Variety: “Almost half of all consumers will own a smart speaker after the upcoming holiday season, according to a new study by Adobe.” Note that the write-up was published in early September. CNBC: “Streaming platforms are feeding the growing boom in smart speakers such as Echo, Home and HomePod, study reveals.” Slate: “Streaming music is […]

Chomping at the bit. “Gimlet is a multimedia storytelling brand, not just a podcast network,” declared Jenny Wall, the company’s newly hired chief marketing officer, in a Fast Company piece in January. That identity refashioning is mostly tethered to Gimlet’s increasingly formalized dealings with Hollywood, but it’s beginning to rear its head in other intriguing […]

First-tinkerer advantage. There should be little doubt over who will set the terms for voice-first computing in its early going, whether via smart speaker or whatever comes immediately after that. Barring the apocalypse (in which case, we’ll be doubting a great many other things), it’ll be some combination of Amazon, Google, and/or Apple, though it […]

Just a heads up: I’m told that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) will indeed be publishing a 2018 update to its podcast advertising study, which means we’ll be able to get at least one contiguous read of the industry’s year-over-year ad revenue growth. As a reminder, the IAB’s inaugural podcast advertising report, which dropped last […]

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 139, published November 7, 2017. Charla de Cóctel. Slate Podcasts is now bilingual. Last week, the network leveraged its hefty experience with conversational programming — which birthed the style known as the “gabfest” — to launch what it bills as its first-ever Spanish language […]

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 133, published August 22, 2017. The daily show. If The New York Times’ The Daily and NPR’s Up First — taken collectively as, like, an index fund of the daily news podcast construct writ large — have taught us anything, it’s that there’s a […]

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 127, published July 11, 2017. The IAB has announced the lineup for its third-annual podcast upfront, and it boasts some changes. Gimlet, Public Media Marketing, and iHeartRadio are added to the mix, while CBS and AdLarge appear to be sitting this one out. This […]

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 122, published June 6, 2017. I sunk a lot of hours this weekend trying to write a column on “Peak Podcasting,” following some inspiration from a tweet by the esteemed Lizzie O’Leary — which speaks to a broad feeling that I’ve been seeing a […]

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 102, published January 10, 2016. Digits to start the year. Is the podcast industry growing, and if so, how? I’m keeping these three numbers taped to the corner of my laptop as benchmarks to keep track: Audience size: 57 million U.S. monthly listeners, according […]

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 101, published December 20, 2016. There’s not a lot of big news this week, but there are some chunky ideas to break into! Predictions. It’s that most wonderful time of the year, when the annual Nieman Lab Predictions for Journalism series trickles in to fill […]