The comedy podcast Off Book: The Improvised Musical Podcast has jumped from Earwolf, a division of Stitcher, to ART19 which will host the show and handle all sales. Continue Reading
Spotify has dropped a group of audiobooks — nine of them — comprising public domain classics read by known actors. The effort is barely a toe in the water of audiobook creation and distribution, but Spotify got its arms around podcasting in little more than two years. So heads up, Audible. Click through for deets. Continue Reading
by Matt Deegan
Guest columnist Matt Deegan (Folder Media) traces the evolution of direct subscription to all kinds of content, and speculates about new monetization methods. Next up for podcasts in 2021: a “battle of the models.” Continue Reading
Triton Digital, parent company of podcast hosting and technology platform Omny Studios, is announcing a suite of auditing features for enterprise clients. These tools enable companies to track organization staff who are creating and modifying objects in the company’s podcast assets. The objects include chapter markers, clips, playlists, and other items. Additionally, the audit log can be utilized to track network and organization activity, such as user settings, invites and permissions. Click through for a link to screenshots of the new tools. Continue Reading
Starting in February, ad-tech company Targetspot will integrate Tru Optik’s identity resolution platform, offering Targetspot advertisers enhanced targeting of ads to U.S. homes. Through this integration, buyers and sellers are able to identify and segment audiences across mobile and streaming audio devices, including smart speakers. Click through for details of both companies. Continue Reading
When was the last time you returned a book you purchased? If it was an audiobook you bought in Amazon-owned Audible, you might have benefited from a relaxed and encouraging returns policy which allows a listener to trade one audiobook for another within a year from purchase. Great for customers; bad for authors and publishers (and some voice performers) whose royalty statements were filled with deductions from payments received months earlier. There has been clamor for change. At the new year, Amazon has responded. Click through for the story. Continue Reading
The podcasting daily news space is crowded and successful as a category. The extensive lineup of daily news podcasts fluxes quite a bit, with new additions, and revisions to existing programs. Here, three items of note. Cadence13 partners with a new organization, Punchbowl News, for The Daily Punch. Vox starts a not-podcast which is really a playlist of podcasts, all squeezed into one feed — we were baffled, then curious, and now we like it. A well-regarded news podcast from The Washington Post switches out the host, who becomes an opinion columnist at the paper. Click for specifics. Continue Reading
Kast Media, the #11 podcast publisher in Podtrac’s monthly Top 20 Podcast Publishers list for December, has loaded its podcast business into Triton Digital’s delivery, measurement, and monetization products. Kast Media publishes 51 podcasts (according to Podtrac) across many categories. In December the group served over 28-million downloads and streams to an audience of nearly 5-million unique listeners. Continue Reading
AdsWizz is trumpeting a major get — Berlin-HQ’d global streamer SoundCloud has chosen the U.S.-HQ’d global ad-tech company AdsWizz to exclusively represent digital audio ad sales in significant European markets. This deal has an in-house feeling; AdsWizz is a subsidiary of Pandora, which is owned by Sirius XM, which also owns 30% of SoundCloud. Continue Reading
“Smart speaker ownership soars and brings AM/FM back into the home,” writes Pierre Bouvard in a new Westwood One blog post. A key statistic from the parent company backs this up: 24% of stream listening to Cumulus radio stations happens on smart speakers. Cumulus booked an interesting smart speaker preroll campaign with a consortium of Ford dealerships. Click through for more context, a chart, and link to more. Continue Reading
Podchaser, a podcast database company and social network of sorts for podcast listeners, announces today that it has raised $4-million from lead investor Greycroft, plus a slewe of additional investors and participating angels. The service plans to build gamification and discussion features into an environment that self-describes as “The IMDb of Pdcasting.” Continue Reading
Has A-list actor Tom Hanks joined TuneIn’s corporate communications team? No, but he did shine love on the TuneIn app when Stephen Colbert asked Hanks to name his favorite app. “Camera,” Hanks said. Answer disqualified by Colbert because the camera is built in. It took Hanks one second to assert: “I’ll go to TuneIn Radio because I can listen to any radio station in the world.” TuneIn’s Apple app shot up instantly. Click through for the clip, and for TuneIn’s audience metrics. Continue Reading