YouTube listening time falls; and working safely during a pandemic

• Americans are spending less time listening to YouTube, according to new data from Edison Research. 6% fewer Americans used it 'last week’ according to the data. Joe Rogan comes off the platform in September. YouTube Music, the company’s Spotify competitor, is likely to replace Google Play Music later this year: and hopefully Google Play Music Podcasts will stop being a thing.

• UK Music, a group of music organisations, have published guidance on working safely through COVID-19, including in recording studios. The advice should be useful for podcast hosts and editors as well.

  • Working in the UK Audio Industry? Already, 15% of UK Audio Network members have submitted their salary information anonymously to help with pay transparency. Step to it!

• Canada’s The Podcast Exchange has launched programmatic advertising for premium podcasts. TPX can now work with agencies to create deals that meet the needs of their clients - whether it’s buying by genre, by demo, publisher, region, or language. It’s using Triton Digital technology.

  
  Aug 25 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Audioboom has closed its Indian office. “While the podcast market in India has grown over the past 5 years, it has not become big enough for us to sustain an operation there. Our hosting platform will still be available to podcasters in India of course,” CEO Stuart Last tells Podnews. “We’re still focused on global expansion, but need to be smart in how we do that. The US and UK remain our core regions, but we are the biggest international podcast publisher in Australia, and we are currently developing a new partnership in Canada that will grow podcasting there.”

  • Amar Deshpande writes about his journey with Audioboom, which started in 2016. His company is now looking at exclusives with different platforms, including JioSaavn.
  • By comparison, Spotify now has over 200 episodes of local Spotify Originals in India, according to The Podcast Hub which looks at the company’s investment there.

• Lower Street has unveiled a rebrand and a new website promoting their production services. The UK-based company focuses on narrative podcasts with brands, and works with brands across the world. They’re also Podnews supporters, which is kind of them.

• Castopod is “an open-source hosting platform made for podcasters who want [to] engage and interact with their audience.” It’s due to launch later this year as part of an initiative called podlibre.

• Podthon20 is a virtual summit on Jul 18-19. Tickets are available now; one of the speakers is our Editor, in a panel with other podcast newsletter editors.

• The Podcast Academy is doing a true crime workshop on Jul 14; and a webinar on mixing and managing your audio on Aug 12. Both events are free.

  
  Aug 25 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Nothing to do with podcasting, but Apple’s Keynote has had an update: with a new feature to “play slide show in window”, which those of us who do a lot of presenting via Zoom will like.

• After we reported it as a bug, Player FM’s RSS feed checker now identifies itself correctly (rather than Ruby which was its useragent until now). We’re seeing it identify itself as something like PlayerFM/1.0 Podcast Sync (687 subscribers; url=https://player.fm/series/podnews-podcasting-news) which looks excellently informative. Thank you!

Tips and tricks - with Podcorn

• How important is it to script your podcast? (Aureal)

This link is no longer available, as at Aug 25 2023
• How to use Facebook to promote your podcast (We Edit Podcasts)

Podcast News

A new podcast for professional wrestling fans has been launched: First Match with Jesse Kage will go behind the scenes with wrestling’s superstars.

Across the world, people are working for apps, not for human bosses. The Gig looks at the people behind the gig economy, starting with a season on the app almost everyone’s used: Uber.

The official Grateful Dead podcast, The good ol’ Grateful Deadcast, has launched: focusing on the band’s Workingman’s Dead album, which was released fifty years ago this year.

Technology Untangled is a new fortnightly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and produced by Lower Street, that tries to decipher technology’s rapid evolutions to work out what’ll shape our future. They plan no marketing speak or unnecessary jargon: which is good, because, as we regularly say, there’s an incredible amount of untapped potential in static Cloud; and as far as we know there is no other industry equally P2P.

Wanting to do a dissertation for your PhD and wanting to make it a little different? My Gothic Dissertation claims it’s “the first-ever PhD dissertation to be produced in podcast form”. “Anna examines the literary evolution of the British gothic novel, but hers is equally a searching and self-reflexive personal inquiry into the nature of producing a dissertation in the twenty-first century,” says the co-director, Jeff Porter. It’s also on the Lyceum platform.

Junk food. Yum! The Junkees, with Australian comedians Dave O’Neil and Kitty Flanagan, are investigating junk food in this new podcast; the current episode is all about salt’n’vinegar potato chips.

PS: Podnews has a LOT of submissions around new podcasts. Our apologies if we can’t list yours.