How many ads in podcasts? Where do you live?

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• Mobituaries with Mo Rocca is one of the biggest podcasts in the US, produced by CBS News and monetised by iHeart. Yet, depending where you listen, you get significantly more advertising.
  • We compared the same episode, downloaded from Brisbane, Los Angeles and New York. The ads are marked here in yellow. When downloaded in Australia, you get just two 30” ads (for a gambling company); when downloaded via a VPN in California, the adload was ten minutes 29 seconds (20% of the whole show). New York listeners get even more.
  • In our second spot break, in California we were served a 2’55” break. Yet, one Podnews reader on the East US coast heard the same episode: they were given a five minute spot break at that point. In total, they were given 18’40” of ads in the same show. Yikes. (Is our reader a desirable audience member, perhaps?)
  • Oddly, in California the second spot break was exactly the same as the third spot break.
• Cumulus Media, the owner of the Westwood One Podcast Network, might be delisted from NASDAQ again, after the company traded below $1 a share for more than thirty days. It’s got until the middle of next year to sort things out, though. It was last delisted in 2017.
• Happy Christmas to ART19, which certified to IAB v2.2 podcast guidelines on Dec 23. The IAB requires annual recertification, yet four companies still appearing in the IAB’s list were last certified in 2021 - three from iHeart (Omny Studio, Spreaker and Voxnest); and the German podcast host Audiorella.

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• Anycast is an “AI-powered podcast app” - which will transcribe podcasts but also allows you to “chat” with the podcast. Here is the source code for both iOS and Android. (It seems to use the Apple directory).
• We linked to this back in 2018, but it might be worthwhile linking again: A Guide to Talking to Your Family About Podcasts During the Holidays

Tips and tricks

• Got a new Chromebook for Christmas? You can install Audacity on a Chromebook. We updated these instructions yesterday.

Podcast News

• Adnan Syed, the subject of the first series of Serial, is seeking a reduction to his prison sentence, so that he isn’t sent back to jail.
• The Guardian posts the 20 best podcasts of 2024. The number one is Wondery and Novel's Kill List, which "laid bare the sinister reality of the dark web, and went where no podcast has gone before."

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