How many buy from podcast ads?

• How well does podcast advertising work? Podcast promos are a good example - nearly 3 in 5 new listeners who find a podcast though podcast promos return to listen to more episodes. That’s detailed in Magellan AI’s first-ever Podcast Measurement Benchmark Report, covering podcast campaigns from Q1. It shows an average response rate of 2.29%; and almost ten percent of those who visited a website converted to a sales lead.

• SpotsNow Intelligence is now available from Claude and ChatGPT. Any MCP-compatible assistant can now connect to live data on 61,000+ shows: sponsors, brand spend, lookalikes, fill rates, and full media plans. As a Podnews reader, you can get your first month free.

• PodCrisp is a new AI podcast post-production tool, offering transcripts, show notes, chapters and social clips. Built by an indie founder from China, it’s significantly cheaper than tools like Castmagic or Capsho. There’s a free tier on the website.

• “I turned my podcast into a video game”, says Matt Medeiros. Agency Action Replay is quite fun - and explains the premise of the podcast well. It uses the show’s RSS feed - including the transcript - to automatically make a new level of the game every week.

• Which are the biggest car podcasts? Car Curious is tracking hundreds of shows to track exactly what’s going on in the space. We learn that the fourth biggest show by episode count is in Spanish, and that EV news is quite different from the rest of automotive.

• Audion is now IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines v2.2 compliant, and was certified last Thursday.

• Drop Media publishes Why podcasting could be TV production’s most overlooked opportunity … meanwhile, Jay Leno reckons that late-night has “too many commercials”, and why would you watch that if you can just consume a full hour uninterrupted online?

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Open source podcast player AntennaPod has sponsored a set of improved features in Weblate, a translation platform. “This is what community-funded open source should look like: users support an app, and the app improves the entire open-source ecosystem.”

• Ryan Williams, who is behind the Car Curious automotive podcast deepdive we link to above, is proposing a “podcast annotation” format, naming an entity or topic, when it appears, and content surrounding it. It could add information like images and more.

• A new law in the state of New York is to ban “stealth crawlers”, bots that hide their identity. If approved by the state governor, the bots will have to disclose when they access a “news organization”'s website. They’d do that by using a “valid and accurate user-agent string”. The New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act looks, from first reading, to cover podcasters, as long as they have at least one thousand active listeners in New York, and as long as they “perform a public-information function”.

  • Inaccurate user-agent strings are used by many bots to hide their identity when they download podcasts or do other things. New signups to our sister site, the Podcast Business Journal, appear to have come from a number of browsers that were last updated over a decade ago.
  • A similar bill has also been tabled by a UK member of Parliament. The Automated Online Software (Access and Transparency) Bill has no chance of becoming law, however.

• Listen Notes has launched a skill for AI coding agents to build with the company’s (paid-for) API.

Moves and hires

Tips and tricks

• Wondering if a podcast network is right for you? In this replay of a session for The Podcast Academy, Greg Wasserman offers a practical look at network models, honest self-assessment, and how to find the right fit for your show’s future. We linked to this on Friday, but messed up the link; sorry.

Podcast News - with Airwave

From Airwave: All Creatures Podcast aims to educate listeners on the diverse animals that share our planet. Each week, the show discusses a different species, conduct interviews with conservation experts from around the globe, and highlight recent conservation news.

In PodBiz this week, Stella Young - co-host of This Is TV Now - shares why a direct, parasocial audience and membership models are the most dependable revenue streams for creators, details her video-first and clip-forward audience growth strategies, and discusses the shift toward digital media freedom and IP control.

Radio Atlantic expands from today, with a second weekly episode and a new co-host, Adam Harris, who is joining Hannah Rosin. Expect a new Monday morning video episode, focusing on the story that sets the agenda for the week ahead. It’ll be on YouTube and podcast platforms.

Imagine a time when the United States was split in two - and then had to put itself back together. It was a time of chaos, and sometimes violence, as millions of people fought for the right to become citizens. This was Reconconstruction… the era following the Civil War, when Americans ended slavery and expanded voting rights. But many people consider the promise of Reconstruction unfulfilled. Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, hosted by Malcolm Gladwell and featuring Barack Obama, tells the story of this era.