Listener retention to be important in 2025

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• More attention to retention will be one of the trends in podcasting in 2025, says the founder of Pod Houston, Ozeal Debastos in his yearly prediction piece for Podnews. He also predicts an audience-centric shift in the forthcoming year.
• In December, total overall podcast downloads on Buzzsprout were down 14% year-on-year. However, we’d not worry; both Spotify and Apple showed increases in download share; and we covered a few days ago that the total number of podcasts being updated is up 2.5% year-on-year. (And, if you’re getting plays on YouTube, or uploading video to Spotify, those plays never get back 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 reflects the fact that, while data costs are low for many in Western countries, that isn’t the case in developing countries, particularly South Africa, where at the time mobile data cost 23x the cost of the US. (To download an episode of This American Life on your mobile would have cost you the equivalent of $3.52).
  • An old article here on Podnews compares audio quality at different bitrates and filesizes. Or this page from NPR is a fun quiz. Marc Maron was once a 40kbps MP3 file; many NPR shows were 64kbps. The reason almost everyone uses 128kbps? Dynamic Audio Insertion, DAI. As Acast says: “In order for ads to be stitched into your audio file, the podcast audio files need to match the encoding of the ad audio file, and the ads are encoded at 128kbps MP3.”

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