The podcasters who earn the most

• Joe Rogan’s earning $30m from his podcast, and My Favorite Murder earnt $15 million in 2019 says Forbes, in a story by a staffer that ranks podcasters by revenue. Dave Ramsey is at #3 at $10m.

• Got ten minutes? Westwood One would like you to take a survey on topics like podcast attribution, measurement, and dynamic ad insertion. Your insights and recommendations will help enhance podcast advertising; and anonymised responses will be included in the published results. Go! Thanks!

• Sony Music Entertainment and Somethin’Else have announced a new podcast venture, working in the UK and the US on new podcasting opportunities. Somethin’Else is already the UK’s leading independent audio producer.

• Buzzsprout has unveiled advanced podcast statistics, which the company claims are privacy-aware and use industry best practice. They’re available to all their publishers at no extra cost, and promise “insight into podcast performance over time, episode downloads, listener location, and apps/devices used.”

• Castos has added the ability for all their users to create private podcasts - for courses, membership sites or internal corporate podcasts.

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• Omny Studio has built a dynamic ad manager for publishers, called the Omny Campaign Manager, using Triton Digital’s ad tech; has added transcription tools (both human and automated); geoblocking tools; enhanced analytics; fully translated web players; and has added a method of delivering ad-free versions of podcasts for subscribers.

• Wondered how many subscribers your podcast has? Some podcast platforms keep data on that; and Reports, a service which aggregates this information, has gone live today on Product Hunt.

• Maestra is a new transcription tool for podcasters: it comes with the first thirty minutes free.

• Music rights company BMI has announced a settlement to their court litigation with US radio companies; and the new agreement includes podcasts. Not so fast… says media lawyer David Oxenford, clarifying that “BMI controls only a portion of the rights necessary to use music in podcasts”.

• Gary Leland has been named Executive Vice President of BizTalkRadio, a US radio company. Leland was a co-founder of Podcast Movement, and one of the first 100 podcasters.

  
  Aug 21 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• What is a podcast, again? David McGuire from Stabl asks a number of podcasting experts on Stabl’s blog (which doesn’t have an RSS feed, thus instantly making it not a blog #pedant)

  
  Aug 21 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

From the new book Make Noise by Eric Nuzum, available now

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Reader’s letters

Yesterday, Overcast improved its “voice boost” function: but that’s not got its fans. Alison Pitt says: I can’t say I’m thrilled at the news that Overcast will be remastering my audio “for me”, since I take quite a bit of care doing it myself. I get that it’s probably a better experience for the listener, but as a producer I’m a little miffed that they’re trying to eliminate what I consider one of my points of difference. Call me curmudgeonly!

We linked to the slightly staggering 50 steps to get listed on the Samsung Bixby platform yesterday. Emily Gammell tells us it doesn’t matter: No one uses it anyway. I’m a Samsung user that purposely disabled the Bixby button on her phone. We tried to find some data for that story: Bixby seems to have a 4% market share.

Hit reply with your thoughts to anything you see in Podnews (or outside).

Podcast News

Fan of true crime? Fan of TV game shows? Want to inexplicably put these two hitherto un-related genres together? Killer Knowledge is a new podcast that claims it’s the first of its kind in podcasting. “Each week, a new episode will be released that is a deep dive into a different shocking topic from history, such has the Manson Family, Jonestown Massacre, Jimmy Hoffa and more. Two contestants will go head-to-head to answer multiple choice questions on the topic at hand.” (Parcast)

The scrupulous impartiality expected from the BBC could lead to boring podcasts, claims BBC journalist Jon Sopel, before promising that Americast, his new podcast with fellow BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, will be “surprising and thoughtful”. (BBC Radio)

BBC News Brasil has released its first podcast, Que História!, literally What a Story!, featuring some of the BBC’s biggest stories. Brazil’s mobile phones are 81% Android, yet the BBC blocks its podcasts from Google Podcasts.