The British Podcast Awards winners for 2022

• 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.

  • Podcast hosting company? Unlike anywhere else, our list of winners includes where the show is hosted, so you can congratulate your podcasters (and promote them).

• The recent Sounds Profitable research, The Creators (also now en español) said that podcast creators are overwhelmingly male. Rephonic has looked at the gender split of podcast audiences: to discover that shows with very female audiences have significantly fewer listeners, and that podcasts with very male audiences tend to have longer episodes. (And, unsurprisingly, tech podcasts skew very male in audience).

• The global podcast market was worth US$13.7bn in 2021, and could be worth $153bn by 2030, says a new $4,500 report from Indian research company Acumen. (Market, not advertising revenue)

• The popular podcast Sh**gged.Married.Annoyed. has launched bonus content and exclusive benefits for fans with Acast+. Potentially interesting: the two tiers are £3.00/month and £3.50/month ($3.60 and $4.20).

• In Germany, Spotify is paying for murals for its latest podcasts to appear in some of the largest German cities.

• Also in Germany, PodMon and podcast.de have monitored 57,814 episodes of German-language podcasts to discover how healthy the country’s podcasters are. Spoiler: they’re tired. So, so, tired.

Moves and hires

• Tara Sonin has joined NYPR, the owner of WNYC, as Director of Audience Development. Prior to NYPR, she was with fiction podcast company Realm.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Micropayment company Alby has published a how-to for enabling value 4 value payments for your podcast. Alby’s Moritz Kaminski was interviewed in the Podland podcast last week.

• Podcast host RSS.com is to announce integration with Alby this week: enabling value 4 value for thousands of podcasts. You’ll be able to activate and link your Alby account with your podcast in RSS.com’s dashboard. Alberto Betella will be on the Podland podcast this week.

• After the finalisation of the socialInteract tag last week in the new podcast namespace, John Spurlock is testing the idea of an automated activitypub service, called Threadland. Simple to support, as soon as it’s finished, Podnews will be an enthusiastic user.

• Dave Jones has been working on a leaderboard view for Helipad.

• The July 19 dump of data from The Podcast Index now includes descriptions and categories. 369,000 shows have no description at all; most podcasts have about 22 characters; and only 44,000 have descriptions of more than a thousand characters. Apple doesn’t search your podcast description field; but Spotify, Overcast, Google and most others do; so we’d recommend putting more in there if you want your podcast found.

• Boosts this week include boosts from Dave Jones, criptocenas, and Chris LAS who got in touch to tell us to name and shame the spammers last week, so we did. Todd Cochrane sent us two boosts - one saying “boosts and beyond!” and another saying “go podcasting”. Dave Jones asks “What does someone do to get listed in the “personal supporters” section? Is that a certain dollar limit per month?” - glad you asked, that’s in our newsletter and RSS feed only, and it’s for our personal supporters at podnews.net/patreon and that’s a great place to go if you get value from Podnews and you want to pay it back. Or, send us a boost or just listen to us using a new podcast app like Fountain. Your sats or Patreon support are all very welcome.

Tips and tricks

• How should you choose a podcast hosting company? We’ve updated our guide.

Podcast News - with Pushkin Industries

From Pushkin: The Loudest Girl in the World - Coming Sept 13. For years, Lauren Ober wasn’t all that jazzed about herself. She was always getting in trouble, she had weird sensory issues and her anxiety felt off the charts. And then, she found out why — she was autistic. Hear the story of Lauren’s journey to understand what it means to be on the autism spectrum and how to live life as a newly diagnosed autistic person.

The Nutrition Couch is celebrating a million downloads in its first twelve months. Produced for ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia, it claims it is one of the few podcasts actually hosted and produced by qualified dietitians.

Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com podcast this week: “Why none of my books are available on Audible”, which he describes as “a short audiobook I produced to be distributed through Amazon’s ACX platform, explaining how that platform’s sloppy rights verification and mandatory DRM screws over writers.”

Love and Radio has come off Luminary, and signed with Gumball. Nick Quah calls it an essential podcast.

New from Wondery today, Fed Up looks at the F-Factor: a trendy diet with some horrible side-effects. It’s the story of influencer Emily Gellis Lande, who drew attention to the problems with the fad diet, and Tanya Zuckerbrot, who had come up with it: and the inevitable online fight that ensued. It’s narrated by Casey Wilson.

Sideways has launched season four - starting with a mini series on nuclear weapons. Why have we kind of forgotten that they exist? And is the Russian invasion of Ukraine the wake-up call we need? Hosted by Matthew Syed, it’s made by Novel, and is from BBC Radio 4 (where you can hear it, Wednesdays at 9am).

When Life Gives You Parkinson’s has returned for a fifth season. The show has had more than 400,000 downloads so far. It’s hosted by Larry Gifford, the National Director of Talk Radio for Corus Entertainment, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017. This season Gifford will sit down one-on-one with Muhammad Ali’s eldest daughter May May to talk about how Parkinson’s impacts the whole family, how Ali struggled to accept the diagnosis and often refused to take his medication.