Thursday 13th June: The winning Publisher Podcast Awards

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We had a brilliant - if not very long - day yesterday at the Publisher Podcast & Newsletter Summit, followed by the Publisher Podcast Awards. It started in a taxi at 6.30am lugging trophies and banners around, and ended in Waterloo McDonalds at 1am eating nuggets.

I’ll write up some more about the winners and what we’ve learned from the process this year when I get chance, but one of the things I love about this winners list is that there are a number of podcasts who have entered year after year but not won…until now. Particularly Scran from The Scotsman, which took away two trophies last night, and the Plodcast from Our Media, which won Best Hobbies & Special Interest.

The marks for each category are getting closer each year but it was so encouraging to see the strides each podcast had taken, and the end result of investment and TLC from the publications. A huge congratulations from us to all the shortlisted and winning podcasts.

Not only did Adam Tinworth run a fantastic morning newsletter workshop, but he live-blogged a number of the sessions from our Newsletter stage yesterday. Catch up on Tobi Oredein’s session above, or see his notes from the panel on newsletter-first publications, and lessons from award-winning newsletters.

Future has launched a new brand called Elevate based around selling its own advertising technology to other publishers. They’re treading a very difficult path - many publishers have tried to develop and sell their own tech to the industry and have found it tough to compete, but Nick Flood is a smart chap so this will be one to watch.

Google itself is urging publishers to diversify their distribution efforts beyond search if they want it to send traffic to their properties. None of the stuff talked about here should be new to publishers, but Jack Marshall sums it up nicely: “Going forward it appears the best way to attract traffic from Google is to look like a genuine site with a genuinely engaged audience. And the best (and possibly only) way to look like you have a genuinely engaged audience is to focus on actually building one.”

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