Podcast ad prices steady in March

• Amid concern about inflation and energy prices, Libsyn’s AdvertiseCast report that May’s average CPM rate was $23.77 for podcast advertising. That’s remarkably stable - down less than 1% from April’s $23.94, and almost identical to May 2021's $23.81. Libsyn bought AdvertiseCast one year ago.

• UK newspaper The Economist says it is reaching 3m people a month through its podcasts.

• Podcast production company Listen has written a piece on what their team learnt from The Podcast Show in London. Content is king, and video is the future, they suggest.

• Tantalising headline for a paywalled piece we’re not going to pay for: “Man says he was talking on a podcast, not threatening to shoot fellow bus passengers”

• “The choice facing the industry is that we can choose to fight amongst ourselves and elbow each other out and grow at the expense of a competitor. Or, [we can] all work together to grow the sector.” Media Week interviewed Podnews’s Editor about the podcast landscape in the UK and beyond.

• “The former UFC commentator” is no longer the #1 person in the news according to the Podnews Ranker for the last 90 days; he’s dropped to #7, being replaced by Sounds Profitable’s newest partner, with a member of the Podcast Index at #2. The top five most covered companies were unchanged. Our mentions of women in the industry dropped slightly to 35% of the total.

Tips and tricks - with RedCircle

• How to avoid the dreaded 'podfade’ - Rachel Corbett suggests checking you’ve got enough content, and batch recording

• Some great data on use of colour in social media images, and, by extension, podcast thumbnails. If you’re a B2B product, aim for cold, dark colours; if you’re B2C, use warm colours.

Podcast News

A new season of Slow Burn launches today, examining the path to Roe vs Wade. The first episode looks at Shirley Wheeler, the first woman to be convicted of manslaughter for getting an abortion: what abortion was like before Roe, and why and how people were starting to talk about it.

Law&Crime Sidebar is a new podcast which has hit the charts quickly: a daily recap of the Depp v Heard trial. From Law&Crime, the show is available both as a podcast and as a YouTube show, and regularly gets 300,000 views on YouTube alone.

Sarah Jones Breaks It Down is a news podcast for kids, which launches today. Hosted by an Emmy award-winning journalist, Sarah Jones, it’s available on all platforms - except Spotify - from today.

Newts! is a new audio drama made for PRX by Ian Coss and Sam Jay Gold. The show combines radio theater, surf rock, and propulsive storytelling to bring audiences an absurd yet uncomfortably resonant catastrophe.

Oldest Podcast Guest Corner: On Monday, we featured 'the oldest podcast guest of all time’, a 92 year-old. Yesterday, we heard of another podcast guest aged 98. But in 2018, the record was really set, it appears: Swedish podcast Framgångspodden interviewed the then 105 year-old Dagny Carlsson, the world’s “oldest blogger”, in this episode. Dagny passed away in March this year, so could have been interviewed later by another podcast, too… (thanks, Pelle!)

More oldest podcast guest info: An honourable mention to Out of the Box from FBi Radio, which in 2014, interviewed Eileen Kramer (aged 99 at the time). Now aged 107, Eileen is still with us, and has a book to sell, so if you wanted to be a record-breaker, you only have to get her onto your podcast…

On the cost of Megaphone’s downtime

Yesterday, we suggested that “$588,791 was lost to the podcast industry” after Megaphone’s nine-hour outage.

As a few people have pointed out, that wasn’t entirely fair. In the US, the outage started on a holiday Monday at 8pm ET and lasted until 5.45am the next day: hardly peak time for streaming podcasts (although it was peak time for Megaphone listeners on a normal working day in Asia and Australia).

Many listeners would not have noticed: their podcast apps simply not downloading those new shows until the outage ended. Other listeners would have just listened to something else: benefiting that podcast publisher and resulting in a net loss to the industry of zero.

So, while the figure is a potential loss - and, we understand, a conservative estimate - the true loss to the industry is unlikely to have been anywhere near as large.

Podnews views things taking the side of a publisher, and is written by someone who worked in the broadcast industry (where a nine hour period of being off-air would most certainly lead to large sums of money being lost). While valid, that wasn’t the fairest way to look at the potential loss from this outage.

And perhaps we should confess that Podnews was itself partially offline for around an hour earlier today, as we upgraded our database cluster and ran into some unexpected problems. It happens to all of us!