It’s Adopt-a-Listener Month

• Happy Adopt-a-Listener Month! “If we want the podcast industry to grow, we need to turn those non-podcast listeners into podcast listeners,” says Tink Media, and they have audio and scripts for your podcast too. Hear one today in our daily podcast.

• Spotify for Podcasters increased its share in March to 23.1% of all new episodes: a six month high for the podcast host formerly known as Anchor. Spotify’s Megaphone also posted an all-time high. At #3, iHeart’s Spreaker saw a dramatic increase from 5.4% to 6.5%, perhaps due to a misleading announcement that the platform was “now free” (it was just a small tweak on already existing free accounts). Buzzsprout remains at #2.

  • Open podcast tracking tool OP3 grew its share of tracked episodes by 11.5% last month, and is now at #13. Podtrac remains #1. And, Amazon Cloudfront remains the most-used CDN.

• The above data is worked out by John Spurlock for March, during which there were:

  • 1.9m podcast episodes
  • lasting more than 130 years
  • taking more than 71 TB of storage

• Spotify is claiming the company now has 5.3m podcasts. In October, the company claimed 5.5m podcasts. 🤔

• YouTube will (globally) roll out a new podcast tab in its main YouTube app this week - pic 1 pic 2. The tab lists all podcasts owned by that particular channel.

  • Tip: Since podcasts are available globally on the main YouTube app, you’re best saying “Listen to our podcast on YouTube” rather than specifically mentioning YouTube Music: podcasts in there are only available in the US.

• Eric Nuzum publishes his speaking notes from a 7-minute speech at Radiodays Europe about the challenges for the industry over the next twelve months. He spoke about market saturation. Podnews’s Editor, James Cridland, also spoke: his topic was about keeping podcasting open. Arielle Nissenblatt gets prime placement in this piece from Czech Radio on the conference.

• Pod Genie is a new service that turns any RSS feed into a podcast. Quite nicely, it’ll pull multiple feeds together into one show. Pricing starts at $10/month.

• Podcast Brunch Club - like book club, but for podcasts - published its April playlist focusing on scams.

• Corner of doom: Vanity Fair publishes a piece on the end of podcasting’s boom; while Paramount is “slowing down its podcast production launch pace”, according to Digiday.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Now that transcripts are part of the recommendation by the Podcast Standards Project, a new library called Transcriptator has been published, which parses transcripts for your app.

• Testing: Anyone want a 50-hour podcast episode to test their player on?

• Cross-app comments are now available on the Podcast Index website. (Podnews Daily supports them, but we see few comments… yet, anyway)

• In the Podcasting 2.0 “board meeting” this week (transcript), Dave Jones is ill (again?!), we learn that Fountain is the most-used app for boosts (except for live shows); and Adam’s views on the Podcast Standards Project, who he sees as welcome “diplomats” in the attack on proprietary podcasting.

• Why support alternateEnclosures? Because if you do, podcast hosts, you could save up to 87.5% of your bandwidth bills. That’s according to our Editor, who has written a response to Blubrry’s Todd Cochrane.

Tips and tricks - with Phantom Producer

• How to use podcasting to amplify credible reporting from the International Journalists’ Network and Amit Varma highlights the benefit of building your audience - and giving it at least a year to succeed.

Podcast News

Podnews’s Sam Sethi is highlighted in the latest Mere Mortals. Expect discussions on: participating actively during the birth of the internet, how digital money will change the world, his focus when creating Podfans, why he is going all in on the 'Value For Value’ model, technology he think will be important in the next 10 years and books/people he finds fascinating.

Lindsay Graham sounded a little different on Saturday’s History Daily - probably because it was actor Ryan Reynolds instead. He’s a fan, listening every day.