Acast acquires Wonder Media Network

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• Podcast company Acast has purchased New York-based creative podcast studio Wonder Media Network for a total value of $7.8mn. The six-year-old WMN makes its own original podcasts, and branded podcasts and digital content for a number of large companies. WMN’s team will combine with Acast’s existing creatives to form a new division called Acast Creative Studios.
• Podtrac published its US rankers for November 2024. “All of the Top Global Networks were down on Global Downloads, Streams & Views in November over October.”
  • Potentially connected to the presidential election results, the only changes in the top 21 publishers are The DailyWire+ (up from #10 to #9); and the Fox Audio Network (up from #13 to #12). The Tucker Carlson Show is a new entry in the most popular podcasts at #6. These rankers measure participating publishers only.
• The New Zealand Podcast Awards released their winners last week. Our page links to the Gold winners, so you can listen for yourself.

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• Wondery released its 2024 Wondery Podcast Playback in the Wondery app.
  • Headliner posts their Wrapped 2024, which is a blog post highlighting the year in podcasting.
• We’ve updated our alternatives to Chartable guide. Rephonic no longer require sign-up to OP3 to claim your podcast; Podgagement has launched a historical chart service, and we’ve also added details of services from CoHost.
• We’ve added many more country podcast top 10s from Spotify’s 2024 Wrapped, including Sweden, Italy (where one podcaster has two shows in the top 10), Germany (where the #1 podcast is hosted on Soundcloud), Spain, New Zealand, and Mexico. More later!

Thank you to the team at Sounds Profitable, who join us as our latest Gold Supporter, and the team have also each joined as personal supporters, too. They write: “Sounds Profitable wouldn’t exist without the support of and free access of industry journalism provided by platforms like Podnews. We encourage you to subscribe and consider supporting Podnews, as we all have. In addition to Sounds Profitable sponsoring Podnews as a company, we as individuals have also pledged to the Podnews Patreon to support the continued publication of podcast industry coverage.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

Moves and hires

• Rockie Thomas has been appointed Chief Strategy Officer at SoundStack. She was previously the company’s Chief Revenue Officer. “I’m thrilled to expand my experience into product and strategy lanes,” she said.
• Adam Shepherd, formerly Editor of PodPod and the British Podcast Awards, is leaving to be editor of Conference & Incentive Travel (C&IT), a publication aimed at the corporate events planning sector. “I’ll miss the vibrant enthusiasm and passion of the podcast community”, he writes. It leaves one less place to read news and information about podcasting (which sounds good for us, but is increasingly not good for the industry).

Tips and tricks

• You might hear people telling you how important ID3 tags are for your audio files. They aren’t, we can conclusively say. There, that’s saved you a job. Instead of spending time doing that, how about making transcripts for your podcasts instead? Much more useful.

Podcast News

• Podcast Perspectives this week covers all things podcast attribution, including how the technology actually works, why a brand would want to utilize it, which tools podcasters can and should use in the wake of Chartable’s sunsetting, and some real-world examples of how these types of tools changed the entire podcast ecosystem.
• The new Goalhanger podcast The Rest Is Classified has achieved 200,000 downloads in its first week, the company says. It topped the charts in the UK and Australia, while also breaking into the top 5 in New Zealand and Ireland. The show offers unparalleled insights into the world of intelligence and security.
• Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce released its first episode. It includes an interview with actor Kaitlin Olson, and we hear how she's dealing with being pregnant. It's also on YouTube in video; not in video on Spotify; and we are required to tell you that it's a Wave Sports + Entertainment Original.
• Intoxicating History is new this week - hosted by author Henry Jeffreys and Tom Parker Bowles (who's described as "critic, writer, son of the Queen"). The show explores the sometimes amusing, often dramatic but always intoxicating stories behind the drinks that we know and love today. The first episode is all about port. It's from TWS Creative.

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