Help fund a new indie fiction podcast

• Fans of indie fiction podcasts have a new podcast to support: VALENCE, which is the first fiction podcast from podcast collective Hug House Productions. The full cast, fully designed urban fantasy fiction podcast, has an Indiegogo campaign starting tomorrow.

• Podcast app Ximalaya FM now has 500 million users in China, and is more than ten times larger than its competitors Lizhi FM and Dragonfly FM. Additionally, more than five million users create and upload content onto the Ximalaya platform. Ximalaya is the main investor in the Himalaya podcast app.

• Podcast host Captivate is now in public beta. Part of Rebel Base Media, it describes itself as the world’s only growth-oriented podcast host, and includes a website generation tool and submission services. Disclosures

  
  Aug 16 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• A great session about how to market your podcasts is one thing - but even better when the speaker at that session used to work for Apple Podcasts. Christina Moore is speaking at a London Podcast Festival event. (Use the code LPF20OFF for 20% off).

  • Also at the London Podcast Festival, Aclass: Women invites podcasters and podcast newbies to learn how to create, develop and grow their very own successful podcast. Brought to the festival by Acast, it’s a free event, and includes free studio time. Here’s more details, and how to apply.

• In Singapore, the Asia Podcast Awards and Asia Podcast Summit have been launched. The event is a virtual summit, and nominations are open for the awards. Ms Raven Lim, co-founder of MeaVox Live who are hosting the event, says, “The Asia podcast community may be small but is actively growing at the moment, ranging from broadcasters to independent creators.”

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Get it free

• Plink, a podcast linking service, has now added Stitcher to its list. (We link to an example of Lore). Stitcher is in all paid pages, and will be rolled out shortly to free pages.

• National Lampoon Radio Hour, which launched the careers of Bill Murray, Chevy Chase and many other comedians, is coming back. National Lampoon Radio Hour: The Podcast have announced the first two members of the show’s new cast and writing team. The new show will be produced by comedy podcaster Forever Dog.

• Podcorn, a self-service platform for sponsorships, launched earlier this month after $2.2m of funding. “Only a small portion of podcast creators are able to monetize, and it’s a manual and tedious process for brands to find the right podcasters to collaborate with directly,” says Agnes Kozera, a co-founder, highlighting the opportunity for Podcorn.

• Audio advertising can improve visits to stores by 90%, according to data from AdsWizz and BigMobile. The companies worked together to track visits from people who’d heard audio ads for the store.

• Current cover the experience of San Diego’s KPBS in producing a long-form documentary podcast, Only Here, with three people. /ht PodMov Daily

• IKEA Netherlands has released their entire 2020 catalogue in audio form. The audio file, which is more than six hours long, is not available as a podcast, which is possibly a relief to us all.

Thank you to Voxnest, an audio technology company specializing in podcasting solutions, who are our latest gold supporter. You can be like Voxnest.

Congratulations to Scott from Florida, who’s the first person to earn an exclusive Podnews podcoaster. In fact, given he’s found us ten new subscribers, he’s getting two! How are you doing? Find out in the links at the bottom of this newsletter.

Developer’s corner

• Noted today: the Apple iTunes API is not returning the feedUrl (i.e. the RSS feed address) for requests made from raw PHP without an HTTP useragent correctly set. This appears to be new behaviour; though Apple has not communicated this change; some podcast websites are not working as a result.
• An update to the open user-agents list now includes Deezer, Podcloud, Majelan and our own PodnewsBot. See if you can guess whether the last entry in this list is related to the first story in developer’s corner today.

Podcasts

Spreaker Prime: Weird Darkness is a podcast narrated by voice artist Darren Marlar who tells true stories of real paranormal events, true crime, unsolved mysteries, and all things dark and strange. He’s using Spreaker Prime to host for free and make more money.

Podcast Accelerator with Mark Asquith is interviewing, in the latest edition, our Editor James Cridland. The short episode is titled “Podcasting into the future”.