Online audio ad revenue to soar to $16.6mn this year

May we have your help? While Apple Podcasts ratings and reviews don’t affect the charts, they do affect traffic estimates from other companies. Could we have a decent rating or review for our daily and/or weekly shows in Apple Podcasts? (Our weekly show is even in video now!) We’d be very grateful. Thank you.

• Global ad spend is to grow by 11.9% this year, according to new data from WARC Media. Online audio should grow +9.9% to $16.6bn globally this year, and a further +7.5% next year. The market research company also says that Amazon, Alphabet and Meta will take a combined market share of 59.7% of all ad revenue (excluding China).

• Spotify is to expand access to audiobooks to make then virtually global, covering more than 180 markets. Some additional countries will get twelve hours of audiobooks free; however across much of Africa and Asia, access will require a paid add-on. Users will “find books next to their music and podcasts”, reports TNW.

• SiriusXM has signed Serialously and 10 to Life - two true crime shows from Annie Elise. They were with Audioboom.

• Podscribe released a new ranker, with updates for “play” definitions for Spotify and YouTube. Engaged view numbers from YouTube require publishers to connect their analytics.

• Stephen Robles has built a lot of helpful tools for MacOS. Transcriber is free, and produces editable, WebVTT files, using Apple Intelligence. He’s also built Leveler, which gives “smooth, consistent speech levels”, setting your audio at -16 LUFS, just how it should be. And Captioner burns in those fancy animated captions to your shareable video clip. Neat!

• A new tool called Pod Is Life combines available podcast charts from Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Castbox and Pocket Casts to give one overall top chart, for a number of different countries including the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. While different charts measure different things, the resulting combined chart scores seem to be reflective of some of the biggest shows in each country.

• The Podcast Taxonomy, a standard way to describe podcast job roles, has disappeared from the internet. It was launched in 2020 by Podchaser, and the specification is part of Podcasting 2.0's person feature. There’s been no communication from the original team.

• A musician called Mike Smith has been thrown in prison for streaming fraud. He had set up a streaming farm to claim streaming revenues from companies like Spotify. Here’s the full judgement.

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