Overcast to skip stats services

• Use Chartable or Podsights to measure your traffic? Overcast will no longer appear in your data: Marco Arment, the developer, has decided to skip those redirects entirely, after they have, he claims, become increasingly affected by ad-blocking DNS servers. “Most download links that would otherwise redirect through these widely-blocked domains will now try to skip that hop and go to whatever’s after them”, he says on Overcast’s Slack channel. “I keep getting emails and tweets from people whose downloads are being blocked at the network level by these DNS blocklists, and they’ve gotten frequent enough that I need to do something.” Podtrac is currently unaffected by this action, though.

• City Cast, the national network of daily news podcasts, has launched today with City Cast Chicago; launching next week, City Cast Denver. The idea of former Slate Editor-in-Chief David Plotz, the company plans more.

• Leigh Zarelli has joined Audible as Chief Product Officer. She joins from Marriott International.

  
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• In Flanders, the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium, some imec.digimeter media consumption data from early 2019. It suggests that 8% listened to podcasts weekly. (Latest comparable data: UK 18% weekly; US 28% weekly). New data is currently being compiled.

• In France, the Médiamétrie podcast ranker claims 94 million podcast listens in February (down from over 100m in January). France Inter is the largest measured podcast publisher. It’s an incomplete ranker, with participating publishers only.

• Libsyn shares a little more about their recent acquistion of Auxbus.

• Noted today: YouTube’s uploader scans your videos for copyright violations as you upload.

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Tips and tricks - with Radiodays Asia

• Fair Use: Just Because You Make a Funny Version of a Copyrighted Work Does Not Mean that You Will Escape an Infringement Claim says media lawyer David Oxenford.

• Who is the best podcast host? We’ve updated our “how to choose” page, with charging structures and Podcasting 2.0. Our recommendation to not use SoundCloud remains intact.

Podcast News - With Toyota Untold

Through the deadly flames of 2018's Camp Fire, revisit Allyn Pierce’s jaw-dropping story of his Marshmello Tundra – The Pandra – on the Toyota Untold

Sounder has launched a new show on their platform, The Path Here - featuring celebrities from across industries as they share stories about their paths to success.

Unexplainable from Vox Media is an expansion of their “Explainer” franchise, according to Digiday: the company also produces Today, Explained and a show on Netflix just entitled “Explained”.