Daylight comes for 'Podcast Review'

• Exclusive: Daylight Media has acquired the online publication Podcast Review. We first reported on the website in Feb 2018; the well-regarded website contains human-curated podcast recommendations, reviews and analysis (like this, for The Idiot). The weekly newsletter goes to 12,000 people. Alice Orr becomes the Managing Editor.

• Exclusive: Million Podcasts has published The State of Video Podcasting 2026 - an analysis of 34,000 English-language video podcasts. This beautifully-designed report suggests that there are 7.7mn video podcast episodes available, but it’s very unequal: the top 1% of video podcasts are getting 42% of all consumption. The inequality also extends to who’s behind the microphone: there are twice as many video podcasts hosted by men as women. You can also score your podcast against the top ten.

• Exclusive: Niche podcasts may lose on scale - but they outperform in many other ways. Strategist Losh Moodaley writes for Podnews to highlight the blind spot of the podcast industry - inventory is valued in bulk, while context is largely ignored.

• The Golden Globes has tweaked the eligibility rules for podcasts for the 84th awards - bumping the number of eligible shows up from 25 to 30. As before, eligibility for podcasts in the US awards will be determined by Luminate, using a proprietary methodology including audience reach and engagement, and platform visibility and presence.

  • In case you were wondering: A “podcast” shall mean an episodic digital audio and/or video series that is made available to the public for download or on-demand streaming over the internet via a widely recognized media platform.

• Edison Research has published the Top 10 Podcast Networks in the US for weekly reach. Spotify is #1, SiriusXM is #2, while iHeartPodcasts is at #3.

• The Washington Post publishes a piece called Inside Ben Shapiro’s MAGA meltdown. It reports that traffic has halved to the Daily Wire in the past year; and that it’s cut 13% of its staff since the beginning of this year.

  • The article suggests DailyWire podcast traffic has fallen, citing the Spotify chart. Streams/downloads have fallen -30% year-on-year according to Podtrac, but DailyWire+ audience is up +16%.

• 'Podslop’ is a real and growing problem, writes TechRadar. Meanwhile, Inception Point AI is still quiet: it hasn’t published any new podcasts for a number of days. CEO Jeanine Wright told us last week that the company is “in the middle of an ongoing platform migration and commercial transition”.

• In Egypt, Podfest Cairo took place over the weekend. You can watch the entire event online.

• In Australia, PodBoost has been launched by podcast producer Podshape. It’s a podcast growth toolkit with features including a personalised audience growth tips tool.

• Will Vox Media be bought by James Murdoch? (James is Rupert Murdoch’s son, but is not currently connected with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns FOX News and newspapers in the US, UK and Australia).

• According to Buzzcast, 32 hours after the launch of it’s service for Apple Podcasts video podcasting, the company had 115 shows that were video-enabled; and had already published 250 episodes.

  • Our podcast pages now mark shows with Apple Podcasts video. We’ve also taken this opportunity to refresh the Apple Podcasts icons we use. The official badges and icons are here, including badges that say “Listen on”, “Watch on”, “Discover on”, or “Find it on”.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

What’s a 308 Redirect, and is it the same as a 301 Redirect? They are almost, but not quite, identical.

A 301 Moved Permanently will redirect the viewer to a new URL, and use GET to, um, get it. On the other hand, a 308 Permanent Redirect will redirect the viewer to a new URL, and use GET, POST or HEAD to get it - whatever request method the viewer initially asked for.

Libsyn is using a 308 Permanent Redirect for customers who have moved feed somewhere else. That’s the right choice - our RSS stats don’t say so, but 11% of the traffic to our RSS feed is a HEAD request, just seeing if it has been updated without downloading the whole thing. With a 308 Permanent Redirect, the HEAD request will be correctly passed through.

So, a 308 Permament Redirect ought to behave in exactly the same way as a 301. If you’ve found any crawlers which don’t treat them the same, we’d quite like to know.

• The Podcast Index has published a page detailing all the open public datasets available from the project. Great for researchers, developers, or anyone wanting to understand the podcast space, they’re all free.

• Worthwhile looking at the HTML for the Apple Podcasts website, particularly its shows page (like this). The company appears to be using the CreativeWorkSeries Schema type to describe podcasts, which adds things like reviews and other metadata to search results. We were using Schema too, but a slightly different type, so we’ve aligned with Apple because they generally know what they’re doing.

• Whispy is another free transcript tool; it runs in your browser.

Tips and tricks - with The Podcast Show London

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: In the Test Kitchen from America’s Test Kitchen. The show’s test cook hosts dive deep into their favorite dishes, taste recipes, and talk about how culture, history, and science influence the foods we love to eat. The latest show looks at salad, but don’t let that put you off.

In the US it’s National Hospital Week, and the Warner Bros TV Group’s podcast A Lot More is spotlighting its acclaimed medical drama The Pitt - with candid behind-the-scenes conversations with stars and writers of the series to reflect on its impact.

Some questions don’t have answers. Yet. New from REWIND, the new brand from PAVE Studios, today - Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat unravels real events from history that still can’t be fully explained. Mass hysterias. Medical oddities. Vanished civilizations. Strange signals. Unexplained phenomena that keep repeating, centuries apart, as if history is trying to tell us something.

How do you build a satisfying career when you, and everything around you, never stop changing? Work-Shaped Life is a new podcast launching today from Dave Weich, the founder of Sheepscot Creative, talking with people going through that in real time: pivots, drifts, reinventions, and the self-awareness that comes from doing the work of figuring it out.

“Every stranger has a story.” This is what Hunter Prosper realized when he began posting man-on-the-street interviews with real-life strangers to his social media accounts. Stories From A Stranger features portraits of strangers connected by themes of love, loss, regret, inspiration, illness, family and more - remind us that we are all human and more connected than we realize.