2018 was the year 'podcasts grew up'

Happy New Year! Here’s hoping 2019 is a good one for you.

• AdExchanger considers 2018 as being the year “podcasts grew up and programmatic audio took off”.

• The hosts of Thriving Launch “bring in six-figure revenue through their podcast and related business activities while spending months of the year on the road, living the digital nomad lifestyle,” says a Forbes blogger’s profile of them . Those who care about ratings and charts might like to note: the podcast had just four reviews in 2018 and is currently just in one country’s podcast charts: Uzbekistan.

• Apple Insider reports that Apple “offered their feedback” on NPR’s RAD analytics system. Meanwhile, Overcast’s Marco Arment, responding to our article on what RAD means for privacy, claims that “each downloaded MP3 could have unique RAD URLs, therefore tracking a user between all IPs they happen to be connected through while listening to a single podcast episode, and building cross-IP profiles of individuals.”

• The Wall Street Journal highlight short podcasts. (Ours is less than two minutes.)

• News from Los Angeles, the Californian city with famously bad traffic: they’re stopping measuring journeys in miles, and starting to measure journeys in podcast episodes instead. Satire, but a little close to home.

  
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Tips and tricks

• Aidan Vuocolo posts “5 most popular ways to find podcast guests that don’t cost a cent”.
• Wil Williams has “4 ways to promote your podcast”.

Podcasts

Podnews uses our own podcast pages to link to podcasts, so we’re able to consistently link to Apple, Google and other platforms. Here were 2018's most-viewed podcast pages.

1 Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

2 The Punies by Kobe Bryant

3 Unobscured

4 Lineker & Baker: Behind Closed Doors

5 Adrift with Geoff Lloyd and Annabel Port

6 The RFK Tapes

7 Round the Houses with Darah Beeny

8 Rebutting a Murderer

9 Headlong: Surviving Y2K

10 The Word from Mouth