Why’s everyone going proprietary? Is it time to change the name podcast? Is James really one in a billion? And what’s the secret sauce for creating a hit podcast?
Listen to James Cridland and Sam Sethi
GUESTS:
- Dino Sofos - Founder and CEO, Persephonica. Recently departed Editor of BBC News Podcasts. Creator of the award-winning Brexitcast, Americast and the daily Newscast.
NEWS:
- Spotify's proprietary video podcasts system is "a dumpster fire", says Drew Linsalata, the host of The Anxious Truth. Even though Anchor gave this podcaster early access, it took six days for his podcast's episode to be correctly available on Spotify, during which Anchor support didn't return his emails.
- The BBC has launched BBC Podcasts Premium exclusively on the proprietary Apple Podcasts subscription system, and only in the US and Canada. The service will include "exclusive shows" (which are also available free in the UK). The BBC Podcasts Channel is available everywhere; the Premium bit only shows up in the US and Canada. All BBC shows are commercial-free in the UK; the corporation still blocks its shows from Google Podcasts.
- Bradley Tirpak is the new CEO of Libsyn. A professional investor, he's been Chairman of Libsyn since August 2020, and a director since October 2019. The company had been without a CEO for over 14 months.
- Libsyn's AdvertiseCast has released average CPM rates for October, showing an average of $23.30. The data is up from September's $23.13, and up 92.3% year-on-year.
- Amazon Music has announced a "synchronised podcast transcripts" feature. It's only available in the Amazon Music app, only in the US, and only for recent episodes of Amazon Original and Wondery shows. It's going to be opened to other selected shows shortly; as far as we can tell, it's a proprietary solution with no link to the existing open transcript standard from the new podcast namespace. We've asked how podcasters can submit transcripts.
- You're one in a billion - new data available by subscription from Omdia suggests that this year the number of global monthly podcast listeners will reach 1 billion people for the first time. Global podcast ad revenue for 2021 will be $1.9 billion.
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