Exclusive: Chartable is going away.
While it’s been public knowledge for some time that Megaphone customers will lose access to Chartable eventually, now there is a concrete date. According to Podnews reporting, an email is set to go out today to Megaphone customers detailing Chartable will fully sunset on December 8th of this year and where users can go to start using Links in Megaphone, Spotify’s in-house answer to Chartable SmartLinks.
Two Surprising Facts About Platform Consumption In 2025 by Tom Webster
Webster goes more into detail over a favorite slide of The Podcast Landscape 2025 data teased at Podcast Movement. The slide focuses on American respondents 18+ using Spotify or YouTube how much of their podcast consumption was watching, not listening, to video podcasts. Only a slight majority of YouTube podcast consumers actually watch more than half of their podcasts (with only 34% saying they watch more than 75% of their podcasts as video). Which means just under half of YouTube podcast consumers primarily listen, even if it’s a video podcast. This data supports Webster’s theory that getting a podcast on YouTube isn’t necessarily about being on video, it’s that YouTube is a really good app for podcast consumption full stop. There’s solid community, search, discovery, and engagement all rolled into an easy-to-use app that’s on just about every phone in the U.S. A video component is important for a podcast on YouTube, but if the audio doesn’t work in a vacuum the podcast won’t make sense to audiences who mostly listen.
Australia podcast advertising benchmarks: Q2 2025
Magellan AI has teamed up with the Australia Radio Network for the first Australia Quarterly Benchmark Report, this time covering Q2 of this year. The report is built from analysis of 10,087 episodes of popular Australian podcasts. Findings include the average ad load sitting at 7.53% (Podnews reporting compares this to a U.S. average ad load of 8.13%). Brand awareness campaigns made up 82% of all detected campaigns in Q2, and ad spend is up 20% year over year.
No, it’s not another Taylor Swift story, I promise. Several months ago YouTube debuted a new system called Hype, which allows YouTube viewers to choose three videos per week posted by channels with fewer than 500k subscribers to “hype,” which gives that video points on a running leaderboard displayed on the front page of YouTube. The smaller a creator’s channel, the more a Hype vote counts towards putting them up the leaderboard. YouTube is announcing a wider launch of the system with it now live in 39 countries, as well as a new UI feature giving Hype its own button for viewers and a special “hyped” badge that appears on hyped videos. This could have knock-on benefits for those in the audio world of podcasting making the jump to video with net-new channels, as Hype votes from audiences following them to these new channels should help grow video reach and make channels financially viable quicker.
Club Comedy 4 Kids Demonetized
Comedian Tiernan Douieb reports that after seven years hosting with Acast, he has been informed his children’s podcast Comedy Club 4 Kids is no longer monetizable due to company policies about ads on podcasts for kids. Douieb points out the value proposition of the premium feed is based around being ad-free, so this decision has both kneecapped ad income and the core premise of the premium feed. According to him the official reasoning for the move is due to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (a 1998 bit of U.S. legislation you might remember from an FTC complaint in 2018 that pressured YouTube to lock down ‘kids’ content), “and/or other applicable privacy laws.” Regardless of if it’s a 27 year old bit of U.S. legislation or the brand-new legislation (e.g. the Online Safety Act in the U.K.), a new problem presents itself. If safeguards/policies for Kids & Family content are not implemented carefully by platforms, similar sudden changes have the potential to undo progress made in the growing Kids & Family podcast genre.
As for the rest of the news…
- The London Podcast Festival is celebrating its 10th year starting September 4th through September 14th, including a 10 year reunion panel of Wolf 359 creators and a new live episode of Wooden Overcoats.
- Amazon’s Regional Creatives Fund, a fund offering grants of up to £30,000 to UK nonprofits helping people from underserved/underrepresented communities access careers in creative industries, has a fast-approaching deadline of August 31st.
- AI-focused podcasting platform PodUp has raised $5.8 million across two funding rounds.
- Katz Media and National Media hav e published a post-election survey conducted in December of last year showcasing podcasting’s political influence.
