Wondery closes in Mexico and Brazil

• Exclusive: Amazon’s Wondery has closed its operations in Mexico and in Brazil. Podnews understands that the closure was announced in a short staff meeting earlier this week. Those impacted include Sarah Barrett, the company’s Head of Mexico Podcast Content. It comes the same week as some of Wondery Mexico’s shows were nominated for the Ondas Globales awards; and the LATAM units own a successful YouTube page with more than 500,000 subscribers.

  • Amazon tells Podnews: “After a careful review of our priorities and customers’ needs, we’ve made the difficult decision to close Wondery’s Brazil and Mexico original content operations. This decision wasn’t made quickly or easily, and we remain committed to developing immersive storytelling and audio content for audiences.”

• A raw download figure doesn’t tell you whether those listeners are new, or returning. Are they people who listened once and swore to never again listen? Or are you not reaching new audiences at all? Bumper has worked out how to calculate new vs returning listeners, using first-party data within the Apple and Spotify dashboards. That data will be added to the Bumper Dashboard soon (which we reviewed last August.)

  • If you’re curious, here’s a graph showing how the Podnews Weekly Review performs on Spotify, using weekly figures. No idea what we did in mid June.

• Exclusive: Podcast industry veteran Christy Mirabal has launched The Listening Party Agency, working with Imelda Vergara-Skinder. The agency describes itself as “a dynamic new marketing consultancy designed to amplify the voices of podcast creators everywhere”, and is based in New York and Los Angeles.

• Transistor has added podcast comments using the popular Bluesky social platform. Comments sync between your Bluesky account and your Transistor podcast website, too.

  • Follow Podnews on Bluesky

• Launched yesterday, Panjaya is a multilingual AI-powered dubbing platform specifically built for podcast publishers, founded by ex-Apple TV and Meta execs. Unlike traditional dubbing, it also syncs voice, lip movements and gestures to preserve authenticity, and supports 29 different languages. The company suggests that 60% of Spotify’s podcast listeners are non-English speakers. You can try the tool for free for up to one-minute clips.

• Headliner has launched a template design contest, to show off your best designs for the tool. You’ll get promotion as a result, as well as a free Headliner Pro account.

• Happy World Radio Day!

Entries Open for The Golden Lobes, the Comedy Podcast Awards

Paid content

The Golden Lobes, powered by Adelicious, is a brand-new awards night celebrating the funniest podcasts, people, and moments in audio. Created by the team behind Cheerful Earful, the annual comedy podcast festival, the awards aim to honour the podcasts that keep us laughing.

With a simple entry process and a flat £25 fee - covering multiple categories - podcasters worldwide can compete across 13 awards, from Best Blooper to the fan-voted Listener Lobe. The awards welcome any genre, as long as it brings the laughs.

Winners take home more than just a trophy - they’ll receive a custom digital badge, a one-year Auphonic subscription, an editorial spotlight in Podbible, a British Comedy Guide Pro subscription, free drinks and tickets from The Clapham Grand, discounted studio services from Podshop, and a year’s free Creator Membership from Audio UK.

Entries are open now and close on March 15 with the awards taking place in London on May 7th. Learn more at the website.

Tips and tricks - with Pod Predictor by Coleman Insights

• Should you have the word “podcast” in your podcast title? No, not unless you want to be competing with 700,000 shows unnecessarily. We’ve lots more reasons why in our article.

Podcast News - with Memberful

Using Memberful: The Bitch Sesh podcast is hosted by Real Housewives historians and comedians Casey Wilson (SNL, Happy Endings), and Danielle Schneider (Hotwives, Hacks) are the world’s foremost authority on all things Housewives and garbage tv.

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and Science of Perception Box releases a special episode today. Renowned anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher joins cohosts Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christoph Koch to explore humankind’s most powerful drive: romantic love. Dr. Fisher used brain scanning (fMRI) to study the neural systems associated with the sex drive, romantic love, attachment, rejection, love addiction, long-term partnership happiness, and the biological foundations of human personality.

Season two of Face-Off: The U.S. vs China launched this week, focusing on Donald Trump’s America vs Xi Jinping’s China. How does the rivalry play out between the two strongmen leaders? Is China taking the lead in Artificial Intelligence? And what will the US do about TikTok? The show is hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jane Perlez, a former New York Times Beijing bureau chief, and her co-host Rana Mitter of the Harvard Kennedy School. It’s funded by the Carnegie Corporation and supported by the Harvard Kennedy School.