Acast doubles revenue year-on-year; Spotify solicits Spanish shows

• Acast release their financial results for last year. Revenue doubled for the Swedish podcast company, and it grew to having 110 employees. The company claims 1.3bn listens over the year.

  • Meanwhile, Netflix shares have plunged after they said they have 130,000 fewer US customers.

• Matty Staudt, iHeartMedia’s VP of Podcast Programming, is leaving the company to become President of Jam Street Media, a new LA based podcast company focused on podcasts for brands, talent coaching, and consulting for businesses entering the podcast space. He’ll be working with Jessica Navarro, who joins Jam Street Media from Mark Wahlberg’s Unrealistic Ideas. He’ll continue hosting iHM’s Access Podcast.

• Sarah Geismer is announced as Head of Creative Development & Production at Crooked Media. Geismer, formerly of Netflix, will lead development for all of Crooked Media’s active and upcoming podcast, television, and film projects.

• RadioPublic interview Kate Krosschell about Lantigua Williams & Co’s 70 Million, and learns about the benefit of transcripts.

• Tweaks for apps and services include podcast app Breaker, which is adding integration with Bullet to produce shareable audio clips for social media; the Pocket Casts app is advertising in WNYC Studios podcasts (thanks, Kristofor!); podcast host Spreaker’s trim and crop tool has been improved; remote recording service Squadcast suggests that it will soon be supported on iOS and iPadOS; and Dropbox now has integrations with transcription services.

  
  Aug 15 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• We linked to a New York Times article a few days ago, which promised we’d “reached peak podcast”. How did the article go down? Not well. Try this critique from Air-nandez for starters; and thank you Larry Gifford for adding: “It’s the podcast equivalent of the time I had a clever name for a restaurant and an Easy Bake Oven, and quit after 6 days because I didn’t earn a Michelin star.”

• Spotify is keen for more Spanish-language podcasts. Mia Nygren, director of Spotify for Latin America, has published a short video, the ABC of making podcasts on Spotify, on Forbes México. She also said that there are now 250,000 podcasts on Spotify.

• Patreon, a creator funding site used by many podcasters and by Podnews, raises $60m in funding. We gave our Patreon page a little polish this morning, and we’re grateful for our many supporters.

• Copenhagen-based Omnipod is (another) social media platform for podcasting, the company says. You can sign up on their rather bare-bones website.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 15 2023

• Tips and advice: 10 agency pros share their best podcast advertising tips (Forbes); Optimizing your website for podcast discoverability (RadioPublic); How to find and keep podcast sponsors (The Podcast Host); 16 ways to promote your podcast (PodReacher)

  
  Aug 15 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Podcasts

First Draft has reached its 200th episode. Hosted by author Sarah Enni, it promises “a quality hang with young adult and middle grade authors”. The 200th episode is a compilation of some of the best and most pointed questions. (Libsyn)

iHeartMedia partners with Pride Media to co-produce a slate of LGBTQ+ podcasts. The Outcast is the first: a weekly podcast exploring queer and queer-adjacent topics (iHeartMedia)

Brian McCullough, the host of Techmeme Ride Home, celebrates daily podcasts like his, saying that daily podcasts become part of peoples’ routines. We’d, cough, agree.

Blubrry has launched Podcast Insider. The first episode has an interview with Brandon Dawson from The Distiller Podcast.