Sounder Product Updates

Introducing Automatic Mid-Roll Ad Break Recommendations & Draft Episodes We’re excited to announce several platform upgrades that enhance your podcast monetization and optimize your workflow experience. As a Sounder creator, you can now: Turn on automatic mid-roll ad insertion for all of your future episodes with just one click Set up episode monetization settings, now before and after publishing Save any episode as a draft so you can prepare content in advance of its release date  Listen to a brief walkthrough of the new features in this episode from our product managers, Ryan Coughlin and Richard Bolton!  Learn more in our new blog post at blog.sounder.fm Let us know what you think! Have feedback or a new idea that’d improve your podcasting experience at Sounder? Message us at support@sounder.fm

It’s now much easier to find the right data and insights you need for your podcast or podcast network, on and off of Sounder’s platform. Today, we’re revamped the entire Analytics Dashboard to include: - Multi-Episode and Multi-Show Comparison - Summarized Insights for Important Time Periods - Scheduled Email Reporting - New Data Visualization and Homepage Experience And much more! Watch while you listen on our Youtube - search Sounder.fm Or, learn more on our most recent blog post at blog.sounder.fm As always, we’re here to listen and to help. Have feedback or a new idea that’d improve your podcasting experience at Sounder? Message us at support@sounder.fm

We’re excited to announce a few automatic improvements to your Sounder account, plus one major upgrade that will enable us to deliver awesome new features in the coming months. The brief version— The free transcription tool in your account has improved word recognition and syntax for English audio. Sounder has implemented a number of tags in Podcast Index’s RSS Namespace Extension for Podcasting (Tag Specification), including Transcript, Guid, Season, Episode, and Person. Now your episode’s full transcript can be found in supporting apps in addition to your Sounder webpage. We’ve upgraded our backend systems, making it easier for us to bring Audio Intelligence tools from our Audio Data Cloud (enterprise technology) to the platform. This allows us to ensure that every creator using Sounder can benefit from the power of actionable audio insights. We’re excited to bring the most advanced Audio Intelligence technology and tools to all podcasters, while also supporting an open ecosystem for the industry to evolve in a direction that empowers creators to thrive. Want to learn more, check out most recent post at blog.sounder.fm! As always, we’re here to listen and to help. Have feedback or a new idea that’d improve your podcasting experience at Sounder? Message us at support@sounder.fm

We are so excited to share that we’ve raised $7.7M in Series A funding to continue growing this podcasting community, building Audio Intelligence products, and getting you the tools you need to thrive. In this episode, you'll hear members of our team share their excitement and explain what's next. We've always believed in building for and with the podcasting community. Thank you for embracing our experiments, testing out new features, and sharing your feedback with our team. It’s been invaluable. In the coming months, our team has even more upgrades coming. We plan to streamline your podcast management experience and growth with automated tools that allow you to focus on the most important part of podcasting, being your creative self! From automatic chaptering for episodes, new analytics features, being able to decide what types of brands you want advertising on your show—we’re bringing more power to you. Stay tuned. In the meantime, we are hiring! So if you have a passion for the creator economy and love podcasting, check out our open roles here: https://jobs.lever.co/sounder And finally, we’re here to help! Let us know of any podcasting obstacles or the tools you would love to have at your fingertips, and we’ll keep developing solutions.

Today, we are excited to launch two exciting distribution updates for every Sounder creator. The first is the creation of a new Distribution tab. This enables everyone to see which podcast listening apps currently distribute their show and choose new channels for distribution. The second is updates to our podcast creation and episode publishing flow. This enables creators to start a new podcast and publish an episode faster than ever before using Sounder. While Spotify, Apple, and Google account for 61% of all podcast listeners, having your podcast distributed to the other top listening apps maximizes your show’s reach by making it discoverable for listeners on those platforms (aka the remaining 39%). With today’s launch of the distribution tab for all Sounder creators, you can now: See the top 15 platforms where you can distribute your podcast on one clean page See which platforms you have/have not distributed your show to Distribute and/or claim your show on any streamer in a few clicks Collect streaming data across all listening platforms into your one Sounder dashboard  Also, in the spirit of improving the efficiency of creators on our platform, we’ve also updated the steps for creating a show and publishing episodes. You can now launch your show with only the four key requirements for your RSS feed: cover art, show title, description and category. All other fields can be added optionally or after your show is live. Episode creation is also more flexible. You can add in your episode’s headline, description, and other details before uploading your audio to better prepare for your release, as well as edit your monetization settings before publishing. Questions? You can send them to support@sounder.fm

Videobites allow you to visualize your audio with shareable clips for social media. Each videobite includes the closed-captioning (which you can edit), and they look great when shared to Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Videos are a leading driver of engagement on social media, and by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer video traffic. Today, we’re announcing two big updates that make them easier to share and simpler to track. First, you can share Videobites as a link that will embed your video clip into your social accounts without having to upload them manually. This means after you create a Videobite, you can just copy and paste it into any platform such as Facebook or Twitter, and your videobite will be embedded into the post. Second, your Videobite link will collect data from any platform where it’s shared and will show its performance in your Sounder Plus analytics dashboard. As you publish multiple Videobites, you will be able to assess which types of content from your show are most engaging to your audience. Then, you can go out and make more! If you have any questions regarding our updates to Videobites, feel free to reach out at support@sounder.fm.

Today, we are introducing the Audio Data Cloud, a dedicated, secure, and customizable cloud environment for publishers and platforms to accelerate content discovery, audience engagement, and advertising revenue. It allows publishers and platforms to dramatically increase ad supply through brand safety and suitability analyses, auto-generated segmentation, and rich contextual insights. The Audio Data Cloud adds the data layer to your audio content strategy that has been historically missing in the industry. It offers publishers and platforms the chance to make their content more accessible, engaging, and monetizable. We use our AI-powered speech-to-text technology to transform audio content to relevant insights, bringing the audio ecosystem up to speed with where we think text and video are today. Technology-wise, we have finally reached the right level to make audio content analysis more powerful and useful to everyone. Whether it’s AI at large or more specifically machine learning and natural language processing capabilities, this type of tech is no longer reserved for just big tech companies that can build all of these capabilities in-house from scratch. This is groundbreaking technology for audio content, and when leveraged correctly we call it Audio Intelligence. The Audio Data Cloud provides the opportunity for you to tap into the power of Audio Intelligence at scale. Learn more about how your organization can leverage Audio Data Cloud: https://sounder.fm/enterprise/