Oprah’s next podcast guests are out of this world

• Oprah Winfrey’s The Oprah Show today features guests that are out of this world - or, at least, they were. After their extraordinary, history-making trip around the moon, Oprah has an in-depth conversation with the crew of Artemis II. The crew shares how they were transformed after spending more than nine days traveling farther into space than any human being has ever been. The show was acquired by Amazon’s Wondery last month.

• Spotify drives 1.5x more podcast consumption than YouTube, according to new data from Podstock. However, part of that is due to discovery tools and reach for new audiences - new listeners lower average time spent per stream. The data, based on thousands of different podcast episodes, highlights the increasingly multiplatform world of podcasting.

• In the UK, podcasting reaches more 18-34 year-olds than broadcast TV, says research from Sounds Profitable, written up by Ben Robins of Sound Insights. The data on the UK’s podcast consumers arrives a week before The Podcast Show in London: Ben Robins and Tom Webster will cover more of the data on May 20 at 10am.

• Alitu and The Podcast Host have been acquired by AI software developer Rocketable. The acquisition occurred a couple of months ago, it’s emerged, and is now complete. Colin Gray leaves the company, but “is not sure at this stage what comes next” - he’ll be at The Podcast Show in London.

• iHeartMedia released its Q1/26 financial report. Podcast revenue was $147mn, up 27% year-on-year (and above guidance from the company). Podcasting represents 16.6% of the company’s revenue - around 50% of podcast revenue came from iHeart’s 1000+ local sales force, Bob Pittman noted in the earnings call. He also said that iHeart is the #1 podcast network according to both Podtrac and Triton - neglecting to mention that Triton is owned by iHeart.

  • Also in the call, Mike McGuinness, CFO, noted that “there’s a new thing called video podcast”, and also said that the iHeart app has begun rolling out video for some of its shows. We reported on this in early January - we look forward to learning more.

• The Podcast Academy is to celebrate two international awards at The Podcast Show in London. Goalhanger’s The Rest is History will receive the International Governor’s Award, while the International Impact Award goes to Wisecrack from Tenderfoot TV & iHeartPodcasts, “recognizing a podcast or individual based or set outside of the United States whose recent work has had a significant, positive impact on the global podcasting landscape”. (The show is set in the UK).

  • Sony Digital Imaging will also be exhibiting at The Podcast Show for the first time. They’ll be showing off all of Sony’s broadcast ecosystem, reflecting podcasting’s switch to video.

• The Nomono sound capsule - we reviewed a pre-release version in 2023 - is about to have “a big system update that brings stability, performance, and security improvements”.

• CreatorX has announced Office Hours, a free monthly forum on how to make your podcast more valuable to new and existing brands. The first event is this Friday at 5pm Eastern.

• The Podcast Professionals Association has announced its inaugural Board of Directors. The non-profit’s new Board are Traci DeForge, President and Co-Founder; Jenn Trepeck, Vice President and Co-Founder; Allison Booker; David Hoffman; and Steve Stewart. It’s part of a new phase of growth for the organisation.

• Scott Galloway now has his own TV channel. “The Prof G Channel” is on The Roku Channel and Prime Video, and brings together his most popular podcasts. The channel is being produced by Swerve TV.

• Little Dot Studios, which partnered with Acast at the end of last year, has opened its in-house video podcast studio in its London headquarters. It will initially be used for History Hit, and provides a dedicated space for future formats and productions.

• Podcasting has “too many awards and no way to stop them”, writes Frank Racioppi in Forbes. His article starts with our story from January of a different type of podcast awards.

Apple and Spotify still rank podcasts like records.

Paid content

Apple Podcasts spun out of iTunes. Spotify started life as a music app. PodSEO analysed roughly 11 million top-5 podcast and episode rankings on a single day, English keywords only, and found their search engines still behave that way.

On Apple, 12% of rank-1 shows have the searched keyword in their title or author field, against a random baseline below 0.001%. Episodes published in the past week appear in the top 5 around eight times more often than their share of the catalogue would predict. Spotify’s recency boost is even stronger, and its episode ranker barely uses show metadata at all.

The full breakdown, including how the two platforms diverge at the episode level, sits on the PodSEO blog.

See how podcasts ranks today.

Tips and tricks - with The Podcast Show London

• Want to know what to really think of video podcasting? We’d recommend The School of Podcasting this week - interview with both Alban Brooke and Justin Jackson, but expertly edited and assembled by Hall of Famer Dave Jackson. Well worth a listen.
• Podcast stats are confusing enough without video in the mix. Here’s how to understand podcast stats. (Hit reply if you’ve more questions!)

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: The History Chicks celebrates the lives of remarkable women from ancient times to the modern day, exploring women’s history in engaging episodes full of deep research, pop culture references, and the occasional tumble down a rabbit hole. The show’s looking at Laura Ingalls Wilder, beloved author of the Little House series and chronicler of life on the US prairie in the late 1800s.

In Australia, it’s Federal Budget week. Is this going to be a fair dinkum budget? Will we have to pay more for a schooner of beer? The Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined Jeremy and Norman for an exclusive chat on On The Talking.

In The Writer’s debut episode, a catastrophic event in London triggers the outbreak of World War III. Oliver, an aspiring Australian writer, and his father are forcibly conscripted under emergency orders and sent to a chaotic enlistment camp, where families are separated and everyday life collapses under rapid global mobilisation.

22nd Century America is crumbling from relentless climate change, collapsing supply chains and recurrent pandemics. In Witchpunk: A Cyberpunk story, a new gritty full cast audio drama, a bickering crew release there’s something badly wrong with their cargo.

Design This Day skips the theory, and instead talks with people who are quietly building the world you’re about to live in: the engineer behind the world’s largest aircraft, the designer bringing human-centered thinking to autonomous weapons systems, the founder growing bionic hands for humans and robots. The actual people doing the work speak with futurist Devin Liddell, who has spent 20 years helping Boeing, Nike, Google, and Amazon figure out what comes next.