Comprehensive coverage of the podcasting industry and its business ecosystem.
The C13Originals division of Audacy-owned Cadence13, and author/historian Jon Meacham, are teaming to create Shining City Audio, a podcast studio for creating history shows. New productions are in the works; the first launches this week. Click for details. Continue Reading
Emulating Spotify and The New York Times, and furthering an ongoing era of podcast consolidation, SiriusXM has acquired 99% Invisible Inc., the owner of the venerable 99% Invisible podcast and its spinoffs. The podcast was launched by host Roman Mars in 2010, which could be considered the Middle Ages of podcasting — an era between the rosy founding days of a new media category and the modern resurgence which started with NPR’s Serial in 2014. Click for details. Continue Reading
by Tom Webster
In his inaugural guest column, Tom Webster illuminates hidden signifiance in metrics from The Infinite Dial, the annual report on American listening produced by Edison Research and Triton Digital. Have you wondered about the conversion rate from monthly to weekly podcast listening? Or mere awareness to actually listening? Those numbers are significant: “What converts people from awareness to usage to habit is not the inevitability of the passage of time, it’s improvement — better content, better access, better discovery — better podcasts.” A must read.
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Spotify is potentially extending its global reach in podcast distribution in a collaboration with Facebook, which has about eight times as many users. We tested sharing Spotify podcasts on the Facebook news feed. It sort of worked. Continue Reading
Paul Chantler, Director of UK’s Podcast Radio, tells us that the TED Radio Collective has joined the all-podcast digital radio station in a content partnership arrangement. Twelve shows from the Collective will be featured in coming weeks. Continue Reading
Podcast media planning platform Magellan AI is out with its monthly top 15 podcast advertisers, and the “Movers & Shakers” list of top increased spends. This edition is for the month of March. Top spend overall? $3.8M by BetterHelp, a familiar online therapy brand to avid podcast listeners. Click for details and link. Continue Reading
Entering one of the most populated and competitive podcast categories, the Los Angeles Times is launching a morning news show. Called The Times, the podcast is scheduled to launch May 3, hosted by Gustavo Arellano, a features writer and former opinion columnist for the news organization. Click for trailer. Continue Reading
iHeartMedia sent us details on its latest partnership: The audio giant will team with the National Football League for an NFL podcast network. The NFL already owns a slate of podcasts in its NFL Media unit, so while there is a creative element to the deal, part of the plan is about distribution and (presumably) monetization. New shows will emerge before the 2021-2022 season starts. Continue Reading
Podcast attribution company Podsights has released the latest in its quarterly Benchmark series — titled for Q2 2021. There is new element not in previous reports: Demographic info resulting from a partnership with Experian, the consumer data company. Click through for details, data, graphs, and a link to the report. Continue Reading
Podcast database company Rephonic has launched the Podcast Audience Graph which is both fun to use and a smart discovery mechniasm. Click through for a link and graphics. Continue Reading
Podcast advertising is famously looser than radio and TV advertising. When delivered via a host riff, it is more informal and improvisatory … and longer, giving added value to advertisers. Audioboom’s EVP Thomas Mancusi worked with Magellan AI to calculate a dollar value of podcasting’s generosity to advertisers. Continue Reading
Publicly traded Audioboom (London Stock Exchange) released its Q1 results. CEO Stuart Last called it “a breakthrough period for Audioboom.” The company’s quarterly releases are especially notable as Audioboom is the only publicly traded major pure podcast publisher; the results offer a glimpse into podcasting economics. Continue Reading