to our request for comment.

We have an article on the definition of a 'podcast' if it helps.

In London, The Podcast Show 2022 has unveiled their final programme, less than a week before the event. Podnews Editor James Cridland will be speaking on the future of podcasting, and moderating a panel on podcast subscriptions. You can use code PODNEWS to save 20% on day tickets; the day events are at the Business Design Centre in Islington.

Johan Seidefors, the Nordic Head of Content at Spotify, thinks there is a future in scripted podcasts, and that podcasting is intimate and that the connection between the host and the listener is important. He was speaking in an interview with Podnews's Editor, James Cridland, at Radiodays Europe.

A number of initial podcast hosting companies have been announced including RSS·com, Libsyn and Buzzsprout; but if you run a podcast hosting company and wish to participate in Delegated Delivery, you're encouraged to fill out this form. (Memo to Apple: here's a list).

First look: CoHost, a new podcast publishing, analytics and growth platform, has just launched. The launch coincides with the release of CoHost’s first annual Podcaster Insights Survey, which found that audience growth is the main challenge podcasters face. The platform has been created by Quill Podcasting.

CBC has launched the CBC True Crime subscription podcast channel. International listeners can pay to listen ad-free.

Podcasting is attracting more new listeners than ever, according to new research. Over 50% of daily podcast listeners began listening in the last two years, says Nielsen's Podcasting Today Report; which also says that the number of US listeners has grown by 40% in the past three years. The data suggests that podcast advertising drives an aided brand recall of 71%.

An article in the UK's Observer newspaper says that Sh**ged, Married, Annoyed has "more than 100m listeners". Adam Bowie points out that that's unlikely.

We've updated our podcast market data slides page with the new headline figure.

After a petition with over 300 signatures and wide condemnation about tweets many considered highly offensive, The Podcast Academy issued a statement that Daniel J Lewis no longer serves on the Board of Governors, acknowledging that the podcast community were questioning Lewis's commitment to inclusivity. Podnews asked Lewis for a statement, but after receiving it, we have declined the opportunity to publish.

Spotify is to close Spotify Stations, a lean-back music radio experience. The Pandora-like app launched in the US in 2019, but first launched in 2018, only in Australia, only on Android. Imagine!

Podtrac has published the top 20 podcasts for the US for April. There's no change in the top 5, but My Favorite Murder is brand new at #6. Amazon bought the rights in January; it's already a top ten podcast with Triton Digital’s Podcast Ranker and Edison Research’s Podcast Consumer Tracking Report. Podtrac's data is participating publishers, now including Exactly Right Media.

In the UK, The Radio Academy's ARIAS took place last night. Among the full winners, Novel for Wondery's Harsh Reality: The Story of Miriam Rivera won Best Factual - Series; Reduced Listening for Spotify's Decode took Gold in both Best New Show and Best Specialist Music Show; The Long Time Academy won Best Independent Podcast, Mags Creative's Life Sentence took home The Creative Innovation Award and We are VOICES won The Grassroots Award.

Announced in Apr 2021, and initially a Spotify-powered player, Facebook's podcast player appeared in Jun 2021, though it was only ever available in the US. It could be that Spotify's public content moderation issues had given the company second thoughts. It's a blow for podcasting, though.

The Asian American Podcasters Association has announced 31 podcasts for May's Asian American Pacific Islander Month. The organisation is also looking for submissions for the Asian Podcast Festival on May 20.

It's less than a month to go until The Podcast Show 2022 in London, on May 25-26. The website currently lists 196 speakers (more on the way). Speaking to the Podland podcast yesterday, Tom Billington said that YouTube will be a partner at the event, sponsoring the "Talking Podcasts" stages. YouTube say it will "facilitate conversations with Podcasters who have found success on YouTube, while also leaning on other platform experts to help delegates understand best practices and the various podcast trends emerging on and off-YouTube."

In 2021, film director and actor Caveh Zahedi recorded a podcast every day for a year - called 365 Stories I Want to Tell You Before We Both Die, it features stories from his life. Now, producer Leon Neyfakh and Prologue Projects are making the whole year's stories available as a paid podcast. They are letting people pick their price: $3.65 (one penny per story), $36.50 (ten cents a story), or $365 (one dollar per story), working with Supporting Cast.

Triton Digital has released its inaugural Canada Podcast Report. The ranker shows the top downloaded podcasts overall, top Canadian English-language and French-language shows, as well as top networks in the country. For Canadian podcasts, CBC Radio's The Current is #1 in English (and CBC run 28 of the top 30); Radio-Canada's Le Radiojournal is the #1 in French (they run 14 of the top 30). Overall, Dateline NBC was the #1 show in the country. It measures thirteen participating publishers.

Apple Podcasts has also launched new listening reports for paid subscriptions. It addresses one criticism in the Podnews Report Card earlier this year.

Fountain is giving away free money for podcast listeners. The Lightning-enabled podcast app is giving every new user 1,000 sats in their account - for them to share with podcasts they enjoy listening to. (We'd recommend Podnews, or perhaps Podland). (Here's where to enable your podcast for Lightning payments).

Many podcasts are available in a separate video format, like the New Media Show (video) in a different feed from the audio version of the New Media Show. Unlike Spotify's solution, they work everywhere else: Apple Podcasts, PocketCasts, and many others.

Spotify has done an exclusive ad deal with The Fantasy Footballers, pulling it away from last year's deal with Audioboom. The podcast also had a deal with SiriusXM for a live show, which no longer appears on their schedule. The deal also signs them up for additional shows on Spotify Greenroom Live, extending a deal done in August. The podcast isn't going to be a Spotify exclusive.

Bonjour! 你好! The first multilingual podcast in French and Mandarin from Ghost Island Media has been launched: a celebration of culture and friendship, 法台漫遊 Balades Culturelles Franco-Taïwanaises talks with French artists who have worked in Taiwan. It's a branded project with the Bureau Français De Taipei with the support of Institut Français; both French and Mandarin versions of each episode are in the same RSS feed. (Podcast consumption in France grew significantly last year).

In June 2021, Spotify announced the Spotify Greenroom Creator Fund for US creators to "support and reward creators for the communities they build and the experiences they create", as part of the launch of Spotify Greenroom. However, the fund never launched; and yesterday, Spotify emailed applicants, admitting that the program had been cancelled.

Kelly McEvers, who has hosted NPR's Embedded podcast for six years, will leave the show as full-time host (but still be heard on it on occasion). She is launching a podcast production company.

A year after it announced podcasts in its app and other audio tools, Facebook's interest in podcasting is waning, according to Bloomberg's Ashley Carman. The company still hasn't launched podcasts outside of the US, and was entirely absent at Podcast Movement Evolutions; it also hasn't renewed some deals with Live Audio Rooms partners, as it pivots to focus on the 'metaverse'.

Acast has signed comedian Hannah Berner's Berning in Hell podcast. It was with Anchor; Acast has also announced new artwork for the show is on the way (partially, perhaps, because the old artwork was emblazoned with the Anchor logo).

The terms for Amazon Music for Podcasters have been updated. Here are all the changes: there doesn't appear to be any obvious change for us (though clarity that the service does not cache your podcast nor inject advertising).

An Anchor podcast called Soldier of Misfortune has been accused of being a shameless rip-off by Brendan I Koerner, a journalist for The Atlantic who wrote the story. His piece took him nine years to report, he says, and he accuses the podcaster, Jesse Rapaport, of knowingly stealing his work, and even pronouncing the name of the main character wrong throughout. "Perhaps we can start a frank discussion about what constitutes fair use for podcasters?" Koerner asks. We've approached Rapaport for comment; plagiarism has unfortunately been a recurring theme for many years.

Podcasting is the most engaging method to advertise using audio, according to Acast's Sounds Smart Report, released today in Australia.

From Monday, Spotify's Megaphone will no longer deliver podcasts to listeners in Russia.

A major new podcast investment company has been launched in Sweden. PodX Group will invest in international podcast IP rights, and offer financing, business development, internationalisation and commercialisation to emerging podcast producers and creators. The company has been founded by leading media figures in the country.

The Podcast Show London has announced its first wave of content sessions for their two-day conference on May 25 and 26. It has also announced some of the live podcasts at The Podcast Show 2022 LIVE, as part of a week-long series of 20+ live events. (We'll be there as a media partner: you can save 20% off a limited number of day passes with promo code PODNEWS).

Podmachine has been launched - a tool to grow and edit your podcast for you (and even manage guests). It takes 48 hours to edit a show, and and starts from $49/month for four weekly shows. Uniquely, the tool also includes advertising in other podcasts. You can try the service for free; we understand it can be white-labelled.

Anchor, Buzzsprout and Spreaker were the podcast hosting companies who published the most new episodes in March. John Spurlock's monthly data shows a significant rise for Libsyn (possibly due to the launch of Libsyn Studio, its free podcast hosting alternative).

The average CPM in AdvertiseCast's marketplace for March was $23.44, the company says; slightly up from February's $23.36 and almost identical year-on-year.

Want to play with the new Spotify interface for podcasting? It's already on your phone. On an iPhone or iPad, open Safari, visit spotify:internal:podcastclips and you'll go straight there. /via @chrismessina

Podimo has bought Dag en Nacht, the largest podcast publisher in the Netherlands. Dag en Nacht have over 60 shows; some will be placed behind Podimo's monthly €5 (US$5.50) paywall.

Apple Podcast Connect has a new terms of service document. Comparing the old and the new, we notice new clauses about the "right to label or remove" your shows (¶1); a new clause about confidentiality (¶4); and a new license clause (¶8). It may allow Apple in future to label shows (as Spotify are doing for COVID-19), and promote guests on your show.

Spotify is working on a brand new podcast interface. Spotted by Chris Messina, who posted a screen recording archived by Podnews here, the new interface adds a dedicated Podcasts tab, vertical scrolling, and live captions for all shows. Messina is running a pre-release version of Spotify; it's unclear when this will be released, if at all. #exciting

The results of the Podnews Report Card were announced at Podcast Movement Evolution by our Editor, James Cridland. Selections from the 750 comments captured are on the Podnews website. Apple and Spotify received roughly equal votes overall, but very different responses.

Announced at Podcast Movement today, Broccoli productions is to launch BUILD - a new education platform for the audio industry.

PRX and Google Podcasts have announced a new round of the Google Podcasts creator program: a podcast accelerator and training program for audio producers around the world. Applications open Mar 29.

In Canada, Rogers Media is running Canada's Next Great Podcaster across its radio stations: a competition to win CAD $10,000 and get your show idea produced. Caution, though: Matt Cundill pointed out to Podnews that the rules let Rogers use any of your ideas they like (even if you don't win) without giving you a penny (¶7d); it might not really be $10,000 (¶9a); and the draw is entirely random anyway and nothing to do with your entry (¶10).

Who are they? Webster didn't spell those out in his post, but here's the data, released last month. The four biggest, now reaching 50% of all weekly podcast listeners, are SXM Media, Spotify, iHeartRadio and NPR.

BREAKING: The Podcast Academy has just announced that Serial will be awarded the Governors Award, recognising the impact a podcast or individual has had on the industry. Co-creators Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder will accept the award at The Ambies next Tuesday.

More listeners pay attention to podcast advertising than ads on TV or radio, according to new UK research from The Guardian. Podcast advertising also has a 'multiplier effect' when used in combination with other advertising media.

Is Robert Riggs the first independent podcaster to turn a podcast into a TV show? (For the record, no, he isn't). But FOX Nation will debut a new docuseries, Freed to Kill, on Friday. It's fronted by the host of True Crime Reporter, Robert Riggs. The program will focus on serial killer Kenneth McDuff - a death row inmate, freed on parole under a cloud of corruption.

Rooster Teeth and WarnerMedia Access announced the Rooster Teeth Digital Creators Program, an initiative designed to identify and develop aspiring and emerging digital content creators with an eye toward widening diverse, equitable, and inclusive representation.

Spanish-language podcast platform iVoox has published its 2021 financial report. Now twelve years old, the profitable company claims over 70 million episodes and more than 700m listeners. Income from subscriptions and advertising doubled during 2021. The company also spends half a million euros a year (US $545,000) on R&D.

What's an indie podcast? In The Ambies, Aftershock has been nominated in the Best Indie Podcast category. The show was announced in July last year as a co-production with the very un-indie iHeartMedia. Indie podcaster Maribel Quezada Smith is disappointed, saying "The intention behind creating an indie category is to amplify and celebrate the work of indie creators".

How many podcasts are there? We were asked in an email: so we turned it into an article. The answer isn't as straightforward as you'd think.

Gumball has raised $10 million to expand its podcasting host-read advertising platform. The company was built by the team behind the Headgum Podcast Network.

Triton Digital has published data for women's podcast listening - fiction is the top genre for females aged 18-24, and Crime Junkie is the most listened-to podcast for women of all ages. The company also says that women are more likely to use Apple and direct websites to listen. (Need a decent embedded player?)

A successful Australian podcast goes exclusive on SCA's LiSTNR app this week. 2 Guys 1 Cup got 28,655 downloads in January, according to the Australian Podcast Ranker, but will no longer be available on other platforms from this week. The Podcast Ranker means we can monitor the effect exclusivity has on their figures.

How many podcasts use chapters? About 1.22% of all episodes, says new data from John Spurlock's Livewire. ID3 tags within MP3 are the most popular method. Here is advice from Apple Podcasts; the newly launched The Refresh from Insider uses them.

Podcast Movement has announced Latif Nasser, Radiolab co-host, as a keynote speaker at Podcast Movement Evolutions. Registration is here; Podnews will be there.

Audacy has launched the Audacy Digital Audience Network, which they call "the highest quality addressable audience in audio". 60 million listeners across podcasts and radio are available to target.

The first show using Spooler is The Refresh from Insider; available as a standard podcast feed, the twelve-minute audio is rebuilt when you listen using dynamic audio insertion, enabling the show to be updated every minute. It's presented by Rebeca Ibarra and Dave Smith; and worth listening on their website to understand how it's been put together. Or, use the chapter feature in your podcast app to skip stories. (Perhaps that explains the release of Apple Podcasts' guide to using chapters last month).

HBO has announced HBO Docs Club, a deep dive into a wide variety of titles from HBO Documentary Films, past and present. Produced by Audacy's Pineapple Street Studios and HBO Max, it'll be hosted by Brittany Luse and Ronald Young Jr, and launches in March.

Triton Digital's January Podcast Report for the US tells us that US podcast listeners downloaded 4 podcasts per week on average. NPR News Now is the new #1 podcast; SXM Media remains #1 for publishers.

Will Ferrell is speaking at Podcast Movement Evolutions as part of the first keynote. He'll join Conal Byrne (CEO, Digital Audio Group at iHeartMedia) to discuss his experience hosting his own The Ron Burgundy Podcast, and growth of his Big Money Players podcast network. Here's where to get tickets: we'll be there!

Libsyn has launched Libsyn Studio Beta, "an all-in-one free platform for new and casual creators to plan, launch, and distribute their podcasts". Here's a how-to video showing how it works. It publishes shows directly to Libsyn - here's a test show we made - and contains a midroll ad and postroll credit. Libsyn Studio builds on the company's acquisition of Auxbus a year ago.

iHeartPodcast Network Australia and Podsights have published their podcast advertising Benchmark Report for 2021. Conversion rate is 62% higher on iHeartPodcast Network Australia than the global average from Podsights, the data claims; and global data shows podcast ads are showing their highest engagement figures yet.

"Spotify's splashy deals with stars from Ava DuVernay to Kim Kardashian made headlines, not podcasts." So says Business Insider, with scuttlebutt from inside the company's "internal tumult". In December, we published a list of announced, but un-made, Spotify shows.

Edison Research also released their first US Top Podcast Networks ranker. The data looks at all of 2021, measuring total reach. SXM Media is #1 for podcasts, the data finds (which is also what the latest Triton Digital US Podcast Ranker, based on server logs, says). "We've tracked this space for ten quarters with thousands of listeners, and the data we see has been incredibly stable over that period of time," said Edison Research SVP Tom Webster.

Spotify has published an interview with Sean Creeley from Podsights. Creeley has also written to his customers (1, 2). Podsights, which has 40 staff, will continue to operate as before; an FAQ sent to customers is explicit that Podsights will not share individual publisher data with Spotify's publishing business.

Today, Podnews is launching the first annual report card for the podcast industry. Requested by some of the platforms themselves, we'd like your views - as publishers or as listeners: what you like, and how they can improve. We'll compile the results, and give comprehensive data to each of the podcast platforms. Please give your views here before Mar 1.

Delegate day passes have just gone on sale for The Podcast Show 2022, coming to London in May. May 25-26 promises an international festival with a number of inspirational speakers including Jen Sargent, CEO of Wondery, Miranda Sawyer, audio critic from The Observer, Ross Adams, CEO of Acast, and Steph Simon, Head of Community & Creators at Clubhouse. Additionally, right through the week of May 23-29, you'll be able to watch your favourite shows live on stage in a number of different venues. You can get your day passes today - use promo code PODNEWS for 20% off a limited number of day passes. Podnews is a media partner (and we'll be there).

The Power of Podcasting is a new book about telling stories through sound. Written by Siobhán McHugh, it's full of case studies, tips and techniques, and highly recommended; follow this link for 20% off; or on Kindle.

Is this the most southerly podcast ever recorded? Dan Snow's History Hit is taking his podcast to find Ernest Shakleton's lost Endurance shipwreck in Antarctica. Snow says: "When I started the History Hit Podcast in 2015 I was sitting in a travelodge talking into a phone. I could not be more excited that now seven years later I will be broadcasting from the moving ice floes of Antarctica via the latest satellite communications to an audience of millions."

The Podcast Hall of Fame 2022 honorees were announced, including Evo Terra, Molly Wood, Dr Emily Morse and Dave Slusher, who, as our 'history of the word podcasts' discusses, was the first podcaster to mention the word "podcast" on his, um, podcast. Congratulations to them all; the ceremony is on Mar 25 at Podcast Movement Evolutions.

16 duPont-Columbia Awards were announced last night. Winners included According to Need from Katie Mingle and 99% Invisible, Blindspot from WNYC Studios and The History Channel, and The Line, an original podcast from Apple TV+.

Why did 70 Joe Rogan episodes disappear from Spotify over the weekend? They were removed by Rogan himself, according to a leaked note from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. In the note, Ek also commits $100 million "for the licensing, development, and marketing of music (artists and songwriters) and audio content from historically marginalized groups". Ek adds: "I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer".

Exclusive: Audiochuck's new podcast, The Deck, has been accused of copying a similar show from May 2020. We speak to one of the co-hosts of Dealing Justice, and take a listen to both shows. This isn't the first accusation of plagiarism against the company.

The winners of the iHeartRadio Podcast Awards 2022 were announced. You can watch again on YouTube. The winner of the Podcast of the Year was You're Wrong About.

UK radio audience figures released earlier today say that UK radio has its biggest-ever audience at 49.5m. However, the average Brit listens for 18 hours a week, down from 19.8 hours ten years ago (though research methodologies have changed).

Google is randomly switching podcasts in its app to point to pirated copies with ads. Jason Calcanis noticed his podcast, All-In, mysteriously had ads in it; Google's Danny Sullivan replied: "we appear to have mistakenly pointed to a duplicate version of the podcast": a pirated copy held on Spreaker, according to Nathan Gathright. "There are loads of benefits from our constantly checking for new RSS feeds and trying to make our own determination about which feed to use for a given show algorithmically, but we've also seen instances where we get it wrong," a Google spokesperson told us in July last year. Podnews offers a Google Podcasts RSS helper so you can check what RSS feed Google has for your podcast; we would also suggest you claim your podcast and then set the preferred feed. Pirated podcasts have been an issue for a while; if you've been affected, here's how to report a pirated podcast.

Podcast producer Resonate Recordings is launching Resonate Originals with a five-show Tenderfoot TV deal. The company has also made a number of hires; we're promised a new season of Culpable and a number of new shows.

Spotify has had a bad few days. Neil Young removed his music from Spotify last week after criticising 'dangerous life-threatening COVID falsehoods found in Spotify programming'. The chief of The World Health Organisation criticised Spotify and thanked Neil Young for, in his words, 'standing up against misinformation and inaccuracies around COVID-19 vaccination'.

Podcast network Lemonada Media has raised $8 million in funding, to hire more diverse talent and staff, make more shows and partner with more brands. Meanwhile, Tortoise, a "slow news" company in the UK, has completed a US $13m funding round, and plans more podcasts.

Jad Abumrad is stepping aside as host of Radiolab. He's been hosting the show for almost twenty years. His co-host, Robert Krulwich, retired in 2019. Nick Quah writes that Radiolab was, for him, a "gateway podcast", and it's probably no over-exaggeration to suggest that Radiolab has influenced a generation of podcasters and sound designers.

TED Audio Collective has entered into a multi-year co-development and production partnership with Transmitter Media. It expands a five-year relationship between the two companies.

The Podcast Host is launching "the world's first ever generative podcast NFT collection". Minted on the Solana blockchain, a hundred episodes will be released over the next five weeks, for 0.2 SOL each.

A former McDonald's drive-thru cashier has signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar podcast deal with his former employer. Gary Coichy, the CEO of Pod Digital Media, has partnered with McDonald's USA to help them reach multicultural audiences.

Audacy's Cadence13 has partnered with an anonymous instagram account for a new podcast. The insta account is celebrity gossip account @DeuxMoi, and the new show is called Deux/U.

Acast has announced the launch of a specialised "growth division", dedicated to helping podcasts scale and grow.

In the US, the flagship podcast from ABC News, Start Here, marks 1,000 episodes today. Since its launch in March 2018, the podcast's host, Brad Mielke, has interviewed the country's biggest newsmakers and earnt an Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Innovation. Speaking to Podnews, he said he's learnt "how much importance simple facts carry … Facts needs to be the most important thing you're imparting. … It's a big deal."

Home bitcoin and lightning node Umbrel has released v0.4.11, and with it, the first version of Helipad: an app that lets you see a live view of incoming boosts and boostagrams from your listeners. This lets anyone see feedback and payments of cryptocurrency from people using new podcast apps. We've a guide to get started.

In July, Audioboom described a similar percentage of back-catalogue show downloads.

True crime rules; but exclusive podcasts don't much, and nor do any of the big acquisitions - at Pacific Content, Matt Hird took all the "top podcasts of 2021" lists he could find, and analysed all 432 podcasts they mentioned to see what can be learnt. 9/12 is incidentally, the top of the tops.

The Australian Podcast Ranker for December 2021 was released. Casefile remains #1. ARN's iHeartPodcast Network is comfortably in the lead for publishers, for the twentieth consecutive time.

The message makes it clear that Google doesn't host content (stories from Sky News UK, the Brookings Institution and others have highlighted content issues in podcasting recently). The company already blocks some podcasts from under 18s and people not signed in.

The shortlists have been announced for The Sports Podcasts Awards 2022; 13 countries are represented. You can register to be a judge on the awards website.

Rate This Podcast, which offers a simple link to help your listeners rate your show (like ours), now supports Spotify. The company also says that more than 3,500 podcasters have signed up to use the tool.

Patrick Butkus has been hired as Vice President of Marketing for Acast. He's based in New York, and joins from Discovery.

One in ten people in the UK are intending to set up and start a podcast of their own this year, according to a survey from Acast. If they all go through with it, that would be 8m new shows.

More than 3,000 organisations are using private podcast channels on Storyboard, the company has announced.

The BPI, the British record company association, has published music consumption data for 2021. Streams increased by 5.7% year-on-year. They highlight: "For an artist, 10 million streams generates at least the same royalties as 10,000 CD sales, and nearly 2,000 artists will achieve at least 10 million streams this year in the UK alone – nearly double the number who sold the equivalent number of CDs and downloads in 2007."

The Podnews Ranker shows an unchanged top three of companies we've reported on over the past 90 days; and a new #1 for the person we've reported on the most: the Podfather has beaten a former wrestling commentator. Our gender balance for people mentions remained unchanged at 36%.

Podcast Index added 466,000 shows in the past six months. It added 3.1m this year, but that's not that surprising, given the index launched in September 2020. Unlike the above two, shows are mainly added automatically: either discovered from open RSS feeds or submitted by podcasters or others.

First look: Nielsen say that podcasts are resonating with diverse audiences, in a new set of data from the Nielsen Podcast Buying Power service. Podcast listening among younger Hispanics has doubled over the last three years, while Asian Americans prefer technology and business podcasts, the report says.

Exclusive: Facebook Podcasts may not be as big as you think. A coding error means that it's making thousands of bogus partial downloads, and one major podcast hosting company is not filtering these out from its stats.

Do you know anyone under 18 making audio in the UK? The Young Audio Awards is for them: they've until mid February to enter. Winners are offered a chance to host their own show on a national radio station, along with mentorship, masterclass events and state-of-the-art audio recording equipment.

Voxalyze has published their Podcast Discovery & Consumption report. The company surveyed listeners across four countries (the US, UK, France and Germany) to see if there are any local differences. Podcast listeners use 1.9 platforms on average, and Amazon Music is surprisingly high in their results. Google Podcasts reaches up to 15% of all users, but only 4% in the UK (possibly because the BBC blocks their podcasts from it).

Spanish podcast company iVoox published a list of the most popular podcasts on their platform in 2021. DIAS EXTRAÑOS con Santiago Camacho was the most streamed, with more than 5m listeners per month.

A San Diego district judge has ordered the makers of the Fat Leonard podcast, which uncovers bribery in the US Navy, to turn over their unaired recordings. Lawyers acting for a navy officer charged with bribery think the tapes may help get their client off. Journalists aren't normally asked to hand over reporting notes, and it's seen as against the First Amendment; "we believe it sets a dangerous precedent for courts to demand journalists to hand over reporting notes", said one of the podcast's producers, Tom Wright. Instead of just handing over the tapes, they've making them - all twenty hours of material - available to the public.

Ten Percent Happier is expanding to launch its own podcast studio, developing a wide range of shows that will explore the intersection of everyday life and mindfulness. The new podcast studio has launched under the leadership of Jen Poyant (ex WNYC Studios and Stable Genius Productions) and Kimmie Regler (Gimlet Media), and is to launch three new shows in the next six months.

We reported yesterday that podcast hosting company bCast had pulled all "lifetime" accounts with just two weeks notice. The company has now changed its mind, calling the decision "misguided, irresponsible and a mistake"; it's also refunding customers if they bought a new plan.

Breaking: Media and entertainment group Global has purchased podcast hosting company Captivate. "This acquisition will enable us to support all talent in the podcast community from the very largest to emerging new talent", said Global's Group CEO Stephen Miron. Terms weren't given; company founders Mark Asquith and Kieran McKeefery will remain with the business. Podnews's Editor was an advisor to Captivate.

If listeners try to rate a show they haven't listened-to (for at least thirty seconds), they'll be told to listen first. You can rate a show on Apple Podcasts without listening at all.

Podfollow, a configurable service which generates free links for your podcast to help you promote it, has had its 20 millionth clickthrough. It had achieved 1m in Dec 2019.

Do Anchor podcasters find it too hard to get into Apple Podcasts? The Podcast Index's Dave Jones reports that "726,234 Anchor feeds in the index do not have Apple iTunes IDs". The company stopped auto-submitting podcasts to Apple in June, resulting in a significant slow-down for Apple numbers. (Earlier this year, Buzzsprout told us that only 60% of their shows have bothered submitting to Apple).

First look: Acast and Nielsen will release data today showing US podcast fans are spending even more time listening to podcasts. The data also says 73% of podcast listeners take action after hearing an ad, with 55% saying they have a more positive opinion about brands who advertise on their favourite podcasts. The data will be presented today in an AdWeek Spotlight Event.

Podnews is rolling out direct links to listen to shows on Amazon Music in our podcast pages. An example is on Podland. Our pages will also highlight if you're missing from that directory; and you can search Amazon Music's podcasts from our search pages.

Spotify has responded to our story on Wednesday wondering where their announced shows are, by giving a statement to, er, HotPod Insider. "Many of our agreements are announced at the deal stage and it’s important to recognize that like any production house or studio, building an audio arm takes time and requires significant planning, from hiring the right audio experts with audio specific technical skills, to pre-production, writing, development, casting and recording", says the company.

Fireside Chat is sending out personal "time limited" invitations - telling us we have a "unique voice that would benefit from being on the Fireside platform". With "lots of interest from the podcast community", "we have limited creator spots left", says co-founder Falon Fatemi, urging us to get in touch at our "earliest convenience". A look into a friendly podcast producer's email inbox leads us to pontificate that the invitations might not be as unique nor "time limited" as we'd hoped; she's been sending these emails since October.

Exclusive: Spotify has made a number of exciting press releases about new podcast partnerships in the past two years: but many of those Spotify announcements have yet to result in a single new podcast, according our research. Where are they? And what's going on?

Jeff Price will be interviewed for Podland later this week.

Ask anyone, including us, about playing commercial music on your podcast, and we'll say no, no you can't. At least, without a license. But how easy is music licensing?

Data: Around 425,000 new episodes were published on Anchor in November, but the company lost 0.7% market share. In the top ten, the top 8 remains unchanged; Captivate is new at #9, beating Megaphone which remains at #10. (Podnews's Editor is an advisor for Captivate).

Exclusive: Slate Plus podcasts are now available on Spotify. Through their integration with Supporting Cast, Slate becomes one of the first and largest publishers in the world to distribute paywalled audio through Spotify’s Open Access Platform. Slate's CEO Dan Check told Podnews: “The challenge with premium podcasts has always been offering listeners an easy way to use their preferred podcast app. A large and growing share of our listener base uses Spotify, and Supporting Cast’s integration with the Open Access Platform lets us deliver exclusive content seamlessly to a greater share of our audience.”

Apple Podcasts announced its Best of 2021. A Slight Change of Plans with Maya Shankar from Pushkin Industries was chosen as Best Show of the Year, and WBUR/Futuro's Anything For Selena chosen as Newcomer of the Year. A list of top new shows and top subscriptions is available in the app.

Spotify has removed its Android "car view" feature, which allowed you to drive and listen to podcasts with a simpler user interface. You can still use Android Auto, or voice control via Google Assistant. ("Hey, Google, play the latest news from Podnews podcasting news" works a treat).

Podcast apps may be buying ads for your podcast in Google Search without you knowing. Acast, The Podcast App and Amazon Music are all advertising against our own podcast title, and that of many other podcast titles, too. On an iPhone in the UK, an ad for Amazon Music appeared as the #1 search result for Podnews, seeming to suggest that access to our podcast costs £7.99/month, which is misleading (it's free on any platform). The Acast ad leads to a web player, but no method of subscribing; The Podcast App's ad led us to a web player with promotion for their own podcast app.

First look: The host of indie fiction podcast The Program has given Podnews readers the first look at his growth, marketing and revenue in 2021. A case study like no other, you'll see his download figures, revenue, the effect Apple Podcasts promotion has on his show, the release of a soundtrack album, and his plans for the future. There's something to learn here for every podcaster.

Fireside Chat is also making transcripts of chats - but not publishing them, yet. This chat recording contains code including a full transcript, which doesn't appear to be visible on the public web page, but which appears in Google search results. As a proof-of-concept, we've temporarily put up this tool to pull those transcripts out.

Copenhagen-based podcast production company Podimo has secured $78m of funding. The subscription company hosts more than 950 original shows, and plans to move into new markets.

New technology from a company called Sonnant could give old podcasts new life - a new product, Archival Retrieval, automatically checks trending topics to find relevant podcasts from your archives to promote, and even clips the audio for you.

Spotify CFO Paul Vogel says the company has $3.5bn in cash for acquisitions. Speaking at a conference in Boston MA, USA, he said: “Podcasting was this business that for 20 years didn’t change — it was a simple RSS feed — no way to do anything different”. (Paul - podcasts are 18 years old).

Tenderfoot TV is funding a podcast entirely from Bitcoin. From Nowhere will look at the "dark past" of the crypto world; it'll launch in early 2022. (Read this to earn Bitcoin from your podcast; we've just updated it with the latest information.)

Edison Research unveiled their latest US top 50 Podcast list by audience size.

Vox Media has acquired Criminal Productions. Founded by former public radio journalists Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer, Criminal Productions is responsible for Criminal, This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. The shows were with PRX's Radiotopia network.

Captivate will give a demonstration of their new AMIE dynamic content tool on YouTube today at 11am Eastern. For "the serious independent podcasters of the world", it's available to anyone who hosts their podcast on Captivate. (Podnews's Editor is an advisor).

The Kurier, an Austrian newspaper, unveiled the winner of their ka․t podcast awards. The 'best newcomer' award was MOMENT, a story podcast from Moment magazine: the first season, 'Abgeschminkt', tells the story of a small employee against a large corporation. (Thanks, Steffen!)

Audiobooks are coming to Spotify - the company is to acquire Findaway, an audiobook distributor. Findaway will "enable Spotify to quickly scale its audiobook catalog". It's experimented with audiobooks before: adding classic books, and a bespoke category for spoken word. An app originally called Spooks but now named Zebralution Audiobooks surfaces more than 3,900 audiobooks on Spotify.

What are the best Portuguese podcasts in the world? The results of the 2021 Podes Awards were announced earlier this week.

Journalist and filmmaker Jon Ronson is back with a new show, Things Fell Apart. It features strange, unexpected human stories from the culture wars, and has a strange, unexpected distribution strategy: if you're in the UK, you'll hear it free on BBC Sounds (or on BBC Radio 4, Tuesdays at 9am) . If you're in the US or Canada and using an Apple device, it's available on BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts, and if you're on Android or elsewhere, you're out of luck.

On Friday, the Apple Podcasts Connect system was checking Podnews's RSS feed every eight minutes.

Entravision has acquired South African digital ad company 365 Digital, who monetise TikTok in the country. Entravision bought Cisneros Interactive, who represent Spotify audio ads in Latin America, in September.

Libsyn is on the acquisition trail again, with its AdvertiseCast platform acquiring "certain assets" of PODGO, a podcast monetisation platform for smaller podcasts, specialising in host-reads. PODGO’s founder David Ehrlich joins the company and will help transition customers and advertisers. No terms were given.

The current #3 podcast in the UK on Spotify is The RSK Podcast. Podnews can reveal that, hosted on Podbean, it consists of 50 pirated episodes of Ricky Gervais podcasts from 2005-2013, from a user who "just made this as I wanted a way to listen to these myself on Spotify". Some episodes have been downloaded more than 150,000 times. A search for "Ricky Gervais" on Spotify reveals that podcast, as well as another pirated copy of his XFM shows.

Amazon Music has announced a "synchronised podcast transcripts" feature. It's only available in the Amazon Music app, only in the US, and only for recent episodes of Amazon Original and Wondery shows. It's going to be opened to other selected shows shortly; as far as we can tell, it's a proprietary solution with no link to the existing open transcript standard from the new podcast namespace. We've asked how podcasters can submit transcripts.

After an incident we reported at one of their meetings earlier in the year, the IAB TechLab has posted an expected code of conduct for future meetings.

Run to the hills! Run for your lives! Psycho Schizo Espresso is a brand new podcast from Oxford University psychologist and author Dr Kevin Dutton and Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson. The first epsiode, unraveling 666, the number of the beast, is now available; it's produced by Pod Prod.

Facebook is quietly rolling out Facebook Podcasts to countries outside the US. We've seen Podnews available in the iOS app in Australia, and we hear some can see their podcasts appearing in the UK. Our Facebook page should show a 'podcasts' tab on iOS mobile only. Do you see it?

Daniel Ek is on the Spotify: On The Record show to talk about more.

Another high-profile podcast signing: SiriusXM has done a deal with Ashley Flowers' podcast network Audiochuck. Audiochuck was previously with AdLarge. SiriusXM has done a number of deals this month, including Rory and Mal, Last Podcast on the Left, and production company Audio Up. Through its ownership of Stitcher, the company is #1 for podcasts according to Triton Digital's US podcast ranker.

Acast and the BBC have renewed their agreement for monetising the BBC's podcasts outside the UK. The broadcaster saw 246m global podcast downloads in Q3/21, making them one of the biggest publishers in the world.

PodSpot Studios, 'Australia's first podcast studio network', has expanded from the Sunshine Coast to add facilities in Sydney and the Gold Coast.

Sorry for the duplicate Due to a technical error, you may have received yesterday's Podnews twice. We apologise for that; not our intention.

Now we know what Audacy spent $40m on - the company has bought WideOrbit's digital audio streaming technology, and will rebrand it AmperWave. Audacy's announcement just mentions digital audio streaming (for live radio); but WideOrbit's announcement mentions podcasting, too: the company does some hosting for clients. Audacy currently uses Omny Studio, a company now owned by competitor iHeartRadio.

Facebook recently added podcasts into their app (mobile only, US only), but haven't talked too much about their plans for podcasting. 1.8 billion users visit Facebook daily, so anything they do to increase podcasting would be welcome. Today, Facebook's podcasting team is joining The New Media Show, with Libsyn's Rob Greenlee and Blubrry's Todd Cochrane, at 3pm Eastern. You can watch the live feed here.

Congratulations to podcast host Jordan Harbinger, who has renewed with PodcastOne for what is described as a "high seven-figure deal". He will remain with the network for the forseeable future. Harbinger does almost 11m monthly downloads.

AdLarge has published their 2021 Podcast Buying Guide, containing guidance and context for advertisers wanting to benefit from podcasts. It's a free download.

SiriusXM's Stitcher has signed Rory Farrell and Jamil 'MAL' Clay, to bring New Rory & MAL to their More Sauce network. It's the latest high-profile podcast signing from Stitcher. Not in the press release: any mention of Joe Budden, who fired the duo from his podcast in May.

Last Podcast On The Left has announced it's no longer to be a Spotify Exclusive show. They've signed with SiriusXM's Stitcher, and will be available in every podcast app, including Spotify, from Feb 1 2022; they'd been exclusive since Feb 2020.

Using the same synthetic voice technology, you can hear our Editor, James Cridland, speaking Spanish (he doesn't speak it either) in our podcast today. It's quite a thing.

Exclusive: Spotify is closing in on Apple Podcasts and indie podcast apps are becoming less popular, according to new data released to Podnews by Podtrac today. Calculated from over a billion US podcast downloads in September, for monthly audience, Spotify is now less than three percentage points away from Apple. But, for monthly streams/downloads, Apple is more than seven times larger - and that number's growing.

Data: Research company Ipsos has released the third edition of their Italian study into digital audio. 31% of Italian adults listen to podcasts every month, says the data.

A new podcast, Fat Leonard, highlights what it claims is corruption within the US Navy. Leonard himself talks for the first time, and the podcast also includes the brave women who exposed the fraud. From PRX and Project Brazen, the content studio created by former Wall Street Journal reporters Bradley Hope and Tom Wright, it launched yesterday.

First look: Supercast has opened their integration with Spotify Open Access, which enables publishers to offer gated content within Spotify's app. It's the first subscription platform to offer the Spotify Open Access integration to all its users.

Here's what else you need to know today - there's no change in the top 5 Top US Podcasts, with The Daily still #1. SmartLess - a new entry last month at #9 - is still #9.

Who invented the word 'podcast'? Who made the term popular? Who used the word 'podcast' first in... a podcast? Our history of the word 'podcast' contains audio, quotes, and a full timeline.

Even among public radio fans, however, The Daily from the New York Times fares better than NPR's own podcasts, NPR News Now or Up First.

Spotify also launched a quiz to help you find your perfect podcast, for users in US, UK, Germany and Australia. We were given Healthy-ish (which shows there's some geo-targeting in the algorithm).

First look: For International Podcast Day, Apple Podcasts has just released data on their top subscriptions and top free channels. Wondery+ is the most popular paid channel, while The New York Times is the top free channel - the data also reveals that Luminary has been thrown a lifeline becoming the second most popular paid subscription on the platform. We have the full list, and analysis of the results.

US comedy writer Scott Aukerman is launching Comedy Bang! Bang! World, a paid-for podcast network. Aukerman, who also launched Earwolf in 2010, is partnering with Acast; subscribers for either $4 or $7 can listen to these shows acro ss almost all podcast apps. Acast's Ross Adams and Johan Billgren are guests tomorrow on the Podland podcast.

Meet Cute, a popular rom-com podcast, releases its first international production today. Written by Nigerian-based Kasimma and acted and produced by Nigerian creators, it's a story of love, friendship and adventure. In the last 1.5 years, Meet Cute has created over 350 stories.

A company called DDEX, which describes itself as an "international standards-setting organization dedicated to improving the exchange of data and information across the music industry", will hold an open meeting tomorrow to discuss proposed requirements for description and communication of music metadata in podcasts.

A non-profit organisation set up by podcaster Ashley Flowers has led to an arrest in an unsolved case. A suspect was arrested a week ago in connection with eight alleged sexual assault cases, after funding was made available for an advanced DNA test from Flowers' Season of Justice. The funding group is currently assisting 31 cases.

PodcastOne has announced the judges for its Self Made Podcast Edition talent competition.

31% of consumer media consumption is now audio - but only 8.8% of the average media advertising budget is allocated to audio, says new research from WARC and iHeartMedia. 25% of advertisers do not invest in audio at all, according to the data, which was presented at AudioCon; the report also suggests that ad-spend for podcasting is growing.

An indie podcast has got airborne: Celebrity Catch Up: Life After That Thing I Did has been selected to be on Virgin Atlantic aeroplanes from October 1, just in time for flights to restart between the US and the UK. The host, Genevieve Hassan, makes the podcast herself and it has no funding, sponsorship or revenue. (We asked: she'll get play stats from Virgin Atlantic's Vera IFE system, as well as "thumbs-up" scores.)

What do you know about the history of podcasting in the UK? We've probably missed a lot: but this look at UK podcasting's early history is a start, at least. Please get in touch with things that have been missed.

While podcast listening has grown, 44% of US Latinos haven't yet listened to a podcast; and 20% haven't listened in the last month - but, says data from Edison Research, that might change: two-thirds of them are already listening to spoken word audio. También tenemos esta noticia en español.

Attribution company Podsights is adding attribution for ads in streaming radio and music services, as well as podcast ads. The company pulled its contract from AdvertiseCast last month.

Pitches on fire! Studio Ochenta has announced the next round of pitches for its fiction series Ochenta Cuentos. They want your pitches for stories related... to fire.

Think dynamic audio insertion is only good for ads? In April, TED Talks Daily released a "mystery episode", using PRX Dovetail, the company's dynamic audio insertion tool. The show played a random episode to listeners. They documented the process, and what it did in terms of total audiences. (For another bit of run with dynamic audio insertion, try PodClock.)

Exclusive: Popular podcast app Player FM has undergone a redesign, incorporating more prominent access to video podcasts, larger podcast cover art, and playlist creation. We asked the Player FM team what they'd done, and how podcasters can help.

The number of podcasts in Spanish grew 6.8 times last year, according to iVoox. 55% of Spanish podcast listeners are listening more now than before the pandemic, says a new study. We've linked to it in full from the press release; above is data showing the growth of other languages.

The Australian Podcast Ranker will report on audience reach and download figures by podcast title. The ranker, compiled by Triton Digital, will add these numbers after ad-buyer request; the ranker will now be in order of total audience, aligning with Triton Digital reports in other countries, and with Podtrac.

Exclusive: Libsyn's AdvertiseCast is to release monthly average advertising rates to aid transparency for the industry - and has launched a report showing historical rates within AdvertiseCast's marketplace. August's figure, based on individual 60-second spots rather than downloads, was an average CPM of $23.57.

Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett's podcast SmartLess is a new entry at #9 in the Podtrac top US podcasts list for August. The show was bought by Amazon's Wondery at the end of June. Podtrac contains participating publishers only.

SBS, the Australian public service broadcaster, is calling to podcasters to submit concepts and pitches.