SPOTIFY: VIDEO UPLOADING TO REPLACE AUDIO BYPASSING RSS?

So are we alive yet? Now we are Todd and Rob in the afternoon with Todd and Rob. Oh yeah, back with the New Media Show, and we're, we're doing it at 8 PM, uh, instead of 3 PM, which is our usual time. So I appreciate you, uh, joining us, uh, later in the day. Again this week, and I think we're going to be doing this later time, Todd, for a few more weeks, aren't we?

Till July, the week of July 25th or something like that.

Yeah. Okay. All right.

Yeah, for a while.

Yeah. So it's been an interesting week in the podcasting space. Um, as, as usual, uh, the, um, the industry keeps, um trying new things and playing around with the existing things and seeing if they can come up with some sort of magic solution to things. And the big thing that happened this week was Spotify put out some information about them having the ability now to replace the audio files up on Spotify of audio that's been delivered to them via RSS with a video file. And it's kind of— Rob, you sparked a controversy on, on Twitter. So I don't know, Todd, what's your kind of big picture on it?

I may have to jump out and jump back in. The audio completely disappeared on me. I'm— I can't hear nothing, so I'll come right back.

Okay. All right. Well, uh, so we had, um, Spotify came out with some information about this in great detail, and I know Pod News covered it. And we will, uh, you know, when Todd comes back, we will dig into it a little bit deeper to kind of unpack this situation. And I think that there was some parallels that were drawn between what's going on here and what YouTube is doing. You know, as we all, all know, YouTube is accepting RSS feeds now to create essentially an audio experience. But when you import the file from the MP3 into YouTube, it actually creates a video file, which has been the case with every kind of publishing into YouTube. Everything goes in as a video. So what's different about what's going on here with Spotify is that they're They've all— they've been historically a pass-through platform for RSS feeds and your audio files that are coming off of your podcast hosting provider. And so that is something that's, um, that's been going on for quite a while. I know that if you don't get submitted, and I don't know if this is still the case, but it used to be the case, but if you're not submitted through a host like a podcast hosting platform, that there is a chance that they will cache all your episodes. I'm talking about Spotify, and they will deliver your files outside of a pass-through, which means that you're— wherever you're hosting will probably likely not get credit for the download of that file to listeners on Spotify. And I do believe one of the reasons that they did that was because a lot of folks that would submit to Spotify weren't necessarily hosting on what would be considered to be a professional hosting platform like a Blueberry or a Lipson or a Buzzsprout or any of these platforms. And so there was a performance concern that Spotify had around the delivery of media files to their, their users, right? The— and so they felt, I think— and Todd, once you confirm this— I mean, in the early days with Spotify, we We basically had to negotiate with them to allow us to have a pass-through. And from what I understand, shows that are not submitted through Blueberry and the, the official large podcast hosting platforms, Spotify was caching those episodes and delivering them via stream because they didn't trust the, the host on the delivery of those podcasts outside of the podcast host.

So is that Yeah, yeah, they, they still do.

Yeah.

And, you know, having the situation now where potentially a podcaster decides they want to add video to their Spotify account or is going to completely disconnect their audio.

Yep.

And get no stats except for Spotify stats, which are not going to be IAB certified. Back into, you know, back to their host. So it's, it's really— this is what they've done here is, is abomination. It's, it's, um, it's, it's, it's not good.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that it's, it's one of those things, um, if you look at this from a historical perspective and what Spotify has done in the past, um, this is relatively consistent with their, their external communications around RSS and In some ways, this is basically bypassing RSS to deliver media files now.

Yeah, exactly. And if, if, if, you know, and we have not had any communications with Spotify, but essentially what they will have done is broke the pass-through agreement. They will have violated the— and again, we got to go back and take a look at this. And I, you know, I'm curious if there's any other hosts that have pass-through agreements have done a test yet. To see if the audio file is still being served.

Yeah, yeah, I agree, Todd. And I think that's something that we, we should emphasize here, that we are still, um, in the discovery phase of what they're actually doing here. Because like you said, it sounds like they haven't had direct communication with the podcast hosts. For everyone to understand what's going on here, I know James is— James Crittland has been playing around with this, and he, he is not as concerned about it. Um, but then again, I'm not sure that, you know, James has always, um, got the host's perspective on this. I think he's looking at it more broadly from the industry perspective, and I'm not always sure that those two things align. Um, and so anyway, Todd, is that where do we go from here with, with this whole situation? You know, if, if a podcaster wants to go in here and replace their audio files with a video file, it's still a little uncertain about what that's going to create for them.

Now, the question is, why didn't— why didn't Spotify talk to us and say, hey, how can we work together? You know, there is a way forward, whether it has—

there always is, isn't there?

Whether it would have been, you know, supporting hosts that support the alternate enclosure or support hosts that have a second feed for video. Um, and then, you know, and used RSS, but it's obvious that, you know, they went their own way here. So, you know, I think podcasters just need to be warned that if they go into Spotify and they are hosting with Blueberry, Libsyn, Buzzsprout, whoever else has a pass-through agreement and they drop a video file in, they need to realize that their audio file will not be served for audio listeners. Their ads will not be served for audio listeners, especially if it's dynamic ad insertion. If you built your ad into the content, then maybe it'll be okay if as long as it's in the video. But, uh, you've just disconnected whatever percentage of monetization stream you're earning from Spotify in one full swoop. So this is, this is bad. This is very bad what they have done. And they have basically taken two middle fingers and said, we don't need RSS and we want to get away from it. Um, they've really done what they want to do. And, you know, I think creators need to wake up. You know, maybe we need to take some of the power away from Spotify and say, okay, fine, you can't have my content anymore and move our audiences back to, to open RSS where these games are not being played and the will of the podcaster is not being, um, usurped. I, you know, I think podcasters should take a huge affront to this, right? There, because there was no disclaimer that by uploading a video file is going to disconnect the audio that's being served by your host through your RSS feed. This, this is, this is, this is really, this is bad. I mean, really, really bad. And if James thinks this is a good idea, um, sorry, he's, he's wrong on this one.

Yeah, well, there's a lot of similarities between this and the technical kind of real realization or reality of what YouTube is doing too. So you can kind of see, and I kind of wonder about this too, Todd, about the timing of it, because think about June being, being the month that, uh, that, um, Google Podcasts got taken down, right? So That's off the table, which was a competitor to Spotify in all these international markets, right? Which was really the only competitor when it comes right down to it as far as at that scale. And who knows, they may feel empowered now because there really is no competition on the Android side now, that they can just do whatever they wanna do now and not be, really be accountable to changes Um, and I don't know, I mean, what do you think about that connection? It seems awfully coincidental.

Well, I think those that don't do advertising probably are not at all concerned about this and say, okay, fine, let's just do it this way. And those that do advertising are going to be like, hold up here, uh, when they start losing money. And some of these shows have huge Spotify audiences. So as soon as their, their checks go down, if they haven't, if they're not paying attention to shows like this or the newsletters or anything else that is talking about this, they're in for a rude awakening, uh, in, in a month or so when they're, when their reporting is being done and they've underdelivered on an advertising campaign.

Yeah, so we don't really know kind of a technical question about this, which is we do know that when you upload the video to replace the audio file, it does something to the audio file. I don't know if it deletes it or removes it from the servers or if it still makes it available to be found like in search or something like that or in some companion experience with the video or with— which I've also heard others express as a possibility that they're pulling the audio out of the video and making that available. And they are going to host both the video and the audio file on Spotify servers, which would give the auto experience, the audio experience, and the video experience on Spotify. But it's also going to take it off of the podcast hosting platforms too.

Herein lies the problem of trying to do one media file for one show. And this is why I've argued in the past against alternate enclosure, is that the playback mechanism, whoever's running whatever, if it's Spotify or YouTube, they choose which media to serve. And in this case, so now Yeah, it's— if you have two different experiences, if your audio podcast is different than your video podcast as far as production goes, well, now you've just completely wiped off the board any, you know, need. You might as well not even do audio on Spotify since they've done this. If you're— again, we need to investigate and see if the pass-through is being honored in the audio files, being served audio when there's been a video attached to it, but My bet is there's something in their terms of service or something to agree to this that they just disconnected.

Yeah, and I do kind of wonder who's somewhat— who's to blame for this? Uh, not— well, let me back up and look at it from a higher perspective. Is that we've been, as an industry, the podcast industry has been somewhat pushing back on supporting video. And are really focused on being an audio-only medium. And I think in a lot of ways we've kind of set ourselves up for this kind of stuff to happen.

I disagree.

I, you know, well, I mean, Todd, if we're an audio— I know your platform is not audio-only, but most of the podcast hosting platforms have built for audio only. So, but the industry is moving towards video. Increasingly.

I don't agree with that. Well, uh, it's—

I talked to a lot of people and they all talk about video.

So, well, I talked to a lot of people and they say, how come I have to add video? They don't want to.

Well, sure, Todd, I'm not saying that that doesn't happen. I'm just saying that the, the trends are pushing this, this video agenda out.

YouTube and Spotify are pushing, pushing the agenda of video. So let's just, let's, let's be careful here.

No, I'm talking about podcasters, Todd. I'm not talking about—

Yeah, but who has drove this narrative?

Research has been driving this.

Okay. Yes. Who's stepping on the, who's stepping on the gas on that?

Well, the research agencies that are doing doing studies about the medium of podcasting. It's increasingly— Todd, I didn't want to make this whole show about arguing about what's happening with video.

Rob, you keep failing to realize—

I'm not failing anything. I came from an era of this podcasting medium when video was like 40% of the medium.

But again, we were talking about a small subset of shows, very large shows.

I'm not talking about how big it is right now, Todd. I'm talking about where people are pushing this industry. Well, then why did YouTube decide to create a playlist called Podcasts then, Todd? It wasn't just a random choice.

They want to—

they hijacked the word and saw a marketing opportunity because they're seeing momentum in the market. Big companies don't make random decisions like that. They make it— they make choices like that because there's momentum.

But there's ground— there's ground truth to your comments. And I think I need to continue to fight this. There's ground truth. Go through and find, but do it.

But Todd, as long as we keep fighting this, what we're doing is we're enabling these big platforms to come in and take the industry away from us.

I'm not, I'm not fighting this. I'm not fighting this. I have supported video. I know you have. Okay. But here's the problem.

It baffles me why, why you're not more supportive of video in podcasting.

I am.

Platform has always—

yeah, we support it fully, but I support it through RSS.

I'm not saying that we don't. I, I'm saying we should.

But here's the problem.

The problem is that the industry hasn't embraced it.

Okay, but here's, here's, here's the dialogue though that we have to be careful of, of leading content creators down the path of thinking they have to do video. They don't have to do video.

Giving people the options. Right?

We understand. But also, quit— we have to quit pumping video as a savior to what everyone is saying is the next big thing in podcasting. Because it's only—

please, but it's already happening. It's already happening. People are talking about video all the time. Okay, I hear it all the time.

Great.

But it's not just me that's saying it. It's a lot of other people.

Great, they're talking about it, but who's successful? About 200 shows. That's it.

But that's, but that's, that's not the question that needs to be answered. I mean, that's part of the equation, but it's not the whole picture.

No, this is education we have to put forward to podcasters is that if you go down the video route, you have, uh, I talked about this at length at the, at the podcast show and everyone in the group agreed with me. Your chances—

audio only. Yeah, right.

You're— no, I talked about video. Your chances of finding success and building a big show with a video podcast is like 1 in a million. It's not easy. So if you want to build a big show and find success, audio is still the primary way to reach an audience. Yes, you may reach a small percentage of people with video. You may, but we have to continue to add disclaimers to this because people that are, uh, starting and trying to do video are not finding success. They're spending a lot of money, they're doing a lot of editing. It's, it's very frustrating for them to get video up and running and be successful.

But there's also a lot of content creators that are struggling to be successful with audio too.

I disagree. I disagree. We're seeing, we are seeing unprecedented growth on the audio side, unlike we've ever seen in many, many years. So I disagree.

Shows are finding that you only see a nail when you're a hammer, right?

No, I'm just saying, Rob, you've, you've bought into the video thing so hard.

No, I haven't bought into it, Todd. I've been involved in this medium long enough to have perspective on it. And, and, and all the video has always been a part of this.

Okay. I've had a perspective of it as well. It's a very, very, very few shows. Here's my, here's my, here's my ultimate concern. You make a podcaster understand that they have to think they have to do video. This industry will die. Why is it going to die? It's going to die.

The opposite is, is possibly true too.

Yeah, the reason it's going—

look right in front of you. What's going on with Spotify? What's going on with Spotify? Tell me what's going on with Spotify.

Well, they're trying to basically— they're trying right now, they're trying to disrupt the space, right, through video.

Okay, but again, again, I don't know how more clear it can be in front of you, but it's there. It's right there. There They're using video as a wedge to get rid of RSS because the industry has not embraced video in RSS to get the content into these platforms. Even, even YouTube doesn't support RSS delivery of video files. And why is that? Because the podcast industry hasn't embraced it.

Well, again, I mean, I've had, I've had, I've had video support since the beginning of time I know you have, but nobody in the industry has been promoting it. We promote—

even Apple took the toggle out of their play experience between audio and video. But again, we've walked away from video, Todd.

Well, this is—

podcasting has walked away from— I was involved in creating a video experience with video podcasts on Windows Media Center, like, but then there you go.

But the narrative, this false narrative that you have to have a video podcast—

that's not the point here. It's not a false narrative. What it is is sharing with people what is possible in this medium. And video is more on people's mind than audio is right now. I'm not talking about how— what the pathway to success is and how you're going to grow your show faster if you do this or you do that. It's looking at the medium and not giving these big media companies a pathway to disrupt the audio, because that's exactly what's happening right now.

But we have to continue to make sure that podcasters understand.

Well, yeah, I'm not arguing that point. I agree that the podcasters need to understand what's involved in audio and video. And need to be educated on that. But at the end of the day, it's their choice, right?

Oh, it's their choice.

It's not us dictating to them about what they're—

we're not dictating.

That's how it comes across, Todd. It comes across as us telling them what they need to be doing.

Well, I think sometimes podcasters do need to be told what they should be doing, and they can make an educated choice then on whether or not they want to go down this path.

I agree with you, they need to be educated. There's no argument on that. They need to be educated about how it works, what the options are, how to do it, all those things. And I believe we're all doing that. I mean, I do that every week on my podcast Tip Show. And so, so it's really a matter of us embracing the medium for what it has always been. It's a medium of distribution of online media files. And we have chosen to remove ourselves from that because we saw YouTube come in and take away all the content from us 15 years ago and then back, back away from it. You didn't, and Lipson didn't, and Podbean didn't, but the rest of the industry did, right? So that's the honest truth. I mean, I'm not lying here. I lived it well.

And, and part of it is, is, you know, uh, those other companies that don't support video have not been willing to take the hit on the bandwidth cost for delivering video.

Well, because back in those days, it was expensive to deliver video. But now it's a lot cheaper now for bandwidth than it was back in 2013 or 2014 or 2012.

But take this show as the example. It'll come in at about 2 gigs. This show on audio will come in at 80 megs. So it's essentially 20 times more expensive to serve a single video play than it is an audio play. And if you have any medium of success with a video podcast, you know, it's, it's a, you, you can't pay for a $20 hosting account and expect the podcast hosting companies to survive.

Well, Todd, you're assuming that the, that the video podcast is going to be so popular that it's, it's going to saturate the pipes.

That's the, that's the, all it takes is one or two. All it takes is one or two, and, and, uh, and some of these podcast hosts will be in big, big trouble. You know, they're not moving petabytes of data.

So that's what this is all about then, Todd.

Oh, I'm sure.

Costs. Costs with the podcast host. They don't want to incur the costs of videos when it comes to—

You get a popular video podcast and it pulls down a petabyte of traffic. They just do the math on it. It's not hard. Right, to come up with it, with what it costs. This show probably costs about a penny per listen or watch. About a penny is what it costs to deliver this, this show. So if you think about a $20 hosting account, you can see how fast those pennies will be, um, will be used up.

Um, and video podcasting is not for everyone, Todd. I agree with you 150%. It's not for everyone, and not everyone should do it. I'm not advocating that. They can— if they want to create video, they can just upload it directly to YouTube. I'm just saying that the industry has abandoned video, really, at the end of the day, because I went through it well. And again, this is what we get. This is, this is what we get. We get Spotify coming in and using video as a weapon against Open RSS.

Again, Libsyn, Podbean, and Blueberry have not abandoned video, right?

But they never talk about it. They never promote it. My—

Podbean does. We do. I don't know.

I think we're seeing Libsyn and Podbean start to promote it here because what they're seeing is what I'm seeing, which is an industry that is embracing video increasingly. And so they're seeing an opportunity.

So yeah, this completely negates it.

What does?

It completely negates if you have, if you have, you know, for YouTube and Spotify, if you're assuming this is where the majority of your listeners are coming from.

I'm not assuming that's where the majority of listeners, that's never been the case.

If, you know, it's basically what ends up going to happen is, is that Um, Blueberry included, um, we won't have to pay for any of that bandwidth, only what's assumed on the apps that support video and Apple Podcasts.

So given, given what you've shared with me, and if this is reflective of the other hosts, this move by Spotify should be, um, something that saves, saves podcast hosts, um, money, right?

Yep, at the expense of podcasters being able to monetize and a few other things.

Right. So, you know, it's always been one of those things, you know, in the early days of video on, on the podcasting side with the hosts, it was like, you know, all those video podcasts left the platforms and a lot of platforms breathed a sigh of relief because how much money they were saving. And so they put all their energies into audio because audio was inexpensive to to deliver. And, and that's, you know, that's, that's the business environment of what has happened with podcasting. And I think, I think being honest about it is, is the right path. And that's what— but this is what we see as a reaction to that, is that a platform like Spotify sees an opportunity here, just like YouTube did, and they're capitalizing on it. And I mean, I used to work for Microsoft. I I know those big companies look for opportunities like this to carve out a niche in the market that they see as an unmet need, that there's some kind of long-term benefit that they can acquire for taking that approach in the market. And I think the long-term plan here is to disrupt RSS, which Spotify's been publicly very aggressive against RSS.

Yeah, they— Spotify hates RSS.

Yep, they've been public about it. Their, their behind-the-scenes talks with the podcast hosts have, have really made that very clear. So in some ways, I'm not surprised at this.

Well, and again, I think it goes back to education. And, you know, I think our approach that we've had has been to circle the wagons, and it's probably one of the reasons why our Spotify Listener percentage is lower than other hosts because we kind of spell it out.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, you know, do you really need to be over here or should you be building your audience somewhere else?

Well, you know, I do see this as a bigger trend line, Todd, and I'm sure maybe you do too. Um, what we've seen happen with YouTube and now what we've seen happen with Spotify is As, as James Cridland stated on Twitter, um, they're very similar strategies in the market and they involve taking advantage of video right now, which is a strategy focus for Spotify to capture more content on their platform. And with, with YouTube, it's a way to do the kind of do the same thing, but a little different approach in the market.

The only thing I'm thankful for is they haven't made it easy.

That's probably the next thing, Todd. The audio part is, it is probably, I don't know, is the audio part going to be disrupted by AI, do you think?

No, I'm not even worried about AI in this regard. What I'm saying is they've made it easy and haven't made it easy. You still have to do extra steps to get video over on Spotify.

Uh, yeah. And that's, I guess, part of the disruption, Todd, is that increasingly we're seeing direct upload strategies at these big media companies. Um, you know, it, it exists today, even at Apple. If you want to create a premium podcast, you upload it directly to them.

No, not necessarily. If you're hosting—

well, you don't have to, but I'm saying that there's a pathway there for that, that they've built, right? Which is a direct upload model. And, and now Spotify is— has workers, they've had a direct upload model for many years, but this takes them into the video realm of a direct upload scenario, which they've had before. I mean, my advocation, if you want to do video on Spotify, create a separate account in Spotify and upload your video through that, but don't disrupt your, your RSS-based distribution. In there, um, keep them separate from each other. But that's, that's what gets the Podcasting 2.0, you know, Sam Sethi all spun up, is because the industry isn't embracing the alternative enclosure, right, which would bring these things together. And that gets back to my concern, the innovation in podcasting is not being adopted.

Well, you know, we, we begrudgingly adopted the alternate enclosure. It's available now in Blueberry. But the problem is That's our vulnerability. It's, it's, that is actually a vulnerability to Spotify. So basically they could now, if Spotify so chose, they could look for the alternate enclosure and really screw the, uh, the audio creators by caching, by doing, taking the video over the audio.

Yeah, if they have the approach like YouTube has is to cache everything. For, for streaming delivery off of their own platform. And that's, that is a, that is basically, I mean, it is still supporting RSS, uh, if, if they do it through RSS, but it's also, you know, it breaks the, the monetization models.

Well, this is what they, for those that don't do monetization, they don't give a shit what's happened here with Spotify.

Yeah, and that's probably three-quarters of the market doesn't do monetization.

Well, I'd say 90%.

Oh, you think so? Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, it's, it's all a massive amount.

So we just have to continue. If we have to make sure that the hype machine surrounding this, you know, you have to be doing video, you have to be doing video. This hype machine needs to come to an end. Um, there has to be, yes, if you choose to do video, here are your X, Y, and Z ramifications of doing so. And understand that if you're on a host and you're trying to, and you're monetized, and, uh, you, you add video to your Spotify show, you are going to lose revenue. That, that's gonna fix this, is that as soon as people start losing money, uh, and their ads aren't being served, then for a small amount of shows, then all hell will break loose.

No, but I mean, just like what you stated earlier, is that the vast majority of shows don't care about monetization. So we're going to see a lot of shows probably do this because they don't really fully understand what they're getting involved with. They're probably perfectly fine with getting their stats off of Spotify.

Well, what will happen is—

same thing they're doing with YouTube—

what will happen is, and what always happens, is that, oh, I can do this. And then about a year down the road, they find some success, and then they go, oh, I have to, I have to disrupt my audience now because I need to separate the audio from the video. And they went down a path that really has no return. So from your point of view, yes, you should have a second show on Spotify, your video.

Purely, you're gonna do that, don't replace your audio file. Yeah, just do it separately.

Doesn't know unless they're listening to this show or reading James Luz's letter. They don't know their audio file is being replaced.

Placed.

They've done this underhanded.

Well, the— their announcement was, was really kind of confusing. And, and I think, you know, the actual headline was uploading video episodes if you're not hosted with Spotify, which is kind of a confusing message because you wouldn't be able to do it unless you were. Um, I mean, it, it causes you to be hosted at Spotify.

Right.

It's what it really comes down to. But they're not saying that. So it doesn't say that your files are now going to be hosted by Spotify. It doesn't say that in their, their PR.

No, of course not.

Yeah. You know, convenient thing.

I mean, everybody wants video now, so, you know, again, quit using the word everyone. Well, one video.

Well, if you look at this, this announcement by Spotify, they're assuming that everybody's hot to, to get video going, else they wouldn't have done this. This is, this is a clue that video is top of mind for lots of people right now, else they wouldn't have done it.

I'll say some, not everyone. I think we have to be careful.

I'm not saying everyone here, Todd. I'm saying, but there is a general knowledge out there of people that are not as knowledgeable that assume that they need to be doing video. Now, whether or not that's accurate or not based on the success metric, there's a perception out there, um, that, that everybody, because of Shorts, Reels, all this TikTok stuff, everything out there, everybody's thinking about video, video, video, video, video right now. It's just, well, it's the reality of the market.

This is— that narrative will continue to shrink the podcasting space.

And well, that's, that's what I'm trying to avoid here by, by raising the alarm bells that the industry needs to either get on board or they're going to get taken out. So that's my— you either swim with the fishes or you get out of the pool, right?

Exactly. And there's a lot of this that's out of our control because I can support video all day.

And you do, which is terrific, Todd. I mean, I'm using your platform for my other show and it works great.

So if the apps, the podcast apps, Apple included, don't fix this and support video, they're adding to the demise.

Well, the truth is Apple does support video. It's just— I know they're not promoting it. It's not visible in their platform. It's, it's, you know, I'm scared what's going to happen here, Todd, is that, uh, Apple's going to come to conclusion that, you know, upload your videos directly to us.

I don't think they'll go that route.

Everybody else is going that way.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Spotify YouTube, who's next?

They've been, they've been pretty good in supporting Open RSS. They know, they understand what is a great— hopefully they understand what's at greater stake.

Well, they're already embracing video submission into their platform, which I can't say is the case for YouTube or Spotify. So they are taking in video. The question is, is that why haven't they prioritized letting everybody know that they support video? I don't understand. So this is the confusing thing about what's going on in the market right now, is that we're, we're letting these big media companies, you know, wag us around like the tail on a dog.

Well, here's, here lies the, you know, the, the long-term issue, right? Anyway, why do you think, you know, I'm pushing on my show and this show to use a new podcast app from podcastapps.com? Yeah, take back the narrative. You know, we're live and lit today with audio. Yeah, well, I thought we were. Maybe I never pushed the bat signal out though.

The— I, I keep hearing that the value-for-value model is a little bit under attack right now, um, from the, the side of the payment side with Satoshis. Um, so there's talk about other forms of payment coming to value for value now, which I think—

yeah, there's gonna be some transition here.

Yeah.

Um, you know, GetAlby is, you know, it's all about regulatory stuff.

Yeah. And it's not easy. I mean, I tried to set up an account with Alby too. I mean, I have an account, but I couldn't actually fund it. So there was no pathway for me to successfully fund it.

Well, you just, yeah, so you need a Fountain account right now. Well, I think there's going to be some, you know, there's big brains are working on transitioning this to, right. And, you know, as much as I love the way to do streaming sats, we got to be able to have the listeners be able to participate in an easier way.

Right.

So I think there's a, there's a solution coming. It may not be on crypto.

Yeah, though I did hear that, um, from a presidential side, um, Donald Trump is supportive of crypto. Um, but I heard that— but again, Biden put out a public announcement saying that he was supporting crypto as well, but then he came out with a subsequent announcement that he's not.

Well, it's— the challenge is, is regardless of the political thing, they can't shut this down. What they— where they're going to— where they're going to cause pain is in the banking side, is in the banking side. Because so it's really about the custodial and non-custodial wallets and the conversion to, to currency. It's about the wallet and knowing who's— who owns that wallet. You know, and it's really all about, uh, you know, trying to prevent— and one thing what they're worried about is drug dealers and, uh, you know, stuff using money laundering. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is where the, the wallet stuff becomes, uh, you know, challenging, because if you become a bank, uh, you know, there's all kinds— and I don't even pretend to even understand it all, but that's what it boils down to.

Yeah, Todd, I hope we're not, um, talking about something that's kind of, you know, with this whole topic about Spotify and what's going on, that we're not talking over the top of a lot of our listeners and not really understanding what we're really concerned about and talking about here. But, you know, if you have any questions, you can certainly post those to the comment field of any kind of live platform that you're on right now, and I can see them and I can bring them up on the screen, and Todd and I can answer those questions. So, um, don't, don't feel like you have to sit quiet and not participate in the show. Be more than happy to take your question and bring it up on the screen and talk about your, your question if we have been confused about what we've been talking about. If you know something more than we do, we'd love to hear from you.

So, and again, I think this all goes back to, to educating, to educating podcasters. I really, I really do think that's the case.

Yeah, and I think that's always been the focus of all the podcast hosts is education and trying to get people to better understand how to work with the platform and how to do these things. And, and, um, I don't know that the, the listening platforms do a very good job of that, but I think to some degree they, they attempt to. I don't think Spotify has done a good job with this one yet.

So I, in my YouTube channel, I, which I did not have the tab open, Dave says small shows are creating video to leverage it and promoting their podcast. Yeah, if you want to promote in clips and stuff, uh, and the fact that it's easy to do contributes to Inspired Money. YouTube may put a video podcast in front of viewers. Podcasts must decide if the extra work is worth the choice. Yeah. Um, Rick says my show costs a lot more than that. Mike Dell Video and RSS did not fail because podcast hosting companies didn't support it. It's because the listeners didn't support it. Audio is the backbone of podcasting. Inspired Money.

That's entirely true, but that's okay.

It is the backbone. It is the backbone. We see it.

Oh, audio is the backbone. I was talking about why why the perception is that video failed. I'm not sure that video failed because of, of, of the listeners didn't support. I think it was more that the podcasters moved away from it because of cost.

Most listeners via RSS are not demanding video. Oh, I agree completely. Rick says, I was late to get in the video side of podcasting because audio was easier, cheaper, and video is so expensive. Yeah, I still think podcasting is audio. Dave says the listener and the planet don't need an all-video podcast ecosystem. There is some shiny object aspect to it, but video is alluring and is king in the media world. I agree, in the media world, that's who's driving this narrative. Yeah, I mean, they are trying to push content creators to go to Spotify.

We are. Moving into an era of mainstream media replacement. And, and we can talk about this a little bit, you know, and this part of the reason why I, I wanted to talk about this topic that Stephen Goldstein raised, which is, uh, go ahead, let me get through the rest of the comments here. Sure.

Spire Money says there's risk to committed published video to Spotify. Video doesn't take off, the company will pivot again. That's true. Beauty Bubble, 61.56 market cap, says to me, play now and then, only crush when you can afford to do so. Podcasters are far too independent of thought and progress, and a temporary pivot is good for you all. And Inspired Money says, I wonder what percentage Spotify users consume audio only versus video podcasts. Suspect video is relatively small. So many. Okay, go ahead.

It looks like Harold, uh, posted a comment in here too. Is there an Apple TV app? Um, yes. And that I, I can view RSS video podcasts with?

Yes. Yeah, that's how I primarily watch any video podcasts of mine. It's on Apple TV.

It's, it's, it's actually been around for probably 15 years or maybe even longer than that.

Been around a long time. You can watch this show right now on Apple TV. Just go to the podcast app.

Yep. And that's part of what I'm talking about here, is that the infrastructure has been there for video for a long time and it just moved to YouTube because of cost.

You know, when I go to an event and show my video podcast on my Apple Podcast app, people you know, they're shocked.

Yeah, well, guess what? Apple hasn't made it visible in their app. So it, it used to have, you know, right up front presentation in their consumption apps. So, but anyway, yeah, so Stephen Goldstein has this article that he, he wrote talking about the breakdown of the age demos around consumption of media and where podcasting fits into that and where, you know, TV, print media kind of fits into, and radio to some degree, cable channels, those kind of things. That traditional media is like the average age is over 65, I believe, or about 65. And the average podcast listener or consumer is like 35. So, so, and part of where I'm making this connection is that I think that part of what we're seeing is a, is a switchover, um, from people seeing podcasts as their, their new media, right? Which is what we've been doing for all these years is talking about this transition from mainstream media over to podcasting. Of course, we've been talking about this on this show for what, 13, 14 years, Todd? Um, right. So, so that's the trend line that's driving a lot of this. That age group, that 35 age group, is heavily into video and audio. So they're doing both. I mean, if you look at the, the studies and the research on this, um, they are consuming audio and video together. And they want that increasingly. So this trend that we're seeing that I'm really talking about isn't so much that it's 100% here yet. I'm talking about where things are going, right? And where the industry may find itself 5 years from now is that only embracing audio may be allowing these big media companies to, get ahead of sorts of the open nature of podcasting. And that's what worries me the most.

Right. Well, I don't know. I guess we'll see. And again, I, I'm, uh, I, I think things will self-adjust because there is, uh, you know, there's this hype.

Yeah, it's hype. Um, Yeah, but that's when you see the significant shifts start to happen, is when there's, there's a hype cycle. It's the same thing that happened with podcasting in the early days when Adam Curry went out and did all that media, and there was a lot of hype around podcasting. Um, got like front page article in the USA Today, and mainstream media was all over podcasting trying to play up its significance when it really had no significance at the time. Um, I mean, really, in the early days of podcasting, it wasn't a significant medium. It was more kind of buzz and talking about the opportunity of it, uh, was really what was going on. Because just from my own show that I was doing at the time, I was getting minuscule downloads as a podcast, but I was getting huge numbers on streaming and off of radio back in those days. So, so we're seeing this shift over to replacing those things. I don't know, streaming may take over.

I don't know what you think about that topic, but I, I don't think so. I, you know, I think a lot of people, if those are going to do video, are going to do live streaming.

But well, no, so you think long term the download is gonna be the dominant way that people get media?

You know, the, the listener doesn't know if it's streaming or, or download. It's all transparent at this point. So how it's delivered, it doesn't matter. They, you know, most probably most listeners think the audio is being streamed. You know, we don't care about that.

In a lot of ways it probably, um, is. It's just not streamed with a certain technical specification, right?

So by the way, um, just for your your record keeping, Rob. We did the first, um, episode of what is now the New Media Show on September— on September 12th, 2010. So 14 years here soon.

14 years. Wow, Todd. This show is— some ways hasn't changed much, but in some ways it has.

Years of arguing.

I don't know about that. Um, I think this show has been always about exploring controversial topics.

I mean, it's also been my job to, you know, try to stay ahead of the hype farm.

Yeah, and it's kind of been my job in, in the industry to push the envelope on things.

Well, that's fine, you know. And again, we've been doing videos since the beginning on this show.

2010 was, was at the early days of—

but again, 90, you know, this show alone, 99% of the people that listen to the show listen and not watch.

So, well, actually it's about 80/20, though I've seen on, on, on my channels since I've been streaming this on my, my YouTube channel that the numbers are getting, getting a lot higher on that side.

Um, well, but are you promoting audio or are you promoting video as a YouTube channel? That's the thing.

Well, you're promoting— well, since this is a live show, obviously I promote the live aspect of it.

So you're promoting the video part?

Yeah, which is what we've always done. So, and, and so the whole thing around The, the video side of this is that we've always done video, so it's always been kind of like a unique aspect of the show that people could tune in and see us both doing it.

It's not as, you know, it wasn't as trendy back then, but I think what you're going to find is that because some podcasters are so wrapped around the axle of having to edit things so heavily that they won't do live because they can't live with the, the original version of this going out live. They can't live with that being the, the master content. So they're gonna, they're gonna record video in private and then upload it.

Harold, uh, Gilchrist left a comment here that I have up on the screen, and he writes, as a podcast viewer, not creator, I find the YouTube app incredibly easy to use to shop and download video podcasts. So this, Todd, the question here isn't whether or not it's technically a video podcast. It's more to do with what's the perception of what it is. Um, people are perceiving what they're watching as a podcast even when it's on YouTube. So this, this comment, we kind of talked about that. Oh, we have, we've talked about that a lot. Yeah. So Harold, thanks for the comment, appreciate it. Keep them coming. So, so anyway, um, so we got that, and so the whole thing around the demographic shifts going on here too is, is—

and I don't believe it's a demographic shift. So we have to think about this from a 20-year perspective. When we started podcasting, the primary age range was really the majority of people were 35 to 55, majority, which it still is the case. Okay, so let's, let's continue thinking about that. So now 20 years later, those 55-year-olds are 75. Those 35-year-olds are 55, and the— and they, the 35-year-olds, and everyone else that's younger that has joined the podcasting space has joined, uh, you know, the older folks that have been listening to podcasts from the beginning.

So are now in their 55-plus age group now, which is also explains why that age group is growing as well.

Yeah. So, you know, so now what we have had is my kids were riding in my car, uh, listening to podcasts when I was 40. And now, you know, they're adults and they're listening to podcasts in their 20s. So of course, this 18 to 25 year demographic, which was nonexistent in the beginning, they didn't, they didn't listen. They were not here. It was like 2 or 3% or something, right? Um, of course they've come on because all they've had their entire life is one of these devices in their hands, right? You know, so of course they naturally listen and watch a variety of media.

So the other thing that's changed, Todd, is, is what's the composition of the audience too? What's the composition of Females versus males, transgender folks, different racial groups are now a part of— that's what I was talking about, about the demographic shifts in this medium have been dramatic, have been dramatic.

You know, the podcast show was a good example. It was 50— very well represented, 50/50, cross-diversity, the whole nine yards, you know. And I think that's one of the things that when I look back, I'm probably the most proud of is that we have moved from those early days of being total geeks that were, you know, and now it's, uh, you know, we've just, it's, it's easy. So it's understanding that people are consuming content a variety of different ways.

Yeah. And, and I think it's, it's a strength, um, statement about the versatility of the concept of podcasting. You know, it's— and it's, you know, there's a fair amount of people in the industry that are like embracing this concept, right? That this medium has become more inclusive. It, it really is a almost like a mirror reflection of the population of the, the world now, right? It's— everyone's involved, right? It's not like the old days when it was all a bunch of old white guys or well, I know he's in their 30s, but it just naturally got easier over time. So, you know, it doesn't require to be a geek as much, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, I saw a thread the other day, someone that's doing their entire podcast on their mobile phone. They don't even have a slate, they don't have a laptop. So I'm like, you know, I can't imagine doing a building and growing a show with just on my phone, but it is possible.

Yeah. And I saw I believe that there was an announcement from Apple saying that you could make a phone call on your phone now and completely record that on your phone and publish it out as a podcast.

I think that's coming. I don't know if they said they could publish as a podcast, but it's— there's an iOS update coming that'll allow you to record, right?

So that could make that possible easier, I guess. I don't know. It's always been possible to record audio.

Again, I don't know if I want to listen to a show that's been recorded on an iPhone.

Well, that's the, that's always the bigger question, right? It's the tension that's been around even the iPad, right? Of using that as a podcasting tool.

Which, which— More comments. Apple Podcasts on Apple TV. I'm watching now on Apple TV. I'm watching on YouTube. I don't have Apple TV.

Oh yeah, you have to have an Apple, Apple TV device in order to do that.

Yeah, you can even watch the show live on the Apple TV using the YouTube app.

Correct. And also on the Roku app as well.

Yeah, we're not on Roku anymore.

Well, we are through, through YouTube.

Oh, yeah. But we don't have, you know, we were, you know, as we've talked before, I had app number 11, 12, and 13 on Roku. Yeah. It were, you know, side-loaded apps. So, matter of fact, some of those apps are still online and we can't get your Roku to remove them. So don't go load the Tech Podcast app. You might be in for a bad experience.

Yeah, and Todd, I think it's interesting that it's, it's still not possible to stream live to Spotify. So maybe they, maybe that's coming.

I don't know. I could foresee that, but maybe not.

Who knows, right? It depends on what they want to do. And then, and it's been possible for, for a while to stream live, I thought, on Amazon.

But I have— I don't have them as a destination.

Yeah, I, I think you have to set them up as their own kind of setup, uh, and then I'm not sure that everybody has access to, to do that, um, at this point. And then the Instagram platform, you can, you can do it. I don't choose to do it because it's kind of a hassle currently until they fix it, but It is possible to do this whole show that we're doing right now on Instagram. So there's a lot of people that are surprised by that.

Well, you know, look who owns them.

There's, there's not a strong history of support for podcasting over there, right?

You know, so we, we came up with a comment, you know, the support team did, and the response on this Spotify YouTube thing and I was gonna look, I can't remember what Mike put together, but, um, I think that, uh, you know, we're just being very upfront and cautioning podcasters that, you know, be very, very careful here, what you wish for, and, uh, you know, uploading video on the top of your audio podcast on Spotify.

Yeah, I'm not recommending that people do that, but, you know, everybody's gonna make their own choice.

Yeah, yeah. John says Amazon store can stream live today. I think that's interesting. Those— a lot of people are making a lot of money on that, doing, uh, you know, home shopping networks on, uh, yeah, on Amazon.

Yeah, but I believe you have to have an Amazon store on there too to get that set up.

So Rick, Rick says, sleeping, uh, streaming on Spotify, please no.

Yeah, I can see that coming next though, to be honest with you. But, and then, uh, wouldn't it be funny if we could stream live to Apple Podcasts at some point?

Well, you know, part of my 5 points of what should we be doing, there was a lot of video discussion, so I didn't talk about streaming live to Apple though. But we're streaming live now to new modern podcast apps at podcastapps.com.

That's true. So technically it's possible.

Yeah, we're actually only audio streaming right now, but when I get back in the studio, we'll be video streaming again.

So it'd be interesting if anybody's talked to Marco from Overcast to see if there's a way to do that.

Marco is a mysterious dude.

Yes, a couple times.

Yeah, he's supporting financially Podcasting 2.0 but has not implemented hardly anything, so— or anything. I don't know, it's, it's just weird.

Yeah. So Todd, based on your travels, where do we— where do you think we are in the bigger picture of the podcast medium right now? It, it feels pretty flat here in the U.S. right now.

It's flat everywhere.

Is it that way even outside of the US, would you say? Or is it different?

I think it's flat.

It's flat everywhere.

Yeah, because we've had, we've got an international audience. So our international customer base, so it's, it's flat everywhere. Now again, I don't have a lot of customers in the Philippines. I don't, right. As you know, Spotify's dominated this market.

Yeah.

Um, what do you think it's gonna take? I think the Arab market is probably exploding the most.

And—

oh, right. And in India and places like that, I'm sure it's growing like gangbusters.

Oh yeah, yeah, I would agree. There's a lot of energy and activity going on in the, the South Asia area, um, you know, with India and that kind of stuff. A lot of people interested in this medium. What do you think it's going to take to bring the energy back? Do you think it's just a better economy?

Economy? Yeah, I think the economy. I might be wrong. I don't know.

Well, I think that's, that's what caused this, this kind of flattening.

Here's the thing. We had some fat years through COVID. Yeah, we did. It's an astounding— we had some astounding growth rates during COVID and people haven't got off the, the, the, the COVID growth train. Right. So, you know, we're back. Be honest with you, if you look at historical growth averages, we're probably 50% down from historical growth. We're still seeing growth, we're still adding customers, you know, and instead of, you know, chewing out 3 to 5% growth, you know, if I get 2% growth this year, I'm going to be happy, you know, and You know, I'm not spending, you know, $100 million in SEM business to get that growth either. It's sustainable, long-term growth that stays and continues. It's not shows that come in and saw a Google ad and clicked, you know, click, let me start my podcast, and then you have this massive failure rate. It's hard enough as it is, even, even today. With a new customer that signs up for Blueberry, there's about a 40% chance that they will not make it to episode 1. Right. And, and, you know, I'm getting someone through serious intention, uh, versus an SEM ad click. We see, we, you know, through our directory, we can see exactly what the what the failure rates of shows are across competitors. And Podbean, Libsyn, and Buzzsprout that are buying all this, spending all this money in SEM, you know, they're losing a high percentage of those, of those customers actually becoming creators. So, you know, that has to affect their cost per acquisition. Their acquisition costs have to be pretty high. To acquire a paying customer. So then what is, what is the payback on that? Let's say the acquisition cost on SEM is $80 or $90. Well, in order to turn a profit for that show, if they're on a monthly subscription and they're on a $15 plan, we'll do the math. And if another 50% of shows fail before they hit episode 7, Your CPA long-term goes up even more. So maybe now your CPA for an SEM customer is $160, $170. Um, you know, that, that's a significant cost to acquire a customer. Yeah, that is long-term customer.

So, Todd, I saw that Tom Webster did a presentation this afternoon about the the question of, um, advertising loads in podcasting.

And I was sleeping when he did that.

Yeah, and there was a, a deck that he put out. This was courtesy of Sounds Profitable, uh, Mr. Tom Webster, um, talking about advertising and the concern around ad loads and, you know, how, how consumers are actually looking at advertising today. So I've got up on the screen the Sounds Profitable deck that, that Tom presented this afternoon. And I think it's interesting, you know, we could probably spend the entire show talking about this deck, Todd, but it says, when was the last time you heard a podcast that had an advertisement in it? This was their survey response, was yesterday 40%, today 32%, and less than a week ago, 29%. So not exactly sure what this is telling us, but it's telling us that people are hearing ads on a regular basis.

Are they hearing ads, not shows that have ads, yeah.

Correct, right. And then the next slide here is really talking about whether or not a listener actually doesn't mind or enjoys the ad that they are hearing in a podcast, and it breaks it up by male and female. It says, when listening to a podcast, how do you feel about the ads? And so the male respondents are basically I would say probably, what, 39% of the responses on males find the ads to be slightly annoying but tolerable, but 47% of women or females, which is a much higher number, kind of slightly feel that they're slightly annoying, but it's a fairly low number, Todd. I think it's interesting, it's around between 7 and 9% that feel that the ads are disruptive barely tolerable. So I think it's interesting, that kind of distribution. And would you tend to agree with that, that assessment, Todd?

I don't know. I, I know I get irritated when— well, we'll look at the ad load irritation. That's more important.

Yeah. So let's Let's jump ahead by age. So this is an age breakdown of the same question. How do different age groups feel about advertising? So it looks like the age 50+ has a slightly annoying but tolerable, which at 50%, and then it looks like 34%, um, is— let me see, what's that? I believe it— don't mind them. So, and then 7% of the 50-plus find them intolerable. Is that intolerable or disruptive? I'm not quite sure.

It's amazing how close those numbers are across all age groups and just the minor change on the 50-plus.

Yeah, so younger people, 18 to 34, um, are, I think, a little bit more tolerant of them, I guess. And it looks like 28% don't mind them at all. So I guess these numbers are pretty optimistic about advertising in podcasts, and I guess that's maybe a good thing. So, and then the next slide that I have up is, have you ever discovered a product or service you liked through a podcast ad? And 58% said yes.

That's a big number.

Yeah. And it says, have you ever purchased a product because of an ad you heard on a podcast? 45% said yes. It's a pretty high number too. So obviously podcasts based on this research are massively converting.

Yeah, that's it. Harold says paying— being able to pay to not listen to YouTube ads on YouTube Podcasts is priceless. I, I think paying for YouTube Premium is priceless in itself to not have to be subjected to ads. Right.

I know I pay to not, not get ads too on, on YouTube. The next slide I have was ad skipping. Most consumers tend to overstate how often they skip ads when asked a hypothetical question. Um, it, it, it looks like people kind of lie about this topic when they're asked, or they just don't recall their actual behavior as much, which I think is interesting, which maybe makes a little bit of sense the more I think about it. And that people are thinking that they're clicking skip more than they actually are. Um, and the next slide is, how do you typically react when an ad starts playing during the podcast? 30% said they continue listening without interruption. 26% say they leave the ad on but ignore it. And 39%, the largest percentage, uh, skip the ad if possible.

The only ads that I skip, um, myself is if I'm listening to a show that has such a high load and I've listened to the episode before and I know that, okay, I'm gonna have 4 ad spots here in a row I, I will, I will mash the 30-second advance button, uh, 3 or 4 times. Yeah, sometimes going so far I go over the ad and then have to bounce back. Um, but I, if the ad load isn't too high, I always listen.

Yeah, and it, it gets into that detail later in the presentation too about, you know, what the distribution is of how people react to various ad loads. And it says, the next slide I have up says, think of the last episode that you listened to that contained ads. How did you react to them? So it says, let me make sure I read this right. It says 18% listened to all of them, 22% listened to most of them, and 28% listened to some of them. Uh, 17% said skipped all of them, so that's a pretty high percentage.

That's weird that 5% muted, right?

Yeah, I don't know how, um, you would know when to unmute it then, right? Yeah, so you could miss some content when you do that, so And then ad skipping says up on the screen now, says still ad skipping does occur as it does in any supported medium. So ad skipping has been done on commercial television, especially with the DVRs for many years. People could just fast forward through it. Traditional television, you haven't been able to do that. So, and then I think we went through a phase where a lot of the streaming video providers totally disabled the ability to skip forward. So we have seen pushback.

What's that? This is an interesting slide.

Yeah, so the next slide is how often do you skip ads on your favorite podcast?

And that's a big number, 29%.

Uh, yeah, 4— yeah, 40— yeah, 7— um, no, yeah, 47 total, um, is what it totals up to. And then, uh, 30% said sometimes.

But yeah, okay.

Yeah, well, it's 29.

Oh, he's got the— he's got the quote there, 46.

So no, I know that. Yeah, well, I'm looking at the actual number though. Um, that— because it— if you add those two numbers up, I think they come up to 45, don't they?

But oh yeah, that's weird.

But, but anyway, Yeah, exactly. 18%, um, uh, skip ads rarely. So it's a pretty common behavior of skipping the ads. So I guess if you have a, like, a listening app that has like that 30-second skip button on it, or 15 seconds—

ladies, the ladies skip more than the guys by far.

Yeah, exactly. That's what this next slide says. How often do you skip ads on your favorite podcast? So this just breaks it out by male and female. And it looks like females skip more, 48%, versus males skip 44%. So yeah, interesting. Women are less tolerant of the ads, which is a little surprising. I would think it'd be the opposite, actually. I don't know what you think about that.

If you think about it, we're too lazy to take our phones out of our pockets in advance the 30 seconds.

Well, men are always seen as the ones that are trying to avoid going shopping or something like that, right? So, so you think the women would enjoy the, uh, the ads, but I guess they get annoyed by them or something. So how often do you, um, ads on your favorite podcast? So this breaks it up by age group. So it looks like the age group that skips the ads the most is the 18 to 34. Yeah. So Uh, so that is, that actually makes some sense.

Less money to spend, right?

And then the 50+ category, um, skips ads the least at 39%. So, and then, uh, the 35 to 49, which we were talking about earlier, is kind of right in the middle of that.

So again, the most with the most disposable income, the 35 to 49 and 50+ are the ones that skip the less. So it makes sense. 18 to 34 has the least amount of disposable income.

So yeah, I do wonder if this is a, this is a little bit of premonition for the future for podcast advertising though, when the younger, younger generation skips the ads more.

I think it's about disposable income.

Oh, you think so?

Okay, well, that's a, that's a, my 20-year-old doesn't have money to go out and buy a lot of stuff.

That's right. They're not as big of a consumer quite yet, right?

Right, right.

Um, so I guess there's, there's more. Says the next slide is, are you more likely to skip an ad in your favorite podcast compared to podcasts you've just started listening to? So it says 58% is about the same. So there's not a big difference between, I guess, podcasts that you're extremely loyal to and ones that you've just started listening to. So I guess there isn't seen as a distinction. I do wonder though, if you have a strong relationship, and that may account for the other 20-22% of more likely or less likely, is your relationship or your feeling of your relationship with the show host and whether or not the show host is utilizing host reads. Right. So I don't know what you think about that, Todd.

I don't really have a comment on this slide.

Okay. All right. And the next one is, do you believe skipping ads affects your support for your favorite podcast?

Not currently, it doesn't.

No, it's at the 59%. No, it doesn't affect my support. So I guess maybe that gets back to ad load.

Well, you know, who knows? It's just their assumption, you know, technically it doesn't affect, right?

Well, it's, yeah, I guess it, it shouldn't in a way, but I guess if there's too many ads, maybe it might. Um, okay, the next one is users of each medium who watch or listen to all of the ads they encounter on podcasts. Podcast comes up number 1, uh, 28%.

I must admit, YouTube ads, when I wasn't paying to have them displayed, was so annoying, right?

They are, because they interrupt right in the middle of the content. They'll actually come right in, right in the middle of a sentence.

Yep.

Um, so I think, um, that's probably driving people to get premium on YouTube, and that may be what their, what their other goal is there. Who knows? And then ad quantity. Okay, here we're getting into the ad load. So this is, this is what I was looking for. It says, have you ever stopped listening to a podcast altogether because you felt it had too many ads in general?

And include me in that 30% that said yes.

Yeah, 30% said yes, they would stop listening. 70% said no. So that either means that the shows that people are listening to are not that heavy into the ads, or they're light. You know, it's not— I think further into the depth—

yeah, let's look at the skipping thing, right?

The next slide is how many ads do you recall hearing in the last episode that you listen to that contain ads. And it said 37% of the podcasts had 3 ads, but a total of 67% had between 2 and 3 ads. It doesn't talk about the duration of the podcast though. That's the other metric here that probably needs to be taken into account. But that's 67% are hearing 2 to 3 ads. And it says 4 to 5 ads, 21%. So we're starting to get into, once you get up into 4 and 5 and 6 ads, you're gonna, I think you're gonna face some pushback.

And I think, yeah, that's where definitely you go above 3, that's where I'm starting to skip.

Yeah, and that's a total of about 25% are in that. 4 to 6+ ads range here. So that's a pretty high number of shows that have that kind of ad load. Says, thinking again of the last podcast you listened to that contained an ad, in your opinion, were there too many, fewer, than expected or just the right number of ads by male and female.

When too many ads range 27, average of 27%, but male 24%, women 30%. Right amount was 57 as an average, 61, 52.

Interesting.

Yeah. So it sounds like people, some shows have the balance right.

Mhm. I think that probably a lot of shows do have the balance right. It's just I do tend to wonder if a lot of the really, really big shows, um, have higher ad loads.

Oh, the ones that I've listened to recently have insane ad loads. That's why I quit listening to them.

Right, right. And then, so is this a different, um, no, yeah, forward yet. Oh, we didn't? Okay, next slide is think about your favorite podcast that also has ads. How many total ads do you expect to hear in a typical episode of that podcast? 73%. Expect 2 to 3, right?

Huh, okay, that's, you know, that's reasonable.

That, that tells us where that sensitivity spot is. Uh, once it gets up into the 4, 5, and 6 range, you're, you're outside of the majority.

Where my audience will tolerate 2, but they won't tolerate 3 on an hour-long program.

Yeah, so this could— I mean, it does— it's pretty balanced between 2 and 3. Yeah, there's not a a big difference between those two. And then ad quantity. Okay, there's another slide here. It says, if an episode of your favorite podcast had more ads than you expected, what would you likely do? 74% would be listen as I normally do.

But can you afford to lose the 26% that said they would stop listening?

I would think that that could impact your ROI, right, on a campaign.

Yeah, I think that's bigger than I expected.

That's a sensitivity point right there that's starting to rear its head. Yeah. So, okay, next slide is imagine your favorite podcast has an episode that is twice as long as usual, but you hear more ads compared to the typical episode. So this gets back to the duration question, right? So these have more ads. How would it impact your listening? So 59% said I would listen to as much of the episode as usual. Hmm. I don't quite—

but 35% said they would take a break, and 6% I would stop listening to the episode altogether.

Altogether, right. So you do have this kind of like—

but again, this is kind of pause and resume type of situation here. Yeah, but this is still kind of a hybrid. So what's the next slide? Yeah.

Oh. Structure and positioning. So it says, how many times was there an ad break in the podcast episode that you heard?

Wow, this, this doesn't make sense because they said 3 to 5 ad breaks, 57%. So I guess people are in that up to 5.

Wow. Well, that, that does kind of fly in the face of the earlier numbers, doesn't it?

Well, you know, it it shows that the numbers are higher. 3 to 5 ads, 57%.

I mean, if you have— I guess if you have 3 ads, um, that falls within that range of 57%. Yeah, so it probably weights very heavily towards the 3 end of that, that range, but that 3 to 5, because it does drop pretty significant when it gets up to the 6+. Yeah. So, so, and then 38% is 1 to 2 breaks, which would be consistent with the other slide. Yeah. So that makes sense. Uh, it says, where do you prefer to hear a podcast ad? This is an interesting kind of distribution. That seems to be pretty evenly distributed, which is fascinating. Um, 57% said during the middle as a break or spread out evenly throughout the podcast. So, so yeah, I'm a big fan of mid-rolls.

I don't know about you, Todd, but even at the beginning of the podcast still is pretty high, 24%. Those are the ones I'm more likely to skip.

Yeah, no, I think, I think a pre-roll is basically like putting a stop sign up, and then the post-roll is at the end.

19% want to listen at the end. That's higher than I would have ever expected because I would never listen to an ad at the end of a show, right?

I've never recommended post-rolls, but still, 19% prefer the ad.

Well, it's preferred. Yeah, it's not for sure, but are they listening to it?

Right. Yeah. Well, I guess if you think about it from the perspective of depending on the kind of content it is, Todd, some content doesn't really lend itself to mid-rolls. So if you're doing like a, like a storytelling program, mid-rolls don't really work that well. So you kind of, your only spots are at the end or at the beginning. Yeah. So that could be where we see this distribution is that certain types of formats of shows have this kind of at the beginning and at the end, uh, and then other formats of shows have the, the mid-roll. Yeah. So let's see here. 34, structure and positioning, uh, says, how many times do you expect a 30-minute podcast episode to take a— how many times do you expect a 30-minute podcast episode to take a break for ads? Um, let's see here. 36% said once at the beginning or in the middle. 50% said twice, once in the beginning and once in the middle. And 13% said 3 times, once at the beginning, twice in the middle. I don't see any that were—

I think that makes sense. And once at the beginning and once in the middle, I can understand why Well, the advertisers want the beginning. Yeah. So 86% of that basically covers it. Yeah. I always say in the middle means first 25% of the podcast is when I want the mid-roll.

Early mid-roll is, is the, is the best approach, right? Because you're going to catch a lot more listeners that way.

But they're also saying, hey, at the 50% mark, it's— that's where I would expect it. So that's interesting. Yeah, okay.

All right.

Never stop listening to a podcast episode because you heard the same ad too many times. Yes, no. Well, I tell you that no is, uh, relevant to my show. 1,746 episodes with GoDaddy is a— actually, 1,646.

Yeah, but your ad isn't the same every episode, is it?

No, but I, I ad-lib it, but it's still the same sponsor.

Same promo. Yeah, that's not, um, stop listening because you heard the same ad. Well, see, that's what's different with what you do, that with a host read, um, a live host read, is that they are different every episode, right? So it's not the same, you know, like hearing the same Geico ad over and over, which becomes a little annoying to people if they hear it too many times, especially if it's in their one episode more than once.

Yeah, but it can be annoying if, you know, if you're not used to it.

Yeah. Oh, uh, the next one is, how do you feel about hearing the same ad more than once in a single episode?

Oh, this makes sense. It becomes annoying over the time. I strongly dislike it, 51%. Yeah, run into two of the ads of the same. Yeah, I can understand that.

And I think this, this can happen in programmatic advertising because they're oftentimes pulling from two different ad selling, ad sales platforms, and sometimes they can get duplicates coming into the show. I know, is that an issue, Todd, that you guys have faced on your platform?

No, because we limit the number of ads.

The number of same ads, or the same ads?

Um, no, we don't allow more than 2 ads to be run programmatically, and most shows only get 1.

Okay, so it's, it's not technically possible for the same ad to get pulled from 2 different—

it potentially, if they do 2, it would potentially could get 2, but we haven't run into it. It's a pre-roll, mid-roll.

Okay. And it says, how do you feel about hearing the same ad more than once in a single episode? Says, uh, looks like females, 47%, it becomes annoying over time. Males are a little more tolerant at 40%. Yeah. So even this is kind of like, you know, maybe a little—

well, the ladies say it's top 31%, right? So exactly.

Yeah, exactly. So people will—

they have a higher level of being annoyed though over time.

So correct. So yeah. Okay. All right. I'm not sure how many more slides there are. There are a lot of slides.

Yeah, because we're almost— we're, we're really long at this point.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, if you want to go, go check it out. I did provide a link in the show notes. If you're watching this on YouTube or any of the video platforms that are live right now, you can get a link to download the Sounds Profitable deck here if you want to, or you can go to soundsprofitable.com and we'll have the link in the show notes for the podcast for the, the other 99% of you. Yep, and get it yourself.

So, okay, well, Todd, that's pretty deep. Better news there than I thought.

Yeah, so that does kind of bode well, uh, for advertising and podcasting as you look to the future. I think the big thing is to keep the ad load kind of under control. I don't think we want to become like, uh, commercial radio again.

So, so, so we'd love to hear what everyone thinks about what Spotify has done here based upon our earlier conversation in, uh, replacing your audio file when you, when you put up a video file. Do you think you're going to lose money? Do you even care?

Right.

Yeah, well, that's the same post she posted on my YouTube channel. She came over and posted on ours.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, thank you for all the comments. Um, yeah, in here too, it was great to hear everybody, um, in their, their thoughts and appreciate it. And I hope the show was valuable to you, and please, you know, come back and check us out next Wednesday at 8 PM, uh, Eastern, 5 PM Pacific.

Um, and, and more importantly, go to newmediashow.com and follow or subscribe to the Right. The favorite modern podcast.

And get the podcast version of it too. It's not just videos, right?

Live. Yes. So anyway, to get out of here, I'm Todd at blueberry.com or geeknews@gmail.com. I'm @geeknews on X. And Mastodon as well is my @geeknews at geeknews.chat.

And here's Todd's platform if you're not familiar with Blueberry to go check it out. If you're interested in having a video podcast, you can do it over there. And, um, all right. And, and then here's my, my YouTube channel if you want to follow this show as well. And then, um, if you want to reach out to me, um, here's my email address, um, as well as I'm on X, uh, @RobGreenlee. So, so thank you everybody for joining me and Todd again on the show. This is— what episode number are we at now, Todd? Are we like, uh, 600-something?

Uh, no, 5— no, hang on. No, we're on— today was 590.

So we're getting close to that 600 mark again.

Yeah.

So yeah, we should do a special episode on that. There you go. Okay. All right, Todd.

Well, thank you. Yeah. And everyone, thanks for being here, and, uh, we'll see you back here same time next week. And, uh, yeah, thanks for— thanks for listening. Yeah.

Or watching, everybody. Okay, bye.