Exclusive: YouTube’s plans for RSS

• Exclusive: Podnews has obtained a document with full details of a YouTube “RSS Ingestion” pilot that it is running with some partners. The service pulls new audio from an RSS feed to upload it to YouTube, complete with a static image of the show art. Shows already using it are CNN’s One Thing and CityCast Pittsburgh.

  • Unlike other RSS-based podcast platforms, YouTube will not offer “passthrough”: the RSS feed is just a way to automatically ingest the audio, once, to their systems. “Your hosting company cannot see how many times a podcast episode was listened to on YouTube because all podcast content on YouTube is hosted on YouTube.”
  • YouTube requires that podcasts must not contain any ads. “Regular ads are not allowed to be uploaded to YouTube. We request feeds to be ad-free.” Sponsored segments can, however, be included if manually marked as such.
  • On a technical level, YouTube crawls each RSS feed every five minutes. Publishers can add a rectangular image for YouTube, using a media:thumbnail tag; only static images are supported.

• The Ben Shapiro Show and other Daily Wire podcasts will be distributed on Twitter, the company has announced, after success with one of its shows.

• The Podcast Show 2023 in London has kicked off. Our Editor was the first speaker: highlighting that the industry should focus more on engagement and time spent listening to grow podcasting, and defend the unique nature of the open medium.

• BBC Sounds has announced a set of new shows, and that the BBC is to work with Spotify’s Megaphone to “recommend relevant content to audiences on other podcast platforms in the UK”. The deal means that Spotify’s Megaphone will programmatically schedule trailers, for UK listeners, on BBC shows carried on third-party platforms. The BBC has confirmed to Podnews that this does not affect the BBC’s deal with Acast for monetising their shows outside the UK.

• The second annual CLUE Awards, 'dedicated entirely to excellence and responsible storytelling in true crime content’, is open for submissions. You’ve until July 31 to enter.

• In France, Acast has signed the independent video game publisher Ubisoft.

• How will AI transform the podcast industry? Maxime Piquette, the CEO of Ausha, suggests it is possible to use AI in every step of podcast creation.

• Steven Goldstein reviews the New York Times’s new NYT Audio app.

• Ever Gonzalez writes about the successful Outlier Podcast Festival, which took place this weekend.

• A new podcast data website has been launched. “This will allow users to query the Podcast Index in a user friendly way, with extra data that we computed,” says the website owner, Benjamin Bellamy. The initial beta focuses on French-speaking podcasts.

Tips and tricks - with Podnews Live - where podcasting connects

• Apple Podcasts has separate editorial curation for more than 170 countries across the world: but how can you see what they’re promoting in other countries? The podcast growth agency Bumper has worked out a way of quickly seeing the contents of every country’s Apple Podcasts front pages.