Apple will soon require secure podcast feeds

Apple Podcasts have sent an email to all podcasters today, “strongly encouraging” podcasters to use “a secure podcast feed with a SSL certificate” - in practice, this means a podcast RSS feed that starts https:// . The email says that, in future, a secure feed will be required for Podcast Analytics and also to submit new podcasts.

• Is your podcast RSS feed secure? We’ve added a tool to check. Search for your podcast in our podcast pages and click 'more info’ to find out.
• Of the current Apple Podcast top 10 trending podcasts in the US, only 40% have secure RSS feeds; This American Life and The Daily are among those that do not (yet) have a secure feed.

Sleepover, a CBC podcast with Sook-Yin Lee, returns for a new season. Sook-Yin invites three strangers to spend a night together to talk; she spends a night in an indigenous care community in Toronto. A previous season was described by NPR as something that “will restore your faith in humans”.

Roman Mars was interviewed by Recode: he made a plea to keep podcasts free. Data point: his main podcast, 99% Invisible, has 11 staff.

Pacific Content’s Dan Misener is concerned we’re preaching to the converted: “26% of Americans listened to a podcast in the last month. Don’t forget about the 74% who didn’t.”

Podtrac have released their top 10 US publishers - there are no new entries - and top 20 US podcasts for April 2018: there’s one new entry, 99% Invisible (replacing Atlanta Monster, which ended in March).

Some stats from Libsyn-hosted podcasts, from their podcast The Feed (ep 120) for the month of April:

• 83.27% of all Libsyn podcasts were downloaded on a mobile device; 0.2% were consumed on a smart speaker. (We would note that all smart speaker downloads were listened-to; not all downloads to a mobile device were).
• Apple was responsible for 62.5% of all podcast downloads; Spotify was second with 6.18% of all downloads. Other larger apps: Overcast (2.9%); Podcast Addict (2.1%); Castbox (2.1%); Stitcher (2.0%); Pocket Casts (1.5%). Rob points out that only around 20% of all Libsyn podcasts are listed on Spotify.
• Libsyn also had two downloads (2!) from North Korea. Is that you? We’d love to know.

In The Word from Mouth this week: the problem of continuing friction for new podcast listeners, and thoughts on adoption rates of new podcast players.

Digiday writes about the Walmart podcast Outside the box, which in season two is trying to convince us that 'time > money’. It’s produced by Omelet and hosted by Panoply’s Megaphone.

Listicle: 10 podcasts to listen to (The National, United Arab Emirates) - none from the UAE, sadly.