Podcast Hall of Fame pays its respects

Dave Ramsey led tributes to Dan Miller, the host of the 48 Days to the Work You Love podcast, at the Podcast Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Friday evening. The popular podcaster was given the recognition posthumously, accepted by his family who attended the event. He died in Jan 2024. The awards also remembered Hall of Famer Todd Cochrane, who passed away last September.

New inductees to the Hall of Fame included former attorney at EFF Julie Samuels, who successfully fought a legal battle against a patent troll, Captivate founder Mark Asquith, Podcast Partnership's Paul Colligan, PRX's Kerri Hoffman, Arielle Nissenblatt, and our Editor, James Cridland. A video of the event, hosted by John Lee Dumas, is on the Podcast Hall of Fame website.

UK podcast company Goalhanger has announced it has more than 250,000 paid subscribers. Each paid subscriber pays on average £6 a month or £60 a year (US $8 / $80), suggesting that the company earns around $20mn a year from paid subscribers.

Assuming Apple Podcasts is responsible for 50% of those subscriptions, that suggests Apple earns between $1.5mn and $3mn per year from Goalhanger. Supporting Cast, who Goalhanger use for other platforms, charges 10% (perhaps earning $1mn from the other 50%).
Paid subscribers get shows ad-free. Given two shows a week per subscriber, that's at least 26 million downloads delivered ad-free; assuming 4 ads per episode at $20 CPM, that's a loss of around $2mn in ad revenue.

Do people turn to podcasts for breaking news? Yes, they do. Podcast411's Rob Walch, speaking at Podfest, discovered that durations for the top 200 (US) episodes in Apple Podcasts dipped notably on 3rd January - with the median duration dropping from 58 minutes to just 51 minutes. The reason? The capture of Nicolás Maduro: many more shows that day were news shows, as audiences caught up with the news.