Automating Video to Audio Podcasting | New Media Show 3/20/23

Oh, good.

That's suno.ai.

Suno, huh?

Suno.ai. Yeah.

That's interesting.

Yeah, it is interesting. So anyway, I don't know why it was repeated. It was only supposed to be 30 seconds, but it was going on a while.

So what's the copyright situation on that stuff? Do you have any idea?

Um, what's happening here? Did we lose the stream?

Let me check mine.

Let me double-check, make sure we're still online. Yeah, we're still online. I, I think I, I did it.

Okay, I see it in mine.

So are we on Rumble? Maybe that's what happened. I don't know.

It didn't, uh, didn't connect on Rumble.

Yeah, you know, I was— be honest with you, I was like running. We, we were 5 minutes before the show started. Lucky I had the studio already turned on. And I had recorded something earlier because we were in the middle of launching our AI system today. And that launch went at 2. And then I'm just trying to, you know, do the orchestra thing here. And I looked at the clock and it was 2:50, like 2:53. And I was like, a big F-word come out of my mouth.

So we're all the balls in the air, right? Yeah.

We're lucky we are even on. And it says YouTube is not receiving enough video to maintain a smooth stream. Okay, is it still complaining? I don't know why it would— that would be the issue. I'm looking here anyway.

Um, I mean, I'm seeing it too. It says, it says, uh, YouTube is not receiving enough video to maintain a smooth stream.

Yeah, I don't know why. Because, yeah, I think I know why, but it's, it's my mess up. So anyway, it is, it is what it is. We're gonna have to live with it because I was pushing too many buttons. Um, no, so, um, yeah, all right. So anyway, that's— my team was in the middle of launching the AI stuff, so I've been a busy, busy week. Course, Monday was a big day.

Yeah. So let's talk about your, your video to audio podcast product that you, that you announced. It's kind of, kind of cool. It'd be good to kind of give a little demo of that, of which I saw a video online that you, that was linked to in Pod News. I saw.

So yeah, there's really no, no demo. It's just basically You screenshot or a screenshot. Yeah, you just, you know, you, you link. Let's see if I can get— find one, find a show here, because, uh, you caught me all on it, unready. But basically all it does is you link. Okay, I've got one here. Hang on here, let me go find it. Which show do I want to do?

Okay, or just pull up that, that screen on your page or something.

Yeah, I'm making sure that I've got the right one here. Nope, it's not that show. I got to get the other one here.

Yeah, I know that we've been talking about for months now the need for video creators over on YouTube and other platforms to be able to have an audio podcast version of their, of their YouTube show. And it looks like, Todd, your team has done an automation process that can grab a playlist.

Yeah. So off of YouTube, essentially all, all the podcasts are— they can either originate on our Vid2Pod, or if they're an existing podcaster, it's real simple. And when, when they're in our dashboard, there's a place over here where we have, uh, show settings.

Yeah.

So this basically is a place where they normally set if they want to page at Blueberry, or if they want a Blueberry-free WordPress site, or if they have their own website. If they own website, they can link it up and all that stuff. But down here we have a new feature, says, uh, vid to pod. And all that really is is we, we make it so that you enter your at sign. In my case, it's @geeknews. We pull up the— in the onboarding process, we pull up the channel Then, um, we show the playlist, our playlist. You have to select the right playlist. You confirm, uh, that and certify. And this is through the terms of service as well. There's a terms of service screen, special terms of service screen you have to do before you get to this screen. Um, and then you decide you want to use your own channel art or you want to use You use your own cover art. Do you want to use your channel art from YouTube? Do you want all videos or you want videos from a certain date? And once that is set and once a podcaster agrees to that, and again, the terms of service and why we have to have a separate terms of service is pretty obvious. Number one, uh, giving us permission to pull their content, some other licensing stuff. Making sure they know, number 2, that if they have music in their video podcast, that the music licenses will not transfer and that they should not be using this service because they'll be liable. Because if they've used YouTube Music as a copyright in their content, that copyright does not cover an audio podcast. They're not clear. So we make them understand that any music in your podcast has to be licensed, it has to have the appropriate license, and we pull in the title, the description, the chapter file, and we auto-publish the media. So anytime you publish a new episode to a, to a playlist over on YouTube, the playlist you've designated, uh, within 15 minutes we'll pick that up, pull it in convert it, and, um, auto-publish. You don't have to do nothing. Set it and forget it. Um, so they can still make additional episodes, they can still participate in anything podcasting, they can still set everything up just like a podcast. But the main process here is we've just completely automated so they don't have to do anything.

And I have a couple of questions. Is there a way that, let's say, a YouTube creator can just go to blueberry.com or whatever and, and say, I want to create a podcast, and all they do is enter their, their, um, their address to YouTube?

Yeah, that's what happens during the field or something like that.

Yeah, that's what will take you through the process.

Yeah, but they have to come to us via the Vid2Pod page The special link will set a flag. If they come to us just from our hosting account, they'll have the opportunity to do the Vid2Pod option after onboarding. It's not part of the normal process, but we can— but basically we want them to start the process on our Vid2Pod page.

Yeah, because you might capture a lot of YouTubers that are saying, well, you know, I'll just— this is easy to do.

Yes, we already have here.

And I'll put in my, my path to my YouTube account, and then I can select what channel I want to have go into a podcast feed, and we're pretty much done.

We reached out to folks that already had podcasts, um, on Real Podcasts, AKA, and, um, all of them that we reached out to have migrated to us, or they originated with us and they changed the process so that they do not know— do They do not do any additional work. Now that they've migrated, they're over, they've just set it and forget it. So now they're saving 15 to 20 minutes. They don't have to come in and create a post. Everything is done automatically.

It just transfers all that data out of YouTube and just uses it in the RSS feed. Yeah.

Okay. And, uh, and we convert it to high quality audio.

Um, Again, what's the default kind of playback bitrate? Is it—

we're doing 128K, and I'd have to look if it was mono or stereo, but okay.

Um, yeah, but I think most of the stuff on YouTube I think is in stereo, I believe.

But so, and again, it's, it's one of those things where the— we just made this so that it would be simple. Yeah.

So is there any kind of authentication of ownership?

You have to, you have to certify that it's your account. Okay. We're, we get a daily running report of who's added content that we're reviewing. So, you know, you basically have to certify and plus you have to have a credit card on file. You have to pay for this. This is, there's no free, you know, there's basically what we've seen and what we saw on other platforms is people on Reddit and other folks have made all kinds of hacks, and they're putting YouTubers' content into apps, um, that are not even podcast apps, um, and the YouTuber's getting no credit for it. So the way we set this up too is that, you know, if a YouTuber is monetized and they're worried about losing monetization, you know, they can turn on monetization programmatic here. And again, it's an audience— the way we feel this is a growth opportunity. People are going to watch and continue to watch.

And then is there any potential way that, let's say, some Joe Blow podcaster types in Joe Rogan's account and is able to create a podcast?

If they do, uh, it'll be caught really quick on our site because we're reviewing every day.

Good, good.

You know, and if we— and if we run into any type of issue, then we'll go to authentication. But we just wanted to lower the onboarding process. Um, you know, it's not something that's— it's some— again, they gotta— they're gonna have to pay to do that. And not saying that's worth it, right? I'm not saying that that's right. But, you know, we're not— we're going to make sure associated accounts are associated accounts.

I would say that's probably the biggest risk there is people getting in and trying to hijack content. Yeah.

But the question really then is for what, a few hours, you know? Yeah.

I mean, if there's processes that can catch it, I think that's terrific. Yeah. I mean, I had the same problem back when I was working at Spreaker. Where people were cloning feeds in the platform and that caused all sorts of problems.

Yeah, we've seen very, very little of that. Anytime you have to put a credit card on and I got your credit card information, you know, your name, your zip code, your billing information.

Yeah, that's a different, that's a different level, right? Yeah, yeah, of engagement. And if I think where mainly this kind of stuff happened is on free free platforms.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And there's a couple out there that are doing this now for free that I'm surprised that, you know— yeah. Oh, oh, they are?

Okay.

Well, you know, there's, there's a— yeah, not doing this now, not creating RSS feeds, but someone that's basically creating audio.

Oh yeah, it's like a website that you enter. It's an app, your YouTube account. Yeah, right. Yeah. It exports all the audio or all the video out of there.

Yeah. So yeah, I've seen those.

Yeah. Awesome. Is there any other details like this? It sounds like, I mean, does it work outside of the WordPress plugin and inside the WordPress plugin?

No, it only works on the Blueberry dashboard.

Just on the dashboard. It doesn't yet work in the, no, the plugin. Yeah.

And we probably won't be put it in the plugin, I don't think. Because if you have, if you have your own website, uh, already, you can link that in the system. So there is a way, um, if you, if you— again, so far we haven't run into anybody that, um, has been publishing via their own website. And then you do, then we'll talk to them, figure out how we're going to work it with them, but turn off auto publishing or something. Because then they would still have to manually publish on their own website.

Yeah, because that's what I'm doing, doing with, um, with your platform right now is I publish directly to my WordPress instance that then goes into your, yeah, your system through the plugin.

So I don't have a solution for you on WordPress now. So again, it's— and we figured the majority of these folks that were going to come in over, you know, those that have a process are— but again, I've moved some people already off other off other podcast hosting platforms that just want the ease. And then what I had over there was a landing page anyway.

So yeah, I think it's those that are creating videos that are, you know, serialized over there that have been put into a podcast playlist. So this is any of the playlists, not just the ones that are designated podcast playlists.

Oh, it's anybody. Yeah. Any playlist. Tom says there's so many reaction videos to licensed music. And it seems impossible to police. Disclaimer or not. Yeah, it's going to be impossible. It's on them. You know, we warned them. Right.

You know, Spotify is going to catch it and take it back. Yep.

Right. We warned them, you know, and basically it's very, very clear that, you know, this— you better have a license if you've got some music in your content. Matter of fact, you have to click and say that, you know, basically And if they didn't read the paragraph, I can't help that. But I'm sure some— somebody's gonna— and we'll get a takedown on a piece of content. I'm sure, I'm sure it'll happen. Yeah.

And it also creates an interesting loop too, if you think about it, where you could have a playlist video that you import in your system, create a podcast feed, and then that podcast feed could be submitted to YouTube Music. Right. Rob.

What? We're trying to get them to come this way.

I know, but it could go both ways is what I'm saying.

Well, then they should already have that designated as a podcast playlist anyway, not set the RSS feed. Yeah, but then it would be just an audio-only version, right?

So you'd have the video and the audio version.

I guess that's true.

Yeah.

You know, so. And really what it, what, what this stemmed from as I came back, you know, Podfest we had, as you know, I was talking to this gal, she's like, I'm doing a YouTube channel. Right. She's quite adamant with me. I don't have time. I don't have time to do a podcast. Yeah.

It's a hill to climb too.

And it was, you know, and she was pretty, I'm like, okay. Okay.

No, it's automated once you get it set up, right?

Right.

You upload to YouTube, it automatically generates it and posts it.

I emailed her yesterday because I had her in our contact list. I said, hey. And she goes, oh, that's cool. And, you know, so you don't have to do any work.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we will see how this works out. I'm not saying that there is a, you know, there's, there's lots of things. There's, you know, The interesting product.

It is, it is. And it, it, it changes the conversation around working with, uh, coming out of YouTube and getting involved in podcasting, which I think is—

and again, making that easier. And you know, one of the things that, you know, I— we really tried to emphasize on the product page is the benefit, the bonus podcast-centric opportunities. Number one, they can get a free WordPress site with us if they want. They get an audio player. They can share premium— they can create premium content. They can go into Apple Podcasts. They can go into their own Blubrry Premium. So if they want to do premium audio, they can. They can— if they decide they want to, they can add another show and create a true video podcast. So if you feel these are all marketing, messaging, training opportunities, they can do V4V. They can do promotions for stuff that's going to happen on their channel. They can do pre-rolls into the audio content. Say, hey, by the way, we're going to have a, you know, we're having a live YouTube event in a week. We want you to be there. They could pre-roll this into all their audio content. Yeah. And the best part is they never have to worry about a platform taking down their content. So, you know, that's some of the bonus stuff, you know. Um, yeah, monetizing immediately, distribution, analytics. So, you know, the goal here is to, you know, that's going to be part of our messaging, is to educate You know, there's a whole nother world over here. You got this great world you're participating in right now. You're— again, this is really designed for video first, folks. So your video first, then we'll go from there.

Yeah, I think there's, there's definitely a need for that. So I think this is a terrific solution. It'd be interesting if we were able to do more of these kind of integrations, right, that can help content creators share content.

Well, we're not done, you know, with this. We're going to add some more.

I don't think you're ever done.

Well, we're going to add some more platforms to VidDepot. Oh yeah, why not? Hmm.

That has some interesting things to think about. Sure.

Yep.

So you also, you also announced some AI tools, right?

Well, it's, it's been, it's been released. So I think the announcement is going out this afternoon. So, but Blueberry customers now have accessibility to what we're calling Blueberry PAI, P-A-I, or Blueberry Podcast AI, nicknamed Blueberry PAI. That's, that's, that's the name of the Getting a little cheeky there.

So does PAI— is PAI an acronym or is it just— Hey, come on, Rob.

Blueberry pie. You know, it's just fun.

I know, I know.

Yeah. So it's PAI. So Podcast AI. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, okay.

PAI. Yeah.

PAI is how we're spelling it, not P-I-E. So yeah, the blog and the product page and all that's probably coming to life as we're talking here, but. I saw the menu item in the dashboard, so anybody that's in the dashboard can get to it now. Okay. And then we give it all of our customers 5 free trials of each product. And the media clip creator is, uh, heavy in work. I expect that in probably a month.

So, so let's, let's play out a scenario. So you have a, a podcaster on your platform that's doing audio now, but yet maybe they have a YouTube channel that has different content on it. How are you bundling that to extend that to maybe that account having two podcasts?

Oh, they could, they could add another. And again, we were just getting started here on that. Yeah.

Yeah, because I'm sure there's examples of that where people create an audio podcast and but they create a different kind of content flow for YouTube. They might be able to convert that to an audio podcast as well.

And here's the thing, it's everything that a normal podcaster does, can do, they can do. Creating new episodes, creating premium within that same channel. Right. They're not limited to what we pull in. They can produce premium, they can do whatever they want. They can go to Apple Podcasts, Apple Premium. They can— so they can do everything there. And if they want to create a new show, you have the ability to create a new show. They want to become a video podcaster, they can become a video podcaster. Hmm. So really, the sky's the limit. The only thing that we're doing is auto-publishing their—

you might want to think about doing a deal with X, maybe, Todd. You know, I had to mention that.

Well, again, we're not done with Viddepod, right?

No, I'm sure.

You know, and you know, it is what it is. Yeah. So those of you that are on our platform, our episode plan. I won't go into everything. There's going to be videos out about this episode planning. We've got the episode production tools, and I'm just showing you the top, top of the menu system. Let me show you an output.

So what's the scope of the AI capability? What's the top level?

That's, uh, here's, here's the one I did for Geek News Central. I got, uh, transcript. Okay. Title, I chose my own title. I didn't like titles that came up with on this one, but we suggest 10 titles. I get a show summary. I get bullet points of the content that's been covered. I didn't do episode generation on that one. Let me back up. Let me find one. I've got episode generation. Episode art. Okay. And episode chapters. So this is a full chapter list of every, you know, the 30+ topics I talked about in Keaton Central. It automatically marked the chapters, put the time hacks in. I can upload images, do links. But here's—

that goes into the, the player too, I would imagine.

Yeah, all this transfers right into If I come back to Geek News Central and look at the last episode, you can see the chapter markers on the player that were—

It also goes into the RSS feed too? Yeah.

Yeah. And then basically, so it's also there too. So we brought it into the player and it's also in the RSS feed. But if I go back and go to the top of the food chain here and I go over to the social promotion, and the production. We've got the ability to do clips. These are clips for Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and I've got the ability to do an email promo as well. We added a little feature in the last minute, um, because what this does, it starts off with a, uh, with episode planning, and there's a show profile. So my name First name, last name, email, bio, podcast goal, podcast description, website, social media links, destinations, and then desired audience. So this is the folks you hope listen to your podcast. You can actually set up a profile and that goes into the episode planning section. But in the end, when we get all done and we've done, we're doing clip highlights, I don't think it'll show up on this one because we just added it.

That email capability there that you're generating there, is that, um, moving towards maybe kind of a newsletter type of—

well, this, this is designed— you cut and paste this and put this right into your email software.

Okay, whatever email.

Yeah, and you can edit it, of course, but it does a great job. And we just— I mean, literally in the last half hour, we added— and I haven't created a new email, but We now embed within the actual email, your social platforms, your email, your subscribe links to the various. So we basically have that embedded in the AI, melds that in. So I don't want to get too deep into this. You guys can, those of you that are not Blueberry customers, come on over, we'll migrate you today. And here's the beauty. Here's the beauty. It's just $10 a month with, it's part of our Thrive plan.

So we've got it in $10 a month in addition to the hosting plan, or—

but it includes— but it's part of our Thrive Bundle. Thrive Bundle's already got like 6 or 7 additional tools. So we've added a whole bunch of value to our, to our Thrive Bundle. So yeah, $10 is the, is the cost per month. So that's cheaper than anybody's AI out there that's doing any AI.

Bundled in with your basic plans?

With the— so no, so you have to have the add-on. You have to have the Thrive add-on. Okay. To get the, to get the assistant. Um, but again, it's a hell of a value.

That's what I was going to say. I mean, it's that— I mean, if you were to get the same capabilities, you'd probably have to have multiple subscriptions with different platforms.

Oh, with a lot of different platforms. Yeah. Basically choose the language model. If somebody all of a sudden next week comes out with something that's 5 times better, we will test in a test environment and then flick the switch. I'm not locked into any model.

So this has pre-written prompts behind them, right? Is that how it works? Yeah, yeah.

The Beauty Bubs says—

There's probably open areas in the prompt to fill with information from each content.

She says, Beauty Bubs, Todd, I noticed images per chapter. Does this mean you'll be able to produce an MP4? No, we're not talking about doing that for YouTube yet. The— Yep. The— The chapters are purely a Podcasting 2.0 feature that's supported in Podcasting 2.0 apps. And, um, I can see where this might go in the future, Todd.

It's interesting to think about the cross-pollinations that could happen between audio and video here. So You start thinking about the growing capability of AI video. Where's that going to take us?

It'd be fun. Yeah. There's lots, lots of options here. Yeah.

I was impressed by some of the AI video that I've been seeing online lately. So we're not—

but, you know, again, I'm not doing— it's very, very expensive if you— okay, so let's say I have 30 chapters to do 30 images. If I was going to do 30 AI images to add to a chapter file, that's, that's, that's not going to be bundled into a $10 a month plan. On top of hosting that. That has—

there's a lot of value in that anyway.

Well, you know what, no, if someone wants to have 3 minutes of this image, 5 minutes of that image, 8 minutes of another image, if you want to switch the image every— like that, I'm not going to do video. That's crazy. I'm not doing a full motion video off an audio podcast. That's, you know, at this time it's crazy how much that would cost. That would be crazy.

You know it's coming though.

Well, you know, but it's expensive. It's really, really expensive when you get into generating images. Yeah. It's just like that little audio clip I just played. You know, those are done on credits. So, you know, you're not getting that. That is heavy lift. You know, you think about strapping You get something like that, it's, it's not inexpensive.

But Todd, I can totally see it happen. So let's say you do an audio podcast and you just use the AI to create a 90-minute video of this show of the same content, right? And then just have a—

well, just have— yeah, okay, well, I— Knox, and anybody can do that for under like At this time, under 100. It's still early. Yeah, it's real early. But what, you know, do I want to watch some swirling BS on a YouTube channel? I don't know.

Well, if you think about the, the potential production capability that could be wrapped around that, um, it could be pretty impressive.

Dave Jones says Vid2Pod is a beautiful product. Massive kudos to the whole team. Are there any feeds in the wild yet?

Same thing, Todd, with Rumble too.

So another 2,222 sats. Not answering your question, Rob. This was from—

Well, it's also, you know, what's interesting is that currently right now I have an account at Rumble and then I have a YouTube account and I can synchronize those together. Yeah. Right, so they'll transfer videos out of YouTube into Rumble. YouTube.

No, they won't do it that way no more. They quit. I'm pretty sure it's only Rumble to YouTube now.

Oh, so YouTube cut it off.

I think so. Okay.

I kind of did wonder why it didn't look like my Rumble account was full of my YouTube stuff yet.

So 2022 stats from Darren Schwartz says, sorry, Rob, I'm with Todd on this one. If you dropped another show's episode in your feed, You'd get an email from me. This is from 2 episodes ago.

Oh, this is the fee drop question. Yeah.

If you continue to do it, I'd probably drop you. I don't have time to listen to podcasts. I, I don't have— I don't have time to listen to the podcast I subscribe to as it is. Now, a quick host suggestion, if preferred. Also, I like the clips Fountain does. I found a couple of new podcasts that way. Go podcasting. Let's see here. Sam Sethi sent— it was actually interviewed by Sam yesterday, so I'm going to be on Pod News on Friday. So anyway, that's what's going on with that. So anyway, Live and Lit, everybody, on the new podcasting app at podcastapps.com. And we appreciate all of you that stream by the minute, stream as Satoshis. That is greatly appreciated. And incentive for us to just keep talking for hours and hours. Yeah, well, You know, let me check her Skype here, see if our guest came.

Yeah, that would be great. I think we're over.

Hey guys, how you doing? Good.

Now let me do some screen changes here because I to get you in here. 2, 3— I don't know, I don't want that one. I want this one. 5— ah, there you are!

What's happening?

Red circles in the house, right?

What's going on? Caden? Yes, Caden.

Yeah, what— welcome to the show, Mike.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I've been listening to you guys for a very long time. I listened to you on like 1.5x though. It's a very different experience to listen to you live, uh, and, and get you at, uh, at the natural pace.

You do know that when you listen at that pace, that your brain gets jacked up. And people have found that they, when they go back to 1x speed, they have less anxiety in life. So we definitely recommend 1x speed. Okay, thanks.

I'll switch it back. It's sometimes I'm listening to the show, like, you know, it's a show about poker or something for my, for entertainment, I tend not to fast forward. And then when I'm just trying to download you know, industry information directly into my brain like the Matrix. Uh, you know, I tend to turn things, turn things up and speed it up. But, um, anyway, I've been listening to you guys for years, so it's cool to be on.

Yeah, thanks. So, uh, you guys made an announcement today too. Yeah, we did.

It was a, a, a really interesting, uh, day for us. We launched a new product of ours that we call OpenWrap, um, which I'm happy to tell you about. Um, many people think about Red Circle as a podcast hosting company, which we are. You know, we have a, a podcast hosting business and a, a competitive product in in that space. Um, but the main focus for our business is on host-read advertising and host-read advertising automation. And, um, the product that we released today sort of takes all the stuff that we've been doing over the last several years that helps us build, uh, and automate host-read advertising and brings it to podcasts that are not hosted on Red Circle exclusively. So those things used to be tightly coupled, our hosting and distribution which has its own dynamic insertion technology and our ad automation. And now we're bringing our ad automation to podcasts that are hosted on other VAS compatible hosting platforms. I just used a lot of jargon, so I'm happy to get into the details.

Let me guess, you are intercepting the download link. You decide if you have an ad inserted ad. If it is, you download the video, reinsert and serve it and You incur the hosting bill to deliver that. And if there's no ad, you deliver it from the host.

No, we don't do it that way. I think that's the way, um, what Dynamo did it. That was a product from VoxNest.

Yeah. I worked on that. Yeah.

That was an interesting kind of like, uh, end-around solution to the problem because, uh, but the problem with that is that once you insert the ad and you're the one delivering it, then you're incurring the bandwidth, which is no fun, but, but doable, but also then can mess with the stats that end up back on the podcaster. That's right. Host of origin. Um, what we've done instead is we've used a technology called VAST, which is supported by some of the larger enterprise, the more enterprisey hosting companies. And what it does is it comes from video ad serving and it's an XML-based protocol and it lets you kind of instruct the other ad server, hey, you know, insert this ad for me. Ping me back after the ad's been inserted. And so we sort of talk server to server directly with the other podcast hosting company. Yeah.

So then you have to do an integration with the hosting company to do it.

Yeah, it's an open standard and it's supported by, you know, Megaphone and Art19 and Omni and some ads with Simplecast setups. So it's supported by a bunch of those like enterprise hosts already. You know, there's always, when you do these kinds of protocols, there's always little idiosyncrasies to work out when you're integrating, but for the most part, it's functional with all those places using the, without having to do a bunch of custom integrations.

Yeah, when we did the SoundStack for Programmatic, ours is a little easier because they just tell us whether they have an ad for this particular, you know, so we serve it when there's no ad and they serve it when there is an ad. And then they send us log files back. So we get our log files back in the same exact format. So we, we basically are able to maintain the, the metric data. And because, you know, they basically— we agreed on the, on the log format, and then they just pop it back to us. So, you know, we thought about doing this for Programmatic as well, kind of similar to what you're doing, but It just, it's, uh, you know, if there's enough money, it's worth it, you know, I guess that's the key. Yeah.

Well, so for us, uh, you know, we've been successful in scaling up the HostRed part of our business, which is where we focus. And, um, it was getting to the point where the main limiter for us was the amount of podcasts that we could convince to switch to our hosting. Uh, and I think our hosting is great. Um, but I think there's lots of hosting providers that are out there that are great. Uh, and so competing over there while also trying to make my main business about advertising, uh, was complicated from, uh, and making it harder for us to scale what we actually cared about, which was delivering hosted ads. And so while we still have a great hosting product and we're not throwing that away or not going to continue iterating on it or anything like that, um, this enables us to move fast on our ad product and do it on podcasts sort of wherever, wherever they live.

Now, without revealing my entire business relationship with SoundStack, you know, so I would just say that their commission came out of my cut. So I took less of a cut. So basically they earned their commission, I earned my commission, I just earned less commission because— so how are you incentivizing me to work with you?

Yeah, well, the ad side of what we do is our own sales team and our own direct relationships with brands and agencies. These. And so, uh, there's nobody else that's like bringing the demand in from the other side. Uh, it's us doing it, and then we, we have a 30% rev share that we take from— so it's in some ways it sort of functions similar to how an ad rep would work. The only difference is you're not dealing with a million emails and spreadsheets to pull that off. You're just interacting with our application.

But if I'm giving you access to my host, what— where's the— is there incentive for the host to give you access to those customers?

You mean the podcast hosting?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, yeah, there's, uh, there's, there's different pricing models that those folks have. They do charge like a small, uh, like CPM-based fee for the actual ad insertion over this technology, but that's the extent of the fees that are being taken by these hosts. Yeah.

That's interesting because I wouldn't give up my host. For an insertion fee.

Yeah, I mean, Megaphone's not letting me, uh, you know, they have their own, their own span, which is like their programmatic thing that, that runs above anything else that is inserted into the inventory.

Sorry, you're getting whatever. Yeah, I understand.

Nah, yeah, their fill rate is not super, you know, overwhelmingly high, so there's plenty of inventory usually.

That's terrible.

But they're making sure that they get to, uh to get the first dibs. And there are other folks that I think, you know, recognize that the publisher has an interest in being able to source their own advertising and, you know, plug it in and punch it into the dynamic insertion UI that existed in Megaphone. This isn't really that different. It's just happening a little bit more automated so that the publisher doesn't have to, you know, copy and paste a bunch of measurement pixels or make sure they get the dates correct when they, when they flight the campaign, right? All of that is happening automatically on our backend instead. Yeah.

Hmm.

Yeah.

So that's, that's kind of what I wanted to ask you about too, Mike, is, is that you say in your announcement that you're automating all the manual steps. Is it just because you're, you're doing it through your own ad sales force or is there some other aspects of automating the manual steps here? Are you guys doing that between your, your ad sales folks and the brands? Is there something new going on there or is it just the automation of working with you guys and not having to deal with it? Yeah.

So I mean, that's, that's the core of what our product is, is, you know, we started 5 years ago, we released a free hosting just to bring some podcasts on and then we started selling ads by hand. And I've heard Todd talk about this and you can hear, you know, you can't monetize the network and all these things. Like it's, it's so painful to run these campaigns by hand. Right. Uh, and you, you have everything from, you know, podcaster says the wrong promo code to, you know, we forgot to invoice, uh, or, you know, the agency didn't pay pay us on time, or the pixel formatted for the— yeah. So every one of those things I just mentioned, we have built systematically features for to streamline and make those part of our application instead of a bunch of emails and spreadsheets. So, you know, as a podcaster, you get an invite to an ad deal where we say, hey, you know, here's the dates and the terms and what's going on. Like, do you want to do it or not? They say yes. And then from then on, the platform is managing everybody's deadlines. It's emailing the advertiser saying, hey, I need a script. I need a script. I need a script. The advertiser puts the script in, uh, you know, it's then emailing the podcaster, hey, I need a read, a read, you know, you need to update in 3 days, 2 days, 1 day. And we're sort of herding all these cats. Um, and then again, the pixels and the reporting and all of that stuff, these are features built into the platform. There are things for, you know, podcaster read the wrong promo code or ad was not approved or, um, you know, putting the right CTA in the RSS feed. All of these things have features that we've built to try and make this as streamlined as possible. And that's why we're doing, you know, I don't know the number offhand, usually like 500 to 600 concurrent host-read ads on the platform. We just have like one ad ops person that's kind of being the glue whenever something isn't handled by the platform itself. But it takes a lot of focus and energy to just work on that for many years to get to that point.

Mike, you should have bought my CAMS product. Yeah, because I've had this built for 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. Not as deep, but we built the same thing, you know, because it was like Cartoon Cat.

Yeah.

And I was, and I was running it.

Yeah.

You know, so it was me, you know, and it wasn't as fancy as it did automatically send reports to the media buyers. It did send emails to the podcasters, but we did true host reads. Nothing was inserted. Everything was baked. Because even today, this is what I don't understand. 95%, 96, 97% of podcasts globally get 90% of the lifetime downloads in the first 96 hours. So why, why do we even want to bother for those shows that are getting this maximum reach within the first night? Why even rebuild that? Why not just, just leave it in there, you know. Um, sure, there's shows that have, yeah, long tails, they have evergreen, you know, but the majority of shows in podcasting looks like a hockey puck, a hockey stick stood up on end, you know.

It's right, so the Apple changes, it's even more so, you know, the back catalog stuff's kind of even less, right? Details in each of these deals, if you're doing 3 a week, it's easy to make a mistake. Um, and then, you know, you're sending screenshots of reporting and stuff afterwards. So there's all this efficiency that comes with doing it over dynamic, which is why we focus.

I still be honest with you, double middle fingers to the media buyers that want pixels. You know, are they really, are they really getting that much value? No, I don't think so. I don't think so either. I think the—

yeah, I mean, they're—

I appreciate the holdover from another era, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

But I think the, like, the, like, one thing it is really good for, and we find it really interesting when we get our hands on the data, is to see the comparative performance of different podcasts. So forget about like a real ROAS number that comes out of this thing, but just to see like, hey, these two true crime podcasts with 20,000 weekly listeners that are reading the same set of talking points, one can perform 5 times better than the other. And what the reason is for that is anybody's guess, right? Is the quality of the ad read? Is the relationship that host has with his audience. And so like, you know, me being able to see that as the guy working with the podcaster and the advertiser is like very helpful, but I understand also kind of like people tend to overvalue some of the data that comes out of it in a way that, you know, sort of backs into like a hard ROAS number, but it's still, you know, you got to look at a much bigger picture than just, uh, just one, one dot on a, on a graph, any down the long tail. Um, but also kind of, uh, there's a huge kind of fat torso. It's named after me. Of middle-class podcasters that are, you know, that have a couple thousand listeners up to a couple tens of thousands of listeners. And when you aggregate those up, they're actually bigger than that. Yeah. Just this middle huge. And those folks, you know, they get an ad deal here, larger budgets, and make sure it gets distributed to podcasts of all shapes and sizes.

Well, I would, I would love to see, uh, I'd love to see, uh, you guys think about, uh, a way to, uh, figure out a point system that incentivizes me. Understood.

Yeah, I mean, I haven't thought about—

yeah, in the end, you know, let's be honest, I'm not greedy, but I'm gonna do the dev work to put something together, which, you know, we can do. Um, that dev work's got to be paid for and whatever overhead, and then, you know, we obviously— you can't cut the pie 25 times. That's because then who gets screwed? The creator gets screwed. So for me, that's why when we worked with SoundStack, I, you know, they took their commission out of mine and I just took a lower commission. So, you know, and they, and, and they provide all the, you know, they provide all the inventory. I don't have to do nothing. I go to sleep and they, they manage it. So it's like the paycheck. Well, and not only that, I just, I give the, you know, these are podcasters that would not have an opportunity otherwise. You know, they can do value for value, they can do all the other stuff that's available out there if they want. And we see a growing number of folks that are using programmatic, which is good, but we both know where programmatic pricing is. You know, that'll never, you know, that'll never, if it ever gets above $15, I think I'll, you know, I'll, you know, Rob, I'll probably eat that hat you're wearing. But, you know, I'd be thrilled if it stayed at 12 or 13, but usually it's 7, 8, 9, 10, you know. And but if we could get to find a way to put money in podcasters' pockets, guess what it does? Doesn't matter if it comes from value for value. Doesn't matter if it comes from donations. Doesn't matter if it comes from advertisers. We put money in podcasters' pockets. Guess what they can do? They hold up that check or that PayPal statement or wherever that money's come in, and maybe they show their partner, or they buy themselves dinner, or they buy— make a car payment, or whatever the number is. This is a motivator. It's just as much as a motivator of Matt just sent us 2,112 sats. He says, watching the show from Spain. So that's, you know, that's again getting value back from Matt for saying, hey, I'm watching the show live. And then Dave Jones says, uh, Yo, Mike, hosting companies interviewing other hosting companies. We live in a crazy world. Well, we're really not a hosting company there, Dave. It's— we're doing the New Media Show. I happen to, you know, be a founder of one, but doesn't mean we're doing— we're an open opportunity thing here. And you can see I'm wheeling and dealing a little bit at the same time. That was from Dave Jones.

Yeah, I think your point is valid. These, these vast and programmatic integrations do a lot of work. We've done them before and then found $100 on the other side.

Disaster.

You know, and so, you know, you do want to make sure you're spending your engineers wisely. I think the, like, the way, like I said, the way these enterprise hosts do it is I think they charge a fee for service. That's just like another approach, you know.

And it's when it goes back to, you know, I'm a creative person. It's, I don't think that's any surprise. So because I, you know, I'm the one that's getting a check too. I get a check from GoDaddy and I, you know, I protect every point of that that I can. So, so I, so I get it. I really do. This is cool what you're doing there. This could be done another way. This could be done the way we did it with SoundStack where it's not as complicated of an implementation. So, hmm. How are you, how are you working the insertion points?

So yeah, that's all managed by the, by the podcaster in their existing, in their existing system.

Okay, so they set their marker. Yeah.

And they, the way this ends up getting flighted on their end is it's almost like a camp, a low priority campaign in their dynamic insertion system that says, you know, my stuff that I flighted for the ads I sold myself go first, and then go down and look at what Red Circle has to offer. And meanwhile, we see those bids bids that are coming out or those bid requests all the time. So we get a feel for how much inventory is available on these shows. And we can use that to figure out how to size campaigns and what to expect.

And when that call comes about this day of the month, where the advertiser says, oh, hey, I got an extra $25 grand to spend, can you move that for me in 10 days? This is an opportunity to get a flight up fast in 2 or 3 days and get that money spent.

That's right. And I think, you know, people, when they think about how to do that effectively, their, their brain turns to programmatic solutions. Right. And I think that, that in addition to, you know, helping us spread the money around to a larger set of creators by, um, by taking out all the friction with this automation, it can also increase the speed at which we deploy these budgets, which makes it possible for those kinds of things to end up in like higher quality authentic host-read ads instead of, you know, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday radio ads that can sometimes end up being those last-minute ones.

What's the fastest time you've ever flighted a campaign on one of those Friday calls?

An hour or two. You know, not to 100 podcasts. Right, right, right. But we have a button in the platform that's called Start Early. You know, our typical turnaround time is 10 days, but sometimes if we have to hustle, you know, we hustle and there's a button that just like makes it go.

Yeah, I think the fastest I turned one was 3 days. So kudos to you for a couple hours. Yeah, yeah.

It's like, you know, some of my sales guys have the podcasters, you know, phone numbers saved as their favorites. You know, it's like we need— sometimes if you're fast enough, there's, there's dollars to grab for everybody, right?

You know, and, you know, this should— and this is to all the podcasters listening— check your email twice a day, please.

Yeah, that's actually one of the things that, uh, that, uh, that we've— that we found. So, uh, what one of the things we did that really improved the response time was adding text. Yeah, we sent texts. We sent texts 5 days before, 3 days before, 2 days before, 1 day before, and 4 hours before, right? If you haven't hit— if you haven't hit a deadline, right?

That ding ding is brilliant. My, my system— my, my system I haven't touched in a while does not have that, but Yeah, if we ever to update it, I think that would be— oh man. Oh, hey, you know, to get this email, hey, is that campaign— 2 weeks, you know, after the deadline— hey, is that campaign still available? No, we told you, we told you at 48 hours to respond, right?

That's an interesting product problem for us too, right? Where it's like, yeah, I mean, we can— because like I said, it's all automated— we can like reflight the campaign and send it to you the next day. Um, but there's like a, a give a mouse a cookie problem there too, where, you know, we want the deadlines to mean something so everybody keeps their hair.

And especially if you've got a media— go ahead.

I was gonna say, as much as we have solved a lot of the friction with software, there are still like fundamental people problems involved with this. And any, any interesting software has to kind of figure out how to best take on those challenges. Right.

You see this? I, I test this to 5 to 7 years of dealing with media buyers and podcasters who didn't respond to email. And yeah, make— yeah, so I understand why you guys built what you built. Believe me, I, I understand completely. Yeah, go ahead, Rob.

Yeah, I was gonna kind of shift the conversation a little bit. I don't know if all of you guys saw the post that Lisa Laporte made, who's the CEO of Twit TV, about the advertising market and why she feels like podcasting is struggling right now. And her top pick was podcast agencies demanding massive ad tech in what they expect around campaigns. This would be, you know, Pixel tracking, uh, brand safety suitability tools, all sorts of, um, you know, kind of attribution type, type stuff. Um, and whether or not that's kind of adding this expense layer to the advertising business and making it difficult for, you know, uh, like a network to kind of run their own stuff, which is kind of what Lisa is trying to do here versus working with a hosting platform like, like Red Circle or Blueberry or whatever is really the only way going forward. Now, are you guys feeling pressured on the, on the cost side and the complexity side around the expectation of agencies and buyers right now around ad tech, around podcasts? Some.

I mean, we, we You know, the, the, the podcast media buying agencies, and there's a relatively small set of them and, you know, we want to maintain a spectacular relationship with them as possible by delivering efficient operations so that they don't have to deal with the exceptions and the problems and providing high performance content for them to be on. Um, and in the end of the day, you know, they control a lot of the ad spend, especially in host read. And so, um, You know, if they are trying to add services or add complexity to be able to service their client as best as they can, you kind of got to play ball. You don't want to be on their bad side because there's a million podcasts and networks out there and you want to be servicing them as best you can. And, you know, I, I tend to trust that they have the best view of what, of what they need to keep their clients happy in terms of technology. Because they, they're the ones who are really good at closing and maintaining those, those clients and keeping that spend going. And so I wouldn't say I have a problem with it, but I completely agree with it's a burden. It's, it's complex. And, you know, our solution for that is try to build as much software as we can to keep that simple. But yeah, you know, sometimes we got to copy and paste 60 pixels into the software to make the thing work, right? That's a lot.

So there was one thing in her commentary that I kind of took umbrage to, right? And my reply— she complained heavily about the drop because of iOS. Oh yeah, yeah.

And the drop in downloads and changes in the consumption.

And my response was that not everyone was hit as badly as— I said, then you need to be wiser in who you're picking for a measurement provider, because, you know, as we've talked about on this show, Yeah, Blueberry saw a little drop because of some of the change in iOS 17, but I didn't get hit on the, the app having the issue of doing the repeated downloads to try to download back catalog. That wasn't ever an issue with us, which many other folks seem to have an issue with. And I look at who I know who's measuring Lisa's shows and I go, hmm. So You know, maybe, maybe podcasters need to be a little wiser in who they pick for measurement partner.

I think, yeah, I think you're shifting quite a burden onto the podcaster there, Todd, by, by saying that because, well, a podcast—

I don't know that a lot of people know the differences.

Supposedly if they're IAB, they're all doing the same thing.

A podcaster in the advertising, doing advertising needs to ask very tough questions of the people that are measuring their shows, right? And if they don't, I have— sorry, that's your business. That's, that's your, that's your, your bundling. And I'm gonna— if I'm going to some company and they're gonna be measuring my show, I'm going to be asking a lot of questions. Again, people need to realize the IB podcast measurement guidelines are minimum standards. Right, right.

Minimum.

And when people realize it's the minimum, then what are you doing above and beyond? And even with this new proposal that's coming out, it's the minimum standards. And I think podcasters need to get smart. And again, maybe I'm just— maybe, okay, I do have 19 years behind my belt on this. And what's—

well, both of us do have a lot on this one too, but it's, it's more, you know, when you say minimum standards, um, that really means that the better platforms will have the capability of doing a better job of filtering, um, and, and actually ultimately getting a lower number compared to other platforms.

No one wants to ever get a lower number. So that's the problem.

That's, that's the key to this whole conversation, is that the IAB has not had a strict, really, standard here. Um, and, and not everyone adheres to it in the same way, um, even on the up, you know, or the lower number side, right? Which just means that there's other filters being applied that are not required by the IAB.

It's just like now when people are saying, oh, we're seeing fraud. Well, right, we saw fraud in 2007. So you built filters to detect it, you know, and you haven't seen fraud in the past? Well, you know, usually if you're looking at your— all your data across the white stack, there's, there's usually like a piper that pops up like, what is that? You know, and that usually that big piper that shows up in your blog, you know, if you, if you as a platform have a broad dashboard to see all your traffic, not just one show, you say, oh, what is that? And you go, oh, that, that's fraud, you know, because it sticks out like a red thumb or whatever, sore thumb or whatever.

Why that podcast has 98% of its traffic coming from iTunes on a Windows machine.

Right, right, right, right.

It's not hard to spot. Fraud hunting is actually one of my favorite pastimes. Me too. I really enjoy it. Um, yeah, I think on this measurement topic, one of the things I think is really interesting as well, uh, is first of all, I think the changes that Apple made were important for the industry. Yeah. You know, you can say what you want to say about the, like, how, how it was handled or so on, but like, those downloads were not high quality.

No.

And so I'm glad they're gone. Um, on the other hand, uh, you know, what you're hearing from people, and this is the range of hours I think was around 20%, sort of what we ended up seeing, uh, as a change. You know, 20% decrease in, in, in downloads.

I know what you're going to say.

Shows me why is the price not up by 20%. Exactly. You just gave a nice big shave to the media buyers. That's right. By not adjusting the prices accordingly.

This performance is the same. This is a sign.

Yeah, right. This performance is the same, but now you're paying, you know, 20% less price. And so to me, this is a sign that there's kind of still not enough sort of pricing transparency and measurement tooling such that the market itself can find the correct price for these ads. If it stays here at below $25 where it's been for a year or two after kind of the economic sluggishness, you know, that's a sign that something's kind of wrong, right? That, that, that, that, that the balance of power shifted towards advertisers in a way that that, that is artificial, or was, or it's been too far in publishers' favor for some time. But why hasn't that moved? Something, something funky about that to me.

Well, it's— this is a second or third time there's been a haircut. The first haircut would have happened really probably before most people in our space. It was when Lipson, Podtrack, and us kind of kind of decided on a semi kind of spec. It was actually the first 8 pages of the— we gave 8 pages of the kind of the first spec that we came up with to the IEB. And that kind of—

this was back in like 2008.

Yeah, 2008. So there was a little— there was a big haircut then. I mean, it was major because, boy, it was— I mean, we're, you know, so, you know, 3, 4 little haircuts here. But you're right. Guess what? CPM's still $25.

Yeah, yeah, that's to say it's $25.

Yeah, and you know, and the performance hasn't changed. So, right, you know, technically I was getting $25 in 2008. Now think about that. Or 2006, I was getting $25 then.

Inflation, right, with that too.

Yeah, and now it's still at $25. They're getting a heck of a deal.

Yeah, well, there's not a lot of transparency Right.

I was gonna say it's one of these things where again, you can see, yeah, not enough transparency. You can, you can kind of see how there are remnants of this market from a kind of a radio era where people are kind of, you know, kind of have set this price and this is how it works and this is what we sell it at and everybody's comfortable there. And it doesn't feel like, like, you know, typical digital marketing where the prices are changing dynamically with demand and supply. And I don't know if the result of a more transparent and automated market is going to increase or decrease CPMs. But what I do know is if the amount of value that you're getting changes by 20% and the price doesn't change, like something is off there.

Well, then I put it back on your sales teams to push. And I know that's hard, but I also remember going, I went to a city in Texas. Let's just put it that way. Leave it random enough. And I was in a meeting and, you know, I was talking with this, you know, group, and they showed me a spreadsheet and it had factoring on it. And the factoring was every podcast network had a factor put on it, a negative factor. No one had a plus. So if the base was this, let's say the base was 20, The factor 50% means you are only going to get offered 10. And matter of fact, I know one network only offered 5, and Rob probably knows who we're talking about there because they used to count by 6s. So, you know, there was factoring that was put against every network. So the media buyers in the end back these, this data, every, every deal they do, they've got a spreadsheet and then they, in the end, they don't ever talk. Do you ever, how many times the media buyer told you how many sales they had. They won't.

That's exactly—

they won't tell you. It's rare. It's rare. I have 5, 5 in 20 years. And I want you to know, and I want you to know, and Citrus GoToMeeting was the one that I knew exactly where our— and that's why we got millions of dollars from them when they were advertising direct before they went to an agency. And so if there's factoring being put against every network, what they're really matching in the end is their, you know, they do the math. It's just a pure math problem. They back it out to DR and see what their cost per acquisition was. And they say they don't, but they do. And they determine next ad spend on cost per acquisition when they— oh, no, no, no, no, we never— we don't do that. They lie.

Well, I think they, I think they're pretty transparent to me, at least that about like, you know, they're going to make smart buying decisions on behalf of their client. I think the interesting part of that thing that you just said is that it could go both ways. So, you know, like if my network has been Network X has been like downgraded and is worth 50% of the other ones, then like, uh, I should be willing, I should understand that and I should be willing to take a $12 CPM If you're not filling it for something higher, but podcasters also won't accept that either. So it's sort of going both ways, right? It's like everybody thinks it's $25. Everybody thinks they're worth more. Everybody thinks it should be, you know, so there's just no transparency. And I'd like to see that start to evolve. It requires a sort of combination of the performance information with the, you know, with the transaction itself, which no one's going to share the direct CPM they ever get.

They're not going to share their download numbers either. Right.

And there's not going to be any transparency on ROI coming back from the advertising either, because that puts their, their buying situation in a, in a competition.

Yeah, because they don't want to show you how well they did. You know, the example I gave was the biggest mistake GoDaddy made with me when I was renegotiating the very first time in 2005. When I asked her how well did we do, and I was only getting— I'll just say it, I got $300 that first month. And because I didn't want to charge, I had no clue. Yeah.

Yeah.

And they could lie to you too.

And she told me 387, 387 new customers. And I went, huh? And I said, more than $300.

Yeah.

And I said, I need to get back to you. And I went back and I did the math. I did the math. I did the math. And I think there was nothing to go by. Called her back the next day and I gave her a number and just like a good used car salesman when you've screwed up, she said yes immediately. And I, and in my mind, I'm like, I just went too low. And I recovered quick enough. And it's a thing that saved me was I said, and I said, I want a bonus, a performance bonus. And she laughed. And she said, you underbid it, didn't you? And I said, yes, I did. And literally that, that split moment decision was the difference between some months getting 4 figures and some months getting 5 figures in a return. So, but if I had not been quick, if I'd have been hungover and not quick enough on the uptake, you know, I'd have been stuck at a 4-figure number. So knock on wood, you know, but again, we had nothing to go by. And she told me the performance numbers and made me go, but now if she— if that conversation happened today, I'd have come back and said $30,000 a month. Right. You know, that's, that's the number. You know, that's what you're gonna have to pay for this inventory. And also, companies will never tell you how much they— it costs them to acquire a customer. Especially in DR, they'll never tell you the cost of the acquisition on TV, radio, or if they're even doing print or digital. They won't tell you that. I guarantee you podcasts are performing better. Yeah, definitely.

It's not, it's not really in their interest to do it.

No, it's not.

You know, and so, so again, I understand kind of that perspective. Yeah. But, you know, in a digital transaction where there is enough volume, also there's price discovery from competitors. Right? So, you know, it should be possible to find a slightly, slightly more dynamic market where the price gets set by what the value is instead of, you know, who has the fanciest—

My sign was whenever I knew the campaign wasn't doing well is when you start getting asked for makegoods. And when a media buyer called me and asked for makegoods, basically, guess what I did? I gave whatever they wanted because I wanted that check. I wanted that renewal and go podcasters, hey, hey, we're underperforming. I need 2 more spots or 1 more spot from every show this month. You, if you want to stay in the campaign, you got to give them one. And then we would overdeliver to make sure that we made them happy. So they would come back and give us another ad insertion order. Yeah, so You know, it goes both ways. If you know, if you're chasing the dollars, sometimes you got— right.

Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. But sometimes that's worth it, right? Yeah. Sometimes that's, that's, you know, you save the relationship with that buyer and they come back, they appreciate it and they come back to you. Sometimes you never hear from them again and it was all transactional. Yeah. So you have to kind of get a feel for whether it's worth doing those extra bonuses and added value and all that stuff.

But I do— one thing I do hate with where the industry is now is, let me just do a trial buy. Let me buy one episode.

That's been going on forever, Todd.

Stupidest thing. It's, it's the worst. It's the worst thing you could do.

Two weeks or one week?

Oh, they want one episode. One episode a month, right? Or just one episode. Let's see how it does on one episode. I'm like, good Lord, a person just has to fart and miss your ad. Come on, you know, it's just— it— yeah, yeah. But you know, they're 25 years old and they know the best.

Well, it comes out of—

they go ahead, Rob.

It comes out, out of the era of, of, of click link marketing campaigns, and a lot of these folks think that this is like a sponsored link on a Google search results page, is that they should evaluate the campaign based on instant results, you know.

And I, I haven't done a lot of deals lately, Mike, so I'm kind of out of the, out of the loop. You guys know what's going on. So, you know, it's— you got a better handle for what these buyers are asking.

Everything you've just said, uh, sounds, sounds familiar to me. Um, but the, the thing I was going to say is we have had buyers, sophisticated buyers, who sort of said, you know, look, we've done this for a long time, and we, uh, we— I'm sure there's one-off situations where somebody farts or whatever you just said and missed an episode, but generally, like, when we look across the breadth of the data we have, we can buy one time and, and get a feel for performance enough where we want to, you know, where we— that's enough for us to make a long-term decision or not.

That's—

and that's amazing. Most of the time when that happens, we sort of say, okay, then, you know, we'll go look for other partners because the, the effort for everybody involved. Yeah.

For one, it's hard.

The podcaster takes all the risk. Right.

And I— and again, you know, my philosophy, and if you're a media buyer out there listening, just try my formula once. You got to be on for 15 days in every episode for 15 days. And if that's a weekly show, they got to— you got to be in there twice. And then you look at where your performance is at 15 days. Just take those first 15 days and that's, that's just good if anything comes through. And then after 15 days, then make your decision. That's my— again, I guess I'm just old school.

But so also, um, but Triton Digital, that document that, that Lisa shared or that post that Lisa shared also included a screenshot to Triton Digital's comparison of weekly average weekly downloads from 2024 to 2023. And it showed a 41% decline across all a lot of the major networks, or at least the ones that are being tracked by Triton. Which isn't a complete picture, but what did Podtrack—

how much did Podtrack drop? Do we know from year to year? I don't know.

I haven't seen that.

Mike, how do you guys do your measuring? You just go off the Pixelfire? We—

yeah. So we have our— for our podcasts that are hosted with us, we have our own stat system, which is based on the IAB, and then we have— but it's not certified. And then for the— where we're getting pingbacks from, You know, there's the IAB, like, ad delivery thing. And that's what these enterprise hosts use. We get a pingback on a URL very similar to a pixel to say, okay, that ad was delivered.

But maybe not listened to.

Yeah, same thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's not— it just means that the bytes were downloaded.

Nothing else.

The— that Triton Tracker thing that you just mentioned. If you look on there, like some of the, you know, 42% is not the median between those networks. Uh, there were some that were down by like massive percent. Oh yeah. Um, and those were ones, I think if you think about who they are from what I saw that have like sort of, uh, a lot of daily shows sometimes with like, uh, some of it sometimes with shows that have like multiple clips of a radio show that are produced as multiple episodes released in a day. And so those are the ones with the massive back catalogs that were receiving tons of background traffic, right? That, that, that sort of all disappeared overnight. Right. So I'm not surprised to see those giant changes. I think, you know, it's funny, I've been listening to the, you know, all the podcast industry podcasts and reading. Nobody wants to like say the number that they're at, you know, there's February, which is a few days shorter. And so, you know, you don't know exactly the numbers or whatever. Or like, yeah, we're, you know, I heard somebody say like, what are you hearing? Instead of answering the question. And, you know, I think a lot of places are seeing, you know, 15 to 25% drops and it has to do with how long your back catalog was. And sure, it has to do with what you said, Todd, about like how much filtering of that kind of stuff you were doing. And, you know, but there are some folks, I think that including individual podcasts on our platform that had these, you know, daily sports podcasts with 25,000—

Oh, the dailies got hit hard.

Hardest, where it was really pretty rough. Yeah, yeah.

Because that, you know, that, and plus, plus a lot of these big networks, um, canceled a bunch of shows, so that's going to impact your numbers too, you know.

And also there's this phenomenon, and the only reason I learned this is because we went one year and we recorded like 60 interviews, and I was putting out interview every day, and I was like, man, these, these are hurting. They're not getting good numbers. So then we went to every 3 days. And of course, that, that, that podcast episode stayed in the queue long enough that it was automatically downloaded. And then they come in 3rd day later and put another one in there. And of course, you know, that, that not guaranteed they were listening, but at least it was registering a download, right? Or play. And so, you know, daily shows are definitely at a at a disadvantage per se. So, I mean, we're at the bottom of the hour, Rob. We're already— we've already made it through here. We did.

Wow.

You're going to be out in— you're going to be out in LA?

I'm not, unfortunately. I have a 7-month-old at home and we just had a company retreat 2 weeks ago. So I've maxed out on my ability to travel. But my co-founder and the rest of the business, you know, a lot of our team's in LA. So we have a bunch.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I damaged a rib on Saturday. I fell down in a— no, bummer— water in a rainstorm. And I'm going, but I'm going to be stiff because it's either cracked or displaced or something. It's not good. So I'll be wobbling around. Rob, was there anything, any other questions you had for Mike or any thoughts? Yeah.

Mike, why don't you share with us how a person can or where a person can go to, to find out more information about your new, new platform? Is there a landing page or something? Yeah.

I mean, the easiest thing to do is just go to redcircle.com and then there's a, there's a button at the top for either ad platform or in the feature section. There's a thing for OpenWrap depending on whether you're an advertiser or a podcaster. And we're doing a special deal. We're like zeroing out our commission on your first host deal with us up to $250. If you sign up for the waitlist. We are doing a waitlist because there are some of these third-party platforms that we theoretically can connect to with Vast, but we haven't done yet. And so we sort of need to work through some of those example podcasts. But we've got the thing up and running now and it's working great on a couple of hosts. Yeah, redcircle.com is the place to go and just sign up and add your name to the waitlist and think about that other opportunity there. Yeah, I'll shoot you an email.

That's an interesting way to, you know, Because guess what? I'd rather you lose your hair than me lose mine. I have nothing left.

So there's obviously more to lose there. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, COVID already took a bunch from me, but it's only a matter of time.

Rob, I will be in LA next week. So you're doing your own little thing. Are you going to try to do an independent new media show or What are you thinking?

Well, we could do one if you want to do one earlier in the day. That's fine. Yeah.

See, a live show that I'm, I'm doing is at 5 p.m.

Pacific. Yeah.

This Viddepod thing is getting my calendar pretty filled up already by YouTubers that are going to be at the event. They want to, they want to talk. So it's not complicated. Just go over and sign up. Anyway, Todd@blueberry.com, @GeekNews on X, @GeekNews@ and @geeknews.chat on Mastodon. Did I say that right, Rob?

On X, Twitter as well, @RobGreenlee. And then off of YouTube, @RobGreenlee as well. You can find me over there. And if you want to reach out, my email address is robgreenlee@gmail.com. Happy to hear from you.

So, and we want to thank all the live boosts and streaming sats that came in today. We're live. I was going to ask you, Mike, before we left, do you listen to, uh, to Adam and, uh, Dave? I do.

Yeah, I, I'm, I'm a consistent listener and I'm into all that stuff. And I, you know, at one point Red Circle had a, had its own Lightning node running in our production infrastructure and I lost, uh, $300 of the business, you know, when I corrupted some Bitcoin, you know. So I've been farting around with all that stuff, but as well.

We had some news from GetAlby today. There's something coming from them. So, but anyway, yeah, so yeah, so you can't, can't monetize the network according to Adam, but you put $16 million in people's pockets. So I think that's something's working. I think that's pretty good.

I think that counts good.

Yeah, I think that counts good. All right, everybody, thanks for being here. And we'll keep you advised via social on what's going on if Rob and I are able to pull one off. And if not, if we don't do it live, then or do some weird hour, it'll be in the feed. So everyone, thanks for being here. And Mike, thanks for coming too. Everybody take care.

Thanks for having me.

All right, all right, everybody.