Stitcher look back on 2017

• Stitcher publish a look back at 2017. They list the most popular podcasts, unusually in terms of total hours streamed. This American Life is #3.

  • Total global usage of Stitcher in the year was, the article quotes, over 100,000,000 hours. In context: total US radio listening in 2017 was 194,220,000,000 hours - (249m listeners, listening on average 15h a week.)

• Commercial radio rules short-form podcasts, claims US radio publication InsideRadio, quoting from the Podtrac data for 'snackable’ podcasts. RAIN quotes Podtrac CEO Mark McCrery as saying the #1, Trending Songs: Pop, fulfilled all the “technical definition and delivery rules of a podcast”. We’ll return to this subject on Monday.

• Triton Digital release their latest ranker of internet radio broadcasts. News/talk is up, top 40 is down.

• The Cast Away Australian Podcast Awards announce that their awards ceremony (May 5) will be in the Melba Spiegeltent, a venue in Collingwood, Melbourne VIC, Australia.

• RAIN staff have made their predictions for 2018. Anna Washenko predicts “An Explosion of Podcast Infrastructure Startups (Mostly Doomed to Fail)”; while Brad Hill predicts “Cars can be channels too, further fragmenting podcasts”.

Podnews will return on New Year’s Day as normal, with more details on those snackable podcast charts.

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