Podcasts about hot pod

The Current State of Podcasting: A Comprehensive GuideIn the latest episode of our podcast, we had the pleasure of hosting Jeff Umbro, the CEO of Podglomerate. Jeff shared his extensive knowledge about the podcasting industry, offering valuable insights into its growth, best practices for independent podcasters, and effective monetization strategies. This blog post will break down the key points discussed in the episode, providing actionable advice and thorough explanations to help you navigate the podcasting landscape.Jeff begins by highlighting the impressive growth of podcasting over the past 16 years. According to the Edison Infinite Dial Report, approximately 132 million people in the U.S. listen to podcasts regularly, averaging about seven shows each month. This growth has been further accelerated by the pandemic, which increased streaming audio consumption. Podglomerate, founded in 2017, is a podcast services company that focuses on producing, marketing, and monetizing podcasts. They work with a diverse range of clients, from large corporations like Netflix and PBS to small businesses and individual creators. Jeff emphasizes that their goal is to help podcasters create high-quality content and effectively reach their target audience.Jeff also discusses the recent consolidation in the podcasting industry, with major players like Spotify, SiriusXM, and Apple acquiring smaller companies. This consolidation has led to a shift in the types of shows being produced, with a growing focus on ad sales and listener engagement. Despite these changes, advertising on podcasts remains highly effective. Jeff notes that podcast ads often outperform other digital mediums, attracting more brands to the space. He emphasizes the importance of creating quality content that resonates with listeners and advises podcasters to focus on engagement metrics such as social media mentions, listener feedback, and overall consumption patterns. For those with limited budgets, Jeff recommends leveraging owned properties like websites, newsletters, and social media to promote their shows and suggests cross-promotion with similar shows as a more effective strategy for audience growth.About Jeff Umbro:Jeff Umbro is the founder and CEO of The Podglomerate, the award-winning company which produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. The Podglomerate is a boot-strapped organization which now works with more than 70 podcasts and more than 30 million monthly podcast downloads. Jeff has written for and been quoted in Bloomberg, Morning Brew, Adweek, Quartz, Hot Pod, Paste, The Daily Dot, and more. Prior to launching the Podglomerate, Jeff had his hands in audience growth and business development for companies like Product Hunt, Serial Box, VotePlz, Talkshow, and Goldberg McDuffie Communications.About Podglomerate:The Podglomerate has been producing, distributing, and monetizing podcasts since 2016. Now representing more than 70 podcasts accounting for over 30 million monthly downloads, The Podglomerate's clients have topped the podcast charts and have received features on every major podcast distribution app and national coverage in print, digital, radio, and television. The Podglomerate has worked with Freakonomics Radio, PBS, NPR, A+E, Lifetime, History Channel, Harvard Business School, MIT, Stanford, Lit Hub Radio, NPR stations (including KPCC/LAist, NHPR, WHYY, WUNC, VPM, WPM, GBH), WNET, Substack, Magnificent Noise, Expedia, Optum, CVS Health, Hubspot, and Hoff Studios, among many others.Apply to be a Guest on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur: https://go.upmyinfluence.com/podcast-guestLinks Mentioned in this Episode:Want to learn more? Check out Podglomerate website athttps://podglomerate.com/Check out Podglomerate...

Alex and Evelyn talk about OpenAI's first threat intel report, California's flurry of AI regulations, the latest on the TikTok ban bill, and a Downunder Special Segment.

Olá, eu sou Leo Lopes e está no ar o POD NOTÍCIAS, a sua dose semanal de informação sobre o mercado de podcasts no Brasil e no mundo! Hoje é segunda-feira, dia 6 de maio de 2024 e esta é a nossa décima segunda edição! A gente está de volta depois de 2 semanas de uma breve pausa e tem muita coisa acontecendo no universo do podcast, mas antes de entrar nas notícias eu quero dizer que você pode anunciar com a gente aqui no Pod Notícias. Se você tem uma marca, produto ou serviço e quer atingir um público qualificado que se interessa pelo podcast aqui no Brasil, manda um e-mail pra gente no contato@podnoticias.com.br, que a gente vai ter o maior prazer em conversar com você. Além disso, se você quiser colaborar com a gente, mandar texto, mandar pauta, também é muito bem-vindo, e pode fazer isso através do mesmo e-mail. 1 - Começando as notícias desta edição, a empresa Mattrics de tecnologia em anúncios de áudio fez uma análise sobre os motivos que levaram o podcasting a se popularizar tanto nos últimos anos. O podcast, que era considerado entretenimento de nicho a poucos anos atrás, hoje em dia está em todos os lugares. E como foi que isso aconteceu? De acordo com a Mattrics, esse boom foi impulsionado por vários fatores, incluindo acessibilidade, conveniência de consumo e o estilo de vida multitarefa do público atual. O fácil acesso a várias vozes, a intimidade que o formato cria com os ouvintes e a criação de comunidades são outros motivadores importantes. Os investimentos da indústria de tecnologia no áudio e nos podcasts também fazem parte desse crescimento. Quando a podosfera começou a querer ficar popular, empresas como Spotify, Microsoft, YouTube e outros gigantes quiseram fazer parte desse mundo - e aí surgiu essa grande gama de plataformas e agregadores de podcast que a gente tem hoje. Se você quiser saber em detalhes a análise completa da Mattrics sobre a ascensão do podcast, ela está disponível na íntegra lá na nossa página do LinkedIn do Pod Notícias - já traduzida, então não deixa de conferir. Link 2 - E é claro que nessas duas semanas em que o Pod Notícias ficou em pausa, aconteceu muita coisa, e não tem como a gente não comentar, então a gente vai fazer um breve resumo dos acontecimentos principais: O primeiro deles, foi que o Spotify deixou de fazer parte do IAB (o Interactive Advertising Bureau), e não é mais uma empresa certificada IAB. Pra quem não sabe, a IAB é uma entidade que desenvolve cada vez mais o mercado de mídias interativas, incentivando a criação de normas e padrões pro planejamento, compras, vendas e veiculação de mídia no digital. A decisão do Spotify de não participar mais da IAB foi tomada silenciosamente nos últimos três meses. Em paralelo, o Spotify também publicou o seu relatório financeiro do primeiro trimestre de 2024, onde a empresa anunciou que alcançou 1 bilhão de euros em lucro bruto, com essa sendo a primeira vez que a empresa atinge esse valor. Além disso, o lucro líquido registrado foi de 197 milhões de euros. Outra movimentação importante pra podosfera, foi o desligamento de uma das maiores repórteres de podcast do mundo, a Ariel Shapiro, do portal The Verge. A saída de Ariel foi anunciada alguns dias antes de seu desligamento e mesmo assim pegou muita gente de surpresa. A jornalista era head de conteúdo da Hot Pod, uma das maiores newsletters sobre podcast - que agora está em hiato e sem uma data de retorno. Link / Link / Link 3 - E o último relatório de benchmarking da Signal Hill mostrou como os podcasts corporativos são eficientes em influenciar o público e as suas decisões de compra. Analisando programas de marcas como Google, Dell e Ford, o estudo destacou que esses podcasts não só aumentam o reconhecimento e a consideração das marcas, mas também geram maior afinidade entre os ouvintes. O segredo pra criar essa conexão é aquele mesmo de sempre: conteúdo bom e relevante. Se o que estiver sendo apresentado não for relevante, ninguém consome, não importa o que seja - ou, nesse caso, quem seja. Além disso, a pesquisa mostrou que mais da metade dos ouvintes se lembra da marca associada ao podcast após um único episódio, sem precisar de nenhum estímulo adicional. O relatório da Signal foi um compilado de 8 anos de estudo de mercado, e mostrou que nos últimos 3 anos, os resultados dos podcasts corporativos tiveram um salto muito grande. Se tem um momento bom pras marcas investirem em publicidade em áudio, o momento é agora. Link AINDA EM NOTÍCIAS DA SEMANA: 4 - A iHeartMedia, em uma colaboração com a Deep Blue Sports, lançou alguns dias atrás a Women's Sports Audio Network, a primeira plataforma de áudio dedicada exclusivamente aos esportes femininos. A parceria oferece conteúdo gratuito em podcasts, relatórios diários de esportes e presença nos maiores eventos da indústria do esporte feminino. E, de acordo com o Sports Audio Report, o lançamento já tem sucesso garantido, porque os fãs de esporte nos Estados Unidos consomem, por dia, pelo menos duas horas a mais de conteúdo em áudio do que o público médio. Além do mais, os ouvintes de áudio esportivo também gastam mais em produtos esportivos, e têm maior chance de comprar mercadorias anunciadas por atletas que gostam, especialmente os ouvintes de podcasts. Lembrando que esses dados são sobre os ouvintes dos Estados Unidos, tá? Aqui no Brasil os números podem variar, mas é fato que o interesse do brasileiro em esporte também é muito grande. Link / Link 5 - De acordo com um novo relatório da Magellan AI, que fez um comparativo ano-após-ano desde 2020, os investimentos em publicidade em podcast cresceram 29% no primeiro trimestre de 2024. O estudo também cobriu detalhes sobre quais temas de podcast mais têm crescido com o público, qual o posicionamento mais popular dos anúncios dentro dos episódios e qual é o tipo de marca que paga por anúncios em áudio. A Magellan AI também publicou uma lista com as empresas que mais investiram em publicidade em podcast em março desse ano. Alguns dos nomes mencionados foram BetterHelp, Amazon, Toyota e Apple. O gênero de podcast que recebeu a maior 'fatia' desses investimentos foi Esportes, seguido por Sociedade & Cultura, e Saúde & Bem Estar. Se você quiser ver o ranking completo, ele está disponível no blog da Magellan, e também na página do LinkedIn do Pod Notícias. O link de cada uma das notícias que a gente comenta aqui, como sempre, vai estar na descrição deste episódio. Link E MAIS: 7 - Os americanos gastam mais tempo ouvindo rádio do que com redes sociais e podcasts, de acordo com o The Record da Nielsen com a Edison Research. No entanto, para os ouvintes com idades entre 18 e 34 anos, o tempo gasto com podcasts, rádio e redes sociais é quase o mesmo. Essa pesquisa é refeita a cada três meses pra entender como está sendo o comportamento de escuta de áudio nos Estados Unidos, e como esse consumo se relaciona com outras mídias. De acordo com o Record, nos primeiros três meses de 2024, os ouvintes dedicaram cerca de 70% do tempo de escuta diária de áudio com as rádios AM/FM, 20% desse tempo foi dedicado aos podcasts e o resto foi pros streamings via satélite. A maior parte dessa escuta de rádio acontece durante o dia, especialmente no carro. Os temas mais populares foram Notícias, Conversas Adultas e Clássicos & Country, com as estações de Notícias e Conversas liderando também no streaming. Link 8 - As empresas Otonal Inc e The Asahi Shimbun Company lançaram em conjunto uma série de informações sobre o consumo de podcasts no Japão. Os dados mostraram que 1 em cada 3 japoneses com idades entre 15 e 19 anos ouve podcasts todos os meses; no geral, 16% dos adultos japoneses escutam podcasts. A pesquisa afirmou também que a escuta de podcasts é tão popular quanto o consumo de TikTok em todos os grupos etários. Além disso, em uma resposta aberta à pergunta "Qual a vantagem de ouvir podcasts?", muitos responderam que gostam de poder ouvir os podcasts enquanto fazem outra coisa. Alguns dos entrevistados também mencionaram que usam os podcasts como ferramentas de aprendizado, dizendo que graças aos podcasts aprenderam a ouvir em inglês, e que suas habilidades linguísticas melhoraram como resultado do consumo de podcasts. Link 9 - Ainda falando sobre a podosfera da Ásia, um estudo da UNPAC Research com o estúdio Ideabrew revelou que apenas 12% das pessoas na Índia ouvem podcasts. No entanto, embora o número seja baixo comparado com outros países, a UNPAC destacou a oportunidade de crescimento no país, já que 78% dos ouvintes indianos só descobriram os podcasts há menos de um ano. A Índia é um desses países em que ainda não existem padrões consolidados de consumo de podcasts. Segundo o blog do Ideabrew, a intenção deles é fazer novas pesquisas de mercado na Índia pra explorar mais padrões de consumo, dinâmicas de gênero, perfis e as nuances entre podcasts de áudio e vídeo. E você reparou no quanto de pesquisa e relatório a gente trouxe nesse episódio? Isso não é segredo nenhum, inclusive deveria ser a régua mínima pra um programa de notícias, mas é bom reforçar que a gente aqui do Pod Notícias tem um grande compromisso com a verdade, que tem fontes e referências. Como sempre, todas as fontes das notícias vão estar na descrição do episódio, pra você poder fazer a sua própria consulta sobre tudo que você ouviu aqui. Link HOJE NO GIRO SOBRE PESSOAS QUE FAZEM A MÍDIA: 10 - A nossa amiga Aline Hack, mestra e pesquisadora em podcasts, teve seu artigo publicado pela Radio Doc Review, uma revista científica australiana que divulga pesquisas sobre o áudio. O artigo, sobre a comunidade feminista de produtoras de podcast no Brasil, foi feito com base em um estudo que mapeou o trabalho de 511 mulheres brasileiras e produtoras de podcast. A maioria dessas mulheres tem diploma universitário, renda variável e se identifica como feminista. Os resultados do artigo mostraram também o quanto a atuação das mulheres no podcast aumentou até 2020. E aqui a gente dá os nossos sinceros parabéns pra Aline, e que cada vez mais pessoas sigam os passos dela na pesquisa acadêmica sobre essa mídia que a gente ama tanto. Link 11 - Também durante o nosso pequeno hiato, o Laboratório de Podcasts Narrativos da Uerj (Lunar) comemorou seu primeiro ano de atividades. Durante esse período, o Lunar alcançou marcos muito significativos com os participantes, bateu metas, e agora a equipe tem ainda mais planos de continuar contando histórias e criando podcasts de qualidade. Se você quiser acompanhar o trabalho do laboratório, pode seguir a página deles no Instagram, no arroba @podcastnarrativo. Os nossos parabéns pelo primeiro ano do projeto, especialmente pro coordenador, o grande a=Andriolli Costa, que trabalhou pra fazer o Lunar acontecer. Link / Instagram E nessa última semana a influencer Viih Tube anunciou que foi demitida do podcast "MaterniDelas", que até então era apresentado por ela e sua companheira de bancada Tata Estaniecki. O motivo foi 'questões contratuais com patrocinadores'. A Viih Tube está grávida do seu segundo filho, e quando divulgou a segunda gravidez, ela acabou fechando contrato com uma marca que é concorrente da marca de produtos para bebês que patrocina o MaterniDelas. Apesar da demissão, ela disse que continua sendo muito amiga da Tata, e que a decisão do seu desligamento do programa foi estritamente profissional. Link SOBRE LANÇAMENTOS: 12 - No dia 18 de abril foi ao ar um novo podcast da Amazon: o Má Influência, apresentado por Maria Bopp e Babu Carreira. O podcast segue o mesmo molde do podcast norte-americano "Scamfluencers", que desmarcara "influenciadores" que são, na verdade, golpistas, charlatões e até estelionatários. Um dos primeiros episódios foi dedicado ao caso de Pablo Marçal, aquele coach que levou um grupo de 32 pessoas pro Pico dos Marins em um dia de chuva e teve que ser resgatado de helicóptero (todo mundo aí se lembra disso? Quem não se lembra, né?). O Má Influência já tem vários episódios disponíveis em todas as principais plataformas de áudio, e também no canal do YouTube da Wondery Brasil. Link 13 - E sobre lançamento de equipamentos, chegou recentemente no mercado o Lewitt Audio Ray, um novo microfone que faz autofoco na sua voz através de laser. A tecnologia é completamente nova e ajusta a voz dependendo de quão perto ou longe a pessoa está do microfone. O Audio Ray tem uma cápsula verde de 1 polegada, parecida com o PURE (que outro microfone da Lewitt), e é um condensador XLR com padrão cardioide. Mas a grande sacada dele, realmente, é o laser classe-1 que permite a ele mutar automaticamente quando não tá em uso e ajusta o foco pra um áudio bem equilibrado, ótimo pra ambientes menos tratados - é quase um photoshop de voz em tempo-real. O James Cridland, do Podnews, já testou e aprovou o microfone, que já está disponível para compra pela bagatela de 350 dólares. Link RECOMENDAÇÃO NACIONAL: 14 - Na semana passada nós tivemos o Dia do Trabalho, uma data que pra alguns significa um feriado de descanso, e pra outros significa... mais trabalho! Então hoje, a nossa recomendação da semana vai pra um podcast que tem tudo a ver com a data: é o Conexão Trabalhista, apresentado pela Michele Mary e a Mariana Bombach. O programa oferece um monte de insights muito valiosos pra gestores e donos de empresas que precisam entender o universo do direito trabalhista. E o tema, claro, também é totalmente pertinente pro trabalhador que precisa conhecer os seus direitos. O Conexão Trabalhista é um programa curtinho e direto, a maioria dos episódios tem cerca de 15 minutos, e é publicado toda semana com um novo tema. As questões são as mais variadas: redução da jornada de trabalho, remuneração, igualdade salarial, enfim; é uma ótima fonte pra se manter atualizado e preparado para lidar com os desafios legais no ambiente de trabalho. Então, não deixa de conferir. Link E assim a gente fecha esta décima segunda edição do Pod Notícias. Acesse podnoticias.com.br para ter acesso à transcrição e os links das fontes de todas as notícias deste episódio! Acompanhe o Pod Notícias diariamente:- Page do Linkedin- Instagram- Canal público do Telegram Ouça o Pod Notícias nos principais agregadores:- Spotify- Apple Podcasts- Deezer- Amazon Music- PocketCasts O Pod Notícias é uma produção original da Rádiofobia Podcast e Multimídia e publicado pela Rádiofobia Podcast Network, e conta com as colaborações de:- Camila Nogueira - arte- Eduardo Sierra - edição- Lana Távora - pesquisa, pauta e redação final- Leo Lopes - direção geral e apresentação- Thiago Miro - pesquisa Publicidade:Entre em contato e saiba como anunciar sua marca, produto ou serviço no Pod Notícias.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lo que está cambiando el podcasting y el marketing digital:-RØDE lanza un nuevo micrófono inalámbrico de mano con grabación integrada.-Exponen el potencial sin explorar de las aplicaciones de audio para los pódcast de ficción.-Audioboom registra pérdidas durante todo el 2023.-Datos, conclusiones y principales tendencias de LinkedIn.-Hot Pod, el boletín informativo de la industria del audio, dejará de publicarse.Pódcast recomendadoHistoria en Podcast. Un espacio destinado a la divulgación de eventos y procesos históricos que marcaron la historia de la humanidad. Desde Córdoba Argentina, para todo el mundo.Patrocinadores: ¡Comienza, crece, sigue y gana con tu podcast en un solo lugar! Descubre la forma más fácil de iniciar, hacer crecer, rastrear y monetizar tu contenido con RSS.com.Entérate, en solo cinco minutos, sobre las noticias, herramientas, tips y recursos que te ayudarán a crear un pódcast genial y exitoso. Subscríbete a la “newsletter “ de Via Podcast.

Plus, an exclusive interview with Flight Studio's team. Sponsored by Podcastle. Create, Edit, Publish, and Grow your podcast -- all in one collaborative, AI-powered platform. Make your voice heard with Podcastle. Visit https://podnews.net/update/hot-pod-hiatus for the story links in full, and to get our daily newsletter.

WWW.PATREON.COM/THEIONPACK ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

“To… refer to videos of podcasts as podcasts–every time that happens, a little piece of me dies.” - Skye Pillsbury, Author of The Squeeze It's almost 2024! So with one ear to the past and one to the future, we've assembled an unparalleled group of audio journalists and industry experts. And what's more, we've gotten them to take strong positions on the trends of 2024 that we 100% will hold them to (mostly). Back on the host microphone is Oxford Road founder and CEO Dan Granger with the World's Favorite Radio Futurologist James Cridland, Ariel Shapiro (Lead Reporter, Hot Pod), and Skye Pillsbury, (Author of The Squeeze). We have some of the most informed and spiciest takes we've ever seen on the show. On the docket, we have: Video podcast–terrible term or convenient catch-all? Rogan and Spotify–should he stay or should he go? And if the audio industry will be getting productive pain in 2024, or just the regular kind. Let's dig in.

Here's what you need to know for today in the business of podcasting: DENTSU BRINGS KEYWORD BUYING TO CONNECTED TV TO IMPROVE BRAND SAFETY AND TARGETING by Jack Neff https://adage.com/article/media/dentsu-brings-keyword-buying-connected-tv-improve-brand-safety-and-targeting/2519186Amazon Music launches Podcast Previews in several global markets by Reem Makari https://www.podpod.com/article/1839177/amazon-music-launches-podcast-previews-several-global-marketsACA study reveals the three factors driving the best returns in advertising https://www.adnews.com.au/news/aca-study-reveals-the-three-factors-driving-the-best-returns-in-advertising/type/yafNewsYouTube and Podcasts by Adam Bowie https://www.adambowie.com/blog/2023/09/youtube-and-podcasts/Why Spotify is Growing its Connected TV Ad Business by Parker Herren https://adage.com/article/media/why-spotify-growing-its-connected-tv-ad-business/2519016As for the rest of the news… Steve Pratt's newsletter series interviewing Tom Webster focuses on defining your podcast's audience, Hot Pod interviewed two people fluent in Spanish to review Spotify's voice AI translations pilot program, and MarketingBrew looks at how to create an effective affiliate marketing campaign for this holiday season.

Here's what you need to know for today in the business of podcasting: DENTSU BRINGS KEYWORD BUYING TO CONNECTED TV TO IMPROVE BRAND SAFETY AND TARGETING by Jack Neff https://adage.com/article/media/dentsu-brings-keyword-buying-connected-tv-improve-brand-safety-and-targeting/2519186Amazon Music launches Podcast Previews in several global markets by Reem Makari https://www.podpod.com/article/1839177/amazon-music-launches-podcast-previews-several-global-marketsACA study reveals the three factors driving the best returns in advertising https://www.adnews.com.au/news/aca-study-reveals-the-three-factors-driving-the-best-returns-in-advertising/type/yafNewsYouTube and Podcasts by Adam Bowie https://www.adambowie.com/blog/2023/09/youtube-and-podcasts/Why Spotify is Growing its Connected TV Ad Business by Parker Herren https://adage.com/article/media/why-spotify-growing-its-connected-tv-ad-business/2519016As for the rest of the news… Steve Pratt's newsletter series interviewing Tom Webster focuses on defining your podcast's audience, Hot Pod interviewed two people fluent in Spanish to review Spotify's voice AI translations pilot program, and MarketingBrew looks at how to create an effective affiliate marketing campaign for this holiday season.

Podcast Movement recap! YouTube supporting RSS feeds by end of year, Triton has integrated with Youtube metrics, commentary on video vs audio and why it's ok to just have an audio podcast, Libsyn Unveils “LibsynEDU” to empower educators and students in podcasting, Apple announces subscription analytics, more delegated delivery partners and Linkfire for podcasts, Relay.FM launched their annual St. Jude fundraiser! The Shure MVX2U USB interface and stats, mean and median numbers! Audience feedback drives the show. We'd love for you to contact us and keep the conversation going! Email thefeed@libsyn.com, call 412-573-1934 or leave us a message on Speakpipe! We'd love to hear from you! SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER HERE! Quick Episode Summary (2:18) PROMO 1: The Strokecast episode on tone basics (2:48) Rob and Elsie conversation (3:12) Podcast Movement recap (9:24) YouTube to support RSS feeds Triton integrates YouTube podcast metrics (12:25) HotPod quotes Rob (13:42) You do not have to do video if you are in podcasting or are looking to get into podcasting (28:27) PROMO 2: The Modern.NET Show (29:25) Libsyn releases LibsynEDU! (36:51) We have excitement about the Apple Podcasts announcement about Linkfire (47:28) The September Apple event has been announced (49:06) Relay.FM just launched their annual St. Jude fundraiser! (51:22) We are loving the Shure MVX2U USB interface (59:04) Strike Force Five has launched (1:00:30) PROMO 3: Mash Matters (1:01:10) Mean and median numbers (1:03:42) Where have we been and where are we going? Featured Podcast Promo + Audio PROMO 1: Strokecast, the tone episode PROMO 2: Modern.NET PROMO 3: Mash Matters Where have we been and where are we going 2023 BNM Summit Content Marketing World | Three days packed with marketing ideas and inspiration! 2023 NAB Show New York - 2023 NAB Show New York PODFEST EXPO NRB 2024 | February 20- 23, 2024 | Gaylord Opryland Podcaster & Podcast Industry Conference - Podcast Movement Evolutions | Los Angeles 2024 Thank you to Nick from MicMe for our awesome intro! Podcasting Articles and Links mentioned by Rob and Elsie Leave us voice feedback! Sound Capsule | Nomono YouTube to support RSS uploads for podcasters by year-end, plus private feeds in YouTube Music | TechCrunch Triton Integrates YouTube Podcast Metrics - Radio World Fire alarms and bleeding audio at Podcast Movement 2023 - The Verge Libsyn Unveils “LibsynEDU” to Empower Educators and Students in Podcasting Introducing subscription analytics, more Delegated Delivery partners & Linkfire for Podcasts Linkfire A/S Expands To Podcasting with Powerful Marketing Toolkit Built for Podcasters Apple Announces 'Wonderlust' Event Expected to Feature iPhone 15, Apple Watch Series 9 and More - MacRumors Relay FM launches annual St. Jude fundraiser, and you can earn 9to5Mac rewards for your support - 9to5Mac Amazon.com: Shure MVX2U XLR-to-USB Digital Interface with Headphone Jack, Integrated Pre-amp with 60dB Gain Control, Zero-Latency Monitoring, 48V Phantom Power, ShurePlus Desktop App, 1m USB-C Cable : Musical Instruments Shure releases MVX2U compact USB interface for XLR microphones | Poc Network // Tech Latina Podcast | LatinasB2B |Latinx Business and Tech Podcast | UnitedStates Learn Podcasting — Publish Your First Episode Today! - YouTube HELP US SPREAD THE WORD! We'd love it if you could please share The Feed with your X followers. Click here to post on X! If you dug this episode, head over to Podchaser and kindly leave us a review and follow the show! Follow The Feed wherever you listen to audio! → Follow via Apple Podcasts → Follow via Google Podcasts → Follow via Spotify → Here's our RSS feed! FEEDBACK AND PROMOTION ON THE SHOW You can ask your questions, make comments and create a segment about podcasting for podcasters! Let your voice be heard. Download The Feed App for iOS and Android Call 412-573-1934 Email thefeed@libsyn.com Use our Speakpipe Page

Podcast Movement recap! YouTube supporting RSS feeds by end of year, Triton has integrated with Youtube metrics, commentary on video vs audio and why it's ok to just have an audio podcast, Libsyn Unveils “LibsynEDU” to empower educators and students in podcasting, Apple announces subscription analytics, more delegated delivery partners and Linkfire for podcasts, Relay.FM launched their annual St. Jude fundraiser! The Shure MVX2U USB interface and stats, mean and median numbers! Audience feedback drives the show. We'd love for you to contact us and keep the conversation going! Email thefeed@libsyn.com, call 412-573-1934 or leave us a message on Speakpipe! We'd love to hear from you! SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER HERE! Quick Episode Summary (2:18) PROMO 1: The Strokecast episode on tone basics (2:48) Rob and Elsie conversation (3:12) Podcast Movement recap (9:24) YouTube to support RSS feeds Triton integrates YouTube podcast metrics (12:25) HotPod quotes Rob (13:42) You do not have to do video if you are in podcasting or are looking to get into podcasting (28:27) PROMO 2: The Modern.NET Show (29:25) Libsyn releases LibsynEDU! (36:51) We have excitement about the Apple Podcasts announcement about Linkfire (47:28) The September Apple event has been announced (49:06) Relay.FM just launched their annual St. Jude fundraiser! (51:22) We are loving the Shure MVX2U USB interface (59:04) Strike Force Five has launched (1:00:30) PROMO 3: Mash Matters (1:01:10) Mean and median numbers (1:03:42) Where have we been and where are we going? Featured Podcast Promo + Audio PROMO 1: Strokecast, the tone episode PROMO 2: Modern.NET PROMO 3: Mash Matters Where have we been and where are we going 2023 BNM Summit Content Marketing World | Three days packed with marketing ideas and inspiration! 2023 NAB Show New York - 2023 NAB Show New York PODFEST EXPO NRB 2024 | February 20- 23, 2024 | Gaylord Opryland Podcaster & Podcast Industry Conference - Podcast Movement Evolutions | Los Angeles 2024 Thank you to Nick from MicMe for our awesome intro! Podcasting Articles and Links mentioned by Rob and Elsie Leave us voice feedback! Sound Capsule | Nomono YouTube to support RSS uploads for podcasters by year-end, plus private feeds in YouTube Music | TechCrunch Triton Integrates YouTube Podcast Metrics - Radio World Fire alarms and bleeding audio at Podcast Movement 2023 - The Verge Libsyn Unveils “LibsynEDU” to Empower Educators and Students in Podcasting Introducing subscription analytics, more Delegated Delivery partners & Linkfire for Podcasts Linkfire A/S Expands To Podcasting with Powerful Marketing Toolkit Built for Podcasters Apple Announces 'Wonderlust' Event Expected to Feature iPhone 15, Apple Watch Series 9 and More - MacRumors Relay FM launches annual St. Jude fundraiser, and you can earn 9to5Mac rewards for your support - 9to5Mac Amazon.com: Shure MVX2U XLR-to-USB Digital Interface with Headphone Jack, Integrated Pre-amp with 60dB Gain Control, Zero-Latency Monitoring, 48V Phantom Power, ShurePlus Desktop App, 1m USB-C Cable : Musical Instruments Shure releases MVX2U compact USB interface for XLR microphones | Poc Network // Tech Latina Podcast | LatinasB2B |Latinx Business and Tech Podcast | UnitedStates Learn Podcasting — Publish Your First Episode Today! - YouTube HELP US SPREAD THE WORD! We'd love it if you could please share The Feed with your X followers. Click here to post on X! If you dug this episode, head over to Podchaser and kindly leave us a review and follow the show! Follow The Feed wherever you listen to audio! → Follow via Apple Podcasts → Follow via Google Podcasts → Follow via Spotify → Here's our RSS feed! FEEDBACK AND PROMOTION ON THE SHOW You can ask your questions, make comments and create a segment about podcasting for podcasters! Let your voice be heard. Download The Feed App for iOS and Android Call 412-573-1934 Email thefeed@libsyn.com Use our Speakpipe Page

The crew meets under sweltering conditions to discuss how they're coping with the heat and how much they are suffering for their gaming. With her Steam Deck laboring under such conditions, Ren has been playing a bunch of retro-style games including HROT and Demon Lord: Reincarnation. Ren, Cado, and Patrick discuss Remnant 2 as a shockingly great co-op game, and Patrick is delighted by Viewfinder. Then the gang digs into the Question Bucket.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On today's episode, host Easton Freeze and producer JT discuss: The Hot Read Podcast has partnered with ZenSports! Use referral code "HOTPOD" when you signup with Tennessee's newest sportsbook for 5% cashback as a special welcome bonus on your total betting volume! (10:59) Rehashing the numbers behind perhaps the single-most frustrating element of the Titans offense under Todd Downing: Running on first down despite horrible rushing efficiency metrics and elite passing efficiency metrics (18:48) Easton explains why he refuses to believe the NFL would ever let sports-washing, bad-faith investors into the family of owners (39:12) _______________________________ Tips? Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Email the show here: easton@broadwaysportsmedia.com Subscribe to The Hot Read Podcast here: Apple: https://apple.co/3eGTlel Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3d2UcW4 Subscribe to the Broadway Sports Media YouTube channel here: https://youtube.com/@BroadwaySportsMedia Follow us on social media! Instagram: https://tinyurl.com/2s3v9dcw TikTok: https://tinyurl.com/mya8kpme The Hot Read Podcast on Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/5238x3c9 Easton Freeze on Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/2r99j4cu Producer JT on Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/2p8wj389 Broadway Sports Media on Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/yc3jrp2e Visit our website for all things Titans, Nashville SC, Predators, and more: https://broadwaysportsmedia.com/

Hi y'all! In this episode, Tori and I talk about the value of rest in our faith! God gives us the gift of rest to relax and slow down and adjust our focus on God! Spend time with God this morning and ask Him what this time of resting looks like for you! Link to "Sit, Walk, Stand" HereBible App Devo HereSubscribe to watch our Podcast on YouTube!Find us on YouTube and IG:YouTubeToriChadMWTM PodcastThat's HOT Pod

Would you confront the friend who had publicly hurt you in middle school decades later? That's just what my guest Skye Pillsbury did on an episode of the Heavyweight podcast. I had questions. This is the second in a 4-part finale for the show, and I'm so grateful to Skye for letting me share it with you since we recorded it right before the pandemic. I know you'll love this episode!   Skye and I talk about the impetus for exploring this experience in a very public way, the importance of friendships in midlife, how your kids often reflect back to you, and how our 50s are still a vital time in our lives.    My guest today is Skye Pillsbury. Skye writes The Squeeze, a free, weekly newsletter for podcasters and audio professionals. It features a mix of investigative reporting, interviews, and industry gossip. Prior to her work at The Squeeze, Skye was the original writer of the Inside Podcasting newsletter; and creator, producer, and host of the award-nominated show Inside Podcasting. She's also served as a contributing writer at Hot Pod.   Find the Heavyweight episode we discuss here. Stay tuned over the next two weeks for the last 2 episodes in the finale. I am planning another podcast for later this year that will continue to be focused on midlife women, so please connect with me on social media, or sign up for my newsletter at www.christymaguire.com to get further updates.

We taped this episode live at Hot Pod Summit. That's our conference for the podcast industry. We have a whole newsletter for podcasters. It's called Hot Pod, written by our very own Ariel Shapiro. Hot Pod Summit is where we bring that community—of creators, trendsetters and decision makers—together to explore the latest developments in podcasting, audiobooks and more. It was a packed house and a great time. We ended the day by recording our first ever live Decoder with Conal Byrne, CEO of iHeartMedia's digital audio group. Conal oversees podcasting at a giant radio company, and his group accounts for a quarter of iHeart's revenue, which was a billion dollars last quarter alone. His team makes some of the biggest podcasts around with huge talent like Will Ferrell, Shonda Rhimes, and Charlamagne Tha God who you'll hear Conal talk about quite a lot. Conal and iHeart digital earned that success by doing some unconventional things. Whereas other big podcasting players like Spotify and Apple have tried to boost revenue through subscriptions or platform exclusivity, Conal shunned those approaches and said he's going for big audience reach, made possible in part by his ability to run ads and even shows on iHeart's huge network of traditional radio stations. But, that maverick approach has included some controversial steps as well. Last year, Verge alumni and Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman reported that iHeart worked with a firm called Jun Group to essentially buy podcast downloads through video games. To many in the industry, that seemed pretty disingenuous. So of course I asked Connell about that and lots more. He was a great guest, super game to answer the questions, especially in front of a live audience. Links: iHeartMedia Buys Stuff Media for $55 Million - WSJ  Podcasters Are Buying Millions of Listeners Through Mobile-Game Ads  Cost Per Thousand (CPM) Definition and Its Role in Marketing Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for Joe Rogan's podcast - The Verge Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet — is it? - Decoder, The Verge Decoder with Nilay Patel (@decoderpod) Official | TikTok   Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23381445 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.  The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here you are! Most Awesome and Brandana break down Super Wild Card Weekend, the future of Lamar Jackson and the best robots in movies! Hot Pod starts NOW!

Dive in head first for some HOT POD. Most Awesome and Brandana review their NFL Team Over Unders, invite on original guest of the pod Jim to talk the movie Troll and rank top Neds! It has to be heard to be believed!

This week: Sounds Profitable publishes brand safety and suitability study, Edison publishes top podcast networks by reach, Libsyn unveils November 2022 podcast advertising rates, Spotify unveils its top five podcasts in Wrapped, and GroupM and Magna predict a ‘durable' ad market next year.  Sounds Profitable publishes brand safety and suitability study Safe and Sound Manuela: We begin today's show with something close to home. Yesterday Sounds Profitable debuted its latest research project, Safe and Sound. The first-ever study of brand safety and suitability from the listener's perspective.  “Safe and Sound surveyed a representative sample of 1093 podcast listeners to find out what they consider ‘offensive,' what they are tolerant of, and how they view the brands that support podcast content when it pushes their boundaries.”  The study delivers a wide range of findings, ranging from bombshells like the idea political ads are unpopular with audiences - regardless of political party - to taking the temperature of what audiences consider most offensive. Spoiler alert: people dislike racist language.  That said, it looks like offensive content might not be as toxic to a podcast's overall image as initially assumed. When asked how they felt about brands that advertise or sponsor a podcast where a guest or host said something offensive or uncomfortable, an average of 30% of respondents said their feelings about the brands had not been changed.  When presented with the situation of a podcast someone regularly enjoys having an uncomfortable or offensive episode, 49% of respondents said they would stop listening to that particular episode but continue listening in general, while 31% said they'd continue listening to the outlier episode regardless.  The data suggests podcast-listening audiences take a more holistic approach to offensive content on podcasts they already have a relationship with. In general, listeners appear to not hold a single out-of-character episode against a podcast they're familiar with.  Edison Top Podcast Networks Shreya: This Tuesday Edison Research published the Q3 edition of U.S. Top Podcast Networks, by Reach. Listeners of The Download might remember Spotify took the lead back in Q2, just edging out SiriusXM Media. This last quarter SiriusXM has overtaken Spotify and returned to the top, leaving the top five at SiriusXM Media, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audioboom, and NPR, with Wondery eyeing the top five from sixth place. From the Edison blog post: “Within the top ten, the biggest jump in rank goes to Wondery/Audible/Amazon Music, up two rank positions, propelled in part by their acquisitions of major shows like Morbid and My Favorite Murder. Bubbling below the top ten, WarnerMedia gained three levels in rank, now up to 14th.“ Once more SiriusXM takes the top spot, but not without Spotify having broken their streak of having been at the top since Edison first started publishing top network by reach reports.  Libsyn Unveils November 2022 Podcast Advertising Rates Manuela: Continuing our unplanned theme of discussing data, let's take a moment to talk about CPM.  Last Thursday Libsyn published the November edition of their monthly CPM rate roundup from AdvertiseCast.  “The Company releases the figures to empower the podcaster and advertiser communities to readily monitor market pricing and provide greater insight into podcasting advertising as a monetization vehicle. The data is derived from actual sales data across AdvertiseCast's network of over 3,000 shows, including more than 225 exclusive podcasts.” Rates are continuing to increase, little by little. Last month the average CPM rate was $24.75 for a sixty-second ad spot, up 78 cents from the October average and a 6% year-over-year increase from November 2021. The report notes that the lower end of the spectrum contains fiction, television, and news content, averaging in the low twenties. On the high side, however, a familiar face for listeners of The Download. We've covered the meteoric rise of Kids & Family podcast content multiple times and its popularity continues into this November. The top four highest-earning categories in November are:  Technology and Health & Fitness, tied for third place at $26. Science at $27. And at the top of the leaderboard, Kids & Family at $28, over three dollars higher than industry average.  Spotify Wrapped is here, including its top podcasts Shreya: Some of you might have noticed a deluge of vibrant colors and boasting about listening habits last Wednesday, as the annual Spotify Wrapped dropped. Kimeko McCoy, writing for Digiday last Thursday, explains how big this yearly infodump has become: “It's an awareness campaign that utilizes user data to serve up users' favorite songs, albums and podcasts to be shared across social media platforms via the app, engaging more than 120 million users last year, according to Spotify. This year, Spotify has launched its Wrapped presence in Roblox, with the goal of tapping into an even bigger audience.” What originally started as a year-end recap in 2015 has grown to a marketing event large enough to necessitate a custom presence in one of the most popular online games. Since entering the podcast space, Spotify has also begun publishing a Podcast Wrapped.According to Ariel Shapiro in last week's issue of Hot Pod, the top five podcasts on Spotify this year are, in descending order: The Joe Rogan ExperienceCall Her DaddyAnything Goes with Emma ChamberlainCaso 63 (in all languages)And, finally, Crime Junkie.  This year only two of the top five podcasts aren't Spotify exclusives, though one of those two is set to become an exclusive early next year. Only the highly successful Crime Junkie breaks through the blockade of podcasts with strong Spotify ties. Shapiro attributes this to Spotify's ability to promote in-ecosystem properties like Caso 63 and its English adaptation Case 63, while podcasts that release on multiple platforms have to deal with divided metrics. Anything Goes performs well on Spotify, but it doesn't necessarily translate to similar performance on Apple Podcasts. While it got third place on Spotify for the year, Shapiro notes Chamberlain didn't make it into Edison Research's top fifty most-listened-to podcasts report for Q2. From the newsletter: “The list, therefore, tells us more about Spotify's strategy than it does about the overall market.”  GroupM and Magna's Global Ad Forecasts Predict A Durable Ad Market Manuela: For our final story today we bring up a bit of good news  n the face of a recession that we're either already in, or about to enter (depending on who you ask). Hana Yoo, writing for AdExchanger, covered reports from both GroupM and Magna this Monday.  “Global advertising revenue grew 6.5% in 2022 and is projected to grow 5.9% in 2023, according to GroupM's global year-end industry growth forecast. Meanwhile, Magna's December global ad forecast predicts 4.8% growth in 2023 after 6.6% growth in 2022.” Yoo notes that these projections are lower than earlier forecasts. Revised versions to meet current numbers, such as Magna's earlier prediction of a 6.3% growth for next year. Still, as Yoo reports GroupM's official line is they're looking at 2023 with ‘conservative optimism.' From the article: “And Magna is on the same page. Although we'll likely see “a slight slowdown in advertising revenue growth in an uncertain economic environment,” said Luke Stillman, Magna's SVP and group director of global market intelligence, growth should reaccelerate during the second half of the year.” In addition to forecasting overall growth, GroupM also anticipates retail media to grow from 101 billion to 110.7 billion in revenue next year. They also note CTV's particular resilience during COVID and its upward trends, even while paid TV subscriptions slip.  Forecasts for next year aren't cloudless skies, but they're also not trending towards thunderstorms just yet. Quick Hits Shreya: Finally, it's time for our semi-regular roundup of articles we're calling Quick Hits. These are articles that didn't quite make the cut for today's episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:  What's going on in audio advertising? Spotify grows, podcasts go global, and radio is a safe bet, by Shreya Feger for Insider Intelligence. A brief three-point breakdown of insights into the state of audio advertising and predictions for next year. Rephonic analyzed its podcast database to share opportunities for podcasters on Patreon, from last Thursday's issue of Inside Podcasting. A brief breakdown of Rephonic's blog post detailing their findings regarding podcasting on Patreon.Magellan AI Taps Experian to Improve Attribution by Magellan AI. A brief press release explaining their new partnership with Experian to use the Experian Identity Graph to power Attribution by Magellan AI. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Tom Webster are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week: Sounds Profitable publishes brand safety and suitability study, Edison publishes top podcast networks by reach, Libsyn unveils November 2022 podcast advertising rates, Spotify unveils its top five podcasts in Wrapped, and GroupM and Magna predict a ‘durable' ad market next year.  Sounds Profitable publishes brand safety and suitability study Safe and Sound Manuela: We begin today's show with something close to home. Yesterday Sounds Profitable debuted its latest research project, Safe and Sound. The first-ever study of brand safety and suitability from the listener's perspective.  “Safe and Sound surveyed a representative sample of 1093 podcast listeners to find out what they consider ‘offensive,' what they are tolerant of, and how they view the brands that support podcast content when it pushes their boundaries.”  The study delivers a wide range of findings, ranging from bombshells like the idea political ads are unpopular with audiences - regardless of political party - to taking the temperature of what audiences consider most offensive. Spoiler alert: people dislike racist language.  That said, it looks like offensive content might not be as toxic to a podcast's overall image as initially assumed. When asked how they felt about brands that advertise or sponsor a podcast where a guest or host said something offensive or uncomfortable, an average of 30% of respondents said their feelings about the brands had not been changed.  When presented with the situation of a podcast someone regularly enjoys having an uncomfortable or offensive episode, 49% of respondents said they would stop listening to that particular episode but continue listening in general, while 31% said they'd continue listening to the outlier episode regardless.  The data suggests podcast-listening audiences take a more holistic approach to offensive content on podcasts they already have a relationship with. In general, listeners appear to not hold a single out-of-character episode against a podcast they're familiar with.  Edison Top Podcast Networks Shreya: This Tuesday Edison Research published the Q3 edition of U.S. Top Podcast Networks, by Reach. Listeners of The Download might remember Spotify took the lead back in Q2, just edging out SiriusXM Media. This last quarter SiriusXM has overtaken Spotify and returned to the top, leaving the top five at SiriusXM Media, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audioboom, and NPR, with Wondery eyeing the top five from sixth place. From the Edison blog post: “Within the top ten, the biggest jump in rank goes to Wondery/Audible/Amazon Music, up two rank positions, propelled in part by their acquisitions of major shows like Morbid and My Favorite Murder. Bubbling below the top ten, WarnerMedia gained three levels in rank, now up to 14th.“ Once more SiriusXM takes the top spot, but not without Spotify having broken their streak of having been at the top since Edison first started publishing top network by reach reports.  Libsyn Unveils November 2022 Podcast Advertising Rates Manuela: Continuing our unplanned theme of discussing data, let's take a moment to talk about CPM.  Last Thursday Libsyn published the November edition of their monthly CPM rate roundup from AdvertiseCast.  “The Company releases the figures to empower the podcaster and advertiser communities to readily monitor market pricing and provide greater insight into podcasting advertising as a monetization vehicle. The data is derived from actual sales data across AdvertiseCast's network of over 3,000 shows, including more than 225 exclusive podcasts.” Rates are continuing to increase, little by little. Last month the average CPM rate was $24.75 for a sixty-second ad spot, up 78 cents from the October average and a 6% year-over-year increase from November 2021. The report notes that the lower end of the spectrum contains fiction, television, and news content, averaging in the low twenties. On the high side, however, a familiar face for listeners of The Download. We've covered the meteoric rise of Kids & Family podcast content multiple times and its popularity continues into this November. The top four highest-earning categories in November are:  Technology and Health & Fitness, tied for third place at $26. Science at $27. And at the top of the leaderboard, Kids & Family at $28, over three dollars higher than industry average.  Spotify Wrapped is here, including its top podcasts Shreya: Some of you might have noticed a deluge of vibrant colors and boasting about listening habits last Wednesday, as the annual Spotify Wrapped dropped. Kimeko McCoy, writing for Digiday last Thursday, explains how big this yearly infodump has become: “It's an awareness campaign that utilizes user data to serve up users' favorite songs, albums and podcasts to be shared across social media platforms via the app, engaging more than 120 million users last year, according to Spotify. This year, Spotify has launched its Wrapped presence in Roblox, with the goal of tapping into an even bigger audience.” What originally started as a year-end recap in 2015 has grown to a marketing event large enough to necessitate a custom presence in one of the most popular online games. Since entering the podcast space, Spotify has also begun publishing a Podcast Wrapped.According to Ariel Shapiro in last week's issue of Hot Pod, the top five podcasts on Spotify this year are, in descending order: The Joe Rogan ExperienceCall Her DaddyAnything Goes with Emma ChamberlainCaso 63 (in all languages)And, finally, Crime Junkie.  This year only two of the top five podcasts aren't Spotify exclusives, though one of those two is set to become an exclusive early next year. Only the highly successful Crime Junkie breaks through the blockade of podcasts with strong Spotify ties. Shapiro attributes this to Spotify's ability to promote in-ecosystem properties like Caso 63 and its English adaptation Case 63, while podcasts that release on multiple platforms have to deal with divided metrics. Anything Goes performs well on Spotify, but it doesn't necessarily translate to similar performance on Apple Podcasts. While it got third place on Spotify for the year, Shapiro notes Chamberlain didn't make it into Edison Research's top fifty most-listened-to podcasts report for Q2. From the newsletter: “The list, therefore, tells us more about Spotify's strategy than it does about the overall market.”  GroupM and Magna's Global Ad Forecasts Predict A Durable Ad Market Manuela: For our final story today we bring up a bit of good news  n the face of a recession that we're either already in, or about to enter (depending on who you ask). Hana Yoo, writing for AdExchanger, covered reports from both GroupM and Magna this Monday.  “Global advertising revenue grew 6.5% in 2022 and is projected to grow 5.9% in 2023, according to GroupM's global year-end industry growth forecast. Meanwhile, Magna's December global ad forecast predicts 4.8% growth in 2023 after 6.6% growth in 2022.” Yoo notes that these projections are lower than earlier forecasts. Revised versions to meet current numbers, such as Magna's earlier prediction of a 6.3% growth for next year. Still, as Yoo reports GroupM's official line is they're looking at 2023 with ‘conservative optimism.' From the article: “And Magna is on the same page. Although we'll likely see “a slight slowdown in advertising revenue growth in an uncertain economic environment,” said Luke Stillman, Magna's SVP and group director of global market intelligence, growth should reaccelerate during the second half of the year.” In addition to forecasting overall growth, GroupM also anticipates retail media to grow from 101 billion to 110.7 billion in revenue next year. They also note CTV's particular resilience during COVID and its upward trends, even while paid TV subscriptions slip.  Forecasts for next year aren't cloudless skies, but they're also not trending towards thunderstorms just yet. Quick Hits Shreya: Finally, it's time for our semi-regular roundup of articles we're calling Quick Hits. These are articles that didn't quite make the cut for today's episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:  What's going on in audio advertising? Spotify grows, podcasts go global, and radio is a safe bet, by Shreya Feger for Insider Intelligence. A brief three-point breakdown of insights into the state of audio advertising and predictions for next year. Rephonic analyzed its podcast database to share opportunities for podcasters on Patreon, from last Thursday's issue of Inside Podcasting. A brief breakdown of Rephonic's blog post detailing their findings regarding podcasting on Patreon.Magellan AI Taps Experian to Improve Attribution by Magellan AI. A brief press release explaining their new partnership with Experian to use the Experian Identity Graph to power Attribution by Magellan AI. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Tom Webster are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Greens make their move, and we learn that Aemond reads just as much as he trains in sword fighting. Also, being a small folk member in Kingslanding... not great. Hope y'all enjoy!!

As we discover another Aegon in the family. King Viserys, the greens, and the blacks hang out together in Kingslanding. And we react to their last supper on the pod.

This week: Podcasting overtakes talk radio, CPMs increase, video game ads counting as podcast downloads, and Publishers test personalizing newsletters. Podcasting overtakes talk radio, CPMs increase Manuela: For today's first segment we're going to cover two recent pieces about industry growth. First, Kurt Hanson's Rain News recap of the Audioscape 2022 talk by Cumulus Media executive Pierre Bouvard. The biggest eye-catching number from Bouvard's presentation of Edison Research media involves how the 18-34 age group spends their weekly time listening to talk or personality-driven audio content. Terrestrial radio has been overtaken in this bracket, with podcasts taking 60% of those listening hours.  “Even within the older demos of 25-54 and 35-64, podcast listening's share of talk/personality listening is high — 47% and 39%, respectively, with those numbers up nearly double and more than triple, respectively, compared to five years ago.” Continuing the trend of good news from new data, Libsyn's Advertisecast has published their Podcast Advertising Rates 2022 report. The presentation is compiled from reporting data provided by 2,985 podcasts. Podnews editor James Cridland reported on Monday:   “There has been a jump in the average CPM for podcast advertising, according to Libsyn's AdvertiseCast: the average is now $24.35, the second-highest on record. It's up 3.7% month-on-month, or 5% year-on-year.”  Podcasting continues its upward climb. More listener share over radio and growing CPMs sounds like a good thing to us.  A follow-up on video game ads counting as podcast downloads.  Shreya: Last week we covered Ashely Carman's piece covering podcast companies, most notably iHeartRadio, purchasing downloads via mobile game ads. In a follow-up piece covering industry reactions posted last Thursday, Carman got official comment from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.  “The standards are in a continual state of review,” said Eric John, vice president of the media center at the IAB. “We're trying to ski to where the puck is going ultimately, and we're going to make standards to match the industry's needs.” On the same day Podnews reported a response from Podtrac explaining why the gaming ads only playing 20 seconds of an episode of were counted as full downloads. “It's our understanding they appear as browser traffic without a unique user agent (or [unique] IP address). These downloads don't have a material impact on the publisher rankings including the rank order of the top publishers.”  Then, in related news, HotPod reported on an InsideRadio piece covering Podtrac suspending its weekly data newsletter after iHeart stopped sponsoring the project. The decision was reportedly made over a month ago. According to HotPod, the last data tracker email they'd received was published September 13th, while the last one with iHeartRadio branding had been sent August 15th.  Since the HotPod publication went live, InsideRadio - a company owned by iHeartMedia - has pulled their Podtrac story.  Publishers test personalizing newsletters with varying degrees of success Manuela: Last Wednesday Digiday's Sara Guaglione reported the experiences of publishers who experimented with using tools to generate personalized newsletters for subscribers. We're covering it here as the tools and methodology involved might just be of interest to podcasting. From the article:  “As companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post experiment with personalizing their homepages to get readers to consume more articles, publishers are also tweaking newsletters to serve readers' specific interests and behaviors — but to varying degrees of success. The piece opens with the success story of The Telegraph, which has run the personalized newsletter Headlines for a year. Each time a newsletter needs to be sent, an algorithm selects vertical-specific content recommendations based on browsing history, including making sure to not recommend articles the subscriber has already read.  The Telegraph reports higher click-through rates, page views per click, and time spent on the website from Headlines subscribers vs. their standard hand-built newsletters. In contrast, publications like The Toronto Star have tried similar things and found little to no results. Newsroom director David Topping told Digiday:   Most newsletter subscribers “seem pretty happy getting what everyone else got,” Topping said. The personalized newsletter drove engagement for a “niche audience” who wanted tailored recommendations but it wasn't “necessarily something that's going to move the needle,” he added.” Niche audiences are a thing podcasting does well. The recommendation tech used to create these newsletters could be of use in the podcasting industry. An individual news podcast could build itself live akin to how Spooler allows The Refresh to add new segments on the fly. Except, with a recommendation engine, a news podcast could be constructed of only segments the recommendation tool knows the listener would enjoy.  Or, scaled up to an entire production house or network, the same tech could be applied to give bespoke RSS feeds to subscribers that only dole out episodes of podcasts that company produces that the listener would enjoy. An elegant solution for the existing logjam of either dozens of individual RSS feeds for a stable of similar podcasts, or one feed containing multiple different shows.  Quick Hits: Recommended Weekend Reading Shreya: Finally, it's time for Quick Hits, our roundup of articles that didn't make the cut for today's episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:  Numbers games by Brian Morrissey for The Rebooting newsletter. An excellent op-ed discussing how recent focus on having writers create content that generates subscriptions to a publication is the modern version of prioritizing writing that generated page clicks. Both overlook the meaty day-to-day content that keeps readers coming back. An excellent piece of opinion about an industry next door to podcasting.  What are the Top 10 Alternative ID Solutions and How Should You Use Them? By Andrew Byrd for Admonsters. For those looking to get into some deep-level tech discussion, Byrd details ten privacy-focused Alternative IDs to future-proof for the day when Google eventually kills third party cookies.  Political advertising is propping up a slow ad market by Jeremy Goldamn for InsiderIntelligence. Political ads are a hot-button topic for podcasting, but there's no denying it's a midterm election year and spending is only going up between now and November.  Hit Songs Are Staying on the Top Charts Longer Than Ever by Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg. A companion piece to last week's Quick Hit from The Guardian, Shaw details how modern streaming analytics are making top charts stagnate. Where a person who buys one CD a quarter and listened to it 500 times didn't affect charts in the 90s, that same listening habit can keep artists afloat for years on Spotify.  How ad tech aims to build back better by Ronana Shields for Digiday. We're four years into a post-GDPR world. Shields covers the current state of adtech and privacy via discussions had at the first in-person Dmexco conference since 2020.  The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Tom Webster are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week: Podcasting overtakes talk radio, CPMs increase, video game ads counting as podcast downloads, and Publishers test personalizing newsletters. Podcasting overtakes talk radio, CPMs increase Manuela: For today's first segment we're going to cover two recent pieces about industry growth. First, Kurt Hanson's Rain News recap of the Audioscape 2022 talk by Cumulus Media executive Pierre Bouvard. The biggest eye-catching number from Bouvard's presentation of Edison Research media involves how the 18-34 age group spends their weekly time listening to talk or personality-driven audio content. Terrestrial radio has been overtaken in this bracket, with podcasts taking 60% of those listening hours.  “Even within the older demos of 25-54 and 35-64, podcast listening's share of talk/personality listening is high — 47% and 39%, respectively, with those numbers up nearly double and more than triple, respectively, compared to five years ago.” Continuing the trend of good news from new data, Libsyn's Advertisecast has published their Podcast Advertising Rates 2022 report. The presentation is compiled from reporting data provided by 2,985 podcasts. Podnews editor James Cridland reported on Monday:   “There has been a jump in the average CPM for podcast advertising, according to Libsyn's AdvertiseCast: the average is now $24.35, the second-highest on record. It's up 3.7% month-on-month, or 5% year-on-year.”  Podcasting continues its upward climb. More listener share over radio and growing CPMs sounds like a good thing to us.  A follow-up on video game ads counting as podcast downloads.  Shreya: Last week we covered Ashely Carman's piece covering podcast companies, most notably iHeartRadio, purchasing downloads via mobile game ads. In a follow-up piece covering industry reactions posted last Thursday, Carman got official comment from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.  “The standards are in a continual state of review,” said Eric John, vice president of the media center at the IAB. “We're trying to ski to where the puck is going ultimately, and we're going to make standards to match the industry's needs.” On the same day Podnews reported a response from Podtrac explaining why the gaming ads only playing 20 seconds of an episode of were counted as full downloads. “It's our understanding they appear as browser traffic without a unique user agent (or [unique] IP address). These downloads don't have a material impact on the publisher rankings including the rank order of the top publishers.”  Then, in related news, HotPod reported on an InsideRadio piece covering Podtrac suspending its weekly data newsletter after iHeart stopped sponsoring the project. The decision was reportedly made over a month ago. According to HotPod, the last data tracker email they'd received was published September 13th, while the last one with iHeartRadio branding had been sent August 15th.  Since the HotPod publication went live, InsideRadio - a company owned by iHeartMedia - has pulled their Podtrac story.  Publishers test personalizing newsletters with varying degrees of success Manuela: Last Wednesday Digiday's Sara Guaglione reported the experiences of publishers who experimented with using tools to generate personalized newsletters for subscribers. We're covering it here as the tools and methodology involved might just be of interest to podcasting. From the article:  “As companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post experiment with personalizing their homepages to get readers to consume more articles, publishers are also tweaking newsletters to serve readers' specific interests and behaviors — but to varying degrees of success. The piece opens with the success story of The Telegraph, which has run the personalized newsletter Headlines for a year. Each time a newsletter needs to be sent, an algorithm selects vertical-specific content recommendations based on browsing history, including making sure to not recommend articles the subscriber has already read.  The Telegraph reports higher click-through rates, page views per click, and time spent on the website from Headlines subscribers vs. their standard hand-built newsletters. In contrast, publications like The Toronto Star have tried similar things and found little to no results. Newsroom director David Topping told Digiday:   Most newsletter subscribers “seem pretty happy getting what everyone else got,” Topping said. The personalized newsletter drove engagement for a “niche audience” who wanted tailored recommendations but it wasn't “necessarily something that's going to move the needle,” he added.” Niche audiences are a thing podcasting does well. The recommendation tech used to create these newsletters could be of use in the podcasting industry. An individual news podcast could build itself live akin to how Spooler allows The Refresh to add new segments on the fly. Except, with a recommendation engine, a news podcast could be constructed of only segments the recommendation tool knows the listener would enjoy.  Or, scaled up to an entire production house or network, the same tech could be applied to give bespoke RSS feeds to subscribers that only dole out episodes of podcasts that company produces that the listener would enjoy. An elegant solution for the existing logjam of either dozens of individual RSS feeds for a stable of similar podcasts, or one feed containing multiple different shows.  Quick Hits: Recommended Weekend Reading Shreya: Finally, it's time for Quick Hits, our roundup of articles that didn't make the cut for today's episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:  Numbers games by Brian Morrissey for The Rebooting newsletter. An excellent op-ed discussing how recent focus on having writers create content that generates subscriptions to a publication is the modern version of prioritizing writing that generated page clicks. Both overlook the meaty day-to-day content that keeps readers coming back. An excellent piece of opinion about an industry next door to podcasting.  What are the Top 10 Alternative ID Solutions and How Should You Use Them? By Andrew Byrd for Admonsters. For those looking to get into some deep-level tech discussion, Byrd details ten privacy-focused Alternative IDs to future-proof for the day when Google eventually kills third party cookies.  Political advertising is propping up a slow ad market by Jeremy Goldamn for InsiderIntelligence. Political ads are a hot-button topic for podcasting, but there's no denying it's a midterm election year and spending is only going up between now and November.  Hit Songs Are Staying on the Top Charts Longer Than Ever by Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg. A companion piece to last week's Quick Hit from The Guardian, Shaw details how modern streaming analytics are making top charts stagnate. Where a person who buys one CD a quarter and listened to it 500 times didn't affect charts in the 90s, that same listening habit can keep artists afloat for years on Spotify.  How ad tech aims to build back better by Ronana Shields for Digiday. We're four years into a post-GDPR world. Shields covers the current state of adtech and privacy via discussions had at the first in-person Dmexco conference since 2020.  The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Tom Webster are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We bring our unconventional style and give our instant reactions to episode 7 of House of the Dragons. This might be our favorite episode of the season. Hope y'all enjoy.

Today's Future of Music episode comes from Ariel Shapiro, The Verge's lead reporter of HotPod, our weekly newsletter about the audio industry. Last week on the show we talked about old music… specifically how the back catalog is a big part of what makes “new” music. This week Ariel picks up right where we left off, with the revival of stars from the past on platforms like TikTok. But what about new… undiscovered talent? Is that even a thing anymore? Can a budding artist find their place in the world of viral video? Ariel explores the complicated relationship between musicians and platforms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this minisode we are joined by a special guest! And don't worry, Skip and I will give you our full reactions to House of the Dragon Episode 5 on a later episode. Also check out our poll for our spotify listeners. Does Ser Criston Cole deserve an apology?

This week: Analyst predicts programmatic will get podcasting to six billion in ad spend, the new iOS update takes care of AppleCoreMedia, Apple announces virtual neighborhood for Latine Heritage Month, brand-lift studies are catching up with the times, and kids content is booming for Paramount+. Programmatic advertising could make podcasting a $6 billion industry by 2026 Manuela: In last Friday's Hot Pod Insider, Ariel Shapiro covers B. Riley analyst Daniel Day's newest publication about the industry. His most attention-grabbing prediction, as the headline spoils, expects podcast ad spending to be up to six billion dollars within four years. It'll be an uphill battle to get there. Shapiro points out the potential downsides of programmatic without the right data and infrastructure by recalling the infamous Wild Turkey incident. Back in May Spotify accidentally ran an ad for budget whiskey on every podcast on the app simultaneously, leading to a social media firestorm as users posted screenshots of the most inappropriate examples of podcasts to pair with Wild Turkey. Day is of the opinion more detailed location data will be a game-changer that avoids such issues in future.  “Small and mid-sized businesses really have almost entirely sat out podcast advertising to date,” Day told Hot Pod. “These advances in geo-targeting and programmatic allow mom and pops and local, regional businesses to access this medium in a way that they couldn't before, absent reaching out to like some local sports or news podcast. Now, they can target audiences listening to some big national podcast.” Day points to iHeartMedia putting significant investments into podcasting, as well as podcasting making up a larger portion of the company's revenue each year, as examples of the growth he projects in action.  iOS 16: What's new for Apple Podcasts Shreya: Last Wednesday Apple published an update blog detailing some of the new features coming with their iOS 16 update.  The update comes with some creature comforts for the user, such as more prominent placement of the sleep timer button and better Apple Watch integration for podcasts. There's also a bit of housekeeping noted, in case you missed the multiple emails over the past few weeks: “Show and provider titles will continue to be displayed alongside show artwork on the Library and Search tabs, so make sure your show's metadata is up to date and that your artwork includes your show's title for the best experience.”  The most important feature of this update for the business side of podcasting isn't mentioned in the update blog, though. This update brings the change to AppleCoreMedia user agent that'll shift how we view Apple's footprint in podcasting. As covered in our June 10th episode, this will lead to far less confusion as to what traffic is actually coming from Apple Podcasts. Those who didn't report ACM will no longer underestimate traffic from Apple, and those who labeled all traffic from ACM as Apple will get a more balanced look at just how much traffic is coming out of Apple. For those that are code-savvy, we'll include a link in the show notes to the official Apple developer page for the updated user agent key. Apple Podcast launches "El Vecindario" collections. Manuela: On the subject of Apple: This Monday an email sent by Apple announced their plans for Latine Heritage Month, which runs from today through October 15th.  “Later this month, Apple will showcase the abundance of Latine created content across genres, formats, and languages – and spotlight many great creators. Apple Podcasts has created a special destination, titled El Vecindario, that honors the spaces where Latine communities come together and conversations originate.” El Vecindario, the neighborhood in Spanish, will showcase Latine-created content covering multiple genres, formats, and languages.  Influencer marketing brand-lift studies are improving Shreya: Last Friday Marketing Brew's Phoebe Bain used the release of the Association of National Advertisers' organic measurement guidelines for influencers as an excuse to discuss how brand-lift studies have matured.  “Out of more than 1,000 Marketing Brew readers surveyed last month, about one-third said they think measurement for influencer marketing has “evolved significantly” over the past two years.”  A useful tool to track that rapid evolution is the brand-lift study. Bain spends a good portion of the article explaining the basics: two groups are asked questions about something, with only one having experience with that thing. Any differing answers or familiarity expressed by the second group is quantified as - you guessed it - brand lift.  Old-school brand-lift studies would ask simple questions regarding information retention, or whether the audience wanted to buy the product in an ad. Modernized studies take into account the changing media landscape, especially with the popularity of influencers.VP of marketing at creator management platform Grin  Ali Fazal explains to Marketing Brew: “With an influencer marketing brand-lift study, questions go a level deeper. Those questions might focus more on brand affinity, or how consumers feel. For example, “is the brand cool? Is it viral? Is it modern?” These questions focus less on what consumers remember, and more on a brand's overall or social appeal. In an influencer marketing brand-lift study, he said, the questions focus on the full picture rather than just the ad itself. “This measures the true depth of impact that creator marketing has,” he said. Why should the business side of podcasting care? Podcasting is influencer marketing. In a world of pixel-based brand attribution and walled garden ad solutions, people are finding their options are missing the mark for influencer and podcaster alike. Brand lift studies by companies like Edison Research, Signal Hill Insights, Veritonic, or Nielsen can help fill that gap.  How kids shows are boosting Paramount+ Manuela: Last Thursday Kelsey Sutton published a look at how kids' content is performing well at Paramount+. While Paramount+ is separate from Paramount's podcasting ventures, The Download has been covering the boom in kid-friendly podcasting since our March 18th episode. Paramount's experiences reaffirm that family and kid-oriented content drive engagement.  “When it comes to streaming, parents will go without eating before disconnecting something that entertains their kids,” Brian Robbins, president and CEO of Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon, said Tuesday at the Bank of America Securities 2022 Media, Communications, and Entertainment Conference. “Kids content is an amazing, amazing retention tool for us.” The streaming platform has done well for itself since the CBS All-Access rebrand. Currently Paramount+ reports 3 million paid subscribers.  “Kids' programming on streaming can also help fill the audience void as linear viewing continues to drop off. “If you take our linear share and the audience for kids that we've picked up on Paramount+, we actually have more audience and share of kids 2–11 than we've had in years when you combine them both,” Robbins said.? As reported back in March, studies show the Kids & Family categories have grown 20% since last year and there's reason to believe poor categorization of content is causing a lower number than the industry is actually experiencing. Kids content is doing quite well, as any parent will tell you.  Quick Hits: Recommended Weekend Reading Shreya: Finally, it's time for our semi-regular roundup of articles we're calling Quick Hits. These are articles that didn't quite make the cut for today's episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:  Class Photos by Skye Pillsbury, for The Squeeze.  Pillsbury holds a mirror up to diversity on the business side of podcasting by compiling yearbook-style collages of the big podcasting company's leaders and known executives with deal-making power. A must-read.  Introducing The Mullet Career Strategy™ — Creativity & Business by Steve Pratt. Pacific Content co-founder Steve Pratt announces his upcoming venture titled The Creativity Business, a strategy firm aimed at helping creatives learn better business and businesses learn better creativity.   17 Stats That Reveal the Power of Podcast Advertising and Host-Read Ads by Connie Chen. In addition to quoting our After These Messages study, senior manager of content management at Gumball Connie Chen brings a bundle of research to back up the efficacy of host-read ads. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Tom Webster are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week: Analyst predicts programmatic will get podcasting to six billion in ad spend, the new iOS update takes care of AppleCoreMedia, Apple announces virtual neighborhood for Latine Heritage Month, brand-lift studies are catching up with the times, and kids content is booming for Paramount+. Programmatic advertising could make podcasting a $6 billion industry by 2026 Manuela: In last Friday's Hot Pod Insider, Ariel Shapiro covers B. Riley analyst Daniel Day's newest publication about the industry. His most attention-grabbing prediction, as the headline spoils, expects podcast ad spending to be up to six billion dollars within four years. It'll be an uphill battle to get there. Shapiro points out the potential downsides of programmatic without the right data and infrastructure by recalling the infamous Wild Turkey incident. Back in May Spotify accidentally ran an ad for budget whiskey on every podcast on the app simultaneously, leading to a social media firestorm as users posted screenshots of the most inappropriate examples of podcasts to pair with Wild Turkey. Day is of the opinion more detailed location data will be a game-changer that avoids such issues in future.  “Small and mid-sized businesses really have almost entirely sat out podcast advertising to date,” Day told Hot Pod. “These advances in geo-targeting and programmatic allow mom and pops and local, regional businesses to access this medium in a way that they couldn't before, absent reaching out to like some local sports or news podcast. Now, they can target audiences listening to some big national podcast.” Day points to iHeartMedia putting significant investments into podcasting, as well as podcasting making up a larger portion of the company's revenue each year, as examples of the growth he projects in action.  iOS 16: What's new for Apple Podcasts Shreya: Last Wednesday Apple published an update blog detailing some of the new features coming with their iOS 16 update.  The update comes with some creature comforts for the user, such as more prominent placement of the sleep timer button and better Apple Watch integration for podcasts. There's also a bit of housekeeping noted, in case you missed the multiple emails over the past few weeks: “Show and provider titles will continue to be displayed alongside show artwork on the Library and Search tabs, so make sure your show's metadata is up to date and that your artwork includes your show's title for the best experience.”  The most important feature of this update for the business side of podcasting isn't mentioned in the update blog, though. This update brings the change to AppleCoreMedia user agent that'll shift how we view Apple's footprint in podcasting. As covered in our June 10th episode, this will lead to far less confusion as to what traffic is actually coming from Apple Podcasts. Those who didn't report ACM will no longer underestimate traffic from Apple, and those who labeled all traffic from ACM as Apple will get a more balanced look at just how much traffic is coming out of Apple. For those that are code-savvy, we'll include a link in the show notes to the official Apple developer page for the updated user agent key. Apple Podcast launches "El Vecindario" collections. Manuela: On the subject of Apple: This Monday an email sent by Apple announced their plans for Latine Heritage Month, which runs from today through October 15th.  “Later this month, Apple will showcase the abundance of Latine created content across genres, formats, and languages – and spotlight many great creators. Apple Podcasts has created a special destination, titled El Vecindario, that honors the spaces where Latine communities come together and conversations originate.” El Vecindario, the neighborhood in Spanish, will showcase Latine-created content covering multiple genres, formats, and languages.  Influencer marketing brand-lift studies are improving Shreya: Last Friday Marketing Brew's Phoebe Bain used the release of the Association of National Advertisers' organic measurement guidelines for influencers as an excuse to discuss how brand-lift studies have matured.  “Out of more than 1,000 Marketing Brew readers surveyed last month, about one-third said they think measurement for influencer marketing has “evolved significantly” over the past two years.”  A useful tool to track that rapid evolution is the brand-lift study. Bain spends a good portion of the article explaining the basics: two groups are asked questions about something, with only one having experience with that thing. Any differing answers or familiarity expressed by the second group is quantified as - you guessed it - brand lift.  Old-school brand-lift studies would ask simple questions regarding information retention, or whether the audience wanted to buy the product in an ad. Modernized studies take into account the changing media landscape, especially with the popularity of influencers.VP of marketing at creator management platform Grin  Ali Fazal explains to Marketing Brew: “With an influencer marketing brand-lift study, questions go a level deeper. Those questions might focus more on brand affinity, or how consumers feel. For example, “is the brand cool? Is it viral? Is it modern?” These questions focus less on what consumers remember, and more on a brand's overall or social appeal. In an influencer marketing brand-lift study, he said, the questions focus on the full picture rather than just the ad itself. “This measures the true depth of impact that creator marketing has,” he said. Why should the business side of podcasting care? Podcasting is influencer marketing. In a world of pixel-based brand attribution and walled garden ad solutions, people are finding their options are missing the mark for influencer and podcaster alike. Brand lift studies by companies like Edison Research, Signal Hill Insights, Veritonic, or Nielsen can help fill that gap.  How kids shows are boosting Paramount+ Manuela: Last Thursday Kelsey Sutton published a look at how kids' content is performing well at Paramount+. While Paramount+ is separate from Paramount's podcasting ventures, The Download has been covering the boom in kid-friendly podcasting since our March 18th episode. Paramount's experiences reaffirm that family and kid-oriented content drive engagement.  “When it comes to streaming, parents will go without eating before disconnecting something that entertains their kids,” Brian Robbins, president and CEO of Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon, said Tuesday at the Bank of America Securities 2022 Media, Communications, and Entertainment Conference. “Kids content is an amazing, amazing retention tool for us.” The streaming platform has done well for itself since the CBS All-Access rebrand. Currently Paramount+ reports 3 million paid subscribers.  “Kids' programming on streaming can also help fill the audience void as linear viewing continues to drop off. “If you take our linear share and the audience for kids that we've picked up on Paramount+, we actually have more audience and share of kids 2–11 than we've had in years when you combine them both,” Robbins said.? As reported back in March, studies show the Kids & Family categories have grown 20% since last year and there's reason to believe poor categorization of content is causing a lower number than the industry is actually experiencing. Kids content is doing quite well, as any parent will tell you.  Quick Hits: Recommended Weekend Reading Shreya: Finally, it's time for our semi-regular roundup of articles we're calling Quick Hits. These are articles that didn't quite make the cut for today's episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week:  Class Photos by Skye Pillsbury, for The Squeeze.  Pillsbury holds a mirror up to diversity on the business side of podcasting by compiling yearbook-style collages of the big podcasting company's leaders and known executives with deal-making power. A must-read.  Introducing The Mullet Career Strategy™ — Creativity & Business by Steve Pratt. Pacific Content co-founder Steve Pratt announces his upcoming venture titled The Creativity Business, a strategy firm aimed at helping creatives learn better business and businesses learn better creativity.   17 Stats That Reveal the Power of Podcast Advertising and Host-Read Ads by Connie Chen. In addition to quoting our After These Messages study, senior manager of content management at Gumball Connie Chen brings a bundle of research to back up the efficacy of host-read ads. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Tom Webster are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Twitter's new podcast playlist function in its Spaces Tab for Twitter Blue users on iOS.  (Pacific Content - Edison Research)  What percentage of Americans say podcasts are too long?  Megan Markle's podcast "Archetypes" on hold - (Hotpod).  The Health and Fitness podcast category continues to "PUMP-UP" downloads!Website:  www.podcastingbythenumbers.comThe fastest 4-Minutes in Podcasting.  It's your daily source for facts and stats from the Podcasting Industry.  Each episode will provide you four key insights and indicators that will help maneuver you through the ever-changing Podcasting landscape.Host:  Gary SpurgeonSPONSOR:  The Podcast Business Journal

After the steamiest(?) episode of HotD we give our instant reaction to the episode. Instead of recapping Stanford gives his hot take on the loser of the week and Skip tries to calm him down. Hope y'all enjoy.

04.09.2022 18:84 Sunday in London leaning on a wall with some graffiti. Pink, white, stripes of blue, black and some grey, and then yellow at the bottom. “It's not what you think.” “So you're not talking to a pretty lady?”

#608 I'm not afraid to admit when I make a mistake, and that's exactly why I'm publishing this episode. You've heard me say this, “Nobody wakes up in the morning wanting more emails.” I was wrong about that, and I'll tell you exactly why. There are newsletters that contain valuable niche content that people are excited to see pop up in their inboxes. James Clear's 3-2-1 Newsletter, the Hot Pod newsletter for podcast industry news, and Morning Brew are great examples of this. The team and I have been hard at work to create something similar for the SPI audience. Today I want to introduce you to the Unstuck newsletter. With concise, five-minute lessons to help you get unstuck, this will be our weekly email that you can't wait to read. Every message contains a story that will inspire you, and we'll provide the resources you need to move to the next level in your business. We're very excited to hear what you think! Show notes and more a SmartPassiveIncome.com/session608.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We dive into episode 2 of HBO's House of the Dragon. We somehow discuss, PETA, haircare, and cave paintings. Enjoy!

A House of the Dragon instant reaction podcast. We jumped on our microphones ten minutes after the episode ended. Come hear our instant hot takes about HBO's House of the Dragon and watch us slowly learn how to podcast.

Guest InterviewsJohn Spurlock - Thread.land  Matt Maderios - CastosShow NotesAcast has released the company's Q2/22 financial report.The Swedish company now hosts 66,000 podcasts (a record growth last quarter); the number of listens in the quarter increased 41% year-on-year. The company lost $11m in the quarter, though now expects to make EBITDA profit in 2024, earlier than previously expected. “The heavy investment phase is now over, " says CEO Ross Adams, noting that the advertising market has been cooling globally.Bloomberg's Ashley Carman's newsletter launches next month. Ashley wrote about the world of paid podcast appearances, or what some consider podcast payola. Guests are paying hosts up to $50K for an interview, and the disclosures around that exchange aren't always clear or even existent.Skye Pillsbury (Frmr contributor, Hot Pod) has launched her newsletter called The SqueezeWant to support podcast:socialInteract with ActivityPub in your feed. Find your podcast on thread.land then DM @johnspurlock the unique prefix url .Congratulation to Josh Chen from JustCast for also adding Alby integration and enabling autofill in Value4Value tag to enable the Alby wallet. Online studio Cleanfeed has won an Emmy Award for Engineering, Science & Technology.The BBC claims a new record number of weekly users for its audio app, BBC Sounds.All future @SoundsProfNews podcasts will be built with @spoolermedia.Publisher and broadcaster Audacy has bought podcast app Moonbeam.Edison Research will unveil The Latino Podcast Listener Report 2022

01:39 - The Verge's David Pierce talks with senior science reporter Loren Grush about what it took to get those images from the James Webb Telescope we saw this week. Marvel at the first batch of full-color images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope How engineers got the world's most powerful space telescope ready to do science 20:45 - David talks with Christian Oestlien, VP of product management at YouTube about what's next for YouTube TV and their approach for bundling packages. YouTube TV hits 5 million subscribers and is looking like the future of cable 28:55 - The Verge answers your tech questions! Featuring Verge reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Hot Pod reporter Ariel Shapiro, Verge writer Cameron Faulkner, and managing editor Alex Cranz Wi-Fi 6E, explained: what is 6GHz Wi-Fi? Where is Spotify HiFi? Apple Studio Display review: nothing to see here Samsung M8 Smart Monitor review: the good enough of both worlds The best webcam to buy right now LG C1 OLED vs. Samsung Odyssey Neo G9: the perfect monitor doesn't exist Alienware's QD-OLED monitor sets a new standard for gaming displays Sony's InZone gaming monitors and headsets are for more than just PS5 gamers Email us at vergecast@theverge.com, we'd love to hear from you. Call our Vergecast Hotline! 866-VERGE11 (866-837-4311) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The Download: Sounds Profitable publishes the Creators report. Slate is running provocative billboards for Slow Burn, Spotify turns its radar on podcasts, rising YouTube CPMs make the platform even more attractive for podcasters, and news organizations struggle to keep young folks around. Firstly, if you'll indulge us a bit of self-promotion, the first ever Sounds Profitable report has been delivered! On Tuesday Sounds Profitable hosted a first-of-its-kind presentation of The Creators. Here's how we billed it: “Sounds Profitable, in partnership with Edison Research, has put together the first credible study of the profile of podcast creators in America. This is an incredibly important benchmark in the history of podcasting and the first of many regular reports Sounds Profitable will be publishing to chart the future of the audio business.”  The Creators operates off a data sample of 617 people who fit the profile of having produced a podcast, were over the age of eighteen, and listened to podcasts weekly. The data was collected from Q2 2021 through Q1 of this year.  Some results put into sharp focus many assumed truths of the industry, as well as challenging others. The gender makeup of those polled showed sixty-nine percent of creators were men, twenty percentage points higher than the population of the United States. On that same token, the ethnicity spectrum shows podcasting has more diversity, with more representation of Black and Hispanic/Latino podcasters than the census reports as a national average.  These juicy stats and more are available at SoundsProfitable.com/thecreators, from the presentation's video to a spiffy 35-slide PDF of just the presentation, for you raw data nerds out there.  In an advertising campaign fitting of a flashy documentary, Slate is running a stealth billboard campaign for the current season of Slow Burn. From Ariel Shapiro's reporting on Tuesday's issue of Hot Pod:  “Slate is launching a provocative new campaign to promote its latest season of Slow Burn, which tells the story of Shirley Wheeler, the first woman convicted of manslaughter for getting an abortion. The outlet has placed billboards in states that now have some of the strictest abortion laws in the country urging passersby to “Defend Shirley Wheeler.” The billboards are up in seven states with deeply-entrenched anti-abortion sentiment that had trigger laws waiting for Roe v. Wade's nullification.  The same issue of Hot Pod also spotlighted the efforts of Earbuds Podcast Collective founder Arielle Nissenblatt to organize a massive campaign of podcasts running pre-roll message to advocate for abortion rights. Messages like the one you'll find at the beginning of this very episode. Hundreds of podcasters have signed on to the cause, including The Bechdel Cast, You Are Good, and legacy household name My Favorite Murder.  This Wednesday Spotify announced a podcast version of its RADAR program, originally created to spotlight up-and-coming artists on the music side of the app. RADAR Podcasters aims to get promising young podcasts in front of wider audiences with free exposure in-app. Each quarter Spotify's content editors in participating regions will select three podcasts to spotlight with the RADAR program. Podcast Editorial Lead Brianne O'Brien goes more into the rhetoric used:  “We'll focus on creators with shows that exhibit authenticity and inclusivity, give us a reason to keep listening, and educate and entertain.”  Currently the list of participating countries is fifteen, including thirteen countries in which English is not the default language. This is encouraging news for more big company recognition of podcasting's strengths outside the North American and UK English-speaking bubble. O'Brien seems passionate about the cause, too.   “My team, and Spotifiers more broadly, are podcast enthusiasts. So first and foremost, we really want to underscore the hard work that's being done by creators to take their podcast to the next level, but also to build those long-lasting relationships with their audience.” Little is given in the way of specific details outside of which countries will be involved and how many podcasts are being selected. For example: The paragraph dedicated to addressing how the program will measure success offers no concrete ways by which they'll measure success. The main drive seems to be that the program exists and those involved are excited to execute its ambitious mission.  Currently RADAR Podcaster will only spotlight podcasts hosted on Anchor. Big Green sees the utility in embracing its creators, but for now only creators who are wholly locked into the Spotify system.  Last Thursday Phoebe Bain of Marketing Brew revealed there's a reason most YouTubers are doing baked-in influencer ads these days, and that could be excellent news for podcasts.  “According to a new report that influencer marketing agency The Outloud Group shared exclusively with Marketing Brew, influencer CPMs went up across major verticals on YouTube—from beauty and fashion to education—in 2021.” One example given is from the YouTube mainstay of gaming. The median CPM for influencers who focused on gaming content was $54.68 in 2021. Now in 2022 it has climbed to $66.48. And gaming influencers aren't even in the top five fastest-growing genre CPMs in the Outloud chart. Bain quotes Outloud Group vice president Nycole Kelly on the topic of rising influencer rates in general, the group having come to the conclusion YouTube influencers are raising rates in general beyond CPMs.  Podcasting is trying to figure out the right way to blend YouTube impressions and podcast downloads. For some, podcast CPMs are a better bet, but MarketingBrew's chart shows Youtube ads sold directly by influencers exceed podcasting average CPM by quite a bit. Yet another reason for the video-agnostic producers to consider a video strategy for their podcasts.  Last Thursday Sara Guaglione of Digiday covered a recent panel at a Reuters event in which prominent execs and editors in the news world addressed a big issue: Young people aren't watching the news anymore.  “Roughly four out of 10 people under 35 years old – 42% – “sometimes or often actively avoid the news,” according to the 11th annual “Digital News Report” report conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Albeit, that aversion is only slightly more acute than among those 35 years old and older, 36% of whom sometimes or often steer clear of the news.” Reasons for the drop in attention are numerous. The panel proposed several, including the draining effect of repetitive long-term events like politics or the pandemic. The under-35 demo is also cited as the one with the lowest amount of trust in established news organizations, and the percentage who outright distrust the media is growing rapidly.  Legacy institutions are scrambling to solve for the growing problem. Guaglione points to places like the Los Angeles Times creating a team of people whose sole mission is to repackage LA Times content for Instagram.  We bring this story to The Download because a significant portion of podcasting is news. Just because we're the cool new kids on the content block doesn't mean the issues affecting the rest of the journalism industry haven't taken root here as well, and the proposed solutions to fix the issue for online and print orgs likely contain useful strategies for podcasting.  Now it's time for our semi-recurring segment spotlighting articles worth reading that didn't quite make it into the episode. This week The Download has just one to recommend, but it makes an excellent companion piece to the story Manuela just told you about.  Top 25 US newspaper circulations: Print Sales fall another 12% in 2022 by Willam Turvill. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Download: Sounds Profitable publishes the Creators report. Slate is running provocative billboards for Slow Burn, Spotify turns its radar on podcasts, rising YouTube CPMs make the platform even more attractive for podcasters, and news organizations struggle to keep young folks around. Firstly, if you'll indulge us a bit of self-promotion, the first ever Sounds Profitable report has been delivered! On Tuesday Sounds Profitable hosted a first-of-its-kind presentation of The Creators. Here's how we billed it: “Sounds Profitable, in partnership with Edison Research, has put together the first credible study of the profile of podcast creators in America. This is an incredibly important benchmark in the history of podcasting and the first of many regular reports Sounds Profitable will be publishing to chart the future of the audio business.”  The Creators operates off a data sample of 617 people who fit the profile of having produced a podcast, were over the age of eighteen, and listened to podcasts weekly. The data was collected from Q2 2021 through Q1 of this year.  Some results put into sharp focus many assumed truths of the industry, as well as challenging others. The gender makeup of those polled showed sixty-nine percent of creators were men, twenty percentage points higher than the population of the United States. On that same token, the ethnicity spectrum shows podcasting has more diversity, with more representation of Black and Hispanic/Latino podcasters than the census reports as a national average.  These juicy stats and more are available at SoundsProfitable.com/thecreators, from the presentation's video to a spiffy 35-slide PDF of just the presentation, for you raw data nerds out there.  In an advertising campaign fitting of a flashy documentary, Slate is running a stealth billboard campaign for the current season of Slow Burn. From Ariel Shapiro's reporting on Tuesday's issue of Hot Pod:  “Slate is launching a provocative new campaign to promote its latest season of Slow Burn, which tells the story of Shirley Wheeler, the first woman convicted of manslaughter for getting an abortion. The outlet has placed billboards in states that now have some of the strictest abortion laws in the country urging passersby to “Defend Shirley Wheeler.” The billboards are up in seven states with deeply-entrenched anti-abortion sentiment that had trigger laws waiting for Roe v. Wade's nullification.  The same issue of Hot Pod also spotlighted the efforts of Earbuds Podcast Collective founder Arielle Nissenblatt to organize a massive campaign of podcasts running pre-roll message to advocate for abortion rights. Messages like the one you'll find at the beginning of this very episode. Hundreds of podcasters have signed on to the cause, including The Bechdel Cast, You Are Good, and legacy household name My Favorite Murder.  This Wednesday Spotify announced a podcast version of its RADAR program, originally created to spotlight up-and-coming artists on the music side of the app. RADAR Podcasters aims to get promising young podcasts in front of wider audiences with free exposure in-app. Each quarter Spotify's content editors in participating regions will select three podcasts to spotlight with the RADAR program. Podcast Editorial Lead Brianne O'Brien goes more into the rhetoric used:  “We'll focus on creators with shows that exhibit authenticity and inclusivity, give us a reason to keep listening, and educate and entertain.”  Currently the list of participating countries is fifteen, including thirteen countries in which English is not the default language. This is encouraging news for more big company recognition of podcasting's strengths outside the North American and UK English-speaking bubble. O'Brien seems passionate about the cause, too.   “My team, and Spotifiers more broadly, are podcast enthusiasts. So first and foremost, we really want to underscore the hard work that's being done by creators to take their podcast to the next level, but also to build those long-lasting relationships with their audience.” Little is given in the way of specific details outside of which countries will be involved and how many podcasts are being selected. For example: The paragraph dedicated to addressing how the program will measure success offers no concrete ways by which they'll measure success. The main drive seems to be that the program exists and those involved are excited to execute its ambitious mission.  Currently RADAR Podcaster will only spotlight podcasts hosted on Anchor. Big Green sees the utility in embracing its creators, but for now only creators who are wholly locked into the Spotify system.  Last Thursday Phoebe Bain of Marketing Brew revealed there's a reason most YouTubers are doing baked-in influencer ads these days, and that could be excellent news for podcasts.  “According to a new report that influencer marketing agency The Outloud Group shared exclusively with Marketing Brew, influencer CPMs went up across major verticals on YouTube—from beauty and fashion to education—in 2021.” One example given is from the YouTube mainstay of gaming. The median CPM for influencers who focused on gaming content was $54.68 in 2021. Now in 2022 it has climbed to $66.48. And gaming influencers aren't even in the top five fastest-growing genre CPMs in the Outloud chart. Bain quotes Outloud Group vice president Nycole Kelly on the topic of rising influencer rates in general, the group having come to the conclusion YouTube influencers are raising rates in general beyond CPMs.  Podcasting is trying to figure out the right way to blend YouTube impressions and podcast downloads. For some, podcast CPMs are a better bet, but MarketingBrew's chart shows Youtube ads sold directly by influencers exceed podcasting average CPM by quite a bit. Yet another reason for the video-agnostic producers to consider a video strategy for their podcasts.  Last Thursday Sara Guaglione of Digiday covered a recent panel at a Reuters event in which prominent execs and editors in the news world addressed a big issue: Young people aren't watching the news anymore.  “Roughly four out of 10 people under 35 years old – 42% – “sometimes or often actively avoid the news,” according to the 11th annual “Digital News Report” report conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Albeit, that aversion is only slightly more acute than among those 35 years old and older, 36% of whom sometimes or often steer clear of the news.” Reasons for the drop in attention are numerous. The panel proposed several, including the draining effect of repetitive long-term events like politics or the pandemic. The under-35 demo is also cited as the one with the lowest amount of trust in established news organizations, and the percentage who outright distrust the media is growing rapidly.  Legacy institutions are scrambling to solve for the growing problem. Guaglione points to places like the Los Angeles Times creating a team of people whose sole mission is to repackage LA Times content for Instagram.  We bring this story to The Download because a significant portion of podcasting is news. Just because we're the cool new kids on the content block doesn't mean the issues affecting the rest of the journalism industry haven't taken root here as well, and the proposed solutions to fix the issue for online and print orgs likely contain useful strategies for podcasting.  Now it's time for our semi-recurring segment spotlighting articles worth reading that didn't quite make it into the episode. This week The Download has just one to recommend, but it makes an excellent companion piece to the story Manuela just told you about.  Top 25 US newspaper circulations: Print Sales fall another 12% in 2022 by Willam Turvill. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Download: Sounds Profitable publishes the Creators report. Slate is running provocative billboards for Slow Burn, Spotify turns its radar on podcasts, rising YouTube CPMs make the platform even more attractive for podcasters, and news organizations struggle to keep young folks around. Firstly, if you'll indulge us a bit of self-promotion, the first ever Sounds Profitable report has been delivered! On Tuesday Sounds Profitable hosted a first-of-its-kind presentation of The Creators. Here's how we billed it: “Sounds Profitable, in partnership with Edison Research, has put together the first credible study of the profile of podcast creators in America. This is an incredibly important benchmark in the history of podcasting and the first of many regular reports Sounds Profitable will be publishing to chart the future of the audio business.”  The Creators operates off a data sample of 617 people who fit the profile of having produced a podcast, were over the age of eighteen, and listened to podcasts weekly. The data was collected from Q2 2021 through Q1 of this year.  Some results put into sharp focus many assumed truths of the industry, as well as challenging others. The gender makeup of those polled showed sixty-nine percent of creators were men, twenty percentage points higher than the population of the United States. On that same token, the ethnicity spectrum shows podcasting has more diversity, with more representation of Black and Hispanic/Latino podcasters than the census reports as a national average.  These juicy stats and more are available at SoundsProfitable.com/thecreators, from the presentation's video to a spiffy 35-slide PDF of just the presentation, for you raw data nerds out there.  In an advertising campaign fitting of a flashy documentary, Slate is running a stealth billboard campaign for the current season of Slow Burn. From Ariel Shapiro's reporting on Tuesday's issue of Hot Pod:  “Slate is launching a provocative new campaign to promote its latest season of Slow Burn, which tells the story of Shirley Wheeler, the first woman convicted of manslaughter for getting an abortion. The outlet has placed billboards in states that now have some of the strictest abortion laws in the country urging passersby to “Defend Shirley Wheeler.” The billboards are up in seven states with deeply-entrenched anti-abortion sentiment that had trigger laws waiting for Roe v. Wade's nullification.  The same issue of Hot Pod also spotlighted the efforts of Earbuds Podcast Collective founder Arielle Nissenblatt to organize a massive campaign of podcasts running pre-roll message to advocate for abortion rights. Messages like the one you'll find at the beginning of this very episode. Hundreds of podcasters have signed on to the cause, including The Bechdel Cast, You Are Good, and legacy household name My Favorite Murder.  This Wednesday Spotify announced a podcast version of its RADAR program, originally created to spotlight up-and-coming artists on the music side of the app. RADAR Podcasters aims to get promising young podcasts in front of wider audiences with free exposure in-app. Each quarter Spotify's content editors in participating regions will select three podcasts to spotlight with the RADAR program. Podcast Editorial Lead Brianne O'Brien goes more into the rhetoric used:  “We'll focus on creators with shows that exhibit authenticity and inclusivity, give us a reason to keep listening, and educate and entertain.”  Currently the list of participating countries is fifteen, including thirteen countries in which English is not the default language. This is encouraging news for more big company recognition of podcasting's strengths outside the North American and UK English-speaking bubble. O'Brien seems passionate about the cause, too.   “My team, and Spotifiers more broadly, are podcast enthusiasts. So first and foremost, we really want to underscore the hard work that's being done by creators to take their podcast to the next level, but also to build those long-lasting relationships with their audience.” Little is given in the way of specific details outside of which countries will be involved and how many podcasts are being selected. For example: The paragraph dedicated to addressing how the program will measure success offers no concrete ways by which they'll measure success. The main drive seems to be that the program exists and those involved are excited to execute its ambitious mission.  Currently RADAR Podcaster will only spotlight podcasts hosted on Anchor. Big Green sees the utility in embracing its creators, but for now only creators who are wholly locked into the Spotify system.  Last Thursday Phoebe Bain of Marketing Brew revealed there's a reason most YouTubers are doing baked-in influencer ads these days, and that could be excellent news for podcasts.  “According to a new report that influencer marketing agency The Outloud Group shared exclusively with Marketing Brew, influencer CPMs went up across major verticals on YouTube—from beauty and fashion to education—in 2021.” One example given is from the YouTube mainstay of gaming. The median CPM for influencers who focused on gaming content was $54.68 in 2021. Now in 2022 it has climbed to $66.48. And gaming influencers aren't even in the top five fastest-growing genre CPMs in the Outloud chart. Bain quotes Outloud Group vice president Nycole Kelly on the topic of rising influencer rates in general, the group having come to the conclusion YouTube influencers are raising rates in general beyond CPMs.  Podcasting is trying to figure out the right way to blend YouTube impressions and podcast downloads. For some, podcast CPMs are a better bet, but MarketingBrew's chart shows Youtube ads sold directly by influencers exceed podcasting average CPM by quite a bit. Yet another reason for the video-agnostic producers to consider a video strategy for their podcasts.  Last Thursday Sara Guaglione of Digiday covered a recent panel at a Reuters event in which prominent execs and editors in the news world addressed a big issue: Young people aren't watching the news anymore.  “Roughly four out of 10 people under 35 years old – 42% – “sometimes or often actively avoid the news,” according to the 11th annual “Digital News Report” report conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Albeit, that aversion is only slightly more acute than among those 35 years old and older, 36% of whom sometimes or often steer clear of the news.” Reasons for the drop in attention are numerous. The panel proposed several, including the draining effect of repetitive long-term events like politics or the pandemic. The under-35 demo is also cited as the one with the lowest amount of trust in established news organizations, and the percentage who outright distrust the media is growing rapidly.  Legacy institutions are scrambling to solve for the growing problem. Guaglione points to places like the Los Angeles Times creating a team of people whose sole mission is to repackage LA Times content for Instagram.  We bring this story to The Download because a significant portion of podcasting is news. Just because we're the cool new kids on the content block doesn't mean the issues affecting the rest of the journalism industry haven't taken root here as well, and the proposed solutions to fix the issue for online and print orgs likely contain useful strategies for podcasting.  Now it's time for our semi-recurring segment spotlighting articles worth reading that didn't quite make it into the episode. This week The Download has just one to recommend, but it makes an excellent companion piece to the story Manuela just told you about.  Top 25 US newspaper circulations: Print Sales fall another 12% in 2022 by Willam Turvill. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Download: a YouTube channel dives into podcasting on the video platform, the absence of podcasting's middle class, and what do IAB's measurement standards in video games mean for podcasting. Last Thursday, Creator Insider, a YouTube channel operated by a creator-focused wing of YouTube, uploaded a four minute FAQ video about podcasting on YouTube.  While the video doesn't necessarily contain new groundbreaking information for someone who is deep in the podcasting industry, it's a wonderful sign for the future of small-to-midsize podcasts unsure about perceiving YouTube as a viable podcast platform. Strategic Partner Manager Erica even backs up the size of YouTube's reach with a citation of Edison Research data.  Having good, concise resources to facilitate an easier move towards the mentality that YouTube should be treated like any other podcast aggregator is a promising step. It's also interesting to note how much importance is placed on properly arranging podcast episodes in playlists. The video takes great care to establish best practices for naming and arranging playlists. While “RSS” is never spoken aloud, it feels like YouTube's approach is to use the existing functionality of easily saving video playlists to treat playlists like an RSS feed.  Who knows, in a few months we could be hearing about updates to the platform that bridge the gap between how YouTube is consumed and audio podcasts are consumed.  Speaking of YouTube… Last Monday an exclusive from Reuters reporter Foo Yun Chee shared details on Google's newest bid to negotiate an EU antitrust probe without a substantial fine. Luckily for podcasting, this could have beneficial knock-on effects.  Google parent Alphabet has proposed to open their digital doors for the first time to allow third-party programmatic partners to place ads on YouTube videos.  “The European Commission opened a probe last year to examine whether the world's largest provider of search and video was giving itself an unfair advantage in digital advertising by restricting rivals' and advertisers' access to user data.”  If Google does end up waiving the requirement to use Ad Manager to place YouTube ads, this could both please the European Commission and open up a considerable amount of valuable inventory to podcast ad buyers. Inventory through platforms they're already familiar with and - since YouTube is pushing for more podcasts on their platform - that inventory will still be going to benefit the podcasting industry.  Last Friday, a prominent podcaster under the Spotify umbrella said the quiet part out loud. As detailed in last week's Hot Pod, sports analyst and host of The Ringer Bill Simmons revealed Spotify parts the metric curtain for creatives that sign with them. The following is in reference to a recent episode of Peter Kafka's podcast Recode, in which Simmons appeared.  “One thing he mentioned in the podcast that stood out to me was how he uses data. Although he said that he does not pay too much attention to his own show's performance metrics, he indicated that he takes advantage of Spotify's other data resources to scope out the competition and better position his shows.”  The newsletter goes on to quote Simmons' interview in Recode in which Simmons describes having the ability to see the metrics of competitor's podcasts on Spotify as having access to “an incredible war chest of intelligence on the habits of people who listen to podcasts.” This is one of those rare moments where a known fact being stated out loud makes it sound like new information. It's not particularly breaking news that a content aggregator would have excellent data. Everyone in the business can use access to the data of a podcaster's competitors, it's just not often talked about. The fear behind what Simmons says here is that Spotify owns more than just the aggregator. Big Green owns hosting platforms and one of the largest ad businesses in Megaphone.  There's nothing new under the sun. Retail giants like Walmart and Amazon have done this for retail purchasing competition in the past, but now podcasting is growing up and one-stop-shops like Spotify are becoming more common. Last Thursday Eric Nuzum published an installment of his Substack The Audio Insurgent in which he floats the question “Does Podcasting Lack a Middle Class?” The piece begins with Nuzum speaking at a conference heavily attended by GMs and CEOs of public radio stations. During a talk Nuzum hosted he asked the group of over 200 public radio heads, a demographic famous for embracing podcasting, who had at least one podcast that made 50,000 downloads a month. Fewer than ten attendees met that metric.  “Why are those numbers important? The average CPM ad rate in podcasting is about $23.16 per thousand downloads. To qualify for buys at even that average rate, you generally need to have a podcast that's downloaded 50,000 times per month. Public radio sees podcasting as a critical part of its future, yet today only eight stations in the country are capable of hitting that rate on their own.” Nuzum's piece proposes the predominant narrative for smaller podcasters has created a class divide where the majority are told the only real strategy is to create content without fair compensation long enough that a magic larger company will buy the podcast for a massive windfall. Independent podcasters are expecting to either make it huge or fail out. There is no middle ground.   “Podcasting has been around for more than 18 years, and public radio has been considered leaders in its development and growth. Yet of the 200+ stations in the room, exactly one of them had figured out in all that time how to produce a show that was self-sustaining for a staff of one.”  The gulf between blockbusters and small indie projects is wide. There must be a place in the middle for creators and providers alike to make a good wage producing podcasts. There's adequate amounts of gold in them there hills, if the industry will stake claim to it.  This one's for the gamers in the audience, though as per usual we're looping back around to podcasting by the end. Marketing Brew's Ryan Barwick covered some interesting new updates from the IAB regarding measurement standards in video games.  The standards, which hadn't been updated since 2009, used to consider an impression to have happened once a player had been exposed to an ad for at least ten seconds. Barwick says: "That's been cut down drastically to one continuous second for in-game display ads and two continuous seconds for video ad units, so long as at least half of the advertisement's pixels are in focus. Those are more or less the same guidelines for online display ads.” These are more or less the same metrics applied to online display ads, but with the added consideration of ads existing in 3D space. The IAB's guidelines take into account viewing angle and pixel clarity in an acknowledgment that modern gaming is capable of placing ads inside game worlds. It's about time, too. The Download script writer Gavin Gaddis remembers when the Obama election campaign purchased billboard space from open-world racing game Burnout Paradise in 2008. Fashion brand Diesel bravely bought ad space on the side of vans that drove around the city. Vans that could be destroyed by players ad nauseam.  Quoting Barwick again: “The IAB's new standards should be finalized by the fall. To Francesco Petruzzelli, chief technology officer at the in-game advertising firm Bidstack, the standards feel a bit like a minimum. One second isn't enough time for an impression, he argued, and that it could lead to an oversupply of inventory.” How does this relate to podcasting? In a world where seeing a Pepsi logo on a street sign while playing a multiplayer match of Halo: Infinite counts as an impression, there's no room for arguments about the validity of considering podcast downloads “real” engagement.   This last full story is a Ryan Reynolds tweet, of all things. On Tuesday the actor posted a video in which he professes his love of shooting ads, describing them as mini-movies with the same creative process and crew requirements. And, like movies, ads are shot in places other than Hollywood without many initiatives to ensure diversity and inclusivity in many of the necessary career paths.  “Almost two years ago we started the Group Effort Initiative to increase inclusion in the entertainment industry amongst BIPOC and underrepresented communities and it's just been hugely rewarding. That's why I'm proud to be co-founding the Creative Ladder.”  The new nonprofit will, like Group Effort Initiative, work to make careers in the advertising creative space accessible to everyone. We love to see more diversity in every corner of the industry.  Finally, it's time for our semi-regular roundup of articles that didn't make it into today's episode, but are still worth working into your weekend reading.  A must-read issue of Stratechery: Spotify's Investor Day, Spotify's Music Aggregation, Podcast Anecdata.  My Lifetime Ban from the Podcasting Cool Kids Club by Neil Hedley  And a reminder that the 2022 edition of the Infinite Dial Canada is June 30th and you can register right now at the link provided in the show notes.  The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Download: a YouTube channel dives into podcasting on the video platform, the absence of podcasting's middle class, and what do IAB's measurement standards in video games mean for podcasting. Last Thursday, Creator Insider, a YouTube channel operated by a creator-focused wing of YouTube, uploaded a four minute FAQ video about podcasting on YouTube.  While the video doesn't necessarily contain new groundbreaking information for someone who is deep in the podcasting industry, it's a wonderful sign for the future of small-to-midsize podcasts unsure about perceiving YouTube as a viable podcast platform. Strategic Partner Manager Erica even backs up the size of YouTube's reach with a citation of Edison Research data.  Having good, concise resources to facilitate an easier move towards the mentality that YouTube should be treated like any other podcast aggregator is a promising step. It's also interesting to note how much importance is placed on properly arranging podcast episodes in playlists. The video takes great care to establish best practices for naming and arranging playlists. While “RSS” is never spoken aloud, it feels like YouTube's approach is to use the existing functionality of easily saving video playlists to treat playlists like an RSS feed.  Who knows, in a few months we could be hearing about updates to the platform that bridge the gap between how YouTube is consumed and audio podcasts are consumed.  Speaking of YouTube… Last Monday an exclusive from Reuters reporter Foo Yun Chee shared details on Google's newest bid to negotiate an EU antitrust probe without a substantial fine. Luckily for podcasting, this could have beneficial knock-on effects.  Google parent Alphabet has proposed to open their digital doors for the first time to allow third-party programmatic partners to place ads on YouTube videos.  “The European Commission opened a probe last year to examine whether the world's largest provider of search and video was giving itself an unfair advantage in digital advertising by restricting rivals' and advertisers' access to user data.”  If Google does end up waiving the requirement to use Ad Manager to place YouTube ads, this could both please the European Commission and open up a considerable amount of valuable inventory to podcast ad buyers. Inventory through platforms they're already familiar with and - since YouTube is pushing for more podcasts on their platform - that inventory will still be going to benefit the podcasting industry.  Last Friday, a prominent podcaster under the Spotify umbrella said the quiet part out loud. As detailed in last week's Hot Pod, sports analyst and host of The Ringer Bill Simmons revealed Spotify parts the metric curtain for creatives that sign with them. The following is in reference to a recent episode of Peter Kafka's podcast Recode, in which Simmons appeared.  “One thing he mentioned in the podcast that stood out to me was how he uses data. Although he said that he does not pay too much attention to his own show's performance metrics, he indicated that he takes advantage of Spotify's other data resources to scope out the competition and better position his shows.”  The newsletter goes on to quote Simmons' interview in Recode in which Simmons describes having the ability to see the metrics of competitor's podcasts on Spotify as having access to “an incredible war chest of intelligence on the habits of people who listen to podcasts.” This is one of those rare moments where a known fact being stated out loud makes it sound like new information. It's not particularly breaking news that a content aggregator would have excellent data. Everyone in the business can use access to the data of a podcaster's competitors, it's just not often talked about. The fear behind what Simmons says here is that Spotify owns more than just the aggregator. Big Green owns hosting platforms and one of the largest ad businesses in Megaphone.  There's nothing new under the sun. Retail giants like Walmart and Amazon have done this for retail purchasing competition in the past, but now podcasting is growing up and one-stop-shops like Spotify are becoming more common. Last Thursday Eric Nuzum published an installment of his Substack The Audio Insurgent in which he floats the question “Does Podcasting Lack a Middle Class?” The piece begins with Nuzum speaking at a conference heavily attended by GMs and CEOs of public radio stations. During a talk Nuzum hosted he asked the group of over 200 public radio heads, a demographic famous for embracing podcasting, who had at least one podcast that made 50,000 downloads a month. Fewer than ten attendees met that metric.  “Why are those numbers important? The average CPM ad rate in podcasting is about $23.16 per thousand downloads. To qualify for buys at even that average rate, you generally need to have a podcast that's downloaded 50,000 times per month. Public radio sees podcasting as a critical part of its future, yet today only eight stations in the country are capable of hitting that rate on their own.” Nuzum's piece proposes the predominant narrative for smaller podcasters has created a class divide where the majority are told the only real strategy is to create content without fair compensation long enough that a magic larger company will buy the podcast for a massive windfall. Independent podcasters are expecting to either make it huge or fail out. There is no middle ground.   “Podcasting has been around for more than 18 years, and public radio has been considered leaders in its development and growth. Yet of the 200+ stations in the room, exactly one of them had figured out in all that time how to produce a show that was self-sustaining for a staff of one.”  The gulf between blockbusters and small indie projects is wide. There must be a place in the middle for creators and providers alike to make a good wage producing podcasts. There's adequate amounts of gold in them there hills, if the industry will stake claim to it.  This one's for the gamers in the audience, though as per usual we're looping back around to podcasting by the end. Marketing Brew's Ryan Barwick covered some interesting new updates from the IAB regarding measurement standards in video games.  The standards, which hadn't been updated since 2009, used to consider an impression to have happened once a player had been exposed to an ad for at least ten seconds. Barwick says: "That's been cut down drastically to one continuous second for in-game display ads and two continuous seconds for video ad units, so long as at least half of the advertisement's pixels are in focus. Those are more or less the same guidelines for online display ads.” These are more or less the same metrics applied to online display ads, but with the added consideration of ads existing in 3D space. The IAB's guidelines take into account viewing angle and pixel clarity in an acknowledgment that modern gaming is capable of placing ads inside game worlds. It's about time, too. The Download script writer Gavin Gaddis remembers when the Obama election campaign purchased billboard space from open-world racing game Burnout Paradise in 2008. Fashion brand Diesel bravely bought ad space on the side of vans that drove around the city. Vans that could be destroyed by players ad nauseam.  Quoting Barwick again: “The IAB's new standards should be finalized by the fall. To Francesco Petruzzelli, chief technology officer at the in-game advertising firm Bidstack, the standards feel a bit like a minimum. One second isn't enough time for an impression, he argued, and that it could lead to an oversupply of inventory.” How does this relate to podcasting? In a world where seeing a Pepsi logo on a street sign while playing a multiplayer match of Halo: Infinite counts as an impression, there's no room for arguments about the validity of considering podcast downloads “real” engagement.   This last full story is a Ryan Reynolds tweet, of all things. On Tuesday the actor posted a video in which he professes his love of shooting ads, describing them as mini-movies with the same creative process and crew requirements. And, like movies, ads are shot in places other than Hollywood without many initiatives to ensure diversity and inclusivity in many of the necessary career paths.  “Almost two years ago we started the Group Effort Initiative to increase inclusion in the entertainment industry amongst BIPOC and underrepresented communities and it's just been hugely rewarding. That's why I'm proud to be co-founding the Creative Ladder.”  The new nonprofit will, like Group Effort Initiative, work to make careers in the advertising creative space accessible to everyone. We love to see more diversity in every corner of the industry.  Finally, it's time for our semi-regular roundup of articles that didn't make it into today's episode, but are still worth working into your weekend reading.  A must-read issue of Stratechery: Spotify's Investor Day, Spotify's Music Aggregation, Podcast Anecdata.  My Lifetime Ban from the Podcasting Cool Kids Club by Neil Hedley  And a reminder that the 2022 edition of the Infinite Dial Canada is June 30th and you can register right now at the link provided in the show notes.  The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Download: a YouTube channel dives into podcasting on the video platform, the absence of podcasting's middle class, and what do IAB's measurement standards in video games mean for podcasting. Last Thursday, Creator Insider, a YouTube channel operated by a creator-focused wing of YouTube, uploaded a four minute FAQ video about podcasting on YouTube.  While the video doesn't necessarily contain new groundbreaking information for someone who is deep in the podcasting industry, it's a wonderful sign for the future of small-to-midsize podcasts unsure about perceiving YouTube as a viable podcast platform. Strategic Partner Manager Erica even backs up the size of YouTube's reach with a citation of Edison Research data.  Having good, concise resources to facilitate an easier move towards the mentality that YouTube should be treated like any other podcast aggregator is a promising step. It's also interesting to note how much importance is placed on properly arranging podcast episodes in playlists. The video takes great care to establish best practices for naming and arranging playlists. While “RSS” is never spoken aloud, it feels like YouTube's approach is to use the existing functionality of easily saving video playlists to treat playlists like an RSS feed.  Who knows, in a few months we could be hearing about updates to the platform that bridge the gap between how YouTube is consumed and audio podcasts are consumed.  Speaking of YouTube… Last Monday an exclusive from Reuters reporter Foo Yun Chee shared details on Google's newest bid to negotiate an EU antitrust probe without a substantial fine. Luckily for podcasting, this could have beneficial knock-on effects.  Google parent Alphabet has proposed to open their digital doors for the first time to allow third-party programmatic partners to place ads on YouTube videos.  “The European Commission opened a probe last year to examine whether the world's largest provider of search and video was giving itself an unfair advantage in digital advertising by restricting rivals' and advertisers' access to user data.”  If Google does end up waiving the requirement to use Ad Manager to place YouTube ads, this could both please the European Commission and open up a considerable amount of valuable inventory to podcast ad buyers. Inventory through platforms they're already familiar with and - since YouTube is pushing for more podcasts on their platform - that inventory will still be going to benefit the podcasting industry.  Last Friday, a prominent podcaster under the Spotify umbrella said the quiet part out loud. As detailed in last week's Hot Pod, sports analyst and host of The Ringer Bill Simmons revealed Spotify parts the metric curtain for creatives that sign with them. The following is in reference to a recent episode of Peter Kafka's podcast Recode, in which Simmons appeared.  “One thing he mentioned in the podcast that stood out to me was how he uses data. Although he said that he does not pay too much attention to his own show's performance metrics, he indicated that he takes advantage of Spotify's other data resources to scope out the competition and better position his shows.”  The newsletter goes on to quote Simmons' interview in Recode in which Simmons describes having the ability to see the metrics of competitor's podcasts on Spotify as having access to “an incredible war chest of intelligence on the habits of people who listen to podcasts.” This is one of those rare moments where a known fact being stated out loud makes it sound like new information. It's not particularly breaking news that a content aggregator would have excellent data. Everyone in the business can use access to the data of a podcaster's competitors, it's just not often talked about. The fear behind what Simmons says here is that Spotify owns more than just the aggregator. Big Green owns hosting platforms and one of the largest ad businesses in Megaphone.  There's nothing new under the sun. Retail giants like Walmart and Amazon have done this for retail purchasing competition in the past, but now podcasting is growing up and one-stop-shops like Spotify are becoming more common. Last Thursday Eric Nuzum published an installment of his Substack The Audio Insurgent in which he floats the question “Does Podcasting Lack a Middle Class?” The piece begins with Nuzum speaking at a conference heavily attended by GMs and CEOs of public radio stations. During a talk Nuzum hosted he asked the group of over 200 public radio heads, a demographic famous for embracing podcasting, who had at least one podcast that made 50,000 downloads a month. Fewer than ten attendees met that metric.  “Why are those numbers important? The average CPM ad rate in podcasting is about $23.16 per thousand downloads. To qualify for buys at even that average rate, you generally need to have a podcast that's downloaded 50,000 times per month. Public radio sees podcasting as a critical part of its future, yet today only eight stations in the country are capable of hitting that rate on their own.” Nuzum's piece proposes the predominant narrative for smaller podcasters has created a class divide where the majority are told the only real strategy is to create content without fair compensation long enough that a magic larger company will buy the podcast for a massive windfall. Independent podcasters are expecting to either make it huge or fail out. There is no middle ground.   “Podcasting has been around for more than 18 years, and public radio has been considered leaders in its development and growth. Yet of the 200+ stations in the room, exactly one of them had figured out in all that time how to produce a show that was self-sustaining for a staff of one.”  The gulf between blockbusters and small indie projects is wide. There must be a place in the middle for creators and providers alike to make a good wage producing podcasts. There's adequate amounts of gold in them there hills, if the industry will stake claim to it.  This one's for the gamers in the audience, though as per usual we're looping back around to podcasting by the end. Marketing Brew's Ryan Barwick covered some interesting new updates from the IAB regarding measurement standards in video games.  The standards, which hadn't been updated since 2009, used to consider an impression to have happened once a player had been exposed to an ad for at least ten seconds. Barwick says: "That's been cut down drastically to one continuous second for in-game display ads and two continuous seconds for video ad units, so long as at least half of the advertisement's pixels are in focus. Those are more or less the same guidelines for online display ads.” These are more or less the same metrics applied to online display ads, but with the added consideration of ads existing in 3D space. The IAB's guidelines take into account viewing angle and pixel clarity in an acknowledgment that modern gaming is capable of placing ads inside game worlds. It's about time, too. The Download script writer Gavin Gaddis remembers when the Obama election campaign purchased billboard space from open-world racing game Burnout Paradise in 2008. Fashion brand Diesel bravely bought ad space on the side of vans that drove around the city. Vans that could be destroyed by players ad nauseam.  Quoting Barwick again: “The IAB's new standards should be finalized by the fall. To Francesco Petruzzelli, chief technology officer at the in-game advertising firm Bidstack, the standards feel a bit like a minimum. One second isn't enough time for an impression, he argued, and that it could lead to an oversupply of inventory.” How does this relate to podcasting? In a world where seeing a Pepsi logo on a street sign while playing a multiplayer match of Halo: Infinite counts as an impression, there's no room for arguments about the validity of considering podcast downloads “real” engagement.   This last full story is a Ryan Reynolds tweet, of all things. On Tuesday the actor posted a video in which he professes his love of shooting ads, describing them as mini-movies with the same creative process and crew requirements. And, like movies, ads are shot in places other than Hollywood without many initiatives to ensure diversity and inclusivity in many of the necessary career paths.  “Almost two years ago we started the Group Effort Initiative to increase inclusion in the entertainment industry amongst BIPOC and underrepresented communities and it's just been hugely rewarding. That's why I'm proud to be co-founding the Creative Ladder.”  The new nonprofit will, like Group Effort Initiative, work to make careers in the advertising creative space accessible to everyone. We love to see more diversity in every corner of the industry.  Finally, it's time for our semi-regular roundup of articles that didn't make it into today's episode, but are still worth working into your weekend reading.  A must-read issue of Stratechery: Spotify's Investor Day, Spotify's Music Aggregation, Podcast Anecdata.  My Lifetime Ban from the Podcasting Cool Kids Club by Neil Hedley  And a reminder that the 2022 edition of the Infinite Dial Canada is June 30th and you can register right now at the link provided in the show notes.  The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Download: Spotify’s building a new brand safety tool, Google Podcast removed an episode under suspicious conditions, and Apple tells us how their podcast search works. It’s been a rollercoaster of a week for Acast news. Let’s start with the positive. This Monday Acast announced a global Audio Pride Parade, celebrating Pride month for the LGBTQIA+ community via a series of podcast live shows in major cities across the world. Senior Partner Manager Alexandria Fuller said: “It’s also one day where you feel safe to be yourself. With hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people on the rise, we’re always wondering when it’s safe to hold hands. But there’s safety in numbers at Pride, and it’s really freeing.” Fuller’s heartfelt blog about the importance of celebrating queerness was undercut the next morning. Tuesday Acast announced a partnership with Spring to provide on-demand merch options for producers hosting on Acast, including Spring’s so-called Mint on Demand NFT service. According to Hot Pod, most of the 11 podcasts in the pilot program have elected to not use Mint on Demand. Also on Tuesday, multiple tweets were posted providing evidence Acast is data mining email addresses tucked in the RSS feeds of podcasts to send an advertisement email suggesting the podcaster would be better off switching to Acast. So far podcasters on Podbean, Captivate, Blubrry, and Transistor have reported being targeted by this aggressive marketing push. Transistor co-founder Justin Jackson has reported Acast to their email service provider, who Jackson reports have said this cold-calling approach is against their terms of service. Jackson - who previously worked for an email company - considers the Acast emails to be illegal under Canadian law and has filed a formal complaint under the government arm created to enforce Canada’s Anti Spam Law (also know as CASL). A spokesperson for Acast told Podnews the emails targeting podcast of competitor hosting services are “... part of our continuing marketing strategy, which we don’t currently plan to change.” At Sounds Profitable, our goals are to lift up and improve the entire industry. Based on the actions and response from Acast, we do not feel like they share those goals. Until Acast discontinues these practices, we will no longer be covering Acast in Sounds Profitable or The Download. --- This Wednesday Integral Ad Sciences announced a joint project with Spotify to develop a new third-party brand safety tool for podcast advertisers, with UM Worldwide signed on to be the first company in line to stress-test the project. From the press release: “The companies will embark on a rigorous analysis to help the industry understand the tools and resources necessary to effectively deliver brand safety in podcasting and digital audio writ large.” Given IAS already has these tools for both the web and apps, we can infer this announcement refers to a net-new production. An overwhelming majority of podcasting operates on RSS outside of Spotify’s control, so this product is exclusively a brand safety play for content Spotify sells ads to on their own platform. From the beginning of the press release: “Ultimately, the firms intend to create the industry's first third-party brand safety and suitability reporting tool to bring more transparency and confidence to podcast advertising.” And then, later on: “In the future, the results will be used to create a first-of-its-kind brand safety and suitability tool to aid in campaign planning, management, and reporting.” Spotify is no stranger to courting controversy when flirting with that safety, be it the actions of acerbic talent or the upcoming return of political ads. Brand safety is hot right now, but so is Spotify announcing things that don’t go live. Should we hold our breath? In keeping with Pride month-adjacent stories: Google has provided a cautionary tale in the unexpected consequences of using automated systems to filter inappropriate content. On Tuesday the tabletop roleplaying game actual play podcast RPG: Realms of Peril and Glory posted a screenshot of their newest episode showing an error on Google Podcasts indicating the content is unavailable for people under the age of 18. As Podnews covered in October of last year, this is not necessarily new. Google Podcasts, in an effort to remain in compliance with some laws in Europe and the UK addressing children accessing age-inappropriate content, began restricting certain podcasts from being visible to users with underaged accounts or users who weren’t logged into a Google account while attempting to access. This particular interest is noteworthy as the episode isn’t just blocked from users who aren’t logged in to Google Podcasts. As of Wednesday it was inaccessible to anyone on Google Podcasts. From the original tweet from RPG: “There is nothing adult in this episode. The only difference from our other episodes is the word Lesbian in the title.” RPG’s missing episode was the first of a Pride month-themed campaign titled Spooky Sword Lesbians. The description also mentions the indie tabletop roleplaying game Thirsty Sword Lesbians used to make the show. The game’s official description describes it as “a roleplaying game for telling queer stories with friends.” Evil Hat Productions, the game’s distributor, lists it as being appropriate for ages 13 and up. This unfortunate incident sparks memories of similar issues on YouTube, on which Google restricts videos from trending or getting traction in the recommendation algorithm if they’re deemed 18+. In recent years LGBTQIA+ content creators have widely reported basic words such as ‘trans’ or ‘gay’ are automatically flagged as adult, regardless of the video’s content. Regardless of Google’s inevitable response to this issue, it stands as a cautionary tale to all podcasting companies: automation technology is a wonderful tool but it is also prone to developing unintended biases based on its creators and training. Unintended consequences such as removing the first episode of a podcast about gay characters halfway through the month dedicated to commemorating the birth of the gay rights movement in the United States. Spotify’s gone shopping again. According to Tech Crunch’s Ingrid Lunden on Monday, Spotify is purchasing Sonantic, the company behind the AI speech synthesizing tech used to voice Val Kilmer’s character in Top Gun: Maverick. While AI voices are the new hotness in entertainment, including Disney’s partnership with Respeech to synthesize younger versions of Mark Hamill and James Earl Jones for The Mandalorian and Obi Wan, Spotify hints at more grounded visions for Sonantic’s tech. The blog post cited by Lunden hints at it being used across Spotify, not in one specific application of a synthetic voice. “One example that Spotify gives of how it might use the tech is to use AI voices to bring more audio-based recommendations and descriptions to users who are not looking at their screens — for example, for those driving cars or listening while doing other activities and not able to look at a screen.” It seems Spotify might be aiming at constructing their own version of Siri or Alexa moreso than dipping their toes into synthetic podcasters. At least, not yet. Once again, we bring you useful news directly from Apple. On Wednesday Apple posted a guide on the Apple Podcasts for Creators website simply titled “Search on Apple Podcasts.” While the information contained therein is more directly useful for podcast creators more so than the wider industry, it’s important to understand the nuts and bolts of how such basic things work. Especially when large companies like Apple voluntarily step up to the plate to be more transparent about systems usually kept locked in secrecy for fear of bad actors exploiting the transparency for gain. “The more listeners engage with your new shows and episodes, the higher they will rank for relevant search terms, so make sure to promote your shows and episodes on Apple Podcasts when they launch. Make sure your channel name, show titles, and episode titles are specific and unique so they may appear in relevant searches. Be distinctive and avoid using names that are too generic or too similar to existing shows. Avoid using emojis and repeated episode titles.” While aspects of these two paragraphs have been known from public statements by Apple employees - Apple’s frustrations with people putting repetitive things like episode numbers in titles has been a long-running affair - now they’re distilled into one official location where newer producers are likely to find concrete proof Apple hates emojis. That said, this might lead to changes in how podcast networks present themselves in future now that the industry has been made aware Channel names are a potential source of SEO in addition to individual podcast names. Place your bets on which network will be the first to work a punchy tagline into their Channel name. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Download: Spotify’s building a new brand safety tool, Google Podcast removed an episode under suspicious conditions, and Apple tells us how their podcast search works. It’s been a rollercoaster of a week for Acast news. Let’s start with the positive. This Monday Acast announced a global Audio Pride Parade, celebrating Pride month for the LGBTQIA+ community via a series of podcast live shows in major cities across the world. Senior Partner Manager Alexandria Fuller said: “It’s also one day where you feel safe to be yourself. With hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people on the rise, we’re always wondering when it’s safe to hold hands. But there’s safety in numbers at Pride, and it’s really freeing.” Fuller’s heartfelt blog about the importance of celebrating queerness was undercut the next morning. Tuesday Acast announced a partnership with Spring to provide on-demand merch options for producers hosting on Acast, including Spring’s so-called Mint on Demand NFT service. According to Hot Pod, most of the 11 podcasts in the pilot program have elected to not use Mint on Demand. Also on Tuesday, multiple tweets were posted providing evidence Acast is data mining email addresses tucked in the RSS feeds of podcasts to send an advertisement email suggesting the podcaster would be better off switching to Acast. So far podcasters on Podbean, Captivate, Blubrry, and Transistor have reported being targeted by this aggressive marketing push. Transistor co-founder Justin Jackson has reported Acast to their email service provider, who Jackson reports have said this cold-calling approach is against their terms of service. Jackson - who previously worked for an email company - considers the Acast emails to be illegal under Canadian law and has filed a formal complaint under the government arm created to enforce Canada’s Anti Spam Law (also know as CASL). A spokesperson for Acast told Podnews the emails targeting podcast of competitor hosting services are “... part of our continuing marketing strategy, which we don’t currently plan to change.” At Sounds Profitable, our goals are to lift up and improve the entire industry. Based on the actions and response from Acast, we do not feel like they share those goals. Until Acast discontinues these practices, we will no longer be covering Acast in Sounds Profitable or The Download. --- This Wednesday Integral Ad Sciences announced a joint project with Spotify to develop a new third-party brand safety tool for podcast advertisers, with UM Worldwide signed on to be the first company in line to stress-test the project. From the press release: “The companies will embark on a rigorous analysis to help the industry understand the tools and resources necessary to effectively deliver brand safety in podcasting and digital audio writ large.” Given IAS already has these tools for both the web and apps, we can infer this announcement refers to a net-new production. An overwhelming majority of podcasting operates on RSS outside of Spotify’s control, so this product is exclusively a brand safety play for content Spotify sells ads to on their own platform. From the beginning of the press release: “Ultimately, the firms intend to create the industry's first third-party brand safety and suitability reporting tool to bring more transparency and confidence to podcast advertising.” And then, later on: “In the future, the results will be used to create a first-of-its-kind brand safety and suitability tool to aid in campaign planning, management, and reporting.” Spotify is no stranger to courting controversy when flirting with that safety, be it the actions of acerbic talent or the upcoming return of political ads. Brand safety is hot right now, but so is Spotify announcing things that don’t go live. Should we hold our breath? In keeping with Pride month-adjacent stories: Google has provided a cautionary tale in the unexpected consequences of using automated systems to filter inappropriate content. On Tuesday the tabletop roleplaying game actual play podcast RPG: Realms of Peril and Glory posted a screenshot of their newest episode showing an error on Google Podcasts indicating the content is unavailable for people under the age of 18. As Podnews covered in October of last year, this is not necessarily new. Google Podcasts, in an effort to remain in compliance with some laws in Europe and the UK addressing children accessing age-inappropriate content, began restricting certain podcasts from being visible to users with underaged accounts or users who weren’t logged into a Google account while attempting to access. This particular interest is noteworthy as the episode isn’t just blocked from users who aren’t logged in to Google Podcasts. As of Wednesday it was inaccessible to anyone on Google Podcasts. From the original tweet from RPG: “There is nothing adult in this episode. The only difference from our other episodes is the word Lesbian in the title.” RPG’s missing episode was the first of a Pride month-themed campaign titled Spooky Sword Lesbians. The description also mentions the indie tabletop roleplaying game Thirsty Sword Lesbians used to make the show. The game’s official description describes it as “a roleplaying game for telling queer stories with friends.” Evil Hat Productions, the game’s distributor, lists it as being appropriate for ages 13 and up. This unfortunate incident sparks memories of similar issues on YouTube, on which Google restricts videos from trending or getting traction in the recommendation algorithm if they’re deemed 18+. In recent years LGBTQIA+ content creators have widely reported basic words such as ‘trans’ or ‘gay’ are automatically flagged as adult, regardless of the video’s content. Regardless of Google’s inevitable response to this issue, it stands as a cautionary tale to all podcasting companies: automation technology is a wonderful tool but it is also prone to developing unintended biases based on its creators and training. Unintended consequences such as removing the first episode of a podcast about gay characters halfway through the month dedicated to commemorating the birth of the gay rights movement in the United States. Spotify’s gone shopping again. According to Tech Crunch’s Ingrid Lunden on Monday, Spotify is purchasing Sonantic, the company behind the AI speech synthesizing tech used to voice Val Kilmer’s character in Top Gun: Maverick. While AI voices are the new hotness in entertainment, including Disney’s partnership with Respeech to synthesize younger versions of Mark Hamill and James Earl Jones for The Mandalorian and Obi Wan, Spotify hints at more grounded visions for Sonantic’s tech. The blog post cited by Lunden hints at it being used across Spotify, not in one specific application of a synthetic voice. “One example that Spotify gives of how it might use the tech is to use AI voices to bring more audio-based recommendations and descriptions to users who are not looking at their screens — for example, for those driving cars or listening while doing other activities and not able to look at a screen.” It seems Spotify might be aiming at constructing their own version of Siri or Alexa moreso than dipping their toes into synthetic podcasters. At least, not yet. Once again, we bring you useful news directly from Apple. On Wednesday Apple posted a guide on the Apple Podcasts for Creators website simply titled “Search on Apple Podcasts.” While the information contained therein is more directly useful for podcast creators more so than the wider industry, it’s important to understand the nuts and bolts of how such basic things work. Especially when large companies like Apple voluntarily step up to the plate to be more transparent about systems usually kept locked in secrecy for fear of bad actors exploiting the transparency for gain. “The more listeners engage with your new shows and episodes, the higher they will rank for relevant search terms, so make sure to promote your shows and episodes on Apple Podcasts when they launch. Make sure your channel name, show titles, and episode titles are specific and unique so they may appear in relevant searches. Be distinctive and avoid using names that are too generic or too similar to existing shows. Avoid using emojis and repeated episode titles.” While aspects of these two paragraphs have been known from public statements by Apple employees - Apple’s frustrations with people putting repetitive things like episode numbers in titles has been a long-running affair - now they’re distilled into one official location where newer producers are likely to find concrete proof Apple hates emojis. That said, this might lead to changes in how podcast networks present themselves in future now that the industry has been made aware Channel names are a potential source of SEO in addition to individual podcast names. Place your bets on which network will be the first to work a punchy tagline into their Channel name. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Download: Spotify's building a new brand safety tool, Google Podcast removed an episode under suspicious conditions, and Apple tells us how their podcast search works. It's been a rollercoaster of a week for Acast news. Let's start with the positive. This Monday Acast announced a global Audio Pride Parade, celebrating Pride month for the LGBTQIA+ community via a series of podcast live shows in major cities across the world. Senior Partner Manager Alexandria Fuller said: “It's also one day where you feel safe to be yourself. With hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people on the rise, we're always wondering when it's safe to hold hands. But there's safety in numbers at Pride, and it's really freeing.” Fuller's heartfelt blog about the importance of celebrating queerness was undercut the next morning. Tuesday Acast announced a partnership with Spring to provide on-demand merch options for producers hosting on Acast, including Spring's so-called Mint on Demand NFT service.  According to Hot Pod, most of the 11 podcasts in the pilot program have elected to not use Mint on Demand. Also on Tuesday, multiple tweets were posted providing evidence Acast is data mining email addresses tucked in the RSS feeds of podcasts to send an advertisement email suggesting the podcaster would be better off switching to Acast. So far podcasters on Podbean, Captivate, Blubrry, and Transistor have reported being targeted by this aggressive marketing push.  Transistor co-founder Justin Jackson has reported Acast to their email service provider, who Jackson reports have said this cold-calling approach is against their terms of service. Jackson - who previously worked for an email company - considers the Acast emails to be illegal under Canadian law and has filed a formal complaint under the government arm created to enforce Canada's Anti Spam Law (also know as CASL).  A spokesperson for Acast told Podnews the emails targeting podcast of competitor hosting services are “... part of our continuing marketing strategy, which we don't currently plan to change.” At Sounds Profitable, our goals are to lift up and improve the entire industry. Based on the actions and response from Acast, we do not feel like they share those goals. Until Acast discontinues these practices, we will no longer be covering Acast in Sounds Profitable or The Download. --- This Wednesday Integral Ad Sciences announced a joint project with Spotify to develop a new third-party brand safety tool for podcast advertisers, with UM Worldwide signed on to be the first company in line to stress-test the project. From the press release: “The companies will embark on a rigorous analysis to help the industry understand the tools and resources necessary to effectively deliver brand safety in podcasting and digital audio writ large.” Given IAS already has these tools for both the web and apps, we can infer this announcement refers to a net-new production. An overwhelming majority of podcasting operates on RSS outside of Spotify's control, so this product is exclusively a brand safety play for content Spotify sells ads to on their own platform.  From the beginning of the press release:  “Ultimately, the firms intend to create the industry's first third-party brand safety and suitability reporting tool to bring more transparency and confidence to podcast advertising.” And then, later on:  “In the future, the results will be used to create a first-of-its-kind brand safety and suitability tool to aid in campaign planning, management, and reporting.” Spotify is no stranger to courting controversy when flirting with that safety, be it the actions of acerbic talent or the upcoming return of political ads. Brand safety is hot right now, but so is Spotify announcing things that don't go live. Should we hold our breath? In keeping with Pride month-adjacent stories: Google has provided a cautionary tale in the unexpected consequences of using automated systems to filter inappropriate content. On Tuesday the tabletop roleplaying game actual play podcast RPG: Realms of Peril and Glory posted a screenshot of their newest episode showing an error on Google Podcasts indicating the content is unavailable for people under the age of 18.  As Podnews covered in October of last year, this is not necessarily new. Google Podcasts, in an effort to remain in compliance with some laws in Europe and the UK addressing children accessing age-inappropriate content, began restricting certain podcasts from being visible to users with underaged accounts or users who weren't logged into a Google account while attempting to access.  This particular interest is noteworthy as the episode isn't just blocked from users who aren't logged in to Google Podcasts. As of Wednesday it was inaccessible to anyone on Google Podcasts. From the original tweet from RPG: “There is nothing adult in this episode. The only difference from our other episodes is the word Lesbian in the title.” RPG's missing episode was the first of a Pride month-themed campaign titled Spooky Sword Lesbians. The description also mentions the indie tabletop roleplaying game Thirsty Sword Lesbians used to make the show. The game's official description describes it as “a roleplaying game for telling queer stories with friends.” Evil Hat Productions, the game's distributor, lists it as being appropriate for ages 13 and up. This unfortunate incident sparks memories of similar issues on YouTube, on which Google restricts videos from trending or getting traction in the recommendation algorithm if they're deemed 18+. In recent years LGBTQIA+ content creators have widely reported basic words such as ‘trans' or ‘gay' are automatically flagged as adult, regardless of the video's content.  Regardless of Google's inevitable response to this issue, it stands as a cautionary tale to all podcasting companies: automation technology is a wonderful tool but it is also prone to developing unintended biases based on its creators and training. Unintended consequences such as removing the first episode of a podcast about gay characters halfway through the month dedicated to commemorating the birth of the gay rights movement in the United States.   Spotify's gone shopping again. According to Tech Crunch's Ingrid Lunden on Monday, Spotify is purchasing Sonantic, the company behind the AI speech synthesizing tech used to voice Val Kilmer's character in Top Gun: Maverick.  While AI voices are the new hotness in entertainment, including Disney's partnership with Respeech to synthesize younger versions of Mark Hamill and James Earl Jones for The Mandalorian and Obi Wan, Spotify hints at more grounded visions for Sonantic's tech. The blog post cited by Lunden hints at it being used across Spotify, not in one specific application of a synthetic voice. “One example that Spotify gives of how it might use the tech is to use AI voices to bring more audio-based recommendations and descriptions to users who are not looking at their screens — for example, for those driving cars or listening while doing other activities and not able to look at a screen.”  It seems Spotify might be aiming at constructing their own version of Siri or Alexa moreso than dipping their toes into synthetic podcasters. At least, not yet.  Once again, we bring you useful news directly from Apple. On Wednesday Apple posted a guide on the Apple Podcasts for Creators website simply titled “Search on Apple Podcasts.”  While the information contained therein is more directly useful for podcast creators more so than the wider industry, it's important to understand the nuts and bolts of how such basic things work. Especially when large companies like Apple voluntarily step up to the plate to be more transparent about systems usually kept locked in secrecy for fear of bad actors exploiting the transparency for gain.  “The more listeners engage with your new shows and episodes, the higher they will rank for relevant search terms, so make sure to promote your shows and episodes on Apple Podcasts when they launch. Make sure your channel name, show titles, and episode titles are specific and unique so they may appear in relevant searches. Be distinctive and avoid using names that are too generic or too similar to existing shows. Avoid using emojis and repeated episode titles.”  While aspects of these two paragraphs have been known from public statements by Apple employees - Apple's frustrations with people putting repetitive things like episode numbers in titles has been a long-running affair - now they're distilled into one official location where newer producers are likely to find concrete proof Apple hates emojis.  That said, this might lead to changes in how podcast networks present themselves in future now that the industry has been made aware Channel names are a potential source of SEO in addition to individual podcast names. Place your bets on which network will be the first to work a punchy tagline into their Channel name.  The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Evo Terra edited today's episode. Special thanks to our media host, Omny Studio. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Podcasting used to be a niche hobby for internet bloggers. Now, companies like Spotify, Amazon and Sirius XM dominate the industry. This week, we look at the rapid growth and commercialization of podcasting and how it's shaping our culture. We'll hear about a podcast studio that centers its work on diverse and undeserved communities. And a look at the role podcasters played in spreading fake news ahead of the January 6th insurrection. GUESTS: Nick Quah: Podcast Critic for Vulture and New York Magazine. He's also the founder of Hot Pod, a trade publication about the industry Paulina Velasco: Managing Producer at LWC Studios Valerie Wirtschafter: Senior data analyst in the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Brookings Institution   Disrupted is produced by James Szkobel-Wolff and Catie Talarski See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Download; data scraping is officially legal, recent Spotify purchases prove concerning for some, and what fiction podcasters can learn from their non-fiction cousins. Collecting data just got legally less questionable in the United States. On a Tuesday news roundup for ExchangeWire, Hanna Dillion covered a huge decision by the US court of appeals. The suit, brought by LinkedIn to prevent a rival company from scraping their publicly-available data, has ended with the Ninth Circuit of Appeals declaring the act of data scraping legal. The act of scraping - using software to automatically collect data hosted on the public internet - is now legally defined as an act that is not classified as hacking with the court’s decision. Scraping, thus, does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. The landmark ruling should come as a relief to academics, journalists, researchers, and archivists, for whom scraping publicly available information from the internet is an integral part of their day-to-day work. The decision, however, could also renew privacy and security concerns, as web scraping has been used for nefarious purposes in the past; in May 2021, several tech giants filed lawsuits against Clearview AI, a facial recognition startup which claimed to have scraped billions of social media profile photos, without the consent of users. What does this mean for the podcasting world? One can legally scrape data, but what they do with it remains a legally gray area. Scraping publicly-available RSS feeds for academic purposes is fine. Scraping those same feeds for email addresses with intent to spam anyone who isn’t using a certain company’s hosting service with offers to switch to said service is subject to other pre-existing laws. For more on the state of data scraping, see our March 11th episode coverage of a story about a similar lawsuit. Up next, in yet another recurring thread that has resurfaced: last Friday a Morning Brew article by Alyssa Meyers went live, titled “Spotify’s acquisition of podcast analytics firms has some in the industry concerned.” The piece acts as an industry reaction to the February acquisition of Podsights and Chartable (see The Download’s February 18th episode for our coverage at the moment). In the interest of full disclosure, we must note one of the industry voices quoted by Meyers is Sound Profitable’s own Bryan Barletta. The week after Spotify announced the acquisitions, Mike Kadin, CEO of podcast hosting and monetization platform RedCircle, told Marketing Brew it “had folks reach out to us from major publishers and ask if we have attribution technology. I’m not super worried about it, but it does sadden me to see more chunks of the ecosystem getting centralized.” It’s no secret the official position of The Download is pro-third party analytics to keep the industry honest and prevent further walled gardens of information in adtech. The concerns continue to be real and the industry will continue to fret until more options exist. Once again we return to highlighting the global nature of podcasting outside of English-speaking markets. On Saturday Luis Pablo Segundo, writing for Milenio, broke down the results of a recent study. The flashiest piece for our audience is the reveal that ad spending on podcasts in Mexico has risen fifty percent from 2019 to 2021, though it still represents a small market share in comparison to traditional radio. Traditional radio is expected to reach an advertising revenue by 2025 of $480 million, 10.6 percent higher than what was recorded in 2021, while podcasting will remain almost 11 times lower at $44 million, according to consulting firm PwC. A quick note for our Spanish-speaking audience: this story, as well as every other story covered each week, is covered in our Spanish sister podcast La Descarga! Hosted by myself and Gabriel Soto. Before we leave the realm of global podcasting growth, a small bit of news from Canada. eMarketer’s Paul Briggs shared last Monday data predicting almost two-thirds of the Canadian population will listen to some form of digital audio by the end of 2022. Last Thursday media critic and podcast producer Wil Williams guested on the Hot Pod newsletter with a column titled “What fiction podcasters can learn from nonfiction podcasters.” Their piece aims to provide fiction podcast producers, aspiring and existing alike, tools to build stories with techniques that are second nature to their nonfiction cousins. Over three sections Williams explores story flow, following a thesis, evocative sound design while providing three examples of existing podcasts that best embody these traits. But while fiction is finally getting its due, nonfiction is still considered the primary mode of storytelling in podcasting. This can cause some understandable contempt from fiction creators, but there's creative gold to be found in nonfiction. If you want your stories to have realistic goals, realistic sounds, and realistic characters, listening to real stories about real people can help you find those roots. Their piece heaps praise on high-quality nonfiction podcasts while also identifying what they do to be high quality. Podcasting needs more successful shows made by well-read producers. Williams effectively provides an entry-level reading list covering everything from a critically-acclaimed episode of Radiolab to the pilot of the hyper-niche podcast The McElroy Brothers Will Be in Trolls 2. Consider their nine to be an extended version of The Download’s occasional suggested reading sections. Knowing why and how podcasts work is the key to making more podcasts that work. For our final full story this week: Matt Deegan’s recent article “Tech Trying to Do Radio & Consistency.” Posted on Wednesday to his Matt on Audio newsletter, Deegan circles back to the topic of live audio and interrogates why the trend has swiftly fallen out of public favor despite multiple platforms. A consistent trend Deegan notes, similar to that of Facebook quietly abandoning podcasting endeavors, is a lack of follow-through and consistency. The vast majority of radio’s success comes from consistency and I’d argue that most successful podcasts are consistent too. If you take out the short-run documentary series, the vast majority of podcasts at the top of the Apple Podcast charts are long-running shows (and that’s with an algorithm that focuses on new). Meanwhile, the majority of flagship podcasts and content creators meant to push new services, such as Spotify’s forgotten Podcasts with Music feature, have faded away months after launch. Flashy tech does not make a successful long-standing platform. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Special thanks to Ian Powell for his audio prowess, and to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This Week On The Download: the IAB cites digital audio as the fastest-growing digital ad sector, Anchor language update embraces global podcasting, and Adweek launched their own podcast network. Let’s get started. Good news for those in the world of digital advertising: your efforts are working extremely well, according to the International Advertising Board. On Tuesday the IAB published an article titled “Digital Advertising Soared 35% to 189 Billion in 2021, according to the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report. Not the catchiest of headlines, but the article is full of good news. “The growth is consistent with a recent study from Harvard Business School, commissioned by IAB, which showed the internet economy has grown seven times faster than the U.S. economy over the past four years and now accounts for 12% of the U.S. GDP.” Digital advertising in general might be up, but there’s a tiny bit of news for the world of podcasting. Digital video, social media, and search revenue are all trending upward but digital audio has outpaced them all. According to one of the IAB’s highlights, digital audio took home the highest year over year growth at 57.9%, totaling $4.9 billion. There’s a lot changing in the world of advertising. Both this and previous episodes cover the small evolutions required to adapt to new tech, legislation, and industry standards. Despite it all, podcasts are still bringing in the money. One of the big-picture stories we’ve been following on The Download for months is that of podcasting as a global medium, not just something for English-speaking markets. The biggest news on that front was posted last Thursday on the official blog of Spotify’s podcast hosting platform Anchor. As of Thursday, Anchor web supports thirty five languages. “One of our biggest goals is to ensure that creators everywhere have access to all the robust tools and features Anchor has to offer. And while creators around the world have been able to record, host, and grow their podcast on our platform, Anchor on web hasn’t always been available to everyone in their native language.” As podcasting grows its infrastructure needs to grow with it. Localizing websites built for a different language is difficult under the best conditions. A major player in the podcasting industry allowing sites built on their service to be built in the native language of thirty five languages is a big step forward in supporting a world where the idea of a podcast does not automatically default to something produced in English. On Tuesday Al Mannarino, writing for the Adweek blog, announced Adweek has leveled up their podcasting capabilities with the help of Acast. “We are excited to announce the launch of the Adweek Podcast Network, the first-ever podcast network for advertising and marketing professionals, brand enthusiasts and anyone curious about what the heck that ad they saw was about.” The new network is planned to feature twelve podcasts, featuring five new creations, four existing Adweek shows, and three pre-existing podcasts from Adweek partners. “Through our partnership with Acast, the world’s leading independent podcast hosting platform, we’ll make sense of trends, tackle pressing challenges, and share top-tier insight to help you level up your career, creativity and strategy.” Adweek joins an ever-growing group of media outlets, organizations, and others who’re capitalizing on the inherent cross-promotional capabilities of a network. More content, more inventory, and a shiny new delivery vehicle for their existing ad sales team. What’s not to love? A changing of the guard is happening at Ad Results Media. On Tuesday Business Wire reported ARM CEO Marshall Williams is stepping down from his position. Chief revenue officer Steven Shanks and chief operations officer Michael Kropko are slated to replace Williams as co-CEOs. Williams’ replacements aren’t newcomers to the industry, either. New co-CEO Steven Shanks laid out his bone fides: ““I’m honored to have had the opportunity to learn from Marshall for the last decade. I’ve enjoyed purchasing some of the first podcast ads, negotiating some of the largest buys in the history of podcasting, developing 360-degree integrated ad concepts, building sponsorships from the ground up, and ultimately fueling the industry up to $2 billion in ad revenue. I’m thrilled to work with our team to further innovate and deliver performance for our clients.” While ARM looks to the future with two new CEOs and a former as chairman, it’s worth acknowledging William’s contribution over two and a half decades. ARM has played a big part in the growth of podcast advertising and Williams’ involvement was easily a large influence in how Podsights became the success they are. The Download has covered multiple articles about upcoming privacy changes on larger platforms and how they’ll affect advertising. On Monday Lara O’Reilly, writing for Insider, published an article showing projections on just how much some of the biggest ad buyers stand to lose from Apple’s App Tracking Transparency update. “The fallout from Apple's major privacy update is expected to continue well past the first year of its rollout, with a new analysis estimating the change could dent Meta, YouTube, Snap, and Twitter's revenues by almost $16 billion in total this year.” Facebook parent company Meta is projected to take the biggest hit with a revenue impact of 9.7 %, just edging out Snapchat owner Snap’s 9.6% loss. Though, where Snap is losing just under $550 million, Meta stands to lose $12.8 billion. “The change forced many advertisers to reassess their marketing and shift spend into channels that are less reliant on Apple's tracking identifier, such as offline advertising or Apple's own search ad products.” This humble podcast news aggregation podcast wishes to point out podcast ads are a pre-existing channel that are in no way reliant on Apple’s tracking identifier. On the February 10th episode of The Download we covered an Ashley Carman op-ed in Hot Pod that highlighted Facebook’s apparent lack of interest in a push into podcasting, a move the company had seemed to be quite vocal about. Carman is back, and the news isn’t looking good for podcasters who favor their grandparent’s favorite social media platform. In an article for Bloomberg, Carman’s new headline reads “Facebook is Pulling Back from Its Foray Into Podcasting.” “A spokesperson for Facebook said the company is still working on podcasts even as it’s accelerating work on priority features like Reels and Feed. The company is seeing good engagement for its audio products, according to the spokesperson, who declined to provide specifics.” Meta’s focus appears to be firmly directed towards plans to build a shortform video platform to compete with TikTok and building out their virtual reality hangout space Metaverse, where users can have meetings and buy NFTs. Meanwhile, the proposed projects to get Facebook-exclusive podcasting have been left to die on the vine. Carman’s reporting reveals multiple contractors who’d been brought on to create content for both Facebook’s podcasting arm and their social audio platform have not had their contracts renewed. Facebook sponsored Podcast Movement last August, yet was absent from Podcast Movement Evolutions last month. Still, not all hope is lost. Carman’s report ends with anecdotal evidence that might suggest there’s still a use-case for podcasting on Facebook. “But even Facebook’s limited podcasting efforts have been a source of growth for some content providers. TYT Network, which produces political programming, said Facebook is its second-most-popular listening platform after Apple Podcasts.” Finally, it’s time for our semi-regular roundup of articles that didn’t make it into today’s episode, but are still worth working into your weekend reading. The first title: Ariel Shapiro Joins The Verge as Lead Reporter for Hot Pod by Aude White And finally: What I Learned Teaching a NYU Course About Podcasting by Steven Goldstein. As always, the links to every article mentioned on an episode of The Download can be found in the episode details. The Download is a production of Sounds Profitable. Today's episode was hosted by Shreya Sharma and Manuela Bedoya, and the script was written by Gavin Gaddis. Bryan Barletta and Evo Terra are the executive producers of The Download from Sounds Profitable. Special thanks to Ian Powell for his audio prowess, and to our media host, Omny Studio.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ashley Carman joins Jason & Molly to discuss Spotify's acquisition of podcast ad-tech companies Chartable and Podsights (1:55). Ashley is a senior reporter at The Verge and the lead writer at HotPod. We dig into why she thinks Spotify's main competition is YouTube and how the Big Tech and Big Media podcasting efforts are playing out. After that, 10 companies pitch Jason and the team in rapid-fire (46:16). These startups went through Founder University, a 12-week course run by the team at Launch. 0:00 Jason and Molly tee up today's topics: Spotify's podcasting ambitions with Ashley Carman PLUS 10 founder pitches from Founder University 1:55 Ashley Carman joins to break down the news: Spotify acquires Chartable and Podsights, she also covers what happened to Clubhouse 13:25 Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist 14:29 What podcasting loses by going with dynamically inserted ads, building for creators vs. building for established brands, Spotify going after YouTube as the main platform for creators 26:45 Linode - Apply to their Rise program for founder-led, early-stage startups and get 3 years of discounts at https://linode.com/twist. 27:52 Podcast tracking users habits, why Spotify is rejecting open standards, sleeping giants in the podcasting space 37:01 Mercury - Banking built for startups. See more at https://mercury.com/twist 38:26 Reflecting on Lumiary's big bet to be the HBO of podcasting 46:16 First 5 pitches: Giphting, Chojuu, TaCo, Term Payments, Fix6 PLUS judge feedback 1:02:05 5 Next 5 pitches: Remotespace. SavvyTeam, Gaan, Timewell, Innocuous AI PLUS judge feedback FOLLOW Ashley: https://twitter.com/ashleyrcarman Check out Founder University: https://www.founder.university Companies Pitching: Giphting, Chojuu, TaCo, Term Payments, Fix6, Remotespace, SavvyTeam, Gaan, Timewell, Innocuous AI FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood