If a podcast is too long, a fifth of listeners never return

• If a podcast is too long, two-thirds of weekly podcast listeners do return to a podcast later and continue listening when they have more time, according to a survey of radio fans. 21%, though, say they never come back. (Here’s our advice).

• Dan Misener looks at two years of the Apple Top 200 Podcasts and discovers a number of trends, including more “Society & Culture” podcasts. (Here’s how the Apple Podcast Charts work).

• Caution: a company called Planet TV Studios is approaching podcasters with the promise of coverage on FOX Business, a US cable channel. It sounds flattering: but don’t waste your time - they want US $28,000 to highlight your podcast, according to one podcaster who contacted us. If you’ve $28,000 to burn on an average of just 149,000 viewers, at least support Podnews too.

• Acast has launched in France; Yann Thébault will run the French business (formerly, he was in charge of Spotify for continental Europe). Over 4m people in France listen to podcasts every month (roughly 8% of the country), says the country’s Médiamétrie research.

• Podcast Movement has a new Head of Sales: Kristy Scott. She was formerly selling Tom Taylor NOW, the very excellent daily email for people in radio; Tom retired at the end of last year.

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• Stitcher’s CEO, Erik Diehn, was interviewed about the benefits of podcast advertising by Yahoo! Finance.

• Anchor has added analytics metrics to its mobile app, so you can even check your download numbers on the loo bus.

• What’s the difference between radio and podcasting? Podnews’s Editor, in his weekly Radio Tomorrow piece for an Australian radio industry website, points out that podcasters want to help each other. [Even podcasting’s newsletter writers tolerate each other!].

  
  Aug 11 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Podcasts

Thinking about the future? Think: Digital Futures, Think: Business Futures and Think: Sustainability all return for a new season, from Sydney station 2SER. They’ll also be broadcast in The Think Hour, Sundays at 10am. (Whooshkaa)

Cultivating Place argues that gardens are much more than just a collection of plants - they improve our relationship to the natural environment and our communal and individual health and well-being, argues a new mini-series of the program.

The Uncertain Hour dives in to one controversial topic each season to bust long-standing myths and find the origin stories of the world we live in; it’s back for season 3, focusing on America’s War on Drugs - and where George W Bush got a little bag of crack. (APM)

Political Party Live is a podcast from Iowa, and therefore, says the New Yorker, probably why it gets some high profile guests. (SoundCloud)

Building a Unicorn is a new podcast that aims to answer what it takes to build a business that succeeds? That defies all expectations? That could one-day become what investors call a unicorn? (Lawson Media / ART19)

Developer’s corner

• Supporting pubsubhubbub could significantly help all parts of the podcasting ecosystem: cutting down on redundant RSS polling, and meaning it’s faster for listeners to get new episodes. As we write in our overview article - it just needs a few lines of code; and Google Podcasts already supports it.

Our podcast pages are designed to have lots of helpful information on them for podcasters. But you can hide all that, and our branding, if you want - so you can link to us to help anyone find your podcast. Just add “/no” at the end of the URL. Here’s an example.