Countries where podcasting is growing fastest

Voxnest have posted the fastest-growing countries for podcasting. The top 4 are Spanish-speaking, all in Latin America. Number 5? China, growing at 43% month-on-month. Given that China has a population of 1.4bn, that’s a significant increase for total downloads.

Swoot, a new social podcast app, has been launched: you can see friends listening to shows. 25% of podcasts played by users, says the press release, are influenced by friends.

Dan Misener had his independent podcast Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids featured on Apple’s front page. In a blog post he explained how he got there, and what effect it had on his traffic.

Patreon changes pricing for new creator plans soon - you have until May 6th to join to retain the old pricing model.

Headliner have published results of a test showing that posting audio and a moving waveform performs three times better than a static image.

Plink makes free smart links for podcasters, automatically forwarding listeners to play your podcast in their pre-installed podcast apps. It’s a nice implementation; the first fifteen users can use code “podnews” and save $5. (We do this too: search for your podcast on Podnews and add “/listen” on the URL - or download the code from our link generator pages.)

The Wondery/UMG announcement we reported on yesterday might have something to do with the disappearance of some Wondery podcasts, including One Plus One's exploration of the relationship between Lennon and McCartney, and the Death Row Records vs Bad Boy Records episodes of Business Wars. The reason? Music rights.