Podnews
Your daily briefing for podcast and on-demand
Website: podnews.net
Owns
Latest news
- Sep 4: Podcasts you love, from people you trust - from January, the TWiT podcast network is to host on DAX US, allowing TWiT to directly manage DAI advertising across its network, and work even closer with advertisers. The company, which has shows like Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech, currently self-hosts.
- Aug 31: In Australia, LiSTNR has partnered with Flightcast to power its podcasting distribution, including video. More than 150 shows will move onto Flightcast, which was launched by Steven Bartlett and Rox Codes in Oct 2025 - it's the company's biggest customer yet. LiSTNR is run by Australia's largest commercial radio company SCA: they currently use Triton's Omny Studio for podcast hosting.
- Aug 25: Podbean podcasters were given a shock this week, as the company rolled out new filters to its download analytics "designed to identify and filter AI and crawler-related traffic" - but the change marked all downloads from Apple Podcasts as invalid, causing a significant decrease in reported numbers to its customers. Podnews has seen data from some podcasts showing hundreds of plays on Apple Podcasts Connect, but apparently zero downloads to Apple Podcasts in Podbean's analytics dashboard during the same time period. One support email says: "We recently pushed an update to mitigate disingenuous traffic from accessing podcasts on our side. Unfortunately, this inadvertently also affected the genuine traffic reporting. It has been advised that we rolled back our current update." If a rollback has happened, no change has been visible in the numbers as yet.
- Aug 24: Top 10 parenting podcast The Parent Tap has been suddenly pulled from YouTube - apparently by an automated tool. With no strikes or warnings, the show was permanently pulled on August 14th, accusing the channel of trying to circumvent a ban: a ban that the channel owner says simply didn't happen. An attempt to appeal the closure was knocked back almost instantly by YouTube, using an automated template. Ryan McDonough, the channel's owner, has opened a petition; and told Podnews: "I poured my heart and soul into building this channel from scratch. In 4 short months, I went from zero to 2.3k subscribers and over 50,000 views with a 150 video catalog. Having all of that wiped out overnight by an automated system is a gut-punch that keeps punching. The fact that I can't reach a human and have literally no idea how this happened is completely beyond comprehension." His show continues on open RSS.
- Aug 21: The power is in our hands, says Losh Moodaley in an eagerly-anticipated new article for Podnews. Power might be being consolidated by the platforms that control distribution - and it's especially the case for podcasting's middle-class - but the good news is that there are ways to gain economic leverage and own many parts of the relationships needed for podcasting, she says.
Data credits: Podnews newsletter