Listener retention to be important in 2025

• More attention to retention will be one of the trends in podcasting in 2025, says the founding father of Pod Houston, Ozeal Debastos in his yearly prediction piece for Podnews. He additionally predicts an audience-centric shift within the forthcoming 12 months.

• In December, total overall podcast downloads on Buzzsprout were down 14% year-on-year. Nonetheless, we’d not fear; each Spotify and Apple confirmed will increase in obtain share; and we coated a number of days in the past that the total number of podcasts being updated is up 2.5% year-on-year. (And, in the event you’re getting performs on YouTube, or importing video to Spotify, these performs by no means get again to your podcast host anyway.)

• From the archives: in February 2021, our Editor wrote a personal blog about “how to get another billion podcast listeners”. It displays the truth that, whereas knowledge prices are low for a lot of in Western international locations, that isn’t the case in growing international locations, notably South Africa, the place on the time cell knowledge value 23x the price of the US. (To obtain an episode of This American Life in your cell would have value you the equal of $3.52).

  • An previous article here on Podnews compares audio high quality at completely different bitrates and filesizes. Or this page from NPR is a fun quiz. Marc Maron was as soon as a 40kbps MP3 file; many NPR exhibits have been 64kbps. The explanation nearly everybody makes use of 128kbps? Dynamic Audio Insertion, DAI. As Acast says: “To ensure that adverts to be stitched into your audio file, the podcast audio recordsdata must match the encoding of the advert audio file, and the adverts are encoded at 128kbps MP3.”

• From the archives: Whereas we’re at it (and by no means associated to needing a minimal of 4 tales or the publication breaks), should you be making MP3 or AAC files? We didn’t point out DAI within the article, and we in all probability ought to, however one more reason why AAC recordsdata aren’t used a lot is that neither Spotify or Deezer settle for them.

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Suggestions and tips – with Pod Predictor by Coleman Insights

Podcast Information – with Airwave