Tuesday 2nd July: What the Publisher Podcast Awards finalists show about podcasting in 2024

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Podcasting has changed in the five years we’ve been running the Publisher Podcast Awards. The potential for growth in an industry desperately looking for opportunities has boosted the profile of podcasts and publishers have put real resources into developing innovative launches, daily news shows and world-class documentaries.

As Esther points out in this post, every year our judges – many who have been with us since the beginning – have said it is getting harder and harder to choose the winners. And their scores back this up - the top podcasts in each category are often separated by just a mark or two.

She’s been particularly impressed by the independent podcasts that stole the show at this year’s awards, “even if they haven’t had millions of listens or a team of thirty producers.” And if you are looking for some indie recommendations, Esther has listed three of our winners as great examples of how smaller publishers can use podcasts to make a difference right across their business.

Writing on The Audiencers, retention marketing manager Tsering Lock explains how The Economist has tested a real-world welcome pack to combat declining engagement rates with welcome emails. The booklet introduces subscriber benefits and helps readers to get started exploring The Economist’s journalism and establishing a reading habit. According to Lock, the test has shown an observed engagement uplift of 3.5% among the test group.

Another day, another story of dodgy AI dealings. This time it’s Q&A-site Quora’s chatbot Poe allegedly making the full text of gated articles available to questioners in downloadable HTML files. Wired prompted the bot with the URL and it delivered a 235-word summary and a 1-MB file containing an HTML capture of the entire article. Other publishers whose articles WIRED was able to download were furious about the situation. Defector co-owner and editor in chief Tom Ley texted: “Defector does not condone having its precious blogs stolen by a dumb chatbot backed by egghead-ass Andreessen Horowitz.”

Exhibiting similar levels of AI-fueled frustration, the data engineer behind the Ludicity blog is done with AI hype. I’m sure he’s not entirely serious in his rant, but anger is an energy and this high-energy post is funny in a way a chatbot will never be. “I'm going to ask ChatGPT how to prepare a garotte… you will simply have to pray that I roll the 10% chance that it freaks out and tells me that a garotte should consist entirely of paper mache and malice.” 🤣🤣🤣

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