Acast’s big European hire and management re-org

• Podcast monetisation company Acast has made a new and significant senior hire - Liv Sandberg will become EVP, Europe from early 2027. She joins from TikTok, Facebook and Starcom, and has served on the IAB Sweden board since 2019. She also won Role Model of the Year at the Nordic Women in Tech Awards in 2024. It means that all of Acast’s businesses in Europe now have a single regional leader.

  • Acast also held its first creator event in Brazil last week.

• Can AI help with your podcast production? Caloroga Media has launched a new AI production studio called Linnet. The tool, born out of the company’s own production workflow, is a scriptwriting tool, an audio and video editor and a publishing tool that uploads finished shows directly to podcast hosting companies. “In an industry flooded with AI-generated content designed to be ignored, Linnet puts creators back in control of what gets made and how it sounds.” It’s in limited-access beta.

  • We notice that the company has also jumped the shark - at least, removed the word from the company name.

• First look: Flightcast has added video advertising capabilities - allowing video ads to be delivered across Spotify, Apple Podcasts and RSS. The tool gives publishers a more unified way to deliver video advertising.

• First look: Red Seat Ventures has integrated Barometer’s contextual analysis directly into its hosting platform Speakeasy. It allows advertisers to target content at the episode level, and unlocks more advertising opportunities across the 40 premium creators that the company represents.

• Podtrac released its ranker for August. The top three companies are showing significantly lower traffic: compared year-on-year, the iHeart Audience Network is down -15% in US monthly audience; and down by more than -20% for US streams/downloads. NPR has seen a -15% slump in both; Libsyn’s audience is down -33%, and streams/downloads are down -50%. Podtrac’s ranker doesn’t yet measure HLS video, but YouTube and Spotify video are included in these numbers. (The ranker itself measures participating publishers only).

• YouTube has been announced as the headline partners for the UK’s Independent Podcast Awards. The awards will be on Nov 4 in London.

• Apple has a launch event today, widely expected to introduce new premium iPhone models (including a foldable device), an updated Apple Watch, new AirPods, and potentially smart home devices. The company should also announce the launch date of iOS, tvOS and macOS 27 - which brings video to Apple Podcasts on all Apple platforms.

• Podcast hosting and monetisation platform Disctopia announced native publishing to Apple Podcasts. The platform has done video podcasting since 2022, and also offers premium subscriptions through Apple Podcasts.

• A widely syndicated article asks “Are most podcasts dead? Four in ten without new episode in a year”. The data, from a UK podcast marketing company, only analyses 19,659 podcast feeds. We analysed the full 4.7 million: 763,319 shows (19.3%) have been updated in the past year.

• It’s a year since we reported the death of Todd Cochrane. In a blog post today, Rob Greenlee looks back at his conversations with Todd. “What stands out most is how consistently Todd fought for what he believed mattered,” he says - also linking to other thoughts from across the industry and beyond.

  • Should you want a bit of Todd in fine form, Chris Pirillo spoke to Todd Cochrane in Hawaii in 2009, about a potential patent for podcasting (one which it took until 2018 to finally get rid of). The oldest YouTube video of Todd that we can find - “a historic first video podcast” from November 2006. Next week will be the first Podcast Movement without him - we’ll miss him.

• Quill and CoHost has announced another free webinar: this time, The Podcast and Pipeline Gap: How Podcasts Fit Into Your ABM Strategy. That’s Account-Based Marketing, should you be interested, though you probably know that if you’re interested in taking part. It’s on Sep 17 at 12pm Eastern, with Stephanie Andrews, VP of Product at CoHost, and Dania Wood, Senior Producer and Analytics Lead at Quill.

• Airwave has signed Philosophize This!, a show with more than a million listens a month … impressions.fm has signed Fun For All Ages and the Amazing Colossal Podcast, broadening the network’s programming.

• Oldest podcast host in the world? Yesterday, we covered 95 year-old Dominic Chianese, and wondered if he might be the oldest podcast host. Podnews reader Becky told us of another 95 year-old hosting a podcast (and this will make you feel old) - none other than William Shatner, who’s podcast No Time But Now aptly talks about health, longevity, and resilience in pursuit of living well. However, Shatner is… twenty-six days younger than Chianese. So, unless you know different, Chianese might be The Official Oldest Podcast Host Ever.

People News

• Ray Harkins has become Head of Podcasts at Mynt Agency. “I am SO happy to roll with the team of audio nerds into the future,” he writes. He was previously at ART19 and Amazon, and hosts the music podcast 100 Words or Less.
• Sam Hoffnagle has joined Airwave as VP of Revenue Operations - she joins from Times of India, IQzone, and Smaato.
• Nathan Jordan has joined Companion as Sales Director. He’s reuniting with General Manager AJ Feliciano, and also joins from Semaphore Brand Solutions and ZATV.
• Niklas Brantberg has started as Managing Director for Spotify in the Nordics. In a post on LinkedIn, he said “I want to build stronger partnerships with creators across” - skip - “responsibility. Right now, though, I” - skip - “a ride!” (That skip ahead button is so useful!)
• The Wall Street Journal has hired Leital Molad as Senior Director of Shows. She was Head of Podcasts at WaitWhat, and also worked at Pushkin Industries and WNYC.
• Sarah Rivera has joined ADOPTER Media as Senior Account Executive.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement NYC

• Mike Russell went to Podcast Movement 2019 and recorded a fancy video of his visit.
• When you say “we’ll be back after the break”, you’re drawing attention to the fact that there is an ad-break coming up - so listeners will be prepared with the skip button. And when you say “welcome back”, then a) we didn’t go away, you did, and b) you sound stupid if your podcast hosting company failed to sell any ads in that break. Ask us how we know. Just leave a pause, don’t telegraph ad breaks. (They don’t on the radio, after all!)

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: The History Chicks celebrates the lives of remarkable women from ancient times to the modern day, exploring women’s history in engaging episodes full of deep research, pop culture references, and the occasional tumble down a rabbit hole. The show’s last episode focuses on Virginia Hall, “the most dangerous Allied agent in France”.

Experience: Analysing Newsmakers launched in July, and is already seven episodes in. It features a former broadcast journalist and a clinical psychologist who take one news story and work out the psychology underneath it. Recent episodes: Keir Starmer standing down and the psychology of role exit, the Meta addictive-design trial and variable ratio reinforcement, and public shaming after the death of Professor Jason Arday.

For The Love Of Golf launched this week from Crowd Network - a new show from UK broadcasters Dan Walker and Iona Stephen. We’re promised it’ll cover everything from the major tournaments and the world’s best players to weekend fourballs, great courses, new equipment and stories away from the fairways. It’s from Crowd Network.

In You’re Not Too Much, Lauren Howard (whose late father was a clinician who was regularly asked to testify in high profile cases of this nature) argues why we’re all missing the point around the Lindsay Clancy story. She says her father would have been “screaming” over the way this case has been handled.

Life as a burglar comes with some great stories, and in Wit or Wit-Out this week, Chick Goodroe of the K&A Gang from the 1950s, 60s and 70s shares his time in and out of jail. The gang was investigated constantly by the FBI, and went to almost every state in the union to burglarize people.