Is the 1 Minute Podcast Measurement Standard to Short? #557 | New Media Show - 9-20-2023

All right, you should have a, should have a live video stream.

Okay, yep.

All right, here we go. Todd and Rob in the afternoon.

Hey, afternoon delight with Todd and Rob Greenleelee.

Oh yeah, here we are. We're here for another edition of the New Media Show after I was off last week, or we were off last week because I was in Phoenix. So actually coming back from Phoenix when, uh, the show was supposed to go on. And so here we are. Rob, welcome back.

Yeah, yeah, I've, I've done that same event that you went to, the Eliances.

Yeah, so it's fun, it was good. Interesting.

I've done it a couple of times. Yeah.

It felt kind of Tony Robinson type almost a little bit. It was, you know, it wasn't quite that, but it was, it was good. Lots of good networking, lots of good contacts that I'm still working through.

Yeah.

So, uh, and anyway, for those, for those of you don't know, it's just, it was basically an event where it was a bunch of business folks networking and such. So I don't— I haven't asked to apply for membership per se. I don't even know how much that costs. But, um, that was— it was— they were nice enough to ask me to come out, and I, I got— I got a little bit of time to, to pitch.

I was always gonna say, it's— it goes by pretty quick, doesn't it? Yeah, I get to the point.

Yeah, I was fast and furious. And, uh, you know, being a podcaster, you're able to do that. But it was, you know, I was the only podcaster in the house, that's for sure. But lots of money, lots of money in that building, lots of rich and famous folks and lots of VCs. And it was, it was good. It was fun. But here we are. We're back. And of course, we're live and lit. So if you're not already playing with one of those newfangled modern podcasting apps at podcastapps.com, please do so. Today, obviously, we are in a value-for-value situation. So if you value our content, please consider supporting the show. And of course, you can always boost us when you're live. I did miss a, a boost. Um, I have to go back because— let me look. Um, yeah, I, I don't see it. I thought there was a boost that had come in from, from Dave, but, um, I think I've read all these. So, uh, but if you've got anything comment today about being, uh, well, if you're using one of those newfangled apps, feel free to hit us up, ping us while we're live. And of course, uh, we had a, uh, well, we— the official announcement comes tomorrow morning, but we, uh, we relaunched Podcast Mirror, uh, silently yesterday. And, um, so, you know, all the, the blog posts went out this morning, and then the press release goes out tomorrow, but We basically enabled Podcasting 2.0 for anyone that is on a non— I'm calling them non-compliant. Now, how can I use this? This is going to piss some people off. So if you are part of a non-compliant podcasting host, which are most of them, which are most of them that are, that are not certified by the podcast— oh, maybe you should talk about that, the PSP.

Right.

Um, then, uh, then you can have a compliant podcasting feed with the Podcast Mirror. So, and participate, go live and lit. You can do value for value. You can set the medium tag. The other thing we can't do is these are all channel level settings. I don't have the ability yet to make any inroads on items, AKA posts, because that would require a much more sophisticated intervention. And that's what we do. We intervene in the feed. We take the podcast— the way Podcast Mirror works is takes your feed and makes an absolute duplicate mirror of it.

Right. And the term Podcast Mirror stands for—

and it will, it will, uh, doesn't change anything if you don't touch any of the settings. And then you have the ability to, uh, now you can set these Podcasting 2.0 features and we will add that to your feed. So it's Mirror Plus, I guess, the better way to say it.

And, uh, so how does a podcaster take advantage of the, the 2.0 specs? Is it in your backend? Is that how they do that?

Yeah, it's in our backend on Podcast Mirror. So they add that, they add the value for value stuff, but again, it's only at the channel level. They can't use any of the episode-level stuff. So it's, um, again, it's, you know, it gets it with the feed that we tested it on was an Anchor or Spotify feed that has none of these features, formerly known as— yeah, and, uh, still has all the Anchor markings in the feed. But we took an Anchor feed and we tested by adding all basically anyone that's on Anchor or Libsyn or Podbean any of those other platforms that have non-compliant feeds, they can now, uh, participate in the Podcasting 2.0 space. So a jab in your eye, a little jab in your eye out there.

Well, it does give podcasters that, that want to embrace the new standard a pathway for doing that. Um, that's setting a good example, I guess, for other hosts, um, that could, you know, do, do the same. And maybe so what would happen here is kind of similar to what we saw in the early days with FeedBurner, right? It's kind of a similar type of a, of a platform.

It was, it really was designed, um, we build it for podcasters. FeedBurner was built for bloggers and it worked for podcasters, but you know, over the years they, they've done nothing with it. So, and podcast.

So it also means that if you want to change hosts or whatever you want to do, you can just change it in the backend of Podcast Mirror and not have to, you know, do anything, anything really with your host.

Yeah. You just change the source. Now it's, it's not the most clean way to change hosts because what we're going to do is if you didn't migrate from one host to the other cleanly and move over those posts from before and carry over the GUIDs, then you could have an event where all your media is re-downloaded again. But the key is, if you carry over the GUID and you migrate from one host to the other, Mirr will pick up those. It won't replace the, the, the GUIDs, and you'll be able to have a clean transition. It's actually easier than doing a 301 because you just—

well, that's what you're actually, actually not having to do, right?

You don't have to do a 301. Yeah, because that is it.

It's still going to require you to transfer and duplicate all RSS feeds over on the new host.

On the new host. Yeah. But it's in— we're— we— it used to be free. It's been free since 2017. And we were charged $60 a year for existing customers, get the first year at $50, then it goes to $60, but $65 a month, you know, and literally that, that site is used by thousands. You know, there is a lot of shows over there that, um, that use it. So I'm sure some are not going to be happy and they can easily redirect off the platform. They, we've, you know, basically one button click and here's the feed to redirect to. But we always have this big caution there. Don't redirect to the feed that is currently being pointed at without removing the redirect on the feed that you're, that you're currently, if you're redirecting a feed., which some people do. You don't have to, but, uh, we tell them don't, you know, if you've redirected a feed to Podcast Mirror, make sure you take off that redirect before you redirect back to the original feed, or it will, it'll do a loop-de-loop and it won't be good. So, um, but most folks, they won't even have to do a redirect, they just redirect back to their source feed. So it's, it's all managed right on the site, it's easy to take care of and Quit at any time. So not too many pushback yet. So we'll see when we send the mass email tomorrow to several thousand of the users and say, hey, uh, you know, we're looking to put our hand in your pocket for $60 a year, um, versus free. So, but you know, we try to add some value, and hopefully that, uh, it's good. You gotta email— I got an email comment on, uh, YouTube says, Bang says, hey peeps, thoughts on the passage of the UK online safety bill? To be honest with you, I haven't really followed it.

Have you, Rob? No. Does that have to do with kind of hate speech? Is that what it would be? I guess that seems to be the hot topic right now.

I don't know. I'm going to have to— in the EU, I'll have to look at it. I know they just whammied TikTok $386 million or some— but this is a UK. Thoughts on the— yeah, this is a UK, this is not EU. But the EU did a big wanger on TikTok for $387 million for signing up minors. So, um, I guess we're just gonna have to send the legal over there and read the, read the bill. So I don't have any real feedback, but we did have some stuff hitting us on Twitter where people are asking us about our opinions on, uh YouTube, uh, basically there's some guy— I don't, and I don't, I don't follow this. Um, let me see, let me get to the comments so I can actually talk authoritatively here. There's a, um, the mention was, um, gatekeeper Vimeo censored— oh, censored a Child— children trans documentary film. I have nothing to know about this, but I guess Venmo took that down. Um, film is an art form. It should never be silenced. Again, Venmo's in business. They can, you know, it's their choice on what content they want on their system, so I really don't have an opinion on that, but This Russell Brand is— have you heard this name? Is he's gotten in trouble?

He's got something. Oh, he's a long, long, long time podcaster in the podcasting space. He's— he had an exclusive contract with Audioboom for many years. Um, so, and he's been— he's like a, like a movie star kind of comedian and stuff like that, and he's built a huge following on YouTube and, and, uh, as well as on Rumble. I guess he's just— multi-millions of people are listening to him.

Someone said that his channel was Demonetized. Demonetized. Is he in trouble for something?

Uh, I guess he's under investigation for some sort of a, uh, sexual assault or something like that that he's being accused of. Uh-huh.

He hasn't been convicted of anything, or there's no, like, there's an accusation out there.

There's just an accusation, and YouTube took him down. Because of an accusation. Well, the question is, and this is the thing, I mean, I took him down but demonetized him.

So did YouTube demonetize him, or did the advertisers unplug from him?

I don't know that that distinction has been made. The only thing that's been said is that, uh, YouTube basically pulled the plug on his monetization, um, support in the platform. They haven't come out and saying that certain advertisers have pulled out of advertising or something like that, because it doesn't usually—

so, so usually the YouTube says you can't, you're no longer monetize something. Oh, so that's what happened there.

And I think, frankly, you know, this was like— I think for, for him, probably it was a straw that broke the camel's back with, with YouTube, because I think he's been given many kind of content strikes over the many years that he's been doing a show and building a huge following. And so, you know, there's, you know, at some point when something breaks that like gives them that one little edge that they need to flip the switch, right?

So, you know, and again, that basically the Twitter follower that sent us this says that it's what you and I and others have been warning about forever— gatekeepers control it.

And it's, it's part of this bigger conversation around content moderation, right? Um, now granted, we're talking about YouTube, so that's kind of like a forgone conclusion that that's been going on. It's, it's, I think most of our conversation has been centered around this kind of moderation coming to podcasting. Yeah. So, which is a different conversation to some degree.

So again, I, you know, I really don't have, you know, again, Venmo or Vimo or however you pronounce them, V-I-M-E-O, Vimo, that, you know, that's, I think you have to pay to use that platform.

So it's one of those situations. Yeah, Venmo is like a PayPal.

It's like a payment platform. Right. Oh, Vine.

Oh, how did—

or is it Vimeo? Vimeo. Vimeo. V-I-M-E-O. So they're an online streaming— they're similar to YouTube. Yeah, video streaming platform.

So yeah, they've been around since— yeah, I've been forever, just after YouTube launched actually. They've been around a long time.

Yeah. So that platform, if I remember correctly, now is mostly paid. They had bought Livestream. It's all paid. Yeah, and we actually stream on Livestream as well. Many people don't know that, but this show's streamed on Livestream as well. But if you're— and I pay to have our show streamed on Livestream. I think I pay about $600 a year for that. Um, this show, Geek News Central, a couple others that are part of the Tech Podcast Network use that same stream on Livestream. We have different channels, but, um, You know, again, this is a platform that they can choose who and what type of content they want on there. And again, I'm not one to tell someone what they can do with their business model, but again, you're on a platform that you have paid for, that is, or someone has paid for that content to be up there. And if you violate their terms of service or they don't like doing business with you, most companies have this ability to say, you're out, you're gone. We don't, we don't want the content, whatever it may be, to be associated with.

Now, it depends on the, the specificity of the terms of service, right? So that you agreed to.

And I'm not going to guess, I'm not going to question if Spotify, if Vimeo, if YouTube— and I don't question if they want to remove content. I just warn people that they can't— can happen, right? And if you— and if you as a content creator are going to have content that you are concerned about being deplatformed, then having your show on an RSS feed, you can still be deplatformed from all the major distribution points in podcasting. That's happened already to a show or two, I think just one real primarily. But there's been a handful of them. Yeah, but you— again, the RSS piece of this allows the show to remain online and people can still— those that choose can still follow and subscribe to your show manually. It doesn't stop that. So again, I, you know, I'm not— I can have a personal opinion on what these sites do, and oftentimes I do. I'm not going to air it, but at the same time, I think that You know, Blueberries, we've had an issue with a gambling site, um, and it's— we believe, and from everything that we've been made to understand, is that gambling site's trying to defraud people. So we've had to— we've had— they've come back 2 or 3 times to try to re-establish their account. We said no, it's, you know, we don't— we refuse to do business with you.

And isn't gambling by its very nature a form of fraud?

Well, again, if it was, I think it is. I think the key here is gambling shows and stuff like that. But what they were trying to do was set up a website that basically was trying to defraud people their money. They weren't a real organization. Right. And they weren't US-based at all. They were overseas and we reviewed and everything and everything we got back was this, they're just trying to steal money. So, you know, and it had been reported. It wasn't like we went looking for it. It had been reported as an issue site. So, you know, we said, okay, no, we don't want your business. Matter of fact, they weren't even publishing a podcast. So that was the kind of the funny thing too. So again, we all have our terms of service of what we allow within our platforms. And, uh, you know, anything that's gonna— for our opinion is if you're trying to defraud someone and being blatant about it and running, you know, uh, links that go to honeypots that do nothing more than try to get people to give up their money and lose it forever. And we're not having it, right? It would be— and if it was reported to us, and why would we— why would we leave that up and then cause— you know, we'd be just as much to blame if we knew this site was a fraud. And left it up. So it wasn't necessarily— it was their actions, it wasn't their content.

Yeah, and speaking of this topic, uh, Cast Media has been in the news about their lack of payment to content creators.

Man, two YouTube videos. I didn't watch the second one, but woo!

Yeah, yeah, I thought that was, you know, and this is an interesting kind of sign of what's been, what's kind of been going on kind of behind the scenes that a lot of people haven't been talking about. And it's interesting that it's finally, these kind of things are finally coming out. And I think that they're, they're really rooted in the same issue primarily. I mean, one of the primary issues is fraud, but right, you know, above that, it's the issue of guarantees. Yeah. And exclusives and those kind of things, which is, which is one of those areas that the industry is completely pulling back from. And what we're seeing happen here is a great example of why they're not good deals to get into for anyone involved, actually. But a lot of the bigger media companies have been pushing for this, and that's primarily where it's happened. And but then it's been increasingly felt by smaller companies that have felt like they had to compete with that in order to compete with the bigger companies and the ones that typically had deeper pockets that this isn't going to happen to. But the smaller companies that have adopted these guarantees, sticking their neck out, saying, you know, well, this is what it appears the revenue is going to be from this show and, you know, we'll be able to pay it.

Right.

And they don't. And then in the end, it doesn't because the economy drops and advertising revenue declines and Guess what?

They're in the hole. Speak of a whammy. Look at this one. Courtside Group.

Yeah. Oh, so that's the name that they went public with was Courtside.

Oh, hang on here. No, no, no. Maybe this is the wrong one. Well, well, that's— let me come back because it's P1 or something like that. Let me go. Let me make sure I got that.

Courtside was the legal name.

Oh, it's Pod C. It's, yeah, it's Pod C is the NASDAQ listing. I got the right one.

Right, but Courtside, uh, yeah, group was the parent company, right? PodcastOne, back when I was working for them.

So $8 was the— it was supposed to open, it was supposed to open at $8. Yeah, $2.24. Now think about this, so this wasn't a traditional opening. They basically— all the intern— the, the people that got the stock were the ones that said, okay, you get it at $5. You can buy it at $5 and you as an employee can get it at $3.75 or whatever it is. And there was probably preconditions on how long they had to hold and sell. And, you know, there are all kinds of things. And so we're going to open this thing at $8. $2.24 closed today or $2.30.

So what was that peak high there?

Peak high was $5— no, $2.56. Let's look at the 1-month average here. So it— when it did actually open, it opened at $4.39. And this is why it took— and they actually did a bunch of stops. They stopped it a couple of times to try to prevent the slide, but it opened at $4.39 and now it's down around $2.30. Now, you know, and again, this is Todd's opinion. This is Todd's opinion. This is perfect example of how podcast one counts in my, in my opinion. So they were going to open at 8.

It's worth 8, but you're only going to get 2.

So, right. It's in, well, the market said it's worth 2, 230. Exactly. So whether that's about 2 times, uh, 2/4. Yeah.

So are you taking this perspective from the The podcaster and the advertiser.

I'm taking this from the podcaster counting perspective. Again, this is Todd's, Todd's opinion.

Right. My opinion. It's not a disparaging.

No, it's just, it's just interesting.

You know? Right.

Yeah. Correct. Wow. $230,000. You know, and here's the challenge. So there's people there left, and again, I'm just thinking, I'm just talking. In my opinion, in my opinion, there is likely— I'm not saying there is— there is likely people holding stock at a much higher price that are now, yeah, screwed. And now in the hole, totally in the hole. And maybe they got stock for some sort of contract Maybe they got, you know, hey, you're going to get some stock. We're going to give you stock for you to be with us for a year. Sign here, you know, and you get it at the discount price of $5 from the opening at $8. And maybe, maybe they really haven't lost real money, but they maybe have lost. Okay. I was expecting $8. This is at $5. Now it's at $2.50. So You know, it's a quarter of what I was thinking it was going to be. And now, you know, they're going to have to work hard. It's going to take a couple of years to get this back up to $5, $6 range if they are ever able to.

So did they share in this granted equity request how much money was raised from the offering?

I don't think they raised money. That's— this is the thing. I don't think they did. They—

I think they did. That's the only reason to do it.

Well, unless they— distributed it all internally. Again, I don't know. They had some banks or whatever. I don't know. I don't know what the number is. I haven't— again, I'm not a stock analyst.

Someone, you know, someone that knows this can send this to us and say, okay, Todd, this is how much they got, and, you know, but because they usually have a certain amount of shares that are offered to the investors, right, um, that can buy those shares at, you know, whether it be $4 a share or $3 a share, some sort of discounted price.

I was hearing that this was not like a traditional raise money thing. That's what I heard. So, but again, I know I, I'm, I'm clueless when it comes to this thing. Don't, don't take any stock advice from me.

Zero. But well, and I'm, I'm looking at the actual release itself and it doesn't give any kind of what the initial private offering was.

Yeah, they say the market cap is $52.69 million is what the market cap is on this. Yeah. Now here's the, here's the interesting thing. This chart looks a lot like Libsyn's chart when they went, when they were public, you know, except there was some spikes over the years where, you know, in my opinion, a certain individual is pumping and dumping. In my opinion. Yeah, you know, but it's interesting that the stock is down at this low.

Well, I mean, there's a good chance that all the employees of the company that had shares dispersed to them are probably doing okay.

Yeah, it's just, it's the prices is probably lower than what it was because they probably didn't cost them anything for those shares.

Maybe. But they got a strike price. Right, right. You know, so there's, there's all sorts of ways that one can slice and dice this. Um, but let's be honest, this wasn't exactly the best time in the economy to be taking any company public.

Well, you know, people are always, you know, how podcasting is supposed to be hot, right? We're supposed to be, uh, hit— getting what, towards what, $2 billion or something?

Is it really that hot?

Yeah, you know, that's, you know, that's the word on the street is everything's super hot.

Hot, hot, hot.

Is that because that's what we want it to be, or is it because it actually is? I'm just reporting what's being reported by other people publicly.

It's hot, hot, hot. It's super hot, yeah. And it is from a listener perspective, it's hot, hot, hot. Yeah, it is, absolutely. From a, you know, if you kind of back up a little bit and you look at, you know, Sony Music doesn't feel like it's so hot.

No, but it's right. But here's the thing too that I, you know, we're sitting here kind of digging a little bit, but I never want to see stock prices go negative. I want to see people be successful. I want to see them make a lot of money. I want to see people enriched. I want to see their pockets full of $100 bill stacks. That's— we really want that, you know. Honestly, I do. I want people to be successful. I want them to get rich on podcasting if they can, you know. That's, you know, the end goal. A lot— some people—

okay, let me say, Tom, slippery slope to say you want people to get rich. Well, I want a different matter of, of people people wanting to make a living, right? You know, have a reasonable return.

Absolutely.

You know, in their investments.

And if someone has a good idea, starts a great business and builds it to maturity and has an exit, I'm, I'm happy for people that do that. They get an exit, put some extra dollars in their pocket. That, that to me is— and if a show is successful, it grows a show, grows an audience, whatever way they monetize, V for V, advertising, whatever it may be, whatever way they're successful I'm happy for him. I really don't like people to see failure. I don't. But it's just, you know, some things are kind of ironic. Yeah. Um, yeah, because, you know, honestly, I could have been along on that ride if things had changed years ago. You know, there could have been— I could have been part of that slide, uh, maybe if I was still around. If we'd have got bought, you know, who knows? But it's, it is a, it is a curious time.

I've been through that too. I've been with companies that had, you know, I worked at for a while and then I left and they went public or they had a big fundraise or they sold to another company or something like that. And I was gone.

So, so 21,000 to 2,000 2,112. That's from Dave Jones. Game changer, Todd. We've been asked to do this numerous times but always said no. This is always something that hosting companies should be doing, not us. About PodcastMirror, Dave also say Podbean actually declares the namespace, but I only think they support a couple of tags so far. Oh, okay, that's good if they do. So, um, again, uh, and it's not a lot. I think we did 8 tags channel level. Um, so again, it gives— that's actually most of the tags, isn't it? No, no, no, no, no, no, there's, there's more. Again, where we're missing though is, again, I can't do items. Some of the really, really cool stuff that's happening right now is happening at the item level— value timestamps. Uh, there'll be some more we can add, but basically here's the deal. I'm gonna watch adoption. And if we get enough adoption on Podcast Mirror where people are using 2.0 tags or features, then I'll start to invest more money in it. Maybe we'll do some, because it's going to be tricky. Because if to inject something into an episode-level item, that's a whole nother level of magic. That's a whole nother level of magic. That we'd have to do. Another $21.12 from Dave. The problem is that exit became the goal when Spotify came in and threw $2 billion around the room. The product itself got lost. Some people did. Some people got lost. The rest of us have been sitting in here and digging in the trenches and, you know, and digging ditches. We've been busy, you know, building things. So. Yeah, you know, and be honest with you, you look at that exit that, uh, the anchor had, you know, they were on— they were, they were, they were out of money. They were gasping for air, and they got that Hail Mary of $100+ million, whatever it was, and it came within this close of being gone, you know.

And, uh, yeah, that's what happens when you build a business without any kind of monetization or business model.

And, and, and, you know, and I had told— I've told this story already. I was in with the Spotify group a few months later, and I'm like, who sold you this bill of goods? Why did you, you know, why in the— and I just, I said it to him. I said, why in the world would you have spent this much money on that property? And oftentimes— and Dave, maybe you probably know this, and we're talking to Dave Jones who's listening— Maybe there's always— investors are always looking to scratch other investors' backs. It's almost like this quid pro quo. It's almost like, okay, company X, Y, and Z have invested in this and they're looking for an exit and we want them to be friends. And, you know, then the exit price gets exaggerated because they— it's almost kind of that type of a thing. I feel, maybe not, but I want, I want the person that negotiated a deal for Anchor on my team, I want that guy negotiating my exit if I ever get to that point, you know, because holy crap, you know, talk about a multiple that was off the chart. Um, you know, that's, that's whatever, you know, if someone's willing to pay that kind of money I'll take the cash any day of the week. Come to me with $100 million, I'll retire, you know.

But so, yeah, it's interesting what, what has happened to that brand. You know, it, it had a big impact on podcasting.

There's no question about that. Still, it's still gaining a lot of shows.

Yeah, but oh yeah, you know, it's not growing as fast as it was in the early days.

We had, you know, and you know, they've convoluted the, the, you know, one of our support guys, and maybe I shouldn't say this, but someone said, I want my video on Anchor, and we're like, they will not take an RSS. I mean, and it went up, they want their video on Spotify, and we keep saying they will not take our video feeds. The only way you can get video on Spotify is you have to go direct.

You have to directly upload it.

Yeah, they go over there direct. That's the only way you can get it there. And they're like, why? You're on pass-through. Well, yes, they'll take our audio, but they won't take our video. It's the carrot that says, hey, come on over here. They could very easily take our video feeds, right? Tomorrow they could flip the switch. They could take it tomorrow, but they won't because it would probably take some development on their side to support that. Nah, if they can take in video now, why? It wouldn't be a lift. They could do it if they wanted to. They don't. It's a marketing ploy. Yeah, the only way you get your video over here is you come over and you host over here.

Plus, the honest answer to that is that most people in industry don't view video RSS feeds, right, as, as much of a play anymore. That's true. So, which kind of a little bit leads into the kind of next topic that we want to maybe talk a little bit about. I mean, I'm not here to just kind of give, give kind of a bad talk to an article that came out, uh, necessarily, but just want to clarify some things because I think this article I'm talking about is one that was written by Stephen Goldstein. And I, I totally appreciate Steve. He's my neighbor here in Connecticut and And I think he, he does a lot of good things for the podcasting industry. I think he, you know, he hosts some great panels and talks about podcasting and stuff, but he put this article out just the last couple of days. Uh, it's called The Three Eras of Podcasting. And I guess I was a little surprised. Um, but maybe in some ways, maybe I shouldn't, but he's now teaching a course at the, at the university in New York City called NYU on the business of podcasting. And so he's, he's teaching young people about the, the creating a business around podcasting. It's kind of the concept here. But he, he wrote this article kind of specifying out the three eras of podcasting, which is trying to, trying to say that, you know, we're in these kind of like these different phases of podcasting's kind of growth and development. And I'll, I'll list his number one, which is the MeUndies era, which was a little bit, um, in the dawning days.

It says the dawning days.

Okay, it's the MeUndies era. Said this first era was the golden age when podcasting was finding its rhythm. So the name of the game was authenticity with baked-in ads forming the backbone of monetization strategy. So keep in mind, everything that's being viewed here is being viewed from the lens of monetization, which is actually, um, not an accurate portrayal of the early stages of podcasting. It was opposite of that. Absolutely. So, so you're kind of just taking this position that this is kind of like the first era of podcasting. That was all about monetization and, and host endorsements and all stuff like that actually wasn't all—

I was ridiculed and lost half my audience when I announced a book deal. How dare you? How dare you take money for the art of podcasting?

You're a sellout. You know, I got— oh, I got given all sorts of flak because I had a radio show, Brutalized, and, and I was running advertisements on my radio show and they were making it into my podcast and I was getting criticized for being a sellout. And there were people that were taking endorsements back then that were actually trashing their advertising. Yeah, they were podcasts. I mean, I mean, Steve is true that authenticity was— oh, it was authentic.

All right.

Right. But what he's missing is the inverse orientation of an earlier era. So yeah, yeah. What I told Steve is there's actually 4 eras of podcasting. The first era was anti-commercial. Oh, big time. Right. So, and then this, this next era, which is, I'm not sure what the MeUndies is really all about.

And actually, Rob, starting about 2005, right? No, early 2006, I had to beg shows. Beg, beg, beg, beg. I have an advertiser for you. I can get you monetized. We can make you substantial car-to-pay money. I mean, car payment money. No, I don't want any advertising. I had to beg shows to take advertising, and that lasted a while.

Yeah. And, and let's also be frank about it too. This MeUndies, um, is a brand, right, that was an advertiser. And so I think what he's using that term is to describe that was the era of, of, let's say, Blue Apron and things like that, which is which is true. I mean, I think that there was a small amount of advertising that was being put into podcasting. And the kind of the date reference that he talks about in this one section, because he mentioned in October of 2014, Apple took the giant step of embedding its podcast app natively in all iPhones, right?

That was an inflection point.

Well, it was an important inflection point, but I don't know that it was really at the root of any kind of era. No, no, no. So, you know, I think that, you know, he's kind of missing because, you know, let's be honest about, you know, Steve wasn't around back then.

I will say the 2004 to 2008-9 was the really high anti-advertising period, but around anti-commercialism of anything. And around 2009, it kind of, it What happened was some bigger shows came in. Adam Carolla and some others around that time, '08, '09, came in where they were big, massive audiences that didn't exist prior to that, where all of a sudden then he's running 3, 4 ads, not very effectively either. Um, matter of fact, I can talk about a $20,000 ad deal that was run on a certain big show at the time that got goose eggs for results because the host actually kind of dogged the product while he was doing the host endorsement, and he got paid $20 grand for that. Whereas I knew what was going to happen, and I had asked the advertiser— I had begged the advertiser not to run the advertising in the show because I said, you're going to waste your money. I made them sign a waiver, said I will not give you any, uh, make goods. You're not going to come back and not pay it. I'm advising against this. I had like a legal document that they signed And then when they went and run that ad on that specific show, because of the way it was portrayed by the host, even though we had a great script, zero, zero conversions. They still wrote me my $20 grand. I paid the podcaster, but I was like, you didn't listen to me.

So though I would say, Todd, this article, if it's taken from the perspective of the eras of podcast monetization, it's probably fairly accurate. But if he's talking about podcasting just in general, as far as the title of the article, The Three Eras of Podcasting, yeah, doesn't say the three eras of podcast advertising. Oh, I got you. So, so that's where it kind of caught me a little bit off because, you know, And, and so his second era—

hold on a second, Tom says the first era was the pirate era, which is fine too. I don't have a problem with that either. Yeah, I think it's about right.

It's, it's true as well. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I think that there is an era missing here. And I, believe me, I love the conversation of talking about trying to, uh, put the different eras in podcasting in their context. I, I, I think it's a great discussion because it's a way to kind of help new people to the medium to really understand how this medium has evolved. Because if they understand each of these eras, yeah, they will have a better contextual orientation to why the medium looks like it does today, right? Um, because there are aspects of the earlier eras in every— even today it's still there if you look at the medium from a a viewpoint of historical knowledge. Um, there, most of the podcasting space is not monetized, right? Right. That takes you back to an earlier era.

Well, still the space is— still the space is mostly non-monetized.

Non-monetized, right. And people don't always do podcasts just to make advertising.

I was in a meeting today, I can't say where, who, or with who, and they said this if we implement this— and I can't talk about what they want to implement— this will bring the advertisers to the small shows. And I laughed. I laughed out loud. I, I literally laughed. And, and the Zoom meeting stopped. It was kind of like, why are you laughing? I said, I've been waiting for this for, for since literally 2008. Right. And you know how many times I've heard this? Yeah.

Well, it's a recurring theme.

Yes.

And I don't know, Todd. I mean, I, I'm pretty open to this too. I would love it that podcasters can make money from their shows. Me too. It's just, it's proven over the years to be just not something the medium really wants. I mean, I mean, it doesn't want, not everybody wants to make money from their shows like that.

Yeah.

Not everybody does.

And that's always been okay. And half of those that say they do don't answer their email.

Right.

Right.

Exactly.

It just passes them right by. They did. Hey, I saw this deal come in, man. I said, yeah, the deadline on that was 21 days ago.

Sorry.

Right. Okay.

In the second era of podcasting, I want to clarify this is the throwing spaghetti against the wall era. Expansion and Experimentation. Oh, okay. So this, this phase saw podcasting diversity expanded like never before. With the introduction of dynamic insertion, audio ads turned sophisticated. It wasn't just about placing an ad, but delivering it to the right listener at the right time. Big companies saw the potential and rushed in.

I— so they still aren't getting it right.

Well, I hate to say, but dynamic ad insertion has been around podcasting since probably— I think Lipson deployed it first back in like 2006.

Yeah, we were a few years later. I think I have to look at our timeline, right? Maybe 2008, 2009 or something like that.

Right. And I was working on pretty powerful dynamic ad insertion when I was working at PodcastOne back in 2014. So, you know, in some ways his first era and the second era are kind of blending together because that's not really when dynamic—

I think the spaghetti phase really has happened multiple times. Well, it's happened over the whole lifespan. Well, it's been like splat 2010, splat 2012, splat 2014, and fall off the wall. Right, right. Yeah. The better way is chewing gum. Let's not use spaghetti. Let's start chewing gum on the wall. And some stuck, some didn't, right? Well, the problem is not that much stuck. And some people came, went, came back, and have left again, you know, or maybe a third time.

Some companies. Yeah. So, I mean, maybe, Todd, I should write an era of podcasting article like this, and I'm sure it would be quite different than this.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure I'd have fun tearing it apart too. You know, I, I think it's a fun story. It is, you know, and it's, it's— I think it's, uh, I keep calling it evolution. I wanted to, you know, early days, we're in a revolution, baby. Oh, you know, it's never been a revolution. It's always been this evolution, and it's a continuum.

Adam Curry wanted to make it a revolution. He's the one that did the podcast talking about riding the— yeah, yeah, you know, rocket.

But you know, that was a great— that still is one of the best opening, opening, uh, trailers to a podcast ever. You know, a matter of fact, uh, Dave, if, if you're still listening, send me that if you can find that segment. You know, I got a small clip where it's small. I got so much strapped to my—

yeah, to my ass. Riding to the future.

You know, that is still to me one of the best openers ever to any podcast that I've ever listened to. Um, but I think that, uh, it's— I think what we are seeing though is that what big companies have found out, this is hard. It's hard work, you know. It's hard to have compelling hits. It's, it's just like— I think it's just like TV, and they try to make these hits and they spend a lot of money doing it and Some stick and some don't. Um, and yet you have, you know, people with, you know, I look at it every day. I'm in my stats and I'm looking at our top 50 and it shows that you're doing half a million, half a million downloads or listens per listen. And, you know, they've been around forever. No one, they're not any top 200 list, but yet they're consistently doing half a million ever and They're out there just rocking it, and it's just one, one lady or one guy, and, you know, they don't have a big budget. They, they just have compelling content, right?

Yeah.

And, and so go ahead.

Oh, I was just gonna jump to the third era of podcasting, um, which is the what's a podcast era. So The visual paradigm shift. So it says, as achieving hits and durable titles became more challenging, podcasters focused attention on pushing and pulling more marketing levers to reach audiences. Yeah, once a purely auditory experience, um, our, our medium has now stepped into the visual limelight.

I don't agree.

It's not the limelight. It's, it's totally missing the historical aspect of this. Um, this whole video with podcasting is not new. It's not— people have been asking what's a podcast since it started, right? Right, right. And this blending between audio and video has always been with podcasting. It's only been less so because of the dominance of YouTube. Um, but it's always been there. This show is an example of it. Yeah. Um, We've been doing video podcasts. We've been doing video for years and years and years and years and years, way back in the first era of podcasting. So I'm not saying that this show is necessarily indicative of the whole industry. I'm just saying that it's, it's more like this video thing is more like a kind of like a renewed energy around video. It's not something new. And actually, the only thing new about it is, is YouTube is actually embracing the idea.

And I'm actually kind of excited because we've actually got people interested in video podcasting again. You know, for years, for years, we were the lone wolves. Tom goes on to say the early GoDaddy, Audible days in the late 2000s were definitely spaghetti days. Well, I'm telling you that for me, it was Audible, GoDaddy, and Citrix GoToMeeting. You know, without GoDaddy, without Citrix GoToMeeting, I would not be here. Here. Blueberry would not be here. Um, you know, they carried us for, you know, those early years, you know. And I mean, literally, it carried the company, those two advertisers alone. Um, you know, and right back here, you know, GoDaddy still sponsor my tech show. And, you know, knock on wood, thank God they, they renew every month. But it's, uh, you know, I still have to deliver. But at the same time, the Um, you know, some of the stuff GoDaddy did back in some of those days with its prior owner, whoo, you know, it wouldn't— that, that company wouldn't have survived in today's environment had something happened what happened maybe 10 or more years ago happened today. They would lose their customer base like that. They'd be out of business because the The times have changed. And, you know, they were, they were very smart finally to pivot and not be, how should we say it, so male. What's the word I want to use? I don't know. Male dominant? Yeah. Well, they are now have a diversified message. They understand their customer base is much greater than just a bunch of male geeks.

So that's how this medium started, to be honest. I'm not, you know, I don't think any of us can look at the history of this medium. I mean, in order to be involved in this medium, it required you to be a geek. You couldn't start in this medium unless you had technical skills, because there just weren't the tools there to do it. And that attracted, you know, the people like us.

I wrote a kind of tongue-in-cheek article for Sonya for her upcoming release of our magazine and basically kind of talks about the history, kind of a little bit of my history without really going into too much details. And I've probably forgotten more than I've, you know, it's just, you know, there's so many years behind us at this point. And it was kind of interesting to do that memory lane. I have a document that kind of has some dates and some timelines and achievements and stuff like that that I've kept over the years. But the, the evolution of this space, in some instances we are no better off today than we were in 2004 or 2005. You know, what are, what are we still challenged with? We're still, we're still challenged with number one, growing shows. We're still challenged with helping podcasters that want to monetize, monetize and to grow, right? And you know, those are still two of the main things that I, you know, deal with on a daily basis with podcasters. So even though the discovery thing, Todd, that's what everybody's been talking about for like 20 years, even though it's— we're 19 years later, um, almost at this point, um, not 20, almost 19 years later, um, actually we are at 19 years now. We are, we're coming up on 20 here. Yeah, I mean, my show's coming up on 19. You know, October 9th will be 19 years for my personal show. But it's, it is some of the same challenges we had even those early days. Now granted, yeah, being early, yeah, there was some advantage there. But those listeners, or some of those listeners, are still with me for 19 years, but 99% of them are not.

Are not, right.

So I, they've moved on to other shows. So one says, oh, you had this great advantage of being early. Well, I had a greater advantage early just to kind of build a show, but at the the same point to maintain a show and continue to grow and still have support and still have engagement, you know, all these years later. That wasn't because I was early. Matter of fact, it's harder because I'm the old dude now, you know.

And so, so this, this also, this comment in the article too, once a purely auditory experience, he's talking about podcasting, our, our medium has now stepped into the visual limelight. Well, Steve, I have to say, I, I was friends with some CEOs of some, um, startup companies in the early days of this medium. Um, one was called Revision3, um, one was called, uh, How Stuff Works. Yep. Uh, which was acquired by the Discovery Channel, uh, built their entire company, startup company, into a multi-million dollar company on video podcasting, right? And making that show available on YouTube as well as on an RSS feed. So, you know, this is not a new phenomenon, right? What we're seeing happen here, this happened in a very significant degree many years ago, probably from probably 2007 through probably— it started to decline because of YouTube's dominance to some degree. Uh, probably coming into probably 2014 or so.

Well, you look in that era of Revision 3, TWiT, How Stuff Works, all that was right there kind of in line.

Huge programs. I mean, those were, those were, you know, Ask a Ninja. Remember that series? Yeah. And those were huge programs and they were extremely popular and was really indicative of the kind of mirroring of podcasting between audio and video back in the era. I mean, I built a video podcast app inside a Windows Media Center back in 20—

2010. There's another show— oh, I gotta go over to the Podcast Awards and look at prior winners to tell you they're still around, but they're primarily not necessarily a podcast anymore. It's— oh, it's a news Oh man, as soon as I say it, people are gonna know who it is. Let me go look and see if I can find their name in the history. But again, there's a whole bunch of examples.

Yeah, I think it's, you know, I guess the bottom line of what I'm saying is that the, the history of podcasting is not easy to fit into specific eras because there's a lot of things that have been tried in the past that failed and that maybe are working now that maybe failed in the past. And so it's a very convoluted story is what it is, and it's very difficult to put it into buckets because there's a lot of linkages with the past into the present. And that's why your comment about this being an evolution is, is really, I think, a better representation of what this medium has gone through. It's not distinct eras that have very distinct, um, things that, that necessarily happen because there's a lot of linkages between the past and the present.

Ah, I can't find this. I'm trying to dig through here. I know they won one year and I'm just—

so, you know, but again, I'm not going to dig on Steve too much because, I mean, I think it's, it's just drawing clarity on what I'm fearful is that people are going to get the wrong impression here about what the history of podcasting is.

But most people don't care. Well, they don't care what Todd and Rob think about the history.

Well, they don't, and that's exactly true. Um, and, but I do think that people reading this article are typically newer people to the medium, and this is what they're going to think is what the history is and what the current present is. It's, you know, another line in here that emphasizes the result of this is the lines between podcasts and visual shows are blurring. And the majority know there is research that's showing that YouTube is becoming more prominent in the podcasting space. But is that more— is that a result of YouTube, or is that a result of, of podcasters? I think it was Young Turks, 2012. They were another one that built the—

were successful, and they were. And they were— the year they won, they had in the Podcast Awards in 2012, I had best video podcast In 2011, it was This Week in Tech. In 2010, it was TED. TED was distributing stuff via podcast. So I only had that category starting in 2010. So look at this. TED won in 2010. 2011, This Week in Tech. 2012 was The Young Turks. 2013, Rob Greenlee has a podcast. Yep, there was no— there was no War Zone that I did in 2014. 2015, it was Night Attack. And then I think we dropped Best Video Podcast because it faded from popularity around 2015. So I dropped the YouTube— I dropped the video podcast category in 2015, and there hasn't been one since. But you look at Young Turks, they're still— they're still massive. They have a massive YouTube channel. Right. Just let me look.

I'm 90% sure they're still— you know, in, in this conversation about what's a podcast, I, I think what is a more interesting conversation to have is that, well, what is the aspects of what's happening right now really, really a legitimate kind of like difference now between the past and the present.

See, look at these guys have got a 5.75—

5.57 million subscribers on YouTube, but they started as a video podcast a long time ago, right?

These guys have been around a long time. Yeah, a long time. And I don't know how long they've had a YouTube channel, probably from the very beginning, I would suspect, if I went into their history, you know.

So that's what started to happen I think it was probably back in 2013, 2012, something like that, where, where these media companies were starting to fork their content. They were trying, they were making it available as a video podcast, but they were increasingly building their, yeah, their subscriber base and their audience on YouTube.

Just, just think if Revision3, for some of those shows, there was, you know, I can't remember what, who did, who bought Revision3, or did they The Discovery Channel bought, right? Now, most people, you know, you don't hear too much about Lauria anymore, um, but, you know, with certain personalities that, that shifted with that, you know, that in one of the— that's one of the reasons why, you know, the reason this show— I'll be honest with you, when I started video podcasting, I think on episode 600 which would have been about 2010, I think, was when I started video podcasting. And I think that's about the time we started this show too. I will have to go back and look because it was Saturday Morning Tech then. The only reason, the only reason we did video podcasting and streamed live, and I think we were striving then on Ustream, I think that was the platform, and then we moved to Blab and 2 or 3 others. And we could only do one stream at one time. We could only be on one platform was when I did my show in Hawaii, it was 8 PM Pacific. I mean, 8 PM Hawaiian, 11 PM Pacific, 2 AM Eastern. And then most of the people that watched the video podcast was coming in from Australia because they were awake. Everyone else was asleep. And I wanted, I wanted some interaction. That was the only reason I did video. Why did I want to have people really kind of doing this, right? And then for me, it was a— it was purely for the interaction piece. It was just like right now, we got Ross, we got Tom in, in the YouTube chat right now all making comments. Um, and I wanted that interaction because I wasn't getting it from the audio podcast. I wasn't live audio streaming. So, and then when you and I started the Saturday Morning Tech and I did the show at 6 AM or whatever ridiculous time we started when I was in Hawaii, 9 AM or whatever it was your time, um, the— and then switch that show to this show. It's, you know, we did on one show we decided to change the name of the show. We did it because we wanted the, the interaction of the audience like we're getting right now. Um, no, that was a big reason. Ross said The Young Turks had a channel on a now-defunct platform called Firetalk in 2016. When I left Blab for Firetalk. But yet The Young Turks were kicking in 2010. So Brand Ross also says a lot of podcasters that have huge audiences for their YouTubers of the show and they call them podcasts. That's where the focus on YouTube has come from. It's probably, it's probably true. Tom says, I can give you 3 eras. Well, Tom, what are those 3 eras? Ross also says, does the article get into all the ways podcasters monetize without running ads? No, I don't think so. I don't think it talks about affiliate links in the notes, promoting your own product and services, merch, Patreon. And again, you know, there's this phenomenon known around affiliate things that, you know, I've talked about in the show years past. I can take— I bet you I could do it today. I bet you I could replicate this. I can tell you, Ross, if I'm going to pay you $25 CPM to promote Red Bull. Let's just say Red Bull. Let's say I'm going to pay you to promote Red Bull. And I tell Ross's twin, if there was such a thing, and I clone in another dimension, and I told Ross's clone in the another dimension to have an affiliate deal with Red Bull, the CPM campaign would outperform the affiliate campaign by 10 times.

Why? I don't know.

It just does. It just does. It's true. Hundreds. I have hundreds of campaigns that we just want to run affiliate. I'm like, no, it's going to fail.

Well, I think it's because the host has a little more passion for it because there's more of a commitment there on both, both parties.

The ads sound the same. And I don't know why they perform different. Must be some reason. There's something, some inflection in voice, some motor— there's something. If someone can unlock it, if someone can— I— this— if someone can unlock that, we can make a lot of money. And you can go back in years past and find where I've said this before. I've said the same thing. There's something psychological that happens between affiliate and paid endorsement.

I don't know. Yeah. So do we think, Todd, that as you look out 2 or 3 years from now— so if I take the premise that Steve's coming up with here about this third era, right, of what's a podcast, right?

Sure. I think leaving the technical side aside, right?

Yeah, I think from a, from a practical perspective and a reality-based perspective, I do think that, um, that question is being asked not as much because people really want to know the answer, uh, that's anything different than what they already perceive. It's more like there's this feeling that we need to expand what the term means. And, and it's not that people are asking, well, what's a podcast? I think most people know what a podcast is. No, what we're faced with is people thinking that they need to think about podcasts as a much larger thing than it has been historically known for.

I think there's another dynamic here, and maybe what you're saying is maybe true from a psychological standpoint, but I also think that some— and I've heard this more than once— some podcasters think that I can't succeed and get big enough with audio to make money. I have to do video in order to get my audience big enough to succeed. And I'm, I'm sorry, but I believe that's a false premise. Good content, good content, good executed engaging content, whether it be audio or video, is going to succeed. I don't believe— maybe you'll adapt the skills and the personality to have a better successful video podcast than you would an audio podcast. But if you are not succeeding as a audio podcaster, I would say first, before you make the jump to start doing video podcasts, and I'm— and when I say it, I want you to do a real one, not one that's over on one of that, that other thing that we've been talking about and we're streaming on right now. Um, I want you to think about fundamentally, what are you doing with your show? Are you making it easier for your content to be found? Are you putting in the work doing show notes? Are you doing the social promotion? Are are you sleeping, breathing, living this, building it 24/7? Well, yeah, if it isn't your second job, then don't complain if your show's not growing. And you may not be getting paid for your second job.

Yeah, I think the problem that happens is people's expectations exceed the reality of what their experience will likely be.

And that's one of the challenges. I look at some of these super talented people out there and I'm amazed. And I try to think, how can I replicate? I can't, because their personality is their personality. You look at Howard Stern, love him or hate him, the guy is a master. Of an interviewer. You may not like his politics. Matter of fact, him and his wife are having— I heard they're having a fight over the COVID thing. It doesn't matter, but he still is a master at doing interviews because he has a big team. They do great research. He has questions to ask that no one else has ever asked. So what is it to be a great podcaster? You got to do the research, you got to do the work, you gotta—

you gotta put the time in.

Yeah, well, it's true. And a lot of shows won't make it to 2 years. It takes 2 years for someone that is out. Rob, did you know me in 2004 before we started podcasting?

No, no, no, but I, I met you in what, 2005?

Right. Because what did I have? I had a podcast. I had a failed blog.

I was a—

I didn't have a successful blog either. I had a— I had a— what's the word we want to use? I had a bird excrement blog. I was not a good writer. Thank God for Grammarly today. Because if it wasn't Grammarly, I still— when I took English in high school and college, man, I'm telling you, the red pen flowed. So, and I'm not— I still destroy the English language. So we started the podcast, we were all together having fun, didn't know, making up any rules, having a good time. We weren't worried about them. I wasn't worried about the money. I knew I spent a lot of money until I got home and, you know, showed my wife the bills.

She's like, I wouldn't feel too bad about it because chat GPT-4, um, is torn apart by Grammarly too, right?

Right. But anyway, I got home and, you know, too bad the money situation became a problem when I showed her, well, I'm spending about $800 a month to keep this show on the line. Oh, you're what? Yeah, I had my own boat, you know, sinking $1,000 every month into the hobby at the time. People complain about their $20 hosting bill, you know, and you know, so, you know, I was given a limit. I say, you— she basically put her finger in my chest and said, you got 2 years, buddy. 2 years. 2 years to make money, or you're going to pull the— pull the plug on this train, you know. So I was motivated. Yeah, you were. And when Wiley came calling with the book deal, I was like, yes, get out of jail! Saved by the book. But what was funny was I spent every penny on that, every penny that I got advanced, that $13,000 I got for doing the advance. I spent every penny on that keeping the podcast online the first year.

Yeah, and getting all your gear and all that stuff.

It was just the way it was, you know, because it cost a lot. You know, it's changing.

But so now we have—

I had my own servers co-located in co-location, so no one wants to hear any of this, you know, right? So, but, you know, there was people that were— that's— and you had to have money to be able to have your show online in those early days because if you build any audience, oh my God, and then let's see, a fortune. Then Lipson showed up and it was like the Holy Grail, you know. No wonder Lipson has these lifetime fans is because they, they save people thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.

It was expensive to host a popular podcast back in those days. That's why I built my own servers and had my own colocation facilities my own T1 connections and all that stuff. So now, cheaper to do that than it was to pay somebody else.

So now you don't have to worry about the money, you just got to worry about building great content, right? You know, and we were investing so much money, guess what? Guess what we had to do? And maybe it made it— made a difference. We had to build an audience.

We had to.

Yeah, it was too expensive not to. Had to build a big audience. Yeah, I remember a good friend of mine, when he started making more money than his job, he begged me, he said, do not ever say how much money I make. He was making over $100,000 a year very early, 2005, 2006. And he's, do not ever say how much money I make because my boss will fire me. Um, and he worked for a very, very big Fortune 50 company at the time. And he was one of the few that made big money in the early days, but he never announced how much money he made ever publicly, ever, ever, you know. And I know we've wandered all over the place here.

I'm sorry if we've gotten too— Yeah, Todd, I wanted to share it towards the end here. I wanted to share the news that came out. And I don't know if you saw this or not, but it appears that OpenAI is going to be integrating DALL-E 3 into ChatGPT.

Did you see this? Oh, when did that news pop?

Today? Actually, it's on their website. I can send you a link to it in the chat.

You know, I'm not a big fan of DALL-E 3 yet.

Well, but you have to look at what the next version of it looks like. Well, probably true. Yeah. So yeah, I sent you a link to it in the meeting chat.

Yeah. I can pull that up.

That's behind me. So, oh, okay. Okay. It's open. It's at openai.com/dall-e-3. Dall-e-3. 3. Right.

And that shows you examples of what the new—

It's openai.com/dall-e-3.

E dash dash 3. Oh, I don't— it came up 404. Uh, let me just do this and I'll Google it here. OpenAI.com.

Oh, that's—

okay, yeah,.com forward slash.

It'll find the story here. Okay. Uh, but really what stood out for me here was, uh, the visual output is going to be capable of embedding actually accurate English language into the image. So, oh, the ability to create episode art may be unlocked here.

Well, I've been doing pretty good with Midjourney, but I have been editing with Photoshop.

Yeah. Yeah, you've been having to layer textual on top of it, right?

Where this is going to have the ability to add it as part of the output. So if text, the text has been challenging. So they're probably doing a trick here. You probably tell it what text to overlay. Right. So that's good, you know, and yeah.

Yeah.

Jack, can you pull it up on the screen? Yeah, this is what I found.

This is probably not it, is it?

Um, uh, what's the address that you're at?

It's at openai.com research. Oh no, no, OpenAI, not open.ai.

It's openai.com, not open.ai. Hang on, it's just— I'm on the right site, I'm just not at the right URL. Okay. I hope this gets it. So it gives me 404 for that address.

I can't find what you're talking about. Oh, okay. I have it up in front of me. I mean, I can share my screen with you here.

Maybe. Oh, okay. Let me see if I see a bunch of people talking about it. But yeah, this is what I see. This is some of the stuff I see is Yeah, that's it there. Okay. Well, we'll see. Again, it's if they're putting just numbers on jerseys and that kind of stuff, then time will tell.

Well, no, if you look at some of the images actually have text on them that's actually accurate.

Yeah, this is not the one from OpenAI because nobody wants a link to the original article. I don't know why I'm having such trouble getting over there.

Let's try this. My image is all messed up now because I shared. Okay. I found it. Yeah. So that image on the left there that you see right there.

Oh, I just feel so empty inside. That was, that's cool.

In a bubble. Yeah. So that gives you a little bit of a clue of what this may be able to accomplish in the future here.

Yeah. So, yeah, that's, that's big. And, you know, it's news by the week. So we did have a couple of comments come in. Unknown caller.

Oh, what was that? My watch.

All right.

But yeah, I thought it was really interesting that this was getting integrated into ChatGPT. So if you have a paid plan, you'll be able to output images too. And my understanding is that the next version of ChatGPT will also be able to upload media to it as well.

So like audio and video, and it'll do things. 3,330 sats from Mike Dell listening live on Podverse. 3,333 sats again from Mike Dell listening live on Podverse. Thanks for the double boost, Mike. You hit it twice. Yeah. Interesting. So, you know, it's what I'm finding is I actually just subscribed for Claude too. It's why I paid the $20 a month for that. And because I started noticing my outputs were getting smaller. And so it shows me that they're tightening down. They're not giving you as much text on an original query. And so I paid for it and I'm getting a little bit more, but I won't say what we're doing internally. But boy, I tell you what, the API is a heck of a lot more— you can get a lot more output of an API than you can just by doing raw queries.

So yeah, because I've been trying to export transcripts from audio that I've been recording in various projects I'm working on and If the transcript is too long, ChatGPT will choke on it.

They'll say, too much text, I can't parse it. So this is where you have to use Claude, where you can attach a file and say, give me a summary and whatever other queries you're going to do. And if it doesn't give you, you have to really be aggressive with it and say, look at the entire transcript, summarize the entire transcript. Don't, don't, don't give me half. Give me all. You have to almost talk to it like a little child and it'll give you half of it. And then you say, okay, continue, and it'll give you the next half of it. Or you may have to say continue 3 times.

Now, where does that happen to ChatGPT as well?

Well, in ChatGPT, you know, it's not as easy to attach files, so you have to use their—

Well, you can't.

You have to cut and paste. No, you don't. You use the contextual editor. Use the advanced data analysis tool. You turn that on in settings. Yeah. In ChatGPT, there's something called advanced data analysis. Now it's typically used for— it's more inclined to be used with spreadsheets and that kind of stuff, but I've tricked it to use transcripts. As well. Um, this is the advanced data analysis is what— and it is 300 megs or something like that. So obviously a transcript won't, but this is where I was able to do data analysis on the Podcast Awards voting was using advanced data analysis from a spreadsheet. Took— actually uploaded a CSV file that was very condensed and So it's usually advanced data analysis is more inclined to be used for, um, for data, but text is data too. You just have to ask it nice. So where do you find those? It's in settings. You go over to your settings, but you do the, do the little, the little clipper, the little, the, the hamburger on the left-hand side, and it says settings and beta. And then you go to Beta Features and you turn on Advanced Data Analysis. Now again, your mileage is going to vary there, but again, I encourage you to use Claude. Claude is much better at looking at transcript text.

Claude.ai.

I went to Settings and then you see, you look for Beta. Beta features, beta settings. They go to beta features. Yep. And then there's a little slide arrow there. Okay, there it is. It says advanced data analytics, and you can turn on plugins too. So plugins are some of the cool stuff to play around with.

All right.

Yeah, I haven't played around with this stuff. Yep. But we don't want to get into it. We don't get into a full AI discussion already. We already We're already dropping people off on the livestream. But so Sony looks like they're pulling the plug. Or kind of.

Yeah, I was always a little surprised that Sony was that heavy into podcasting anyway, to be honest about it. It's kind of like Xbox being involved in podcasting. It didn't really make a lot of sense. But, but Yeah, it's interesting that they've— but I see that they're still hiring people. I saw that there was a job listing, uh, in PodNews for Sony Music for a podcast person, but yet they're, they're in the news for laying off a significant percentage of their podcast division.

So it's, again, it's too bad, to be honest with you. A lot of jobs going to be lost. And they're canceling a celebrity podcast. So, hmm.

Of course, I wonder why they highlighted this one podcast in the article. It's almost like, because they have many shows.

I don't know how many total shows do they have.

Well, they've been working on, I mean, They've had a pretty, pretty large team working on creating all sorts of different kinds of products.

Well, that's probably because it's the biggest name in the— of course, I don't pay for Bloomberg, so I don't get the full news on this.

I get the cutoff part here. Yeah, I don't see that much of the article either.

But this is a third round, and it says, "Decision to cut staff and shows follows industry contraction." That's just it. It's not a contraction. Listeners are still here. This just means, you know what that means? Money, money, money, money, money. Not as much money is coming into the space.

Yeah. Well, I guess you could say that that's a contraction if your focus is on making advertising revenue. That's right. And that's, that's kind of the common theme of the show today, is, is the, the retraction or the contraction or whatever word you want to describe what's going on in the podcasting industry is pretty isolated just to those that are involved in advertising.

So I had an interview and with one of my most favorite podcasters, uh, Erica and I had a had a podcast. We were on her podcast, Advertising Playbook Podcast, mastering long-term advertiser relationships. We talked a little bit about that during the show.

But I also—

but you know, you're talking about Heather. Heather. I'm sorry, not Heather. Yeah, not Erica. Heather.

Yeah, sorry, Heather. It's okay.

I'm gonna be on her show too. And, um, the We, you know, there was some— we had some interesting conversation, and there was a thing in there where I asked her, you know, what can we do for you? And, you know, I would just leave it out there. I'm gonna let people go out there and listen. But it was interesting what she asked of me, the someone that runs a hosting company. And, um, but we talked a little bit about the ad loads that we're hearing. And we've talked about it on this show about every 6 and a half minutes and bam, you're hit with 2 ads that suck and driving me insane. And talking about, you know, keeping ads fresh and maybe why my show on Geekness Central where the ads aren't necessarily fresh and why they don't necessarily have to be. But We also had a great conversation pre-show. Um, let's see here, let me see if I can paraphrase this here without getting too many people angry. Um, is it time, Rob, for the IEB standard to change to have the minimum play length be more than a minute? Should it move to 5 minutes before we count it as a download? I think that may be too much.

What's the number? Um, probably between 2 and 3 minutes max, probably would be my guess. So my thought, but that's just a random thought. It's not really based on looking at any kind of data or metrics, you know, because it does drive really this, that metric right there drives what a lot of the advertisers do. They want to have all their ads in the first minute.

Well, they don't all put all their ads in the first minute.

I know they don't, but I mean, if you look at the historical aspect of this, pre-rolls has been—

I'm just going to play devil's advocate here. Is, is, you know, I know what we do at Blueberry and I'm not going to go into— It's early mid-roll, right? Well, I'm just going to say that's the minimum requirement for counting a listen or a download. But do any of us really, you know, as you as a podcaster, and as you're thinking about it, thinking about the IAB spec and how they're counting plays and downloads today, should 1 minute be the minimum for a count, or should it be 3 minutes like Rob said, or should it be 5? You know, how much of that media file should be delivered before we say, yep, someone's actually listening? And we're going to count that as a play.

There's going to be a direct impact on the amount of revenue that a particular show would be able to make.

So I would change it to 5 minutes. Let me, uh, put on my bulletproof vest here and, and, you know, put some on the scales a little bit and say, is 3 minutes something we should really be looking at. I think it depends on— I know what the math is. I'm not going to say what the math is. I know what the math is.

It's— but if you put that requirement even at 3, 3 to 5, you're going to cut your accounting down probably by half, probably.

Well, that's one that's interesting. That you would say that. Maybe, maybe.

Let's say it's 3 minutes. Back up a little bit. Let's, let's apply a little bit of context to this because, because I think the historical orientation to this conversation has been that the download happens and that's what we're counting is the download, right? And but that comes out of an earlier era in podcasting right, where people subscribed and the file got delivered to their media player.

Right.

And we counted that as a download. Now people are just clicking play, right? Sure.

They're not really subscribing. In many instances, though, that player will grab a minute's worth of audio that quick.

Yeah, but is it counting what actually plays or is it counting?

They don't know. They don't know. They don't know still.

They don't know.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's still the same problem.

Same problem.

Same problem.

Because they don't have the client side data.

They still don't know if they actually listened.

Right.

They still don't know. 1 minute, 3 minutes, 5 minutes. You still don't know if they listened. Spotify knows. Apple knows. So let's say we take the 3 minutes. Would that potentially solve this issue that might be occurring with Apple querying 100 files at once and not only downloading 3? Oh, oh, I'll leave it at that. Does it? I'm gonna get shot.

I'll just leave it there. So let's put it this way, Blueberry doesn't have a problem So say that again.

So you're saying specifically in Apple, you're saying that when they will ping the RSS feed— when someone buys a new app or, you know, something gets screwed up or anything and they try to— Apple tries to download 100 episodes and they can't because it's not physically possible to do that at once, but it queries 100 at a time and only downloads 2, and then tomorrow it It'll try to download 98, and the next day, you know, keeps hitting it. So, okay, Blueberry doesn't have that issue. We don't have a counting issue because I overqualify media downloads. So Todd's, you know, Todd's thought is, you know, are we doing too little? Are we measuring too little? Recounting too early? And should we, should we have a little more of a qualified delivery to count it instead of counting it 1 minute? Should we count it at 3 or 5? I think you would have a better number of actual audience engagement the higher that number is. So, uh, Drink with Rick says a minute and a half seems decent amount of time to count as a listener who is checking out a podcast to determine if they want to continue listening or not. That would count as a listen though. Yes, it would. Today it would. But here's the thing. Majority of apps, when you are not subscribed and you click play, will probably download consistently more than just a minute.

Right.

It depends on the speed of your connection. And app. And, you know, there's, there's, they grab it in different chunks and sizes.

So.

Because you're never going to have an accurate measurement if it's based on a download. So I'll just leave this out here in the audience, you know, as a podcaster, do you think we should have a higher standard for counting something as a play and listen than just 1 minute of delivery?

I know what people in the Advertising side of things.

That's why I have my bulletproof vest on right now, Rob.

I think they would prefer that it gets count just at the point of clicking the button. I think so.

Right. Yeah.

And probably what YouTube does. But what's interesting about what's different about YouTube is that they will give you playback duration.

And that's a major factor in the metrics of evaluating the success of a program. They see all that. They see everything. They don't count when I fall asleep though.

It's still playing, you know, going to the show on YouTube. I can log in and see, right, what the— what's— what's—

how far are people listening? Hey, please everyone get on YouTube. Please everyone, when they get ready to leave for the— we don't want to tell you this, but tomorrow when you get ready to go to work, make sure you At this point, nobody's really listening anyway. Yes, they are. Click play, click play on YouTube and go to work. Actually, I think that's illegal to do. I could probably get banned off. Don't do that, don't do that.

Yeah, right. Oh, funny.

Okay, we've gone way over. Yeah, we have. We've went way over, but, uh, some juicy, juicy, juicy— go listen. To the podcast advertising playbook. Listen to the discussion Heather and I had. Link to her article, please. We appreciate it when you do that. True Native Media is her company. Yes, True Native Media.

And, uh, Rob Greenlee. I'm going to be on her show here soon, too.

Yep. I've been on her show a couple of times. It was a great time. Todd at Blueberry, Blueberry without the ease because we couldn't afford the ease, blueberry.com. @geeknews on X. I'm at @geeknews, @geeknews.chat on Mastodon. You want to experiment with Podcasting 2.0 and you're not a Blueberry, Buzzsprout, RSS.com, go over to podcastmirror.com. And if you want to see who has a standardized— who is all basically compliant, go to Podcast Standards Project. Just Google it, podcast— PSPstandards.com or Podcast Standards Project. Google that and go look at those companies that are have a certified compliant podcast RSS feed, and you'll see the list over there.

So doing a call with Charles in a day or so here.

Oh good. Yeah, maybe we'll have something to talk about there. Maybe. Hint, hint, hint. So, uh, thank everyone for watching. We'll be— I think we're back next week. I'll be heavy prepping for the Podcast Awards ceremony on the 27th, but the Podcast Awards ceremony is on the 30th. The votes are in, tallying is going on, and fraud analysis is also taking place. But I think we have our winners.

So how has the voting been as far as total numbers?

We had over 8 million people participate in the nomination round. And then we did 22,500 in the final voting round, of which 82% voted for 6 more—

6 shows or more.

Okay, those are good numbers. Yeah, good numbers. And, uh, voting was tight. It's unbelievable when it comes down to the end how, you know, some stuff is 1 and 2 votes. It's crazy.

So yeah, okay, thanks. Are we back again, uh, next Wednesday?

Yeah, we're back next Wednesday. Hot and heavy. Yeah. At some point I got to go see my new grandbaby. At some point. I don't know if— did you hear about that? I have a new grand— yeah, yeah, I have a new granddaughter. Congratulations. So at some point I got to go out to Wachena, Washington and cuddle that little one.

At some point soon I've got to go out to Seattle at some point here in October myself.

Oh, let me know so maybe we can coordinate so we're both gone. Um, Okay. All right, everyone, thanks for being here. And thanks for the chit-chat in YouTube. And the Facebook folks were quiet today, but all the action was on YouTube. Thanks to Tom Ross, Drink with Rick. Who else was in here today? A few others that came in and chatted in YouTube. Thanks so much. All right, buddy. All right. Let's see you next time, everybody. Yep. Bye. Bye.