Up Next - a podcast up front - goes live

• Where better to sell audio than… audio. Sounds Profitable’s Up Next - Spring 2021 is now live, with more than two dozen companies taking part, promoting their new shows to ad buyers. Learn more at Sounds Profitable or start listening now - the feed also includes panels and a look at the trends behind podcast consumption.

  • The idea came from a brainstorming session between AdLarge and Sounds Profitable; AdLarge’s premiere episode focuses on the power of podcast advertising in addition to exploring the intriguing and valuable aspects of the podcasting world.

• iHeartMedia released their Q1/21 results. Podcasting revenue grew 142% year-on-year, according to the earnings call. Overall, the company’s revenue fell 9.5% year-on-year.

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

• Audacy’s Q1/21 results saw “weaker results in podcasting”, said CEO David Field. The company, formerly Entercom, saw overall revenue fall by 19% year-on-year.

• HelloFresh, Manscaped and BetterHelp are the most recalled brands from podcast ads in Q1/21, Edison Research say, according to their Podcast Consumer Tracker.

• The former CEO of Vice UK, Matt O’Mara has joined premium podcast company Novel as Director and Chief Strategy & Operating Officer.

• Netflix might be working on a portal called N-Plus, which could include podcasts.

• The Podcast Academy’s first annual awards, The Ambies, will be hosted by Cameron Esposito. They’ll be streamed live on Sunday May 16, from 7.30pm Eastern.

• Clubhouse is now available on Android, in the US only. The Android app is missing a number of features from the live audio company’s iOS app.

• PodcastOne has signed a first look development deal with Patrick Wachsberger’s Picture Perfect Federation.

• Podtrac has published its top US publisher data for April. It’s the 5 year anniversary of these numbers, which list participating publishers only. Total global downloads fell by 2% in comparison to March; but then, April has 3.3% fewer days than March. They also released their top 20 US podcasts.

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

• Web-browser Brave has added a 'playlist’ feature in their iOS app, which allows users to save and access audio and video, including podcasts.

Thank you to the UK’s 18Sixty, who help brands talk to the people they want to talk to by making podcasts that people want to listen to, for becoming our latest supporter. We’re very grateful for your support - it helps us continue our independent journalism about our industry. Here’s how to support us.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• Above - Apple Podcasts’s crawler, which exclusively powers the new Apple Podcasts app, is getting better at visiting our feeds to check for new episodes. Our RSS stats show it’s now visiting every 20 minutes, rather than every hour and a half.

• The Podcasting 2.0 project is working on an alternative to WebSub (which would fix all the above issues): podping․cloud is a distributed alternative that is, say the developers, better suited to podcasting - so that crawlers can be told to come and visit when you publish a new episode. The GitHub repo includes details of how to ping: if you’re already using WebSub it’s going to be relatively similar code. This PodPing watcher lets you watch in real time. Podnews now pings this service when we publish a new podcast.

• Is Apple Podcasts’s crawler also reporting itself as something else? We’re seeing requests from the same IP address calling itself Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1. Bug? (How do we report bugs to Apple?)

• Something that looks like Audacity, but running in the browser? Waveform Playlist might be for you to build on. Here is the full source code.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Day 24

• How to find new topics for your podcast episodes - We Edit Podcasts suggests, firstly, reading the news.
• Want to embed your podcast into your website? We have a page of many different options for embedded players, and have just added Fusebox’s player to this page too.

Podcast News - with Sounder․fm

On Sounder: Real Sports Heroes explores the importance of today’s black sports star having a voice that goes beyond the court and playing field.

Teenager Therapy, a coming-of-age podcast hosted by five teens, has been pre-announced as the winners of the Audio Impact Award at The Ambies.

“Part podcast, part radio show”, ChillDaBeats is new from former BBC Radio 1 DJ Phil Taggart. The Spotify show-with-music has run since December, and starts a new season with guests and “a weekly mental musical massage”.

Cuban-American podcast teikirisi returns for a second season, covering the perfect lechón asado, to stories of immigration, art, history, geo-politics, family, travel and more.

Toxic: The Britney Spears Story is a new investigative documentary coming July from Witness Docs, a unit of SiriusXM’s Stitcher.

Birds are in trouble: the population of breeding birds in the US has declined by nearly a third since 1970. Tenijah Hamilton hosts Bring Birds Back, a podcast that aims to make bird conservation accessible to everyone. The first episode will be on Wed May 19.

The Who and How Club, a podcast, blog and movement created and hosted by recording artist Arys Déjan, has hit episode #50. It asks “who are you” and “how did you become you?”

The Royal Record is a new podcast promising “your weekly dose of royal news, without the spin”. It’s new from SCA in Australia.