Spotify Signs Nebula for Video, Kids' Podcasts Cut 📱Time, & More

Just before Parliament dissolved for the U.K.’s  pre-election period, the Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumers Bill was passed. This move opens the door for the replication of Australian legislation that, among other things, compels tech companies to pay news publishers for information lifted out of articles and shared for free in a search result. The Digital Markets Bill demands relevant tech platforms not apply discriminatory terms, conditions, or policies to certain users or use their market position to treat their own products more favorably than competitors. [Source]

Nebula, a paid streaming service founded in 2019 to serve as a creator-owned alternative to YouTube multi-channel networks, has signed on to bring content from top Nebula creators to Spotify’s video podcast platform. The initial slate of creators includes music reviewer Todd in the Shadows, movie review series CinemaWins, and video essayists like F.D. Signifier and Kat Blaque. [Source]

The 2023 holiday season was the first time mobile-revenue share outweighed desktop-based purchases, reaching 61% on Christmas Day according to Adobe data. That said, consumers prefer pulling the trigger on larger purchases from the perceived safety of a desktop environment, to the point the term “big-screen purchase” has been coined. The gulf between the two environments boils down to a wider need for better attribution. Mobile purchases are more appealing to retailers as they give more data, while the same is not true for desktop environments. [Source]

The skyrocketing growth of the Kids & Family podcast genre is leading educators to reframe their views on the medium. Audio podcasts have the ability to swap out screen time with audio-based leisure time, as well as have the ability to be educational tools. Effectively continuing the mission of child-focused audio companies all the way back to the mid-1970s with the founding of Books on Tape. [Source]

With a series of announcements involving publishers selling their content to companies like OpenAI to train their AI systems, Guaglione lists out the positives and negatives of publishers helping build large language models (LLMs). For pros, it monetizes a publisher’s archive and potentially creates traffic possibilities if AI chatbots quote excerpts with direct links to the full article. Cons include being underpaid as publishers have a lack of leverage, the deals lack transparency, and they could be helping build tools that eventually replace them with automatically-written SEO-optimized content. Such as The Verge’s protest article from early April that used Google’s Gemini AI to re-review a printer using SEO-bait tactics like dozens of hyperlinks, AI-generated text, and a nonsensical headline built entirely of keywords. The article proved its point by immediately rocketing to the top of search engine charts for the phrase “best printer.” [Source]

To illuminate audience perceptions and expectations, Sounds Profitable’s latest study surveyed 1,000 weekly podcast listeners. The new study, Ad Nauseum, debuts Wednesday, June 12th at 3:00 p.m. EST.

How much is too much when it comes to podcast advertising? The truth is elusive: ask someone how many ads are too many, and they will likely tell you "one", but as study after study has shown, podcast advertising works and works well, all the same. Join Tom Webster on June 12th for a free 30 minute dive into Ad Nauseam’s findings.

…as for the rest of the news:

• Libsyn has published their IAB Podcast Upfront takeaways and the May 2024 podcast advertising rates on Libsyn Ads ($21.63 CPM, down $0.27 from April and $1.71 year-over-year)

• Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights have published the Spring Podcast Download report, including a finding that podcast consumption might be undercounted due to co-listening. 

• BBC journalists say podcasting allows them to have a more relaxed relationship with their audience than traditional broadcasting.

• MSNBC has announced a premium podcast subscription with Apple.

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