Trio of award wins for DC Thomson podcasts as million milestone reached
Podcasts produced by DC Thomson have taken three prizes in this year’s Publisher Podcast Awards with Energy Voice Out Loud, Author in Your Classroom and the Bunkered Golf Podcast all winning their categories. The awards come as the company marks the milestone of reaching a million downloads since it started podcasting in 2019.
Winning Best B2B Podcast, Energy Voice Out Loud leads the conversation in the energy sector and introduces a significant new revenue stream through a mix of standard sponsorship advertising and, more significantly, through producing native content for clients such as NatWest and Ernst & Young.
Author in Your Classroom won the Best Books & Literature Podcast and introduces young people, their teachers, parents and carers to Aceville’s Plazoom platform with some of the world’s best children’s writers such as Cressida Cowell, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Morpurgo. Each episode is supported with a free resource pack on Plazoom, giving a taster of the subscription product.
The Bunkered Golf Podcast takes ‘Best Sport Podcast’ for a second year in a row, and was praised by judges for the show’s “irreverence and repartee between the hosts” which they said “kept the subject matter fresh and interesting, even to listeners with little knowledge”.
DC Thomson came first equal in this year’s awards with the number of wins it achieved.
The company produces podcasts on themes as diverse as wind energy, potatoes and football. This month it passed the milestone of having its podcasts downloaded more than a million times since it first began podcasting in 2019. In 2021 alone, the company’s podcasts were downloaded 518,000 times, almost double the number of downloads in 2020 (299,000).
According to Christopher Phin, DC Thomson’s head of podcasts, the company is in the top few percent of podcasters worldwide. “Our journalists are learning new skills and finding ways to get closer to their audiences,” he says.
For Christopher, one of the most significant learnings is that while audience growth can be slow, once they’ve started listening, engagement levels (primarily how much of a podcast is listened to) are high. Cross marketing of podcasts across DC Thomson brands has also been shown to increase growth of listeners.
“We’re building momentum and ensuring that commercial thinking is baked into the very beginning of new show development. It’s been a phenomenal year of growth and experimentation,” he says, “and it feels like we’re still just getting started.”
DC Thomson Podcast portfolio:
Gardening podcast The Dirt from Grow Your Own magazine is one of the most listened to programmes, designed to keep listeners company when they’re pottering on their allotment or veg patch while Health & Wellbeing magazine’s Walk To Wellbeing invites listeners to join celebrities on their favourite walks.
Football is covered in three podcasts with over a hundred episodes each. Twa Teams, One Street is where the Evening Telegraph sports team share their obsessions about the two Dundee teams, The Courier sports writers can be found on the Talking Football podcast, and The Press and Journal and Evening Express sports desks are behind Northern Goal.
The Bunkered Golf Podcast discusses the latest big talking points from across the game with ‘plenty of opinions and absolutely zero fluff’.
Out Loud from Energy Voice offers up news, analysis, and expert insight from across the oil, gas and renewable energy sectors, and The Global Franchise covers off news from the team at the magazine of the same name. Political commentators from The Courier, The Press and Journal, the Evening Telegraph and the Evening Express come together for political insights and analysis with a Scottish focus on The Stooshie.
The People’s Friend team delve into their 153-year archives in Reading Between the Lines, the My Weekly Magical Flying Bookshop is a feelgood fiction podcast, and Author in Your Classroom features advice and inspiration from some of the world’s best children’s writers.
An additional podcast, Pass it On from the Sunday Post, shares household tips from the 1950s. Although the programme is on an extended break and didn’t release new episodes in 2021 this evergreen content is still being listened to.
Pilot episodes for a number of other DC Thomson brands have been recorded, and are expected to go live in the coming months.