Podcast creation was up in 2025

• Listen Notes says that there were 198,488 new podcasts published in 2025. That figure was 198,280 in 2024, so is ever so slightly up year-on-year. The number of new podcast launches are actually much higher than that - the data refers to new podcast feeds rather than new podcasts: many new launches re-use existing feeds from older shows.

• And, Livewire says there were 13.2% more podcast episodes published last month than in the month of November. The data also shows Triton Digital’s Omny Studio, an enterprise podcast host, has leapt from #9 to #6.

• StrawberryData is a new “MVP for podcast and media intelligence that I built to solve a personal curiosity: what are these shows actually saying?”. Using semantic analysis, this new analytics engine shows what sort of things podcasts talk about; their ad loads; their words-per-minute, how many times they say the word “um” or “er”, and even how many times they swear. Here’s the page for Call Her Daddy as one example. It’s an interesting tool looking for your feedback.

• The Radcast Network, which monetises and hosts podcasts, has reportedly closed, according to one podcaster that was part of it. The company hasn’t responded to questions from Podnews; for the last three days its website has been unavailable (and that of its parent company), and there don’t appear to have been any posts from the company for more than a month on social media. The company launched in Mar 2024, and added its own podcast hosting in Aug 2025.

• Triton Digital’s Spreaker, a podcast host, has added automated transcripts for some of its shows. Here’s Bigfoot Society's latest episode page on Spreaker - you can see a transcript button, and the transcript is also available in the RSS feed using the Podcasting 2.0 transcript tag. The first show with a transcript in this feed is from March 2023. We’re unsure when Spreaker started doing this, but bravo!

Podcast News

The Podnews Weekly Review returns today with a look at James and Sam’s predictions for 2025. How much did they get right - and wrong? And what were their lowlights, and highlights, of the year? The show is sponsored by Buzzsprout.

The BBC show Strong Message Here looks at the words and phrases used by politicians in the country (and outside it). This week, the host Armando Ianucci is joined by stand-up comedian Stewart Lee.

Life is better when you have a friend by your side! Abby Howard, known for hosting the hit podcast Unplanned with her husband, has launched Always Here, an even more personal deep-dive into her family life. Together with her sister-in-law Abby Howard (yes, they have the same name!), the duo explores everything from the chaos of parenting to the beauty of lifelong friendship.

Having a bad DAI

An occasional series featuring bad programmatic advertising, so we can learn to do better.

Here’s a copy of a recent episode we downloaded from Ox news daily, an AI-voiced show hosted and monetised by Triton Digital’s Spreaker. The first 1'15" of this 3-minute episode is ads, and contains, for us in Brisbane QLD, Australia, an ad for Bank of Queensland, followed by… the same ad for Bank of Queensland.

Spreaker’s parent company Triton Digital’s TAP product offers configurable ad separation and sets automatic ad separation defaults; however Spreaker’s Ad Exchange program appears not to offer a mention of ad separation in its settings.