A virtual studio for your podcast

• Podcast marketing agency Podcast Discovery has launched the Virtual Studio - a full, bespoke 3D modelled virtual studio, and a camera/lighting kit for each contributor. The company says that clips that are shot professionally are more than twice as likely to go viral than clips shot on a webcam.

• John W Gibbons is no longer the CEO of Libsyn, we understand: his departure was announced to the team on Tuesday. The company is also said to have sold Pair Networks, the website hosting company it owns, to a company based in Amsterdam. Libsyn has not made a statement, or responded to Podnews for comment.

• Acast has just signed some of the biggest podcasts in Australia and the UK.

  • Former Spotify show Toni and Ryan will move to Acast on Monday, on the duo’s third anniversary; the show will be available on YouTube in full for the first time.
  • Meanwhile in the UK, The Fellas Studios has moved the network of shows from Audioboom over to Acast, including the Edison top 10 show Saving Grace. Acast will work with all The Fellas Studios podcasts not only on audio ads and sponsorship, but select visual branded campaigns across social and video channels.

• Do postrolls - ads at the end of a podcast - deserve the hate they get from some parts of the industry? Nate Wells posts some data from a recent campaign - suggesting that post-rolls aren’t intrusive to the audience, and because they’re significantly cheaper, even though they perform only a little worse, they’re much better value for advertisers.

• Veritonic has been selected by European programmatic platform Hawk for audio attribution.

• Real estate investment company BiggerPockets has published its 1,000th podcast episode; and gained majority investment from The Chernin Group. The company claims 154,000 daily podcast listeners.

• Podbean has launched a new blog-to-podcast feature, which will automatically take a blog post, convert it to audio, and automatically publish it as a podcast.

Tips and tricks - with Ausha 🚀

• Learn how to expand your podcast’s reach with Ausha’s advice on transforming audio episodes into captivating videos.

• Step into the world of video podcasting and learn everything you need to know about Podcasting on YouTube from Ausha.

• Kieran McCrae shares How To Create Rock Solid Podcast Goals - particularly, SMART ones.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: Everyone wants to work smarter - so everyone should be listening to Fast Company Daily. Stories, tips, and advice on how employees, managers, and businesses are working smarter, all from Fast Company and all in less than five minutes each weekday.

Basic Folk features honest conversations with folk musicians: the best in folk, bluegrass, acoustic and americana. It’s hosted by Lizzie No and Cindy Howes, who joined Podnews as a personal supporter this week.

In 2001, Robert Fisher killed his family, blew up their suburban home and vanished into a remote Arizona forest. Missing in Arizona features an AI cloned voice of the killer, telling his story. Did he die? Or did he escape? The podcast is new from iHeartPodcasts and Neon33.

Women have their fair share of conspiracy culture - as architects, evangelisers, and symbols. Cristen Conger launches Conspiracy, She Wrote today, covering everything from QAnon to royal pregnancy truthers and Taylor Swift psyops. Even the most absurd fictions have plenty of truths to tell us about what we choose or refuse to believe and why.

Radio Atlantic this month has a new short podcast series, Scripts. In a moment where 25% of Americans are taking psychiatric drugs, Scripts explores the stories behind these drugs through expert interviews and compelling narratives, challenging conventional wisdom and revealing the bizarre, intriguing, and sometimes unsettling realities of the drugs we depend on. It starts today.

In the Midst feed is Moonward, a semi-improvised four-part miniseries which blends live video, audio, music, and lighting effects to transport audiences into an immersive black box theater setting. The show also launched yesterday on YouTube and Twitch.