Brand safety: X sues, while new partnership helps

• X is suing brand safety alliance GARM for what it calls “a massive advertiser boycott” against the company. Companies using the GARM framework categorise material to ensure advertisers can choose the content they advertise in, including podcasts. “No small group of people should be able to monopolise what gets monetised”, said X Corp’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino on a video.

• Data that Podnews published a year ago suggested that some brand safety tools incorrectly categorise Black-hosted podcasts as risky, because of a lack of nuance and cultural understanding. Today, Barometer and DCP have partnered to create the Black Podcast Coalition - a collective of influential Black networks and shows. Shows will be tracked and certified for brand safety. The group suggests that these shows “are actually more suitable and less potentially risky than the average show in the Edison top 50.”

• A major podcast hosting company has lost its CEO, and has sold part of its business to someone else, we’ve heard from multiple sources. We contacted those involved: they have not responded. Guess we’d best not say who it is yet, then, until we’ve a little more confirmation…

• The Podcast Movement 2024 app is now available from the Apple App Store and on Google Play. (Not booked yet? Code PODNEWS will save).

• Podtrac’s rankers for July have been released. There’s no change in the US publisher top 10; globally, The Daily Wire enters the top 5. iHeart is still #1 for everything, everywhere, except the top US podcasts, where The Daily from The New York Times remains top. MrBallen is a new entry at #19. The ranker measures participating publishers only through a combination of redirects and logfile analysis.

• Amazon Music has launched a new AI-powered feature for podcast discovery. Topics, available in the US only, are based on automatically extracting things spoken about in podcasts from transcripts, “alongside human review”. It appears to only work across top podcasts for now.

• Spotify for Podcasters is now heavily marketing its competing hosting service within the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard, for those hosting podcasts elsewhere. “Host with us” appears in the left-hand menu; while a large ad promises distribution and monetisation.

• The People’s Choice Podcast Awards has announced the 2024 slate. The entire voting pool was 3.1mn votes across the 900+ participant shows. “Final voting starts today with a pool of 20,000 listeners with weighting to make sure no single show has a listener voting advantage,” says the organiser, Todd Cochrane.

• PodMatch is to launch a podcast network. “We’re looking for 20 independent interview-based podcasts”, Alex Sanfilippo xitted.

• Podcast app Castro has released a new version, fixing technical debt and making the app faster and quicker to release new features in future.

• Veritonic has released a new set of research about shopping and podcasting, called Why Podcast Ads Are Winning Over TikTok, Facebook, & Instagram for Back-to-School and Holiday Deals. 70% of consumers are more inclined to purchase from a podcast ad that offers a discount code, says the research - also, and interesting for those who love attribution software, “46% will make a purchase from a podcast ad using their desktop computer”.

• Wondery’s Dr Death podcast is going on tour later this year. It’s part of a new agreement between the podcast company and promoter Mills Entertainment.

Thank you to Cindy Howes from music podcast Basic Folk, and to Dave Campbell from The How to Podcast Series for becoming personal supporters of Podnews.

Tips and tricks - with Ausha 🚀

• Learn how Ausha suggest you Find the Best Podcast Keywords for Your Show to boost your visibility in-apps.

• Explore in-depth analysis on how to rank #1 on Apple Podcasts through Ausha’s detailed study.

• Are some OG podcasters talking about making sure your ID3 tags are set properly? Good news! The data says that you don’t need to do that any more.

Podcast News - with Airwave

From 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. Each week, Anne Bogel, of the blog Modern Mrs Darcy, interviews a reader about the books they love, the books they hate, and the books they’re reading now.

Seeing Red has hit their 300th episode. The true crime podcast delivers intriguing, terrifying and dumbfounding True Crime stories each and every week. It’s represented by Adelicious.

Unsung is a podcast all about sport’s hidden stars. Did you know that there is an official team at the Olympics consisting of refugees? The show hears from two team members competing in Paris - badminton player Dorsa Yavarivafa and swimmer Matin Balsini, two refugees who have now settled in the UK after fleeing Iran.

When Panoply closed the popular podcast Empire on Blood, creator Steve Fishman wouldn’t let it go - and a special Director’s Cut version is back today in The Burden's feed. One of The Atlantic’s best podcasts in 2018 (and a podcast Malcolm Gladwell called 'in the tradition of Serial’), it’s a true crime classic, telling the story of two young drug dealers in The Bronx in the early 1990s - and a man accused of a double homicide he says he didn’t do.

What is it like to be a teenager in an era of school shootings? Violence Week is new today from the Silver Podcast Network. Producer and host Emily Reeves takes us to her old high school in East Lansing MI, USA, where an outbreak of violence and the discovery of a gun ignited intense fears of school shootings and a fierce debate over policing in schools.

Launching today, Private Eyes is hosted by, according to the producer, “two badass female private investigators”, Bari Kroll and Jen Rosant. They take listeners into the crazy and secret world of private investigating, sharing shocking stories and giving expert PI advice: breaking the mould in a male-dominated industry. The first season is all about infidelity.