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• Apple Podcasts shared the “most popular podcasts of 2024”. There’s more to the lists than just the US, though - we’ve compiled a list of the top shows in most English-speaking countries; plus, a way for you to view the top charts for 33 different places.


• Podcast host Ausha has launched two new tools as part of its Podcast Search Optimisation features. The PSO Checker gives recommendations to help optimise your titles, description and tags; and the PSO Live Search lets you compare your podcast with your competitors.


• “Spotify playlists and podcasts are being abused by spammers to link to pirate websites”, says Digital Music News, noting six-second podcasts that actually serve to link to websites. This isn’t entirely new - back in 2022, RSS<wbr>.com’s Alberto Betella shared details of how that company deals with spam podcasts, mostly promoting Dubai sex workers.

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• Journalists in Europe are being invited to take part in the European Podcast Academy, a five-day educational event dedicated to advancing the art of podcasting. The event is in Milan, Italy, in mid-March.


• The Australian Podcast Ranker was released for October. Triton Digital is set to introduce a new ranker capability that will rank the podcast category by monthly listener, and integrate Triton Demos+ data.


• If you’re a registered owner of a Focusrite audio interface, you get to claim a free set of the iZotope Ozone 11 Elements mastering plugin.


• Libsyn Ads have announced an exclusive ad partnership with Envy Media’s Humble Brag with Crystal and Cynthia.


• Libsyn also released the company’s download statistics. Apple Podcasts improved its download share in October, up by 0.8%. (We know this isn’t a great number to measure, but it’s the only one we have).

Focus

Since 1996, The Webby Awards has been recognized as the preeminent international honor for Internet excellence. Last year’s Webby Awards received nearly 13,000 entries from around the world.

This year, The Webby Awards has expanded recognitions for independent creators with Best Indie Podcast and Best Indie Podcast - Limited Run in Features and is now honoring Best Creator or Influencer Series in Features and History in Individual Episode. Don’t forget, Podcast Company of the Year, a Special Achievement award recognizing the podcast company with the most accolades across the 29th Annual Webby Awards competition.

New judges for Podcasts this year include: Shannon Sharpe, NFL Hall of Famer & Host, Club Shay Shay & NightCapt, Michael Bosstick, Co-Founder, Dear Media, Ben Cave, Director, Apple Podcasts, Carrie Lieberman Chief Operating Officer, iHeartPodcasts, Bob Carrigan, CEO, Audible, and Sahar Elhabashi, Head of Podcast Business, Spotify.

Learn more, and enter the 29th Annual Webby Awards by the Final Entry Deadline on December 20th, 2024.

Moves and Hires

• Jim Ballas has been promoted to General Manager, Measurement, at Magellan AI. Ballas will oversee the company’s growing suite of measurement solutions.


• Congratulations to Jen Sargent, the CEO of Wondery, and the former publisher of the Podcast Business Journal, Streamline Media’s Deborah Parenti, for being among those honoured in the Gracies Leadership Awards.

The Tech Stuff

• Producing creator transcripts in RSS? The WebVTT format allows you to specify speaker names (which appear in Apple Podcasts transcripts), and work with web browsers too; so if you’re only going to support one format, we’d recommend this one. But: while the WebVTT format has no formal line length definition, we’d recommend no more than 65 characters per line: it’ll help podcast apps display captions, and adds better timing information. --split-on-word --max-len 65 is your friend, if you’re using whisper-cpp.


• An enhanced podcast:location tag is coming to Podcasting 2.0 - which lets you associate shows (and episodes) with locations: “This is a podcast about the Eiffel Tower” and “This is a podcast recorded in New York”. There’s a JavaScript tag generator here; and the specification discussion is here.


• If you show podcast descriptions and episode notes, as mentioned above, spammers are targeting podcast directories to hope that you link out to their naughty websites. Our podcast pages mark all links from podcasts as rel=“ugc”, following Google’s recommendations, which essentially makes these links worthless to spammers. You might want to check you’re doing the same.

Tips and tricks

• These tricks to get live captions for every podcast you listen to - on whatever app you use - also work for every remote recording tool, like Riverside, Cleanfeed or SquadCast.