From Toronto, the latest from our daily newsletter at podnews.net with Red Circle. The podcast industry might be bigger than you think. New research from Hernan Lopez's Owl & Co suggests that the global podcast economy is $7.3 billion and says that the US makes up two-thirds of that. The enlarged figure comes from including video and consumer revenue like Patreon and others.
The London Standard newspaper has partnered with podcast producer Message Heard to lead the development and production of the Standard's award-winning audio output. It's the first such partnership for a UK news brand. What are plays on Spotify? Since the announcement yesterday that Spotify is adding a play count to its app, we've been trying to learn how a play is defined.
But Spotify doesn't want to say, just that it's intended to capture user intent using a number of proprietary signals. As a by-product, starts will disappear from the creator dashboard as well. Now, YouTube has also never published how it calculates plays, so both companies are now using opaque proprietary numbers as the primary consumption metric for creators. And popular podcast Sips, Suds & Smokes has announced it's to come off Spotify.
They say Spotify has made the decision to make non-IAB metrics publicly available. They've misrepresented data associated with the show on repeated occasions. This causes confusion with our advertisers that rely on IAB data, and that confusion directly impacts our ad revenue. Why doesn't Sir Michael Palin have a podcast? It's not even an ex-podcast. It didn't cease to be.
It hasn't shuffled off its mortal coil, nor has it joined the choir invisible, because Michael Palin has never made one. The Crossed Wires podcast festival will seek to change that in a live on-stage podcast called Nobody Expects the Michael Palin Podcast. Pre-sale tickets are available now for the event, hosted by Greg James, whose chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear. Fear and surprise. His two weapons are fear and surprise.
Podscribe added new features, including Spotify video modelling. The tool now models Spotify video views, but those numbers are, however, based on performance of the ad in the RSS audio. As part of a larger set of content announcements, Samsung announced a new partnership with Spotify to launch a dedicated video podcast channel featuring the Ringer's most popular shows. The channel will appear on Samsung TV+.
And comedy podcasts still dominate the attention economy and are the smartest bet for brands, says Adalicious CEO Andrew Goldsmith in a blog post we link to today. And in podcast news, the EFF's How to Fix the Internet is back for a sixth season today. The first guest is Kate Bertasch from the Digital Defence Fund, discussing how digital autonomy and bodily autonomy go hand in hand. And in the On The Media feed, the second season of The Divided Dial, which looks into radio.
This season, the untold story of shortwave radio, a cousin of AM and FM radio that, while less listened to, nevertheless has the distinct capacity to extend its broadcasts beyond national borders. And this podcast is sponsored by Red Circle. 10,000 and more paid ad opportunities to podcasters of all sizes delivered. If you want one too, you should sign up with Red Circle. There's a link in our show notes.
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