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• Spotify has launched Creator Milestone Awards, which will be given to podcasts that reach particular streaming levels on Spotify. It’s the first time Spotify has publicly revealed streaming numbers for podcasters across the platform. Like YouTube, award recipients will be hand-delivered a physical Spotify plaque.
  • Gold (500mn+ lifetime streams) includes Joe Rogan, Crime Junkie, Armchair Expert and Last Podcast on the left, but also two German podcasts. One of those, Gemischtes Hack, only has 285 episodes: so each episode has been played an average of 1,750,000 times, just on Spotify. (And even more impressive, when you know there are only about 120mn native German speakers.)
  • There are 13 Silver (250mn+ lifetime streams) awardees, including Call Her Daddy and The Daily, two Spanish podcasts, one German and one Portuguese.
  • There are 83 Bronze (100mn+ lifetime streams) awardees. Podcasts in “emerging markets” get Bronze after just 50mn+ lifetime streams.
• SiriusXM has pulled its video versions of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy from Spotify along with other Unwell Network shows. The shows will be viewable on YouTube and the SiriusXM app. Cooper posted on Instagram saying that you can watch on YouTube “for free”.
• How do you make podcast advertising work better? Don’t make the ads dull and boring. Ads that have emotion or are otherwise interesting can work more than six times better than boring ones, according to a set of research compiled by Westwood One’s Pierre Bouvard. There’s a PDF, a video, and a white paper to download.

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