James Cridland: We start with an exclusive today. Evergreen Podcasts has
acquired Rhapsody Voices. The
deal unites the teams, talent and assets of both companies. Rhapsody
Voices founder Mike
Jensen becomes Chief Business Officer at Evergreen. We have an
interview with Mike Jensen in the
Podcast Business Journal back in September 2023. We link to that
today from our show
notes and our newsletter at podnews.net. We also link to the
winners of the Audio Production
Awards in the UK which announced at the end of last week.
Podcasting is the fastest growing ad format in Australia.
According to data from the IAB
in the country, podcast advertising for the quarter was up by 26.5%
year on year. The
quarter's total revenue was US$20.5 million. Podcasts account
for 40% of all online audio
ad spend in the country.
Evergreen has returned to the list of companies certified to the
IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines.
The company is now certified to version 2.2.
BBC Sounds, the broadcaster's proprietary radio, music and
podcast app has signed a
licensing deal with Goalhanger to carry two of its podcasts. The
shows will be ad-free
and time delayed. The Rest is Football will be delayed by two
days while The Rest is History
will be delayed by eight weeks. The shows will continue to be
available elsewhere.
Goalhanger will receive a fee from the BBC for its shows to be
available in this way
which we understand is based on total listens within the BBC
Sounds app. Goalhanger was
one of the companies most fiercely opposed to the BBC's podcast
monetisation plans
which were designed to push audiences to the BBC Sounds app.
PodPage now supports Podroll lists. A Podroll, supported by
podcast hosts like Buzzsprout,
Blubrry, RSS.com and Transistor and by apps like Podcast Guru
and TrueFans, let you recommend
other shows to your listeners. Now if it's in your RSS feed, Podpage
automatically creates
a page for its pro users. We link to a example page today and
also our podcast pages also
support that too.
Spotify for Creators is discontinuing its US-only listener
support programme which let
listeners pledge a monthly recurring amount to support your show.
After a period of learnings
they say we are shutting down listener support on January 2nd
2025 to prioritise programmes
and resources that are more impactful to creators. Alternatives
include our sponsor, memberful.com.
Podcast Growth Connect tells us that a client has been following
our podcast and deeply
admires the value and actionable insights that we provide and
would like to be a guest
which is exciting. The company's unfinished website uses an
address in Sydney that doesn't
exist alongside a telephone number based elsewhere. The client
apparently wants to be a guest
on our new podcast trailers feed which we don't actually make.
"Those are not automated email," said Anisur Rahman-Shuvo, the
company's founder.
"My team members research them from the internet. Sometimes
leads could be mismatched. It's
a general issue." And he added, "Please keep your nose aside."
It's a Monday so time for some tech stuff and the podcasting 2.0
board meeting this
week discussed a significant change to the mechanism behind
streaming payments in podcasts.
The proposal is to optionally be able to link a podcast app to
an existing service like
Strike, a bitcoin banking app, or to a Noster wallet for payment
and to use a new protocol
- LN address - to receive money. The required changes to receive
money will require updates
to existing streaming payment apps and to every podcast RSS feed
that accepts streaming
payments. Currently, payment details are hard-coded in the RSS
feed and use Keysend which is a
protocol that only podcasting uses. The change is move payment
details out of the feed into
a file containing one or more payment destination addresses and
it offers more interoperability
with other payment platforms. Other benefits include easier
onboarding for listeners and
leaving the system open to bank transfers or even credit card
payments in future.
The streaming payment piece is important to get right, painful
though change can be. Suzanne
Santo had a song played on 'Boostagram Ball' episode 26 and
within five minutes of the
show ending said "So far, I've accumulated $7.77, which is more
than I've received from
Spotify after 28,000 plays." And just to put that into context,
'Boostagram Ball' only
gets a thousand plays a week. Joining Bluesky like everybody
else? Do your brand a favour
and use your domain name as a nickname. Easier to read out on
your podcast and comes with
full verification. Bluesky has a guide that we link to today.
You can find us on Bluesky.
We're at podnews.net. Just as simple as that. You can also
find our sponsors for
this section, rss.com over there as well. And in podcast news,
it was 20 years ago this
week that the first podcast came from Australia. This is what it
sounded like.
Cameron Reilly: Alright, welcome to the very first edition of G'day World, the Aussie
blog cast. I'm
Cameron in Melbourne and this is Mick in Sydney.
James Cridland: The voice of Cameron Reilly. G'day World episode one also
included a section called 'The Problems
with the name podcasting'. How things have changed. Cameron went
on to run The Podcast
Network which had more than 100 shows by 2007. His current feed
contains a chat with Ewan
Spence 20 years on. Looking back at their history in the space,
Cameron is now based
in Brisbane. Podtastic Audio covers the dirty secrets of
podcast scams and how to spot them this week from fake listener
boost services to phony
sponsorships and sketchy guest booking offers. Channels with
Peter Kafka interviews Chris
Balfe of Red Seat Ventures who helps stars find audiences and
make money via podcasts
and YouTube. Balfe notes that unlike podcasts, 70% of viewers of
his content on YouTube find
it because of the "algorithm" and in Kafka's words "An algorithm
that brought them there
today is an algorithm that could not bring them there tomorrow."
Stephen Bartlett's Diary of a CEO has reached 1 billion views
and listens. Bartlett said
"I owe the success of the Diary of a CEO to the now 50 strong
team behind the scenes.
This is a result of their hard work and talent." The Dicks are
coming to a small town near you.
True crime show Small Town Dicks has announced its first tour,
taking in tiny places like
Portland, Phoenix, Denver and Los Angeles in February. Fans of
the show will get a rare
glimpse into the detective's experience during an interrogation.
The Archery Parent Podcast launches today, the only archery
podcast hosted by an archery
mum. The show offers expert interviews, practical advice and
real-time stories to help parents
navigate the unique and relatively unknown world of archery and
to assist them with supporting
archers at every level, all around the world.
And unlike the Archery podcast which launches today, The Archers
is an everyday story of
country folk and slightly confusingly doesn't mention archery at
all. Broadcast since 1951,
this 12 minute daily show has over 5 million listeners in the UK.
In the latest episode,
Jacob finds himself on the spot and some new arrivals cause
chaos in Ambridge.
This podcast is sponsored by CoHost. Uncover the seniority,
department, companies and industries
your listeners work in, using CoHost's B2B analytics feature to
drive revenue. You can
book a demo today, you'll find the link in our show notes. And
that's the latest from
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