Comprehensive coverage of the podcasting industry and its business ecosystem.
Pod Drop features new and returning podcasts. Today — two CNN news shows drop, Carlos Watson brings great interviews chops to his podcast, and a podumentary about a student-operated marijuana black market syndicate. Continue Reading
Triton Digital has released its U.S. Podcast Report, an every-four-week rolling weekly average of downloads and listeners. This report covers the July 6 through August 2 period. Most remarkable is the stability of this report compared to the previous one. And we noticed the same thing in our previous coverage. Click through for details. Continue Reading
If Q2 was the Covid Quarter, NPR was infected. The U.S. public radio network lost about a quarter of its audience during that period. The main influence? Loss of morning and evening car commuting. But this trend is balanced by shifts to in-home device listening, increasing reach overall. Podcast revenue will surpass broadcast ad revenue for the first time. Click through for details. Continue Reading
Toronto-based podcast advertising company The Podcast Exchange (TPX) is announcing today the launch of TPX Studios, a production facility intended to meet a demand for business podcasting. The focus here is branded podcasting. In its promotion, the company notes that one in three Canadaians listens to podcasts, and that the on-demand audio category, mobile and immersive as it is, is a premium way to reach customers. Continue Reading
Spotify has announced a new daily sports playlist, appropriately named Daily Sports. This new product triples down on mixed-media programming that combines spoken word and music. As such, the playlists are personalized to each user — at least so far as the music is chosen. Spotify has been down this road twice already, with Daily Wellness and Your Daily Drive. Mixing spoken word with music is part of the company’s effort to diversify listening, and shift usage time into low-cost non-music content. Continue Reading
Measurement company Media Monitors released its Q2 Podcast Listener Survey results. The public reveal contains the top 25 podcasts according to a survey conducted in June. Also, a list of podcast publishers with the most number of shows in the top-200 list (not publicly shown) and top 10 categories in which those 200 shows are slotted. Every show in the top 25 is familiar, in title at least, to anyone into podcasting. Continue Reading
In Entercom’s Q2 earnings call on August 7, CEO David Field held forth with a considerable portion of his opening remarks focused on digital audio and cross-category business in the U.S.’s second-largest commercial radio group. In fact, “radio” is subsumed in Field’s broad definition of Entercom: “Entercom is now a scaled media and entertainment company.” Continue Reading
Edison Research has released a public version of its subscription product Podcast Consumer Tracker (PCT). The PCT is intended to rank podcasts by reach, while most rankers use downloads as the determining factor of their lists. The time period represented in today’s release is Q3 2019 through Q2 2020. No dark horse surprises here; click through for the whole top-30 list. Continue Reading
After soliciting over 400 nominations, Inside Radio and its sister publication Podcast News Daily have released a top-10 list of podcasting executives. That evidently not being sufficient to represent the field, there is also a second list of 32 “Podcast Power Players.” Conal Byrne (President, iHeartPodcast Network and RAIN Summit speaker) took the top honor. Click through for the top-10 list. Continue Reading
Signal Hill Insights President Jeff Vidler contributes this very interesting column about how to program (radio and podcasts) for the COVID and post-COVID eras. He notes that radio has worked its way through reinventions before — in the 1950s and 1970s. During those transitions, radio invented new station categories to address changes in audience and listening routines. A must-read. Continue Reading
Wonder Media Network, the podcast content company whose mission is to amplify underrepresented voices, has signed with WME (the talent agency part of the broader Endeavor company). WME will exclusively represent WMN, and help the young network diversify into books, TV, and other categories. Continue Reading
An item in today’s Podnews nudged our attention to the New York Times Q2 earnings statement. As Podnews mentioned, the Times disclosed that its leading podcast effort The Daily (the top news podcast in the U.S., and one of the most successful podcasts across categories) serves 3.5-million downloads per daily episode. We do some back-of-envelope math to estimate annual revenue. Click through for meeting quotes about podcast strategy at the Times. Continue Reading