Nielsen: US podcast listeners are more diverse than population

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• US podcast listeners are more diverse than the US population, says data from Nielsen, shared by WARC.

• A Million Ads have signed up to Google’s Display and Video 360. The access will allow more audio inventory for the company, which produces dynamic audio ads. From Sounds Profitable, here is an example of how it works.

• Meghan and Harry’s Spotify podcast cost the company $25m, according to the UK press.

• An interviewee is taking Spotify to court for, she says, manipulating her interview to paint her in a bad light. Son of a Hitman, from Spotify Studios, featured excerpts from an interview, and cast doubt on her judgement.

  
  Sep 1 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
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• Africa Podfest’s Feb 12 event is available in full on their YouTube page, and the team have posted an overview of their event this year.

• Evergreen Podcasts has launched a sports channel with a number of different podcasts.

• Twitter Spaces appears to be slowly rolling out to users. Our @podnews account - on an Android phone - can see (and hear!) Spaces discussions. We took part in two over the weekend.

• Tom Webster’s newsletter this week focuses on “hard data vs real data”, examining the Edison Research Podcast Consumer Ranker, and the surprising appearance of Serial as the 13th biggest podcast (by total audience) in 2020.

  • Analysis: Tom’s explanation - that Serial included Nice White Parents in full - is certainly part of the answer: as independent verification, Podtrac reported the audience for the Serial feed was huge in July 2020, up 48 places to #11. However, that “up 48 places” tells us that Serial was #59 in Podtrac’s chart in June - which is worth highlighting. In spite of Serial not releasing an episode since November 2018, it was still in the top 60 podcasts on Podtrac, measured by unique audience. Serial appears to be relatively unique as an evergreen podcast that new listeners seek out, and as Edison Research’s data also shows.
  
  Sep 1 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

The Tech Stuff - with the Podcast Index

• Is your podcast host IPv6 compatible? Some mobile networks, especially in places like India, are requiring all connections to work in future using IPv6-only. We are, but many podcast hosts aren’t yet. (We’ve added an IPv6 checker in our podcast pages, now that there’s an agreed plan for IPv6 measurement).
• Dave Jones has written about the podcast:value tag, and also published the standard which explains how payments can be made by listeners.
• The Podcast Index is now publishing their full podcast database index on IPFS, updated every 24 hours. (Listing 1.3m podcasts, today’s dump is a 192MB .tgz file, which expands to 647MB. You can use DB Browser for SQLite to examine it).

Sep 1 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
• Apple’s API is not currently returning episode data, breaking our episode pages but also breaking other tools that link directly to shows. (Apple episode IDs are assigned by Apple, rather than using the UID in the RSS feed).
• The Podlove Publisher Plugin now supports the transcript and person tags from the new Podcast namespace. (Podnews’s podcast has both in, too).
• The Anytime Podcast Player, available for Android, has support for Podcast Index search, chapters and funding links.
• RSS useragents for Podmust, Sonnet and Verb․fm have been added to the RSS-useragents list in Github.

Tips and tricks

• Three Ways To Monetize A Podcast: A Pro’s Tips - an interview in Forbes with Jason Allan Scott.

• The most important word to use in your podcast (Rachel Corbett)

Podcast News

The 'exploration of modern life and how to survive it’, Reply All, has been put on pause, following the allegations of toxic behaviour from some staff members.

Buzzsprout has published a technical postmortem of their DDoS attack last week. Their podcast, Buzzcast, also goes into the incident.