OZY Media shuts down after reports about business practices

• Ozy Media has announced it is to shut down, after a number of reports about the company’s business practices. There were question marks over what the company had told investors, advertisers, employees and guests; and the impact could still affect other media companies. Carlos Watson, the co-founder and CEO of Ozy Media, has resigned from the NPR Board. The company had five podcasts, including co-productions with iHeartMedia and the BBC.

• 71% of younger (25-40 year-old) public radio fans use podcasts, accordings to Jacobs Media’s’ Public Radio Techsurvey 2021. Only three-quarters of public radio fans use a radio at home; and for millennials, that figure drops to 55%. In total, 39% of public radio fans listen to podcasts every week.

  • Even among public radio fans, however, The Daily from the New York Times fares better than NPR’s own podcasts, NPR News Now or Up First.

• In case you missed an email, Anchor “identified an issue that caused plays to be undercounted between Sep 8-14”. It recalculated all data on Sep 21.

• Fireside Chat has made changes to its terms and conditions. The main change corrects a layout problem, but the company also asked you “to use commercially reasonable efforts” to notify Fireside if you plan to commercialise content you make on the service (which is curious, since the company has been at pains to point out that you own your content anyway). Here’s what’s changed.

• Melinda Wittstock, the CEO and founder of Podopolo, has published an open letter to “clear up some misconceptions”. It follows a story in Friday’s Podnews about “poorly worded” tweets.

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• Podpage has a new feature to import all videos from your YouTube channel into your podpage website. Here’s an example from Miss Ileane’s Anchor Show.

• Podtube is a “platform and social network just for podcasts”, according to a piece in The Times of India. It appears to not use RSS. Meanwhile, the New Indian Express’s Indulge website looks at independent podcasters from Kerala.

• David Couch has joined podcast publisher Auddy as Chief Revenue Officer. He joins from Deezer and SoundCloud.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 7 2023

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• RadioPublic, the Podbean app, and TuneIn are among those that have not updated any shows hosted on Anchor since Sep 30. We suspect this is related to the expiration of an old root certificate for Let’s Encrypt. Podnews’s webserver also failed to connect to Anchor RSS feeds from Oct 1 (or our own internal tools which also use Let’s Encrypt); we had to patch our server. The fix is for RadioPublic, Podbean and TuneIn to implement, not Anchor.

• Open-source Android podcast app AntennaPod is curious about an apparent drop in users over the last few days. Any clues for them? (We wonder if it’s related to the above?)

• RSS feeds on LibsynPro infrastructure appear to being migrated to standard libsyn․com feeds.

• In case you wondered, last week Podnews made 4,536 sats from listening to the show, and a further 29,956 from boosts. That’s $16.40 just last week. In total so far, we’ve made $188. Even though it’s very early days, that’ll pay for a decent round of drinks, so if your podcast isn’t value4value-enabled, we’d recommend doing so.

Tips and tricks - with Muck Rack's State of Podcasting Survey

• How to get Your Podcast That all-Important 5-Star Review - Riverside suggests, among other things, reading reviews out on your show.

• This Agent Sees a Future for Actors in Podcasting — Are You Next? - Backstage Magazine, a publication for the acting profession, reckons the acting community should so take notice, darling!

  
  Sep 7 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Podcast News

Unholier than thou returns for season two: Crooked Media’s podcast that explores the intersection of the saintly and secular. Hosted by Philip Picardi, the trailer’s now available, and the new show starts Friday.

Also launching today, Because of Anita, looking at the testimony of Professor Anita Hill in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. It’s from The Meteor and Pineapple Street Studios.

The Guardian’s Today in Focus goes inside the Pandora papers, one of the biggest leaks of financial data in history, showing how 35 current and former world leaders, and over 300 public officials, have used offshore companies to avoid paying tax.