Less ad repetition leads to better effectiveness

• We’re hearing the same podcast ad less often, says Podsights in its new Q3/22 benchmark report. Average frequency dipped from 6.3 to 4.7, which the company says improved ad effectiveness. The company also reports that programmatic ads work better than embedded ones.

• Congratulations to The Moth, which has hit 100 million downloads this year. It’s The Moth’s 25th anniversary year, recently releasing a best-selling book; later this year you’ll be able to get a card game, and the show goes on a pop-up porch tour.

• Gregory Warner is curator of The EarBuds Podcast Collective this week, focusing on Podcasts About Work & Work Culture Around the World. You should subscribe to the newsletter!

• Frank Racioppi posts a list of people he considers to be thoughtleaders in podcasting.

• Paid podcast directory Listen Notes is to start its own free podcast host, dubbed Listen Host. The service will require you to use your own custom domain; and will not (initially) provide analytics.

  • Listen Notes has also posted data of how people use its platform. They haven’t mentioned those that purchase email addresses to spam podcasters, which the Wisdom app has done twice in the past week (while falsely claiming we’d signed up somehow). We’ve asked Wisdom for a statement; they’ve not got back to us.

• “Ratings for Chris Cuomo’s podcast sinking fast”, claims the New York Post. Their source: the Apple Podcast Charts. But, as we’ve explained before, Apple’s so-called “podcast charts” are nothing of the sort: engineered to show trending shows, and wholly unrelated to downloads or long-term popularity.

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• The Podcast Index has more than 4.1m podcasts in it - but aren’t many of them abandoned shows not listed in other directories? No - there’s an automated removal process from their database. “90 days after birth, the podcast has to have at least 2 episodes, one of which is longer than 3 minutes. This criteria only applies to the free hosting platforms.”

• As iOS 16 gets ever closer, and with it, AVURLAssetHTTPUserAgentKey, John Spurlock has posted code showing podcast app developers how to set their user-agent correctly (goodbye AppleCoreMedia). There was an issue, FB10073333, where it didn’t work if the server didn’t support HTTP range requests; that bug seems to have been fixed in iOS 16 beta 5, which was released last week.

• Designed to be a documentation website and demonstration tool for the new podcast namespace, podcastnamespace.org is new from your friends at Podnews. (We’d love your help!)

• Satoshis.Stream is working on a web version, removing the requirement to use Telegram to maintain your podcast on the system.

• Thank you for the many, many boostagrams this week.