There are now 5.2m podcasts

• How many podcasts are in Spotify now? According to a notification from the Spotify app, there are 5,290,396.

• At Podcast Movement, research company nuvoodoo unveiled research on Six Things That Listeners Love About Podcasts (and Four That Drive Them Crazy). A blog post from the company highlights one of the six positive things; and tells us there’s a webinar to come.

• Substack has added a podcast preview feature, allowing creators to add a second audio file to send to free subscribers only. You might use that as a teaser. The company has also added separate show notes.

• Audioboom has debuted its new slate of original podcasts in the UK.

• Sign of the times: a new youth podcast from a young entrepreneur in the UK, My Duvet Flip is being released on TikTok and YouTube only.

• An example of why a gradual rollout is not a great idea. In an article, The Daily Star in Bangladesh explains how to use the new Twitter Podcasts feature, with plenty of screenshots: but the writer’s account hasn’t been enabled for Twitter Podcasts at all, so the article completely confuses podcasts with Twitter Spaces.

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FYI: Newly generated podcast pages within Podnews no longer carry the filtered credits information we used to display from Podchaser. We aim to support the open channel-level podcast:person tag instead from the new podcast namespace.

Moves and hires - with Podjobs.net

• Patton Valentine has been hired by Audacy’s Cadence13 to help adapt the company’s podcasts for TV and film. He joins from Ley Line Entertainment.

Tips and tricks

• Rephonic posts “how to promote a podcast: 55 hacks to get 1,000 subs”. You won’t believe number 48!

• After 17 years in podcasting, Sounds Profitable’s Tom Webster posts 17 things he has learnt from audiences and from you.

Podcast News

The News Agents launched yesterday: a new daily news podcast from Global. Matt Deegan writes more about it in his blog: the show is being launched, he estimates, with more than £1m ($1.1m) being spent on it.

The BBC’s Americast - which used to be hosted by The News Agent’s Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel - has chosen the launch day of The News Agents to announce its new hosts, as a grumpy spoiler to their commercial upstarts. The show will now be hosted by Justin Webb, Sarah Smith, Marianna Spring “and the Zurch”, whatever that is.

StraightioLab, hosted by George Civeris and Sam Taggart, has joined iHeartMedia and Will Ferrell’s Big Money Players Network. The first official episode of season three launches today and features comedians and hosts of the podcast “Las Culturistas” Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

LiSTNR’s Just the Gist is to run a three-part mini series on true crime, promoting NBCUniversal’s Hayu TV platform.

Modern Persian Food has launched its 100th episode. The show is a weekly podcast about Persian flavours, modern recipes, and embracing culture and identity through food.

The Run-Up, first launched for the presidential campaign in 2016, is back for the 2022 midterm elections in the US. The show starts on Sept 6, and will be hosted by New York Times political reporter Astead Herndon.