Subscription data: US podcasts rule the world

• Exclusive: US podcasts rule the world, according to new subscription data from Pocket Casts. The data shows the podcasts subscribed to most by Pocket Casts listeners in 2019: Podnews requested data for the UK and Australia. Pocket Casts is now free on Android and iOS.

  • In the UK, British podcasts account for 38% of the most-subscribed shows in the country, with the BBC responsible for half of them - 19% of the full list. The UK scored highest for news and comedy podcasts, which account for a third of all subscriptions; Brits don’t listen to true crime, though, with half as many subscriptions as the worldwide figures.
  • In Australia, Aussie podcasts account for just 21% of the most-subscribed, with the ABC responsible for 12%. Australians listen to significantly less comedy, it seems.
  • Worldwide, North American podcasts account for 91% of all top subscribed podcasts: the other 9% from the UK.

• The above data is from the Pocket Casts app - but is it representative of all podcast users? In the US, The Podcast Consumer Tracker from Edison Research, released yesterday, highlights differences between users of iPhone vs Android, and different apps, too. Tom Webster told Podnews:

  There are not only differences between Apple Podcast-primary users and Android-primary users, there are also differences between those and Spotify listeners. And these differences are, frankly, wonderful. You can eyeball the Apple charts and get a sense of the types of content that do well with their users—iPhone users and public media fans are a Venn diagram with a great deal of overlap, for instance. But when you look at Android users you see some real differences in political bent, for instance—you see conservative shows like Ben Shapiro do a lot better than the Apple charts might suggest. And with Spotify, one of the biggest differences there is youth (Spotify-dominant podcast listeners are younger than the average) and more of a predilection to short, daily news shows than the average listener. All of this rolled together gives us a very robust and variegated picture of a diverse and thriving audience.

• Spotify’s new Your Daily Podcasts feature appears to give us some understanding of the total amount of new people using it: at the time of writing, it’s showing 85,036 followers, a figure that appears to be rapidly increasing. Most people would never hit 'follow’, but it’s a useful guide to its growth. (h/t Mark Moriarty) We can also reveal that if you go to sleep listening to “Your Daily Podcasts”, it’ll still be playing when you wake up. Yawn.

• A Dutch true-crime podcast may be the latest to potentially solve a crime - in this case, possibly identifying a victim of one.

• Luminary Podcasts is promoting a low-price subscription offer: currently, 50% for your first year in the US and Australia and slightly higher savings for Canada and the UK.

• Bello Collective co-founder Dana Gerber-Margie is stepping down as co-editor.

• Esquire have written a long piece about the history of the podcast.

  
  Aug 18 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Correction: as far as we can tell, the incorrect information about host images in Apple Podcasts’s email last week was, itself, incorrect information from an Apple Podcasts support team member. We’ve reverted the amendment to our copy of the email.

  • As an aside: while Apple welcomes episode images in your RSS, it seems that the only place they actually display is in a search: and not when playing them back or viewing them elsewhere. Bug?

Tips and tricks - with Acast Open

• Here are 10 Things New Podcasters Can Do to Boost Downloads from Tae Haahr, including the simple “tell everyone you know”
• If you want engagement from your podcast listeners, use your show notes, says Evo Terra - “the “show notes” that appear in the podcast app on the device that your listener is using to listen to your episode.”

Podcast News - with Spreaker Prime

Spreaker Prime: The Disruptors is a long-form – TED level – podcast featuring conversations with top thinkers, founders and scientists on how advances in biotech and genomics, space travel, IoT, AI and other exponential tech converge to create our collective future. Plus, they discuss what we can do, from a research and policy perspective, to shape the trends, technologies and societal norms for a better world. They’re using Spreaker Prime to increase exposure and maximize monetization.

Family Ghosts isn’t another spooky paranormal podcast - instead, it’s about those stories and rumors that follow families around, sometimes for generations. It returns on December 3rd, and the first three episodes focus on the descendants of the last known slave ship to arrive on US shores. (WALT FM / Spoke Media / Megaphone)