Award winners in Arkansas; and Patreon’s podcast hosting

• The winners of the ARKAST Podcast Awards were announced at the second annual event in Little Rock AK, USA. Tiger Talk won the Kids and Family, Young Pod and Rising Star categories.

• Last week, Riverside launched podcast hosting as a free service for its customers. This week, Patreon launches RSS-based podcast hosting for its users. You can “insert previews of your paid episodes in your public RSS feed to help more listeners discover and upgrade to your paid membership”. The announcement - podcast hosting is item #5 - suggests it won’t work with podcasts that use dynamic ads (we’d think that’s referring to the import tool).

  • Here’s a sample feed. It declares the Podcast namespace, but doesn’t, yet, support any Podcasting 2.0 features. The company is using Cloudflare as its CDN.

• The biggest “history” podcasts - literally, the ones with history in their title - were unveiled by Edison Podcast Metrics. #3 is Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History; and the Goalhanger show The Rest is History at #2. The #1 show is from Audioboom.

• Triton Digital released its 2025 LATAM Audio Insights Report. Spotify has twice the download share of Apple Podcasts, the report says; and news is the #1 genre. The data is based on Jan-Aug data from this year.

• PodcastOne has partnered with former Yankees outfielder Clint Frazier, for exclusive rights to his podcast Life After the Show … Podeo has signed the most watched podcast episode guest in the world, Yasser Al-Huzaimi, for a new podcast.

• Congratulations to Podcast Movement’s creator newsletter, The Noise Gate, for hitting its two year anniversary. Doug Fraser shares his favourite interview moments. (Podnews has a 50% business partnership with Podcast Movement.)

• Overcast’s new feature that removes feed drops and trailers (“you may also like” type activity) from automatic download in the app has been heavily criticised by John McDermott of Caloroga Shark Media. “Guess what gang, those feed drops pay pretty well,” he says. He also points out that “you may also like” type ads are a revenue generation tool in Overcast itself.

  • Overcast’s developer, Marco Argent, recently criticised the Podcasting 2.0 project for “not collaborating … to get widespread agreement on a set of proposals”: but it’s our opinion that removing revenue opportunities for podcast creators, as Overcast has done with this feature, would not get widespread agreement either. The funding tag is worthy of support, based on an original Overcast idea, and trivial to implement.

• Black Friday: We’ll carry a list of Black Friday deals on, er, Friday. Got a deal? Reply to this email and let us know. Your deadline is Black Friday itself, at 3am NY time. (Your own company only, please!)

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Podcast News

Platform Media has launched a new show about wine, called Bottoms Up, with Alan Carr and Lee Peart. It’s with Laithwaites, and is the podcast for people who like wine but don’t know a thing about it.

In a new season from Living Planet – The Switch – you’ll hear how solar became the cheapest form of energy in history. Asking why we aren’t moving faster on renewables, host Charli Shield is on the hunt to find out what’s snagging the energy transition. From mega-solar in Morocco’s desert, to Spain’s blackout and European gridlocks, to insights from legendary climate writer Bill McKibben, we’re asking what the holdup is – and where to from here.