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Fans trust the creators they listen to as much - or more than - their own friends, according to new research released today. The data, from SmithGeiger commissioned by Wondery, also suggests that clips are almost twice as effective as word-of-mouth in bringing new viewers to a show. 71% trust their favorite creator over social media influencers, too. The report is a free download.
First look: Podcast ads are getting more targeted - Triton Digital announced the integration of Datonics audience data into its ad platform. The company suggests ad-buyers will gain the ability to target precisely and reach new audiences.
Is Apple Podcasts appearing correctly in your podcast statistics? Listen to a podcast episode using Apple Podcasts (without auto-downloading it first), and it appears to make three download requests - two marked bytes=0-1 which the IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines v2.3 say should be disregarded: the only one that counts is the one marked "AppleCoreMedia" - which hasn't been used by Apple Podcasts as a user-agent since Mar 2023.
- (To check the user-agent, we used our guide here. We're running iOS 27.2 beta; but this behaviour was also present in the public release of iOS 27.)
- The IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines v2.3 were made final on Sep 29.

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