Consolidation in podcasting: happening fast

• Podcasting is consolidating fast, according to Edison Research’s Tom Webster. If you wanted to reach 50% of all weekly podcast consumers a year ago, you would need to have advertised on the top seven podcast networks. But after considerable acquisition of big independent shows in the past twelve months, you can now reach 50% of weekly listeners if you buy advertising on just four podcast networks, he says.

  • 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.

• Just 1.1% of active podcasts in 2021 had transcripts, according to new data; and far fewer for non-English shows. The transcript tag is a relatively simple part of the new podcast namespace, but in spite of accessibility laws in most countries mandating them, no podcast app with more than 1% of the market supports in-app transcripts. SiriusXM was sued in December last year for not supplying them.

• Vizzy has been launched in beta - new podcast software that allows creators to enrich their episodes with visuals and interactive features. A demo app is available now, and a portal for publishers.

• Automatic posting of podcasts to YouTube is the number one use for Headliner, according to a company blog. The feature was launched in October last year.

• A new, free, podcast host has launched in France called Vodio. The website is run by a ten year-old association; alongside the usual RSS feed and analytics, you also get an “audio answering machine”.

• In Germany, the MA Podcast ranker published data for February. The #1 show, the science news podcast SWR Wissen, achieved 5.6m downloads in February, but a note says this figure excludes any downloads from Spotify. (It’s also ad-free). The ranker contains 104 participating podcasts. /thx Steffen!

• “The future of media is synthetic media”, claims Aflorithmic, a company taking your text and making a podcast from it. The company claims it “makes personalised audio scalable”; it’s based in London and Barcelona.

• Live in Gaston NC, USA? The library is getting a podcast studio.

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• Potentially good news for some podcasters doing remote interviews, Apple’s latest Bluetooth headphones now support a new AAC-ELD codec, which has the potential to significantly improve the quality of bidirectional speech.

• Cross-app comments using Twitter are now supported in Podverse. This uses the socialInteraction namespace tag - find one in Podnews’s RSS feed.

• The Podcast Index has merch now.

  
  Sep 12 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Disctopia is the latest podcast platform to support the new podcast namespace. It has announced support for “locked” and “funding”.