Top shows up 7% in August, say Podtrac

• Podcast analytics company Podtrac’s US podcast publisher data for August was released. In spite of all the publicity handed to them last month, The Daily Wire, a right-wing podcast network, underperformed, increasing total downloads by just 3% against an average increase of 7%. Ben Shapiro’s show also dropped a place in Podtrac’s top podcast ranking. iHeart remains #1 for podcasts, with downloads up by 6.8%. The ranker measures participating publishers only.

• The Brookings Institution, an American policy think-tank, has released a real-time dashboard focusing on US political podcasts. It suggests that conservative hosts release three times as many episodes as liberals.

• In the UK, the Audio Production Awards has announced a “Pay What You Can” scheme with Amazon Music and Wondery. Entrants and attendees who would otherwise be unable to enter can choose to pay what they can afford.

• In Australia, the Australian Podcast Awards are open for entry. The country’s most prestigious and well recognised podcast awards, the judges had more than a thousand submissions in 2021.

• Eminem uses a Shure SM7B microphone to podcast with, we discover; as does his daughter.

• Audiobooks are coming to Spotify “reasonably soon”, according to CFO Paul Vogel.

• Jason Calcanis, an American entrepreneur and podcaster, is considering “hosting a 48-hour event for podcasters only”.

• SendtoPod takes articles you’re too busy to read, and transforms them into an audio file for your podcast app. A new service, the developer wonders if it’s too expensive.

Advertisers don’t really want to know who you are - they want to show diaper ads to people who have babies, not to show them to people who don’t, and to have some sense of which ads drove half a million sales and which ads drove a million sales. Targeting ads per se doesn’t seem fundamentally evil, unless you think putting car ads in car magazines is also evil. - Benedict Evans, writing about ads, privacy and confusion

Moves and hires - with Sugar23 Audio

• Podcast network Dear Media has made two promotions: Paige Port to President of the company, and Jocelyn Falk is now VP of Originals and Development.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Rogue Amoeba takes us through how the company redesigned Audio Hijack 4, an audio capture program.

• Balcao claims it is a new decentralised podcast platform. It uses the blockchain; a web app is due shortly.

• The dump of Podcast Index data, to be found at the bottom of the Podcast Index website, now has newestEnclosureDuration as a new field. This shows the duration of the latest audio file, in seconds.

• Podcast Index’s websites are no longer going to store any user’s email address. Emails will be stored hashed in future, according to Dave Jones speaking in the Podcasting 2.0 podcast board meeting.

• Dave Jones boosts Friday's rather subdued edition of Podnews: “Good run down today. The Alby tool looks great.” It does; the “live” view also shows streaming sats, letting you see people listening. Hello, too, to @RealCoachAndy, @nick, @mattcicino and @criptocenas for your boosts. Try boosting us using the Fountain app.

Tips and tricks

• Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter and blogger, writes a guide to making a podcast. He last wrote one in 2011, noting this year that “the way I create a podcast today is completely different than how I did it in the past, thanks mostly to maturing tools in the podcast space.”

• Shreya Sharma and Lauren Passell publish 4.5 things everyone wants to know about podcast marketing

Podcast News - with Lemonada Media

From Lemonada Media: Every day, the world seems on the brink of crisis. In In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt when overlapping crises and a relentless news cycle overwhelm Americans, Andy finds the right helpers to help us move forward together.

In Argentina, Historia en Podcast is the #1 podcast: hosted by a secondary school teacher. La Voz, an Argentinian newspaper, takes up the story of how the show became so successful.

Lava for Good Podcasts and iHeartMedia have joined forces to distribute Lava for Good’s slate of shows. Bone Valley is the first new podcast under the partnership: an investigative journey through the swamps and courtrooms of central Florida in a search for truth and justice in the wrongful conviction of Leo Schofield. It launches next week.

Should we search for extraterrestrial life? In Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates, one expert argues yes, and one argues no. Astronomer and SETI Institute co-founder Jill Tarter thinks we should; theoretical cosmologist and Science Channel host Paul Sutter argues that we shouldn’t.

Phantom Power, a podcast that investigates the power of sound, will return this week for its fourth season. The show is hosted and produced by Mack Hagood, an author and sound professor; he’ll be joined by guests including Dallas Taylor from Twenty Thousand Hertz, podcast host Karen Tongson and acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp.