YouTube is 20

• YouTube is twenty years old this week (YouTube Music is ten years old this year, too). The company has posted plenty of new stats on its blog.

• Hamish & Andy, who present one of the biggest podcasts in Australia, have signed a renewal deal, early, with LiSTNR owners SCA.

• After the NASDAQ warned Cumulus Media that it might be delisted, Cumulus has announced that it will move off the stock exchange on May 2, “rather than investing time, effort, and cost into developing a plan to remain”. Its share price needed to be at least $1; its shares are down 90% over the last twelve months, and are currently trading at $0.27. Its Q1/25 results are out on May 1.

• King’s College, London has worked with the BBC on a tool to help people with aphasia - a condition after brain damage following a stroke, that can lead to difficulties in speaking, reading and language comprehension. The tool can take podcasts or radio shows and simplify the language, making it easier to understand.

• Podcastpage has introduced a new dashboard page, and is now offering automated AI transcripts, an AI-based page editor, and AI-generated SEO metadata tools.

• Pete Buttigieg “makes his first foray into the podcast manosphere” (The Verge) “appears on a podcast” (Podnews) on the comedy show Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akaash Singh.

Tips and tricks - with Memberful

• Making sure every bit of your show is the right loudness - not too loud, not too quiet - is something that can even elude the professionals (see below); but all you need is LUFS, and chances are, your audio editor will handle this for you.

Podcast News - with New Podcasts

A podcast that aims to explain Podcasting 2.0 in Practice concludes today. The last episode explains how the show was put together, and the changes that needed making while the show was being made.

In Man vs Mind, Tim and J tackle the stigma around male mental health, by… just… talking about it, “and embarrassing themselves”.

Data is all around us, but we spend very little time talking about where it comes from. Season two of Behind the Data started recently, with Andrea Jones-Rooy, who brings you a story about one of the many types of datasets powering our lives - from political polls to measures of democracy, from tracking happiness to powering generative AI.

Having a bad DAI

An occasional section where we highlight odd things going on with podcast ads so we all get better at them

Hosted on Simplecast, Call Her Daddy might be also calling help for deafness. This is an episode with Megan Fox, where the podcast itself is mistakenly authored at -24 LUFS, making the dynamic ads at -16 LUFS sound massively louder - and then, baked-in reads for Patrón Tequila, recorded in a bathroom by the sounds of it, at an astonishing -4 LUFS! Jumping without any warning between -11dB to 0dB - almost four times as loud - is quite jarring.