For 18-34s, time with podcasts nears time with radio

• Nielsen released The Record: Q3 2026 US audio listening trends. Podcasts achieve 21% of ad-supported audio time among US audiences, says the data - significantly larger than ad-supported music services. Radio is almost three times larger, however, at 61%. The story’s different for younger audiences, though: for 18-34s, podcasts account for 33% of all audio time, and radio is only slightly larger at 42%. Edison Research’s data shows that total podcast consumption time in the US has increased 386% in ten years.

• Podtrac released its October 2026 rankings. On the run-up to the recent mid-term elections, DailyWire increased its audience most in the US; the FOX Audio Network increasing most on the global multi-channel ranker.

• The ParaPod Podcast Awards announced its winners for 2026. The awards received more than 900 submissions. Podcast of the Year went to Acid for Squares, the alternative psycho-spiritual talk show.

• Podcast app Castro, which was purchased by Maple Media, released a new update. Users now need to agree to Maple Media’s privacy policy in order to continue to use it.

• Headliner has added a scheduler and calendar-view planner - a major feature request from users, we’re told, allowing you to set social messages in advance for every platform, and see exactly what’s going out and when. It’s available on Headliner Pro.

• It was Paris Creator Week last week. Acast’s Lizzy “LP” Pollott was there, and posts her reflections of the event.

• Vogue writes “As Podcasters Become Cultural Juggernauts, Brands Should Probably Tune In”

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• RSS feeds look ugly if you click them by mistake. And they’re set to look even uglier, as XSLT is taken out of browsers. We’ve been warning about this for a while, and Chrome is now giving users a big red error message on the top of RSS feeds that use XSLT. A while ago, we suggested CSS as a partial replacement, and put something live in our RSS feed. The folks at Transistor took this as a challenge to see how far they could push RSS, and have produced a really nice looking CSS stylesheet to make RSS feeds look nicer to humans without changing how they work for podcast apps. Here’s an example.

  • Before compression, this adds 449 bytes to a typical RSS feed. The stylesheet is only called by browsers.

• The Spanish-language explainer podcast Esto También es Política, which has run since 2016, has made its entire archive available through its own free public MCP server. That’s more than 241 episodes and 330 hours, fully transcribed. The podcast says they’re unaware of any other Spanish-language podcast doing similar.

• A new suggestion to combat dishonest podcast apps (or AI tools) that hide their useragent has been proposed. The new experiment uses Common Access Tools, which are an existing open standard from the streaming world; and allows an app saying that it’s Overcast, for example, to actually prove it. It’s an additive idea, and acts as a useful signal to a podcast host.

  • Meanwhile, downloads from “web browsers” - or, rather, things pretending to be web browsers - more than doubled last month according to Buzzsprout figures.

• Meanwhile, Dave Jones of the Podcast Index posts: “Fighting scraper bots the last two days. It’s endless. It’s fun seeing your own user agent scraping your site from IP addresses you don’t own. Sigh.”

Tips and tricks

• Time.is is my new favorite way to sync up a podcast says Lex Friedman.

People news - with podnews.net/jobs

• Formerly at CBC and Pacific Content, Steve Pratt unveiled a new company today. In a Substack post, he says: “They say that there’s no business like show business….So Cameron Uganec and I started one.” Like Show Business is “a new company exclusively focused on original Social Shows made with brands, built for how audiences watch now.”
• Leigh McGowan has been announced by Crooked Media as the new co-host of the Hysteria podcast. The host of PoliticsGirl, McGowan will join Erin Ryan on the show.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: The Really Very Crunchy Podcast features crunchy comedy duo Jason and Emily Morrow, who dive into the hilariously contrasting worlds of a crunchy mom and her not-as-crunchy husband. Each episode, they explore a variety of life’s quirks and conundrums, from parenting and personal wellness to bizarre daily occurrences and everything in-between.

Backstory with Cathy Newman is a new video-first podcast series from the UK’s Sky News, seeing Cathy with a guest personally connected to a major news event from recent history, returning to stories that changed public debate, challenged institutions and shaped the world around us. Within the conversation, Cathy will hear from listeners and viewers about their own personal connection to the story, and why it still matters to them today.

Delve into Adelaide’s stunning coastline with the City of Marion’s Coastal Walkway Audio Tour, which launched over the weekend with a community walk and breakfast. This 15-episode series invites listeners to discover more of coastal walk, talking to business owners, park rangers, engineers, First Nations leaders, local artists and more to uncover exactly what makes the trail so special. Produced in conjunction with Solstice Podcasting, the Audio Tour combines the power of audio storytelling with tourism initiatives to give locals and tourists alike a free, screen-free way to connect with the coast.