Podcast neighbourhoods, paying to be a guest, and podcast:verify. Evo Terra sits in for Sam Sethi.

Evo Terra joins James Cridland this week, while Sam drinks wine in Europe somewhere. Evo's podcast is at podcast pontifications and he runs simpler.media

Special Guest: Dan Misener co-founder of Bumper. 

• Podcast guests are paying up to $50,000 to appear on popular shows, and the podcasts don’t disclose it, according to a piece from Ashley Carman in Bloomberg. It quotes a number of podcasts who charge more than $30,000 per interview… and they only added a full disclosure (an FTC requirement) after being contacted by Bloomberg for the story.
  
• Dan Misener and Jonas Woost launched Bumper, a new podcast growth agency. Bumper will work with organisations on audience development strategies, marketing and promotion.
• How many downloads get you into the Apple Podcasts charts? Tanner Campbell managed to get into the top 100 in the US Books category last Friday with just 10 listens and 24 followers.

  In November last year, Steffan Garrero got into the top 50 using social media; but it had no effect on his overall downloads.

• Podtrac is to add a Sales Network Ranker report in Q3 this year, according to emails from ART19 to some of its customers.
• Tips and Tricks might be a waste of time, argues Evo Terra, in an article entitled Avoiding The Perils Of Un-aligned Podcast Advice
  
• The team at the Podcast Index have worked on a proposal for the podcast:verify tag, which would remove email addresses from RSS feeds, and instead use a simple one-click claiming process.

  It uses a simple token system, letting podcast hosting companies understand which services people are using, and avoiding the near-25% dropoff from email verification. It’s built to be simple to implement, and great for privacy.

  If you work for a podcast hosting company or a service like a directory or tool, they would appreciate your feedback on the proposal.
  

• A reminder that if you use Apple’s AppleCoreMedia SDK to playback audio in your app, iOS 16 lets you set your user-agent so your app gets the credit in podcast host company dashboards. Please update your app ready for the release.