Bringing Podcasts to 🖁, Amazon’s Ad Relevance, & More

Amazon unveils Ads Relevance, claiming it is no longer reliant on single IDs by Ronan Shields

The new offering, announced during the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, uses signals like browsing, shopping, and viewing behavior across Amazon properties to predict user behavior and offer media buyers ad opportunities using that data. Ad Relevance is designed to provide targeting for online audiences in a post-third-party-data world. A synergetic fit with Amazon’s podcasting arm of Art19 and Wondery, as this kind targeting strategy is one podcasting has found success with for years.

PodLP Turns 4, Launches on Cloud Phone

The podcast distribution platform designed to work on low-power devices like T9 flip phones is celebrating its fourth birthday by adding functionality for Cloud Phone, a remote browser designed to run app-like widgets on phones with as little as 16mb of RAM and a screen as small as 128x160px. Services like PodLP’s enables the podcasting industry to be more accessible to people outside the bubble of high-end smartphone users. For more on advertising and smartphone bias, see Bryan Barletta’s 2020 article written around PodLP’s launch.

How Immediate Media is growing its paid podcast audience by Charlotte Tobitt

At the recent Media Voices Publisher Podcast Summit in London, Immediate Media head of podcasts Ben Youatt says paid podcast subscriptions currently make up 10% of the company’s overall podcast revenue and the conversion rate of free listeners to paid subscribers is around 4 to 5%. Youatt warns of punishing the listeners while trying to build out premium offerings. Reducing a daily podcast’s cadence by one and making Friday episode paywalled throws off the routine of the core audience. Added value has more success than carving up an existing, working property.

The Gen Z-focused publisher abandoning Meta platforms by Jason Pollock

Back in March Meta announced they would shut down the News tab on Facebook, ending all deals it had to pay Australian publishers for their premium content. AdNews interviews Centennial World, an independent publisher with a focus on content creators and internet culture, who preemptively distanced from Meta-owned platforms months before the announcement. A significant portion of their traffic comes from posting their content on TikTok, YouTube, and taking advantage of Australia’s thriving podcast audience with their show Infinite Scroll.

Exclusive: Oracle Will End All of Its Ad Products by Sept. 30 by Catherine Perloff

This Monday an email sent to Oracle customers announced the company will stop supporting its advertising products on September 30th, including Moat analytics, Oracle Contextual Intelligence, and everything under Digital Audiences. Oracle says they will continue fulfilling existing orders for the affected products through the end-date but stopped entering into any new agreements as of the 17th. Earlier in the company’s history, an attempt was made by Oracle to introduce the Moat product into podcasting, but was not able to have their SDK installed in any of the major podcast apps.

…as for the rest of the news: