TikTok prepares to launch podcast app

• Social media app TikTok is preparing to launch a podcast app. Podcast hosting company Audiomeans has told Podnews that it spotted a “new bot that is scraping our feeds, starting October 11”, and they’ve tracked it back to TikTok: more on the bots in our “Tech Stuff”, below.

  • TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly users and 138m monthly active US users, has recently registered a trademark for TikTok Music which includes the provision for podcast content; and the company is already talking to record companies.
  • TikTok’s parent company also owns Resso, a music streaming service in Brazil, India and Indonesia, which already carries podcasts from hosts like Libsyn.

• A live show for UK politics podcast The Rest is Politics apparently sold out in seven minutes, says one of the podcast’s hosts.

• Sada, a podcast forum in the UAE, returned earlier this month. We’ve some quotes from the event.

• Veritonic has been approved as an attribution partner by Audioboom. Advertisers on more than 8,000 shows on Audioboom can now use Veritonic to optimise and increase their ROI.

• Still with attribution, Podscribe has launched what they call independent, third-party attribution for advertising. The company already offers verification and reporting. (Independent? Third party? Both attribution companies Chartable and Podsights are owned by Spotify).

• Advertising in fiction podcasts delivers 10x more conversions than not-fiction podcasts, according to a data point in Lauren Passell’s Podcast Marketing Magic newsletter. /ht Evo Terra

• Social audio network LIZHI has added short audio clips to its platform.

• Platformer reports on an abortion ad that was rejected by Spotify, then allowed after all.

• In the Earbuds Podcast Collective this week, Jordan Gass-Poore’ chooses five podcast episodes from Climate Podcasts That’ll Change You.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• More on those new TikTok RSS scrapers that Audiomeans spotted (above). The servers are in Singapore, with a range of IP addresses leading back to TikTok’s AS138699. The useragent being used is Go-http-client/1.1, the default useragent for a library used in the Go development language (which TikTok developers use). Podnews’s daily podcast is also seeing traffic from these IP ranges.

• Documentation for the new podcast namespace is being suggested to be updated with proper mimetypes. For transcripts, application/srt is wrong; application/x-subrip is right - and for audio, audio/mp3 is wrong; audio/mpeg is right.

• The Hive blockchain, which is used in Podping to send instant notifications of new shows and live streams, underwent a “hard fork” recently (but, as Brian from London posted, nothing broke).

  • You can watch new episodes being announced, live, on this website.

• The new Podcast namespace has had its licence made clearer: it’s CC0 v1.0.

Podcast News - with Lemonada Media

From Lemonada Media: Every day, the world seems on the brink of crisis. In In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt when overlapping crises and a relentless news cycle overwhelm Americans, Andy finds the right helpers to help us move forward together.

In The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) you’ll find an interview with Spotify’s Chief Research & Development Officer Gustav Söderström, talking about why building a product is nothing to do with art. (Ask Jony Ive for a view on that).

Fit And Full Of It is brand new today from Podshape: hosted by two fitness coaches and best friends navigating their way through life.

Unbossed with Nina Turner is new from TYT Network today. “Progressive firebrand and hell-raising humanitarian Nina Turner unites real, everyday Americans to take on the corrupt forces that seek to keep the power from the people.”

Off Air… with Jane and Fi is the replacement to the BBC’s Fortunately, as Jane Garvey and Fi Glover moved to commercial rival Times Radio. It’s a new, daily podcast recorded as they come off-air from the radio show.

Wondery’s Suspect returns for a new season. Suspect: Vanished in the Snow looks at a disappearance in the Rocky Mountains. Hosted by former CNN reporter Ashley Fantz, it’s an Amazon Music exclusive.

Enjoying nature and escaping to green spaces are an essential part of our modern lives. Now, more than ever, we understand the need to preserve and protect these places. But what if our love of the land is accidentally doing more harm than good? Produced by The Podglomerate, Trail Weight returns for a new season today.

Podcast ads in the wild

In bus stops in Sydney NSW, Australia (above, this bus stop), an ad for Full Story by The Guardian. The show is focusing on Ben Roberts-Smith vs the media, examining why Australia’s most decorated living soldier is suing three newspapers for defamation over articles he says falsely accuse him of war crimes. The ads are also running in Sydney’s train stations.