Open Podcasting Under Attack—What Creators Must Do Now

Well, welcome to Podcast Tips. My name is Rob Greenlee. This episode 62. Wow, I can't believe I'm up to 62 on this, this particular show. But, uh, let's just jump right into it. Uh, I want to thank you for being here. Thank you for joining me. Um, so the topic tonight I want to talk about is, is one that's a hotly discussed topic in the podcasting industry and space, and it's been that way for a few years now. So what exactly is open podcasting? So when we talk about this concept of open podcasting, what does that really mean? And why is understanding it kind of crucial for creators today? And I think that, you know, to answer just real briefly, I think it's important to have context about, you know, what this medium was built on originally. And what the concept is of podcasting and where it came from and what the motivation was for starting it. And I'll try and expand on that a little bit tonight on the show. But is this concept of open really needed? And is it important now? And I think those are key questions that we all have to ask ourselves as we run through this topic. There's many in the podcasting space that know extensively about this concept of open podcasting and what's different about it and what's interesting about it. And, and I think it's really important for everybody to have at least a, a basic level understanding on what open podcasting means. So if you wanted to watch this show and some of the other podcasts that I do as well, you can go to a network that I have called Adore Network. And you can get this show on demand as an audio and video podcast over there on that platform. And it's another example of pointing to a.com that I control. So it's a little bit of an example, but let's get started here. Podcasting began with openness of distribution in its concept, starting it back in 2004 is when it really took off. The, the whole concept of RSS was invented much earlier than that, a few years earlier, by Dave Weiner. And then Adam Curry and Dave kind of worked together to kind of merge the, the RSS technology, which is XML. It's not important that you understand in detail what that is, but it's basically a a web document that is basically code. So it's not really a usable, visible document. And I think I've shown it on the show in the past, but it was basically a way to share an episode list that had links to the MP3 files in that shared document that could be shared to many different listening platforms all at once, right? So you publish a new episode, it goes in there, it's an item that's listed in the list of episodes. And then in that, that document has all your metadata and links to your cover art or your graphics. And those are important pieces for listening platforms to have about your podcast. So that's in the early days, and as it still is called, is really simple syndication. So You know, it's really easy to share that, that web address with various platforms, whether it be Apple Podcasts or Spotify or any of the, the other podcast listening platforms or viewing platforms as you look at the, the past, as well as you look at this show. This show is an audio and video podcast via RSS. That doesn't mean that it isn't available on LinkedIn and YouTube and all of the the more modern consumption platforms is I'm also doing this live. So, you know, this has really been something that's been utilized. And if you think about the context of this, and I'm going to talk about this in the context of kind of walled garden platforms per se and how they're having an oversized influence in podcasting. And that entrance really started in 2005 with the entrance of Apple, um, with the iTunes platform and the, in the iPod. So that really started to move us to another era of having this content, uh, and via RSS indexed by these, um, bigger platforms. That was like the the first one that did it. And then, then, then we saw a platform that I worked on called, called Zune popped up, and it had its own kind of client software like iTunes, and it had its portable media players and all that stuff. So that was the early days, but it was all built on the back of really simple syndication. And so it was really easy. These podcast hosts like Libsyn and Buzzsprout, whatever, you go there, create an account, you upload your episodes or your trailer and input all your metadata, and they generated an RSS feed for you that then could be shared with all of the listening platforms that were out there all at once. So you don't have to go in and upload your content directly to each of these platforms separately, right? That's not very efficient, right? And that's one of the things that keep in mind about this whole concept of really simple syndication means is that it's, it's simple, it's easy, it's very efficient in getting your content out to as many platforms as you can with one publish. And so what I'm going to talk about tonight is some of the challenges that the medium has right now around some of these bigger proprietary platforms kind of wanting to have you upload directly to their platform. So, you know, I've explained a little bit what RSS is, and that's really the foundation of this concept of open podcasting, which means that anybody can get access to your RSS feed. Though I would say that the RSS feed is kind of disappearing from the, the, the visible landscape of podcasting now. I think fewer people in the podcast industry really know extensively about even what an RSS feed is, what it looks like. There's, there's probably many people in the industry that have been working in the industry for a few years now that may not even know what an RSS feed looks like. So this is, and in some ways, maybe they don't really need to know what it looks like and what it really is. Right. All they need to know is how it works and what it is. Right. It's basically a URL link that is just shared like a web link to a website. But all it is is a link to an updatable XML document that basically has all your episodes, all your description data for each of the episodes, your title, the date of publish, what the format of the media that's in there can be, either audio or video. And it also has master series-level metadata in there too, like a link to your podcast cover art. And it has in there your series description, right? So it has all the basics that any of these listening platforms need to display your podcast in their interface, right? Everybody's agreed to most of the tags that are in there. And there's this concept of what they call namespace, which is basically most of the industry conforms to a namespace that was adopted or created by Apple in the early days of podcasting. It's the iTunes namespace is what was created, and everybody in the industry adopted it. And all the namespaces is a list of tags, metadata tags that a platform like Ellipsen or Buzzsprout or a Blueberry, whatever, would create a field in their interface that you would cut and paste, let's say a description or metadata or text and upload an image and it would create an image link in that document that can be shared with a large number of, of, podcatchers is the term that oftentimes is used, but, you know, like, like an Overcast or a Pocket Cast or, or Spotify or whatever, it can be shared with those platforms and they can get it up. And so when you publish one episode, it just goes everywhere, mostly all at once. So there can be a little bit of time delay in each of the platforms. It depends on how quickly they scan all the RSS feeds that they have in their catalog to pick up any changes. So, um, the other advantage of RSS is that you kind of own that to some degree, and the podcast hosts have kind of like mostly kept their hands off of things that are, that are put into an RSS feed. But there is another level here that I wanted to talk about too, um, is is there is a side of RSS that can be even independent of a Lipson or a Podbean or a Buzzsprout. You can actually get a plugin for your WordPress website, and a good example of that is PowerPress from Blueberry, and it does have the capability in there for you to generate your own RSS feed off of your own dot-com. And actually host the media files on your own website, um, server, right? So you would own pretty much all of the infrastructure of your podcast. And this is a key distinction to keep in mind as an option. Now, most people aren't choosing to do this. In the earlier years, I would say even just a few years ago, probably a third of all podcasts that were ever created were doing just what I just said. They were generating an RSS feed off of their own website domain name, right off of their own hosting plan that they're maybe paying $20 a month for or $30 a month for. Instead of going to Podbean or Buzzsprout and having them host it, they would host it themselves. They would host the MP3 files themselves off of the same account. As they had their website. And this really gets back to this concept that I was talking about around open podcasting, right? Open and a platform that you— it's really difficult to be taken down or moderated or censored. Now, there's been some examples of this happening in the past at the big platforms where they just don't like your content or you said something that offends the moderators on those platforms and you get taken down. I think we've all seen that happen with the social media platforms, so in some ways this has happened also with these big walled garden proprietary platforms, and that includes Apple, includes Spotify, it includes, you know, the YouTube platform. So all those platforms have what they call terms of service, and so those terms of service specify there's only certain types of content that are allowed to be published on their platform. Now that's a separate issue from what you do in your RSS feed, right? They can choose to remove that RSS feed from that platform if you happen to publish content that doesn't align with their content policies, right? Or their— what's termed in like a YouTube platform, their community standards. So there's terms that have been kind of created over time to kind of soften this to some degree in its perception, but nonetheless, it's a form of, we don't like your content, so we don't want that on our platform and we're going to take it down. So this concept of openness means that platforms don't have that level of control. And so if you want it, this is a complex topic, especially today, is, is it, you know, there's very few shows that fall into this, but it's always kind of like the power of open podcasting is, is that if you own the RSS feed, you own most of it. In the early days when I started podcasting, I literally did own everything. I had my own servers, I had my own software, operating system software that served my website and also made available streams off of my server. And I actually had that in my own computer, my own servers that I co-located. I, I paid for and owned the bandwidth that went into that server. So there literally would not be anyone that could take down my podcast if I didn't want it to be taken down. So that is kind of at the core, if we kind of go, go back to the earlier era of, of podcasting and kind of see why we are where we are at right now. So, so I think we want, as an industry, we want to hold on to some of the aspects of open podcasting. And so this concept of what's called, you know, this Podcast Index, which is built on kind of an open philosophy, and I can pull up, but there's also another organization called the Podcast Standards Project, which is really all these organizations, the Podcasting 2.0 Initiative, are really ways that we can extend the, usability and function of the RSS feed. And so I think you have that as a backdrop here to some degree, um, you know, and I think that the big platforms are kind of not necessarily adopting these new ideas, these new what would be termed standards. And so I can pull up on the screen here what one of these looks like here. Let's see if I can add it to the— it says here I've got to do something different. Remove streams from the stage. I'm not sure why it's doing that. So anyway, the Podcast Standards Project is here, let me try and pull it up again here and see if I can get it to show on the screen. Let's see here, Podcast Standards Project. Let's see if it'll show up this time. Okay, that's not it. So let's go in here. Okay, so the Podcast Standards Project is advocating for open podcasting, right? That's the actual name of it. And it's basically a group of people that are involved in the industry that are looking to advance some of these new standards for RSS. So, so that is the idea behind it. And, and trying to advocate for the adoption of some new standards around opportunities to extend the functionality of RSS, add some new tags, add some more functionality. That kind of concept. So I would, I would recommend going to podstandards.org is the actual website itself. Pod, P-O-D, standards.org. So that's a, that's definitely a good one to check out. And then the, the other one to check out here, and I will pull this up too is called the, the podcast index. So if you can see at the top up here, podcast index, it's also got some tracking of, of, um, you know, how many podcasts there are. It's got like a, um, uh, do I see it in here? Stats. Yeah, here it is. So currently we've got 4,498,000 podcast feeds totally that are out there in the world today, of which about 96,000 have published a new episode in the last 3 days, about 243,000 in the last week or so. 243,000. So, you know, it's— that's a big drop in how many new episodes are being published into that 4,498,000 podcasts that are, that, that have really ever been published. So that's, that's something to, to think about. But the Podcast Index also has other things on it too. And this site is run by Adam Curry and Dave Jones. Those two, two guys are very important and Actually, Adam Curry is the one that kind of invented the podcatcher and really is considered to be the father of podcasting. So let me pull up this one next here. This is a website too called podcastingnumber2.org is what this is, and this is a website that you can go to to check out all of the the kind of namespaces that the Podcasting 2.0 project is advocating for. So it has its own namespace. You can see that up in the upper part of the screen here. And it basically runs through all of the ideas, right, or the new tags or the new functionality that can be added to RSS. So it's, it's really a comprehensive list of ideas. Now granted, this is always being improved and worked on. And so there's, there's always new things coming into here. And so there's an advocacy that's going on to advocate to the podcast players like the apps, as well as the podcast hosts and the the large and small podcast consumption apps like Spotify or Apple or any of those are all people that are being pitched some of these concepts of adding some more functionality to add some innovation to RSS. Because right now, most of what RSS is built on has been kind of, kind of a legacy thing, right? It's, it's been based on what's, uh, what's been out there for many years now. So, so I think we all want open podcasting to survive, and one of the things that RSS has faced is criticism because it's not innovative, it's not innovating, it's not improving, it's not getting better. And lots of people have criticized, even, even a company like Spotify back in the early days. The guy that worked and actually founded Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify, wrote many articles kind of criticizing RSS, is that, well, a proprietary platform like Spotify can innovate, right? But RSS is old and outdated and, and And in some ways that was just kind of scapegoating the issue is that Spotify and these big walled gardens wanna be the innovators. They don't wanna adopt someone else's innovation or idea necessarily. They oftentimes have a structure and an organizational culture that everything has to be invented by them. And I understand that I used to work for Microsoft I get it, you know, the, the concept of adopting someone else's idea is not exactly normal. Um, so, so the, the power of this really is, is that this is a standard that's existed for over 20 years, and, and it is getting a little dated, and it needs to be improved, it needs to be updated. And the industry needs to really come together and really apply these innovations to podcasting, be proactive about it, and everybody wins. If each of us takes a position on this that, well, I only want to be the one that wins, then we're gonna get stuck in this quagmire of one platform doing this, another platform doing something else, and we just create this what I'm starting to call is kind of chaos, is because everybody is, is kind of competing against each other. Now I understand that this is a capitalistic system that we live in, and, and, and that, that happens. But there are some other undertows going on here because technology is much more flexible than RSS. RSS can be used Right? But there are other ways of accomplishing the same thing. Technologies like APIs is a good example. Now, I know I'm kind of diving into kind of technical aspects that maybe you don't have as much of an interest in if you're watching this, but you know, there are other ways that a platform can, can share your episode information with other, other listening platforms. It doesn't have to be RSS, but, but the key thing about RSS is that everybody up to this point has agreed to support what it is today. And that is something that just doesn't really exist that much out there in the technology sector because everybody's fighting over users and they're fighting over market share and people are trying to do something different than others. Not adopting common standards. And I think that's the big thing that we're up against. But we did in the early days, and still today we still have a big common shared infrastructure built on RSS. And I think we really have to think of that as a unique opportunity. So there's been many companies, hosting companies that have adopted RSS. There's been even Apple has adopted RSS. Now, granted, they came in very early and say, well, Okay, the RSS spec was fine, but it didn't fit with our needs. And I'm talking about Apple saying this. Apple had very specific metadata needs that they wanted to get from the creator community. And so they came up with their own, what's called namespace, which is their own tags. And that's kind of essentially what the Podcasting 2.0 project is doing. Is they have come up with a namespace that doesn't disrupt what the Apple or the iTunes namespace specifies, right? It's basic tags. What we're doing is we're adding to that because you can have multiple namespaces applied to the same RSS feed. So, and it will work. Because there has been a precedent for that in the past. So, um, but the big thing really, I think, around this topic of open podcasting is the ability to create your own website right off of a.com, which many podcasters, or I would say a large percentage of podcasters, have created their own website for their podcast. But there's no reason why you can't host everything on that. And, and it's good for people to realize that they can do that. So let's say that they get into an issue with a particular episode that they have and they get taken down off of the big listening platforms. That doesn't necessarily mean that their, their podcast has been removed because it's still off of your own website. So there has been folks that have, have done this approach where they've had their own RSS feed off of their own website, plus they've created a hosting account like at a Spreaker or whatever that was almost like a mirror of that, that RSS feed. But they had this RSS feed that was off of their own.com domain name that was kind of like an insurance blanket for them that they could still make their shows available. So, but yet at the same time, take advantage of the opportunity to distribute their show to these big platforms that maybe had terms of service that could potentially take your show down from. So, you know, that's the, that's the challenge. So if you have your own domain name and about a third, and I think I mentioned this earlier, about a third of the podcasts out there are still doing self-hosting. It's basically what is called self-hosting and, and having your RSS feed generated locally on your own website through a plugin. It's usually done through WordPress. Usually back when I got started in doing all this, there weren't any plugins, there weren't any really kind of RSS generators. There was a couple of really rough ones, but when I got started with it I was hand-adding the enclosure tag to my RSS feed that I had for my blog. So I know I'm getting into kind of minor details here, but, but in the early days, you know, you had to kind of hand-edit that stuff because there really wasn't the software out there that would automatically generate that, that RSS feed. I made a lot of mistakes, which means that sometimes my RSS feed would break and it wouldn't work. So I know I'm taking everybody kind of back in time, maybe a little too far here, but, um, but owning your own.com, I think, is still a good, good thing. Or having whatever you're doing off of a.com, um, it is important because you kind of control access to that, right? So if for some reason you do get taken down off of one of these big platforms, you can tell your audience go to my website and watch my, my show off of my website. It's the same thing I'm doing with the Adore Network. If you were to go to adorenetwork.com, you can find this podcast in there as a video and audio show, and you can actually watch it because it's based on RSS. It's not based on a link that's in there from Apple or from Spotify or any of those platforms where they could take you down. All right. So you're in control of your distribution. So that's the, that's the big advantage. And I think it's really important for all podcasters to kind of understand this concept. And, and one of the things that we're shifting a lot of control over too is the, is the monetization. Now, granted, I don't believe that there's any plugins that will do programmatic advertising. Into a self-hosted podcast right now. I think most of those you have to work through, let's say, a Spreaker or a Libsyn platform, or— and that has that automatic advertising built in if you want to monetize. So that's one of the downsides, right, of this monetization approach that we're taking, is that it's not an open kind of platform for that, right? The other threat that we're seeing to RSS is increasingly these big platforms are trying to— and I would say YouTube is the best example of it right now— where if you give YouTube your RSS feed, they will capture, they will download one copy of each of your episodes, and then they will host it and make it available to YouTube users. And they will stream it to their YouTube users. Oftentimes what they'll do is convert that audio file, that MP3, into an MP4 and then deliver that file as an HLS stream. Now, granted, there is talk that there's passthrough with YouTube, but I haven't honestly confirmed that, that that is exactly happening in all cases. I, I would be skeptical of that, um, just because YouTube is a video platform. Everything they've done up till now— I probably need to dig a little deeper into that just to make sure that I'm saying the right thing here, but— and it gets very convoluted when a platform captures and makes a cached copy of your episode and then redistributes it, right? And, and somewhat this is happening on This is in a different way with Spotify, where Spotify, you can submit your RSS feed. Let's say you have programmatic advertising going into each of your episodes. Um, and, and, and then you upload a video to the Spotify platform. And what Spotify will do is they will take the audio out of the video and overwrite and delete your RSS-based audio. And that becomes the audio for that episode. So when you upload the video, they just swap out the audio. I don't like that for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is, is that RSS-based audio file that you've shared with them that is on pass-through will be— all your monetization, your programmatic advertising will be eliminated. The other thing is, is that the option of creating a separate version of your episode that maybe is edited differently as audio than it is as a video gets removed as well. So just the concept of what Spotify is doing is really kind of breaking the mold of what the intent of RSS is. And, and I think it's obvious why they're doing that is that they want to disrupt RSS They want to take control of the media file. They want to be the one to monetize it. But currently, the way they've architected it is that content creators are actually losing revenue by doing that. So the industry has been publicly recommending not to upload video to Spotify until Spotify fixes that, because at the present time, Spotify is not playing fair with content creators. And, and, and some of the content creators have said, okay, I'll upload my video to Spotify, unknowing that, that inadvertently or on purpose, you know, you can come to your own conclusion, is that they're going to lose half of their revenue. Let's say that they have a lot of people listening on to their audiophile on Spotify. And then all of a sudden that audio episode that's shared through RSS gets removed and the audio from your video file replaces it. And that's all hosted by Spotify instead of hosted from your central podcast host. You're going to lose revenue clearly. And there's been examples of people losing half of their revenue by doing this when the whole idea was to grow your revenue. You upload video, hopefully you're going to make additional money from the video and not lose the revenue from your audio. Though I think it may be a little misunderstanding the dynamic there. I think if you have audio and video as an option, what you're going to see is a split in consumption. You're probably going to see 20% of your audience consuming the the video and probably 80% consuming your audio. So there's going to be a split there, you know, the 20% video, 80% audio. And so you may lose 20% of your, your listeners on the audio, which means that you maybe, maybe get a 20% reduction in your audio ad revenue. So you need to be able to make up that revenue over on the video side. But how it's set up right now, um, that's, that's not an easy thing to accomplish right now. So I think Spotify has some adjusting to do to make all this really, really work. And, and it's, you know, at least YouTube is being upfront about it, right? People know that when they do what they do with YouTube, you have to create your YouTube channel and you have to create a you know, a playlist and all this kind of stuff in your YouTube channel. Whether or not they're, they're doing pass-through, I think is doubtful. Um, I need to dig a little deeper to actually find out about that, um, just to make sure what they're doing right now. Um, you know, so I think I've made a case of why open podcasting still matters. So The creator needs to be in more control. And I think over time, we're kind of increasingly losing control because of these big proprietary walled garden platforms. So how do we keep control of that? I think one of the ways is that we adopt these Podcast 2.0 kind of new tags. And I've talked about in this series too, in the past, around this concept of HLS streaming. Because these big walled gardens platforms are primarily HLS streaming our content to their consumers. So one of the ways that they're justifying that is that they get a copy of the media file and they can convert it into a file that's compatible with their system. Right? And up to this point, we've wanted them to have, you know, a pass-through where we deliver the content to the user. But if we adopt HLS streaming, then we're adopting in the RSS feed an alternative for these platforms to just capture that stream. So the podcaster retains central control, without giving the file to these platforms for them to rehost and restream your content and thus lose control of your content. It's really the only way that we can battle this. And then there's these models like value for value, you know, and this is being, being developed too. It's a way for the host and the listening platform and the, um, the listener can exchange value or money or cryptocurrency, um, with each other to provide a financial benefit for that relationship. Kind of like a, like a donation model that's been around for many years around Patreon and PayPal and things like that that people have been using. But this value-for-value model that exists inside of the Podcast 2.0 project is, is a solution for some of these problems. So, um, you know, how can podcasters, you know, keep this open? And I think the big thing is just being educated about what it is, how it works, and don't let the, the whole conversation about RSS get lost. And because then that's playing into the power of these big platforms. You know, and, and increasingly we need to kind of avoid these exclusive platform deals, you know, where your content is only available on this listening platform or watching platform. Now, granted, for like YouTube, I think that's kind of a separate conversation because it's not really a traditional podcasting platform. It's always run kind of parallel with podcasting. And it's always had a, a role in just distributing video content in the podcasting kind of lane of sorts, but it doesn't really use RSS all that much to accomplish any of this. You have to upload directly to them. So, you know, I think the platform that's really the big platform that's really embraced open podcasting, um, to the, the max is really Apple Podcasts and the Podcast Index and all these what I would call kind of smaller listening apps that are out there too, um, like Overcast and Pocket Cast and Fountain. And there's a bunch of new ones that are out there too that are adopting and keeping the RSS distribution flame alive. And I think that's important. And I think all of us need to, to go to these websites and, and kind of just read through it and at least be, be aware of it. And in the comments on social media, or if you make comments to these big platforms like Spotify or whatever, you know, make a comment to them about are you planning on supporting any of the Podcasting 2.0 tags to help justify the podcast hosting platforms adopting this in their RSS spec? 'Cause it's like the chicken or the egg thing, right? It's, are people going to adopt these new innovative tags or some of them? I mean, some of them have been adopted like the transcript tag, And, and the podping tag, and some of these are being adopted because they just make logical sense. But how do we get all the platforms to, to adopt it? You know, when Apple came out with a new namespace, everybody jumped and said, well, yeah, I'll, you know, I'll have that out next week. Well, that doesn't, that doesn't happen with the Podcasting 2.0. Namespace because there's no big power behind it, right? There's no big platform that has so much power over the medium to, to, to drive new things. So that's where it has to come from, all of us. And, and it's just not going to happen unless all of us as creators and fans of podcasting kind of encourage it. And say that this is important. Also, I'll go and use the Fountain app, or I'll go use an app that supports the Podcast 2.0 specs. And there are apps out there. There's Podverse, Fountain are just a couple of them. So, you know, if you want to stand up for free, open podcasting, then, you know, go on over and use those platforms. You know, Blueberry is the platform that I use for this podcast to host, and they, they embrace the Podcasting 2.0 spec in a, in a significant way. So hopefully this has been helpful for you tonight, and I hope that you go take a look at the podcasting2.org, the number 2, dot org, as well as the podcastindex.org. Check those sites out and go to podstandards.org as well and just kind of read and keep up with what's going on over there. You know, we have a landscape now that is both open and closed. And that's kind of been always the case for, for years now. So if you have any questions or comments about this, I would love to see those. I see that there's been a couple of comments in here, and I, I appreciate everybody being in here. Uh, AKA TGIF says, hello Rob, hey, thank you for making the the post and the comment here. And then AKA TGIF writes, the workaround, submit a teaser to Spotify and point to Spotify user to your destination. So yeah, I think that's a good idea. So you always need to be kind of pointing people back to your, your home of sorts and use these platforms as a way to recruit your fans over to your owned platforms. And, and I think that's a key, key thing to, to think about. And then also Harold Gilchrist writes here, why don't podcast hosts simply acknowledge that it's Spotify pulling and adjusting the RSS feed and tailor it to an RSS feed best served at Spotify. The MP3 could be modified to be Spotify-enabled. Well, I think part of the option that's in the Podcasting 2.0 spec has what's called an alternative enclosure. And so there has been a lot of speculation around various ways that that alternative enclosure, because the main enclosure is usually what's used to share the, the URL to the, the MP3 file, right? Or, or if it's video, the MP4 file. So what if you could offer a second option link, right? So you have the, the main enclosure be, let's say, a direct link to your MP3 file. And then the alternative enclosure could be a link to an HLS stream as an option, right? So, and then as you work with these platforms that want to stream your show, not deliver a download, that want to capture one episode, then you just tell them to pick up the streaming link right, right, right below, and you can stream it to their users. They don't even have to use their own platform to stream it. They don't have to cache the episodes. And that leaves the podcast host as well as the podcaster in central control of their content that they can get involved even on the video side. They can get involved in advertising that is centrally controlled by the host, by the show itself. And not have this bifurcated relationship with these big platforms is to have advertising that's funneled into content that goes to some apps, and then Spotify takes an ad-free version of your show and then adds their own ads, which basically kind of splits the ecosystem up and doesn't make it as efficient. Granted, that's probably in the business interest of Spotify to actually do that, but it's certainly not in the best interest of the, of the podcast hosting platform or the owner of the content who wants to be in control of the content. So, and then it looks like I got a comment also from Chris Ellis. There is also decentralized publishing platforms now that, like Nostr, that use relay networks. You can publish podcasts on bridging platforms like fountain.fm. So I'm not that familiar with the Nostr platform to be able to add too much commentary on that, Um, but it's a decentralized publishing platform. So the question that I would ask on that, Chris, is, is, um, what is the, the technology that's used to publish that in, in that relay network? Is it utilizing RSS or is it using API technology? Because that's the other thing that we're gradually shifting towards is some new podcast hosting platforms are going to start shifting syndication, right? That it has the same function as RSS but will be based on API relationships between the, the host and the, the listening or viewing platforms. So I'm not sure what technology is being utilized to, to bridge platforms. And, and Fountain FM, are they They just taking the same link from the podcast hosting platform and just sharing it with another, another platform through their platform. I mean, that's, that's a possibility as well, as long as the art is the URL to the master file, the master media file pulls from the same source. And that's also a way for us to get get centralized reporting of, of analytics and data, right? So it looks like Chris Ellis also leaves a comment in here too. That way you're not dependent on DNS and centralized web hosting or having an email account. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think technology has a bunch of different ways of sharing information and sharing files and things like that. It's— it really has to do with what's the technology that's being used to do that. Is it based on RSS or is it based on some other protocol, right? And then Chris Ellis also writes here, um, The bridging platforms use the legacy web of DNS and hosted websites to make it accessible. That's still not telling me what the, what the, the sharing file is, or is it a, a link URL to the master hosting, or is it sharing the, the media file itself? You know, saying DNS doesn't really tell me the complete picture other than the DNS could, could be linked up with an IP address or something like that. So I'm not really sure, Chris, exactly what you're, what you're pointing to here, but it's, you know, I'm, I'm curious. I, I appreciate you mentioning it. I would love to know more about what you're thinking about here and what it really means in the context of Open RSS and how that is being shared and what's the protocols and the technology that's being used to actually share that. So it looks like Harold Gilchrist wrote in here something too. He writes, what happens if you send Spotify an MP3 that has all of your advertisements embedded. Well, that's kind of baked in, right? That's been around a long time. Does it stay or is it stripped out before they post the audio at Spotify? Is this defined in their policy? Well, at this point, I would assume, I mean, let me back up and say that ability to strip out ads is a technology that's out there, right? LipSync actually has the ability to take out audio ads and replace them with new ads. So it's not that this methodology you're talking about is outside of the realm of the available tech that's available today. So you could replace an audio ad that would be baked in with a dynamically inserted ad. So that is a possibility. I just don't think that Spotify or YouTube are actually doing that. I think if you have baked-in ads, they will stay in the content. Now granted, oftentimes these platforms want a version of the audio that doesn't have any ads in it. But mostly what they're concerned about is programmatic ads. So, and that's a, that's a concern on the podcast owner as well as the host too, is that if they're on a programmatic advertising campaign and that file gets shared with Spotify, cached, any programmatic ads that were in that audio file will get permanently stored in the Spotify platform, so, or on the YouTube platform. So that's the danger of this, is that if you're monetizing through a central monetization methodology, then that could be baked into the content that's available in YouTube up until some point it gets removed. So, okay, so Chris Ellis writes in here, um, I believe that Fountain FM still uses RSS, but the concept is that when you host a file, it's hosted on other people's computers rather than the central servers. Okay, well, you know, I think That's like a file sharing type of a relationship then. So does the central host platform get any kind of credit for that transfer or that play is the question, right? It's all about trying to achieve centralized metrics, right? So all of us know that that show was listened to or downloaded a certain amount of times, right? And it got presented to a certain amount of audience. And so if you're transferring files around that are, that are not, you know, hosted from the central server, the central server is not going to get that credit for the distribution of that. Now, granted, if it's just sharing the URL link to the hosting platform that's hosting that media file, then yeah, that podcaster will get credit and the referring platform will also get credit for making that show available to an audience member. So hopefully they're using RSS in a way that's compatible with the metrics, right? And how things are counted. So Chris, thank you so much. Harold, thank you for the comment. I hope I answered the questions. Now, some of these questions can be linked up with some technology or tech that we're not really, you know, I'm not 100% clear on what you're talking about. So I hope that's still a good answer that answered those questions. So feel free to ask any more or share any other comments about open podcasting and what you think you know, maybe I spend a minute here talking about what, what I think is going to happen. Um, oh, looks like Chris Ellis wrote, uh, another comment in here to kind of follow up. Uh, Chris says, good show, thank you so much, this is a very important topic right now. And I agree with you, Chris. I mean, it's, it, it's why I wanted to do this episode tonight was to talk about this. But it is a topic that's very linked up with tech, right? And it's linked up with technical processes that are not necessarily easy to understand or realize what's going on. And it creates a lot of confusion in the market. And that's one of the challenges is because the industry has been moving towards simplification, right? And more and more Content creators are really content creators. They're not technologists, right? I mean, I started podcasting in the era when you kind of had to be a geek and you had to, you know, hand code RSS feeds. I mean, how many of you out there are actually hand coding RSS feeds? Uh, I don't think anybody. So this whole concept of RSS feeds is kind of disappearing from people's attention and consciousness. For many years in podcasting, people were— that's how they shared podcasts was they cut and paste the RSS feed and they would send it to somebody else to cut and paste it into, you know, a feed reader or a podcatcher are the terms, right? They would cut and paste this RSS feed to be able to get access to the show. But slowly that's disappearing. And it looks like Matt Medeiros also left a comment in here too. You You know, it's open also means we can openly develop solutions to create new listener experiences. Yeah, Matt, I agree 100%. That's what this whole Podcasting 2.0 initiative is all about. And that's, but it's also coming grassroots, right? It's coming from the ground up of sorts. It's coming from the community up, which is not how these big corporate platforms like to operate. They are more top-down, right? So decisions come from higher levels in the company about what the strategy is, where what we're doing here with the Podcasting 2.0 project or the Podcast Index or the podstandards.org project is more of a bottom-up approach to innovation. That's a little contrary to how these big tech companies work. I mean, how many big tech companies listen to a standards group that's talking about best practices in social media? I don't think that they're listening. I mean, unless they're government and they have influence and power over those platforms, those platforms aren't gonna listen. So that's what we're up against. So if we want to have this control over the medium and the influence over the medium, It's really going to take all of us coming together and really advocating for this in a significant way, or take a pathway toward the platforms that are embracing it as we look to the future. And that may be our best approach here, is to maybe shift our usage over to Fountain or these other Podverse and these other apps that are embracing the change that we all want. Now granted, that can be a little tough because all of us like to watch YouTube videos. All of us like to get music off of Spotify. But that doesn't mean that you can't use Spotify for music and then use these other podcast apps to listen to podcasts or audio. And oftentimes video. And some of these, you know, like Podverse and Fountain support live video streaming inside of their podcast listening apps. The live lit tag, which is part of it too. I just think we're in this era of change and we're changing towards video in a— or re-engaging with video in an increasing way. And for us to properly adjust to this, I think the total solution is not Spotify and YouTube. Though they're gonna obviously have a big influence and power over the marketplace on a global scale, I don't think we can necessarily stop that. But I think what we can do is come together and advocate for open podcasting and keeping that alive and strong. And I appreciate all you being here today watching this show tonight. I think you're, you're an example of people that do care, or she wouldn't be here tonight. So, well, thank you so much. I'm at the top of the hour, and like I said, I appreciate you being here tonight. And keep this conversation alive, make comments in the, the area of this post on whatever social platform that you're on, and and let's keep this conversation going. And like I said, I appreciate all of you being here and all the comments. Thank you so much, and we'll call it a night. Thank you so much, and have, have a wonderful Thursday and, and a great Friday and a great weekend. So, and then if you wanted to see any of the past episodes of this show, you can go to adornetwork.com, and you can get access to that. So thank you so much. Okay, good night.