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Has Spotify's podcast bet paid off?

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Arielle Nissenblatt writes for Podnews: “When I read the news about the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, my heart sank. But then I thought that, as an industry, there’s something we can do: use our platform to share resources, come together, and help those who are (or will be) at risk. We quickly organized, creating suggested language for host-reads that can be placed as pre-roll ads on your podcast as a way of voicing our opposition to this decision. To take part read this document, record a pre-roll for your next episode, share that episode with me so we can credit you, and let me know if you have questions.”

  • Bloomberg Businessweek posts Spotify’s Billion-Dollar Bet on Podcasting Has Yet to Pay Off. The piece, originally titled “Spotify’s Joe Rogan-Powered Podcast Bet Hasn’t Paid Off”, suggests that the company’s investments haven’t yet yielded a major hit, and contains criticism of Dawn Ostroff’s growth strategy.

  • HotPod Insider reports that Spotify Original Breaking Bread with the Oshry sisters “may be its biggest hit yet”, but it was mysteriously not promoted by Spotify at all. It was #2 for much of last week.

  • Headgum has just announced that it has signed Tig and Cheryl: True Story to the Headgum Podcast Network. The show features comedian Tig Notaro and actor Cheryl Hines, who discuss a new documentary every week.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

  • OpenGraph has a number of properties around audio. <meta property="og:audio" has been in our page headers for some time linking to the podcast version of our daily updates; we see around 40 downloads a day of the audio from Trello and LinkedIn apps on iOS, among other things. (We’ve been using our AAC file; we’ve switched to MP3 to see if that’s more widely accepted).

  • Podnews podcast pages now highlight when a show doesn’t have a trailer in its RSS feed, like this one. We have a mini player for trailers in our press releases pages, too, like this one.

  • How are shows doing with earning money through streaming sats? CurioCaster posts their top 35 chart, including how much revenue has been earnt. Podnews is there at #11!

  • Want to be alerted every time a podcast does a live stream? @podcastslive is the Twitter account for you; it links to the live stream and a chat service. It uses the liveItem tag from the new podcast namespace.

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Podcast ads in the wild

7am

7am
Spotted by our Editor in Australia’s The Saturday Paper, this ad for their daily news podcast 7am. Clear messaging and use of a QR code seems to make this quite effective. (To get a QR code for your own show, search Podnews for your podcast, and use the tool in the “Information for podcasters” section.)

Advertising for podcasts help grow the whole medium - so if you’ve spotted any (or responsible for some), just hit reply and send us a nice picture.

Companies mentioned above:
Apple logoAppleBlubrry logoBlubrryBuzzsprout logoBuzzsproutHeadgum logoHeadgumPineapple Street Studios logoPineapple Street StudiosRooster TeethSpotify logoSpotifyStak logoStakTriton Digital logoTriton Digital

Podcast data for Jun 27

#1 in Apple Podcasts
US flag The Execution of Bonny Lee Bakley (Wondery)
SG flag Global News Podcast (BBC World Service)

#1 in Spotify
US flag The Joe Rogan Experience (Joe Rogan)
SG flag KISAH RUQYAH SG (Ustaz Ruknuddin & Ustaz Tamliikhaa)

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