Audio Production Awards 2023 - the nominees

• 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.

• Good Tape, a zine for podcasting (announced in May), has published its first issue. There’s a fancy video ad for it on Instagram. There’s still time to order it - code PODNEWS gets you money off.

• Crooked Media founders Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor are publishing their first book, Democracy or Else, “a useful and illustrated guide to saving American democracy”, which will be out June 4 next year.

• Amrita Khalid, who’s been writing HotPod for the last six months, has written a final update looking back at the last six months. She also writes about industry concerns around YouTube’s podcasting plans (for more of which, try The Tech Stuff, below). HotPod’s Ariel Shapiro returns next week.

• Matt Deegan posts about a podcast strategy for YouTube: “You need to get your shows there otherwise you’ll be missing out on listeners. Wherever you get your podcasts really does mean WHEREVER your listeners get their podcasts.” He also shows what the RSS ingest trial looks like in YouTube Studio.

• Further reading: The Media Leader reports from the IAB Podcast Upfront in London … Brett Spencer writes about why walled gardens (almost) never work … and Earbuds looks at delightfully engaging kids podcast episodes, curated by Meg Lewis.

Moves & Hires

• Marilyn Haigh has been promoted to Senior Business Development Manager at mowPod.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• How does the YouTube RSS ingest work?

  • The company re-encodes and re-hosts your audio, so (similar to other content on YouTube) if you want to replace the content, it’ll make a new episode under a new URL (and hide the previous one as private).
  • Because YouTube rehosts the audio, YouTube maintains its own analytics. If your podcast host writes the code to connect to YouTube’s Analytics API, and if you connect your account, you can import those analytics to your podcast host. YouTube analytics aren’t IAB compliant: so you can’t add one to the other.
  • Self-contained ads (DAI or not) are against YouTube policies: so, while sponsorship messages are fine, podcast hosts will need to produce ad-free audio for YouTube. It’s going to be hard to give YouTube an ad-free feed - YouTube won’t give podcast hosts an IP range for their servers, and instead, will just send a user-agent and a separate HTTP header (which we’ll not publish) as identification. It’s trivial to spoof these.

• In terms of YouTube’s analytics, you can see how popular the YouTube Music app is for listening to your podcast so far. In YouTube Studio, go to “Channel analytics”, go for “Advanced Mode” (top right), and then under “More…” choose “YouTube Product”. Our data for the last 28 days suggests YouTube Music is already bringing in 14% of the total time spent listening.

• Play a podcast in a browser, and it gives the browser’s user-agent, right? In fact, you can set the user-agent in Firefox and Safari - including every browser on iOS (which all use Safari’s webview). Some gotchas include this approach only working through fetch() and not the AUDIO tag; and requiring CORS.

• This time last week, we asked for boost messages - not (just) a vain attempt at getting more satoshis, but (also) a test of code that inserts messages received by boost directly into JSON chapters, in a tool by John Spurlock called Reflex. You can see the effect by playing the episode in Podverse, clicking the player in the footer to enlarge it. Thank you to everyone who took part.

Podcast News

Big Game Hunger is new from Multitude: a weekly comedy show where Jenna Stoeber and friends craft the big next game every episode. Starting with a random genre, concept, and vibe, Jenna and a friend will take a game all the way from pitch, to slightly more developed pitch. Get ready to laugh about games you love, learn about game trends, and yearn for titles that will surely never make their release date.

Bloodlines is new from CBC and the BBC today. The show looks at family members of notorious ISIS fighters, and what life was like living under ISIS rule.

Missing Pages returns today from The Podglomerate. This season investigates the biggest “hot button” topics in the book world – from the rise of Colleen Hoover, to the idea of who owns what in fan fiction, as well as the impact of literary scams and frauds, and the fallout from the 2022 DOJ trial against the PRH/S&S merger.

In Morrison Mysteries which debuts today, Dateline NBC’s Keith Morrison takes you on “a captivating ride through some of the most suspenseful and chilling works of fiction you’ll ever hear”. We’re promised haunting stories of ghosts, love triangles, jealousy, and rage; starting with a trip to a haunted town in New York, where some say the Headless Horseman rides to this day.

Ghost Story is new from Wondery today - a jaw-dropping tale of a haunting, which becomes a murder investigation, which leads to a family drama. It’s made by Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios.

Bad Influencer is a nine-episode immersive fiction podcast, with an “intriguing storyline and creative ensemble cast”. The cast includes Aaron Dalla Villa, Perez Hilton, and many other personalities - and is a show focused on the impact of influencer culture on society. It came out earlier this month.