Podcast Movement 2025 Review

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In the afternoon, hey, afternoon delight with Todd and Rob Greenlee.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, we are here and hopefully we're not squeaking or buzzing every minute or 2 minutes. Um, prolific troubleshooting has went down, so maybe after a month I've, I've got it right. We'll see. Hey Rob, welcome to the show.

Yeah, it's great to be, to be back static-free.

Yeah, static-free. Yeah, it was kind of weird. It was just this weird thing that just kind of cropped up, cropped up, and, and I thought I had it licked. I had heard it once before, and, and then you said, oh no, I heard it on the last two shows. I'm like, oh yeah. So anyway, um, but anyway, we're, we're running completely on the Mac Mini, uh, so I guess it doesn't matter. People don't care how it's running, but I'm not on the MacBook no more, so there's no more power supplies or, you know, any of that weird stuff. But hey, um, Podcast Movement wrapped up. I don't know if you heard much about Podcast Movement at all, um, on your side, but I had quite the report from my team.

Yeah, I would love to hear, um, from your team on what they thought of it. I know you're not Planning on going back, it sounds like, next year. But it'd be great to hear. I've got an outline of kind of the main kind of key topics that were covered in a significant way at the event. And what got people talking, I think, is the interesting aspect of what happened there. So yeah, let's go ahead and dive into it.

From an exhibitor standpoint, Um, yeah, pretty bad. Uh, pretty bad.

So bad from what perspective?

Traffic standpoint, you know, just a traffic standpoint. And it was an upstairs-downstairs type of venue. They didn't even know after— for the— until like the first 24 hours that there were even stuff going on downstairs. And there was just some, you know, major— yeah, it just— it was just one of these layouts that wasn't conducive to the traffic and the consensus was not positive from the— and again, as an exhibitor, what you're looking for is traffic and people to talk to. And, you know, they did stay fairly busy and have some good meetings. So it wasn't like there wasn't, but that's nothing that couldn't have been accomplished by just one of us being on the ground, having bought a regular ticket and just been there in person. So, you know, probably going forward, that will probably be at least for the, what I call the winter event or spring event, is what we'll do. The— there was not a lot. I think they said they saw DeAn once. The entire time. And just in passing, um, there was a notable, uh, very, very significant commentary about Jared not being there. A lot of discussion about him with amongst the vendors. Um, you know, Jared really kind of acted as, um, how you doing, how's things going, how's the show, you know, that type of a liaison almost. Um, at the event. Dan had done some of that in years past. I think, you know, just like any other show, Dan's pretty busy. Um, but we and others did not opt to go back. Now, ironically, they did not announce where the event would be held next year.

Hmm, that's interesting. So usually they, they know that by now.

Yeah, they did not take reservations. So does that mean they're going to go back to— or they're just going to go to one show? I— my suspicion is that would probably be a very smart move. Um, they, they did not, um, almost entirely— there was, there was less than a handful of new podcasters they talked to, and it was the same people that were business-wise, um, at the— you know, it's again, it's turned into a business event, um, largely. Um, obviously there's creators there, but, um, yeah, some of the same, same faces per se. So, you know, I think it's— we'll go to the summer event, obviously we'll continue to do that and support it, but I just don't see, um, value anymore in supporting the spring event. So, you know, what that really means for us is a reduction in expenses. Yeah. And we're looking at other events to go to. You know, we went to a travel event a couple of weeks before this, and obviously I went out here to Podfest Asia. I was lucky enough I'm in-country, so it wasn't extra cost for me just to go up to Manila per se. Uh, but, um, yeah, interesting. And of course, the— some of the reports coming out were stuff I want to talk about, but let's go over what you, you see from a content standpoint, what was being chit-chatted at the event.

Well, I think a lot of these things that are kind of key takeaways from the events, um, really get back to kind of the core of the content that was talked about at the event in the panel sessions and that type of stuff. But it was also conversations in the hallway around trends in the industry, where things are going, just like you mentioned, you know, talking about Jared Easley and his move to the NAB Show and being more involved on the content and programming side at the NAB Show.

Right.

I mean, both of us know that show very, very well. We used to go to that show all the time. And I, you know, it's also another event that's kind of dropped off of the map for podcasters and podcasting as well. I mean, it's just one of those events that we started out a few years ago having a podcast pavilion at, and now it's like there's very little people at the NAB show now that is related to podcasting. I'm not saying that maybe, you know, that there isn't still people there at the event that are interested in podcasting. It's just that kind of the event itself has kind of moved away from it. And it kind of speaks to a bigger topic around conferences when it comes to new creators and new content creators. You know, I think The thought that came into my mind as I thought about what you were talking about, about Podcast Movement, was maybe that event just needs to move into being like a Podcast Movement Summit or something like that, where it's like a, like a 1-day or 2-day track or something like that, that, you know, the business leaders in the industry all get together and it's really just mostly a networking event. 'Cause that's essentially what the benefit of this thing is anyway. And to really double down on that and just accept the fact that you're not gonna attract content creators. I mean, unless you create something around it like a content festival or a way that can create a platform for large content creators to help promote what they're doing and attract fans and stuff. But I just don't see Podcast Movement move in that direction. So, you know, I think probably just doubling down on being kind of like focused on what it's trying to do instead of trying to do something that it's not really doing.

It's not a creator event in my opinion anymore.

Yeah.

And, you know, and the summer event was supposed to be the creator event. They will probably, they'll probably vehemently disagree. And again, they had, and another thing about attendance, I asked, you know, what was their, you know, what was my team's guess? And, you know, the best indication is going to a keynote, a big keynote, and doing a headcount during a keynote. And, you know, you figure if you get probably 75% of the people attending the keynote, because the other 25% are people that are exhibitors and those types of folks. And they just, you know, they said they had a hard time, and maybe it's wrong, you know, again, this was just their observation that 800 to 900 people they figured was the number of attendees. Now, again, if they said 1,600, Um, that people, you know, what's— what I saw even at Podfest Asia, even this is a one-day event, people come in and they came in, they had their, their session, and they left. They didn't hang out. Uh, so if people are coming in and out, um, which doesn't seem to me to be completely plausible, but who knows. Um, I have a meeting with someone next week, one of my partners, and he was there, and I'm going to ask him what his assessment was because he was purely boots on the ground and not doing a session. But what were some of the sessions that you saw that maybe made some headlines or people were talking about?

Well, I mean, I didn't actually go, go to the event myself, so I'm not really an expert in the sessions because I didn't really go, go to any. But I can, I can certainly speak to kind of the the main takeaways from the event and what was shared up on stage and things like that from a broad stroke.

Yeah.

And I think this whole— I kept hearing that the official number of attendance was about 1,600 people, just to kind of say that. But I don't know that you and I necessarily believe that.

We know how that number is always—

it's always bigger than Yeah, it's always padded with people that, you know, prior to cancellations. It's probably maybe how many tickets they sold in combination with all of the vendors that are there and all that stuff is probably what they had originally thought they were going to have. But maybe, you know, there's always people that cancel and don't show up. So it's it's probably at least 10 to 15% at the maximum, less than that, right? So anyway, the kind of big topic that I kept hearing was, it was all about video, video, video, and the convergence of audio and video is the big takeaway. The Oxford Road kind of study talked about saying that 77% of podcast consumers engage in both audio and video formats. You know what I mean? That's probably to some degree always been the case. So, you know, just the fact that we're discovering that now is, you know, not as remarkable as it may sound.

Yeah.

Video has been part of podcasting since 2005. So plus YouTube has been around since 2005. It's just for many years YouTube didn't pay attention to podcasting really in any significant degree. And now that they have, you know, all of a sudden Yep. You know, now it's showing up in everybody's priority list. I don't think things have changed dramatically, though I think people's consumption patterns are moving more towards consuming YouTube content and, you know, Netflix and other, other video platforms on big screen televisions now. So I say that's the most profound shift that's happened.

You know, it's At the same time, audio is still doing well. Yeah, and I think that's where it continues to be missed in most of the dialogue is that the audio audience is strong as ever.

Yeah, it may not be growing as fast as it was.

Well, it's always been steady. It's always, you know.

Right. Yeah. And it, I mean, at least it showed in some of the survey data that the the video side was showing more kind of movement, I guess. I don't even know the way they presented that data when we talked about it in a prior episode. It wasn't really 100% clear if that was over-the-top growth or if that just was the proportion. If it was, if that was the proportion, then it's probably not that big of a movement.

So yeah, and I'm looking forward— there's a, the full report from, um, Coleman Insights and, uh, yeah, uh, gosh, um, Amplify Media, uh, is going to happen next week. And, um, and again, I, I like Jay and I like their approach, and, um, uh, obviously I like Steve as well. We've had him on the show here. Might be good to get Jay on the show to talk a little bit about this in the future after they do their, their result.

But, um, yeah, I'm doing a call with him next week, so I'll invite him to come on.

Yeah, so, you know, and we— if they look at Gen Z between 15 and 29, 83% use audio and video interchangeably. To me, that's, you know, that's, that's good news. Um, And also, you know, I think we— YouTube has even admitted that consumption has moved from the smartphone to a smart TV. And what's curious about that is on the podcast consumption, or what I see happening in, in our stats, or because, you know, we've been looking at this a lot closer to, to try to make sure we're And we're looking specifically at video shows. I think there's currently about 1,000, a little under 1,000 shows on the platform that are doing video, which actually was a much higher number than I thought it would have been originally.

Oh, you're talking about RSS-based video?

Yeah, yeah.

On your platform?

Right, yeah.

Okay.

So when we look at that data, I'm starting to look specifically for shows that have audio and video. It's generally no more, I would say I never saw a single show have an average higher than 30% of video. Basically, if they have an audio video show, there was no show that got greater than 30% consumption on RSS. So 70% will listen to audio, highest was 30%, and then it was the full range in between. But the, I would say, I don't know if I want to use the word medium, but around 20% was typically the split. And it kind of follows this show, 80/20. So, you know, around 20%, and again, the outliers were those that were in a 30% range. From, and that's all being done. And we, we looked at, um, Apple TV consumption, and Apple TV consumption is just, I mean, nil. There's hardly any video being— you would think that this is— would be the place where if someone was doing video on Apple Podcasts, um, that's where the video would be consumed, and it's not. It's nil.

Apple isn't, isn't surfacing video content over there.

Oh, on Apple TV they are. Oh, it's easy to find. If you play this show on Apple TV, it comes up video on Apple TV. Absolutely.

No, no, but are they featuring it as video?

Uh, yeah, well, they're—

no, they're not necessarily saying it's featured, but if you go to this show, I mean, I mean, does it say this is video content or is it just a sea of—

it's, it's in amongst everything else.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, so there's no featured video on Apple TV from an Apple Podcast.

Yeah, and I think that's where the mistake was, 'cause I think in the past the Apple TV Podcast app had different categories, one video, one's audio.

Yeah, I don't remember on Apple TV if it was broke down that way, but you might be right.

Yeah, yeah, in the past.

Yeah, I can't remember. But again, most of the consumption is on, you know, obviously Apple leads the charge. Um, my, this, you know, this show and Geek News Central, obviously we've been promoting the Podcast 2.0 app. So there's some consumption there in small digits, but again, the majority of the consumption for video, at least for RSS-based, is on Apple Podcasts, the high majority of it. Even though it is suppressed. So, but then again, here's the kicker. I can't see, and I, and I've been asking my audience this, maybe I'll ask those of you that are listening to this or watching the show right now. Are you watching the show in your mobile device? And we know about 20% of you are listening to Geek News Central, I mean, New Media Show video version. But are you actually watching? Are you just listening? In other words, do you say, oh, there's a new media show, click play, and don't look at your phone because unless you click again, the video isn't exposed. So it could be.

I thought it wasn't clear what you were talking about, if you're talking about the audio feed or the video feed.

Let's say someone goes to the video feed. We've got 20% of people from this show that are at least listening to the video feed. The question is, are you actually watching the video? You know, or— yeah, in the app we don't know if they're actually watching or if they've just mistakenly clicked on new media show video and are playing it and listening to it, not watching it.

Well, that's the problem with the interface, right?

That's right.

For playing video podcasts is that it requires a second click.

Second click. So we don't— that's the question. Are you guys second clicking Or are you just listening to the audio? Yeah, so we don't know, you know. So there, there—

yeah, it's almost— yeah, I don't understand why, why Apple did that. It's like, you know, it's, it's best case scenario was that all the video podcasts that the video creator went to all this effort to publish video.

Yeah.

And they, through their interface, really convert it to an audio.

Yeah.

Experience. I, I don't get it. I just—

yeah, so, you know, they would do that, you know. Someone just explained, doesn't do anything else, that they're listening to the video version, you know. And, you know, so yeah, there might be 20%, but are they really, really watching? And that may not be the case. We just—

really shooting themselves in the foot on that.

Yeah. So I think we've talked so much about it that I'm sure Ted and team over there, like, Quit talking about it, but fix it, you know, come on.

Oh no, I'm not gonna stop talking about it. Yeah, because it's clearly a mistake that they're making. Yeah, um, from a usability standpoint and from a content creator, um, kind of relationship standpoint, I think it's, it's a big blunder on their part.

But if you go back to the study that was done, uh, again by Coleman Insights and Amplify Media, this trend of people watching on a TV has changed. So maybe, maybe everyone has gotten to the point where they don't want to watch the video on their phone anymore. I mean, you know, there's a lot of stuff. If I think about how I'm using my phone right now, um, I don't watch YouTube on my phone. I watch TikTok, I watch Facebook Reels, I watch— that's—

well, you're watching video.

I'm watching shorts.

Watching, right, but you're still watching video on your phone.

But I'm not watching long-form content on my phone. I'm just consuming short-form content on my phone.

Yeah, I think that's more of a use case situation, but it's— or how how you, you are probably only consuming short-form content because that's, that's the amount of time or attention you want to put to it.

But YouTube has already said people have shifted to their televisions to watching content. So is this the overall trend that people are no longer watching long-form content on their mobile device? They're watching Reels and Shorts. And well, if YouTube says it is the primary way people are watching content now is on television, I don't watch Shorts on my TV. That's the difference. I only watch shorts on my phone. I don't play—

I think it's—

yeah, so I watch long-form content on my television, right? So wide format, wide format. Yeah, wide format, right? So my, my— I'm just assuming that most of the short consumption on YouTube, Facebook, and on TikTok are obvious. Yeah, it's, it's all the short the short reels versus—

well, if you think about it, that conforms to the, the aspect ratio of the device.

And it also talks about, you know, again, it goes to— it backs up what they said today. Smart TV usage just climbed significantly and is tied with computers for second place. It's not enough to say lots of people use YouTube for podcasts. The way they're using YouTube is changing. So this is the, this is the key. Is that again, not everyone, again, an 18 to 29-year-old, not all of them have a big screen TV. They might be in college, new homeowner, new apartment, they moved into a new apartment. So maybe the majority of their consumption is on smartphone, tablet, and laptop. And maybe the TV is, you know, for that age group, Yeah, you know, and maybe obviously when you're probably plus— my kids, I think about what my kids are doing now, and my son does not have a TV in his bedroom, so he does everything on his tablet or a phone tablet or computer. Whereas my daughter, both daughters, who, all three daughters have their own homes, they have smart TVs. So I think there's an age split at some point, you know, depends on where you are in your life journey. I'm sure a lot of kids have TVs in their rooms, but are they using that as a consumption device? I don't know.

Well, and if you think about YouTube content, right? YouTube videos, you know, I use YouTube every day to consume content. And I don't necessarily automatically consider, well, everything that I consume in YouTube, I guess, could be also put out as an audio podcast. So, You know, it's, it's where we're really where I think our adjustment is, is our perception of and how broad do we want to paint the stroke of what a podcast is.

Well, I think that ship has sailed already.

Well, yeah, but I think as you apply it to YouTube, there's a lot of content in YouTube that has not been added to a podcast playlist, right?

Right.

You can say so you have this kind of separation between some of the content is included in a podcast playlist, but being included in a podcast playlist is not what I would call the definition of what a podcast is, if you know what I mean. I mean, it's like just because you create a playlist that's named podcast doesn't make what you're doing a, a podcast necessarily. It's just a video. So are we basically taking this concept of Everything that's published into YouTube now, we are considering as a podcast now.

Well, one thing's for sure, you know, the Podcast Awards was streamed on a playlist and YouTube flagged that as a podcast. And it really wasn't, it was just because it had the name podcast in it. I'm sure they did that. Matt says in the chat, he says, I'm watching on my laptop while doing some work. And I'm watching on Todd's channel because Rob never looks at his live chat during the show.

So that's probably true.

You know, you need another monitor, Rob. Um, so, uh, so, you know, I, I think it's where you're at too. You know, it's like, I, there's— when emails come in, I, I pay Patreon donations to, I don't know, a handful of shows And every once in a while they'll do an update or they'll put content that is Patreon exclusive. I watch that purely in my— on my browser, and I don't use the Patreon app in my phone to consume that content. So, but again, everyone is a little bit different. I think it's what device you have. And but anyway, I think we know the discussion, but it looks like a little bit of luster has come off video, in my opinion. But I was very interested in, um, the report that James Fridland came out with. And Rob, you won't be able to see this screen, um, because I'm flipping it here in OBS. But you know, they, they basically did the Pod News report card. And, um, it was— they looked— more than 150 different podcast creators took part. So I wish more people would take part in this because he's got a huge audience he's getting to, and we could get— garner more data. So being the only 150 people— I, I participated. I don't know if you did too. I feel so, you know, we're that— we're a P1, you know, we're part of that P1 audience that is, uh, in radio terms, we're super podcasters. And, and, and, but it said that as publisher, as one of the questions was, as a publisher, how would you rate the following podcast apps? Do they do a good job at helping your listeners find, follow, subscribe, and then listen to your show? Um, and I don't fully understand. I guess this is a 1 out of 5 Apple Podcasts 3.7, Pocket Casts 3.4, Spotify 3.3, YouTube 2.8, Podcast Addict 2.8, and then Music at YouTube Music all the way down to 2.2. So YouTube definitely rated higher than YouTube Music at 2.2. So this is just about, do they do a good job of helping your listeners find and follow? And then the next question was promotion in app. And the, some of the comments that were made, Apple Podcast feels like the platform tends to rely on latest releases from some big names and studios for its recommendations. And that's pretty true. YouTube needs to invest in real time, in real editorial, real editorial curation. And some real content curators to be taken more seriously. Please don't just, uh, disturb the computer in the closet. Uh, basically it's in a logarithm and YouTube is never gonna hand curate.

Uh, they used to, yeah, but years and years and years ago they did, but not anymore, I don't think.

And it's, and it's interesting, people are still saying discovery is still a huge issue in all these apps. If you're a smaller independent show, it's very difficult to get noticed. Of course. All these apps would do a much better job highlighting high-quality smaller shows. Well, they're not going to do that. That's not driving views. They're going to go over quantity over quality. No, quantity, quantity of money, quantity of plays. And yeah, they're going to go after shows that have more, more views. Um, Star ratings, Apple Podcasts, so people want to leave a star rating anonymously, I think that's fine, but they can also leave a comment that could be completely untrue. Spotify and YouTube give you more control over comments. That's absolutely true. You basically, you're stuck with 1-star reviews. Now here's where the P1 stuff comes in again, directories. Podcast Index got a ranking of 4.2. So how many listeners— this is obviously questions being asked by podcasters. So you definitely had a lot of people that are Podcast Index fans ranking Podcast Index over Spotify. 4.2 Podcast Index, 4.0 Spotify, 4.0 Apple Podcasts, 3.6 Apple Music, 3.3 for YouTube. So this is where the survey gets skewed, in my opinion. It's still good information. It shows that Podcast Index is appreciated by podcasters, but this is about ease of getting your podcast listed. So it talks about YouTube being very— is too complicated. YouTube has taken some fairly easy-to-do YouTube is taking something fairly easy to do on other apps and made it unnecessarily convoluted. Other than RSS setup in YouTube, getting your podcast listed is simple everywhere. Spotify and YouTube are pretty challenging, requiring too many steps to get a new show on the platform.

Well, I don't, I don't always— I don't agree with that.

Well, that's the, that's the feedback he got from the survey.

I know Apple's been the one that had the the steep curve. I wouldn't say that that's the case for Spotify.

I— we, we have— we take more questions on— we never get a, uh, how do I submit to Apple Podcasts? Even before, um, they automated it, we never had questions how do I submit to Apple Podcasts. It was always— the questions always come up from YouTube. People are confused. They're confused about the RSS integration, what it means.

Oh, as far as the RSS?

Yeah. And then Once they kind of figure out what YouTube has done, most people don't have the RSS ingestion. If they have video, they auto, they submit it themselves.

Yeah.

And treat it.

It's a pretty complicated topic because if you're an Android user and you want to get your podcast into Apple, it's a hassle.

No, not anymore.

Well, I realize that, but for the vast majority of the years, it's only been a, what, a couple months. I mean, that changed.

But again, Android users are still in the minority on podcast listeners, so—

yeah, well, no, I'm not talking about listeners, I'm talking about podcasters. Yeah, well, I want to get their podcasts into Apple because you have to have an Apple ID.

Yeah, well, I still think Android users are a minority in podcast creators. You don't— you know, we— you go to a podcast event, it's a sea of Macs. There's no Windows machines.

Well, Android has nothing to do with Windows.

But again, it's more associated with people being Android users than being a Windows person, because if you have a Mac, you have an Apple ID.

Yeah, no, I agree with that. So if you're on Windows or if you're on Android, you may not have an Apple ID, so you have to go create one.

Right, right. But again, Again, that's why, at least from my opinion, the way it looks to me is if you are a— if you are more likely to be an Android user if you're using Windows. What phone do you carry?

I've got an iPhone.

Oh, I mean, you're a Windows user, so you, you've got an Apple ID. So maybe I'm wrong.

I've had one for years.

But we've never had that come up as a problem. That's never been a—

well, it's not a problem issue as much now.

Oh, even before, it's never been a support.

I kept hearing about it constantly.

Oh no, I got on, on the hosting side, one a month maybe.

Now you— yeah, I got questions about it a lot.

Well, I think also we've made it very clear on how you do it. We gave clear instructions on how to submit your show. Yeah, so, you know, that was— that's the business we're in, is making sure people's shows get, get listed.

But yeah, it was always the, the entire process of getting it into Apple. Um, you know, sometimes they would ask for a credit card number and all this, all these hurdles that you have to jump, all these security hurdles and all this kind of stuff that, that Apple put, put in front of people to get it, get an account set up with them.

No, that definitely is, is now gone.

Yeah, well, is it really? I mean, it is if you want to get access to your account, you have to have still have an Apple ID, I would imagine. Yeah, but you still have to create one.

People can do that, people can do that at their leisure now. They don't have to worry about it in the moment. Right.

Yeah, right. But it's not completely wiped away. It just depends on if that podcaster wants to get access to Podcast Connect or not, right?

You don't want to claim their show, right? But so again, I, I think it's much harder if you want to be on YouTube. You have to go create a— you have to have a— create a channel, go through all the steps to set up the channel. I, I don't think there's any You know, um, but again, this is what podcasters are saying. YouTube is taking something fairly easy to do on other apps and made it unnecessarily convoluted. Other than the RSS setup in YouTube, getting your podcast to listen is simple everywhere. Spotify and YouTube are pretty challenging, require too many steps to get a show on the platform. Now Spotify though, if it's— if they're referencing video, yeah, Spotify is difficult. But getting your show on Spotify has been easier than it has been to Apple for many years because it's— oh yeah, you just click one, one-click submit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

But I don't know, I mean, I would love to see some stats on how many podcasters don't have a YouTube account.

Oh, I would. If you have a Google account, you've got a YouTube account.

Yeah, so And that's what makes me wonder is it's not the same thing, I don't think, as Android podcasters.

Android users will have— With Apple. Will have a Google account for sure.

Right, right. So I wouldn't say that it's, I don't know.

I think people have it.

It just would be interesting to know what the percentage of podcasters out there have a YouTube channel, right?

Yeah, that's, that's probably a good question. I bet it's lower than everyone thinks.

I don't know, it may be higher than everyone thought. I don't know what everyone thinks.

Well, we, we know how many connected via RSS, I can tell you that. Oh yeah, it's less, it's less than 5%.

Yeah, well, that's a second layer question, right? Well, the first layer question is, do those podcasters have a, a YouTube account?

Well, they do, because 5% have submitted their— are having their podcast ingested via RSS from YouTube. And at Blueberry, it's, it's less than 5% have connected their YouTube account to their RSS feed, right?

Which is a small percentage, very small percent. But that may not be the full percentage of how many podcasters have YouTube accounts.

Oh, that's— oh, yeah, from a YouTube account, I bet you it's near 100%.

Yeah, well, that's part of my—

The difference between having a YouTube account and a YouTube channel though, Rob.

Well—

You can have a YouTube account without having a YouTube channel. So I would say near 100% probably have a YouTube account.

Account, but they don't have—

And then we don't know what the percentage has a YouTube channel.

What's the percentage?

Yeah, right, right.

I've got— where they would have, have the ability to publish content.

Yeah, I've got 5 or 6 YouTube channels, you know, so—

oh, you do?

But, you know, you know, they're not being used, so, you know, they're, they're, they're— you, YouTube faded, you faded.

Oh, YouTube fades, right, right. Um, another thing to ask, that's going to be a term in the future, right?

Yeah, I think it already— well, you know, it's just like the It's just like the dead shows on Spotify, the same thing. You know, you have a lot of lookie-loos, and I was a lookie-loo and thought I had a great idea for something for YouTube, and, you know, not enough time, and, uh, you know, there's nothing there.

Um, so is that a, uh, spot fade? Is that what that is?

I think it's like you have an idea and, you know, oh, I'm gonna try this, and then, you know, just the complexity of, you know, chasing that animal is just not enough hours in the day. Right. Um, insights. These services offer a dashboard containing analytics and insights how to— how your podcast is doing, how you should find this data. YouTube at 3.6, Apple Podcasts 3.4. This is a weird thing, I never look at my Apple Podcast analytics ever. I probably haven't been in there in a year. Spotify 3.4, OP3 3.2, Amazon Music.

So when you say Apple Analytics, are you talking about Podcast Connect?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, podcast hosting. They're saying— no, they don't. They call it out as Apple Podcasts. They don't call it out as Podcast Connect. Most podcasters don't know what Podcast Connect is. They say, I'm going to go over and look at my Apple Analytics, and they log into Apple. They don't know that's Podcast Connect. It's so Apple Podcasts.

You can see your Apple stats in your podcast hosting.

Yeah, you can too. Yeah, you can. But they didn't cover any They covered OP3. You know, OP3 is a redirect. You know, they don't include Blueberry as, or PodTrack as a question. You know, so—

It's also Apple doesn't track download plays and all that stuff in the same way that the NAB metric standard either. No, they don't. You're really looking at apples and oranges.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, they he's pumping OP3 as a solution here because it's open stats. He doesn't include, you know, those of us that are running, you know, our 45,000 people that are using Blueberry Podcast Statistics. He doesn't include Blueberry or Podtrack and how many number they have, 100,000 people using Podtrack for stats. So there's, you know, They, he just, it's limited by questions here. Nobody measures the same. Apple, why can't it match IB standards for greater than 60 seconds? Well, they're Apple. Uh, there needs to be a standard definition that all these services use. The data provided each app should match. They're not going to. Because YouTube has their own. Well, they won't. It could. YouTube has their own thing. Apple has their own thing.

Spotify has their own thing. Yeah, I think the problem with Apple is the fact that they don't care about advertising. So.

Yeah. Why is it—

why would they conform?

Why isn't there an industry metric for download? There is. This is why you use your podcast hosting platform. Um, that's the best place to get in it, but everything else is, you know, you got to go to YouTube and get their data. You got to go to Spotify and get their data. Um, if you want more—

oh, YouTube is increasingly sharing via API back to the hosting platforms.

Yeah, but again, uh, it's YouTube numbers and it's, it's apples and oranges.

Yeah, yeah, it's not the same analytics, you know, kind of standards, right?

But I find it interesting here. Monetization. These services offer ways to help your podcast make money. Subscriptions, value for value, donation, other forms. How well do they work for your podcast? YouTube 2.6, Podcasting 2.0 2.6, Apple Podcasts Premium subscription 2.5, Spotify for Creators 2.0, Apple Music 1, Amazon Music 1. I don't even know Amazon Music offers premium. So kind of a weird— but I know exactly how many Blueberry customers are using Apple Podcasts Premium. It's not a big number in the scheme of things. It's not. It's not a big number at all. Um, yeah, there's feedback. Apple subscription service, I don't think that a 30% fee is appropriate. Uh, another comment is terrible for not allowing you to have any relationship with supporters who then message with customer service requests that you can help with. I think this is, you know, this is why we introduced, uh, Blueberry Premium, so we understand that relationship between the the podcaster and those people subscribed is important, giving them access to those folks. Um, Apple Podcasts brings me some money, but they take too steep of a cut and they don't allow direct access to their audience. They're never going to. Um, innovation— are these apps or services doing anything innovative? Do they offer ideas or features you can't get anywhere else? Podcast Index 3.7, Spotify 3.0, YouTube 2.9, Apple Podcasts 2.7, Amazon— I don't even know why we include Amazon Music. They are such a low percentage of overall consumption. I don't think they break 1%.

Well, people don't really think of Amazon as a place to get a podcast.

Yeah, but James includes it in the in the questionnaire here. Standard, are these services good stewards of podcasting open ecosystem? Do they support open standards? Well, of course, this is going to play out like you think it would. Podcast Index 4.0, Apple Podcasts 3.5, Amazon Music 2.6, YouTube 2.4, Spotify 2.2. Spotify and YouTube should get a 0 on these. And in all honesty, um, open RSS is valued. Um, they say they're all trying to become walled gardens. Not all. Spotify selfishly building themselves, not the industry, the creators. I feel they're lacking in supporting the podcast ecosystem. The push for video is disturbing. Each platform in their fight to win market share diminished podcasting's open ecosystem. These are pretty valid bitches for sure. Greater relations. Podcast Index 3.4, Apple Podcasts 3.1.

Um, how are you? I don't know, I'm feeling a little, like I say, disappointed. In what we're hearing here to some degree that we've had this medium for 20 years. And it just feels like it's chaos.

I don't think it's chaos.

Well, it feels that way though. It feels very disjointed amongst all of, no, no, I'm not saying about the hosting platforms. I'm talking about the ecosystem. Everybody's playing like stray cats. They're all running off in different directions. Everybody's doing different stuff. For sure. I mean, which is great when a medium is very young and people are experimenting and stuff, but it just feels like it's being done for not so great a reasons.

Well, it's very clear how people are feeling. They're all trying to become walled gardens. Spotify selfishly building themselves, not the industry, the creators. Each platform is in their fight to win market share, diminish podcasting's open ecosystem. So that sentiment is coming across. But again, we have to remember these are 150 of the most hardcore podcasters have responded, or, or podcast industry people. Podcast industry people have responded out of 32,000 people in James's newsletter, right? So I would be much happier James, we have to, you know, we need to push your survey. You know, you need to push it more hard next time. We need more, more, more, more, more.

Um, yeah, it seems like it. I mean, with that kind of circulation, you could have gotten more responses.

Yeah, you would have hoped.

I'm not— I mean, I mean, James didn't do anything wrong.

No, no, no, people just didn't respond.

Why aren't Yeah, yeah, why aren't the people in the industry contributing to this?

So this is, you know, this survey is made up of Todd— and just a simple fact that there is Podcast Index in here— this is made up of the Todds, the Robs, the Daves. These, these are— these— this survey was done by, you know, 150 of those of us that care about this in a great deal. So is it indicative of average podcast creators? To an extent, it seems like it is by the comments. Now, he had over 700 comments, and, uh, I'd like to see all those comments. We're sharing this, um, so I'd like to see— we've been adding a country code. I don't know where all the comments are, but overall someone said, I hate them all. So I think that's kind of funny. Um, Matt says, why I don't like the view from the top from Goldstein is because of its ad biz bias. And all of this has— well, James doesn't, but for sure, for sure, Matt, there is a— all this, the YouTube The Spotify play, all of it is on an ad biz bias. It's all focused on the money.

And I heard a quote from a person that went to Podcast Movement, and their two takeaways that they had was mostly all of the investment and tech in the podcasting space mostly right now is focused on trying to leverage monetization.

Oh, you need to come over to Blueberry.

No, no, no, I'm not saying that there aren't people that aren't doing that. It just— that's the impression that they get when they talk to people or go to booths and stuff. Everybody's pushing monetization, monetization. And most of— and most of the the focus of the innovation in the podcasting space is focused around technology to enable deeper metrics or advanced analytics or building platforms that can drive more programmatic advertising or, I mean, that's where most of the investment is going right now because I guess there's a direct mapping to revenue.

Well, it's, it's not coming from Blueberry. It's not coming from RSS.com. I don't think it's coming from Buzzsprout. You know, we're all doing lots of innovative stuff. Libsyn's got its own whole arm. They're investing a huge amount of money, obviously, and Wondery and others. But if I was solely focused on making money, for podcasters, I'd be out of business.

Um, it's— but Todd, you have to admit, I mean, that is a— I mean, if just look, it sounds profitable. Yeah, you know, that's, that's the focus of that organization. It's in the name.

Yeah, they don't— I think they would like to be known more as a, as an association, but it's true, it's Even their articles are heavily, heavily, heavily focused on advertising. Matt says, we need a view from the bottom to share what us blue-collar podcasters think. And I think that is the— was the design of, uh, James's Report Card. But again, we need more blue-collar podcasters to—

more participation.

Yeah, yeah. And maybe James needs to ask, are you Do you run a podcast host? Are you a podcast industry person? Are you just a podcaster? And he could see the spread of responses. I think we put our email in there. I think there's— I don't think it's anonymized.

So yeah, no, I did.

Yeah, I, I, you know, I know what podcasters are asking for. I talk to them every day. I know their opinions. And it doesn't align with this heavy video-centric focus. It— that alignment is, you know, that is not the conversations I'm having with blue-collar podcasters. The, the conversations I'm having with blue-collar podcasters, how do I grow my podcast, 90% of the time.

Yeah, but that, that doesn't exclude a a video?

Well, sometimes, sometimes people will say, do you think I should do a video podcast? And usually they can— after the phone call, it's a no, you know.

So again, or, or do they not talk about video because they don't really consider doing something? Invariably it'll come on, on YouTube as part of their podcast.

Invariably it'll come up 50% of the time in a call, right? They'll ask me my opinion. Should I start video? And again, I say I've been doing video for 15 or so years and I like video, but at the same time I do live. I do live for a reason. I think there's value in having live, live audio, live video. So I don't discount it at all, but I also make them understand that only a small percentage or percentage of the audience watches. So there's a split. And is it— you have the time? Do you, you want to go through the pain of setting up OBS and a camera and lights in the background and, you know, make yourself camera ready?

Todd, I got this impression, um, kind of going through the the key takeaways from Podcast Movement, these key things like this convergence of audio and video and redefining podcast metrics, right? And trying to understand this distinction between video and audio and this concept of evolution of multi-channel brands per se. None of this stuff is new. No. And the more I look at it and the more I think about it, the more it's the same.

It's the same. We've been doing—

has always been—

we've been doing multi-channel distribution, Rob, for 15 years.

So I'm just trying to get more practical about, as I think, as I pull back and I think about all this stuff, what really has changed. I'm not sure that anything has changed that much.

I think that—

I think maybe what we're emphasizing and what we're talking about is maybe slightly different, but it's not— but it's all rooted in the same thing.

Nothing's changed for us, but for some it is a monumental change because people have just been doing audio only and they have now this, this, you know, oh my God, I need to do video. So then, right, you know, then there was a—

but that was always an option.

But I don't think a lot of podcasters considered it an option. If they did, we would have had more video content via RSS than we do now. So I just don't think they considered it as an option. I think there was this divide for many years. You're a YouTuber, you're a podcaster. And then as soon as YouTube said, oh, you now can do podcasts over here, everyone went apeshit gaga. And, you know, oh, I got it. Oh, oh, gotta have this. And yet only 5% have connected RSS feeds to Blueberry to YouTube. And okay, so then, um, you know, oh my God, I gotta be on— oh, but it sucks, it looks horrible. So, so now I have to do a live video.

I, I— yeah, but people have been able to push audio over to YouTube for like the last 12 years.

I know, but they, they didn't. Only a small percentage did.

I know, I know, but It's probably still a small percentage that are pushing it.

Well, like it's— like I said, 5% connect to RSS feed. Yeah, yeah.

So I'm still looking for what has dramatically changed.

Nothing has dramatically changed. It's the hype, it's the money, it's, oh, chasing the dollars. Everything's tied to chasing money and getting monetized.

And it gets back to what we were just saying earlier, that everything is about monetization now. Everything. And though I would say that AI to some degree has changed the conversation a little bit, but even that— I mean, we've had the ability to have transcripts far before we had this AI conversation.

Yeah, for a long time. And matter of fact, the AI, unless you're using the right AI, doesn't create a transcript. So, you know, ChatGPT will not give you a transcript. You know, you have to— how we do transcripts now is we integrate with the services specifically creates a transcript in the format that is a true transcript.

So it technically can create one because I've done it before. It's just it kind of maxes out at a certain number of minutes.

Well, you don't You have a token limitation, so— and it doesn't give you— it doesn't give you an SRT VTT file.

Well, you have to cut and paste it out of the app, right?

Well, again, they don't give you—

or save it and then paste it into something else.

If you look at an SRT VTT file, you'll— it— you can't get that output out of ChatGPT. You can get a text, you can get some text, but you can't get a true closed caption ready transcript. Oh, close. And track by the second, word for word. You know, you can't get that.

Yeah, I don't know about you, but I export usually in just a text file anyway, so—

but that's not a transcript, that's a text file.

So what's— no, well, a transcript is not a format.

Yeah. Oh, it absolutely is. SRT, BTT are are the two standards for transcripts.

Well, that's for closed captioning transcripts.

But it's if you want to have any utilization at all across platforms. If you're just creating a text file, a text file is a text file of just words.

Yeah, but it's still a transcript.

There's no delineation of person speaking. There's none of that. Yeah, there is not in it.

I get it out of, uh, out of Descript. Everything—

that's, that's— you're getting a SRT or VTT file then out of Descript?

No, I'm not.

Well, then they're giving you a— they're, they're doing wrong. They're making— they're, they're giving you an incorrect format then. A text file.

Text in the transcript is all it is. Is it coming over a paragraph?

Does it come in a TXT file?

Well, you can export the transcript as a TXT file. Yeah. Or you can export it as a text file. That doesn't not make it a transcript just because of the format that it's exported in.

Okay. I'm just telling you, if you're going to follow the transcript rules and have something—

Well, it's not a matter of rules. It's the type of file it is. It's kind of like saying that a Word doc is not a Word doc unless it's a text file.

I'm just saying, if you're going to have a transcript, don't export to a text file. That, that is asinine.

Why is that asinine? It depends on how it's being used.

Where else? How else you're going to use it?

You can take a text file and you can upload it to ChatGPT and they can do it. Oh yeah, you come up with a summary. Create other types of content from that.

Of course. Yeah, of course. But if you don't call it— don't call it— don't call that file a transcript. That's a text file of the content that will be— that you can use. It's not something you should put in an RSS feed.

I'm not saying that I'm putting it in.

Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. So you're just—

that's a use case. Yeah, yeah. But a transcript is taking the words that are spoken and converting them into text. That's what a transcript is. It doesn't matter what the export format is.

Okay, in a podcast format, you're going to use a transcript. Just don't use text file in the transcript tag, please. I'm not. Okay. Yeah. But if the advantage of having a VTT and SRT file used within— with the time hacks used within an AI model, is you can see the audio segment length. You're able to determine, okay, this is a 1-minute clip versus them guessing via tokens what is a 1-minute clip and the breakout of people that are speaking. So, but again, I guess it's apples and oranges. I just, I focus on the technical side, sorry. But again, I think what Descript gives you is different than what— you can't just submit audio to ChatGPT and have it give you a transcript.

Yeah, you can. It just can't be too long. Because I've done it a zillion times. I'll give it like maybe a 10 or 15 minute audio piece and it'll transcribe the whole thing and create a summary.

Oh, that's interesting. But does it give you the transcription, the output, or does it just give you a summary?

Um, well, I mean, it'll do both. Mainly the transcripting capability in ChatGPT is by recording it in the app.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't upload it. Last I checked, you couldn't upload an audio file. I might be wrong. It may have changed because most people are using Whisper or one of those types of platforms to do a—

well, I think they do recommend that if it's too long, right? They say, well, we're not— you know, you're going to have to use Descript or you're going to have to use some other app to create a transcript from this.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm not a Descript user, so Yeah, it does a lot of different stuff with the transcript. That's really foundational to everything it does.

Yeah, that's why we build our AI tools. I don't need Descript to do that.

Yeah, right. So, you know, you got to capture what the words are and then you can formulate different uses for those words.

Yeah, that's what we do with the AI tools.

Right.

Right. But again, the queries that we are using a time-based transcript that has the time hacks in it so that we're able to get audio snippets and have a word-for-word, second-by-second tracking of knowing where, and then not only for the closed caption, but also for audio clipping or video clips or whatever we're putting together.

Yeah, and I also export chapter markers out of the platform too that will have like, you know, from 0 minutes to 2 minutes and 33 seconds, it talks about this topic. And if you cut and paste that into YouTube, YouTube will automatically connect up those timestamps.

You need to be using our AI tool. This stuff comes automatically right into YouTube. With what we are providing you. So you should use that, Rob. That way you don't need to— you don't need to have, uh, you know, you can have these outputs that go in your show notes and to YouTube that give you the chapter markers.

Okay, are you talking about the audio file? Are you talking about the video file?

Audio, video, same difference.

Like, for this show, push push my video over to YouTube through your platform?

Yes, you can. Sure can. But it's not video. You can push the audio version.

Yeah, well, that's—

but again, if I haven't pushed the video, but I have an audio— the audio and video version, the sound is the same. So the audio version, creating chapter files, I just copy that, paste that into YouTube, right?

For audio, but not for the video.

Yeah, for the video, because it's time sync the same. Okay, what we're talking about here in the audio is going to be time synced the same in the video, right?

Well, that's if you're creating the same version.

Yeah, absolutely.

For video that you're doing with the audio, which oftentimes I don't. Oh well, I'll do additional editing on the audio than I do on the video.

Yeah, I don't know. But again, I think it's, you know, It depends on how you want to use the tool, if you want to be efficient or if you want to be inefficient. Um, how long does it take you?

I don't know what you're creating.

No, that's true. Right, 15 minutes, I'm done. That's the beauty.

Well, I spend more time on the editing side than I guess what you're doing, so yeah.

Speaking of editing, did you get a chance to see that new AI platform, that beta?

What platform is that?

The one you introduced me to, I think you, or recommended, you recommended I have. You saw the, it's Unify, or what's the name of the company? Um, you told him to talk to me.

Um, I can't remember what that was.

I gotta go to my calendar and look at the company name. Um, when was that meeting? Yesterday? Uh, not that guy. See here, maybe that was Monday. Um, no, it was an AI video editing tool.

I remember what it was I recommended. I can't remember.

When did I do that meeting?

QSO? Was it QSO?

No, it wasn't that. How come it's not in my— because it happened— it didn't happen last week. Hey, was it— I'm looking at my calendar here. It was late my time, and I don't know why it's I don't see it in my calendar. Oh, it's— yeah, it's Ukumi.

Ukumi.ai. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ukumi, right? Yeah.

So—

yeah, I remember now. Nice tool, but pricing, holy shit.

Oh, it was expensive, no question.

Yeah, I told him basically, that's a non-starter.

Yeah, I told them that they probably couldn't sell any plans at that pricing level.

No, I said that's absolute insanity. I told them, I said, $20, $30 a month for, you know, a number of episodes, it might be worth it.

But yeah, wow. Yeah, it was a lot.

Yeah, and you know, and actually doing a comparison, I said, have you guys, you know, have you guys looked at the pricing of Opus Clips. I'm, you know, and I'm like, you know, if you look at Opus Clips and what you're doing here, the only thing additional you do is give me a little metadata, and I've already got that metadata extracted. So the clipping tool was nice in it, but way too expensive. Way, way, way. I mean, I was actually kind of shocked.

I know I was too, and I told them that too. I told them flat out that they probably wouldn't get any podcasters to sign up at that level.

Yeah, I told him, I said, this is a— if you have a, if you have a top YouTuber, maybe they'll use it. But I said, they have a team already that's editing, and you know, we even have a video editor now, so, and for Blueberry, so it's like, I'll have them make the Shorts. In reels and use a human to, to do that interaction.

Um, so what, create the shorts and the reels manually?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's gonna be very labor intensive.

Actually not, because it's very short videos, 8 minutes or whatever, and you're doing a—

but you have to find where the clips are in the video and then you have to format them.

Yeah, it's, yeah. Again, it's if you're, if you're editing the video already, you know where the clips are at. So if you're actually in there editing, it's not like they're coming in there and, and doing it raw. They're, they're doing the full production.

So, and again, have you ever used it like an Opus Clip?

Yeah, yeah, we've used Opus Clips, but Opus Clips doesn't always get it right. It's, it's about it. About a 50% solution, so you have to hunt anyway.

Yeah, I use a— I've been using a platform called QSO AI here lately to play around with it. It'll generate like 30 or 40 different, um—

oh, that's a huge number—

vertical videos out of like an hour-long video.

So how many of those are viable?

Probably maybe half.

Oh, that's actually pretty good. QUSO? Q-U-S-O? Uh, Q-U—

here, I think it's QUSO. Here, let me pull it up here really quick. QUSO. But yeah, it's a platform that has, has the ability to create AI, AI videos as well.

Yeah, kisu.ai. They need to fix their HTTPS on their website. A-U-U-S-O dot—

oh, you found it?

Yeah, yeah, not secure. Not a good look.

It's not a good look.

Okay, why don't they have HTTPS fixed? They must be early. They are pretty early, you're right. Pricing, how much is it?

The other one that's good too is, um, InVideo AI. I don't know if you've seen that one before, Todd. InVideo AI. Uh, NVIDIA. In, in, I-N-V-I-D-E-O-A-I.

Yeah, NVIDIA. These are a dime a dozen now, aren't they?

Yeah, there's a lot of them, that's for sure. Actually, this one's pretty popular.

And I'm looking at pricing on these. Not bad. 50 minutes a month. Oh, it's really low minutes for $28.

Oh, really? Only 58 minutes?

Oh, it's a— this is for AI creation. AI Copilot for video creation. This isn't a— doesn't look like it's a clipping tool.

Yeah, it's made for creating full AI videos. Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

I have no desire to do that at this point.

Hmm. Yeah. It's— so you got the full spectrum of what people are giving creators out there, what's possible. So you can actually make full— you know, if you think about making— was it close to 60 minutes of content? You know, a lot of creators will make like maybe a 30-second or 60-second AI video, right? And so you can get a lot of content if you keep it, keep it in short form.

Well, again, I guess we'll see when people are going to start you know, doing more on audio side. Everyone's focused on video, but NotebookLM made some improvements to their, their platform. I don't know exactly what they did. Um, I gotta go back and look at pod news, but, um, they made an improvement to their, to their platform. So yeah. Hopefully the voices aren't so chitter-chattery. Where was the publish? What did they update? Been some more layoffs too. Where? At Daily Wire. Automatic also laid some people off. Where was that announcement?

Oh yeah, yeah, I think I heard about that.

Yeah, they let 25% of the company Go to report the kids division has closed and makes sense. That really doesn't— that really makes sense for Daily Wire. And then with Matt being off the rails on WordPress, I wonder if they've been affected because they let 280 people off in a restructure. Um, so more layoffs. Um. One thing I'm running into is I'm hearing a lot of people are using DaVinci for video editing, and I've, I've never used DaVinci at all.

Yeah, it's a good tool. Yeah, at one point I almost got that tool to try and learn.

Yeah, once you, once you went down the road and use a tool for a while, it's pretty hard to, to go backwards. And start on another one. Just a learning curve to learn how to use something.

Well, and increasingly those kind of tools are going to be incorporating AI video editing capability. I know that the really high-end tools are— yeah, Adobe's increasingly adding, adding that kind of capability.

Yeah, Adobe's always asking me, do you want me to improve this with AI? No. Yeah. What else has happened here in the past week? I'm just looking through the stuff that they had a podcast standards meeting and— oh yeah, so they've committed to adding the location tag to the list of supported features in the PSP certified spec. We've already done that. And they're adding chapters to our list of optional but recommended. We've already done that. Uh, they had a big discussion about video. I'm sure they did. Their collective desire is to bring new features to OpenPodcast ecosystem that matter to listeners and creators. And some new participants, which is— I don't know if— I guess I can probably say who was there. Had new participants in the meeting was from rep from Episode FM, Transistor, SportingCast, OP3, Libsyn, Podgagement, SoundStack, Dystopia. We were there. Mike Dell was there. So I'm looking at the image here. How many people? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.

Yeah, it looks like 12. Rocky Thomas was there. Yeah, Jay Lewis was there.

Yeah. So it looks like 12 people had time to attend. But yeah, a few new faces in that group.

Still a lot of folks missing.

A lot of folks missing. But again, we kind of do this as a, you know, at events, you know, to do a quick catch-up. So not everyone is at those events, but it was nice to see that Rob Greenlee joined again. Which he had not been participating for a while from Libsyn. So yeah, it's good. Anyway, what else is happening with you?

Just trying to play around more with the AI tools, trying to learn what works, what doesn't, how they work. Where it's shifting to. You know, if you think about where AI is going, I know you've been digging deep into this topic for, for a while now. And, um, you know, there was a big improvement to the AI artwork.

Oh, that was a massive update.

Yeah, and I've been playing around with that a lot too. It's definitely— you can get a lot more precise with it. Yeah. It's still not perfect. It still doesn't spell things correctly all the time, every time, but it's definitely a lot better than it was.

There was a service we're playing with called, I think it's Flux. Is it Flux AI? Yeah. Maybe not. Maybe not Flux AI. It's flux. Okay, it's kind of a weird, uh, look. It's flux-ai.io, and they have a Flux image generator. And because ChatGPT API is still using DALL-E 3 and not the new image generator, they haven't announced the pricing for it, uh, we're switching our Pi solution to use Flux AI image generator in the interim while we're waiting for ChatGPT or waiting for Google Gemini to get better. So it's just a moving target. Again, it's nothing is perfect yet, but I will say that the OpenAI image generators pretty damn good, um, currently. I just wish they would roll it out into making it allowable with an API call. Oh, right. And it's definitely slower from an image generation standpoint, but I'll wait 30 seconds for a better video— I mean, better image. Um, and I've been pretty good on the spelling standpoint, although I did have trouble with the image I tried creating for my tech show, which was kind of funny. I was talking about the tech stock and tariffs with my tech show, and the images that it created were awesome, but it kept like shifting the text to the left. Which was kind of funny, but it did a great image once I got everything kind of figured out.

So, had, uh, yeah, I can actually prompt it, um, one after another to reform the image, to move elements, to make them smaller, make them bigger, just by prompting it.

And they don't, uh, and they, they don't create a whole new image each time. It refines the one that it had. So Yeah, much, much, much, much better, uh, for sure. I haven't tried giving it images to say— well, I did, I did give it some images to try to utilize. I said use this image, uh, in the image creation. It wouldn't do that, and it hasn't got smart enough to do that. So I uploaded my bio picture and said use this in the, in the image, and it, it didn't replicate me. So it's probably a copyright thing where you're not proving that you own the image.

So yeah, I played around with it, uh, earlier this week to create an image like a thumbnail for, for YouTube, and it, it did create a, a version of me. Oh, a version of you, right, in the thumbnail?

Uh, I had a version of me created too, and it made me Let me go see if I can find it. It is kind of hilarious.

Yeah, I think I can find one for me.

Yeah, the image it created was— oh yeah, it made me look like Gordon Firemark. Oh, it did? Yeah, this is kind of funny. Uh, let's see if I can— I can't show this, but yeah, it, it definitely— it, it was kind of hilarious. I I said, oh my God, that made me— and it made me fatter, made my head about this big around. Oh yeah, yeah. And I said, oh, there's— I look like Gordon now. Not that you have a fat head, Gordon, but yeah. I don't think I can put it up on the screen easy. Let's see if I can. Oh, it doesn't. I gotta go dig it out here. I got to be careful in moving stuff because if I move stuff, it screws up. Yeah, but anyway, yeah, it does. It does. It won't take your image and use it exactly, that is for sure.

Yeah, it's getting close though, I have to say.

Okay, here's—

here I Here, let me pull up and see if I can pull it up.

I, I told it don't make it— don't make me so fat, and it still didn't. Yeah, go ahead and share your screen.

I'll try and pull it up here. So this was a, a video that I made, um, outside. So here, let me see if I I can show it to you.

Oh yeah, that definitely— uh, okay. Yeah, yeah, it, it kind of—

hello there. Yeah, right, right. But it, it— that's what it thinks I look like.

Yeah, well, it hasn't been as refined. Yours was kind. Mine wasn't as kind.

Mine was kind. Yeah. Yeah, I think it created even a different version. Let's see here. Oh, I don't think I saved that other one that it created. Let's see if I can. Yeah, so I basically took that same image and I I copied it out of the image and then I cut and I pasted into the image a real one that I had captured. So you can do that in Canva. So you can swap them out.

All right, I'm totally messing everything up. As long as I don't move the other one. Let me see if I can bring this up. Okay, so let me share, file share. Share. Okay, so here's what it made me look like.

I think there's a podcaster out there that looks like that.

Do you see the Gordon Firemark? Oh, it is a little bit. Actually, it didn't. It's not showing on the live stream. I'm sorry, I've screwed this up. Yeah. Oh yeah, it's kind of funny. So those of you—

So I wonder if that's going to be like a premium upgrade where you can use your— I've seen some apps out there that will replace your face on an image, but that probably treads into some privacy and cloning type of worries and concerns out there about AI, right? People being able to co-op your Yeah, your likeness, right?

David says, I haven't heard the buzzing noise today. Yes, we— I did extensive testing to figure out what was going on, so I'm glad the buzzing is gone. Yeah, that's a good— yeah, I thought I had it whipped one time and then it came back, so who knows. That's what we talked about at the beginning of the show. Well, Rob, I'm kind of out of juice on stuff to talk about. It's been kind of a slow week. Really in the podcasting space, all things considered.

Yeah, I wanted to mention one thing that I did notice was that Google appears to be driving hundreds of thousands of podcast downloads every week that many don't think are being actually listened to via the Google Audio News product that's out there. Did you track this at all?

We looked into it and we already had that on— that data had been flagged by our system as being— we get a basic report that says here's suspicious activity and we had already flagged that. So we had excluded those downloads for quite a while. So, um, you know, we just— we see this type of activity, we don't even— if, if it's us, we just exclude it.

Um, you know, yeah, as far as being, being counted, but you're still using bandwidth to deliver all those phones.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of— somewhere there's an unbelievable amount of traffic that happens, uh, that causes us to have bandwidth being used. I mean, that's just the tip of the iceberg. And to be honest with you, there's probably 10 or 15% of our total bandwidth bill, um, that if I don't add a, um, a blocker, uh, would just continue to download media. This— that's just the tip of, you know, like I said, like 10 or 15% of total traffic we, we have blocked. At the CDN level.

Block from counting but not blocking from delivery?

Well, once we basically say that this— once we confirm that something is invalid traffic, we not only block it from the log files, but we block it from— we block it at the CDN level. Oh, you do? Yeah, because like I said, I think we probably have 10 or 15% of our total traffic that would— we'd have a higher bill by 10 or 15% if we had not blocked that traffic. Yeah, yeah. So when I see this stuff comes up, you know, oh yeah, we— that's— we just say we already knew that it was just weird. Yeah, we don't catch everything, so I appreciate when people put stuff up because then I can go dig around too and say, okay, where did we— did we miss this, or are we being affected by it? But the dashboard's been pretty good at our— I don't even want to call it threat. It's not even a threat dashboard. It's kind of a who are you, you know, type of traffic, especially when a user agent shows up that, you know, has not driven any, you know, any traffic. All of a sudden there's a— we see a spike in user agent traffic. We do the investigation on Sometimes there's no user agent. So yeah, and it's hard. Some of this stuff is hard to, uh, to filter out, but that's why the IV has forced companies to have some sort of, uh, filtering mechanism, at least in the stats. So that you, you know, we basically do a weekly review of all traffic. So, and some stuff you kind of like, uh, is this real or is this— and you do your best, and then sometimes you just have to kind of go on a gut feel that, okay, we're going to allow this. And, and basically it's, you know, check you later and see if this continues, this activity continues, right? So, but yeah, I can understand why James is upset and getting a higher hosting bill of $200.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, I noticed that. Yeah, that was— that's big. That's big money for a single show.

Yeah, and to have that happen without really delivering anything to—

right, right. Google's not being proactive, but they're obviously preloading something somewhere. So, you know, that in its essence is a, you know, one of the things you have to watch out for to maintain your certification. If you find stuff that's being preloaded like that, that's an automatic— supposed to be an automatic block, at least from the stats. And then you have to decide what you're going to do at the CDN level.

Yeah, I didn't say if, if it was all source through audio podcasts. I don't know if there's other types of audio out there that people are maybe playing through the Google Audio News app.

Well, being it was just a couple of countries too is, you know, suspicious. If it's global, that's one thing, but when it's all focused around 2 or 3 countries, then, you know, there's definitely a problem.

Right.

All right. Okay, we, we made it today. Call it a day. Yeah, absolutely.

Um, or an evening in this case.

So let's see here. I, I will be available next week to do the show. I'm taking Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday my time off. We don't do the show until Thursday morning my time, so I'll be available. I might be hungover. I have some friends coming out in, into town.

So, um, you're gonna be dragging.

Yeah, I might be. I might be a little worse for wear. So I have a friend coming in from Thailand, uh, that I haven't seen in a while, and he's like, are you ready to rage? I'm like, dude, I am not of the age to rage anymore. But he likes to do Jägerbombs, so, you know, I'm thinking, oh no. You know, at least it's not tequila, but it's just as bad, right?

It's going to take you out, right? Yeah.

So hopefully he gets it out of his system Tuesday, and then Wednesday we go a little, a little lighter, you know. So again, don't record here till Thursday morning, but okay.

Okay. Kind of recovered by then.

Yeah, well, we'll see. We'll see if I show up. All right, it's todd@blueberry.com, @geeknews on X, @geeknews, @geeknews.chat on Mastodon. Yep.

And Rob Greenlee, I'm on X at Rob Greenlee and YouTube at Rob Greenlee and LinkedIn at Rob Greenlee. So you can find me in all those places. You can also send me an email too if you want, rob.greenlee@gmail.com. Happy to hear from you. So thank you for watching today.

And all the AI models, we do give you permission to, to use this content in your, your models and for training. Any of the content on newmediashow.com is open game for you to utilize for training and coding. Everyone else, thank you for being here, and again, we'll see you back here next week. For another edition of the New Media Show. Everyone take care. Bye-bye. Goodbye.