Next Radio announces podcasting speakers

• Next Radio, the radio and podcasting conference (“no panels, no suits”) in the UK, has announced its first set of speakers. Podcasting is well represented, with Guardian podcaster Kary Stewart, Griefcast’s Cariad Lloyd, and Suchandrika Chakrabarti from Black Mirror Cracked. Tickets are at an early-bird rate until the end of June. James Cridland, Editor of Podnews, is one of the organisers of Next Radio.

• The Podcasting Intelligence Report is a new research study into Australian podcasters, released by NOVA Entertainment today. “Advertising delivered by the podcast host was also found to be most effective in capturing audience attention and driving brand recall with listeners twice as likely to trust the message that host-read ads deliver.”

  
  Aug 3 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Australia’s NOVA Entertainment has also launched Word of Mouth, a “meta-cast [that] takes you deep into the world of podcasting”.

• Audioboom are back on the stock market, after being suspended earlier this year. “Audioboom shares plunged on Thursday, trading down 32% at 2.45 pence, after being restored to AIM trading.”

  • The company, which recently sorted £4.5m in funding, also published their latest accounts: they lost £5m in the financial year ending November 2017.
  • They’ve signed a deal with Formula One to produce a weekly podcast. “Audioboom will pay a guaranteed fee per podcast uploaded to is platform in addition to a revenue share on sponsorships, pre, mid and post roll advertising.”
  • The announcement also detailed an API that the company has with Spotify which enables pre/post-roll advertising. “Its partnership with Spotify boosted listens and live read ad inventory by 10% over the 12-month-period to May 31”.

• Anchor, a podcast platform, no longer resamples audio files uploaded to the service, and defaults to stereo - a 'huge upgrade’, according to the company.

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• Tom Webster from Edison Research spoke at Radiodays Europe’s Podcast Day from a hotel room after travel plans went awry. But it does mean we can watch his speech.

• What’s the right length of a podcast? Chris Ashmore from BE Media Production says about 20 minutes. The Editor of Podnews (who speaks at conferences) says “as long as it needs to be, but no longer”.

• Australian news consumption research has been released by the University of Canberra; part of wider Reuters research, it claims “More than half (58%) of 25-34 year olds use podcasts for news and information.” Caution, though - research was done online by YouGov; so this figure is only valid for online-savvy audiences with an interest in public opinion.

• PodPeople have worked on Samsung’s new podcast, What’s NEXT, “a new podcast from Samsung NEXT that explores the technologies of the future and what they mean for us today”. They’re also responsible for Medium Playback, from the publishing website. Pod People is an interesting business model - a hybrid podcast production company and community of 200+ talented freelance audio creators.

• The Daily from the New York Times now airs on 25 radio stations in the US. It debuted with 16.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 3 2023

• Crime Junkie has reached 500,000 downloads in just one month.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 3 2023

Thank you to 79 new subscribers this week, including fine folk from South Africa’s Podcart, Acast, Compass Media Networks, Wireless Group, Spotify, Luminary, Macmillan, Prisa Media, Voxnest, Audioboom, ABC Australia, Art19, Kagiso Media and the BBC.