Next Podcasting 2.0 and YouTube Music Topics with James Cridland, Podnews, and Sam Sethi, PodFans

Welcome to the New Media Show.

We're back doing the New Media Show again.

People are actually going to listen to this junk.

We do it live.

We're live right now.

We'll just do it live. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. We just can't get enough. The New Media Show, let's go. Just do it live. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. The New Media Show. If we do it live, just do it live. We're doing it live. The New Media Show. I'm like Adam Curry and you're more like John C. De Vorak.

I think I am Adam Curry and you're the old curmudgeon.

We do it live on The New Media Show again.

The New Media Show.

Technology, we make it sound so special. Yes, and we always try and make it sound so special. So thank you for joining me on a solo attempt on my part of the New Media Show minus Todd Cochran, who is on the road. So thank you so much for joining me on the show. I have a terrific show planned, and we're going to talk about kind of Podcasting 2.0 today a little bit and kind of dive into the details on that. And it's very exciting. I've got a couple of terrific guests that are certainly in the midst of that world. And I'm sure many of you are very familiar with James Cridland, the editor-in-chief of PodNews at podnews.net. He keeps us up to date every workday on what's happening around the world in podcasting. And Sam Sethi, who's the CEO of a kind of a new platform that's supporting all the Podcasting 2.0 standards, and that's at podfans.fm. Thank you so much, guys, for streaming live. I know, James, you're up pretty early down in Australia.

I'm up pretty early, but that's, that's all okay, really. Yeah.

And it's probably fairly normal. I'm sure you do this quite often.

Indeed.

Indeed.

Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a wonderful place to live, but it's also a very, very long way away, it turns out. So, and the time zone is not, is not fantastic, but still, there we are.

Yeah, and it's great. It's coming into summer for you and we're all getting cold out here. So it is.

And in fact, I have two apps on the phone. One app on the phone is my weather app, which was telling me yesterday that we have a heat wave warning for this week. And the other app that I have is a fires app, which tells me whether the, you know, whether the country is bursting into flames near me. So it's all going on.

Right, right. Well, I kind of wish I was warm now. So funny how we kind of feel in the summer months. It's like, oh, I'm so hot all the time. I want it to be a little cooler. And then we get into the cooler and then we want it to be warmer again.

But I'm sure for Sam, he's outside, you know, if he was to look outside, it would be drizzling and wet. So I don't know.

I never noticed the difference anymore. It's just constant. It is the weather. We don't have an app for it because there is no change. It's the weather.

Yes. Well, that's enough of the weather, weather talk on the podcast here. But, uh, Sam, thank you for joining again. I know both of you guys are fairly regular on this, uh, show. And then also both of you guys do your own podcast too. Why don't you share some information about that, your Pod News Weekly that you guys do together?

Over to you, James.

Go ahead and plug your podcast.

Right, yes, so, and Todd will love us plugging our podcast on this. So yeah, we need to be obviously careful there.

Anyway, yeah, I want to battle you with my audio to play over the top of it.

That's quite enough of that. Anyway, yes, so we do a weekly show which is all about podcasting, essentially much the same as yours, to be honest, without, without Todd telling you to go out and buy your own dot-com. It's called the Pod News Weekly Review. You'll find it at weekly.podnews.net. There's a lot of interviews in there. Sam is very good at finding excellent people to interview. And I'm very good at trying to make sure that it doesn't last 4 and a half hours. So yeah, but it's really good. Yeah, you should go and have a listen.

Yeah, no, I think you should. So I've been on that show before and it's terrific. And I know Sam—

You have co-hosted it.

That's true. And Sam, I know you've been working hard on this PodFans platform for what, a couple of years now? Or what's the duration?

A year and a half. Year and a half. It was last October that we, they, we started doing a little bit of it, and then we stopped, and it was like, okay, and then we really went for it last October. So yeah, it's day in, day out, every day, but I love it. Yeah, it's really cool, loving it.

And Mark, uh, Askwith, thank you for the, the comments here. It's always great to have you with us. But, um, well, let's, let's dive into it. I know I got an email from you, um, Sam, about, this alternate enclosure tag, and I thought that was an interesting, um, idea that has been, you know, talked about in the podcasting space. I mean, if I think about it, it goes way back, um, many, many years ago, back when, um, video podcasting was a big thing back in the early days of the medium. And frankly, a lot of people don't realize that, you know. I've been shocked— I shouldn't say I've been shocked, I've just been a little bit surprised that a lot of people don't really fully understand what the history of this medium has been. And there was a time fairly early in the medium when video was probably 30% of the market. I mean, true video podcasting. And there's a distinction here, and that's that the enclosure tag in the RSS was a video file. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of discussion right now about, well, what is a podcast and what is a video podcast, right? And I think we're all open to maybe expanding that definition a little bit to include what's happening at YouTube today. But there's also a lot of folks that are kind of pushing back on that too. So it's like, well, it can't be called a podcast unless it's in an RSS feed. So, so that's why I thought this was an interesting discussion, was this whole concept of trying to have an audio and video file in the RSS. And I'm just curious, you know, Sam and and James, what you think about that. I mean, what's the implications of that as you look to the future?

So I've been talking— yeah, I'll start because I started the email. I've been talking to Todd for 6 months plus now about the alternate enclosure tag. It's part of the Podcasting 2.0 namespace. It's a completely out-there ratified extension. And Todd being what you and him do, this show, for example, but also, you know, Geek News as well. You have two feeds. You have a feed that is a video feed and a feed that is a podcast feed. And I said, I said to Todd, why aren't you using the alternate enclosures? And he said, oh no, because of Apple, I have to have two feeds. I need to have one that goes as a video feed so that people can watch it in Apple as a video. Same with the podcast because they don't support the alternative enclosure. I went, fine, no problem. And that got battered back and forth between us, uh, and it led to nothing. This week, uh, Alberto from RSS.com said, look, um, I'm going to use Live to video broadcast into a number of different applications, you know, PodFans, Fountain, Podverse, PodGuru. And it was great. And for the first time, James can, you know, confirm or this up, but I think it's the first time that we've had a live event using the Lit tag with basically audio and video capability. And the Live tag also supports the alternative enclosure. So within that Live tag, you could put an audio feed and a separate video feed. So then I started looking at the New Media Show actual RSS feed. And you actually have the alternate enclosure in your live feed. You have, but what Todd or whoever has done is put in the main enclosure you've got MP3, and in the alternative enclosure you've got MP3. And then if you have a look at your video feed, you've got basically the video in the main and the video in the alternative. So the email I sent you is, look, why don't you just put the alternative closure as the video for this audio feed and put the audio in the video feed, right? So you're not having— if you scroll to the right, um, Rob, just slightly, you'll see the end where it says alternative enclosures. You'll see they're both the same file again. And it just seems to me that you've got everything there. It's not a lot of work to change one URL in one feed, one URL in another, and suddenly boom, you're supporting the alternative enclosure and you're giving people the choice to watch or to listen to you. So again, within Podfans, as you can see there, we did an experiment. We did actually that. We copied over your video feed into your audio and your audio into your video., and I just played it in PodFans. It comes up with MP3 and it comes up with a video. I clicked on the video and there you go, it plays the video in the podcast app. Not a lot of work was done, it takes 5 minutes to do, and it supports the alternative enclosure, and it gives the Podcasting 2.0 community, you know, that one leg up against what we're seeing with YouTube currently. So that was what I was talking about.

James, any thoughts from you? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things, just to sort of reel this back a little bit, I think one of the things that doesn't work very well in the podcasting world is if you've got a video feed and an audio feed, then that's essentially split. So what you're producing there is you're producing two different shows. You're producing two different shows that Apple Podcasts will treat differently, that Apple Podcasts will promote differently. And in the same way that, you know, with Google, you don't want to split your Google juice. You don't want to have copies of different things all over the place because because then Google doesn't know which to promote. Exactly the same thing goes in terms of a podcast as well. And so it's really confusing when you do a web search for, for example, the New Media Show, you end up with two different shows. One of them is the audio version, one of them is a version with video on. So really, you know, the point behind the alternate enclosure, a part of the point behind the alternate enclosure was to get rid of those additional feeds, make life easier for the listener because they've only got one New Media Show to go and find. And I think when you start having a look at, you know, some of the— and Adam will hate me calling this a new podcast app— but YouTube Music. YouTube Music, when you're listening to a particular podcast on YouTube Music, then what YouTube Music allows you to do is it allows you to flick between the audio and the video of that. Now, it's not quite the same because it's not using alternate enclosures, but that's the sort of user experience that would be quite useful to enable. So that you can have a listen to a video or an audio file. If you're commuting on the bus, you can watch the video, great. And when you get off, you can turn it back onto audio-only mode and carry on walking around. So yeah, so I think it's a really good thing if we can actually turn that on.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it really plays into this kind of convergence strategy that I'm really talking about a lot now. And this whole thing of, of trying to produce video at the same time you're producing the audio, if you can do that. And sometimes that makes sense and sometimes that doesn't. It just depends on the type of show and the format and things like that. But, you know, some podcasts will always be just strictly audio, um, and that's perfectly fine. Um, but I think that there's other shows like this one, obviously The New Media Show is a perfect example of that, and I'm doing an a new show for StreamYard now that's moving in that direction too, of having that support across all that stuff as well. It does take a little bit of work to get, you know, everything set up and get everything working properly and getting all these things. But if you can set up one account, uh, with these hosting platforms and be able to upload a video and an audio file to that account, then yeah, because right now I have to create two separate RSS feeds, one for video, one for audio, and that's kind of like, just like what you say, James, I've been thinking about this for many years, is that this combining of the two mediums makes a lot of sense, right? If a show wants to support that, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you can use alternate enclosures for other things. Yeah, Pod News, the Pod News feed, for example, the Pod News Daily feed has a video in there. It's not really a video, it's just a fancy graphic, but it's also got two different audio versions. One of those audio versions is the nice big 128K version that everybody is used to here in the West, but actually in some places like South Africa, the cost of bandwidth is massively, massively expensive. And so what we make available in that feed is a very low bitrate. It's a 16 kilobits file through Opus, which is playable on any Android phone and any KaiOS phone. So that actually, if you're in a bandwidth-starved place, you can actually get a different version of the Pod News Daily podcast, which only consumes about a tenth of the bandwidth. So you can use it for a lot of different things. But I think that actually helps us make sure that all of these different versions of the show that we produce are under one listing in Apple Podcasts, one listing in Spotify, one listing in you know, all of the other podcast apps as well. And this is actually how Spotify works already. I know that Spotify is a proprietary service when it comes to video, but yeah, if you want to turn video on, on, you know, when you're watching Joe Rogan, then it's just a little, a little one button and away you go.

Yeah, but Joe Rogan's not a podcast anymore, right, James?

Well, I mean, I mean, I mean, it is, Rob.

I know he is. I'm just teasing. But there are some in the podcast. Industry that think Joe's no longer a podcast. I know he still has his active RSS feed on Lipson, but he's not using it.

Yeah. No, I think, I think it's important. It's important for us to split the two sets of people. There are people who are very keen. It's like the, you know, the work that I've been doing for the YouTube Music app this week. YouTube Music is a really bad thing for podcast, for the podcast industry. You know, there's lots of bad things about that. For listeners, it's an amazing thing. 58% of Americans don't listen to podcasts every month. So if we can convert some of those 58% using the second largest search engine, using a massive, great big app, which is pre-installed on all new Android phones, then great. And I think we just need to bear in mind, yeah, there are things that we want that are good for the podcast industry. And then there are things that we want that are good for listeners, and they aren't always the same.

And I agree with you, that's a good example of that. And then also, you know, if— and this is how I think about it— is it— well, I mean, what is YouTube's strength? YouTube's strength is video, right? And if we're taking audio and putting it into YouTube, that's not playing to YouTube's strength. Now granted, Looking at the future, maybe YouTube can become a stronger consumption app for audio. It's never going to be audio, it'll always be a video, but that's more of a technical distinction, not a UI distinction.

But YouTube Music, I think the difference is, and this is the hugely complicated thing, is that YouTube Music is an audio app. That's exactly what YouTube Music is. So it's a separate app which does audio, and it does audio for music, and it does audio for podcasts in there as well. And you can subscribe to RSS feeds in YouTube Music. So I think, I think that's the other sort of side of it, you know, that we just need to be careful about. So actually YouTube is a brand and it's got a video player and an audio player in there as well. And the Pod News Weekly Review, by the way, looks fantastic if you subscribe using RSS. It's got no, weirdly, no Podcasting 2.0 features. Can't think I don't think why, but nevertheless it looks fine. But of course you can get the Pod News Weekly review as a smushed-up audio video file on the proper YouTube as well. So yeah, but you know, so with all of this, all of this comes back to alternate enclosures being really helpful for people like YouTube and for people like Spotify, neither of which are using this particular standard. You know, it's early days, but also useful for many other use cases as well.

Yeah, I mean, that's a good— that's a good point. I think that, you know, it does seem a little silly to me that they didn't embrace the import of video files through RSS.

Yeah, I can probably understand. I can probably understand why that would be a massive backdoor. Sam, you were trying to jump in there.

Well, no, I was just saying with, with Todd and Rob's show, for example, if you took what you're doing now, Rob, and you took the URL and you put it into the live item tag and you took the audio, you wouldn't have to broadcast this on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, right? As you're doing now, you could have then said, hey, you can go and look at it on any Podcasting 2.0 app live right now using that same feed, the one we've got here. Right. So I could watch it or I can listen to it in there. But what would also be clever is that you could have people paying you in sats to stream while they're watching that, because they can't do it as we are now through Twitter or through YouTube. Um, and the last part is what was really interesting from PodCon, uh, in Mexico, uh, is that there was a back channel for conversations. So yes, within StreamYard, you've got the ability to accept comments, but also within the podcasting apps using boosts, again, with payments, you could have a back channel where there is a conversation.

So.

What you are doing now is you are creating a live audio and video feed and broadcasting that out to endpoints through StreamYard. But you could take that same URL and put it into your live item tag of your feed.

Mm-hmm.

Use PodPing to alert all the podcasting 2.0 apps. We're live, which is really what StreamYard did to Twitter and everyone else. And at the same point, have those people who are participating in the world of micropayments paying you as well. So again, it's an evolution, not a revolution, and it takes steps. But one of those steps I was trying to get you and Todd to do was to switch your audio and video in those feeds. So you had one of each in the same feeds. Keep two feeds. Todd's never gonna, for now, take two feeds and smash them into one because he will always argue Apple, Apple, Apple need to have, have a separate feed. But you can be smart and use the alternative enclosure so that Podcasting 2.0 apps, those people watching and listening there, will have a choice.

And that's all I was trying to say. Yeah, just to kind of clarify on something, I am streaming through Todd's channels right now, so it's possible maybe that it did trigger a ping out to all of the, the Podcasting 2.0 apps for this episode.

Is that? Sam will check.

I'm just checking while we're in the background.

Hold on, caller. Might as well. But it is what I found really weird. So my other job is a radio consultant and I talk to radio companies and I help them understand, you know, what's coming up next. And I have so far spoken 4 different continents about the live tag and saying, you run a radio station, you have a podcast of your breakfast show. 'Why are you not using the live tag? If you were to implement it today, you would be the first radio station, proper radio station, to be implementing it. Why are you not implementing it?' And it's interesting, I mean, you know, Rob, you won't find it particularly unusual that the radio industry has looked at progress and gone, 'Oh no.' But it's interesting to see that, you know, that is a real obvious slam dunk for a radio station to be running a live tag in their podcast feed to pull people to their live stream. And still I'm not seeing any radio stations doing it. Now, of course, you know, if you're a large radio station like iHeart, it's going to be quite difficult for someone to make a decision to go ahead with that. But if you're a smaller station, then, you know, I'm surprised that we haven't seen, you know, more of that actually happening.

What do you think is holding that back, James?

I mean, oh, I mean, I think, you know, I mean, in the same talk I show, so I show, it's a very good talk, by the way, I highly recommend it. I show lots of different tools from podcasting and that you can use in the world of radio. And one of the tools I use is Descript. And I show actually a podcast that Sam and I recorded about 3 years ago where I get the name of a podcast wrong, except I don't really, but then I change it on the fly using the AI voice clone that it had at the time. And I show this to radio companies and they go, oh wow, we've never seen anything like this. And I'm there thinking, it's 3-year-old technology. It's been out for years. Why have you not seen it? And I think a lot of it comes down to there are specific processes that the radio industry has. Where they've not really bothered to look outside and they've just gone on with what's been done in the past. Yeah, and to an extent, we just need to be careful about doing that in terms of the podcast world as well, right? You know, we're seeing more and more people now support new features like Podroll, which went live in a number of different podcast hosting companies this week, and various other things such as that. And I think that's great. Great, and I think we should probably be careful not to sort of, you know, sleep on our laurels, so to speak. We need to, you know, keep on pushing new ideas, and eventually Apple and Spotify will wake up, smell the coffee, and go, oh, you know what, that would be quite a good feature for us to include as well.

Rob, just one—

Yeah, go ahead, Sam. No, the bat signal has not been sent out, but normally it is sent out, so normally the New Media Show is sent through to podcasting2.apps. The other thing I'd say is James knows this. I used to run a radio station, which we did 40 live podcast shows per week, and we used an RMTP server and we broadcast it on Alexa, web, mobile, and also on DAB. It's all there. What wasn't there was the live item tag at the time, so we couldn't use that. But if I was still doing that, what happened over in Mexico with albertoandrss.com is a very simple setup. It takes what comes from the laptop, puts it through an audio and video grabber, through to an RMTP server that then broadcasts that out, right? And that in itself now could happen even easier than it was when I was doing it 3 or 4 years ago with River Radio. And so, as James said, what we've got to do is get these case studies in front of the radio stations, in front of conference organizers. So, you know, Podcast Movement, The London Podcast Show should be doing exactly the same thing as PodCon. That's when we want to get this. The technology is now matured and we are now ready to actually use it, you know, eat your own dog food. And we are ready. And, and I guess, James, it's probably going to be another 12 months before, you know, you've done the rounds of keynotes and everyone else has picked up on it. But, you know, it's now that we're ready to start to put all the pieces together that we've been building and start to create solutions for events, radio, and podcasters.

So as far as your guys' perspective on this, I mean, what would a platform like a StreamYard need to do to simplify this, to, to make it available in an RSS feed? What we're doing here kind of into the, the LitTag, is that something that would have to be manually added in the publishing process of that RSS feed?

James, you want me to answer, or do you want to?

Yes, I'm looking at you, Sam. I know you can't tell. It's very strange because normally we have no video, so it's a new experience for all of us.

So, yeah, me at 6 o'clock in the morning is not what James needs to see, right? So fundamentally with StreamYard, because I've used it before, you've got a URL that you've sent out, right? And that's a live URL.

Yeah. To all of these streaming platforms. Right. Yeah.

Right. So you would take that same URL, put it in the enclosure tag of the live item tag. You would then do a pod ping, a bat alert, hey, we're live. And that would be the stream that I would see through my podcasting app as a video feed or an audio feed. So it would be fine to do that. You don't have to do much. What would StreamYard do to make it automated? In the same way that you can have broadcast channels, which is what you've got set up, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. You could have an extra one, which is live item tag as a channel, right? Or you could have certain apps, but it doesn't have to be apps. It'd just be RSS as a live item tag where you fill in that same URL link that you're sending out, right, to Twitter, Facebook.

So that would be sent out to the podcast Host platform, like, uh, Lipson or, or something else.

Podping from there that says, hey, something's changed in the RSS feed. And the apps would go, oh, something's changed. What have they changed? They've changed the live item tag. It's gone from pending to live, which is literally what StreamYard do when you click the broadcast now. And suddenly all those apps, so it's not a lot of work for StreamYard to do to actually integrate podcasting as another channel. Alongside Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and whatever else they do these days.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I guess they would need to work together with podcast hosting companies, and I know that there are a number watching. Hello, Mark from Captivate. And so, you know, there would need to be a little bit of APIs there, but perhaps the UX within StreamYard might say go live with Captivate or go live with Libsyn or, you know, go live with any other, any other hosts. So, you know, RSS.com, other hosts are available. So yeah, I think that that would be worthwhile having a look at.

Yeah, I mean, the StreamYard platform currently has today a way to input a— was it, what's— I'm drawing a blank on this. It's an HTM or something like that stream.

HLS stream.

HLS stream, right?

Right. There you go. Yeah. And so that could be plugged in to this, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But somehow it needs to get into the RSS feed, right?

And then, yeah, and then really kind of, kind of, that's where it gets a little bit more— I think that's where it gets a little bit more complicated because you do have to have some kind of implement, um, integration with your podcast hosting company. Journey. And those who've been doing this in the past have been doing this because they roll their own podcast RSS feed. And so therefore it's sort of relatively easy for them. Whereas I think we would need some of the podcast hosts to basically go, okay, here's, here's the API for our live item tag. And that podcast host would of course also need to support Podping as well, I would have thought. So, you know, so, so there's a bit of work to be done on both sides. But I'm sure that, you know, the more, the more enterprising podcast hosting company would be, you know, would be very happy to do that little piece of work. It is, of course, chicken and egg because it requires StreamYard to do some work as well. It also requires the live item tag to be supported by more and more podcast apps as well. So it's available in Podverse, it's available in Fountain, of course, podfans.fm. It's available in, you know, those particular apps, but as more and more people are producing content for it, you would expect that more and more apps would also put the live item tag supported in there as well.

Yeah, I guess it depends on, you know, if you think about Apple, Apple's had video podcasts forever. You know, I guess they would have to decide if they wanted to support live in the podcast experience on, on Apple, and they may to be able to keep up with the competition in the market too.

And so, Rob, so, so you understand HLS stands for HTTP live streaming, right? And it is an Apple standard. It comes from Apple. So, you know, if anyone—

you go, it should be easy, right?

Yeah, they might actually do it. The one thing, um, you might feed back to StreamYard is StreamYard, unlike Squadcast and Riverside, doesn't have a permanent URL. And that's one of its weaknesses. So every time you generate a new show, you have to generate a new URL. And because you're doing that, you can't have a sticky URL for your show for every week. So that would be something that they would also wanna change so that in my feed, I could have that same URL so that all I had to do was put it into my RSS and then PodPing alert, change the status, PodPing alert, job done. On. I think it could be a lot simpler with what they're doing if they just make that one change.

Yeah, I think you'd have to like do a, do a simultaneous publish of an item in your RSS feed, right, to, to make this episode available. Not unlike what happens at YouTube today when I set up or schedule a live show, it, it schedules it in in YouTube and it displays, you know, will be live at such and such time, that could be the opportunity that would be available to the podcast hosts too. And then, and then I guess at that point it would have— I think those hosts would have the option of whether or not they wanted to cache the video episode somehow, or that could be published through a separate process as an on-demand version.

Right. Yeah. I mean, talking to several hosts, they're not keen on doing the video because of the cost of the bandwidth. That is one of the reasons that you haven't seen—

Yeah, I mean, a lot of them don't support the video, but 3 of the, of the earliest host podcast hosting platforms do, like Ellipsen, Podbean, and I think Blueberry are the only 3 that currently support video podcasting per se. Right. But live is something different, right? So they wouldn't have to store that.

No, I mean, it's— yeah, you wouldn't have to, but you could do so. For example, yeah, the way that the live item works is you have a pending status with a time, which is what we show to people who subscribe to your show in PodFans. So they will know the minute that that show's gone live, they'll get a notification, push notification saying show live, right? What Rob Rob, um, what Todd is doing— I'll get the names right eventually tonight— what Todd is doing is he's changing the pending status to live status. That's what he's doing. That then alerts the host. The host then does a podping alert, which the apps are listening for. So all Todd is doing is changing the status of the live show from pending to live. That then does an alert, podping, a bat signal up to the apps, and the apps then say, right We've updated the RSS, so we do a refresh of the RSS and it has a live status that then is then broadcast out at the end of the show. What we do is we take the recorded audio from your next episode, so the live one now becomes your next episode, and then we do a refresh of the RSS as soon as you've done it and it just becomes an episode. Now again, as I said when we just showed it, You support the alternative enclosure in the live item tag, but you don't support it in the episode item tag, right? And that's just the thing that I keep asking Todd, just do it. Give the people the option to have in a non-live but post-recording show episode, the option. And Blueberry, as you said, supports both audio and video. So of all the hosts out there right now, Todd and you should be the first ones slamming this door down because, A, you're, you're doing it live as a podcaster, and B, you're a host that supports both live and audio. You are the perfect example of people who should be doing this. And I just don't get why Todd is digging his size 12 feet in and saying, no, not I, not I.

Well, I think he's probably, probably more willing to do it than maybe others. At this, right at this stage. So I think, I think it's going to be easy to convince him.

I think, I think from my understanding, he is seeing this as being a UX issue, not necessarily a tech issue. It's, it's a UX issue of, oh my goodness, we've got to tell podcasters now that they need to put alternate links into things and it's just going to be, it's just going to be hard and everything else. And I think that, that is an absolutely fair thing. You know, there may well be reasons why he doesn't want to roll it out to all of Blueberry, on all of Blueberry's customers. That's not going to be a fun supporting, you know, fun user experience. So I can well understand that. And, you know, so don't eat me, Todd Cochran. Very good. Very good reasons why he might want to end up doing that. But I think, you know, the interesting thing about this is there are actually very few podcast hosting companies who have right at the top a podcaster. You know, Mark at Captivate is one of those. Todd at Blueberry is one of those. And well, you know, and Justin at Transistor, and there aren't really too many more. And I think that's one of the real differences that Todd has that really helps is that he's doing it every single day. And so he can talk with a measure of real authority over, you know, what works, what doesn't, because he's there making two different podcasts every single week. And that's always a worthwhile thing just to bear in mind as well.

Yeah, I think that those days of the podcasters actually starting companies and, and, and creating platforms for podcasters is kind of a— has been fading away a little bit, hasn't it? Yeah, just a bit. Yeah. And I actually, you know, I, I can definitely associate with that, as you might imagine. So I've worked for a lot of podcast companies, and then a lot of those companies had— most of their staff weren't podcasters, so Yeah, right. Yeah, totally.

Yeah. So many, many folks in radio aren't radio listeners either, which is—

yeah, well, that's a whole other conversation. Do podcasters listen to podcasts? Yeah, that's a whole other conversation, right?

Yeah.

No, indeed. Indeed. So, so anyway, um, I think this was a kind of a fascinating conversation, and I, I hope, um, that this conversation continues in the medium and And hopefully we can kind of gather some momentum around this because I think it is something that many of us in the podcasting space have been thinking about for many years. And it's exciting to see it start to develop and have a pathway here that is, you know, right here available to us. It's just whether or not we as an industry want to grab that opportunity and run with it right now and take advantage of the infrastructure that already exists, and I'm definitely wanting to embrace it and support it and push for greater adoption. If we can get a Spotify and a StreamYard and the hosting platforms to embrace it, I think bringing this industry together and trying to come up with a pathway here is definitely well worth the effort.

Yeah, no, indeed. And if you're watching the video version of this, Dave Mansueto, who of course appeared on the screen just a second ago, saying, that's right, got to eat the dog food. Dave, of course, co-founder of Libsyn. So, you know, he's, he's somebody that ought to know. So yeah, absolutely, absolutely right.

Yeah. And he's— I've known Dave since back, back in those days. So back when Libsyn started, and he's a terrific technologist. You know, himself. So he's currently working on a recording app and things like that. He's been working on for many years. So Dave, thanks for joining us. Yeah, indeed. And then, well, I don't know, let's move on and talk about another topic here. I know we could probably go a full hour talking about this integration of this, but I think that there's a few other topics that we might want to talk about. And one of them is this research that came out from the Edison Research and NPR about the audience size for podcasting has kind of exploded. I know, James, you covered this in your newsletter, and I think it's just evidence to me that there's podcasting's growth in all areas has been gradual.

Yeah, no, indeed. So this is data around spoken word.. So it's not necessarily just podcasting, it's spoken word in all of its forms. But some great data from Edison Research, and they're saying that half of people in the US listen to some type of spoken word every single day, which is up, but also listening time is also increasing. And I'm always with all of this less interested in the total amount of listeners, always more interested in listening time.

Yeah, and how much people are listening to, right?

Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, exactly. And you can see that listeners in the US are spending far, far longer than they were 9 years or so ago. 55%, you can see at the top of the screen there. So you can see that there's some real growth in terms of spoken word content. And clearly a lot of that is podcasting. There are other reasons why spoken word might be very successful in terms of radio stations as well, but this is really being driven by podcasting and, for the first time ever, being consumed through mobile as well. So I think it's a really interesting time to actually see some really good numbers coming out of the Spoken Word Report, and that of course has information in there in terms of, you know, well, why are people listening to more spoken word? I'm sure that a lot of that is to do with news and the type of news which is going on, but I think also it's just that there's much more spoken word now with podcasting, you know, SiriusXM, all of those types of services. So actually there's more likely to be spoken word that people feel that they want to go away and have a listen to. You're a spoken word radio presenter a long, long time ago, Rob. Do you sort of see that as being, you know, a good change?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I do think that the movement— and I think one of the interesting things that came out of this was that oftentimes people think of the podcasting medium as, as like a hockey stick kind of growth situation. And this, this research kind of follows a pattern that we've been seeing for many years that a lot of people don't fully comprehend, is that we've been growing on the audience side between 2% and 4% every year for almost every year of this medium. So you have to have a lot of patience. You know, I was very patient in this medium many years ago when when a lot of people didn't have a lot of confidence in the medium because it was growing so slowly. But there is this perception that this is like, you know, this is the golden age of podcasting and somehow, you know, it's a hockey stick kind of growth situation. But it looks like here over the last year it's grown, what, I believe 2% is what it was on the listening side. Now granted, at the scale that podcasting reaches, you know, 2% is significant. It's just not as fast as some people perceive it as growing. Uh, and then I also— I don't know if it was in this research, but, but it was in something I saw— is that the, the older demographic tends to listen to more, I guess, longer duration podcasts than the younger generation, which I thought was okay.

Well, that's interesting. Yeah, I saw that as well. Yeah, yeah, because I'd say that older people have got more time.

Uh, that would be one thing. It could be.

Yeah, that could Or one of the reasons, or more patience for longer form content, maybe, maybe, maybe because they're not—

maybe they can't get up to turn it off.

Yeah, exactly. Martha, reach the phone. But I think the other one is also when I look at my teenage children who are now early 20s as well, they don't listen to radio at all, zero, because the music they want isn't on the radio. The music they want has swear words and it has has rude words in it, and it's just not where they can listen to their music. So they're a YouTuber, they're a, they're a Spotify, they are not a radio listener. And so what radio is losing out on is habitual motion. The minute my daughter gets in the car, the first thing she does in her Mini is plugs in her phone, goes on to CarPlay, and she's off and running listening to whatever she wants to listen to. And she might even have a YouTube video playing but just have listening to the audio as she's driving. She has no interest in radio at all. Yeah.

No, I think it's a generational thing. I don't know, James, you're more plugged into this convergence with radio, but what do you see with radio over like maybe the next 5 to 10 years? Is it going to continue to decline in its reach?

Oh, well, I think, I mean, I think radio is is particularly radio in the US, which is in a very different place to radio elsewhere. But radio in the US appears to be working out how many things it can cut on the air to automate as much as possible. There's now AI-powered radio stations where they don't even have to pay any human being to present anything. And I think what that inevitably means is that there's no real reason to listen to a radio station when you can just use your Spotify or your YouTube Music collection instead, if you want music, or podcasts if you want spoken word. So I think that if radio wants to kill the medium, it's doing a very good job of doing that right now. Understanding what the difference is in terms of radio and understanding why people tune into the radio is a really important thing. And I'm not necessarily sure that, particularly in the US, that people you know, fully grasp that. It's a bit of a different world elsewhere, and certainly when you have a look into Europe, you know, where there's a lot, an awful lot of government-funded broadcasting, but you can see that they're focusing much more on younger audiences, and there's, you know, a bit of a different conversation going on there, I think.

I know, Sam, what's your thoughts on radio and Well, I think it goes back to what James said earlier, you know, radio needs to adopt, um, a lot of radio talk shows that I listen to, the show happens and then it's gone. It's like no one's thought about recording it, repurposing it, reusing it, right? It's just gone. And you go, are you mental? You've just spent how much on that presenter with the guest, done it all, and you're just not thinking about it now. Now, you know, again, as I said, when I ran a radio station, we used Wooshka. So we took the live feed, put it to Wooshka, Wooshka turned it into a podcast. So we had reusability straight away. And that is something that I find radio stations haven't got their heads around yet. I mean, I struggle as well. One of the biggest podcasts in the UK is from, uh, it's called The Newsagent. It's a news politics show, but Global are the company who produce it. Global are the company who make it, and yet Global do not live feed it. It's not a live show anywhere. So they're not using their mediums at all. They've got a podcast that goes out, reaches 10 million downloads, but that's not reused live. Then they have a video version of it, but that's not in the podcast version. That's on a— you— I mean, it's just scattergun, and I think radio stations are really their worst enemies.

Yeah, I think that the convergence between radio and podcasting can be difficult for some of these radio stations to try and grapple with and deal with because radio is a different format. I mean, sure, it's both audio, but it has different kind of structure to the content and it doesn't always work that great for podcasting. And oftentimes, you know, I see, you know, these radio stations maybe don't have full rights to to distribute the commercials, but, but I do know that there are, there are platforms that will filter those commercials out. They've been using that for many years with their, their, their live streams that they've been doing. So, you know, it's just a matter of plugging in another capability to be able to get that audio out minus the ads and then maybe taking those same breaks and putting in podcast ads or something like that might be an option.

Yeah, one of the— I mean, you know, there are a couple of things going on. It's interesting to read Jeff Smullian's autobiography. He was the person that ran Emmis. You're smiling, Rob. You clearly have long, long memories of Jeff. What a nice man he is.

But yeah, I did an interview with him once, right?

Yeah. Oh, right.

Okay.

Well, that would have been interesting. He says in that book book that he thinks that podcasting will never make radio stations any money and was very, very down on the whole podcasting thing. iHeartMedia released its Q3 '23 financial results last week, and podcast revenue, just podcast revenue, is 10.7% of the entire company. And they own thousands of radio stations. They own all kinds of other things as well. They run events and everything else. Podcasting, little plucky podcasting, 10.7% of the company revenue, and podcast revenue itself up 12.5% year on year. I think there are quite a lot of people, you know, like Jeff, who are probably eating their words a little bit in terms of, you know, their guesses of where the future is actually going. And part of that was he is also, you know, Jeff was also deliciously rude about Bob Pittman from iHeart in that book as well.

It's wonderful. Are you surprised, James?

Are you surprised? Well, he's so positive. He's so positive about about everybody else. And then whenever he talks about Bob, it's kind of, oh dear. But, uh, yeah, so, you know, interesting to have a look at that. You know, I mean, similarly, Audacy released their financial results last week. They used to be called Entercom, the second biggest broadcaster. And, you know, again, although their total revenue is down, as, um, as iHeartMedia's is, to be fair, um, their digital revenue, which includes podcasting, uh, was up 3.3%. So it's clearly still, you know, a place of growth for radio companies while their big old-fashioned AM transmitters are slowly, you know, slowly dying.

Yeah, yeah, I would imagine that the radio side would die for between 3% and 10% growth.

Oh yeah, they would be absolutely delighted with that.

So clearly that's the direction, I guess, but probably The fact that it's only 10% of their overall revenue kind of doesn't raise its priority very much, does it?

No, but it's, you know, I think it's certainly a start. And interesting seeing yesterday, today in your world, where Global, which is the largest radio broadcaster in the UK, has signed a deal to sell advertising into iHeart podcasts in the UK and the other way around. iHeart is selling advertising into Global podcasts. In the US. Two large broadcast companies, but are selling each other's, you know, ad slots in podcasting. I did take a peek. The FCC was approached a couple of years ago. Global was thinking about buying as much of iHeartMedia as it possibly could. It owns 15% of iHeartMedia, it turns out. I didn't realize that. Yeah. So it's a, it's a, there are various laws on foreign ownership of radio companies in in the US, and Global had to get special permission to buy a bunch of shares. So that is probably driving that sort of side of it. And maybe Global's plan is to be a bit more global. They're not very global actually in terms of what they do. They do have DAX, which is a podcast sales house in the US. So this obviously asks, begs a question what the deal is there. But yeah, I think it's, you know, interesting seeing You know, yet more consolidation in the radio business, which of course is just what we need.

Right. Well, I think that the, what you've seen the radio industry do is they've, they're acquiring or have acquired podcasting companies, cuz guess what? They can't really do it themselves internally. Right. Mm-hmm. And I think that's a real sign of what the, the core issue is with radio embracing podcasting is that they, they have their processes, they have their staff that knows radio, but they just don't know how to translate that to podcasting. So they, they've often, you know, I mean, you look at all these big, big, uh, radio networks and they've all acquired podcasting companies, right? So that just tells you everything you need to know, I think, about, you know, kind of their skill set and what they what they're good at and what they're not good at. And I guess I have to praise them to say that they recognize that and bring in a company that does, you know, understand podcasting. And, and I think that overall, if you look at a lot of those deals that, that those radio companies have done, I think they've turned out to be pretty good choices by the, by the radio industry, right?

Yeah, I think that that's certainly That's certainly going on. I think one thing, if you don't mind, Rob, that I spotted the other day, which is probably worthwhile for the audience here just mentioning, is the amount of scams going on on Facebook at the moment and podcasters being very specifically targeted. So there's a company which is— there's a story from a guy called Johnny Jet. I'm sure that's not his real name, name. Anyway, he's a travel blogger and he was offered £3,000 to appear on a podcast, which already sounds a little bit suspicious, but anyway, who wouldn't turn down £3,000? And all that the guy wanted was, oh, we need to set up live streaming from your Facebook account. Can I spend a couple of minutes with you on a screen share to set up that live streaming? And what he was actually doing is he was grabbing access to this guy's Facebook page and is then filling his Facebook page with you know, selling cryptocurrency and everything else, which is, you know, which is no good. And this isn't just one story. I have now had 3 other large podcasters, very large podcasters, you know, household names, who've told me that they have either been very close to being suckered for the same sort of thing, or that they've been— or that they've actually had exactly this, this, you know, happening. So either people offer you a guest fee of 3 grand or another one that I spoke to was offered $2,000 to speak at a conference remotely. I'm speaking at a conference remotely in Spain. I'm not being earned— tomorrow I'm not being earned $3,000 for it. But anyway, so, you know, if there are these— if you do get these emails who want to fiddle around with your Facebook page, just say no. But they seem to be really targeting podcasters, um, possibly because they've worked out what makes us tick. Um, so just a warning there, I guess.

So this, this guy, um, uh, paid $3,000 to this—

no, it's the other way around.

He was still way around.

He was okay. Yeah, he was, he was offered $3,000 if, if only he'll turn up, um, and be a guest on a show.

Um, so of course he never got the $3,000.

Right. He didn't see the $3,000, of course.

Yeah.

But, you know, I mean, obviously you're going to turn around and you're going to say, well, yes, I'll be a guest on your show. And yes, absolutely. If you've got $3,000 as a budget, then yes, absolutely. And what's that? You want to fiddle around with my Facebook, you know, account just to turn that on? Well, great. Let's, let's do that. So, yeah, so I thought that was, you know, just worthwhile for the people that are watching this. If people come to you and they offer you vast sums of money money, then A, send it my way, but also B, just be really, really careful. If they want to start fiddling around with your Facebook account or your StreamYard account or anything else, just say no.

Yes, I, I would agree. And, and the, the stuff typically happens during tough economic times. There's a lot of scammers out there now that are trying to take advantage of people because maybe they're desperate or they think that other people are expert, and they're willing to take risks like this. But, you know, I think it's interesting that this stuff is happening. You also shared with me, I guess, you launched a new RSS feed of sorts, and I want you to tell me a little bit about that.

So this is a website, and I can almost hear, I can almost hear Todd and indeed Adam Curry both shouting at me already, It's, it's a very simple, straightforward website called RSS to YouTube Music, RSS to YTM. And what it allows you to do is it allows you to find the RSS feed for any podcast and plug it into the YouTube Music app, because the YouTube Music app plays podcasts. It plays podcasts via RSS feeds. But of course, it's very difficult to find the RSS feed of a podcast that you actually have. So, you know, so if you were to visit RSS2YTM, RSS2YTM.net, then you will see it basically asks you what podcast you want to listen to, and you can type in a podcast there. You can type in the New Media Show or whatever, and it will then show you what the RSS feed is for that particular show. And will give you the option to actually help you plug it into your YouTube Music app. So if you were to choose the new, the New Media Show right at the top of that list and click on there, then it shows you what the RSS feed is, and then it lets you paste it into YouTube Music in the right place. So it's a super easy way if you want to use use, maybe you don't want to use YouTube Music as a podcast app, but it's a super useful way for other people to get their favorite shows into YouTube Music. I don't suppose, Sam, you'll be using YouTube Music anytime soon. You use Spotify, don't you, for your music?

I do, and that's only because also my kids wouldn't use the YouTube Music part. They don't I don't know if it was well supported in the time when Spotify was— one of the things that Spotify does really well that we should actually praise it for, it is everywhere, right? Whether it's on your watch, whether it's on your car, whether it's on a device, somehow Spotify has made their client available everywhere. You know, Alexa devices. And I think that's one of the smartest things that they did when Apple and other platforms that had music like Amazon and we're just single platform solutions.

Hmm.

Hmm. Yeah. No, it's, um, it's, yeah, it's, it's going to be really interesting to watch what happens with YouTube Music and whether or not this YouTube, whether or not this RSS ingestion, um, that they have in their music app, but not of course in, in the, in the main YouTube, um, it actually takes off or whether or not we'll see anything else going on there. So, um, Yeah, but I just thought, yeah, take it back.

I'm sure that—

graveyard.

Yeah, Google, Google will close it all down in a, in a year's, uh, in a year's time.

Graveyard in the making. So, so I've got up on the screen the current experience for, for the New Media Show in YouTube Music right now, and I was curious, um, if I were to add the RSS feed, the audio RSS read. How would this experience, James, as far as you understand, how would it be different? Would it be a separate entire listing?

Yes, it would appear as a different listing, but it appears just as if it's a standard podcast. So if you go back one in your— this makes for a very good audio podcast, doesn't it?

Well, I mean, if we want to describe it, maybe.

So there's a, so there's a button in, in this particular area of the YouTube Music app. There's a button there which says add podcast and it's got a big plus button on there. And when you press that, you can see two different things. You can either see find a podcast on YouTube or underneath it, it's a little button that says add RSS feed. Once you press that add RSS feed button, it then, it then allows you to just punch in an RSS feed, you know, URL in there. So you could You, you could, you know, type in any RSS feed that you wanted to, press the OK button, and it then goes off, grabs that RSS feed, ingests it, and it's available within your YouTube Music app whether or not you're using YouTube Music on the web or whether or not— or whether you're using YouTube Music on Android or iOS. It works in all of those.

So it's— I don't know, James, does it sense that there's programmatic advertising and somehow block that?

No. So in this, if you listen to a podcast via RSS, it comes complete with the ads, and that's all fine. So YouTube don't want ads in podcasts if they're hosting them, if you're uploading the files to them. But if it's— but this works just the same as a typical podcast app, so there's no ingestion going on. It's passed through It'll appear in your podcast hosting numbers if your podcast hosting company has updated their user agents. And yeah, and it basically allows, you know, it's a proper, in inverted commas, podcast player in that it's using RSS just the same as everything else is.

But it's caching and delivering the media file, right, separately?

No, it's not. It's not actually playing. Yeah, it's playing the audio directly from, you know, it's exactly the same way as any any other podcast hosting, uh, podcast platform does. So, and that's probably the difference. This is the bit that actually I think podcasters really like is that this is what YouTube Music should work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

So it is playing pure audio. It's not converting it to a video, which I, I had the impression that's what they were doing.

Yeah. So they're doing, and this is where it gets hugely complicated, but they're doing two 2 different things. So if you want to be, if you're a creator and you want to be in YouTube overall, then you can submit your RSS feed to them and they will ingest that and they will make videos out of it and it'll be available in the main YouTube product as well. So if you've got YouTube on your telly, you can listen to a specific show. But if you, if you just want to listen to your favorite podcasts, then you can also plug the RSS feed of your favorite podcast into YouTube Music, and YouTube Music only will end up having that podcast in there. But it's complete pass-through, so it contains the advertising. A play in YouTube Music will mean a play appears in your podcast hosting company.

Okay.

But there's this sort of— so YouTube Music is actually playing podcasts in two completely different ways. So you can imagine how simple and straightforward this is going to be.

Is it just to be clear about this? So it's a pass-through within YouTube Music, but it's, it's going to be cached and re-encoded as a video file if it plays in the proper YouTube experience, right?

Yeah, it'll never appear in YouTube at all if you add a podcast this way. It only appears for you. It won't appear to be searchable visible. So it won't appear.

It's only going to be visible to me because I put it in my collection.

Because you've put it in your collection. Yeah, absolutely. And they're marked. They're marked. If you, if you add a podcast through RSS, they're marked as this is a podcast which has been added through an RSS feed. And you can see the, you know, and you can see all of that. Now, of course, it doesn't support any Podcasting 2.0 tags that we found so far, but you know, who knows. But the user agents are now in the, in the big OPorg list that Jon Spurlock looks after. And if you're running a podcast host which, you know, which looks after that, then that seems to work quite nicely, I think.

So I can add a podcast in the, the YouTube Studio experience, correct?

Yeah, so if you're a creator, you can add a podcast into YouTube Studio, but that you're adding your podcast in there and that's the full ingestion and you're not allowed any ads in there and all of that. So that's the other way. So if you're a creator, that's the way of getting a podcast into YouTube if you really want to do that. But if you're just a listener and you really wish that This American Life was available in your YouTube Music app, then you can do that straight from this tool. Sam, do you think this is a good plan for audiences, or is this just massively confusing?

Well, I think I thought I understood it until about 30 seconds ago, and then now I'm totally confused.

Well, I think that's, that's been a, an issue here. I'm not sure that the YouTube team has done a good job of really communicating this. No, um, I don't know. What's your thought on that, James?

I know you're more plugged into what they've been communicating or not, but yeah, I think communication is a difficult thing for, um, for, for the Google team. And I think, um, if you were to look at the difference between Google and Apple, Apple's team has a PR person connected to podcasting at all times, a young eager man called Zach who's just about to leave.

But they're going to have another— Oh, he's about to leave?

He's about to leave, yeah, yeah. So he's something we said, James. Zach is Zach Kahn, who has been PR for the last 3 years for Apple Podcasts, right? He's been promoted. He's been promoted, Rob, promoted to PR. Zach? Yeah, to PR for Apple Vision Pro, or as I call them, those toy glasses.

It's a lateral move to a new product that needs help, right?

Oh no, I'm sure it's a promotion. Well, of course it's to be the PR for those toy glasses. But yes, so, but the good news is we get— we do get it. I mean, it's a great product. I'm just joking, and Zach has my home address.

So I'm looking for— Oh, okay.

There you go. Um, but, um, but I do understand though that Apple Podcasts will be getting a new PR person next month. Um, so, uh, it's early December when Zack makes that move. Um, and, uh, you know, so hopefully, um, that will still be a, um, a dedicated PR person for Apple Podcasts. And that's the big difference between Apple and Google. So Apple has a PR person who looks after Apple Podcasts. Spotify has 427 PR people who look after podcasts. And Google, um, and Google/YouTube Music, as far as I can work out, don't have a PR person, uh, at all. I was in touch with a PR person from YouTube, um, uh, a while back. He seems to have vanished off the face of the earth, um, stopped answering any of my emails. And, you know, has run away. So I think that, that being fair, I think that that's what's going on. They haven't, you know, it's a very small thing for YouTube in general, and they just haven't got, you know, enough people who are enough resources to actually afford a proper PR person. And I would agree that that's probably harming, you know, where they, where they're going.

PR is very difficult, particularly if you've got a very complicated product as this Yeah, well, that's why it's important to have kind of— I'm like a spokesperson out there that's going on a bunch of podcasts and explaining it to us. Exactly what I did when I worked at Microsoft on the Zoom platform for, for the 7 years that I worked on that product is that I was kind of the external communication for my platform. And it's probably difficult for a company like Google to embrace something like that, But, but I know that they're not as locked down, uh, supposedly. Maybe they are, as like an Apple or something like that. No, Apple's kind of struggled with this over the years as well. Um, so it's— but I just found where that, that research that I found, it was Spotify's Megaphone that was talking about, I guess, their podcast trends of 2023, talking about how people, uh, 55 to 64 are listening to twice as long content as last year. So I don't know what's changed between last year and this year.

Yeah, so they're listening. So the total amount of podcast listening has gone up. It's gone up by 50%, but for 55 to 64, it's gone up by 49% for those over 65, which is a nice number. But this is, I think, what we want to see. We want want many of the older audiences to be listening more to podcasts. I mean, weirdly, in Italy, it seems to have more than doubled, which I don't fully understand. Australia, it's gone up by two-thirds, you know, for older audiences. You know, the US, it's also gone up as well. So I'm wondering what's going on there. And I'm wondering, you know, whether or not it's got something to do with the amount of content which is available whether there are more shows which are now interesting to people aged 65 and older. Sam isn't aged 65 or older, but do you have any sort of thoughts as to why this might be the thing?

Sadly, I'm going to get there before you, James. That's what worries me. No, I also think, again, complexity has failed simplicity. I think a lot of people are now being able to find podcasts through whether it's Spotify, YouTube, Apple, you know, the mainstream apps that they use. They're now becoming much more obvious. I mean, Spotify has taken a couple of years to get it onto the platform. People are probably listening to music, stumbling across it. And again, I think music itself doesn't appeal on the radio to people, and they are seeing talk radio, but their favorite talk radio shows are probably 1 hour, 2 hours, and then they're going, oh, what else can I listen to now? Nothing else on the radio. And then trying to find— and we all know the thing with podcasting is it's behavioral. So when you find one or two or three favorite podcasts, you really do then enjoy listening to them. To shove one of those podcasts off your listening behavior then becomes doubly hard. Um, so I think, you know, again, we've seen lots more political, uh, podcasts appearing, certainly here in the UK. I think The Rest Is Politics announced today that they've just hit the 10 million downloads per month. I mean, so you— I think we are beginning to see people, A, understanding this medium is interesting, B, as James said, finding content as well that they, they find sticky and want to listen to. And then I think, you know, we're seeing more dailies. James is, you know, is a daily podcasts, but we're seeing more daily political shows as well. And I think a couple of years ago, James, you probably didn't have that many daily shows of news, sport, or whatever.

Yeah, I'm sure that that's got something to end up doing with it. And I'm— and as you say, you know, just the amount of shows out there. I mean, I was just having a look through all of the different shows that I listen to and thinking, my goodness, this there's, there's so many shows, um, all of which, by the way, have big, um, uh, signs on them saying there's a new episode to go and have a listen to. So really, James, that's all you're gonna do today, just really, really behind with everything that I actually have, right? Um, but, but yeah, you know, so, but so perhaps you're right, um, Sam, you know, I mean, if, if I was, um, you know, I mean, I, I've been, um, Involved in podcasting since 2005, so not as long as you, Rob, but my mother, my mother last month, my mother, after I appeared on national ABC television in this country, my mother was very proud that I'd managed to get onto the TV here and she said how proud she was in an email and then she added, said, tell me, what is a podcast?

Yeah, fill me in, I want to know.

Yeah, yeah, after 5 years of writing a daily newsletter about podcasting, thanks, Mum. But the fact that she is now interested in what a podcast is, I think, says a lot in terms of, you know, reaching all of those older people who historically, you know, as you know, Rob, have not listened to this sort of thing.

So, um, there may be some great, great growth there, though I've always said that what's, what, what's great about podcast listeners is that they always get older. Um, so if you kind of inverse that to realize that maybe many of these folks were like maybe 35 years old, uh, when they started listening to podcasts, right, right. Um, or in their age range. If I think about what the research showed of the most pop— the age demo that was most popular back in the earlier years of podcast listening, it was in that 30 to 35 and 40 age range. So what we could see is just those were the hardcore listeners for many years, and they're just getting more serious, and they're increasingly replacing their media consumption patterns away from mainstream media towards podcasting increasingly. Um, I don't know, I mean, that's kind of how I look at it. I mean, I'm kind of in that age demo too. When I fully embraced podcasting, I was in my mid-30s as well. And so that I can totally, you know, associate with what's going on here and the patterns that we're seeing. And I do am, as you know, this is a 90-minute show, so I do believe in long-form content. In podcasting, because I do think that short-form content is difficult to get a lot of value out of in audio. Yeah. Though it is easier in video.

I wonder how much of this is being driven by the fact that it's now much easier to get podcasts in your car than you've ever been able to get in the past. Oh, I agree with you. You know, I mean, Sam drives his massive great big car. No, you drive a new car since I last I last actually saw you. But you've got, you know, Apple CarPlay and you've got Spotify and everything else in your car as well. Do you listen to that or do you listen to the radio? I bet you listen to Radio 4 every morning, don't you?

I do listen to Radio 4, the Today Show, and I do listen to sports, TalkSport, which is a sports show. But I do listen less and less even myself now to radio. Um, I don't listen to Radio 1, 2, or 3.

But are you listening to Spotify instead?

Listen to, uh, Podfans actually. But yes, no, uh, of course, sorry, yes, yes, obviously get that plug in. Um, but no, uh, with music, yeah, but I think as you get older as well, you listen to less new music. We are more nostalgic about the music we listen to, so So it's more Paul Weller than it is Dua Lipa, let's put it that way.

Um, yeah.

And, uh, but I do, I actually, when I get in the car, it is podcast after podcast. I'm literally, I've got my, um, playlist ready to go. And if I'm driving somewhere, then I've go through my 5 or 6 different podcasts that I listen to. And that's, that's what it is. And I don't have 20 hours in the day to listen to podcasts or music or radio. So walking the dog, driving somewhere, or whatever, that's my time.

Yeah. And Rob, do you, in your Elon Musk mobile, do you listen to a bunch of podcasts in there?

I do on occasion, but I also listen to some streaming music in there too. So it was, it's a little bit a mix of both. It just kind of feel, you know, just whatever my mood is at the moment. And if I want to catch up on an episode somewhere, I can do that in the car. And it's it streams directly to the head unit of the car itself because the car has a continuous internet connection. So, right, it's, it's all, you know, it's pulling from the, the, the mobile networks, right, that are supplying that connection. So, so all of the data connectivity goes directly to the car, doesn't have to pass through my phone.

But, but, but yeah, I guess how are those shares going for you?

They're going okay. I'm not, I'm not disappointed. I bought it a long time ago, so it's all upside on mine. It's never going to dip down to the price that I paid for it.

That was an impressive tip of where the future was, was going to buy a bunch of Tesla shares all the way back when.

So, yeah, yeah, I was all into, into electric cars a long time ago. I bought my first electric car in 2011, so that's how far back I go with it. I bought a Nissan Leaf. Okay. So I was one of the first 2,000 owners of a Nissan Leaf.

They don't do too well in this state because this state is really hot and the Nissan Leaf doesn't really understand how to cool its batteries down.

No, it doesn't.

It doesn't.

And if you bought one of those like in Arizona or or other places that are really hot, it's probably going to burn the batteries out.

I agree with you. Yeah. I'm trying to buy an electric car, hence why I'm interested in all of this, but I won't buy an Elon Musk car because it's Elon Musk. Really? Interesting. So I don't want to go, yeah. So I don't want to go, can you imagine the shame of driving around in a car made by Elon Musk? Actually make it himself. So I'm busy trying to find a decent electric car, which is quite difficult. I mean, to be fair, the Teslas do look very nice, but you drive a massive, great gas-guzzling Range Rover, I think, Sam, don't you?

It's an electric hybrid, thank you very much, James.

Is it? Is it? I did not know that.

There you go. Yes. So I get— it gets plugged in at night and we do electric drives on all local, and I haven't filled up with petroleum for 3 months.

Wow.

Wow. That's awesome.

That's awesome.

So I could not—

I could not have a fully electric car. Jesus, I'm— I get stressed when my phone's on 5% and I'm on a train. 5% battery on the motorway would absolutely send me to the hospital, I think.

Range anxiety is what they call that.

Well, mine's called a Range Rover, and it would have range anxiety.

So one last question for both of you guys. We've seen the fluctuation in the amount of podcasts that are in the medium today. I think, you know, there's over 4 million that have— that are active in the Podcast Index, and, and what, 2.5 million in Apple Podcasts. But as you guys look out a couple years, I've just been wondering about this whole thing. I mean, we're totally seeing kind of a reset that's going on around shows out there. And there's this little bit of fluctuation going on with new episodes being published. You know, I see it in Pod News every day. One day it's up 0.2, the next day it's down 2%, or, you know, it's bouncing around. But as we think about the next couple years, I guess, you know, this is probably really indicative of the economy, right, is kind of what we're seeing having a big influence here. Or do you think that it's not the economy and somehow we're seeing kind of like a reset of podcasts and a shift maybe towards larger podcasts and the smaller ones are kind of not getting the attention and fading away because they're not picking up on audience too fast? I know it's a complicated question, but I just wanted to just throw it out to you guys. What do you see, James and Sam, in the market? Are we seeing a shift towards, um, a consolidation towards larger shows, uh, and less of an opportunity for smaller shows? Or what direction do you see this going?

Sam, do you want to take that?

James, you didn't like—

Thanks, James.

I mean, I, I'm perfectly happy to jump in. I, I know you are. I've done a lot of talking.

Um, yeah, so I, I'd say this, look, um, advertising is a crap model for monetization of the long tail of podcasts, right?

The reason being that they don't get hard to argue with that, actually.

Yeah. And so pod fade, pod fade is very quick. And, and, and the bigger apps like the Apples, the Spotifys do not help the smaller podcasters get to discovered, they do not do anything. So I think the tools are really bad for discovery. I think the monetization's really bad. And of course you just get very bored talking to yourself if you're at the long tail, because it's just not fun. A lot of hard work for not a lot of return. I think what we will see is with the new podcasting apps that are adding better discovery tools, better interactivity tools, better monetization capabilities, that we are going. I said it to Mark Asquith at Captivate when he interviewed me. I said, look, we're going through the Web 1.0 to the Web 2.0 model. So the Web 1.0 was stupid crazy valuations. Everyone was paying stupid money for Pets R Us, right, and blah blah blah. And then the market just crashed and burned, and somebody was going around, oh well, that's it, the sky's fallen in, the internet's over, the web's done, let's go back to client-server, that's it. And I get the same feeling that we're seeing the same with podcasting. Joe Rogan, oh, all the big exclusives have gone. Oh, the market's dead, advertising's dying, it's all going, and numbers are falling. And then we're just going to see some really smart technologies and businesses and people come back, and the second growth of podcasting will come. And on the back of that, I think people will then find that their time and attention, the value that they have to put into creating podcasts podcast has a return. And with that return will become, I think, more and more people saying, yeah, this medium now has growth that I can get to and I can see a return on, as opposed to it's Joe Rogan with $300 million and it's Prince Harry and Meghan getting $85 million and no one else getting any of the money. So I think we're just seeing a 1.0 to 2.0 web— web crash to web growth. And I think we're seeing a podcasting whatever you want to call it, 1.0 to 2.0. I don't know what we're calling podcasting in this, this medium. Anyway, I'll leave that to James to name. But that's my opinion. I think, I think we're seeing, uh, the lull before the next storm.

Yeah. And I think, you know, I, I look at the numbers and, you know, and I, I sort of pull the numbers apart on, uh, the Podcast Business Journal, um, and I actually wonder whether or the data that we have is right. Um, because you're talking about, um, shows. So, you know, um, uh, only 207,000 podcasts were actually updated last week. So you're looking at, um, actually not that many. It's not, uh, you're not, uh, for 4.2 million, um, you know, there aren't 4.2 million shows out there really. There are only 207,000 shows which have being updated right now.

So that's weekly, right?

Weekly.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah. On a weekly basis. Yeah. Um, so I think that that's, you know, an important thing just to bear in mind. But I think also the, the, the numbers, we, we keep on seeing these large scare stories about the amount of new podcasts being created is going down and down and down. Well, one of the reasons for that is that podcasters are being more canny in when they launch a new podcast. Podcast, reusing an old RSS feed so that they all automatically inherit the old audience of that old show. And then they start a show with, you know, with guaranteed audience. That won't appear in any stats as a new podcast, even though it is a new podcast. It's a brand new piece of editorial, but they're using an old show's RSS feed to do it. So I think, you know, some of the data that we see, particularly from Listen Notes, but also from the podcast index as well, isn't necessarily telling the entire story in terms of what's going on in the podcasting world. There's a little chart that I produce on the Podcast Business Journal website, podcastbusinessjournal.com/data, and that shows the active podcast trends. So the amount of of shows which have been updated in the last 30 days. And that chart from August has looked really good. There's been a nice increase in the amount of shows updated over the last month from around 325,000 to around 350,000. So there's a good amount of growth there, but I think, you know, it's what are we actually measuring here? And I would much rather look at total time spent listening to podcasts, because that to me is much more interesting. And the actual, you know, podcast creation trends, I'm kind of, you know, still a little bit sort of— I'm not quite so sure where we're going there.

Yeah, so I wanted to pull up that page, James, and you could kind of show us.

So if you just click into podcast creation on that on that page, podcastbusinessjournal.com/data, and then scroll right to the bottom. You should see hopefully a beautiful graph there, which, yeah, which is showing podcasts updated over the last 30 days. And you can see big, big jump in September. And I suspect that the reason why it went up so high in September is the end of the summer holidays in the northern hemisphere. And so therefore lots of shows that were on hiatus during the summer holidays coming back again. And perhaps that had something to do with it. But, you know, some nice figures, I think, you know, in terms of the amount of creation which is actually happening there. My favorite stat from that page: over on average last month, there was a new podcast episode posted every 0.8 seconds.

That is a good, good— I'm not quite sure how to relate to that necessarily too much. But so this, this active podcast trend chart is— it says, um, this graph shows total podcasts that have been updated in the past 30 days, right? Yeah. But what you have on the daily is— or the daily newsletter is podcasts that were updated in the last week, right?

Yes, I think PodNews shows total podcasts updated in the last week, which is on this page as well.

Yeah, yeah, it's here, right?

Just at the top there. Yeah, the reason why I look at podcasts updated in the last 30 days for that graph is that it makes it a much easier graph to read. There's much less bouncing up and down. So it's just purely, it's just purely making it easy and simple to look at a graph and go, okay, what's the, what's the trend here? So that's why I use the last 30 days in this particular graph. But this is just a little script that sits there and updates every single day from the podcast index, grabs this, you know, information, and, you know, and hopefully it helps us understand whether or not things are going up or down and, you know, and whether or not we should be scared. But I don't think from any of the numbers that we actually have here that we should should worry too much about, um, the, the trends and where, where this industry is going.

I mean, clearly, if you contrast these numbers to even 4 years ago, these are— these numbers are dramatically higher than, than this medium had even 4 years ago, um, I think.

So, you know—

oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And if you go back even further than that, it's, it, the numbers were probably half of what it was 4 years ago.

So Rob, I would add one thing. James is the person who said it to me many years ago. I see. I do listen to what you say, James. Um, like a library, certain, certain podcasts may not be included in this because they're not updated, but they are complete. So let's take Serial. There is not a new episode of Serial, but Serial will be listened to by new podcast listeners. And so that podcast is not included in the weekly update because there is no new update. That doesn't mean that that podcast has no value anymore.

Yeah, I completely agree. And in fact, a friend of the show, Ivo Terra— are we allowed to use friend of the show on this show? I don't know. But anyway, Ivo Terra, for years and years and years, he's a great guy.

He's in the Hall of Fame and everything.

So we certainly is. And, um, his, his job, uh, uh, right now is writing a, uh, weekly newsletter called The End. You'll find it at theend.fyi. And that is a podcast just about audio fiction podcasts which have finished. So it's only for complete audio fiction podcasts. Now, if you look at, um, all of the numbers that we've just been talking about here, um, we, we're kind of saying that these don't matter because they've finished. But actually, for audio fiction, hugely important that you can go back and binge on an entire complete audio fiction, you know, series. So, you know, there is definitely something for the fact that there are completed podcasts out there. Theend.fyi is a super great, you know, newsletter to get if you're interested in that sort of, in that sort sort of, uh, of thing. And audio fiction, it's not my bag, but it is quite a lot of other people's bags.

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, the, the whole kind of audiobooks and audio fiction stuff is, it's really taken off, or less, probably 6, 7 years or whatever. But this is the, this is the current number off the Podcast Index, uh, 4.269 million podcasts that are in the index. Index. Um, yeah, I think I talked to, to Dave about this at one point, and he told me that, you know, you see Apple with like 2.5 million, right? But you see the Podcast Index with, um, you know, 4.2 million. And what's the delta there? I know Apple's gone through and kind of sifted out, um, feeds, but I also heard from Dave that, that they've done the same thing here. They've sifted out the feeds. So what's the delta? What's the difference between these these two numbers. Yeah, I think it is things that are not submitted to Apple is a big—

Oh, okay. Yeah, that, that could be some, some of it. I have to say, um, uh, again, friend of the show, Daniel J. Lewis, um, he produces some, um, podcast industry data as well, which I can never quite remember where they are, um, uh, because, because they always move. Podcast Industry Insights .com. There you go. Um, but that, that number is the number, as I understand it, that number is the number from, um, from Apple Podcasts and, um, the number that Daniel J. Lewis, uh, tracks. And it's remarkably close now to the number where, yeah, where the Podcast Index is. Oh, um, well, that's good. So yeah, so there seems to be, um, so what's he saying at the moment? Oh no, no, hang on. No. No, you're absolutely right. I've made a mistake. It doesn't happen very often.

That never happens.

I'm shocked. But you're absolutely right. Yes. So Daniel J. Lewis's stuff, podcastindustryinsights.com, says 2.6 million valid podcasts are in the Apple Podcasts chart. Sorry, in the Apple Podcasts database. Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. So he also pulls in podcast podcast index data as well. But again, that figure is going up, and that figure has been going up. It was 2.5 million November of last year. It looks, it looks as it'll be, as if it'll be about 2.7 million for November this year. So that's another 200,000 that we didn't have last year. So there's some quite nice, quite nice numbers there. But yeah, if you, if you want to really dig into the data then Daniel's site is really good at being able to, you know, end up doing that. So podcastindustryinsights.com, I believe. Well, he says, he's been saying on this site for a while that he was going to focus on the Google Podcasts data as well. But I noticed that he's now dropped that. Not much point of focusing on the Google Podcasts data now.

Right, right.

That's true. Rob, I'd say for, for somebody like Podfans, we look at this as well very closely. We are pulling, or our goal is to pull in about 350,000 to 400,000 podcasts only. We don't think that there are 4.2 million podcasts that are gonna be updating or that are gonna drive an audience. And, um, You know, we've built it in such a way that we pull from the podcast index, we pull the active podcasts, we pull the music podcasts, which is another, again, another piece of that index. And then we will pull in what we think are the volume podcasts, the ones that are getting, you know, plus 100 users or listeners. After that, on the long tail, we've got a way where the listener on Podfans can, through gamification, actually suggest a new podcast and we'll grow our index that way. We've gone from the let's not take everything and add it and then use it to the let's take the most successful, the majority, and then add as we move forward. And I think that's the way forward. James, quick question. Did the podcast complete tag ever get completed?

Oh yes.

Uh, the podcast complete tag, which is actually Apple's Yes, it's part of the— it's part of Apple's spec. Apple don't do a very good job of actually supporting their own tags, but also documenting them for other people. I've got a bit of a beef with the trailers tag at the moment. But yes, so that is actually there. So the complete tag is being used by a number of shows. In fact, if you take a look at the Trade Secrets podcast, which of course, if you remember, was Dave Weiner and Adam Curry's original podcast back in 2002. 4 or so, that show has a complete tag in it because of course it's complete. It's not been updated in, you know, 19 years. So yeah, so that's certainly there, but, you know, I guess there's concerns about what happens when you do tick that button. Can you still add more shows to it? You know, what happens there? There. So, you know, it's something that I think Apple could do a better job with actually writing proper specification documents rather than flowery, you know, nicely laid out with a beautiful font, you know, articles. I think some proper documentation around the Apple Podcasts iTunes specs would be quite helpful as well.

Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to just kind of make sure that everybody kind of has a little bit of a clear picture of why these numbers are so wildly different between Apple and the Podcast Index.

And, and of course, Spotify's number is even higher, right?

So, you know, there's— there is— and this is what— this is what Dave pointed out to me too when I talked to him about it, is that— is that there are lots of shows out there that are self-hosting, right? So they're, they're hosting their own podcasts on their own dot-com, or I know this plays into Todd's conversation, but, but they never submit to Apple, you know. And, and Adam Curry is a good example of this too. His, his podcast, as far as I know, isn't submitted to Apple either. So, so, but it's available on other platforms Um, but not, you know, in, in Apple or Spotify or any of those bigger platforms because he, you know, he doesn't want to support those folks actually at the end of the day, I think. Um, but that is a big reason why there's a discrepancy between these two that's so broad. I mean, that's a lot of shows.

Yeah, there's a massive, a massive difference. And, you know, Spotify, I think, uh, Spotify's number is actually going down. And occasionally they release a new number, but it was something like 5.3 million. But of course, Spotify is full of an awful lot of shows which aren't necessarily publicly distributed. Well, yeah. So there's some which don't have RSS feeds, but also if you go on any of these services and you search for the word test, the amount of shows that you find is really, really high.

I've done it.

I've done it. Yeah. Even Apple Podcasts. So I think, you know, the, you know, look, at the end of the day, here's something that might be interesting. When the— so PodNews has podcast pages, right? So it's got a page for every single podcast out there. And those pages contain all kinds of information about a particular podcast. Now, that's what I tell people. It's not actually true. What PodNews has is it's got pages for every podcast that someone has searched for. And clicked on. So you can see all 4.2 million podcasts in the search in PodNews, but that doesn't mean that I've made 4.2 million pages. I've only made a page if somebody clicked on the actual podcast name. That's when it gets into the database. I only have half a million shows in my database, so I've given everybody 5 million shows that they can search through, or 4 million shows that they can, that they can search through, but only 500,000 of those shows have actually been clicked on. And that's the only time when it's actually, you know, been added, been added in there. So yeah, there is, I think Sam is doing things absolutely right in the Podfans app by making sure that he's only importing shows that people actually want to go and have a listen to. I would certainly agree. I agree with that.

Podfans.fm, by the way, very good. Yeah. Well, let's, let's wrap up the show. Once you guys both share your contact information and how, how people can reach out to you and take advantage of the things that you're bringing to the market. So James, go ahead.

Oh, I was going to throw to Sam. Okay. Please get Pod News. It's a free newsletter, podnews.net. It. It's very good. There is another, another podcast that you might want to get, which is called New Podcast Trailers, and all it's got in it is podcast trailers from all kinds of different shows. It updates every single day. So if you're looking for something new to listen to, New Podcast Trailers, you'll find it in your favorite podcast app and also in Spotify. And if you want to get in touch with me, I'm james@krid.land. Is my email address. That's james@crit.land.

Sam? Yeah, well, James and I do a podcast weekly together, so Pod News Weekly. So get that wherever you get your podcasts. And I do Podfans, which is this brand new podcasting 2.0 app that I'm building and releasing. So yeah, the doors open, the waitlists removed. Moved at the end of this month.

So yeah, happy days. Awesome. That's exciting. Yeah, I'm excited to get in there and start using it more.

So yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, by then we'll have the 350,000 podcasts that we think are worth having. And yeah, so we've been adding— there's a big bugbear of mine with the hosts in this industry of ours at the moment, which is garbage out. They are not verifying the data in, and we're finding a lot of RSS that is just garbage out. Um, and I just don't understand it. I, I keep asking. I had a word with Tom Rossi at Buzzsprout, and I've had words with RSSBlue. Why— you, you use Magic Mastering, you do all these great audio things and blah blah blah, and you're AIing everything. Why can't you just do simple field validation? Just into trouble with Buzzsprout. They don't listen to us anyway.

Well, yeah, well, yeah, who knows? That could be possible, right? Um, well, thanks guys. I'm Rob Greenlee and you can certainly reach me online too at Twitter. I have my own website, robgreenlee.com, and obviously go to newmediashow.com to catch all the archives. On this show. We've got plenty. I think we're over 566 episodes or something like that. And, and if you want to send me an email, you can certainly send it to rob.greenlee@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. And I'm sure Todd will be back soon at some point, but in the meantime, I'm gonna keep, keep the lights on and the, the stream going here on this, the show. So thank you for being with us today. And, and I think we had some steady listeners that went, uh, the full duration here. So I guess there are some folks, they're probably on the older end of the spectrum, probably, if they stayed with us this long. So, so thank you so much, everybody, and we'll be back. Uh, I don't know if we'll be back next week or not. I think it's that it's, um, Thanksgiving time frame, so I don't think so. So, but anyway, uh, have a great time. Thank you both, James and Sam, for, uh, taking time out. I know it's really early in the morning for you, James. I appreciate it. Go back to bed or something. But anyway, all right, bye everybody.

Thank you. Take