Ad Removal Filtering Hits Podcasting - New Media Show 11-29-2023

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Yes, we do. We're back for another New Media Show, and, uh, yes we are, and we are doing it live just like, uh, was said in the intro. That's a very famous intro, do it live.

Yeah, and you know, it's, uh, and, and of course I'm, I'm remote, so I'm not in the studio, and I'm in a very echoey room with no carpet, right? Bare. So it's like, yeah, it's only so much you can do with, uh, with the audio when you have a, you know, essentially a box. Unless I wrap myself in a towel or something.

Wrap yourself in bubble wrap.

Yeah. Did you have a good Thanksgiving?

Yeah, I certainly did. So it was relaxing, which is always a good thing, you know, around the holidays is always a good thing. So we're coming up on December too, but we're going to keep doing episodes of the show as much as we can. So we're definitely excited to be back. And, and I know I did an episode last week with James Cridland and Sam Sethi, and that was a terrific episode too. So it's— we're back on StreamYard again, and this is a, this is a great platform. So if you have any comments or questions in, in YouTube or LinkedIn or any of the platforms here, it'll show up in my comment thread here and we can display it on the screen here. So if you have any questions or comments, we can get you involved in the, in the show here, which is a little bit different than our normal show that Todd and I do. But, but anyway, Todd, I don't know if you wanted to start off with anything or, or we can just kind of roll into the news.

Well, you know, I, you know, I saw this news about this new app. Yeah, that's going to allow, uh, you know, allow listeners to skip the ads. Yeah, it's pre-built into the platform. So, uh, I just wonder what kind of technology they're using to, to do that.

Well, it's kind of a—

I'm sure that's gonna— go ahead.

Yeah, it's kind of a controversial thing too because it's, it's almost like they're they're removing the ads. So, you know, there's implications for that. Does that mean that they're creating a cached copy or are they running an algorithm that's looking for ads and just not playing them? Or, you know, there's a lot of speculation about exactly how they're doing it. But it was funny, the statement said, Uh, why opt out is no harm, um, being done, right?

Well, what it is, is, you know, it's kind of funny, is that the, uh, the situation allows them to get credit for the download. So in other words, what they, what they're really doing here is they've, they've made it so that it looks like everything's being played, assumed I'd love to see the log files from a playback from this device, and we'll have to get on that once they, uh, you know, we'll set something up and see what we can see. But it makes me wonder if they, if they actually do pull all the bits and then just jump you, uh, you know, to the next spot. It's right. I don't know if it just jumps because I can't imagine that they're, they're doing— they're not going to do any rehosting on these files. They're just gonna right, make them such that, you know, so it's really unfair, um, you know, and you probably are legally liable if you know this company or this app is, is removing ads. I think you're legally liable not to, not to count those. Yeah, and reporting—

well, that and that. And also, you know, I think generally the industry has been concerned about this kind of technology blocking podcast ads for a long time now. So it's, it's interesting that this is happening, and I, I'm wondering how it detects what a host read is versus a programmatic ad. And maybe this is primarily targeting programmatic radio-like ads that actually have like, you know, like maybe a change in the frequencies or, or you know, but a host read ad is usually read by the host. So it's the same content, right, as what's in the content itself. So I'm not sure how they're doing that. So this may only apply to programmatic or dynamically inserted ads.

In the end though, if you think about it, Apple CarPlay lets you reach right up and advance 30 seconds.

Yeah.

Most of the apps on your phone has the ability to fast forward. So is this really any different than someone hitting Fast Forward? I think that's what it is in a sense, because they're publicly saying that they're doing this. So, you know, I don't think there's anything to get too excited about because number one, are they even going to get any market share? You know, are they going to?

Well, yeah, that's a— that's even another layer to this because they're charging $5.99 a month. $5.99 a month to the platform.

So yeah, no, non-starter. $6 a month, you kidding me?

Yeah, so they're trying to extract value from being an ad blocking platform from their listeners, um, because they think that they're going to save listeners all this time and, and all this kind of stuff.

And I don't think they understand how listeners support podcasts, right?

Right. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

I mean, did they even talk to listeners?

Oh, I'm sure they didn't. This, this sounds so much like a contrived business model that it doesn't, doesn't make a lot of sense, actually. Um, I mean, nobody's going to sign up for this, right? I don't think anybody's going to sign up for this, right?

Well, if they— except for the, uh, shows that are pre-loaded. Yeah, and then those shows may come in and do a cease and desist and ask for the show to be removed.

Well, yeah, and that's, that's a bigger question for podcasters. Do they have a choice in being included in this, or can they opt out?

Well, you know, this is where we go back to some of the podcasting— yeah, this is where we go back to some of the Podcasting 2.0 stuff. If you You could set the block flag for that specific app. And if they honored that, they would have to remove it. But again, you know, they'd have to support the, support the tag and that feature. So, you know, we just added that here recently, and we put a big caution on there, says, yeah, you can block a platform, but you may not, you know, you may still have to go over and tell them to do it because they may not honor the what's in the metadata.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

So I also noticed that, uh, Castro folks, um, have been unwinding their iOS app for, uh, for a few months now. It's— it seems like that there's been a slow drip of departures from the, the team.

Uh, well, apparently the years down is Isn't the app down?

Yeah, yeah, it's actually—

you gotta be careful. There's a hosting company and then there is an app. This is the app, it's not the hosting company.

Yeah, this is the listening app, I believe, right?

Yeah.

So I would imagine this company is probably either going to get sold quickly somewhere for pennies on the dollar, or it's just going to get shut down, would be my, my guess. But it looks like there's an exit stage left going on with the team here over the last— actually, the last couple of years.

So it is the season. You know, historically we've seen podcast apps and platforms, you know, get close to the end of the fiscal year and start looking at the math and say, okay, this isn't being viable no more and we're going to end operations in December so that we can close out our tax books for— right., you know, do I have to carry into January, you know, into January? So, right, uh, this is the time of the season when this stuff kind of happens.

Yeah, yeah, it was funny. It was funny, the quote here. It says Tiny Capital, which I guess is the, is the owner of the, or the investment company that bought Castro, um, The co-founder was quoted as saying, um, that he removed podcasts from his phone in 2021 because they made him anxious. So not quite—

oh, that's funny.

That's kind of weird.

Makes you anxious.

Wow. I guess, I guess because maybe he owns a company that's not viable. Is that how it's making him anxious? I don't know.

Does he even know? Does he even know he owns a company that does podcasts?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, one of those venture firms that owns, you know, 500 properties and maybe they don't know what they have.

So I, I saw that Apple and PodNews has put out their top shows from around the world for 2023. I don't know if you, if you looked at that, and then the top 10 podcast hosts too.

Did we make the list, huh? Did we make the show make the list?

Well, uh, I don't think so. I don't think this show made, made a list. I, I did notice that it made the top, uh, 2 of, um, James Cridland's most favorite listened to podcasts. So good. That's the— so I guess the Podcasting 2.0, uh, podcast with Adam, Adam and Dave, uh, took the number 1 spot. We were second.

Oh, okay.

Well, cool.

I would expect so. I think that Adam and Dave's show is pretty good too, so, you know.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, really, really, the fact this show came in second—

although we're not lit live today because I'm down a computer.

Oh, okay. Well, you should— I should— let me know how to lit and live it because I took some heat last episode for not Lit and Live.

He did. Well, they're probably gonna take heat from me today too because— oh, right, yeah, one extra box here to, uh, yes. I don't, I don't like traveling with two computers unless I have to.

Yeah, so these, these stats that came out, um, you know, like the top 10 genres in podcasting, the number one in this overall stats, um, that came back, from Apple was that the true crime genre was the, uh, and it's equivalent, I guess, to the culture category, uh, is the top 10, is the first 2 of the top 10. And then comedy is number 3, and news is number 4, education is 5, health and fitness is 6, business is 7, 8 is society and culture, politics is 9, and unknown That's always an interesting category, the unknown category.

I've always liked it. Unknown. Apple knows everything. How can it be?

How can it be unknown? Maybe it's uncategorized, or it— or nobody bothered to fill out the, uh, tag. It's probably more likely.

It's interesting that news is number 4.

Yeah. We shall see on that one, right? Yeah. Well, I think it's, it's the area— it's, it— I, I don't know, is it a news source that is more reliable? Uh, is that why it's growing in its importance? I mean, politics did come in number 9, so it's certainly not political news. Also, it would probably would be in the news category, right? Or, or Or would it be? I don't know. But it's interesting. In the top 10 podcast hosts, it looks like as far as the host that hosted the largest shows, that's kind of— I thought this was what the calculation was.

But it said— Apple said this or James did this?

Well, James and Apple. So it says Apple published a number of charts at popular shows on the platform. These charts were published within the Apple Podcasts app, and only your own country stats are, are visible. So if you're in some other country outside the US, you're going to see your own set. So this is, um, so I guess they only highlighted 140 shows on the platform to come up with these breakdowns. Um, so The number 1 hosting platform is Megaphone with 15 shows. I guess, uh, number 2 was Simplecast. Number 3, which was tied with Simplecast, uh, was Acast with 13. OmniStudio had 12. Spotify for Podcasters surprisingly had 11 of the top shows. And, um, Himalaya, or X-Himalaya, had 5 of— that's really surprising. In the 6th spot. So I thought that was that, that Chinese hosting platform, right? Um, so they're actually pushing stuff out there too. And then number— and then tied with that one was, uh, SoundOn. And then Art19 had 5, and then one called First Story, um, at 9. And then 4 are unknown. Just another one of those unknowns. It was the same unknown at the bottom, right?

Unknown host. It's usually, well, you know, just like, it's probably self-hosted. It's just like, potentially. And, you know, and also like us, we have some clients that are using their own domain names too, or subdomains. So, you know, it's just like, that's when it goes out and he's like, okay, who, who are they, you know, who are they hosting with? And you can't tell.

Yeah, I think that this, this top 10 podcast host ranking was interesting because, yeah, in the top list are platforms that are, are owned by big media companies, right?

Yeah. Um, yeah, you know, and they had big media shows probably, so that's, you know, probably part of it.

Yep. So, you know, Spotify owns Spotify for Podcasts as well as Megaphone, and then, uh, Simplecast is owned by SiriusXM. Yeah, and, uh, doesn't, uh, Cirrus XM also own Omni Studio too?

I think, I believe so. I'm not sure.

Or is that Triton? That could be Triton. But anyway, um, and then Art19 is owned by Amazon. So if you think about the most—

so, you know, what was the purpose of that list? Was that to, uh, you know, cause people that, you know, want to be a top podcast think they need to be over on those podcast hosts? You know what, you know, what's the purpose of this list?

Well, that could be the, the result of it if everyday podcasters are paying attention. Is the, the only thing about that list is that, uh, some of those platforms, I don't know that it's that easy to get on for a podcaster. I think they're, you know, I mean, like a megaphone, the megaphone's the easiest. Yeah. And I would say that Spotify for Podcasters is, is the easiest one, probably. But most of the rest of them, you know, OmniStudio probably is to some degree. Um, but I think it's interesting, um, that this list is comprised of the players that it is, and it does symbolize definitely a shift towards, um, the bigger platforms hosting the bigger shows.

Um, I think is what it— so was Apple help them come up with that list of shows?

It looks like it came from Apple. It came from Apple, right? Which kind of surprises me that there's 4 unknown shows and podcast hosts on the list. Yeah, yeah, it is a little weird. And then on the language side, it says English. Of the 145 shows, it says 45 of them are in the English language, 19 of them are in Chinese, Huh. 10 of them are in Portuguese, 10 of them are in German, 10 in Spanish, 9 in Arabic, 8 in French, 8 in Japanese, which is—

oh, this is explaining a lot here.

Uh, 8 in Swedish, 7 in Korean, and 5 of them none given, and 1 Norwegian.

So it makes sense because You know, I heard— how many was it Portuguese for? Uh, 10. 10. So, you know, and people are like, what 10 shows in Portuguese are in the top 149 in the whole world? And they've never heard—

people have never heard of them before. Well, because each of these countries, uh, US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, and the UK all have— this is a compilation list from what I gather. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's, uh, it's interesting. So it's pulling from all those markets. So I could see a show, you know, in, in, um, you know, 8 shows in Japan showing up in the list, right? Because they're showing up in that ranking list.

Yeah.

So, but it's weighting them based on others, right?

And you've just never ever heard of the show because it's Japanese.

Right. And you're probably never going to listen to it either because you won't understand a word it says.

Right.

And then it says, and then by Apple Podcasts channel. So there's a channel breakdown in here too.

So what did the Arabic one come in at?

How many?

9. Yeah, that—

I'm not surprised.

And then French was 500, I think. What is it, 500? How many Arabic speakers in the world? I used to know this number.

It's huge.

Oh, it's 500 million or something like that. It's at least probably, maybe, right? Yeah, yeah, it's a big—

yeah, I think the one that I was, I think, shocked at the most, that there was 19 Chinese podcasts.

So, well, if you think about it though, I bet you, um, if we looked at those, if we knew what those shows were, I bet they were education shows because that's what's big in Japan— I mean, in China. And of course, that's probably why that one Chinese podcast hosting provider made it on the list. What was it, Badoo or whatever?

Uh, uh, it's actually The same company that launched Himalaya in the US.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I forget what it's called.

Yeah, I can't pronounce it. You read it off, but, but you— so they got to channel this too by channel, right?

Right. So that's Apple Podcast channels. So number 1 was Wondery, number 2 is RTL. Um, and then it looks like a couple of networks out of, um, Scandinavia, uh, and then one called Mike's and iHeartPodcasts, Mamma Mia, The New York Times, Perfect Day, TBS Podcasts, and Audiochuck, and Dateline NBC. So RTL, RTL, yeah, I think that's, um What is that? Um, I can't remember off top of my head.

It's, it's interesting to me that, that Wondery is still number 1. You know, you don't hear a lot coming out of them.

Yeah, that's an Amazon company.

Um, yeah, so they don't hear too much coming out of that camp.

It's pretty quiet. Yeah, I guess they had 4 entries from, from Wondery, so they've got a big team over there. They got a lot of people working working on podcasts at, uh, Wondery. So, right, so anyway, that's what's going on. I'm sure we're boring our audience to death here. I think we have to get into more controversial stuff, Todd.

No, this is just kind of good stuff to go over, you know, and yeah, just, it's interesting, you know. I think what we see is that the podcasting space remains as diverse as it ever has been. Yeah. And I think that, you know, that, that bodes well, um, in, in the, you know, indie creators may be a little bit discouraged by this list, but in the end, um, you know, I think there's a huge number of indie shows that I would kind of term indies that are still being very, very successful in their own right and doing very, very well, right? You know, if you can focus beyond the download number and, you know, and look at how shows are doing, you know, in my opinion, it's— we continue to see growth.

Yeah. Well, speaking of that, um, also showed in Pod News, and thank you, James, for putting that newsletter out every week, every day, actually. He's showing that last week during the Thanksgiving week, um, we saw a drop by 5.5% in new episodes being published. And I'm actually surprised that that number wasn't actually lower than it was, um, which means that, you know, of the 190,000 podcasts out there that are active, most of them published a new episode last week.

Well, you know, of course, with Thanksgiving following on a Thursday, that gives those folks that are publishing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, right, lots of time. They're normal, you know, that's, you know, that's, that's, you know, almost a third or a little more than a third. Yeah. But if I'm looking at the chart here, in the last 10 days, 231,000 shows have published a new episode. So, you know, it's, it's, it's just, you know, 5% in my opinion is really, yeah, I think I'm surprised too. Yeah. It was only 5%. But then we'll see what happens during the Christmas holidays when actually that time between, uh, Christmas and New Year's is, you know, typically a low is when, you know, people should really be turning it on.

Right. Yeah. Well, that's the best time when everybody's off. Right. Um, So I did notice that, speaking of you, uh, Blueberry launched a premium podcasting tool this week. I mean, you keep charging ahead with features and functions on your platform, and that's exciting to see.

Yeah, yep. So, uh, yeah, we basically— it's been on the to-do list for a while, and we finally kind of broke a threshold of number of customers requesting it. And then what we did is we did something kind of cool Since we have the Apple Podcasts, Apple Premium delegated delivery, what we did was if someone is doing a— hasn't already a premium show on Apple, they can at the same time that they publish their Apple Premium show, they can publish their Blueberry Premium Podcast at the same click. Oh, so there's basically two upload boxes, one for Apple, one for Blueberry Premium. You can set the rules on the— if it's going to be early release, or, you know, the rules for the release can be the same. And then when you hit publish, both of those go out at the same time. So what you really can do here is you can— you have the best of both worlds. Number one, you can still have some people on Apple and doing a, um, that was weird. I got a thumbs up that just showed my screen when I did a thumbs up. Um, must be some magic in StreamYard. The— so anyway, the— you can basically have both. So you get a landing page to sell, you know, it's, it's, um, they have their own drop page and where they can promote. And then anywhere— and we make them set a minimum charge of $3 a month, for monthly minimum of $20 a month, $20 for an annual subscription. Um, and then we charge, uh, it's for every podcaster, it's a $10 add-on, and then we take 15% of proceeds to do the processing. Yeah. Um, so, you know, it's easy for a content creator to add this on. It's on part of their publishing flow. They just don't really change anything, and they can do their public, private, or the Apple Premium, and they can do the premium with us in one shot. Just click publish and all three would go out.

So you see a growth in interest on the part of podcasters for trying to support kind of, kind of like a premium offering? Yeah.

And, you know, we saw the uptake on Apple Apple Premium, and, uh, and I might be using the wrong term, sorry Ted, um, but those subscriptions, um, you know, those numbers are, you know, slow to grow. But again, uh, you know, we've supported people be using membership plugin and PowerPress for years, and what ends up happening is, is people get discouraged because they don't want to set up Stripe or some sort of payment processor. They don't want to bother with the, you know, with the minutia of the credit card processing. So, you know, we said, hey, we got all this infrastructure in place anyway. We already built a platform for our programmatic folks for reporting. So some of that was cut and paste code, you know, some changes, some variables. And really the reporting piece probably was one of our easiest pieces on this. But um, the, the— we do not create a custom RSS feed for every listener though. So there's one RSS feed and everything is controlled through a user password. So, got it. So we didn't go to that level. If it becomes a situation where people are requesting it, then we will probably add that as a feature down the road. But for right now, one show gets one premium authenticated RSS feed. And, but it's fun. It's interesting to see the number of apps now that are supporting basically authentication. And that list is not as long as I would think it would have been. It kind of surprises me a little bit that I think right now I'm only tracking 5. Let's see if I can find it. Um, 5 apps. And if I, if I, if this is wrong, if someone knows more, please let me know. But currently Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, and Castbox are the only 4 apps that we know that allow a direct RSS feed subscription through a user authentication. Oh, okay. So, and if someone knows other apps that will support user password, let me know. We'll add them to the list and get them in the, in the system. Maybe some of those Podcasting 2.0 apps will have feature as well. But so we'll see, we'll see how this goes.

Yeah, um, yeah, I think, uh, if, if you're struggling to make revenue from advertising from your podcast, you're probably more open to exploring a premium route as an alternative, right? And, but I do wonder about that too, if there are people that are gonna try and monetize through subscription. I mean, I think people are doing it on X and other platforms, and I think it is a big trend to do direct monetization with your audience, right?

Yeah, this isn't, this isn't going to be for everybody. So, you know, we basically set this, we just wanted to have the tools available for, you know, they didn't have to go use a third party. It's all integrated in the platform. Yeah, right. And it's a minimal cost per month. And we feel the, you know, the processing fees are fair. So we'll see. We'll see what kind of feedback we get. So far it's been positive. Of course, it's only been, you know, 24 hours or so.

Yeah. Yeah, I did notice that, uh, I guess Google has, has basically enabled OPML exports for Google Podcasts. So if you have a bunch of subscriptions in your Google Podcasts app, I guess you're going to be able to get them out and be able to export them in an OPML file. And a lot of people probably listening to this don't even know what an OPML file is, but that goes back to the very early days of podcasting when, when, when we were very focused on RSS, right? So there was this derivative of RSS that Dave Weiner had come up with as well. And it's basically the same concept. It's a, it's basically a list of potentially RSS feeds.

Right?

So, so you could have multiple RSS feeds in an OPML file. So, so I guess this is a pathway if you want to move your subscriptions from Google Podcasts over to like one of the new podcast apps like AntennaPod or Pocket Casts or Podverse or Fountain are among the newer listening apps that are supporting OPML ingestion of all of your subscriptions.

To your podcast. Yeah, and one thing I do want to call out is, um, just as an oh by the way, we added the podroll feature to PowerPress and Blueberry. So now, Rob, if you've got a few shows that you want to send me, I can add to our podroll. And for those of you that don't know what the heck a podroll is, is just— it's a derivative of what used to be a blog roll in the old days, literally. We used to put lists of shows, um, on our blogs, of blogs that we recommended, and we called them blog rolls. So the pod roll is the same thing. It's a list of shows that Rob and I recommend you listen to, um, and then those are being surfaced. Well, they're going to be surfaced in Podcasting 2.0 apps, and then also at the same time we've got some stuff coming to allow the surfacing of podrolls as well for individual podcasters to— I just, I guess I'll say it— we put a widget on their website and they can show the— show that old-fashioned blogrolls, a podroll on their website as well.

Yeah, no, that's, it's a good option too. Um, so, so the bottom line of this is that you can You can move from one app to another just like you can move with a podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with OPML.

But as far as on the sharing side, that, that Podroll is certainly, uh, yeah, a fun— sorry, preempted you here, but yeah, you just export the OPML, then yeah, some of the apps again will support the import of OPML. Yeah, yeah. So does Apple do that?

Do they support OPML, or— I don't believe so. I've never heard that term described in relation to Apple. I don't know if you have ever in the history of the medium, but I haven't.

Yeah, I wonder if Overcast supports OPML import. There's a number of them that do. It'd be nice to get a list.

Yeah, well, the one that— I mean, as far as the one I read just here, it's AntennaPod, Pocket Casts, Podverse, and Fountain. I guess are confirmed to support OPML in imports, right? So if you export that OPML file, which is basically, basically it's a document just like an RSS feed of sorts that you just save as a file and then you upload it to your new listening app and it'll transfer all those subscriptions that you have from Google Podcasts.

And I believe all of those are Podcasting 2.0 apps, can be found at podcastapps.com. Here's the thing, here's the thing we have to really start making podcasters understand. All this work, all this work that's being done by these apps to, number one, make portability and supporting the openness I guess that's the word. The openness of podcasting, you know, is really pretty crucial here, is the disgruntlement with the platform that shall not be named and Spotify, with people not happy with those platforms. You know, it's our own fault. You know, you as a listener, you as a podcaster, you need to start educating yourself on the functions and the advancements being made here and start educating your audiences. Now, again, this will be incremental, but if you're not, if you're not talking about this stuff, you're not going to get the advantages of all these new cool things we're doing. I'm going to say we, that we as a community are doing. You know, RSS.com, Buzzsprout, Blueberry, you know, a handful of others, RSS Blue, you know, these, these things we're adding, and also all the apps that support this stuff we're adding. Um, the ultimate goal is, number one, we're going to keep the listener in the app, and we're going to keep the listener engaged in the app and interacting in the app. And, uh, instead of just listening and giving them functions and giving them rec— you know, who do you want recommending to your listeners what to listen to? I think, I think if they listen to you, they would, they trust you to say, hey, I listen to these 5 shows, I think they're great, go listen to them. You know, and that, that is, that's the ultimate endorsement. And what you're going to start seeing is there, there's gonna be folks out there that are going to be curating these. As an example, the pod roles, they're going to be curating that. They're going to say, okay, here's the list of, you know, they're going to say, okay, Todd, Rob, uh, Mike, uh, Sam, uh, James, all these folks, they recommended, 5 of them recommended this same show, so there has to be something there. Right. You know, so it acts as a recommendation engine when some of that data is going to get curated. And in the end, then what's, what's that going to do? That's going to give the listener, say, okay, 10 podcasts said this is a great show, um, maybe I should listen to it. And as we, as indie content creators, we can, because, you know, we're scouring through all this content. We're listening to our own shows, to different shows. We as the creators can help drive the, uh, the discovery engine. Now don't start scamming the system by, you know, you put me in your pod role, I'll put you in your pod role, and don't do that. But actually go out there and recommend, you know, use this as a recommendation engine for shows that you love. And that's why we went in, in PowerPress and Blueberry I know Daniel was kind of disgruntled. We named it Shows You Love and Trust. We didn't put it as, say, Pod Roll. It says Pod Roll kind of in the subtext, but we wanted to make it, um, you know, make a podcaster understand, hey, this is where I share shows that I love and trust. Um, so I, I just think that there's so much going on at this point that Um, I, I don't know. I don't know how we get more podcasters to understand the value that is being brought here. I think it's, you know, probably another 2-year climb to make them, you know, to get this kind of thought process in mind going.

Right, right. You also notice that Acast is adding, uh, some dynamic ads targeted to listeners on Google Podcasts, right? Um, I thought that was smart. Yeah, yeah, trying to point them to a blog post that Acast made, um, talking about ways to transfer your subscriptions.

And actually, I think that was— that's pretty brilliant. I might copy that. Yeah, well, really, all they're doing there is they're looking for that user agent, and when that user agent hits, then they feed them that file with that But you're gonna have to get— we're gonna have to get the podcasters to actually implement that, say, hey, right, this is the feature you can use.

Yeah. So yeah, because I mean, if you think about it, the Google Podcast platform has, what, driven over 2% of the downloads, right?

It's good. I think with us it's, it's, it's even higher from a global average. Yeah, just because we had such high Android adoption before.

So, you know, all those subscriptions, it's really in the best interest of the whole industry to try and work together to try and shift those subscribers over to new platforms so we don't lose those listeners and lose those downloads.

There's an economic—

right.

And, you know, and again, we go back to— we kind of did a refresh on subscribeonandroid.com, right, and went through and made sure the, the list was current of apps that are currently supporting, and it took a few off that hadn't updated and some stuff like that. So, you know, again, there's a resource that we've made publicly available for the space to use for years where you can provide a one-click, potentially one-click subscribe function on your website for Android users. So it doesn't matter which— you don't have to tell them to go use a specific app. They click on that link and it brings them to a page that shows the app options, and then they pick an app. And from furthermore, once they click subscribe on Android on a website or on a page like they would Apple Podcasts, similar to that, then the app that they have pre-selected will preload from henceforth, and you'll have one-click subscription into that specific app. So, you know, I haven't been promoting that for a long time because of Google So now I guess it's time in, you know, to get, to get people to start, um, to start considering that again, you know. And there's other, you know, other folks that come around with some workarounds as well. But, you know, we provide a piece of hyperlink for people to put on their websites to be able to do this. So this isn't— this is an easy, easy peasy, uh, implementation.

Yeah, I guess, um, There's discussion that's bubbling, I guess, from overseas talking about this, um, this concept I think we both have known for a long time. There's not much money in podcasts is the comment here. That we all know. And where there is money to be made is in the USA. So that's the comment coming out of an article that was published by a gentleman by the name of Will Page, and he made this comment that, um, I guess the PwC Media Outlook, uh, report that the U.S. podcasting advertising market is estimated to be $1.8 billion compared to just $60 million in the UK, $50 million in both Canada and Australia, and 2 million in the tiny country of New Zealand. So, so you can see a big discrepancy between— of course, you're also, if you're comparing those markets, you're also comparing countries that have very low numbers of citizens, of population.

You know, let's, let's be, let's be fair though. Let's be fair. UK, you know, considering the country size and number of people number of citizens, you would think, uh, that spend would be much, much higher, right?

Why is that, do you think? Is it just because those markets are less mature, because they haven't been pursuing the monetization as long as the U.S. has?

Or is it, is it maybe because are they more radio-centric? There's not as many indie content creators.

Um, I think that all factors into it, right?

You know, we, we make— we pulled the trigger, we're gonna go to the London show, and, um, so I guess I'm gonna get a feel for the first time what that real market's really about. We did a one of their kiosk things. Um, yeah, so I, I just, um, I, I don't know, you know, and I And yeah, you have to look at the number of podcasts originating out of those countries too. How many podcasts are actually originating out of the UK or the Netherlands, I think you said was one of those countries. New Zealand.

Oh, New Zealand. Right. So it was 60 million in the UK, 50 million in combined in both Canada and Australia, which we've, we've all perceived as being strong podcast markets, right? But they haven't necessarily been strong on the advertising side.

Yeah, well, you know, I talk— I have a friend who has a show, true crime show, syndicated in Australia. Um, he has done very, very well here in the United States. But his syndication deal that he did in Australia has been not great. So it may be an indication again, again, I think maybe in Australia's a big radio dominated market.

Yeah.

Some of the challenges that we've had executing campaigns for Canadian companies is depending on where they're at in Canada, the requirement to do both the English and French versions of ads and making sure that the right ad is served to the right audience in Canada. So we haven't had any— I think by default, most advertisers kind of know that if they advertise in a US podcast, that that is going to cover cross over into the Canadian market, and a lot of those products and services are available in Canada. So it's a freebie. They don't have to pay for it, but they get that percentage, uh, of listeners that hear that ad that is, you know, largely American products that cross over. I don't think that's the case so much as in Australia. Yeah, just because of the, you know, basically on the opposite side of the world, literally.

So I think the bigger question is, you know, are those other markets going to catch up proportionally to the US in monetization? And I've also wondered about this whole concept, is it like you were saying earlier, those are more more public radio type markets, and the market has always leaned that way in how they look at podcasts as well. So maybe that limits the commercial success of podcasting because of its linkage with more public radio stuff, which hasn't, I guess, historically been as aggressive around advertising as what commercial radio has been here in the US.

But what I find even more amazing is, is we've been trying to get to 2 billion for a long time.

Oh yeah, it's been like, we're gonna hit 2 billion, um, for the last 3 or 4 years, right? Yeah. And yeah, we're still not there yet.

Well, you know, and I, I, I continue to attribute that to media— lazy media buyers that aren't willing to look the pike. That's true. You know, they're just trying to fill more in for— fill more of existing inventory with, you know, 6, 7, 10 ads.

And they're playing it safe. Um, I mean, all these buyers are playing it safe. And especially with these brand safety and suitability platforms growing in popularity, that can either be a good thing or it can be a plague on the industry. One of the two. I'm not quite sure, you know, entirely if it if it drives more advertisers in because they feel more comfortable, or does it drive more advertisers into buying into fewer numbers of shows?

I don't think it changes the number of people coming in and buying ads. I think it's been an industry issue for years, right, that, you know, uh, there just hasn't been complete crossover of radio and television and print into podcasting. If you go and if you did a side-by-side, and that would be a good thing, is to have a list. If someone could produce a list of every— let's just, let's talk a national, at the national level, every national advertiser, and, and put that list on a wall. Yeah, the Geicos and the Fords of the world, put that list on a wall. And then look at the radio, the national advertising done on radio, not the local, you know, not the local shop that's, you know, selling cars, right? But the national reads. And then compare that to a podcast list and see what that ABC comparison would be. I think that would be, uh, something very astonishing to look at. Yeah, we didn't even have to look at the spend levels. We just look at the comparisons. Is Geico in podcast? Is Ford in podcast? Is Chevy in for podcasts? And I think most of those answers are right now no. And you look at the amount of money that Ford, Geico, and all those, those groups are spending.

Uh, yeah, I mean, it's— I don't know, the, the, the brand safety stuff, um, it, it's a conflicting thing in To some people, I think it's a benefit. To other people, it's a hindrance to growth of advertising. I think the advertisers feel safer about it, but I'm not sure that podcasters more broadly feel that it's good, good for them. I guess if you're doing brand-safe content, it's probably good for them.

Weren't we talking a few weeks ago about, you know, some study that came out that basically said that brands are playing it too safe?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that that, that's a factor here too, is, is our brands playing it too, too safe and limiting the amount of reach that they can have in podcasting because they're, they're so hypersensitive towards their brand image that they, they lose out on ROI on, on things that they're doing like that.

Or, or is the real truth is they're just not advertising?

It's not a brand. Yeah.

Or is this a reason to pull back, right? Yeah, they're, they're— or maybe no, it's not even that. Maybe they just don't have it as part of their buy. It's not because of brand safety. Maybe— why isn't Ford advertising in podcasts? Why?

There's got to be a reason.

Maybe it doesn't work.

And potentially. Yeah. Well, I think this conflict between brand safety and brand suitability, I think there is a little bit of a shift away from that concept of brand safety into thinking of it as brand suitability. Because then you start getting into contextual relevance and evaluating that instead of looking at it from, you know, like a political lens, which does fall into that safety Um, well, let's look, let's look at it, let's look at it under this lens.

What if— and my graying out around my head is a little weird— um, if, if you, if you, if you look at, um, let's just hypothetically say that every show that is offered advertising every show is being looked at for, let's just call it brand suitability. Let's say that this is— they get their dream and every show is being monitored, tracked for every word they say, penalized whenever they, you know, swear, or, you know, the computer determines whatever. Let's just say that's all in place, right? And that everyone's using it. Does ad spend go up? That's the theory. Ad spend goes up if we have brand suitability. I don't think so. I don't think, I don't think spend goes up.

I think, I think it goes up, um, for a smaller number of shows.

No, I think what it does is, but I don't think it grows us to $2 billion or $3 billion. What we're, what we're lacking is depth of inventory.

And number two, It's inventory. I mean, brand suitability limits inventory.

Well, even very nature, even. Okay, but let's again, Rob, think about it. Everyone's being on brand. If everyone's being looked at, my point is, is everyone's been saying for a long time that we have to have these tools in order for advertisers to feel safe. Okay, so let's say we made the advertisers feel safe, the brands feel safe. Do they really then come in and actually spend money, or is it just bullshit where the company is, uh, this has just been something that they think is going to allow more brands to come in and buy? Because it's just like when I launch a new product, I think and I project and have an idea on how much revenues it's going to drive. But if that— that oftentimes those numbers are not correct, because what have we done? We've reached out, talked to the audience, we've talked to the customers, we found out what they need. But in the end, will they spend the extra $10 for blueberry premium? Will they? Don't know if they will. So if, if we're— if we say that we have all these brand suitability things that are in there now, spend should be way up. Spend should be exploding because they got what they want.

But if that, that standard for brand suitability is too high, guess what? It filters out more shows, right? So you have a fewer pool of inventory.

Yeah, but it should open up from— but it should open up, it should open up a whole pool, a whole, you know, thousands of shows.

But fundamentally, I don't think it does. I don't think it opens up more shows because I think it— they're only analyzing shows that they're probably interested in buying, buying into already.

The problem is, the ultimate problem is, is there's still only so many top-level shows, right? So if you want to grow to $3 billion Then you need to get into the— you got to get down, okay? You got to get into the 5,000 shows at Blueberry that are looking for advertisers that never had an advertiser. That's what you got to do. You got to get into that stack.

You got to get into— yeah, right. Random, my question about this is, okay, okay, you have a list of shows that have been rated by these brand suitability platforms as approved for these advertisers, right? Um, does that present an opportunity for a higher CPM because those shows are, are deemed as safe or suitable?

Well, you, you got to get them to buy them first.

Well, I know, but I, I mean, it's almost like if it doesn't drive up CPM then who's really benefiting from this? I mean, I mean, a show that puts themselves under scrutiny like that, and oftentimes the shows don't even know they're being put under—

the advertisers feel better about themselves. They feel safe, you know, right? Done their job. They've done their due diligence to make sure that they're not going to get fired as an agency. So it's all BS.

In my opinion. Or does this, this create an atmosphere that, let's say, a show is like right on the line of being brand safe? Does that present an opportunity for the advertiser to come in and say, well, we'll buy your show for half of the CPM because we're not sure about its safety?

I don't think so. I don't think they apply it that way. I think that it's a yes or no on shows. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's a yes or no. I don't, you know, Again, let's say all these things are in place. I, I think the industry has an ultimate issue of not enough advertisers are interested in buying podcasts.

I think that's ultimately— what media are they buying then?

Are they, they just buying Facebook ads? They can— they're buying TV, Facebook.

It's, you know, it's, it's It's easy. Increasingly isn't working unless they're buying, let's say, YouTube, right?

Or Rob Greenlee. How much did they spend on TV last year?

TV's working or they would not be spending billions and billions of dollars on TV advertising. The audience to TV is in a free fall, so—

well, it's not a lot, but they're still spending a lot. They're still selling. They're still selling billions, you know, billions and billions of advertising in TV, you know, and be honest with you, we're pretty happy right now where we're at with programmatic. I know some people don't like it, but, uh, you know, we've hit our goal numbers for 2024 or 2023 with the adoption of programmatic at Blueberry. I'm very, very pleased, uh, with the numbers that I, I looked at the latest report and we hit another benchmark, um, hit a KPI, and I, I'm just I'm really, really thrilled. So ultimately, we're now putting money in podcasters' pockets that would never— and I'm talking about tens of thousands of dollars a month that we're putting in podcasters' pockets that would never have gotten a dime in advertising right now. I know the Podcasting 2.0 folks are saying, screaming out loud, but again, we're about options. We're about giving podcasters options. You know, you can go the donation route, you can go the value for value, you can go the Patreon premium route. You know, there's lots of options now. I think that's the key, is whatever a podcaster decides they want to throw at the wall and see if it sticks.

Oh, this ad. Yeah, did you see this ad on, uh, it looks like a, like a subway train.

That's what it looks like. It does. Podcast promotion in the wild. For those of you listening, Rob is showing an advertisement for Football Ramble. This must be in the UK, right? Because football doesn't have to be serious.

Where did— where was this scene? There is most definitely a soccer ball there. Yeah, yeah, it is a soccer ball.

All right, right.

So this must be in the UK. Yeah, so, you know, this is, this is pretty aggressive podcast advertising here. You know, if you're running like a display campaign on, on board a subway train, probably it looks like it's maybe in London or something like that.

That's what it looks like. Yeah. So what's the company logo that's in that? Can you zoom in and see what that says? Is it in the bottom? No, no, no, no. So scroll down or scroll back up. You see the bottom right of that? There's a, there's a, there's a logo there.

What does that say?

Uh, let me see if I can— does it start with an S or— yeah, let's see if I can maybe just do a—

maybe do a Ctrl+ or something. Yeah, I can, I can do that.

Here, hang on.

Maybe that's easier.

I kind of went crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, see, totally, you went to a mobile view. Well, I think it's up here. Yes, I just wonder what the company is that did that, you know?

Right, I think it's down.

Is it down here?

Yeah, it's down. Yeah, looks like it's, uh, looks like Stack maybe.

Stack. Oh, interesting.

Never heard of them. Yeah, yeah, I thought it was interesting that It says that— oh yeah, Stack Football Rumble, right? Um, was, was spotted at the Bakerloo train, I guess, in, in the UK.

So, oh, it is, it's, uh, in Britain. So, yeah, you know, what does an ad like that cost to put in a subway? Yeah, it's, it's probably 5 figures, I would think.

Yeah, I like their, their tagline off to the left is, 'Because football doesn't have to be serious.' Okay, they're pretty serious about their football. I know they are. That's, that's what was kind of, kind of funny about— so I guess they're implying that the podcast isn't so serious, right?

Well, maybe it's a little comedy on football. It is Football Rambles.

So maybe they, you know. Yeah, right, that's true. Yeah. So, so anyway, I thought I would show a podcast ad because we don't see that that often these days.

Well, it's usually on the, you know, the, the 30-second one they get at Times Square that they paid $10,000 for and took a picture of it, right? Yeah, you know, get their Instagram post.

That's true, that is true. So So anything else that you can think of that's going on out there that caught your interest?

You know, I just— it just— it's, you know, it looks like the news is steady. Um, there's not been any big major announcements. Um, I know somebody's working on something big, and I haven't quite been able to determine what it is. You know, you hear your competitors talking, or, you know, we can't do this until, you know, April because we're working on something big and you're like, hmm, what are they working on? So, you know, from my perspective, the rumor line has been pretty quiet.

Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, I kind of wonder what the impact of what happened with ChatGPT and OpenAI over the last couple weeks has had on people's enthusiasm for embracing AI and podcasting?

I think if you're not even in the tech world, you have no idea what even happened, right? You know, if you— unless you followed the tech space, you know, that debacle, I guess I will call it a cluster beep. Yeah, totally. Uh, it definitely was curious, and what it really means Ultimately is those that want to push forward won and those that wanted to pull back lost. That's what it really is. That's what it boils down to, is the board said we're going too fast, this is dangerous, we need to slow down, and because you won't slow down, we're going to fire you. And Microsoft, who had dumped billions of dollars in, came in and did the ultimate Oh man, it, you know, it, what do I, power play is what I would call it, power play. Oh no, what they did is they, they climbed, he said like the wrestling organization, they claimed he got in the corner, take down, Nutella got in the corner and stood on the top, right, of the, uh, of the corner post and came down with his elbow, uh, full force into OpenAI's board and gutted them. In full suit. Yeah, he's hired. I mean, it was, it was, I was like, I was like, touchdown, you know, he slammed it.

And, uh, so I was actually, I, I never thought for a minute that, um, those AI folks were gonna go to work for Microsoft.

Oh, not for a minute, not for a minute. I saw that, that wasn't gonna work, that totally wasn't gonna work in that way. Yeah, to me, that was a way of Microsoft saying, what have you done? And I put billions of dollars in you. And then the employees coming out and say 500 said, we'll go to work for Microsoft tomorrow. And I was like, oh, they're done. I didn't even really follow the news after that. Because I was like, okay, this will be resolved in a day or two.

And it was. Well, because nobody really talked about What would actually happen if all of this team went to Microsoft? I mean, Microsoft doesn't, as far as I know, doesn't own the code, doesn't own the platform. They do own—

well, they've licensed it. I think they own some of it. Yeah, I think they have access to the model. But what it really would have done is gutted OpenAI. Yeah, they would have been— it could have You know, for those of us in— and here's the thing, here's the thing people have to realize, and I, I say it again, uh, be careful on what you build your castle on, right? You know, if, if you're going to build your model— and this is— I shouldn't be giving advice here, but I was very specific in how Blueberry's designing their, their AI integration. I'm not going to be locked into any platform. I'm going to be able to flip a switch and change to a different model. I'm not going to be beholden to OpenAI or Anthropic or any of those platforms.

Right. Because as you saw, things can change very quickly. Very quickly.

You've got a problem. Yeah. Yeah, and this is where probably people that are building their own models are saying, well, we're good. And there's been some companies that have pulled back on some of their AI implementations because it hasn't been very good. And this is the challenge that, you know, all of us are going to be up against is in the early days, um, we need to make sure we set the expectations correctly with the listener, saying, listen, you know, this is a This is the dumbest it'll ever be. It's not always going to be perfect. It runs home to mama and lies. It makes stuff up. What we give you should not be considered as gospel. You should, you know, you— this is why we're giving people an edit box. You know, there'll be an edit box for them to edit the outputs that we give them. And just a suggestion, that's not— well, it's not going to be a suggestion. It's going to— I mean, it's going to be like a warning on the page.

No, no, I'm talking about the output is just a suggested thing. It isn't something you should just take verbatim, take for granted, right?

Right. Because even when it analyzes a transcript, it's still— they'll still lie. They'll still put stuff in there that, you know, was made up.

Right.

When I ran the transcript through from your guys's show with Sam and James, they— it the train. They— the AI thought I was on the show, right? They've gotten so used to processing with my voice. It was like, Todd and Rob, they have Sam Setti and, you know, James Cridland on the podcast today.

I'm like, no, I wasn't there. Yeah, right. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. So these AI tools can hallucinate, and they can see things that aren't there.

Right. And they, and they, they love to, they love to go off on a tangent from time to time. Yeah. You know, that's the hardest part of any of this is putting up the guardrails, um, in the prompt writing to say almost repeatedly, you almost have to teach it like a teenager, you know? Okay. So what do you, uh, what's the number one thing parents tell young kids in the evening? Go brush your teeth. Go brush your teeth. You have to tell the kids 15 times, go brush your teeth, right? And sometimes AIs are like this. You have to tell it, go brush your teeth, hey dummy, go brush your teeth, right? You didn't listen to me, go brush your teeth or I'm gonna spank you.

Or you spelled something and you have to tell it to, right, you know, change this error, right? I've had to do that a lot, especially in the graphics and imaging that is generated by Yeah, but when you—

and then you don't get the same output. Maybe you get something slick, totally different. You know, I've been trying to get it to give me open space so I can put my own text in, and it's not real good at that either. Saying, hey, give me 200 pixels at the bottom of the page that is kind of translucent. Yeah, it doesn't do that. So, um, but again, I think, uh, it's why when you're using the tools in their native state, you can kind of scold it 2 or 3 times, say, hey, I didn't say that, clean that up. Whereas if I'm doing an output at Blueberry where I have to do a single run, single output of whatever we're given, the podcaster, that has— that prompt has to have been written so well that I get consistent results every time. Yeah. So you have to like constrain it. You have to like, you almost have to like strangulate it to make sure that it doesn't go outside of the boundaries of what you have defined. And it's not real good at that. It still will wander at times. As an example, I've asked multiple times, I've had to say, give me a narrative a narrative write-up of the transcript. Do not use bullet points. And 50% of the time, the stupid thing will give me bullet points even though I tell it not to get bullet points. Yeah, you know, do like 2 or 3 sentences in narrative, then it switches into bullet points. It runs home to mama, right? So it gets it to the mind, well, I can just summarize by bullet Well, no, I've already done that, dummy. Give me the narrative. Yeah. Or the summary, you know, in written format. Do not use bullet points. And again, I repeat, do not use bullet points. That will be an output that won't be, you know, it's just dumb. Yeah. But I do feel like it's still, even though the thing is still hallucinating a little bit, still giving kind of weird outputs at times, it's a heck of a lot better than what I used to do. Right.

From a show notes perspective. That's true. That's true. Yeah. I did notice that there's been some reporting that the auto download behavior in Apple Podcasts is showing, at least for October, it looks like, uh, um, from, I guess from August to October, a drop in overall downloads. Right.

Not a blueberry.

Really?

You know why? Why is that? Because everyone was overcounting before. To begin with, they weren't taking into account the bad behavior that was going on. Hadn't— and they weren't over— they weren't analyzing deep enough to get those thrown out because I'll say it again, the IEB specifications is the minimum standard, right? Minimum standard. And most companies meet the minimum standard because guess what? If they meet the minimum standard, they can get the most number of downloads. But if you go and want to have a pure view and overqualify downloads, which we do, then you get rid of that extra stuff that shouldn't have been counted to begin with, and your numbers don't change, right? So it tells me those companies that are reporting that they're down 5%, shame on them.

Yeah, so it looks like, uh, Lipson's data from August to October showed download drop of 3.6%. And Buzzsprout, um, showed a drop of 4.8%.

Just, just tells me that they're not doing their stats very well.

I, I'm just gonna say it because again, yeah, and that's since the iOS 17 rolled out in mid-September. So, right, is there something to do with the iOS update.

Yeah, they made some big changes to the, you know, and it— they got— Apple got some feedback and made some changes. So, you know, they publicly said what they've done, so I'm just gonna leave it at that. Yeah. So I, I think that As an industry, I maintain the model from day one when Angelo started building the stat system at Blueberry. I said, I don't care what the number is, as long as I know what the number is. Get rid of this, the beep, you know, get rid of the crap. And we do our best to do that. Every once in a while, something slips through. A couple weeks, we go in and add a filter for, and we, you know, we we go back and reprocess.

So reprocessing is expensive. Yeah, but Todd, is that decrease due to changes in the methodology of Apple Podcasts, or is it— I don't believe it's a change in how the hosting platforms are analyzing that data, is it? I mean, it sounds like from what you're saying is that your platform took what the changes were that Apple had made and somehow you guys didn't see the impact of it.

So what's happening was that some platforms were seeing re-tries of downloads. I guess the best way to say it is, is it basically, if, if the, if there wasn't a completion of the download, Apple Podcasts would come back later and try again. Deeper into an inventory, which was ultimately driving, you know, some false downloads. And it appeared there was a download, there was enough— 1 minute of the media was delivered to count it, but then it would come back a couple days or 24 hours or 10 hours later or whatever and try to download that same file again. So that was where this, this extra was coming from. And that's the most simple way to explain it. But the thing is, if you weren't looking, if you weren't looking long enough of a period, again, where's a 24-hour window that everyone is certified to, right? If you look at a longer window, we've known forever that— and in fact, this is one of the reasons, one of the main things that happened during one of the very, very early IAB battles where we were all in Las Vegas and they were putting spreadsheets on the wall, literally, you know, taping it to the wall, and they were looking at data and, uh, you know, hot sweaty bunker room with 30 people in it, uh, no one quite yelling at each other, but it was, you know, a very heated discussion. It was very, very clear that when you have a device and an app— let's say it's an Apple, let's say it's an iPhone— and you have Apple Podcasts and you are subscribed to the New Media Show and it comes out and it downloads that episode. You don't see that again, rarely, on the same combination of phone IP. Rarely, rarely does it. I think when we did the study, we would see the IP a second time for the same, just the IP, not even matching user agents. Or device agents, we just by tracking IPs, we maybe see the IP maybe 10, 12% of the time, we'd see the IP come in a second time and grab the same file. But when you get to the third, third time that that file was grabbed by that same IP, that number was like, like one half of 1% or something, it was ridiculously small. So, and that's not even doing IP slash agent matching. That's just pure IP matching. It's looking and it's, oh, there's a lot of IPs out there behind universities and blah, blah, blah. Well, to know there's not that many. Right. So, and you just put that in, you know, an override list. I guess that's the best way to say it today. And, uh, then those shows can, you know, be counted. Those downloads can be counted multiple times from, you know, behind, you know, a class or a university that is funneling stuff. But, you know, what happens when this all goes out the window if anyone ever truly implements the VPN stuff that Apple's done? But that's a whole nother discussion. Mm-hmm. Um, so why didn't we see a drop? Well, it's because I over-process, I over-qualify, uh, the downloads.

I look deeper than just 24 hours. So would you say generally your numbers are typically lower than your competitors? Is that what you're saying? Absolutely. Yeah. So all that did was was kind of level things up of sorts.

Yeah, potentially. Yeah, yeah. And another thing too is if you're on a redirect, the difference can be pretty astronomical. If you're on it, if you're with a hosting— okay, let's say that you are hosting at Blueberry. We, we measure your statistics with your hosted data, hosted delivery data. But if you're not If you're using a redirect and you're not hosting with Blueberry, that difference could be 5 to 13% lower than what the, what a hosted log file processing will look like. So people that are on redirects are just invariably handicapped because they can't qualify. And I'm sure it's— I've never heard Podtrack or any of the other folks come out and make a statement on this, but I've been public about it. Is that we just can't qualify some, some listens. We can't. So we have to throw it out, and we have a model.

Yeah, if you can't, you know, verify it or have confidence in it, you have to throw it.

Well, it's, it's really what it is. It's, it's the— it's applied to a model, and, um, because it just passes through, right? I said boom boom, it's gone. And so we have a model that we've compared where we take every app, Apple Podcasts version 16, 17, 14, and they each have a model applied against it. And we know the behavior of that app when we see that user agent and it's applied to a model. And That's why having the redirect was so difficult. It was very difficult. Mm-hmm. And it's a model we have to continue to revalidate. I think legally we're required to do it every 90 days, but I think we run it every 30. Oh, okay. Interesting. Yeah, to validate, because we basically take A/B data and make sure that the model's still bringing the numbers in the way it should be, because every app's a little bit different.

So Todd, as we look to the new year, you know, I think we're coming into December, which is typically a time when the whole industry is flooded with predictions for the next year, right? I'm sure each one of us is going to be asked to contribute something to something about that, right? What's coming and This is probably the year that I'm, I'm as probably uncertain about the future as any time, and that's saying a lot for me given— and both of us to some degree, if you feel the same way. I think the, the path for podcasting has, you know, for me has been pretty clear over the years. You know, it's been pretty steady growing and doing well, but we're in this kind of this weird kind of limbo. I don't know if limbo is the right word. It's more like it's just kind of like there's so much uncertainty around, um, what's going to happen, right? And I think AI is like one of those wild cards that's there. I think this brand suitability safety is a wild card that we don't really know how that's going to play out in the market. I think, um, Just, you know, the acceptance of content by audiences is a little bit up in the air to some degree. This convergence that's happening, or reconvergence might be a better way of saying it, between audio and video and the definition of podcasting being kind of pushed towards being expanded has created a lot of, in my mind, a lot of uncertainty about the medium and what it's going to look like, you know, even a year from now.

I don't think there is uncertainty about the media. I think there's just different potential—

the mediums that are happening, or the medium itself.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So I think ultimately, you know, I'm looking at the bottom line and 2023, while we're keeping the green line above the red line, definitely is a year that has been, you know, it's been pretty flat. I think the economy, the economy, the economy, the economy, the economy is, you know, driving this, driving things in a big, big way. And I understand there's some fundamental things that are, you know, I think from our perspective, we feel it's just, you know, big shift. I don't think so. I think the average consumer, there's consuming podcasts, again, don't care where they listen, as long as they listen. But I think we definitely need to make sure that we're doing our jobs as podcasters to protect open RSS. And if we're not, and I say this very in a foreboding way, if we're not protecting Open RSS. Um, you're giving up the farm in a couple years. Um, you know, Google has not been necessarily a great friend of podcasting this entire time.

And, uh, yeah, I would tend to agree with that generally, right?

And to this point, I think they have good intentions, but I don't think they can be trusted. Um, Spotify, um, you know, they're going to become more desperate. Uh, so what's going to happen there? Are they going to start running more ads around your content that you get nary a penny for? Um, you know, at what point do podcasters wake up and understand that, uh, Spotify may not be the best platform to push their listeners to? You can't tell these, the younger podcasters anything because they know it all. So me to say, hey, you should be pushing your podcasters to a podcast app, you know, and they're like, well, I listen on Spotify.

Well, fine, uh, and until it isn't. Well, increasingly, Todd, and this is, this is a fact that I, I've noticed because of some of the things that I'm doing, is that increasingly I hear people talking more about video in the context of podcasting now than ever.

Well, again, it's because you have a small subset, a couple hundred shows that are being very successful doing video. But let's also not forget that we have tens of thousands of shows that are highly successful in audio that don't do video at all.

And I don't think we should— yeah, we should not lose sight of that. Yeah, I don't think there's any question about that necessarily. I do think that there's more than just a couple hundred shows on, on YouTube.

You're talking tens of thousands of shows.

Go find me a couple. Okay, Todd, let's, let's properly define what we're talking about here, because shows that look like they're a podcast but they're not is what I'm talking about.

Um, okay, that's fine, but go find me, right? Okay, but go find 200 that call themselves podcasts on YouTube. More than— just go try to find more than 200 that are actually doing well.

Well, I'm not sure that's the right way to look at it. I, I think the right way to look at it is, are there shows on YouTube that look like a podcast, calling themselves a podcast, their audiences perceiving them as a podcast, but they don't do our Oh, for sure, there's plenty, right? That's, that's, that's, that's the delta of change that I'm seeing over there.

So what we need to do is, why don't— why aren't we on those shows' comment sections and YouTube saying, I can't subscribe to you on Apple Podcasts, why are you— well, why aren't you—

why don't you have a feed? That's a, that's, that's, that's a reasonable ask. Um, and then there is that subset like you say, that are doing YouTube as well as doing an audio podcast. But, but again, that are in there as well.

That's right. But even if we just look at all of them, let's take everybody, those that say they're podcasts and are not technically— let's just leave that word, just say technically— let's look at— let's go find those shows and count them, count how many there are. So again, I think Tom Webster was right some weeks ago where he said that this small number of shows, very highly popular shows, are basically driving the narrative and making the other 99% of people lose their freaking minds that they have to do video. Yeah. And that they need to build a YouTube channel.

Um, yep. Yeah, I'm not so sure it's just small shows that are driving the that narrative though. Um, I think a lot of shows are produced like what we're doing right here, uh, that, that are just not doing RSS. All they're doing is they're doing a show just like what we're doing here. Yeah, but it's only video. That's it.

It's true, right?

But it looks like a podcast. They're calling themselves doing a podcast. Their artwork says— maybe says podcast on it. Maybe they don't say that. But, but people are perceiving it that way, and I think that's, that's the perceptual challenge that we have about this shift that's happening. And, and let's be honest with you, YouTube is playing right into it.

Yeah, of course. So what we have to do as podcasters, as, as listeners, is every time we see a show that's on YouTube that's calling itself a podcast, go look for it in Apple Podcasts or on Podcast Index if it's not there, and ask Lee. And if you follow this podcast, quote unquote, in YouTube, this YouTube channel, then start badgering them. So I think that we have to do it the other way around.

I think the bigger opportunity is trying to figure out ways that we can leverage creators that are wanting to create video, primary video content, to be able to take the audio from that and get it into a podcast feed. Yeah, that's, that's the challenge that the industry has. I think before it, because as we move into this next phase, is the hosting platforms need to do some more work to get integrated in with like StreamYard or with Riverside or with those platforms.

StreamYard has to integrate with us.

We have a full-blown API, right? So no, I agree, there's no question on that. And I think You know, you look at Lipson or you look at some of the other companies too, there are active APIs for— and it's really the same kind of integration that's happening with like Hindenburg or with—

So what I, what I would tell you then, Rob, is to go back to StreamYard folks and say, hey, we'd love to have StreamYard to be an embed, right, on Blueberry.

Yeah. And I think that's, that's a proactive step to helping this shift.

That, uh, but, but the challenge is, is up to this point, none of these platforms, yeah, have been wanting— they want to be standalone. They don't want to integrate, right?

Though they don't want to integrate, though the talk that I hear inside of, uh, you know, all I can speak to is StreamYard at this point, is that I think they're open to it. So it's just a matter of getting getting everybody together and talking through it.

So I need an SDK. Yeah, come up with an SDK. Yeah, and come out with an enterprise plan that I can plug into and run up the food chain, right?

Right. Yeah, you know, and I think that's the answer here that will really go a long ways to helping us kind of bridge this current growing divide between what a podcast is and what a what an RSS feed podcast is.

But the, but the challenge really ultimately is, is again, we shouldn't be forcing podcasters to think they have to do video.

No, I think it's the other way around. I think, um, by default, more people are thinking about video and don't even think about the option of audio. I think it's going the other way. Um, and that's, I That's not a good trend for podcasting.

Well, ultimately, I think we're a little too close to this because, you know, we do both, but at the same time, I, I, I see the, the data, you know, I see the, the data, data, you know, and podcast audio podcasts are growing. They're growing the fastest rate they've ever grown because basically there's fewer shows and the same audiences here.

And I think that these video creation platforms need to be thought as a compatible companion to podcasting because as we both know, podcasting and video have been neck and neck with each other since the beginning. Well, you look at— Trying to isolate video from podcasting, I think in the long run is kind of not—

But if you go and look at the And believe me, I've talked to everybody. Yeah, I talked to StreamYard too. Say, hey, let's integrate, you know. Oh, that's interesting. Oh no, we're not doing that. We have our own plans to compete in the podcasting space, or blah blah blah, whatever it may be.

I don't know what that is, right?

But they're right. I didn't say that. I didn't say StreamYard said that, but I said others have said that, right? We want to be our own standalone. Oh, you know, we've already built this multi-recording system. Now we'll just, we'll just add the podcast piece. We don't want to integrate with you, right?

So we want to be, uh, what they call a, what, a full-stack solution?

Is that what you're— right. So, so, so, so, so, you know, what, what am I faced with? Building, building it. So what, you know, here's, here's what I've done. I've polled the Blueberry community. I know what they want. Yeah, Nvidia is not a priority right now because we asked them what they wanted.

Yeah, it's— I think the question is, it's not your existing community, it's what your potential future customer base looks like.

But those folks on YouTube, they're not, you know, they're, they, they're too busy. Most of them have a regular YouTube channel and then have a so-called podcast.

Right. And they don't put a lot of energy into the audio-only version too.

That's the other— well, they don't put out an audio-only version.

They only put out video. Well, no, but the ones that do, I've seen have put out an audio version, but they don't really actively promote it because they think of themselves as YouTubers.

Right, right. So it's— it's— they're in the case they shouldn't be calling themselves podcasts.

Podcasters. Yeah, but their audience is calling them podcasts.

So Rob, you need to start being a troll.

I just need to be proactive about getting these communities from a tech stack perspective.

Just be a troll and just go in there and say, hey, I can't subscribe to your podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Are you really a podcaster? Like I have nothing else to do, Todd, right?

Sure. Why not? Spare time laying in bed, search out shows on YouTube and do the cross-referencing. Matter of fact, that's a good job for somebody that has— wants to run a script, you know, go and, go and look for all these so-called podcasts and then cross-promote them and then do a spam email to them, you know.

Not that I'm condoning that, but— well, and that's why getting a, getting a relationship with like a StreamYard type of a platform, then they could actively promote that as an option to their current content creators that are creating for YouTube or LinkedIn or Twitter or all the places that we're being seen right now with this program. So, you know, I think I look at it more as an opportunity, right?

Yeah. Well, we'll see. The bigger— the biggest challenge still, we can talk about this until we're blue in the face, You got to get the new podcasters episode 1 to episode 1, right? That's still the challenge.

Yeah, getting them to episode 1 is still the biggest hurdle, and getting them beyond episode 7 is the other challenge.

Yeah, and you know what's funny is someone else came out with those almost similar numbers recently. Something— someone that I'd never heard of before said, yeah, we can't get people past episode 6. I'm like, oh, that seems—

that sounds familiar. I think we've heard that one for a few years, right?

Once or twice. Yeah, right. All right, we are— we're at the time, right? Yeah. And, uh, Rob, send me the audio and video on this if you would. I will, no problem. All right. And, uh, but we need to talk about something after we go offline. But, uh, everyone, uh, thanks for being here. I'm traveling next Wednesday, so unless Rob wants to do a solo show, I probably— or we do a late show on Thursday or something.

And yeah, I could probably do a show possibly next week. I could try and round up a guest or something.

So, and if, if you can't, then we can do a show Thursday.

I'll be in a hotel room Thursday morning. And would you prefer to do it on Thursday?

Uh, potentially, yeah. I, I, you know, as long as we get an hour that's, you know, not ridiculously early and not ridiculously late.

Well, it shouldn't be too bad because you'll be in the same time zone.

Yeah, yeah, same time zone. And I— my train out of Chicago is like 5 o'clock or something like that.

Oh, it is? Okay, so yeah, so it probably would happen. That's the reason why it'd be a little bit of a different—

could be— well, it could be in the morning or something, but anyway. Yeah, okay, okay. All right, let's get out of here. Thanks, everybody. All right, okay, newmediashow.com, follow, subscribe.

I'm geeknews@gmail.com or todd@blueberry.com. Rob? Yeah, and I'm on, on Twitter as well, @RobGreenlee. And you can go to my website, robgreenlee.com. I'm, I'm posting new articles up there too about all sorts of topics. And I'm doing a bunch of podcasts. I'm doing a live show tomorrow night Podcast Tips with Rob Greenlee on the StreamYard channel. So it's 7 PM Eastern time. So, you know, always everything's about podcasting around here. So thanks everybody, and thank you so much for watching, and we'll, we'll catch you next week, probably either on Wednesday or Thursday, but likely on Thursday. So, so thank you.

Okay, bye.