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Oprah Winfrey’s The Oprah Podcast today features guests that are out of this world – or, at least, they were. After their extraordinary, history-making trip around the moon, Oprah has an in-depth conversation with the crew of Artemis II. The crew shares how they were transformed after spending more than nine days traveling farther into space than any human being has ever been. The show was acquired by Amazon’s Wondery last month.
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Spotify drives 1.5x more podcast consumption than YouTube, according to new data from Podstock. However, part of that is due to discovery tools and reach for new audiences – new listeners lower average time spent per stream. The data, based on thousands of different podcast episodes, highlights the increasingly multiplatform world of podcasting.
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In the UK, podcasting reaches more 18-34 year-olds than broadcast TV, says research from Sounds Profitable, written up by Ben Robins of Sound Insights. The data on the UK’s podcast consumers arrives a week before The Podcast Show in London: Ben Robins and Tom Webster will cover more of the data on May 20 at 10am.
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Alitu and The Podcast Host have been acquired by AI software developer Rocketable. The acquisition occurred a couple of months ago, it’s emerged, and is now complete. Colin Gray leaves the company, but “is not sure at this stage what comes next” – he’ll be at The Podcast Show in London.
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iHeartMedia released its Q1/26 financial report. Podcast revenue was $147mn, up 27% year-on-year (and above guidance from the company). Podcasting represents 16.6% of the company’s revenue – around 50% of podcast revenue came from iHeart’s 1000+ local sales force, Bob Pittman noted in the earnings call. He also said that iHeart is the #1 podcast network according to both Podtrac and Triton – neglecting to mention that Triton is owned by iHeart.
- Also in the call, Mike McGuinness, CFO, noted that “there’s a new thing called video podcast”, and also said that the iHeart app has begun rolling out video for some of its shows. We reported on this in early January – we look forward to learning more.
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The Podcast Academy is to celebrate two international awards at The Podcast Show in London. Goalhanger’s The Rest is History will receive the International Governor’s Award, while the International Impact Award goes to Wisecrack from Tenderfoot TV & iHeartPodcasts, “recognizing a podcast or individual based or set outside of the United States whose recent work has had a significant, positive impact on the global podcasting landscape”. (The show is set in the UK).
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The Nomono sound capsule – we reviewed a pre-release version in 2023 – is about to have “a big system update that brings stability, performance, and security improvements”.
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CreatorX has announced Office Hours, a free monthly forum on how to make your podcast more valuable to new and existing brands. The first event is this Friday at 5pm Eastern.
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The Podcast Professionals Association has announced its inaugural Board of Directors. The non-profit’s new Board are Traci DeForge, President and Co-Founder; Jenn Trepeck, Vice President and Co-Founder; Allison Booker; David Hoffman; and Steve Stewart. It’s part of a new phase of growth for the organisation.
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Scott Galloway now has his own TV channel. “The Prof G Channel” is on The Roku Channel and Prime Video, and brings together his most popular podcasts. The channel is being produced by Swerve TV.
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Little Dot Studios, which partnered with Acast at the end of last year, has opened its in-house video podcast studio in its London headquarters. It will initially be used for History Hit, and provides a dedicated space for future formats and productions.
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Podcasting has “too many awards and no way to stop them”, writes Frank Racioppi in Forbes. His article starts with our story from January of a different type of podcast awards.
Apple and Spotify still rank podcasts like records.
Paid content
Apple Podcasts spun out of iTunes. Spotify started life as a music app. PodSEO analysed roughly 11 million top-5 podcast and episode rankings on a single day, English keywords only, and found their search engines still behave that way.
On Apple, 12% of rank-1 shows have the searched keyword in their title or author field, against a random baseline below 0.001%. Episodes published in the past week appear in the top 5 around eight times more often than their share of the catalogue would predict. Spotify’s recency boost is even stronger, and its episode ranker barely uses show metadata at all.
The full breakdown, including how the two platforms diverge at the episode level, sits on the PodSEO blog.
Tips and tricks – with The Podcast Show London
- Want to know what to really think of video podcasting? We’d recommend The School of Podcasting this week – interview with both Alban Brooke and Justin Jackson, but expertly edited and assembled by Hall of Famer Dave Jackson. Well worth a listen.
- Podcast stats are confusing enough without video in the mix. Here’s how to understand podcast stats. (Hit reply if you’ve more questions!)
Podcast News – with Airwave
