RAIN Notes: Wednesday April 28
Jottings of note:
— Productive Breakage (Integr8 Research)
— Playlisting the Game (iHeartRadio)
— Executive Promotion (LiSTNR)
— The Stoop Steps Up (Radiotopia/PRX)
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Instreamatic completes $6.1-million fundraising
Voice dialog marketing company Instreamatic is today announcing the completion of a Series A $6.1-million round of fundraising led by Progress Ventures. The investment money is targeted to product development and increasing the staff. Continue Reading
Acast launches “Sponsored Stories” ad format for immersive sponsor messaging [audio]
Calling it “an immersive sponsorship experience,” global podcast company Acast has introduced the Sponsored Stories ad format, which can be up to four minutes long. Acast Creative helps with production. Click for an audio example. Continue Reading
Spotify launches paid podcast subscriptions, and advances two other programs (a little)
Spotify released a trio of announcements this morning. One predominates: Paid podcast subscriptions within Spotify. Continue Reading
New CEO at TPX as Jean-Marie Heimrath retires.
Lina Kim, formerly Managing Director at Havas Media Group, takes the CEO role at Toronto-based TPX (The Podcast Exchange) today, as former CEO Jean-Marie Heimrath retires. Heimrath remains on the board. Continue Reading
Cadence13 and Jon Meacham jointly form Shining City Audio podcast studio
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
SiriusXM acquires 99% Invisible Inc.
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
Tom Webster: A Crucial Metric of Podcasting’s Health
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 adds podcast sharing to Facebook, potentially expanding its reach x8
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
TED Audio Collective goes into Podcast Radio rotation
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
Riverside.FM raises $9.5-million dollars for product dev and doubling staff in 2021
Tel Aviv-based Riverside.FM, a browser-based recording studio that offers fluent interplay of audio and video, raised $9.5-million in a round led by Alexis Ohanion’s Seven Seven Six. New product features have just been released, and the company plans to double staff from 20 to 40. Click through for details and link to job openings. Continue Reading
Top podcast ad spenders in March (Magellan AI)
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