“Listen Time” - how to calculate it for your podcasts

Below: images of the YouTube podcast test that we reported on yesterday.

• How are you measuring your podcast’s success? Downloads are easy, but Bumper is suggesting Listen Time as the right metric; and the company has published a detailed method of calculating it.

  • We’ve worked out the Podnews Daily’s total listen time for January: it’s 860 hours. Shh - we might prefer “55,589 downloads”: our podcast is less than five minutes, after all… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Exclusive: Vizzy Studio has added YouTube video as an output to the company’s popular podcast enhancement platform. The software also adds visual chapters to shows, that work on many players including Apple Podcasts.

• Exclusive: Airwave Media has launched Airwave Kids, a major expansion into the kids and family category. Acquisitions include Tumble Science Podcast for Kids, What If World and Sleep Tight Stories.

• In Australia, the IAB has announced a new industry digital audience measurement currency called Ipsos iris. The tech is already in use in the UK, and will initially be used for TV figures; it could be used for other media types, too, in future.

• The SiriusXM Podcast Network remains #1 in the latest data from Edison Podcast Metrics for the US. The Acast Creator Network is new at #9.

• Momento is an AI-powered tool for podcasters that grabs the best shareable clips of podcasts, produces transcripts, and automates social media. It became publicly available today (and has a fancy video with examples).

• RØDE has announced the 5th generation of their NT1 condenser microphone. It features both XLR and USB-C connections.

• Most podcast marketing is wrong, says Steve Pratt in an interview with Steven Goldstein.

• The owner of ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia, HT&E released its annual report. It claims 4.7mn monthly podcast listeners, and 2.4mn registered users on the iHeartRadio app in the country. Digital revenue was AU$14.6mn (US $10mn), up 56% y/y: 4.6% of total audio revenue (the group also owns out-of-home businesses).

• The owner of LiSTNR, SCA also released its annual report. It claims 3.4mn monthly podcast listeners, and 889,000 registered users on LiSTNR. Digital revenue was AU$20.7mn (US $14mn), up 35% y/y: 5.2% of total audio revenue (the group also owns television licences).

• Listen Notes has launched Listen Clips, a tool to “create podcast clips for free”.

• Microfeed is a new “lightweight content management system” for serverless hosting on Cloudflare, produced by Wenbin Fang, the owner of Listen Notes. It can host a podcast and produces an RSS feed. v0.1.1 was launched over the weekend.

  • The Trade Secrets archive website uses Hugo on AWS’s S3.

Moves and hires

• Simon Cross is to join Soundwide, the owner of plugin company iZotope among others, as Chief Product Officer. He joins from Meta and the BBC.

The YouTube Podcasting Features Test

Yesterday, we reported on a test for some podcast creators on YouTube. We’ve found someone with access to it; here is an anonymised version of their view:

On the left - the new “create podcast” link goes to a dialog box that explains: “A podcast is a type of playlist”, and lets you make a new playlist. Unlike a normal YouTube playlist, this dialog asks for a square thumbnail image (the standard for podcasts).

Some playlists in YouTube are already marked as “podcasts”, including the Podnews Daily. We assume this has been a manual process until now. We haven’t been asked to set a square image, though.

On the right - playlists that are marked “podcast” are now marked as a podcast. Meanwhile, there is another tab for “podcasts” under “Channel Content”, which may have some form of analytics in there, like the video tab does.

However, creators still need to upload a video file. It isn’t pulling from RSS at all. This means programmatic ads or any form of dynamic monetisation won’t work; though we do know that YouTube is selling audio ads in some territories already for their YouTube Music product. You might expect them to share revenue with podcast creators in the same way they currently do with video producers (if you’re large enough).

If we were to speculate, we’d guess that the same kind of playback experience as on YouTube Music, where you can select the audio or the video, might be what’s coming.

YouTube could make RSS versions of podcast audio available everywhere for free (much like Anchor does), and pull visitors to YouTube to watch the video version. As a customer acquisition tool, this would drive usage of YouTube, and allow them to sell audio ads off-platform, perhaps.

But all this is just a guess; and until YouTube communicates more (or, indeed, anything) we’ll be in the dark.

Kai Chuk is scheduled to speak at the Hot Pod Summit on Feb 23.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement Evolutions

• Podcasts seem to do well on Tik Tok. Katie Paterson shares three different shows, and points out what you can learn.