The Shift Happening to New Media in 2025

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Pot, pot, pot on fire. Are We on fire, Rob! Welcome to the New Media Show. I thought it would be appropriate entry for today, right?

Everything's burning down, is that what you're saying?

Well, it might be the end, right?

Right. Well, I think that's the, that's the feeling that I'm sensing in the medium right now.

Well, I don't know if it's the end. You know, but you know, there's a lot of people that are worried.

That's what happens when change hits, right?

Yeah, it's— but it's, you know, it's, it's self— it's what it's— what it is. It's, uh, self-induced, you know.

Well, yeah, to an extent, I suppose so. Yeah, I mean, I think people's perceptions are what's driving it.

Yeah. And, and, you know, it's kind of funny because, um, You know, obviously just getting back from London, and, uh, um, I, I wrote a piece on, uh, on podcasternews.com and also put something up on LinkedIn. And, um, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? Yeah, because I think it's, uh, you know, it's, it's a— it's too, too early to, uh, um, to even You know, I think what really needs to happen is that we need to remember that audio podcasting still has an incredibly large audience. And, you know, we have great growth. We still have, you know, overseas and other places are still growing. But, you know, this little video thing, this little video conversation has has, uh, you know, got everyone a little freaked out. And, you know, I was, um, my takeaway was a couple of things. And, you know, I had, um, the folks from Apple were at the podcast show in force, and they, um, they spoke for the first time Yeah, I saw that. And they talked about 2004 was up there. Yeah, and 2004 was the biggest year ever. Um, they paid homage to Open RSS. They talked about other apps than Apple Podcasts in their homage to Open RSS. And, uh, you know, basically said, hey, uh, remember, you know, we, we were responsible for bringing this medium, to the point that it is today, you know, starting 20 years ago. And yeah, and I, you know, I, I'm interpreting a little bit, so don't shoot me, Apple team.

Um, yeah, it's hard to argue with that point, right?

Yeah. And, you know, I had a conversation with the, with the group, and it's, it's, it's not nothing— it's, you know, confidential. They, they, they listen to a lot of people. I, I, I just can only imagine You probably feel like a punching bag after you get done talking to 20 companies or whatever the total number. But, you know, I made the point, I said, listen, we need some cheerleaders for audio and for people to understand the value of audio has not changed. The value of audio is still valuable. That, uh, you know, that there is, uh, there is a segment of the population, uh, that listens and watches, and that we shouldn't be— you know, we needed some cheerleaders. And, you know, I want you guys to be a— and there's a great opportunity here. June, uh, will be 20 years since the introduction of podcasting in iTunes, so great, great time to be able to make a splash. That said, you know, you can, you know, you can, you can make suggestions, um, and you never know which way the wind's gonna flow. Um, in confidence, a couple things was asked of me about some stuff, and I gave my feedback. And, um, you know, I have a— I understand that the wheels move slow over there, and you know what we want today, we won't see for a year or two years. That's just kind of the way it is. And maybe we won't see it at all, and that's all right. Um, but I, I think in the end, um, we just need more advocates that are talking to content creators to say, hey, it's okay, it's okay to start with audio. You know, there's nothing wrong with starting with audio, but the— there is a trend that I'm hearing again and again and again and again. And it really kind of came to light in London even more. Um, I kept getting asked, should I do video? Should I do video? Should I do video? I don't want to do video. Should I do video? And people are asking my opinion, and these are relatively new creators. Uh, and, you know, typically a year or two years, you know, to that range. And, and I said, listen, I've been doing video for 15 years, but it's not, uh, it's not everything. Audio is important. Um, I said, you know, ease into it if you want to. But the main objections really rolled down to— and, and I heard this more there than I've heard anywhere else— it was the women were saying, I don't want to be on video, um, because of privacy issues. I'm like, well, you know, some people, if your show is talking about private personal nature where you don't want to have your face exposed, then probably video is not for you. And if you're doing a show that's more adapted to video, maybe it works for you, you know. So I see you have to make that decision. But one thing was for sure, there was a huge huge, huge, huge, huge contingencies of studios and networks there, and they're all trying to dig in everyone's pocket to get business, production business, and yeah, video production business, you know. And we'll help you with your video strategy, and the prices on that was extra extraordinary. You know, here I am in my booth, and right across from me is Canon. And Canon has a video studio setup with 3 cameras, microphones, everything. Of course, they have, you know, $1,800 microphones in their studio. They've got $12,000 cameras in each position. They've got $1,000— and I'm like You're scaring people, Canon. Uh, people don't have $50,000 or $100,000 to set up a professional studio unless they're very high-end. Yeah, you know, well-watched show. So there was a couple other vendors there that had lower cost items, but you know, they're all doing the math and they're saying, okay, I've got my $100 microphone, I've got my RODECaster, I've got an investment of about a thousand bucks into my audio production. Now I got to add camera switcher. And what does that look like? You know, you don't look, don't look here, you know, because yeah, you know, you're an example of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't, don't look here. Right, you know, Yeah, yeah. So I think, and you know, the money and the time— time was the big thing too, was, uh, for the late— the guys didn't care about being on video. Um, they were worried about the cost and the time commitment. Um, those were the three main concerns. And then, um, you know, feeling like they're— if they're getting this feeling like they're being pushed they're being pushed by the industry through everything that's being talked about. So, you know, that, that discussion is just going to continue, you know, the way it is. But I think what we have to be careful of— and I guess the Buzzsprout guys had some— I didn't listen to their episode. I think James did something on Pod News Daily, or I heard there was 3 or 4 podcasts that were basically You know, London Bridge is falling down, you know, that, um, you know, and where's the audio discussion going? But, uh, hello, uh, where have you been? You know, I, I think I've been the only one that's been talking about the audio space being flat. No one else has been willing to say anything.

So I'm not sure that there's a lot of honesty flying around in the podcast space right now as far as what's happening in the market. So I think that's part of it too. There's people that, you know, have an outcome that they would like to see happen here, but the RSS outcome that they would like to see happen here, that's what's driving a lot of this conversation about it.

Yeah, the RSS.com guys there, Transistor was there, Acast was there, that we all kind of met, um, you know, even run into folks chit-chatting. There's no— those folks are real active, or they're not in a panic, you know. They, they're, you know, how's business? Business is okay. Business ain't great. Business is okay. So, you know, from that perspective, I'm, you know, I'm confident that, you know, that there's no danger in some of the major companies going out. I think smaller companies are are impacted or going to be impacted. But I, again, you know, I, we had a board meeting last night and basically we're talking about financials and everything that's going on with us. Um, May looks better than January, so, you know, I'll just say that. Um, it doesn't look as good as I want it to be, but June, you know, basically almost into June, June's looking better than it was in January. So, um, from that perspective, uh, you know, and we're, you know, we're also being proactive too. So it's—

I don't know, uh, that's exactly what you should do, right?

But at the same time, um, we— I was taking the point of taking show names down of people that were already in YouTube. I just, you know, and I probably— there was maybe 20 that I talked to, they had YouTube channels. And, um, I went and looked their shows up and nothing extraordinary. 100 views, maybe top 65 on episodes. So again, I think there's a divide. There's probably 3 tiers. You know, there's probably the people that are doing a little, a little more and doing great. And I think that's the way it is in audio podcasting too. There's a little, little medium, a little more.

Um, so also to add up, add another layer to that. There's those that are audio first, those that are video first, and then there are those that are doing a hybrid strategy of doing video and audio. So there's 3 tiers of content creators too, and each content creator has to decide which path do they want to go. But I think this, this binary choice between doing, doing audio or doing video is kind of missing a piece here. And the video part doesn't have to be, you know, a $100,000 investment.

No. Oh, it doesn't. No, no.

But that's That's, that's what's being talked about in the context. Well, it's too expensive. It's too— it's actually not. And, and the only reason people are saying that is because they want to dissuade people from doing video.

No, I don't say it's— I, I say it's, it is going to be some cost. You are going to have to— of course you're going to have to buy webcam, you're going to buy lights, you're going to have to have a camera of sorts.

Well, you don't have to buy lights, but you're not gonna— depends on what your recording environment is. If you do it in front of a window and they can give you natural light, that's possibility too. And you, you can do your show completely on your iPhone or on your Android device. You don't even have to go out and buy a new camera.

So again, I think they're seeing the examples of content and right understanding they're going to have to invest. And then invest in—

that's, that's a deeper discussion here, which is actually podcasting and what's happening. What we're seeing on the video side is professionalizing, right? Which means that there are companies or shows that are becoming media companies. I mean, we all have to accept that podcasting and YouTube is the media now. Right? And those expectations—

I don't agree with that at all. Well, it's a portion of the— it's a portion of the media.

Well, okay, Todd, YouTube is getting more views on video content now than all of the other networks.

Oh, I, I understand that streaming platform, but Rob, you're taking it a macro level.

Okay, no, I'm not. I'm actually looking at from what's actually happening globally with video.

Again, but understand, if you are the average Joe podcaster. So the thing is, you, you're looking at these top, top ends. Again, we have to focus on the regular podcast.

The, the focus on that, Todd. That's what we're choosing to do. Well, we, that we have to factor here that, that the individual— so here, individual content creator that's creating a show, right? The landscape for media distribution monetization, marketing, PR, promotion, growing an audience is, is becoming professionalized. And the shows that are growing in scale and reach an audience, even on the audio side, it's gravitating towards larger shows.

So you made my point exactly. So here's the— so here's—

that's kind of my bigger point, Todd, is that we're not actually looking at what's happening in the market.

So here's the issue, right? No new creators are coming in. No new creators are coming in. Change what's happening in the market. I'm just telling you that this type of discussion—

I get it—

this type of discussion is what's causing creators to say, I don't want to do it, it's too much work.

Well, it's because there's a certain amount of fear factoring that's going in.

There's not fear factoring.

That's If you do video, it's going to be overwhelming.

No, no, no, no, no, no, nope, nope, nope. That's not the conversation.

That's what I'm hearing.

Well, the conversation is, I'm being told I have to do video. I don't want to do video, but if I have to do video, I'm not going to do anything. People are not starting because of this narrative, you have to do video. So here's what the problem is going to be.

Why is that happening?

We have to have We have—

that's the next follow-up question here.

We have to have—

why is that perception in the marketplace?

We have to have the ability for someone that's new to be able to come in and build a show and feel like they have a chance of success.

Nobody's stopping them.

That's the narrative that they're feeling.

Um, where is— where's the market shifting towards, Todd, is the bigger question. If people are getting that perception, then that's kind of on them.

There's a misunderstanding of what's happening in the market. You told me it was fearmongering on the last show. It is. Then in 5 years, then in 5 years, audio podcasting will be gone.

No, it won't.

Oh, it'll be so diminished. No one will be left. In 5 years.

But you also— because publicly— no, Todd, you, you also state publicly on your own social media that audio podcast listening is bigger than ever. Absolutely.

So it can't be both. Okay, the reason it can't— dying and being okay— the reason it can't— at the same time, the reason it can be both, because no new, new creators are not entering.

Hey, but that doesn't mean that the medium is dying.

Okay, so what will happen is, is over time— again, 5 years— over time, okay, you'll see a drop-off of all the smaller shows. If anyone under 10,000 downloads, they'll be gone. And there'll be just a small number, a very small number of successful audio and video shows and the rest will be a wasteland. Because, because again, there is the perception by new creators that this is too hard. It's too hard to break out, too hard to build an audience.

Todd, I've been around this medium long enough to know what the pathways have been on. Yes, there was a time in the— maybe 10 years ago that this conversation was happening around storytelling podcasts and true crime. You know, and it was the same dialogue, right? It was, oh, those productions are too expensive and too difficult to do. And it's going to— it's changing the podcast landscape, right? People are going to have to have all these big budgets to produce these highly produced audio series programs.

That's what the expectation of the market was. They do have high budgets.

Well, you know what's happening right now is that those productions are not finding a market anymore, really. They're having struggles getting funded because everything has shifted over to monetization focus. And it's difficult to monetize a storytelling podcast, a true crime podcast, because it's intrusive to have mid-roll ads in it. Things like that. So there's structural things that happen in the, in the medium that change the narrative, right? And that narrative is happening again, and it just happens to be focused on video. And you and I both know that video and podcasting have been riding tandem with each other since 2005.

But at the same— but at the same point, this isn't a big surprise to me, and it shouldn't be to you. So maybe, so maybe in 2, 3 years the fad will wear off. And maybe we'll be okay.

Yeah, I think that audio podcasting is still strong, right? I think we both acknowledge that audio podcasting is still growing. Audience is still growing. It just so happens right now that people are gravitating increasingly over to larger shows or getting larger. Yeah. And that's part of my bigger uber trend that I see in the market of the professionalization of podcasting. And as we saw mainstream media kind of decline and fall off and lose their influence, guess what? That talent is moving over to podcasting and they're carving up more and more of the audience. And I agree with you 100%. That is a threat to independent individual creators.

I think, though, that we need to— I think it's a simple solution to They're just— people need to start getting on the messaging, right? Marketing and everything. That audio is still a viable medium. It's not going anywhere. We're still good. If—

no, I think that's a good, good, good discussion point. But I think where it goes sideways is, is we kind of demonize video.

I'm not demonizing video. I'm just—

that's what's been going on.

I don't think so.

Yeah, it's like saying video's bad.

No, people don't really do a video here.

Don't really want to do video because there's all these issues.

If you're, if you're 18 to 35, you want to do video. But again, there is a segment of the market that doesn't want to do video, that feel they're being forced to. Right.

But you don't demonize an option that is part of the landscape of podcasting. I don't think anyway. Let's, let's approach this proactively and say It's okay to be an audio-first creator. It's okay to be a video-first creator. It's okay to do a hybrid strategy. And it's— and let's push the success of the medium to those that want to create the kind of content that they want to create and not play one side against the other, which I think is what's going on right now. And I don't like it because it's not playing into what my experience in the medium is right now. Yeah.

Well, I'm, I'm on the ground talking with creators every day, you know, so I can only tell you that too. I do calls all day with people around the world, but I can tell you the mindset of new creators. This is what I'm hearing from new creators. So maybe that's just a subset.

Again, well, that's, that's one part of the industry, but there's also this whole other side of the industry that is, that is already professionalized. Right. And they're driving this change, right?

Those very successful shows. A lot of the monetization pieces are driving that.

Right. Those successful media companies, I would profess, increasingly that's what we're seeing happen. And that's why I take it back to this conversation that what we're seeing is the professionalization of podcasting, which does tend to move the industry towards a smaller number of shows, which may be antithetical to where podcasting started as being in an open landscape. And this is where it's so important now that the Podcast Standards Project gets its legs and really starts to drive innovation into RSS, because that's the pathway to us maintaining what we have, because we are seeing a shift into professionalization, which drives more attention to smaller numbers of shows into these big platforms. But that's being driven based on what the audience is doing. And I know that there's a feeling out there that creators are causing this to happen or someone else is responsible for this. No, it's the audience is what's driving this shift.

You know, I, you know, I'll just say I wish the PSP could move faster.

I know I do too. I do too. And I, I think they're on the right track.

It's just, you know, and you know, there was a few comments from a couple of people at a couple of meetings. I was just kind of like, they don't even know what's going on. You know, they, it's, they, it feel like, yeah, yeah, you know, I, I think it's just here, you know, in the end it goes back to, I, you know, Blueberry, Buzzsprout, RSS.com, you know, all the folks that are playing, Transistor is playing in the Podcasting 2.0 space. Um, We can do what we can do, but unless the apps follow, then it's tough. It's tough. So, you know, Pocket Cash just introduced, uh, you know, Podroll, basically make that available. So that, you know, little, little inroads here and there. Um, in, in the end, it's, you know, I, there's this was a semi-discussion around video and, um, my point was we don't need HLS. You know, everyone talks, we need HLS, we need HLS. I said, um, it's been working all the way up to this point with MP4. If someone wants to cache, take the, you know, take the media and cache it and create an HLS stream, that's great.

But HLS is so a, a stream versus a download is really what you're talking about.

It's, it's, it all feels the same to the audience. They don't know they're getting HLS stream an MP4. They don't know the difference.

Well, the question gets back to is the, the performance of the video.

It's again with the way modern connectivity is today, they, they don't know the difference. The majority of people don't.

Well, I noticed that there's a difference with the video, so there can be some latency.

I, I think, I think what will end up happening is HLS is not going to be delivered at the price of podcast hosting. No way, because of the cost involved in HLS streaming. Um, it just won't. But it's— right now, even to spin your own solution up, it's, it's incredibly expensive to do it on a— you know, that bandwidth is, is really, really high. And, you know, the advantage Google has with YouTube is they have all their own pipes, they have all their infrastructure, they're interconnected with data centers. So for them, this is, you know, they, they, they put the money into dark fiber and, you know, they don't have to worry about this cost situation.

But when you get down to an individual hosting platform, my comeback to that is that by not doing HLS, we're, we're shifting more control over to the big, big, um, consumption platform.

Again, we've been serving video for since the beginning here with no issue, no complaints from the consumption audience. So, you know, HLS, if we figure out a way to do it that's not so expensive, great.

Maybe, maybe, maybe all these platforms are not gonna— Apple would be the exception, and probably Pocket Casts. Um, they're all going to want to support a central distribution of HLS streams. If we're going to maintain that kind of central hosting capability into all the platforms, whether it be Apple or Spotify or whatever, that is, as we look to the future, that is our leverage.

Well, those apps are not making any money to begin with. So I don't know how, you know, HLS is going to have to be delivered on their side. Or you'd have to cache the video.

Shifting the, the burden of the distribution over to the consumption platforms, and that's antithetical to the future of ourselves.

Again, um, I wouldn't be against someone taking video and caching it and serving it as HLS as long as they sent the signal back, considering, you know, I do that. I know what the math is on this. So, you know, you're not going to get a host to provide HLS video streams at what people will consider an acceptable price to pay for that delivery. If they're willing to pay for the delivery, great, we can do HLS. But hold on to your wallet, it's not cheap. That's the, that's the thing.

You know, you build your own infrastructure. See, Todd, I think we have to think about this.

How can I, how can I— okay, I can do it right today.

What does this look like in the future is the question.

Well, the question then is— the real question is, um, if— and I don't know if there's an answer for this— if people want to— here's, you know, here's the thing I said to Apple: if you have video on— make video a first-class citizen on Apple Podcasts, everyone will want to have video on Apple Podcasts.

That's simple. No, I agree with that.

They want it. They'll say— they'll call me tomorrow, said, I want video on, on, uh, on Apple Podcast. A certain segment will pay that price if they want HLS. They're going to pay that price for that bill to have that media go to, to Apple. Some won't because it's free at YouTube, it's free at Spotify.

And why is it free, Todd?

Because they have huge infrastructure. They control the ecosystem.

And they monetize.

But yeah, and that's the price of admission. And that's why there was another discussion. Podcasters are so pissed off about content being monetized around their content that they're starting to think, do I need to pull off Spotify? I'm like, hey, it's your decision if you want to be there or not. I had about 5 conversations around that. Yeah. And of course people were not educated on the video overlap and the audio thing. That's a whole nother, that's a whole nother discussion.

Well, and then the whole conversation around dynamic insertion of sponsor messages into video.

Yeah.

Not, not, I mean, we haven't progressed to that conversation yet.

It's not that complicated. You just got to implement it.

No, I know it's not, but, but podcasting really has no connection to video monetization. No, I mean, other than baked-in hosts.

So, and again, now, key— go back to a stat I've said for years and years and years: 90% of podcasters will not ever need to rebuild their video or audio. 10% will, but the other 90%, there's no need.

So when you say rebuild, what does that mean?

Yeah, if you're doing it manually, which would be nuts on video., but, you know, oh, you mean putting ads in? Yeah, if you change ads out. Yeah. Okay. Using DVI on, on video, you know, 90% of shows won't need it anyway. But again, I, I think so, you know, so, so what happens, let's just do a hypothetical here. If, uh, and again, this is wishful thinking, what if Apple says, oh yeah, we're going to support video, make it first-class citizen. Um, we'll cache your MP4, change it into HLS, and serve it. Now, you know, I think the majority of people would say yay because of the cost involved. I think there's a lot of hosts that are scared about the video hosting costs. I know what it costs to deliver MP4 stuff. You know, it's very simple. You know, size the file by your gigabit price. It's easy math solution. It's simple math. And, um, HLS, that's, uh, a tier 4, 5, 10 higher in cost. So if, if Apple did that, which again, you know, that's just Todd talking, um, if they gave me a pingback and said, hey, play happened, hey, we're good, we can, we can measure it and we can, uh, we, we can do well with it, but What do you give up? You give up the ability to, you know, there's a monetization issue. There's no pass-through. So there's all these problems. So if you decide, okay, we're going to serve at HLS, there's a trade-off. You know, if they cache it, change it to HLS, cost zero. If you want to have HLS streaming and you want to be able to place ads in it, and you want to do all this stuff, you're going to pay, and it's going to be big. It's not going to be small. Um, you know, you—

well, I've heard, uh, Todd, I've heard conflicting information from hosts out there, um, about the cost of HLS. I've heard people tell me, and then I hear other people tell me, um, some people tell me that it's not that expensive if you have HLS on your own infrastructure. You have to have that expensive if you outsource it to like an Amazon.

Yeah, but services, or if you have to build your own infrastructure, there is significant overhead on all those servers to do that. Absolutely, it can be built on your own infrastructure, but again, you are still staying— you are still— you're paying for that infrastructure, which will not be inexpensive. I look at it to what, Todd?

Everything.

You know, audio is simple, you know, as compared to video. From a, you know, audio is a no-brainer from a serving standpoint. But if you want to look at—

I think to be, to be fair about it, is the costs of audio hosting have plummeted.

But if you want to do video, right, it's at least a factor of 25 or 30 in cost.

No, I'm, I'm not hearing that, Todd, from other people that I talk to.

Okay, then they're not moving.

Oh, it's all about moving big scale.

That's how you get the lower cost, right? On HLS, you would be doing your own because that's the only way you can do it and even probably make it even effective from a cost standpoint. We priced it out, we did the math on it, and seen what— how many servers we're going to need just to host the shows we have now. I, I have to come in and, and charge it a much, much, much, much higher rate.

So you're talking to CDNs?

You don't want— if you're going to do HLS, you're going to go through CDN. You're going to— oh my God, you have to be your own CDN. You have to build your own infrastructure if you're going to do HLS.

Okay. So you have to actually physically own the servers?

Well, you have to spin them up in AWS, you know.

And yeah. So that's essentially a CDN type of infrastructure?

Not really. CDN is a centralized distribution network. You go from— you want to get what it is, 1 to 500 different sites. We're talking about if you're going to do HLS as a hosting provider, you're going to have, you know, 4 or 5, a dozen servers, right?

Yeah, dedicated servers that are on either your own co-located facility or in a leased co-location.

Oh, it's going to be in— it's going to be in AWS or whatever. You're not going to put a server in a facility anymore. No one does that. Hard iron. Very few people do that. Yeah, well, but you still believe it. You still, you still have outbound. You've got that outbound bandwidth that happens. You got the cost of the server, you got the cost of the overhead to do the encoding, all that stuff. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a price.

Well, then the cost of audio podcast hosting has not gone up either, right?

No, no, but Everything else around the thing is, okay, this is the problem. Uh, yeah, my bandwidth costs are the same, but my insurance, my healthcare— oh, I get that.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, that's all separate from what we're talking about here.

But it's not, because the cost of hosting has gone up, just the price hasn't increased, as you know, right? Yeah.

So if you look at what's been happening in the economy for the last 4 years, everything has gone up, you know, except for your podcast host, Bill.

To 30%.

And except there's got to be a reason for that.

What's the reason for that? Except why hasn't podcast hosting went up? But every— you know, believe it or not, it was a, it was a discussion. It was being— I have no collusion, right? And I always tell the people, I encourage you to go. You go, I will follow, you know.

Yeah, you just don't want to go first one.

Yeah, yeah, you don't want to do that. No, I don't want to be the first, right? Yeah, at some point someone's gonna have to go. Have to. No choice. Have to. I can't— I cannot absorb— because, you know, how we were able to do it before, you, you, you basically had this trade-off. The bandwidth cost went lower and, you know, you were able to have this spread. Well, now this is what's happening. You're at the bottom on bandwidth and now the You know, now the margin's coming down much, much tighter. And, uh, yeah, something has to give. Has to. Yeah. Uh, you know, I, I can't say that we would be able to go, you know, I'd hate to even predict, but at some point there's going to have to be a price increase.

Has to be. Well, Todd, if you back up and you look at the total market for the podcast infrastructure, right? And what's— and looking at individual companies in the medium, there's always been a subset of hosting infrastructure companies for podcasting that have catered to kind of the higher end of the market, right? So you think about like an R19, or they had a sales team. Yeah, yeah, a Megaphone. Or you think about you know, these, these platforms that really catered to—

yeah, and they've had— yeah, they were top tier. Well, they had a bunch of acquisitions and they acquired sales teams and—

yeah, so they all have some— they built kind of sales organizations around those organizations. They built in robust programmatic advertising. So the market's been shifting this way for many years towards catering to higher higher volume, larger podcasts, larger shows.

But at the same time, some of those larger shows are now being asked to pay. Well, um, oh, there's, there's, there's a few.

I don't know that that is— I wouldn't make a generalization on that, Todd. I think it gets back to the most of the, those bigger professional networks are doing revenue shares, um, that is paying for the infrastructure.

So that margin is getting— I talked to all of them. I know, but that margin is getting tighter, and there are more— if you're not a super big show, you're paying these days.

Oh yeah, that's a sliding scale, isn't it? I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure the top means that there's more revenue.

Well, I'm sure there's 10% that, uh, don't have to pay and 90% that do. That are on the monetization end.

From what I see, the pricing plans is that it's usually, let's say, $100, $150 a month just to be on their platform. Yeah. And then at some point, um, that, that revenue share kicks in and makes the hosting free. Yeah, sometimes.

That's their whole business model, Todd. Sometimes. Again, we have people coming back to us that were promised the earth and the sky.

Well, if the show didn't reach scale—

oh, the show had scale, they just didn't deliver what— they just didn't deliver what was promised. So I see both sides of it. I see shows that go on, you know, and they host for free and they have, they have a revenue share. But again, that's 5, 6, 7% of the total ecosystem, you know.

And a lot of what's happening, you know, like with Spreaker, I see it with Art19, I see it with Megaphone, there's this spectrum of how they're going to market trying to attract shows. And if you look at Spreaker, they have what's called the Spreaker Prime program, which basically gives access to hosting on their platform for free. All you have to do is sign up for the programmatic.

Right.

And then you go to Megaphone. They have a more elaborate kind of business plan that they have set up. But everybody's different. It's, it's $50 or $100 a month base minimum. And then once you get in the door, then there's other opportunities to expand on the revenue that offsets the cost for that slice of shows, which, you know, that's good for them. Yeah, but it's a big part of the market for podcasts, right?

I mean, those are small number of shows as compared to the whole.

Yeah, right. I'm not saying that everybody in the industry is taking advantage of these programs, that they're still—

they don't qualify for the programs.

Well, they could if they wanted to. Uh, all they have to pay is that $50 or $100 a month, but again, it'd be on those platforms.

Yeah, but if you don't have the audience size to, to monetize, offset the difference, you are not going to be on that plan, you're gonna pay.

Yeah, that's exactly what I just said.

If you have a small show, you're gonna pay.

You can go over there, but there are platforms that are free.

Like, so a person that's getting 100 downloads can get a free account with advertising, programmatic advertising? Yeah, I can, I can name a couple of them right now that I have 100, 100 people listening.

Well, Spotify for Creators is one. Speaking of Spotify, right? So see, that's, that's what's going on. There's a spectrum of things that are going on in the space and that it's not always in the same model, right? And it's not, it's not being done in the same way across the industry. And certain players in the industry are charging more for hosting and other ones are not. And because the other ones that are not are catering to a different end of the market.

And yet none of those folks support video. Not a one of them. Um, yeah, okay. Yeah, there's a reason.

I can tell you though that all the ones that I have talked to are moving that direction.

Well, they're considering it. I know one show— well, I know one show that begged a certain big platform for video And they agreed and his bill went from, you know, almost nothing to a multi-thousand dollars a month.

Well, I mean, that's certainly a possibility, but you always have to consider the monetization piece and that's going to put pressure on those hosting platforms to do dynamic insertion programmatic advertising into video.

And that's, that's the piece at the CPM, at the CPM rates. That you're getting for programmatic. Well, it's not going to be the same, okay?

But again, it's video.

But again, yeah, I know, and I know what YouTube is getting for CPM programmatic. We bought ads on YouTube and I know what it is. You can't, you can't make enough to offset the cost of the delivery. I don't know, YouTube can because they own all the fiber.

Yeah, YouTube doesn't pay that much.

Yeah, they paid almost nothing. So of course they have a distinct advantage. But when you want to upload a 4K video and it is 4 to 5 gigabytes in size— yeah, okay— and if you are sub-penny for your bandwidth delivery with just MP4, not HLS, and you multiply that, and then you multiply that again by 1,000, and you come up with that number, you're going to be kind of shocked of what that costs to deliver. And if you're getting a CPM that's not above— if you're gonna have to be above $12 or $13 consistently, and if you're not, you're not gonna make no money on that audio because it's going to cost you more to deliver it than the ad will deliver. Unless you put 5 ads in it, right?

Thus the, the inherent complexity in the, in the medium today. And if you want to— at the root of what we're seeing happen—

and if you want to deliver HLS, then it's— it is more expensive to deliver via HLS. So you got to have a— you know, that the math works out different. So I'm not saying that people can't do it. But there's going to be a lot of scratching heads and the margins are going to be much smaller. I will say this, I had at least 5 people come to me during the show and say, I want your programmatic business. I'm like, I have a partner already. You know, what kind of a deal are you going to make me? You know, and, and no one, at least verbally, the deal I was presented as better than the deal I have. I'm like, why? You know, they're taking such a huge margin on programmatic, on audio programmatic. Some of these, some of these folks are taking 50%, 50%, right?

That's insane. I think it ranges from like 40 to 50, right?

Yeah, that's— I won't do any deal unless the podcaster gets 70%.

No way. You're not going to have much programmatic then.

Well, we do.

We do.

Okay, that's good. Yeah, absolutely. Our podcasters get 70% of the gross revenue. Oh, that's good. Yeah. So why would I—

kind of, kind of rare in the industry, or it is probably— you're probably the only one. My people might be the the comment that we—

because in the end, guess who ends up making all the money? The delivery people make all the money.

Well, they're, they're— they built the infrastructure to capture the buyers.

Yeah, it's all computerized.

It is, right? And I believe that's going to come to the video side too. So we'll see how that gets rolled out. I think it's, you know, if you talk to to Justin from Transistor. I know that's, that's the point he's positioning towards with the Podcast Standards Group is trying to figure out a way to, to standardize the support of HLS.

Well, in the enclosure, unless, unless Apple does it, it won't work. My point, you know, that's the key.

Did you get any sense from the Apple folks you talked to that they even acknowledge what's happening in the market compared to what they're doing on their own platform?

They didn't say anything, but here's my personal gut. Okay. And I would be willing to lose a bet on this. But I— my gut is that that alternate enclosure thing is— would never be considered by them. But maybe that's just my— and again, that's just Todd. That's not— that's my crystal ball. I have no idea.

Well, let's pull that apart. Why would they be against it?

I think it makes it much harder to deal with in the app.

No, I think, well, they could still separate it out into two, two separate categories of listing.

Well, there's a— that's already, it's already done. I know it's already in there, and you know, and if that's done by separate RSS. Yeah, but if they say, you know, let's say they say we're only going to support second RSS feed and you can send us HLS, well, great. But I would, I would, I would be shocked if they supported alternate enclosure. I just would. If they did, great. But the original purpose of the alternate enclosure was not just— it was to serve multiple versions of a show. In other words, lower quality audio for, you know, Africa. Yeah, no one's doing that now.

I think we're past that. So I think that the, the use of alternative enclosure is to offer a video version and then the main enclosure tag to offer the audio version.

Yeah, you know, if they did it, that would be, that would be fantastic.

But again, it doesn't have to be HLS, it can just be a link to the MP4.

Well, then why? And then, and then again, they could very well within their infrastructure pull that MP4, re-encode it to HLS, serve it. The alternate closure just be— you know, there's all kinds of ways to mix it up.

Well, and that's kind of, kind of the bigger point here is that there's lots of pathways that Apple could do this. And all they have to do is make the tweaks to their backend really at the end of the day, because they used to have the infrastructure where you could pull up all of the video versions and it also, and separately all the audio versions. So all they have to do is separate that in the backend.

And the other reason that they might do alternate enclosure. What is— if they're going to control the user experience and want to make sure there's a good experience, they'll do like Spotify has done, and within the app they'll infrastructure it on the backend on their side to support the HLS. So they'll just take the MP4, convert it. And if I was going to do— that's probably— if I was— if I had to say so at Apple, that's what I would probably recommend. Now people are screaming because they're saying, well, that's not pass-through. Um, well, it's not, you know, so, you know, so, you know, maybe they're just going to break any kind of dynamically inserted host read capabilities. And being that no podcast, uh, content host has that support now, nobody has that. So unless it gets built— but it is the first time though, it's kind of funny, the first time of any show I've actually heard other podcasts, so it's now considering to do video. Everyone a year ago was, no way, we're not doing it. Don't talk to us. This is not in our roadmap. We're not doing it.

Well, that was a couple of hosts that was saying that.

Oh, that was—

yes.

All of them were saying that. Well, there's the ones that I was exposed to. There are events, right?

Well, there was what they said offline and what they said in private.

Well, what they say in private was the same thing a year and a half ago, 2 years ago. Absolutely. We're not doing it. I had those private conversations and we have no desire to do video again and again and again.

A couple of them, with a couple of them, but I wouldn't say that all of them had that approach. They may have had that publicly, but they didn't necessarily have it privately. Yeah, they could see where the winds were blowing.

Of course. Then how— it's simple to implement video. How come they're not supporting now? It's simple. Turn it on. It's simple. Turn it on. It's not, it's not any more complicated than hosting audio. I agree with you. It's 15 minutes. I know you might need, you might need a video player for your customers. So that's, you know, a week of dev time.

Well, you've already built all that stuff.

Yeah, but I'm just saying, but you know, that what we use with WordPress is the default video player that comes with WordPress. What we, what we provided for our podcast hosting customers that are on—

it's, it's not complicated. No, it's not. I would imagine that player that you have works with HLS too.

Uh, I don't know about that.

I'd have to look.

You don't know about that? Yeah, HLS is mostly employed on apps and, you know, the YouTube website. You have to have the the playback infrastructure. Again, you got to have the serving infrastructure to be able to make that happen. When someone plays this show on the website, they don't know what's HLS. They don't. They just play it back and it's—

well, especially live shows like what we're doing right now.

Or someone comes and does the— downloads the show, which, you know, 20% of the audience does.

So yeah, and what are we going to do with live? Because live can really only be done through—

well, live is already being done on HLS. We were doing live HLS with this show right now. With this— well, no, with this show we're doing, um, we're pushing to other platforms. We're doing, we're doing RTMP and we're not doing any HLS on this, on this right now. We—

okay, so you're using RTMP to push—

that goes there, that goes to everybody, goes to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, everyone's doing RTMP.

They're using HLS to push it out.

Uh, I don't know how they convert it, so, okay, or if they do. RTMP is its own thing. I see the bandwidth that it is used on Facebook and YouTube and everywhere else. Yeah, it's a streaming— I think they serve the— I think they serve original content. There is a, you know, there is a— we already have a solution for live. That's the thing. We've got the ability for apps to show the live. Now, I stopped doing HLS because it was so expensive. Oh, you know that, because you get 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 50 people on the HLS stream. It could be, it could be $100 every live stream or more. The way to serve this show One person on HLS, one person is about a dollar to serve this show for 90 minutes. One person to, to restream and go out HLS on an app, one person is about a dollar for that delivery. That's using Cloudflare. Single, look at their prices. That seems to be gouging. Restream, no, it's expensive. Restream doesn't even support HLS. Yeah, because it's too expensive, the delivery platform and the conversion and the computers. And again, that's, that's part of it. So, okay, this works on, on most platforms that take RTMP. And I, again, I'm not a techie, so it's going to Twitter. And there's a reason that none of those platforms take HLS. YouTube doesn't take HLS. YouTube takes RTMP. Facebook takes RTMP. Twitter takes RTMP. They all take RTMP.

So why don't we all just use RTMP then?

Um, I think because it's more a live than on demand.

Could it be on demand?

Um, I don't think so. RTMP. What is he— what is the actual— I think it's Real-Time Media Protocol.

Yeah, I think it's built on the HTTP stack, isn't it?

Yeah, Real-Time Messaging Protocol. Protocol designed for transmitting audio, video, and other data over the internet, particularly for live streaming. It's broke down into small packets.

That sounds like the definition for HLS.

So HLS definition, let's do that. HTTP live streaming is a video streaming protocol developed by Apple. HTTP, right, right. And it's the same, it's just a different protocol.

Yeah, it's probably doing the same technical process, right?

And it supports adaptive bitrate, which I don't think RTMP does.

Oh, well, like, actually, I think it's variable bitrate, right?

So, well, it's adaptive is what it's— a definition says it's adaptive bitrate. Supports multiple versions of video stream at different bitrates and resolution, allowing the client to choose the best quality for their network. Most time they pick the stream you should get based upon your bandwidth. That's the main difference.

That's why the, the variable bitrate Or, or VBR has been around with audio for years.

Yeah, but no, no one does VBR in podcast. Everybody does fixed bitrate in audio.

And because the files are small—

live streaming, right? Yeah, I don't know, maybe. But adaptive bitrate is what makes HLS so powerful.

Years and years ago I did that with my own radio show. I did an adapt or a VBR version of my MP3 file. So I would play it through the Shoutcast server. So if a listener had a higher bitrate consumption capability, they could listen to a better quality version of the show.

So again, you know, all these other folks, you know, So again, I think when— because HLS is not used a lot in live streaming and people are not serving media to app— most apps, like, again, the most of the podcast apps that were supporting video, um, live would only take HLS. And because it's natively supported in the app, it's easy for the developers, to my understanding. Um, whereas the RTMP video is not easy for the apps. So that's the reason why all the apps required an H for HLS for the live stream, and that's what just was so, so ridiculously expensive. Um, HLS delivery cost difference.

So Todd, one thing we haven't really talked about is kind of the the podcast show event itself. Yeah. And, uh, how many people were there? What was the, the vibe beyond just the video, video stuff? But what was kind of the, the culture you saw there? Did you see a lot of Americans there?

No. Did you— no, hardly any Americans. There was a handful that we talked to, and it was all industry people. Um, 6,000, I would, I would say that's probably, you know, you always try the, you know, the show produces a number, 6,200, and then you look at the number. I, I have some pictures I put on social that there, there was at least, at least 1,000 people just in 3 shots that I shot. Um, and again, that wasn't counting any of the rooms. So it was, you know, there are a lot of people there. Um, but again, that show does not— we didn't see 6,000 people's worth of traffic at the booth, I can tell you that.

Well, I think, I think you have to back up and you have to look at what number you just shared and where that's derived from, because if you compare that to like Podcast Movements—

oh, that's— it's not the same. Oh, it is, it is, it is a massive show.

No, I'm not saying— oh, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about kind of the, the infrastructure of what they actually do at the event is different, right? So it's, it's 2 days. Yeah. And people can come in and buy a single day pass. Yep. Right. So you have a certain percentage of the people that go day 1 and day 2, and then there's another group of people that just do one or second day.

Yeah. Most of the people we talk to are coming for a day.

Yeah. So, so what we don't know is how many people attended the whole event.

I would say—

was it 2,000 people out of the 6, or was it 3,000 people out of the 6? Probably half. Okay, so 3,000 people, um, new each day.

No, I would say 6,000 was the total.

Total.

But you're I would say that there was at least 1,000 people that were there both days, and then 2,000 that were in and out.

Yeah, so you have to factor in how many people attended both days.

I would say, I'd say about 1,000, right?

Because I think the event counts people that attend.

Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, of course. So again, that would be 2,000 for 2 days, and then 4,000 that were you know, came for a single day, that went both days, or— yeah, so 2,000 that came for both days and 4,000 that came for one day each, or 2,000 each.

Yeah, yeah. So people that are comparing podcast movement with the podcast show may be comparing apples and oranges, but again, it was—

it's, it's because people come in, have meetings, go to some events, and then they go home. They go home, right? People were coming in from France just for the day. People were getting in late. But anyway, it was— and central location, you're 10 minutes from the tube, you know. Um, it was— and no one, no one except for exhibitors are at the hotels. No one. No attendees stayed at— you know, no one came in.

A lot of, a lot of people came from the local UK.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I'm sure the people that came 2 days in a row probably were mostly local, although we had some people from Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland. A lot of people from Ireland, Scots. What else? Um, yeah, a lot of people from Italy. Um, yeah, those are the countries I heard mostly. Yeah. And what else? Some Swiss. A few Dutch. Yeah, so there was a good, good variety.

Yes, I think I also saw that there was, um, 6 after-hours live podcasts on, on stage in, in the venue. So like outside the normal—

yeah, I don't know how many people attended those. Well, I don't either, but, but I'm just saying that the evening events were only us that were exhibitors. There was hardly any— you know, like we went to go to the iHeart party, and it was, it was just, you know, everyone was an exhibitor because people went home. So there's, there, you know, there's a few, but there was not networking. There's no networking opportunities after the show besides people within the industry.

Yeah, I went to the first year of the podcast show, so I spent a whole week in London. Yeah, around that particular event. And, and when they had the event the first year, they had all those live performances of podcasts, um, in theaters around London.

So I think they had that— some of that going on too.

Well, from what I saw on the, on the website, only one of the five live shows that they did on the day before and the day after were actually, um, outside of the venue.

Oh, I see. They had a whole bunch of mini studios there. Oh, do they? Yeah, but I don't know. I, I didn't pay attention too much. I just— the only session I could go to was the Apple session, and it was full. There was 600 people in that room with people sitting on the floor.

And I think they also counted how many people that they counted attended the, the live tapings of sorts of podcasts in their overall attendance.

What we didn't talk to was new creators. Everyone was an existing creator. We didn't talk to a single person that was pre-launch. Not a single show, not a single person the entire time.

Does that make the show not a success for you?

Um, what's going to make the show a success for us is our network offering. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, that's what— yeah, that will be. And also getting our word out because people that still don't know who we are.

That's what I see in the market today. There's a lot of activity around networks right now.

Oh yeah, it's huge. Yeah, and everyone's— and it's— they're all fighting for the same talent, right?

Well, that's been going on for a while.

Yeah, it's even more now. But there was— yeah, there was— we probably talked to 30 or 40 networks. Probably. That's probably—

that's what was the perception that you had around what they were all looking for? What we offer? No, no, no. What's— what—

yeah, I mean, yeah, what they're— what their challenge is, is all their shows—

are they trying to solve by, by aligning with a particular host?

Uh, they're trying to make sure that they don't have to have 18 different interfaces. And they have a single point of stats. And our stats, man, people were crazy about it. We had a picture on the wall, and just that picture alone drove 50% of the traffic in the booth wanting to see our stats. Um, the majority— I, I think that there's— well, anyway, I won't— yeah, I think some hosts do a pretty shitty job on stats. Spotify for sure. You know, their, their stats are junk.

Spotify doesn't really care that much.

They don't care, no.

And people—

the number, the better. And people can't believe the numbers. Yeah, that was a hoax. That was industry talk in the— on the floor.

But I mean, a lot of people probably, I'm sure, were talking about the display of plays.

The BBC had a booth that was kitty-corner to us, and there was nobody. There's like 2 people in the booth, and No, not a lot of activity going on. It's kind of weird. So I had this big expensive booth. Um, there was some big booths there that I was trying to figure out what their business even was. Wasn't as many vendors.

What booths did you say, from what you could tell, we're getting the most interest?

Nobody got much traffic. We probably walked out with 200 contacts.

So would you go back?

Yeah, we're gonna go back.

I'm not gonna have this.

How's that? I'm not gonna have as big a booth.

Yeah, so how's that different than what you went through with Podcast Movement? And which event?

Either one. I'm almost embarrassed to say how bad Podcast Movement Evolutions was.

Bad. There just weren't anybody there.

Or bad, and the people we talked to— we talked to more people that we know and are friends with and then have been in the business. We talked to the industry there. We didn't talk to creators.

Well, that's, that's what that event is. It's bad. It's not, it's not a creator.

And there was, you know, Frank, I mean Dan should be— should have been over there and seen that show. Um, there is— here's— okay, so here, here's a problem. Centrally located, easy to get to, lots of food options. Oops, oops. Oh, what's going on here? I pulled the cable. Oh no. Um, we're not out in the middle of the boondocks. Dallas and Gaylord is, you know, we're out in the middle of nowhere. We're not in a central location. I can't walk out of the Gaylord and go to a restaurant. Well, it's such a huge venue too, you know, and it's You know, and that is much— because if someone's coming, like, with London, we could get out in the evenings if we wanted to go to sightseeing. We could, we could have walked out, bam, been on the tube or been in a bus, and 10 minutes we could have been at a major attraction. Westminster Abbey, 10 minutes away from that venue area. All kinds of stuff. So I I don't know. You know, I— everyone is going to see the word on the street, Dan, is everyone's going to see how the summer event goes.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the acid test this year.

That's the acid test. Yep. Yeah. And right now I'm only planning 2 events for next year, podcast events.

That's a big change, Todd.

And one of London, and that one didn't even sound like it was—

it's, it's good because a great creator event either.

It's— we'll know in a month what our numbers are from that event. But there's so many creators there, you have to be there. There's 6,000 people, I mean, wall to wall.

Well, there were creators there or there weren't creators?

Yeah, there's plenty of creators there, but not pre-launch. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, it just shows that I'm—

gobs of another network.

Yeah, gobs, or have their own individual shows, individual. We talked to a lot of people that are just a month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, a lot.

A lot of that. Why don't you think that, uh, that same pattern isn't happening with podcast movement here?

No day pass, middle of nowhere, right? Middle of the week. But the middle of the week there, they could come for a day, right? It— boom. It's just geography. It's different. Texas is the size of all of Europe. You know, so, you know, you can get an airplane and be in London in an hour from any place in Europe. So it's just, it's just, it's just a different geographical thing.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. But yeah, so what does Podcast Movement need to do to change is the question.

Does it need to— venue and location.

Just, just venue. Well, because they have to accept the fact that they're not a 3,000-person show. No, no. So they can't justify being in a huge hotel anymore. No, they could probably be in a— be in a theater venue and be better off.

They could— they could probably be in downtown LA and be okay. It'd be better than Texas and the Gaylord. I mean, you need a rental car to get to.

Oh, they're gonna— if They're going to cater to the industry. The industry is pretty small. Yeah, actually, and it's been getting smaller over the last year because everybody's getting laid off.

But Dallas is a major hub, but Dallas— and then from where the airport is to where the venue is, is a long ways.

It's quite a drive.

Yeah, yeah. But not to say that Heathrow to this venue is not a long ways either, but again, I'm coming from international, I'm going into Heathrow, and I'm taking an hour to get to the venue. But once I'm at the venue, everything is— there's 50 food options. Yeah, 5 minutes within the venue.

Yeah, right around that venue. It's all walking distance.

You can go have an off-site meeting and not— right, and go off-site and be back in an hour.

I know. Yeah, I did that quite often when I was— yeah, you know, these pubs that are underground.

And yeah, there's, there's just lots, lots of options, right? You know, and I, I, and also, again, I think if podcast movement wants to survive, they gotta shift. If they want creators to come— if it's gonna be an industry event, it's an industry event. That's all we need to know.

I don't even know why, why a creator would even go, Todd, at this point. Why would a creator even go?

I It's a good question.

Good question that podcast movement needs to answer. Um, I don't know that there is a reason for them to go, um, podcast. I mean, increasingly, if you see the surveys that are coming out of the trade show industry right now, um, you know, panel and content is at the bottom of the list of reasons.

Oh, these panels were conferences. These panels were full. I think that's the reason a lot of people went. The panels were jock— I mean, jam-packed.

What was different about those compared to what we see at Podcast Movement, where there, there's very few people that go to the panels?

I think there's very few people that go to a few of the panels because there's very few people there. Well, well, that's a given, right? Well, I, I think what's happening at, uh, a lot of people are going to have meetings with big industry people, so they go to the meetings and do their business and leave.

Or is it just because it's still new in London?

What's happening?

Maybe this medium, maybe. And what's happening here in the U.S.?

Maybe. Sure, maybe. But there's a lot of people speaking 2 or 3 times. Like, James spoke 2 or 3 times. I, I didn't even apply to speak. I could have probably gotten a, a spot, but I didn't want to leave— there's only 2 of us there, and we didn't want to leave Dave hanging for too long. By himself. So yeah, right, it's a different show. There's a huge amount of energy. But one thing is true from last year to this year: everyone's got a place to go. You gotta have a reason to have them stop at the booth. You got to have good signage. You got to have— and you know, if I, if I— next year my booth is going to be more simple. Start your podcast here or migrate to us. That'll be the sign.

So the reason that most people you think, um, went to that show was because of the panel sessions?

Oh, I— they weren't talking to the— if— okay, so there was less than—

or was it just to meet other people?

I don't know. Maybe they're— again, I'm not intermixing. I'm sitting in a booth, right? So there was 20— I would have to count— we can count it on 25 vendors maybe. And if there's— if Podcast Movement had 6,000 people, I would, I would not be able— I wouldn't be able to talk at the end of the day because I would be 5 deep.

Well, there's been times at Podcast Movement when that's been the case, right?

I would be 5— I'd be 5 deep. 4 years ago there, I was never 5 deep. It was It was 2-1-2, 2-1-2, both of us busy. You know, we had steady traffic the entire time, but it wasn't like I had people, you know, once in a while I had a person waiting. And to me, a good sign of a good trade show for the, for the vendors is when we are 5 deep and people are listening into the other conversations, and then, you know, they're cycling through, right?

You know, well, I think what one of the things, Todd, if you think back 4 or 5 years ago, what one of the things that really made that happen was the fact that there was energy around being a new creator, right?

Yeah, that's true.

But one thing we're excited about podcasting, people are wanting to get involved in it. It was the hot thing at the time. Yeah. And it's— let's call a spade a spade—

podcasting is mature now. So the hot thing— so the How Podfest drives people to the floor to talk to the vendors is they're smart, have beer each evening, and they have a networking event, right? Yeah, in, in the middle of the hall, and no sessions going on, and they have a treasure map. So, you know, again, what is the quality of those? Because, you know, we try to pitch as many as we can when they come to the treasure map. You know, if they're already hosting with someone else, we send them away with, why are you going to migrate to us? Does that generate any business? Probably Very little. Yeah. But it gives us at least exposure. Oh, you guys Are blueberry. Here's what you have. Wow, that's cool. But I will say this. The traffic that came to the booth, everyone was. It was like, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. I got this. That was the word. Wow was the word. You got all this. You guys been in business 20 years. Wow, wow. All under one roof. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the reaction.

Well, Todd, I think you're, you're a, in your platform are, are reflective of a company that has spanned the entire span of podcasts, um, journey, right? So you've, you're one of 3 platforms that supports video still today at, in RSS. There's only two other companies that support it. And so you've been able to see the full span of time on this. And I think that puts you in a kind of a unique position in the market. I don't necessarily see Podbean or to some degree even Lipson, but I would say Lipson to more degree really playing that position.

Supposedly Lipson was there. I never seen anybody. Course, I don't know if I'd recognize any other people now. I would say that they were all the people that were probably the advertisers, probably the advertised cast.

Yeah, so I mean, it's not called advertised cast anymore. Yeah, whatever. It's a lot of that team left, so it's, it's really just a couple of guys now.

I saw some of the ex-Podbean— yeah, employees. And there's no bitterness there at all, right? But no one had anything— I'm not going to comment too much, but no one had anything to say, which I thought was interesting. So I thought, oh, when people have— they all want to be positive when no one has— well, they were positive, they had nothing to say privately, they weren't positive, but I'm talking about public But, you know, to me makes me say, oh, they got severance and some NDA as part of their— then why are they being so quiet?

That's a question. It's, it's a very challenging job market right now. All those people want to find new roles.

That's probably true. So they don't want to be caught squealing about their old employer.

So that old employer made some pretty big changes very quickly.

So, and we're getting some of their big customers because of it.

Yeah, there's been a lot of people that have left.

Well, I'm saying we're getting some of their big corporate clients because— yeah, not their people.

Well, no, no, no, no, I'm not talking about staff, I'm talking about business customers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Right. No, I, I can totally see that happening.

Yeah, especially when people's contracts are up because some people are under contracts.

Yeah, I think it's challenging market right now, so we'll see. So Rob, what's happening with, uh, with Lipson right now? Yeah, it's, it's probably a pretty challenging situation for them too.

Yeah. So anyway, is, um, getting to another topic at hand. Is this the end? Are we going to continue the New Media Show?

I don't know, Todd. We should— maybe we should talk about that. Is there a reason to continue this show? I think so. What would your definition of that be?

Uh, you know, I, I just have to be frank. I'm the— I have to protect the audio audience. I have to continue to be that that bearer of truth, that audio is still valuable, and, and, and push back a little bit on not your narrative but some of this corporate narrative.

I have a narrative, Todd.

Yeah, you do too, a little bit. You, you fell in love with YouTube, so, you know.

No, I, I got into it to learn what was happening.

Well, okay, but, you know, I understand.

I'm not infatuated with YouTube. I'm just seeing what's happening there and what the impact is of what they're doing is significant and we should be paying attention to it. Yeah. So, but, um, yeah, I think it's a good question. You know, is, is the medium that we're working in new media anymore too, Todd?

Well, it's not like I can change the show to meet to the meet to the media show. I don't think that domain is available.

Um, I do know that the White House has now apportioned a seat in the press room called the New Media Seat.

Oh, that's great. I could buy my domain.

Which I thought was an interesting connection to us because it's usually a podcast of some sort.

Or they definitely pissed off the mainstream media with that seat too. But well, well, well in time.

I, I really feel sorry for the mainstream media right now, Todd.

I don't know about you, but, you know, I, you know, I saw your post on, on LinkedIn and other places talking about, you know, maybe pursuing some more AI-type topics.

And yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm looking to the future, Todd. I'm looking to what's on the horizon here and and adjusting, and which I've always kind of dodged and moved and, and tried to, you know, keep up with what's happening in the market. You know, if I think back to back when I started my radio show back in 1999, I did it because of a big shift in media. I could see what was happening with content marketing and online contributions for that, and I wanted to get involved in it and I wanted to learn it and I wanted to participate in it. And I wanted to take advantage of— I have a marketing background, I have a marketing degree, and that was a big part of what I could see, the, the shifts in the market. And so I'm seeing the same thing happen right now, um, with AI.

And surprisingly, that conversation didn't come up at one time at the booth, which is curious.

It is curious, Todd.

Not once. Now they asked about our—

they took our flyer Why do you think that's— that happened? That probably should have been a more important conversation than video.

Um, I think it's just become part of everybody's, or, uh, their lives are using it. So when they see someone has an AI-integrated solution, they're like, oh, okay, you know, if you don't have it, then maybe that's a red flag.

But they're not concerned about the direction that it's going, or—

yeah. Issues related? Oh, they're concerned. I'm sure they're concerned about their jobs, you know, but they weren't there to talk about their jobs. They're there to talk about building their shows.

So I guess the same thing.

Yeah, yeah. But I think the, the— I didn't hear any discussions about AI taking over content or anything like that. You know, a few people asked, you know, about, uh You know, can you, you know, who do you recommend for doing multi-language? And of course, and there's just a couple players that are doing that well right now.

So, um, yeah, I just wonder if that market for podcasting is still not seeing its impact yet, I guess.

Well, I think that I don't see it as an impact to original content. Um, I, you know, personally, maybe you're listening to it, I'm avoiding any AI-generated videos when I can detect it.

Why are you avoiding it, Todd?

Because I don't trust it yet.

Is there a point which when you will trust?

We'll see. I don't know. But again, I'm going to be seeking out original voices and people that like to argue. You know me, you know, you know, who knows. I, I just, uh, yeah, you know, there's lots of cool things you can experiment with. You know, a lot of people are experimenting with having their co-hosts being an AI, you know. And but, you know, the, the— a lot of— you can't do that live because there's too much of a delay. So, you know, there's just Yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens. It's not going to hold it back for long. Ah, again, you know, everyone—

you can always, uh, edit out the delay.

Everyone's going— yeah, you can edit out— you can edit out for sure. But I think, uh, you know, I don't know. It wasn't a conversation there, that's for sure.

I think that's more interesting than anything. So this whole conversation between audio and video, I think, is kind of a not a sign of, well, industry really embracing the, the reality of the consumer market.

So, but the re— again, most people have time to listen and have time to watch. Some people like one over the other, and it's always, it's always been that way. Some people like to read more than they like to listen.

So there's a lot of ways That's why this conversation is kind of— or, you know, this tug of war between audio and video is kind of a silly one, because, you know, audio and video have been part of podcasting since 2005. So it's— it just wasn't emphasized for many years.

Yeah, and it was expensive in the early days.

Well, and yeah, and I think That was a big reason why video podcasting kind of went to YouTube back in—

it went to YouTube in the beginning.

Yeah, everybody shifted their content to YouTube because then they didn't have to pay for—

they didn't have to pay for nothing.

Yeah, right. But the bandwidth back in those days was a lot more expensive than it is today.

Yeah, we started out paying 10 cents a gig.

Yeah. And now it's fractions of a cent.

So yeah, sub-penny.

Yeah, yeah. So things have changed. But the medium hasn't really changed from the standpoint of the infrastructure of podcasting. We're still doing the same thing that we did 15 years ago.

It's beautiful. It's open. It's beautiful. It's open and it is—

can't be controlled. Well, not that people aren't going to try, but I agree with you, Todd. I don't think it's going to be successful. And that's why I don't think that YouTube is going to be able to disrupt podcasting.

Oh, they're disrupting it already. They're just— they're disrupting the message.

They're trying, and to some degree they're succeeding. Oh yeah, we've seen this happen before.

Oh, true. And then they gave up on stuff before. I don't think they're gonna get— I don't think— I don't think they're going to give up this time. No, there's too much money to be made for them and, and to, you know, monetize on the backs of creators that don't make enough, don't get enough views to get their, uh, you know, get their 10 cents.

I'm fascinated to think about how AI is going to change the paradigm of you, of YouTube.

It could saturate it to the point that, uh, hero humans don't make no money and YouTube takes it all.

There's a lot of talk in the tech space right now that, um, AI is going to take over our devices and how we interface with the internet.

Yeah, it's a— it's what you allow.

Well, it's what the big tech companies make available to us. Yeah, you look at the Google— going to be, uh, AI interface.

You look at the Google announcement last week, it's everything's integrated, so that's all going to be funneled through AI. Which, you know, may ultimately completely destroy small businesses, completely destroy creators. It has serious ramifications. Yeah, because if, if YouTube doesn't have to rely on creators to make content, they can just use robots.

Well, the same thing happened with the internet in the early days, Todd. We transitioned from an analog economy to a digital economy, and that caused change. Well, at least they're in the middle of another— oh, they're kind of technological transformation.

Yeah. Okay, I just want to look at this. Just got my numbers. Just got my numbers for GoDaddy.

You did?

Well, good news.

Good news. Yeah, so to get back to your, your question, yeah, about, about the future of the show, I would love to hear from the audience. Oh, to let us know what you think we should do. Are we serving a purpose in the market? Do you see us— you know, I want to do a show that is growing and what— and is relevant to the audience and is driving value to the audience. And I think you want that too, Todd.

Well, I also want to protect the medium, and I, you know, and if we're not serving—

if we're not into it with an agenda, which is what I'm worried about— well, I'm sure that I want to go into it with an agenda. Well, it drives a certain narrative.

I have to— I have to protect the medium. If I don't, I'm gonna get fired.

Yeah, but that doesn't have to be here.

Well, I'm a purveyor of take my RSS out of my dead bare hands.

Okay, well, I'm not against that. That's fine.

Um, so, you know, we've been, we've been talking about AI and stuff, but I— my issue is I just don't want to be so hung up on video.

At the same time the whole world is?

Well, you know, not the whole world, a percentage of the world, a big percentage. It's a growing percentage. Yeah, but again, if we want— and you know, I'm saying this very seriously, you thought I'm, I'm lying— if we, if we want the podcasting space to survive, as audio podcasting space, the audio podcasting space to survive We have to make sure that we are inclusive and open to people that are not being under pressure to think they have to do video. And what is podcasting served? Under-marginalized groups. It served women. It served people in countries that can't show their face. All kinds of potential because it's audio. And I think there's still a huge market for it. But if we continue to just talk about video, those that— and if that is what's coming out of the industry's mouth and that's what they want to shift to, they'll never beat YouTube. Never. They'll never beat YouTube.

They'll never beat YouTube. So somebody has to beat YouTube?

No, I'm just saying it'll all go to YouTube. If, if, if, if that's all they want to talk about, it's just all going to go to YouTube. And if that's what people want, that's fine. And then you have to answer to that piper. You have to answer to YouTube. And if you say one thing wrong, you're out. And then you have to go find a new home and a way to make money and find a way to build your brand. There is so much risk, and from a creator standpoint, of being a one-trick pony. And as long as we keep telling people that there is not just a one-trick pony, you can do stuff all across the space, including YouTube, if you want. I'm cool with that. But I think we have to, you know, again, I feel it's my mission. I almost like— I used to tell people, you have to have your own dot-com. I still say that, but I tell people now, hey, you gotta have— you better have an RSS feed. As a backup plan, if nothing else. Yeah. Well, so, you know, I'm happy to talk about AI and all that stuff. I am. I think it's going to be huge. I already know it. We're using it all the way through my company. You know, we're definitely going to be an AI-first company.

That's for sure. Otherwise, audio is going to go away at all. It's not. Really entirely under threat per se. I think it's under threat to, to, to some that are looking at the audio podcast industry, uh, growing as fast as it—

oh, it's, it's not going to grow as fast as it did. That's not happening. What is, as far as new creators, what is under threat is new creators, right? And there has— and if there's not a pipeline of new creators, companies won't survive. The reason—

how do you— I think the bigger question to answer is how do we foster new creators in audio podcasting?

Just make them understand the value of it. But we also have to do what Podcasting 2.0 is doing, what the standards project is doing. We need to get these effing features. And what we also have to do is understand that without micro networks, with people circling wagons with 20 shows that are like, it's going to be a hard road. Oh, so, you know, I fully understand. I, I can't wait for the apps no more. So stuff we're doing internally, we're not waiting for the apps. We can't. I can't wait for the apps because we have to give the list. Here's what we have to do. Why are people on YouTube? Why are people on Spotify?

It's easy.

I agree. We got these old apps. There's no interaction. There's no way to, to give at least, you know, in some of the more overcast knows others. There's no way to build community. There's none of that in there.

Well, it's all being built outside of podcasting. It's all being built on other platforms that are building these capabilities. So people have to plug and play into a bunch of different, um, tools and platforms, right?

And most people are not technically inclined to do that. So, you know, we're going to have to come up with solutions. And other people, you know, I'm not the only one thinking about this.

Well, I mean, I think to attract new creators, I think the industry needs to integrate more of these things into one tool, just like what YouTube is doing. I mean, if you want to compete with YouTube, you got to compete with YouTube. It's the same message that I have for Spotify because Spotify is not competing with YouTube right now, even though they, they say they want to be just like YouTube.

But again, you know, are we going to be able to coalesce around one tool and they're going to become the YouTube of podcasting? No.

No one's going to do that. And what if Netflix gets into podcasting in a big way? I saw that they were a sponsor at the, at the podcast show.

I don't know what they were doing. Um, didn't see any of their people or booth. They didn't have a booth.

Uh, they probably didn't have a booth, but they've had a podcast staff. Actually, a person that worked there used to work for Apple.

I, you know, I will see the podcasting side. We'll see what happens. I, I think in the end it's going to be a big shakeout. But you know what we have to do as podcast hosts now, it's kind of interesting. Fountain made a deal with RSS Blue and they're combining. So, um, that— I won't go into this. What's, what's RSS Blue? That's another hosting platform, a small one. It was a Podcasting 2.0 100% platform. Oh. They served a lot of music shows. So, okay. Yeah, I wasn't familiar with them, but you know, they went from a price structure. It was very low to very high. So there's disruption there. Yeah. I won't go into it, but you know, they've got a tough challenge now to figure that out, how to keep their creators happy. But again, that is probably smart move by them to join up and have forces. But as a podcast host, they're not technically competing against me. So I, how can I promote that app? So it's a double-edged sword, right? If I go over there and tell my listeners to go over there and listen, and I'm trying to also— and I've converted a lot of my listeners to podcasters, you know, they're going over there and then, you know, they're being marketed to. Not saying that that's happening yet, but again, you know, this is, you know, this, you know, it's kind of funny. So, but again, I think it's up to the creators. Again, I'm going to try to build tools that allow E, it make it easier for small networks to have a bigger presence. And initially it's going to be strictly PWA. It's not the best solution, but I don't have a half million laying around to build an app either. Right. And I don't want to build an app. I really don't. But now there's a bit of a game change. Apple has been forced. This is kind of funny.

Oh, on their 30% share?

Well, they've been forced to allow external links. So now if I'm a podcast app, put the funding tag in there. Put the funding tag, link to my funding stuff, so I can— if someone's using your app and they want to send me a donation via PayPal or whatever mechanism I'm using, let that happen. But again, will they do it? I don't And I jokingly said to Apple, they're like, what would you like to see us implement? And of course, you know, I've got a laundry list of stuff and I, and, and, and, you know, as I kind of jokingly say, I said, now you guys really want to make a statement. And of course they're stonewalled, you know, not a, not a smile, not a grin, you know, not, not a single, not a single thing. And I jokingly said, I said, you want to make a statement. If the lawsuit gets— your appeal fails, and I, you know, I said put the funding link in the Apple Podcast app linking to— and not a, not a smile, not— and of course, you know, they— Apple does not like this, you know, Apple corporate does not like this ruling, but it is— has major implications.

Major. Todd, I have a question for Apple that I'm going to post on here because I know sometimes Apple listens. Yeah. Is, um, so with Jake Shapiro up on stage at the podcast show, does that mean that, um, Jake or Ted or any of the others that are at Apple can join us on the New Media Show at some point?

Um, There's not a chance in hell because we'll ask too many, uh, no, it's because of questions. I'm just assuming they've been 20 years since they've been able to present. I know. Okay, that's kind of my point. So you had two of the top dogs for Apple Podcasts on the stage.

So it was Jake and who else?

Uh, what's her name?

I apologize. Um, Oh, okay. She's, uh, talking about— oh God, yeah, yeah, I know who you're talking about.

All right, I'm being— I'll be scolded here by somebody. I'll get an email.

Anyway, she's the lead program manager for Apple Podcasts, and, um, the Apple—

the presentation was very Apple-esque and very practiced. They do what Apple does. And I kind of teased somebody that was on the team. I said, how long did that take to get through legal? As I say, buttoned up and not a word. You know, I said, take 3 months, 4 months. How many months did it take to get that through legal? And, you know, not a single comment. So there's no way. That we could ever get. Maybe if they had an announcement and we had an agenda. But again, they have their own— they have the Apple way. They send an email, they invite people for private meetings, you're under non-disclosure, you know, no public spontaneous discussions. No, because they get fired. Yeah, they can't. You know, they really can't. And, you know, I, I feel bad because we all abuse them. You know, we, we don't abuse them, but, you know, you know, 30 minutes, how's things going? And I go for 30 minutes and they can't really say, that sounds great. I call it contractor speak. When I worked for the government, it was— I'd go in and the contractor would be telling me, and if I said, that sounds great, that was an acknowledgment that I think we should do this. I said, hmm, interesting. Wow.

Yeah, I mean, Apple has every right to do what they're doing. Yeah, of course. It's, it's unfortunately a little disengaged from the reality of it.

Is the reason— the reason is, is because— but, but do you see really YouTube out there doing their messaging? It's pretty tight too. So it's, it's not much.

They're up on stage doing interviews. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and I do see their, their staff going on podcasts.

So again, I think it's just that's the culture there, and I understand.

I know it is. It's been that way since we started, since the beginning, acknowledging their—

that's why I had to make sure I got in and hear the presentation. And I was so rare, I filmed a couple of the things, and, you know, they, they showed our, you know, and And we have to give credit where credit's due, um, regardless of what people think. But this industry would not be here had not iTunes been introduced, uh, podcasting. Yeah, he's the one that really made this, you know, Steve Jobs and Adam Curry discussion and getting, you know, Adam providing the, the initial influx of feed listings and all that stuff that happened.

Well, he got, uh, Steve's attention.

I know that. Yeah, you've heard that.

There's just—

I mean, you got Steve's attention, right? But in a different way. Also, yeah, in a different way. Yeah, because I was pissed off about the piece of shit Mac Mini I had. First one, piece of trash. Got a MacBook Pro out of it. Yeah, you did.

But I don't know, a phone call from him.

Yeah, well, I got a phone call from his secretary, then I talked to him. Yeah, right. Yeah, but I did.

Yeah, that's how they do stuff, right?

I talked to Donald Trump too, but I really didn't talk, I just listened. Of course. Yeah, that was still back when he was not a politician.

I think Donald Trump was really always a politician.

You know, that I just— I laugh about that. I was coming out of the tunnel on H3 headed towards Honolulu and know my phone rings and, you know, Donald, I'm like, I heard you've been talking to these guys that were on the Apprentice. I understand they want to do a podcast. I know there's a licensing issue we'll get it done. Don't worry. We'll take care of the legal. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're free to work with them. We'll get the. We'll get the paperwork done. Click. Oh, you know, I didn't even say three words.

You're furiously taking notes.

No, I'm driving.

Oh, you're driving when you're doing this?

Yeah, I'm on speakerphone, you know. All right, anyway, okay, well, uh, Rob, I guess we will play this by ear.

Yes, we shall. So let us know what you think, post in the comments here, and if you want to send an email, you can send it to me, robgreenlee@gmail.com, or send Tod a pestering message?

Sure. Um, we've had a lot of people watching, not very many people commenting. The live stream has a lot of people, Facebook has quite a number, but no one's made a comment. So what does everyone think?

Is this the end, or should it be the end?

Or, or does someone have a media— media media.show they want to give us, right?

Or do you think we should change the name of the show to, um, what could we change the show?

Oh God, we did this before.

This is dangerous. Years ago.

Years ago. Yeah, we did it during the show, so don't do it here because the domain name will get bought up before I can get it. What should we do?

Yeah, what should we have as a new show name if we were to revamp Well, and how could we change the, the format of the show?

Beauty Bible says pivot, guys, pivot. Pivot where? Yeah, that's the key.

Pivot where? And then, um, or should we continue to have this conversation between video and audio and AI and everything else? And, and AI here? Or are we just two old dogs that are not relevant anymore?

So James Gridland said to make sure that if we quit, to, um, encourage everyone to go over to listen to Pod News Weekly Review.

That's what—

oh, I'm sure you did. So yeah, that's what, uh, let's see here. Do I have— here we go. Oh, I didn't have it. James Gridland. Oh, let me do that again.

This is all wrong.

James Gridland. So anyway, um, He said send them all over to that show, and they do a good job with the news, you know.

So I heard that he had some recording problems with his live stage event and he had to cancel his live stage.

No, right? Yeah, no comment. Yeah, I don't— I think he was a little disgruntled.

Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I could understand. Yeah, I heard the details on it. So yeah, tough, tough deal to get everybody excited about doing something and then they cancel it.

Yeah. So I, I'm just, you know, what do you think, audience, for my dilemma? And this is not necessarily a show dilemma, but for my dilemma, how do we soften the message to make sure that new creators— this is what I'm worried about right now— new creators, how do we make them understand it's okay to do audio, it's okay to do video, and it's okay to do both? Your choice.

Your—

and how do we make it exciting again for them and pump some energy back into this? Um, I just think it's again the apps. There's some people are trying, the Podcasting 2.0 folks are trying, but the majority of big apps have failed this and are woefully behind. And I really didn't have that opinion until maybe a couple months ago.

It hasn't changed. Let's say that they don't do anything. They don't do anything. It doesn't doesn't change or do anything different, then guess what?

You're going to be just like me without a job in 5 years. And I don't want to be a— I, I hope not, because I do have a strategic plan to get to 2030 alive. Well, alive and the company thriving and growing. You know, so, you know, I'm, I'm looking 5 years ahead and taking all this stuff into account. Yeah, we're diversifying. You're gonna see it. It's still going to be media related.

I just— it's so hard to predict how this is going to play out. Yeah, very hard. Just in the next 24 months, I think it's beyond the scope of anybody's comprehension.

I, I think what will happen is the reality is going to set in that, as it should already be, creating media is hard. Good media is hard. And if you don't have a refined, good message and good content and good production— just like last week, you were pissed off. I was too. I totally blew out the video. I was like all the way through the show. I have no idea what happened.

So it's getting so complex and so sophisticated to, to play at the, at the game that's expected now.

It's—

oh yeah, I mean, that's, that's the reality of the situation.

But the problem is that this, that, that level, someone— again, there's people are just going to come in and they're going to create a show and they don't care. Businesses are going to come in. Sure.

You know. Sure, but, but they're not going to grow like a show that is created with a strong vision and a media team around it and marketing.

And I, you know, I, I'm hoping that there's still unicorns out there. You know, we see— you know, here's the crazy thing, we see tremendous growth on the audio side.

Yeah, I, you know, to a smaller number of shows.

Yeah, you know, we're still measuring 300 million downloads a month, you know.

So it's definitely risen to the top. So we've been saying that for years. What will ultimately happen to this podcast medium is, is that the cream will rise to the top.

But the problem is if there's no new cream to rise to the top, that's the problem.

Then, then I agree with you, Todd, then we become like legacy media, right?

This is Walter Conrad, you've heard the news.

It takes us back to another era where there's a limited selection of content creators and content.

And the only thing that's going to change that is some event or something that's going to make— you know, here's the thing, you hear about the current administration, everyone's squealing that, you know, oh, we're gonna be sacrificed and there's no free speech. I think we're in an era of the most free speech ever, because if you were in an era of no free speech, you couldn't say that. They usually round off and head to the gulag, right?

I think we all got a taste of what the lack of free speech was during the pandemic.

Oh, don't go there because people are going to think it's the opposite right now, so be careful.

Um, this is a, you know, again, best time media narrative changes, but the reality doesn't.

They're all, you know, in, in all honesty when a politician's lips is moving, they're all lying to you, you know. So, you know, just keep that in mind.

That's a harsh reality to accept, Todd, is that everything we've been told all these years have probably been deceptions, right?

Uh, I, you know, it's okay. So I've told this, we're really long, but I'll tell you, I'll tell this story. When I was in the Navy and when I had my tickets and I had all kinds of, you know, I was read in pretty deep on security-wise from a classification level And I could go into work and I'd log into two special computers, actually three. And so those that are in the know understand 1, 2, 3, how high the level went, because at the number 3 level was really, really high. And I would go in there and I would read— there'd be— it wouldn't be like the news, but there'd be the message board, right? And I saw the ground truth of stuff that was happening out throughout the world. And pretty reliable ground truth analysis, stuff, after-action reports, all this stuff. And then a day or two or three later on the news, there would be something that would be said, and I'd go, oh, that's interesting. And they would get it about 25% right, and the other 75% was wrong, really wrong. But that 25%, I would never say, oh, that part's right, but that part's wrong, because I would have ended up, you know, in a gulag. I'd arrested. And, um, so it was always comical to me to see what they got right, what they got wrong. And they so latched on to that 75% that was wrong and shared that narrative so much that the general public thought the whole story was right, and only 25% was right. And of course, you can't correct the record unless something is declassified, and usually it never was. And so I see stuff in the news now and I look and I'm like, so if it's something about the government or something, and I said, okay, that 25% is right, the other 75% is wrong. And if you can always keep that in mind, and this was over 20-plus years, you keep in mind that 25% of what the media is telling you is probably right, the other 75% is bullshit, you're probably in a pretty good spot on both sides of the fence, right? Doesn't matter if it's Fox, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, either. You know, they have their own twist, but they're going to get about 25% of it right.

So that's 25% of information you get is they're lying to you?

No, 75%.

They just got it wrong.

Lying to you? They didn't— not lying, they just— sides of the fence, right? Doesn't matter if it's just made up shit. Yeah, but, but you get all the truth here in podcasting.

See, always on this show, we're always going to tell the truth.

Yeah, but it is interesting to hear what a couple of shows have said about running cover prior election and not telling the truth on their shows. That's probably worthy of a whole discussion. When a podcaster admits that they run cover and didn't tell the truth, how can you trust a show that admits that they didn't tell the truth on the show because they wanted to fucking win? Yeah, that, that should concern people more than anything. If you have a podcaster that has purposely held information back that they should have been talking about in their show, politics or not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How, how can you, how can you listen to a show and say that they being credible in what they're saying?

Yeah, I think you have to be careful these days. Yeah, don't put yourself in a position where you've lost credibility.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and they were bragging about it. Yeah, I think I took that one to the grave.

Some of them will.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, let us know.

Todd@blueberry.com, Rob@robgreenlee.com. I wouldn't use that one.

Oh no, Rob.Greenlee.

Which one?

It, it rob.greenlee@gmail.com. Okay, that's the better one.

All right. Yeah, I don't have the email address for my own domain name right now.

Well, I'm glad I set this to go to 5 o'clock on the live item because we made it 2 hours.

Yeah, it's true, we just crossed over, didn't we?

Yes, we did.

This will be—

all right, this will be a big video download. All right, everybody, we will see more to follow. Uh, is it the end? We don't know.

Time will tell. Let us know what you think. Should this be the end? Should we be like Rob and Todd?

Oh, it should be. Should we be the— all right, everyone. Hey, and AIs, you can still index the show. You're all good to use everything that we publish here. Everyone, thanks. Thanks for being here. We'll see you maybe next week.

Yeah, maybe.

We'll see. All right, take care. Bye-bye. Bye.