How is Podcasting Changing? | Live New Media Show

Hey, afternoon delight with Todd and Rob. Oh yeah. Hey Rob, here we are, another, another new media show, another Wednesday live and lit and live for all of you that are watching via your favorite podcast apps. How are you?

I'm doing all right, Todd. These, these Wednesdays come by pretty fast. It's It's like it just seemed like the other day that we did a Wednesday, you know.

Um, I've been, uh, I guess I've been trying something new at the J-O-B. And, uh, before I was tracking times kind of like I did 2 hours worth of meetings, I did 3 hours of planning, I did whatever. And so now I've went into a mode of Hyper efficiency and tracking my activities by the 30-minute window. What did I do for the past 30 minutes? What did I do? What did I do? And you know what I've come to determine? I do a ton of shit every day.

Well, that's good. That's probably what you need to do with the business, right?

Yeah. Well, you know, I was doing all this stuff before, but then it's like I can go back 3 days ago and I can say, oh, you know, that's what I did. You know, you got your calendar. And everything, right? But, um, we work on a sprint model, so we have a stand-up every morning. This is what I did yesterday, that's what I'm doing today. That's what I did yesterday, that's what I'm doing today. And then we do a team kickoff every Monday with a whole team to kind of go over the performance of the last week and everything else. And, and, uh, and since adding my new employees, I've been putting in some refinement to you know, all our processes. And, uh, yeah, you can, you can definitely see where you can gain efficiencies when you're looking at every 30-minute window. Now, you know, the average person— I think there's this national, and I don't know where I got this, this is from years ago— someone told me at an 8-hour day you get about 6.7 hours of productivity out of people. So, um, You know, it's hard to stay completely full-on 8, you know, even with lunch, with 8 hours. There's some point to focus that long. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah. And, um, but anyway, that's just what's going on here.

So I wanted to mention that, uh, March 5th at 8 PM Eastern, we're going to have, uh, Mark Webster, who's the head of podcasting at Adobe Podcasts. So We have a commitment from him to, to join us on the show so we can talk about all of the interesting stuff that Adobe's doing in the podcasting space.

So, uh, you know, put that in your calendar and it'll be, be scary because I'm gonna be running on my new setup, uh, with OBS. And yeah, so I thought you got that all dialed in. It's, it's, it's all— well, no, last trip, see, the problem we had, I had was the video. Yeah, I had it all dialed in, but I could never get a quality video recording. Oh, so now I'm recording locally. I've got, you know, I wasn't using OBS and all these other tools, Riverside and all these things that we tried, you know, there was just a little bit missing from each one. So OBS is just the best solution. It gives me everything I want, gives me the stuff windowed the way I want. So yeah, I'm, I'm pretty jazzed about that. So there'll be a few tweaks to do once I, once I have the system set up, but maybe I'll even ask you to come online and we'll do a, do a little, do a little test. But we shouldn't be able to maintain quality, quality audio and video, and at the same time have a, a master recording that is going to be worthy of either putting out as a video podcast or, you know, in case we had stream issues, to replace the YouTube embed. So yeah, pretty, pretty jazzed.

So thought today I wanted to talk about a few kind of, like I say, relatively controversial topics that are going on online around and inside the podcast space around various topics, and they're, they're mixed up between audio and video, like, like we've been regular here on the show discussing. And, um, a couple of them, just to kind of set the table here, is, um, it's a topic around Podcasting 2.0 and also kind of where that's at. Has it really kind of lived up to expectations? Um, where we are with it right now. And I think getting both of our opinions on this might be a good, good thing for us to share. And then also some other topics have come up too around with this kind of tension around audio versus video. This topic has been raised by John McDermott, who has a Substack that he posts on that James Cridland frequently links to.

Who is he? Who is McDermott? I don't even know who this guy is.

Uh, he's, uh, got a newsletter of sorts, and he, he publishes, you know, like every couple days.

Is he a podcaster or what is he?

Yeah, I think he came out of the, the radio business to some degree.

Um, well, there's, there's a red flag.

Well, it's, it's, you know, we can kind of take that position, but he's, he's really focused on kind of this conflict between audio and video, right? And it's a fun read. I mean, he's a creative writer and he's basically shooting some ideas out and that is podcasting versus what he's calling VODcasting or broadcast.

Oh my God, that's a word from 20 years ago.

Well, it is, and that's part of the reason why I wanted to talk about it is that these are recurring topics. So, you know, when he wrote this extensive article on it and I gave him feedback off of his kind of post on LinkedIn about it, sharing with him a little bit of history about this, right? And how we've kind of been down this path of trying to change the name His, his thought process is that we keep podcasting for the audio side and we keep, or we create this new name, VODcasting for the video side.

That ship has sailed.

I know. And I challenged him on that. I go, well, what do you think you're really accomplishing by doing that? What's the goal? Yeah. Is it just, just to settle this dispute or is it something that's actually going to be proactive to the industry? I mean, Does he see Spotify or YouTube adopting this term?

No.

And if they don't, then what's the purpose? What's the point?

Yeah, right.

Yeah. And so it also, also depends on who we're talking about. Are we talking about the industry or are we talking about the listener or the viewer?

In this case, I will be honest with you, Rob. It's, it's a non-starter. So was he arguing with you?

Yeah, he's saying that the era of the earlier part of podcasting is old, right? So this concept that the term podcast can be a reference to an audio and video file is old school, right? And his reason for that, I believe, and he's not been really clear about it, but is that it's this connection between RSS and the media file, right? And that it's not really a commonly accepted principle to put video in an RSS feed. And I think that's at the core. And I, you know, like I told them in my post, I said the term podcast does not need to be replaced to preserve audio. You know, from day one, the term podcast was always intended to describe whatever media you wanted to put in the RSS feed, right? Podcasting was audio and video for a large chunk of this experience. So that's why we've seen these big platforms adopt it and say, because it's easier to have just one name than it is to have a bunch of names to describe all this stuff, which isn't really compatible with the expectation of the audience. You know, granted, this makes it simpler for the creator community or the industry of podcasting to some degree, but in other ways it just confuses the issue.

So video podcasters are not going to call their shows vodcast. They're not. It's not a chance in this planet. He may not, he may not know, but there's about 13, 13, almost 13,500 shows that have a— are doing— now again, it's a smaller number, but there's 13,500 shows that are doing video that have a true RSS feed video podcast. I, I bet you that would shock him a little bit.

Yeah. And I, I kind of blame Apple for this to some degree, that they've, they've buried this.

Yeah.

Um, in their, their UI. And I'm I'm hopeful that we'll see them kind of change their mind on this at some point here.

Mike, if you're, if you're listening, I don't know if one of my team members is listening, he has an, uh, an assignment for me. He was going out and looking at all of the, um, apps that support video, and it was a pretty big list, and he was still going through it. And it's not just the new apps. It's— there's a lot of old apps that support videos. So there's lots of video support, people just don't understand, don't realize it, right? Yeah.

And then also some of the platforms will take the video file and just play the audio.

Yeah, some do that too.

That's another component of this that confuses the issue.

Yep.

And to some degree, I believe that's what Spotify is actually doing. So it's—

well, that's what they're doing when they overwrite the video and someone wants audio only. Yeah.

It's not like they're likely playing or creating an MP3 file and then hosting an MP3 file. They're probably just playing video, not displaying the video.

Yeah, I can almost guarantee it.

Right. And because that's easier on the programming side and the infrastructure side, you're not having to re-encode everything, which they're probably doing on the video side, but not audio to video. Or video to audio, right? So, so that's kind of the takeaway for this topic. You know, it's a little bit of Back to the Future kind of a concept once again, right? And we've been through this path many times. Even a big Hall of Fame podcaster, Leo Laporte, kind of went through this process and he abandoned it finally, right?

He tried, he tried really hard Right. Yeah.

And he was clearly a video creator.

That's right. He was video first. Oh yeah.

Well, he was also on the radio.

Yeah.

But he did a lot of stuff with video. I mean, he created like 3 different RSS feeds with video in it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He had like low, low, medium, high or something. Yeah.

Kind of mid and high.

We all did versions. I had, I had 4 versions of audio files and, you know, we all had multiple feeds because no one had bandwidth.

So, and that's, that's a good kind of segue into talking about kind of what's happening with the Podcasting 2.0 initiative.

Just hang on a second though, but David Da Silva says, funny, someone in Europe mentioned vodcast in conversation today. I didn't know the term had a history and was pretty much dead. Yep. So that's funny. So what about Podcasting 2.0 that's having great adoption?

This topic that we raised around having various formats and streaming rates and all this stuff really kind of plays well into this topic around Podcasting 2.0 because some of the initiatives over there were trying to leverage that concept, right, of having alternative enclosures and those kind of things, having audio and video in the same feed and having live streaming available through that RSS feed. And so I guess—

like we're doing right now.

Right. And so some of the issues that he's— or John is raising here, or what he sees as opportunities, are actually things that are being— have been worked on for many years now with the Podcasting 2.0 initiative. And so it begs the question, right? What is the status of the Podcasting 2.0 initiative? And And do we think it's going to get traction or larger amount of traction as we look to the future? And Todd, what do you think is holding it back?

The app developers. The app developers.

It's the app. Well, it's always been the listening platform.

Because we've got— and I will admit the last 6 months or so, I think Adam and Dave have been distracted about something. They're not adding as much. Podcast features. They've been talking about a lot of stuff, um, some personal projects and some stuff. So, you know, from an internal standpoint, stuff is still moving. There's still stuff being rolled out, but it's not happening as fast. And part of that is also a strategy on their end to let the apps catch up. Um, right. So, you know, the music thing was as big for a while and still is kind of big, but there's about 5,000 shows that are classified true music shows. But, you know, adoption-wise on the big stuff— transcripts, chapters, funding tag— that's pretty big. And there's about 4 million episodes, 4.1 million episodes now with transcripts in. About 800,000 episodes have chapter files. Which is incredible if you really think about it in the scheme of things. Now compare that to the total number of shows though. The total number of shows that have, um, transcripts is only about 73,000. So of the active shows. So, and of course they're not supported by Amazon, not supported by Spotify, not supported really well by a whole bunch of major podcast hosts, some of them kind of haphazardly. So, you know, of the, you know, of the big companies that have adopted transcripts, they're there. But then again, you know, Apple did their own thing on transcripts, but they will take your transcript if you link to it. So that helped that particular feature a lot. But, you know, there's been some issues with the funding stuff that's been going on with Boost because of And now they're, you know, someone is talking about these cross-app comments going to Blue Sky. I have no desire to be on Blue Sky at all. So that, you know, there is, there's challenges here for sure, but the—

you're talking about what Sam Sethi and James Cridland are pushing for?

Yeah, and, and, and, uh, Cridland loves Blue Sky. He left Twitter, so I, I, I don't want to be over on Blue Sky. It's just the conversations over there are out of control.

So there's just a limit to how much you can scatter yourself across things. I guess you have to give up something to be able to do that.

Now there's just too many platforms and the majority of podcast listeners are on a handful of— so having some integration with cross-app comments. And again, for those of you that don't know what this is about, it's just basically being able to comment one place and being able to see it across all apps and share back and forth. And it's, it's, it's a, it'll get a small number of people that will use it, but it needs wider adoption with our own protocol. And, but again, it's all about the app developers. Marco, you know, what's he going to do? Is he going to introduce some of this stuff? Um, we've been, you know, we've been pushing hard. We've been educating our podcasters. We have the majority people that are moving to us from other platforms are moving because of the Podcasting 2.0 stuff. The— but again, it's— we knew this is going to be an uphill climb. We knew this was going to be difficult because in the end, it's all— it's, it's, it's about the— it's about the app developers being able to get these features into the apps. And they're— in true to mind, what is in it for them? And, you know, the model, if we get the funding thing kind of fixed, which I believe is just broke as shit right now.

Yeah. Um, yeah, I think you're talking about the payment exchange. Yeah.

Yeah. It's Satoshis and stuff. Yeah. So, you know, and that's part of the problem we ran into is regulatory stuff that the regulatory caught up and the people say, oh, I can't do certain things. That's a whole hour discussion, but If we can get the funding thing figured out and get that working, then there's an incentive for the, the app developers to add these features because then they can earn money as part of the ecosystem.

Um, so I am hearing talk in the industry that, that maybe Podcasting 2.0, the, the concept of it, has kind of failed.

I don't think so. I think it's— I think we knew that this is going to be an uphill climb. I agree with you, Todd, on that, because if you don't have the app developers, popular app developers, you know, Pocket Cast has done some stuff. So, you know, but it's the chicken or the egg first. Oh, that's why we question, right?

Yeah, that's why we're on the publisher side, and it's got to be on the—

well, you've got a huge number of publishers supporting it now. It's on the app side. Yeah, so, but again, Apple— if Apple adopted a couple more things, that would help it along too, because then, you know, as Apple goes, so does the rest of the space. But I don't know if Apple's gonna adopt anything anymore. You know, what is incentive for them to add more stuff? And that's what it really boils down to. And if there's anything that's concerning privacy then they're not going to implement it if they feel that there's a way people can be looked upon.

Yeah, this really gets to the heart of the question around open versus proprietary, I think.

Well, the proprietary just decides what they're going to do and they do it, right?

Exactly. And that's how this— unfortunately, that's how a lot of this medium has operated for most of its existence, really, if you think about it. Is that the listening side has always really dictated what the publishing side can do. And Apple has been the classic example of that. They put out a new namespace and everybody can't get it done fast enough, right?

Here's what it boils down to. If the app developers don't innovate and don't add some of these features, it is not a good outlook. For those apps.

But if they do— but if they do do that, that may increase their costs.

Not necessarily. Most of the stuff doesn't increase their cost. Half the app developers don't run any infrastructure.

Well, no, I'm talking about development time.

Oh, always. There's always a cost with development time, right? But what if they always—

well, it's the— it's the chicken or the egg.

Well, if you don't do it, you're going to fail. And you're going to be, you're going to be bled out of existence by proprietary platforms, maybe you should consider doing that.

Yeah, but I'm not sure that that's going to necessarily win the battle though.

It will, it'll win the win, it'll win the listeners when it's presented in a way that where the listeners get value. In the end, this all goes back to empowering the listeners. It's all about helping the listeners. Everything that's been done here— is not about helping me as a podcaster. What does transcripts do? It helps the listener. What do chapters do? It helps the listener to be able to find content within an episode that they want to listen to. All this stuff is focused back towards the listener. And this is the thing where people forget, we can add all these features. And that's all cool bells and whistles for us to add this to our to our feeds and to do all this support. But if the, if the apps don't put these features in where the listener gets the value, the listeners aren't going to use the app. So the apps that are involved are small, they've done a great job. But you know, again, we got to have an app that's breaking 3% or 5% or 6% like Overcast to make people understand, okay, there is value here and this is exciting and I need to be consuming the content here instead of going over to fucking YouTube. There's got to be incentive. This is where the listeners have to have, because otherwise, if it's— what's, what's the point? What, why are we doing this? We're doing this for the listeners and we're not doing this for our, our well-being or just to be fun or geeky.

Why? That's an idealized view of it, um, you know, and I think that that makes sense if you have a perspective that these big proprietary platforms don't want to chart their own path.

Oh, they're going to, right? Oh, they're going to. So otherwise, if we don't chart our own path, everything will go to these platforms.

Well, it's already gone to those platforms though, Todd.

That's— well, again, I just— I see, I see the real data. And that's not necessarily true. Listening on apps has not declined.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying where's the vast majority of the audience today? It's on the big platforms, right?

Well, and again, they're being exposed to a small number of shows, so it does no good for a small show on YouTube. Yeah, some will get some traction. Good. But majority won't.

Todd, the only example that I can come up with of this working in a predominantly dominant, which the podcasting space is, of walled garden platforms—

um, how do you say that, Rob?

Because just look at any other space out there. There is no acceptance of an open standard, right?

Because guess what? They want to control everything.

That's right, that's my point. Yeah, is it— is it—

this is not a normal thing in the technology space, so that's why we have to continue to fight for its existence.

I, I understand that, but you're fighting an uphill battle that, um, those companies don't think like this.

Well, I know they don't think like this, so I don't have to care how they think. I have to protect—

you kind of do, because if you want to convince them, then it needs to be packaged.

It's not going to— I'm not going to convince YouTube. Sounds— and for sure, okay, for sure Spotify will never do anything.

You think that a, a Pocket Cast will grow larger than Spotify?

Because, oh, they will never— will they? Never will.

Well, if you don't think that, then it's hard to convince anybody of this.

Well, if I'm Pocket Cast and my goal is a few more percentage points and more people, again, they know what they're up against. But the question is, do they want to have a bigger share of the potato? If half the potato is cut down the middle, as often YouTube and Spotify, that audience is, is gone. So the rest of the potato, you're fighting for the rest of the potato here. So again, I do not—

what is the percentage of the rest of the potato, Todd? Is it 1%, half a percent?

No, I— for most shows, most audio shows, 95, 97% of their con— uh, consumption is on podcast apps.

I'm not arguing that point, right? I'm saying which of the podcast apps is the 99%?

Oh, well, you know, going to, uh, 50%, at least for us, 53% is going to Apple. Right. Yeah.

And then everyone else is going to Spotify.

No, not with us. With us, no, nobody's getting half. Even Buzzsprout, their highest numbers is like 12 or 13%. Okay. Yeah. And maybe it's a little higher. Spot— Buzzsprout has about the highest percentage of listeners on Spotify, has about the highest percent of podcast hosts that have their content distributed on Spotify. We're not talking about this standalone Spotify shows. So, you know, there— and again, there's 100 different apps that have 0.1, 0.2, you know, there's, you know, I think there's only 10 or 11 apps that break 1%.

So, so, you know, and of, of the apps that are most likely to adopt this, um, what's up for grabs as a percentage?

A lot. A lot's up for grabs. Well, what's a lot? Well, if you consider Apple is going to probably still continue to hover around 50% depending on the host, all of that, all of that rest of that is available for any app. But again, no one, no one up to this point has ever broke more than 5%. Overcast has never broke 5%, right? You know, Spotify, for some podcast hosts, have broke, you know, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13%, some higher.

So is there anything that you can think of, Todd, that we can do as an industry that will convince these big platforms to start adopting all these things? And I know this has been the conversation that's been going on since 2020.

The only one that believe me, when I'm in the hallways at an event and the Apple team comes by and I say, hey, and I say, you know, I'd love to see you guys do something like this or do this or support this, and you always get the nice smile, you know. And, you know, and Apple being Apple, you know, they, they never allude to anything. They take your input You know, what have I been hammering on? I've been hammering, you know, I publicly talked about this. I've asked them to, right, to basically to surface video, you know, don't hide it. Yeah, you know, make it, make it a first-class citizen again. Now, what else, what else could they do? Oh man, could they, could they really knock the ball out of the ballpark with cross-app comments? But they won't.

Because they want to own the comments.

No, not necessarily, because there's no commenting system in Apple Podcasts. There's only ratings, rankings. There's no—

I think it's also a privacy—

it's a privacy issue. So they will never have security level issue. Yeah, they're never gonna— they're never gonna hook into, you know, Blue Sky or anybody else, and never comment, you know, you know, that it'll never happen. But they—

right, and that's kind of, that's kind of the, the brutal truth.

But they have, they have— so let's say, let's say they don't even adopt the Podcasting 2.0 funding tag. Let's say they don't adopt it, but they put their own way to give a podcaster value. Maybe something like that, you know. So there's all kinds of—

I thought on this, Todd, is that maybe we're pushing the wrong things. Maybe what we should be pushing is features and functionality that each of these proprietary platforms can adopt that conforms to their methods and practices.

But they, they don't— they're not going to integrate. They're not going to—

Spotify is not about integrating. These, these companies build their own thing.

But Rob, we have all those features. We have all that.

I get that, but that's That's a commonly shared approach, right? And most of these companies from— I mean, I used to work for Microsoft. I mean, they just don't approach things like this. This, this isn't what they do. Oh, these big tech companies don't do this kind of stuff.

Oh, I know.

So outbound.

So, so guess what? So guess what we're battling with? We're battling to get people within our own ecosphere, the existing podcast apps to add some of this stuff to maybe reach 10 to 15% of the market. Believe me, if we could have— if we could have all the apps just adopt 10 features, 5, I'll take 5, right? That would be astounding, you know. And then what happens is, as these features become more prevalent, people say, oh, look over here, look what they have, they've got They've got features 6 through 9, whatever they may be.

But the problem is, yeah, but 15 to 20% of the market's not going to move the needle for these big tech companies.

But we're not worried about the big tech companies. Why are we worried about them? That's going to continue to evolve the way it is. We can only control what we can control at this point.

Yeah, and we haven't been able to control that either.

So, well, it— here's the You know, you know, look what Sam's doing. You know, he's, he's adopted everything.

Oh, I know. And he actually pushes beyond, you know.

Yeah. You know, and again, what does he need? He needs a, uh, an app. And I think he's gonna do that. He needs a native app, not a PWA. He needs a native app. Yeah, you know, if he has a native app, then, you know, boom. It's— I hate to say it, and it's expensive. Native apps are—

oh yeah, crazy, especially the kind of platform that. That he has with the capabilities.

So the problem he's going to run. Well, the problem he's going to run into with a native app is Apple's going to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't have these 10 features because you're going to have to give me 30% of that. Right. And then build a Google app. And they, oh, oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh. And you can't do that. And you're not. So building a native app actually caused you to go in reverse because of the rules those platforms invoke on, you know, oh, you're, you're, you're taking money.

Oh, so Todd, about trying to do this through a common shared code infrastructure, I think is the mistake. I think what we have to do—

common shared code? There's no code.

Well, okay, it's, it's all funneled through RSS. Yeah, these platforms are going to see these features funneled through RSS as a, as a potential security issue.

Why? There's nothing that's a security issue. It's nothing as a security— why would there be a security issue? They can ignore data, they can ignore it of their platform, they can ignore it, they can ignore it.

Who? No, they can. Who?

Who? But If you don't adopt the feed, if you don't adopt the functions inside a proprietary platform, there's no security issue. They've already thrown away all those tags.

Well, we just talked about the shared comments.

They're not going to do that.

Well, Spotify's not going to do either.

No, never.

They want comments on their platform.

Of course they do.

They don't want to share it with someone else.

Yeah, so they're already ignoring that data is already in the RSS feed. They're just throwing that away when they see it. So it's not a security issue.

So what's the real benefit for them doing any of this? There's no benefit.

Good question. We know there's no benefit.

So, you know, and is there really—

YouTube's not going to do nothing.

I, I'm just trying to be objective.

So, so you're saying what can we get— what can we do to get— okay, well, yeah, all right, so what can we do to get Spotify to— do we care that much about Spotify? No. Because here's what Spotify has already done. They've already broke the spec. They've already broke it. Okay, I submit my show to Spotify with an audio podcast.

Oh, you're talking about the whole video?

Yeah, they've already broke the spec. They don't— they don't want two feeds. They've stated they don't want two feeds. They don't want an alternate enclosure. They don't want to give their listeners the option of an A or B, so they're going to do what they're going to do then. And, you know, we can't, we can't lose sleep that Spotify is going to adopt something that YouTube will not adopt something because they want you on the YouTube channel. They want you on the YouTube app. They want that.

And even, even, even these smaller apps want to have that. Because they all aspire to be like Spotify, don't they?

So of course, but here's, here's the thing about the small apps, and this is part of the initiative with Podcasting 2.0. If the apps understood this and really bought into what we're doing here as a collective, our goal is to keep the listener on the app. Our goal is to keep them on the app being engaged. In other words, if they make a comment And just use one example. They use a comment, it goes out to, to @B, and they get a reply from B to A. So hold on, that's cool. You didn't have to go to @B to find the other, to find the other commentary. Same thing. All these features are, have been designed as a collective. We want them to stay on the app. Why do we want them to stay on the app? So the app developer can make money and the app developer has incentive to stay on the app. Why did I put all this stuff in Blueberry? The incentive is I want to keep the podcasters on Blueberry, give them these features that ultimately if the app developers— and maybe I'm missing the key here, but we can't— I can't cry. I wish that Apple would adopt some stuff. I wish that Spotify would wish would adopt some stuff. I wish Overcast would adopt some stuff. But there's this old saying about wishing, and that my dad, my, my late father, used to say, and it's really crude, and once you hear it, you know, you'll know what I'm talking about, Rob Greenlee. You wish in one hand and you shit in the other, and you see what you get first. You end up with a pile of poop. So, so we have to—

well, that's graphic.

So, so, you know, we can wish, we can wish all we want, but we— what we have to do is beg, plead, borrow, and say, please, Marco, adopt chapters. They're not going to leave out of the goodness of his heart. They're not going to leave your app. They're going to stay there. We're giving you a better experience. It truly is. It gives the listener a better experience. Please, Marco, adapt the funding tag. You'll get a piece of this, of this, uh, revenue. You know, this is what we have to do. Is Marco's percentage going to grow? I think it would if you put these features in. I think it would. What is, what is a cool thing that you get to do, Rob, when you go live on YouTube? You've got, uh, the ability to get money, right? When your people can send you a donation. What is it called? There's a word for it.

The whole Super Chats thing.

And we have Super Chat now. It's a little broke. They're working to fix it, but the Super Chat works. It's, it's, it's a little hard for the listener now to really do it effectively without a bunch of pain, and it's getting better, but we have Super Chat. And podcasters are making a lot of money because of Super Chat. Not as much as they were, but it's, you know, we'll get this fixed at some point. So, and guess what? The podcaster gets a lot more of the percentage there than they do on YouTube. But again, it's a different mindset, you know. I, I just don't think, you know, the new until we— and we have to continually educate podcasters. I have conversations all the time. What is this? What's the benefit? You know, so for us, it's like, you know, we knew 2 years minimum, minimum to get any traction.

Oh, it's already been 5, Todd.

Okay, so it's okay. But again, it was like this in the beginning. Very, very slow adoption. Then it's— then, and you just go over it, you look now and see still today, if you look at the, at the list, let me go over to Podcast Index, there's still huge room to grow. Uh, so this is in, in, in adoption, and this is apps, podcast hosts, the whole nine yards. True Fans number 1, CastGuard number 2, Blueberry number 3, PowerPress by Blueberry number 4, Sovereign Fiends 5— people don't even know what that is— PodHome 6, Podverse 7, Podcast Guru 8, RSS Blue 9, RSS.com 10, Fountain 11, CastPod 12, Captivate 13— did I count right?— Once Sold 14, I Own FM 15, Podcast Mirror by Blueberry 16, PeerTube. So it goes down this whole list. As a matter of fact, I should have just put up on the screen So, oops, sorry. So again, by adoption, a web app host, it shows you who has adopted what. And some people say, I don't know any— there's Podcast Addict. So they've got, they got enclosures, chapters, funding, live, location, person, search, season, transcript, all adopted. Podcast Addict, pretty big app. Yeah, so they've, you know, they've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9 features. So if I go back and look at where Android Podcast Addict was a year ago, you know, then we can see if they're seeing— if they're getting a jump. Goes down. Here's Buzzsprout. Here's Transistor. So Transistor, big podcast hosts, chapters, funding, locked, OP3, person, PodPing, podroll, transcripts, text. Buzzsprout, chapters, funding, lock, person, podping, podroll, sound, soundbite, transcript. And you know, you go down this list, but again, if only— okay, so who are the podcast hosts here? We've got Blueberry, we've got PodHome, we have RSS Blue, RSS.com, we have Captivate. Uh, let's see here. Iono.fm, I don't know what they are. Once Told is apparently a hosting platform too. Um, JustCast, never— I think I've heard of them once. Pod2, Transistor, Buzzsprout. So these are, these are Podcast AI, I guess they do hosting too. Fireside, which I think got sold. Podigy, Caproni. So again, from a, from a hosting standpoint, Red Circle, Castos. Libsyn's got one down here at the bottom somewhere.

Well, it's just, uh, was it, um, they got Locked in Transcript.

So again, PodServe. So again, we've got a number of hosting providers that are playing But what is the probably the most known app in this list? If we just look at the apps only, um, it's probably like Pocket Casts. Pocket Casts. But you know, you look at Fountain, a great app, great features, um, but how many people have tried the Fountain app? So, and, and here's the next thing, we're not going to get everyone to move to these apps. People, people get stuck on an app and they, they kind of stay there. Yeah. So, but what I can do, and what I do on my show, is I tell my listeners on Geek News Central, hey, the app I like the most is Fountain. Please follow or subscribe over there on Fountain, grab the app, participate, you know. So part of it is the podcasters have to And 5%, you'll get lucky if 5% of the people listening to your show will move to these other apps. And then hopefully they like it so much that they'll spread the word. So is Podcasting 2.0 going to take over the world? No. But guess what? We're at least going with our boots on.

Right. Well, I guess, I mean, it gets back to what's the goals, what's, what's attainable. And how do we attain those goals? That's the obvious next question, right?

No. Okay, so here's something I think about too. They, the, the two leaders of Podcasting 2.0, don't get a salary over this.

They— there's not, not, not much of an economic—

oh, there's a huge—

of this—

oh, there's a huge economic support of this. Huge.

They've, they've—

huge. Oh yeah, hosting companies like mine are writing checks every month to make sure that the, that the, that the software and the servers stay online.

You're talking about the Podcast Index.

That's right, Project Podcast Index. It's got all this stuff that Podcasting 2 runs under, all the servers that support PodPing, the indexing. All this stuff.

So, but that's a separate project from this.

Podcasting 2.0 is basically related to— oh no, Podcast Index and everything underneath Podcast Index is Podcasting 2.0. Podcast Index stays online and everything associated with Podcasting 2 stays online today through Buzzsprout rsist.com, Blueberry, everyone, everyone that's making a cash donation, any cash donation they put aside into a bucket, it goes into account to run the, run the servers for as long as that money will carry. All the Satoshis, all the money that's coming in for— so they get a percentage, like I, we I think my fee, 3%, goes back to Podcast Index. All the money that comes in via the— and again, I'm speaking— if I speak out of turn, Adam, I'm sorry if I got it wrong. But Podcast Index, the money that comes in for Satoshis are used to build liquidity between nodes. So they'll put a million sats so that this infrastructure will work, right? And so they don't take— and here's the crazy part— whatever money Blueberry Buzzsprout, whatever money they get through donations, whatever comes in through sats minus expenses, Dave and— and, uh, my God, I'm having a brain fart— Dave and Adam, right, pay taxes on that profit. They take no salary. Right. So, okay, so when, when people are like, what's this Podcasting 2.0 about? Blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice, and impact to two individuals' bottom line when they write the IRS a check every year. So if they, they don't take, don't take a penny of salary, so it all goes towards keeping infrastructure up and running and keeping the machine going.

So you're talking about— are you talking about corporate taxes? Is that what you're talking about?

I don't know how they're set up, but they have to pay taxes on that income that comes in. I don't know if they're set up as an LLC, but they, they talk about doing their accounting, sending it off, and they have to write a check because they're taking in more. I assume they've never laid out the black and white. Yeah, but If, if RSS.com's giving them $1,000 a month and it doesn't, I don't think they always do. We typically do about $300, $350 a month. Uh, Buzzsprout does about $1,000 a month.

Um, very, that's, that's usually shared with the partners in a K-1.

Well, again, I don't know how it's set up, but I know they're personal taxes, but I know they pay taxes on this.

Yeah, it probably is. There's some sort of profit or something that comes out of it that goes—

well, again, we'll have to have Adam on it to explain it. But again, I know that their personal taxes are affected by this, right? And if they go to a conference or something, I'm sure they take it out of the kitty, but they don't do that. They don't go to too much stuff. Um, but So, you know, this whole thing, the whole thing is you have developers developing that are not getting paid besides Satoshi's share.

It's an open source project.

It is, it absolutely is. So, um, there's, there's no YouTube money, there's no Spotify money, there's no, there's no big piles of cash. To make this happen. We've had some other people say we need to incentivize it. You know, Brian Berletta said we need to incentivize by putting a pool of money together to have the app developers put these features in place. Well, that's easier said than done.

Yeah, I think that everything about this is easier said than done.

Yeah. But how did podcasting—

there's, there's factors at play that the, the project, but again, doesn't necessarily address.

How does podcasting— how did podcasting get started? It got started boots on the ground and people putting code and doing what we could. This is how this thing launched. And then we blew it. We went— Apple came in and everyone said, oh, blew it. Well, we know we in the podcasting space blew it. And here's why we blew it.

It's— Apple's gonna do what they were gonna do.

Okay, okay, here's what happened. You think about— we had all this cool innovation going on. June or July—

big, big companies think—

June or July of— no, no, no, June or July of 2005, Apple said, here is podcasting in iTunes. And guess what happened to everything going on in the app development side It went and it ended. Innovation ended. And we allowed for many, many years without any voices in the wind. Apple said, oh, we're going to change our iTunes spec to this spec and you got 90 days. Oh yes, yes, Apple, we'll do as you say.

And we did exactly what's— that's what we did happen. That's exactly what will happen because that's what these big companies have the power to do.

We got to a point where a bunch of factors made Adam and Dave say, well, you know, we go into the history of that and, you know, and they said, hey, maybe we should— maybe we should think about trying to take some control back. Yeah, where we gave— we gave it up. We gave it up for like 15 years or more. We just sat back like little lap dogs. And then little—

we're all so happy that Apple—

oh, still happy—

affirmed our ideas as a good thing. Still happy at Microsoft when I worked at Microsoft.

We're still happy that they did. You know, right? We wouldn't be here if Apple hadn't done what they did. Let's be frank, right? You know, say what you will, this, this space would not exist in the shape that it is today. What may— but again, maybe not. Maybe we would have had to forge our own way and had better apps and had better experiences So maybe, you know, you, you can't look back in a crystal ball. Crystal ball looks forward and it's murky too.

So, you know, I think there's any examples of, of a situation like that, um, reaching scale. Well, I don't know that there's any examples of that.

There have been 2 or 3 companies that it took off if Apple hadn't, and, you know, the landscape would be different.

Yeah, I just, I don't know what would happen to podcasting if Apple hadn't come in. I think it it, it would have remained a relatively small medium.

Yeah, so, um, but again, I think we did pretty good. Uh, Beauty Bubble says all things that grow demand momentum and motivation. Give those examples if you can. All things that grow demand—

kind of my bigger, bigger argument here is that I'm not sure that this is this is as attractive to these big players or any, any player really as it needs to be. Well, I'm not sure how to change it or how to adopt it. This concept of open is, is becoming less and less favored now. Well, but the problem is we're facing a headwind.

Well, they're slowing it down. Here's the thing. They want podcasts. They have to get it via an RSS feed. That's not going to change, though.

There's interests out there that would like to get rid of them.

Oh, good, good. Interests that would like to— they can pack sand.

Well, it depends on how powerful they are.

Well, you want, you want, uh, you want our podcast?

I'm just telling you what—

if someone came to me today, there's to be the trends in the industry. If someone came to me, if someone came to me today, say the only way to get shows into our platform is API, it says— I'm gonna have to say sorry. Sorry. Here's an open RSS feed that has all the data that you want. I don't have to build anything else. Just pull the feed. You can do all the API and stuff inside, whatever you want. But otherwise, here's the data. I'm not doing it. Why do I need to do extra work for you? PacSun? Well, how are you helping me? How are you helping podcasters? No, not doing it. Not doing it. All right, YouTube doesn't want it, or YouTube would have— YouTube, if YouTube had wanted to get podcasts in via API, they just said you have to submit via API. They've been doing it for years, Todd, but they didn't. They took the RSS feed.

They have been doing, doing, getting content into—

but they've been— they said for podcasting, they said— but they said for podcasting, but they said for podcasting, we're going to take the RSS feed.

Why?

Yeah, it was easy.

I get that they didn't have to ask permission, but that also helped justify their position.

Well, you know, yeah, of course that's true. David says, on Satoshis, I almost finished setting up my Raspberry Pi. Well, David, see, this is part of the problem right there. Raspberry Pi Lightning Node. The node is running. I haven't been able to make a client work to transfer my Alby wallet. Any recommended reading? I talked to Alby. Oh, you did? No, I'm just telling David, talk to—

oh, you're recommending to him talk to— yeah.

I have been able to make a client work to transfer my— oh, you know you can run your Alby wallet on your Pi if you're running Umbrel. And see, this is geeky stuff. This is where, you know, podcasters, 99% of them, what What? They don't even want to see the little box that's sitting behind me that's got $3,000 in it, virtually, you know, sitting on the blockchain or whatever works, you know, and a little, a little screenshot of my recovery codes and my password manager if that thing ever goes belly up. It's not— there's no money actually in it, but the— you know what I mean.

So that's, that's the argument why these big platforms come in and solve those problems. Well, again, why we wind up in these—

yeah, and, and guess what happens with the, with the creator? I, I can be very graphic today. I'm just feeling it. What have these platforms done to help the majority of creators? Nothing. They say, bend over, give me your content, and you're gonna like it.

And you think that's going to change with AI?

Ah, who knows. I don't even want to get in that topic today. Well, you know, if we already talked about the other day, if YouTube was smart, they'd just start ramping up the AI machines, and that way they don't need the creators no more.

Well, they are building in increasing— I don't know if you saw the, the announcements. They're, they're rolling up a bunch of AI features in inside of their, yeah, the YouTube Studio.

Well, I'm running into so much wish in one hand and you know in the other. That stuff on YouTube, it's just, it's just prolific. I found some channels that I've watched using some of that now, and I'm unsubscribing. I'm voting with my feet. If they're going to put an AI voice, I'm, I'm, I'm out. Okay, why, why do I want to support the downfall of the Creator Space? And I know some people hate that word, the Creator Space, but I just, you know, in general—

why does anybody hate it, Todd? I'm not hearing anybody saying that they hate it.

What do you mean? I hear it all the time, people talking about the stuff that's on there that's just CR.

No, no, no, no, I'm talking about the Creator Space. Why do people hate that term? I'm not talking—

well, there's some people that do.

I don't know what's going on.

Yeah, again, some people do. So I just think that, uh, you know, we, we've been this little— here's— okay, let's, let's, let's please have some perspective, Rob. Um, I deleted 3.7 million listings off our podcast directory. Right. That was a culmination of shows that had either submitted their podcast or that we pulled in over the years. Mm-hmm. I killed them. I got rid of those listings off the directory. And, you know, there's a little bit of a story behind it. And, you know, my SEO is improving. It's all I will just generally say. Yeah. So if I'm gonna— I'm gonna bring up a screen. For those of you that are listening, I will, I will describe what I'm putting up. There was about 4.438 million podcasts in the index, in the podcast index feeds, in the feeds in the index, and I just killed 3.7 million. So you can kind of do the math there. Now if we look down at the bottom number, in the last 30 days, 344,000 shows have updated with a new episode. In the last 90 days, 468,000. So if you think about this 3.7 million I had, plus let's say 500,000, 4.2. You were kind of getting in the, kind of an idea here where the, where the delta is. So there's a lot of dead D, E, A D, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead listings.

So we non-active shows. They may have—

okay, okay, they're dead, right?

Okay, so non-active is probably the more accurate—

okay, you want to be politically correct. They're dead, pod faded, gone away.

Okay, no, I want to be accurate. Dead implies that the RSS feed doesn't work anymore.

Yeah, so that's 468,000 in the entire podcasting space today. Spotify and Buzzsprout, Libsyn, Blueberry, Podbean— of active feeds, 468,000. Now, if I removed everything except the shows that we host, that number is obviously much smaller. So my point here is 468,000 active shows. Let's do the Google search.

How— how— 65 million.

65 active? Yeah, active means they've—

active, active YouTube channels.

How many active YouTube channels? Well, this says at the end of 2023 there was 113.9 million active channels. At least that's what Google is telling me. Depends on—

yeah, criteria.

So anyway, so compared to 468,000, does it matter? Does it matter? Because we are still What does it mean though? What it means is we— it's the question— we remain a very small niche space. We still have— but how many— let's go back to the share of ear report. What was the share of ear report recently? Uh, share of ear, let's see here if I can find it. The Edison Research share of ear. Um, actually, I saw something quarter one to— okay, so, but anyway, if we go and look at how many people are listening to podcasts today and that split, we're doing pretty damn good for reaching a large— yeah, many might be listening some stuff on YouTube, but the percentage of people listening is still pretty significant for only having 468,000 shows. I would rather take my chances, create a little itty-bitty audio podcast that has a higher chance of succeeding and being discovered than trying to build a mammoth YouTube channel.

Yeah, but that only going to happen if the the big platforms weed the content out like you've just said that you did on your platform?

They're not weeding it out.

And that's my question, is it— is it there's so much clutter in there of old, what you call dead shows? Yeah, that people have a hard time finding active shows.

But again, no. So Apple has, and other people have, cleaned house, but they're under a little pressure, like down in the 2.5. Yeah, they're, they're under, they're under pressure though, stockholder-wise. It's very bad to say, well, we had 2.5 million in our directory and this next quarter we're at 2.2 million. That, that doesn't invoke stockholder confidence when the numbers are down.

I would think that the stockholder confidence would be what's the consumption, not the number.

Probably, probably that's the— maybe that's— and again, I don't know if Apple has actually even announced their numbers at any time recently. And but I think the key is, is it's true, we should have a— there should be a house cleaning. The stuff that is new, the stuff that is being produced on a regular basis, should surface up. They should be, you know, the stuff that hasn't produced a new episode in 90 days, it should be suppressed further down the list. It should be, should be, could be, is it?

Now we've got a bunch of comments that come in, uh, or maybe Apple needs to identify shows that are active versus archive.

And we don't know what they do. That's something they never talk about. They may be suppressing—

no, I'm talking about visually in the interface.

They may be doing that, but we don't even know.

I haven't seen it, Todd. I, I use that app all the time.

I don't search on Apple though. That's— I don't discover shows on Apple Podcasts. That's not how I discover podcasts.

Well, I think it's because it's such a sucky experience to do it, Todd.

Again, I— the number one— again, you got to think about how people are discovering podcasts today, including YouTube. So, um, David says, super geeky, I'll look at Umbrel. He says, I stopped listening when it's an AI voice. Maybe it'll stop sounding robotic with time, but right now I cannot.

God, you sound like an AI there.

Uh, ElevenLabs is getting pretty close on some stuff, but you know, so again we have 400 and, you know, the scary, the scary number, the scary number is this: 468,000 shows have only updated in the last 90 days. That's the scary number.

Well, and that's updated in the last 90 days. Boy, that's a low bar where, where we should see shows updated weekly?

Well, and what's that number? Uh, 3 days is 98,000, 10 days is 242.

Those are more, more important numbers. Yeah, yeah, any of the other times.

Yeah, yeah, the 2— the 240, in my opinion, is the 10-day total is 242. So here's the thing, here's the beauty about that number for those of you that are active. It's a good time to be a podcaster. Well, bad time to be a podcast host.

Yeah, exactly. And then also, you know, what's the— of that 240,000, um, how many of them are growing, number one? How many of them have grown to monetization, number two? And, uh, what's the growth prospects?

Well, I can just speak for a list of shows. I can just speak for Blueberry customers. 2024 was the biggest growth year for podcasts across the board on the listening side, on the listening side we've ever seen. Shows grew faster last year than they ever have.

So is that growth mostly happening in a small set of shows or growing across, across?

It's proportional, but it's, it's, it's across the entire platform and entire library. Why? It's been what I've been saying is this number, this number is shit. This, and some people are going to say, Todd, look at the, look at the 24-month average. Doesn't look that bad. It needs to be, it needs to be going up 3 or 4%. We need to see. And again, maybe number going up.

I think the weekly and monthly number needs to be going up.

Here's, here's, here, here. I hear someone already screaming, don't eat me, James Cridland. He said, Todd, you need to look at the chart. It is going up. Again, I can probably— I can— someone's gonna call me out here and say I'm wrong. There's always somebody with a different opinion, you know, and, and it might show out. But, you know, I will tell you, and I've been— you guys, I'm pretty transparent. Is she pretty flat right now? Yeah, she's pretty flat.

I mean, all you have to do is go look at James Cridland's charting that he has on shows. I mean, it's right there.

It's pretty flat.

It's not like— I think Spreaker was the only one that was showing much growth in new shows.

Our stuff is—

numbers that I've seen.

Our stuff is kind of hid a little bit because of the PowerPress users, but still. It's pretty flat, you know.

And I'm not sure that there's a lot of innovation development work going into these hosting platforms right now.

Uh, we've been doing—

a lot of them are kind of holding.

We've been doing tons of it.

Oh, I know you have. Yeah, I'm just talking about across the industry.

Why, why, why have I been doing tons of it?

Well, because you're trying to get ahead of the market.

I'm trying to battle to survive. I know.

Yeah. And your, your, your philosophy is that if you innovate and do new things, that, that there will be a chance that you will be able to overcome this, this—

we, we, we will, we will survive, but what we come out on the other end 5 years from now, that could be a little— it could look a little different. Yeah, I think it's really, you know, so, but at the same time I'm diversifying. I'm launching 2 new products this year, 2 brand new products. Why am I doing that? Well, it's very, very obvious. There's diversify or die.

And then you keep seeing these, these Edison Research numbers that are coming out, and, and it's, it's painting the— a very different picture of what they're seeing in the research. Now, research is different than actual hard, fast data, right, that comes off of a consumption platform, right, of what actually is happening with downloads and with streams and all this stuff like that. Research is a different thing, but we are seeing this onslaught of research coming out that's shaping people's perceptions. Like the Edison Research right there is reporting that 31% of weekly podcast listeners age 13 and up in the US chose YouTube as their primary platform for podcasts, 31%, outpacing Spotify at 27% and Apple at 15%. So, you know, these research companies are coming out putting these things out there. Now, I acknowledge that they're not data-driven.

Well, and I have no—

you look at it, or how these hosting—

I have no, I have no doubt that they're doing well. There are certain shows on YouTube that do very well that call themselves a podcast. They do very well, I have no doubt.

Then it's also a generational shift. Yeah, sure. Gen Z engagement with video podcasts. Yeah, the same study found that 84% of Gen Z monthly podcast listeners— now he's not saying watchers, he's saying—

right, that's kind of an interesting term, right?

Engage with podcasts that have a video component. So part of what we're seeing here is a generational shift.

That's true too. And also there's a lot more options. There's TikTok and there's Instagram. And you know, Rob, hey, the way I look at it is, you know, you're talking about the devil's—

Gen Z. But yeah, yeah, I can see these trends moving.

But if I look at it from a devil's advocate standpoint, we shouldn't still exist considering in podcasting in 2004 we were the option.

You know, Todd, I podcasting was always an underdog, no question about it.

Always been an underdog, you know, right, right.

Scrapping for the bone, you know, for the next bone, you know.

And this is why I always laugh now when someone says, oh, we're gonna hit $3 billion. I'm like, yeah, good luck on that.

We've been trying to get over $2 billion for like 5 years now.

So, you know, so I can only do— Todd can only do what he can do. And, you know, right now Todd is making sure that, uh, that Blueberry is in a position to, to not, um, you know, have to make reductions. Keep the team together, you know, keep playing ball and doing what we do, and, you know, keep the revenue coming and keep innovating and, uh You know, there's a, there's a statistic out there. It's a scary one. Um, how many— and actually, I knew this number recently— go, how many businesses survive 20 years? And it's a really crazy number. 20% of businesses survive for 20 years. So I only have to make it until July of this year to beat the odds. Yeah. To beat the odds, you know. And then, you know, but the, the, um, you know, it's the newcomers are the ones that, um, have got to worry because only 35% of new businesses, um, that are 10 years or younger survive. So we have a large number of podcast hosts out there that are younger than 10 years and they have a 1 in 3 chance of making it to 10 years. So with the current conditions, you either number one have to have a very small team and not have a very fast development cycle to keep your overhead down just to survive, um, because what is the number one expense in any of this is, is salary. Is the number one expense in any business.

So that comes from inflation.

So, oh, and it compounds, you know, you give it, you give a 5% raise this year, you know, you give it 3% next year. It's really, you know, it's that compounding effect. So especially as most of the podcast host platforms haven't raised prices, haven't raised prices ever. Everyone else, so price sensitive, everyone else, everyone else has raised prices. We have people that are paying 5 times as much money today for a third-party service. If I could— here's, here's a, here's a crazy thing.

Most of the hosting platforms haven't really increased their prices.

No, right? No, it's been a race to the bottom. So this is why it's a commoditized product. So it's a feature.

That's why people are— most of the people out there are pulling back on building new features.

So, well, you better build new features because if you don't build new features, you're going to get put out to pasture eventually, right? Yeah, yeah, you, you have to. You just can't live under the status quo in this kind of a marketplace. We're having a lot more migration conversations than we ever had coming off of Podfest, more than 100. Um, that's It's good. Yeah, it's great. You never see that many people migrate from a single event.

You know, I have this perception, Todd, and I talk to a lot of, a lot of potential podcasters, people that have an interest in it, uh, people that are doing it, and I get a sense that there, there is a pent-up desire to do it, but I, I think that there is Um, there's hesitancy. Yeah, hesitancy.

That's a good term. Yeah, hesitancy, right? Because there's a reason they want instant success. They don't want to put the work in.

Really, their first interest is monetization. Yeah. And then the second interest is growing audience. You know, it probably should be reversed.

And I tell them, you know, yeah, you can make money at Blueberry on day one, but You know, you're going to get a quarter, right? Exactly.

I can monetize you.

We can make and monetize you immediately, you know, but let's be honest with you, it's probably going to piss your new audience off to listen to a 30-second pre-roll, right? You know, let's get you to 1,000 listeners before we flip that switch, at least. So, you know, at least then, you know, after a couple of months, I can give you enough of a check to take yourself out to dinner, not your partner.

Yeah. So that's, that's really at the core of the tension here is, is expectations versus reality.

But if they go on YouTube or TikTok or anyplace else, they still have to put the work in to make money. There's, there's not an unequal amount of work there, Todd. Oh, there's sizzle.

Yeah. There's more, you know, kind of buzz.

Yeah. Tell me where you're at 2 years in and I bet you, okay. It's like anything else. Input in, input out, right?

Yeah.

If you know, I was often asked, and, and again, if you haven't been around here for a while, in the early days of podcasting, I had a, I had a job in the Navy. Yeah, working 8, 10, 12 hours a day. I started a podcast, started a business, and didn't sleep for 10 years. Didn't sleep for 10 years. Yeah, 4 hours. 4. That's why I'll probably die next week. For—

let's say as you get older, Todd, that's, that's less than enough.

So I now, you know, now I try to get 6 or 7. That's the most my body will let me sleep, is 6 or 7 hours. So in a hard day and a really good day, 8 hours. I'll get 8. So people would say— they would ask me, how are you doing all this? I said, I don't sleep. People are not willing to put that kind of time in for success. Yeah, some are. And when they do—

a lot of people that don't have that time, Todd, that's the problem.

Rob, I didn't have it. I was married, raised— of course, that's probably why I'm single now, you know. But I, you know, I was raising kids. I had— I was living in freaking Hawaii, for God's sake, the most expensive place on the planet almost.

Well, a lot of people are more motivated now because maybe, maybe they've gotten laid off from their full-time gig and they're not doing anything.

That is not the time to be motivated. The time to be motivated is before you're laid off, because then it's desperation.

Well, when you're laid off, it, it is a level of desperation.

And if you don't have enough, uh, comfort, if you don't have enough backup And most people don't. They have me, you know, most people live paycheck to paycheck. They don't have a 3-month or 6-month runway unless they're listening to the Ramsey Show or whatever it is and following his formula, which some of that stuff in my opinion is kooky. But again, if they don't have enough runway, how can they— again, like, to— you don't— unless you're out there doing OnlyFans or you're on, uh, you come up—

I hadn't thought of that. I should do that.

Uh, Rob, uh, you might make a quarter. So, okay, you know, so if—

darn, that's—

you can check that option off my list. So if you, if you are— so that's why I tell my listeners, a podcast, starting a podcast is a good insurance policy for the future. Well, if you were at it—

for that may not always be so obvious. Um, it's all about— it can also be about skill development too.

Yeah, that's true too. Talking with people, doing interviews, making connections. And then when it comes down to your communicator, or it's when you get that, that 9 AM call when you hit the office and they say, or you're getting in, they say, hey, we need you in a Zoom meeting. Or you need to come over to Office 232, and you leave your desk and you see people walking up with a trash can, and you go in and get the— give me your keys and badge, you're out. It's happening a lot in government right now. So again, that is not the time to think about, oh, I should do a podcast. So again, you know, everyone that's listening here is doing a podcast already, so Probably, right?

Yeah.

So we're kind of— yeah, preaching to the choir here. Is my podcast an insurance policy? Not really.

No, no, I would— I wouldn't think of it that way.

But, you know, is GoDaddy still sponsoring? Yes. Knock on wood. God forbid something happened dramatic happened at the company, you know, I'd have a bit of a backup for sure. And then, you know, I'm 2 years away from qualifying for Social Security, so I'm sure I can survive off that.

Hahaha. Yeah, so I do kind of blame this focus on monetization as a downward pressure on the media. Yeah. It's definitely taken that form. For sure. Maybe a lot of people don't think about it that way, but I think it has put people in a situation where they have expectations that maybe don't match with reality in the timeframe that they would like it to be.

And right, yeah, I, I don't think you fix that. We're in the middle right now of, um, recording our podcast consulting course that we've developed. It's been at work for about a year and we're finally at the point of recording. And, um, I'm next week, uh, recording the monetization chapter. And basically, and again, we're training consultants And you can be absolutely guaranteed that I had worked about 10 minutes of that discussion into have the conversation, have the ugly baby conversation early, set expectations appropriately.

But then that plays into the hesitancy narrative that we mentioned earlier, Todd. Well then, oh my God, it's going to be that hard.

Well, no, I mean, it's okay. So So we'll think that. Yeah, of course. Now let's think about a trade. Let's think about, uh, people that do, uh, bricklayers. How long is a bricklayer journey? Yeah, like, how long is a bricklayer apprenticeship program? A bricklayer apprenticeship typically lasts 3 to 4 years, providing a combination of classroom instruction and on-the-job training. And guess what? During those 3 to 4 years You don't get paid that much. But what is, what is the average salary of a 5-year bricklayer? And again, this is— and again, I'm sorry, I'm not picking on nobody. After you guys hear how much they make, you'll understand why.

Um, Maybe those bricklayers should start a podcast.

Yeah, so about $100K. That ain't bad, you know, but you got to get through the journeyman program where you're eating $34,000 a year. Steel worker, same thing. How long is a steel worker apprenticeship? So no one gets anywhere unless— okay. Some people would go do a 4-year college.

Well, it's the same. Yeah, that college example that you're about to give is a good example.

And you walk out with that marketing degree and you walk in and you're like, man, I'm gonna make the money. And they're like, $37,000. Huh?

$37,000. People aren't going to college now, huh? It's because they realize that college is not the path to riches.

Well, I guarantee you that not everyone can get rich on YouTube. Not everyone can get rich on podcasting. Which begs the question, I am not rich. I've been doing this for 20 years. I should be retired and drinking piña coladas in the Caribbean.

I'll tell you, you haven't had this big, uh, big exit.

Yeah, whatever. Big exit. Come on.

Well, that's how, that's how most people earn that living, right? Or that big cash influx is the exit sale, right? Yeah, those are, those are kind of few and far between.

Few and far between. Unless you've been funded and have got part of a deal. You look at, you look at Anchor. You know, those guys were out of money. They had like 2 weeks of money left. Yeah, you know, and the only reason they got bought is because, well, it was a roll-up. Yeah, you know, and all of a sudden say, hey, we got this and this, and, uh, you know, give me $100 million for this piece, you can have it, and, uh, we'll throw it in with the deal, right? You know, and again, I don't know the details of it, was a roll-up or bigger part of a plan, but yeah, in the long run You know, well, the same investors were invested in, uh, Anker and in Gimlet. I was talking about Anker.

Yeah, I know, but Gimlet was part of that, that package deal.

And part of this is, is, you know, the VCs are getting— the VCs are getting paid because, you know, they're looking to exit. And, you know, and good on them, they got their money. I don't, you know, I, I don't begrudge you. Give me $100 million, see ya.

It's the same thing that happened to The Speaker, right? You know, they got rolled up into iHeartMedia.

So, you know, that's a win, but again, that happens to such a small percentage. It does, you know. And then we go back to the odds of being able to stay in business for 20 years, you know. Yeah, yeah. And the changing dynamic and search and everything, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's an interesting time. I get my SEO stuff kind of fixed, and then, you know, AI is going to come in and, you know, it'll all be for naught. So I don't know, you know, what do you guys think? Those of you listening to us, thing is, no one's going to tell you because, except when you're at a conference and you're, hey, how's things going? Well, They do the, you know, they do the look both ways. It's kind of flat. And then 5 minutes later you hear them talk, oh, business is great.

Yeah. Everybody wants to play a positive tone, right?

You know?

And if you don't, then you're seen as a kind of a Debbie Downer type of personality.

And that's, yeah, that's not really fair. No, not at all. And things aren't, things are not like the sky is falling. It's not like that yet, but you know, I, you know, and I'm just, you know, I keep my ear to the ground. I'm like, who's going to survive? And you've already seen companies make adjustments. Why do people let people go? Because the outgoes are more than the incomes. And when the outgo is more than incomes, guess what you have to do? You've got to get rid of some of the outgoes, so the incomes become more than the outgoes. It's business.

Or it's also a change in priority, needs different—

yeah, change the business model.

Yeah, that's the other thing that happens, especially at these big—

there's, there's some companies that are printing money, you know, for sure. It's, you know, because they, they don't have to host no media. They all they do is they run an ad machine. They're the smartest ones in the group. You know, let's be honest. Those are the ones, those are companies that are doing well. They have a big full sale in it. They're, they're doing well. But the question is, how well are they doing? Are the margins tighter? You know, when we began, when, when, when Raw Voice began and no one, no one was on payroll. And we were getting our 30% of a, of a million dollar ad deal for a quarter. And, you know, $300,000 drops into your bank account every quarter. You're like, holy shit, life is good when you have no outflows. You know, that, that was money. You know, it really, really was. So, but then you say, okay, we can afford it, let's put 5 people on the payroll. And then, you know, that $300,000 then changes to $150,000 or whatever it may have been, you know, whatever your overhead costs were. And then you start adding everything else and, you know, healthcare is not getting any cheaper.

And right, you know, so I thought I wanted to talk about a couple other things.

Oh, we're almost out of time, Rob. We're already— I know.

Yeah, go ahead. Oh yeah, right.

What else you got?

I thought it was— yeah, I thought it was interesting, a couple of things. Um, and one was, and I think maybe we mentioned in a prior episode, is there's lots of rumors flying around about Netflix exploring podcasts.

Yeah, we talked about it last show. Yeah, they want to do— they want to do some— well, good luck. We already figured out, you know, some companies have said, oh, give you so many dollars for, uh, 12-run series or something. I'm sure that would be the approach.

Yeah, it's probably big talent on, on the video podcasting side.

I hope they bring in some stupid money and lose it all.

Yeah, I don't see it as an audio play.

No way, it's, it's a video play.

It's a total, total video play. And that would be another big, big entrance.

Hey, Netflix will be an exclusive show over on Netflix, no problem. Come on, talk to Todd and Rob. We'll give you a deal. Absolutely. Million a year. We're there. We're good.

Sign us up.

Sign us up.

Right. And then Fox Corporation acquired Red Seat Ventures. Did you see this? It's a— was it Toby Media Group, a division of Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corporation, has acquired a company called Red Seat Ventures. It's known for producing shows for personalities like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Piers Morgan.

Fox Nation, they probably bought it for to make sure that Fox Nation has more and more content. Maybe I'm not understanding this deal, but that's rather, um, maybe it was a circle. It might have been a kind of a full circle. Well, might have been an inside baseball thing, you know, again Gotta rub the, rub the back and say, okay, we'll give you an exit. We'll give you some money.

Well, the reason that was intriguing to me is, is that it may be a sign of, uh, of this shift that podcasting has taken kind of the mantle away from cable television, right? Oh yeah. And, and that this whole online video thing, depending on whether or not you want to call it a video podcast or not, All those folks listed there are doing some form of a video or video podcast type of a strategy. And they're building— I thought it was ironic because if you look at Tucker Carlson, he's built his own kind of paywall platform. Right. And so if he's doing a deal with Fox, what does that mean? Is he going to create another show for Fox? But it's just going to be off of their YouTube channel or—

well, have you seen, they've got this Fox Nation thing and they've got all kind, they advertise all kinds of shows on it. So who knows, maybe it's their pay-to-play internal platform too. Yeah.

And then Megyn Kelly's another one. I mean, she lives here.

Oh, she's on Sirius, isn't she? She's on SiriusXM. Yeah. So she's got her own deal already.

Yeah. Yeah, she does. And most of what she does, I don't know if she's pushing. Yeah, I think she is pushing it out of the—

yeah, she's got stuff. Uh, yeah. And then she has a YouTube as well.

So, you know, what's interesting about this is that the big networks may be shifting towards a digital distribution, or did their, or did their, uh, primary—

this will piss half of you off— did, uh, or did their funding dry up? Did Doge find their funding? Who's funding? Did Doge find their— I'm just— oh, just people's brain just exploded, right?

Yeah, I'm not even gonna mention that. Um, but it's— yeah, I don't know. I mean, this is a very interesting move that's happening, and I just wonder if it's, uh, a sign of a shift of mainstream media. Rob, recognizing the fact that they're losing on—

I know that you run CNN and MSNBC and Fox and ABC. Yeah, you know, you got a wall of TVs in your house and you have all those channels on running 24/7, right?

No, I don't watch.

Okay, see, exactly.

I don't even have cable television.

Me neither. I don't have— I, you know, I couldn't watch it if I wanted to.

Yeah, I have a TV mounted up here on my, my screen tree that I have, and, you know, it's, it's, it's a dedicated kind of, kind of YouTube playing.

So it's— to me, it's like, unless I get something fed into my YouTube feed, I don't— and none of it I watch.

Right. And that's, that's kind of my bigger point here, is, is that, you know, as the cable audiences decline— yeah, right— which they are— yeah, they're literally dying.

Well, YouTube said their number one consumption right now is on a television set, so that just tells you right there where it's shifting towards.

Yeah. And so these big media corporations are either going to have to shift or they're going to die, right?

I would hope they would just die. Wouldn't it be better? Wouldn't it be beautiful? Wouldn't it be beautiful if they all went out of business?

It's a full circle situation for these big, um, big celebrity talent off of those platforms, right?

What did I tell you to begin of the year, Rob? Yeah, what did I— what was my prediction on YouTube? I don't, I don't remember. You don't remember? They're going to be a kingmaker this year. They're going to make kings of content. They're going to be a kingmaker this year.

Or Todd is the king's already been made and all they're going to do is do a deal with him. Maybe.

I mean, if you look at the list of names there, yeah, well, those are very well known, but they, but they've, you know, but they've been in the game for a while. They know how to create content. They should have high production because they got big teams and big money behind them.

Exactly.

Who do I care about? I care about John the podcaster. That's in his closet trying to record his first podcast.

So it's— we may be moving back to an era where the, the content that's actually being put out on these digital platforms is not that much different than what was put on, out on cable television.

And guess what I do? I will run. I will run away.

I will block. Well, no, I'm not talking about the, the topics. I'm I'm just talking about how they're, they're trying to shift the attention from where they see it's popular to away from where they see it's dying.

Right.

Well, regardless of the content. Now, granted, these particular personalities are taking a particular position on the content that they're doing that is contrary to the cable channels. Right. So that's part of what's shifting here.

I think it's pretty obvious that that's happening.

So yeah, well, it's, it's obvious, but yeah, I haven't seen these big cable channel media companies, uh, really shift that aggressively towards putting all their content.

I have a lot of stuff that pops up in my feed that I'm having to suppress.

Well, it's, it's, it's usually clips.

Clips, yeah, it's never full functions.

Yeah, it's clips, right? And I, I kind of see this shifting towards it becoming more full content?

Um, because if they, if they, if they do, if they do cable television side, if they do, why wouldn't they? If they do, um, well, then they have to compete with all the other folks that are out there. And I can just as easily block a bunch of mainstream media on YouTube.

Who, who and what show we're talking about here?

I can, I can just as easily block all those 3— what What is it, 7, whatever letters they have, I can just as easily block them on YouTube as I block them from canceling my cable connection.

Yeah. And is this also a, a play that's going to increasingly move into YouTube TV?

Oh, they're already on YouTube TV, but YouTube TV's gotten as expensive as you— as buying it from your cable provider.

Television. So it's the same content right now.

So guess what? I, you know, I had YouTube TV for about 3 months and then they raised the price. I said, oh, here's the game again.

Bye-bye.

No, I don't need sports. Take all the sports off. Give me something dumb. Give me Discovery Channel and model coming. Give me Discovery, Sci-Fi Channel, and give me 5 channels. That's it. That's all I want.

I just think that there's a new model coming that we haven't seen fully deployed yet.

And you know what's beautiful? We get to compete with them.

Well, they're all becoming podcasters, right?

Oh well, so-called podcasters.

Well, if they're doing a video strategy and they're doing it, yeah, yeah, yeah, then they're putting their content out. Yeah, in an RSS feed typically. That's all. That's really the only way to distribute audio right now. I mean, unless you're on the radio.

And our vid2pod service is doing fine.

I would say that that was a good approach.

Yeah. It's done very well. It's, it's hit all the KPIs that we set for it. Yep.

So, and also notice that, uh, Joe Rogan has been surpassed on Apple Podcasts, uh, ranking charts by Kylie Kelsey.

Oh, they got a big audience, but yeah, you know, people are tuned in. Probably he probably picked it up on YouTube.

Who?

What? Rogan?

Probably. Kylie Kelsey is the, the wife of an ex, um, football player. Oh, and okay, and she launched a show called Not Gonna Lie.

Oh, does that mean she actually is lying?

It depends on your political view, but Um, she's gotten higher ranking chart on Apple than Joe Rogan.

We'll see how long that lasts.

Her topic is motherhood, sports, occasionally politics.

Well, then that'll— that show will do very well. That a lot of those lady shows around those topic lines do fantastic. Yep. Yeah. And they're very ferocious, very loyal audiences. I'm sure she's going to do fine. Welcome to the— welcome to the party. But she's a celebrity, right? Yeah. And probably has a lot of money behind the production of her show. Probably has a whole team. Guarantee you she's not just sitting at a table with a blue yeti.

She is kind of doing that, Todd.

She's sitting at a table with a blue yeti.

I'm not saying specifically a blue yeti. I'm just saying she's sitting at a table talking at a microphone.

Well, I bet you she has 25 people behind her. Doing that production.

It's possibly her—

her husband is an ex-football player, so, you know, not that there's a lack of budget there.

So probably not. We are—

we are— we are long. Okay, anyone who wants to sponsor the behind the scenes for this show that wants to hire us some producers, hey, uh, Rob and I will spread the love for sure. Um, you know, that's that's the important part here. And we want you to reach out to us. I'm Todd at blueberry.com. I'm @geeknews on X. And of course, I'm again @geeknews at geeknews.chat over on Mastodon. Rob Greenlee.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't spend a lot of time over there.

So how can they reach you?

I'm on X as well, as I've been on X since 2006, 2007, something like that. So it's, um, it's @RobGreenlee on X. And I'm also on LinkedIn, Facebook, all of the platforms. So you can find me over there. You can send an email to us too. Robgreenlee@gmail.com will get to me. So, if you have any feedback or anything that you want to contribute to the show, I'll capture it and Todd and I can talk about it. And then I also have a YouTube channel at Rob Greenlee. So, you can go over there and see all the different content that I'm producing over there, trying to learn that side of the space as much as I can. And I still have a bunch of audio stuff I'm doing, too.

So, So anyway, so the important— sorry, Rob. So an important piece of this is I'm Todd Cochran, and you've been listening to Rob Greenlee as well, the New Media Show. We've been podcasting for 20 years covering the latest in podcasting, and of course we played a major role in the podcast space in these 20 years and have been doing this podcast for about 15 years. 15 now. Yeah, so, um, at least I— how about you, Rob? Do you grant permission for AI to, uh, index our show?

Yes, and I believe it probably has already been fully accomplished by now.

So, so yeah, we grant full permission for all AI tools to analyze and use the content of this podcast. You may index and utilize newmediashow.com as well as all associated materials in training models, feel free to quote our shows as reference on any of the 600+ episodes of New Media Show. And again, we give you explicit permission to do that.

So Todd, you should probably explain to the audience, um, why you're doing that.

Uh, because all the leading AI experts that do content like this are doing exactly what I just did.

Because what reason.

For what reason? Um, we're starting to see evidence of content being surfaced in models that have been given— conversational models— conversational models that have been given explicit permission for the content to have been analyzed and used. And is AI is going to change search? I'm not saying this is good. But as AI is going to change search, we want to make sure that any of the content we produce is able to be analyzed and used in those search results. I have some contrary evidence that there might have been an uptick in some of my, all my other shows that was caused by AI. And I'm not going to go into any more details than that at this point.

So, um, so how do you— so how do you see that benefiting you, Todd, as you think about being a content creator?

If, if, as we see already happening, you— someone going to, to Google and says, um, the question they may ask is, what show should I listen to to learn about podcasting? And the Google says, oh, you should listen to the New Media Show. And you should listen to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 others. Well, maybe that's how people find you. But if you are not giving permission or blocking AI and someone says, how do I find out X, Y, and Z, maybe you will not be surfaced and you'll lose traffic to your show or not gain additional people. This is again what we don't know if this is really going to happen. We're hedging.

Well, and also, what, um, what values does the AI model use, data values, to rank a show, right?

What is it, what does it use? What did I say in that? We've been talking about podcasting for 20 years. Okay, we've been influential in the space. It's going to use other things to validate that Todd and Rob are Is it going to be able to analyze statistics of audience size?

Is it going to know who's the most popular? Maybe. Or is it just going to speculate?

It's going to use a lot of signals to figure out who it should be surfacing, and every little bit of tips you can give it, I think maybe that— maybe it'll just block us.

It depends on the values of the AI. Who knows, you know, like, does the AI agree with us?

Yeah, you know, I mean, you hope that after doing this for 20 years that—

which podcast about podcasting is the most politically, um, safe?

Who knows? If Us Lately, I don't know.

But, or, or are we going to eventually make all of our— like the— oh, like the podcast metrics, oh, you know, open standard, right? Is that going to be made available to the AI where they can get in and be able to get access to that data?

Yeah, and all that stuff's available from OP3, by the way, already. But Blueberry's not giving out our statistic data because that's part of our terms of service, is that we keep that private, right?

So What criteria is the AI going to use to prioritize who they show in the results?

Rob, if I knew that answer, I would not tell it on this show. That would be, that would be, that would be a deeply kept trade secret. That, you know, you wouldn't pry that out of me with a case of beer.

Wow, it wouldn't take much more than a case of beer.

Well, I'm just saying, you know, if we knew, if we knew how it was really going to work. And some of you are like rolling your eyes because you don't like AI as it is, but you know, I, I'm— the future is going to change and I want to make sure we're indexing part of it. Yeah, yeah. I will say that, that 1,700 and some episodes of my Geekness Central podcast— I'll just leave it at this— has had something in it in every episode, had something in it that was the same Let you do your own conclusion here, but I believe it has positively affected me in one thing—

showing up when somebody searches for GoDaddy.

You could say that. All right, so that tells me that the content is already being indexed.

And you're already being associated with GoDaddy.

That's right. And where to find deals.

I can see that.

But that's 19 years of the same sponsor. So if— and 19 years of blog posts. So if they have— so did he get from the blog post? You get it from the podcast.

I think that's a pretty good signal to the AI.

Yeah, pretty steady signal.

Credibility-building kind of vote.

Doesn't work all the time, but it has worked enough. All I will say, it's worked enough. And I have some ancillary evidence.

Sponsorship in, and we'll mention your, your name on the show, and you'll get, you know, listed with us.

So makes you go, hmm, just a little bit. I bet you every one of you See, there's your value for value. You stay to the end, we will take that $1,000 donation for value for value. We just provided value, right? Well, but I don't think— but I don't think— I don't think going in and doing insertion in your back catalog is going to help you. I think it's a combo of many things. It's not just one signal. It's just like search. It's not just one signal.

It's the same thing with what Google's been doing for years, right? They, they've had a PageRank of sorts that they've been, they've been evaluating websites and web pages on for years.

So, so there we go. We're way over. This is going to take me 3 hours to upload with, uh, this big of a show. All right, everyone, thank you for being here. I'm glad you stuck around. And, uh, AI, uh, use it, baby. Rabbits. Take care. See you next time. Bye-bye.