What is a Podcast Now?

Well, welcome to Podcast Tips. I'm happy to be here tonight, and it's great to have you here with me. Thank you so much for tuning in. And so tonight we're going to dive into what is a podcast anymore, and has the understanding and the definition of what a podcast changed. Is it redefining the medium that we know of as podcasting to understand, given the context of the market today in 2025, and as you look to the future, exactly what a podcast is? And I think it's an important discussion to have. And I think that there's some historical context here. And then there's some more modern contexts that need to be kind of blended together to have a, a better understanding of how we got here over the last 20 years and where we are right now. And what is the benefit of seeing this word podcast in the world? Now granted, you know, there's lots of layers to this And I think we're all kind of in this weird time of trying to decipher what a podcast is. And it used to be simple. And really, even the simple explanation doesn't jive necessarily with the perception of the medium that we have today. So it's a fascinating thing that I've been thinking about for 20 years. You know, I've lived through the very early days of podcasting when it was very simple. Podcasting was audio and video content or files that are delivered via RSS feeds. And I said, let me emphasize this, I said audio and video from as far back as 20 2005. That goes back to the timeframe when Apple entered the support of the podcasting medium. So from the very early days, this was an audio and video medium. Let me emphasize that. And it's only been in recent years that we have let a platform like YouTube kind of capture the market for video podcasts. So this is, this is something that everybody needs to get really, really clear as they think about where we are today and where we are going. Even in the early days, podcasting also embraced the delivery of PDF files. Or Word docs via RSS. Apple even supported the delivery of PDF files. So, you know, podcatchers caught a lot of different stuff and it wasn't just audio files. And so that's what's made this medium susceptible to being captured by big players is that This Medium decided in about, you know, 2010 timeframe that they were just kind of gonna let, um, let the video side go and just let YouTube have it. And so a lot of the content creators back in the, probably, probably starting in like 2008, uh, '09 timeframe decided that they were just gonna move all their video content over to YouTube. And like I said, that was back in like 2007, '08, '09, '10. So that was very early when podcasting and creators, podcasters decided to move their video content over to YouTube. This is not a new phenomenon. This is something that's been with us since the very early days. And this is something that I worked on when I worked at Microsoft on the Zune portable media player. And I can actually show this to you and actually symbolize to you what exactly was going on. Video had an equal place in the podcasting space with audio. Back in this time frame, and I'm talking about when the Zoom started in like 2006 to 2014, this portable media player device that I'm going to show you had a toggle in it that would allow you to toggle between audio and video. So I'm trying to get the device to actually load. Anyway, this is the Zune portable media player and it had a large screen on it, not unlike the, the iPod did in the later versions of the iPod. It had a video, a larger video screen. So here is the, the interface of the, of the Zune podcast area. And you can look at the top up here of the navigation and it shows, I don't know if you can read it, but it says video. And you just tap right next to it and it throttles over to display audio. So you had a list of audio and version, audio and video versions of podcasts in the catalog. So I could just tap right here and I could play a video podcast right on the, on the portal media player. This happens to be an Apple keynote back in the, back in the early days that I added to the podcast catalog when I was working at Microsoft on Zune. So this was a, this was one of the last Zune HD devices. And you can see, if you can see on there, that the, the company had a tombstone engraved on the back of the Zune. And so this was the last run of, of the Zune. But this Zune, um, basically ceased production in about 2010, which is about the same time frame that video kind of left the podcasting space. And so, so, but all this time, even up till today, um, video is still supported by Apple Podcasts. It's still supported by many of the, of the podcast consumption apps right now. And a lot of people don't realize this, but, uh, even Pocket Casts supports video. I think that it's, it's not being supported in the right way, but that's a different conversation. Video is part of podcasting in its ecosystem today. Podbean, Blueberry, and Libsyn, all three of those support traditional video podcasting. And I do believe that there's a few other podcast hosts that do as well, like like Hubhopper and some of the other ones that are trying to be more progressive and also think about Podcasting 2.0 type of processes as well, which the Podcasting 2.0 process has offered this option of having alternative enclosures, right? So you could have one RSS feed that has an audio file and a video file. In the same item tag in the RSS. And then it's just up to the players to support that option. So I wanted to also reinforce this because I worked on the editorial side at Zune as well. I just wanted to show you what the early Zune platform kind of supported here. Oops, let's see here. I clicked on the wrong one here. So let me add this back up here again. So it may be hard to see this on the screen. So this was the Zune Marketplace software that I worked on from like 2007 to like 2013, '14 timeframe. This was client software that was similar to, iTunes. It was a competitive platform to iTunes. And if you looked at the older iTunes platform, you will see kind of a similar type of thing. But on this screen, you will actually see at the top those 4 top featured podcasts at the top that happen to be college basketball, The Adam and Dr. Drew Show. Those two on the left were audio podcasts. And the two podcasts are actually the Real Time with Bill Maher, that third one over, is actually an audio podcast at the time. But the fourth one over, the Sounders FC podcast, was a video podcast. And then I can also show you another version of this too. And oftentimes I would actually feature an audio podcast, 2 audio podcasts in that upper feature area on the left. Those were both audio and the 2 on the right were video podcasts. So I equally promoted audio and video podcasts. In a podcast RSS-based platform. And if you look at the, the featured areas below, like, uh, just, just below the large one, it may be difficult for you to see, and I can't zoom in on it, but it, but, but it's 3 areas here, but 2 of them, each of the areas here is we recommend dash video is the top one. So The video was at the top, not below. And right below that is we recommend audio. So we offered in the early days of podcasting, a complete ecosystem of audio and video. And what's hot down here, the third row down below, down here, was a mixture of audio and video. And about 30% of the podcasting platforms at that time, or the creation and the consumption side, were consuming video. And if you look at the, you know, this portable media player that I was showing you has a fairly large screen. It had like almost a 3-inch screen on a small, very small portable media player that you could take with you anywhere and listen to content on it. So, you know, I, I really want to drive this point home that, that, uh, podcasting was, was a lot more than what people perceive it is today. And, and it's definitely, um, how can I say, being misunderstood on why this is happening. And I also want to show too, and I, I haven't pulled this up yet, but I've got a, a, a screen share that I wanted to share with you too that basically has a document that I got from YouTube. This was back in, uh, 2014 when I was working for PodcastOne, and they had a— YouTube had a whole team that I worked with down in Los Angeles that was looking for partners to work with, um, for trying to drive podcasters over to, to YouTube. So they had an initiative inside the company all the way back in 2014 to work with podcasters to get them to do shows in their platform. So it's something that has been around a long time. This is like a 2-page kind of document. It goes through 10 items. And the first one on the list is titled Catch-up viewing. Let audiences decide when to tune in. So it's all about scheduling when you're publishing the episode. And then number 2 is create bite-sized content. Cut long segments into engaging clips. Now, does that sound familiar with, you know, what's happening in the podcasting space today? I think it does. I think it sounds very familiar. Number 3 is high-impact metadata. So making sure that the metadata is put in there correctly, the titles and the— back then it wasn't as big of an issue around the thumbnails, they actually just typically did screenshots or the logo or something like that of the creator. But usually it was usually screenshots, usually. And then they started to evolve into this more advanced approach to thumbnails. And then number 4, or actually I'll jump down to number 5, and it says audio only. No problem. So upload your audio-only podcast with a title card that uses annotations to timestamps discussed. And what they were, what they did through social sharing was publish your audio in there and create a fixed thumbnail to represent the audio, not unlike they're doing still today. So You know, this was back in 2014, so there was efforts to embrace podcasters, get podcasters into the catalog. Just, they had— the only thing that was, that was really that's different today is that, uh, YouTube decided to add a playlist called Podcasts. So that's, that's really the only thing that's really changed. Uh, and then YouTube has been more public about their embrace of podcasting. And as their audiences have moved that direction, you know, and watching more and more content, and there's more and more content creators making programming over there, then, you know, it becomes a higher priority for them. So, so it really gets back to the podcast industry. Really gave video to YouTube, going back in the earliest times in this medium. And so for us to be all spun up about, oh, you know, oh, is a podcast audio and video? That's kind of missing the point to some degree of where this medium is now and what its history has been. And I just want to say that this isn't anything against audio. Audio is primary here, and audio should be primary because frankly, that's where most of the consumption has been in podcasting. Now, this new era that we're in is only different because we have a different generation coming through. We have a heightened interest on the part of the consumption side to consume more video. And we're seeing this YouTube platform become such a powerhouse of content. That really wasn't the case back in the early days of podcasting. YouTube was not that significant of a platform in the early days of podcasting. It was trying to grow. It was trying to get content creators. There weren't that many content creators back then, so they wanted to build partnerships with content creators to start publishing video into their platform. There were some very good video podcasters back in the early days of this medium that are not that much different than what we see today. So it's all about having historical context here. Now I do want to talk about today and how we need to think about this, but I don't think we need to go down this path of trying to rename what we're doing here into some like vodcast or, or some other name. That's come up so many times over the years that people think somehow they're going to fix something that's wrong with podcasting by changing the name. It's a, it's a terrible name, or it's a name that, that implies an association with a, a dead platform called the iPod. They were accurate. When most podcasters in the early days of podcasting did not like the term podcast, they, they, they rejected it. They didn't really like it. They wanted to call it netcasting, or they wanted to call it call it, you know, VODcast, or they wanted to call it, you know, a bunch of different names that never caught on because podcasting was the name. And why do we want to abandon something that has so much existing awareness? You know, and the other part of this too that has changed is is that when podcasting started, it was a part of a very vibrant and fairly strong but fairly small independent podcaster community. And at the very beginning, we saw public radio got into audio podcasting. They were not into video podcasting. And to some degree, commercial radio started to get into it too, but they were a little bit further behind public radio. But independent podcasters built this medium to what it is today. Um, that's the backbone of it. A lot of even the biggest podcasters of today came out of being independent creators. You know, even Joe Rogan, the biggest one in the world, he started back in 2009. Now granted, you could claim that he was a celebrity, had, you know, TV shows and had some level of fame, you know, but I wouldn't say that he was a top celebrity. I would say, you know, look at Marc Maron. He's another example. He was kind of a comedian that was— he started back in 2009, and so did Adam Carolla. Um, and all those guys had— I would, I would, I, I wouldn't even consider them to be A-level celebrities. I would consider them to be maybe B-level celebrities. And I, I've heard Mark talk about this. He was, he was struggling with his comedy career back then, and this was an avenue for him to connect. And that's what happened to a lot of comedians in Los Angeles, was this was a medium that they could express themselves, and they were funny, humorous, and that would connect with a community around them. And that's what oftentimes they built. And also, podcasting in the early years was not a commercial medium. I'll have to say that again. When podcasting started, if you were running ads in your show, you were shunned by the community, because I was, because I was doing a radio show when I started. And I, I got kind of hate comments from people in the podcast community, um, that, that listened to my show and it had some ads in it, and I was labeled a sellout. So, you know, you know, not always looking at the past is helpful to understanding what to do today, but it does give you context to why we're where we're at today. And business models in podcasting have evolved, um, from primarily no interest in, in business around podcasting at all. The whole idea of commercialism was antithetical to the, to the foundation and the creation of this medium. And then host reads, authentic host endorsement, host reads is what really opened the, the box to the opportunity of being able to make an income from your, your show that you spent time creating. And in the early days, most of the distribution was done by portable MP3 players. That were sideloaded, or you would download it to iTunes or the Zune software, and then you would transfer it via a cable to your, your Zune portable media player via a dock or a wire that would plug into a USB port, and it would transfer the files into the device. This was before you were able to just access them over the ubiquitous internet on your mobile phone like we do today. So, and that's the old definition of what a podcast is. And I agree, we've moved on. I've lived through every phase of this. And so we're basically moved into this next era, which is the, the shift that's happening now. YouTube is being seen as the biggest podcasting platform because people are consuming a lot of video now and people are seeing video podcasters, podcasters creating content on YouTube, which has been, like I told you in the early part of this episode, has been there all along. Really. So even, even since the start of YouTube, podcasters have been part of building that platform. So that's just a, that's just a fact. It's just not well known or, or even thought of in the proper context. And, and now with Spotify leaning into video, though, I would say in a very, as typical with Spotify, kind of a very bumbling process. You know, even Spotify's entry into audio podcasting was a, was a very much of a long and struggling process for them and everybody else in the industry that had to work with them. They have done very well on the audio side, but that's because they got a boost really from the industry that saw an opportunity with them to really help grow podcasting. And the same thing has existed with Apple too. I spent, I've been to the Apple corporate offices so many times over the years in group meetings and have known most of the teams over there since the very early days, since 2005. And so they've been very, very pro-RSS open-based podcasting, um, all along. Though I think there's other interests out there, other platforms that are less interested in RSS-based distribution. So, so now we're seeing kind of Spotify emphasizing leaning into video and then maybe kind of taking a little bit more of a backseat to the audio side, just because maybe it's not as profitable as it was. But there's economic forces that are pushing on this too. I think podcasting is going to lean more into live events and merchandise and social media and newsletters and private communities and lots of other, other aspects of this. Um, and, and the radio-rooted stars are kind of losing ground to digital natives. And so, so when I say that is that if, you know, traditional radio broadcast kind of platforms and stars and stuff are kind of falling behind, you know, especially if you look at media brands. I say that the whole market is shifting towards personal brands. People like to follow people. People like to listen to people. They don't like to listen to narratives about a brand or a company, like a corporate brand or a company, that's not as personal. Podcasting and new media that we're seeing today is really a more of a personal medium, which leans into personal brands. That's why when you see like a big media personality, like a Chris Cuomo, If you go to his show on NewsNation on YouTube and you look at how many people are watching his show on NewsNation on YouTube, and then you go to Chris Cuomo's— Chris Cuomo's project, his own personal, um, video show on, on YouTube, his numbers are like 3 times as much as his numbers on his show on NewsNation. Because people want to follow Chris because they like Chris, or they trust Chris, or they appreciate him and his perspectives. They don't want to go to News Nation to hear what Chris has to say, even though that would make logical sense, right? It's the same guy. But people are leaning towards personal brands now more, more than ever. Now granted, this is a little bit of a distraction from the point of the topic of my show tonight. But I think it's a key takeaway to understand what's happening in the market right now and why the media is shifting away from these big cable TV brands and cable channels and shifting more into media brands that are being developed by media personalities, people. I think that's the key way to, to think about this. And also this understanding about podcasters is shifting in another way as well. It's really about the creator journey. It's really about creating content. It's not so much about just being a podcaster, though you could make a case based on what I've said tonight that calling everyone that creates content online a podcaster. Well, it depends. Usually if you're a written creator, you're typically not going to be defined as a podcaster. If you're going to be defined as a podcaster, that would be a creator that creates audio and/or video. That fits the definition of a podcaster. But if you're a writer, then you're just, you know, you're a digital writer or you're an author is where that falls into play. And lots of authors become podcasters. They take their written word, they convert it into spoken word or audio and video, and then what they're doing turns into a podcast. Or an audiobook, which has been, um, a type of content that's been mixed in with the, uh, podcasting medium for many years as well. So, so the really the big question is, do we move away from the term podcast, or do we embrace it, hug it, make it make it bigger, encapsulate video and audio, and all of us accept that and say, let's go to our strength. Why do we want to fragment ourselves by calling video, you know, VODcast now? But, you know, the only case that could be made is because we as the industry have been promoting podcasts to mean audio only. And I think in the long run, that choice on the part of each one of us in the podcast community may be pulling the rug out from under the industry. Because I'm not sure that the future looks as brightly on audio only as audio and video. I'm not saying this to say you don't have every right or any, or every reason to create audio-only content. That's the whole thing about podcasting is that it's included audio and video. It's not to the exclusion of either one. So it's a little bit of a mindset adjustment that I think the industry needs to make. You know, now being a podcaster is extending into building community, but the— and human voice is the core here. Now we're seeing AI come into this game and try and disrupt that too. So we as an industry have to get in sync with how we want this AI thing to play out. You know, human voices have ruled this medium for its entire life, and I don't see humans going away. So unless we're creating content for other AIs, there's no reason why we can't keep the focus on human-created content. Now, AI can play a supporting role. So, you know, so the other part of this is Why does all this matter? You know, I think one of the reasons that this matters is because I think we have to be all clear on this definition that we're going to undertake involves metrics, involves inclusion of every aspect of video and audio. That can be put into this bucket that we can create some commonality of standards and ways of measuring and just recognizing what this is and making a big tent instead of trying to fragment our tent. You know, audio versus video labeling is important in the interface. But it's not important in how we think of ourselves as creators, content creators, or creator podcasters, or podcast creators. Maybe that's the right way for us to think about it so we can roll up all this stuff and build a much more powerful platform for podcasting. That includes YouTube, includes Spotify, but it's not to the exclusion of open RSS. And, and I think the podcast industry has to decide whether or not they're going to seed RSS-based video to Spotify and YouTube. As the only way that that same content can be consumed. Because I believe we're giving up that part of podcasting to our detriment. Because we're now giving, just like Spotify has demonstrated, we gave them a way to disrupt the audio by saying, if you upload the video directly to us, we'll just take the audio out you know, just remove your audio via RSS and you gave us the content via your video. So we feel free to just replace that audio. So we as an industry are empowering these folks to disrupt us. So if we're going to capture control of this back, we need to encourage the industry to do what video podcasting was in the early days, which is RSS-based. Now, I'm not going to die on the hill on this. I'm just going to— I'm just trying to tell you a different perspective than you're typically hearing out there. You know, do we want to be part of a big tent or do we want to be part of a small tent? And this example I'm gonna share with you right now really kind of exemplifies that. Are podcasters trapped in what is termed the influencer market, which is $9 billion of revenue? So all of us now, podcasters, are considered influencers. So we're not considered podcasters, we're considered to be influencers. We create media, right, that attract attention, that influences other people. It's just another form of advertising. Or are we staying in the audio niche? Podcasters are just audio. And guess what that revenue opportunity is currently? $2 billion. $9 billion or $2 billion? Your choice. If we look at it from a big tent perspective, it's $9 billion plus $2 billion. But if we look at it from an exclusionary standpoint where we ignore entire segments, and that's not even taking into account what the advertising revenue is for video. You throw that on top of the $11 billion there, and that number gets really big. But if we still consider ourselves to be just, well, we're audio only because that's what we believe in. Okay, just make sure you want to die on that hill. Yeah, um, yeah, I mean, I, I, I'm not all about commercialism or anything like that either. I'm more about what's doing best for what the creators want, but I also am aware of what the audience wants. And the audience wants video and audio increasingly. Now that may not be a direct one-on-one, one-to-one relationship, but it certainly is one that's becoming more and more important to more and more consumers of this content. I agree with people saying that there's more places in people's lives to consume audio. So audio will still remain strong because that's the case. And I agree with that. That's been one of the powers of podcasting from the very early days is that, you know, you can listen to it on the bus, on the train, while you're mowing the lawn, while you're on the treadmill. Watching a video program while you're on the treadmill or out mowing the lawn is probably not a good idea. It's not to say it couldn't happen, or, you know, even watching video in your autonomous driving car, which is coming. People will be able to watch video in their cars while they're driving here within a few years. That's coming. So this listening to audio only in your car is not going to be with us forever. So, you know, we were all worried about losing connection to the radio in the car. Well, this is the next step, is losing audio consumption in the car. So, I mean, I mean, the cars of the future may not even have steering wheels and pedals. So that's, that's, you know, this medium progresses because of technology. And it evolves because of technology. It evolves because of choices by big platforms. And podcasting has always been driven by proprietary platforms to some degree. Even when Apple entered the medium, they had a proprietary platform. Even when I worked for Zune from Microsoft, that was a proprietary platform. Both those platforms tapped into an open RSS, open ecosystem that we still have today. And it's one of the few open technology ecosystems that exist today. And the pressures that we're seeing pushing against us are pushing us towards an increasingly powerful walled garden proprietary ecosystem podcasting market, which has some of the players in the industry have an intention to disrupt RSS and get content increasingly from direct upload to API-based distribution, which has always been kind of part of the, the medium. This whole thing of social media sharing has been a part of podcasting platforms for many, many, many years. So, you know, it's not a new idea, but as, as people, as these big platforms want people to publish directly to them and have them host the content, then that's where I see that'll probably happen more. But it's, you know, that same process can happen via RSS. These big proprietary platforms can take your content and just download one copy off of your RSS feed and store it on their servers, and they actually handle the, the delivery. And many podcast consumption platforms have pushed for that. I've, I've dealt with a bunch of them over the years. They wanted, you know, a lot of the big platforms, even Spotify in the early days when they wanted to get into it, Pandora and And there's been a few others that wanted to just capture a copy of the media file, and then they handle the streaming or the redistribution of the content, and it doesn't come off of the centralized podcast hosting platforms like Libsyn or Buzzsprout. Those folks would have gotten disrupted, especially as you look at automatic advertising now. Programmatic advertising, automatic insertion advertising, that stuff gets disrupted in an ecosystem where proprietary platforms cache episodes, 'cause they're gonna want an ad-free version of the content so they can do the ad insertion. Now, are they gonna do a fair revenue share deal with the creator? That's the tension that we have in the market right now. With, uh, with Spotify. So, and, and that is just, uh, just a reality of the market. A lot of people are not putting their video into Spotify because it's, it's not seen as a, as a financially beneficial decision because the audio, the automatic advertising and audio gets disrupted. And content creators are losing money by publishing video into Spotify today. Spotify needs to fix that if they want to compete with YouTube, because you can actually make more money on, on YouTube with video than you can with Spotify today. And Spotify wants people to consume video and wants creators. They're going to have to create a more attractive solution. Because they're the underdog right now, even though they're a big platform. So, you know, so as we look ahead, podcasting is a— it is kind of a moving medium. Uh, things are evolving, things are changing. Um, creators and platforms are, are, are the keys now. They've always been the keys, and, and those Fans of those creators are really defining the market right now. It's about what they want, but we as creators need to understand what they want and also understand what this medium is being seen as and perceived as. And it is likely— I'll put my little futurist hat on and say that the future of this medium may lean a little bit more towards video. Now, a lot of you out there aren't going to like that because you've invested a lot in your audio infrastructure and your audio shows and your audio focus, and you're doing a terrific job with that. But the future is moving forward towards more video and maybe more virtual reality video. But at the end of the day, the human voice is going to be strong. Now, that human voice may be disrupted a little bit by AI voices. So we may see some success on that front. You know, and I want to ask you, those that have been watching this tonight, um, what's a podcast to you? How do you consume it? And it's going to be different for everybody. Some people are going to be like, well, I'm all into the audio podcast stuff. And then others will say, well, I'm— I watch some audio stuff, and then I— there's a few shows that I watch in video too. And then there's others that will say, I, I watch everything on YouTube on my big screen TV in my living room, which the, the research is showing that that's what's going on. So here at the end of the show, here in the next, uh, couple minutes, I want to start taking your, your comments and your questions here as we kind of wrap the show up here, and I want to get your thoughts on all this. You know, where is podcasting today? What do you see it as? What would you like it to be? And also, are you shocked by what I've said tonight about what this medium really represents and has represented for almost two decades, and how we— maybe many of us have got it so wrong? And why that's happened. And, and I, I do get that the market pushes towards an outcome that is desired. But maybe as an industry, we're just not thinking about this right. Maybe we're trying to stop something that should happen. I think there's a lot of fear that Spotify and YouTube are going to take over a lot of power in this medium and disrupt the monetization that has been built around audio. Well, I'd say that the monetization built around audio right now is pretty much stagnant, and it may be stagnant for the reason that we're thinking too small. So I want to hear what you think here. Let me pull up the comments here and see if I can go through these and see what all of you are thinking. I see a lot of comments in here. It looks like— Dave looks like, looks like, uh, Dave Siff writes, uh, great perspective on the history of video podcasting. That's old is new again in 2025, and the job market is flooded with laid-off TV people. Well, it's also flooded with a bunch of laid-off audio podcasting people too, and podcasting is a great place to, to land. Yeah, well, I think it's, it's because all these things are kind of mushing together, you know. Um, TV is, is being disrupted by video podcasting, is, you know, would be my comment on that, Dave. Um, and so we're seeing a lot of people that were entrenched into each of these silos of sorts. Audio podcasting had a silo, and then TV had a silo, and then YouTube had its own silo. And so now everything is kind of like— everything's the, the attraction of the, of the planets around the sun of podcasting are kind of collapsing. All the legacy media is, is moving more and more towards doing what is probably closer termed as a video podcast. It just happens to be on, on YouTube. So that's where the, the worlds are colliding. Sure, there's Hulu, and sure, there's still cable, cable TV channels that are out there that are doing more and more streaming. And I think we're going to see those media brands turn into being much, much stronger kind of digital creators. Now, the challenge that like a CNN has or MSNBC is that those are media brands, and people don't like media brands anymore. So people want to follow people they trust. So you're seeing creators that are going off on their own. And there is some interest on the part of these big media companies, these big cable TV media companies, the very large media-creating brands out there, to try and scoop up these, these online individual personalities. And I'm not sure it's going to work. 'Cause I'm not sure it's really what the audiences want. So that's a long answer to your question, Dave. Thank you so much for asking it. I think it's a probing question that opens up a lot of discussion and it may be a good topic for another show. And then looks like Harold Gilchrist writes, at a high macro level, the industry needs to recognize that that podcasting exists across multiple platforms, each with its own structures, YouTube, Spotify, and RSS. Harold, I tend to agree with that, though I think a lot of people in the podcasting medium don't like that. I think they wanna keep to their silos. But to start thinking of just media, audio and video, in a much more complete, comprehensive way, though I think is the path that the future is before us. And we can either embrace it or not. It's kind of, it's all of ours choices. And I do think that people are choosing to think with audio and video together increasingly. And that's just how it's gonna move. And then Harold, Gilchrist writes again here, how these platforms approach podcasting is ultimately their decisions. It's, it's that straightforward. I mean, it is each player in this industry, each creator in this industry has lots of choices to make. And that's what makes this market complicated right now is that there are a lot of choices to make. The ongoing debate over video versus audio has unnecessarily complicated this issue for years. I agree with you because all you got to do is look at the, look at the history of this medium, and it's not as complicated as people are trying to make it today. And, and I think that because we've made it complicated, we've left the door open for RSS-delivered video to be disrupted. So, um, and that's kind of what we're seeing in the market today. Spotify and YouTube do not accept video via RSS today. That's the disruption that I'm talking about. Because if we as an industry had embraced video via RSS all these years, then these platforms would have felt obligated to embrace it just like they did with the audio side because the audio side was so much stronger. So, you know, this whole video revolution in podcasting happened before Spotify was ever in the podcasting medium. They weren't involved in it, just like I showed you with the Zune. This was a big company, big media company, Microsoft with Xbox, that was embracing video podcasting in their portable media platform. This is This is why Apple still supports video podcasts today. So if we had stayed on this, this industry focus of video podcasting, then YouTube wouldn't have gotten as much traction as they have today. And so I think a lot of ways we've kind of created our own problem here. And, and Harold, thank you so much for the comments here. And then Matt, Madero writes, uh, I watch and listen, but I always defend RSS. Yeah, and Matt, I think you should. And I, I'm a big supporter of RSS, and I would love to see our Podcasting 2.0 initiative catch fire and be embraced by everybody. And the alternative enclosure tag and the live lit tag— as you all know, I love doing live stuff, and I do 2 shows a week live. So it's, it's something, and to have that all pass through RSS is, it would be fantastic, but the industry needs to embrace its own self here and, and, and embrace this stuff. Sometimes the business models don't 100% work the way people would like them to work. So Matt, uh, thank you so much for the comment here and I'll pull up another one here. Podcast Hero writes, um, a podcast to me is an audio show or a video show distributed via RSS. Well, that's awesome. I like that and I agree with that. A YouTube video is a YouTube show unless it is also distributed via RSS for, for, for an equivalent. Okay. I can accept that, but it is ignoring the market reality that the listening or the viewing side of this still sees that YouTube episode as a podcast today. And YouTube has labeled it such, so it's playing right into that trend. So that's kind of at the core of the friction there. Is that, you know, we have decided that podcasting is only RSS-based, and that may be too narrow at this point for us to really understand the market in the context of what the consumers of this content is seeing in the market. So, but I think it's a good comment, and I appreciate that. Thank you so much. And, and Rick Savoia writes, "It's a podcast if it's distributed from an RSS feed and can be freely listened to or watched without having to log into any platform to do it." Okay, Rick. Yeah, I mean, that's the origin story of this medium called podcasting, is that most of the podcasting platforms that existed in the early days of podcasting didn't really have a login requirement. And that's something that's developed in the modern technology era as these platforms want to get more user data and want to monetize and want to be able to deliver personalization and advertising and create revenue from those opportunities. But really, at the end of the day, that login is really about data gathering on listeners and audiences, which is what the advertisers are increasingly demanding of the podcast ecosystem. And they're— the podcast ecosystem is very, very jealous right now of the capabilities of audience assessment and data metrics that YouTube is is offering the consumption side. And there's a lot of pressure to push podcasting towards more of like a YouTube model because of what the advertisers want. The advertisers— that's why we're locked at $2 billion on the audio podcasting ad revenue side, is because there's a lot of big brand buyers that don't want to invest that much money in podcasting because they can't see the deep metrics around How many ads were listened to and how deep into the content was being consumed and was their ad actually heard and was their ad, you know, what's the count on how many people actually listened to that ad and what's the demographic profile of who listened to that ad, right? That's the level of data that is holding back the monetization of audio podcasting today. At least on the open side. You know, Spotify and Apple have access to that data. Now, Apple is not an advertising platform. So, you know, is Apple gonna get into advertising? I'm not sure. They tried to get into advertising a few years ago and it completely flopped for them. And I haven't seen them try again. Um, yeah, so, and, and I see Podcast Hero made another comment here, which is true, um, because it's, it's not a modern thing now. But, um, yeah, he says he still hasn't found the mythical PDF podcaster. Well, it was usually done, uh, as a, as an extra attachment to each episode. So a podcaster would put out an audio episode or video episode, and then they would publish in a second post— they would post like the, the show notes and things like that in a document, and then they could post another supporting document that happened to be a PDF. And Apple actually supported that, and most of the The feed readers, the earlier podcast feed readers, supported it as well. It was just another attachment, right? It was pretty simple. So that's— that is true though. There weren't many PDF podcasters per se. It's not like that there were podcasts that were created, that were created only in the PDF format. So yeah, so I hope that answers that. That question, but it's a fun one to think about anyway. It says Rick Savoia writes, whether audio or video, if it isn't distributed primarily via RSS, it isn't a podcast. It's just an audio or video presentation. Yeah, and I think, you know, I think that's the perception the industry has right now, and I agree with you, Rick. I just wonder if, if we're being driven by that against the perception of the audience. The audience is not seeing it that way. The industry wants to think of themselves in that way, but I'm not sure that the, the audiences are increasingly thinking in that same line of reasoning. They don't care about RSS. Audiences don't really care about RSS, and RSS as a factor in media distribution right now is becoming less and less important. In the earlier days of podcasting, as you might recall, Rick, people would cut and paste around RSS feeds, links, those URLs that you could cut and paste into a podcast catcher player of sorts. And she wouldn't have to be entirely reliant on a directory to find content. So, but increasingly audiences are not even seeing RSS. So it's not, they don't care about it. Audiences don't, podcasters care about it. So I hope that kind of muddies the water even more for you, Rick. And then Podcast Hero writes again here, YouTube got traction because they offered free video hosting. That is very true. And one of the disadvantages on the, on the video podcasting side was that bandwidth was expensive in the early days of podcasting, in the earlier years when this transfer started to happen in the mid, uh, like in the 2007, 2008, 2009 timeframe when video podcasters were transitioning over to YouTube to save money on their bandwidth from their hosting. But what's changed now is that bandwidth is a lot cheaper now than it was back then. The, the bandwidth to deliver video files is not as expensive as it used to be. So you have to ask yourself, you know, what's, what's the business model for this? And that's always been the challenging question, is that if you were going to host a video podcast feed on Libsyn or Podbean or Blueberry or any of these platforms, you would have to pay a little bit more to host that, that file because those hosting plans were more expensive. So, but it's not like it used to be back in 2009 and 2010 when a video podcaster a significant chunk of the venture capital that maybe they got to build their network in the early days went to paying their bandwidth bill to deliver those files. Now granted, the scale is a lot higher now. So like a Joe Rogan video podcast version uses a lot more bandwidth than the audio file version does of of his same show. But I would say that he gets a lot of views through his video experience now, and he always has. So, and then Harold writes another one here. So I think we're having a real conversation here about this. Harold Gilchrist writes, if I had to identify the root of the problem with audio podcasts, I'd say it's because the industry has never truly listened to its non-podcaster audience, the actual listeners. Yeah, I think we've, we've decided that we're going to chart our own path and we like RSS and we're going to put all of our energy behind it. And, and it's going to be our, our defining principle is that we're going to be RSS. And that may be, you know, there was good reason for that for many, many years. But I do think times have changed now and that RSS is not the primary thing that people think about. It's still part of the ecosystem and it's still important to creators and the people that distribute this content. It's an important player in this, but the listener side just doesn't care anymore. What they see is content. Spotify is not exposing RSS feeds. Apple Podcasts still has some legacy embrace of RSS in their settings area with each show, but that stuff's been fading away for many years as well. So, you know, audiences just aren't seeing RSS as something that's important. All they want to do is get access to the content. And we have to ask ourselves, is that going to drive, um, a change on the industry side? I think the jury's out on that a little bit. I think it just depends on what the largest number of the big platforms want to embrace. And I think all of us just need to open our minds to the fact that podcasting and RSS may be just one part of being a podcaster, may not be the only part like it used to be. And then Harold also writes, um, Harold Gilcrest writes, instead of they relying on surveys and spreadsheets, maybe more to— more so recently, but I, I have yet to see genuine engagement with listeners. Yeah, I think that the industry— I think that only happens with like Edison Research and Nielsen and some of these research entities that actually call listeners and get their, get their responses. It's just podcasters talking to other podcasters and hosting companies. Yeah, and, and we are locked into this RSS-based conversation. And that's part of what I'm trying to do tonight with the show that I'm doing, is I'm trying to, you know, kind of open people's eyes to what the history of this medium is, as opposed to You know, maybe how it's changing and how maybe all of us need to open our minds a little bit to, to maybe thinking a little bit more inclusively about what this medium represents to the listener side and also to the business community side, the advertising side. They're not as locked— the advertising side doesn't really care about RSS. Advertising side or the business side of podcasting doesn't care about RSS. All they want to do is get their ad delivered. And they want to have a way of tracking that, tracing that, and being able to do it in the most efficient and effective way possible. So you have constituents in this industry that want something that the other part of the industry doesn't see as necessary. So, you know, it's, it's one of those things that, um, I want to keep talking about it, and I hope all of you keep talking about it and sharing your ideas and maybe, you know, that'll grow into something much larger for podcasting as we look to the future. And I do think that the up-and-coming generation, the Gen Z and the younger generation, is gonna help define this for all of us as well. And the economic pressures of everybody wanting to be, wanting to make money from being a podcaster now. Has reached the highest level I've ever seen, and that expectation is driving the conversation increasingly. So I, I think we're going to see some changes in this, and a lot of people are not going to like it. So, well, thank you so much for being with me here tonight and asking and sharing your thoughts and your questions. I appreciate it a lot, and I appreciate you being here., and I hope you'll come back and watch, uh, next Thursday's edition of, uh, Live Podcast Tips with me, and that we stay connected. And if you wanted to follow all the episodes here on a, on a website, not on one of the big proprietary platforms, uh, you can go to adorenetwork.com to get all of the the video episodes as well as the audio episodes in that, in that website. It's actually a Podpage network page, so I've got a— got some other shows that I'm, I'm building a network around inside of. So it's called adorenetwork.com. So go there and check out the, the Podcast Tips show, and then also, also other shows that I've, I've done in there. And so I hope you have a wonderful evening, and this show went a little longer than I thought it would, but thank you so much for asking all the terrific questions, and, and hope you have a terrific rest of your evening, and thank you so much. Okay, good night.