Losing money, Pocket Casts is put up for sale

• Podcast app Pocket Casts is loss-making, and is to be sold by its current shareholders. NPR, which owns 34.6% of the company, has reported that their share of the company’s loss was $812,000 in their recent accounts.

  • Analysis: In our Editor’s personal blog, he looks at the app’s slump in market share, and wonders what Pocket Casts could have done differently.

• Edison Research and Triton Digital have announced that The Infinite Dial 2021 will be presented on March 11th. This research of the US media market typically includes the most-quoted figure of the year for podcasting: the number of Americans aged 12 and over who consume podcasts per month. Last year the figure was 37% - equivalent to 104m people.

  
  Aug 31 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Triton Digital will hold a “deep dive” of their Podcast Metrics product next week. Part of the Sounds Profitable monthly series of detailed looks into podcast ad-tech, it’s free to watch.

• Casted, a podcast platform built for B2B marketers, has added video podcasts. The new release includes embedded players, analytics and videograms.

• Evergreen Podcasts is “taking an ownership stake” in Ars Longa Media, a healthcare podcast network which delivered more than a million downloads last year.

Get the free Podnews newsletter for more like this

Get it free

• Pat Flynn has launched Fusebox 2.0, a set of plugins, players and tools for podcast websites.

• Dan Misener at Pacific Content teases us with the launch of a podcast SEO tool called Paseo. It’s only for Pacific Content clients, though: not to worry, Podkite offers a similar tool (covered on May 18); and Podr also offers podcast ranking (covered April 23).

• Podmatch Agency is a new service to help PR firms with multiple clients to match their people as guests for potential podcasts.

• Pop Culture and Entertainment remains the most popular podcast genre in Nigeria, according to new research into the country’s podcast fans from Tony Doe Media.

• After an experiment, growth-orientated podcast host Captivate has stopped publishing one of their company podcasts to YouTube. In a blog post, Mark Asquith explains the steps they took, and concludes that focusing solely on audio helps grow a more specific and focused audience, rather than automatic repurposing to YouTube.

• Matt Deegan tweets: “New podcast rule: Anyone that tweets excitement over an Apple Podcasts position should also be made to tweet that week’s actual download numbers too.” 👏

Tips and tricks - with Buzzsprout

• How to make money with a podcast (DiscoverPods)

• “I’d like to use a 30 second clip of a track by Rhianna and is it OK if I add a disclaimer or something that’ll be OK, right?” Not really.

Podcast News

Podland this week features a look at Clubhouse, interviews with Adelicious, the BBC World Service, and sponsor Buzzsprout has some detail on their dynamic content feature. It’s hosted by Sam Sethi and Podnews’s Editor, James Cridland. Come and find out why it’s the #23 news commentary podcast in Slovenia.

Dog Edition, from the Dog Podcast Network, has a new, “indogural episode”, celebrating dogs returning to The White House: President-Elect Joe Biden will bring two. We’d make a pithy comment here, but last time we tried, someone hit the sad-face below.

Popular, multi-award winning show The Fantasy Footballers is moving to Audioboom, which is to provide exclusive ad sales and marketing support. The podcast was being hosted on Libsyn.

Business Movers is a new show from Wondery, which is shortly to join Amazon. Telling “the true stories of the brilliant but all-too-human leaders who risked it all”, the first season of the show focuses on Walt Disney and Disneyworld.

Our Editor is an advisor to Captivate, who we link to today. More disclosures