Facebook to get serious about podcasting

• Facebook is coming. The social media giant is to get into audio and podcasts, according to Recode. Announcements are due today; it describes “a podcast discovery product that will be connected with Spotify”, as well as an audio-only version of 'Rooms’, a separate Clubhouse-like product, and a way for Facebook users to add voice messages to the newsfeed.

• “The ability to submit new shows for review is temporarily unavailable” says Apple Podcasts Connect for us today. This may be related to a big Apple announcement tomorrow, or perhaps it’s just broken: the tool is famously unreliable.

• What does Spotify really think of RSS? Michael Mignano, the co-founder of Anchor and “Head of Podcaster” for Spotify, writes about the 'limitations and tradeoffs’ with RSS, adding that Spotify is “also interested in pushing the medium of audio beyond the limitations of the RSS standard”.

• Google Podcasts has added episode recommendations on its website. The “For you” tab has been available in their app for some time.

  • “For you”, for me, contains a few episodes from shows I’ve unsubscribed from; and a few episodes of new shows from people I already listen to on other shows. It’s geographically-aware, too, with some shows from my home country.

• Podsights has released their Conversions Benchmark Report for Q1/21. The company has partnered with Experian to show demographic information for campaigns that the company ran over the past year, and which categories do best in podcast advertising.

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• Joe Rogan went exclusive on Spotify in December 2020. How’s that going for him? Here’s a look at Google Trends - either a) everyone knows where he is and nobody needs to Google for him any more, or b) locked behind a proprietary registration wall, nobody wants to Google for him any more.

• Netflix is looking for a Head of Audio/Podcast Programming, in Los Angeles CA, USA.

• Chartable has announced retention analytics - discovering how long your podcast listeners stick around.

• Rephonic has added a new episode search to its service, as well as estimated listener numbers and search operators.

• Erik Diehn has joined Podchaser as an advisor. He was formerly Stitcher CEO.

  
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The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• Podcast Index has now indexed over 3m podcasts.
  • This backs up a number of conversations last week for an upcoming article. Apple Podcasts is increasingly being ignored by some podcasters, particularly outside the US, as a place to add their show. (Even when it works…)
• The Podcast Index social website now hosts a regular video chat every weekend.
• Your podcast app might be calling itself AppleCoreMedia; and your podcast host might be claiming that’s a play from Apple Podcasts. Our editor posts a list of apps that use AppleCoreMedia under certain circumstances.
• Want to make sure your podcast app never calls itself AppleCoreMedia (and thus your app doesn’t get credit for plays?) Here’s some code to do just that from John Spurlock.
• John Spurlock has also launched a new, simple, podcast called Reflections. It reads back your podcast app’s user-agent, the time, and your IP address. It may be useful to help you discover which apps call themselves what.

Tips and tricks, and our Podcast News section, return tomorrow.