Audioboom posts 10x profit, but warns of dark clouds

• Audioboom’s H1/22 financials were released, showing revenue was up 79% on the same period last year. Profit was $2m, up from last year’s $0.2m, and the company’s doing 124m downloads a month (up 35%). Shares fell, though, after the company noted “a softening in advertiser demand for Q3/22” because of lower consumer spending.

• Pushkin Industries has purchased podcast creator Transmitter Media. Transmitter’s founder and CEO, Gretta Cohn, will join Pushkin’s senior leadership team. Terms weren’t given.

• Our survey says… a TV show is shifting to podcasting. Family Feud The Podcast has been launched by ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia. The show is also called Family Fortunes in the UK, and the podcast features two showbiz stars pitched against each other.

• Following the acquisition of Podchaser by Acast, Acast’s Ross Adams and Podchaser’s Bradley Davis will be on the Podland podcast this Thursday. Meanwhile, Mathew Passy wonders if the acquisition enables Acast to “spam more podcasters”, Matt Cundill wonders whether to keep information on Podchaser, and Blubrry’s Todd Cochrane says he’ll pull all his shows because of Acast’s “spamming and poaching”. Acast tell us the acquisition is “completely unrelated to our email marketing strategy”; and we would also note that Acast doesn’t appear to have sent a cold email marketing campaign, to anyone, since mid-June. Perhaps they’ve heard us.

  • One podcast company has emailed the address in our RSS feed… 216 times since May: and no, Acast didn’t mail us once in that period. Should we publish a list of the biggest podcast spammers?

• Podtrac has published its top US podcast publishers for June. iHeartRadio is still #1 for podcasts, though SXM Media, who are believed to be larger, is not a participating publisher. iHeartRadio downloads fell 3.8% month-on-month. Wondery is the new #2, overtaking NPR.

• Auphonic and Hindenburg have announced an integration: the audio post-production system now appears as a publish point in the software.

• Think you know the icons and logos from podcasting? The Podcast Quiz is a brand new daily game that tests you. Our job is safe.

• In New Zealand, Spotify is testing a feature to “record your own podcast directly into the app”; but listening to the podcasts also appears geo-locked to New Zealand too. (Unless it works for you?)

• Hiding in an article about the goings-on in British radio at the moment, from Matt Deegan, is a graph showing revenue from Danny Baker’s Treehouse, a podcast now entirely behind a Patreon paywall. “It shows the problem dealing with expiring credit cards and unsubscriptions”.

• PodcastOne has announced fourteen additional podcasts.

• Libsyn’s AdvertiseCast has a new exclusive ad partnership deal with BiggerPockets, a real estate investing media network.

• AdsWizz shared video of two panels that the company participated in at the Cannes Lions.

• PodMov Daily, Podcast Movement’s daily newsletter that’s almost as good as this one, celebrated its 3 year anniversary. Congratulations, Brennan and the team, from this 5.1 year-old.

• Joe Rogan has said another awful thing to get press coverage. Looks like we fell for it.

Tips and tricks - with Podscribe

• Writing or running a podcast tool which parses RSS? From the Podinfra.net best practices website, this article on setting a correct RSS scraper useragent contains best practices.

• A few ways to monetise your show: Blubrry highlight some of the tools you can use.

Podcast News - with Pushkin Industries

From Pushkin: Coming Oct 11: Bad Women: The Blackout Ripper The seldom-told story of women in World War Two who were killed not by the enemy, but by husbands, lovers and strangers wearing the uniform of their own side. The stories are numerous and shocking - yet they’ve somehow been erased from memory.

Chat Sh!t: The Official Rap Sh!t Podcast is brand new from HBO Max - a companion podcast to Rap Sh!t with Jessie Woo and Zach Campbell. It’s produced under HBO Max’s “Scene in Black” initiative – celebrating Black creators and audiences – and in partnership with Loud Speakers Network and Issa Rae’s Raedio

If you like learning about new podcasts in Podnews, you can now get this section as a podcast itself. New Podcast Trailers is available in your favourite RSS podcast app.

Podcast ads in the wild

For our final “podcast ads in the wild” feature for now, this was spotted by Ashley Carman (yes, that one), presumably over Long Island somewhere: a plane dragging an ad for the Long Island Tea podcast. For all its brashness, we’d note that it’s quite sophisticated: the artwork has been modified to add the word “podcast” and be more readable from 1,000 feet. The aerial billboard also has the word 'subscribe’, and icons for Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and YouTube, as well as a website address: no doubting what it is (though not that clear that it “dishes the best from the destination, seasonal adventures, insider tips, mishaps and more”). We thank Ashley for letting us reproduce it.