Budget Cuts Are Forcing Podcast Creators to Innovate

Oh, thank you for joining me, um, on Podcast Tips tonight. I appreciate you being here. My name is Rob Greenlee. I'm a longtime podcaster, uh, 2017 Podcast Hall of Famer, and just wanted to, um, do another show tonight live. This is probably going to be a little bit of a different show than what I've normally done because I've I've usually had guests on the program. So what you're going to get tonight is all me. So this is, this is a little bit of a different direction for, for the show, but tonight we're going to do another deep dive into kind of the, the market for podcasting. And what we're going to really dig into is where we are at with the podcast medium right now in the creator market. I'm not going to dive too much in the creator's market, but have a little bit of tangential relationship since podcasting has become really an all-encompassing word to describe online content creation. And that's part of what I want to talk about tonight as well. You know, where are we in podcasting? And that's really what this episode is really all about. I've done some recent presentations out in other cities around the country, and I wanted to, to offer an episode that would cover that here. You know, most of what we've seen in what's happening in the podcasting market today, we have never seen before, and I've been around for 20 years, so I've seen a lot. And, you know, I think one of the biggest changes, I think, compared to what I've seen in the past is that You know, big company podcast budgets have been slashed, right? I think we've all heard layoffs and things like that happening all across the industry. And but the big thing that's really happened is just a massive reduction in budgets for podcasts. So as you think about these bigger media companies, and what they're doing, you know, it's kind of a reflection of the attitude in the medium today and how I think, you know, what they're doing is going to impact all of us to some degree. But it's also kind of a reset of sorts that takes us back to the earlier days of podcasting and how that particular time period I believe that we're kind of coming back into again. And that's looking at this medium as a very efficient way to produce content and to get it out there. And it's very human. And it's also, it's difficult to contrive this medium. And just because you spend a lot of money on creating content doesn't necessarily mean that it's sustainable. And I think there's a lot of winds blowing against the content creation industry right now with the economy and what's happening with that, but a 50% reduction. Just to give you an example, there are shows at some of the big media companies that were produced that they had, you know, I know you're probably going to be shocked if you're not really involved in that, but half-million-dollar production budgets for short-run series. And these are like guarantees of sorts, funding of staff and things like that. And so what we've seen is a reduction, a slashing really in half of the expectation. Now, granted, for everyday regular podcasters, it's not a big deal because you guys are not involved in producing content at that kind of investment, right? And that's part of what we're seeing here. And I've been saying this for years myself on the New Media Show and things like that, that We will eventually come back to a time when kind of budgets are in creating content are more rational, right? I've always felt that creating content in the podcast medium is not supposed to be really a big budget type of production. It's not like we're trying to make a feature-length movie or something like that. This is— this should be organic, natural, kind of spoken word content that connects and builds community. And typically, that doesn't require huge budgets. Now granted, I think we're also moving into an era where people are spending a lot of money on marketing, things like that to grow audience and to kind of reach different areas of exposure that might drive more audience. So I think that's part of where the investment is. But Really, I think these big budgets are really about the, you know, having producers and paying hosts and really having a bunch of, you know, executive producers or directors or all sorts of things going on with that. And that stuff is just getting cut back. And I do think it's interesting that it's happening right at the same time that we're seeing AI start to take off, which is also applying this level of efficiency to the content creation process. And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind here too. And is this fall really more linked to the economic downturn? And I think that could be a big part of this too. I do believe brands and advertisers are not spending as much money advertising in podcasting, though if you speak to people in the industry, they will tell you podcasting advertising is still strong and doing great. But I don't know that that's really entirely the full picture. It may, you know, CPMs may be strong. There may be a regular flow of campaigns, but I don't believe that there's as much investment being made in podcasting than maybe was even done like maybe a year ago, year and a half ago. So I think a lot of that's been cut back, which has really impacted the ability of even small and large media companies. I mean, if you have a, a fairly successful podcast, maybe you're getting 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 downloads or something like that, which is a, which is a pretty big show in the scheme of things. You know, you may have seen the amount of spend into your program drop. Not because you've done anything wrong or that your audience has dropped, because the audience continues to grow. So we've continued to see this growth in in the podcast medium. So, you know, one of the big things I'm going to dive into more of this content too here later in the show, but I just want to also encourage you and say, keep your heads up if you're a podcaster today or you're aspiring to be a podcaster. This is not a bad time to be a podcaster. I mean, if you're really focused on audience and you're really focused on trying to drive value, and you have a compelling message and that's unique and, and, and really kind of connects with people and brings people into a community, I think you have an opportunity in front of you. There are a lot of podcasts, and there— but they're not as many active, and I'm going to show you that here in a minute. So you may not have seen some of the current numbers around active podcasts, and so I I definitely want to share that with you tonight. I also want to mention too that I do another live show called The New Media Show, and you can see that, that, uh, that logo up here, um, every Wednesday at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific. And I do that with my co-host Todd Cochran, who is the CEO of Blueberry, who, um, coincidentally— it's probably more than a coincidence, but This show is actually hosted on the Blubrry platform, and, and one of the reasons why I selected Blubrry was because of their integration that they have with WordPress, and then also that they actually support true RSS-based video podcasts. So that doesn't mean that this show isn't heard on Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube and all that stuff like that, which I fully embrace, is that it's also available as a video podcast in Apple Podcasts and some other consumption platforms for podcasting. A lot of people are shocked when they hear that you can actually consume a video in the Apple Podcasts app. The problem is that they've depreciated it and not made it available to be really actively, you know, found in the platform. They used to in iTunes have like a little toggle that would take you between all the audio shows and the video shows. So if by chance Apple is listening to this, I would advocate for them to bring back a little toggle in the interface to toggle between video and audio podcasts, and that might bring back video podcasting. And this is where, where Blueberry, Lipson, and Podbean are really the three main platforms that really started podcasting in the early days, and they fully embraced video podcasting. And lots of big, I mean, small and large media companies supported video podcasting in the early days as well. So that's why in some ways I'm a proponent of it, 'cause I've been actively involved in the early days of this medium. Kind of encouraging video podcasting. I used to work at Microsoft and they had a Zune portable media player and I can actually show you that here. I happen to have it at my desk, but it's— a lot of people don't know that this device ever existed, but it's got a pretty good size screen on it. It only weighs like 2 ounces, but it's a— and I worked on this for for like 6 years at Microsoft before they closed it down and I moved on to working at Xbox. But, but, um, it just kind of, kind of symbolizes a different era in podcasting, which was, which was very much focused on video. So there's a lot of consternation in the, in the podcasting space right now around video, right? Everybody's worried that YouTube is going to destroy podcasting and all this kind of stuff., but I think as an industry, we need to kind of take charge here and own what we own, right? And we own video podcasting. That belongs with the podcast community and that belongs with the podcast market. YouTube coming in is trying to get content for their platform. And they've always played at the sidelines of video podcasting because it's video, right? And they're a video platform. In the very early days, When YouTube started, they basically siphoned off all those video podcasters that were doing RSS because they had free hosting, right? So those are the things that made this change happen where the podcast medium started to think of themselves more as audio only, right? And I do think that audio only, there's nothing wrong with that strategy. I think a lot of people misunderstand my position on this. I do have this kind of approach that I, I like the synergy of audio and video together, right, out there in the consumption platforms. And that's what I do with this show, and that's what I do with the New Media Show, because that's how I've always done it. I mean, I've done that, that New Media Show. I think Todd and I were— Todd Cochran, who's the CEO of Blueberry, actually, um, we were both talking about it, and, and I think we've been doing that show for like 13 or 14 years now. So it's It's one that's been around a long time, and we've, we started that show when video was a big deal. And then, and then when YouTube launched in about 2007, 2008 or so, all the content creators started to put all their videos up on, on YouTube, and then we saw the video podcasting decline a little bit. But I don't want to spend too much time on, on that particular aspect of it. I did want to mention that this show from here forward is going to be available off of the Rob Greenlee channels on social media, Facebook, on, on YouTube and things like that. So, uh, Twitter and LinkedIn, those are the other ones. I'm probably going to try and do it, get it going with Instagram, and it's a little bit of a challenging process to get that going. And hopefully Instagram does a, does a better job with updating that. And if you're, you know, if you're a StreamYard user, which I used to do this show— if you are new to this show, the The Podcast Tips with Rob Greenlee program. I did 30 episodes on the StreamYard channels over the last, you know, 6 months or so. And that was a successful show over there. And so what I'm hoping, I'm no longer working with StreamYard as kind of like a contractor kind of thing, but they are still my production tool here. That's what I'm using to actually do this show. Because I think it is a powerful tool, and, and I will continue to do that because it gives me the option to do what I want to do. So, so anyway, so I've got a couple of partners that have been supportive of this program, and I, I, I've had a community here that has followed this show over on the StreamYard channels for quite a while now, for 30 episodes, and those are all in my RSS feed in Apple Podcasts, so you can get it over there. So, so that's— and it's also available on all the other podcasting platforms. And, uh, it says Johnny Bean writes, uh, hey everyone, and Rob Greenlee. Johnny, thank you for being here with me tonight. It's, it's great to have you here. So, um, you know, if you want to make a comment in your, um, you know, in your preferred viewing platform feel free to do that. And I would love to hear your questions or your comments about any of the things that I'm going to try and cover in this program tonight. I probably have more content than maybe I have time, unless we go really long. I was hoping to only make this episode maybe like an hour long or something like that. But, um, but I'll also, um, let me, um, move on here and pull up, um, on onto the screen here in just a minute. But, um, So, so let me see if I can pull up on the screen here a, a little topic that I can cover here a little bit. It may be a little hard to read here, but these are stats from Lipson, and it may be a little difficult to see here, but I think it's an interesting trend line, you know, as we see what's going on in the market right now. And it's, it may be a little hard to see, but that top line that you see on, on the screen, and I, if you're listening to this as an audio podcast, you're, you're obviously not able to see this, but, um, what you're seeing is that line on the top up there is very interesting because it is the trend line of consumption of podcasts on Apple Podcasts. And so you're seeing this fall-off in, in kind of the market, um, in the support of podcasts, um, in Apple's platform. And then you go a little bit further down, you see this little upline here that is Spotify. So we're seeing this convergence of these two lines. Apple and Spotify are are converging on each other. And so if Apple continues this path, you know, Spotify is going to cross over at some point. This is stats off of the Lipson platform, and all these other ones are other listening apps. Like this is, looks like Spotify on Apple is what this one is, on Apple devices, I believe is what this is. And then this down here is, looks like it's on Firefox. So there's an increase in consumption of podcasts on Firefox here recently as well, which is a browser. So it's kind of interesting, these trend lines that are going on that kind of support what we're talking about here is that there is a changing of the guard going on right now. And kind of back up a little bit and I'll get out of this slide right now and then we'll talk about another one here in a second. But, you know, when or if the economy actually comes back and there's no guarantee of when that's gonna happen, we could see opportunities in podcasting kind of expand again. I mean, a lot of companies are kind of like, reassessing what they're doing. They're shifting over to supporting more AI-type technology to bring more efficiency. One thing that's interesting that really nobody ever talks about, about what's been happening in the podcasting space is that I think in the broader economy, we've seen the, you know, this inflation, right? Money isn't going as far as it used to. Um, but what I've seen in the podcast medium is nobody's raised prices. Nobody's— now when I say raise prices, I'm talking about hosting plans. They remain the same. Uh, and that's, that's an interesting trend line too. I think that the podcast industry has not embraced this inflation paradigm and, and raised prices because I've seen— I think all of us have seen our costs go up with car insurance and house insurance or at the grocery store or whatever. Everybody's jacking up prices because of inflation. And it does kind of raise a question. Do those companies really have to do that? Or is it being driven by some other agenda? But not to get into politics here. I didn't want to get into politics, but I think it's an interesting comparison. So, if you wanted to create a podcast today, I believe it's, it's a much better value than even it was in the past because of inflation. So, so, and I also think the industry has been able to successfully keep their costs down and, and that has given them the ability to remain kind of cost competitive because podcasters are cost sensitive. And so that's an important thing to think about. You know, I used to work for Libsyn, Spreaker, Podbean. And, and some other platforms. And we were very cost-conscious, cost-sensitive to, to podcasters because they, they usually get hit by all these other charges. And especially now, if you want to get ChatGPT or you want to get any of those type of platforms in addition to your podcast, you're probably gonna have to pay as much as you're paying for your podcast hosting plan just to get ChatGPT. So it's like it's easy for podcasters' budgets to get out of control. And that's, that's, you know, something that the industry has always wrestled with. And I think it's an interesting question as we look to the future. Are podcast technology platforms going to raise prices? And I'm hoping that they don't, and I'm hoping that that doesn't have a negative impact on on the podcast medium if they do that, because we will probably lose more podcasters because that value equation needs to be there. And the two main questions that podcasters are asking today is, you know, how do I grow a show? How do I monetize? Right? Because everybody wants to make a little bit of side money on their podcasting, and that totally makes sense. So, you know, it's, It's just one of those things that, you know, I think it just makes logical sense to most people that that would be what people would wanna do. And it's not like that's a massively new thing for podcasting, that podcasters wanna make money. I remember this conversation going on even back in 2005 where companies were starting up and they were trying to build networks and they were trying to build, you know, monetization approaches, which are typically host reads back then. The technology around programmatic advertising or even like a Patreon-type platform wasn't really in existence yet. So, you know, it was very traditional around host read advertising. And I did that with my own radio show. I did a bunch of host read advertising even in the radio industry. And it, you know, that host read stuff kind of comes out of radio, really. That's where the concept came from. But it just really worked in podcasting, especially if the host, you know, got that product that they were going to promote and they actually tried it and they loved it and they talked about it glowingly. But they were also during that time, a lot of people don't know this either, that if they were sponsored by a product, let's say a bed like a Casper bed or something like that, they would the, the manufacturer would send that bed to the podcaster to sleep on for a while, right? And there were many times that the podcaster didn't feel any obligation to give their sponsor a positive review on their show. So, you know, I think it's very interesting, and I think that gives you a good perspective on kind of the integrity of podcasting and where that comes from. Now granted, you might have the position that Talking bad about your sponsors is probably not good integrity, but I think if you really think about what the reason for that was, is they slept on the bed and maybe they got up with back pain. But that could also be caused by other things too. That could be because of, you know, they are not used to the bed or something like that. But nonetheless, there were other products too that were sent to podcasters with an endorsement contract, and, and they the host of the show would say, well, you know, I would probably advise not getting that product. So, so, but you don't really hear that any anymore, right? If you hear about a sponsorship or an endorsement, you know, no matter what the quality of the product is or how it works or what the podcaster's experience is, they're probably going to say gung-ho, that's great product, go buy it today, here's your promo code. So I think it's kind of an interesting contrast, but I know I can sit here and just ramble all day long about the history of podcasting and how it's significant, but I think it does paint a picture that's helpful to anyone out there that's playing in this space and maybe is a little baffled by why things happen the way they do because of, and I think there's a lot of assumptions that come out of commercial radio or come out of places that are not as historically authentic. Right. And, you know, unfortunately, that may come across as a negative thing to say. I'm not really intending it that way. I'm just giving a factual representation of what happened in the past. But let me also share here. I can bring up on the screen, too, there is a, a page at the Podcast Index. And if you don't know about the Podcast Index, this is probably— and it looks like we had a comment here from Johnny saying, I only talk about and promote products that I use and like. So Johnny, I, I think that's, that's really the ethical and best practice right there, is to, is to only take endorsements from products and services that you really feel are good and that you feel good about promoting. And I think that's really the key, but that's contrary to really what the advertising market looks like today. You know, Johnny also asks, what do you think about podcasting networks? I think podcasting networks is a significant and influential aspect of the podcast medium. It always has been. I've been a part of many networks. I used to work for PodcastOne for a year back in 2014, and which is a fairly large— I think we had 200 shows on the network. And so I think networks are terrific because what they can do is they can support the podcaster in their endeavors, whether it be getting sponsors, or they can do, you know, help support the show in the production side, which is what PodcastOne did when I was working back in, in those days back in Los Angeles in 2014. That's when I worked for PodcastOne as their chief technology officer. But I also was the liaison to like Apple, and that was even before Spotify really got involved in podcasting. So, so that's, that's what was going on there. But, um, uh, let's Let's talk a little bit about how podcasting is changing. And I think, you know, I think we started out with that a little bit, but let's kind of expand on that a little bit more. And I think, you know, these budget cuts that we're seeing is just indicative of a change in attitude towards content. And I think creating content. And I think as you as a podcaster, I think it's helpful to, to really think about ways that you can more efficiently, and whether it be time or resources, to accomplish what your goals are or to build a show that, that is, is good in the market. And I think that is a little bit of a, of a change. I think it was easier for people in the earlier, like a year ago or so, to make money doing this and also to build a career. And I think one of the big things that's happening right now is really a shuffling of the deck of sorts at every company in podcasting. I'm seeing it in my own work and my own experience as well. I kind of probably felt it earlier than other people did just because I'm always kind of working at the at the edges of the industry, which puts me under, you know, a glimpse of what's coming. And I saw these changes starting to develop early on. And then we just saw, you know, really when the interest rates went up with the Federal Reserve is when it really kind of hit a significant turn. And so, you know, I don't know. When that's going to change, when that's going to turn around. There's a lot of people talking about the economy turning around and potentially sometime later this year or into 2025. I'm not really that confident that that's actually going to happen. And there's also a lot of people over the last couple of days that are saying this is kind of what we're in right now is kind of a new normal. And so, you know, but yet at the same time, audiences are strong. You know, so what we're doing here is really, really, it should be more focused on audiences. And I think we get a little focused on, you know, as an industry, we get a little too focused on these bigger budget productions and we forget that podcasting really at its roots is an independent creator medium and it has always been. It's always been a very small number of shows that have been produced by either big media companies or have big budgets. It's always been just a fraction of the podcasting space, but there's this over-heightened visibility to that, right? And emphasis on the big productions, the celebrities, the— I saw this at PodcastOne. You know, I worked with Adam Carolla and I worked with a lot of the the early big podcasters, you know, like, um, Jordan Harbinger, who's actually been on this show before, is a, is a big podcaster too. And he, he feels a lot like I do about this stuff too. If you wanted to see that conversation I had with him on Podcast Tips, uh, I think it was like maybe a couple months ago, um, but it might be worth going back and watching Jordan, um, in this podcast talk about— I mean, he's He's also of this opinion that not everybody should be a podcaster. I don't, I don't always agree with that because I do think that everybody has a voice, everybody has the ability to do this. It all gets back to expectations. What is your expectations of what you are going to get out of being a podcaster is, is really, really more important. And, and so, you know, I've kind of belabor this point, I need to show you what I was talking about, the podcast index. And let me do that now, and you can kind of see what I'm talking about here. So the podcast index, it's at podcastindex.org, is the actual domain name that I'm pulling this data. And this is live, real-time data. This is pulling off of their, their website. So if you go to their website, podcastindex.org, just click on the upper part of the screen that says Stats, and this will tell you the total number of current podcasts, RSS feeds of sorts, in the podcast medium. So we're, we're showing about 4,201,112. So that's at— that's like pretty much as of today. So that gives you a pretty good glimpse. And then right below the screen, there are a series of other numbers, and those numbers are, are, you know, for those that aren't watching this, those numbers, it says shows published in the last 3 days, 10 days, 30 days, and 90 days, or is it 60 days? So, um, the first one on the left there is and I believe the one below is 90 days. But the first one on the left there in smaller text is 110,307 shows have been published or have published at least one episode in the last 3 days. So you just contrast it. Those are typical podcasts that probably publish twice a week you know, on average, but it could also catch a bunch of weekly shows as well that just so happen to publish on the last 3 days. But so that gives you, you know, 4,201,000 shows knocked down to 110,000 shows that have published a new episode. And then in the last 10 days, about 241,576 shows. So basically about little over double the amount of shows have published an episode really in the last week. So that, that would be a number of how many podcasts are actively publishing weekly. It's about just a little under a quarter million shows, and these are global numbers. And then the next number over is shows that have published an episode in the last days. So in the last month, and it's, uh, 342,151 shows. Um, so we're still, you know, just a fraction of the overall numbers. So that 4,201,000 shows, as you can see, there's a lot of archive shows. There's a lot of shows that are just not publishing any new episodes. So, you know, you could say that they're podfaded. Right, um, or the producer decided that they weren't going to produce any new episodes, but they still have active RSS feeds. Because from what I understand, you can't be on this list unless you have an active RSS feed that has archival content in it. And then the next one over, I believe, is 60 days, and that has 413,731 shows. And then the 90-day number is, uh, 462,531 shows. So still under a half a million, even at 90 days, have published a recent episode. I don't even say that's recent. So if they hadn't published in the last 90 days, I would say that they're an archive, um, they're essentially a, a dead show of sorts. So this kind of gives you kind of a big picture that you're really not competing with that many shows that are active, right? Especially if you produce twice a week. And I've been talking about this for a while now, is that if you publish twice a week, you're playing in this, this realm down here of 110,000 global podcasts, which is a much smaller number than, than what a lot of people think is going on out there. So So that's kind of, you know, a little bit of a snapshot to kind of give you an idea of how much competition you have out there as a podcaster and kind of what the state of the market is. It really can help you have an idea of how big this market really is for podcasting. And it's nowhere near— I believe the last number that I heard that YouTube had 11 million channels. So as you can contrast that to podcasting, the opportunity in podcasting is probably still strong, right? The audience continues to grow. I think we are over 70% in the US awareness or have consumed a podcast in the past, you know, or ever of sorts. I should have probably grabbed some Edison research on that to, to be, to really show you that. Um, so, but I wanted to also show you a little bit, um, around, um, podcast hosting platforms. And I wanted to talk about that a little bit. I know I mentioned, um, that, um, the, the Blueberry hosts this show, but I used to work for Libsyn, used to work for Podbean, used to work for Spreaker, which is now owned by iHeartRadio. So I've been across all these, all these platforms And they're all terrific platforms and they've been around for quite a while. But here, let me share another number from Lipson. These are— this is a chart that I'm showing you, top podcast hosting companies by new episodes. So, you know, who's— which platform is publishing new episodes, right? And at what scale is what this is. So this This is also an indicator of active podcast hosting platforms. Where are people, you know, going to publish their episodes? And it looks like the top one that's been a little fluctuating is the Spotify for Podcasters platform. So you can see it went through, I can't see the date at this dip point down here. I believe that's August of 2023 is at the low point. It looks like in Spotify for Podcasters. So it was about a year ago that Spotify really kind of hit the bottom of the barrel, per se, of their own publishing. And then since then, since about August of 2023, they've seen a steady uptick in, uh, people publishing episodes. So they must have done something different. Um, but as you can see, this chart line goes over and And then in February 2024, so just a few months ago, we started to see Spotify for Podcasters drop again. So we're seeing this fall off here as we, and then it kind of flatlined again. So you can even see that there's some volatility when it comes to, so something happened in February and I do believe it's probably a change in the economy. In the perception of the economy coming out. And it's not unusual for podcasting or new podcasts to drop post the holiday time period. But there has also been a history of people starting to get back on the game again. So, but if you go down further, it's not just all about Spotify. There's also Buzzsprout. So if you look at down here, there's a little kind of a greenish line, what it looks like. And Buzzsprout, since about, uh, looks like February of 2024, has seen an uptick in episodes being published on their platform. So, you know, but up here with Spotify, there was a downtick. So, you know, Buzzsprout was picking up new customers while Spotify and, and other platforms like, uh, Uh, wait a minute, is this Buzzsprout or is this— okay, no, no, no, I think I had the wrong, wrong hosting platform that is growing. It actually was Spreaker that was growing. Sorry, I was talking about Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout was actually kind of flatlined and probably on a decline a little bit. It was Spreaker that showed the uptick. So people were shifting, or, you know, maybe Spreaker was doing more promotion at the time to drive new podcasters to their platform, but that was a sharp increase coming out of February, coming into where we are today, where pretty much everybody else has kind of like been flat or down. So it looks like really Spreaker is the only one that's been growing since February. So it's kind of an interesting thing. So as you look at different podcast hosting platforms, They, you know, people are seeing Spreaker as an interesting platform, and I do think it's because of the iHeartRadio connection there. iHeartRadio owns them, and I worked for Spreaker for about 4 years, so, and did a show on their platform called the Spreaker Live Show, which is still available up there. You could go, you can go listen to some of my old episodes there. But anyway, I think I showed enough here, I think, to show kind of a trend line of the big players. And then Lipson down here and OmniStudio and all these, you know, SoundCloud and SimpleCast, whatever. Most of those platforms are pretty flat in their publishing of new episodes. And this is all data that's coming off of, I believe it's all off of the, I think it's off of the Lipson platform, but I'm not entirely sure. It may not be. It looks like it's off of livewire.io, and it doesn't have a reference to Libsyn specifically, so this could be something through James Cridland, I believe, with PodNews. But top hosting companies by episode share, and it looks like what's going on here is you can see up here, this is Omni Studio at a big big drop here in August of 2023. They started a downward turn. And then if you look at who's growing, it looks like there's a little bit of uptick from Podbean, but it looks like Megaphone has had a significant drop. And then looks like SoundStack has been been dropping a little bit as well. So anyway, it's an interesting kind of thing to, to look at. And if you look at the, the top podcast hosting platforms, this is, um, this is as of May of 2024. It's probably hard to read here, but the top one at the list, top list up here, uh, 27.5% of of all podcast hosting platforms, new episodes published, Spotify for Podcasters. Number 2 is Spreaker. Number 3 is Buzzsprout. Number 4 is Omnistudio. Number 5 is Megaphone. Number 6 is Podbean. Number 7 is Lipson. So there's been a significant reshuffling of these platforms here over the last year or so. It's, it's an interesting development. And I realize that it's hard for you to see these numbers, so I can probably try and zoom in here a little bit so you can maybe see it a little bit better. Um, okay, here we go. So you can see maybe a little bit better if you're watching the video on this, where you can kind of see who those, those players are and what their percentages are. So Spreaker, it looks like, is getting close to 10% share of episodes being published. Buzzsprout has dropped a little bit, dropped to 7.8%. I believe Buzzsprout was in second place prior to this, so Spreaker's picked it up a little bit. And Lipson has dropped to 3.5%. Podbean has kind of surpassed Lipson, which Podbean was pretty much always kind of behind Lipson. So there's some changes happening. ACast is on the list at number 9, SimpleCast, and there's a whole bunch. So as you look at the whole list, this is an interesting number too. There are, looks like about 100, and let's see how many, how many hosting platforms are there? There's like, or, or involved in some sort of hosting, it, it looks like it's well over 200 Okay, here we go. 244. Who would have thought? So anyway, let's, let's move on from this. I spent a lot of time on that. I think it's an interesting thing for you to know about, but let's go ahead and I'm going to jump into a PDF deck that I, I created, and maybe I can quickly walk through this presentation. To share some information that's in there that may be helpful for you. So let me pull that up to the stage. So this is a presentation that I gave back in Phoenix just a couple weeks ago to some groups of real estate agents about the power of audio and video podcasting. And I think it's got some interesting conversational points that we can definitely explore here. So let me go into it here a little bit. I think we've talked a little bit about the past, present, and future of podcasting, but this particular slide kind of just paints a picture that— and I think I talked about at the beginning of the show— is audio and video's origins with podcasting and how we Over a subsequent period of time, as YouTube siphoned off all the video, we became pretty much a predominant audio-only medium. And, but what we've seen over the last couple of years is growing audience demand. And I want to really emphasize this. This is really being driven by audiences' desire for video. Now, granted, I think that there's a little bit of a lag right now of how many video creators are involved in podcasting. I do think that there's some tug of war going on around people's desire to get involved with video because it's complex. But if you do a query in ChatGPT-4 Omni, which is the latest version, I think what you'll see is that the quote that comes back, a podcast combines the traditional audio podcast with visual video elements. This is what ChatGPT output is in creating a multimedia experience that can include the recordings, interviews, and other visual content via RSS, Spotify, and YouTube, and even Apple. So I think, you know, my position on this, and I think it's healthy for the industry to think about it in this way, this is an opportunity to embrace the origins of this medium and to really kind of take it to its full potential again. And I think we kind of got distracted by YouTube, but now YouTube has given us an opportunity to capture our origins back again. Now, a lot of folks in the podcast medium itself, a lot of the technology platforms, a lot of the companies I just talked about, some of them don't support video. And it is a little bit more expensive to do video podcasting because of the amount of bandwidth it takes to deliver the content. And this is a lot of the reason why people left to go over to YouTube, 'cause YouTube hosts stuff for free, right? And everybody loves free. So that's definitely what has really driven this change is that desire to get free bandwidth. And I think that may be something of a red herring now. I do believe the cost of bandwidth has dropped dramatically. So it may not be as big of an issue now as it was back in, let's say, 2008 or 2009 when this big transition went from video podcasting into YouTube. So let's go to the next slide here. And it looks like it's covered up a little bit of above by my logo there. So I'm not sure how to fix that. Let me see how I can. So I believe that number here, let me drop that brand logo up there really quick, and I can always add it back again. So you can actually see, see what I'm presenting here, but 67% of the US population, 12+, in the population has, um, has listened to a podcast. So 67% of the US population, 12+, has listened to a podcast. And, and it looks like 47% of the US 12+ has, um, listened to a podcast, I believe, in the last, uh, week. I can't see the presentation that well, so I need to pull it bigger so I can read it better. The text is a little too small. So let's see here. Let me pull it across so I can get it a little bit bigger. And then, okay, okay. The top one has, have listened, ever listened to a podcast is 67% is that above number. And then 47% of the US 12+ population has listened to a podcast in the last month, and 34% of the US population has listened to a podcast in the last week. So that's what these numbers show. And I think that shows a pretty strong penetration into the market. And then with podcast listening, this is just a— this is a reflection of what we were kind of just seeing on the prior slide, but this shows you the progression since 2006 of podcast consumption. And this is, I would think this is primarily audio, but in the early days there was video included in this as well. So this is a chart that shows US population age 12+ have ever listened to a podcast in every year since 2006. So in 2006, it was 11%. In 2007, it was 13%. And '08 was 18%, so there was a 5% jump there, and then the next year, 2009, there was a 4% jump. So if you look at the span of time, the growth of audience listening has not been, you know, like a hockey stick or anything like that. It hasn't been growing exponentially, but it's been growing steadily, and I think that's what kept my faith in maintaining my career in this medium was the possibility that if you waited long enough, podcasting was going to be a big thing. And I think that's, that's kind of what's happened here. So just in the last year, from 2023 to 2024, we went from 64% to 67%. So what, that's, that's a 3% growth rate there. And then the prior was 2%. So you can kind of see that, that range is somewhere between 2% and 4%. There were stretches of time when it was more, like from 2018 to 2019, it went from 44% to 51%, which is 7% growth in one year. But that's kind of unusual. That's not the normal growth pattern. So what we're seeing is a steady growth, and, and, and I think that's, that's healthy for the podcast medium, and And I think it's gonna carry into the future, but there is a top side to that. I don't know that it will continue growing much beyond probably 70 or 80%. So who knows where the maturity line is, where it kind of caps out. So at the monthly listening, we're capped out right now at about 135 million people in the US have listened in the last month. About 47% have listened to a podcast in the last month. And just map that to the, the number that we saw on the amount of monthly podcasts being published too. But those people are listening to all sorts of publishing frequency. So, and then in 2023, on a monthly basis, people were only listening about 42%. So, we've seen a 5% increase in the listening side of podcasting on a monthly basis. And I think that is a significant number. So, and then as you look at kind of the global podcast market share, this is in 2024 numbers. This is podcast media file downloads and the distribution between Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Now, granted, this, this may be starting to shift a little bit more based on the data that we just saw in the prior slide. Apple Podcasts at over 70% of the media file downloads, that's the content that's being consumed on Apple, is higher than Spotify, which tends to be about 9 to 10%. But we may be seeing a shift here since this data was captured where Spotify is picking up more, more consumption of podcasting. But, you know, this has typically been the distribution is that Apple gets more consumption per user. They may have less users. So as we hop to the next section of this presentation, it says listener/user share. So not actual listens, but how many actual podcast consumers that actually listen to a podcast, let's say, on Spotify. How many individual people did that, right? And Spotify appears to be exceeding Apple right now. 34% of the listeners are actually— people are actually consuming podcasts on Spotify. But Apple is at 28% of the listeners. But of that 28%, they're consuming over 70% of the downloads. So those Apple Podcasters are passionate consumers of podcasting and content, where Spotify is like splitting their time between music and video and, and, um, and podcasts. So there's a little bit more distraction on the Spotify platform, which tends to splinter the consumption patterns, where Apple has a dedicated podcasting app, and, and that That is what's different, and Apple has a music app that's separate, right? So people are very intentional about what type of media that they're trying to consume in the Apple platform, which isn't the case with Spotify. iHeart is 6%, and Google Podcasts, which is now closed in most places around the world, was at 4%, and Amazon Music at 3%, and collectively all the smaller apps on the listening side, at least on the user base, about 26%. So as you look at all the collection of all the Podcasting 2.0 apps and like Fountain and Pocket Casts and all these other consumption platforms, they comprise about 26%, which is a significant number. So as you look at those long tail platforms, it is a significant number. Of consumption happening over there and listeners that are associated with those smaller apps. That's why it's so important when you, you know, submit your show to Create a Podcast and when you submit it to all these platforms that you get it out to everybody, right? You get it in as many of these listening or viewing platforms as you can because you're more likely to reach more listeners, right? More potential listeners. You may not necessarily capture a lot more actual downloads or plays of your content. That depends on your content and how you've marketed it. But the potential reach of the whole spectrum or the whole population of people that are actively consuming podcasts, you really have to have a broad-based syndication strategy, right? And be everywhere is kind of my, my thought on this. So let me skip forward here. And what's the, what's the percentage of, of audio versus video on the— I think if this is, um, I think this is how much content is, is in podcasting, uh, and what people are gravitated towards. About 25% are, are video, 75% is audio. So audio is still king here in podcasting. I don't want to give the wrong impression that somehow video is is dominant over audio. It is not as far as on the consumption side, but it does— video does reach oftentimes an opportunity to reach maybe a consumer of podcasts that maybe likes video better and/or maybe likes to watch content on their big screen television and likes to watch things on YouTube or on Spotify or whatever on their big screen TVs. And I think we're seeing trend lines that are kind of showing that trend in that direction. So audio is extremely important for broad-based consumption and reaching listeners, but the video side reaches people that are a little ambidextrous on this topic of where they consume. Maybe they start listening in the car, they come home, and they can start listening on their television. So, you know, having that choice I think is very, very powerful. So let's go ahead and jump to the next slide. So share of video podcasts on YouTube and Spotify and other platforms. So as you might imagine, you know, YouTube is the dominant platform for podcasts on the video side, right? They got 35% of the share of video podcasts are on YouTube. 21%, and that's a growing percentage at 21%, video on, you know, video podcasts of sorts on Spotify. So, but the only thing about video on Spotify is you have to upload that video content directly to Spotify. And where YouTube, you have to do the same thing as well. And but on other platforms, you might be able to get it into via RSS. So, That's where the 44%, which is a big number of other platforms that you can get your video podcast into. But the two big dominant players are YouTube and Spotify right now. And increasingly, that is an opportunity. If you're creating video, get it up on Spotify, get it up on YouTube. I know I need to do that with this show. I need to get it up on Spotify. I haven't done that yet, but it's certainly on my list of things to accomplish. So, um, And then the reasons to do video are visual engagement and the intimacy of the visual experiences is powerful. That personal connection, the emotional impact, the nonverbal versus the verbal and in addition to the verbal is important as well. And being able to connect with consumers of your content on a big screen TV, which is increasingly happening. And that makes sense as people, you know, cut the cable or they, they stop watching mainstream media as much, trying to save money. They will start shifting over to over-the-top, you know, Roku and, and Fire Stick type platforms or smart TVs, things like that, where they can, they can use free apps. To consume content. I mean, a lot of those are paid subscriptions as well. Like you can pay to have no ads on YouTube. So, but it's a lot cheaper than having cable television. So I know that's what I do. And then the expanded reach of the combination of audio and video, as I've shown here, it kind of fits a new consumption lifestyle that we're seeing increasingly happen, and especially with young people is that You know, they are embracing video more. Short-form video is a big thing too. Some prefer video, some prefer having the option of having both, and that's what the research is starting to show us. And it's also increasing accessibility too, like closed captions on the video side, so the hearing impaired can get access to your content as well if they happen to have closed captions on there as well, which some of the Platforms are increasingly adding closed captioning. And content repurposing, like I was talking about earlier, is this ability to create different forms of the content, whether it be Reels or Shorts or even creating a shorter version of your show just in general and putting that out is also a possibility. And then one thing a lot of people don't realize too is that YouTube is in the process of rolling out a translation of all their content to, I understand, all the languages on the planet. So eventually your content will be translated into a version of your voice spoken in, you know, 100 different languages out there. So it's kind of an interesting thing to think about, but that also opens the gate towards people that are creating content outside of English getting into the English market too. So those that are creating, let's say, a podcast in Asia or that are using a local native language will be translated into English and then played back in the US too. So that's gonna open up a lot of opportunities on both sides and really make this a global content marketplace. And then I think I mentioned this earlier, the video podcast playing apps. So the apps that support video, or some of them will support video, but they'll only play the audio from the video too. So you kind of have a little bit of that going on too. So let's say a show is a video podcast. The apps will potentially just play the audio from the video file, not just not show you the video per se, but it's a way to, you know, get that content into the platform. But, but a fair number of these will actually support the video playback experience. But the number one, um, one for that that are considered a podcast app are the Apple Podcasts platform that actually, actually supports that. So, so I didn't go through it. It's like, uh, Podcast Addict, Podcast Republic, Pocket Casts, Podbean app, Dogcatcher, Downcast, HiCast, iCatcher, Podcruncher, Podest, Primecast, RSS Radio, YouTube Music is one as well, and Spotify. So, so those are the main ones that are currently embracing the video side. So, um, you know, you know, this— the power of producing once, that's this synergy strategy that I have of producing video and audio at the same time. That's what I'm doing with this show, and it, it basically enables you to produce the content once and then— but put it out in all the potential places, whether it's via RSS or non-RSS-based video platforms like a Spotify is a good example of a, of a video podcast publishing platform that's not able to embrace RSS. Now, I'm hoping that they will at some point. I'm hoping that, that YouTube will actually embrace video podcast feeds. They're currently embracing audio RSS feeds, which seems a little counterintuitive to me that YouTube would support audio podcast feeds because what they have to do is they have to take that audio file and convert it into a video file., because YouTube does not support MP3s on their playback on their platform. From what I understand, everything gets converted into a video file. It may look like, or, you know, it may feel like it's an audio file, but it's actually being converted into a video file, and then there's a static image being presented with that playback. And there is talk at YouTube that they're going to take that content and dynamically generate AI videos to go along with that audio content that's actually a video. So it's very confusing what they're doing. And then the other thing that is powering a lot of this is transcription being powered by AI and how that's being used in closed captioning and how it's being used in just showing transcripts to the consumers of podcasts that can be utilized by the hearing impaired or just as a reference. To being able to get deep into the content. And increasingly transcripts are like key to just about everything now of creating show notes, creating descriptions. It's such a powerful tool now to take advantage of. And the whole social media, full and shorts, you know, you can generate infographics, visuals, You can use it in your email newsletters. So there's lots of ways that you can produce once and then multi-repurpose into lots of different other forms of content. And a lot of people will write a book from their podcast too, or they'll create an audiobook or whatever. They'll take each episode and they will make basically a book from each episode and publish that. Or they'll create an audiobook from it too. So, there are opportunities to extend the kind of content you're using into multi-format presentations of your story or your content. And I'm a big proponent of live, as you can see with this podcast, the interactivity of live and community building is very, very powerful., and, and that is, uh, something that I, I really enjoy doing. And, um, RJ Jenkins, thank you so much, uh, for the compliment. He says, great job, Rob. Thank you so much, I appreciate that. And yeah, I know I hadn't really got through a lot of the, um, the comments here, um, and Beauty Bubble writes, uh, these statistics, I think it was from earlier, are always amazing. And I think it is important that the industry see these stats because they're not something that are easily accessible or people know where that, where that data exists. And, and I think it really gives you a perspective on where, where we are in this medium and what's, what's happening with it. To get back to the live And interactive capability, I think everybody that's probably here probably understands that to some degree. Live interactions, just like I did with you that's watching this right now. Host accessibility, I'm accessible, I can be reached. You know, all I have to do is pull up on the screen here my contact information and you can find me on X or you can send me an email if you want to. I love to hear from people in the audience that have a question or comment or a contribution to, to the program. If there's anything I can do to help you, I will, I will, you know, send you an email back or give you some ideas, or I take calls all the time. So, so we can, we can certainly talk about what you're doing, and, and hopefully I can at least point you in the right direction. I don't have all the answers, but I I definitely will try. So, and then building community is important, engagement. It also fosters feedback, just like what I was asking for just now, and authenticity. And I'm, I'm doing this for you, you know, without really a script or anything like that. This is, this is very similar to what I did up on stage in front of a real live group of people that I was presenting this to. So this I've had practice doing this one, but that doesn't mean that it's not truly authentic. And I, I really firmly believe all this stuff too that I'm talking about. So, uh, let's see, um, the creative, uh, visual possibilities in audio and video too. Like, we've seen the interactivity, guests and conversations with people that join you on your program. I I usually have a guest on this show, so this is a little bit of a unique episode where you got all me tonight. Um, and that may be something I do more of. Um, guests can be a little bit distracting, and, and I can't, um, address your questions as easily if my guest is talking. So that does kind of get in the way of that, um, interactivity to some degree. Um, and then also with the visual, uh, you animation overlays. I can pull up on the screen and visually show you things. You know, there's some work that can be done with sound design and multi-camera stuff, which is what I intended playing with, uh, with this show too, is trying to bring in multi-camera angles. But I don't know if it's really— it's not really necessary. Brand identity and visual impact, which is the, the other big part here, to show consistent branding Visual aesthetics. So if I were to bring my overlay back again, let's see if I, if I have that here. Let's see if I can bring that back. Consistent branding. There you go. So I pulled up on the screen my, my little overlay logo. So just to be consistent with my branding here too. You can show custom graphics like a lot of the graphics, like if you're listening to this, the graphics I'm showing on the screen, I generated with ChatGPT. They create graphics. They don't always spell things correctly though. That's the only problem with ChatGPT. I battle with it all the time about them. You know, I say, you know, write this text on the image and they're constantly misspelling it. Like you can even see it up there on the screen here. They got the word identity all messed up and and the word power is misspelled too. So it's really more about, you know, using these tools is really more about giving it kind of a creative expression. But, you know, eventually I think these things will be able to learn how to spell. I've always been a little bit amused by that because supposedly these large language models are experts at language, right? Because they call them large language models. But I know that creating imaging is not a language model per se. It's more of an illustration model, but it's just a little amusing, its lack of ability to spell words. So I think it's interesting. And, and really brand alignment, you know, and that gets back to the, the consistent branding and things like that of your program, like my colors and stuff and my background. And if I think about all that stuff, it's, it's all, you know, part of the package. So, and then of course we have to talk about audio and video monetization models and the common ones. I mean, we talked about that a little bit in the earlier part of the program. Dynamic advertising is kind of what everybody's all spun up about here recently, is the automatic insertion, dynamic insertion capability. You create insertion points and you can prerecord or it can be dynamically delivered on the fly off of a buying platform of sorts where the advertiser comes in and buys campaigns in shows that are part of that network, and that campaign runs automatically. And that's called, um, it's actually programmatic advertising is what it is, but it's all being delivered based on dynamic ad insertion. So it's all a technology that finds a spot in the content and slides that ad in just as it's being played or it's pre-inserted. That's the other thing that can be done as well. Host reads have always been pretty much what they call baked in, which is sponsored, typically sponsored host reads in the history of podcasting have been usually baked into the content, which when I say baked in, they're put in the content in post-production and they will remain there. Until someone removes them or some technology removes them. They will remain in the content for as long as that content is published. That's what's different about the dynamic advertising stuff is that it can be changed, it can be replaced, it can get a new campaign. You know, a lot of advertisers have gotten a lot of benefit from having ads that stay in the content for years, right? So if you have Listeners listening to your content over an extended period of time beyond the window of the campaign, they get value for that. If it's a product or brand that continues to exist, they continue to get value from that. So that's why a lot of advertisers like to buy baked-in content, baked-in ads. So because they get that long-term benefit from it. Plus also product reviews, demos, things like that. Just like what I did a little bit with the Blubrry platform early on. They're, they're supporting me in this as far as hosting my delivery of my podcast side of this on the video and audio side. And then affiliate and performance-based marketing, that's basically a relationship that you have with a brand or a product that you get a commission off the sale and the actual customer acquisition part of that transaction. Sponsored content, which is basically, you know, you get paid like maybe per episode or per ad read that you do, um, that's, that sponsors that show. Typically I've done a lot of content that's really kind of a sponsor type of relationship as well, but it's also, you know, it's, it's really kind of more of a branded podcast, and that's kind of what I did for StreamYard. It wasn't really sponsored content, but it was kind of like, like a branded podcast to some degree. And then paid premium content is also another growing aspect of monetization and podcasting, like a Patreon, or there's a bunch of platforms out there that are developing that are creating, you know, private communities that are based on a subscription model. And We've even seen this happen with like X.com, you know, formerly Twitter, having a premium program. And, and others have been rolling this out. Even Apple has a, has a premium pathway that you can upload content directly to them and get it on a subscription. Branded merchandise is another one that people do, you know, hats and t-shirts and mugs and things like that. And, and I used to give away StreamYard merch on this program too. So it's kind of, kind of similar to that. And then live Super Chats is the other one that people are increasing using, increasingly using, especially if they do live. I don't currently support it right now myself, but I'll look into that though. I think it's an interesting idea. And then, uh, let's see. Okay, I think I jumped ahead a little bit, and I think we're kind of running out of time, so You know, what I typically will do here with this presentation, I will run through, um, kind of how to put a podcast together. What were the things to think about? Maybe I'll save that for the next episode, um, to maybe run through how to create a podcast, um, and that the steps through that process, uh, that you should think about. Um, I don't know, probably a lot of you that are watching this probably already have a podcast, but I think it's helpful to understand kind of what I've experienced in creating podcasts and what I've seen others do and what those steps are. And so I'll probably cover this in maybe, I don't know if it's next week's episode or whatever, and really deep dive into the concept of, of concepting your audio and video podcasting and trying to come up with, you know, that that workflow progress or process. So, so I will talk about it more next week. But so the top podcast hosting services that, that support audio and video podcasting into, let's say, an Apple platform, I think I mentioned earlier Podbean and Libsyn and Blueberry. So if you're interested in doing a video podcast from, let's say you're creating a video on StreamYard and you want to get it in there and you, you've got a little bit of a budget to spend on getting a, a video-capable RSS feed, is you typically have to create a separate RSS feed, one for the audio, and then a separate RSS feed from that just for the MP4 file, which is the video file. So you're basically getting two podcast hosting accounts is what you are essentially doing, where, you know, typically you'll go in and just get the audio RSS feed. But if you're doing video, you really need to do it in two separate RSS feeds. That's the case now anyway. If you look at the initiative that's going on through the Podcast 2.0 initiative, if you go to podcasting2.org, I believe is the address, you can see where there is an effort being put underway to come up with a way to create what's called an alternative enclosure, which is basically having two enclosures in each item of your RSS feed. So you could conceivably have one of those be an audio file and the other one be a video file. Or the other alternative that's being pursued too is having one that's an audio file and then the other one is a, a link to your YouTube version of your video. That's the, that's the thing that's being worked on by the Podcasting 2.0 initiative. And then the, the initiative and the Podcasting 2 or 2.0 initiative is an extension of RSS, right? It's the adding new tags to the RSS to allow the listening platforms to embrace other capabilities or other ways of using that RSS feed to add more value to the listening apps and to create more community, maybe share comments across podcast listening apps. So when one person makes a comment in one app, it shows up in all the other apps. And then any comment that's made in any of those apps gets shared across all the apps. And that will actually really kind of supercharge this community impression that's happening around podcasting, even on the on-demand side. But there's also a new tag called the lit tag that basically enables those podcasts, those newer podcast listening apps to get triggered to say there's a live version of this show that's available right now. And you'll be notified that Podcast Tips is now live and you can launch the app and start watching the show or listening to the audio, one of the two. So what I have up on the screen right now is just some photographs of my studio. That I'm using right now to do the show, just kind of give you an idea of the equipment that I have and things like that. If you look at the bottom image, bottom left image, that's my camcorder going into my teleprompter. And then the middle image is my RODECaster Pro that I use, and it's right here on my right. And then the lights and the microphone so that that other image that shows the lights up at the top of the image, those are my small flat panel studio lights that are lighting my face right now and creating that depth here in the video. So let me jump ahead. This is some of the software that I use. I use, you know, down below is the Audacity software. The one above is is basically Sound Forge, which is another audio editing platform. And the one on the right there is, um, um, Numano's, um, cloud editing, um, tools. So if you're not familiar with Numano, it's a, it's, it's an audio recording platform. And then I think we're getting towards the end here. So I think we're at almost an hour and a half. I think that's long enough. So as you can see, my my background. So if you look behind me, you can see up at the top of that image, the big green box, there's a light strip. It's an LED light that I have that's attached to the panels that are behind me in my bookshelf. And so that's what you're looking at there. And then there's my microphone, which you can see anyway. So it's not not that helpful. And that's, that's me. That's all, pretty much all that I wanted to cover tonight. And I certainly appreciate you being here. And let me, let me pull this down and pull back up on the screen. And let's, let's go through, and I will go through and I'll look at to see if there's any questions that have come in that I want to address here in the last couple minutes of the show. Um, let's see, Johnny Bean, uh, let's see, uh, writes here, let me pull that up here. I mainly make video, um, then I'll podcast the audio. So Johnny is doing this, um, so congratulations Johnny that you're, you're actually doing this, this whole process. I mean, it's It's not easy, I have to be honest. It's doing audio and video does require some additional work, and it depends on what your particular workflow is for it. You know, if you're using the Descript app or you're using an editing tool for the video as well as you're using an editing tool for the audio. What's cool about the Descript app is you can kind of edit the audio and video at the same time, which I find is is pretty powerful, but I do pull it still into a wave editor and do some other optimizations to it. I also use a platform called Levelator, which basically will sound compress and level all the audio from the audio that I produce. It's really a legacy tool. It's only really available on the Windows machines platforms. It used to be available on the Mac side, but you just drag and drop your wave file into this, it's called Levelator, It's in Google if you do a search for it, and it will sound level all your audio to sound terrific. Oftentimes podcasters will record their audio kind of at too low of a volume, to be quite honest with you, and puts the listener in a position where they have to crank the volume on their playback device. Or their phone or whatever to be able to hear your content, especially if you're on a bus or if you're on a train or an airplane or something like that and you synchronized it to your phone or something like that, or you don't have Wi-Fi access. You know, that is a challenge, but, you know, that really has nothing to do with your normalization or your leveling of the audio. I think that's something that every podcaster needs to really think about is, is where your listeners may be consuming your content and is the volume there good enough? And you can test that yourself. I mean, play your podcast back in like Apple headphones or whatever, you know, the small earbuds and see if the volume that you're getting is good for you and, you know, especially, or if you're having to ride the volume all the time, to be able to properly hear your show. Johnny Bean also writes, yeah, AI will misspell stuff, but it will look kind of right though. Yeah, I agree with that, Johnny. It'll look kind of right, but it depends on what your standards are. I kind of get a little irritated with ChatGPT 'cause it's like, I ask it like 5 times to spell this, this way, spell this this way, and it just— it's almost like it hasn't learned English yet, and it's a little frustrating, to be honest with you. So then it looks like Sonya writes, yes, for AI until today is more into graphics images, but still, you know, it's difficult to put put your own words into it. I agree, um, sometimes it works. I've gotten some images out of ChatGPT that had the proper spelling of words in it, but it is kind of rare, I have to admit. So Johnny Bean also writes, uh, looking to grow the podcast version of my live video. Well, that's terrific, Johnny. I think that's, that's great, and And I do think that's kind of the direction that the industry is heading, whether or not they really like it or not is kind of beside the point. So I just think that's the direction the industry is going. Johnny also writes, I pretty much just upload the audio from the StreamYard video and I have done some post-production. Okay, so you're doing a similar process to what I'm doing. Um, and let's say the bigger the podcast version gets, I'll put more work into that. So, um, so yeah, makes sense. So as your podcast grows, then you put more effort into the, the podcast side of things. Uh, and Johnny also writes, um, I make thumbnails, uh, for some of my, my videos they can be fun. So yeah, I think that the thumbnail part of it is a whole nother thing that maybe I can talk about a little bit in what I do with this show too. And it's, um, I use Canva is what I use. And, um, but I think I've gotten through most of the questions here today, and I appreciate you being here. I think we're getting toward the bottom of the hour. I can't believe I went 90 minutes with this show, but, uh, It's great to have you along with me and, and do, do a little bit of a solo show. And I will probably do more of these, but I'll also bring on some guests too. I do have a couple of guests that are booked to come up here in the future, and so we can, we can do, uh, do a deep dive. And definitely want to hear from you though, so send me an email. I would love to hear from you. So let me pull up, uh, here on the screen again my, my email address, my address over on, on X. You can follow— I, I make regular postings over there about when this show's coming out and when I'm doing it. And then also on YouTube too, that's where this show— this is— this address here is the home of this show now. It's not StreamYard. So that's the the place to go. And I want to thank Blueberry again for hosting my podcast. And, and if you, if you want to go back and listen to some of the older archives of the show, the past 30 episodes, there's some great content in there, and you might get some value out of that because I, I talked to some pretty, uh, successful podcasters and get their, their views on their efforts on the video side and audio side. So it might be of help to helpfulness to you. So, but I want to say thank you to everybody for being here. I appreciate you spending so much time with me here. Um, you know, as I move away from the StreamYard channels and move to my own, own channels, um, it's great to have you along. So thank you so much, and I hope you have a wonderful evening, and we'll see you next Thursday at 7 PM Eastern, uh, 4 PM Pacific. And if you're outside of the US, uh, it'd be great to have you along too. So thank you so much and good night everybody. Okay, bye.