James Cridland: 0:00

It's Friday, the 19th of January 2024.

Speaker 2: 0:04

The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.

James Cridland: 0:14

I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of True Funds In the chapters today. Welcome to the number one weekly podcast of all time, According to Good Pods. Yes, that's this one. More details about that in a second Podcast. Ads should be funnier. Good news from Audio Boom as well, Plus.

Andy Goldsmith: 0:34

I'm Andy Goldsmith. I'm managing director of Adalicious. Today I'm going to be talking about advertising and my ongoing issue around age and ageism in the industry.

James Cridland: 0:45

He will. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout. Last week, 3,105 people started a podcast with Buzzsprout. Podcast hosting made easy with powerful tools, free learning materials and remarkable customer support. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi: 1:04

OK, james, let's kick this off Now. You had a report in Pod News Daily that podcast ads need to be funnier. From Signer Hill why.

James Cridland: 1:15

Well, apparently, people podcast consumers, people who listen to podcasts expect and would like to hear podcasts that are funny or entertaining, and, according to the data, what they're actually getting is podcasts that communicate features, benefits of products and services. So not quite as exciting. Now, what I would say about this is that the numbers are quite close to one another. So 71% of people say that they want funny podcasts. 61% of people say that they want podcasts podcast ads which communicate features and benefits. So actually there's not much difference in it, and there's not much difference in what people are actually hearing. 78% of people say that they're hearing the boring ads. 72% of people say that they're hearing entertaining ads. So perhaps it's not quite as bad as they seem, but there's certainly a small disconnect. I guess is what the data is showing.

Sam Sethi: 2:15

I do remember back in the late 80s, early 90s in the UK ads became super funny and they became very memorable because they were super funny. People would regale the stories of them and then we went through a phase with ads in the UK where there were songs Do the shaking bag. Do the shaking bag and put the freshness back.

Speaker 2: 2:34

Do the shaking bag and put the freshness back. When you cough, it's your fresh. You're under due.

Sam Sethi: 2:40

Every time you vacuum, remember what to do Do the shaking bag and put the freshness back. Oh, freshness, freshness, freshness. We are biscuits. We are biscuits. Beef grills and lamb grills More sizzlers from the birds eye steakhouse.

Andy Goldsmith: 2:56

Chocolatey biscuit and a toffee taste too.

Sam Sethi: 2:59

They're tasty, tasty, very, very tasty. They're very tasty Kellogg's brand flakes. They're very tasty. And I remember going to a concert and they had this comedian at the beginning who came up on stage. I think there was about 50,000 people in the audience and he did all the songs of adverts as his act and everyone in the audience remembered every word of every advert because it was a song. And I just wonder maybe that's what we need to do. Maybe, instead of making them funny, make them songs. I don't know, maybe that's the way forward.

James Cridland: 3:32

There was a thing. So when I used to write radio commercials, one of the big advertisers was Cold Seal, and Cold Seal had these awful jingles Cold Seal, windows were the best.

Andy Goldsmith: 3:42

Double two, double one, double five.

James Cridland: 3:44

They were a double glazing company and they had these awful songs that used to run over and, over and over again, and so, of course, all of the advertisers said, oh, I'd like a song like Cold Seal, please.

Sam Sethi: 3:57

Cold Seal. Windows are the best you can voice a cold double two double one, double five.

James Cridland: 4:04

And it was not easy and not fun. I suppose when you have an ad that stands out, then all of a sudden you remember that I mean. Similarly, there was an ad, which was a very futuristic ad, I seem to remember, for a product called Ready Break, which was a porridge, a warm porridge, breakfast cereal, ready Break with lashings of hot milk to soak up those natural oats, malt and vitamins.

Sam Sethi: 4:28

All goodness and nothing wasted. Loved it in the day.

James Cridland: 4:30

yes, yes, and it was central heating for kids, central heating for kids, and there was one kid that had had his Ready Break in the morning and he was nice and warm and it showed this sort of red glow next to that Nuclear glow around them. Yes, yeah, yeah, made him look radioactive, but again, I think it's just a different take and perhaps what people are really asking for is ads that are a little bit different. Perhaps that's what one might guess.

Sam Sethi: 5:00

Well, talking of funnier things, here's a funny thing, james. It turns out that Pod News Weekly reviewed this podcast. It's the number one weekly podcast of all time. Excellent, where's the 200 million? Come on, jay Rogan, move on.

James Cridland: 5:15

Well, yes, so this is data from Good Pods. And who am I to doubt the data from Good Pods? It is worked out. It's the best weekly podcasts, worked out from millions of podcasts available on the Good Pods platform and ranked by listens, ratings, comments, subscriptions and shares, and the number one spot is this very podcast. So I'm just waiting for Spotify to get in touch, obviously, because I'm imagining that they'll be buying us.

Sam Sethi: 5:47

Yep exclusively on Spotify only.

James Cridland: 5:50

Yes, well, I think, an exclusive video on Spotify is, I think, how they do these things.

Sam Sethi: 5:56

Oh no, not at this time of the morning. You don't want one of those Exactly.

James Cridland: 5:59

No, exactly. Yes, gaming with the Bros Cast is number two, the Night Post is number three and number four the Modern Art Notes podcast. And you might be asking to yourself I've never heard of any of those shows, and that's probably the point, so anyway. So, thank you, good Pods. I've always thought that these figures were slightly dubious, but obviously, now that we're number one, I will never doubt them again.

Sam Sethi: 6:29

Yes, that's it. Was it also because you questioned their AI descriptions? Maybe they're just giving you a little leg up. As I say, thank you.

James Cridland: 6:39

I'm sure they're completely above board with these analytics. And yes, and I'm sure that they're all, yes, absolutely all fine and dandy. It's like when you win an award. If you don't win an award, then the award's rigged and it's just pay to play and blah, blah, blah and as soon as you win an award, it's, oh, it's excellent, the future they can see.

Sam Sethi: 7:02

Well done, judges.

James Cridland: 7:03

You are very futuristic in your thinking yes, I mean it would be interesting, wouldn't it, just to have a look at how many listens this show has had on the Good Pods platform, just to work out how many. You know how many listens is needed to be number one forever. Would you like to know that figure?

Sam Sethi: 7:24

Well, I've got one hand and I've got another hand. Do I need any more hands?

James Cridland: 7:30

You've over-excited your hands, according to OP3. Do you know how many downloads we had in Good Pods during December of last year? Now we are with the number one best weekly podcast of all time, according to Good Pods. How many downloads do we get on Good Pods in the whole month of December Four?

Sam Sethi: 7:55

I'm sticking with four, no higher, no lower. Four One, okay, excellent.

James Cridland: 8:02

So there you go, Brilliant Well. Thank you for that.

Sam Sethi: 8:08

Let's move on. Yes, now let's move on with some good news. Audio Boom, yes, Audio Boom, the London-based podcast publisher, has just posted a trading update for Q423. Its revenues were $19 million, up 37% quarter on quarter and up 5% on the year. Downloads for the quarter were also only down a small amount 0.75% in spite of the upper apocalypse of the auto download changes. James, it all sounds amazing. Well done, Audio Boom, but is it real Well?

James Cridland: 8:44

it kind of all does sound amazing. I have been saying for quite some time that there is a difference between the US and the UK in terms of the podcast market and clearly they are at different points in their evolution. But this seems to be pretty good news. It's the highest revenue since quarter 222. They're still not making a profit, I should say, but nevertheless it seems to be quite splendid in terms of the numbers. I was most interested at that total downloads number because for the quarter we have seen a lot of people who have been posting 15% down, 20% down. In this particular case, downloads for the quarter are only down 0.75%, which is virtually nothing. So I think that there's probably is some good news there.

Sam Sethi: 9:40

Yes, stuart Laster, ceo of Audio Boom, said the business is returning to growth mode, which is great and it's true.

Sam Sethi: 9:47

He also said that there was a sharp increase in the number of ad slots we created per episode, with a subsequent one billion ad impressions being made available for sale to our customers in October. So I sort of had a look around and when you look at the share price chart it goes back to, let's say, march 2023. The share price was somewhere around the 550, 600 mark it's currently. It went all the way down quite significantly by October 2023 to below 150. It's bounced back up to 300 roughly. So it's still half of the value that it was back in March 2023. But what made it even more scary is when I looked further back to January 2022 and the share price was at 2,250. It's 10x less than January 2022. They really did have what I'd call a black run ski drop in terms of their share price, so it's good to see them returning. I do say that 2023 now should be just renamed the podcast apocalypse and the big reset, because it seems like everyone's had a problem.

James Cridland: 11:02

Oh, the podcast winter, as Adam and Dave are calling it, which I do quite like, and I think you're right to highlight. The number of ads which they are selling into shows has gone up. They post a thing called the equivalent CPM, so that's their average revenue per 1,000 downloads and that is up 59% on quarter 2023. So up from $37 to $58. So that can't just be done by yield management, by working out how much money you have, how much money you're going to charge for an ad. It is also just purely the amount of ads that you cram into a show and I wonder, necessarily whether or not that means that there's going to be even more ads in shows in the future. Have they passed?

Sam Sethi: 12:00

the radio 15 minute ads per hour.

James Cridland: 12:06

They haven't. But one thing that they do say is AudioBoom now creates more than eight advertising slots per episode download. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that they fill them, but in fact I had somebody asking to advertising this very show and they said we want to buy a pre-roll, a 30 second pre-roll, and I said, well, I don't want to sell you a 30 second pre-roll. So it was as simple as that.

Sam Sethi: 12:37

But you know, so I'm kind of fine, I'm as well the off-front, james.

James Cridland: 12:40

Well, they never got that far, but I'm kind of keen to just sort of tread a little bit carefully on that. So, eight potential slots whether or not they've actually filled those is a different question. They don't necessarily say that, but I think that that's certainly interesting to have a look at.

Sam Sethi: 13:00

Well, just to give it not a total kick in the teeth, I mean AudioBoom's platform were downloaded 1.5 billion times across 150 countries. Across the world, over 300 million people listened to an AudioBoom podcast and the popularity of AudioBoom podcast that it was the fifth biggest podcast publisher in the US. So look overall. I think, as I said, it's had a downhill ski slope in terms of its share price, but it is growing and I think 2024 will be a year of growth.

James Cridland: 13:32

So there you go yeah, and the share price, of course, is worked out by idiots in the stock market who don't understand anything so well.

Sam Sethi: 13:41

Now talking of advertising, you caught up with a company called Adelicious, didn't you, james?

James Cridland: 13:48

Yes, I did so. They're quite similar actually to AudioBoom in many ways. I caught up with the managing director, andy Goldsmith. He thinks we're targeting young people too much and he also thinks that podcast hosting companies should get with the program regarding certification with the IAB.

Andy Goldsmith: 14:06

In a nutshell, we are a hosting and monetization network. The best-known hosting and monetization business is ACAST. We are effectively a boutique version of ACAST, but we are entirely independent and we are invitation only. So there is no backdoor into Adelicious, there's no pay-to-play model, so it's 100% curated.

James Cridland: 14:30

So how do you choose some of the podcasts that are in the Adelicious network then?

Andy Goldsmith: 14:35

There's two ways in which we bring podcasts on. Obviously, you get a lot of incoming calls. They either come directly from the publisher or via agents, which are becoming a preeminent part of this world. So the first thing we do is look at the content. Is the content the type of content that we believe is additive to the network? So that's the first thing. But also within the content, is it content that we believe we feel has values, has got a mission, has got a purpose and is, as I said, additive to the network? And then, thirdly, will brands want to work with this podcast? Because, at the end of the day, we are here to make money for our publishers and our partners.

Andy Goldsmith: 15:16

That's exactly one of the values that Adelicious was built on. So does it tick those three boxes, I suppose the mechanism that we also go through, because that's quite an emotional decision that we're making there. And then, from a mechanical and rational point of view, are the numbers strong enough? And in that sense, james, it's a bit more fluid, because some of the content is incredibly well-produced and very premium. It might not have significant numbers behind it just yet. So do we believe it can grow? But also, will it stand anyway on its own two legs. Is it additional to the other content that we've got out there? So it's a bit of a process that we go through in that respect.

James Cridland: 15:57

So what are some of the biggest podcasts that would have heard of them?

Andy Goldsmith: 16:01

The biggest that we have is Stephen Bartlett's, the Diary of a CEO. Yeah, we've been working with them since the 1st of September and that's going obviously very well. James, I think from the advertising point of view, it's very rare that you get incoming briefs that are targeted to a specific podcast. Usually you get the brief and it's around demographics, age content. We are starting to see briefs that are written exclusively for the Diary of a CEO, so that's the biggest. We have a relationship with Bower, and Bower are contracted to work on staying relevant. We are the podcast support for staying relevant, which again is a significant podcast, huge growth, obviously. Since San Juan King of the Jungle over in Yorneck of the Woods before Christmas, the numbers there continue to go up and up and up. So I suppose in terms of a shop window, they're the two biggest that we currently represent.

James Cridland: 16:59

Two very large podcasts there. I'm wondering what the difference is between podcasting and particular podcast ad sales between the UK, where you're based, and the US.

Andy Goldsmith: 17:12

I think there's a significant difference between the US and the UK. So the first thing I would say is that the US treat podcasting in a very different way, almost as a very grown-up industry. We already know that it is a $2 billion industry over there, but the recent research that was published, I think in the autumn it tried to reflect the spending podcasts on a listen basis. Versus the UK. The US is four times bigger than the UK on a like for like basis. That cannot be ignored. The US has driven a lot by DR and D2C. They have a number of agencies buying agencies that focus entirely on the podcast media landscape. Uk they don't really exist and it is set up really more from a branding advertising point of view. I think this is where we have a lot of work to do.

Andy Goldsmith: 18:06

In the UK. A lot of research, a lot of evidence that is coming through this market tends to be brought out of the US. The way they talk about the industry is in a far more grown-up way, whereas in the UK we are still establishing ourselves into the marketplace. We need to do a little bit more on the research and the evidence. I'm very passionate about the need for transparency in the numbers that we produce. We're trying to win business from TV, from digital, from out of home, from broadcast radio. In order to do that, in order for us to really have a seat at the table, I think we need to start working together more as an industry to provide that evidence that's going to allow us to effectively bring the agency along on our journeys, because actually, even I would say agency by agency, the knowledge gap is either smaller or wider. I think that we've still got a long ways to go here in the UK. I think, as I said, in the US, it's just a far more grown-up. It's talked about far more positively as well.

James Cridland: 19:10

I guess one of the things about the US is that they don't have the big BBC breathing down their neck. Would that be fair to say?

Andy Goldsmith: 19:19

I think that's probably a fair assumption as well, isn't it? I mean, bbc sounds and the output that they have there is phenomenal. It's incredibly well produced, it's premium content and it drives significant numbers of listens. So I think that there is a point, isn't there? Like you said, in Britain we're a little bit different to the rest of the world in that respect. We do have this big giant beast that sits over there. But you're right, commercial radio is finally overtaken the BBC in terms of the volume of listens and obviously it's a very well-supported media channel by the advertising community. But even then, it's hovering around about probably 3% to 4% of total media spend. So therefore, if you put that into some sort of context, podcasting has got a long way to go, but I see that as an opportunity.

James Cridland: 20:14

Yeah, I'm wondering in terms of the types of people who podcast advertisers want to reach. I don't know, but I have a suspicion that they're aiming for younger audiences rather than older audiences that they want to reach. Would that kind of suspicion be about right?

Andy Goldsmith: 20:35

I think that is a suspicion that is correct, maybe because I'm on a bit of a journey where, you know, since we're born, we're all getting older and I'm moving into a life stage where I feel like I'm getting forgotten a little bit. Age and ageism is something that I am taking on board as a bit of a project at the moment, and this is because I don't think it really matters necessarily what media you're working in, but there is always this desire to talk to the new generations that are coming through. So at the moment I would say we get if it's talking generationally, then you get a lot of briefs and a lot of brands looking to talk to Gen Z. We've even got conversations moving around generation alpha and also this is quite alarming to me actually a piece of research that was done recently by OmnDevice with WaveMaker and it talked about the research was talking around age and ageism within the industry and there's just research about research, but only 4% of any research budget goes into analyzing and looking into anybody over the age of 50.

Andy Goldsmith: 21:54

And disproportionately, generation Z millennials is what drives most of the insights. So there's this kind of desire to talk to the younger demographic and there's nothing wrong with that, obviously. I think the issue is that it's a disproportionate amount of time and effort in targeting and spend onto a younger demographic that doesn't have the same spending power or the same desire that the over let's call them the over 45s, necessarily, but over 50s in particular have, and the over 55s in particular. They are already holding the majority of the purse strings globally and that's only going to get bigger as the population gets older. So when we talk to brands, there is always a it's either Gen Z, millennial, or 25 to 34, is the predominant type of targeting that we see.

James Cridland: 22:52

Yeah, there's a radio station that I listen to occasionally here and it's an oldest radio station, and whenever you hear the advert breaks it's things like retirement homes or it's pest control, or it's even funeral. You know funeral, you know engage. Oh, my God, it's just quite something else, and it just really annoys me.

Andy Goldsmith: 23:16

Yeah, it's almost lazy. Oh, I'm insulted for you that they now feel like you're not interested in the music or going out or buying cars or any kind of consumable goods. I just find this fascinating that they're just completely skipped over and it's like your life is dead and now it's a slow march to your grave and it's completely not true, yeah, exactly, I mean, you know, I would quite like to buy a new car as well, and I happen to be over 50 as well.

Andy Goldsmith: 23:53

It's interesting you mentioned motors, james, because I think I don't know where I read this and I'm paraphrasing to an extent. But there's a path to purchase that we all know exists in advertising. So the point where you are aware of a product, you start to learn about the project and product and then you physically go and buy that product. And I think the longest path to purchase is a Porsche. So your desire is built up as a very young person, you know pre 10 years old and you start to fall in love with the brand. And then the average age of the Porsche buyer, I don't know. Let's say they're 60. And it's the longest path to purchase that you've got. So let's not forget that.

James Cridland: 24:30

That's really interesting, Really interesting. I mean we were talking on this podcast last week about time to buy something and advertising cigarettes, because you're buying a packet of cigarettes every single day and I hadn't even considered that. You know, if you're looking for a brand new car, your path to purchase might be decades.

Andy Goldsmith: 24:50

Decades, Absolutely, Absolutely. I mean a Mars bar, a can of Coke, you know, like you said, packets, cigarettes. It could be minutes, could be hours, could be a day.

James Cridland: 24:58

It's really interesting, really interesting. Now, last week I covered something around the IAB and I was talking about quite a lot of companies who haven't bothered to get their new certification for the IAB and they haven't bothered to keep that certification up to date. I think it's 80% of companies are actually out of date with the IAB at the moment and I'm wondering whether that says that the IAB isn't necessarily relevant anymore, and I'm wondering what you think.

Andy Goldsmith: 25:32

I think it would be remiss of me to say that they're not important, because they fundamentally are to the future of Adalicious, to the future of the monetization side of this business, because you know we podcasting is now, I would say it's no longer niche, it's arrived Okay, but the spend behind them doesn't support that at this stage. I've already mentioned have an eye earlier that the research that was done in the autumn of last year that talked about spending, the US market versus the UK and we are about four times behind the pace and I think a lot of that comes down to a misunderstanding or a lot of mistrust, I would say, in the metrics that we have in the market. Maybe it's not necessarily the metrics, james, but it might be the standardization of those metrics, because we've got different businesses using slightly different language or putting slightly different numbers into the marketplace and I believe that once we can get over this, we will start to see agencies sit up and take podcasting as a media channel a bit more seriously versus other media. We're in a big brief stage at the moment with a leading high street bank and the question they have got is around data and proof and efficacy at the planning stage. The data is getting better. We host a megaphone. My general understanding and belief is that megaphone provides as good, if not the best, data that we can get in the marketplace at this stage. But we are constantly having to reassess the data and the proof and efficacy that we've got, almost on a brief by brief basis. If we can come together and provide a uniform system of measuring the performance of podcasts and the numbers that we are producing, then I think that we can step forward.

Andy Goldsmith: 27:34

My issue with those businesses that maybe are falling behind a little bit on the latest standards on IAB, where it becomes an issue, is definitely on the programmatic and automated spot-by-market. There are huge buying desks in the UK or globally Zaxis, for instance that demand, quite rightly, that the people that they work with are delivering the highest standards of metrics and efficacy and proof, and I think that that's where there's potentially going to be an issue. The other issue that I think I have heard rumors of is that the IAB might be updating that certification process on an annual basis and obviously that takes, you know, to get this, this, this certification, takes a lot of time. There's a lot of input that's required from these platforms to get there and I think making it an annual change again is something that needs to be discussed because it's a worry on that automated and the spot-by-basis, I mean one thing that we've got which is good is that attribution is pretty standard now for all campaigns, but that's all that's standard at this stage is the attribution side. So you know how many people did we drive to a website as part of this campaign running and that can run across your spot campaign. It can run across your host streets.

Andy Goldsmith: 28:52

The bigger the investment that Brand makes with the campaign, the more they are looking for that proof. So that you're talking, then, about bespoke BrandLift studies, and I think that where the industry I'm talking about the podcast industry now has got better is is really understanding how to genuinely measure a BrandLift study on podcasts. Brandlift studies are the norm across pretty much all media. We're running, I think, three studies as part of the campaign we've got with Uber at the moment, and that's significantly more investment. You know that. You know that costs multiple thousands of pounds to get those BrandLift studies off the ground, but that is an investment that I think is necessary. The more case studies, the more use studies that we've got are going into the marketplace across multiple categories and verticals, the better, and I think that IBS doing a good job creating a portal where agencies, brands and we can publish our studies in a portal there at the IAB. So we started to build a bit more of a body of evidence Some of the BrandLift studies.

Andy Goldsmith: 29:52

We found amazing results, you know, significant results from the performance of the advertising, which shouldn't be surprising because we all know great attention, great engagement, but it's the proof. It's the proof that we need. So I'm quite pleased to say we're updating our website, which has taken a long time, james. So, adaliciousfm, we turned three in August, so we're approaching three and a half years old. So we're out of our terrible twos, which is a nice place to be. Finally, say Adaliciousfm, talk to me. I'm Andrew at Adaliciousfm. We'd love to hear from anybody and everybody. I'm also really keen to talk to my peers in the industry. I'd like to talk on a regular basis just to how we can do better. You know we've talked about a few things, haven't we, james? About metrics, transparency, the issue around age in this industry, and we should be talking about more behaviors. I would just I'd love to have a debate with people, have a chat.

James Cridland: 30:51

Well, maybe we can do that at the podcast show in London in May. Andy, it's been great to chat. Thank you so much.

Andy Goldsmith: 30:57

Definitely see you in May, James. Thanks very much for having me on and great talking to you.

Sam Sethi: 31:01

There we go. Andy Goldsmith from Adalicious Right. That's enough of the good news, james. What? Yes, sadly, back to the bad news. We've had enough. Yeah, one good news story per week, that's all we're allowed. Now. The big reset of 2023 is over. It seems that Semaphore wrote the incredible, shrinking podcast industry. They said that advertising deals were inked under the assumption that shows had audiences. They no longer have and that they're going to struggle to meet the minimum downloads. So they're very angry, those podcast publishers. Are they going to sue?

James Cridland: 31:37

Well, no, I don't think they're going to sue, and I am not entirely, you know. I think that the article and it won't come as a surprise to anybody that has listened to this show that the article just sort of explains what's happened with Apple over the last couple of months, where some of the numbers have come down. Now. The article is wrong in quite a few places, and you know, in terms of actually how Apple does automated downloads and everything else, but let's sort of ignore that bit, I think. What it seems to suggest, though, is that, as an industry, we do have a bit of a problem, because there isn't necessarily anyone from the industry turning around and explaining what is going on. There is no podcast advertising bureau, as I whitter on about every single week. There is no one who you can ring up and say who's in charge of podcasting, what's a view about this from the industry?

James Cridland: 32:44

And you know, I mean, I think that it's absolutely fair to say that Apple's change wasn't planned in advance. We didn't know that it was going to happen, and it's caused some short term issues, particularly and I think it's a very brave organization who turns around and says well, we were behind the lobbying because A, that's not true, but also B. Do you really want to be behind big changes of numbers that people are scrabbling to recover from? So you know, I don't know, but I do think that stories like the Seven of Four story and others are trying to paint a very bad you know, trying to paint podcasting in a very bad light, and I don't think that's necessarily particularly fair.

Sam Sethi: 33:42

No, I yeah. No, it's probably not very fair, and I think you know, I think, once we've just put this to bed, I think we can now move forward. Unfortunately, though, I'm going to give you some more bad news, james, before we can put it. I think this is the end of the 23 stories. Maybe it seems it's emerged that Podvine, a podcast hosting company and listening app, has quite the shut down, james.

James Cridland: 34:06

Yes, now, if you remember, I did. I did predict last year that a podcast hosting company would go bankrupt and close down, and I think I can possibly claim this one now Podvine, which was a hosting company, also a listening app. It was originally branded reason. It wasn't doing too badly, but ended up closing in the middle of last year, or rather to the end of last year. They did a good job. They worked with customers to transfer to other hosts, but Podvine is no more and in fact, chatting with one of the folk who used to work at Podvine, he is now a travel person who is working in Nepal at the moment being a tourist guide. So why not? But yes, I think I would expect that we will see more of these this year. But yeah, I I certainly think that during the podcasting winter, I think that we will see a number of these smaller hosting companies realising that it's actually quite hard to make proper cash out of all of this.

Sam Sethi: 35:25

Does it also mean that hosting really has just become a commodity and it's not a differentiator?

James Cridland: 35:31

Well, I think, particularly if Spotify for podcasters is doing such a good job as it clearly is, I think it does really lead quite a lot of people to say why should I be paying more to host elsewhere? Now, there are good reasons to pay more to host elsewhere. We're obviously sponsored by Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is a paid for hosting service, but Buzzsprout offers you lots of additional things, including podcasting 2.0, tags, transcripts, all kinds of other helpful things in the co-host AI and all of that kind of stuff. So there is reason. But unless you are particularly educated on those reasons, you could well see a lot of podcasters going. Well, I'll just use Spotify because it's free, and so I think it's much harder now to be a podcast hosting company and to be earning money out of that, particularly harder if you're a brand new podcast hosting company.

James Cridland: 36:28

I don't know whether you heard Sam Barry Laubrecht from yeah, from what's that company called Pod Home?

James Cridland: 36:40

Yes, absolutely, on the podcasting 2.0 show. I think it was last week, and Adam and Dave are there talking to him and going well, how can you afford to do all of this, unlimited and Barry explaining that, oh, he has a deal with such and such, and it was a really, I really felt for Barry, because both Adam and Dave both turned around and said, oh yeah, we used to have one of those. And then they rang us up and they said that they can't afford to keep us going and that will happen to you. And Barry was there kind of you could almost see his little face falling as he suddenly realized oh, there might be a problem here. So, yeah, I'm sure there's going to be more of that. And I mean, clearly we hear every so often in the new media show how much Todd Cochran's bandwidth bills are, and mine are relatively high as well. So, yeah, I think we just need to be. Just bear in mind that podcast hosting is actually a relatively expensive thing.

Sam Sethi: 37:50

Yeah, I have to say Podvine wasn't the company I thought you were going to mention. That failed this year.

James Cridland: 37:55

So yes, I think the lawyers didn't have one on the list either.

Sam Sethi: 38:00

Yeah, yeah exactly Now, moving on, formerly Podinbox, now called Fandless, has dropped its paid plans and made all former Podinbox pro features free. The company says it will take 7% as a cut from monetization features, but no longer charges monthly fees. Is this because people just don't want to pay for podcasting, James?

James Cridland: 38:23

I don't know. So I mean, what this basically was is. This was a service which allows your fans to leave messages, to leave voice messages on there, to give you tips and donations and stuff like that, to join newsletters, all of that kind of thing. I think it's interesting that they firstly changed their name to get rid of the pod, so it's Fandless.

Andy Goldsmith: 38:48

Smart, smart idea Wow.

James Cridland: 38:52

You would say that, but also, secondly, that they have then dropped the amount of money. Now, I can't tell you how much it used to cost, frankly, because I've forgotten, but I think it was somewhere in the region of $9 a month, something like that, and you got all of these additional features in there. Now all they're doing is and they're basically saying, we earn money only when you earn money, so there's no costs to use it, but they do skim 7% off the top of any earnings that you make, and perhaps that's just a different route in, and they think that they're going to get more money as a result of that.

Sam Sethi: 39:34

It's a V for V type deal, really. We will give you this value out and if people pay to use my service, I'll take the value in terms of a percentage of their value, I don't know as opposed to fixed fee. I mean, I won't say who, but again, I've heard that some people have said maybe that's a way for hosting to go forward. Instead of charging me to host with you, charge me to have a percentage of the sats I get in terms of hosting. Now, I know Adam sort of does that with his podcast because he puts it on the IPFS network and then gives a 5% split to the IPFS network. So in effect, the listener is paying for Adam's hosting as opposed to Adam paying for his hosting. Yeah to a degree.

James Cridland: 40:22

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely yeah. I mean, I think that there's definitely something in companies such as this basically pay as you go. So if somebody is earning $100,000 a month from this service, then this company deserves to earn more than just a $9 monthly subscription. And similarly, if a company isn't earning an awful lot, then that's a little bit different. It gets difficult, I think, when you then start looking at costs of customer support, because essentially, those very small organisations and companies and podcasters who aren't making an awful lot of money are the ones that will be your big drag on customer support. So perhaps that's something that this company needs to think about.

James Cridland: 41:12

But I think certainly, yeah, one of the very enticing things about the value for value model is pay what you think it's worth. Not pay this particular price, and I think it's. I'm for the podprotectemail product that I'm just sort of playing around with. The plan for that is going to be pay what you think it's worth. If you think it's worth $2 a year, then pay $2 a year, but if you think it's worth $20 a month, then I will happily take that too. So you know, and I think that that's quite an interesting model. Of course, you know streaming sats and stuff like that isn't quite there yet in terms of the mass market. He says slight under exaggeration, so perhaps that's going to be one of the things that needs to happen prior to a podcast company. You know doing exactly that, I guess.

Sam Sethi: 42:10

Moving along, then YouTube. If you're playing the buzzword bingo, now's your time to drink. Youtube has taken its RSS ingest tool out of beta. Feels very painful. Tell me more, James.

James Cridland: 42:22

So this was the RSS ingest tool that they started to show us. Well, we heard about it in May. They started to actually roll it out properly to normal human beings in October and that rollout has now completed. So it's now available in 98 countries and, if you want to, you can go to YouTube studioyoutubecom. You can tell it where your RSS feed is and it will take your RSS audio, make a copy of it, put it onto the YouTube platform and make money which at some point they might share with you. So that's basically how that bit works. But everybody's got very excited, I have to say, when I saw the story that YouTube had rolled out, I thought well, they rolled it out in October, really for most of us, so it's not really a story. And then I realized that it probably was a story and I should be talking about it, so I was a little bit late.

James Cridland: 43:18

Having said that, YouTube music itself hasn't got a particularly high score in terms of a podcast player. 95. Google is saying that it's missing too many podcast basics to be a decent podcast player, particularly Mark episodes as played, which it still doesn't have. I mean, yes, you can. You can, you know, fix it by hitting play and then scrubbing right to the end, but that's not really much much benefit there. It doesn't support chapters in the way that you and I do chapters, and it doesn't support new episode notifications not quite yet. So 95 Google is a little bit grumpy, I would add. It doesn't do skip, silence and volume boost. I do hear that both of those are coming though, but that's but. That's quite handy, and I would like the way of getting rid of a of an episode from the new episodes view. I've gone back to pocket casts, obviously my, you know, dallying around with different, with different apps. But yes, YouTube is very exciting and on the way and everybody's talking about it, except there's nothing really new there over the last three months or so.

Sam Sethi: 44:31

Oh well, I'm sure these features are all coming or maybe not. Now around the world, hsbc UK has renewed its sponsorship with the news agents for a further year. The podcast has now surpassed $69 million. I mean the news agents is either. Uk is probably number one along with the rest is group, but that seems very impressive.

James Cridland: 44:54

Yeah, it seems. It seems very impressive, and they apparently have been sponsoring the news agents for the last year. And what I find fascinating is that I listen to the news agents quite a lot and I've not once heard a promo for HSBC, which I think goes to show that that geo targeting is always a good plan. I just get an ad free version, seemingly so. So that's always good. But, yes, many congratulations to global and to, or maybe James.

Sam Sethi: 45:23

they just not made it funny, it's not remember.

James Cridland: 45:27

Trust me, it's not. Hsbc is, of course, a big bank. If you're listening to us in America and you've got no idea who they are a big bank, heng Seng Bank, and they're based in Hong Kong. In fact, netflix it turns out that they have released 130 fewer shows. It's a drop of 16% here on year. So it wasn't just podcasting releasing fewer shows. Netflix also released fewer shows. Apparently it's a new strategy from the streamer, but they would say that wouldn't they Nothing to do with the writer strike? Yes, well, yeah, exactly Exactly.

James Cridland: 46:07

Triton Digital have released the Australian podcast ranker for December 2023. Now Audio Booms case file is number one. What I found fascinating is they only released one full show in December. Literally one show, one episode.

James Cridland: 46:23

So I went to have a look at the data and I thought how could they possibly be number one? And it's number one in terms of listeners listen numbers. It's not number one in terms of downloads. So when you do number one in terms of downloads, it's the ABC's Conversations, which is a podcast that comes out every weekday, except it doesn't come out every weekday in December because we were all on holiday.

James Cridland: 46:46

It only released seven shows, but nevertheless, that's number one by total downloads and that's very high. I think the main thing there is that total downloads for the top 10 publishers fell by a fifth fell by 22% month on month. We've seen lots of drops of downloads in all of these rankings across the world is not just Apple podcasts. There is something else going on, but no one wants to talk about the something else going on, and I find that a little bit weird. I mean, yes, december is the start of the Australian summer holidays. Obviously there's Christmas in there as well, but I think there's something going on in terms of downloads but nobody really wants to talk about it.

Sam Sethi: 47:28

Sorry, I just can't get ahead of December as the start of the Aussie summer holidays.

James Cridland: 47:32

I know, I know, and let me tell you, it's been raining pretty well nonstop for the last three weeks here, and the garden loves this, and so I have a garden which is full of weeds and incredibly fast growing plants. I wish the rain would stop.

Sam Sethi: 47:55

Can you stop it? Because I'm coming there soon. So stop it now please. I do not want to come to a rainy Australia. Thanks. Now a little bit more bad news, I'm afraid to give you some time. It seems that Audible has laid off over 100 employees around 5% of its workforce and Twitch has laid off 500 employees. It says Google might lay off a thousand employees. I think again, as I'm trying to get to the point, it is the end of the podcast winter. I think we can stick these numbers into 2023, even though they're just coming out now. Hopefully it's the end of all this bad news and we can see, like Audio Boom, maybe a green shoots of growth for 2014.

James Cridland: 48:38

Well, here's here's hoping. Let's move on to events, and the I Heart podcast awards have been announced that they will be held this year at South by Southwest in Austin on March the 11th. You'll be able to watch that as a live stream all over again. Pushkin Industries, the boss of that, malcolm Gladwell. He is going to be awarded the 2024 Audio Vanguard Award on AirFest, which is happening, I think from memory, at the end of February in Brooklyn in New York, and the 2024 Hall of Fame inductees have all been announced and they will be induced next week. Is that right if you're in an induction ceremony?

Sam Sethi: 49:26

I don't think so that sounds like rehypnal. That's what you do. No, I don't think you could use the word induced.

James Cridland: 49:33

They will be inducted. That's it. There you go. Next week at PodFest in Orlando. The eight inductees are Adam Corolla, aaron Mankey, daniel J Lewis, doug K, jesse Thorne, laurie Sims, maria Hinojosa and Michael Butler. Laurie Sims, if you don't know, used to be the CEO of Libsyn, and the podcast Hall of Fame is sponsored by Libsyn. These two are, I'm sure, completely separated, but that's happening at PodFest in Orlando. It's going to be a good event. Congratulations to those who have been.

Sam Sethi: 50:12

There's someone missing, though, james, I'm looking, I'm looking really hard. Can't see him, can't know where he is.

James Cridland: 50:21

You're looking for Sam Sethi in there, are you?

Sam Sethi: 50:23

No, not me. I'm never going to get on that bloody list, never. I'm going to have to be about 108 before I get on that list, but no.

James Cridland: 50:37

Where are?

Sam Sethi: 50:39

you Moving on then.

James Cridland: 50:40

Let's go to events. Yes, so pod fest, of course, happening in Orlando January 24th to the 25th. I am heading to Orlando, but not until May, so that will confuse things, won't it? The podcast advertising summit what's this?

Sam Sethi: 50:56

Well, just having a look around at events and those people over at Podpod are doing an event in London on the 25th of January I didn't really care about the event itself the podcast advertising summit. What did stand out there was goal-hanger are bringing together all of their hit presenters, so Gary Lineker and the Restless Entertainment team and the Restless Politics team onto the stage to do one big show where they will record live at the podcast advertising summit. So I thought that was quite nice. I thought maybe I'll go and get a ticket and go along. Not until I saw that the tickets are £450 a ticket and I thought no, I won't be going along. So there you go.

James Cridland: 51:40

Yes, it's a haymarket event. It's really aimed at the campaign magazine readers, so £450 is probably absolutely fair enough. That is a thing called Spotify presents. The Rest is live Gary Lineker, marina Hyde, steph McGovern and Alistair Campbell. It's a Rest is crossover episode. Gosh, there's a thing I wonder if it's going to be recorded and made available in some way, shape or form. I would hope it is, because that does look quite good. I think I would definitely go for that. Rather than James Wallace, the marketing lead of business banking for Nat West, talking about the future of podcast advertising. I'm not sure. Wow. Earlier Victoria Handley, the brand communications lead from Lloyd's banking group. I think we can guess who this is being aimed at. Sophie May Lelland, the growth managing marketer for Monzo, which is another bank. Seems to be an awful lot of banks speaking there.

Andy Goldsmith: 52:47

And also somebody from.

James Cridland: 52:47

Spotify, somebody from Wendy's. So, yes, who knows? Who knows what's going on there.

Sam Sethi: 52:54

Anyway, let's move over to Paris. The Paris Radio Podcast show is on from the 6th to the 7th of February, if you want to go on.

James Cridland: 53:02

Yes, and that is completely free for you to go to if you want to. Parisradioshowcom is the website address there. I was a speaker in 2020, just before the Thing and very much enjoyed this show Not so much a fan of Paris, to be honest. It's fine if you like dog poo, but not so fine if you don't.

Sam Sethi: 53:26

Sorry. Can I just say that has never been on any tour guide that I've seen Paris come and smell the dog poo.

James Cridland: 53:32

Yes, come and stand in the dog poo On AirFest. I was right. Brooklyn, february 28th to March the 1st. Also podcast movement Evolutions in LA, which is where I'm speaking, between the 26th and the 29th of March. I have just booked my hotel for that and I have taken a leaf out of your book, sam, and not booked the actual hotel. I'm down the street because I wanted to save myself $400. So I'm literally down the street. There is a cheap hotel directly opposite now as well. So quite a lot of much cheaper hotels if you don't want to stay in the JW Marriott, but it's all absolutely good. Very much looking forward to that. It's going to be a good event and worthwhile going to and you're coming to that as well, aren't you?

Sam Sethi: 54:29

I am indeed, and can I say my hotel cost is zero this year. Zero, absolutely zilch, it's perfect.

James Cridland: 54:36

No, I'm not taking. Is that because you're staying with somebody on, I'm not sharing with you? No, damn, nearly got that idea out the door.

Sam Sethi: 54:46

Yeah, no, and I'm not taking a tent either to live under one of the bridges, no, no. My cousin who's got a penthouse apartment literally, he says, next door to the event and he's got a hot tub. So yeah, I'm staying with him instead, much nicer.

James Cridland: 55:04

Wow. Well, and again, I'm not sharing the hot tub, so we're both there and hopefully doing this show there as well, which should be good, and the podcast show in London is back on in May. You can come there, where we will both be there as well, and I have literally just been booking my hotel there as well. So there we are.

Sam Sethi: 55:28

Quick question which was pricier London or LA?

James Cridland: 55:32

Oh well, la much more pricier than London actually but that's only because some of the hotel is being paid for by somebody else, so that's okay. And the days where I am paying for the hotel, I am staying in a cheap airport hotel which is next to London Heathrow, because I am a cheapskate and I.

Andy Goldsmith: 55:57

That's a journey.

James Cridland: 55:58

Yeah, Well, you know it's not too far and those are on the days when the podcast show isn't actually on, but I was there going. Do I spend three times the amount to stay in central London when actually it's just going to be a day of work for me I'm just going to be in the hotel room working or do I just go for a cheap hotel somewhere? So I've gone for the cheap hotel somewhere.

Sam Sethi: 56:23

Excellent. More drinks on you then, brilliant.

James Cridland: 56:27

Yes, anyway, there are more events, both paid for and free, at Pod News. You can find out more at podnewsnet slash events, the tech stuff On the Pod News Weekly Review. Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where we do all of the tech talks. Strap yourself in Vodio. Who are they, sam, and why should I care?

Sam Sethi: 56:50

Well, for those questions I have no answers for you, but the thing they have done, it seems it's the French podcast platform, which is partnered with Albi, to enable value for value streaming micro payments. So bienvenue Vodio, or welcome to the party.

James Cridland: 57:06

M'ai oui, Bien sûr. Also Castapod. Talking about French podcast companies, Castapod has added the Castapod index, which is a listing of shows hosted on the platform to aid discovery. There's download analytics supplied by OP3 on there and a bunch of other data in there as well, which is quite nice. It's always good to see podcast hosting companies doing something to help people find new podcasts. That's always a good thing.

Sam Sethi: 57:35

Now, this next segment was going to be a rant. It's been downgraded to a really tuts-tuts, which, if anyone knows, that's the British version of a rant. It's not. Now, look, john Spurlock is a lovely man, very smart, and we don't know how he runs and makes no money off OP3, but he does so well done and I don't have an issue. Op3 is a great way of measuring a sample of downloads and saying to people right, based on this sample, this is what I can interpret as the trend in the industry and that's great, and hosting companies don't care, because it's only a sample, blah, blah, blah.

Sam Sethi: 58:15

John has now decided to enable a new service called Listen Time Metrics for selected shows, including Pod News Daily. It uses value for value streaming stats feature and so, yes, I thought great, okay, let's go and have a look at that, because I'm a big advocate of Listen Time and percent completed and value paid as the metrics we should be using in podcasting and not downloads. And then I thought hang on a minute, how's he getting this data? And then I realized what John's asking people to do Bit like putting it a prefix for the OP3, but in this case he's asking people to put him in the value splits and therefore he can then see the whole TLV record for every payment and he can extract information from it. I thought, oh God, here we go again, people getting into the value splits. Why are we doing it this way? Now, I personally hate the way that certain podcasts are in putting splits in for the boost bot that fountain does. Now, this is not a rant at Oscar. Oscar came up with a brilliant way to say I'm not on Olby, I can't see everyone's value payment. So if you put me in the split, I can now see the TLV record. I can aggregate that all into fountain and I can create a service called boost bot and we can all see an aggregated view of what's being paid. And I thought smart, smart, smart. So it's not a go at fountain.

Sam Sethi: 59:43

But the more I hear there's several hosting companies now putting themselves into the value splits. Now we're asking other people to put themselves in the value splits so they can see the TLV record. Why don't we do something better? Because this is a bad hack as far as I'm concerned, and it starts off being a hack. And the other part of this is if people are putting fountain into the value splits so that fountain can see everyone. Why can't we put it into podverse, our podversed splits, or podcast guru a true fan so the other apps can see what fountains payments are? But no, we can only put fountains payments in.

Sam Sethi: 1:00:21

And this way that John's asking people to put it in, it's just a way that he's going to be able to get data. Now it's opt in so anyone can do it. It's not a case of. I think you shouldn't do it. If you wish to give John your data, put him in the splits. He wants 5% and he will take that as a way of paying for the service and he then gives out a report, I guess, on what he sees as the listen time, as an extracted sample from the industry.

Sam Sethi: 1:00:50

But there is a better way and this is why I wanted to say it and I keep banging it. There's a W3 standard called activity streams, which is a user generated event listing structured data that we could create. That is available. Things like fountain and true funds already use it and we put our data in that way and we could share that data together. It could be user permission based and we could then see cross up comments, payments and many other bits of data. So, please, please. My one wish or request for 24 is stop putting splits from everybody around the world into everyone else's value blocks so you can get a back end hack to see how everyone's being made or paid. This is not the way forward. There is a better way and there is a standard for it. End of rant.

James Cridland: 1:01:42

Sam Sethi has spoken everybody and make sure that you make sure that you take that to heed. I don't know, I look at it and I go this is data which is available now. This is data which I mean. I'm already giving John all of my data in terms of total downloads. Now, all of a sudden, I'm giving John data in terms of how long people spend with the pod news daily podcast, for example, and you know it's just an additional bit of data, so I'm not too concerned about it. But it works today and I think what worries me is that if you're asking a podcast apps to put lots of complicated activity pub stuff into their apps, just so that they can, you know, theoretically get a little bit more data, I'm not sure that very many people are going to do it.

James Cridland: 1:02:40

Whereas this is a nice side effect of streaming sats is that you know you get sats every single minute while somebody has a listen. So I can kind of see it on both sides. But for the record, the pod news daily, 100% of listeners listen to at least a quarter of it. You would hope 96% of listeners listen to at least half and 92% of listeners listen basically all the way through. So that seems to me to be about correct.

James Cridland: 1:03:11

Now what I would say is that it's only based on 24 playback sessions, so that's not an awful lot, to put it mildly. And also, if you were to have a look at the streaming sats, you know what type of person streams sats right now. That would be more. That would be white mostly. You know mostly older gentlemen. I'm not seeing very many female people giving us booster grams. I'm not seeing very many female people streaming, so it's not necessarily a particularly helpful number in terms of how your overall audience is, but at least it's something. So I suppose that that's, you know, a good start. You can, of course, pull listen time from Spotify, from YouTube and from Apple podcasts as well if you wanted to, and I suggest that they may be a little bit more accurate in terms of data, but obviously not actually open.

Sam Sethi: 1:04:23

Yeah, all I'm asking is that. I don't have any issue. I agree this is a quick fix, it's a hack, it's a way of seeing data now and great. But as an industry, we should be able to put our collective brains together and come up with a better way of doing this without everyone dipping into the splits to try and get. I think Adam's at something like 25 splits in his now and it's getting crazier and crazier. And I just think you know we have a standard, it is available, it's W3C, it's been around for ages. I mean, can you imagine if Dave Weiner, before doing RSS, said well, we just put a quick hack together and you know, you can throw a bit of OP3 in there and you can put a bit of RSS and there's something called an enclosure, but anyway, we'll just do something.

James Cridland: 1:05:06

Well, maybe there is maybe there is something where you can turn a streaming sat request into into an activity pub you know, post and that way, actually, that fixes both sides of it. Firstly, it means that anything which deals with streaming sat already has all of this built into it, but also, secondly, it would then mean that you only need one mirror if you like to turn a streaming sat into the activity pub. Information that you would need here.

Sam Sethi: 1:05:39

Yeah, well, I mean again based on what John's doing. Rss Blue has already announced that it's going to integrate that data into its service. So they've got a feature in RSS Blue which takes the live wire IO data for listener analytics from OP3, and also produces these God ugly boostergram chapters which I won't take into true fans. They are the. They just mess up. There's no UI thinking here at all. I'm going to wait from a Friday night with a tin hack for in Adam and Dave respond, but I do not like this and I won't be supporting it.

James Cridland: 1:06:19

Well, and on that bombshell, let's talk AI, shall we?

Sam Sethi: 1:06:23

Well, let's do, because here's another drink. I think I need one. It's only 7, 30 in the morning.

Andy Goldsmith: 1:06:27

But who?

Sam Sethi: 1:06:28

knows, podcast editor Descript has added a new AI action called edit. For clarity, what's this, james?

James Cridland: 1:06:36

This is quite neat. I think you basically ask Descript for somebody like me who keeps on saying ums and you basically, and all of that kind of thing. It would automatically remove filler words, tangents, non essential sections. It would ensure that your message is concise and impactful. So it basically gets rid of all of the all of the fluff and filler and make sure that you're actually making your point. I think that's quite a nice, quite nice new tool from the folks at Descript.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:11

I think it's just a renaming. Maybe it's better versioning.

James Cridland: 1:07:15

Well, getting rid of Ums and Urges is one thing, but if you're telling a story and then all of a sudden you go off on a tangent for five minutes about something else and then you come back to the story, this would get rid of that.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:28

So take all of my OP3 rant out, would it?

James Cridland: 1:07:32

Well, I mean it wouldn't take that out, because obviously I'm not going to take that out. I mean, would it take out a story that we covered earlier on about Magellan AI and an attention-based measurement company called Adelaide, which weirdly nobody has heard? Yes, it would have taken that out. So, yes, I think that's what's going on. I think it's quite neat. So I think it's worth a peak called Edit for Clarity.

James Cridland: 1:07:57

And if you're a user of a chat, gpt plus, refonic has produced a dreadful idea. It's an AI podcast question generator. If you're too stupid to book a interviewee and to then work out what questions to ask them, then Refonic has produced an AI podcast question generator to help you be less stupid and know what questions that you should be asking that particular person. Frankly, if you need help understanding what questions to ask somebody who you've already booked, then you are. Then already you have more trouble than an AI podcast generator can actually help you with. But still, there we are. It's a nice plan and I actually thought it was quite a nice clever thing from Refonic, because what they're actually doing is that they have a long blog post all about how to ask people questions, what questions you should be asking, and then they've made people link to it by also adding an AI question generator. I think that's quite a neat little plan, so I quite like that. Boostergram corner, corner, corner on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 1:09:15

Oh yes, it's our favorite time of the week, sam isn't it, it would be, it used to be.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:19

I can't find them anymore. Please, please, please. I'll be put a filter in, hurry up.

James Cridland: 1:09:25

Oh well, there you go. You should be using Helipad on your Umbrell, perhaps, as almost nobody is. Yes, let's go on with it. Loneyank, hello LoneYank, 555 sats. So thank you for that. And all you've written is V for V. That's fine, it worked. Yeah, is that a thing? Which? Is that a thing? A bit like Go podcasting, that there's a jingle for?

Sam Sethi: 1:09:51

I guess it must be. If you've got the jingle LoneYank, send it through Adam Curry 5000 sats boosting for the big knob. I'm not sure if that's you or me, james.

James Cridland: 1:10:04

Yes, well, I can explain that because he boosted the Pod News Daily, and the Pod News Daily we have no way of reading out boost, so it's going to go in here, whether or not he likes it or not. I was talking about Hindenburg Pro, which has a, which is our title sponsor at the moment, and they have a big knob which is a really easy, simple to use compressor and I managed to get, because I've written all of the taglines for this month. I managed to get. Come and have a play with our big knob.

Sam Sethi: 1:10:33

I can see why you're no longer writing ads and commercials.

James Cridland: 1:10:37

It's a paid for thing. No, I was. I was a fan of it. So, yes, so 5000 sats from Adam Curry. He liked that, which is funny because he was on the podcasting 2.0 show last week saying that he presses the stop button as soon as he hears me going into the ad read for Hindenburg Pro. But thankfully he didn't on this particular occasion. So that was good and always good to be able to afford that to the client as well. To end up with doing that, nathan has sent us a ton of of individual boosts, hasn't?

Sam Sethi: 1:11:12

it. Yeah, nathan Gath right, we were talking about the new content link tag extension proposal. He says it only really works if lots of people are using it. I'm hoping it has a value, even if very few podcasts use it. At the very least giving podcasts as a way to override incorrect links across services like pod link and pod news for platforms like link fire that make you enter those man, they could start auto populating some of the links.

James Cridland: 1:11:40

So yeah, I mean again yes, I think that the content link tag has a lot going for it. It's seemingly a lot of argument in the in the GitHub at the moment because various people have decided it's not for them and so therefore they don't think that it should be going through it's. I mean, it's already a standard. We're already using it for the remote, for the remote item you know live stuff, so frankly, it should be in use in in other places as well. So keep on fighting the good fight, nathan.

Sam Sethi: 1:12:12

I can see why people don't want it. So come to my app and here's a link to go to another app Not really a big seller for me to include it really is it?

James Cridland: 1:12:21

Yes, exactly, completely useless for you. Very useful for services like pod link or, for me, for pod news or for other services where you want to be able to guarantee that the link you are going to send somebody to actually works. So that's, I think, a good thing and a good promotion for some of those apps. One of the things I wanted to do is to add a recommended thing to it so that I could actually say I recommend that you listen to this show in Truefans or in Fountain or whatever it might be, so that I can actually do that. So if somebody is writing about my podcast, they can see where I would rather people go to have a listen to it, although that is a little bit more complex than that. He was also asking why would I want to follow a podcast on Masterdome, and one of the things that Nathan says is, if a user authorizes their Fediverse account within Truefans, you could post their comments to the Fediverse for cross app comments and, in fact, participating apps could support cross app following by syncing your followed shows to your Fediverse account. Well, that's quite neat because, yes, of course, I can see what podcasts you are following on Masterdome. So there's some quite interesting things there.

James Cridland: 1:13:43

But one of the other things that I all of a sudden thought of when I was listening to the podcasting 2.0 show last week was that if every single podcast is available on Masterdome, then that means that every single podcast all of a sudden has a working fallback social interacts tag, because if there's no social interact tag, you know that it looks like this on Masterdome, and so you know that there is somewhere to leave comments on every single podcast on a decentralized you know, not owned by anybody platform, which is what the Fediverse is.

James Cridland: 1:14:22

So all of a sudden, I think actually that weirdly, dave Jones is fiddling around with adding every single podcast onto Masterdome has also meant that every single podcast all of a sudden has a space for cross app comments and so therefore has potentially solved cross app comments forever. You can even work out what the URL is going to be for an individual episode, because you know what the episode GUID is, you know what it should be, you know, you know what the podcast index ID number is and all of that, so you can actually work out where the comments are going to be. So I actually think that this is quite exciting, because it could mean that there are comments for every single podcast out there cross app comments hurrah. Finally, and all you need to do to post is to post using your existing Masterdome or Fediverse account. So I'm kind of quite, I'm quite excited by that.

Sam Sethi: 1:15:22

Now you could auto populate that social interact tag, couldn't you? Which will be quite interesting.

James Cridland: 1:15:26

So I mean either auto populate it or, if there isn't a social interact tag, well, you know that you can fall back to the one that Dave has put on there. So that even means that for this American life or for the rest of his politics, or any of those big shows that won't have any of these social interact tags, you know that there is already a working one there, so that you can actually just automatically do that. I think it's very exciting.

Sam Sethi: 1:15:53

It goes back to my comment earlier, which is, if you created a podcast events tag, an aggregated. So this is just taking one of the event types, which is basically saying here's where the comments are going to be or here's where this podcast is. I think when we start to look at using Activity Pub as a like Masterdome, as a place for aggregating content, then you could have an activity stream element, a verb populating that activity comment or populating that activity Masterdome account.

James Cridland: 1:16:30

Yeah, I'm sure you could, but I think one of the exciting things about this is that this again, this works now, yeah no, no, no, I agree.

James Cridland: 1:16:41

And you can add additional benefits to it. But I'm very excited about the fact that there is a fallback for every single podcast which is out there. Now I happen to publish a social interact tag in the pod news daily so that it goes on my own Masterdome server and that way I have a little bit more control and that's absolutely fine. But I think if there isn't one there, then now we've got one which we can use. So I'm quite excited by that.

Sam Sethi: 1:17:10

Yeah, I agree. I think this actually in the hindsight could be a really cool way Okay.

James Cridland: 1:17:17

And finally, nathan also says guys, and thank you for the 1000 sats. Talking about the IAB certification and those people that haven't bothered to re-certify to the brand new version, I said that you couldn't continue being compliant if you are only compliant to an old standard. And he said, well, they're not IAB certified, but there's nothing stopping them from saying that they're compliant with version two, even if that is outdated. And yes, that's absolutely right, they can say that they're compliant, but I don't think that they should be allowed to put a certified badge on their website because they're not certified anymore. And that's kind of all that I was saying there, really. And one final boost 1,024 sats. So that's a kilobyte sat, I believe, from Castamatic, no name, and the message just says love you. So thanks, mum for that. It's very kind. Also, thank you to those who are I'm going to call them our SuperSat streamers, who are giving us more than 1000 sats per minute. As they listen, we can see you Dave Jackson, Brian Entsminger, adam Curry, buzz Brouts, kevin Finn and Dave Jones. That's super kind of you. Thank you very much. And we should be talking about our SuperSat streamers even more. There you go, adam, supersat streamers. You can have that one on me and if you get value from what we do.

James Cridland: 1:18:52

The Pod News Weekly review is separate from Pod News. Sam and I share everything from it. We really appreciate your support so we can continue making this show and so that Sam can afford his flight over to LA. You can become a power supporter at weeklypodnewsnet or you can support us with sats by hitting the boost button in your podcast app. And if you don't have one, try Truefans. It's very good. So I'm told truefansfm. So what's happened for you this week, sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:19:18

Well, first of all, a podcast host, a podcast app and a musician. Walk into a coffee bar. Yes, I met up with Dovey Duff from RSS Blue and Joe Martin, which was very nice. We just had a coffee together, the three of us, and we're putting the world to rights around podcasting Excellent.

Sam Sethi: 1:19:37

Yes it was very good. In fact, it was really good because we were Dovey Duff and I were talking about the publisher feeds and what needs to be tweaked to make them work from both from a host's perspective and from a app perspective, and it's also this verification element within that publisher feed. So that was really cool. Joe Martin was there talking very much about why he's on Wave Lake, but why would he go to RSS Blue and blah, blah, blah and what's working, what's not working and, as an artist, what he needs to make it work. So, yeah, it was great. We were just putting a lot of different things on the table and just talking about all the different challenges we've got for 24. So, yeah, it's very good fun.

James Cridland: 1:20:19

Excellent. Well, that sounds very good.

Sam Sethi: 1:20:23

We thank you very much to you, truefans, as part of with Pod News, to integrate RSS feeds into our new publisher pages, which worked instantly. So thank you very much for that.

James Cridland: 1:20:33

That worked very nice, all right, you see that's open, open standards for you, yes, which is always a good thing. One of the things that I need to do, which is now on my actual list here, is to link to Truefans from Pod News podcast pages. I need to find the information that you have sent me somewhere in some form, shape or other, so I can actually find the API. Thank you, and then we'll get that in there as well.

Sam Sethi: 1:21:00

Yeah, and the next thing we're doing, again with open standards, is using a blog client. So in the publisher pages you'll be able to not only read the news about that publisher, see all the latest episodes from their slate, but also they will be able to blog using RSS with value for value. So it's a blog client with value for value. So there we go and last bit, we've been focusing on what I call in and out week.

James Cridland: 1:21:26

We are I bet you have yes, I bits I hate.

Sam Sethi: 1:21:31

So onboarding is the bane of my life, but I realized we had we'd cocked it up quite badly actually, so apologies to everyone who was joining. We've totally reviewed and refactored that and that's been pushed out actually today, and we've created a new traffic light system in our podcast database because, again, we're just trying to make sure that every podcast we have is up to date. Yeah, and we will release next week and open sourced RSS 2.0 validator that anyone can use. It's not going to be just for true fans and we're just going to make that available to everyone. So you can take your RSS feed, you can search for it against the podcast index and it will tell you what's working, what's not working, what tags you've got, and anyone can use that. So, yeah, that'll be available for everyone. Very good. Now, moving on, james, what's happened for you this week?

James Cridland: 1:22:24

Well, tomorrow I'm going all the way to Sydney. I've got a day in Sydney working for the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a place called Paramatta, which I've never been to before, and that might be fun. So there we are. Also, I was on a podcast this week called Business Beyond the Mic. It's from we Edit Podcasts. It was recorded a couple of months ago and that is very good and available now wherever you get your podcasts. So yeah, so that's all a good thing.

Sam Sethi: 1:23:02

Now, James, before we check out this week, can you remind everyone, because you've been working quite hard actually, I think you sometimes hide your efforts under the bush too much what three services have you been working on recently?

James Cridland: 1:23:18

Well, it says here in the show notes that I've been working on. There's a service with which anybody can join. It's called podprotectemail. We all have quite a lot of spam coming in through RSS feeds. Now, either you can get rid of your email from RSS feeds, and then that's a nuisance, because nobody has really worked out a better way of working out who you are, and so you have to put an email back in, and then you have to take it back out again to prove that you own that particular RSS feed, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Or why don't I give you a protected email address which just works, gets rid of the spam, gets rid of the viruses and the malware that you get sent, and just automatically forwards you the clean email? So that's what podprotectemail does. It's completely free at the moment. As I work on it, I've been using it now for the last two months or so and it's working absolutely great. So that is there and you can sign up today.

James Cridland: 1:24:21

Livenow News is nothing to do with podcasting, but if you are interested in news and you want to watch a variety of news channels from across the world live for free in your browser, then why not? Livenow News is where you can find those which you know. I mean, there are some elections going on this year Elections in America, elections in the UK, elections in India and various other places as well. It's probably worthwhile a peek at that. And then there's the podnews directory, which isn't kind of properly launched but it's kind of nearly there. Podnewsnet slash directory. It's a list of every single person which is involved in the podcast industry in some way, shape or form, and when I say person I mean company, so every single company which is involved. It's worth a peek. If you would like to be a directory editor, then I mean the technology is there, quite what it looked like, who knows. But anyway, if you want to be a directory editor, then you can ask and I will be happy to add you onto there. So yes, there's a thing.

Sam Sethi: 1:25:22

Very well done, mate, and I guess that's it then.

James Cridland: 1:25:26

Yes, and thank you to Andy Goldsmith for being an excellent guest. You can also listen to the podnews daily and you can subscribe to the podnews newsletter for more of these stories and much more too.

Sam Sethi: 1:25:37

You can give feedback to James and me by sending us a boost to Graham. And if you don't have a new podcast app, what are you waiting for? Go to podnewsnet forward slash new podcast apps.

James Cridland: 1:25:48

Our music is from Studio Dragonfly. Our voiceover is Sheila D, who, by the way, sent me a very nice postcard over the holiday period, so that was very nice. We use clean feed for our main audio, and this was Google Meet, in case you're wondering. Yes, that's why it sounded like that, and we're hosted and sponsored by Bud Sprout podcast hosting Made Easy. Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.

Sam Sethi: 1:26:18

Tell your friends and grow the show and support us, and support us, the podnews weekly review will return next week. Keep listening.