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Friday, July 26, 2024
👉Exclusive: A podcast app that skips ads has been launched. Adblock Podcast is built by Micah Engle-Eshleman, who charges listeners to skip ads, and shares that revenue with podcast creators. The service also caches audio to avoid negatively impacting advertisers who pay per impression. We have the first interview with Micah in today’s edition of the Podnews Weekly Review, to learn how it works, and what its future is.
👉Sounds Profitable’s Tom Webster has launched a book. The Audience Is Listening: A Little Guide to Building a Big Podcast is not a book telling you how to make a podcast (“you know how to do that”), and instead, tells you how to make your podcast better.Our link to the book helps support independent bookstores, is cheaper than Amazon, and we earn $2 for each book sold.
👉Acast released its Q2 2024 financial report. Net sales grew by 24% year-on-year to SEK 477.9 mn (US $44mn), driven by North America and Europe; total listens dropped 15% y-on-y to 1,104 mn after the changes in Apple’s iOS 17. The figures are described as “another step closer to profitability”.Earlier this week, Audioboom published its eCPM (revenue per 1,000 downloads) of $60.09. For comparison, we calculate Acast’s average eCPM is $39.63.
👉Podcast hosting company bCast is to close. “It has simply not been possible to sustain the amount of usage with the revenue generated”, says an email to customers, seen by Podnews. The London-based company had grown by selling “lifetime” deals, which it tried to cancel in 2021, (and, a day later, changed its mind). The company hosts around 1,500 shows, of which around 350 are active.
👉Podcast Movement has published its full schedule for its event near Washington DC in August. MrBallen is the latest big name to be confirmed as a speaker. Code PODNEWS saves money on passes.
👉There's More to Read: HERE
Thursday, July 25, 2024
👉Spotify announced a major update to its self-serve ad platform, Spotify Ad Studio - and a new name, now called Spotify Ads Manager. There are new ad formats and measurement tools, as well as a redesign.
👉The British Podcast Awards announced the nominations for the 2024 awards. The winners will be announced on Sep 26 in central London, hosted by Marcus Brigstocke. The awards had over a thousand entries.
👉Sports podcasting is booming in the UK, says PressGazette. The article quotes YouTube views, which are public.
👉Microsoft Research is demonstrating a tool it calls GraphRAG, which (in part) uses podcast transcripts to produce a “knowledge-graph” of a podcast, making it easier to search. The website contains a short demo and an arXiv paper.
👉Google announced it is no longer planning to block third-party cookies in Chrome. Podcasts don’t use cookies; but podcasts do use IP addresses, which are increasingly hidden with VPNs, Apple’s Private Relay, and other tools. Google is suggesting it will hide IP addresses from Chrome next year.
👉There's More to Read: HERE
👉Spotify published its Q2 2024 results. As part of a record high $297mn quarterly profit, the company reported improved podcast profitability, “driven by growth in impressions sold across Original and Licensed podcasts and the Spotify Audience Network”. The company says it has more than 6 million podcasts.Spotify’s monthly active users grew 14% year-on-year, but missed targets by 5mn.
A reminder that Spotify for Podcasters has a free masterclass on Thursday about how to use video.
More from Daniel Ek about the benefits of video podcasting below.
👉Audioboom published its H1 2024 results. eCPM (revenue per 1,000 downloads) was up 38% in Q2. Revenue is up 7% in total, and adjusted EBITDA profit is $0.3mn.CEO Stuart Last estimates that the changes in Apple’s iOS 17 update have cost them $9mn in revenue. Earlier in the year, Acast had put its iOS 17 costs at $7.2mn.
👉More keynote speakers at the upcoming Podcast Movement in August. Ira Glass is the iconic voice behind This American Life, and will join NPR’s Wild Card host Rachel Martin on stage. Additionally, a new edition of The Podcast Landscape will be shared on stage. Use code PODNEWS to save on passes.
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YouTube Music added the ability to mark a podcast as played earlier in the month. We also notice that in Australia, we now get a “podcasts” chip at the top of the screen; you can now auto-download shows; and there are ways of filtering episode lists to only show, for example, unplayed or downloaded episodes.
👉Magellan AI shared its list of top (US) podcast advertisers for June. BetterHelp remains at #1; AI voice provider AudioStack is the newest “mover and shaker”, spending $1.7mn. Magellan AI has a short webinar on Thursday to discuss the results.
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
👉Spotify published its Q2 2024 results. As part of a record high $297mn quarterly profit, the company reported improved podcast profitability, “driven by growth in impressions sold across Original and Licensed podcasts and the Spotify Audience Network”. The company says it has more than 6 million podcasts.Spotify’s monthly active users grew 14% year-on-year, but missed targets by 5mn.
A reminder that Spotify for Podcasters has a free masterclass on Thursday about how to use video.
More from Daniel Ek about the benefits of video podcasting below.
👉Audioboom published its H1 2024 results. eCPM (revenue per 1,000 downloads) was up 38% in Q2. Revenue is up 7% in total, and adjusted EBITDA profit is $0.3mn.CEO Stuart Last estimates that the changes in Apple’s iOS 17 update have cost them $9mn in revenue. Earlier in the year, Acast had put its iOS 17 costs at $7.2mn.
👉More keynote speakers at the upcoming Podcast Movement in August. Ira Glass is the iconic voice behind This American Life, and will join NPR’s Wild Card host Rachel Martin on stage. Additionally, a new edition of The Podcast Landscape will be shared on stage. Use code PODNEWS to save on passes.
👉
YouTube Music added the ability to mark a podcast as played earlier in the month. We also notice that in Australia, we now get a “podcasts” chip at the top of the screen; you can now auto-download shows; and there are ways of filtering episode lists to only show, for example, unplayed or downloaded episodes.
👉Magellan AI shared its list of top (US) podcast advertisers for June. BetterHelp remains at #1; AI voice provider AudioStack is the newest “mover and shaker”, spending $1.7mn. Magellan AI has a short webinar on Thursday to discuss the results.
👉There's More To Read: HERE
👉Growth-oriented podcast hosting platform Captivate is the first podcast host to achieve IAB v2.2 Certification for Podcast Measurement. The company supports IPv6 and has a self-auditing spike detection system for accurate and reliable data. v2.2 of the podcast measurement guidelines were released in May.Other certified companies are at v2.1; Spotify’s Megaphone plans to returning to the IAB under v2.2 compliance. Here’s more about podcast statistics.
👉According to a customer email seen by Podnews, Megaphone is rolling out new charts and metrics, and an upgraded campaign management tool (here’s how to use it).
👉Podcast hosting company Blubrry has launched AI-Generated Clip Highlights. It’s part of the company’s Podcast AI Assistant. Here’s an example.
👉In Australia, Commercial Radio & Audio has published The Audio Edge, with data and information about audio advertising.
👉Kast Media, which is under Chapter 11 protection, is publishing monthly reports as it continues to operate. In June, it earnt $2,100 from Apple subscriptions, and $74,000 from advertising.
👉Because someone asked: we monitored 9,634 non-cached accesses to our podcast RSS feed in a 36-hour period, from podcast directories and apps.
👉Podcast production company Paradiso Media has started bankruptcy proceedings in a French court. The company was founded in June 2019, and acquired competitor Binge Audio in May 2023: at the time it had 170 shows and 50 employees, based in Paris, Los Angeles and New York. Paradiso raised $5.9mn in investment in Sept 2021. We understand that Binge Audio, still a separate company, continues its operations.
👉The majority of women in the US are sports fans, according to the Female Fans Sports Audio Report from Edison Research, which was released last week. The research, with SiriusXM Media and GroupM, discovered that a third of them listen to sports audio each week.
👉The Triton Digital Podcast Ranker for June was released. Downloads for the period were down 2.2%. Audioboom re-entered the top 5. iHeart is #1 sales network with average weekly downloads of 66mn.
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
👉Growth-oriented podcast hosting platform Captivate is the first podcast host to achieve IAB v2.2 Certification for Podcast Measurement. The company supports IPv6 and has a self-auditing spike detection system for accurate and reliable data. v2.2 of the podcast measurement guidelines were released in May.Other certified companies are at v2.1; Spotify’s Megaphone plans to returning to the IAB under v2.2 compliance. Here’s more about podcast statistics.
👉According to a customer email seen by Podnews, Megaphone is rolling out new charts and metrics, and an upgraded campaign management tool (here’s how to use it).
👉Podcast hosting company Blubrry has launched AI-Generated Clip Highlights. It’s part of the company’s Podcast AI Assistant. Here’s an example.
👉In Australia, Commercial Radio & Audio has published The Audio Edge, with data and information about audio advertising.
👉Kast Media, which is under Chapter 11 protection, is publishing monthly reports as it continues to operate. In June, it earnt $2,100 from Apple subscriptions, and $74,000 from advertising.
👉Because someone asked: we monitored 9,634 non-cached accesses to our podcast RSS feed in a 36-hour period, from podcast directories and apps.
- Good news: 83.9% support some form of compression (either GZIP or Brotli), which has helped save a lot of bandwidth (87% every time!). 58% prefer GZIP, 42% prefer Brotli, incidentally.
- Bad news: 21% don’t support if-modified-since, a simple HTTP header that avoids re-dowloading and re-parsing our RSS feed every time. And 13.5% don’t support either if-modified-since or if-none-match.
There's More To Read: HERE
Monday, July 22, 2024
👉The majority of women in the US are sports fans, according to the Female Fans Sports Audio Report from Edison Research, which was released last week. The research, with SiriusXM Media and GroupM, discovered that a third of them listen to sports audio each week.
👉The Triton Digital Podcast Ranker for June was released. Downloads for the period were down 2.2%. Audioboom re-entered the top 5. iHeart is #1 sales network with average weekly downloads of 66mn.
- iHeart’s average weekly downloads in the Podtrac ranker for June are 78mn, 18% higher than Triton’s number, despite both solutions being IAB Certified. Over the last month, trying to understand why they’re different, Podnews spoke to Podtrac, Triton, iHeart and the IAB - and learnt:Not all iHeart shows are measured by both Podtrac and Triton. Triton works by logfile analysis, Podtrac works by redirects, and not all shows support both. (Triton doesn’t report the total number of iHeart shows that it measures).
- Additionally, Podtrac measures a calendar month; while Triton measures a four-week period. (June, as one example, has an extra weekend and three fewer weekdays than May this year, which changes average numbers substantially).
👉There's More To Read: HERE\
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