The best podcast hosting company is…

• Buzzsprout is the best podcast hosting company, says TechRadar in a review that also gives special credit to Podbean, Libsyn, Captivate and Transistor.

• Kamala Harris’s podcast strategy fell way short of Trump’s, says Ashley Carman: Harris didn’t appear to focus on a cohesive list of shows, which didn’t share similar audiences - making it hard to hit the same talking points. The article is in the latest edition of her Bloomberg newsletter, Soundbite.

  • To support podcast journalism, Podnews has snagged a deal on Ashley Carman’s Soundbite newsletter. You can grab Bloomberg’s Tech Newsletter Bundle at a 25% discount for the first year - which includes Soundbite and others.

• The IAB suggests in its 2025 Outlook Study of ad buyers that growth of podcast ad spend will slow this year, and its market share will drop. Total advertising is set to grow by 7.3%; podcasting will just beat that, at 7.4%.

  • And, in a surprise, S&P Global Market Intelligence suggests that the US podcast industry won’t top $2bn in revenue until 2032. The IAB suggest it hit $1.9bn in 2023.

• Mystery: reruns of The Ricky Gervais Show are, reports The Times, at the top of Apple Podcasts UK comedy charts, eighteen years after their release - but nobody seems to know why: not The Guardian (who’s podcast it is), or Gervais himself. The show is being hosted on Spotify for Creators.

• Podcast hosting platform Adelicious has partnered with publisher Immediate to bring its shows to the Adelicious network. Immediate saw 3.5mn downloads a month last year to its 16 shows.

• Looking at the schedule for the IAB’s 2025 Annual Leadership Meeting, Acast’s Greg Glenday posts that he’s “disappointed that podcasting barely registers a footnote … even in the shadow of The Podcast Election. This is one of the fastest growing parts of the Creator Economy, and it’s still undervalued and misunderstood.”

• While TuneIn’s CEO Richard Stern wouldn’t talk to Podnews after we revealed in December the company’s lay-offs and the removal of a way to submit podcasts on the platform, he did talk to iHeart’s Podcast News Daily, which carries a full interview. He complains that there’s no revenue in adding a podcast to TuneIn; says they “get no or very little listening” anyway, given 96% of listening on TuneIn is to live audio; and confirms that the company is “not updating our podcast directory for anything other than our partners’ podcasts”. One of those partners? iHeart.

  • The article claims 2024 was TuneIn’s “fifth consecutive year in the black”. But, in an interview in RadioWorld in 2022, Stern claimed “We just finished our first full year of profitable operations in the company’s 20-year history in 2021.” Both can’t be right.

• Further reading: The FT highlight “The podcast bros who helped put Trump back in the White House” … EarBuds focuses on podcast episode recommendations about neurodiversity, exploring everything ADHD, autism, and more … Amazon Music held India Pod Day in Mumbai last week. … The Relay FM podcast network is now simply Relay, with a new logo and revised artwork.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Podcast Vibes is a piece of research work from Yuri Vishnevsky, using AI to extract subjects and emotions from individual shows. It’s an interesting use of the technology - could “emotion” be a useful addition to just raw transcripts when working out brand suitability scores?

• Dave Jones from the Podcast Index is looking for your help: first, to stop the Docker logs from “eating all the disk space”; and secondly, to read live stream metadata from Shoutcast streams. There’s more in the Podcasting 2.0 podcast this week.

People news

• Stephen “teevio” Hallgren has joined Bumper as the company’s full-time Chief Technology Officer. He was working for the company as a “fractional” CTO.

• Ryan Morrison, a former BBC News journalist, is now working as a Content Editor at ElevenLabs.

• Gary Krantz has died. Recently, he was the Managing Partner for Podcast Radio US; he also worked with Podnews on our acquisition of the Podcast Business Journal. He had a long history of being in the radio business. He was 65.

Tips and tricks - with Pod Predictor by Coleman Insights

• Josh Liston posts “4 reasons to post audio-only episodes onto YouTube”, which focus on expanded accessibility.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: What Should I Read Next? is the show for every reader who has ever finished a book and faced the problem of not knowing what to read next. The show is to help YOU find your next read, by interviewing a reader each week about their favourite books.

The Lex Fridman Podcast is apparently going to feature Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of Wordpress (and owner of Pocket Casts), in a future episode. He’s raised eyebrows recently after “going through a bunch of drama”, and Fridman is keen to “nudge him” to admit “mistakes”.

Fascinated by the future of humanity beyond Earth? Entropy Rising has started gaining traction with its first milestone of 100 followers and over 500 episode downloads. The podcast explores out-of-this-world topics, from what it takes to live in space to the possibilities of mining asteroids.

Never Miss A Monday launches today - a podcast that makes the case for the power of Mondays. Says host Stacey Garcia, “After my breast cancer diagnosis, I leaned on the lifestyle choices that had always sustained me, and I want to share these tools with others facing life’s challenges.” The primary theme of the season is the power of connection and community, which is more crucial now than ever. It’s executive produced by r63 Podcast Media’s Scott Slaughter.

Cop City, a new police training facility in Atlanta GA, is nearly open, in spite of protests that led to the death of one activist. We Came to the Forest from Wondery and Campside Media is new today, with details, new facts and perspectives about the events that led to the death. It’s hosted by Campside co-founder, and Atlanta resident, Matthew Shaer.