Podcast fills stadium with listeners

• The Acquired podcast filled San Francisco’s Chase Arena with more than 6,000 fans last week. Guests for the show included Mark Zuckerberg, Emily Chang and Daniel Ek. Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor (which hosts the show) was there and took a bunch of photographs. If ever you need a concrete example of the power of podcasting, this was it.

• Happy 20 year anniversary to the word “podcast”, which was proposed on Sep 16 2004 by Dannie J Gregoire on a mailing list. (Here’s a full history.)

• Got a diary? Find Sep 24, and mark it “New exciting thing from RØDE to be released”. Shhh.

• Picked Cherries is to expand the company’s audio snippet technology from podcasts to other audio content, including audiobooks and music. The tech lets users create and share up to 60-second clips, known as “cherries”, with others.

• The Washington Post covers a great story about niche podcasting: the story of a man who earns $400,000 a year from… HVAC School, a podcast about heating, ventilation and air conditioning products.

• Remember last week, when we pointed out that Deezer had changed its logo from a multi-coloured equaliser thing to a “beating heart”? Jimmy points out that Deezer’s Podcasters site is still using the multi-coloured equaliser thing. Get with the program, Deezer.

• Happy 20 years in podcasting, Rob Greenlee, who launched his first “active RSS feed with a media enclosure” (since it didn’t, yet, have a name) on Sep 15, 2004.

While we do some technical work, you may see a few missing graphics on our website and emails over the next few days. We’ll try to keep the broken images to a minimum!

People News

• Cathrine McVeigh has been made Director of Production - Audible Studios APAC. Based in Singapore, she’s worked at SCA, the Australian ABC, and Amazon Prime Video; and is a founding board member of Women in Media.

• An audio journalist working on two Ukraine podcasts, David Knowles, has died. He was 32. Knowles was on holiday at the time; there are no specific concerns about his death. Ukraine: The Latest and Battle Lines will continue in production.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• You can now link to episodes.fm for any podcast, by using the encoded RSS URL. The tool lets you link directly to individual episodes, too. The tool helps listeners follow your show wherever they get their podcasts, and is a great thing to put on a QR code to promote your show.

• TrueFans is now sharing listener activity (with permission) to the fediverse. Here’s ⁂ @sam@truefans.social and his activity - which you can subscribe to in tools like Mastodon and others. TrueFans has also announced that it is beginning work on iOS and Android apps.

  • Please do also join ⁂ @podnews@social.podnews.net if you’re on the fediverse. That’s us.

Tips and tricks - with Ausha Pro 🚀

• Master audience engagement by creating listener personas with Ausha’s guide.

• Learn Ausha’s key strategies to build a dedicated audience for your podcast

• There are more podcast directories to add your show to than you’d think. We link to all of them here.

… and in Podcast News

• History This Week returns today for a fifth season. It’s a Back Pocket Studios production with The History Channel - and, at its launch in Jan 2020, was the first podcast from the channel.
• The Life of Bryony is new from Bryony Gordon, a UK journalist and author. She describes it as “my little corner of the world where we can talk openly about mental health, the weird bits of life, and everything in between.”