Are ads coming to podcasts on Spotify?

Welcome to our recent new subscribers, including folk from Spotify, Havas Edge, Audioboom, Vox Media, Gimlet Media, and broadcasters BR, NPR, SRF, ITN and NPO. Tell your colleagues!

• “We are looking for a Senior Product Manager to build out native audio advertising for Spotify’s podcast experience.” So starts the beginning of a job advertisement for the post of Senior Product Manager – Podcast Advertising at Spotify’s New York NY, USA office. Interesting. Spotify is the #2 most popular podcast platform.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 9 2023

• RAIN News gives its predictions for 2019. Anna Washenko predicts that smart speakers will “have their Serial moment”; Brad Hill suggests increasing variety around podcast business models.

• The Spectator criticises the BBC for some of its new podcasts, being especially dismissive of sex-education podcast Unexpected Fluids. How it “ever got past editorial control at the corporation is a mystery”, they say, before going on to discuss how splendid Serial is.

  
  Aug 9 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Transistor is now offering free SSL certificates for all customers. The company has always offered secure RSS feeds, but now allows customers to use SSL on their own domain-name.

  • Unlike some other hosts, Transistor’s SSL implementation correctly forwards from http:// to https:// and doesn’t produce two duplicate websites or feeds, which Google explicitly warns against.
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• We should have linked to this earlier, but here’s Canada’s JAR Audio telling us how to talk to your relatives about podcasting.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 9 2023

• More than 30% of SF SketchFest, a comedy festival in San Francisco CA, USA from Jan 10, will be related to podcasts. Janet Varney, a co-founder, says it was a “no-brainer”.

  
  Aug 9 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Omny Studio are letting clients know that they are now passthrough-enabled for Spotify.

• In case you missed it, here’s our overview on LUFS, LKFS and loudness, which is the subject of some discussion at the moment on some podcasting Facebook groups.

• A bit annoyed by podcasters who just link to iTunes? As a bit of fun, we’ve made a Chrome extension today which will catch Apple iTunes links and open them on Podnews instead, so you can subscribe in your favourite podcast app. (Very helpful, particularly, for Chromebook owners.)

Podcasts

Healthcare Interior Design 2.0 explores the changing face of healthcare design through intimate conversations with leading creatives in the field. The press release says that the podcast is 'geared toward the designers, architects, developers and engineers who create tomorrow’s hospitals, healthcare spaces and senior living communities’.

Thank you to Podcraft and Podrover who both renewed their kind support of Podnews today. It helped us fiddle about with our Chrome extension, and fix a bug in our new support page.