Friday 26th July: The Rest Is Football dominates booming UK sport podcasts market

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After having a look at the growth of politics podcasts during the UK election, Press Gazette has turned its gaze to sports podcasts ahead of the Paris Olympics. And it seems that ‘sport-related podcasts are booming in the UK with the top-rated shows seeing millions of downloads per month.’

As you might expect, football dominates the top 10, although F1, cricket and cycling are in the mix too. Gary Lineker-owned production company Goalhanger is leading the way with The Rest Is Football. The celebrity-led show scores (see what I did there) nearly eight million listens per month on Youtube.

The High Performance Podcast - claiming more than 10 million listens across all platforms every quarter - is not exclusively about sports, but features regular conversations with sports men and women. Host, former BT Sport and BBC presenter Jake Humphrey, says, “Our job is to produce an amazing product, but then to go and find the audience to enjoy that amazing product.”

I love the this new feature from Dan Oshinsky on Inbox Collective. His ‘Ask a Newsletter Therapist’ interview with Clare Zulkey of the Evil Witches newsletter sums up everything we’ve felt about doing this daily newsletter, so much so that I accused Dan of reading Media Voices mail. The good news is he thinks we’ve ‘already made some smart choices for the future’. Maybe we’ll get in touch later in the year to let him know how our shift to a weekly newsletter has gone.

Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies. That’s the same ‘consent or pay’ tactic that the EU went after Facebook for earlier this week and the UK’s Information Commissioner warns organisations “must be careful to ensure that consent to processing of personal information for personalised advertising has been freely given”. What can possibly go wrong?

There’s not much in this story that will make you better at your job (unless your name’s Murdoch) but it’s a proper ‘get the popcorn’ read. Basically Rupe is living the fictional-media-mogul nightmare of battling his heirs over his plans for, well, succession. The nonogenarian wants to put his oldest offspring Lachlan in charge to protect the company’s odious conservative political stance, however the more politically moderate younger siblings are fighting back. In case anyone’s in any doubt, I’m rooting for the youngsters.

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