Podland News Podcast industry news

Evo Terra joins James Cridland this week, while Sam drinks wine in Europe somewhere. Evo's podcast is at podcast pontifications and he runs simpler.media

Special Guest: Dan Misener co-founder of Bumper. 
Podcast guests are paying up to $50,000 to appear on popular shows, and the podcasts don’t disclose it, according to a piece from Ashley Carman in Bloomberg. It quotes a number of podcasts who charge more than $30,000 per interview… and they only added a full disclosure (an FTC requirement) after being contacted by Bloomberg for the story.

Dan Misener and Jonas Woost launched Bumper, a new podcast growth agency. Bumper will work with organisations on audience development strategies, marketing and promotion.

How many downloads get you into the Apple Podcasts charts? Tanner Campbell managed to get into the top 100 in the US Books category last Friday with just 10 listens and 24 followers.

In November last year, Steffan Garrero got into the top 50 using social media; but it had no effect on his overall downloads.

Podtrac is to add a Sales Network Ranker report in Q3 this year, according to emails from ART19 to some of its customers.

Tips and Tricks might be a waste of time, argues Evo Terra, in an article entitled Avoiding The Perils Of Un-aligned Podcast Advice

The team at the Podcast Index have worked on a proposal for the podcast:verify tag, which would remove email addresses from RSS feeds, and instead use a simple one-click claiming process.

It uses a simple token system, letting podcast hosting companies understand which services people are using, and avoiding the near-25% dropoff from email verification. It’s built to be simple to implement, and great for privacy.

If you work for a podcast hosting company or a service like a directory or tool, they would appreciate your feedback on the proposal.

A reminder that if you use Apple’s AppleCoreMedia SDK to playback audio in your app, iOS 16 lets you set your user-agent so your app gets the credit in podcast host company dashboards. Please update your app ready for the release.Zedcast - The Tyler Zed PodcastTyler Zed of the YouTube channel Zedcation hosts Zedcast, a podcast talking about...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Guest Interviews


John Spurlock - Thread.land  Matt Maderios - CastosShow Notes


Acast has released the company’s Q2/22 financial report.
The Swedish company now hosts 66,000 podcasts (a record growth last quarter); the number of listens in the quarter increased 41% year-on-year. 

The company lost $11m in the quarter, though now expects to make EBITDA profit in 2024, earlier than previously expected. 

“The heavy investment phase is now over, " says CEO Ross Adams, noting that the advertising market has been cooling globally.

Bloomberg's Ashley Carman’s newsletter launches next month. 

Ashley wrote about the world of paid podcast appearances, or what some consider podcast payola. Guests are paying hosts up to $50K for an interview, and the disclosures around that exchange aren’t always clear or even existent.

Skye Pillsbury (Frmr contributor, Hot Pod) has launched her newsletter called The Squeeze

Want to support podcast:socialInteract with ActivityPub in your feed. Find your podcast on thread.land then DM @johnspurlock the unique prefix url .

Congratulation to Josh Chen from JustCast for also adding Alby integration and enabling autofill in Value4Value tag to enable the Alby wallet. 

Online studio Cleanfeed has won an Emmy Award for Engineering, Science & Technology.

The BBC claims a new record number of weekly users for its audio app, BBC Sounds.

All future @SoundsProfNews podcasts will be built with @spoolermedia.

Publisher and broadcaster Audacy has bought podcast app Moonbeam.

Zedcast - The Tyler Zed PodcastTyler Zed of the YouTube channel Zedcation hosts Zedcast, a podcast talking about...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Guest Interview
Alberto Betella - CTO RSS.comShow Notes


Podcast host RSS.com is to announce integration with Alby this week: enabling value 4 value for thousands of podcasts. You’ll be able to activate and link your Alby account with your podcast in RSS.com’s dashboard.  RSS has produced a video showing how it works on their platform

Monetize your @CastosHQ podcast with @getAlby and @PodcastindexOrg value4value tag!  Castos has produced a video showing how it works on their platform

Full List of  New Podcast 2.0 Apps  Full List of Podcast Hosts

Hot on the heels of last week's acquisition by Acast. Podchaser announced this week that developers can now pull episode transcripts from the Podchaser API.  In this beta release, developers can retrieve JSON transcript files of episodes from the top 5k podcasts.  

Spotify published its Q2/21 financial report. which out-performed market expectations. Ignoring currency fluctuations, ad-supported revenue (including podcasting) is up 31%; the platform now has 4.4m podcasts. “The number of (monthly active users) that engaged with podcasts grew in the substantial double-digits Y/Y and per user podcast consumption rates continued to rise,” though no numbers were given.

Does podcasting have a privacy problem? Writing on his personal blog, our Editor highlights what the GDPR actually says, whether you can do privacy-friendly geo-targeting, and where things might be an issue. 

Was the much-loved comedian and actor Robin Williams the first podcaster? We’ve unearthed some compelling evidence that shows that yes, he might well have been.

The British Podcast Awards 2022 winner’s ceremony took place on Saturday. Podcast of the year was Dear Daughter from the BBC World Service - a show hosted by Namulanta Kombo, the Kenyan winner of the BBC World Service International Podcast.

 We’ve got a full list of the winners including a fZedcast - The Tyler Zed PodcastTyler Zed of the YouTube channel Zedcation hosts Zedcast, a podcast talking about...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Special Guests
Moritz Kaminski - AlbyRoss Adams -  AcastBradley Davis - PodchaserShow Notes
Acast is to acquire Podchaser, the “world’s most comprehensive and authoritative podcast database” in a deal worth $34m. Podchaser, which is expected to make a profit next year, will continue to operate as a separate brand: it contains data of more than 4.5m million podcasts, including advertising information. The integration will bring additional data to Acast’s advertisers.

The podcast landscape is ever shifting!

Alby, a browser extension for cryptocurrency, has added its own podcaster wallet. The service allows you to earn from your listeners as they listen. The company has written a full guide to enabling your podcast.

Audioboom’s H1/22 financials were released, showing revenue was up 79% on the same period last year. Profit was $2m, up from last year’s $0.2m, and the company’s doing 124m downloads a month (up 35%).

Pushkin Industries has purchased podcast creator Transmitter Media. Transmitter’s founder and CEO, Gretta Cohn, will join Pushkin’s senior leadership team. 

Auphonic and Hindenburg have announced an integration

Which company is sending the most unsolicited commercial email to podcasters, by scraping your RSS feed to gather your email? We have been running a spamtrap on our podcast feed for the last three months, and today, we reveal the podcast industry’s biggest spammer. (No, it doesn’t start with an “A”).

British Podcast Awards: Jul 23 · London, England, UK

The podcast:socialInteract tag has been finalised in the Zedcast - The Tyler Zed PodcastTyler Zed of the YouTube channel Zedcation hosts Zedcast, a podcast talking about...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Special Guests:
Mitch Downey - PodverseMike Mignano - Angel Investor and ex-SpotifyShow Notes:
Michael Mignano, has written a piece about what he calls The Standards Innovation Paradox.

In response, James Cridland wrote a long article that basically points out that Apple took the RSS standard and enhanced it. The thing that Mike Mignano says is impossible.

Adam Curry said: Spotify is the shitcoin of podcasting.

Spotify is expanding the ability to post video podcasts for creators in six new countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil and Mexico. This marks the first time the audio streaming company is making this feature available in non-English speaking countries.

Spotify has purchased Heardle.

Overcast, Marco Arment, describes “cheap, sloppy dynamic ad insertion in podcasts” as something that “continues to degrade the experience for listeners” in a tweet.

Reddit is to start live audio Talks says Arielle Nissenblatt in a Twitter thread.

Message Heard has signed an audio partnership with The Kyiv Independent.

Descript launched Storyboard.

Eddy, the audio editor that works like a word processor, now lets you edit video.

Zedcast - The Tyler Zed PodcastTyler Zed of the YouTube channel Zedcation hosts Zedcast, a podcast talking about...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Special Guests
Harry Duran -  Full CastOscar Merry - Fountain AppShow Notes
Podverse adds support for LIT and Video Support. Podcast Host Ranking from John Spurlock Fountain rewards users for listening to podcastsBlubrry has launched 'podcast media kits’ that update daily Libsyn StudioAnchor podcast fraud.  Here’s a link with details on how to report themAlby, a browser extension for cryptocurrency, has added its own podcaster wallet. The service allows you to earn from your listeners as they listen. The company has written a full guide to enabling your podcast.Events
The British Podcast Awards, powered by Audible, Ceremony- Kennington Park, London - Saturday 23rd July - Tickets on Sale: Monday 20th June. Zedcast - The Tyler Zed PodcastTyler Zed of the YouTube channel Zedcation hosts Zedcast, a podcast talking about...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify
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