Pod Slop
According to new data from Podcast Index, more than a third of all new podcasts being created right now are AI-generated, and one company alone, Inception Point AI, is responsible for nearly a quarter of all new podcast output.
Jeanine Wright, the CEO of Inception Point AI told the Hollywood Reporter, “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life.”
Podcasting became one of the most powerful mediums on the planet precisely because it is deeply, irreducibly human, a real person’s voice, perspective, and personality coming through your earbuds like a conversation with a friend. The whole value proposition of this medium is intimacy, and you cannot manufacture intimacy with a language model churning out five-minute episodes about the definition of the word ‘literally.’ AI-generated slop is not the future of podcasting; it’s noise that the best creators in this space will rise above, but we should all be paying attention to how fast that noise is growing.
Image created by Inception Point AI
And the Winner is…
One podcast that’s all human: Beneath the Law by Gavin Tighe and Stephen Thiele.
They just received a Mondaq Thought Leadership Award for their episode “He Shoots, He’s Charged.” And it’s well deserved.
This is a sharp podcast focused on legal cases and political commentary, always mindful that if no one is above the law… then everyone is beneath it.
We’ve had the pleasure of producing Beneath the Law since it launched in October 2024. Congratulations, Gavin and Stephen. 🎉
Why Brands Are Looking Beyond the Big Shows
The podcast industry is shifting its focus from mega-shows to mid-sized creators, and that's good news for independents. Executives at last month's NAB Show made the case that shows with around 100,000 downloads can be highly attractive to advertisers. Especially direct-response brands that care more about engaged, targeted listeners than raw scale.
New tools like programmatic buying and improved analytics are making it easier for brands to find the right audiences, while YouTube is emerging as a major discovery engine, helping creators reach listeners well beyond their home markets.
AI is also playing a growing role in streamlining production and matching brands with the right shows more efficiently.
What Kind of Content Works Best in AI Search
Vince Nero at Buzzstream looked into this.
Here are his top findings and keep in mind prompt type has substantial impact on outputs:
No single site dominates AI citation. Reddit leads at just 3.49%
Prompt type drives citations more than domain
Blog/content makes up 53.46% of all citations, far ahead of news (14.09%) and social (8.71%)
Owned content appears in ~40% of brand awareness queries.
Earned media accounts for ~80% of citations when brand-agnostic queries are excluded
ChatGPT is more controllable, with 68.9% of citations coming from owned content
Social citations skew toward the bottom of the funnel, with 18% of evaluative queries vs. ~5% for informational queries
Reddit drives 39.87% of social citations
There’s a complex but important story playing out in Canada involving two podcasters accused in court of running a campaign of harassment and intimidation. I’ve written a simplified story on LinkedIn.
Cleveland.com's AI Avatar Disaster Has a Simple Lesson for Podcasters
Cleveland.com replaced its podcast hosts with AI-generated cartoon avatars to promote its shows on social media, using the hosts’ real voices but cheerful animated likenesses instead of, well, the actual people.
The backlash was swift and universal.
But the real mistake wasn’t using AI, it’s that a local news audience built on trust in real journalists is about the worst possible fit for AI slop promos.
Know your listeners: a tech or AI podcast could pull this off without a second thought, but if your audience follows you for human credibility, sending a cartoon in your place is a fast way to tell them you don’t get them at all.
Image from Cleveland.com
Other Stuff
Riverside.FM is launching new upgrades to its editor
New Sounds Profitable research shows one in four American adults have never listened to a podcast. They’re typically female, older, and lower income
Amazon creates the World’s least necessary podcast
Podcasting drives brand engagement ahead of World Cup
Apple’s Q2/26 fiscal results came out last week. Services Revenue, which revenue from Apple Podcasts subscriptions, reached an all time high of $31 billion, up 16.3%
SiriusXM leans into video as podcast revenue jumps 37% in Q1
If you’re in the Toronto area Soundwave Summit is happening Saturday (May 9) at the Harbourfront Centre
Lynda Steele is a longtime friend of mine and she’s just launched a new podcast “Change My Mind, with Lynda Steele.” Lynda is a longtime journalist. Each episode she takes a position on a hot topic or complex issue, then sits down with an expert, not to debate, but to listen and learn