Lovin' it: McDonald's signs podcast deal with former employee

• A former McDonald’s drive-thru cashier has signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar podcast deal with his former employer. Gary Coichy, the CEO of Pod Digital Media, has partnered with McDonald’s USA to help them reach multicultural audiences.

• Exclusive: The free and open-source podcast solution for you to self-host, Castopod has reached v1.0, and now has a website of its own. The podcast platform includes open comments, video clips, anonymised analytics, and wide support for the new podcast namespace. It’s available for download today.

• Are you a podcaster? The Podcast Host is running a survey to learn what matters to you.

• The host of The Ambies will be announced a little later today. Podnews predicts it’ll be hosted by two people. (wink)

• Osher Günsberg and Meshel Laurie have renewed their partnerships with Acast. Meshel’s Australian True Crime recently celebrated over 50m downloads; Osher’s Better Than Yesterday has seen a 73% increase in downloads since partnering with Acast.

• In Sweden, Acast has revealed the winner of the Poddnästet, the country’s biggest competition. Axel Hietanen Ingman, a 26-year-old social worker and hobby musician from Älvsjö, will get his podcast produced and marketed.

• First look: Pod Save America and Lovett or Leave It have both announced dates for national tours.

• Podjobs, our free jobs board, now lets you remove vacancies from view if you fill them early; and now shows statistics like pageviews and clicks as a percentage of all positions.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• Castopod joins Spotify, Podchaser and Podnews in adding copious amounts of JSON_LD to podcast pages. Our schema includes RSS feed addresses, descriptions and the podcast:guid.

• Neat thing - this podcast is putting their boost messages onto their website. (If you’ve an Umbrel running Helipad, http://umbrel.local:2112/boosts is a JSON feed that might help)

• The launch of Libsyn5 last week also means a new, more private, RSS feed address for shows. Libsyn had used unique domain names for RSS feeds, which are never encrypted and bad for listener privacy. New feeds from Libsyn will come from feeds.libsyn.com - older feeds don’t yet 301-redirect, but we assume they will. (If all that’s tech-speak - don’t worry, you need do nothing).

• Buzzsprout lost 28 podcasts from its platform last week, but Anchor also lost 28 shows according to our sample of podcasts. Anchor podcasts were (are still?) being produced in a non-compliant format, which makes them unplayable in some podcast apps

Tips and tricks - with Podpage

• Acast has launched Aclass Essentials, “a free resource designed to equip you with the knowledge you need to produce great, original audio content from home”.
• Gary Arndt writes Why I’m Done Travel Blogging (But I’m Not Done With Travel) - it’s a look at the success of podcasting.

Podcast News - with Quill

Produced by Quill: The Great Indoors How has technology changed around the world? Join Matt Roberts from Amdocs as he discusses how human technological adoption habits are evolving as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic, and how we’re rediscovering the magic of technology as a necessary result of being indoors.

In the Podmotion podcast this week, our Editor talks about podcast predictions for 2022, and whether subscription is going to become a thing. - read more

Today is the 1,500th edition of CyberWire Daily. A cybersecurity podcast hosted by Dave Bittner, it’s the flagship of the CyberWire network that now includes 14 podcasts and reaches over a quarter of a million unique listeners every month.