Comprehensive coverage of the podcasting industry and its business ecosystem.
Newsweek has formally launched its first podcast, a current events show called The Debate. This podcast actually dropped its first episode on April 20, with little or no publicity, in what the company’s PR describes as an experimental phase. The show springs from a magazine feature. Continue Reading
Twenty-eight 1st-place awards, and three times that many total awards, were bestowed over the weekend by the British Podcast Awards. VENT Documentaries won Podcast of the Year — a show in which investigative stories are told by young people from a single London borough. The winner list of nearly 90 shows provides great discovery browsing, especially for American audiences. Click for details and link. Continue Reading
Podtrac has released the June edition of its two monthly rankers: Top Podcasts and Top Podcast Publishers. Regular followers of these lists can probably recite the top three in each. Stability reigns both in the podcast and publishers list, and also in the overall measurements. Click for details and the lists. Continue Reading
iHeartMedia has disclosed a trio of launch sponsors for the company’s My Cultura podcast network, which seeks to amplify Latinx voices. In addition, four new shows with July launch dates are detailed. The company promises a monthly drumbeat of new My Cultura shows. Continue Reading
PodcastOne, an acquired unit of LiveXLive Media, is grabbing attention this week with two developments: a new content partnership, and a new self-serve podcast hosting platform. Click through for details about upcoming shows, and how the hosting platform works. Continue Reading
The rationale of branded podcasts is to build an audience around a show which is affiliated with a brand, but avoids outright marketing. In many, the brand is rarely mentioned. SXM packaged a Buick sponsorship production of a bonus episode of “Office Ladies.” Click for audio. Continue Reading
by Steve Goldstein
If “findability” isn’t in every podcast creator’s lexicon, this guest column by Steve Goldstein will put it there. Steve details the search agony an enthusiastic and motivated user might have (and he did have) finding a podcast after hearing it advertised. An eye-opening read. Continue Reading
iHeartRadio is announcing a mentoring and incubation program called NextUp, to cultivate and fund what the program’s leader, Anna Hossnieh, calls “underrepresented diverse creators.” Hossnieh is an iHeart executive producer and host of the Ethnically Ambiguous podcast. Continue Reading
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 spans many media types, with global survey work displayed across 164 pages. Podcasts are a main focus of the Audio section. Click through for research results and graphs pertaining to podcast discovery and why some people don’t listen. Continue Reading
Listening on the go, or when alone, or on weekends, or weeknights — how do different audio content types draw listeners? That’s one question examined by the Audacy Insights blog, in a piece authored by Idil Cakim, SVP Research & Insights. Click through for interesting metrics andc charts. Continue Reading
Yesterday’s late-afternoon acquisition of ART19 was buttoned down by Amazon with exceptional discipline. Which is to say nobody in either company would talk about it. But Kintan Brahmbhatt, GM Podcasts (Director) at Amazon, celebrated more openly in social media, and offered career opportunities to “define the future of podcasts.” Continue Reading
If podcast rankers reveal stagnation at the top levels of popularity (they do), Magellan AI’s monthly ranking of top advertisers shows the same characteristic. Looking at the just-released list of top 15 spenders in May, and comparing it to April, we see the same top five advertisers: BetterHelp, HelloFresh, ZipRecruiter, Amazon, and Geico. Click through for comparison chart. Continue Reading