Greenlee to step down as Podcast Academy Chair

• Exclusive: Speaking on an episode of the Podland podcast to be released later today, Rob Greenlee has announced he is to step down as Chair of the Podcast Academy this month, as part of significant changes in the board of governors. “The board has decided to re-elect all new officers,” he explains.

  • Greenlee also announced in his Podland interview that Libsyn has decided not to support the new Podcasting 2.0 namespace at this time. “We’re definitely monitoring it. We’re very supportive of what Adam Curry is doing, but we are primarily working on our new Libsyn5 tools. It’s in our roadmap to consider against a lot of other things that are going on as far as priorities in the company.”

• First look: AdsWizz and Simplecast have just released their Podcast Trends Report for 2020. Among a lot of useful data, they tell us:

  • by September 2020, available podcast ad inventory had grown by 51% from the start of the year
  • a third of indie podcasters think that 'unique listeners’ are more important than 'downloads’
  • podcasts now represent 19% of all digital audio buys
  • 50% of podcasters they surveyed use sponsorships and host-read ads
  • 85% of podcast publishers plan to increase their investment in ad-tech in 2021. (Tip: Sounds Profitable will help there).

• The BBC has launched the BBC World Service International Podcast Competition - open to people living in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. If that’s you, you’ve got until January 22 to enter.

• iHeartRadio is still the #1 podcaster, says Podtrac. They’ve 32% more US unique monthly listeners than podcasts from NPR, and 26% more global downloads; though they do have ten times more shows. The Daily is still the US’s most popular podcast, too. An incomplete ranker, Podtrac measures participating publishers only.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 30 2023

• Paul Kondo’s excellent weekly Podcast Gumbo newsletter is going to come out every fortnight from now on: it’ll allow him to listen to more podcasts. His Podcast Gumbo podcast is also to end; “time for something bigger and better”, he writes.

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• The Podfest Global Summit returns in March; and they’re currently looking for speaker submissions.

• Podfriend has just launched a native Mac app. One of the most complete Podcast 2.0 apps, it’s available in alpha today.

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• How I make… Podrunner and Groovelectric (Steve Boyett)

Podcast News

The Daily from the New York Times’s Michael Barbaro is the subject of an interview for OZY. He claims to be still terrified of interviews.

'Real Housewives of Dallas’ stars Kameron Westcott and Kary Brittingham are diving into podcasting, with a new show starting next week called Kam & Kary Do Dallas. The show is from YEA Networks, which also produces and distributes two other podcasts with RHOD cast members: “Weekly Dose of BS” (Brandi Redmond and Stephanie Hollman) and “I Don’t Give a Rip!” (D’Andra Simmons).