This is The Download from Sounds Profitable, the most important news from this week and why it matters to people in the business of podcasting. I'm Newton Shuttlecott. And I'm Gavin Gaddis. The Download is brought to you by Podscribe. Find out more at podscribe.com. This week, the Business of Video Podcasting Summit, video as a new user, why gaming should be looking at podcasts, and what counts as a play. Let's get started.
Continuing Sounds Profitable's mission of empowering the business of podcasting and promoting collaboration, we will be holding our first standalone topic-focused event on Monday, May 5th at HeadGum Studios in Los Angeles. The event will be capped at around 60 attendees with discussion topics led by key individuals in the video podcasting space. The goal is to have those key figures guide conversations as well as sharing examples and candid details about video podcasting.
their successes, their failures, building clarity on the state of video production and getting the industry on the same page regarding wants and needs for video podcast platforms. Change can happen if podcasting asks for them. collectively as an unavoidable unified front. Due to the limited capacity of the event, the event is open to only one person per Sounds Profitable Partner Company. The fee for attending is bringing a brand with them.
not an agency you're holding company, as their guest. Current partners, interested parties, and brands can sign up with a form link in the show notes. This Wednesday from Brian Barletta, the first of a two-part article series looking at the current state of Spotify video and the user experience on the app. In preparation for the article, Barletta started a net new Spotify account and used it for a month.
His findings include a much heavier reliance on suggesting video products to him as a new user, even when he expressed interest in the same audio focused podcasts he'd been consuming on his old account. Then there's the disconnect and discoverability between audio and video. A quote from the article, quote, on the mobile app, when browsing through the podcast section of the home tab, a video starts playing when you center on a specific show.
For audio-only podcasts, that video is presented as a waveform with the cover art of the show. For video podcasts, it's the beginning of an episode. Both experiences autoplay on mute by default with subtitles. While you can toggle the audio on or off, you can't stop the video from playing if it's still on screen. Here's where the format starts to change the experience the most. An audio podcast plays a preview of around one minute.
We've seen variations from 57 seconds to 1 minute and 6 seconds, so the preview does not cut off mid-sentence, and either plays from the absolute beginning of the episode or a specific section set either by Spotify or the podcaster. Scrolling down and back up restarts the clip, with no way to continue listening to the full episode from where you left the clip.
While some audio podcasts are uploading video clips, not full videos, that can be seen within the specific episode page, this autoplay preview doesn't use them." Meanwhile, video podcasts autoplay the episode in question as soon as you scroll onto the panel, pausing and resuming as soon as you leave or come back.
Barletta calls for the business of podcasting to consider the new user experience for someone net new to podcasting. Someone who signs up for a Spotify premium account and encounters podcasts for the first time via this system. He encourages readers to emulate his experience, starting fresh with a new account and seeing what podcasting looks like from that perspective.
This Thursday from Edward Fuller, CEO of Media Bodies, in addition to the ongoing Sounds Profitable Thought Leadership article series in which Fuller discusses podcasting historically attracting performance-based marketing channels. With that in mind, there's one industry that heavily relies on performance channels with deterministic attribution. Video games. A quote from Fuller. Quote, we're armed with data on the typical podcast consumer.
We've seen that close to 90% of podcast consumers are aged 18 to 54. This means the generation with the most disposable income currently and the generation that will move on to having the most disposable income over the next decade are primary consumers of the channel.
The average podcast listener in the U.S. is also more likely than the population average to have a household income of over $75,000. Those high-value consumers with purchasing power game marketers are looking for? They're listening to podcasts. And, quote, the next step is demonstrating to game marketers that podcasting gets them in front of ideal audiences who actively pay to support brands that sponsor their favorite shows.
This Monday from Bumper, Dan Meisner brings us a piece aiming to help consolidate and compare audio and video podcast data from various platforms with different methodologies for representing how people engaged with a piece of media. Apple Podcasts, for instance, tracks a play metric. According to Bumper's reporting, while a play seems similar to a YouTube View or Spotify stream, the true definition of an Apple Podcast play is a user hitting the play button.
Which is to say, if a user pauses an episode and then resumes twice throughout, that's three plays in one playback session. While the secret sauce of what constitutes a YouTube play remains secret, it's widely accepted that YouTube and Spotify's consumption metrics combine a play initiation along with a necessary threshold of media consumed before it counts as a play.
While raw Apple plays might be different than Spotify and YouTube, Apple's episode retention data and listener count can be used to estimate an equivalent play metric similar to how Spotify estimates streams. As a result, This is what Bumper uses to calculate Apple plays in their dashboard. A quote from Meisner, quote, It's possible to add views, streams, and estimated plays together, but that doesn't mean they're equally valuable.
Quarters, dimes, and nickels are all coins, but they have different values. So if part of your podcast goal is for people to spend time with your show, I recommend looking at play counts alongside listen time. Because if you're optimizing for time spent with your show, the reach engagement tradeoff looks very different across platforms, end quote.
Finally, it's time for our quick hits. These are articles that didn't quite make the cut for today's episode, but are still worth including in your weekend reading. This week, the fourth annual Signal Awards are now open for entries.
This year's edition of the Signal Awards is expanding to include new categories, including the introduction of separate best host categories for news, politics, culture, and documentary. Also added this year is partnership with industry platforms and publishers like YouTube, TED. on air fast, good tape, and sounds profitable. Podscribe has announced a new integration with fairing to enable viewing pixel promo and post-purchase survey results all in one place without manual data reconciliation.
The new feature has been added to the dashboard at no extra cost to Podscribe attribution clients. Spreaker opens inventory to contextual and brand suitability targeting with Sounder. The new integration brings Sounder's AI-powered end-to-end audio intelligence platform to Spreaker's podcast platform.
Baratonic has partnered with True Native Media to publish the podcast advertising efficacy guide, a resource designed to help marketers identify the most effective types of podcast ads, learn how brands are using pre-market testing and brand lift studies. and how data-driven audio strategies improve ROI. RSS.com has received IAB certification. As of February 28th, the podcast platform RSS.com has received IAB podcast measurement guidelines version 2.2 compliance.
The first time RSS.com has been certified. Gen Z and video podcast. The numbers speak loudly by Stephen Goldstein. In preparation for debuting a new report titled The State of Video Podcasting 2025 next week alongside Coleman Insights. Goldstein has released and analyzed a slide of info from the survey of 1,000 respondents who've consumed a podcast in the past month. The power of in-person discussion to promote and advance podcasting as an essential part of the greater media landscape.
Podcasting magazine Good Tape has launched Off the Record, a community-centered media business that facilitates real-time dialogues between podcast executives, creatives, and brands. AdsWiz and Nielsen have renewed and extended an agreement to provide Nielsen's data activations and audience targeting capabilities within AdsWiz's ad tech, including Nielsen Marketing Cloud and other third-party data sets.
And that was the download brought to you by Sounds Profitable. I know we went through today's stories fast, so be sure to check out the links to every article mentioned right in your podcast listening app or on the download section of soundsprofitable.com. And thank you for sticking with us as we bring you the top stories you might have.
might have missed from the past week. I'm Newton Shuttlecotti. And I'm Gavin Gaddis. Our producers are myself, Newton Shuttlecotti, Brian Barletta, and Tom Webster. Special thanks to you for joining us. Robot. Download complete.