The podcast awards that aren’t all they seem

• Exclusive: Podnews has investigated The International Podcast Awards, a new award ceremony launched last year in Arizona, and discovered a website with misleading images, made-up winners, and a unique business model. As we report today, it’s an award that looks great… but looks aren’t everything.

• The Ambie Awards nominations were announced yesterday. Winners in 32 categories will be selected by the full voting membership of TPA; there are 227 nominees. The ceremony will take place as part of On Air Fest in Brooklyn on Feb 23.

  • The Golden Globes winner, Amy Poehler’s Good Hang, is not among the nominees; indeed, Spotify is only nominated once, for its co-production with the Wall Street Journal.

• Spotify released a new set of data, in a piece by Spotify product director Frances McNamara. The total number of followed shows has doubled in the past three years on Spotify, with more than 34 million shows discovered every week by users. 93% of podcast listeners on Spotify say they expect Spotify to help them find their next favorite show.

  • The company also says that auto-generated chapters are “rolling out to more shows”; Apple Podcasts recently launched the feature for every single eligible show in the Apple Podcasts directory.

• Triton Digital announced the release of its US Podcast Ranker for December 2025. At the time of writing, however, the ranker isn’t yet available online.

• Transistor has added a podcast show notes template, to give consistent headers, footers and other information in episode notes.

• Voxtopica’s CEO Richard Fawal has written a piece arguing that podcasts are one of the most effective channels for public policy education; and given three case studies.

• Acast has worked with Barometer to launch pre-bid targeting at the episode level for the first time. It gives brands automated, granular control over where their ads appear before a buy is made.

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