First speakers announced for Podcast Movement Evolutions

• Podcast Movement Evolutions has announced the first set of confirmed speakers for the event in Las Vegas NV, this March. If you want to save money, you might take advantage of the holiday sale for registration.

• Betterhelp is still the top spender in podcast advertising, detected in 879 shows in November, says Magellan AI. Peloton, Etsy and Skylight were the advertisers who’ve increased their spend the most. There’s a market update webinar today at 11.30am ET.

• Vice Media Group are to make new exclusive video podcasts in Indonesia. The country ranked “in the top 10 countries globally for podcast consumption on Spotify” last month.

• Livewire reports that Libsyn’s podcast consumption stats are now using IAB-compliant numbers. Those figures had been their own legacy numbers until September. The company appears to include all AppleCoreMedia downloads under Apple Podcasts data, and claims Apple has 69.5% of all downloads, Spotify 13.7%, and Google Podcasts at 2.2%.

• Christmas comes early part 1: In October, RØDE launched a games division, including streaming software Unify. Costing $69 a year, it was given away for $1 at the end of November, but in an email sent to customers and seen by Podnews, the software is now free. It will only work with RØDE microphones from now on; but the company is to send a free XCM-50 microphone to every former subscriber. /ht Neal Veglio

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• Christmas comes early part 2: Overcast’s developer, Marco Arment, has announced he is not going to remove Overcast’s web player after all. He promises it’ll continue to be very basic, and kind of ugly, but will remain for the forseeable future.

• The host of Sword and Scale, Mike Boudet has posted a racially unpleasant poll on Twitter. Boudet was sacked by Wondery in 2019 after similar Twitter comments, and was widely accused of orchestrating one-star reviews against a competitor. He has denied that he left one star reviews; and is also the subject of a YouTube documentary. We’ve again asked for comment.

• Further reading: The CEO of PRX, Kerri Hoffman, thinks podcasting has significant opportunities for local communities in 2023 … and Troy Larson suggests that radio is ignoring podcasting.

Big failures are often the springboard to bigger success.

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Podcast News

Podbean’s Rob Greenlee makes a guest appearance on The Sound Off Podcast - but don’t worry, there are “No Podcast Predictions, Just A Look Forward”. There’s a transcript available on the website.

Dish, a podcast with Nick Grimshaw and Angela Harnett, has some special guests this Christmas - Downtown Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, radio’s Annie Mac, and morning TV stars Dermot O’Leary and Alison Hammond will be enjoying seasonal favourites and serving up a warm helping of chat, probably.

It’s the season finale for the seventh season of Heavyweight today. The show is produced by Spotify’s Gimlet, and the last episode of the season will hear the story of an unlucky branch of the Elliott family seeking to lift a curse placed on them by the Archbishop of Glasgow in 1525.

Podcast ads in the wild

Running on subway trains and trams in Toronto ON, Canada, Terry spots these ads for Amazon Music’s ad-free offering. Toronto’s subway system was Canada’s first, opening in 1954; Toronto is also the home to the world’s first batteryless radio, built by Rogers, a company that now sells mobile phones which can be used to stream live radio, making their batteries run down faster. Progress!

• Our Editor will be speaking at Radiodays North America in Toronto in June 2023.