The top 50 podcasts in the US

• Edison Research at SSRS released the top 50 podcasts in the US for Q2 2026. The Bill Simmons Podcast, which is now visible on Netflix, has jumped 17 positions to make it into the top 25 for the first time. British podcast The Rest Is History has entered the top 50 for the first time. (Simplecast hosts 17, Megaphone hosts 16, Omny Studio 4, ART19 and Audioboom 3, FlightCast, Acast, Blubrry, Libsyn, WNYC and WideOrbit 1)

• Even if Netflix won’t say how well its podcasts have done, one’s clearly done well: The Rest is Football has been renewed by Netflix for the next Premier League season.

• “No categories for video. Or ads. Or AI.” That’s the headline for the NYC Podcast Awards, which is now open for entries. The second season for the awards, entries start at just $75.

• PodcastPilot is a new tool to help with recording a multicam podcast - delivering a finished, synced timeline for Premiere, Resolve and Final Cut, shaving an hour off every production. The app’s developers are looking for testers of the software, which runs on any Apple Silicon Mac.

• The SONARR Awards in Australia has announced its 2026 judges.

• A press release distribution network for podcasters, PressLaunch, has been launched: and it’s free until mid-August (after which it’ll be $59). It sends your release to verified media contacts, adds it to an RSS feed and publishes online. (It’s always free to send your news to Podnews).

• Hilite is a new audio editor within your browser, aiming to make it easier to start podcasting - it lets you edit audio as if it’s a text document, enhance the audio, and also includes a podcast hosting service. The tool used to be known as Shanda Studio, launched by Dumi Mabhena and Paul Kassar, and has been in development for just over three years.

  • We think Hilite looks pretty good, though the case studies on its website are less so. “Derek Brunelle” is a Hilite customer, but his podcast is called The Credit Bubble and he looks like this. “Sarah Fay” looks just like Gwyneth Paltrow. “Marcus Lin” is Maisie Williams, and “Dr Priya Adekunle” is really the Serbian conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović, interviewed on the Spotify-hosted Are We On Air podcast.

• A platform that turns podcasts into books, PodToBook.ai is celebrating its one year anniversary. Since its launch, it has produced more than 100 books.

• The Guardian highlights BBC podcast Buried. One of the hosts of the show says that his house has been targeted as a result of his reporting … SportsPro has a paid article about Goalhanger which is probably a good read if you want to pay for it

• Happy 7th birthday to Tink Media.

People News

• Videographer and photographer Ti King is stepping away from his role as Audio & Video Producer for Sounds Profitable. He continues being on the Board of Governors at The Podcast Academy.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• “Forget streaming payments. Streaming payments is just not going to work. It’s over.” Speaking in the Podcasting 2.0 podcast this week, Adam Curry and Dave Jones said they’d close the Podcast Index “lightning node” since it was costing more to run than it earned, and urged podcasters to focus on a clean, simple method of support using the podcast:funding tag. As of today, Podnews has a simple, clean payment page, via Stripe linked from our RSS feed’s funding tag.

• Podbean is the latest podcast host to support what it describes as “HLS Video Information in podcast RSS feeds” - which we think is support of the alternateEnclosure, allowing compatible podcast apps to access the video version.

• In Buzzsprout’s implementation of video podcasting: the company’s “magic mastering” still runs on the audio version, with dynamic compression and background noise cleanup still applied to the audio. We’ve noticed dramatically different audio quality on shows that have switched to video full-time; we’d suggest this is a good thing to consider for any podcast hosting company.

• Drea is the latest iOS podcast app that promises to remove the ads. This one is free; it downloads episodes onto your phone, and uses both cloud LLMs and audio fingerprinting to work out where the ads are. It’s the first ad-removal tool we’ve discovered that correctly removes the host-read ad in our own daily show, with no false positives: which is impressive. In our tests, the app is pretending that it’s Apple Podcasts, using a user-agent of Podcasts/4025.610.1, so it’ll be almost impossible to block (unless we start considering some form of request signing by apps). “I wanted to eliminate the possibility of the podcast host/distributor being able to identify which download requests are coming from my app, so that they couldn’t block them,” the developer told us.

• In July 2025, Felix Wolf published a thesis for his MSc, on the subject of identifying advertisements in podcasts, which has been published by the University of Hamburg. It used transcripts and machine learning - but only found 60% of ads.

• PodKit is a new API for podcast search, metadata, chapters and transcripts. It’s “launched at $15/month vs the $75+ most competitors charge.” There’s also a free tier, and it works with AI agents via an MCP.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement NYC's Public Vote

• Bryan Barletta appeared with Arielle Nissenblatt on a “primer” about Podcast Movement 2026.
• Podcast law is complicated. Last year at Podcast Movement, two lawyers - Gordon Firemark and Lindsay Bowen - goes through common (and not-so-common) beliefs about podcasting in a fast-paced game show format. (Our Editor was in the audience and thankfully got most of the questions right.)

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: Babies can eat so many more foods than we give them credit for. Baby-Led Weaning is hosted by Katie Ferraro, a registered Dietitian specializing in infant feeding - and if that wasn’t qualification enough, she’s also a mom of 7, so she should know how to solid foods safely using baby-led weaning.

Christopher Balfe from Red Seat Ventures is the guest on Channels with Peter Kafka - we’re told it’s “a wide-ranging conversation about where the creator business is headed — and where the value is really being created.”

Southeast Asia is one of the world’s fastest-growing regions and offers major business and investment opportunities, but too few in the US are familiar with the region and its potential. Asia Forward helps to close that gap by focusing each episode on specific trends and issues shaping the region and what they mean for US audiences. Within only 5 months since launch, Asia Forward has garnered more than 20K subscribers and almost 1 million total views on YouTube.

Broadcasting from another world! Blue Angel Radio is the audio novel branch of the Blue Angel Series — a retrofuturistic ensemble of cinematic fiction and parallel universes.