From our daily newsletter, the latest from podnews.net with Co-Host's advanced audience demographics. Apple Podcasts shared the most popular podcasts of 2024. There's more to the lists than just the US though. We've compiled a list of the top shows in most English speaking countries, plus a way for you to view the top charts for 33 different places. You'll find that linked from our show notes and our newsletter at podnews.net.
Podcast host Ausha has launched two new tools as part of its podcast search optimization features. The PSO Checker gives recommendations to help optimize your titles, descriptions and tags. And the PSO Live Search lets you compare your podcast with your competitors. Spotify playlists and podcasts are being abused by spammers to link to pirate websites. That's according to Digital Music News, noting six second podcasts that actually serve to link to websites. This isn't entirely new.
Back in 2022, RSS.com's Alberto Batella shared details of how that company deals with spam podcasts, mostly promoting Dubai sex workers. Journalists in Europe are being invited to take part in the European Podcast Academy, a five-day educational event dedicated to advancing the art of podcasting. The event is in Milan in Italy in mid-March. The Australian Podcast Ranker was released for October.
Triton Digital is set to announce a new ranker capability that will rank the podcast category by monthly listener and integrate Triton demos plus data. If you're a registered owner of a Focusrite audio interface, you get to claim a free set of the iZotope Ozone 11 Elements Mastering plugin today. More details in our show notes and our newsletter at podnews.net. Libsyn Ads have announced an exclusive ad partnership with Envy Media's Humblebrag with Crystal and Cynthia.
And Libsyn also released the company's download statistics. Apple Podcasts improved its download share in October, up by 0.8%. And yes, we know it's not a great number to measure, but it's the only one we have. In people news, Jim Ballas has been promoted to General Manager of Measurement at Magellan AI. Ballas will oversee the company's growing suite of measurement solutions.
And congratulations to Jen Sargent, the CEO of Wondery, and the former publisher of the Podcast Business Journal, Streamline Media's Deborah Parenti, for being among those honored in the Gracie's Leadership Awards. It's Wednesday, so it's time for an extra tech stuff with RSS.com. And if you're producing creator transcripts in RSS, then the WebVTT format allows you to specify speaker names, which appear in Apple Podcasts transcripts, and work with web browsers too.
So if you're only going to support one format, we'd recommend that one. But while the WebVTT format has no formal line length definition, we'd recommend no more than 65 characters per line. It'll help podcast apps display captions and adds better timing information. We've details of how to achieve that if you're using Whisper in our show notes and our newsletter at podnews.net.
An enhanced podcast location tag is coming to Podcasting 2.0, which lets you associate shows and episodes with locations. There's a JavaScript tag generator and a specification discussion for you to have a look at. And if you show podcast descriptions and episode notes, as we've already mentioned, spammers are out and they're targeting podcast directories to hope that you link out to their naughty websites.
Our podcast pages mark all links from podcasts as rel=ugc, which is Google's recommendation. Essentially, it makes those links worthless to spammers, and you might want to check that you're doing the same. And in podcast news, we've covered the launch of "Roots", the new show for British train company LNER. A few weeks ago, we mentioned that the show is even being promoted in station platform announcements. Well, here's what that sounds like.
#AUDIO - The next guest on the podcast is Candice Brathwaite. "Table Read" has just hit 5 million downloads and continue to keep a top 10 spot on Apple's fiction chart for 74 consecutive weeks. It's also among the first podcasts to secure a SAG-AFTRA partnership, setting a new benchmark in audio storytelling and creator protections.
Each episode features a selection of exceptional award-winning scripts performed live by a talented cast of up to 20 working actors in a world-class studio. Also in podcast news today, Pantsuit Politics has joined Lemonada Media. "Stop blaming boomers," says the host of new podcast, "Grandparenthood". Okay, boomer.
"Views on First" is new from the Knight First Amendment Institute, exploring the ways the US government uses the border as a justification for censorship and surveillance. The Bruce Lee podcast launched its eighth season today, featuring six new episodes with sports and entertainment luminaries and a new comedy podcast launched last week from Absolute Radio's Andy Bush about the always hilarious subject of death.
"DeadPod" looks at famous deaths in TV soap operas, villainous deaths in popular fiction, dead technology, strange burial rituals in ancient civilizations, incredibly weird historical deaths. Bush and co-host Brian Murphy will cover it all. And this podcast is sponsored by CoHost. Get in-depth insights into who your podcast audience is, including income, family members, social media habits, age, and more with CoHost's advanced audience demographics. You can book a demo today.
You'll find the link in our show notes. And that's the latest from our newsletter to read all the stories and subscribe. We're at podnews.net.