Getting ready for a trip to France in a few weeks? This year Sounds Profitable is sponsoring the Little Black Book Beach at Cannes Lions. For all those attending, we have a free custom graphic generator live to help folks announce where they’ll be hanging out June 22-26. Just upload a headshot, plug in your details, and you’ll get a socials-ready graphic!
Prime Time is Podcast Time: Smart TVs and Podcasts in the U.K. by Paul Riismandel
The new Signal Hill Insights Pulse Report, *Podcasts in the Living Room U.K.*, conducted with Flightstory, finds that 45% of monthly podcast consumers in the U.K. have used a smart TV to listen to podcasts in the past month. Just 27% used a smart speaker. Smart TVs are now the second most-used device for podcast consumption in the U.K., ahead of computers at 44%. 54% of video podcast viewers are consuming their podcasts during prime time (7-11 p.m.), outpacing the afternoon commute (4-7 p.m.) at 31%. Taken together, Riismandel says the data suggest video podcasting is becoming more popular as living-room viewing in the U.K. and increasingly resembles prime-time television content for those users.
NPR, NPM, and PRX Collaborate to Expand Revenue Opportunities for Public Radio Stations
National Public Radio, its sponsorship subsidiary National Public Media, and PRX have announced a collaboration to give stations a more flexible way to monetize their podcasts. Now, NPM can handle sponsorship sales for individual stations’ content hosted and distributed through PRX’s Dovetail podcast publishing and monetization platform. Podcasts from Boise State Public Radio, LAist, VPM in Virginia, WGCU in Southwest Florida, and WWNO in New Orleans are among the early adopters distributed via Dovetail and supported by NPM sponsorship sales.
Supporting Cast Becomes the First Podcast Subscription Platform to Deliver Gated Video on Spotify
Subscription platform Supporting Cast has launched gated, subscriber-only video content on Spotify using Spotify’s Distribution APISubscribers who connect their Spotify account to a publisher’s Supporting Cast-powered account can now access exclusive video episodes within the Spotify app alongside the rest of their content library. The first two shows to utilize this new feature are the journalist-led independent podcasts Libero and Legacy.
The unwinding by Brian Morrissey
Morrissey examines the collapse of page view-based publisher models for companies built in the 2000s and 2010s. With the new AI-focused version of Google Search further eroding direct search engine traffic to publishers, companies like Business Insider find themselves left in a lurch. The recent sale of Vox Media specifically valued the podcast network and New York magazine assets above many other parts of Vox. In the modern media ecosystem, owned podcast networks have evolved from a nice-to-have side gig into a core asset that drives a company’s value.
As for the rest of the news…
- Spotify users will soon have the ability to create and share clips of podcasts, with availability “starting to roll out globally to Free and Premium users on mobile.” Elsewhere in the Spotify world, Global Head of Ad Product Katie English was recently interviewed by Anthony Vargas for AdExchanger and Spotify’s Global Head of Podcasts Roman Wasenmüller sat down with Natalie Jarvey for Like & Subscribe.
- Amplifi Media founder Steven Goldstein shares conversation topics and takeaways from a panel he moderated at The Podcast Show London, with panelists Tom Webster, Dan Misener, and Christiana Brenton.
- Speaking of Podcast Show London: Acast CEO Greg Glenday shares his keynote speech from last week about the free-flowing nature of podcasting’s future.
- Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky is now officially part of the fwd. network’s portfolio.
