Do podcasts have a discovery problem?

Survey: If you are UK-based, please help journalist and producer Heidi Pett with some research into rates for those in the industry.

• The ABC publish “the perfect podcasts to listen to in the car, on the beach and at home this summer”. Lots of recommendations from all kinds of publishers. These podcasts also work well in front of the fire, under a duvet, sheltering from the snow.

• Do podcasts have a discoverability problem? Jacobs Media asked “some of the best and brightest in the podcasting space” for their opinions. One of these people is apparently the publisher of this very publication.

• A brand new search engine for podcasts, Castdex, is launched, coming out of Madison WI, USA.

• Some data about audio-book consumption, including some numbers from Edison Research, who became a podnews silver sponsor on Friday.

• Scale Up is a new podcast about startups in Melbourne scaling to global success.

• Welcome to Nearly, who became a silver sponsor today. The company are “storytellers that love the medium, the opportunities podcasts present and the flexibility for creativity.”

• From Reddit, a question about how to achieve maximum vocal warmth, so you too can sound like Roman Mars.

  
  Jul 28 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Embattled crowd-funding site Patreon contact everyone who cancelled last week as a result of their bungled fee changes, asking them to reconsider.

• India: will people there take to podcasting? There’s no culture of talk radio in the country, this article points out. It omits to mention a wider issue, perhaps - there are twenty-three different official languages in the country - Hindi is most popular, with 53% of the population speaking it, but the next most popular, Bengali, is just 8%. (12% speak English, though virtually none as a first language).

• Korea: an oldish article, but interesting nonetheless - statistics and take-up of podcasting in the country, and details of Korea’s largest podcasting platform, Podbang. I’m grateful to Eric Jon Magnuson for these Korean and Indian links.

• Apple’s new podcasting analytics data: AdExchanger writes about what it means for podcasters: “Since Apple is only providing aggregated listener data, the new analytics won’t open the floodgates for programmatic dollars”. Vulture says that the new data will “go far in proving that while everybody may well be podcasting, some people indeed may be podlistening”.

• A nice idea for the holidays from RadioPublic: a 'podcard’ for you to send podcast suggestions to family members.