iHeartMedia to buy podcast host Voxnest

Demographic targeting rightfully receives attention from advertisers and agencies, but what are its limits within podcasting? Should we be aiming for the hyper-targeted individual or instead focus on the digital household? - from this week’s Sounds Profitable with Podsights, our adtech newsletter. Subscribe now.

Aug 28 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• iHeartMedia is to acquire Voxnest. Voxnest will provide dynamic ad serving for iHeartRadio’s podcasts and analytics. Voxnest also owns Spreaker, the 6th largest podcast host with 61,000 shows, and BlogTalkRadio, with a further 8,300. Terms weren’t disclosed.

  • iHeart currently hosts with Megaphone; but has hosted with Spreaker in the past.

• Podcast host Captivate have unveiled AMIE, their “audio mastering and integration engine” which is now in private beta. The tool offers dynamic content insertion for all podcasters on the platform, and also includes a proprietary audio processing tool. (Podnews’s Editor is an advisor).

  
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• The finalists have been announced for the 2020 Discover Pods Awards. You have until November 6 to vote for the winners. Podnews is in the “best news podcast”; but we’re up against The Daily, Up First, Pod Save America and Today, Explained, so—anyway, thanks for the finalist status!

• Big Tech Comes for Podcasts - “Silicon Valley could wreck audio journalism”, claims an article in Washington Monthly, arguing that we need government regulation to keep podcasting healthy.

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• Director of Radio James Purnell is to leave the BBC next week. A former Labour MP who was responsible for BBC Sounds, the corporation’s audio app, he was publicly sidelined by the new DG, Tim Davie. He moves to be President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Arts in London; but must have been in a hurry to leave - that job starts in March.

  • New government rules on redundancy payouts mean we’re likely to see a rush of people leaving the BBC over the next few weeks; David Robey, the Station Editor of BBC Radio London, suddenly departed on Friday.

• Podshape, an Australian podcast publisher, has got one of its shows into a new Spotify “Daily Wellness” podcast playlist; and launched three new shows.

• The founders of Gotham Podcast Studio have unveiled their own community-focused hosting company. Tandem Podcasting launches with member profiles and a live member chat service.

• Spotify’s “music with shows” seems to have been possible for some time. Tom Mullen contacts us to point us to two projects he’s worked with - a track-by-track with Kranium, an artist at Atlantic done in February, and Duran Duran Radio’s WHOOOSH!, with Simon Le Bon and Katy Krassner, now at episode 27.

  
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  • It’s possible to do the same with YouTube. See “the tech stuff” below.

• mp3DirectCut, a direct MP3 editor (which edits without re-encoding), is now available on Android.

Thank you to the users at Podhero for supporting Podnews! (You can support your favourite shows here, too).

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

There’s been significant movement in the new Podcast Index podcast namespace. With the locking, transcript, funding and chapters data all being returned in the API responses, a lot of support has already been announced.

• Fireside is now supporting publishing of the locking, funding and transcript tags; and will obey the locking tag for imports early this week.
• Castopod, an open-source podcast hosting platform, now supports the locking tag (both for import and publish). The service now also uses OPAWG’s RSS useragents list to enhance analytics. Funded by the NGI0 Discovery Fund by NLnet, you can grab the source and download it today.
• Hypercatcher, “an Interactive Podcast App unlike any other”, now supports the podcast:chapters tag.
• Podfriend now supports the funding tag. (It’s in our feed, too, if you want to see how it works).
• Blubrry now has a tool to help you submit your podcast to the Podcast Index. (This works for anyone - no need to be hosted with Blubrry).
• Adam Curry writes that we shouldn’t forget the listeners - asking for testing tools. A reminder that Dave Jones and Adam Curry’s Podcasting 2.0 podcast is not on Apple (or Spotify).
• Is there a better way to attribute platforms and apps than a useragent? This audio query string proposal from our Editor probably has a lot of holes in it, but feedback is welcome.
• Want to do a “Spotify show with music” but using YouTube’s catalogue instead? You can do it with a playlist - and It turns out that you can do quite a creditable version using the YouTube Javascript API - properly mixing and talking over the songs and jingles and all that. (That bit does, however, come with a few gotchas).

Tips and tricks - with True Crime Reporter from PAR

• It all comes down to being authentic, says Aussie podcaster Christian Hull.

This link is no longer available, as at Aug 28 2023
• Advertising a podcast - a three part series from Sean Howard focuses on how to promote your podcast in many different ways.

Podcast News

The Mother Jones Podcast is hosting their first ever live podcast show tomorrow at 4pm EST.

NRC, a national broadsheet newspaper in the Netherlands, is concerned about “the platforms of major tech companies that control the market”. It’s to move their shows like NRC Vandaag, their daily news podcast, into their own app, NRC Audio. From January 1, the website says, “certain NRC podcasts will only be available to subscribers”.

Photographs

In Europe, Podcast Day started a few hours ago (at the time of writing). Here’s a snapshot of the Ear Hustle session with Earlonne Woods.