Lower Street buys Pacific Content

• Exclusive: The Canadian podcast producer Pacific Content has been sold to the UK’s Lower Street. A number of Pacific Content employees will be joining Lower Street over the coming weeks. Lower Street founder Harry Morton praised Pacific Content, saying that the company’s podcasts are “legendary - super-creative, and expertly produced”. Terms were not made public.

• Exclusive: In a post to go public later today, Dave Jackson’s new gig has been revealed as Head of Podcasting for Podpage. Podpage says it’s “the simplest way to create a podcast website”. And now, Podpage Elite customers will get podcast coaching sessions at no additional cost; Dave will also host free weekly sessions for everyone.

• A Few Blockbuster Podcasts Are Making All the Money is the headline of a piece from the Wall Street Journal; the story is about the success of the big shows, and doesn’t actually suggest that smaller shows don’t make money.

• The 63 finalists have been announced for the RadioToday Australia/NZ Podcast Awards. The People’s Choice Awards are now open for you to vote.

• PodcastAddict has closed its customer feedback and ideas forum, after Uservoice removed its free tier (it now asks for $899 a month).

• In the UK, Channel 4 News thinks YouTube is ‘where podcast market growth really lies’, according to a story in Press Gazette. As evidence, the article quotes the apparent success of The Political Fourcast, which achieves “over 100,000 views per episode on average”. By comparison, two years ago, The Rest is Politics’s audio podcast got more than a million downloads per episode; and two years later they’re doing around 200,000 views per episode on YouTube.

• BBC History magazine’s website has published its 30 under 30. There are a lot of podcasters in there - so congratulations Katrina Kelly, the host of The Classics Podcast; Luke Daly from The Daly Medieval Podcast; Will Davis-Coleman from The Cloak and Dagger Podcast, and last but not least, Samuel Hume, the host of Pax Britannica.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• From logos to prefixes, hosts to user-agents and blocklists, we’ve compiled a list of Github repositories for podcast app and website developers.

• If you run a podcast directory, perhaps in your app, do you have a DMCA process clearly described on your website? It might help save the cost of a lawyer’s letter.

• And, a year on from its closure, what was the history of the Stitcher app?

Tips and tricks - with Memberful

• Podcasters of Reddit: Why does it take you so long to get to the point? Perhaps a tip of what not to do?

• Vetting guests is fundamental to maintaining the integrity and quality of your podcast. A News Reporter’s Guide to Vetting and Managing Podcast Guests discusses researching their backgrounds, providing pre-interview materials, and building rapport.

Podcast News

Ad Infinitum this week has Mike Jensen, the CEO of Rhapsody Voices, discussing different dimensions of making audio ads work with authenticity, including the ingredients of a persuasive host-read ad. The show is produced by Stew Redwine of Oxford Road.

Podcasting 2.0 came from a Bitcoin conference - at least in part - last weekend. A number of folks from the Podcasting 2.0 world were in Nashville for a music concert, and plenty of other things too.

The Seneschal: A Rebel Moon Story is a new drama podcast launched today by Netflix Podcasts. Set in the world of Rebel Moon, the epic science-fantasy two-part movie decades in the making, The Seneschal is Netflix’s first fictional companion podcast for a film, and coincide with the release of the Rebel Moon Director’s Cut.

From the BBC, Good Bad Billionaire returns for a new season today, looking at the super-rich. In the new season, the show looks at how Tiger Woods went from a child prodigy to the world’s highest paid athlete, how a communist mime artist became the boss of fashion house Prada, how hedge fund tycoon George Soros escaped Nazi occupation to become one of the most successful investors in history, and how an Indian multinational conglomerate boss built the biggest fortune in Asia.