Edison Research releases top 10 podcast tracker

• Edison Research have released a top 10 podcast ranker, from its Podcast Consumer Tracker subscription product. The ranker is the top ten podcasts in the US by reach among weekly podcast consumers. It’s based on 4,053 online interviews, making it the most robust reach-based study we’ve seen. Joe Rogan is #1, with This American Life at #2 and The Daily at #3.

• Acast are opening two new podcast studios in Surry Hills, Sydney. The studios are free of charge for Acast publishers.

• Factory Studios have opened The Podcast Lounge in central London: for studio hire and access to their creative team.

• From Turkey, Wilixis is a freemium podcast host, and claims it is the first podcast platform in the country.

• Andrew Yang, a former US presidential candidate, is to launch a podcast.

• Paul Bae has announced he is to produce two original fiction series for Spotify. Meanwhile, music website Digital Music News dialed up the pressure on Spotify’s bootleg podcasts problem. “One cannot help wondering how much longer the world’s largest music-streaming service will stand by while criminals flagrantly violate the law,” the website says.

• Aaron Dowd has joined Podcorn. He was previously “Customer Success Lead” for Simplecast.

• Pinecast, a podcast host, was down for some users over the weekend.

  
  Aug 21 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Peter Jussila posts about his experience with paying to advertise his podcast on Instagram. “We ended up paying $13.83 per new follower - and we got zero visits to our website from the promotion”.

  
  Aug 21 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• A free event in the UK this Wednesday Feb 26 at the University of Bedfordshire - Fantastic Noise: Making Radio Drama features Jeremy Howe, who’s the Editor of The Archers, and Adam Jarell, the man behind Stakhanov’s The Offensive. It’s free - tickets here.

• Hubhopper, which we discovered was copying and republishing RSS feeds, promised us they’d removed all their copied RSS feeds on Feb 13. It turned out they hadn’t - a number of copied RSS feeds on their platform were only removed over the weekend after we asked why they were still there. “Any and all duplicate feeds that were unintentionally exposed have been removed”, says an email from “Team Hubhopper”; but then, they said that last time.

• Question - we don’t use Apple Podcasts. But wasn’t there a way of flagging spammy or offensive reviews within the app? Has that been removed?

Podcast News

Distinct Nostalgia, a UK television nostalgia podcast, carried an interview with a big story: that “Dot Cotton”, June Brown, was leaving EastEnders, a popular BBC soap, after 35 years. The story made it to television news, newspapers, and, naturally, the BBC website. (Buzzsprout)

New from Stitcher today is Verified, an immersive true-crime series that “examines the trust we place in the sharing economy and the power that a simple checkmark or digital review can hold over our lives.”

The Space Programme is a twenty-part soap opera for kids, which launched over the weekend. “When two tech entrepreneurs announce their plan to make one of the local kids the world’s first child astronaut, nothing is ever the same again.” (Fun Kids)

At the start of National Eating Disorders Awareness WeekTransmitter Media have launched their first original podcast, Rebel Eaters Club - a show that is about breaking up with diet culture. The host, Virgie Tovar, “shares her personal history as a fat woman of color who hated her body for twenty years before learning to love herself as she is”.
Aug 21 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Start Here from ABC News publishes its 500th episode today. An award-winning daily news podcast, it’s a straightforward look at the day’s top news in twenty minutes. (Wide Orbit)

The BBC’s Newscast podcast is to be turned into a daily news podcast from Q2 2020, according to reports. Bill Rogers, a media pundit, says: “This is not a bold confident move; this is mere apery of the success of the New York Times’ The Daily”.
This link is no longer available, as at Aug 21 2023

Meanwhile, Beyond Today, a podcast many saw as an attempt to ape the success of the New York Times’s The Daily, is to stop being a daily podcast, and will now be published twice a week.

The BBC also produces a daily news podcast Global News Podcast, and, unavailable within Apple Podcasts but discovered by Google Podcasts, a two-minute news bulletin, probably destined for smart speakers. (That helps it evade the block the BBC puts on its podcasts for Google.)