Platform insights for YouTube

• WARC Media released a report on YouTube - which, it says, is worth $40bn to advertisers, but revenue growth is slowing down. TikTok is set to grow bigger than YouTube by the end of the decade; but Netflix is expected to pull ahead in the next eighteen months. Users spend 58 minutes a day on the platform.

• Podcast and video production agency The Podcast Guys is officially a Great Place to Work, after gaining certification from the workplace culture company. Certification is based entirely on anonymous survey feedback from employees. The company has offices in London and New York, with teams across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East.

• In the UK, the Future of Media Awards shared its shortlist. There are two podcast awards.

• Triton Digital’s Sounder has added sentiment analysis, which enables advertisers to target podcast content based on the emotional tone, as well as categorisation and words used.

  • Triton Digital has also added Amazon DSP to its programmatic marketplace, so advertisers buying through Amazon DSP can now buy Triton-powered audio ads (in podcasts and streaming audio) while layering in Amazon’s first-party shopping, browsing and streaming signals to help target the ads. (Spotify and iHeart have also added integrations recently.)

• It’s nearly time for the Edinburgh Fringe - a festival featuring plenty of comedians and performers who probably also want to do podcasts. The Wel Podcast Studio is a podcast studio that can come to them, since it’s in a VW Campervan. The team say that they’ll be in Edinburgh right through the event.

• Podpage has added two new AI writing tools, as part of a set of new features. The tools are built to write blog posts, as well as to write your “about page”, too.

The SOUND Creator

Paid content

The mix nobody notices because it’s perfect. The atmos a listener can almost touch. The score they’d recognise in a heartbeat - you’re the reason it sounds like that.

Built by people who work in audio, for people who work in audio. SONARR Awards - where the craft now has a home.  

Enter the SONARR Awards today. Entries close 31 July.

Info session and mixer in Sydney on 21st of July: RSVP to be there.

Feedback: those AI studies

The AI studies we covered yesterday (in a very caveated way) certainly annoyed The Internet…

• “I listened to the samples of the human vs. AI voices. The audio quality of the AI was much better. It was louder for one thing. So I don’t think it’s a fair test at all if that’s what the respondents heard.” - Podnews reader Gloria
• “The first study looks at AI audiobooks vs human narrators, is funded by an AI audiobook company and compares a single narrator vs AI generated multi-cast, so the actual conclusion is that people might prefer multi-cast audiobooks” - angry BlueSky-er
• “First, listeners didn’t listen to both AI and human and then pick AI. Second, it compared multi-cast AI narration w/single voice human narration, so respondents may have just preferred multi-cast.” - nicer fediverse-user Mignon
• “100% of AI speech startups backing this research agree” - cynical fediverse-user Max

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement NYC's Public Vote

• • Toni and Ryan are two Australian podcasters who have created a loyal community of podcast listeners - TARPers - who help grow their show for them. Ryan Jon spilled the means at last year’s Podcast Movement about how they did it, and what a strong community can do for your show.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave and TWiT.tv: iOS Today focuses on all things iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and plenty more. The latest episode looked at Apple’s sports app, which puts the World Cup and every major match at your fingertips, with live activities and seamless Apple TV integration. Discover how your iPhone can keep you in the loop, even if sports aren’t your thing.

Election skeptics were once a fringe subset of the US Republican party but now they are becoming a permanent fixture in election apparatus. Nowhere is that more evident than the state of Georgia. Just in time for a Trump speech today on what he calls “election interference”, Radio Atlantic today reports from Georgia, where election skeptics are running elections.

For homicide detectives, their chance of solving a murder is cut in half if they don’t get a lead within the first 48 hours. The First 48 is a new podcast produced in partnership with PAVE Studio’s Crime House and A+E Networks. Launching today, the show will revisit a landmark investigation from the franchise, pairing its signature investigative depth with immersive, long-form storytelling built for your ears.

Who was Stephen Foster? He was a Beautiful Dreamer - America’s first professional composer, and the subject of a new audio drama podcast that tells the story of over twenty of his songs and why he wrote them. It launched on Independence Day, which was also his bicentennial.

Having a bad DAI

An occasional feature helping us all learn to get better

Leading Through Connection is hosted on Megaphone, and boy, they love their pre-rolls. When the YouTube RSS scraper went knocking, this is what it was served - podcast audio that starts with an ad, then an ad, then an ad, then an ad, then another ad, then an ad, then you guessed it an ad… in total, eight minutes 11 seconds of preroll ads, educating its listeners to work out how to hit the skip button. There isn’t an intelligent listener out there who won’t skip these prerolls. Thanks to a Podnews reader, who forwarded this on to us saying “you guys sometimes feature a section called DAI Disasters or something similar” - this truly is a DAI disaster (not least, because YouTube doesn’t allow ads like this anyway). Let’s hope that the new Spotify Ads server, which goes into place on Friday, caps its prerolls to a sensible amount, for all our sakes.