A map to help navigate the podcasting landscape

• Magellan AI and Sounds Profitable have produced a map of the podcast advertising landscape, designed to help make sense of the space. Dubbed a “Podscape”, you can learn more about it in this week’s Sounds Profitable.

• Buzzsprout is now the world’s largest paid-for podcast host. The company overtook Libsyn (including LibsynPro) according to data from ListenNotes over the past few days, which measures RSS hosting domains. Buzzsprout itself claimed it has 82,574 shows at the end of October; Libsyn claims just 62,000 podcasts on their main website but over 75,000 in their latest press release; Libsyn haven’t responded to recent requests for comment. While both companies also offer custom RSS domains, Buzzsprout has a limited free plan.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 29 2023

• Joe Rogan interviewed Alex Jones in October - but that episode, #1555, mysteriously disappeared from Spotify. Rogan claimed it was just a 'cache issue’ - however, DigitalMusicNews claims it was a deliberate removal by a Spotify employee; and that Rogan was fed a different story to hide the real reason.

• ElasticPod is a new tool for “making the spoken content of your podcast fully searchable”, automatically producing transcripts and an embedded player.

• SoundCloud, which some use as a podcast host, released their financials for 2019. In 2019, the company lost $28.2m; an improvement from 2018, when they lost $39m.

• Someone’s got hold of 350,000 Spotify passwords, forcing the company to reset them.

• PodcastOne has revealed its Q4 2020 slate. The new hosts signed-up have a total social media reach of 21 million, the company says.

Today, well over twice as many people listen to a podcast every month than use Twitter monthly. And if you … do a little math, the weekly reach of indie podcasting alone is nearly the weekly reach of Twitter in America. — Tom Webster, I Hear Things

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• Here are all the apps and hosts that are supporting the new 'podcast’ namespace.
• If you are supporting a new Podcast Index namespace tag, you’re asked to let the world know, by adding it to their Github.
• The simplest podcatcher in the world? simple-podcast-dl is a command-line Python script. The downside? It only supports six podcasts.

Tips and tricks

• A better way to do voicemail and listener participation? Jay Tomlinson writes about his clever idea - VoicedMail.

• Three ways to repurpose a podcast (Wesleyne Greer)

Podcast News - with Vurbl

On Vurbl Voices - get to know the co-founders of Vurbl with a behind the scenes launch episode. They talk about why they’re building the platform, developing the team, what they’re excited about most for Vurbl and what creators and listeners can expect from the platform. Listen on Vurbl

Life On Pause: A Quarantine Anthology is “an audio drama set in a world that has been forced into lockdown due to a global pandemic”. With a cast of 22 actors and six writers, the show starts on December 10.

Brains Trust is new from SCA’s PodcastOne Australia. Its first season, “2020 – The Year We Can’t Forget”, is a set of long-form interviews with Australian personalities. It was produced by TV producer Chris Walker, who says: “Putting this together really reframed my attitude toward 2020 and was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever made. It made it feel like none of 2020 was a waste.” We’ll be the judge of that, Chris.