Olympian Social Media 🥇, History Podcasting’s Long Tail, & More

If you couldn’t make yesterday’s webinar with Tom Webster, good news! The recording of Building a Better Pitch for Podcasting is now available for free. Click here to catch Tom’s 41 minute lecture and Q&A session focused around how to sell the world of podcasting to agencies.

How These Olympic Athletes Are Winning on Social Media by Paul Hiebert

Continuing the theme of yesterday’s discussion of fragmentation in media: while the Olympics remains a sizable watercooler moment in media, social media is allowing a good portion of that energy to funnel directly to the athletes themselves. Instagram follow counts are jumping exponentially, TikTok views are rolling in. Social platform Dash Hudson, which has tracked engagement and growth of almost 200 athletes in Paris for the Olympic and Paralympic games, attributes the organic performance to entertainment, authenticity, and community. Making podcasting a natural transition for athletes post-Paris.

Adalytics Report Challenges Verifiers And Pubs That Claim 100% Brand-Safe Media by James Herscher

A recently-released Adalytics report discovered ads with markers from major brand safety services like DoubleVerify and IAS running on brand-unsafe content from user-generated content sites (e.g. Fandom wikis, Tumblr, and Urban Dictionary). DoubleVerify’s response takes issue with the report, saying the outcomes of their findings lack organic validity or scale. Herscher highlights that even if the findings were discovered arbitrarily, the company advertises its AI-powered brand safety tools as providing “100% suitable” ad placements. The existence of ad placements on pages featuring racial slurs in the url challenges that 100%. Transparency is key in ad tech to establish long-term trust.

History podcasts are booming

From comedians talking about history on The Dollop to the director of the British Museum hosting History of the World in 100 Objects, the genre has grown with podcasting. Last October, history podcast The Rest is History sold out the storied Royal Albert Hall in London, a venue with seating capacity for over 5,000. What stands out about the history genre in comparison to chat podcasts or news shows is history podcasts are almost entirely long-tail. Audiences are more likely to start an older miniseries/season about a topic they want to learn about than worry about staying current, making back-catalog buys on history podcasts more bang for one’s advertising buck than, say, back catalog of a weekly news discussion podcast.

…as for the rest of the news: