Anchor is hosting pirated podcasts

• Anchor is hosting a large number of pirated podcasts from other publishers, we can reveal today. 30% of all the Podtrac top 20 podcasts are currently being copied on Anchor, according to our searches. The new podcast from NYT/Serial, Nice White Parents, has a further five pirated copies hosted on Anchor, using the original artwork.

  • Because podcasts hosted on Anchor are not subject to the normal Apple Podcasts approval process, these pirated copies are instantly appearing in searches using Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and apps that use that data, like Overcast and Pocket Casts. Many of the copies have enabled Anchor’s Listener Support, to gain financially from their copies. None of these plays will be credited back to the original owner; and ads will not earn the publishers revenue.

• Podcast host Libsyn has published a positive Q2 2020 financial report. While revenue from advertising and LibsynPro decreased during the worst months of the pandemic, total podcasting revenue was up by 10.6% in the second quarter. Laurie Sims has been promoted to COO, and a strategic review has recently concluded. The company now hosts 74,000 podcasts; and April was the second-highest month in the company’s history for signups. Libsyn also owns Pair, an internet hosting company.

• Podcast host Transistor has launched an API for developers. It’s in limited-release beta.

• Podcast host Captivate has added Gaana as a destination - they claim it’s India’s #1 audio platform; and a link with Podcorn in their new resources section. (Our Editor is on Captivate’s advisory board - Disclosures).

• PodBooth, a podcast studio based in Adelaide SA, Australia, has moved to larger premises and filmed the building process.

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• Kshitij Aranke writes an in-depth look at Spotify’s user experience - How Spotify revolutionized podcast discovery - comparing it to Apple Podcasts.

• AdsWizz have unveiled a set of new features to “make podcast ad buying better”, including brand safety, contextual targeting and ad sequencing.

• Ollie Wards, who hosted the true-crime podcast Reveal: Snowball, is to leave his day job as Content Director of Australian radio station triple j to focus, among other things, on a television drama series inspired by the podcast. He leaves on Friday; the Acting Content Director will be Laura McAuliffe, who has previously worked with ABC Audio Studios on a number of ABC podcasts. The station’s currently on its best-ever audience figures.

• Why did Serial bounce so high in Podtrac’s Top 20 Podcasts for July? It wasn’t anything to do with the news about the New York Times buying Serial Productions, it turns out - instead, it was that Serial’s feed had a promo in it for Nice White Parents, and the amount of people still subscribed to the Serial feed kicked off all those downloads.

• Developers: podcasts-rss-useragents is a new repo in Github containing a simple match-list for useragents that consume podcast RSS. Podnews is using this data to monitor podcast players that do not send proper useragents themselves, like TuneIn, and to supply different versions of our audio to different platforms.

Tips and tricks

• For Podnews, Jason DeFillippo has written How I make… Grumpy Old Geeks for Podnews - lots of detail about microphones, post-production and distribution. Learn from a podcast with more than 460 episodes and “a few million downloads”

• How to get universal links to your podcast for everyone looks at different services making it easy to link to your podcast.

(Want to write a “How I make…” for us? We’re at editor@podnews.net)

Podcast News - with The John Bartolo Show

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