Samsung jumps into podcast advertising

• Samsung is the biggest new podcast advertiser in April, according to Magellan AI, spending $1.4m. BetterHelp is still the biggest spender in US podcasting.

• Podpraat reports that Anchor has deleted a musician’s podcast account because he put his own music in it.

• Following our article last week about whether Spotify or Apple is the big dog of aggregator apps, Edison Research’s Tom Webster adds some detail from The Podcast Consumer Tracker - what US podcast listeners say is the platform they use most.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 3 2023

• New York NY, USA-based Spokn, a private podcast platform, has closed a $4m seed investment round.

• Joel Sucherman, NPR’s Vice President for New Platform Partnerships, was interviewed by Steve Goldstein about the potential of podcast subscriptions. NPR started selling sponsor-free subscriptions on Spotify at the beginning of the month, though shows remain free.

  
  Sep 3 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Bob Garfield’s sacking from WNYC is the subject of a wider look from the New York Times at WNYC’s “epidemic of bullying, or whining, depending on who you ask.” He’s starting a new Substack podcast.

• Bob Hoffman, a US keynote speaker about advertising, spoke to the UK Parliament last week about the dangers of ad tracking.

• FAIR, a US media watchdog, warns about the new podcast oligopoly. They note the size of LibertyMedia, which owns SiriusXM and also 50% of iHeartRadio.

• You can now download podcasts to your Apple watch with Spotify.

• The next version of Podverse will support the podcast:transcript tag.

• After a short hiatus, our podcast hosting company changes page has returned. As ever, it shows a significant amount of podcasts moving from paid hosting companies to Anchor. Overall, the biggest gains went to Anchor, RedCircle and Megaphone; the biggest losers were Whooshkaa, Soundcloud and Libsyn.

• Follow us on Twitter, and now we’ll also periodically post new podcast events from pod․events, as well as podcast jobs, too.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

Podping goes live

podping․cloud is now being used in production at PodcastIndex.

The service is a way to instantly inform podcast apps and directories that you have a new episode. By removing constant polling (Google and Overcast poll our RSS feed every four minutes) it saves electricity and bandwidth, too. This article talks more about how it works: it’s a distributed service using the Hive blockchain.

If this seems familiar: it is. WebSub works almost the same way; but it doesn’t work for every use-case out there, particularly standalone apps. However, from a podcast host point of view, it works identically: you just ping an address to say your feed has just updated.

Buzzsprout and RSS Podcasting are already feeding updates to Podping, as is Podnews for our podcast. Captivate will do so shortly. You can watch updates live on the Podping Watcher. It means that new episodes appear in the PodcastIndex roughly 40 seconds after they’ve been published.

…and…

• The podcast:license tag is now finalised.
• The podcast namespace now has a formal XML schema.
• Fun with testing: a podcast title just in emojis? You’ll be wanting 🍖🍗🍕🍮🍯

Tips and tricks - with Sounder․fm

• On Sounder: Huddle Up With Gus Former NFL quarterback, Gus Frerotte talks with guests about when they fell in love with sports, how sports taught them to overcome adversity and help shape their path to success.
• Should you swear on your podcast? Rachel Corbett suggests that you should f—ing not do that.
• Got a Chromebook? Want to do some editing on it? Here’s how to install Audacity onto your Chromebook - now updated with the latest information for ChromeOS v90.

Podcast News - with HubSpot Podcast Network

From the HubSpot Podcast Network: Being Boss is an exploration of what it takes to be boss as a creative business owner, entrepreneur, freelancer, or side-hustler.

To Live And Die in LA returns this week for season 2, focused on finding the truth about what happened to 20-year old California woman, Elaine Park.

Thinking Is Cool, according to a new podcast from Kinsey Grant. “What if we all stopped to think a little harder? To have conversations with each other? What might the world look like?”

Podland this week contains an interview with Casted’s Lindsay Tjepkema; and with a new service, Cleanvoice, which automatically removes your ums and ers.