IS it TIME to Retire Podcast Downloading? | Live 6-19-2024

Well, we're back with the New Media Show again. Tonight, and I appreciate you joining us. Todd's with me, joining me again. So Todd, how's it going?

I'm alive, live and well, and, uh, it's been a very, very busy week for my team at Blueberry. And so, uh, continue to roll out some new stuff we can talk about at some point here. But, uh, yeah, you know, another week in podcasting, another week of, uh You know, people trying to change the world.

Yeah, right. And also a lot of things that come up in the podcasting kind of ecosystem and PodNews and other ones that are— feel like they're kind of like happening over and over again for us, Todd, because we've been around long enough to see these conversations happen. And, and some— sometimes it's interesting to go back and talk about the things that maybe we've talked about like 10 times over the last 14 years to revisit them again. And one of them is this conversation that's been happening in an article or two online about the download, right, with podcasting and whether or not time has come somehow, somewhere in one's perception that maybe time's up for the download.

Todd, is it 2010, '11, '12, '14, '18, '20, '21, '22?

Yeah, I think this conversation has happened a lot. I was thinking about this conversation back when podcasting started because a lot of the distribution of the radio show that I started back in 1999 was distributed by streaming, right? So we've had this conversation around the download versus streaming and who's going to win and, and what's, what's going to be the future. And, and it's been an interesting, pretty simple kind of perspective on it up to this point. Right. The download won.

Yes, it did. And, you know, you know, when these articles come up that says we need to retire the download. Well, for those that want to do that, go ahead and knock yourself out. There's nothing saying that you can't do that. There is, there's some ramifications to it. So, you know, if this is going to serve you and your advertising overlords better, then, then, then do that. And it's kind of ironic because, you know, I'll talk after we get talking about this, I'll talk about a conversation I had just today. Uh, well, yeah, just today. Um, yeah, well, anyway, there's, it's, there's a little irony here, but, um, there's nothing stopping a company from invoking streaming and then watching to see what the fallout is. Yeah, they, they forget there's people like me, and there's parts of the world that are still bandwidth challenged. I, you know, I've been a little bit bandwidth challenged from time to time right here in the location that I'm at. I go out and, uh, guess what? No data. And I have to find a local— I have to go into a shop or, or whatever it may be, and they have Wi-Fi, and I connect to the Wi-Fi right here in a major metropolitan city outside of the United States. So, you know, this, this discussion, uh, let's go streaming, you know, they, they travel a little bit, get outside the United States, or go to rural America and see what your experience is going to be like, right? Yeah, yeah, it all works until it doesn't work.

Yeah, it's, it's a conversation that is kind of like a very loaded conversation from the standpoint of one's perspective on access and also one's current perspective on the desire of the commercial side of podcasting to get deeper metrics, right? Uh, I think the The conversation has mainly been focused in this article, what was a little bit focused on this as well, is about the accuracy of the information that is obtained primarily for advertisers that utilizes streaming delivery, right? They know when the stream starts, they know when the stream ends, and that's what the advertisers want. They want to know that their ad got heard. Right? At the end of the day, that's what they all want, and they want it to have it be confirmed in a way that they're used to seeing it.

Wish in one hand and doo-doo in the other. And, you know, so I'll interject. I, um, I was inter— I don't think I can say who they are, but I'll just give you some street cred. I was introduced to someone by Tom Webster earlier this week. I was demoed a system that is really a solution that I thought about more than, more than 10 years ago, as a possible way to monetize the 90% of podcasts that aren't monetized today in a way that would be very, very viable. And the tech at the time wasn't there. And the company I talked to has spent the last 3 years building something that is wholly remarkable, wholly in line with everything that I've been talking about for many, many years. They don't care about attribution. They don't care about the numbers. They don't— all they care about is the ability to give someone an opportunity to earn a little money from the show. If they so choose to, in a way that allows them to be in more control than any system I've ever seen before. No longer having the agencies drive the discussion. It's essentially a model where the podcaster picks the advertiser.

Yeah.

And there's still a little bit of an approval process, but the advertiser still— I mean, excuse me, the advertiser says, here's the deal. And I don't want to go much more deeper into that, but I will say that, you know, I think I found my brother from another mother in a meeting today. A 30-minute meeting turned into 90 minutes and Um, the company has something viable that I think will benefit my podcasters without the BS that we all have to go through and kiss in the asses of these media agencies. Excuse my French.

Um, Yeah, I agree with you, Todd. I mean, it's a lot of these discussions like we're seeing here really fall out of a shift in priority, right? The shift in priority is towards doing things that the advertisers want versus doing things that the audience wants. And at the end of the day, that's what the conflict has always been focused on is who are we doing these shows for? Are we doing these shows for listeners? Are we doing these shows for advertisers?

And here's part of the bigger challenge. The amount of money. Okay, so let's look at this from a layered standpoint. Company ABC Acme Company. You know, let's go back to Bugs Bunny days. You know, the ABC Acme Company out there, right? And they're selling a product. And they say in the early days they came to Todd and said, hey, we want to ever— we want you to advertise the ABC Acme Company. And I would agree or disagree, and we would make a deal, and I would get a superior advertising rate because I did a direct deal. Then ABC Acme Company, after they tried to manage 4 or 5 podcasters like me, said, oh, I can't do this by myself anymore, I need an agency. So then the agency took their 15%, and then the agency says, well, we don't know about this performance, even though ABC Acme Company is backing this data out into a CPA, how much they're earning from what they're spending with these advertisers. And they say, oh, we need attribution, we need all these things, and you're going to pay for that, Mr. Podcaster. You're gonna, you're gonna take that out of your hide. And to be on our system, you're gonna pay us to run this ad tech for you. And then in the end, um, after everyone's done dipping their, their claws into the revenue, the average, the podcaster ends up with a pittance of what he should have run into, right? And then you got people saying we need to get rid of the download because we need more download, we need more data. Please, but take control. We need to take control. And it's all bullshit. All this data that they're collecting, it's all BS. It's, it's all BS. Here's the reason why it's all BS. They're gonna know if they— if their campaign's on performance. If it performed, it performed. If it didn't, it didn't. If you performed, you get renewed.

So I have a sense here, Todd, and I'm not— I'm just guessing off top of my head because I don't know any better here, but I would think that maybe this new idea might be making it easier for people to do, or podcasters to do, direct deals versus trying to go through a third party to do a deal, right?

To some degree, the podcaster is 100% control of the advertising deals that he or she takes.

And that goes back to the very early days of this medium and why this medium exists the way it does today. I think a lot of people have forgotten that.

So I can't go into much more than this without really kind of unveiling the cookie. But I'll be honest with you, I was, when I first started this conversation, I said, you know, man, I said the reason we didn't do this to, you know, 10, 12, whatever the years ago. And matter of fact, we, we were brought this idea by someone that, you know, basically tried to become part of the company. And, um, And I said, it was just too hard to connect the dots. Well, these folks have spent 3 years building a system that connects the dots and built a platform that I see why it took 3 years to build. I was stunned. Simple in execution, hard to implement, hard to replicate. So, you know, I—

Sounds like a great business model, Todd.

Yeah, great business model for that team, right? Um, and, and when Tom sends me an email and says, Todd, you need to talk to this guy, you know, uh, you're gonna love this. Well, Tom, if you're listening, a home run, my friend. A home effing run. Um, so yeah, and in the end, for me as a host, I, I have a— the show, as shows get bigger, it's this internal problem for years and years and years. I start, let's say I help the show get advertisers when they're at the 5,000 downloads per episode mark. That works out really, really well. 5, 10, 15, 25, 30, 40, but get about 50,000 downloads per episode. All of a sudden, that company or that podcaster doesn't want to give Todd 30% anymore. Mm-hmm. And they want to do their own ad deals because they're making enough money. So oftentimes I'll start losing shows because they go their own route. Some don't. Some go to a big agency or go to a big, you know, to an ACast or someone like that. But what do I still do for the 90%? Actually, it's not really 90%. It's 40% of the remaining 90% that want an ad deal. Because again, only about 40% of shows that aren't monetized would like to earn some money. And in the end, that show that's got 1,000, 3,000 downloads per episode will never qualify for a HelloFresh or any of these other deals that are out there because media buyers are too lazy to offer a deal to them. And okay, so the guy's going to do a $25 CPM after the cut for the media buyer and da da da da, that's down to 19, 18, 17., and then they get, you know, $34. What is that? What is that high-level math here? $48? No, that's $51 per spot. Is it worth it? No. So if you have the opportunity to have a campaign that offers you the ability to earn a a higher than a CPM through a different model. And yes, using a promo code and a few other variables. You know, my biggest challenge is with, uh, with, with promo codes was securing the best deal. You know, if I advertise— and it's even true today for GoDaddy— if I promote GoDaddy and give a promo code out, um, consumers are smart today. Many people have that Honey plugin on their Chrome browser. And guess what they do? They go to GoDaddy to buy a product and then some pop-up comes up and says, hey, there's a way potentially have a better deal for you and replaces my promo code with someone else's. Um, then I lose the credit for the sale. So if you can secure the best deal for a product or service for a period of time where no one else can usurp that. In other words, you say, okay, you're going to get 25% off, you know, product XYZ from Acme Dynamite Company. You then win-win because they're going to go— if they want to go buy that, you've basically said that I endorse this, which you truly have because it's a product you picked. Then guess what? You win because that promo code will not be observed by someone else. So this is definitely not about brand advertising. This is about products and services. This goes back to DR, pure DR, and but with a twist, um, implemented some of the stuff that I've implemented on my own website, having the promo codes publicly displayed on a page and etc., etc. So right out of my playbook. So, you know, to my opinion is we need to take back control again, Rob. Yeah.

What's, what's the irony on this though? Let's, let's think about it. Is that, you know, these models that you're talking about in this, um, this process of sponsorship takes us back to the earliest days of this medium and why this medium exists.

That's right.

Or not the reason it exists, right? But how people monetize in the early days was really based on building trust. You know, really at the end of the day, does your audience trust you as a host to represent a product or brand and make a recommendation, right? We've evolved this medium to be kind of like it— there isn't a trust relationship really anymore that's really based on anything that's been demonstrated to the audience. It's just been an implied trust. But when every sponsor you have on your show is, is probably not something that you have personal experience with and can demonstrate that somehow or share it just by, by by sharing your knowledge of the product at a deep level, right? An emotional level, an experiential level. It kind of takes us into this realm of like commercial radio, right? Which we're basically, we've been moving this industry towards closer to radio advertising model for many years. And that's been something that the industry has wanted to do because we want to monetize things more. And get more money to build bigger shows. And but we're seeing a pullback on that right now. There's not the investment in big shows right now. And so now we're starting to fall back into the roots and what actually works and what builds more organic relationships with audiences.

And yeah, you know, and to me, This is why we made the relationship with Backbeat Media. And Dave and I are on the same page on this attribution piece. We're going to do pure deals, as pure as we can in the way we do them. And, and the ad tech can pack sand. Um, and then people say, oh, whoa, 'Whoa, you can't do that.' Yes, we can. How much data do they need to be happy, right? Yeah, it— at some point, I, I— and again, this is— this conversation that we're having right now is purely for those that just want advertising.

And yeah, that's true. And it's what, what percentage of the market— now granted, I think there's a desire of the hosting platforms to be able to get more money to more shows. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think we want that, but what are we compromising to make that happen is the, is the big question, right?

So if you tie back and go back and we, you know, we think about these tiers of monetization, we've got value for value, which in the purest sense, it's probably the model that most shows should really be approaching. Um, even before they start thinking about taking an advertiser, you know, get that listener support. Um, the value for value is really going to, you know, time, talent, or treasure. And because then it ties into more than just getting money. Time and talent means you get people in your audience to try to help you submit clips, submit ideas, help you with social, do the things that you don't have time to do using your audience and the biggest fans of your shows to provide their time and talent. Then there's some that have their busy lives and they can provide treasure. They can provide some support. Whether that be through a monthly PayPal donation, whether that could be through live streaming sats, that whether it be by boost in value for value, that's fine. And then promoting yourself. You know, what, what are you offering? You know, are you using your podcast as a funnel? And you know, when you're small, you know, those are probably the 3 options. And then now that this, this platform that I've been exposed to, I think will become a fourth tier. Now, if you get big, yeah, go sign that big ad deal. You know, I did that and I'm still being rewarded for the hard work that, you know, it's It's, it's in its bio. It's, it's money. It's real money. So yeah, when you get all these technologists in the middle and snooty little media buyers that want every little speck of, of information, um, I'm so done. I'm so done with, uh, with ad tech. I, I really, really am. And it's the same thing in programmatic. How many people, how many hands touch the percentage of that revenue before it gets back to the podcaster? It's a huge amount. I bet you 50%. This is why when we did our deal with SoundStack, I said, I will take, um, I'll take less money to make sure we make the podcasters get the maximized amount, right? So I took a very small, very small, like almost like an administrative fee, um, because we're, you know, we have to write the checks and do, do the accounting. And we're not really do the accounting, but do all the, do all the, you know, basically administrative work. So I took a small administrative fee. Why? Because I want the podcaster to earn the most. Even in this deal that I'm talking to with this new platform, Todd's going to earn zero revenue. Todd is, Todd and Blueberry, zero. But guess what's going to happen? We're going to be able to put potentially money in podcasters' pockets, make them fulfill the feedback cycle to be able to say, mama, or their partner or whoever it is, I got a check for $82. You know, let's put that against a bill. Or I got a check for $182. Let's, let's put that against part of the car payment or whatever it may be that, that basically justifies the time the podcasters put into doing the show. There's a multi-tiered approach here and podcasters can have it all.

Yeah. Well, and it does raise the question in my mind too, Todd, around the desired metrics and measurement that are out there as well. And in this case that this article is making about, you know, that we need streaming metrics, not download metrics, and somehow that's gonna make the advertisers happy.

Um, yeah, and I found nothing makes them happy, right?

Well, I mean, what is it about that streaming metric that will make them more happy? I, I think one of the things that we haven't seen is transparency on both sides of this issue. Well, all I hear is the advertisers wanting more and more and more and more data to be able to whittle down the effectiveness of these campaigns, and maybe ultimately it drives lower CPMs eventually.

Well, they're definitely going to pay less because you're going to earn less.

Right. And it's also— but, but at the end of the day, what's the actual ROI on these things too? That's not being shared back to the— right, right, to the sell side. Right. What's the ROI? What's the effectiveness? So there's not a balance in the marketplace right now that it's— it leans entirely towards this industry catering to the needs of the advertiser.

Because what have we done over the past 10 years? So we got the IB spec in place. Everybody took a haircut anywhere from, uh, 5 to 30%.

Um, and, and many platforms took a haircut, um, here recently with the change in the Apple platform.

And, you know, and, and there's a percentage— we didn't see as big of a haircut, but we saw a little bit just because of the change in the way. So, you know, so yeah, so everyone took a haircut. Everyone took a haircut. And did CPMs go up? Nope, not a dime, right?

So supposedly though, the numbers are much more, you know, accurate right now.

Yeah, but it didn't move the needle when it comes to, you know, and, and so did the CPM go up? No. And they said, no, that's the goal. Well, that was the goal, but it wasn't the reality. So now, now, I'm— be careful what you wish for, folks. Now you're gonna say, okay, let's go to streaming. Guess what?

The numbers are, are now lower, which means podcasters make less money. Yeah, but the ROI is still there, right?

If, if, if, if I had an absolute underwritten of an unequivocal guarantee that we switch to streaming and my podcasters are going to earn more money because the, the con— the, the, the content's more valuable now? No, it's not. What they're going to do is going to say, okay, now we got you all on streaming, now we don't need host read, now we're just going to fill you with crap See, it's a double-edged sword, right? You must sleep with the devil, you know.

Come on. Well, and Todd, if I think back to the past, we've always said be careful what you wish for here. That's right, because, because you pull back the covers on everything. And now granted, this isn't being said to say that, um, that there's anything being hidden here, but there is a level of, of kind of assumption of connection with audience that goes beyond hard metrics, right? So it's, you know, it's really a double standard because a lot of these, these media buyers have been buying commercial radio for all these years and there's less data there, but they spend lots more money over there.

There's no data, right? You know, an estimated market. You know, if I, if I advertise on my little radio station, that they can tell what the maximum size of that audience is going to be based upon how far that signal can be heard. And they know, okay, that radio station gets this percentage of market share, supposedly, right? You know, and, you know, so we're gonna, you know, you, this is what you're valued at, that's what the advertising value is at. And if I, if I was able to charge radio rates in podcasting, we'd all be rich, right?

With all, with really no accountability, rich. Accountability for actual, uh, listener numbers. Really?

2 billion or not? If we had a radio model, podcasting would be a $50 billion industry.

So there is a little bit of a game being played with the, with the digital medium. It's, it's, uh, so there's a different standard being expected.

And, and, and who's really getting rich? The toolmaker, the ad tech, taking their piece out of this. So who's, who's, who in the end gets bent over the table?

Podcaster, right?

Yeah, sorry I'm being graphic tonight, but it's, it's just one of those things that I got fired up, you know. It was just like, finally I talked to someone today that gets it and has serious, serious street cred. Mhm. He thinks— they think the same way and sick of the same BS that I'm sick of. Yeah. So I, I, I'm moving full force, full, full steam ahead. Uh, we'll be able, you know, probably take a couple weeks, maybe a month to get something put together here. But, uh, we are going to rock and roll with this. And when, when I explain it all, I think, and when it's— and it's going to be made available public to everyone. It's not going to be a Blueberry exclusive thing.

They're just ramping up. I mean, Todd, I know that this conversation is not going to be popular in the podcast industry. I mean, it's— there's a constituency in the industry that is like gung-ho monetization, gung-ho advertising, gung-ho. We're all here because we have to pay our big, you know, staffing. And, you know, there's expectations now for monetization and podcasting. And we're basically saying that what we're what the industry is pursuing right now is kind of a little bit of a mistake. And well, and that's, that's a tough conversation to have. And I guess my question for you, Todd, too, and I need to be held accountable to this question too, is, okay, this is our opinion about what's wrong. What can we do to make it right?

Up until, um, let me look at my, the time here, right? Up until, um, 8 hours ago, I didn't have a solution. Yeah. So this is, to me, the conversation I had today— game changer. Is it perfect? No. No system is. But is it fair? Is it transparent? Absolutely. Absolutely unequivocally. Fair and transparent.

And that's the criteria that's most important, right? Yeah. So, so if we want to get over— finally, after 5 years, get over $2 billion in industry advertising sales, which, um, I, I don't know if that's going to happen this year or next year or, or some point in the future, but We're basically stagnant right now around advertising growth.

It's, um, podcast advertising is facing an existential crisis, and, uh, nobody wants to talk about that though. Do you? It's a— it's facing extension, and it's going to hit a wall.

I think we already have, haven't we, Todd?

Well, I think probably we have, but it'll become more apparent And why have we hit the wall? Because media agency buyers are lazy and they're not, and I, you know, I'm probably pissing some people off here, but they're not willing to look down and come up with innovative solutions. And they want, they want control. They, they didn't. And what I was demonstrated today, uh, It really takes the control back. It takes the control back in a big, big way. And the company that has built this, they're going to be handsomely— someone is, you know, once this gets out and gets momentum, someone's going to come in and try to swoop this up. So, but once the model is laid out and people see the value in it, then even though it gets swooped, it could be get swooped up and bought up. Um, it can be duplicated, and there's, there's a way ahead.

Um, the question gets back to also, is there a patent on this, um, that has been filed?

There's a patent on some of the tech. Yeah, on some of it, but the fundamental way of doing this, no, I don't think so. He did mention there was a couple of patents, but it's on pre-existing tech. This is, again, this is someone that's been in the space. Tom Webster doesn't recommend people very often, and when someone has known Tom Webster for 30 years and Tom Webster trusts this individual, to me, that, that's all, that's all I Steve Goldstein knows about this platform too.

So, um, yeah, from a person that has, has an existing reputation in the podcast medium?

No, someone not podcasting but has a major reputation in radio.

Oh, on the radio side. And but they're tired of the bullshit that's going on there too, so Yeah, because I'm sure this is all going to work based on our radio model.

It's not a radio model. Yeah, it's not a radio. He comes from radio.

No, no, I mean, but, but the methodology that's being pushed into the medium right now is really kind of rooted in radio, kind of.

Yeah, but this, this is a pure— this is a pure P-U-R-E podcasting solution. Mm-hmm. And it's so simple. I mean, I thought about it 12 years ago, but I didn't have the tech to build to do it, which was so funny because I just laughed.

Yeah. Okay. So it's not entirely a new idea. It's just not something that—

No, they spent 3 years to build a platform to do to do the interconnects, okay, to, to, to, to build the relationships and connect with sellers and retailers and, you know, okay.

So it's a true marketplace of opportunity, and then it sounds like on for everyone involved.

Yeah, potentially, but in a unique way. And again, going back to what I said earlier, guaranteeing the best promo code.

Does it create an atmosphere where there's accountability on both sides of the— That's right.

Action. Yep, it does.

Well, that's the big piece that's missing.

Yep. That's, that's, that's the key here. You know, the agreement they have with the sellers is you shall You will, and you won't offer a better deal somewhere else during this period of time that we put this offer together. And in exchange, you get access to this bevy of— there's about 100 podcasters that have been beta testing this for a year.

So Hey, Todd, let's kind of change topics right now and kind of move on to talk a little bit about some of the stats that have come out. I know a lot of people in the industry like to see and try and comprehend what's going on.

Yeah, they like to dog on Apple.

Right. And there were some stats that came out this week, which you have stats that come out every week as well around— Or every month. What, yeah, that are covering kind of where people are listening to podcasts, like what platforms like Apple or Spotify and what's that distribution look like. And, and it was announced in PodNews that Lipson had their May stats that, that showed a new low for Apple Podcasts.

And what was the percentage?

Their market share. Uh, let me pull it up on the screen here and, uh, You can see it here. Let me, uh, oh no, this is it here. Let me pull it up here and we can talk about it a little bit. So, okay, here it comes. And so we're— this is, this is stats from, from Lipson Hosting.

So where, where What is that? What's that line number when you hover on that? Keep going down then. Where does it go to the bottom? It's Apple Podcasts. Yes, but go to the bottom of that purple line. What's that number? Keep going down.

All the way down is 47.3%.

And I'm going to look at Blueberry.

That's as of May of 2024. We are.

We're at 50.59. Blueberry's at 50.59 for May of 2024. Okay, so not that much difference, 3% split.

But the, the significance here is it's, it's basically almost like a free fall though, um, because if you back up to October of 2023, it was at 63.7%. And then if you look down the screen, that green line here is Spotify.

See, that's a— that's an incredible number because compared to Blueberry, our, you know, we don't have anyone above 10%. Well, we do. We actually have the Chrome browser above 10%, but again, different audience. You know, we have people that are you know, a different customer makeup. Most of our customers have their own websites, right?

So back down to, let's say, March of 2022 at Lipson, it looks like it was 10%. Yeah. So in, in 2 years, we've seen it go from 10% up to 23%.

Well, Spotify's making noise and Apple's not.

Yep. And it also looks like we've seen growth with, I'm not sure what X, Apple, and Spotify is at.

I don't know what that is.

That appears to be growing. And the other one that's growing is Mozilla and Firefox.

Yeah, see, that's, for us, we are, our browser share, Chrome specifically is at 10.85%, and Apple Other, which is known as Apple Core Media, is at 6.39%. Yeah, you know, and our Spotify number is 1.53%, and people say, how can it be? How can it be? Right? Well, uh, people don't listen to tech, religion, business, news on Spotify, which is, you know, basically my top 5 categories.

Okay, it says this is podcast apps under 5% market share, uh, and it shows Mozilla Firefox growing.

Yeah, that I would wait until next month to see what happens there. But Overcast, 2.6.

Overcast is up 2%.

So where, where's Overcast on our system? Overcast is at 2.45%, so a near mirror. Where's Podcast Addict in that stack?

Uh, let's see. So if I look at down here, Podcast Addict.

All right, I bet it's the next one down, so just go to the next. It's this one here. Podcast Addict is 0.3. See, we're 2.39. For podcast adding.

That's a big difference.

Big difference. How about, um, CastBox?

CastBox is green right there.

That's a— and what's that number there?

That's a falloff. No, that's Google Podcasts. CastBox must be this one right there.

Yeah, go to the end. Let's see what that number is. So they have 1.1%, and CastBox for us is 2.26%, whereas Google Podcast app for us is 1.27%. And it's, you know, it's steadily dropped. It was like number 3 or 4 here before they started. Of course, that's just going to go completely to zero here very, very quickly. Yeah. So yeah, Spotify is the big winner in the It probably is the big winner in the Google Podcast, uh, drop-off.

Oh yeah, I would imagine that. Yeah, the, the removal of Google Podcasts has really helped Spotify a lot. Yeah, added at least a couple, couple percentage points.

Jeffrey asks, how will these numbers change to Spotify video? I don't think it's going to change at all because there's extra effort. Just in— actually, you are screwed if you Um, you screw your audio show if you, if you upload video though over there.

Hmm.

Okay.

Yeah. So, okay. So here's the percentages on, on your platform, Todd. Yeah. Let's, let's expand on this a little bit more. Okay. So you can see Apple is 50.59% and Chrome is 10.

Right, but again, it should be— it would be natural. We, we have PowerPress. Everyone that publishes uses, uh, you know, uses our, our players, so we should be high on mobile desktop.

Yeah, that's true. And it looks like you're, you're showing good numbers for Overcast and Podcast Addict.

Yeah, yeah, it's just Spotify's our outlier.

Right, and then Apple Other, right? So should that be— should that number be added to the Apple Podcasts? Which one? Remember the Apple Other?

No, because that's Apple Core Media. That is basically anyone's— yeah, other apps. Jeffrey says, should we not be putting up Spotify audio and video, or should we only put video on YouTube? If you put up Spotify video, you need to do it in a new, a new listing, because if you put up a video on Spotify, your audio is no longer served.

Yeah, it's, it's no longer there. Well, your number here for Spotify is 1.53.

Yeah, it's— again, now again, the reason it's drove down, no one's listening to religion, and, and I have a massive religious user base.

Mm-hmm. Interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So yeah, that's interesting, Todd.

But yeah, I'm not worried about Spotify Video. Mm-hmm. I will say we've, you know, we've launched some new stuff this week. Maybe it's good interlude to talk about that. I get to toot my own horn over here a little bit. Sure. We've, we, this is a pretty basic one. We've basically created an art generator for podcast album art. So it basically gives folks the ability to, to create album art and be able to edit it and put your, you know, put your, your text in and, you know, show title and all this stuff. And basically, gives them the ability to, and it's really, there's a lot of onus on the podcaster to write a good prompt. And if nothing else, help them get some album art. If it turns out, and again, I think probably 50-50% of the time they're going to be able to get something decent. And we've worked quite a bit on making sure that the instructions were there to, you know, you need to really write a good prompt and you can do this on ChatGPT. So it's not like you or Claude. So you, you could do this anywhere. The only difference we made is it's right in the platform and you can, you can update the— update it with a couple clicks. So it's not going to be for everyone, but just something we added. It was pretty easy add. But the one of the big things we added earlier in the week was— Rob, how many times have you heard of, uh, podcasters say, how do I compare to other shows in my own category? Right. Have you heard that?

Yeah, I've heard people say that before. Yeah, because they'll go and look at other shows in the same genre and do some comparison.

Sure. So what we actually do is a roll-up. We basically say, okay, here's your primary category, your recent episodes. An example that I give, and it's hard to see because it's We basically say, uh, you know, your recent episodes, last 4 episodes, you had an average of 743 downloads per episode. Then we give them the global averages of those shows we measure at Blueberry, um, for the comparison. So we also say, okay, you're doing 4 episodes a month. So we do a comparison to shows that are doing 1, 2, 3, and 4+ episodes a month. So as an example, in the, what we put on the blog was shows that were doing 1 episode a month was getting 349, 2 episodes 217, 3 episodes 485, 4+ episodes 970. So you can kind of see, all right, then this particular example, you're doing 743, someone comparable in your category is doing 970. So we. Basically laid out how they compare to other shows in their category. Um, yeah, and then we did, um, some work on our trending charts. We basically made it more granular to let them see, uh, more people are dropping off and stuff on there. Uh, the trending charts are, you know, we've got a basic download trending.

Is it download trending or is it playback trending?

Yeah, and by day, by month, and we give them the ability now to kind of see data by year and basically gives them a little more— it's just more graphical, I guess, is the better way to, to say it. So yeah, so those are the 3 things we put out this week. And again, actionable information that hopefully will help your show. Now it could, you know, some of that category comparison stuff could be pretty scary because if your number's 82 and you're doing 4 episodes a week and the the industry average is, you know, or our average is $886, then, you know, you've got some work to do.

You've got some building to do, right? Yeah.

Yeah. But it's just, again, the transparency. How is your show doing? You know? Right. And so that, but that category comparison is only available to our customers that are on our Thrive program. So anyway, that's what we've been up to. A little whack-a-mole, a lot of little whack-a-mole stuff. Yeah. And meanwhile, go ahead.

No, no, you go ahead and finish what you're about to say.

We've been trying to get our clip creator across the finish line, and just the prompting has just kicked my butt. And I started, I said, well, why don't we try, because we have the ability to switch. Large language model based upon the best use case. And we switched the language model over to a different one that I had been testing on. And I think I can get my clip right across the finish line now. Okay. Because the responses that were coming out from the system we were using was absolute garbage. You know, basically telling it, saying, pick out 5 highlights of the show. And it was bad. I mean, it was really, really bad. So bad, that's why I haven't released it in the last month.

So was it a, a partner platform that was specializing in those kind of prompts?

No, it's just one that does a better job at that type of a query.

Oh, um, so is it like a large, large language model?

It's one of the large big ones.

Yeah, it's not a, not ChatGPT, not a custom one. No, but a different one.

Okay, well, let's just put it this way: ChatGPT didn't do a good job.

Yeah, I mean, I think there, there's an important takeaway from that, um, that in some stuff it does, it, it does kind of struggle with stuff sometimes.

Sometimes, yeah. And no matter—

oh, go ahead.

No amount of prompting, uh, Fixes it.

Fixes it. I have here recently seen the image generation of ChatGPT-4 get a little better here recently.

It's still a little off. Yeah, it's not perfect. It's not. Still misspells words and—

Yeah, it does. Or completely creates its own language, right?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and not only language, but symbols too.

Yeah, right, right. And it just loves to put beards on men. Have you noticed that? It just can't seem to break that habit. I keep telling it to generate an image 'cause I don't have a beard on, right? So I don't wanna be represented in the artwork as having a beard. And it just can't seem to remove the beard.

Some of this stuff is hokey, but it is what it is, right?

So, Todd, on another topic, there was a digital news report 2024 that came out saying that podcasts continue to attract younger, richer, and better-educated audiences with news and politics shows that are heavily skewed towards men. And partly due to the dominance of male hosts. This is primarily outside of the United States. So we're seeing data starting to come in from research around audience growth outside of the US. Here's the actual, this is in Pod News. Thank you, James, for posting this up here and bringing it to all of our attention.

Put in this source.

Reuters.

Yeah, digital news report.

Yeah, it was— yeah, the digital news report 2024 is what this is.

And how many countries? UK, USA, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Australia, Canada. So that's one. And let's look— count the countries here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. So it's a pretty big study. They talked to 40,000 people across those 20 countries, right? That's a good, uh, that's a big sample, right?

And this chart that we have up on the screen, if you're listening to the audio on this, charts the growth of any podcast versus news podcasts from 2018 to 2024. And what we see is on the Any Podcasts, it started out about 29% of the population listens to a podcast at least once a month in all these countries. And then over subsequent years, it goes up and down a little bit, goes from like 29 to 28 in 2019. And then in 2020, it goes up to 31. It stays at 31% through 2022. And it has a, like, a 3% jump in 2022 up to 34%, and then it stays at 34% through 2023 and then jumps up to 35% in 2025.

Whereas news podcasts stay 11, 10, 11, 11, 11, 11, 12, 13.

So pretty, pretty flat line.

So pretty flat, but yeah, so it's being rooted, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Go ahead.

Sorry, we're stepping on each other again.

It's okay. This growth doesn't map precisely to the growth of audience in the podcast market. I think the podcast market grows a little quicker in the US, I meant to say, grows a little quicker than this. So we have seen steady growth, but it's not as quick as what's happened historically in the US. But Go ahead, Todd, with what you were gonna—

uh, I— it just— it's, you know, having done a new show, even though it's a tech news show, for nearly 20 years now, you know, I— it's, it's pretty obvious, you know, my audience runs heavy on men listeners. But, you know, we've slowly grown the show from 1, 2, 3% of women listenership to maybe now 12 or 13%. Not much higher than that, as I do my annual demographic surveys. So it makes sense when they say that news shows— that's interesting. What was the specific quote about news shows over outside the United States?

Uh, the exact quote was, podcasts continue to attract younger, richer, better-educated audiences, with news and politics shows heavily skewed towards men, partly due to the dominance of male hosts, is what they're—

oh, what they're supposing.

Attribution, right? And then adding, many markets have, have, have become saturated with content, making it hard for new shows to be discovered and existing shows to grow audience.

I, I don't, I don't it's some— that's a weird assertion based upon where we're at today and the number of new episodes being put out every month.

Well, that, and also, you know, this is, this is a reflection of what's going on outside of the U.S. So yeah, other countries around the world, this is the, the perception. But we've gone through phases in the U.S. where people have felt this same thing as well.

When, when I talk to You know, when we go to podcast events, you know, the podcast show, and you know, it's, it's a, you know, great mix of humanity. Um, but I rarely hear about, um, a lady saying she's doing a news or politics show. It's either, you know, it is unusual. Yeah, yeah. So maybe the show's out there, but it's not. Yeah, but I, I, you know, I, you know, it's just like sports shows. You know, sports shows are male, pretty male-dominated. There's ladies that are doing those shows, but you don't hear men doing fashion shows, uh, or, you know, or doing a lot of self-help shows. So, you know, I think, I think we have to take into effect, you know, that everyone thinks the world's flat right now, and everyone is, uh, you know, everything, every, everyone is everything. Well, no, there's still this, these trends of, you know, I'm not a sports fan, but I have friends that are absolute fanatics and they're, they're, they listen to nothing but sports shows. That's it. They don't listen to it.

Yeah, you know, I do think that there's, there's trend lines around, um, what, what people are interested based on their gender and their age, right, that are are legitimate. We shouldn't go through looking at this data from the standpoint is that everything should be equal.

Equal.

Yeah. Right. Because women or females have different interests than males have. So we have to take that into account. We can't just say that's why there's something wrong because there's not enough women doing sports talk shows, right?

Or news talk shows. That's why true crime is so heavy on women listeners. And, you know, it's a weird phenomenon to me, but But on the other hand, the assertion that younger and more affluent, well, podcasting has always been catered to people that, if I look at demographic surveys and I can look at a bunch, there's this line. It's like this, for those of you that aren't watching. It's basically like, um, what's the best analogy here? You know, on the left you have people with no high school diploma, right? And then you have high school educated, associate's, bachelor's degree at the top of the pyramid. And then on the other side you have, uh, master's degrees. And then at the bottom of the other side of the pyramid you have PhDs. So of course course.

Yeah, there's fewer people with PhDs than there are with bachelor's degrees.

Yeah, right. But still, the percentage of people listening to podcasts with PhDs and master's degrees and, and bachelor's degrees probably are more from a percentage standpoint than those with— because if you look at a non— a no diploma, no high school, that number's like it's, it's lower than national average. Yeah. So, and there's nothing wrong with, you know, I went 20-plus years in coming out of high school and only having a high school diploma, and only later in life did I get my, my bachelor's degree. And, you know, I made a great living. I built a business without having a bachelor's degree. So there's nothing there's— and here's the thing too we have to think about, is a lot of non-degree holders are just as affluent, right? Matter of fact, some people are being very, very smart now. They're coming out of high school and they're working the trades, and in 5 years they're making $150,000.

Yeah, they're making $150 grand, which, you know, which is, is becoming less necessary for creating a career. I mean, having a college degree is not always a requirement now.

And probably with all this AI stuff coming, it's going to disrupt a lot of jobs. Um, yeah, you're probably safe if you're a plumber. And then nothing— and we all need plumbers, and we all need HVAC people, and we all need bricklayers. I mean, we need these people, right? You know, the world was built upon tradespeople. You know, the, the chair you're sitting in today, it would not exist without people that work in trades.

Yeah, well, um, manufacturing, you know, creating a hard product, right? I think so. What's the definition? Uh, well, I think that definition is probably changing right now to some degree, right?

Yeah, but you know, they say affluent. What does affluent mean? Affluent to me, you know, means, uh, hobnobby and hoity-toity and, you know, right, you know, affluent means buying power, right? People have buying power.

I think we're all under attack on that side, right, because of inflation.

Oh my God. Yeah, have you, have you went to the grocery store lately? So by the way, we have been live and lit today. Oh, perfect. And I do want to read a few sats, a few, a few comments. Sam Sethi came in last week with 1,449 sats. He says, true fans support Spotify impact on RSS and what podcasters should know. True fans support from Spotify impact on— oh, okay, this was from Show 590. He just basically boosted the show. Um, 1701 Sats from Mike Dell. Hi guys, Spotify should stay in their lane, music. Um, so, and we've had a bunch of people that have been streaming Sats too. So I want to thank those of you that are streaming Sats by the minute. Uh, Chad F has been started streaming the show here a little bit ago today, doing it while we're live. And yes, we are live and lit. We're streaming the audio version of the show and you can find this show on those newfangled podcasting apps from podcastapps.com. Yep.

So, Todd, I found a, a website that does a terrific job of shrinking podcast artwork down to, uh, um, you know, like, like going from like a 3,000 by 3,000 pixel, cover art. Yeah, that's maybe like 1.2, 1.3 megabytes in size. This, this website will shrink it down to like 200K and still keep its, its quality.

And does it smash it, or what is it?

Uh, it's called tinypng.com.

Any PNG has a WordPress plugin for those of you that want to smash your images before they are posted to keep the image size so tight. Yeah, I'm familiar with tinypng.

You are? Okay, awesome. Yeah, awesome.

But yeah, we run that plugin on New Media Show. Oh good. Okay, so it takes the, the art that I create and reduces it down to like 200K.

Yeah, because there is a kind of a recommend. I'm not sure, does, as far as you know, Todd, does Apple really enforce that file size restriction of 512 on a I don't know.

3,000. At this time, I don't know, you know, but that's always—

I'm not sure they enforce it either, but—

That's been the— hey, Ted, do you guys enforce the 512K image size?

I have noticed that when I shrunk it down, I recently did an update to one of my podcasts, and I did notice that the update happened a lot quicker after I crunched it. I mean, if I traded the artwork out, that the update happened almost within a, you know, 12 hours of me uploading it.

The key is to use a new name. Don't name it the same thing, right? That kind of helps kickstart the process a little bit.

Well, it's because the server sees something new there too. It may pick it up quicker too because it sees a change. Yeah, because Apple will scan your RSS feed looking for changes on some sort of a cadence that it has, um, based on your publishing frequency and things like that. So, um, yeah, it was just an interesting site that I came across because I was, I was looking to crunch my own artwork down because it was too big.

So it's a common problem. So here's the thing, uh, that I want to hear from those of you that are listening. You guys stay very, very quiet and I don't know if you're throwing darts at the screen or, you know, but, you know, Rob and I, you know, we did a pretty deep dive today into this, you know, and me being a little bit expressive in this ad tech and, you know, down in your hearts, you know, where do you guys stand on this? You know, where do you stand? Are you, are you drinking the Kool-Aid of kissing the advertiser's butts? Or, um, you know, where do you guys stand on this? Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, uh, Fader Dragon, uh, sent us a comment that says Apple Podcasts allegedly no longer prefers 500K image files and it will take images, uh, files of any size. Still best though to keep it under 2 megabytes for sure.

Ted, is that true?

I would like to think that because I mean, I would love to. Yeah, look as good as they can.

Yeah, because I would think if you crunch it down too far, you're doing some resizing already in the app.

So yeah, I mean, if you crunch it down too much, it's probably going to lose some integrity of the image. Regardless.

Yeah, yeah. And depends on the quality of your monitor too. So if you have a color grade monitor, you'll definitely see the change. Yeah, I have one color grade monitor that Dell sent me years ago. Well, not that many years ago, maybe 3 or 4 years ago, that I absolutely adore. Because until you've edited on a color grade monitor, it's, it's pretty— what I mean by color grade is what you see is what is actually portrayed. You know, it's, it's the best. It's, it's got the exact color code. You know, you're seeing the right, the real color.

Yeah, because I mean, a lot of people don't realize it, but monitors, computer monitors, have different settings in, in display of colors, and it also can be driven by your computer too.

I've got a little itty-bitty Blackmagic Design monitor that I can see when I'm doing white balancing with the TriCaster because the white balancing and color correction that I do for my show with the TriCaster, if I use the monitor, I've just got a cheap Dell monitor off the side and it's— should not be used for that purpose. So that's why I have the small Blackmagic Design monitor that I can see as I'm making the color correction to make sure that it, you know, what is being streamed is, uh, is what I'm— is again as close to being color corrected as compared to what I'm seeing on that, that horrible monitor that I have, you know, kind of off to the side of me in the studio, or, or the old studio.

Yeah, so given the fact, Todd, that you, you lost your your studio, um, just prior to you going on your trip. Um, how are you thinking about your new studio going forward? Is there any, any kind of things that you can share about how you're thinking about building a new—

yeah, I'm going to build a false studio in the loft.

Oh, you are?

Okay.

Yeah. Now, is it going to be still the same concept of what you had in your office space, or We'll see.

You know, I have a little, again, I'm, I don't, I live, my, my loft is 2,000 square foot, but it doesn't mean, and it's good size, right? But it doesn't mean I have, I'm going to have to get rid of some stuff. I may have to make some room if I'm going to build a, a 10 by 12 room or something like that in the middle of the loft. And, you know, and again, sloping ceilings, it's, it's tapered like this, right?, so the edges are not— I can't go right to the edge of the wall and have a, you know, an 8-foot vertical space behind me. So, you know, I have to be offset from the wall. Slope behind you, right? So, so we'll— I'll get it figured out. Um, I do have one part of the wall that does have a higher vertical, so I'll probably build against that. And, and then the challenge is, is the light. This is it has a— on each end of the loft is this massive wall of windows. So it has natural light coming from both sides, and that's just going to play hell on, you know, trying to get the lighting right, especially when I record at night and the sun is coming in. You know, it— yeah, it's going to be a bit of it. So I might have to do blackout curtains on one side of the building.

Well, you— I mean, you've got big panel lights that you can put right in front of you to kind of keep it balanced anyway.

Yeah, but natural light will still, you know, and it— and because the sun is going to be changing angles when I normally record, right, it will— it, you know, I can't continue to re-white balance every 15 minutes, so there's going to have to be some, some solution. Yeah, I've actually thought about that, Vader, is a customized shipping container. Actually, what I've thought about is a, like, they sell mobile homes. And why don't I take a, the key would be is to find a half-size mobile home, right, that I could convert into a studio. So that's a consideration. But then again, and I do, we do have a place where I can park market. But again, it's the— is the bandwidth situation. So I'm going to build in the studio. I'm going to be traveling a lot, so I, I will build the, uh, the studio in the loft and go from there. And I'll basically— I'm gonna— we have Amish and local communities. I'm just going to hire them to come in and build me a box.

Um, are you gonna still keep, keep using your Tricaster studio?

Probably, you know, but again, we'll see. We'll see how it all works out. I may end up using StreamYard or something else. Um, but yeah, Renee, a mobile home studio would be so cool, right?

Have—

be able to hitch up to that thing and pull it somewhere. But I don't need a— I don't— I don't need a $100,000 mobile home. I need a half-size.

You know.

Yeah, kind of almost like, um, like a construction hut or something.

Yeah, like what size, um, would you recommend, uh, our arena for, for that? I guess it depends on how big a studio you want to build, right?

Well, I need, I need a 10 by 12. I've operated for years by 10 by 12. Matter of fact, the studio in that I had before was only 10 by 10.

So yeah, that's about the size of my, my bedroom here that I'm—

yeah, it's a bit— it's a bedroom. Yeah, right.

Yeah, I do well. It's perfect size. It gives you enough depth behind you.

Yeah, that's— he is having enough depth behind me.

And then some, some windows that you can augment but have blinds that you can pull down and block.

Yeah, that's just what I do here. When I was in the studio in Hawaii, there was a window front left and directly in front and a sliding glass door, which never really affected me because I recorded at night. So there I got— remember when I used to get sunlight shining on my face?

There was always this little beam of light hitting you right here, right?

Yeah, back in Hawaii. Yeah, right, because there was no air conditioning. And yeah, if I, if I closed the drapes, I'd cook myself out.

So— oh, that's right, that's right. You didn't have air conditioning in that house? No, not at all.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know that I could, I could do this. Hawaii, yeah, Hawaii is— Hawaii, you don't need AC. I know. Yes, you got the trade winds.

It can be really humid there too, right?

Yeah, a few days a year. Yeah, yeah, it's not bad. And a ceiling fan is, you know, all you really need to take the edge off usually.

Yeah.

No, but I have gotten spoiled with the air conditioner.

So it's a, it's a new kind of phase for you. I mean, it's interesting to see how you, how it looks and how you come back from.

Yeah, we'll, we'll see how the, uh, we'll see how the bandwidth does once I, you know. Right. But one thing is, uh, unique is the, because I've set up, um, what's the name of the technology? I talked about it. I had spent a lot of money and upgraded my network stuff. And it's got the ability to do fallback. So I've got Starlink as primary. And then I actually may switch it. I may make the point-to-point because I was able to get an upgrade in speed. I may make the point-to-point more primary because at least for the show, because it does okay during rainstorms. So if it rains, Starlink usually goes belly up. So I would probably make Starlink the backup for the live show. And plus, Starlink penalizes me if I use too much bandwidth where the other provider doesn't. So I've got a tower outside of my house that is about 25, 5, maybe. Well, it goes— it's, it's higher than the second floor, so whatever a two-story home is, and it's got an antenna on it, it's pointing at another antenna about 10 or 15 miles away. And now I'm on a supposed 50-meg connection, but it never gets there. So there should be enough upload bandwidth using Restream.io to have a single stream going out. I may have to go down to 720 and not push it. Yeah, Ubiquiti. Yeah, that's what I've got.

It's a Ubiquiti box. So, okay, well, fader knows what you're doing, I can tell.

Yeah, I guess so.

Fader must listen to the podcast, right? Well, there must be some occasional crossover here, but, uh, yeah, between your, your Geek News Central and this show.

So, right, you know, it's, it's, it's funny. I've got two of these Ubiquiti Dream Machines. And it's just like, like, really? That took us some money, you know.

Well, it's like those, those TriCasters that you have are significant.

Yeah, but you know, at the same point, those have, you know, those been amortized over many years, you know.

There's to help me with my tax situation, so You've been, you've been, uh, depreciating those for many years, right?

Is that what you can only do it for 3 to 5 years or whatever it is? Well, what's funny is I finally— my insurance agent, basically because I have now stuff in a storage unit and stuff at the— I was, you know, be frank and I won't say how much, but it's a significant number, more than 6 figures. Um, well, not 7 figures, but a 6-figure number in gear. And, you know, no, no real coverage because I moved it out of a commercial space into residential. And then I have stuff in a storage unit and I'm like, oh my God, you know, I need insurance. Oh, insurance, right? Because I've had the insurance I had at the studio was replacement value. If the, if the studio burned down or I got robbed, there was no depreciation. I, I paid the extra premium for 100% replacement value. And, uh, so they had to go back to the underwriter and say, hey, here's the situation. And it, it's taken 2 weeks, and they let me know the other day that they're going to— basically, I have to give them an account of what's in each location, an approximate account, and then the policy is going to be reissued. So sigh of relief, at least I have insurance.

That's always a good thing, I think, these days. Yeah, even though insurance rates are going way up on some things. Car insurance rates have gone way up, and I know home insurance rates are in the middle of going as well.

My commercial insurance was about $2,000 a year. Yeah, yeah. So I don't see my— I don't see my cost of that policy going down, to be honest with you. So, but anyway, I'm not stressing that right now, Rob. I'm— well, in fact, I'm moving locations. As soon as we get done with the show today, I pack up and move to a new location. So I'm— I'll be— you can't tell because I've got the green screen or whatever it's called up, but, uh, I'll be at a new location, uh, tonight.

So I'm on the move. So Todd, I, I saw a post from Neil Viguelo on, on Twitter kind of commenting about one of our past episodes in our discussion. And Neil's comment is about if hosting companies want to protect the future of RSS, they need to offer more opportunities that can compete with platforms that make them redundant. I think what he's talking about is these, like the Spotify type platforms, I believe that type of a platform, as in more help with marketing and lift. But with our results, not just here's how you do it.

Okay, does anybody want— are they ready to pay for that?

Well, I think you— I think you've already kind of pursued that a little bit with your kind of, kind of marketing initiative, right, that you've been—

well, again, am I going to— if I'm going to help with marketing, you know, that's money. That costs real money. When a show comes in and says, help me with marketing, um, that doesn't— you're not going to get that on a $20 hosting account, right? Yeah, I can provide you tools. I can provide you clip creation. I can help you with email. I can help you with social posts. We're doing all of that already. Yeah, but if you want true marketing assistance, strategizing, these types of things, That, that's money. That's, that's big, big, that's big money. So my point is that if hosting companies want to protect features, they need to offer more because it can compete with the platforms.

I don't have to compete with the platforms because, right, they're aggregating audience, right, right.

Because we're one-to-many, not one-to-one. Um, as in more help with marketing and lift But again, you know how much I pay for my marketing firm every month? You know, that's a number. Oh yeah, that's, that's a big number. You know, it's a full-time employee number.

So yes, I responded to him saying, Neil, it's hard to disagree with you on podcast audience lift via a better podcast marketing being needed and wanted very badly. The issue is listeners have free choice in where they put their listening time. Listening must be earned in very difficult ways like word of mouth. And I'm not sure that you can artificially create that. I think it's really kind of a one of those black boxes in podcasting that isn't, isn't easily solved.

Um, yeah, Renee, what, what my marketing firm does me— does for me at Blueberry is, um, most of our social, PR, traditional outreach, um, everything you would think a company would need for marketing SEM campaigns, that type of stuff. They help with strategy. And again, that comes at a full-time employee cost for a mid-level, you know, probably you're— if you're going to do this as a— as again, and we're not a big company. So, you know, that probably, that number probably starts at $60,000 plus annually, um, for any company that's doing any, you know, you're basically, you're not going to engage a marketing firm for anything less than $5,000 a month. Yeah.

And which is a typical fee for a PR firm too.

So, right. You're looking, yeah. And you're only going to get probably 10, 12 hours a week if you're lucky. Yeah, um, from that. So, but it's very, very focused, very, very focused task.

So yeah, and it, and it may or may not work. I mean, it's, that's the, that's the question that is always asked, is that it, it's great to put marketing resources behind your show, but if your show doesn't have hooks in it that can actually connect with audiences. If you haven't thought about the content enough and you haven't thought about, you know, who your audience is and who, who gets value from your content, then it's difficult to, to target a marketing campaign to, you know, I had a customer, I had a customer leave the other day because we were $3 more expensive than a competitor. $3. Right. There's some price sensitivity there, isn't there? And it also explains why maybe the podcast hosting platforms— and I think you've talked about this lately—

haven't raised their prices in all these years. We haven't raised our since the beginning. Yeah, since we started hosting, we haven't raised our prices, but yet everyone's paying $29.95, $49.95, you know, whatever, for all these third-party stuff. But, you know, God forbid I'm $3 more expensive. Than a competitor. Yet, yet I offer phone support, you know.

Yeah, you should talk to a human. Most platforms don't do that, right? I know I did it when I worked at the companies that I worked for. I did phone support. And but, but from a policy standpoint, a lot of the hosting companies just don't do phone support. And oftentimes the reason for that is, is that oftentimes their phone support people are outside of the US.

So yeah., which puts them in different time zones that are not compatible with the phone call. Our support people are all based in the United States, and, you know, so, you know, I, I have 3 full-time employees that, you know, answer the phones, answer tickets.

So yeah, and, um, Fader also agrees with us. The best podcast marketing is word of mouth. It's also the most difficult type of promotion to get. That's right, because you're trying to change people's behavior that is very much linked to their own personal self-esteem and their own personal kind of brand in their communities. So getting people to share a recommendation about your podcast is almost like they're like part of your team.

And it's difficult to get people on your team. I'm pretty pro, uh, hiring American help, um, in the— in more US-based companies. So we pay US-based wages, US-based, um, compensation packages, you know, the whole nine yards. And that, that, you know, that doesn't— and my programmers are all in the United States, you know. So you know how much programmers cost these days, you know, you get You're talking $100K plus for every programmer, along with packages. Now, I, you know, I am not against at some point hiring some people outside of the United States. But when I do, I'm going to pay well above market average. If I do that, I'm going to probably pay double market average because quite honestly, I don't necessarily agree with You know, if you're going to ask someone to work for you and do, uh, high-level US-based or even European-based standards, then you need to pay them accordingly and, and reward them for that, for that level of competency. Too many companies take advantage of foreign workers, and it really grinds my ass, to be honest with you. And why do some of my competitors, um, can offer much cheaper pricing? Their help is all offshore. They have a few token people in the United States and that's it.

Well, it also depends on where, where the company is based and where their team is based. Oftentimes there are podcast hosts that just don't have much of a team in the US.

Yeah, they're all US.

Right.

And, and I, and I don't know, and no one ever discloses what they're paying those, uh, international workers, right? So I don't know, I'm, I'm pretty, I'm pretty pro built in the USA. And yeah, I know a lot of people don't care about that, but I'm, I'm an old guy, so.

Well, if you care about, about support, uh, I think having a team that's US-based helps from some aspects of culture compatibility and, and, well, just patient understanding, right?

Just look what happened with the, you know, the company that you were working there for a while, you know, what they did, right?

Yeah. And once it gets acquired by a company outside of the U.S., then, you know, things change.

Well, maybe they're, they're acquired by a company out in the U.S., so what are they going to do? They're going to hire local. They're going to do just like I do.

They're going to hire people in their own country. Yeah. And they are— it appears that they are looking— I'm talking about StreamYard here— is looking at hiring and keeping staff in the US. There was a feeling that they were going to get rid of everybody, but I think they found that maybe that wasn't the prudent thing to do.

Right. I want to thank again Chad F. for streaming the show live today. We definitely appreciate you doing that. Let me see if any other boosts have come in. Rob, we're long here, so, uh, yeah, we are. Well, time for 90 minutes. Yeah, and I do have a clean audio recording today. I know there was a little bit of, uh, trouble with the audio on the last show, but, uh, I've got a clean recording here today, so knock on wood.

That's good. And I'm not sure that we were talking over the top of each other quite as much in this episode as we did last week, to be honest about it.

Yeah. So to bring this to a close, I'm Todd at blueberry.com, @geeknews on X. Guess we've made the official transition. Of course, @geeknews, @geeknews.chat on Mastodon. Feel free to reach out to me on any one of those platforms. We really do want to hear what you think about me bashing the ad tech industry.

Well, and I think, you know, I think, yeah, I hate to do it because it makes us seem like we're like somehow not with the industry or we're opposed to people doing things to help people make money. And that's not really our intent, I think.

No, no, not at all. All right. I am a little sick of the BS that, yeah.

Yeah, so yeah, I can be reached on X as well. Here's my information, @RobGreenlee. And then my email address is rob.greenlee@gmail.com. Feel free to reach out to me. And then my YouTube is @RobGreenlee as well. And you can find this show on newmediashow.com. So we keep the episodes updated on there and they're audio and video podcasts. So we are doing actually separate RSS feeds. And the other show that I do every Thursday night, so I do another live show on Thursday night at 7:00 PM Eastern, is also available as an audio and video podcast through Todd's Blueberry platform.

So Rob, you're going to like this. For the first time ever on this episode today, we will use the alternate enclosure and those on a new podcast can either listen or watch the show within the same, within the same episode, I guess. That's— or within the same, same listing. Okay, so we've got that employed. So Sam, if you're listening, you'll be happy about that. There was one thing I was gonna say. Was it— now I guess it doesn't matter.

We'll save it for the next show. Yep. And Podcast Movement's coming up soon too, so, you know, I'm gonna try and make it down there, Todd, if I can.

Yeah.

So Rob, for the next show, I will be, um, I'm gonna be out of the pocket too.

I'm gonna be in Seattle that week. Yeah. So nothing for the 27th. And of course then the following show is, uh, the following show, it may not be available as well. Right. Yeah, I might. So we may not be back for the next couple weeks. Okay. So, or maybe we can work some schedule, but the week of the Fourth of July, I plan on actually taking true PTO even though I'm overseas. I'm going to take a week's vacation and not work.

Well, I might— maybe I'll, maybe I'll do an episode, a live episode, if I have time. So, okay, I can bring on a guest or somebody like that.

So, all right, all right, Todd. Thanks everybody. Thanks for being here, and I hope you enjoyed the podcast.

Yeah, thank you and good night.

So bye-bye.