David Pakman says he's being 'bullied into sharing your data'

• Podcast advertising company Midroll is “bullying” podcaster David Pakman to switch his podcast host from Libsyn to Omny Studio, he says in a YouTube video. Pakman is unhappy at leaving Libsyn, and claims Omny Studio “tracks listeners using a tracking pixel”. He is, he says, ending his relationship with Midroll as a result. We’ve approached Midroll for comment, and will carry that tomorrow; however, Sharon Taylor, CEO of Omny Studio, has clarified to Podnews (our bold):

  Omny Studio does not use tracking pixels to collect personally identifiable information about listeners or target advertising for Midroll. Any third party tracking pixels which are used in our platform (referenced in our Cookie Policy, Privacy Policy and GDPR documentation online) anonymize and aggregate data before being used for non-ad related purposes (eg performance/error reporting). We are happy to go into more detail, should Mr Pakman or any other podcaster be interested in what is possible and what we do.

• Pakman chose to make this announcement in a monetised YouTube video. For the record: YouTube tracks viewers in many ways and has access to a viewer’s full Google Account, including, theoretically, cross-linking data about the ads they’ve seen, the websites they’ve visited, the locations they’ve physically visited, their internet search history, their emails, their names, addresses and telephone numbers, and that of their friends.

• Could targeted podcast advertising save lives? Radio France is using Targetspot to produce personalised podcast advertising that is aware of a listeners’ location, the local weather, and health data to warn of flu outbreaks, colds, food poisoning and other issues near them.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 19 2023

• Don’t put HTML in your description tag. That’s the result of Podnews research on every popular podcast app out there, to help you to get beautiful HTML episode notes into podcast apps. In short: put HTML into the content:encoded tag. Podcast apps that support HTML episode notes always use it. Apps which don’t support HTML, like Spotify, always fall back to the description tag instead.

• The My Podcast Reviews service, by Daniel J. Lewis, tells us that there are currently 799,482 valid podcasts in Apple Podcasts. He promises “a little gift” when it hits 800,000, which will probably be later today.

• French podcast company Saooti has launched Octopus, a hosting platform with a number of different arms like hosting, distribution, analytics and monetisation.

• Adori have launched their Android app in “early access” mode. The company already has an iOS app. The company says “It is a full fledged #podcast app , built using our SDK that powers exciting new interactive audio experiences.”

• German podcast host Podigee has now got Spotify Passthrough, enabling dynamic ad insertion for their customers. They join a number of podcast hosts with passthrough enabled.

• ZenCast, a podcast host based in Melbourne VIC, Australia, now supports WebSub so your podcast gets published faster. We’d love to hear of more podcast apps that do, too.

• Podnews now has a JSON feed, including enclosures. It’s here. If you’re using it for anything, please get in touch with feedback.

• We have updated our “For Podcast Listeners” section of our privacy policy to reflect that we are now a client of Triton Digital’s Podcast Metrics, who parse our audio logfiles. Opinion: are we alone in having a privacy policy for podcast listeners? And if so… why?

Tips and tricks - with Acast Open

• Srinivas Rao outlines how to start a minimum viable podcast.
• Richard Davies posts seven ways a good podcast fails at being a great podcast. “Your host has zero personality” is number 4.

Podcasts

The RadioToday Programme includes this week Paul Chantler, who’s working on the UK’s Podcast Radio. There’s a discussion about that during the episode. Podcasters won’t get paid, and it has a “pod-jock”.