Three-quarters of top podcasts have ads in them; and podcasting makes it to SNL

• How many podcasts have ads? About three-quarters of the US top 100; and about a quarter of all podcasts, reckons podcast ad monitoring company Magellan.

• Podcasting made it to TV comedy show Saturday Night Live over the weekend, with a lampoon of a podcast award. The skit featured “Michael Barbaro” and “Sarah Koenig”. (Outside the US? You might need a VPN - we like Tunnelbear).

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 7 2023

• Apple is removing podcasts who abuse the title or description by adding tons of keywords. The Audacity to Podcast was one of those removed; the author of that podcast, Daniel J Lewis, explains what happens next.

  
  Aug 7 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Audio search company Audioburst translate into English an article from The Marker about the company’s plans for the future.

• Job: Mamamia is looking for a podcast host and producer, in Sydney NSW, Australia.

• Ad company Targetspot has launched “the first all-in global podcast ad marketplace across North America and Europe”, according to a press release. Voxnest appears to be one of its first partners; Targetspot claims their publishers are already responsible for over 100 million monthly downloads.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 7 2023

• What makes a podcast sponsorable? Podcast company Cabana have some thoughts.

• The Free Music Archive has suddenly closed. This article claims shut-down was initially November 9, but it would remain open until November 16; however, all pages are returning a “503 Service Unavailable” error at press time.

• The Washington Post has announced a set of new hires in their podcast division.

• Blubrry have published a set of guidelines on how to ensure your podcast statistics are accurate. Podnews podcast pages have always conformed to their requirements of no pre-loading or auto-playing.

At the conferences

The ABC posts top six takeaways from OzPod 2018, including an infographic with Australian podcast consumption data, and quotes from many of the speakers, including Kyla Slaven:

You can go deep and dark with kids - it’s just the way that you pitch it. Kids are super smart and ready to ask questions about the world around them

An overview of the RAIN Summit Europe in London last week included BBC Podcast Commissioner Jason Phipps, who:

“strongly advocated for UK podcasters to find a strong collective voice to counter the fertile creative activity in the American podcast industry”

Jason Rigden was a speaker at the Podcasting Like A Pro event in Seattle:

This event reminded me that the true heart of podcasting is the individual. The independent podcaster that is making a show with no budget or media connections. The hosts with nothing but passion and grit.

Chris Boyce (Pacific Content) was speaking at the Ontario Association of Broadcasters event on Thursday, and highlighted the success of Red Hat’s Command Line Heroes:

They would have been happy if they had 10,000 downloads per episode, but they were getting many multiples of that - because they were doing something for a community that speaks to the community in the voice of the community - that is absolutely different than how everyone else was serving them.

Opinions

David Hooper’s heard too many presenter-read sponsorship messages in podcasts (and helpfully provides the talking-points from Caspar):

Nobody who hears you read generic, company-provided talking points in your podcast advertising is buying what you’re selling

In Spain, the lack of podcasting data, and existing conflicting numbers, are holding the medium back, says a well-researched article published in TELOS Magazine. It quotes podcaster Francisco Izuzquiza:

[Podcasting in Spain] will continue to grow steadily, although it would be good to have a clear case study that broke barriers, as Serial was in the US.

Podcasts

Missing Richard Simmonds is now Headlong; Dan Taberski’s original series is still in the feed, and a new season is about to start - Surviving Y2K is the story of those fine men and women who avoided total meltdown on January 1, 2000, and who were rewarded by most people calling the Y2K issue a hoax. Fine people, all of them. (Can you guess a project your Editor was in charge of for six months in 1999/2000?)