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Podnews Daily - podcast industry and podcasting news episodes

August 28Keynotes announced for Podcast Movement NYC
Sponsored by Magellan AI. CBC swapped generic trailers for episode-specific promos and nearly tripled conversion, measured by Magellan AI. See how they did it
Podcast Movement announced two keynotes - Tom Webster will give a preview of The Podcast Landscape 2026, while TINK Media's Lauren Passell and Arielle Nissenblatt (above) will explain "WTF is a podcast in 2026". Tickets are available here.
Podcast Movement has also announced it is to celebrate sponsors and attendees with a billboard in Times Square (upload your logo through the Swapcard app); and "podcast newsletter checkups" with beehiiv through the event.
And, Arielle Nissenblatt (who's a licensed NYC Tour Guide) is running a Podcast Walking Tour on the Wednesday - a tour of NYC's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood through the lens of podcasting, storytelling, and New York City history.
Audacy is to close its podcast hosting and monetisation service, Audacy Creator Lab, on Nov 1. Launched as Podcorn in 2019, which was acquired by Audacy for $22.5mn in 2021, the new "Creator Lab" was announced at Podcast Movement Evolutions in Apr 2025 - making some podcasting companies angry at its marketing tactics. It announced YouTube integration this March. There appear to be just 426 shows hosted on Audacy Creator Lab in the Podcast Index, though you could also take part in the Creator Lab Marketplace wherever you were hosted.
The company's website doesn't mention that it's closing yet; and they're still marketing on podcasts: Podscribe reports that Audacy Creator Lab has advertised on 52 shows since Monday.
A new website builder called Podspun has released a significant update. The tool creates a website from your podcast - but also your social media as well, to keep it fresh. The websites are also built to be visible in AI search as well as traditional SEO.
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5 min
August 27Building in public: Podsqueeze
Sponsored by Magellan AI. When CBC hosts guested on other podcasts, those appearances converted at around 13%, tracked by Magellan AI. Read their story
Building in public: the founders of Podsqueeze appeared on Jason Cohen's Smart Bear Live, and on his YouTube channel alongside the founder of Castos Craig Hewitt, in a workshop discussing how the company's growth has plateaued, and what they might want to do to continue growing. It's a helpful (and honest) view about producing tools for podcasting.
This tap has been turned back on... on Monday, we covered The Parent Tap being wrongly kicked off YouTube, and an automated review almost instantly being denied. YouTube has now reinstated the channel, saying "after taking another look, we can confirm that it is not in violation of our Terms of Service".
Threads is experimenting with a new interface to share podcast episodes - using a word-by-word transcript. It looks nice; these appear to be tests that aren't yet available to most users.
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4 min
August 26July’s top podcast ad spender
Sponsored by Magellan AI. Join Magellan AI and Sounds Profitable on September 10th to unpack Q2 measurement trends across the podcast market. Register for the webinar
Quince is buying more podcast ads than anyone else, says Magellan AI - spending $7.5mn in July. BetterHelp and Amazon spent around $5.4mn. Meanwhile, Hero Bread, Accenture and Lululemon were the biggest movers and shakers. Magellan AI has a free webinar on Sep 10.
Crooked Media has acquired the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast - kind of. Its founder Nate Silver sold the brand to Disney; but was laid off in 2023. The podcast podfaded in March 2025 along with the website. Variety reports that the new show will be named Still Counting, and will feature the former hosts and data journalists.
Podcast Movement NYC's Swapcard is up and running; so if you've already bought your tickets, you'll be able to log in and make connections.
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6 min
August 25Podcast Movement NYC releases full schedule
Sponsored by Magellan AI. Trees.com used to burst audio spend in-season, then drop it to zero. Magellan AI helped it stay always-on for the first time. See how they scaled
The full schedule for Podcast Movement NYC has been published on the website. There are announcements still to come for the keynote sessions. We're told that the event will be using Swapcard, as previous years, so you'll have an app to plan it all. Tickets are still available.
Podbean podcasters were given a shock this week, as the company rolled out new filters to its download analytics "designed to identify and filter AI and crawler-related traffic" - but the change marked all downloads from Apple Podcasts as invalid, causing a significant decrease in reported numbers to its customers. Podnews has seen data from some podcasts showing hundreds of plays on Apple Podcasts Connect, but apparently zero downloads to Apple Podcasts in Podbean's analytics dashboard during the same time period. One support email says: "We recently pushed an update to mitigate disingenuous traffic from accessing podcasts on our side. Unfortunately, this inadvertently also affected the genuine traffic reporting. It has been advised that we rolled back our current update." If a rollback has happened, no change has been visible in the numbers as yet.
Podbean is certified compliant with IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines v2.2, and was last certified in January. However, it seems that a company is able to significantly change its podcast measurement toolset without affecting its published IAB Tech Lab certification.
RØDE released the DS3, a new desktop studio arm. It's capable of holding a microphone weighing 1.5kg, and doesn't need a desk clamp.
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5 min
August 24Turned off: YouTube suddenly pulls podcast
Sponsored by Magellan AI. Trees.com used Magellan AI to cut waste and lift audio efficiency 96% year over year. See how they did it
Top 10 parenting podcast The Parent Tap has been suddenly pulled from YouTube - apparently by an automated tool. With no strikes or warnings, the show was permanently pulled on August 14th, accusing the channel of trying to circumvent a ban: a ban that the channel owner says simply didn't happen. An attempt to appeal the closure was knocked back almost instantly by YouTube, using an automated template. Ryan McDonough, the channel's owner, has opened a petition; and told Podnews: "I poured my heart and soul into building this channel from scratch. In 4 short months, I went from zero to 2.3k subscribers and over 50,000 views with a 150 video catalog. Having all of that wiped out overnight by an automated system is a gut-punch that keeps punching. The fact that I can't reach a human and have literally no idea how this happened is completely beyond comprehension." His show continues on open RSS.
Fictional TV shows like Only Murders In The Building are giving an image of podcasting that is "at best, a crude simplification, and at worst, a fantasy flatly incompatible with the physics of sound", says a new academic study conducted by Spanish researchers. Writing for Podnews today, one of the authors, Maria Fitó Carreras, says don't believe everything you see on television - and, for the value of the craft, don't let others either.
Bloomberg is suggesting that YouTube is not happy about creators who are also posting videos on Netflix. YouTube is apparently less likely to promote these shows, will exclude creators from major brand campaign revenue, and may offer "millions of dollars" to retain first-view exclusivity. Tubefilter reports on Bloomberg's paid story; YouTube is said to be reluctant to pay for content, and doesn't want to appear to show favouritism to some creators over others.
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7 min
August 21Good news - the power is with us in podcasting
Sponsored by Magellan AI. Smarter signals, smarter podcast decisions. See how in Beyond the Buy, from Magellan AI and True Native Media. Download the guide
The power is in our hands, says Losh Moodaley in an eagerly-anticipated new article for Podnews. Power might be being consolidated by the platforms that control distribution - and it's especially the case for podcasting's middle-class - but the good news is that there are ways to gain economic leverage and own many parts of the relationships needed for podcasting, she says.
It's nice to read good news at the end of this week. So let's have some more.
Good news for video podcasters from Apple Podcasts: they shared early results from three shows that have begun distributing video via HLS on the platform. TED's How to Be a Better Human (Acast) saw its unique audience on Apple Podcasts grow 93%, and new follows on Apple Podcasts have increased 113%. Toni and Ryan (Acast) saw unique audience grow by nearly 40%, and new follows are up 68%. And The MeatEater Podcast (Omny Studio) saw new follows up 151%, while "32% of non-follows who watched the video went on to follow the show within a week".
Great news for Audacy, which has announced a strategic partnership with The MeidasTouch Network, including one of the biggest podcasts in the US. The shows will join Audacy on Sep 1: Audacy becomes exclusive audio partner for sales and distribution. Audacy has also signed Dumb Blonde, partnering with creator and #1 New York Times bestselling author Alisa “Bunnie Xo” DeFord - another top 50 podcast.
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6 min
August 20Who’s flying this thing: publishers, or ad-tech?
Sponsored by Magellan AI. Join Magellan AI today at 12P ET for a live look at where Q2 podcast ad dollars went. Join the webinar
"Should a publisher’s commercial decisions be honored by the technology they pay for?" Flightpath is shipping a tool today called Automation Playbooks, a new tool to combat what it calls unreliable ad delivery from podcast ad-tech partners. The tool logs in regularly to check all campaigns against delivery, and to make changes to live orders. The release quotes one frustrated Head of Revenue at a podcast network: "Being asked to re-flight thousands of orders by hand is not a viable solution to a problem we did not create."
Flightpath has also published an open letter from its co-founders. Titled "We are not going to sit this one out", the piece highlights recent changes by one "major technology platform", which has "turned a major upgrade of their systems into a five alarm fire for their publishers." Some, the company says, are at risk of losing as much as 50% of revenue on currently running orders, and the post promises that Flightpath will speak up and lend full support to affected publishers.
You can contact Flightpath directly; but to maintain confidentiality, you can also share your story and experiences through us: [email protected]. We would suggest that the industry isn't well served by sitting on our hands and trying not to rock the boat. If we're being given a rough sea, then it's all hands on deck.
YouTube has added more explanation about the change to "views" and "engaged views". An "auto-play" on the homepage (when you hover over a video) will now be counted as a view if it starts playing - and an "engaged view" if it keeps playing "for some amount of seconds". (For us to note - there's no audio playing when this happens. It it works with your eyes closed...)
Additionally, YouTube's Rene Ritchie adds: "I've heard some people say it previously took 30 seconds for a view to be counted. And that's simply not the case. YouTube doesn't specify exactly how many seconds, because it can vary across surfaces. YouTube also doesn't want anyone focusing on gaming the metric: just making the most satisfying experience possible for viewers." YouTube were a participant in the AMP Accords, which "with no dissenting votes" defined a play as "30 seconds of content played". So... wtf?
"The previous definition of a view will now be called an 'engaged view'", says YouTube in its announcement. But even for long-form videos, these numbers are actually not the same. You can compare both the existing "views" and "engaged views" numbers in YouTube Studio - and when we did that for our tiny YouTube channel, the numbers were different. Michael Paretsky from Podstock analyzed 300,000 YouTube podcast episodes to discover that "engaged views" is 7% lower than the existing "view" count; and for some shows, there was much more of a significant difference. "For some shows, this change will be a rounding error. For others, it could be a major commercial event," he said.
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7 min
August 19Publishers “should ignore” new YouTube view numbers
Sponsored by Magellan AI. Rhapsody Voices uses Magellan AI to help land 30%+ of every show's sponsors. Read their story
Yesterday's announcement from YouTube of a new way to calculate "views" should be ignored by all publishers, says Zachary Boone from YMH Studios. The company will only report on "Engaged Views", the original view metric from YouTube, which is widely believed to have a 30-second minimum. Boone says the change "opens the door for unsavory actors to misrepresent their numbers," and calls for other publishers and networks to commit to the same.
Spotify Creative Lab has shown an example of how they helped UK television channel ITV promote a new spy thriller. The company worked with Goalhanger, with host-read content and a special episode of The Rest is Classified. As a well-produced sizzle reel, this is hard to beat - nice work.
It appears that Spotify added a support page about the "skip ahead" button on Tues Aug 4, added shortly after Podnews exclusively revealed the unannounced feature. It's in the style of a Q&A, and remains remarkably coy about where they are testing it ("select markets"). It clarifies that no, you cannot opt out of your show having a "skip ahead" button, and also confirms that Spotify-sold ads are not exempt. New (to us): the page suggests that it works in both audio and video.
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6 min
August 18YouTube changes how “views” are calculated
Sponsored by Magellan AI. With Magellan AI, Rhapsody Voices sold 80%+ of its ad inventory on two shows in back-to-back quarters. See how they did it
A week after YouTube altered the numbers you need before you start making money, YouTube's visible definition of a "play" (or "view") is also to change. From August 24, a public view will be counted "the moment a video begins to play from the very first frame".
Creators still have access to "engaged views", which YouTube publicly says is "how many times viewers stayed to watch past the first frame and initial seconds". This is the previous definition of a play/view, believed by many to be at least 30 seconds (though YouTube doesn't publicly say). If that's true, the "engaged view" roughly aligns to the AMP Accords definition of a play.
So, what is a podcast play? We've written up a full article, with our own stats, to explain and compare the different platforms. Most - but not all - give a roughly consistent number.
What will be the effect of YouTube's new "view" metric? The public numbers will be significantly bigger, we'd guess - but also, significantly less meaningful, since a play for one second will still count. However, the more comparable "engaged views" metric will, as far as we can see, become entirely private to the creator: it won't be seen on public pages, and it will not be available through the YouTube Public Data API. It remains accessible in YouTube Studio, and through the Analytics and Reporting APIs, for creators; but third-party rankers or data companies will no longer have access, unless they're specifically given that.
After we published a video of a podcast ad that was unskippable in Spotify yesterday, Spotify contacted us to say: "Spotify does not make podcast ads unskippable. A bug caused the 15-second skip to not be visible in the example, and it was fixed. The 15-second skip works for both Free and Premium users. Skip Ahead is a separate feature we are testing with a subset of Premium subscribers." They've not commented on what their terms for creators could allow them to do.
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Ask a Marketer: How Advertisers Read the Research — John Right Side Up and Sounds Profitable as they walk through the latest podcast research to show you how real marketers think about consumer data. Turn numbers into insights and insights into action!
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Silver supporters: Audacia Audio, Gamut Podcast Network, Bumper, Sounds Debatable, True Native Media, Magellan AI, Nomono, Voxtopica, Tink Media, Locked On Podcast Network, Frequency, The Podcast Haven, POW PR, Podium, Red Seat Ventures, Jonekiri, Castbox, Podcast Movement, Compliance Podcast Network, iono.fm, Hypecast, Blubrry, Podium , Companion Arts, SoundStack, PodAnalyst, Ausha, ARN's iHeartPodcast Network Aust, Truefans, Health Podcast Library, Sonic Influencer Marketing, Rhapsody Voices, Jam Street Media, Lemonada Media, Transistor, CreatorX, Headliner, Double Elvis Productions, Rephonic, Diversion Podcasts, Podcast Partnership, Content10x, Cleanfeed, School of Podcasting, Lower Street, Revolver Podcasts, Adopter Media, Podigy, Signal Hill Insights
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Image: Christian Wiediger
5 min
August 17Spotify: unskippable ads for them, skipped ads for us?
Sponsored by Magellan AI. Q2's podcast ad spend numbers are in. Get Magellan AI's Benchmark Report. Download now
Exclusive: A few weeks ago, Podnews broke the story that Spotify is testing a "Skip ahead" ad-skipping tool for some customers. Perhaps making the most of its dominant market position, today we note that Spotify is selling its own unskippable podcast ads; and we discover that its terms and conditions gives Spotify the legal right to automatically skip everyone else's.
The Ambies are open for entry from today. There are two new categories - best music and episode of the year - and there will be two listener's choice awards, for Best Podcast Host and Podcast of the Year. You get a discount if you're a member of The Podcast Academy.
The New York Times focused on Inception Point AI in a front-page article in its Arts section about AI influencers. However this publicity comes at an odd time: because it appears that Inception Point AI has been rebranded as Liquify AI, "the company behind Liquid Studios". The company's new website suggests that the Quiet Please Podcast network "was never the destination", just "proof that content infrastructure works at this scale". They're now offering the same technology to other companies.
Technology like yesterday's episode of Jay Shetty's Biography Flash podcast - which still says it's published by Inception Point AI - gives an AI-generated error in the episode audio: "I did not find a clearly verified major personal life announcement from the past few days, and I did not see a confirmed high impact scandal or break in his public image in the material reviewed ... nothing in the gathered reporting rises above ordinary promotional noise or can be treated as confirmed biographical news."
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Ask a Marketer: How Advertisers Read the Research — John Right Side Up and Sounds Profitable as they walk through the latest podcast research to show you how real marketers think about consumer data. Turn numbers into insights and insights into action!
Gold supporters: Buzzsprout, Mowpod, Beehiiv, Podbean, The $100 MBA, The Podglomerate, Cloud10, Libsyn, The Content Creator's Accountant, Scicomm Media, Audiohook, Podscribe, Magid, audioBoom, RedCircle, Cohost, PAVE Studios, Sounds Profitable, Simplecast, Jar Podcast Solutions, Awesound, Podpage websites, We Edit Podcasts, Acast
Silver supporters: Audacia Audio, Gamut Podcast Network, Bumper, Sounds Debatable, True Native Media, Nomono, Magellan AI, Companion Arts, Truefans, Frequency, SoundStack, Locked On Podcast Network, Podcast Movement, iono.fm, Compliance Podcast Network, Ausha, Podium, PodAnalyst, Hypecast, Tink Media, Red Seat Ventures, ARN's iHeartPodcast Network Aust, Blubrry, Podium , Jonekiri, The Podcast Haven, POW PR, Castbox, Voxtopica, Health Podcast Library, Sonic Influencer Marketing, Lemonada Media, Double Elvis Productions, Rephonic, Diversion Podcasts, Headliner, Jam Street Media, CreatorX, Rhapsody Voices, Transistor, Content10x, Podcast Partnership, Cleanfeed, Podigy, Revolver Podcasts, School of Podcasting, Adopter Media, Lower Street, Signal Hill Insights
Our supporters pay for Podnews, so everyone can read it. Join them today.
Image: charlesdeluvio
6 min

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Daily news for people in podcasting - from Apple Podcasts to Spotify and YouTube; Amy Poehler to Crime Junkie and Joe Rogan, indie podcasting to the biggest hits. Whether it's the newest show from Goalhanger, the latest signing from The Ringer, advertising information from Magellan AI or Podtrac, research including the most popular podcasts to listen to, or updates from The Daily from The New York Times, we cover it all, every weekday.