SiriusXM: Simplecast’s price; Pandora’s decline

• SiriusXM’s financial report for Q2 2020 has been released. The company owns Stitcher, Simplecast, Pandora and AdsWizz. The acquisition price for Simplecast, unreported at the time, was $28m.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 26 2023
  • Pandora now has 59.6m monthly active users, which dropped by 1.3m in the last quarter.
  • “I believe the podcasting game is in the first inning,” SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer said in the earnings call. “I don’t know what the viability is of podcasting as a standalone business.” Chief Content Officer Scott Greenstein added “The podcast is very nascent … you can tell by the numbers, not many podcasts do very significant numbers.”

• Podcasting “is finally big business”, says an article for DW, which focuses on an overview of recent deals.

• Spotify now supports HTML formatting for show notes. It appears to use <description> and, unlike others, does not prefer the <content:encoded> field where that exists.

• A new Latin American Podcast Report is out from Triton Digital, covering the four weeks ending July 5. The top 10 podcasts have seen a slump in downloads, down by over 10%. The highest new entry is at 11: Educação Financeira a financial podcast from Radios Grupo Globo.

• Anchor has made a fancy shortcut - type podcast.new into a browser to go straight to the episode builder. It’s part of Google’s ownership of the .new domain.

  
  Aug 26 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
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• Elision claims to be the world’s first podcast app that is focused on learning and edutainment, with podcasts “enriched with RichAudio visuals”, which the company claims is “a unique listening format, which enriches the audio content with text, photos, and links”. (A bit like Entale, and others).

• Thing that has probably existed for some time: A Spotify scannable code generator. Just paste your podcast’s Spotify URL into the box.

  
  Aug 26 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
  • Here’s the code for Podnews. To use it, in your Spotify app, hit “search” then the camera icon.

Tips and tricks

• Why your podcast needs a show bible (Pacific Content)
• The Best Way To Write A Podcast Script (Kate Erickson, Entrepreneurs on Fire)

Podcast News - with The John Bartolo Show

In The John Bartolo Show Vinny Magalhaes - PFL Fighter and Black Belt in BJJ. Vinny stops in to discuss JiuJitsu and MMA. Listen now

Nice White Parents launched yesterday: the first from “Serial Productions, a New York Times Company”. It’s a new limited podcast series hosted by Chana Joffe-Walt about building a better school system, and what often gets in the way: white parents.