Podcast Movement Evolutions under way in LA

• Podcast Movement Evolutions has kicked off in Los Angeles CA, USA. The first of three keynotes featured (on World Radio Day) Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia, Conal Byrne, President of iHeart Media, and AdWeek’s 2019 Producer of the Year, Misha Euceph. There will be a number of announcements during the show: we’ll report on many of them in Monday’s issue. James Cridland, our Editor, will be moderating a Q&A this morning as part of the opening keynote session; and talking at 10.30am in the Gold Room.

• HubHopper, who were republishing and editing podcast RSS feeds without publisher consent (Feb 12), have removed these feeds. In a response to Podnews, and a post made to their private WhatsApp group, the company have claimed “a bug” but also admitting these feeds “was purely an SEO strengthening exercise”. Read their statement in full, and our thoughts on it

• Dan Misener from Pacific Content has published analysis on the most crowded Apple Podcasts categories. As he points out, you’re guaranteed a place in the Apple Podcast charts if your podcast is in the “Swimming” category: there are only fourteen there!

• Podtrac have published the January top 10 podcast publishers for US audience. The list actually lists fifteen publishers, with Westwood One new at #11, and NPR is still #1. It doesn’t list all publishers. Podtrac claim 1.3 billion downloads in January 2019 across all publishers, up 21% from December.

  • The numbers also come with a note: “In January, most publishers experienced a drop in UMA (Unique Measured Audience) with a simultaneous increase in downloads. This divergence was precipitated by a popular podcast app providing less-specific User Agent data on which the IAB UMA algorithm relies. Podtrac is currently working on a refinement to the UMA algorithm to address this issue.”

• The International Podcast Association has closed. It was a group founded last year, and undertook some research into the potential benefits of such an membership organisation. Podnews understands that time pressures were mainly to blame.

• In Why the podcast gold rush is slowing down for some publishers, Digiday reports that some podcast publishers are finding out that it can be expensive and hard to produce successful podcasts.

Reader’s letters

Jacob Tender clarifies that Breaker still has its own Patron-only functionality through its Upstream program. Only the integration involving an existing Patreon campaign is being removed. - damn you, auto-correct, for changing our “patreon-only” to “patron-only”. (That’s our story and we’re sticking to it)