Shhh - internal Spotify podcast data leaked

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How’s podcasting doing for Spotify? Internal Spotify podcast consumption data has been leaked to Business Insider. It says that in September 2020, 331.8m hours of podcasts were listened-to on Spotify; 18.7% of that was made by Spotify. But, shows from Spotify’s Gimlet (bought for $230m) account for just 0.4% of all podcast listening.
- September 2020 was also Joe Rogan’s first month on Spotify (bought for $100m). The data shows that 14.9m hours of Rogan’s show were consumed on Spotify during that month. If the average length of the show is 3 hours, that would translate to about 5m plays during September on Spotify alone. The show was still available on other platforms that month.
- Matt Deegan writes more about the figures and the strategy of exclusives.
If Spotify’s not getting much value from Gimlet, that feeling’s mutual - Gimlet’s ReplyAll has posted a tweet apologising for an ad in their show for the US Military, and blaming it on being “sold to Spotify”. Nick Hilton uses this to highlight the close relationship between podcasters and advertisers.
The Australian Podcast Awards is back for 2021; this year it features a total of 31 award categories. You can enter here.

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Podchaser has refreshed their creator profiles and alerts, and made it simpler to follow creators across different shows. In terms of language, they’re now referring to roles as “Credits”. We’ve followed suit (like our listing for Podland ▸).
Entale has also added a way to follow people, as well as films and TV shows discussed within a podcast. It’s driven by proprietary AI technology, the company says.
You can now link to a specific timestamp in a podcast episode on Buzzsprout. Alban Brooke’s demonstration of it chooses an excellent show.
- The implementation adds ?t=(seconds) at the end of the URL. YouTube and Spotify use this too, as does Pocket Casts and Podfriend, and it works on Overcast. Google Podcasts works differently; Apple Podcasts doesn’t let you do this at all.
Triton Digital’s podcast host Omny Studio has enabled the Podcast Namespace transcript RSS tag for its publishers. It enables visibility of transcripts in many new podcast apps, and could also help contextual advertising.
Shure has been announced as the headline partner for the International Women’s Podcast Awards. The ceremony is in London on Sep 23.

Fun napkin math corner

With the leaked Spotify data, it’s tempting to play with numbers like this:

The average length of a podcast in 2019 was 37 minutes. If 331.8m hours of podcasts were played, that’s roughly 543m podcast plays in total on Spotify.

If Spotify is roughly 20% of the industry, that could suggest the industry is 2.7 billion podcast plays a month.

If 11% of podcasts are auto-downloaded and never listened-to, that means there are globally at least 3 billion podcast downloads per month.

This figure is probably too low, though: it’s based on an assumption that nobody on Spotify ever bails out of a show early or fast-forwards it. If you assume that only two-thirds of shows are listened-to the end, that might mean 4 billion downloads a month.

Tips and tricks

You got your first - or hundredth - negative review. Now what? Meryl Klemow writes for Blubrry and asks: can you make content out of it? (What, this?)
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The Sound Off Podcast ▸ interviewed Catherine O’Brien a week or so ago about her experiences at Podcast Movement.

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