Now, 'boosts' come with messages from your listeners

• Using Podcasting 2.0 apps like CurioCaster or Podfriend, listeners can share small amounts of cryptocurrency with the podcasts they listen to. Now, so-called “Boostagrams”, like those seen above, allow listeners to send messages to podcasters, too, along with a tip. Here’s how to get started with accepting cryptocurrency for your podcast

• At Podcast Movement, Megaphone launched its Audience Insights Dashboard, working with Nielsen, allowing publishers to segment their audience with details like “job seeker”, “tech adopter” or even “dog owner”.

• At Podcast Movement, Lantigua Williams & Co announced a rebrand to LWC Studios. The company is also expanding into film-making. See their new logo in our supporters section.

• Chris Messina has noticed that Spotify has added a “most shared” badge on popular podcast episodes.

• Google Podcasts is rolling out a small redesign for some users.

• iHeartRadio is #1 for podcasts again, according to Podtrac’s figures for July. The average US unique monthly audience was 7% down year-on-year, as a download bug in Apple Podcasts continued to disrupt data. The Daily is still the most listened-to podcast; the Podtrac numbers measure participating publishers only.

  
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• iHeartMedia’s Q2/21 financial results show the company’s podcast revenue continues to increase: now $53.4m, it was up 152% year-on-year (though only accounts for 6% of the company’s total revenue).

• WIRED magazine highlights all the ways Spotify tracks you - and how to stop it

Tips and tricks

• Ten questions to never ask on your podcast again - Jennay Horn includes “tell us a little more about yourself”; and some questions to ask instead.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• As mentioned above, Boostagrams - little messages from listeners when sending cryptocurrency tips in value4value apps - are now appearing in SatoshiStreams. Use the new /messagesub command to enable them. These messages are also available in other Lightning Node enabled payments, and most clients also have the ability to turn them off if required. The PodcastIndex social website is a good place to learn more.

• Podcast host JustCast has announced it supports podcast chapters in RSS feeds, using the Podcast Namespace.

• Podping means apps can detect new episodes in less than a minute. In response to a query, Libsyn says that the more people who request that they support podping, the higher priority those requests will be given.

• Last week, we saw an overall 70 shows migrate to Anchor and Megaphone. Excepting Podiant’s migrations to Castos, Libsyn lost the most shows, losing 15 overall.

• Congratulations to Bullhorn, which is now identifying its app as Bullhorn/1.0 in its useragent when downloading audio.

• Shuffle’s RSS scraper is identifying itself as axios/02.11, while Trebble is using a generic node fetch useragent for its RSS feed, and United Podcasters calls itself simply 'ruby’. We’ve reported these as bugs. Here’s more information on RSS useragents - we echo back the RSS useragent in our show description and the bottom of our episode notes. Combining the RSS useragent as well as the audio useragent means we can identify 99.8% of apps that use our podcast.

Podcast News - with Podcast Fellows at Stony Brook University-Southampton

Metallica has teamed up with Amazon for The Metallica Podcast, the band has announced. It focuses on The Black Album, which will be reissued on September 10th.

Freakonomics, M.D. is new today from the Freakonomics Radio Network. Physician and economist Dr. Bapu Jena digs into a fascinating study at the intersection of economics and healthcare.

Daniel J Lewis joins Dave Jones and Adam Curry in this week’s Podcasting 2.0: Dave and Daniel were at Podcast Movement. Here’s Dave with a lot of wires.