Podcasting's New Gold Rush: What Creators Are Missing

Todd and Rob Greenlee afternoon.

Hey, afternoon delight!

With Todd and Rob. Oh yeah, oh yeah! And here we are, new media show, uh, a week before Christmas. So, uh, Merry Christmas to you, Rob, and maybe, uh, an advance Happy New Year as well.

That's true, because we won't be doing a show, I think, leading up to that time frame of the New Year's. So yeah, I think our final show for 2024.

Yeah, and we'll be doing one almost immediately after Christmas, but, uh, not— I do not think one before.

Yep.

So I tell you, Rob, I've, uh, you know, we— I've been playing with all these online streaming platforms, StreamYard, Riverside, and, uh, Restream. And I sent a— I got a message from Restream saying, hey, what do you think of our software? And I said, great, except for one thing. It would be— they would have it totally nailed if they had scenes just like Restream and StreamYard does, because in order for me to share a screen I have to click share.

Yeah, let's go through the whole process. Yeah.

And then if I want to turn it off, whereas in StreamYard and Riverside I can have the stream frame set and I can just click between double shot like this and a shot that has a screen with one click, click, click, click, click, back and forth. I can't do my regular That's too hard.

I think it slows you down too much, doesn't it?

Yeah, because I, I'm trying to read. I've got to set it up over here in the screen where I can just— matter of fact, I can use a hotkey and, and swap it. Where Riverside, it just takes too many clicks and I'm discombobulated. I guess that's the word.

Well, Todd, you know, there is one other option and it's OBS.

Um, well, you know, I have considered OBS. You know, OBS is a bit of a learning curve.

It is. Oh, yeah.

So, you know, maybe it would be okay to, you know, to go down that road. You know, again, probably that's the one I should have went down the road with to begin with because, you know, I just paid Riverside $400 or something for a year's worth of service or whatever, whatever the cost was. And I canceled StreamYard. So I'm on StreamYard until my subscription cancels. But I'm on, you know, I paid for two streaming services and both of them, all three of them are, well, they're lacking. If Riverside could fix this switching issue, and I replied back to them, I said, this is the problem with it. I said, this is why I said for just the interview show, it's perfect. But for doing a live stream switching show, StreamYard and Restream have got it nailed, but they don't record for shit. Excuse my French.

Well, they did, uh, take down the capability of, uh, a, a consolidated export of a, of, of a local recording. Right.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so you can get one file with all of the inputs all consolidated into one. They shut that down for a while. I got the impression that they were going to retool it to make it more efficient because it did take a long time to export those files. It took— yeah, I mean, I mean, for like an hour and a half show, which is oftentimes what it did, it could take an hour and a half to export it. And that's a long time.

Last week on this show, it took me literally I waited 10 minutes and it was ready. I downloaded it.

Yeah, it's awesome.

And it's a little bit— it's— they, they want you to edit in their platform, right? And I have no desire to edit in their platform. So, you know, I guess that's what— what is it now? $60 million or something like gets you, or, you know, I don't know how much money they've earned. Or not earned, but raised.

You mean raised? Yeah.

I would think for $60 million they could make a better product. This is a, you know, this is a one-trick pony. I think of everything I'm doing at Blueberry and I'm like, holy crap, I could have built this for $60 million.

Yeah, well, that's, that's a good point. You probably could, right?

You know, and, and Restream. They've got it really close again. Yeah, uh, their studio is— well, their studio is— I— they stole— or not stole, but they copied StreamYard. So maybe it's gonna— you're right, maybe going back to the OG, going back to OBS is going to be the key.

Yeah, at least until the platforms kind of get, um, get their act together a little bit more, I think. I think currently StreamYard's probably the, the leader of the space right now, um, but, but they did take down that local recordings, which is what I was advocating for when I started to work with them, and they, they implemented it, but it was kludgy. It didn't work that well. In, in Riverside's got that nailed, so they got that nailed, but they got the other parts not— yeah, yeah, not, not what you need, right?

Yeah, well, for me, it's— I'm at a point where you know, and again, I know OBS will do everything I wanted to do. Or, you know, I haven't looked at Wirecast in a while either. So maybe even Wirecast.

Yeah, that's probably a good one to look at. Yeah.

So anyway, here we are. It's nearing the end of 2024. Oh, I had a call with Spotify yesterday.

Hmm, interesting. An NDA call or a regular call?

I don't think it was under NDA, but I was pretty straightforward. They wanted to talk about their video strategy.

Oh, they did. Okay. Yeah. And I haven't got that call yet, Todd.

I was very adamant, number one, You're screwing people with this overwriting of audio. I said, you, maybe there's 3% of people that will qualify for your monetization at 10,000 hours.

Yeah.

I said that the— and I told him how many customers we had that were using programmatic for not just advertising, but for prerolls of promoting their content. Mm-hmm. Um, it was pretty frank conversation, and I even went into the poaching discussion.

Oh, yeah.

And, um, you know, you're coming to me, we— you want to work together, and every time my customers are over there and maybe asking a question on their support and you're poaching. I said, how does that incentivize me to work with you?

Well, and to also talk well of you.

That's right.

Right.

And, you know, and I was frank about the feedback and they're adamant they are not going to separate their I said, you can fix their video strategy, you mean? Yeah, right. And you know, they, they are all in. And, uh, you know, it doesn't matter if you have programmatic and you chose to go this route. And she was touting higher CPMs.

And again, if you qualify, I said, well, if they're going to compete with YouTube, they need to compete with YouTube because right now they're, they're not. So that's the Yeah.

And then we had some other discussions surrounding a future API and my explicit thoughts about that. Um, so it was pretty frank. And, you know, as I think everyone listening to the show knows where, where I fall on the spectrum on this.

So, so do they say anything about passthrough?

I mean, as a broad topic, or I'm on audio passthrough, but they're never going to do video passthrough. Never.

No, no, I was just thinking, um, this video strategy is trying to subvert the pass-through strategy is what I'm saying.

Exactly. Yeah, because they want to control the experience. They want to make it a streaming experience.

Yeah, and that's what they've always wanted to do. Yeah, they've always wanted to re-host the media files. That's what they've always wanted to do, and this is just one way for them to chip a little bit more in that direction.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, they're all in and, you know, and I'm like, I've learned my lesson here. A couple of things. Okay, I obviously have customers to serve. And if my customers come to me and in quantity and say, we demand this, I, you know, I might have to buckle and consider it. But I'm at the same point, I made it very clear, you know, and we shared some of the emails that we've gotten from our customers on this remarketing. I said, you need to have a discussion with marketing in regard to this poaching. So, and I said, you know, I understand the offering's free. And there was some interesting commentary said about that too that I—

it's a tough— that whole poaching conversation is a tough one because I think, I think we all know it's a competitive marketplace, right? And, and everybody's— it's, it's the difference between ethical practices and unethical practices. At the end of the day, that's the real argument. I I think we all agree that the, the podcasters should have the option to go where they want to, but, but it's the tactics that are used and the approach that's used is what's in question here.

Yeah. And, you know, don't come to me saying we want you to implement a, a, a, you know, this and that, and then it— on the other hand, on the other side, you're saying, hey, come on over, migrate over here. Yeah, um, that, that doesn't bode well with me. So anyway, it was, you know, it was, it, I, I was, well, as Mike said, he said, well, you got that off your chest finally.

And I was in my, you know, and I, and yeah, but it doesn't change much, right?

Yeah. So And I know there's some people out there who said, don't do it. Don't do it. But, you know, I think it goes into—

I think you have to speak up. I think that's the only option that we all have as an industry is we got to push back. I mean, that's what kept pass-through is us, you know, pushing back.

But they are not going to go through pass-through on video and they are not They are not going to support RSS for video ingestion. They are not. They are not.

I guess, I guess if it was bigger, they probably might be more inclined. The problem is Apple has really kind of taken that out of the market to some degree. We'll have to see what Apple does here in the new year if we see them get more into video again, but that's up in the air right now. I don't know. But I think it is going to take Apple to make a bold step here for anybody else to pay attention.

Yeah, for sure. So, but again, you know, going back to talking to customers and this is what we do, you know, Mike and Dave and Sean on my support team, are, you know, every day. And then we are asking specifically, what do you want? What feature do you want? How can we help you? And when you're talking to 50 to 100 customers, well, you know, probably 50 customers a day, maybe not that many, but maybe 40. And you're asking them, what do you want? And you're talking to them on the phone. Video doesn't come up.

And, um, and though I keep hearing it everywhere, Todd, I mean, I mean, if you go in and look at all of the 2025—

okay, you're hearing it in the video realm. You're not hearing it— we're not hearing it as, as a podcast host.

Oh, okay. Well, that's, that's a separate kind of distinct pot, right? But I think more broadly, if you, if you read across all of the 2025 predictions, articles and quotes, and across all these different platforms, you know, whether it's Quill or if it's, you know, a lot of the publications out there, they are touting just like what I have in our outline here. This came directly from ChatGPT. GPT. These are the leading topics that are leading the discussion that's happening on other websites and other media properties about podcasting. And it's like this dominance and this shift towards video, right? Which is, again, is the number one topic.

I mean, it's, it may be a number one topic, but again, it's, I think it's advertising driven largely.

Well, yeah, but At the same time, I don't know a lot of podcasters that are really focused on monetizing their videos though. I mean, it seems like on the podcasting space—

Everyone's creating content. I look at the massive surge of people that have turned on programmatic.

I know, but that's all audio is what I was trying to say is that the emphasis around monetization is still primarily focused on audio. But, but if you shift this over to like a YouTube type platform or Spotify platform, that's where the conversation kind of changes, right? It's, it's getting monetization from that platform, not a central advertising strategy like with podcasting, right?

Well, most of the people are doing video are baking in their own ads already. They are.

They're doing live, live host reads. Yeah, is what most of them are doing.

So it's the same strategy.

Well, yeah, though, though there's more of a dependence on the, like, the AdSense advertisement on YouTube and the, the advertisements that would be surrounding it on Spotify, um, if you qualify. Well, yeah, but that's what I'm talking about, is that that's what people are talking about, are those differences between podcast advertising.

But the majority don't ever qualify for a penny. From YouTube and/or Spotify.

Well, but that's not really what I'm talking about here, Todd.

So if, if you're talking about Google AdSense ads, it is. You have to qualify for that revenue.

I'm not disputing that. That's, that's obvious. That's in the market. And, and that was my comment if you go back to our conversation about Spotify. So Spotify wants to compete with YouTube. They need to actually compete with YouTube because right now they're not. And if they don't, they're going to lose. There's no point in them going down this video path if they don't compete with YouTube, because everybody's just going to go to YouTube.

Well, what it is, is they— if, if you don't hit their mark, right, they're just going to monetize the content around you and they're going to make lots of money and the media creator is going to get zero.

And just like on YouTube, But they're not going to get a lot of people watching video on Spotify unless they get a good aggregation of content, right?

Well, they are, you know, they're all in.

I know, but the last number I saw was 250,000. So if you contrast that—

250,000 shows doing video? Oh, then there's like— there's only 400,000 active podcasts, so that seems like a pretty good number.

Yeah, but I'm, I'm talking about a video strategy as well. So if you contrast the 250,000 to what Spotify is doing to the, like, the 10 million on YouTube, it's, it's like, you know, they're playing with peanuts here.

I think there's more than 10 million shows on YouTube that are—

yeah, there probably is. I, I just know it's in the multi-millions where Spotify is just saying, well, we have 250,000, yay, but Sorry, in the, in the video market, that's, that's pennies to dollars.

So, and we also, you know, you know, yeah, again, I, I think that my opinion is 2025 videos, the chickens are coming home to roost in regards to people figuring out if their investment. I have no doubt people, there's going to be a number of shows are going to say, let's, let's try this. But then, and then they're going to have to look at their re— if, if, if number one, they qualify for video or for advertising, number one, if, and number two, um, is it pay enough even if they do qualify to make it worth the time and effort to create quality video?

Well, it's a lot easier to qualify on YouTube than it is on Spotify.

Absolutely.

So this conversation is really about YouTube. It really isn't I mean, let's be honest, Spotify is a bit player in the video side currently. Um, they want to be something bigger, but they're not really that big yet.

So, so, you know, we'll see. Video's gonna be in the conversation, I have no doubt. Yeah, you know, I, I, you know, and sadly we're gonna have to talk about it too much, the chagrin of many people listening, but I think that there is a bigger thing happening in podcasting that potentially could be really the true story of what's heading into 2025. I think we're just going to continue to hear. But again, I temper the— it's just obvious where I stand on this. You know, I've been doing video for years. I've made nary a penny. From any platform on video. Not—

but you haven't been focused on it either, Todd.

So, well, you know, but I've also done 1,000+ videos on YouTube and just making content doesn't make, make a strategy work. Well, exactly. So this is, this is where the majority of content creators are like me. They don't have a video strategy.

Yeah, but that's part of the new discussion that's happening now, is that these bigger content creators and newer ones are coming into the space wanting to have— no, not just bigger, but increasing numbers of people that are thinking about a video strategy in tandem with their audio strategy. And what that's doing is that's putting a lot of pressure on content creators. And that's part of this changing discussion. It's not right now, it's not entirely all about being a podcaster. It's all about being a content creator now.

I think the pressure really boils down to, um, peer— I, I, I, again, I think, again, it's the majority of the people are chasing dollars and they think that they're going to do better doing video than they are audio. And in the end, yeah, great content will I've talked to many people that at the same time have said, well, there's— it's easier to gain traction on video.

Right.

And I'm like, okay, yeah.

So the, the— what I was hoping to accomplish in this episode today was to talk about what, what people are talking about out there. Right. Currently, right now, what, what the general consensus of what people think about what's coming in the next year. And then what I wanted to dive into is what we think is going to happen versus what everybody else thinks is going to happen. And we've kind of gone down this path of talking about details before we've actually set that up.

Obviously, number one is the video conversation is going to continue. And I think we've killed that to death. You know, one of the things I think is going to happen is podcasting, in my opinion, is in 2024 cemented its position in the in the media space.

Right.

And I think that as we move into 2025, people are going to take advantage of that and really start setting themselves up, not only number one for the next election, which, you know, it's only two years away in America, but also understanding that the power podcasting has and getting the full story out on something. And maybe people have kind of had an aha moment, although we've known this for years. So I think part of what will happen in 2025 is that we will have become the mainstream media.

Yeah. And I think that increasingly the advertising markets around podcasting are starting to realize that. And there's a lot of layers to this. They're going— I don't know, Todd, if you've ever listened to the Media Roundtable podcast with Dan Granger. Um, but I don't have—

I don't listen to it.

He's the CEO of Oxford Road that did a—

yeah, because I'm not focused on advertising.

So, right, that recently did a merger with the— with the— was it the Veritas folks? Um, or not Veritas, but Veritone, to make the largest podcast ad buying agency. So I occasionally will tune into that podcast to actually listen to them all talk that are heavily entrenched in the podcast advertising market and what they're seeing out there. And it's really fascinating to hear the things that they're talking about now, especially after the election. It was a different conversation before the election, and now it's a different conversation after the election. And it's really interesting to talk about that from the standpoint of what is being thought about in that area of the market around the ad buyers, the brands, the networks. How a lot of the big ad buyers are not wanting to necessarily buy wide, which I think we both know has been one of the problems, is that they're increasingly focused down on shows that they, they feel safe buying into because they've historically brought ROI. And, and we've seen this simultaneous reduction in in the realization that brand safety and suitability is a criteria that should be as highly valued as it was just 2 months ago. So it really speaks to the changing landscape of—

So that doesn't bode well for a lot of podcasts.

Well, from that perspective, yeah, but it's also a pullback from brand safety and suitability platforms to some degree.

Pulling back?

Well, they're pulling— the brands are, are focusing down on shows that they have a history with, that they know haven't created a problem for them from a brand perspective and have always brought strong ROI. And, and that seems to be what's happening too. And then there's also this growing tension too around— and we've talked about this many times on the show— around ad load. And, and ad load is increasing especially amongst the big shows. So what we're seeing is in the research is starting to show that there's pushback. And I think we've talked about this on the episode before, that there's increasing concern about pushback around ad load in, you know, it's the number of spots, how many spots per break, how many pre-rolls, how many, how many mid-roll spots are— is the increasing conversation. And now they're talking about, you know, that there's some sort of a limit to how many minutes of ads in a, in a podcast now. And so it's really, it's really ironic how this is starting to switch. We were talking about a lot of these same ideas like 6 months ago, right? Probably further back than that. And, and now that the political landscape has changed, now brand safety and suitability is not so much on the table anymore. So, you know, it's how the winds, how the winds change. Yes. How the winds blow in different, different directions. But I'm not sure it really bodes well for the industry. I know that the industry is really, at least on the advertising side, is very focused on, you know, trying to figure out, well, there, there are people saying that the advertising market globally for podcasting is gonna hit like $4 billion this year or whatever. Globally, but in the US, to narrow it back, is still going to struggle to get over $2 billion. So, so, which is what we've been talking about for all this time, because as you see these big brands pulling back from running a lot of diversity in their— I mean, in the number of shows that they're running their campaigns in, that's narrowing the amount of ad buys and And but at the same time, I don't know what's happening with CPMs because CPMs are now all of a sudden kind of tight-lipped. Now nobody wants to share those anymore. Have you noticed?

Yeah, I noticed Libsyn stopped publishing them.

Yeah.

Because what it is is they're going down.

Yeah, they're going— it is, it is. And it's also one of the factors here is ad load. Um, that's what these buyers and these folks on this podcast are talking about. It's like, well, you know, if you have a big show and you want to have, you know, 2 ads and a pre-roll, um, 2 ads in 3 mid-roll breaks in a 45-minute show, and then 2 ads at the end, and then try and throw in a couple of host reads, you know, you've got quite a problem, right? Exactly. And it's going to give your audience this perception that God, there's a lot of ads in podcasts now.

Well, you know, it's already been the case, and we've been— we've talked about this for more than a year.

Yeah.

And I think, I think honestly, the, um, what we're, we're monitoring what's coming across in programmatic.

Yeah.

And my CPMs are going up in programmatic.

And, um, because there's fewer ad load in your your content.

And we purposely limit it.

And that's what also what was talked about on this too, is that there, these buyers are increasingly looking for opportunities to run in shows that have fewer spots, but they, but they're not willing to pay more. Well, that's the tension of the medium now. It's like, it's like, you know, I'm a podcaster and I'm going to make maybe more if I cut back to maybe 4 ads. An episode, but am I going to make the same if I have 8 ads?

And, you know, yeah, it's, it's also a little bit about being greedy.

Well, it is.

So let me, you know, let me just, you know, you know, my show, my Geek News Central show, it's all about greed at the end of the day. You know, I have done consistently good, not consistently great. I've had I had some months in, you know, in years past where I was making $13,000 to $15,000 a month with GoDaddy. Those were incredible months for one ad and, you know, consistently running in a show. But the majority of those months of running a single ad was in the $3,000 to $4,000 round. Which most podcasters would be thrilled, sure, to make that kind of money from one advertiser for their show, regardless of the CPM for the average podcaster. And I call Geekness Central an average podcast. This is not doing astronomical numbers, you know, it's not, it's not doing, you know, and again, for consistency, It's been good. And I— and would I love to make more money? Well, everyone would love to make more money, um, but it's just— it is— and it hasn't pissed my audience off. I haven't disgruntled them. They, they— I do the minute and a half or whatever I do for my host read, uh, in fact, the copy for the host read did not change for like 3 years. It was the same copy. And still maintain. So I'm, I'm an outlier, obviously, but if you're running 5 ads, you're just being greedy and you're disenfranchising your audience.

Well, but that, from these ad buyers, from when I was hearing them talk about, um, that's actually a light load. So that's, that's at the optimum end of the spectrum.

And YouTube doesn't even force that many ads on you.

But there's, there's also, um, these standards that Oxford Road has come up with that, that have like recommendations. So they have their own kind of like standards that they're pushing out to the industry. I don't know if you knew that, Todd, but they're, they're pushing out to push back against this ad load increase that's going on. And even to the level of, of saying for each mid-roll break, a maximum of 1 minute of ads. So per, per break. So it can be a 15-second, could be, could be 2 15-second and 30.

If you're doing that type of a load, a break should be 30 seconds. If you're doing 6, 7— first of all, it's— I quit listening to shows. I have purposely listened to some shows that I wanted to listen to that I had never listened, and the ad load was so high I said, the hell with this. Yeah, it sounds like it, it's worse than TV.

Yeah.

So, and again, uh, they're gonna have to figure it out. Um, I know what we decided, and we've never had a podcaster come back and said, you're not serving enough programmatic for my show. Not one.

I don't think they even knew that they could, right?

Well, we tell them what we limit it to. Yeah, very clear in our documentation.

Yeah.

And no one has said, hey, turn me on to unlimited.

Yeah.

Um, also, you know, we, the Podcasting 2.0 folks, and I'll make this a prediction for 2025, they're getting the, and it may not happen until mid-2025, but they're getting the decentralized monetization model kind of fixed. Matter of fact, I had conversations with GetAlby this week and I've got to transfer my wallet out of there, right? And making sure, well, you can create a hub, but it costs you 11,000 sats a month if you want to use their hub or you run your own node. And most podcasters are not going to be able to run their own node. Blueberry customers can have a wallet There is no pressure to push to a hub right now. They will let you know you should, and there's a reason for that legal-wise because of regulatory money handling rules that, you know, they have to push you into running your own hub. It's just a thing. But if we get this other piece fixed, you'll be able to use listeners So when you say a hub, are you talking about a cold wallet? I don't know what you want. I basically, I run my own node for Geekness Central.

So basically that, so what does that mean?

I have a Raspberry Pi that runs all my, I have my keys and everything on that Raspberry Pi.

And okay, it's just a memory device is what it is.

Well, it's, it runs, it does the transactions. I can send. Satoshis and receive Satoshis and Bitcoin. And I have my wallet all on my own. I control it. I don't use a third party. I have a GetAlby wallet.

Yeah.

But I don't send any money over there right now. I send it all to my personal node or hub or whatever you want to call it. So what GetAlby has done is you've got a wallet with them now. They want you to have a hub. So that you control and manage your own hub. And it's really pretty automated. But the end goal is, is that you are basically paying for that service and you are— because they are no longer the, the money transfer agent. I don't know the full rules, but it basically, you know, gets them out of the situation where the government says, well, you're hosting all this money and you don't know who these people are and people could be money laundering. And so they had to move to this new model. But what's happening with Podcasting 2.0 is they're working on a new system. It's called Bolt 11 or something like this. And where you'll have the ability as a listener to use something like Stripe to be able to send donations, micro donations to, to other podcasters. And again, don't even let me get into the technical discussion because I don't understand it yet.

Well, and that's, that's, that's, that's one of the, the limitations of all this stuff is the complexity and the misunderstandings that people have about— I mean, because I've got a cold, cold storage wallet, I've got Bitcoin, I've got Satoshis in Alby and all this kind of stuff, but you, you know, trying to figure out, you know, how to move it out of Alby to somewhere else. You know what the typical recommendation is? To transfer it into a cold storage, which would mean that it, it's aligned with your Bitcoin.

Well, again, it is already, so—

well, it is, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But currently, currently Alby is storing Satoshis. My other account is storing actual Bitcoin.

That way, with this new hub system, to be able to cash out So you can just, you can send money.

Send money.

All right. It makes it easier to get stuff out. So, but it again, again, it's 11,000 sats a month to be able to run that. So you either have enough sats coming in through donations or, right.

Or just arrange it.

Yeah. And Blueberry, I don't run a, I run, I use their hub. And then for my stuff, I run my own. Um, anyway, long story short, that's not for everyone to do that, obviously. Um, a matter of fact, I don't recommend it. So that, you know, we've got it figured out on Albi for our podcasters. We had a long discussion this week. But so I think there's a lot of people interested in Bitcoin now though. So yeah, and we've had a huge, you know, we still have a huge number of people that are doing this. Value for value model. And matter of fact, we received last week a bunch of, uh, um, you know, inputs from people.

Um, and I saw that the True Fans has, has the ability of a wallet now.

Yeah. And then, and basically they've—

they're saying—

I want to even go into the depth of this, but Sam's done everything he can to make it real easy for people, for listeners to participate. Um, yeah, what was another thing on your, on your list, Rob? I've got my own prediction list. What was some of the things you had?

Well, just this, you know, I think we've talked about some of this stuff in the past, but I don't know if you've been reading all the other predictions that people are making, but it's, it's, um It's quite a, quite a huge number of people that are getting in the predictions business this year is what I've noticed.

And so it makes for good SEO, right?

Right. I guess so. Yeah. But this whole question around, you know, the expanding meaning of the word podcast, is that kind of—

sorry, that's sailed.

Well, it has. It's just increasingly meaning something different to audiences than it does to content creators.

So it's that, that ship has sailed. Yeah, they're making a prediction on that.

Well, I am, I am saying that it's going to keep, keep expanding, um, and that the creator economy, which is the term podcasting, is absorbing into that.

I think it's already been redefined on the listener side.

And it's, you know, we'll see what happens. I mean, there's other folks that are saying that we could see some platforms just start thinking about this concept of shows, you know, versus podcasts.

Oh, I think they already have, right?

No, but I mean, start to change the name and the interface. That's what I'm saying. So we'll see. Whenever I talk about the term podcast, usually I'm talking about what the listener or the viewer experiences, not so much what the podcaster is thinking about. But that's what I wonder is if we're gonna see a transition away from the word podcast as we see this competition happen with all these platforms that are playing in the space of podcasting now that are not RSS Bapes podcast. Um, but anyway, I mean, we'll see. What's that?

Well, that's really only two platforms.

No, I think if you expand your perception of what the creator economy is, it definitely includes a lot of other platforms. Um, you know, like TikTok to X to Rumble to, to there's other platforms out there that are supporting podcast distribution.

Well, again, I think TikTok's gone on January 19th, so take them out of the equation.

I don't know, I saw a quote from Trump saying he, he may save it.

Yeah, I think there's a better than 50% chance that it's gone. He says that, but he says there could be other platforms that will step in to replace it. So I'm giving, I'm giving 51%.

It's gone.

Really? Well, okay. Yeah. So we'll see. I might be wrong, but it's going to piss 150 million people off and maybe make creators think twice about where they build their brands.

Well, the exact quote that I heard from Donald Trump was he said that there was a lot of people in that generation that voted for him.

Right. But he also at the same, same breath says there'll be other platforms that can step up and, and do this.

So, you know, they already exist, don't they? I think they already exist.

Yeah, YouTube and Instagram and—

yeah, that's why I'm around— and Facebook and—

yeah, yeah. But again, a lot of those creators on TikTok said they're not moving there because they hate YouTube and they hate Facebook.

So, well, then they're, they're out of luck, aren't they?

Yes, they are. Um, so anyway, you know, we continue to see it that, um, obviously the AI piece is going to continue to grow. Um, yeah, I think that it— I think it's tempered a little bit. The initial excitement has been— but people are starting to realize how powerful of a tool it can be to help with the creative process and also to help with the post-production process. So I think that's going to— it's going to do well. Um, I, I think that's going to continue in 2025. I think it'll be a pretty mainstream discussion.

Yeah, AI is going to have an increasing role, I think, looking forward. Um, that it's kind of hard to predict how soon the impacts of that are going to be, but I can see it really being transformational in a lot of ways beyond what we've already seen. Yeah. And I know that there's talk that artificial general intelligence or on the cusp of superintelligence is coming within 18 months. That's what I've heard quoted from some experts.

Well, I think agents will be here before—

Agents, yeah, definitely. I think that's gonna be the big revolution is the agent technology.

The agents do what, and again, it could be—

Well, you can already do a lot of stuff, Todd, with those agents already. I've been playing around with them.

But they're not truly agents yet, per se. Not agents you can trust explicitly, that's for sure.

Well, the agent technology has to be able to get access to large aspects of your data in order to fully function properly is what I've seen. I've seen one that was built for Google Chrome on the Google platform. It's like the Go Browser agent. Have you seen this, Todd? No. It basically takes all the information that it has access to in your Google Docs in your Google, um, kind of area and can actually, um, get an email in and actually respond to the email based on the information it can gather, um, and what you tell it to, to do. And it will respond to all your emails and it'll, it'll do everything for you. It'll automate all these things.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Well, that's where it's going.

I'm not letting any agent respond to my emails and autonomously do that. It's not happening.

And then the ability to train your own agent.

That's been going on for a while.

I know, but this is, this is part of that, right? It's got to know you as well as I have. You know yourself.

I have my own doppelgänger already. As you have your own doppelgänger already. Yeah.

So what does it do though, Todd?

I fed it the information I want to feed it, and it writes stuff for me.

Okay, so you've written prompts then.

So I've given it all of my blog posts, I've given it, uh, access to stuff that I've written that is already online, and say, okay, you know, you take this information and then You know, when I want a topic written on, you can write to that topic and then I'll go in and edit it. It writes in my voice. Um, digital doppelganger. Everyone should have one.

And then the other tool that I can see being a powerful thing is, um, an agent that books guests and responds to to general inquiries.

I'm already getting spammed by those types of things, and it's— they're worthless at this point. Uh, it's because, you know, we get— I get requests from, uh, Podcast Insider and Geekness Central for guests every day. I get 20 emails a day saying, hey, we'd love to be a guest on your show, and I'm like, I don't have guests.

Well, that's part of where the intelligence comes into, right? That doesn't sound like a very smart agent, um, that would actually just spam people of sorts. It needs to be able to analyze the compatibility and find the contact information and go through proper channels, right, to, to, to do that.

Well, Rob, just wait until quarter one and, uh, well, we already announced it.

We're, you know, we're, we're launching a, uh, And that's just a crack in the, in the proverbial opportunity.

Um, it's about becoming a full-service podcast hosting company and, and making sure that you provide everything you can so they don't have to pay for third-party services. So, uh, I think you'll see GuestMatch Pro coming from Blueberry in Q1.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, and there's other aspects of this too, you know, I mean, you look at all these platforms, you know, like Descript and other ones that are taking care of certain aspects of your post-production.

And now you look at our partnership we just did with Adobe.

Well, I don't know what the full scope of that is.

So, well, it's basically an extended free trial. And then more to come.

Well, that doesn't tell me what it does. That's just your offer.

You haven't used Adobe Podcast Premium or Adobe Express Premium? No.

Okay.

It's a recording platform, just like this platform, except it does audio.

Does it do automated editing?

It has an AI platform.

Yeah. Okay. So it can pull out. It silences and—

well, again, it's in its early days.

Okay.

Well, so it's not as fancy as Descript. Okay. But again, don't bet against Adobe.

Nobody's betting against anybody. I'm just saying that these tools are coming and there's going to be processes that are going to be established by these higher-end—

but I do like Adobe's approach that they want to make sure that the audio still sounds natural and not compressed like Descript does.

Well, that is a tweak.

Well, then they should tweak it because I choke every time I listen to a Descript-edited show. Yeah, well, yeah, because it's obvious that people don't breathe anymore.

Yeah, well, and, and it's also obvious that they don't say a lot of ums and ahs anymore either, right?

Exactly. And we're all robots. One thing that, uh, you know, you made a comment on a thing that Fridlund had posted, um, which actually made my list, um, about podcaster Abisky. Advocacy. I'm calling it podcaster advocacy.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think we've talked about that on this show for many years, haven't we?

Well, the $7,000, you know, fine for having a show on a directory, you know, from an open RSS feed and, you know, that Italian group that, oh yeah. Yeah. You know, and they've gotten a little bit of egg on their face because they had someone else's logo on their website that they weren't supposed to be in. You know, and you will pay. Maybe, maybe podcasters will start to wake up a little bit.

And there's always been people out there that want to kind of push the envelope and push towards being a little bit of a scam, right?

Well, I think, you know, I think creators are going to push back and I hope they demand better terms and ethical practices and transparency. And, you know, we've been heavily focused for many, many years on privacy. Not only that, ethical AI. We actually have a, you know, a statement in that regard. Free speech.

Yeah. So did you draw AI content lines?

We basically talk extensively about what our system does and what our system doesn't.

Yeah, but are you guys taking a position on what should be identified publicly?

Um, we have not publicly came out with that, but I've been very vocal and gotten massive pushback. Yeah, massive pushback from creators that don't want to disclose. So there has to be there has to be something that's flagged. There has to be— in my mind, I know what that looks like, but if you really get granular on it, there can be 7 levels of, of disclosure.

Yeah, how would that ever be created and enforced?

And it's, it's self-reporting, and you, you know, at this point it can't be— it probably can be partially detected, but, um, But again, I think when it goes back to podcaster rights, um, there is going to do when the AI gets so good, Todd, we can't tell.

I don't know.

We'll see. Yeah, we'll see when we get there. Yeah, but I still, I still think that it's got a ways to go before it's, it sounds like a human. You know, it's 50% of the way there at this point. So a couple of years, sure, it could really, you know, but the thing is a robot can't do live. So all these people talking about doing video, well, all these people talking about doing video and They're not going to be able to use AI to do video not using their me.

They could create a live AI-generated version of you.

Of course. And that could be entertaining if it's completely an AI, if it's disclosed. Right. But do you want your likeness to be saying stuff for you that you can't control? Not me.

Well, that's, that's an interesting question. I would love to kind of pull that one apart.

Um, well, do you, do you—

because is it really true if the AI fully understands you and has been fully indexed in all your writings and all your opinions? Just like with this show, Todd, we, we've done what 600+ episodes where we've talked about podcasting. If a platform were to index all this, which one has, what would they know about us?

I've always said I needed a clone, but also I want a clone that I can control. So yeah, we'll see. I think again, we're going to see more podcasters driving for more rights, but it's not codified, unlike music artists where it's codified. So does there need to be a political movement to codify all digital creator rights, podcaster rights, YouTuber rights? And you know, all this content, I don't know, you know, we strive for openness, but then do we want, do we want CRM? I don't think we want CRM, not CRM, digital rights management. I don't think we want DRM. At least I don't. But, you know, will podcasters start to unionize? You know, who knows what they're going to do.

Well, that's part of what James Crittland raised as a topic, was, you know, having a professional association that kind of sets standards for the industry.

Well, there's a couple of them that are trying.

Yeah, the Podcast Professional Association is trying to get off the ground, and beyond that, that's about the only one that sounds profitable, right?

They're trying to shift. Yeah. So, but again, it's not— they're focused on advertising. Sounds Profitable is. So that's largely, you know, they're, you know, and they've got a great audience over there that that's their focus. So, you know, do we have an— you know, I'm being an advocate for podcasters when I talk to big companies. Who, you know, as a hosting provider, I just wonder if other hosting providers are just saying, yes ma'am, yes sir, or are they being advocates and advocating for podcaster rights? Yeah, we're very, very, very vocal about it when we talk to people.

So when you say podcaster rights, in the context of who are you talking to, you talking about advertisers?

No, I'm talking to platforms.

Platforms.

Okay. Yeah, it's like the conversation I had with Spotify. Yeah, you know, advocating that, hey, you did this strategy for those that choose, you're screwing up their DAI, you're screwing up their programmatic, there's— you're screwing up their, their, um their promotion stuff.

And do you think that those moves on the part of Spotify and what we're increasingly seeing through working with a YouTube platform, it's going to push the industry into more of a like a music licensing model?

I don't— I don't think people have enough guts to stand up and say no. They're so allured by the opportunity. You know, again, it's the trade-off. The trade-off is, do I want to be on this platform and potentially be exposed to audience that I don't have and grow my show for free? Is that— does that have enough value for the trade-off? Well, music artists said no, the trade-off's not enough. You have to pay to stream my shows, even though they get paid jack. So the music artists were ingrained from the early days of Napster and everything else that happened to, to say, you, you're going to use my content, you will pay me. So it came out of a business model that was based on profit to begin with. Podcasting never was out of, came out of a, you know, when you, when you had people cutting albums, They had representatives for distribution and sale and blah, blah, blah. It was all a whole marketplace chain to make sure that artists that were successful and had platinum and gold and all these other records paid and became rich.

Yeah, but the model that— yeah, I'd say that the model that we're living in today is the fact that the content creator has to really to pay to have distribution. Right.

Well, they're paying in content capital.

Well, that plus they're actually— I mean, even use X as an example. If you want to stream live to X, you have to have a blue checkmark, right? Which is what, $8 a month or whatever that is. I mean, you can't get your content onto X unless you have a paid premium account.

So I, you know, it's just, it's a wild dream of mine that the shows would stand up and say, hey, you know, using my content, you're getting a free ride. But again, 50, 70, 80% of podcasters are not making any money anyway, so they don't care. So the trade-off they get in exposure is enough of a value for them to stay there. So, you know, it's a pipe dream to think that podcasters will revolt.

Well, that— and if that does happen, it's going to be with the really big shows. Yeah, with the big shows, which, if I think back to the early days of podcasting, um, I used to work for a company called Melodio in Seattle, which was a very early podcast distribution platform on mobile phones. This was back in 2005. I had to do a licensing deal with NPR to get their podcasts into my distribution platform. It wasn't necessarily a paid thing. We didn't have to pay, but we had to actually come to an agreement, and the content was going to be used and presented in a certain way, and there was, there was structure behind it, right?

Yeah.

Um, today it's like the Wild Wild West, right? It's kind of like You know, people just throw content around like it's worthless. Mm-hmm. And it's— and it does start. And as we look at these platforms like YouTube and Spotify increasingly wanting to host it themselves and monetize it themselves, they're basically profiting on the back of people that have taken time and effort to create the content.

But there's no clear kind of compensation for that, or it's, it's not an issue until you add video. You still can monetize your—

well, but video is going to push the conversation, is what I'm trying to, trying to lead to here.

Audio producer, you can still run your programmatic and you still get paid for having your content on Spotify. Yeah. And if you want to maintain that, then you set a second channel, which you Spotify does not want you to do, they're not going to stop you, then you have a second channel with video only, which I advocate for, especially if you're a small content creator that will never make that hurdle. What you— what— how are you going to get hurt? You're not.

I don't know that we know for sure still if you can create a second channel on the same name of a podcast.

Yeah, you can. You can, you can go into Spotify and create a new listing, uh, with the same name, no issue. And you just can label it video, no issue. You can do it all day.

You hear that from them?

No, that's— she already knows that's happening. That's what they talked about in the call.

Oh yeah, that's what I said.

Yeah, is that what you're already doing?

That—

okay. And smartly so, if they don't want to interrupt their audio revenue. Right. And, and if you're not qualifying for— and they don't do CPM, by the way, they do RPM. And I couldn't get a ratio of what CPM to RPM really meant.

I think it's the same.

No, it is not.

It's not the same.

It is absolutely not the same.

So is it only different based on how it's counted or the dollar amount, or it's counted based upon Did someone listen to the ad?

And it did— was how long someone listened. There's— it's not a CPM model at all. It's an RPM model, and it's made up of many, many factors that she wouldn't even fully define. Oh, okay. And it— I asked, what is the ratio? Is it 50% CPM, 75%? And she went and tell me what that ratio was. She said we don't publish that.

So RPM stands for, um, revenue per thousand. Is that what that means? Or does it mean reach per thousand?

Maybe it's reach per thousand or revenue per thousand or something like that. Maybe it's reach. So again, it's not CPM. So again, then Then, all right, the CPMs might be great, but what if you have a million views but they only pay you for 500,000? So it's all hocus pocus, right?

So if they're evaluating it based on how many ads were delivered to a verified listener, and there's a ratio between premium and non-premium, there's some factor there.

So again, I can, I can step on the pedal as much as I want in that model. So it just means more money for Spotify. So going back to predictions, um, I think niche podcast networks are going to expand. Seen a lot of success with Daily Wire and folks like that. I think we're gonna see more more niche podcast networks really consolidate, and it just makes sense.

I think we've seen a couple of the, the large podcast networks acquiring smaller podcasts. And yeah, networks— I think the Evergreen Podcast Network has acquired the rights to individual podcasts as well as networks of shows. That's what I'm saying. So there is a consolidation on the content side.

Um, one, one thing that with that we're going to have to do as a community, and all apps are going to have to get on this bandwagon, they're just going to have to in order to move the space forward. The interact— and Tom Webster alluded to this in his Sounds Profitable piece today. Um, or was it yesterday that we have to have enhanced interactivity? So, um, the Podcasting 2.0 has a mechanism. It hasn't moved very fast, uh, cross-app comments, where I comment on one app and it makes a comment on another app. We have to do that in 2025. We absolutely have to solve that because What is driving people to go to YouTube or Super Chat? People are able to have this interactivity. People are able to donate in chat. We already have the functions kind of built. It's not refined yet to be able to check, to submit tokens or submit Satoshis as comments. But the, the, the value as an example. Right now. Um, here's a comment that came in before. 1,111 sats from Silas. He says, at a time a lot of people are going to Blue Sky, but it's been around for years already. In that way, the AT protocol work is set up for a great future, better than ActivityPub, even though ActivityPub hate to hear that. So that was a comment that came in live on the last show. And some of this was actually, um, he goes on to say Apple already has 4 different native apps on the Play Store. One has a 2.9 star and the others aren't better than the 3.6. 2 Apple Music apps, Move It iPhone, and Beats, and Beats app, I'd say really, really made PWAs better than a crap native app, by the way. So again, um, it goes back to If we have interactivity that the listeners can participate in, that's going to move the whole needle so far. Because number one, what does it do? You, if you're having consolidated conversations across all apps, what happens then? You have a podcaster that gets excited and starts embracing the other things that we've been trying to accomplish with Podcasting 2.0.

Yeah, I mean, does— I'm just trying to think of— of— there's an analogy that can be drawn between what we see on the social networks, right? So you, you post a post onto, let's say, LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever, and you see a flow of comments. That is a static piece of content, Right. That's right. So, but the commenting comes in over a multiple day period of time. Right, right. And then it kind of fades out. Sure. So as you think about it though, does that translate, does that approach translate as well to on-demand audio and video as it does to text?

I think so, because if you, you can go to those individual solo piles and go to LinkedIn, X, all these platforms and look at the various comments. If, if number one, if you posted to social media on this episode, but number two, if you have in all the apps, and again, everyone has to get on board or this doesn't work. If you get on all the apps and there's this interactive flow of commentary that's happened during an episode. And you know that you can contribute to the conversation no matter where you're at. If you're on Overcast and you're listening and so, oh, that was really cool, and the app has a flow of timeline full of comments that have showed up, you can add to that conversation and it feeds back to the app that it originated with. So there's this there's a thread that could be incredibly valuable. Add the component of being able to have an ecosystem where I like Rob's comment and I can send Rob some money for his comments, or I can send money to the shows and Rob gets a share of that because you made a lot really good. Holy shit. You have this whole new ecosystem now that no one else has.

Well, you should be able to plug in, uh, the comment stream that comes, um, off of these social platforms too, because, because I know that, that StreamYard has that ability where you can—

there's no time. Yeah, it does, but the key is it has to coincide with the timeline of the show, you would think, or maybe see the whole thing. We are, we are getting in our own way. Everyone's got these little piles. If you want to grow the app ecosphere and have these apps outside of Apple, outside of Spotify, if you want these, all these apps to survive and to thrive, you gotta have some cooperation and you need to adapt. And you don't have to share in marketing. You're just sharing in listener comments. That's it. That's the only common thread is the conscious thread. You get that and you get that in 15 apps. That will change podcasting. That will change podcasting for those listening to audio. Is that way? Do I have time to go to LinkedIn, Twitter, blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah. Do I have that time to do that?

As a content creator though, the audience is, is, is engaging with that show on all these platforms too. It can be live or it could be even on demand.

Right. They are engaging in YouTube, probably on Spotify because it's easy, It's very easy to engage mid-listen. It's not easy to engage mid-listen on a podcast app. Not easy at all. Cross-app comments solves that. But again, you have to get these app developers that understand the bigger picture here.

So we're only talking about audio at this point, right?

Yeah, well, it could be video too, because the The, the modern podcast apps support video, so it could be a combination thereof.

So they could make a, make a connection to the X's comment API and Facebook's comment API.

I don't think there's anything that is a timeline. It would be a part of a comment, but the, you know, the value is I send a timestamp. I'm able to timestamp in the content where I made the comment about something. And if someone sees something, they could jump to that. There's just so much value there for building the ecosystem, not only to get listener engagement, tying in monetization. It kills two or three birds with one stone. The mechanism has already been defined. It's just getting people to implement it. Right.

Um, in a world that is increasingly becoming fragmented.

Fragmented. They can still remain fragmented. You can have overcast, you can have Fountain, you can have all these apps that are fragmented apps, but keep the comments centralized, right?

Holy crap. If you can.

Yeah, if you can, you know. And it's that, that to me is, would be If I could have one dream feature for the entire 2025, is that mass adoption. I think it would change. I think it would be— I think it would force— it would force those other platforms to potentially play ball. And if Apple saw a big adoption on 15 apps that had cross-app comments, they may not because of a privacy thing. But wow, the power there would be huge. Yeah, because there's so many other predictions around.

Do you see, um, especially on big shows, do you see a lot of comment streams on podcasts in Apple?

I don't think there's— there's no mechanism, just, uh, review.

There's no— no, I mean, I mean, just the quantity of people actually commenting about episodes that they watch.

I was just curious. You know, and I both know, that's very hard right now. If I— if we have people to email the show, and the only reason is because we share our email. Yeah. And a small percentage of shows are going to um, a small percentage of listeners are going to comment. Just a small number. It's just the way it is because it's hard. It's a separate process. They have to open their browser, they have to send— they have to figure out, oh, it was geeknews@gmail.com or it was rob@robgreenlee.com, and then they have to type it out, the, the comment. But imagine being in the app listening to the show right now live or listening to the show later, and I'm talking about something that intrigues them, and all they have to do is just tap on their app and leave a comment.

Yeah, yeah, I was just, um, I happened to go to the Joe Rogan podcast in Apple Podcasts and just looked at the amount of reviews. Well, its ratings is all it is. It doesn't give you a count on—

yeah, and it's just a ratings thing. That's a one and done.

So there's— there appears to be a lot of comments in here and, and, and ratings. I mean, he's got 200,000 ratings in here, but that's a— for that show, I think that's a, that's a pretty low number.

But that's a one and done. Give it a 3-star. You can't make multiple ratings on Apple. You do it one time for the lifetime of the show. I'm talking about this ongoing conscious stream of commentary, okay, you know, across all platforms. That, you know, I'm— yeah, people are pushing for it, but again, really slow. And we have to quit thinking about being in our— sometimes you have to do stuff for the common good. Why did we— why did we implement all the Podcasting 2.0 stuff at Blueberry? We did it for the common good, right? I want to help make sure that we are ready to rock and roll when everyone else catches up, right?

Um, yeah, I agree, it'd be cool to have that.

Capability. And it just takes a couple— two apps to start. Two apps. Two apps do the link up, and that's big news. Wow, you make a comment on Pocket Casts and you can make a comment on, uh, Fountain, and those show up— those comments show up on both apps. And then someone else, I want to be part of the party, and then 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's solved because you're not part of the cool kids club of doing something cool and innovative. And developers and marketeers are two different folks. My developers like to do a lot of stuff and my marketing team likes to do a lot of stuff, but my marketing team drives what the developers do. Most app-based are, are not marketing first. They are, they are developer-based first and then marketing second.

So, um, so how would an app like a listening app, um, look at that opportunity, um, as a benefit to them?

Do you think that they would? That's huge news. I think two apps put their heads together and say, hey, look what we've got. And publicize that, and companies like mine come on and tell podcasters, listen, you know, here's something new. We would include that in a newsletter. We would, we would, we would. And the more parties that got out, then it's a story.

So then it's— so would the, the podcast hosting apps or the hosting platforms like Blueberry, they could also consolidate those comments? Absolutely. In the the hosting platform's interface, right?

Because they could tap into the same share, the same thing, and put that right in. And there could be a reply button right in our platform for hosts to come in and say— and, and just, they wouldn't even need to do it in an app. They could do it right in, right in our platform. They could reply to every show comment there was. That, that, that's a dream. And here's a cool thing. Um, that would feed back into the ecosystem. And if you have a platform like True Fans, guess what? That commentary resides on True Fans too.

That whole—

yeah, that whole— and Podcasting 2.0 is already doing this to an extent.

So for those that are participating, so all of the The shares that happen through the platform don't have to go through a central repository. They all get shared through a shared connection to APIs, right?

It's basically Podcasting 2.0 has— and again, I don't even know how to explain it, but it's— and this is going to make some people roll their eyes, but it's blockchain-based.

So, okay, okay. It's like a ledger of sorts. Yeah. That tracks each of the And since that blockchain is open, then it can be shared to anyone that connects to it.

And Dave, if I just explained it wrong, I forgive you.

I'm sure we did. I'm sure we slaughtered it.

Yeah, but anyway, that of course— and so there does have to be a centralized place to have this stuff, but it's already established.

Anybody can tap into that to pull them into their own app.

And we're writing a check every month to support Podcasting 2.0 to make sure the servers stay online. So the ecosystem— not only that, it goes back to the bigger picture. Whereas if the listeners are— or the podcasters set a split to go to Podcast Index, anytime the monetization piece goes in, it helps pay for the service that's supporting this stuff. Yeah, we just all need to understand we— how do we survive? You know, Dave Weiner making his complaints, how do we survive? We have to work together. Yeah, there has to be some place where that happens, and it's happening, it's happening, but we just need the developers to get off their colies And that's a word that means you're, you're, your buttocks get off.

Getting these other companies to talk to other competitors is probably where the challenge is, right?

Well, I, you know, I don't— I think this is a competitive advantage for apps to do this, and I think it would be incredible to advance, and it leads to other things.

But so, but Wouldn't this be one of the first times that like, uh, Pocket Casts did a co-development with— it's not like a, like an Overcast or something like that.

Believe it or not, it's not even a co-development. It's already established.

All they got to do is just plug into it. That's all they have to do is just plug into it.

Yeah, right. But if two of them did it at the same time and said, hey, we're supporting— you see a comment come here, it's going to come over there. Doesn't matter what's happening on the back end.

So if, if one listening app does it but nobody else does it, it's worthless, then it's not very useful, right?

No, it's not useful. It's only useful when you have mass adoption. And I think True Fans has adopted it. Podcasting Index has adopted it.

So, so The more apps that plug into it, the more value it has. So at the beginning, there's kind of a very narrow value which may get in the way of it getting traction, right?

Well, you know, do you want to fight off the beast?

The beast.

And I should say plural, beasts with an S, right? Yeah, um, so we have to have enhanced interactivity. Um, yeah, yeah, that's true. And I think this would— it would transform podcasts into more dynamic, interactive experiences. It would really— I'm— I didn't come up with this. Adam Curry came up with this, or someone came up with this. This wasn't my idea. I'm just advocating for it. I think one of my last predictions is, is I think we're going to see an explosion again because of the economy change and the perception of what's going to happen with the economy. I think we'll see a lot of business podcasts to launch that haven't launched because I think they're fully understanding that AI search is screwing them. They're going to have to have other ways to— that you have— if you're not, if you don't have a social presence on every platform and you don't have a message on YouTube, you don't have a message on a podcast, you are going to be L-O-S-S-T. Oh my God.

L-O-S-T. Lost.

L-O-S-T. Oh, here's my— you, you are going to be lost because search is going to lose you. Yeah, it's already happening.

And that's where kind of AI can come in with this too and help with that.

Well, AI is going to screw search, so you have to have an online presence. You have to.

Yeah, and if you do queries in chat GPT, and I believe in even Gemini with Google, it, it comes up with attribution source.

But again, it's not like Google, and it's limited in response. So if you are in those results, you are lost.

So if you're not in those results, you mean?

That's right. And I'm looking a lot of search results, I'm like, I'm saying, holy shit.

Because in the AI search, is that what you're saying?

That's right. Okay, look at AI search and stuff that you trend for, for your keyword ranking. And if you don't show up in that, you're done. D-O-N-E. Done. You are— you do not have a presence on the web no more. It's big. It's a big deal. So if you don't have a podcast, if you don't have all this other stuff on social media, no one will find you, right?

So if we do a search in, what, ChatGPT for this— I mean, think about a business, Rob, like what would you search for in relation to this show?

For us to analyze. Probably discussions on podcasting. What are the best shows for discussion on podcasting?

Yeah, I think we—

maybe that is— or what are the best podcast— best podcast shows about podcasts?

Podcast show.

Yeah, what are the best podcasts about podcasts? Maybe that's the search result.

Podcasts So this is in ChatGPT search for Omni or whatever it is, or whatever it is for—

yeah.

Um, well, of course it comes up with, uh, ours as number one, so because it's my account, probably.

Yeah, so what was the search term that— let me go over here and I said best podcast about podcast. Podcast. Okay. Let me go over here and, and do it on mine. Let's see here. I want to do search the web, best podcast on podcast.

I'm just going to use that. And it ranks our show number 1, The Feed, the official podcast from Lipson, number 2, Dave Jackson School Podcasting, number 3, and BuzzCast, number 4, Podcasting 2.0, 5, Podcraft number 6, Pod News Weekly Review 7, podcast, podcast editors mastermind number 8.

Ours, in my search, it gave me 2 results and New Media Show doesn't show up in either. So, and it shows a show that is not producing podcast episodes anymore, so You know, so again, it varies towards the, towards the interests of the user too. So I think what you have is, um, this— here's the realization: as more businesses understand their web traffic's dropping, they're going to have to adopt a more extensive social media You're going to need to be on Reddit. You're going to have to have— again, you've got to have all this stuff now that's external to be found or to be heard. You know, a big national business is not going to be affected. But, you know, if you do a web search on, say, in your town, what is there more than one business of, Rob? How many?

Okay, I'm going to put in, uh, yeah, like a, like a restaurant or something.

I'm gonna say recommend a lawyer in Coldwater, Michigan. And Coldwater is a small town, and I'm doing a, a web search. It lists, uh, you might consider if you're seeking legal assistance It gives me 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 results. And of those attorneys, I know— I'm familiar with 3 of these firms. So there's 8, which is not bad, not a bad list for a small town, but I guarantee you there's more than 8 lawyers. So maybe— and these are all references from lawyer.com and other places, but What if you don't show up in those searches no more? Used to be you could scroll deeper and you can't scroll deeper. So what if you're a lawyer and you're not in this list then?

Yeah, so I don't know how you game, uh, you don't game. There's no AI platforms to, to rank you in a query.

There's strategies And we've been doing those strategies for the past year and a half. But again, it's about being wide. It's simple. You have to be seen everywhere. You have to be seen in more places. Thus, if you're a business, that's why I made the prediction that businesses, if you don't have an online podcast, YouTube channel, everything, um, you might not be found anymore.

Yeah, because it gives you what, what you think you want to find, not exactly what you necessarily want to find. Yeah, because I changed my query to top podcasts about podcasts without bias towards me, and it probably removed it, didn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. So again, um The dynamics of search are going to change dramatically, and OpenAI has already said they're going to make search free for all of their customers. And then now what am I gonna have to do? I'm gonna have to start buying advertising with OpenAI. Well, I'm sure that's what's coming next. Yeah. So the open web is, is important as it's been since ever. It's in, in viction or a beginning. But, you know, kingmakers are the real gatekeepers now with search engines and, uh, the AI search. They are the gatekeepers to traffic to your website.

Okay, I changed the query to be top podcasts about podcasts based on audience size.

How does it know that?

I know. Well, that's the only other metric, right? Yeah. So what other qualitative search query factors?

We don't know. We don't know what they're using for a qualitative. We have no idea. I mean, again, it's getting data from—

and what is considered a top anything, right?

Well, maybe that's where, you know, again, a new media show, a top podcast about podcasts and the metadata. You know, who might influence that? Will it? Who knows? It doesn't influence the search engines because the search engines have figured out how to, you know, to basically avoid the fluff that we've all used for years to try to get traffic to our websites.

Okay, I did a— I changed the query to podcasts about podcasts based on audience size, so I I removed the word top. Yeah. And it came up with a classification based on a list that has large audience and then a short list of medium-sized audience.

Okay.

And then another list says niche audience. Oh, did we make any of those? Yeah. And then one that said emerging audience.

Oh, how does it know?

I don't know.

Which list did we end up in?

We ended up in the medium-sized. Well, just below Buzzcast, which is the Buzzsprout podcast.

Okay, so Buzzsprout is talking to their podcasters, right?

Which people in public can consume that too.

So, so, you know, I— you asked me to look at our stats and, you know, we're still hovering 14,000, 15,000. Um, so does that consider— are we small at 14,000 or 15,000 people that listen to a podcast about podcasts?

I know, what kind of time frame is that?

Oh, that's— we've been running those numbers for years.

No, but is that like Uh, per episode or monthly or—

Oh yeah, per episode.

It's per episode. Okay. Yeah, because it shows here large audience is the, the Podcast Hosts podcast. Well, that's extremely meta. And then the School of Podcasting with Dave Jackson.

But I, I would— we'd have to ask Dave what his audience size is.

And then Podland News is the third one on the large audience list.

Oh, so that's Cridland, right? Yeah, so they do it daily, so I would assume that their audience is pretty big. Of course, you can look at OP3 and actually see how big Podland is.

So it gets back to— and it was the same thing that happened with Google Search too. It was really, you know, what queries, what prompts are, are people using to find content in there? I don't see any links to anything. In this list. I guess if I added, if I added the term add links, let's see if it actually pulls the links to those shows. And I found it occasionally where it will actually make a mistake. It'll pull Something different. Okay, so I had the same query and all I did was add the words "add links," and it actually pulled up a categorization, or actually a, a list of shows, and it actually shows the COVID art image with the results.

And where they link to, they show the reference information.

It actually It doesn't actually show the actual URL. So let's see if I click on it. It doesn't actually go anywhere.

Uh, Spurlock, you need a search on your website so I can search for a show. I don't see a search button. I was going to look at Podland's numbers. These are all public numbers, but you know, how do I get to it if I'm not using an API?

Yeah, but I found it interesting that it was pulling the album art from the podcast in the ChatGPT results right next to the short description with the link. So that is more like a search query.

Yeah. Okay. So here is OP 3 Analytics for Pod News. Um, they've had 1,281 downloads in the last 7 days, 5,500 downloads in the last 30, uh, 5667 downloads in November. So, you know, compared to that, we're definitely bigger than their show, um, just by the OP3 data. So, but still, that's a You know, considering he's got how many people who subscribe to the newsletter, well, that's, that's still a pretty great number for him. Um, you know, not many shows are getting 5,000, you know, so, you know, he's got a good tuned-in audience there.

So this, this output from chat GPT looks increasingly like a web page.

Oh yeah, exactly. And thus my prediction on why, uh, search is going to fundamentally— and it already is changing. You look at Perplexity as well. Yeah, you know, I'm starting to see in my stats logs, I'm looking at it very heavily. And by the way, we're way over on time. Oh, we are. I'm looking at those referrals and I've got a lot of stuff coming to the website that has no referral data. And OpenAI is purposely not showing if you're getting traffic from them. Oh, okay. And you can experiment on your own. All you have to do is put— find some obscure page on your website that gets very, very little web traffic. Do a search query in, in, in ChatGPT that drives that result. Right. So you can find that exact page and then you click on the link in ChatGPT. Then you go to your weblogs and look. And okay, that traffic isn't defined where it came from.

So. Yeah, you just increasingly— it looks like you have to be very, very specific to it. Um, and hence gets, gets back to prompts, and it will deliver to you what you specifically ask for.

Specifically ask for. Yeah, but if you ask a question like, what is the best podcast hosting company, which is subjective Then, you know, you can see where I start getting— because it doesn't give me blueberry in my results. Maybe it will for you, but again and again, it's pulling from webs. So if you've had a bunch of web reviews that ranked you high, you may show up in the list. So again, it's about being wide. It's about being seen more places.

Yeah, I did that same query, Todd. It was best podcast hosting company. Yeah. And it came up with Buzzsprout number 1, Lipson 2, Captivate 3, Podbean 4, Anchor 5, Transistor. Anchor isn't even—

all right, Anchor's gone. But again, the model is old, so A red circle, 7.

Spreaker, 8. SoundCloud. SoundCloud's even coming up on the list.

Yeah. So now, but if you ask it what is the best podcast host for WordPress, and we were right there. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's again, it's how the question is asked, right? Yeah. So again, if you're a business and you relied to be in that first 10 or 15 search results in Google, and people are looking at this data. And if you're specific enough in ChatGPT, you'll get the answer you're looking for to an extent. But what are you missing? And that's the worry, you know, what are you missing?

So yeah, I did that same query, best podcast hosting for WordPress, and it does bring up Uh, Blue Bears number 1.

That's right. So again, it's because that's what everyone's talked about us for years. Yeah, yeah. So we have some, some stake in that, you know. Yeah, yeah. So again, I think there's— anyway, that's pretty much—

I, I have more on my prediction list, but yeah, go ahead if you want to mention a couple more quickly.

Um, And let's see here, let me look and make sure I've got everything I wanted covered. Yeah, I've got everything I want to cover, so I went through all my stuff here. Um, how about you, anything additional?

Yeah, I was just going to mention, I, I think, uh, we're going to see a lot more global expansion of the podcast medium on the listenership side and also on the business side too. I I know that I heard some, a lot of, a lot of discussion that the business side of podcasting is not really very developed outside of the US. I mean, it is in Canada and, you know, Europe and places like that, but once you get beyond those Western countries, it, it becomes challenging. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of the best practices that we've come accustomed to here in the US are just not built out in those markets. Um, but it's probably coming.

So, so, ladies and gentlemen, we can call a call-in. What are your predictions?

Yeah, send us an email, let us know what you think, or post online and send us a link to it, right?

And, uh, Let's see here. Obviously you can send Rob an email at robgreenlee@gmail.com. Yep. And, uh, let's see here. I'm todd@blueberry.com. Uh, so easy to do that. Of course you can— we always want you to make sure that you're following us live and that, uh, um, you follow our social as well. Yes, I do have lower thirds set up. I just haven't been clicking them. Yeah. Oh, I— that, that sucks. It only stayed up for 5 seconds. I got to change the setting on that. @NMSpodcast on X. But I don't know, um, it's been an interesting year. It's been an interesting year.

Yeah, it is definitely been, been, been an interesting year. So we'll see if 2025 turns out to be a better one for podcasting as we kind of transition into something.

Well, I'm, you know, I think, um, I have a couple of predictions that I'm not going to make. Um, but I would suspect we'll see some— I'll just leave it at that. I, I think we may see some business failures in 2025.

Yeah, I would agree with you, Todd, that that will likely happen. Um, there's clues to some significant platforms out there that have been involved in podcasting that are maybe not doing so well. Yeah, yeah.

So, and even some emails that I've gotten about basically, hey, we'd like to talk. So when people are sending emails and wanting to talk, um, there's potential of someone not doing financially well.

And the, and the layoffs and the hiring continue, you know, that, that's the thing. So It's definitely a, a reshuffling of the deck that's going on in the medium right now. Yep, transition is happening.

So indeed. All right, ladies and gentlemen, again, I'm Todd at blueberry.com, @geeknews on X, @geeknews at geeknews.chat on Mastodon.

Rob? Yeah, I'm on X as well, @RobGreenlee, and got my own, uh, YouTube channel, which I'm regularly updating with content to that, @RobGreenlee as well. And then you want to send me an email, actually you just showed it on the screen, robgreenlee@gmail.com will actually work as well.

Yep. Let's see here, I'll make sure I didn't miss any comments. New phone, who's that? I don't know, I heard an AI pod. Okay, 3 to 4K, man. Yeah, and Rick says, I'm thrilled if someone buys me a coffee. Um, yeah, I, I agree. Yeah, that's where it is. I think we had quite a people watch on YouTube, but not a lot of commentary. You all must be sleepy. So, all right, um, we'll get out of here. And, uh, yes, if you have any influence on Riverside easily switching on screens, uh, would be greatly appreciated, not the kludgy way they've got it right now. That would solve my issues. Otherwise, maybe OBS is in my future. Okay, Rob, thanks. Uh, we'll see you in 2 weeks.

Yep. Um, after the, the new year, right?

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and happy new year, everyone.

And let's see, Podfest is coming up soon.

So that's right, uh, we'll talk about that on the next show.

We're going to be doing, doing an episode of, of this show at Podfest.

So, and have you been working on a guest list? Yeah. Oh, okay, good.

Rob Greenlee. All the other stuff I'm doing, right?

Yeah. All right, everyone, thanks.

All right, okay. Yep.

Bye. Yep. Bye. See here, how do I stop going live on this? If I click that?

Yeah, there should be a—

oh, how do I— oh, there's down the bottom, stop. All right, make sure we're off the air. Waiting for the stream to catch up on, uh, Restream. Wow, that's taking a long time to—

I'm all uploaded, I think.

What'd you say?

I said I'm all uploaded, I believe.

Okay, why is that still showing live? The stream is off. Did it actually end the show? That's curious because, um, I've stopped the stream