A piece aiming to help consolidate and compare audio and video podcast data from various platforms with different methodologies for representing how people engaged with a piece of media. Apple Podcasts, for instance, tracks a “play” metric. According to Bumper’s reporting, while a play seems similar to a YouTube view or Spotify stream, the true definition of an Apple Podcast ‘play’ is a user hitting the play button. Which is to say, if a user pauses an episode and then resumes twice throughout, that’s three plays in one playback session. While the secret sauce of what constitutes a YouTube play remains secret, it’s widely accepted that YouTube and Spotify’s consumption metrics combine a play initiation along with a necessary threshold of media consumed before it counts as a play. While raw Apple plays might be different than Spotify and YouTube, Apple’s episode retention data and listener count can be used to estimate an equivalent “play” metric similar to how Spotify estimates streams. As a result, this is what Bumper uses to calculate Apple plays in their dashboard.
Gen Z and Video Podcasts: The Numbers Speak Loudly by Steven Goldstein
Next week at Evolutions by Podcast Movement, Amplifi Media founder Steven Goldstein and Coleman Insights Vice President Jay Nachlis will debut The State of Video Podcasting 2025. In preparation for that, Goldstein has released a slide of info from the survey of 1,000 respondents who’ve consumed a podcast in the past month. Of that 1,000 aged 15-64, 307 fall in the Gen Z range. The key finding of the slide: only 10% of Gen Z podcast consumers say they never watch video podcasts. Though, there remains nuance, as 41% of Gen Z respondents still lean towards audio-first experiences. Still, video continues to grow. 84% of the overall respondent pool engage with video podcasts on some level, showing it’s not just a younger demographic fascination.
A rising number of agencies are updating creator contracts to include clauses specifically for AI protections. Open Influencer general counsel Bill Rowley told Digiday agencies are seeking more transparency, and many clients are now requesting contractual clauses explicitly stating no AI was used in content creation. A trend accelerated by the inclusion of generative AI in industry standard tools, leading to unknowing publication of generated content. For instance, Wizards of the Coast accidentally claimed gen-AI artwork was “human-made” due to a contracted artist not disclosing they used Photoshop’s AI image generation for work that was supposed to be hand-illustrated. The world of podcasting is a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to protective clauses, with ADOPTER Media having put the call out to define clear limits on AI voice cloning for host-read podcast advertisements back in July of last year.
YouTube ramps up podcasting with new ad test by Max Tani
According to Semafor’s sources, YouTube is in the process of developing the ability to dynamically insert host-read ads within YouTube videos, emulating the wider podcasting industry’s capabilities. Once finished, such a feature would change the game both for video podcasters on YouTube, and the overall YouTube ecosystem.
Porn on Spotify Is Infiltrating the Platform’s Top Podcast Charts by Ashley Carman
In last week’s Soundbite, Carman covers the issue of freebooted content on Spotify’s video podcast platform. In addition to ‘podcasts’ that are, in essence, bots re-uploading popular YouTube videos, there are also SEO-savvy pirates stealing erotic content from big-name tube sites and reuploading it to Spotify, with descriptions and titles optimized enough to crack the top 15 shows of genres like TV/Film and Business. While attention-grabbing, it’s worth noting this is neither new behavior, nor monetizable as the net-new podcasts spiking up the charts never reached the thresholds necessary to join the Spotify Partner Program off content that goes against multiple sections of Spotify’s ToS. With that said, a quick reminder for readers who want full access to Soundbyte: Sounds Profitable partner companies get access to a 33% discount at Bloomberg. If interested, send us a reply or hit up the Sounds Profitable official Slack server to learn more.
As for the rest of the news…
- The Globe and Mail has published their inaugural ranking of top-growing women-led companies and branded podcast agency Quill has taken the top spot with 4,186% growth in the past three years.
- Podscribe has announced a new integration with Fairing to enable viewing pixel, promo, and post-purchase survey results all in one place without manual data reconciliation. The new feature has been added to the dashboard with no extra cost to Podscribe attribution clients.
- Brittany Hall has joined Libsyn Ads as Director, Brand Partnerships, continuing her career in audio which includes Golden Audio, Seekr, Triton Digital, and Spotify
- The Boston Globe’s top 50 fastest growing New England companies includes podcast producer and agency The Podglomerate
- Anjali Sud, CEO of Fox’s free ad-supported streaming platform Tubi, is now on the board of directors for SiriusXM.
- Station has announced official integration with Spotify Open Access, allowing users with Station subscriptions to access their paid content seamlessly in the Spotify ecosystem.
- Flightpath, a predictive analytics platform, has announced a partnership with YEA Media Group to provide them deeper insights on inventory and campaign performance.
