2024 Podcast Hall of Fame inductees announced

• The 2024 Podcast Hall of Fame inductees have been announced, ahead of the induction ceremony at Podfest Expo. The eight inductees are Adam Carolla, Aaron Mahnke, Daniel J. Lewis, Doug Kaye, Jesse Thorn, Laurie Sims, Maria Hinojosa, and Michael Butler.

• Edison Research released the 25 biggest podcasts in the UK for Q3/23. Joe Rogan is still #1; new entries in the top 10 are Global’s The News Agents, Saving Grace from The Fellas Studios, and Spotify’s Parenting Hell. Broadcast analyst Adam Bowie reviewed the latest figures.

• OP3 has enabled a new “listen time” metric for selected shows, including the Podnews Daily. It uses value4value’s streaming sats feature. Here’s the data for Podcasting 2.0 - a show that’s a little longer. ;)

• It’s emerged that Podvine, a podcast hosting company and listening app, quietly shut down late last year. The company worked with customers to transfer to other hosts; the website is no longer active. Originally branded Reason, in October 2022 it was achieving 3.2mn downloads monthly.

• The Brand Podcast Virtual Summit, organised by Lower Street, has announced its full speaker schedule. The event, aimed at people looking to launch or grow a brand’s podcast, is free.

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• YouTube has taken its RSS ingest tool out of beta. It’s now available in 98 countries. Podcasts uploaded in this way cannot contain advertising (just host-read sponsorships).

• Magellan AI has partnered with attention-based measurement company Adelaide to surface attention metrics within its podcast measurement suite.

• Black and queer-owned audio post-production studio Hemlock Creek Productions, founded by Marisa Ewing, is celebrating its fourth anniversary by giving away three podcast consulting slots (or, if you’d prefer, an audit of your podcast’s audio).

• Spotify is to close its US-only Ambassador Ads program. A spokesperson told Podnews that creators currently enrolled in Ambassador Ads are invited to participate in the Automated Ads program, which connects creators to third-party brands through the Spotify Audience Network. Automated Ads are available to creators in the US, Canada and Brazil, with more countries to be added shortly.

• It wasn’t just podcasting releasing fewer new shows in 2023. Netflix also released 130 fewer shows: a drop of 16%. It’s part of a new strategy from the streamer.

Moves and hires

• Stephen Hallgren, also known as Teevio, has joined Bumper as fractional CTO. He was with Simplecast.

Tips and tricks - with Patreon + Spotify

• Lauren Shippen’s Atypical Artists has published a set of resources to help you make audio fiction podcasts: handbooks on production, development and scripting, as well as templates and examples.

• Resonate Recordings has shared how they optimise SEO for their branded podcasts.

Podcast News - with Airwave

From Airwave: New York Daily News contains the top stories you need to start your day – with New York attitude.

The Top 11 is launched today from Caloroga Shark Media. Each week, it embarks on an in-depth exploration of a single topic, uncovering 11 fascinating facets of it. From the top Seinfeld episodes. to the top movie villains, quirky hobbies, mythical creatures, iconic album covers, and more, this podcast has a list and it goes to 11.

Infertile AF has joined AdLarge. The show dives into the messy, frustrating, painful, absurd and sometimes humorous journey to have a baby. Or in some cases, to not have a baby.

A new investigative podcast from APM Studios and Western Sound starts today. Ripple returns to the scene of major events to discover the long-term impacts that have been raging, unnoticed, for years. This season, host Dan Leone travels across the Gulf Coast of the United States to document the ongoing effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill - which are still impacting many coastal residents more than a decade later.

Bloomberg launches Big Take DC today - a new podcast that shares one reported story a week about how money, politics, and power shape Washington — and the consequences for people in America and all over the world. The first episode later today features an interview with Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds.

Unf*cking the Future is new from climate scientist and optimist, Chris Turney and iHeartPodcasts. It contains alarming truths about our planet’s health, then pivots to the innovative, sometimes bizarre, but always brilliant solutions that give us a fighting chance at a brighter and greener future.

Sketchplanations returns for a second season today - a podcast based on a set of weekly illustrations posted online that cleverly distil big complex ideas into digestible, bite-size sketches. The podcast share ideas and stories around a weekly topic.