Popular podcast app Pocket Casts has a new owner

“Let’s be honest, 2020 was rough for all of us individually but also for us as a company. This is a bright new chapter for us where we can focus on what we do best, bringing you the best possible podcasting experience we can.” - Russell and Philip, the founders of Pocket Casts

• Podcast app (and website) Pocket Casts has been bought by Automattic, the owners of Wordpress and Tumblr. No terms were given; co-founders Russell Ivanovic and Philip Simpson, based in Adelaide SA, Australia, will continue to lead Pocket Casts as part of Automattic; WordPress says “we will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts”, which might mean they have aspirations as a podcast hosting company. (They understand RSS after all).

  • Analysis: Launched in January 2011, and especially keen on Android, Pocket Casts was bought in 2018 by a consortium of US public broadcasters; but was put up for sale in January 2021, after NPR’s accounts said its 34.6% share had lost $812,000 (a figure PocketCasts denied). The app appears to have stalled in recent years, with a shrinking market share and no investment in new features. Podnews’s Editor uses it every day - he hopes they invest in Podcasting 2.0 enhancements to differentiate it from the competition.

• Mat George, the co-host of She Rates Dogs, was killed in a hit and run accident in Los Angeles on Saturday morning. He was 26.

• Rephonic has launched a podcast discovery tool. Give it three podcasts you love, and it’ll find you some great shows, powered by Apple Podcasts data.

• In The Verge, Ashley Carman writes about shortform audio as the future for social networks. Beams, Quest, Pludo, Soundbites and Racket are all mentioned; not mentioned, the many failed/pivoted audio social networks, which include “Twitter for audio” app Audioboo (now Audioboom), and… Anchor.

• Macmillan Podcasts’ Kathy Doyle sings the praises of the short-form podcast in an interview for Podcast Movement. Mignon Fogarty, the host of Grammar Girl, is a guest on Podland this Thursday.

• Dan Moren, a former Macworld journalist, writes in Six Colors that “Apple Podcasts reliability problem is turning into an image problem”, citing ongoing issues with the app not listing some episodes for podcasts. “I haven’t seen any direct acknowledgment from Apple about this issue over the last two months, much less any indication of what went wrong and how it plans to fix it,” he adds, and says “it’s started to feel uncomfortably like Apple doesn’t care about podcast creators livelihoods”. (Podnews has repeatedly asked for statements and an interview with Apple).

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The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• Thinking about building a PWA - a progressive web app - for audio? Prototyped suggests that PWA ought to stand for Problems with Apple, after they share their learnings.

• Beyond The Podcast does some analysis on the Podcast Index data. It looks at the “boom” in 2020, noting that Anchor powered much of the growth in podcasting, and has a higher percentage of dead podcasts.

  
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• Samsung Podcasts’s user-agent, both RSS and the audio app, is sp-agent. GoodPods is also beginning to identify its app (but not, yet, its RSS parser). They’re added into the OPAWG useragents and rss-useragents lists.

• There are now 701 value-enabled podcasts, earning Bitcoin payments in real-time. It’s for the techie, but here’s how.

• The Brian of London NA Tube is a video podcast archive of the weekly developers’ meetings for Podcasting 2.0. (This was a good excuse for us to enable video playback on podcast pages).

Tips and tricks

• Podcast Movement’s Jared Easley suggests the best investments entrepreneurs can make for their podcasts; one of those investments is holidays.

Podcast News

A new season of Prince - The Official Podcast is released on Wednesday - with the first chance to hear the songs on a brand new Prince album ahead of its official release.