Podnews Weekly Review

To edit or not to edit that is the question? Castopod v1.0 launches, Squadcast awarded US Patent, Is podcasting coming to TikTok? YouTube advertising for podcasters?

October 20, 2022 James Cridland & Sam Sethi Season 1 Episode 98
Podnews Weekly Review
To edit or not to edit that is the question? Castopod v1.0 launches, Squadcast awarded US Patent, Is podcasting coming to TikTok? YouTube advertising for podcasters?
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James Cridland:

From POD News, welcome to Pod Land, the last word in podcasting news. It's Thursday the 20th of October, 2022. I'm James Cridlin, the editor of POD News.

Sam Sethi:

And I'm Sam Sethy, the host of a new podcast coming out called Off the Mic Due in November.

Benjamin Bellamy:

Hey, I'm Yesin. I'm the CTO and co-founder ofs, and I'll be talking about Topo 1.03 and the plugin architecture of Cast podd. I'm Benjamin Bellami. I'm co-founder and CEO Ofdo has, and later I will be talking about cast padd transcription with Whisper and Micropayment for podcasters.

Neal Veglio:

Hi, this is Neil Valio from Ponos Podcasting, and I'm gonna be on with these guys on pod land talking about podcast editing and get this, Sam and I are gonna be having an edit off.

James Cridland:

They will Pod Land is sponsored and hosted by Buzz Sprout. Last week, 3,681 people started a podcast with Buzz Sprout. Now there's Buzz Sprout adds to grow your podcast wherever it's host.

Sam Sethi:

And we're sponsored by Squad Cast. We use Squad Cast version five to remotely record this episode with Sam UK and James somewhere in the world. We'll find out in a minute now. Squad Cast this week officially was awarded a US patent for their recording engine for. Progressive uploads. Congratulations to the team there. Um, it's like teleporting audio and video recording said Zach while recording them. It solves a ton of problems, and he quotes, I say, Harry Joran as the person who is responsible for them starting on that technology. Well done to the team at squad.

James Cridland:

Yeah, it's a fantastic tool. And, uh, Neil Valio, uh, one of our, um, guests today, uh, just, uh, tweeted something saying, just experience recording in squad cast for the first time in two years. And I have to say, he says, I'm bloody, I. Uh, very British. Uh, it's come a long way since 2020, and I'm going to say that, uh, Ariel being there probably isn't just coincidence. Oh, there you go.

Sam Sethi:

Hmm.

James Cridland:

Well, Pod lands our weekly review. Sam and I review the week's top podcasting stories covered on pod news.

Sam Sethi:

And the first story up, Where are you, James? Where in the world? It's like, Where's Wally? Where's James? Where? What are you up to today?

James Cridland:

Well, um, uh, Todd Cochran is here. Norma Jean Belenky from Podbean is here. Uh, there's, uh, lots of, uh, interesting people, uh, who are here, whereas here, here is Saudi Arabia. Uh, and I'm at a big, uh, conference, um, uh, called Ignite, uh, here, which is, uh, fascinating. Uh, it's is most definitely a different world, but, uh, yeah, it's, uh, that's, that's what's going on.

Sam Sethi:

So what were the highlights, James? I mean you, What was your keynote on and what were the highlights?

James Cridland:

Well, uh, I was on the stage last night, uh, talking about, uh, content and, uh, what you can do with content and repurposing content and everything else, but I'm actually doing a, um, a piece on Friday all about, uh, how to make your podcast a global hit. Um, and, uh, Todd Cochran will be on stage with me and a bunch of other people, uh, from. The Middle East, uh, which should be good. But there's a, a ton of, um, a ton of speakers in, uh, Arabic here as well. Uh, and also a ton of individual companies are, uh, here too. Uh, so Podcast Network Asia, um, is here. Ron Baton, a friend of the show, uh, who was very excitedly pointing out to me over breakfast this morning, uh, that, uh, his, um, 14 hour flight from. The Philippines, the only thing that he was listening to was this show. Uh, so he listened, so he binge listened. Imagine imagine that.

Sam Sethi:

I was gonna say if my wife wouldn't stand 14 hours of my voice and there is.

James Cridland:

Well, and, uh, there's, uh, there's plenty going on around the world as well. Isn't the Sam?

Sam Sethi:

Yeah. Um, there's an event called Suda Podcast Forum in the uae, which returned earlier this month. Um, do you know much about that event as well, James?

James Cridland:

Yes, I covered a bit from the event. It was run by, uh, Curing Cultures, which is, uh, a big, uh, podcast company in Dubai. And, uh, yeah, so that happened earlier on in, uh, the month. Sharma was there as she is here as well. Um, Africa, There's Africa Podcast Day, which is coming back at next year. Uh, and that'll be in Nairobi, in Kenya on February the 12th, which is a Sunday. Um, so, uh, looking forward to learning more about, uh, podcasting in Africa as well.

Sam Sethi:

Now zipping over to Canada Sports Media Company. Playmaker has signed a monetization deal and distribution deal with a C, so acas are certainly putting out their feelers around the world.

James Cridland:

Yeah, doing a bunch of, uh, deals, uh, there, which is good in France, ACP M's. Ranker, there are two rankers in France. They're both different and, uh, acp, M's. Ranker says that downloads are up 18% year on. France, which is interesting to see and transfer, which is a podcast from Slates, but not that slate, uh, is number one as it's been in that ranker pretty well ever since it's, uh, started.

Sam Sethi:

Back here in the uk the TV production arm of Comcast in the uk, uh, Sky Studios has signed a first look Deal with Tortoise Media's podcast. Now, TOS Media is slow news. If I, I remember rightly.

James Cridland:

Yes. Listen to you saying toto., That's a, that's a British thing. Toto.

Sam Sethi:

No

James Cridland:

yes. Tortoise Media as I would say, tortoise. Media mate. Uh, yes, they are. They, um, uh, they take their time and, um, uh, properly research stories and things, but actually I covered something a couple of weeks ago in, uh, the pod, new, new. Uh, basically saying that, uh, their big success has been their podcasting, uh, work. Uh, that's where they've made the most money, uh, and that's where they seem to be doing quite well. So interesting to see Sky Studios jumping in there and going, Are there podcasts that we can turn into TV here as well? Also in the uk. Uh, the rest is politics, uh, which is a popular, uh, politics podcast that I listen to. Actually. It's got, uh, Alice Campbell, who used to be Tony Blair's, Spin Doctor, and Rory Stewart, who used to be a cabinet minister in, uh, the Conservative Party, um, uh, a great podcast does very, very well. And they, uh, announced a live show, which sold out in seven minutes. Seven minutes, uh, which is pretty impressive. Uh, so many congratulations, uh, to them. They're on, uh, a cast I seem to remember. And, uh, I now hear them plugging their a cast plus thing. Uh, an awful.

Sam Sethi:

Yeah, somebody said that would they be now termed a super podcaster. They sold out faster than Emerson Lake and Palmer, so there you go.

James Cridland:

Emerson Lake and Palmer, are they still going?

Sam Sethi:

Wow. What? We'll see, maybe one or two of them might

James Cridland:

My, my word. Um, also in the UK radar, which publishes a ton of radio, uh, numbers. They have published their Midas Summer 2022 study. Now Midas stands for something, Can't remember what it stands for, but it's something like multimedia and internet delivered, you know, audio services or something like that. But anyway, um, it's all about how people are listening to audio. People listen to audio on, they, uh, released that stuff every single quarter and, uh, they have, uh, said that there's a new high of adults listening to podcasts every week. 10.5 million of them, uh, which is 19%. Um, they say 69 million hours. Which, uh, if you then work out, um, uh, what that is per listener, that means that 6.5 hours are spent by every podcast listener in the UK every week listening to podcasts, which is, um, seems very high to me.

Sam Sethi:

It does. Yeah. I mean, maybe you and I might achieve that, but I don't imagine everybody's doing

James Cridland:

not even sure that I achieved that. Um, but um, you know, but it's, it's good. Um, it's good, uh, data. It comes off the, uh, the radio data that they also put, uh, together. Um, probably shouldn't compare it with Edison research's, infinite dial because it's not comparable cuz it's worked out in a different way. Um, but there's some really interesting data in there. Bit of bits of data that I found interesting, uh, is that podcast listening is still a bit too, um, male, uh, 58% male, um, in the country rather than the 50 50, which it is in the us. And peak time for podcast listening is about nine in the morning, so a little bit later than, uh, radio, uh, uh, broadcasting, which is about eight o'clock. But, um, yeah, some really interesting data that comes out.

Sam Sethi:

Mm. Now just slightly tangential. Uh, also in the uk Netflix is about to launch his AUP supported subscription service. So they're coming out with a lower value rate for your subscription. But of course, you then have to, uh, watch those. Pesky ads, but Netflix has joined Barb, which, uh, James you'll know more about. But Barb, um, has 8% of the UK TV audience, is what Barb has said, that Netflix has, putting it just above channel four, if anyone's in the UK and knows where that is.

James Cridland:

Wow, that's really interesting. So Barb is the, uh, company that does the, um, the audience rating for tv. Um, So, uh, yeah, that's really interesting. And of course, they kind of had to join Barb if they were going to make a proper go of their ad, um, uh, selling business because Barb is the, is the currency on which you buy, uh, the ads. So, uh, yeah, that's a, that's a fascinating thing.

Sam Sethi:

Now moving back over to another part of the world in India, a brand of podcast microphones, Audio array has been launched. I haven't seen these yet, but, uh, good to see some more hardware coming

James Cridland:

Yeah, they look very fancy and very, um, uh, it looks to be the, the particular company that's put this, uh, together appears to have. Build all kinds of different models of, um, microphones and stuff, but interesting to end up seeing that. Um, down in Australia where I am normally based , there's all kinds of, uh, entertaining stuff going on. There's the Australian Podcast Awards, Asha Goberg, uh, has been named Chair of Judges, uh, for that, that, um, will be announced, uh, in November. Asha once told me that he liked the shirt that I was wearing. Um, so I've always had a nice soft spot for Asha ever since. But also, um, the Australian podcast, Ranker for September was released. Um, if you look at the data, then, uh, listener is number one according to sca. iHeart Podcast Network is number one according to arn. And frankly, um, the ABC probably is number one, but they're not measured by the Australian Podcast. Ranker for some reason that I've never been able to get to the bottom of. So , it's a weird old, it's a weird old one, listeners, number one for sales networks, I think. Whereas iHeart Podcast Network is number one for publisher networks. So it's, um, it's all a bit of a mess to be.

Sam Sethi:

Oh wow. It's just nice to share out the number one between all of them.

James Cridland:

Yes, that's probably what it is. And in New Zealand, uh, over the ditch, uh, the New Zealand Podcast Awards, um, are closing for entries. The ditch. Yes. Uh, then the New Zealand Podcast awards are just closing entries. Well, kind of as we record this, um, uh, in fact, they

just closed 5:

00 PM on Thursday.

It's already 5:

00 PM uh, down there. So, uh, yes. So those will be coming out. Um, Guess sometime in November or early December, so as we say, down there in the summer.

Sam Sethi:

Oh yes, of course. Now, uh, that's a little bit of a wizard around the world. Now let's get back to some more, uh, beefier news. Um, TikTok, let's start with a social media app. TikTok is preparing to launch a podcast app, James Uhoh, Spotify. You are in trouble. Podcast hosting company Audio means has told POD news that it's spotted a new bot that is scraping their feeds, and it started around October the 11th. You have tracked it back to TikTok. So James, tell me more.

James Cridland:

Yeah, so audio means is a French podcast company and they did, um, uh, a bit of looking into this. Um, the servers that they spotted are in Singapore. The range of IP addresses leads back to tick's as number, um, of 1 3 8, 6 9, which is. Uh, basically the, uh, bit of the internet that TikTok owns and, um, it's also, it's using the Go Development language, which, which TikTok developers use as well. Um, so clearly there's something going on there. Now, it might be TikTok launching a brand new music service. Um, they've recently registered a trademark for TikTok music, which include. In that, uh, registered trademark, um, the provision for podcast content, um, the company's already talking to record companies that we know, uh, that much we know as well. Um, uh, but they also own a company called reso. And I wonder whether this, uh, traffic is actually coming from their RESO service. So RESO is basically Spotify. It's a music streaming service. It's available in Brazil, Indonesia, and India. And it's already got, um, podcasts from hosts like Lipson. So if you're with Lips, Often in your, uh, distribution panel that gets your podcast onto the RESO platform. So perhaps RESO are using that. But, uh, I, I find it fascinating. I mean, TikTok is massive, 138 million monthly active users in the US alone, a billion monthly users. Um, if you look at the whole world, apparently, which seems very high to me. Um, but um, you know, so they are massive. And if they are doing podcasts correctly by scraping RSS feeds, then that's very exciting, uh, for us. I think. So, um, yeah, TikTok on the horizon, so to. What about YouTube?

Sam Sethi:

Well, it's, uh, YouTube where we are holding our breath. Still waiting for some podcasting, actual podcasting, but it's rolling out an enhanced advertising of four podcast listeners. Advertisers will now be able to place up to 30, uh, seconds out audio spots and narrow their campaigns to specific genres. Uh, James, translate that.

James Cridland:

Yeah, well, uh, what, what they're basically doing is they're, is that they're selling audio ads, , and they appear to be selling them globally, which is a bit weird because YouTube's podcasts homepage is only available in the US and not available anywhere else., but if you look at. You know what YouTube are interested in, clearly they're interested in earning money from podcasts somehow. Of course, you know, video ads only work if you are looking at the screen, whereas audio ads, uh, don't require you to end up doing that. Um, it's a bit weird because, um, they only really are getting into podcasts in the us. YouTube has a podcast homepage, but it only works within the us It doesn't work anywhere else. I checked that the other day. Um, so. Probably points to the fact that, uh, YouTube is going to roll that out to other countries in the future. But YouTube most certainly on the way in terms of, uh, podcasting,

Sam Sethi:

Well, I won't be rushing. I, I promise you that now. Alby, uh, the Micropayment, uh, digital wallet has now launched a YouTube monetization solution. So now you can go into your YouTube profile on your customized channel. Uh, look at your information and add your lightning address there. And hey, Presto, you can start to pay Satoshi's whole micropayments between your YouTube creator and yourself.

James Cridland:

Ah, that's very cool. That's very cool. And a lightning address looks like a, an email address except it's got a lightning flash at the front of it and a little emoji. Uh, for that Sam's is sam get lb.com. Uh, and uh, mine is actuallyJames@cri.land cuz I've worked out how to do that, which is woo, very exciting. Um, which kind of vaguely works. Um, so, uh, yeah, no, that's a, that's a pretty cool and smart thing from al.

Sam Sethi:

Hmm. Moving on. Uh, podcasting. In car listening, Xsm Media has discovered where and when people listen to podcasts with others. 12% of podcast listeners often listen with someone else really, and the company has calculated that podcast. Advertising gets 5% more impressions from those listeners. It seems listening with someone else is more likely to happen in the car or when cooking, uh, or eating. And comedy is the most co-listed genre. Uh, the data was conducted with Edison Research and Car Media

James Cridland:

It's, uh, interesting to see, given that actually that should theoretically allow podcasters to charge 5% more because we know that there's 5% more listeners than the numbers that we've seen in the past. so that's a, a nice number to have a look at., most people still listen to podcasts alone. Of course. In fact, the radar Midas, uh, study said that 93% of podcasts are listened to alone in the UK that does still mean that, um, there are some podcasts which are listened to by other people. And so interesting seeing this from S xm.

Sam Sethi:

Well, anecdotally, I, I know that my daughter and her boyfriend, when they're on car drives, do listen to a podcast together. They listen to parenting Hell with Rob Beckett and Josh Whitcomb. Um, so yeah, uh, I can see how it's becoming more common for people to listen to comedy together in that way.

James Cridland:

Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's, um, and that's just one piece of, uh, data from Edison Research. Another piece of data is coming out next week, um, from Edison Research and npr, the Spoken Word audio report, um, which is, um, a great piece of, um, yearly data that Edison release. Um, more people listen to personality and talk shows on podcasts now than they do on the. According to, uh, some data which has come out of that, uh, study already. Um, I wonder how much of that is just a definition of personality and talk shows. But even so, it's um, interesting to see that podcasting is beginning to, um, become bigger than radio in certain, uh, genres.

Sam Sethi:

Mm. Now, uh, an interesting report this week from Tom Webster. It's called How many Podcasts are You Really Competing With? Uh, Tom suggests that you aren't competing with 4 million Podcast. Um, he talks about. Active podcast and active podcast in production. Uh, and he suggests that the number of podcasts you are competing with is much, much smaller. And therefore, it's better for you to start marketing your podcast on other media because you actually have a fair chance of getting your podcast heard.

James Cridland:

Yeah, it's a great piece of, uh, data from, uh, Tom. Tom puts, um, uh, a lot of work into these and. Basically, I think he looked at a piece of work that I did with, um, Steven Goldstein, which ended up saying that there were only 180,000 actively produced podcasts out there. And Tom says, Yes, there's actively produced podcasts, but there're also active podcasts. There are podcasts that people are actively the. Listening to, Um, so Serial used to be the big, um, example of this that didn't have any new episodes for a long, long time. Um, but it was still an active podcast. It was still being listened to and you're still kind of competing with it even though it wasn't actually getting. Produced. So, um, uh, is he, he's, he's basically taken that and gone, uh, a step further in this, uh, article. You'll sa find it@soundsprofitable.com. Um, and he's also saying that, uh, one of the things that podcasting could be doing to compete rather better. With other things is to not just advertise on podcasts. And he says that, you know, radio used to only advertise on the radio and look what happens to that. And I think that there's certainly some, uh, some, uh, truth in that. Um, so, uh, it's one of the reasons that, um, POD News has a. Podcast adss in the wild, uh, section every so often, which is just photographs of people's, um, advertising of, um, podcasts that they can see, on billboards and in tube trains and everything else. And so, uh, yeah, I think that there's real opportunity for marketing podcasts on something that isn't a podcast.

Sam Sethi:

Now, Eric Newsome, friend of the show has written about the power of three and how we use it to promote podcasts. Did you read this one, James?

James Cridland:

Yeah, there's some research and I remember this research from, uh, uk, uh, my days in UK radio where I used to write radio ads and the research long, long, long time ago, uh, said that you have to hear something three times for it to even sink in. Uh, and I remember, I can't quite remember who came up with that, uh, research. Um, Uh, the research basically, uh, uh, said, um, that the first time you hear it, uh, people think, What was that? The second time you hear it, people think what of it? And then the third time people hear it, they think, let's buy it. Not sure it quite works that way, but nevertheless, um, there's been a. A ton of other research, um, that's been, uh, done. And in fact, Pierre Ard, who's also been on this show, and Steve Marks, uh, put something together called Optimum Effective Scheduling. And that comes back to podcasting because, you know, essentially that means that, um, if you are going to be promoting podcasts, don't just promote them once. Don't just mention them once. Um, see if you can get that to be mention. Three times. See if you can get, um, people to, you know, promote your podcast more than once in a particular show. That's kind of important. So, um, yeah. So Eric does, um, a really good job looking into the power of three and how that works.

Sam Sethi:

Well try and put all these in our show notes, depending on space. Now, Nick Hilton, uh, also asks who owns a podcast brand. Uh, it seems that, different people come out with the same name of podcasts, uh, many years later or even in the same timeframe. Uh, and who owns that brand and who owns the name, I suppose. James, did

James Cridland:

Yeah.

Sam Sethi:

one?

James Cridland:

Indeed. I think, you know, having a registered trademark is always a good plan. Um, that's usually a, that's usually a significant help. Although, of course, registered trademarks only work in the country that they are registered in. Uh, so there's a pod news in Germany, which is in, uh, the German language. And the reason why all of their stuff is in the German language is that, uh, we reached an agreement that they would do whatever they liked in the German. The pod news that I own, uh, would, would never do anything in the, in the German language. And, um, that's basically how that bit's worked. So, uh, yeah, so I think that that's, uh, a good plan. But yeah, exactly who does own a podcast's brand. And certainly when you are having a look at the amount of podcasts that are out there that are called the same name, uh, then, uh, that, that's certainly something to have a.

Sam Sethi:

Fuss does I podcast called Poland Ija Na Na Bitter. Sorry. Does that break the copyright?

James Cridland:

Yes, Yes. We can't do that. We can't do that. Um, another thing around who owns a podcast brand, of course, is the whole thing around, uh, Spotify. Uh, and, uh, Spotify has been doing some interesting things with some of the podcasts that they own, um, and basically remaking those with, uh, other people. We mentioned this a bit last, uh, week, but that's not the only thing that's, uh, happened about, uh, Spotify this week. Is it?

Sam Sethi:

Now in, in Spotify news generally. I mean, and we'll come back to that one cuz there's, uh, something to do with the charts and that rebranded show. But, um, Sky Pilsbury has published an oral history of Gimlet slow demise after interviewing five current and former Gimlet starters. So highly recommend going to look at that from Sky Pillsbury. AOL Shapiro takes a look at Spotify's practice of making its podcast exclusive and also notes that this is interesting. The ringer didn't make any layoffs at all, so maybe they're the, uh, favorite child of Spotify. And Ashley, Carmen suggests that Spotify is refining its strategy. So lots of review and analysis if you're interested in knowing what's going on. Spotify's strategy.

James Cridland:

Yes, indeed. Um, they, they've been quite busy though. Uh, they've added free access to pod sites and chartable. Uh, for megaphone customers in the uk, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. You'll remember that pod sites, uh, launched officially, uh, in those territories only a couple of, uh, weeks ago. Um, they've also announced that reach plc, big, big UK publisher is the latest one to join Megaphone and the Spotify audience network. So they seem to be doing, uh, pretty well in terms.

Sam Sethi:

And, uh, first news, a sp just nothing to do with really podcasting. Spotify's decorated its New York office with statues of cats called podcasts.

James Cridland:

Hey, go to everything to do with podcasting, isn't it

Sam Sethi:

There you go. We're told that one of the cat statues wears goggles and holds a test tube, which represents Spotify's Podcasts on science Cats. Really?

James Cridland:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Sethi:

Someone in the marketing department needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

James Cridland:

Yeah, there was some sort of, uh, uh, piece from the person that is in charge of d of decorating the office saying, you know, well, we take ourselves in a very funny way and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, I'm not so convinced to be honest, but still, uh, you know, if Spotify want to end up doing that, uh, then they can, um, uh, obviously they've also got a really, uh, really angry hairless cat, uh, who is talking about whiskey, uh, all the time and smoking weed. Uh, and they've also got a cat that isn't there anymore. Um, that was really good at, uh, at environment and stuff like that. Um, uh, after the. Many of the gimlet, uh, podcasts that they've been doing, uh, clearly they don't. That's just me being sarcastic.

Sam Sethi:

Uh, Okay.. Uh, in further news on Spotify, the platformer reports an abortion ad that was rejected by Spotify was then allowed after all.

James Cridland:

Yes,

Sam Sethi:

What was that about James?

James Cridland:

yes. Well, they, they said that they were, they said that, uh, Spotify rules are no, no adss about abortion. And then they said, Oh, actually no, we don't have any rules like that. Uh, it's a good job that they know what they're doing. Uh, they are doing it though a, um, a social network. Brilliant. That's just what we need. Um, so a new friend's activity tab, uh, which, uh, is that Christmas scene air friend of the show that I can see?

Sam Sethi:

It is indeed, it's, Chris has spotted this on the, uh, cuz he gets early access to everything Chris does. Um, he spotted the new friends activity tab alongside the podcast tab. So, yeah. Uh, It's pretty much like the old thing that they had on the desktop. I don't see what's different. Um, I still ask a very simple question. Will I be able to not just see the music you're listening to if I follow you, but will I also find out what podcasts you're listening to? And no one seems to have an answer.

James Cridland:

Ah, yes, and I think you can probably learn a bit more from people from their podcasts, uh, choices. Then you can, from their music choices. Certainly if you're listening to a podcast, you know about how do I deal with, with breast cancer, then, um, it's gonna be pretty obvious that that person has breast cancer or knows somebody with it. And, uh, you know, I think that that's a little bit more difficult than, you know, somebody who's listening to, you know, Taylor Swift or, uh, you know, or any of the weird bands that, um, that Christino appears to listen to. How on Earth are these people,

Sam Sethi:

how was your ABA greatest hits on the flight coming over James?

James Cridland:

I actually did hear Abba in the Air New Zealand lounge on the way over here. Um, uh, I went in and they had crowded house on, and I thought, Yes, the Finn Brothers. Yes, absolutely. Very, very New Zealand. And then, and then Abba turned up, which is very strange. Um, don't really understand that, but still. There you go. Um, Alex Jones.

Sam Sethi:

Yes. Uh, say what you want on a podcast. No, you can't anymore. Uh, last week, of course, just at the end of, uh, last week's pod land, uh, podcaster, Alex Jones was told to pay a whopping $964 million in damages uh, Alex Jones show Info Wars were removed from Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Facebook in 2018 for promoting violence and hate speech. Though noted his RSS is still available, he's indicated his appeal and his company has filed for bankruptcy. So just to be evenly balanced.

James Cridland:

Yes, indeed. That's gonna be, uh, that's gonna be interesting, uh, to watch and, uh, can you West said something dreadful in a podcast and, uh, somebody is suing for $250 million.

Sam Sethi:

Yeah, so he's backtracked fast and gone on PI Morgan and gone. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say it. So, uh, last week's show I had a wonderful interview with Todd Cochran and, uh, Adam and Dave were listening to it and they were talking about it on their podcast, Podcast Index. Um, then there was a discussion that we had last week as well about Misa Usee, who's the CEO and founder of Dust Light Productions, who said that a super lean price for a weekly show would be around $244,000. This all resulted in a long conversation about is that mad and too much money. Um, and then finally, um, somebody said though, that. Actual interview was a little bit too tight that I'd given on Todd. Um, and this whole thing got mixed up in Twitter where eventually Neil was saying, uh, that maybe we should look at how we edit it. And Adam was saying, Yeah, maybe we shouldn't edit it all because it's dishonest. And Todd of course, doesn't edit any of his shit. So I then went back to Neil, who's a podcast producer and editor, and I said, Hey, Neil, Geo Fancy coming on to pod land and doing. Edit off. So I interviewed him about what we were talking about, which was the$244,000 for a podcast and whether that was good value for money or not. Uh, and then he's now edited it and I'm going to edit it as well. And at the end of the show, right after the credits, you'll hear two different versions of this, uh, edit and you can decide who did the better job. Me or Neil

James Cridland:

Wow.. Well, I hope it's Neil. Uh, cuz, cuz it's his job, isn't it?

Sam Sethi:

Yes, exactly.

James Cridland:

But yeah. Wow. There's a thing. There's a thing. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing that. And that's right at the end of this podcast. I, I, I was, I was, uh, curious as to where that was coming in because I know that we are just about to dive in, in, into an interview with Benjamin Bellamy because it is time for the tech stuff.

Sam Sethi:

It is indeed. So, uh, before we do though, James, uh, you were having a wonderful thread on Twitter with John Spurlock talking about OP three, and it seems that you and him were having a wonderful geek off about what was going to happen with OP three. So please update us.

James Cridland:

So O P three, it's an open prefix analytics service. So it's much like, um, pod track for example, except everything's in the open. Uh, so if you add your show onto o P three, then you can have a look at, um, at that shows, uh, stats, but so can everybody else. Um, and um, what John has been doing is he's been busy. He's been adding a bunch more things. Including a setup page to help you set the thing up for your show. Um, he's, uh, added a prefix argument for a show's good. So basically you can now indicate in the, um, in the prefix what the show is. Um, so you can actually, um, be able to pull. All of the details for Pod News, uh, for the pod news Daily, for example. Or you can pull off all of the details for no agenda, which also uses, um, uh, O P three because you just have to look for the goed, uh, in there. So all of that makes a bunch of sense, and that's gonna be useful for when O P three starts doing, uh, actual download stats in the.. Uh, and he's also added, uh, API key management, which is all very exciting, uh, and very dull. And the redirect logs also include the referrer. It's just basically, you know, uh, John is, um, doing little bits of work. To that, um, every single week. And, uh, it's gonna be really interesting seeing where O P three goes because it's going to be potentially something that allows any podcaster to be open and transparent with the amount of downloads that they get. But also should hopefully allow any, um, any podcaster to be able to see anybody else's numbers as well.

Sam Sethi:

Mm. I'm not sure people like that. Anyway, we'll see.

James Cridland:

Yeah. Well,

Sam Sethi:

Hey. Hey iHeartMedia. Now, um, you. Castor podd, version one is officially out today. It launches at the Paris Podcast Festival. Um, and basically it's the open of free source, self-hosting podcast platform. Um, Benjamin Bellamy, uh, friend of the show, uh, calls it the WordPress of podcasting. And in some. Other than Acast who tried to use that title last week, it actually is because in, you can download it yourself freely, like you would WordPress instance, host it yourself and run it. Or you can use casta podd.com to have a a hosted version that is managed by Benjamin and his team. Very much in the same way that wordpress.com exists. So, uh, I thought I'd reach out to Benjamin, uh, and to his lead cto, uh, and talk to them about what's in Casta Pod 1.0 and what's coming up next for it as well. Let's start off with Benjamin a cast Apod. Now it's an open source free hosting platform for podcasting, but let's take a little step back. When did you start it and why did you start it? The project

Benjamin Bellamy:

started almost three years ago, but the actual development started like two years ago. We started talking with podcasters and uh, asking what their needs were and, uh, we found out. Uh, there were at the time, no open source solution for hosting your podcast the way there is for websites. Would we all know WordPress, which is a very famous and successful platform, and we wondered why there were no platform for podcasting that would be the same way. So we say, Hey, let's build WordPress for podcasters, and this is how Casta Pod was.

Sam Sethi:

Okay. Now, when you started, what was the design goal behind it? Was the podcast index around at the time? Did you start before it or after it? We started

Benjamin Bellamy:

like a few months right before the podcast index was launched, or actually before we heard about it, because we heard about it like exactly two years ago, I think. And we had started the development a few months before.

Sam Sethi:

Okay. Now, what are some of the core features that you get? Obviously it's self-hosting, which is brilliant. You get customization within it, but give me some of the core features that you've implemented over the last couple of years that we would expect to find in the pro Back to

Benjamin Bellamy:

WordPress. When we try to analyze the success of it, we thought that the main reason was that it was very powerful for the amateurs as well as the big corporations. So we tried to do the same thing. In the end, Casto Podd has been designed for amateurs, podcasters, or for radio broadcasting companies, and we try not to forget any needs that a podcaster would have. So basically with Casto Podd, you get everything you need as a podcaster. You can publish on any platform. So Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, these. On the small one, the big ones, you can approach the MP3 files, you can choose the images, you can type correct publish, you can program you can in advance, so you don't have to wake up at 6:00 AM if you want the episode to be released at a specific time. And you have also analytics. Which are also self hosted, so you don't rely on the analytics are using the A I B V two specification and you, you get many features and all these were designed so that you don't have to, to relying on a middle man on the a third party. So I, I mentioned the analytics. So the analytics are yours and they are your data regarding your audience. And we also embedded a social network, so we are relying on something called the Fed Verse. So basically anyone connected to any platform on the Fed verse. Usually it's mastered on, but there are many others can interact with the podcast. And share comments, like an episode or anything directly without any third party involved. So the podcaster or the network has a direct connection with the audience. I.

Sam Sethi:

So the Fed verse, which is something that you've built the platform around, is the ability for multiple third parties as well as Casta podd hosted implementations to cross comment. Really? Is that the right word we should

Benjamin Bellamy:

use? Cross comment is the consequence because as soon as it's open and we are using open standards, any application can connect to that. So, . Usually when you are on specific app, let's say Apple Podcast, the comment that you post as a listener can be seen only by other users who are also on the exact same platform. And if you're using Spotify, you won't see the comments of someone who posted it on Apple. Well, we break the barriers. Cast Padd and the Fed verse. The comments can be seen from any platform, of course, as long as the platform wants to fetch these comments, But it's open so you can share the information and you cannot as a podcaster. They cannot be blocked from you. You just go to casa.org and there's a download link. You click download, you get a zip file, you upload it to your hosting. It can be a shared hosting that will cost like three bucks a month or even less. And then you just run a with where you enter your email address and basic information. And there you are, ready to podcast.

Sam Sethi:

Now you talk about WordPress and I think is a very good analogy, but will you also as Casta Podd be doing a service like wordpress.com where you will host my Casta Podd solution for me?

Benjamin Bellamy:

Well, I think that's a brilliant idea, and actually we're already had it. So if you go on cast.org, you can download Cast to Self-Host, and if you go to cast dot. Then you can ask us to do everything for you. So it's up to you, your choice. Either you sell, host, or you ask us to host the podcast for you. Now,

Sam Sethi:

Yahi version 1.0 is about to be launched. So please tell me, I mean, How hard has it been to build a platform? What's been the challenges that you've faced as a ctf?

Benjamin Bellamy:

Well, the

Yassine:

biggest challenge, I guess, is to manage an open source community, I guess. Cause I, I've never done it before. And same as Benjamin, I guess. But going from code to support and getting the feedback from users, improving Casta pods and having to do a kind of ping pong between the. Was the biggest challenge, I guess, but it was quite rewarding. I've learned a lot with it, so I'm proud to say that V1 is finally here

Sam Sethi:

today. And congratulations. Now looking slightly forward, there's a couple of things that I wanted to talk to you about. First and foremost, obviously there's a big push within the podcast community for value, for value and the use of micro payments. Where are you guys in terms of implementing support for micropayments? Like a service like Get Obi or any third party Micropayment. Where are you in supporting the value

Benjamin Bellamy:

tag? We already supported, We've been supporting for months. The thing that you have to understand is Casad is agnostic, so we don't want to push one solution before the others as a company rest, we do contentional monetization for podcasters, which mean that basically we are analyzing the content of a podcast and we analyze, uh, product catalogs and we put an. On top of a podcast, but an ad that is directly linked to the content. So you won't get, uh, uh, an ad for, uh, a kitchen if you are listening to a podcast talking about black holes, for instance. We do that a lot with books. I was selling books like for 10 years before. So this is a product that we know very well and there are books talking about everything, so it works pretty well. But we also implemented a pay wall system on Casto, so you can have private premium podcast. And all the micropayment systems, but we do not encourage podcaster to use one system or another. They are totally free to use whichever system they like the best. Regarding Micropayment and value for value, you can insert anything you need to make it work. You can use N N D, you can use some platform such as Get Albi, who makes things very. Easier for our podcasters. We are in contact with them. Uh, we talk with Michael and Moritz a few days ago and a, uh, early 2023, we are probably released a plugin to connect cast podd and git alb together. And we also enabled web monetization, which is another form of micropayments based on Interledger. And by the way, we're, we're going to the Interledger Summit in New Orleans next. So it's really up to the podcaster. You choose. It can be real money, payroll, advertising, Micropayment, cryptocurrencies. It's up to you.

Sam Sethi:

So Dawns on me. I mean, Castor Podd is free, It's open source. Where do you guys make your money? As I just

Benjamin Bellamy:

said, our company is an advertising. So we make money by making a connection between the podcasters and the advertisers. We analyze catalogs of product. We analyze catalogs of podcasts, and we find the right product for the right podcast.

Sam Sethi:

So just to be clear, do I then have to work with you on the advertising platform or is that a choice I can make? So is me using cast podd a requirement, therefore to use ADD Azure or is it a option that I can then monetize with you?

Benjamin Bellamy:

Everything is optional. So great. You can choose, obviously, if you are using cast as a podcaster, it's gonna be easier. Easier, meaning you just have to feel one field and you are ready to go and to monetize with us. Okay? You need to contact us because we need to index your podcasts and we need your agreements to.

Sam Sethi:

Okay. Now one of the other, uh, interesting technologies that's floating around the industry is called o P three from John Spurlock Yashin. Are you looking at using or in integrating o P three into the Casta platform? That's

Yassine:

actually the next thing we're going to integrate. I'm guessing, so we took a look at it. It's not that hard to integrate. It's quite easy, so it's gonna be one of the next

Benjamin Bellamy:

things we do.

Sam Sethi:

And what do you think you know from your perspective as a technologist, the benefit will be back to either the user or the industry or yourselves? Why do you want to I implement O P three?

Benjamin Bellamy:

There are many reasons to do that. First thing I said earlier that we're using the A I B V two specification, but ified is not certified. And there are three reasons why it cannot be certified first, because since it's self host, It would mean that each, each self hosted cast code would need a certification, which would be quite difficult. Then the price that is required to certify is way too much expensive regarding the price of hosting Casto code. Which is basically free. And next, since everything is open source, it's quite easy as a podcaster who self hosts to go into the database and change the numbers. We know that it's always possible to trick the numbers, to have bots or whatever, to have falsified analytics, but with cast being open source and open, it's very easy. So using O P. Allows us to have a third party, which makes things a little bit harder, and so that you can compare to other podcasters and you can have your audience numbers public if you want to. And OP three is also open source. So you know exactly who's behind it. What are the programs? The everything is open. So obviously we love when things are open, and did a very good job with this, so we'll integrate that Very soon. We'll probably also use the you lead tag to make the number even more accurate.

Sam Sethi:

So let's just break some of this down because it's getting quite technical. So O P three, just for those who aren't up to speed, stands to the Open Podcast Prefix Project and we did an interview with John Spurlock in a previous show. So please go back and find that of course is gonna mean that uh, it's an open analytical service that you are going to be integrating with, which is great. And the more. Podcast hosts that do that. The more data we can know about various podcasts, now explain to me in English or French, No, in English, I won't understand the French. What is a uli then, just so that everyone else can

Benjamin Bellamy:

understand, a ULI just token that's is sent. Every time you send a an MP3 or a an RSS feed, you generate a number so that if someone listens to the same podcast, episode three. Or four times, you just count one. So what the I B V two says is that when you have an raw analytics data, you look at the IP of the user, you look at the application the user is using, and you make a 24 hours window. And if you get many request. With that 24 hour window with the same IP address and the same application. And if it's over around one minute, then it's one download. So if you listen to the same episode like four times within the 24 hours window, it will count only for one download. One. Listen you,

Sam Sethi:

that's what it should be. Really, shouldn't it? It it's to stop this sort of spammy type hyping of numbers.

Benjamin Bellamy:

I don't understand what you mean by that.

Sam Sethi:

Oh, so people just going and listening for 20 seconds, doing it three or four times, and then of course showing that their numbers are much higher for the number of listeners. With a uli, of course, it just removes that, uh, type of spam where people are show only one proper

Benjamin Bellamy:

Listen. Well, I think that ULI will be much more accurate than the ev. Standard, but in the end, I think it doesn't really matter what matters. It is that you have a number that everything use the same. Algorithm to calculate that number and you can compare to each other. We know that when Apple Podcast stopped the auto download, we saw a 30% decrease, I guess. So we know that probably 30% of the downloads are never listened to, but that's not a big deal, as long as you know it and everyone has the same error margin. What's the big deal? You when, when you calculate the cpm, you know that, so maybe you lower the price like 30%, but just needs a, a number that you can compare with the industry and the ecosystem.

Sam Sethi:

And I agree, and I thought that should have been a feature, although it was considered by Apple to be a bug, I wished it was a feature because that would give a more accurate view of what the industry's doing. Now, moving on from these cool features that you've got coming down the pipe, one of the other. Things that you did this week was wrote a really cool blog post about using a technology called Whisper from Open ai. Now Whisper, from what I understand, is a free and open source transcription service. So Benjamin, tell me a little bit more about Whisper and why you are using it with Cast Pod.

Benjamin Bellamy:

Well, actually we've been using transcription systems for years because, , we, we index the content of the podcasts, so we need to analyze them, so we need the transcriptions. So we've been working with our own, like in-house technology based on vsc, which is also an open source and free transcription system. It's not a service per se, it's a system and we've been very happy with it. But then came whisper and. Whisper is a game changer. It's really a game changer because it is so accurate and so efficient that it makes everything much more easy. For instance, when you are using the train model with VASc, usually you have to do the punctuation afterwards. Well, Whisper does everything, and you get the capital letter, the names, even the numbers. If you say like 21st Century, you have X a. X, X I, it knows when a number, how it should be written. So the train models are very good. The w e r, so the word error rates are very low and it can recognize many languages. So basically you install it, you run it, and that's it. You almost have no corrections to make afterwards.

Sam Sethi:

Now Yasin, have you got a version working with Casta pot already in one of your beta servers?

Yassine:

Not yet, but we're planning to do so in the coming months. So we're still experimenting with it at the moment. But we'll be working on having a free transcription for users openly in the next months. Yep.

Sam Sethi:

Okay. Now, Benjamin, you wrote that there are three outputs from Whisper, so SRT being one, obviously. What were the others?

Benjamin Bellamy:

T and uh, Vtt.

Sam Sethi:

Okay. So obviously it's giving you captions as well as transcriptions. Yeah. You

Benjamin Bellamy:

get everything you. So this, this is if you use the, the common line, uh, program, but you can also use the Python library to do whatever you need. But out of the box, you within, uh, like one common line, you tap whisper your MP three file and. That's it. You get the transcription and the caption, and if you add a, let's say, task translate, it'll automatically translate the transcription into English

Sam Sethi:

and from the chart that you put in the blog post, which will link to, in the show notes, you showed something like 50, a hundred different languages that it could work with.

Benjamin Bellamy:

Yeah, the trend model is quite impressive because there are so many languages. I've never seen that many.

Sam Sethi:

Now, how long does it take? I mean, how long's a piece of string, but how long does it take to do the transcription? You know, let's say a 30 minute podcast? So

Benjamin Bellamy:

there's a catch here, obviously, because Okay. Whisper is very efficient. It's very accurate, but it is also very slow. So if you have a very old laptop and if your graphic card is old, also, if you don't have a, what we call a gpu, it could take like forever. It can take more than an hour. Just to transcribe a five minutes episode. So it, it really depends on the hardware that you have. If you have a pretty decent laptop with, let's say, an Nvidia graphic adapter for an hour podcast, it's gonna take maybe 30 minutes with a good model, because also the whisper comes with different models, a tiny one, a small one, a medium one, and a large one. And the bigger, the more accurate the result. But also it's, it'll, the longer it'll take to, uh, to perform the transcription. So it's a compromise between your hardware, the time you want to spend and the accuracy you want to get at the end.

Sam Sethi:

I. Okay. What if this was service on? Would that work better? Is there gonna be an option to put it service side or can it run service side? Of

Benjamin Bellamy:

course it can. And there is a demo on hugging face provided by a whisper, which is blazing fast or really fast, but it's limited to 30 seconds because obviously it cuts money.

Sam Sethi:

Right? But if you were doing this as an app developer, you would integrate it and put it service aside for yourself.

Benjamin Bellamy:

This is what we are doing. Yeah, we, we are working on that providing whisper transcription service for podcaster using kpod.

Sam Sethi:

Excellent ya. What else is coming down the track? Sounds like your hands are gonna be very busy for the next few months with O P three and with all of the whisper integration. Is that the basis of everything or is there anything else that you have coming? Oh, well actually

Yassine:

the basis of the next months is that we are going to. Quite a system redesigned for Casta podd. We're gonna include the plugin architecture. So it's gonna take some efforts to have best architecture possible and have anyone extend Casta podd as they wish

Sam Sethi:

to. Cool. So this is very much like WordPress being able to have third party plugins to add to the platform then.

Yassine:

Yeah, and first and foremost I think is having the ability to add rss. Because of, uh, podcasts obviously. So I think the first thing we, we are gonna tackle is having a way to include new tags into the RSS in order to have new podcasting 2.0 tags easily included in gastropods with plugins.

Sam Sethi:

Okay. That'll be really interesting to see. Now, Benjamin, remind us all again, where can we go to get Casta podd please?

Benjamin Bellamy:

You can download Casta Pod for free on casta podd.org. And you can get a turnkey hosting platform for a very reasonable price on kapo.com.

Sam Sethi:

Excellent. Thank you Benjamin. A thank you, Ashin. Look forward to downloading it and playing with

Benjamin Bellamy:

it. Thank you, Sam. Thank you.

James Cridland:

Cast upon 1.0. It's all very exciting, and the Paris Podcast Festival is clearly the place to be. The lovely thing about uh, Casta Pod is that it is open source so anyone can go in and, uh, make that product better. Uh, and talking about open source, PocketCasts has just announced that its mobile apps are now open source, which is really exciting. It's a really good product. It. Podcast app that I use more than any other podcast app. It's available for both iOS and for Android. They have opened their mobile apps now as full open source. It's, um, it won't give you everything that you need to run your own podcast app because it still uses. Bits of the pocket cast's, uh, infrastructure, um, back at, uh, the pocket cast's end. But what it does mean is that everybody can help make pod pocket casts even better by reporting bugs, by suggesting new features and by submitting pool requests for current issues. And, um, from my point of view, a. I think that that should mean that those people that are interested in podcasting 2.0 can, uh, submit pull requests to get some of the podcasting 2.0 features into PocketCasts, which would be a big, big deal because PocketCasts has a lot of users. Um, so, um, you know, so I'm hoping that we see a bunch of people, uh, doing that. They've, uh, shared the data under the Mozilla public license, which I hadn't spotted before, but the Mozilla public license is a pretty good, uh, license and basically is a very permissive one and allows you to do, uh, a lot of stuff with that code. So many congratulations to PocketCasts and automatic, uh, for doing that and talking about, um, licenses. Um, the new podcast, Namespace now has a much clearer license. Um, which is creative common zero, which basically means that anybody can do whatever it is that they want to do with the new podcast name space, which is a good thing. So thank you to Dave Jones for, uh, doing that.

Sam Sethi:

Uh, Yeah, indeed. Now, uh, we talked about squad cars getting their, uh, US patent. They've also got a new version out with a number of quick minor changes. Uh, one of those that I think is quite interesting is that you as the host can change the equipment of your guests. So if they're set up wrongly, you can now change their setup for them, them

James Cridland:

Oh, that's very clever. Very clever. I don't think you're gonna be seeing that in Zoom anytime soon, Are you? That's a very smart thing. Um, yes. And they're also, they've added, um, Uh, global echo cancellation, which is, uh, smart. And also, um, you can now download multiple recordings as a zip far so you don't have, um, tons of different, uh, downloads happening at the same time. Uh, so it's a good tool. So, uh, many congratulations to, uh, squad cast, uh, for that.

Sam Sethi:

And we should obviously say that they sponsored this show as well.

James Cridland:

We, we, we should, you've been reading the rules, uh, so , so there we

Sam Sethi:

you've trained me. Well, James, now moving on, uh, Umbr, uh, which I still haven't got out the box, but I will do eventually, Uh, the Lightning Plus Network. Umbr app is coming along nicely. Uh, we hear on a tweet and they'll be soon submitting the app to the store. Uh, they also are going to be submitting, uh, an IPFS application to the Umbr node in just a few commands. You two can be running a distributed data system. Do you understand any of that? James?

James Cridland:

I, I understand a bit of it. Uh, IPFS podcasting. There is an IPFS podcasting app, which is already available on Umbr. And what that essentially allows you to do is, um, uh, instead of, for example, all of the downloads for no agenda happening on, uh, Adam Curry's, um, uh, website, um, it can be. Distributed around so that, it just makes it easier and faster for everybody concerned. Um, so you can al you can already just, um, download an app on your umbr to make that available, but, um, I know that they're working on that a little bit more, um, which is interesting. And, uh, yeah, so you, you know, fascinating to see a little bit of that, but ipfs, um, I mean, it's never, it's never quite worked. It, it always appears to have, I know that podcast index, were using it for the, for what Dave calls the big dump, um, which is all of the data that, that he makes available every single week. And I don't think that he makes it available in that way anymore because it was just a bit too complicated to sit there and run.

Sam Sethi:

Hmm. Well, Kevin Brook talks about it if you're interested on the Kevin Brooks show, uh, about using IPFS on the enbr to store your podcasts and charge for access in Satoshi's or SATs. So,

James Cridland:

Now I'm going to jump forward to Booster Graham Corner. Um, For, I have a, uh, I have an appointment with a, a person in, in a few minutes. Um, so I'm very aware that I need , I need to run, uh, for that. This is the professional way of doing a podcast, isn't it? Um, but thank you to, uh, a bunch of, uh, Boosts, um, that we, uh, got in, uh, including, uh, Kyron from the Mere Mortals podcast who says, Great interview with Todd. Um, Dave Jones has sent through a, uh, rush boost saying, Sam, well off the mic, be value for value. Question mark. Well off the mic, be value for value.

Sam Sethi:

It's already set up to be. Yes, we're gonna be, it's hosted by rss.com who have already integrated with the oldie wallet, and yes, it will be value for value from the get go.

James Cridland:

Excellent. And he also, uh, has given us a big rush. Boost. That's two trouble. One, two SATs. Uh, for a fake Todd and a real Todd, both in the same episode, get your own.com. Uh, so, uh, so thank you Dave, uh, for that. Uh, much, much appreciate that. Uh, and also to real coach Andy, uh, who uses Fountain, who just sent us a boost saying first, uh, and first is absolutely correct. Uh, so, uh, thank you. Uh, All of the boosts. We really appreciate it. If you do get value outta this show, then please do press that boost button, um, and, uh, share some of your time, talent, and or treasure, uh, with us. Uh, we would really appreciate it.

Sam Sethi:

Okay. Now, uh, moving on very quickly, if you wanna speak up, Podcast movement evolutions in la which I'm going to, I booked so early. It's crazy. It's so crazy. Uh, you've until Friday, October the 28th to, uh, submit your speech.

James Cridland:

Yes, Yes. So, uh, get doing that. You've only got a week, uh, to, uh, end up, uh, doing that. Uh, there's been a bunch of movement in the attribution space this week. Uh, very tonic, approved as an attribution partner by audio boom, which adds a potential 8,000 shows, uh, there and. Pod scribe have added attribution as well. Uh, they're very, uh, brave on the independent third party attribution for advertising stuff, um, which is all, uh, very exciting. And of course, you realize that the reason why they're so heavily pushing independent and third party is that Chartable and pod sites are both owned by Spotify. So you can exactly see what they're doing.

Sam Sethi:

Hmm. Now a couple of podcasts worth, you know, listening to, apart from this one of course, is uh, decoder with Neli Patel has interviewed a Mark Zuckerberg this week, which I think is worth a listen to. Pod Save America has special guest back. President Barack Obama, which might be an interesting one. He talks about Trump and the January 6th attack on the capital building. Uh, and finally, uh, Spotify's released its latest episode of Spotify. Discover this and the host talks with near Zerman, whose Spotify's global head of audio books about his vision. So again, if you wanna know more about what they think about they're gonna do with audiobooks, check out Spotify, Discover this.

James Cridland:

Yeah, indeed. And there's one more podcast, actually, the 20 Minute vc, which has an interview with, uh, Spotify's Chief Research and Development Officer Gustav Surro. And he talks about why building a product is nothing to do with art. Uh, I have just, uh, finished reading a long book about Johnny Ives time at Apple. Uh, where he believes that building a product is everything to do with art. Uh, so I think it's interesting seeing those two, uh, differing, uh, points of view, but, uh, fascinating to end up seeing. So, what's been happening for you this week in, uh, Pod Land? Sam?

Sam Sethi:

Uh, well, this week, uh, I've been listening to two books on Audible, the new one from Yuri Noah Harari, who is, uh, somebody I like. But, uh, Adam Garry says he finds him very frightening. Uh, uh, you and Noel Harari wrote 24 21 Rules for the 21st Century. And Sapians is two of his other books. Uh, this new book is called Unstoppable and it's talking about a man's superhuman power. And he says, The superhuman power we have is the ability to tell stories, and that's what separates us from all the beasts. The ability to transfer our knowledge through stories, which I think is what podcasting does very well.

James Cridland:

Wow. Well, there's a thing. Well, for me, I've been, I've been very excited, uh, to see Pod News getting, uh, 25,000 subscribers to our newsletter. And in fact, it was Neve, who you'll, uh, hear in just a minute, um, being a subscriber, 25,000, uh, which is, uh, very exciting. So, uh, thank you if you are one of those, and if you're not one of those, you should go to pod news.net and subscribe. Um, that will be a splendid thing. Um, and yes, looking forward to the rest of this week, uh, here in, uh, Reyad. Um, and, uh, it should be an, it should be an interesting week from my point of view.

Sam Sethi:

Well, that's it for this week, James. Then.

James Cridland:

it is. Uh, if you like this episode of Pod Land, tell others to visit and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll be back next week with another review and analysis of all things podcasting.

Sam Sethi:

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James Cridland:

That's right. And if you'd like daily news, you should get Pod news, the newsletters free@podnews.net. The podcast can be found in your podcast.

Sam Sethi:

And our music is from Studio Dragonfly, and we're hosted and sponsored by our good friends, Boss Sprout and Squad Cast.

James Cridland:

Keep listening.

Sam Sethi:

And in this case, do keep listening,

James Cridland:

Yes indeed. To keep listening because this bit is going to be a little bit strange because you'll hear quite a lot twice. We're just about to hear two different versions of the interview that Sam did with Neil Valeo. We'll start off with Sam's and then we'll play you Niels. And at the end of that, we'd be really interested to find out which you think you liked the most. So, uh, please do drop us a boost or send us a tweet where at pod land news. And we'd love to hear from you. So first here's Neil Valeo talking with Sam Stephy. And this is Sam's edit.

Sam Sethi:

I'm excited by this section. Actually, we are going to be doing an edit off. What the hell's an edit off? Well, it started off with a little tweet that was posted last week by Miesha Usee, who's the CEO and co-founder of Just Like Productions, and she said, Super lean. That is in quotes, That's what she said, Price for a weekly podcast is $244,000. Well, when I read that, I nearly fell off my chair, but when I looked at her tweet, she'd got a team of five or six producers and it was quite justifiable. If you are producing a hitch, But of course that was left in the Twitter sphere and people started to comment about it, and one of those people commented was my guest today. His name's Neil Aveo. Neil, hello. How

Neal Veglio:

are you? Hi, Sam. I'm absolutely ecstatic. It's such an honor. I've been listening to you guys well since the beginning. For me, it's like meeting the queen. Bless her, rest, her soul. It's huge honor. So thank you for inviting me on. First of all,

Sam Sethi:

it's been so long since I've been called a queen Um,. Neal Veglio: Great start.. We'll leave that bit in. Uh, now let's get a little bit of background into who is Neil and why I've invited you on to talk about editing Funda. Should you spend that much money on a podcast like $244,000, or can you do it very simply and cheaply and or should you edit at all? As as the pod father says that he thinks that editing is dishonest. Now, Neil, what's your background? Give us a little backtrack

Neal Veglio:

really quickly summed up for the ease of editing this. I started out in radio in the mid nineties, and I just really got into the whole personality radio thing. My hero growing up was Kenny Everett. Mm-hmm.. I used to sneakily listen to him under the bed, covers on tapes that I'd ordered from before the internet mail order from the back of my dad's daily mail. I used to order Kenny Everett tapes and Howard Stern tapes and all those kinds of radio gods from the late eighties and mid nineties, and I just decided, That's what I want to do. If only I could get paid for doing this, like Kenny does. And that's really where the inspiration came from. So roll forward, landed in the doorstep of Bruno Brooks, who'd heard me on a radio station, said That's what I want. And I just, I learned a lot from Bruno as a guy that was an ex top 40 dj, one of the biggest radio stars in the nineties and late eighties. I just picked so much up from him about content and what people wanna listen to and what we think they want to listen to versus the reality and you know, the difference between being on a stage and doing a show live. It just taught me a lot about understanding from the listener point of view. Rather than from the creator point of view, which I think has helped me now rolling forward 25 odd years doing podcasts with individuals and brands, getting the right kind of listeners and understanding what those sorts of listeners want to hear in their ears. So that's kind of a roundup.

Sam Sethi:

So in summary, in my head today, you at Val's clients on podcasting, both from a brand and monetization aspect, but also from a production and editing aspect as.

Neal Veglio:

I hate the term personal branding. I think it's overused, but really yes, it is. It, it's a way of translating that whole marketing lingo of personal branding into audio format. So that is a case of almost sitting down with whoever wants to do the podcast and saying to them, What do you wanna get outta this? You know, do you want people to be aware of your product? Do you want to use it as what I call a Trojan horse effect? Which is where, you know, like what you use pod land for, essentially you're, you are using it as a networking tool. So you and James, you'll sit down with people in the industry. You know, it's a great way of starting a conversation with them. And that could lead to either, you know, a, an ongoing friendship or perhaps a business transaction, anything like that you guys managed to get out to, you know, podcast movement? Well, a big part of that would've been because of Woodland. You know, you are an exhibitor. It's really about understanding what their ideal listen. Is going to get from the experience and then guiding them towards creating that kind of content. So

Sam Sethi:

going back to what was said by Misha, do you find that the $244,000. Price mark is therefore justifiable. Is that a totally understandable cost or do you think that she's smoking

Neal Veglio:

something? It's not that she's smoking something. My take on this, and I think I tweeted this, although I can never remember what I've tweeted, which is why I always catches up with Minad. This is a mind thread that has come from within a bubble. And that bubble is a large corporate building filled with people that essentially just go, make this happen. Here's the won. And therefore, you know, the budget is not a consideration. And I think if you are gonna make statements about how much something should cost, you should have a more varied background in understanding what the costs are that are involved in the process of producing a podcast. Like for example, I mean, you know, let's take cereal. Obviously that's the most well known podcast that went huge. How much did cereal cost to make? I couldn't tell you. I'm guessing it was probably not $244,000 a year. It might have been, but my point is if cereal had been made for $24,000 a year, Would it have sounded vastly different? It might have done, because you might have had a little bit less, you know, in terms of the research that had gone into it. So it might have been a bit more of a lower key show, but I personally feel that cereal got a bit of a helping hand anyway, with the fact that it was circumstantially, it was a product of its time. So it came out largely at the right time when Apple Podcasts went completely mainstream. My thing on it is, is that yes, you can spend thousands on researchers, on producers. You know you can pay someone $50 to do an hour of editing on fiber. Will it sound as good as the $5,000 person that's being paid monthly by. The corporate? No, probably not, because then you're paying for that level of quality. You're paying for that accountability. You've got someone that actually can then have a boss come to them and say, The way that you chopped out that first sentence, I didn't like it. Can you leave that in next time? You know you've got that accountability there. Whereas with a five person, You as a producer or as a show runner, you kind of feel a little bit beholden to the level of standard they're putting in because you paid them $50. You know, there's nuances to this stuff. I'll give you

Sam Sethi:

some, um, stats back the other way, which is quite interesting. Cereal made $272,000 per episode. It was a $40 CPM and they had 3.4 million downloads, which comes out 3.3 million for a season. So again, when you are right at the top of the tree, I think those crazy numbers that Miesha were talking about. Don't look so crazy and equally well done to the guys at Serial. They sold it to the New York Times for $25 million. I don't think you're gonna be able to do that often and repeatable. I think there are very few examples of Serial. I think, you know, Smartless is a good example. Maybe there's a few other cases, but. I think the precedent that was set, and I think Spotify's looked at this and gone, Hey, can we have some hit shows like this? And have started to get exclusive. So they started buying podcast Gimlet cuz Wonder was already sold and they started acquiring IP and hit shows with the aim of generating this similar sort of amount. We've seen in the last week, Neil, and the number of people have been let go from podcast and Gimlet about 38 people, 5% of Spotify's podcast staff. The problem is, and I guess have people. Who are as you put it in the bubble, gone, Hey, I can come up and create a really good quality show for you. Give me a bag of money, and you have a serious bag of money. You produce a show, but they've not produced the audience because they're in the Spotify walled garden. Maybe, uh, Misha is correct. Maybe they're the numbers that people are playing with today and me and you who are not hobbyists, but we are at the middle of that sort of, uh, body of podcasting. Couldn't afford to pay those sorts of crazy numbers for, I don't know, editing podcast, a writers, et cetera, cuz we're not generating the audience and we're not generating the revenue.

Neal Veglio:

It's about a scale set. Yeah. I mean, this is my point, and this is the point I make to every new podcaster that I talk to, you know, I've got clients that I work with that are one man bands, one lady bands, and I've got corporates teams of 20 people in a marketing department who have got, you know, the boss has gone. Right. We need a podcast. And they've gone, Where the hell do we even start? And my advice to all of them is start slow. Because at the end of the day, you can put$244,000 worth of investment into a show. I don't know what your monthly listening figures are. I would assume they're pretty good. I'd assume that you guys wouldn't keep doing this. Especially James because he is used to big numbers on pod news. You know, you guys wouldn't keep doing this if you weren't getting the return of the attention and you know, the satisfaction of, uh, you know, connecting with an audience that are clearly loving what you're doing, speaking as one. But my point with this is that you can expect probably around about 120 downloads on your show per episode within a month for the first, at least six months. Who's that?

Sam Sethi:

Is that the beginner? The average beginner? The

Neal Veglio:

average new podcast. Right? Unless they're so, And I'm talking about your business coach who maybe is in London, has been doing the talk scene, you know, gets great feedback to their talks. Someone comes up to 'em and says, You know what, John, you should do a podcast. Great idea. John's not gonna get 3000 downloads on his first episode. John's probably not gonna get 3000 downloads. 20th episode because what he's done is he is taken an established piece of content and tried to approach a new audience with it. That is the point of podcasting. We are trying to reach new audiences with sometimes different modalities. You know, for example, if we're a YouTuber, we might go, Well, you know, a podcast. That's a, that's a no brainer. Yeah. But your modality. That you've learned, your skill is video. You're visual. You're a visual person. Therefore, you obviously communicate in a very visual way. You might not communicate as well in an audio way. So there's considerations here. But the thing is, if you are gonna go ahead and invest $244,000, In a new podcast, unless you've got Kim Kardashian hosting it,

Sam Sethi:

don't listen to her podcast. Oh,

Neal Veglio:

right. But this is my point. You know, everyone's going, Oh, you know, Kim Kardashian, a podcast sucks. It's terrible. It's not even true crime. Well, that's the thing. You're talking about it, and obviously Spotify have gone. We're not really that worried about the content per se. We want a podcast that we can crowbar Kim Kardashian into. She will do it because she gets that creative fulfillment about doing something that she wants to be known for. And that is literally the same thing that branded podcasts are doing. They're literally saying, We're not really worried about the content. Per se, we just want to get the credibility of having some consistent content going out. And this is where I think they all get it wrong. People need to do a bit more development work upfront. They need to do a bit more forethought. And my suspicion is Spotify don't do that. What they do is they go, Right, we've got this bag of money. You said it yourself. We've got this huge bag of money. Let's give it to a Gimlet or a podcast or an audio boom or whoever to produce a podcast. Let them get on with. And then what you are left with is a show that is given to you. But the problem with that is you've got no creative control as Spotify. So you are literally giving them the money, getting back something which is not guaranteed to be a hit because you've got people that are creatives and creatives, love to be creative and don't necessarily come from the, what's the logical approach to this? How much money are we, are we investing in this? And what's the return on investment we're gonna give to Spotify? Is anyone actually gonna enjoy it and listen to.

Sam Sethi:

The other part of this that I wanted to talk to you about is editing. We have both got a radio background, and I hope when we edit this back there aren't too many ums and ahs so far in what we've. The question is, where do you stand on editing? As I said, Adam Curry is of the school of he thinks editing's, dishonest, and I think to be fair to Adam is because I think he thinks people can be taken outta context and misquoted. Todd Cochran, who's done 1,628 shows probably a few more by now, doesn't famously. Geek New Central or his, uh, new media show because they're live and he says, I haven't got the time to edit. But where do you stand on editing? Should podcasts be edited? I

Neal Veglio:

don't by anybody saying I don't have the time to edit. And I respect Todd. You know, Todd's been around a long time. Adam Curry been around a long time, and these guys, they know their stuff. This is about perspective, This is about nuance, and for me, when you've got a Todd, he's got his audience. So the editing for him would be less of a consideration for, you know, say somebody new that comes along and goes, You know what? I'd really wanna do a show about tech. I wanna do a geek. But I wanna compete with Todd cuz Todd does a great job and I wanna get all of his audience. So if you are then gonna go in and do you know, a competition with Todd Coch? Would you take Todd's format and duplicate it? Probably not, right? Because you know that Todd has been doing it the way Todd's been doing it. He's established what he does. So if you are gonna be a new show that wants to compete with that, you probably have to think a little bit more in terms of, well, okay, so what does this show have that mine doesn't? And what can my show bring to the table? That will beat Todd. The first place I would look is probably the editing, because if you think about it, Todd's been putting out this show. How many more listeners could he have if he approached the new audience with a new format of actually tighter edits, more engaging to listen to? More lean to moments you'll know about this Sam in radio, lean to and lean back audio. I do find it funny when I go onto certain Facebook groups and I see people saying, Don't edit the audio. Just, you know, put it out as it is. It's authentic. A lot of people don't get what authenticity actually means. What authenticity means is, Putting a side of yourself that is really you. And if the side of yourself that's really you is someone that wants to put out a tight show that's loaded with content and no filler moments, you're being authentic. So how dare someone who just lops stuff together for an hour, puts it on the internet with no music, no transitions, no engaging moments, no lean to audio. How dare they tell you that that's how you should produce your show? Every other show goes on for 20 minutes at the beginning about their day. Then they finally get into the content. You're shaking your

Sam Sethi:

head cuz you know any show that starts off with, Hey, how's your dog, Neil? What you been doing? Did you, did you enjoy the wine last week? I turn off instantly. Shut up. That is my time. You are wasting and I don't want to hear it. I'm not joining in to find about your social life. I really hate those type of shows.

Neal Veglio:

We talked about modalities earlier. Let me bring modality back into it because I think this in marketing is a really important point. I mean, Tony Robbins talks about modality in a big way. If you've never read a Tony Robbins book, you can learn so much about how to do your podcast or your video or whatever content you're doing from Tony Robbins section about NLP and modality. Straight away, whatever you think about nlp, regardless, you can't dismiss the fact that we have modalities. We know this has been proven, and if your modality is your more kinesthetic, So, in other words, you like to feel, you, like to understand, you like to deep dive more. I mean, to start with you've got a challenge cuz you've gotta convince someone that likes reading blog posts, that they're gonna listen to audio in the first place. But if you pull it off 20%, your audience might do, Do they really want to hear when they've been used to reading blog posts that are nicely broken up with headings and they get to the point, do you really. Them to sit through. So joining me on the show is Neil, Neil's been doing podcasting for a while, for 25 years, blah, blah, blah. Let's go through his entire bio for five minutes right now. Here's a word from our sponsor right now. So how you doing, Neil? Yeah. Great. Thanks Sam. Yeah. Wow.

Sam Sethi:

That's the whole nice show. That's my

Neal Veglio:

stick it. Absolutely. Which is why I was brave enough to frame it like that. Stop it. You self-deprecating. Delightful. You've got to understand where your listener is in your journey. It's not about you. It isn't about you. It's never about you. It's about your listener, and the reason why everyone listening to the sound of my whiny, egotistical voice right now, The reason why they listen to what you and James are doing is because you get into deep conversations, but you do it quickly. Yeah. You might shout your lovely sponsor squad. You might talk about your Ignite Jingles. You might talk about Buzz Sprout being 3000 new podcasts this week. Well done. Buzz Sprout well say's. The,

Sam Sethi:

all the, all those mentions were, You got 'em all off though. So that's all that, all that matters.

Neal Veglio:

It does, but you are doing in the right places. You know it, it's not three and a half minutes of pre-roll ad. You're throwing it in. You are mentioning them in the right way, which is organically, you know? Yeah. We're using bus sprout for this. The point is you are bringing the content to them, so we are willing to sit there and go, Well, I, you know, I, I maybe don't use those tools necessarily, but I'm aware of them now because you've told me about them. But I'm loving the content anyway, so yeah, I forgive You're paying the bills set. What I won't forgive is you making me sit through 20 minutes of irrelevant in a chat. Because you want to be authentic and you don't wanna be dishonest. I'm not Adam Curry. People are not gonna go to a, a conference center in LA to hear me speak. So if I'm Adam Curry and I can do that, then maybe I would be, you know what, I'm just gonna leave everything I say, you know, to Dave in the content because it's all relevant with pod land.

Sam Sethi:

It is as tight as we can make it. We try, you know, we do have some flap in it, but we do try now sometimes, and I will take this on the. When I first started editing and learning about editing, I was probably overly tight and probably didn't understand the tools of production that I was using properly. And I was letting the AI do much of the editing for me. Oh, look, if I click one button, everything disappears. Excellent. That's amazing. And then if I click this other button, it adds studio sound. And if I add this button, it does something else to it. And suddenly it sounded very robotic and. In natural. And the reason why we're having this conversation was cuz on the Podcast Index Podcast this week, Adam and Dave had heard my interview with Todd, but their commentary was that I was DMing and Dearing too much and maybe a little too tight. And that's where I was like, Okay, I wanna learn., what's different? So Neil's gonna be editing this part of the podcast and I'm gonna be editing it, and we will have that at the end of the show as a comparative. Now, what tools do you use, Neil?

Neal Veglio:

D Script is an unbelievably good tool. I use it for first wave, Well, I use it for second wave technically because the first wave is sitting down listening to the full audio and getting notes down in your head of where things are gonna go and all that sort of stuff. But if you're talking about the actual technicalities of editing, which we are here, it's second wave. So you are listening out for which parts of the show you have already noted you wanna get rid of because they're not relevant, then you are getting rid of. For me, the ums and the Rs. You've got to bring this with some common sense. Would I leave in every, um, and ah, absolutely not 100%. No way. For the visuals amongst your audience, I'm gonna put this in a way that they'll understand. If you are in a conference and you are watching a speaker that you don't know that well yet, you've not established whether or not they've got any credibility. They stand on stage and they're talking about something you're really interested in, and they start their opening talk with. Um, so I'm here to talk to you about, uh, business immediately. Your head, I'm out. This guy does not know what he's talking about. He's thinking on the fly. He's completely clueless. So I don't care if five minutes into this, you're gonna bring me the nugget that is going to change my life and make me into a successful business owner. I've dismissed you straight away. And this is what is happening with audio. So for me it's a case of understanding how is the listener gonna take this if it's in the first sentence. How many podcasts have you heard, Sam? Where someone has started the sentence with, um, taken a pause and then started speaking? Yeah. Now

Sam Sethi:

we have had radio training and all my presenters, I always say don't put the mic up and then think while the music's. That's your thinking time, and soon as you put the mic up, you then communicate. The challenge I've got with editing and why I edit still is because many of my guests, not you, but many of my guests aren't trained presenters, and that's when I believe editing is required because. The number of people who, uh, uh, I was, I was saying to myself that the, the, the, the, the words I need to say, and they will make random sentences up. So again, I think it's a nuance of where you sit. I think when you've got a inexperienced guest who's got great content, but hasn't got great vocabulary in terms of audio presentation. Then you do need to edit them, not just for your sake, not just for the listener's sake, but actually sometimes for their sake to make them sound intelligent and

Neal Veglio:

credible. I 100% agree, and a big way of facilitating that is to learn how to use the descript editing tool properly. Because you know, like you, you mentioned it yourself. You know you got all these buttons. And let's be honest about it not being on kinds of e-script, because they're a brilliant tool and I really appreciate their existence cuz they make my job easier, certainly on the first wave. But the same thing that software recording tools do, where they give you these processing buttons, which everyone goes, Oh, I'm gonna hit that cuz that's gonna make me, No it doesn't. What it does is it jacks your audio straight away, Turn 'em off, do all the post production work. You know, with Dsri, you've got that apply to all button and everyone hits it and you can hear. You know, one of the biggest giveaways of badly edited audio, and now I'm gonna say this, you are never gonna wanna hear this is a half breath, because what it's telling you is someone has just seen a bit of audio and another bit of audio, and then a gap, and they've just chopped out the gap. But the problem with that is then if that person is breathing in a particular way, as they go into the next part of the. That's when it sounds robotic. So when people say, Don't edit because it makes you sound robotic, what they're talking about is not editing. They're talking about terrible editing.

Sam Sethi:

Great. So Adam's basically saying to me, Sam, you're a tele report.. Right? That's, thanks for the translation

Neal Veglio:

there. I had nothing to do with that. I, that's, I'll take that. That was not Mela, but No, listen, and honestly, and I'll be completely honest with you, Yeah. You know, there have been episodes in the past, I've listened to. And I didn't even know that it was you that was editing it at the time, but I've been G Oh wow. That's jarring or yikes. And it does, It throws you outta the conversation because you are saying something, you are sort of laughing, and then suddenly your laughter disappears. There's a breath, and then suddenly you are midway through another sentence. You know, you are not the only person. In podcasting that is guilty of this. This is quite a common thing where people go, I quite like the idea of doing a podcast. Descript is marketed as this tool that handles all the editing for me at the click of a button, I'm just gonna do that, put it out there. For me, it's about understanding. Descript does one thing very well. It puts visual cues on the audio you should be looking at, but then making a decision editorially on whether or not that audio needs to go and if it's an, um, it might need to stay if it's relevant to the piece, if it's an emotive point. What's worse when you're hearing someone ask a question, like certainly for, for document. I'm a, a judge at the British Podcast Awards, and I hear probably about 200 podcasts per year in the documentary category as part of that judging process. And you can tell when a producer has given thought to the content rather than just editing it because it's their job. Because if someone's turning around and saying, So, um, you know, Abigail, tell me what it felt like to see that man that harassed you, terrorized you for many years. Finally, go behind bars. I felt great. No . Um, honestly, did you hear the difference that, obviously, you know, that is the difference between E motive. Powerful audio that has been considered before a decision has been taken versus, Oh, well I've gotta edit that out cause she's just gone. Um, and this is the nuance that I'm talking about when I'm talking to people like Adam Curry who's saying editing is dishonest. It's not dishonest because what it's doing is it's presenting your authentic self to your listener, your authentic self is I want my listener to get the best possible experience that will work for them. Based on the content that they've come to experience. I think that's the

Sam Sethi:

key to it, isn't it? It's that authentic self and however you present that now, I think we're gonna have fun. You're gonna go away now and take this copy of this audio and I'm gonna go and take the copy of this audio. And we're gonna edit it, and I think it'll be interesting to see how that's produced. I actually wish that one of us had more ums and errs and more double words in

Neal Veglio:

it. I'm guilty to be honest. Now. You know why? I've learned to edit so

Sam Sethi:

well. Now before you go though, Neil, of course, please tell everyone if they wanna get in touch with you or they want to get to know more about pod knows, where can they go?

Neal Veglio:

I'm absolutely prolific on LinkedIn, so if you search for Neil Valley I'll spell it for you cuz my parents weird and misspelled my name. It's n a l. V E G L I O and you can get me on Twitter where I'm at real Neil

Sam Sethi:

Valio. Neil, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this. We are gonna have fun now putting it out as a double episode of you editing it and eye editing it. I'll catch you later,

Neal Veglio:

mate. Thanks so much. Well, that was Sam's edit. And now let's hear Neil value's edit of exactly the same interview and this will be ever so slightly shorter. I say ever so slightly shorter. It's very much shorter. It's very, very much shorter. Again, which do you prefer? Uh, please do let us know. Here comes, Neil Valeo

Sam Sethi:

I'm excited by this section. Actually, we are going to be doing an edit off. What the hell's an edit off? Well, it started off with a little tweet that was posted last week by Miesha Usee, who's the CEO and co-founder of Just Like Productions, and she said, Super lean. That is in quotes, That's what she said, Price for a weekly podcast is $244,000. Well, when I read that, I nearly fell off my chair, but when I looked at her tweet, she'd got a team of five or six producers and it was quite justifiable. If you are producing a hitch, But of course that was left in the Twitter sphere and people started to comment about it, and one of those people commented was my guest today. His name's Neil Aveo. Neil, hello. How

Neal Veglio:

are you? Hi, Sam. I'm absolutely ecstatic. It's such an honor. I've been listening to you guys well since the beginning. For me, it's like meeting the queen. Bless her, rest, her soul. It's huge honor. So thank you for inviting me on. First of all,

Sam Sethi:

it's been so long since I've been called a queen Um,. Neal Veglio: Great start.. We'll leave that bit in. Uh, now let's get a little bit of background into who is Neil and why I've invited you on to talk about editing Funda. Should you spend that much money on a podcast like $244,000, or can you do it very simply and cheaply and or should you edit at all? As as the pod father says that he thinks that editing is dishonest. Now, Neil, what's your background? Give us a little backtrack

Neal Veglio:

really quickly summed up for the ease of editing this. I started out in radio in the mid nineties, and I just really got into the whole personality radio thing. My hero growing up was Kenny Everett. Mm-hmm.. I used to sneakily listen to him under the bed, covers on tapes that I'd ordered from before the internet mail order from the back of my dad's daily mail. I used to order Kenny Everett tapes and Howard Stern tapes and all those kinds of radio gods from the late eighties and mid nineties, and I just decided, That's what I want to do. If only I could get paid for doing this, like Kenny does. And that's really where the inspiration came from. So roll forward, landed in the doorstep of Bruno Brooks, who'd heard me on a radio station, said That's what I want. And I just, I learned a lot from Bruno as a guy that was an ex top 40 dj, one of the biggest radio stars in the nineties and late eighties. I just picked so much up from him about content and what people wanna listen to and what we think they want to listen to versus the reality and you know, the difference between being on a stage and doing a show live. It just taught me a lot about understanding from the listener point of view. Rather than from the creator point of view, which I think has helped me now rolling forward 25 odd years doing podcasts with individuals and brands, getting the right kind of listeners and understanding what those sorts of listeners want to hear in their ears. So that's kind of a roundup.

Sam Sethi:

So in summary, in my head today, you at Val's clients on podcasting, both from a brand and monetization aspect, but also from a production and editing aspect as.

Neal Veglio:

I hate the term personal branding. I think it's overused, but really yes, it is. It, it's a way of translating that whole marketing lingo of personal branding into audio format. So that is a case of almost sitting down with whoever wants to do the podcast and saying to them, What do you wanna get outta this? You know, do you want people to be aware of your product? Do you want to use it as what I call a Trojan horse effect? Which is where, you know, like what you use pod land for, essentially you're, you are using it as a networking tool. So you and James, you'll sit down with people in the industry. You know, it's a great way of starting a conversation with them. And that could lead to either, you know, a, an ongoing friendship or perhaps a business transaction, anything like that you guys managed to get out to, you know, podcast movement? Well, a big part of that would've been because of Woodland. You know, you are an exhibitor. It's really about understanding what their ideal listen. Is going to get from the experience and then guiding them towards creating that kind of content. So

Sam Sethi:

going back to what was said by Misha, do you find that the $244,000. Price mark is therefore justifiable. Is that a totally understandable cost or do you think that she's smoking

Neal Veglio:

something? It's not that she's smoking something. My take on this, and I think I tweeted this, although I can never remember what I've tweeted, which is why I always catches up with Minad. This is a mind thread that has come from within a bubble. And that bubble is a large corporate building filled with people that essentially just go, make this happen. Here's the won. And therefore, you know, the budget is not a consideration. And I think if you are gonna make statements about how much something should cost, you should have a more varied background in understanding what the costs are that are involved in the process of producing a podcast. Like for example, I mean, you know, let's take cereal. Obviously that's the most well known podcast that went huge. How much did cereal cost to make? I couldn't tell you. I'm guessing it was probably not $244,000 a year. It might have been, but my point is if cereal had been made for $24,000 a year, Would it have sounded vastly different? It might have done, because you might have had a little bit less, you know, in terms of the research that had gone into it. So it might have been a bit more of a lower key show, but I personally feel that cereal got a bit of a helping hand anyway, with the fact that it was circumstantially, it was a product of its time. So it came out largely at the right time when Apple Podcasts went completely mainstream. My thing on it is, is that yes, you can spend thousands on researchers, on producers. You know you can pay someone $50 to do an hour of editing on fiber. Will it sound as good as the $5,000 person that's being paid monthly by. The corporate? No, probably not, because then you're paying for that level of quality. You're paying for that accountability. You've got someone that actually can then have a boss come to them and say, The way that you chopped out that first sentence, I didn't like it. Can you leave that in next time? You know you've got that accountability there. Whereas with a five person, You as a producer or as a show runner, you kind of feel a little bit beholden to the level of standard they're putting in because you paid them $50. You know, there's nuances to this stuff. I'll give you

Sam Sethi:

some, um, stats back the other way, which is quite interesting. Cereal made $272,000 per episode. It was a $40 CPM and they had 3.4 million downloads, which comes out 3.3 million for a season. So again, when you are right at the top of the tree, I think those crazy numbers that Miesha were talking about. Don't look so crazy and equally well done to the guys at Serial. They sold it to the New York Times for $25 million. I don't think you're gonna be able to do that often and repeatable. I think there are very few examples of Serial. I think, you know, Smartless is a good example. Maybe there's a few other cases, but. I think the precedent that was set, and I think Spotify's looked at this and gone, Hey, can we have some hit shows like this? And have started to get exclusive. So they started buying podcast Gimlet cuz Wonder was already sold and they started acquiring IP and hit shows with the aim of generating this similar sort of amount. We've seen in the last week, Neil, and the number of people have been let go from podcast and Gimlet about 38 people, 5% of Spotify's podcast staff. The problem is, and I guess have people. Who are as you put it in the bubble, gone, Hey, I can come up and create a really good quality show for you. Give me a bag of money, and you have a serious bag of money. You produce a show, but they've not produced the audience because they're in the Spotify walled garden. Maybe, uh, Misha is correct. Maybe they're the numbers that people are playing with today and me and you who are not hobbyists, but we are at the middle of that sort of, uh, body of podcasting. Couldn't afford to pay those sorts of crazy numbers for, I don't know, editing podcast, a writers, et cetera, cuz we're not generating the audience and we're not generating the revenue.

Neal Veglio:

It's about a scale set. Yeah. I mean, this is my point, and this is the point I make to every new podcaster that I talk to, you know, I've got clients that I work with that are one man bands, one lady bands, and I've got corporates teams of 20 people in a marketing department who have got, you know, the boss has gone. Right. We need a podcast. And they've gone, Where the hell do we even start? And my advice to all of them is start slow. Because at the end of the day, you can put$244,000 worth of investment into a show. I don't know what your monthly listening figures are. I would assume they're pretty good. I'd assume that you guys wouldn't keep doing this. Especially James because he is used to big numbers on pod news. You know, you guys wouldn't keep doing this if you weren't getting the return of the attention and you know, the satisfaction of, uh, you know, connecting with an audience that are clearly loving what you're doing, speaking as one. But my point with this is that you can expect probably around about 120 downloads on your show per episode within a month for the first, at least six months. Who's that?

Sam Sethi:

Is that the beginner? The average beginner? The

Neal Veglio:

average new podcast. Right? Unless they're so, And I'm talking about your business coach who maybe is in London, has been doing the talk scene, you know, gets great feedback to their talks. Someone comes up to 'em and says, You know what, John, you should do a podcast. Great idea. John's not gonna get 3000 downloads on his first episode. John's probably not gonna get 3000 downloads. 20th episode because what he's done is he is taken an established piece of content and tried to approach a new audience with it. That is the point of podcasting. We are trying to reach new audiences with sometimes different modalities. You know, for example, if we're a YouTuber, we might go, Well, you know, a podcast. That's a, that's a no brainer. Yeah. But your modality. That you've learned, your skill is video. You're visual. You're a visual person. Therefore, you obviously communicate in a very visual way. You might not communicate as well in an audio way. So there's considerations here. But the thing is, if you are gonna go ahead and invest $244,000, In a new podcast, unless you've got Kim Kardashian hosting it,

Sam Sethi:

don't listen to her podcast. Oh,

Neal Veglio:

right. But this is my point. You know, everyone's going, Oh, you know, Kim Kardashian, a podcast sucks. It's terrible. It's not even true crime. Well, that's the thing. You're talking about it, and obviously Spotify have gone. We're not really that worried about the content per se. We want a podcast that we can crowbar Kim Kardashian into. She will do it because she gets that creative fulfillment about doing something that she wants to be known for. And that is literally the same thing that branded podcasts are doing. They're literally saying, We're not really worried about the content. Per se, we just want to get the credibility of having some consistent content going out. And this is where I think they all get it wrong. People need to do a bit more development work upfront. They need to do a bit more forethought. And my suspicion is Spotify don't do that. What they do is they go, Right, we've got this bag of money. You said it yourself. We've got this huge bag of money. Let's give it to a Gimlet or a podcast or an audio boom or whoever to produce a podcast. Let them get on with. And then what you are left with is a show that is given to you. But the problem with that is you've got no creative control as Spotify. So you are literally giving them the money, getting back something which is not guaranteed to be a hit because you've got people that are creatives and creatives, love to be creative and don't necessarily come from the, what's the logical approach to this? How much money are we, are we investing in this? And what's the return on investment we're gonna give to Spotify? Is anyone actually gonna enjoy it and listen to.

Sam Sethi:

The other part of this that I wanted to talk to you about is editing. We have both got a radio background, and I hope when we edit this back there aren't too many ums and ahs so far in what we've. The question is, where do you stand on editing? As I said, Adam Curry is of the school of he thinks editing's, dishonest, and I think to be fair to Adam is because I think he thinks people can be taken outta context and misquoted. Todd Cochran, who's done 1,628 shows probably a few more by now, doesn't famously. Geek New Central or his, uh, new media show because they're live and he says, I haven't got the time to edit. But where do you stand on editing? Should podcasts be edited? I

Neal Veglio:

don't by anybody saying I don't have the time to edit. And I respect Todd. You know, Todd's been around a long time. Adam Curry been around a long time, and these guys, they know their stuff. This is about perspective, This is about nuance, and for me, when you've got a Todd, he's got his audience. So the editing for him would be less of a consideration for, you know, say somebody new that comes along and goes, You know what? I'd really wanna do a show about tech. I wanna do a geek. But I wanna compete with Todd cuz Todd does a great job and I wanna get all of his audience. So if you are then gonna go in and do you know, a competition with Todd Coch? Would you take Todd's format and duplicate it? Probably not, right? Because you know that Todd has been doing it the way Todd's been doing it. He's established what he does. So if you are gonna be a new show that wants to compete with that, you probably have to think a little bit more in terms of, well, okay, so what does this show have that mine doesn't? And what can my show bring to the table? That will beat Todd. The first place I would look is probably the editing, because if you think about it, Todd's been putting out this show. How many more listeners could he have if he approached the new audience with a new format of actually tighter edits, more engaging to listen to? More lean to moments you'll know about this Sam in radio, lean to and lean back audio. I do find it funny when I go onto certain Facebook groups and I see people saying, Don't edit the audio. Just, you know, put it out as it is. It's authentic. A lot of people don't get what authenticity actually means. What authenticity means is, Putting a side of yourself that is really you. And if the side of yourself that's really you is someone that wants to put out a tight show that's loaded with content and no filler moments, you're being authentic. So how dare someone who just lops stuff together for an hour, puts it on the internet with no music, no transitions, no engaging moments, no lean to audio. How dare they tell you that that's how you should produce your show? Every other show goes on for 20 minutes at the beginning about their day. Then they finally get into the content. You're shaking your

Sam Sethi:

head cuz you know any show that starts off with, Hey, how's your dog, Neil? What you been doing? Did you, did you enjoy the wine last week? I turn off instantly. Shut up. That is my time. You are wasting and I don't want to hear it. I'm not joining in to find about your social life. I really hate those type of shows.

Neal Veglio:

We talked about modalities earlier. Let me bring modality back into it because I think this in marketing is a really important point. I mean, Tony Robbins talks about modality in a big way. If you've never read a Tony Robbins book, you can learn so much about how to do your podcast or your video or whatever content you're doing from Tony Robbins section about NLP and modality. Straight away, whatever you think about nlp, regardless, you can't dismiss the fact that we have modalities. We know this has been proven, and if your modality is your more kinesthetic, So, in other words, you like to feel, you, like to understand, you like to deep dive more. I mean, to start with you've got a challenge cuz you've gotta convince someone that likes reading blog posts, that they're gonna listen to audio in the first place. But if you pull it off 20%, your audience might do, Do they really want to hear when they've been used to reading blog posts that are nicely broken up with headings and they get to the point, do you really. Them to sit through. So joining me on the show is Neil, Neil's been doing podcasting for a while, for 25 years, blah, blah, blah. Let's go through his entire bio for five minutes right now. Here's a word from our sponsor right now. So how you doing, Neil? Yeah. Great. Thanks Sam. Yeah. Wow.

Sam Sethi:

That's the whole nice show. That's my

Neal Veglio:

stick it. Absolutely. Which is why I was brave enough to frame it like that. Stop it. You self-deprecating. Delightful. You've got to understand where your listener is in your journey. It's not about you. It isn't about you. It's never about you. It's about your listener, and the reason why everyone listening to the sound of my whiny, egotistical voice right now, The reason why they listen to what you and James are doing is because you get into deep conversations, but you do it quickly. Yeah. You might shout your lovely sponsor squad. You might talk about your Ignite Jingles. You might talk about Buzz Sprout being 3000 new podcasts this week. Well done. Buzz Sprout well say's. The,

Sam Sethi:

all the, all those mentions were, You got 'em all off though. So that's all that, all that matters.

Neal Veglio:

It does, but you are doing in the right places. You know it, it's not three and a half minutes of pre-roll ad. You're throwing it in. You are mentioning them in the right way, which is organically, you know? Yeah. We're using bus sprout for this. The point is you are bringing the content to them, so we are willing to sit there and go, Well, I, you know, I, I maybe don't use those tools necessarily, but I'm aware of them now because you've told me about them. But I'm loving the content anyway, so yeah, I forgive You're paying the bills set. What I won't forgive is you making me sit through 20 minutes of irrelevant in a chat. Because you want to be authentic and you don't wanna be dishonest. I'm not Adam Curry. People are not gonna go to a, a conference center in LA to hear me speak. So if I'm Adam Curry and I can do that, then maybe I would be, you know what, I'm just gonna leave everything I say, you know, to Dave in the content because it's all relevant with pod land.

Sam Sethi:

It is as tight as we can make it. We try, you know, we do have some flap in it, but we do try now sometimes, and I will take this on the. When I first started editing and learning about editing, I was probably overly tight and probably didn't understand the tools of production that I was using properly. And I was letting the AI do much of the editing for me. Oh, look, if I click one button, everything disappears. Excellent. That's amazing. And then if I click this other button, it adds studio sound. And if I add this button, it does something else to it. And suddenly it sounded very robotic and. In natural. And the reason why we're having this conversation was cuz on the Podcast Index Podcast this week, Adam and Dave had heard my interview with Todd, but their commentary was that I was DMing and Dearing too much and maybe a little too tight. And that's where I was like, Okay, I wanna learn., what's different? So Neil's gonna be editing this part of the podcast and I'm gonna be editing it, and we will have that at the end of the show as a comparative. Now, what tools do you use, Neil?

Neal Veglio:

D Script is an unbelievably good tool. I use it for first wave, Well, I use it for second wave technically because the first wave is sitting down listening to the full audio and getting notes down in your head of where things are gonna go and all that sort of stuff. But if you're talking about the actual technicalities of editing, which we are here, it's second wave. So you are listening out for which parts of the show you have already noted you wanna get rid of because they're not relevant, then you are getting rid of. For me, the ums and the Rs. You've got to bring this with some common sense. Would I leave in every, um, and ah, absolutely not 100%. No way. For the visuals amongst your audience, I'm gonna put this in a way that they'll understand. If you are in a conference and you are watching a speaker that you don't know that well yet, you've not established whether or not they've got any credibility. They stand on stage and they're talking about something you're really interested in, and they start their opening talk with. Um, so I'm here to talk to you about, uh, business immediately. Your head, I'm out. This guy does not know what he's talking about. He's thinking on the fly. He's completely clueless. So I don't care if five minutes into this, you're gonna bring me the nugget that is going to change my life and make me into a successful business owner. I've dismissed you straight away. And this is what is happening with audio. So for me it's a case of understanding how is the listener gonna take this if it's in the first sentence. How many podcasts have you heard, Sam? Where someone has started the sentence with, um, taken a pause and then started speaking? Yeah. Now

Sam Sethi:

we have had radio training and all my presenters, I always say don't put the mic up and then think while the music's. That's your thinking time, and soon as you put the mic up, you then communicate. The challenge I've got with editing and why I edit still is because many of my guests, not you, but many of my guests aren't trained presenters, and that's when I believe editing is required because. The number of people who, uh, uh, I was, I was saying to myself that the, the, the, the, the words I need to say, and they will make random sentences up. So again, I think it's a nuance of where you sit. I think when you've got a inexperienced guest who's got great content, but hasn't got great vocabulary in terms of audio presentation. Then you do need to edit them, not just for your sake, not just for the listener's sake, but actually sometimes for their sake to make them sound intelligent and

Neal Veglio:

credible. I 100% agree, and a big way of facilitating that is to learn how to use the descript editing tool properly. Because you know, like you, you mentioned it yourself. You know you got all these buttons. And let's be honest about it not being on kinds of e-script, because they're a brilliant tool and I really appreciate their existence cuz they make my job easier, certainly on the first wave. But the same thing that software recording tools do, where they give you these processing buttons, which everyone goes, Oh, I'm gonna hit that cuz that's gonna make me, No it doesn't. What it does is it jacks your audio straight away, Turn 'em off, do all the post production work. You know, with Dsri, you've got that apply to all button and everyone hits it and you can hear. You know, one of the biggest giveaways of badly edited audio, and now I'm gonna say this, you are never gonna wanna hear this is a half breath, because what it's telling you is someone has just seen a bit of audio and another bit of audio, and then a gap, and they've just chopped out the gap. But the problem with that is then if that person is breathing in a particular way, as they go into the next part of the. That's when it sounds robotic. So when people say, Don't edit because it makes you sound robotic, what they're talking about is not editing. They're talking about terrible editing.

Sam Sethi:

Great. So Adam's basically saying to me, Sam, you're a tele report.. Right? That's, thanks for the translation

Neal Veglio:

there. I had nothing to do with that. I, that's, I'll take that. That was not Mela, but No, listen, and honestly, and I'll be completely honest with you, Yeah. You know, there have been episodes in the past, I've listened to. And I didn't even know that it was you that was editing it at the time, but I've been G Oh wow. That's jarring or yikes. And it does, It throws you outta the conversation because you are saying something, you are sort of laughing, and then suddenly your laughter disappears. There's a breath, and then suddenly you are midway through another sentence. You know, you are not the only person. In podcasting that is guilty of this. This is quite a common thing where people go, I quite like the idea of doing a podcast. Descript is marketed as this tool that handles all the editing for me at the click of a button, I'm just gonna do that, put it out there. For me, it's about understanding. Descript does one thing very well. It puts visual cues on the audio you should be looking at, but then making a decision editorially on whether or not that audio needs to go and if it's an, um, it might need to stay if it's relevant to the piece, if it's an emotive point. What's worse when you're hearing someone ask a question, like certainly for, for document. I'm a, a judge at the British Podcast Awards, and I hear probably about 200 podcasts per year in the documentary category as part of that judging process. And you can tell when a producer has given thought to the content rather than just editing it because it's their job. Because if someone's turning around and saying, So, um, you know, Abigail, tell me what it felt like to see that man that harassed you, terrorized you for many years. Finally, go behind bars. I felt great. No . Um, honestly, did you hear the difference that, obviously, you know, that is the difference between E motive. Powerful audio that has been considered before a decision has been taken versus, Oh, well I've gotta edit that out cause she's just gone. Um, and this is the nuance that I'm talking about when I'm talking to people like Adam Curry who's saying editing is dishonest. It's not dishonest because what it's doing is it's presenting your authentic self to your listener, your authentic self is I want my listener to get the best possible experience that will work for them. Based on the content that they've come to experience. I think that's the

Sam Sethi:

key to it, isn't it? It's that authentic self and however you present that now, I think we're gonna have fun. You're gonna go away now and take this copy of this audio and I'm gonna go and take the copy of this audio. And we're gonna edit it, and I think it'll be interesting to see how that's produced. I actually wish that one of us had more ums and errs and more double words in

Neal Veglio:

it. I'm guilty to be honest. Now. You know why? I've learned to edit so

Sam Sethi:

well. Now before you go though, Neil, of course, please tell everyone if they wanna get in touch with you or they want to get to know more about pod knows, where can they go?

Neal Veglio:

I'm absolutely prolific on LinkedIn, so if you search for Neil Valley I'll spell it for you cuz my parents weird and misspelled my name. It's n a l. V E G L I O and you can get me on Twitter where I'm at real Neil

Sam Sethi:

Valio. Neil, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this. We are gonna have fun now putting it out as a double episode of you editing it and eye editing it. I'll catch you later,

Neal Veglio:

mate. Thanks so much. And that's Neil Valeo is edit, which did you prefer better? Uh, drop us a boost or send us a tweet to at pod land news. And that's it for this week to keep listening and we'll catch you again next week

Podland Oct 20
Where is James?
Podcasting news around the world
TikTok is coming
YouTube sell audio ads
In-car listening and listening with others
Tom Webster's list of total podcasts
Eric's rule of three
Neal Veglio coming later
Castopod and AdAures interview
Pocket Casts goes open source
Podcast namespace licence
Squadcast changes
Umbrel cleverness
Boostagram Corner
A few podcasts to listen to
Interview and edit-off: Neal Veglio
Sam's edit
Neal's edit

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