Podcast Live launches in UK; and mobile data costs around the world

• Podcast Live is a new company in the UK, hoping to “take the UK’s leading factual podcasters into venues across the country to host interactive versions of their shows in front of a live audience”. Their first event is on 7 April, featuring politics, with up to ten separate shows.

• Since Spotify, Google Podcasts and others default to streaming (rather than downloading), does that matter? It sure does if mobile data costs a lot. Today, we went to look for the price of mobile data across the world - and found some astonishing differences between countries. A deal in India for $5.50 a month is twice as good as a deal costing $147 per month in Canada. (Coincidentally - podcasting appears to be growing fastest in India).

• ESPN is all-in on podcasts. As we learn from Steven Goldstein, interviews ESPN’s Traug Keller, ESPN’s first podcast was in 2005; and podcasts skew significantly younger than any other platform at ESPN.

  
  Aug 10 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Vox Media is expanding its partnership with Stitcher to make a technology news podcast from Recode. The deal is described as “multi-million dollar”. They have a fancy new website to celebrate.

  
  Aug 10 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Wavve, a service that lets you share podcasts on social media “in style”, now supports automatic transcription and captions, the company has announced. Here’s what one looks like.

• Apple’s Affiliate Platform, which allows podcasters to measure their podcast marketing, has been updated today to offer better reporting and analytics.

• We have just booked our flight for Radiodays Europe’s Podcast Day on 13th June in London, UK.

Data and stats

Vox Media’s revenue from podcast advertising tripled 2017-2018, and should more than double again this year. Vox Media’s podcast business is an eight figure business; it now runs over 75 podcasts.