From our daily newsletter, the latest from podnews.net. Basically, it's time, folks. It's time. WTF is coming to an end. One of the longest-running and most popular podcasters, Mark Maron, is to end his podcast, WTF, after 16 years. The final episode of the Acast-hosted show will be sometime in the fall, the comedian says. That he and his producer, Brendan, are burnt out. This is a full-hearted decision. It's the right decision for me. It's the right decision for Brendan.
It's okay. It's okay for things to end. It's just time, folks. Elsewhere, eight kids' podcasts are working together to grow podcast listening with the Summer Listening Challenge. Inspired by classic library reading programs, kids get a certificate for taking part and a special video message. If they finish all 16. The Podcasting Seriously Awards Fund has awarded its 300th grant. The fund covers submission fees for producers, editors and others up to $200 per calendar year per creator.
Canadian creative agency Sequel has become the fund's latest partner. A Scottish voiceover, Gayanne Potter, claims she's had her voice stolen and used as the voice of Scott Rail, a train operator. She spoke with AI Haven't a Clue, telling them that she'd recorded voice samples in 2021 for ReadSpeaker, believing that it would only be used for e-learning and accessibility. She's calling for tighter regulations. ReadSpeaker says it's repeatedly addressed her claims.
Meanwhile, the Orson Welles estate has approved an AI voice clone of the actor to produce an audio guide, which is available within the Story Rabbit app. The actor died in 1985. Radio is becoming even more like podcasting with the launch of a nightly radio show and podcast called True Crime Tonight. The show goes live this week on 20 broadcast radio stations throughout the US. In Australia, digital audio advertising is up by 18% year on year to $49.6 million.
Digital video advertising is 15 times larger, though, an increase by 23% to $748 million. Here's a thing we didn't spot. Acast Plus is going away, as mentioned at the bottom of a press release in April. The tool offered podcast subscriptions. The company's teamed up with Supercast. Sometimes the biggest stories are in the last paragraph. And if you want a page with just some random podcasts on it, well, we've just built one. Podnews.net slash podcasts slash random. And thank you.
We've two new personal supporters. UChicago Digital and Ben Robbins from Sound Insights. We're super grateful to personal supporters like this. They help pay for Podnews so we can keep this free for everyone. And you can join them by supporting us at podnews.net slash Patreon. It's a Monday, so time for some tech stuff with RSS.com. Have you been sent a piece of spam from someone called Don Scott trying to sell you a .podcast domain? Well, if you have, there's no such thing.
He's selling you a Web3 cryptocurrency-backed alternate root domain. It's a domain name that doesn't work with your phone or your laptop without additional software and a domain name that web search engines will never see because they're not available through the regular internet. We'd suggest you kept your money. Buzzsprout's monthly platform stats for May show an increase in market share for Spotify of more than 3%. Total downloads of Buzzsprout shows were down 5% in the month.
Data from Transistor matched that trend with an increase for Spotify and a decrease for Apple Podcasts. Livewire reported a set of data for May 2025. New episode market share for Spotify and Spreaker, the top two podcast hosts, were relatively static. Libsyn returned to a worst-ever figure after a slight improvement last month. In terms of CDNs used, Amazon CloudFront hosts 60.7% of all podcast episodes, including this one.
And in podcast news, Turkish Airlines serves more countries than any other airline, and their podcast Turkish Airlines series has nine episodes, everything from what to see in Istanbul to tech travel tips, where to find the best Turkish food, and how to keep the kids entertained while traveling. The show is also available on board using the in-flight entertainment system. And that's the latest from our newsletter. To read all the stories and subscribe for free, we're at podnews.net.