Acast’s Aussie $31mn payout

• Acast Australia and New Zealand has revealed that the company has paid AUD $31mn (US $20mn) to local podcasters since the company’s local launch in Aug 2017.

• Spotify’s 2023 Wrapped appears to have highlighted how many people have had their Spotify accounts hacked. Looks like in May, a lot of accounts were playing Lil Durk, a Chicago-based “drill rapper”. In May, his album had three times the plays that Taylor Swift did.

• Elsie Escobar and Libsyn are releasing a prediction video at 8am ET today. Among those interviewed: our Editor, James Cridland.

• We notice that YouTube now has a /podcasts index page in Australia and the Netherlands. It doesn’t, yet, have one in Japan. A little review is below.

• Joe Casabona is halfway through a Podcast Advent Calendar, with insights, freebies and tips delivered daily to your inbox.

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• Podcast discovery website GreatPods has shared the most-viewed reviews from the last year. Among the top 10 are Strike Force Five, Archetypes and Diary of a CEO.

• Last week, we mentioned PodcastAI, a tool that automates much of your podcast production, noting that it got $25,000 funding from the Founder University. In September, the company got a further $100,000 from Jason Calacanis’s Accelerator, LAUNCH.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• Substack now has a video episodes feature. They’ve not called it a video podcasts feature, because the video doesn’t make it to the RSS feed, thus you’ll not be able to watch it in Pocket Casts or Apple Podcasts; and you can only watch in the iOS Substack app.

• You might see many different people telling you that Google Podcasts is to close in April 2024. Not quite true… that’s its US closure date only. The rest of the world get to keep it for a little longer. Anyway, here are the migration details and an example of the OPML file it spits out.

• The Shure MV7 has new firmware, v1.2.18 (“addresses audio distortion issues”). Use ShurePlus MOTIV to update the firmware. Similarly, new firmware is available for the MV88+. (We use the MV7, which we bought, every day; we carry the MV88+, which we were given by Shure, when travelling).

Podcast News

Congratulations to the folks at Optimal Living Daily: Healthy Habits & Motivation for hitting episode 3,000; with a network that has achieved more than 400 million listens. Today is the podcast’s eighth anniversary; they were one of the first Podnews supporters, too.

YouTube Podcasts - a mini review

We notice that YouTube now has a /podcasts index page in Australia and the Netherlands. It doesn’t, yet, have one in Japan.

• The Netherlands experience (when viewed in a private window from a dutch IP) shows an Indonesian show in the #1 “popular episodes” slot, US politics (in English) in #2, a US social activist (in English) in #3, a bodybuilder (in English) in #4, and content using cyrillic script in #5.) The “Popular Podcasts” section contains one dutch-language podcast called, literally, “All Episodes” at #2 (it’s actually the Lotgenoten Podcast from entrepreneurs); and MIDMID, a dutch sports podcast at #5. Those two shows are the only dutch-language highlights on the page.

• The Aussie experience (when viewed in a private window from an Aussie IP) contains no Australian content whatsoever; with the same Indonesian show in #1 position - fewer than 0.9% of Australians speak Indonesian - and the US’s NBC News at #2. There’s a Chinese-language show in “popular podcasts”. The ABC’s podcasts aren’t listed; nor are those from Sky News Australia, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Mamamia, and others.

The YouTube Music app is rather good for podcast playback, especially when playing RSS feeds; it now marks “played” shows nicely, too. The /podcasts landing page in YouTube itself, however, doesn’t appear to reflect the care and attention that the YouTube Music app has clearly received. Perhaps a properly curated experience is coming.