Sponsored by SpotsNow. Want to fill more ad space? SpotsNow's AI Search routes advertisers to the right shows by audience fit, at the time of planning. Set up a free account, list your shows, and requests land straight in your ad sales inbox. Book a demo today The world's funniest podcast festival returns this October. Cheerful Earful will be in London, Brighton, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Dublin and New York from Sep 28 - Oct 28, with the largest lineup in the festival's history. Is video the future for podcasting? It depends, suggests Losh Moodaley, writing for Podnews today - the hidden economics of the price of visibility mean you might consider calculating your own video threshold: when does it make sense to add video so that it starts funding itself? In Dec 2024, the BBC World Service ran an investigation on harmful health misinformation on Steven Bartlett's podcast, and focused on claims by Thomas Seyfried. Private Eye reports that FlightStory's Diary of a CEO has welcomed Thomas Seyfried back in an episode released on Jul 16, which also acts as a fundraiser for Seyfried's work. Seyfried claims that chemotherapy and radiotherapy are little better than medieval quackery, and the real way to beat cancer is a ketogenic diet - claims that could significantly harm listeners if they followed them without real medical advice. Bartlett quietly announced a commitment to on-screen fact-checking in Nov 2025 - but, these notes are invisible to audio listeners, and there is no link to any document in the podcast episode notes. In the YouTube video, there's a link marked "Independent Fact Check", but it's truncated, and doesn't work. An article in The Sunday Times yesterday noted that his show is nearing the size of Joe Rogan's. FlightStory's PR company told us that "Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO recorded 86 million views in May, roughly three times the 35 million logged by Joe Rogan's podcast in the same period. DOAC also added over a million new subscribers during that window, while Rogan stayed flat." There's also a paid article today by Nick Hilton in today's i paper, titled "How Steven Bartlett fooled the world", which highlights recent guests, queries his continued establishment approval, and notes that Bartlett has, curiously, turned comments off for his podcasts o