Bill Maher signs with Daylight Media

• Exclusive: Daylight Media has signed Bill Maher’s Club Random - it becomes the latest show to join the network in a period of fast growth. Daylight will work with Club Random on sales and distribution; nine other shows have recently joined the platform.

• “Consumers simply don’t have the attention span they once had.” Writing for Podnews today, DAX US’s Brian Conlon suggests this is a myth waiting to trip up the unwary marketer: and, in fact, the data points to consumers just making choices on where to direct their attention.

• A podcast app that removes advertising, ZeroAds, has measured the ads in 60,000 episodes submitted by their users. The median, the company says, is 4.3 minutes of ads per episode - 10.2% ads. But some shows are significantly more. All measured using at least 25 different episodes, iHeart’s Handel On The Law is 44% ads; iHeart’s Covino & Rich is 36.7% ads; iHeart’s Dear Chelsea is 36.6% ads; and iHeart’s The Ben Maller Show is 35.1% ads. (There’s something linking all four of those and we can’t think what it is.)

  • Data in Podscribe - and our own tests - suggests that ZeroAds is significantly over-estimating the number of ads in podcasts. That’s unsurprising, given it’s trying to promote its product: but even Podscribe suggests that these four shows consist of more than 20% ads.

• Megaphone switches to using Spotify Ad Server from Friday. Since we reported on this in early May, the company appears to have changed the maximum allowable duration to 90 seconds rather than 60 seconds. VAST tags are no longer supported.

• Got an archive clip you want to use, but someone’s mixed music underneath it? A new tool from LALAL.AI has been released that could help with that. Lynx is trained to separate speech from background music, crowd noise, interference or environmental noise. We’ve a few examples in our copy of the press release.

• In an email to users - one of eleven since early June - Goodpods is celebrating more than 2,000 connections with its EarShot podcast guest service. The email comes from “Santi, CEO, Goodpods” - but Santi Garza has confirmed to Podnews that he hasn’t worked at Goodpods since April.

• The MPN Awards take place on Jul 30, in a live stream from London. The awards recognise marketing podcasts across the world.

• The New Zealand Podcast Awards 2026 has been announced. Entries open in early August.

• PrismClip is a new tool that helps podcast producers (or listeners) quickly search and clip long-form audio or video. Describe the moment in ordinary language, and the tool will render short clips to share on social media. There’s a free tier for you to upload up to 60 minutes.

• Buzzcast, the official podcast from Buzzsprout, the third-largest podcast host in the world, has added its show back to Spotify. In the latest episode (also in video), Kevin Finn explained why the company had made the choice to remove its show from the platform in the first place. It sounds as if Spotify is fixing the lock-in issue that we highlighted in May; that the company is more open about podcasting as a whole; and that Buzzsprout’s team are keen to use as many platforms as possible.

• Podtrac has updated its certification to v2.2 of the IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines. And, there’s a new company listed as compliant: Red Seat Ventures. Red Seat Ventures itself doesn’t own any podcast hosting companies apart from Supercast.

• Horror folk audio drama Beck’s End is at the end of a crowdfunding round. Just £4,000 (USD $5,300) away from the target, the atmospheric show would be set in a remote English village, where something ancient stirs beneath the water.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• ZeroAds, which we mention above, operates similarly to other ad-blocking services: it takes one download, then caches an ad-free version on their service, so total downloads are hidden from the creator. Download requests come from 152.236.1.118 - using hosting run by Latitude, a service built for AI tools. As is probably as expected, the downloads are spoofing a version of Chrome from May 2024: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36.

  • We gave it a recent issue of Podnews; it hacked the first 2'10" off the front, and a further 1'05" from the end. It identified 57% of the show as ads: in reality, the only ad-read totalled 14% of the episode.

• After Amazon and iHeart announced (upcoming?) support for the alternateEnclosure earlier this year - to enable both apps to be able to show video podcasts - Buzzsprout appears to be testing it. It’s visible in Buzzcast, the company’s podcast.

• SpeechifyAI’s SIMBA 3.2 - an artificial voice tool - has hit the top of the Artificial Analysis chart. The chart measures voice quality, marked by humans; the appearance is interesting, given that it’s also the cheapest model in the top 20. ElevenLabs is ten times the price.

• Looking for a quick and simple way to grab a milestone card to promote your show? RSS.com has added a tool to help, for its own podcasters.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement NYC's Public Vote

• Narrative podcasts - some of the most creative podcasts out there: but how does video work for them? At Podcast Movement 2025, Sheryl Worsley from KSL Podcasts shared her company’s strategy for making video work in this space.
• Audio? Video? Your audience doesn’t care, suggests Ralph Estep Jr.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave and TWiT.tv: This Week in Tech is the top-ranked flagship tech podcast with Leo Laporte and friends. This week, Apple is suing OpenAI for alleged trade secret theft; Meta is testing new AI glasses; and plenty more - he’s joined by Wesley Faulkner, Louis Maresca, and Patrick Beja.

Tom Holland was interviewed by Tom Holland for The Rest Is History. Tom Holland isn’t a podcast host, and appears with Tom Holland who isn’t an actor. Holland talked to Holland about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming epic Odyssey, which Tom Holland doesn’t star in, although Tom Holland does. Holland (not that one) has recently been criticised by Elon Musk for apparently liking the movie, which stars Holland (not that one).

Joe Marler Will See You Now has Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex on his podcast later today. To mark exactly one year to go until the Invictus Games Birmingham 2027, The Duke is joining Joe and co-host Jake Bhardwaj alongside his close friend, former Invictus competitor and broadcaster JJ Chalmers.

In More Movement Please, you’ll hear Richmond KY host Ashley Grant record almost every episode from her car, sweaty and unpolished, on a mission to get people who feel intimidated by fitness to just move a little more. Today is episode 100 (and 365 days of daily movement). You can join her new free and paid membership community on Patreon, with 14 year YMCA instructor Rhonda Goode on board as head coach. Every episode ends with the same question: have you worked out today?

After almost 5 million downloads of the My Morning Devotional podcast, led by four sisters, their father and their husbands decided they wanted to give it a try. The result? Men’s Morning Devotional shares 5 minute Bible studies every weekday and adds a daily “Man Up” challenge to help men grow more confident as husbands, fathers and leaders.