News From Vidcon
Annual video industry conference and fan convention Vidcon took place in Anaheim, CA. The Information covered TikTok’s renewed focus on longer videos. Despite their retiring official podcast support before it launched, this could be good news for video podcast distributors. And Digiday interviewed over a dozen Gen Z Vidcon attendees on their concerns with the biggest video platforms, and the growing presence of AI in content creation.
Episode Artwork vs Show Artwork on Podcasts by Adam Bowie
With podcasts widely adopting the medium’s ability to have per-episode artwork in addition to the overall show art, Adam Bowie breaks down why it’s important to remember the context in which a piece of content is consumed. Several major podcasts skip the step of putting branding or watermarks on their episode art, accidentally anonymizing that episode in several major podcast listening apps that are designed around the presumption users will recognize podcast episodes in a feed by the artwork.
Before New TV Show ‘Hindsight’ Debuts, Producer Will Release Its Podcast Adaptation.
Writer and producer Mark Haynes is currently developing a TV series titled Hindsight, but while the show is in production, a star-studded official audio drama series dubbed Hindsight: The Day Before is set to release in the lead-up to the show itself. Libsyn Ads is attached for exclusive ad partnership. Often audio fiction is used as a testbed for TV IP, but this is an example of podcasting’s promotional power, with the podcast adaptation intentionally being used as hype generation for the ‘main’ story.
Podcasts are becoming increasingly attractive for news operators by David Fernández Quijada
The 2024 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University is now live. The report is built from online surveys of over 95,000 people in 47 countries. One key takeaway is the rising popularity of bundling podcasts with other media products in all-access style subscriptions, boosting discoverability and monetization possibilities.
The gold rush is over. Now podcasters are picking up the pieces by Barry Divola
As podcasting settles into a new normal after the highest highs of the early pandemic years, a side effect is renewed focus on maximizing profit and minimizing costs. Demands are increasing on quantity over quality for podcast producers and beloved highly-produced investigative journalistic podcasts are fading away as a result. An alternative to save the genre would be to re-frame them as the podcasting equivalent of the Costco rotisserie chicken: a loss-leader that brings attention to the rest of a company’s content produced with better margins.
…as for the rest of the news:
- Spotify has announced there are over 250,000 video podcast shows on Spotify, up from 100,000 last year.
- A new episode of Podcast Perspectives features Flightpath founder Sean Howard discussing predictive podcast analytics.
- AdNews has release a mid-year report on the state of the advertising market in Australia
- New coverage from Defector uses an Audacy job listing to talk about the wider issue of media jobs often condensing the work of multiple producers into one position
