The top 50 podcasts in the US

• Edison Research has released the Top 50 US Podcasts by audience size, for Q2 2021. Joe Rogan is still #1, The Daily is #2, and Crime Junkie #3 - the data is compiled by asking participants what podcasts they listened-to in the past week, rather than raw download figures, and should measure everyone.

  • In terms of hosts, Megaphone (14), NPR (8) and Omny Studio (8) host the most shows.

• Podtrac has highlighted how the Apple Podcasts bug affected US podcast traffic in July - reporting a 31% drop in downloads from the app. The company suggests that traffic during much of August will still be affected. Podtrac also report a significant drop in news podcast downloads since the end of the US election cycle in February 2020.

• First look: PodMatch, a podcast guest booking service, has purchased Poddit, a competitor. The combined company will have nearly 20,000 members. Poddit’s website will cease at the end of August; no terms were given.

• Google has changed their requirements for your podcast’s RSS feed if you want it to appear in recommendations within Google Podcasts and other places in Google. The requirements are almost all required by Apple Podcasts anyway; except a requirement that <link> needs to be a valid URL to your podcast’s website.

  • We’ve added this check on our podcast pages. (Podpage has a blog post with a coupon code if you’re affected).
  • According to the Podcast Index, only 5.8% of podcasts currently don’t have a valid website link. They’ll still work in Google Podcasts - they just won’t be recommended.

• The nominations have been announced for the People’s Choice Podcast Awards. The winners will be announced on International Podcast Day on September 30. Podnews is a finalist in The Majority Report Politics & News Category: if you’re one of the 10,500 people doing final voting, you’re looking good today - that’s a great shirt you’re wearing, where did you get it?

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• The Triton Digital Australian Podcast Ranker for June 2021 has been released. Casefile True Crime is still #1, as is ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia.

• Podimo has launched Podimo España, an Apple Podcasts channel for its Spanish-language podcasts. The company says it will grow audiences and revenue for their exclusive Spanish podcasters. The company also has Podimo Latino, for Latin American publishers.

Tips and tricks

• Seth Resler writes about his experience at Podcast Movement, while Jenna Spinelle has three takeaways from the conference.

• To start a podcast series - pick a topic, suggests Audry. “It will be challenging and annoying if the topic of the podcast doesn’t interest you.”

  
  Sep 6 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• The Wall Street Journal promises subscribers that they’ll discover “what Marc Maron’s learned from hosting over 1,200 episodes of his podcast”.

Podcast News - with Podcast Fellows at Stony Brook University-Southampton

Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place, the most-listened-to wellness podcast in the UK, has signed with Acast. The deal will unlock fan-supported revenue with Acast+. It was with Libsyn.

After 14 years and 45 million downloads, Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann’s Answer Me This! has posted its last show, #400.

Pennies: Going In Raw, hosted by a 21 year-old millionaire, has joined the iHeartPodcast Network.

How Science Matters is a new eight-part series by the Burnet Institute, produced by Written & Recorded. The podcast features visionary Australian scientists and sifts through the science of COVID-19, the inequities created by it, the impact on other diseases, the difficulties in changing behaviour, and what keeps scientists awake at night.

Sales Talk for CEOs is a “first of its kind” podcast from Alice Heiman. Alice covers the good, the bad, and the ugly of scaling a sales organization with innovative CEOs.