Spotify buys The Ringer, podcast listening up 200%

Spotify buys The Ringer, podcast listening up 200%

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  • Spotify claims podcast listening on its platform has grown 200% year-on-year, and has data showing podcast consumption on Spotify leads to stronger retention and upgrades to Premium. Spotify now claims over 700,000 podcasts on its platform; Apple currently has 873,466 in their directory. Just 16% (43m) of Spotify’s monthly active users engage with podcasts, though.


    Aug 21 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
  • WeCrashed, a Wondery podcast about the rise and fall of WeWork, has been accused by one podcaster of taking multiple clips from his own podcast without attribution. The clips of the interview, featuring WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey, were originally from an episode of the Rich Roll podcast in July. Contacted by Podnews, Wondery claim “an honest mistake: we had, under fair use, taken portions of three interviews from different podcasts, and we mistakenly gave credit to only two of them.” The clips have now been removed, and Wondery have reached out to Roll to talk more.

  • Is it possible to become the #2 podcast even if you’re not available on podcast apps? A new Australian Podcast Ranker has been released, and the #2 podcast is “Sky News - News Bulletin”, audio which is only available on smart speakers (though we found this listing). Similarly, “Fox Sports Audio Bulletin”, at #9, is a smart-speaker exclusive. These are both pieces of on-demand audio delivered via RSS, so it’s still a “podcast” to the IAB’s definitions (and that of Commercial Radio Australia, which runs the ranker): but shows the high level of use of these daily bulletins on speakers.

    • Del Fordham from parent company News Corp told us: “In Australia the number of adults owning smart speakers reached 5.7million in Jan19, 29.3% of the population. With some of the most popular questions to the speaker being about news, sport and weather, naturally content in the speaker space forms an important part of our audio strategy across the group.”
    • Might we also recommend “Hey, Google - play the latest from Podnews podcasting news”, which is quite good too.

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Companies mentioned above:
Apple logoAppleCastro logoCastroGoogle logoGooglePodcast Movement logoPodcast MovementSpotify logoSpotifySpreaker logoSpreakerThe Ringer logoThe RingerWondery logoWondery

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