Prime day: Amazon buys ART19

• Amazon has bought enterprise podcast hosting and adsales company ART19, announcing the news on their podcasters portal. No details of the deal were given. ART19 already hosts Wondery podcasts: this gives Amazon access to podcast hosting technology and a monetisation platform for dynamically-inserted advertising across all apps. Kintan Brahmbhatt, GM of Amazon Podcasts says that the company is hiring. Podnews has been predicting the purchase since Amazon bought Wondery in December.

• Stacey Goers is to leave NPR to join Acast. She has worked within NPR for the last five years, and is currently the Senior Product Manager for NPR Podcasts. Her LinkedIn post suggests her team will be “focused on products for audience development”.

  • Meanwhile, Acast has a new piece of sonic branding which you’ll hear in front of ads. Lizzy Pollott writes about what they call the Acast North Star; and the Bachelors in the City podcast has signed up to use Acast+ for exclusives and bonus episodes.

• Lauren Jarvis has left Spotify to join Literati, a book club startup, as Chief Business Officer. She was overseeing podcasting at Spotify for North America, and is credited for the deals with Joe Rogan and Dax Shephard. A former colleague tells us that “she helped lay the foundation for Spotify’s podcast offering, thanks to a relentless work ethic and a belief that hard work pays off”.

• Audacy has launched 2400Sports, a sports podcast studio. The company is the largest radio sports broadcaster in the US, and announced a deal with Major League Baseball recently.

• Podchaser has announced integration with OutlierClips, a Chrome extension that helps podcast hosts research and prep for interviews. The company has also introduced saved searches on its website, allowing you to bookmark filters and searches.

  
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• Moonbeam is a new app aimed at “solving the biggest problem facing the industry: finding new podcasts”. Built with a combination of machine-learning and human creators, it includes the ability for podcasters to create shareable clips, and was founded by Paul English, who built Kayak and Lola.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 4 2023

• Tortoise, a “slow news” website in the UK, has been signed by the Creative Artists Agency, mainly because of their podcast output like The Slow Newscast.

• What do ad-free podcasts mean to advertisers? Amaeya Media’s Chirag Desai writes for Communicate that there’s still a strong future for advertising messages in podcasts.

• Privacy seems less urgent at Google, after the company announced it was to delay blocking third-party cookies until 2023. “We need to move at a responsible pace,” says Vinay Goel, the Privacy Engineering Director for Chrome. Podnews uses no third-party cookies (indeed, no cookies at all unless you log in).

Podcast News

The Media & Entertainment Podcast, part of The Interim Leader from Odgers Interim, has our Editor as a guest in their latest episode: talking about the business of podcasting and the opportunities for leadership roles within it.

Don’t recognise any of the songs in Song Exploder? You’re not alone. Song Surgery is new, looking at the process of how songs were written - but songs Baby Boomers or Gen Xers (people born between 1946-1980) would have heard of.

On The Edge is a new podcast from The Creative Coalition, a charity from the entertainment industry for public service and advocacy. The podcast will spotlight stories of opportunity, discovery and courage.

Bad, Bad Thing is new from PodcastOne and the writer and director Barbara Schroeder, who previously worked on Evil Genius for Netflix.