Quibi says 'Quit it' - and tells a fan podcaster to stop

• Run a fan podcast? A show by fans of Quibi, a mobile video platform, has been told to cease and desist. The hosts of the podcast say that Quibi’s lawyers got in contact, insisting “you can’t use the name Quibi, you can’t tell anyone that you’re about Quibi, you can talk about Quibi but no one can know through your title, and you can’t have any artwork that resembles our stuff”. The show has a new name of Streamiverse.

• Search Engine Optimisation has never been more important for podcasting. A podcast SEO product, Podr has been launched today. It allows you to ensure you’re choosing the right names and keywords for your podcast; monitors your search rank for the keywords you want; and allows you to check your competitors appearance too. Pricing is from US $7/month after a 14-day trial.

• Podapalooza Live, has announced its line-up for this weekend, including Kara Swisher, Cory Doctorow and Scott Galloway. It’s a COVID-19 relief fundraiser for GiveDirectly - tickets are as much, or as little, as you’d like.

• This video from Pulse Conference 2020 comes highly recommended: one of the panelists, Lauren Jarvis, is Spotify’s Head of Content Partnerships for North America. “She’s the best Podder inside the Spotify business: I love her vision, grounded in practical realities”, says our informant.

• Radio Tech Con, a technology conference in London covering the broadcast radio industry, is releasing last year’s videos for free. Some are very radio-centric, but many are relevant for podcasting, too - especially the Brexitcast session.

• Podtrac says that The Daily has seen a yearly increase in US audience of 73%; and monthly audiences increased by 7% in the month of March. It’s part of their paid-for category report.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 23 2023

• Patreon, a crowd fundraising service used by podcasters (and by us), has laid off 30 employees, which is 13% of their workforce. Only last month, the company was claiming record growth for the platform. (We’re over here).

• Edison Research and NPR are releasing their Smart Audio Report, which looks at the usage of smart speakers, a little earlier this year, in a free webinar on Apr 30.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 23 2023

Changing times, changing consumption

• Voxnest have released an update on COVID-19 podcast listening across their network. The main claim is that global podcast listens are “up by 42%”, a comparison to listening in the first week of January, a time when many people, especially in Europe, were on holiday. The graphs appear to show that all territories have increased since the end of March; and that categories around peoples’ “hobbies and passions” are doing well; the company does note that, as a whole, US podcast listens are down by over 20%, however.

  
  Aug 23 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Pacific Content’s Steve Pratt highlights different ways their podcast production company is thinking. The pandemic has changed marketing, affected speed to market, and highlighted the benefit of topicality.

• Headgum has seen a 10% decrease, according to Deadline. The piece also includes Earwolf, who claim a small decline.

Podcast News

Keeping Up With Corona is a new podcast on ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia, about how to navigate life and keep the kids sane while dealing with isolation. Of note: the podcast’s evergreen content is augmented with the latest information, using dynamic content insertion.

The Radio Survivor podcast has an interview with our Editor. If you’re interested in radio across the world, this one might be for you. If you’re not, it probably isn’t.

iHeartRadio is getting into audio fiction in the US, with the release this week of Light House, a ten-part scripted horror/thriller.