Has Spotify's podcast bet paid off?

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.

• Triton Digital has published its Canada Podcast Report for May. WarnerMedia is a new participating publisher. Dateline NBC remains #1; SXM Media are the network that’s #1 for podcasts.

• Want less background noise on your microphone? The University of Stuttgart might be able to help, by inventing a microphone that uses quantum light, improving the signal-to-noise ratio by almost 0.6dB. “These results are mainly based on the high rate at which we generate entangled photons, as well as the subsequent quantum state conversion from a multi-photon state to a single-photon state," bafflingly explains project coordinator Dr. Florian Kaiser. (thanks, Steffen!)

• Remote recording tool Riverside has updated its iOS app to use external mics, its Android app to support host and producer modes, and now offers higher quality video backup files.

• AJ Feliciano and Geoff Ramsey from Rooster Teeth spoke at VidCon, saying if you want your podcast to reach as many people possible, it needs to follow consumers to their favourite platforms.

• Buzzsprout has added a new share page for all Buzzsprout websites. Here’s the share page on Podland’s website, for example.

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.

Tips and tricks - with RedCircle

• Audry list Five Creative Ways to Interact with Your Listeners - including the idea of creating a virtual answering machine.

• Todd Cochrane of Blubrry Podcasting is interviewed by Authority Magazine, for an article called 5 Things You Need To Know To Create A Very Successful Podcast. “You need your own website on your own top level domain” is one of those.

Podcast News - with Post Script Media

From Post Script Media: In the latest episode of Hot Buttons: the fashion industry isn’t short on ideas or passion for slashing carbon pollution. It’s short on money. Hosts Christina Binkley, Rachel Kibbe and Shilla Kim-Parker dig into a new climate fund from the Apparel Impact Institute and Fashion for Good. Will it move the needle on decarbonization?

The History Extra podcast, from BBC History magazine, is about to celebrate its 15th anniversary. To date, it has over 150 million downloads, and publishes six times a week. They tell us their top five download countries are US, UK, Australia, Canada and China - and their most listened-to episode was “A Year in Medieval England”, from Oct 2015, which has had over 293,000 downloads.

It’s 1999 and Enron finance manager Jim Yang has received an email from the future. Then, everything changed… BOOM is new today from Stak, and features actor and voice-actor Akie Kotabe, two-time Olivier Award winner Sharon D. Clarke MBE, and BAFTA nominee and star of the smash hit It’s a Sin Omari Douglas. Put on your dungarees, reconnect your dial-up, and get ready to be thrust into the heart of America’s tech boom, where nothing is as it seems…

Project Unabom is the newest podcast from Apple TV+, and goes live today. Hosted by journalist Eric Benson and produced by Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios, the podcast explores the story of serial bomber Ted Kaczynski and what drove him to his dystopian vision.

The Wittering Whitehalls is new from Global, featuring Michael & Hilary Whitehall - mum and dad to comedian Jack Whitehall. With a combined social following of nearly a million, they’ve gone on to become a much-loved comedy duo themselves. Michael charming audiences with his trademark grumpiness and Hilary with her never-ending optimism; the duo will share their advice on anything you ask them.

Podcast ads in the wild

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.