Navigating Apple's New Regulations And The Power Of Consistency

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Hey everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard along with my co host and partner Tom Hazzard, and we are talking about podcast regulations. Oh, that sounds boring, Tom, but it's really not. It's important because this is how the changes that they're making affect both your intellectual property rights, your access rights, your what's going to happen with the downloads, it could affect your earning rights. There's lots of changes over at Apple and if we don't pay attention to it, we're going to sit back and look at our podcast statistics and go, what the heck happened?

Yeah. And you know, it's interesting. This has been. Some of these changes have been in place since mid October, early October 2023. And I see a lot of shows. I monitor a lot of shows, analytics, and some I haven't seen much of a drop off in downloads at all. And others I have. I think it depends a little bit on several factors. But we're here to talk about a few changes. That's one of them in terms of Apple Podcasts, which is still the dominant app people listen to podcasts on, and they really do drive the industry with any changes.

Let's talk about what some of these changes are. So some of you may have gotten notifications from Apple. Some of you don't manage your own accounts. You have podcast managers or editors or assistants who may have received them as well. And it forces you to log into Apple to accept the new terms and conditions. And it has made some also backend changes to some things in the way that things the directory shares your podcast with others, with your listeners, with your subscribers, the way downloads are recorded from that standpoint. So some of those things are functional changes in terms of how it works for listening and downloads, and others are just straight changes that have to do with your relationship with Apple as a contributor to the podcast ecosystem.

That's absolutely correct. Should we talk about some of the changes?

Yeah, let's talk about them.

All right, so let's talk about the one that everybody's going to be most concerned about. Who's Listening to this episode or watching us live right now on social media. And that is the download impact. If you've been podcasting for years, you've been used to how many downloads you get. And I'm going to share a little bit of what used to happen when somebody would subscribe to your show, whether they did it six months after it started, a year after it started, or several years after it started. What used to happen is once they subscribed, the app would download every single episode to their device, whether you listened to it or not. As a subscriber, you got that was.

Early on, they made a change at some point which limited the number to five or three. I think it depended on your personal settings.

There's still even pretty recently there a lot of situations where the back catalog would download. But this change definitely changes that. Even if you are a subscriber now of a show and then you don't listen to any episodes for a few weeks or a month or two, once you resume listening to the latest episode, it used to download those ones that.

You hadn't heard, the ones you missed.

And it's not doing that anymore. Now they're in the list. You'll see them in the list, but you have to actually actively press to play them for it, to download it to your device. So it requires a little more user interaction. And here's the reason why Apple's doing this. They recognize that there's an awful lot of automatic downloads that used to happen from their app, and they can also tell who's been listening and who hasn't. And they realized, you know what, there's an awful lot of episodes that podcasters are getting downloads for that are never being listened to. And so this is Apple's way of trying to make the download numbers more in alignment with actual listenership. That's really the key thing they're trying to achieve now. It's flawed, right? I will tell you there, even if you are downloading it and you're actively pushing it to download it, that doesn't mean you have to listen to it, right? Then you might come back to it later. You may never listen to it now. Apple will know if you listen to it. And as a podcaster, you can log into Apple Podcast Connect and see the average percentage of each episode and how much it's been listened to. And I've looked at this a lot, and there are some shows that get listened to 50% of the way through. Some on average are 75, some are 90, 95. And I've actually seen some that are 120% listened through. And you might be thinking, how's that possible, Tom? I listened to the whole thing. How is it 120%? Well, because if I really enjoyed that episode and I got something out of it and I want to go back and listen to a part of it and say, all right, now what was Tom saying when he was talking about this thing with Apple? And you go back and listen to part of it again, the app knows that. So that's how you actually can get more than 100% listenership, either on your entire show or in some episodes. But what they have done now is just made it. If your listener behavior is such that you're not really listening to every episode or you have gaps, it's not going to automatically download them. The good and the bad of that is, and the bad is if you were strictly having sponsorship based on download numbers and now your downloads are going down, that's not going to be a great thing for you because your download numbers are less. However, if you really wanting to know what your true listenership is now that listenership is more in alignment with what you see in the download analytics. Does that make sense? Tracy?

Yeah, I want to say this a little bit differently in what you just said. There is that, look, if you were depending on downloads, there's a reason why you've been getting these cheap junk rates for your advertising. And that is because advertisers know these download numbers were not real. They devalued podcast advertising. Now that needs to change because now when I have a real download, I haven't actually somebody who downloaded, they may not have listened. Right. There's still that, but they actively took an action to download it. So there's a much better indication of action taking than it is if I just had these automatic downloads happening. Now the industry needs to reset itself to be more accurate. And this is where Tom and I also have an issue. IAB has also announced a shift and difference in what they do. And IAB is the Interactive Advertising Bureau. They control some of the major platforms. Register with them. We refuse to do it. That's a whole nother episode. I'm not going to go into that right now. But we refuse to be IAB compliant because we disagree on this one thing, and that is that when they're devaluing download numbers because they say these numbers aren't real. So this is how cpms started in the industry. It's iab and companies like that started ball, right? They decided that really out of a thousand views of your banner ad. Way back when one of them could be counted as real. That's what they decided. And so now they've decided that same thing quite some time ago, over 15 years ago, about podcast downloads as well. But now Apple's made this change, and now one out of every thousand is not accurate. Maybe it's 20 out of every thousand don't get actually listened to. They're just downloaded, but they're not listened to. We don't have the numbers on that yet because this change has only happened in October. So it's relatively new. We'll start seeing. Because if before I had a hundred downloads and eighty of them were automatic and they're gone now, I had a hundred downloads that were calculating in my playthrough rate, and so they were at zero in my playthrough rate. But now my playthrough rate should be more accurate because it's on the ones that were really downloaded. So my playthrough rate should rise. That's going to be our new metric, I believe, at some point here. But it's not available to us. It's not available and passed back to us podcasters. We have to go into Apple Connect, log in, look at it, find it. It's not available to the advertisers, but I think that's going to have to be the new rate that we look at. Number of downloads and playthrough rate are going to be an indicator of real podcaster success. And when you have both, you should demand a lot more money than IAB is allowing you to have because they've already downgraded it.

Yeah, there is a lot more data out there than Apple provides to all the podcast hosting companies or in a more efficient way, to the podcaster. You have to sort of get information from here and there and kind of put it together. If you know your average playthrough rate on your episode is 90%, that's great. And then they have different kinds of playthrough rate. Like all your episodes are listened to on a total percentage of X as well. Right. And then each episode, some get listened to more than others, but there is an average total show playthrough rate. And if you look at that, let's say it's 90%, you can expect either that everybody who downloaded it listened to every episode and only 90% of it, or another way to look at that is 90% of your downloads actually listen to your episode, which is probably more likely. And you can apply that playthrough rate from Apple and make a projection that all your downloads across all apps. About 90% of those are listened to. But that's really not what advertisers are looking at. I mean they base paying for advertising based on usually. Well, there are different ways, lots of different ways. And I encourage everyone to find their own way to sell their sponsorships and not just jump on the CPM bandwagon.

I really wish I could convince all of you podcasters out there to boycott that low cost advertising model. Stop enrolling with these platforms that promise you money and you don't even get 10 bucks for your show. Just stop doing it. Because if they had no inventory they'd have to raise the rates. I really wish I could convince you out there, run a general podcast advertising boycott and stop this ridiculousness of low cost.

And you know, I'll give you an example here of recent customer came to Poditize from another platform was in a programmatic ad program. They were making nothing. I mean they really weren't getting paid anything, but they adopted into it. And when we migrated their show to Poditize, obviously you have to remove the ads and we had done that, but there was a player out there somewhere that was still feeding their episodes from the old platform. And it ended up this show was a, let's just put it, a family friendly show that was on subject matter that young ears would be listening to potentially. And they were running ads for condoms on this show. I couldn't believe it. And they're like how's that happening? And it was really weird. Anyway, we figured out how it was happening and helped them shut off that program. So that wasn't happening. But anyway, the point is you don't get control in these programmatic ads systems. What kinds of ads are run on your show? They're going to run whatever they want and they're paying very little for it because it is random shotgun approach of advertising. Which is not all advertising and podcasting, it's just some systems. But you're going to get paid based on for every thousand downloads you're going to get paid a certain amount of money. That's how that works.

We're hoping, and we have no actual data on this, but we're hoping that this move on Apple's side is an indication that there may be advertising coming from the Apple platform. There may be more statistics pass through coming because they're trying to be more advertiser friendly and more accurate. However, flip side of that is again, remember that this is supposed to be a Two way platform. You're the content creator, they didn't have your content. They wouldn't get people to sit around and use their phones for hours on end listening to podcasts. Right? It's a user grab for them, a number of hours on the phone. And it's part of what they want is to create this stickiness for their devices. It's a two way. They win by having content and you get to have your content distributed. However, when they've now done this and removed the automatic downloads, it means out of sight, out of mind for some people that may have just forgotten and then they would have remembered and they would have seen it and they'd be like, oh, I gotta catch up on that show. So now you have no ability to connect back with those listeners. You never had it, but they should provide that. And that's the big issue that I have with this change that they created, is that they've taken something away from you podcasters in terms of at least some number that was getting you a little bit more in the programmatic advertising dollars. They took that away from you and then they still give you no way to send a message to your subscribers who haven't been downloading. You don't have a way to push to them to say, hey, I'm here, except to create another episode that they won't get downloaded. It's an unfair relationship, it's imbalanced. They are going to need to fix it.

Serious pet peeve of yours. And honestly, I think every podcaster would like to be able to communicate with their subscribers, with their followers on Spotify, even if it was through the listening app that they're subscribed to. Just so everybody understands, each of those apps has their own users who've signed up. Like an Apple, you have to sign up with an Apple ID before you can listen to podcasts. And on Spotify, you can listen for free, but hear ads. But if you want to follow someone and you want to have that information stored, you've got to have a Spotify account and sign into it. They actually know to push it to you to let you know, hey, there's a new episode out. But that information, as those people are, belongs to that app or the company that owns that app and provides that app. That's their intellectual property and they don't share it with podcasters. Never have, and I'm sure never will. You need to accept that. I talk to new podcasters all the time, like, who are my subscribers? Well, how many of them are men and how Many are women and all this sort of stuff. They want demographic information, what are their ages? Well, we don't get that because the apps don't share it with us podcasters. That's one of the realities of the podcast ecosystem. But there's still a lot of value that we're getting putting our podcasts out on all these apps. We're distributing it widely. Every time we publish a new one, it does push to the apps. It is in the lineup of your shows. The listing. There's a new episode today and if you're subscribed, Apple still tells me, hey, a new episode of feed your brand is live today is available on Apple or whatever app does other apps do this too. But gosh, it would be nice if all these different apps, especially the big ones, made it so that we could communicate. Even just an announcement here and there.

That would push like, our new season is dropping or you won't believe the guests that I've got on next episode. Right. Make sure you're paying attention to your notifications. There's no way for us to do that, and that is making the relationship imbalanced. That's what we really want to point out today with this podcast. Regulations. If you're not paying attention when they pass through terms and conditions, when they pass through these changes to you, it's creating much more imbalance as we go forward. And it's significant. Another change that came forward is they made you accept the terms and conditions and they have now offered captioning and you have to go in and you have to turn it off if you don't want it.

I didn't, didn't read that. Can you actually turn it off?

Tracy, you don't have an ability to turn it off, but you can provide your own, right?

Let's lay this out for people. I mean, any of you who have ever watched a YouTube video are probably familiar. When you watch a YouTube video, especially if your sound is off, you see captions on the YouTube video and even sometimes if the sound is on. It depends on what you're doing. But there are captions.

I want to be clear with everyone that is user controlled too, though, if you have that set as turned off as a user, as a viewer of YouTube videos or a listener, I don't actually know about that because it's a new feature. So I don't know if you can, as a listener, turn them off on the Apple app side. I don't have an Apple app, so.

I think it is a choice. Let's stick with YouTube for a moment. YouTube Auto generates a transcript and puts captions on YouTube videos. But you can also, on YouTube, when you upload your video, upload a file that has a corrected transcript and I'll tell you the ones that are auto generated. The more technical or unique industry terms and things that are spoken in your episode, the worse the auto generated transcript is going to be. It often gets things wrong. It never spells poditize correctly when we say potatoz in a video. This is very similar what Apple is doing now, podcasts have always been a listening medium, not a viewing medium. But what they say they're doing it for is actually for, how do you say more for accessibility, compliance, like hearing impaired and such. People that Apple will automatically and you have to agree to the terms and conditions will automatically transcribe your episodes in their system and people can choose to view the equivalent of follow the bouncing ball with the transcript, which really it's I think just making the text sort of lighter and bolder as it goes. But you follow it through if you want to. They're doing that and they'll auto generate it whether you want them to or not. Even they say on your back catalog eventually that's what they said.

No, actually Tom, the terms and conditions say. But I haven't found the button yet. I've only found a place where you can upload it. I haven't found the place where you opt out. But the actual Apple Podcast Connect terms and conditions that you all had to just accept in order to use your Connect account. It says you grant Apple the right to create transcripts of your content and to display such transcripts on Apple Podcasts, provided that Apple shall provide you with the ability within Podcast Connect or by other digital means. So maybe you have to send an email to opt out of the public display of such transcripts on Apple podcasts, except where the display of such transcripts is required by applicable law, which is in some countries. And then here's the second part of it that I'm not happy with. You grant Apple a non exclusive worldwide and royalty free license to use your content for internal research and development to improve Apple's products and services. That is saying AI without saying AI.

That they get to use it for whatever they want for their purposes.

Yeah, for artificial intelligence research. That means a training data set. That means they're using your content really without you knowing exactly how it's being used. And you've agreed to it in order to have your podcast distributed. Right.

Right to be on Apple. You're going to have to agree.

Right. And so you need to understand that these things are happening. I'm first off, I'm a really not a fan at all of Automatic Transcripts. My last name's Hazard with two Zs. It is never spelled properly. Our company Potatize comes out poeticize every time like they can't spell it. It's always wrong. So your brand is damaged by Automatic Transcripts, your messaging. If you are in industry, I've used this example a lot. If you're in the e commerce industry and on air you say skew, they will spell it S K E W not S K U Stock keeping units. So it's completely misinterpreted. If someone's actually reading that and not listening, they're not getting the understanding and it reflects people badly on you. They don't understand that that's Apple's automatic transcript problem or YouTube's automatic transcript problem. They think you provided that and that you can't spell that. You don't even know your own industry terms. Right. They don't understand the user listener, viewer doesn't understand and connect that to the app. They connect that to you. This is where I am not happy with. I understand that there's these regulations and there are some countries in the world that are requiring that. But we must have a better way to do this and better way to have control. Better way to review what's going on there. Apple podcasts. Apple Connect does not have a way to edit that.

No, actually they do.

They've said that you have to upload it.

You can download their version after they've done it, you can adjust it and put it back up, which they would love it if you did. But there also is a way to upload from the get go before you even publish an episode with a edited transcript that will publish with it.

But it doesn't match timestamps. When you do that, you mess up the timing and you cannot be guaranteed. It's not like in video. They have something called an srt file and the srt file has the timings put into it so that it actually runs when the words are being said. But that doesn't work in the audio version. When you download it and you re upload it, it changes its formatting because the system changes. It converts it and it doesn't always match up.

I think they're trying to and there are chapter markings and other things you can do. But it remains to be seen how easy this is going to be. It can be done is the point. But it's a lot more work for the podcaster, the typical podcaster who really is recording their content, uploading it and publishing it in real time or very quickly, like within the same day. And we have some podcasters doing that on Potitize. They're not really editing their stuff. They don't have time to get a transcript that's ready and make sure and correct it, make sure it's right before they upload it and publish that episode on the same day or the next day. They're gonna be stuck probably with Apple doing it on their own.

Yes, absolutely. Because at least you can say it wasn't me.

At least you can say it wasn't me because you don't have the time to go through it that thoroughly. And for lower downloads, lower ad dollars, do you really want to spend the time they haven't incentivized us to either. They're reducing the quality overall of experience. And I don't think this is in your favor. And we really do need to pay attention that their compliance with regulations. The other regulation we talked about ad nauseam is obviously the email change where they allow the blocking and privacy of emails. We definitely don't comply with that. Make sure your email is being shown or your listeners can't reach out to you at all. And you've just made it so much easier for them to keep your subscribers from you. Stop doing that one too. There's a lot of these regulations that are not actually going to make the subscriber and listener experience better. And you need to make sure you understand that that's what you're agreeing to when you just randomly say, I gotta have my stuff on Apple so I gotta agree to their terms and conditions. I'm stuck. And then keep out and watch because I guarantee you there's gonna be some artificial intelligence big like surprise as to what Apple's doing with your data. There's a reason they're transcribing everything and agreeing to transcribe it. They're going to be using it for an artificial intelligence large language model and they have not offered to pay you.

That is a murky issue that the digital rights management of images, that's going through a huge shift in that business right now.

By agreeing to that, you agree to allow it for research purposes. But that research purpose has become a base of knowledge and it's really hard and very murky to separate the two from whatever their eventual output and the benefits that they're achieving off the backs of your information. Keep that in mind. You've waived your right already to it.

I'm glad they're saying it's for research purposes only because that implies they're not allowed to directly profit off of it.

That implies that, but they are profiting off of it. So let's say they build an amazing large language model that does conversations better than anyone else because they use real language pattern. Because you all do it. You're great speakers. Right. Way better than just taking Reddit information and then regurgitating that into that's what conversations should sound like. That's not how humans speak. That's how people type. Right. It's not really accurate as to it. So it could be an even better conversational AI than anyone out there because they're using our data. But they're going to get paid a lot of money off of that because their AI is better. But we didn't get paid a dime in the process for training that, for being the research basis of that.

Yeah, that's problematic. I agree.

It's really problematic. I do not know that for a fact. Everyone out there listening, this is just. I understand how AI LLMs are created, large language models, and I understand the training data sets and the research side of things. And this is how it happens.

It's a slippery slope.

Yes, exactly, Tom, These are why we wanted to bring these up to you. But here's the thing that we know. If you want to make sure that your subscribers, your listeners, your community, everything that you do is being nurtured to its maximum so that they will download your episodes, play through, do these things. The number one thing you can do is be absolutely consistent and constant. Everything in this system is geared against you. This is why Tom and I are against seasonal shows. They're harder. This is why you can't take more than three weeks off. Make sure you don't take three weeks off. Make sure you drop an episode once a month. That's what we recommend to you in between seasons, if that's what you want to do. Because all of these algorithms are geared to making sure that you are no longer found. You can be a contributing factor in making this more harmful to your show. Not just the regulations. That's what we really wanted to leave you with today, like this idea that, yeah, these things are happening and they are kind of happening to you here, but that doesn't mean that you're without power. Your ability to be consistent with your audience is the number one thing you can control. And consistency is the most rewarded things because listeners are out there looking for podcasts and they don't want fly by night podcasts who show up now and again. The ones that show up consistently are the ones they're going to listen to consistently. And there are a lot of listeners out there looking for content.

And really to that end, Tracy, creating valuable content that your listeners are going to want to come back to and hear over and over again. They like you. They want to keep hearing from you. They're going to find you. And if you make yourself available to be found and to be communicated with, even with a unique email for the podcast, if that's what it is, or over through LinkedIn or whatever, however you want to be communicated, incentivize those listeners to get off that listening app and engage with you elsewhere so you know who they are and you benefit. There are ways to do this. We talk about it all the time here on Potitize. We're here to support you not only with making sure you're aware of the murky waters of digital rights and all these sorts of things, your copyrighted material, your podcast episodes and all that. We're keeping an eye out for you and we're going to keep coming back and sharing our thoughts with you on it. But aside from that, there are many things you can do to engage your listeners outside of that app. Provide them more value and they will seek you out.

That's right. I don't really want downloads. I don't want the automatic downloads. I want to really know who's listening to my show because I'm out here talking to you is worthless to me. To share this advice and share this information with a download. I want to share with a human who can do something about it. We are actually doing a little study on our end because we offer these coaching calls every single week for our community and Potitize and we live stream them out on social media and in YouTube as well. We want to see if you're listening and taking action. Is your show growing faster than those that don't show up to our calls? We're doing an internal study from our client base that says these people showed up. The A people showed up and they took actions and the B people didn't show up. Is there a growth difference in shows that are at the same. Same stage, startup stage, 25 episodes, 100 episodes, and we're taking a look at that. And I can't wait to share that information in some of the case studies about what growth has happened because this is the one thing Tom and I know, those that take action are few and far between and they are ten to a hundred times more successful than their counterparts who never take action, who listen but don't do anything, or who don't listen at all and just say ah, I don't need to know.

I love what we do, Tracy. That's why I get charged and I keep coming back, showing up for all of you. I love it. We're all about the numbers and measuring results.

Thanks everyone for listening. We appreciate you and we'll be back here next week with another episode and another coaching topic. For those of you in the podcast.

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