The Black Effect Podcast Festival: “create with purpose”

Not long left to fill in the Podnews Report Card. We’ve already got time with the team at Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music to go over the results; and we’re unveiling the results in full at The Podcast Show in London. Your voice deserves to be heard.

• The Black Effect Podcast Festival took place over the weekend in Atlanta GA, USA. The event featured live podcast recordings, panel discussions spanning the business of podcasting, a pitch your podcast booth, the Black Marketplace and more. The day contained a number of similar themes, says a piece in the Saporta Report - be yourself, stay consistent, create with purpose, and explore the growing ways that artificial intelligence can support that work.

• Amazon’s Wondery has acquired the rights for The Oprah Podcast. No terms were shared; the deal also includes the rights for the full archive of The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Winfrey’s Book Club, among other things.

• Red Seat Ventures has announced a multiyear partnership with live comedy podcast Kill Tony. Expect the opportunity to get ad-free versions using Supercast; and the show will be in video on Tubi, FOX One, as well as YouTube.

• Do advertisers spend enough time on the creative of their ad? Boring ads cost much more to achieve the same result as interesting ones, says the research - the duller the ad, the greater the cost. That’s part of the Cumulus Media and Westwood One Creative Best Practices Handbook, which has been published today - giving a number of clear rules on how to make ads work better.

• Nielsen is to use Triton Digital’s Podcast Metrics Demos+ data for Nielsen’s cross-media planning tool, Nielsen Media Impact. The company integrated data from Edison Research in August.

• A Forbes blogger, Heather Wishart-Smith, covers Unexpected Business Lessons From The Podcast With A Billion Downloads - the podcast being The Bible In a Year from Fr Mike Schmitz.

• Marked “#slopwars”, the Podcast Index’s Dave Jones shares a screen of output of his work-in-progress AI and spam detector. 42% of new shows yesterday were caught by the system as being spam, AI or low-quality.

• Podcast hosting company Castos has added pre-roll and post-roll audio capabilities, in a new feature dubbed Castos Campaigns.

• Spotify has added fitness playlists and Peleton on-demand classes.

Most podcasts never get press. Here's what actually works.

Paid content

PodSEO analysed 655,000 editorial podcast placements across 29,000 domains and found that just 2.67% of podcasts have any editorial coverage at all, and only 0.29% are mentioned by high-authority publications. The full data, including which platforms journalists actually link to (hint: not Spotify), is on the PodSEO blog.

The takeaway: editorial visibility takes deliberate work. PodSEO includes PR Outreach, which surfaces the newsletters, blogs and curators in a podcast’s niche that are actively featuring shows, suggests where to pitch based on comparable podcasts, and runs each conversation through a Kanban pipeline (Identified, Contacted, Replied, Featured) with follow-up reminders so nothing slips. Editorial Presence also provides a running view of where a podcast is already being mentioned across the web, so coverage can be tracked as it lands.

See where podcasts are showing up.

Tips and tricks - with the Podnews Report Card

• Only 1% of new podcasts make it to episode 21, says Rutendo Nyamuda in The Podcast Sessions. She gives reasons why that might be, and ways to avoid burnout.
• Making video podcasts? Careful of flashing lights, or patterns - they could set off photo-epileptic seizures, says YouTuber Chris Spargo. He gives a few examples, including an episode of Pokémon: and the bewildering tests that exist.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day we all get dressed. Join Dressed: The History of Fashion as the show explores the social and cultural histories behind the who, what, when of why we wear.

Whispers From the Void - a modern day eldritch horror/thriller set in Houston, Texas - has hit 10,000 downloads. Season two drops next month; the show was first published in May 2024.

Is the world ending, or does it just feel like it? Are We Doomed? investigates the greatest risks facing society, the planet, and our species. What’s real? What’s hype? And how do we actually make it out alive? Award-winning public radio journalist Ben Bradford brings you wild true stories, high-production sound design, and world-class experts answering the questions they never prepared for.

This week, TED relaunched their podcast WorkLife with a brand new host, Molly Graham. Molly starts from a different premise: that the messy inner life of work can be understood — and even harnessed — to help you build a more meaningful, more sustainable career. The first episode is a conversation between Molly and the former host, Adam Grant.

In 2001, Leslie Preer was found murdered in the wealthy suburbs of Washington DC. Investigators initially set their sights on Leslie’s husband as the prime suspect — until bombshell DNA evidence revealed the presence of an “unknown male” at the scene. With extensive access to the original police tapes and interviews with the cold case detectives who worked to solve the crime, ABC Audio’s Blood and Water tells the story of a decades-long wait for justice for Leslie’s daughter and the cutting-edge investigative techniques that finally caught the killer.

Lore in the Machine: Forgotten Tech History is a narrative technology podcast about the hidden history of computing, software, and the internet. Each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computing history or internet lore. This week: how a graduate student’s fix for spam bots quietly became a global labor system, and how billions of people unwittingly built one of humanity’s largest digital archives.

Image Unscripted features candid, unfiltered conversations with Black actors, comedians, and innovators, focusing on career-defining moments and cultural impact. The first episode features KevOnStage, Scott Evans and Kalen Allen joke about taking Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon’s late night tv spot.

This Being Human is back with a new season — new host Mai Habib, new look, and now in video. From the Aga Khan Museum and The Walrus Lab, Season 5 brings you into conversations with the architect who designed the museum itself, a pro athlete, a Pakistani metal musician, and filmmakers pushing the edges of their craft—all exploring how Muslim cultures shape—and are shaped by—art, storytelling, and everyday life.

Podcasts in the wild

Thank you to Podnews reader Justin, who popped into the Trader Joes at the improbably-named Walnut Village Center in Irvine CA and saw this fine piece of advertising for Inside Trader Joe’s, complete with a replaceable card for each new episode. As advertised, the new episode, published yesterday, talks about wine you can get at Trader Joe’s in 1-liter sized bottles. That’s “upwards of 33% more wine”. Walnut Village, in case you wondered, gets its name from the crop harvested there between 1890-1967, after which remaining trees were converted into citrus groves, and then converted into a Starbucks, a Trader Joes, and a parking lot with shopping carts.

See any ads for podcasts in the real world? Snap’em and send’em to us.