Spotify announced that week that Joe Rogan’s huge podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, will to Spotify-and only be available as a Spotify exclusive. This continues Spotify’s aggressive push into the podcast space, following blockbuster acquisitions of The Ringer and Gimlet.

This has helped Spotify surge into the most important player in the podcast space outside of Apple. And you have to give them credit for their choice of acquisitions. The Ringer and Gimlet have proven to be excellent podcast producers, so they’re buying talent that can develop shows and drive new content for Spotify.

With Rogan, Spotify grabs one of the top podcasts with 90 million downloads per month, and the exclusive nature of the deal will drive more downloads of the Spotify app. Spotify can sell ads on the show for users who down’t buy a subscription, but then can drive more subscribers by offering the show ad-free to subscribers. Frankly it’s a brilliant play and is money well spent.

Meanwhile, this deal is a huge blow to Libsyn, which will host the Joe Rogan podcast until September. Libsyn has been a hosting leader in the podcasting space, but now has many competitors and has lost their main source of downloads and prestige.

Discoverability remains a challenge in the podcasting industry. Apps are generally getting better, but it’s still very difficult for new podcasts to be noticed.

As a result, SEO can be a very important tool to help listeners discover your podcast. But SEO also presents a challenge, so you have to utilize best practices when posting your podcast and podcast episodes. Here are a few tips:

Create show notes with a descriptive episode title

Too many podcasters pay little attention to the show notes. Other get way to clever and creative with episode titles.

Think about what someone would use to search a podcast with the topic of your episode, and then make sure those key words are in the episode title. A clever title can be fun, but without descriptive key words you’ve made it very difficult for anyone to find the episode with a search.

Also, you’re helping listeners who find your podcast pick an episode they would find most interesting. Remember, podcasting is essentially on demand audio. Tell everyone what the episode is about, and then make sure to get to that topic quickly in the episode, or at least make it clear in your show notes the minute mark where you start discussing the topic.

This is where show notes can be critical. Show notes can enhance the podcast experience by providing useful references and links for someone who want to know more about the topic. It can also be a guide to all topics addressed in an episode. Remember, let listeners know what they can expect to hear in an episode.

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With everyone stuck at home, any business that aims to replace brick and mortar activity with electronic transactions has a change to gobble up new busness.

That’s certainly the case with the fintech business area, as more people look to manage money electronically and avoid going to the bank. And we’re seeing more activity in that area as companies like Paypal and Venmo see a surge in new sign-ups.

Deal activity is picking up in the fintech space as smaller startups that had great promise are being scooped up by the big boys. This M&A activity is expected to accelerate as the market starts to feel the impact of the Coronavirus. We will see the big players such as Paypal, the banks, Visa and Mastercard will be leading the way:

A surge in deals began just as the contagion was spreading. In January Visa announced it would pay $5.3 billion to purchase San Francisco’s Plaid, a tech platform connecting bank accounts to apps, and in February Intuit said it would pay $7.1 billion for Credit Karma. The coronavirus pandemic—and the business disruptions it is causing—will quicken the pace of transactions over the next year. Already, Motif, a 10-year old stock investing fintech backed by Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan that was once valued at $440 million, announced that it would shutter and sell its tech and intellectual property to Charles Schwab. Some like Motif and On Deck will end up in shotgun weddings, but others will find happy marriages of convenience.

Let’s see how this plays out.

Those of us who remember the Web 1.0 world also remember when you could get decent CPM rates for banner ads. Yes, that seems like a lifetime ago, but prior to the Great Recession and the introduction of the iPhone and social media, website owners and bloggers could make decent money on internet advertising.

Tom Webster poses the question as to whether the same thing can happen in the podcasting business:

Great content is expensive to produce, and great advertising native to that content’s form and delivery is well worth a premium. But if several large players in the space start taking poorly executed, irrelevant ads at ultra-low (for podcasting) CPMs, that’s going to have repercussions on the economic feasibility of great audio content.

And that, my friends, is what worries me the most.

Ad delivery technology is progressing rapidly in podcasting, with companies like Megaphone leading the way with dynamic ad insertion and programmatic ads that make it easy to pump ads through tons of podcast episodes. Over time, ad rates for these ads will come down, and then we’ll see if podcasters can still command premium CPMs for host-read ads. So far, the intimacy of podcasting and listener loyalty to hosts has led to excellent performance for these ads. Time will tell . . .