James Cridland: 0:01

From Pod News. Welcome to Pod Land, the last word in podcasting news. It's Thursday the 13th of October, 2022. I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News

Sam Sethi: 0:10

And I'm Sam Seth, and still the managing director of River Radio.

Todd Cochrane: 0:14

Hey, Pod land listeners. This is Todd Cochran. I'm here to talk about my 18 years in podcasting in the Crazy Road It has been.

Alban Brooke: 0:21

And I'm Alvin Brook from Bus Sprout, and I'll be on later to talk about our new features from Bus Sprout.

James Cridland: 0:27

They will, Pod Land is sponsored by squad. We use the latest squad cast version five to remotely record this episode. Sam's in the UK and I'm in Australia.

Sam Sethi: 0:35

And we're sponsored and hosted by Bus Sprout. Last week, 3,763 people started a podcast with Bus Sprout and now there's Bus Sprout Adds to Grow your podcast wherever it's hosted. And of course we'll hear more about Bus Sprout ads from Auburn later in the show.

James Cridland: 0:50

we will pod lands our weekly review where Sam and I review the week's top podcasting stories covered on pod news.

Sam Sethi: 0:58

So today's top story, James, uh, I'll start it off with the title, Spotify. What's going wrong?, it's not been a good week again for Spotify. If you look at Twitter and some of the press, Spotify's canceling 11 of its original shows, those cancel represent though only 2% of Spotify's more than 500 original podcasts. So in terms of numbers, that doesn't feel very big. And it's also less than 5% of Spotify's staff on original podcasts. So you'd think from the noise that was coming across Twitter, James, that the sky was falling in, but it doesn't seem like it's a big number when you look at the actual percentages.

James Cridland: 1:39

No, I guess it's a big number when you are looking at Gimlet and podcast, which is where the big, uh, cancellations have come from. Um, the Gimlet Union and the podcast union, of course, are working together on, um, putting the record straight. So they say they're talking about the 38 people who have gone across, uh, Spotify. Now, that, uh, would mean that there's an awful lot of people working in Spotify on podcasts, and perhaps that's what, uh, Spotify's management wanted us to think. Um, when, uh, they released that less than 5% of Spotify staff thing. What podcast and Gimlet have also pointed out is that the reason why quite a lot of these shows have disappeared and are not doing very well or weren't doing very well, is that, um, they lost as much as three quarters of their audience when they went exclusive onto Spotify, they lost so much of their audience and now they've been canned for not attracting enough audiences. Well, you know, and they are arguing, Well that's probably because you've made them exclusive. That's not great. And also what it wasn't particularly great is they canceled these things in the middle of their, uh, series. And, um, some people were basically told, You've got an hour to clear your desk and get. Um, and that's not a particularly nice way of treating somebody. So you can quite well see how irritated they would be about, um, the way that, uh, Spotify has, uh, done this.

Sam Sethi: 3:10

Yeah, I mean, it seems a bit rushed. I, I dunno what that reason is. but is this a, a case of, uh, explaining to people exclusive don't work? Are we, is that the answer, exclusives just don't work? Or are there other reasons why these shows may have not achieved the audience that they should have achieved?

James Cridland: 3:30

Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, who used to be a co-host of How to Save a Planet, basically said Spotify invested nothing in building our show's audience. Then they forced us to go exclusive onto Spotify, and then they canceled it because it didn't build a big enough audience. Um, that's a pretty , you know, damning, uh, thing. But on the other side, you know, if you. Running a podcast studio, then sometimes you will have to make a decision on which podcasts stay and which podcasts go. You can't carry on making a podcast forever. And perhaps, uh, that's been the conversation which has gone on here, you know, in the very industrial complex side of the podcast industry, um, that they've looked at these particular shows and they've said, Well, you know, these shows aren't going to continue. And we're, um, going to use that as an excuse to, um, get rid of some, uh, headcount, which, um, they will be, let's be fair about this. They will be, congratulated by their investors and by their stock, uh, holders for saving, um, you know, additional overheads. So, um, you know, perhaps it's that sort of side of it as well.

Sam Sethi: 4:43

Well, we reported a few weeks back that Acast was laying off around 70 people, which is 15% of its staff. And again, one of the reasons behind that was the need to reach profitability. And I, I'm sure that that's also top of mind with Spotify's execs that, you know, the growth phase of investing into podcasts, maybe, uh, time to turn off that tap and get back to some profitability. You know, as you said, the share price will bounce upwards, um, on that news.

James Cridland: 5:14

Yeah. I mean, the stock market now wants companies to focus on near term profit, not long term growth. And Spotify's podcasts have been losing money. They lost 110 million, or if you prefer it better that way, Sam, 110 million pounds, uh, last year. Um, sorry, sorry to rub us in. So you can see from that point of view that they clearly want, um, their podcast, um, uh, division to be not hemorrhaging cash. And this is probably one of it. But, you know, I look back through POD News over the last couple of months. There's a lot going on. You know, Acast, as you say, just made 70 people redundant. That's 15% of its staff. Oy made 250 people redundant. Espn, 300 people. CNN has made a number of its podcast staff, redundant Vox Media laying off 39 people, patriot, laying off 80 people, and so on and so forth. So it's not a, a Spotify story, I don't think. I think it's probably more a story of any large media company which has seen that there maybe trouble ahead and is rather desperately looking to work out how they can make, uh, savings so that they don't go hideously into the.

Sam Sethi: 6:25

Yeah, I mean, do you think these shows will go standalone and come back out on their own, or do you think any of the other players like Amazon, Acast, Apple will snap them up? James?

James Cridland: 6:37

I think that's a really interesting question., of course the shows remain Spotify's IP and will probably dive into that uh, in a couple of minutes. So there are Spotifys to do with what they want to. Now you could, I suppose, go to Spotify and say, Can I buy the format for how to save a planet? Because I think there's something in it. And Spotify might turn around and say, Yes, you can for a hundred. Thousand million dollars or whatever it might be. But, um, you know, so perhaps that might happen. I think also, I mean, you know, there was an interesting story from an Argentin podcast called L Meto, Do Reor, um, who, uh, ended up saying that, uh, we're leaving Spotify and the reason why we're leaving Spotify is that Spotify pays musicians, but they don't pay podcasters and YouTube pays podcasters. They say, um, and so they're leaving Spotify because they would like some free money from YouTube. Um, and I'm sure that that's, um, uh, a plan. I'm not necessarily sure how long term that's, that's likely to be, but uh, you know, you've got that kind of side of it as well in that there are quite a lot of people who are on Spotify who are contributing content to the, you know, to the podcast industrial complex and, uh, not necessarily getting any money from Spotify because of it.

Sam Sethi: 8:01

Yeah, we've seen other exclusives as well. You know, the Obama said they were leaving cuz they weren't reaching the audience they wanted. Uh, Brene Brown announced she will not be releasing any new podcasts. Um, you had Harry and Megan. Saying they were expressing concerns last April about the size of the audience and the type of content. Steve Goldstein has written a, uh, interesting post that suggests that the podcast business is being right sized and Evo terror. Last night in podcast, Pontifications said that, you know, 2023 is a year podcasting has to pay. So it does feel like everyone's getting a little bit of a, I guess we, we spoke about it with Sky Pillsbury, you know, maybe this is the web 1.0 popping of the bubble. You know, we've grown now it's quick reset and then we'll grow again. Cause all these people have got skills. They'll the start their own companies or they'll get picked up by others, I guess.

James Cridland: 8:59

They will. And I, I also wonder from the other side, there was a brilliant, um, Twitter thread from Misha usf, um, a couple of days ago. Uh, she, uh, used to, uh, host a bunch of, um, you know, massive podcasts now runs her own production company, Dust Light Productions. And she says that there's a lot. Assumption that podcast teams are made up of one producer and they're really cheap to make. And, uh, and that's probably true for this podcast. Um, but it's not necessarily true for proper full, you know, narrative podcasts. Podcasts that have a lot of, um, you know, a lot of, um, hard, uh, research that go into them and everything else. I mean, this podcast does as well, but you know what I mean. Um, and so she actually, uh, wrote this, uh, long, uh, Twitter thread, which was explaining how much it will cost you if you were making a proper studio quality podcast. you know how much it would cost you in terms of people, in terms of music, in terms. Producers and blah, blah, blah. And you are looking at nearly a quarter of a million dollars in terms of costs. That's how much it costs. She says, to make a, you know, to make a large show and a show that brings in the numbers. Now, that may or may not be right, but nevertheless, I think, if you are looking at every one of these shows that Spotify has just canned costing, uh, a quarter of million dollars, um, which is probably fair, then uh, you can see that there's, uh, clearly quite a lot of cost savings that have, uh, happened by, uh, Spotify canceling these

Sam Sethi: 10:40

Yeah, I, I took the number and I divided it by the number of shows weekly. It's just under five K dollars per episode. Um, and then you've gotta ask, how do you monetize against that?

James Cridland: 10:53

Yeah.

Sam Sethi: 10:54

it's,

James Cridland: 10:55

No. Exactly, and, and you can, well see, you know, Spotify having, um, good economies of scale in terms of that. But, uh, yeah, you know, I think, I think that there's an awful lot of podcasts which are being made, which are out there, which are losing money hand over fist. And it's probably fair that, uh, companies such as, uh, Spotify ends up turning around and says, you know what, which of the podcasts that we don't think are good value for money, we're going to can those, and we're going to focus a little bit more on some of the others.

Sam Sethi: 11:24

Yeah, Well, Spotify aren't just canning podcasts. They're also, uh, regurgitating podcast. James seems that, uh, Spotify's Sex Lies and DM slides is relaunched, but with not the same original host and the original hosts are not happy. James. So what again, is Spotify up to?

James Cridland: 11:44

Yeah, so this is from the UK and it's her podcast, Sex Lies and DM Slides, Uh, Gizzy Erkin or Gizzy Kin. I've got no idea. Um, she's, you know, one of these influencers, um, she's posted on Instagram that, uh, the show is being made again without us. And she, um, uh, you know, very angry, uh, Instagram post from her saying, if Spotify don't want to, This show with us, then that's fine. But don't steal our format and our name. We created it in my kitchen over a series of months. Spotify just paid for it to be made, which isn't quite true. Spotify bought the format. Spotify bought the name. Spotify produced it. Yes, but that's the point of doing a deal with, uh, Spotify. You do the ip. And what Spotify have, uh, realized perhaps is, and I don't know whether or not the new people who are presenting it are cheaper or a less hassle or whatever, but Spotify has taken a look at this Sex Lives and DM slides and gone, We think that there's something in this, but we are not going to use, um, the original podcast hosts and we're gonna find some new podcast hosts instead. Um, and they ended up saying, you know, it's a holy owned Spotify original podcast, inclusive of name and format. We look forward to watching the show continue to evolve. And they also said, We take intellectual property extremely seriously. I'm sure they do.

Sam Sethi: 13:11

I've always said, when you start a company with, with your partner, it, it's like a marriage. It's all lovely, lovely dovey and I, and the same with podcasts is when they sign up to big production houses. But what you have to do, and, and I've always done this in startups, is you have to have the breakup contract or so. Again, in the same way, I think podcasters are gonna have to start to look much closer at their contracts. Um, do they own the IP or who owns the IP and are they allowed to take it? Or in case of Carra Swisher last week, who owns the RSS feed more importantly as well. Um, I think people are having to look at contracts a lot harder. Cause I think it's lovey dovey coming in. Oh, you look will pay you all this money and we'll produce it. That's amazing. That's amazing. And then suddenly it's like, you can't take my baby away. That's mine.

James Cridland: 14:04

Yeah, no, absolutely agreed. Absolutely agreed. So I'm sure that, uh, yeah, I'm sure that there's a, a, a, you know, a real, uh, you know, something to have a look at there in terms of some of these, uh, legal, uh, conversations which are going on. But at the end of the day, if you are a large company and you buy something, then typically what buying something means is that you own that thing. Now, Joe Rogan is not the same. Joe Rogan was specifically a deal, which was a. Distribution deal and a monetization deal, but they didn't buy the, um, you know, the rights to that show. Um, but Sex Lies and DM slides, yes they did. And that's exactly, you know, it's up to them as to what they end up doing with it. And unfair though, that might be to some of these people who think that they still own it. But, um, you know, that's what happens when you sell your idea to a large company is that that large company.

Sam Sethi: 15:01

Now more from Spotify. On a more positive note, Spotify has acquired the platform safety company, sen, which is based in Dublin in island. The technology behind SEN allows Spotify to combine machine learning and human expertise backed by analysis from leading local academics and journalists. It says here to analyze potential harmful content and hate speech in multiple language and countries. Tell me more abouts and James.

James Cridland: 15:30

Yeah, well, it, it seems to be a interesting, uh, company, which is really looking at platform safety. So nobody wants to advertise next to something which doesn't necessarily, uh, associate with their brand values. So, you know, you are probably not gonna have, I don't know, a kindergarten company who wants to advertise in a podcast, which is all about guns. That's probably not gonna be a thing. So therefore, um, what Kinson have brought Spotify is, uh, essentially, um, both automated but also human, um, categorization of individual shows and working out whether or not, uh, it contains what they call harmful content and what they call hate speech. Who knows what that really is, Um, and crucially in multiple languages as well. My understanding, for example, is that the Spotify audience network, which is the main way that Spotify earns its money, My understanding is that that doesn't include Joe Rogan. It doesn't include Call Me Daddy, because they have real brand safety concerns around those particular shows, and they don't want to put that into the standard Spotify audience network. Um, so, uh, perhaps this allows them to, um, uh, to spread this out rather more to both allow some of those big shows into the Spotify audience network, but also, for example, take all of Anchor and put all of Anchor's shows into the Spotify advertising network as well. Um, maybe you'll share some of that money, uh, as an anchor creative. Maybe you won't, but, um, uh, you can only start selling ads on those types of shows once you've got some understanding of that, uh, of that brand safety. And that's what Kinson has, has, um, and that's what Kinson is capable of.

Sam Sethi: 17:24

No, it sounds like a good step forward for Spotify still. I'm just looking at Spotify now and I'm looking at pod land. There is no user generated reporting still, uh, as a mechanism. I'm amazed that they still don't allow users to help them identify issues within podcasting.

James Cridland: 17:44

Yeah, but I guess on the other side it would be very quick and easy for, you know, um, a particular podcaster to, um, Hate Bomb and other podcast, you know, by, uh, getting their listeners to, um, you know, report that podcast for, you know, for naughty things. Um, so, you know, I can kind of see that on that side of it as well. And I, and you know, and I, and I'm very aware that, you know, somebody like Adam Curry will be sitting there and, and, and, you know, Steam will be coming out of his ears talking about hate speech and potential harmful content and this, and this nice Irish company, uh, basically saying what's good and what isn't. Um, so, um, you know, I'm very aware that that is also a thing too. So just to be, uh, aware.

Sam Sethi: 18:30

Well, lucky it's not being paid through PayPal. Otherwise, you might be fined two and a half thousand pounds every time.

James Cridland: 18:37

Yes, yes. I've not been following that, but I've been sort of seeing that from afar. And, uh, PayPal is, uh, really interesting. And by the way, my monthly subscription or, um, my monthly support to the podcast index, uh, goes through PayPal. I would very much like to not do that. Um, very much like to, I don't know, send the money through an account or whatever it is. Um, but, uh, anyway, uh, I'm sure that there will fix that at some point.

Sam Sethi: 19:06

Yeah, just on this Kinson thing, just, uh, a mental note. Of course, there is another company who's been doing this brand safety analysis for a while. It's called SOUND or fm, which we've had on the show before. So again, uh, Spotify aren't the only ones in this space, but,

James Cridland: 19:20

Yeah, Indeed. And also Barometer and Oxford Road are busy working on stuff, uh, on that side, uh, as well. And, uh, my suspicion is that we will see some news from them over the next couple of months.

Sam Sethi: 19:32

Now Spotify's pod sites and ad measurement service has launched in the uk, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. The company's also testing pod site tools on audio ads in music, and it's partnering with the Omnicom Media Group here in the uk. What's this all about, James?

James Cridland: 19:52

what is this all about? Well, pod sites is, uh, is an interesting company. Spotify ended up buying them earlier on in the year. It measures shows. So, measures, podcasts, let's advertisers know how many people have heard the ads that are in those shows. But it also does attribution. So maybe you are selling tractors in, uh, for example, you can put a thing on the podcasts that you're advertising on and you can then put a thing on your website to work out how many people heard your ad for tractors in a podcast who then came to your tractor website to buy a tractor or to have a look at your vast range of tractors. Um, so that's basically what pod sites, uh, does. Um, there are clear privacy implications. In there. Um, and uh, I think companies who are using this sort of thing need to tread really quite carefully, um, because they may end up learning an awful lot about their users. I think what what's notable here is that they have launched in the uk, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Those are all countries, including the UK that has this thing called the gdpr, which is the European Union's Privacy Rules. And the GDPR still applies in the UK as well. So therefore, um, uh, what this basically shows is that, um, pod sites believe that their systems are GDPR compliant and they may well be for pod sites. They may well not be for, uh, those companies, the tractor company that wants to put it on their.. Um, but that's a different conversation. Um, but uh, that does mean that, you know, clearly upon sites are comfortable with the fact that their product is GDPR compliant and can be in these European, uh, countries. And particularly launching in Germany who are incredibly privacy focused, um, is uh, quite a thing. So, um, yeah, I think that's gonna be interesting to watch, um, and see how pod sites does in Europe.

Sam Sethi: 21:51

Wow. Okay. Well another interesting launch this week was Octave, uh, a joint venture between Bauer Media and News uk. It's launched the podcast ad sales team for over 1000 shows and a hundred million impressions. James' Espouse equivalent to Global's Ds.

James Cridland: 22:11

Uh, yeah, I think it, I, I think that's it, exactly. Yes. So, um, Bauer is a big radio company in the uk. They also own a bunch of magazines as well, uh, in the uk. They're also present in Ireland and in most of the Nordic countries as well. Uh, and they also bought a big Spanish. Broadcaster amusingly called global, um, which is very confusing. Anyway, so Bauer, uh, have jumped into bed with News uk, which is, uh, Rupert Murdoch's, um, company. They published The Times and The Sun and um, various other horrible, horrible, horrible things. Um, but they also own, uh, a bunch of radio stations, some of, some of which are horrible and some of which are possible. Um, so talk radio for example, or talk TV as it is now. Um, uh, which is the UK's Fox News, I guess. Um, but also they own, uh, Virgin Radio these days. They own talk sport, um, and uh, a bunch of other services. So they've, uh, jumped into Ben together. And the reasons why they've done that is Global is their big competitor. Global is a big commercial radio broadcaster in the uk. They own about 50% of commercial radio in the uk. And so if you put Bauer and News UK together, then you get about 50%, uh, of the industry for commercial radio as well. So basically, um, it's a duopoly these days. Uh, if you were to look at that. Uh, and that makes perfect sense for Bauer and News UK to both be jump, be jumping in together, use case big enough, uh, otherwise. Um, and so they are selling ads inside their streaming radio stations and now they're also selling ads inside their podcast as well. Just the same as Global Stacks works. And you can see that there is opportunity for a. Potentially in future for, um, for Okta to work, uh, in Ireland where Bauer has a lot of radio stations in the Nordic countries, um, possibly even in the US as well, where obviously, um, Rupert Murdoch owns, uh, Fox News and various other things. So, uh, yeah, so there's uh, clearly that kind of play is, uh, going on and a lot of this is all about scale. So yeah.

Sam Sethi: 24:28

Quick question for you, James. Where is Joe Rogan? Uh,

James Cridland: 24:32

Where is Joe Rogan?

Sam Sethi: 24:33

yeah, for the last few months. I mean, I know when we've been looking at Spotify's analyst reports, one of the things you've often said is, Where's Joe Rogan? You know, there's no, uh, mention of him in the deck. Um, and also looking at your charts that you cover on Pod News, Joe Rogan slipped off the number one. Uh, he isn't there anymore. Um, and again, is this because he's exclusive and his audience isn't there? He's no longer number one, or is he up to something else? James, where is Joe Rogan?

James Cridland: 25:06

Where is Joe Rogan? Well, I mean, I don't think necessarily that Joe Rogan is seeing a dramatic slowdown in the amount of traffic that he gets. Um, I think that the story here is probably that there have been some other big shows. Kim Kardashian's New True Crime Podcast, uh, is certainly one of those, Uh, Serial, of course being another. Um, and Call her Daddy appears to be doing pretty well. Those have been number one in Spotify in the us, um, uh, quite a lot over the last couple of months. And of course archetypes as well. The Megan Mark. Uh, show again has been number one. Um, so I think we've seen a little bit less of Joe Rogan in terms of being number one, which, um, used to be news and it's now just what kind of happens. Um, so, uh, that kind of one side of it. The other side, I, I would just sort of mention that Joe Rogan's contract looks to expire at the end of 2023, so he's got another year to go. But, um, I, I, I, you know, I've heard that people are already talking to him, um, about where he might want to go next. Um, whether or not he wants to stay with, uh, Spotify, who I think have been pretty good to them or whether or not he wants to, you know, jump, uh, somewhere else as well. So, um, yeah, I think it is gonna be very interesting seeing what happens with Mr. Rogan and probably a very big story if he, if he jumps somewhere else.

Sam Sethi: 26:35

Oh, I think he's going back to YouTube. I can imagine that would be an amazing launch for them. Bring out YouTube podcasts and then bring back Joe Rogan.

James Cridland: 26:43

Wow, wouldn't it be? Yeah, no, absolutely. You can, well see that. Uh, and of course he's, everything that he does is in video and, uh, he will bring back the comments, which, uh, Spotify still haven't, um, managed to do in their app. So yeah, that will be a, an, an incredible, um, an incredible thing for them.

Sam Sethi: 27:02

Well, one thing Joe Rogan has been doing, he's been interviewing Steve Jobs this week, which I thought was quite amazing, uh, in a podcast entirely generated by artificial intelligence. Uh, Joe Rogan, the artificial intelligence version, and Steve Jobs, uh, had a little chat together. I dunno if you had a chance to listen to that podcaster on transistor.

James Cridland: 27:25

I have, I've had listeners here, a little clip right now, shall we? Do you feel like you are glorifying technology too much? That you have a responsibility to promote the idea of being more in nature than having to go ahead and put implants in your face or whatever? It isn't necessarily good or bad, just different. And what we want to do is help people make the most of whatever future comes. We always ask ourselves, what is the most insanely great thing we could do? And if we can't think of that, then we do something less. I, it, it is just like very strange, isn't it? And um, yeah. Really, really scary. Um, what did you think if you listened to the whole

Sam Sethi: 28:06

Yeah, I, I mean, I, I, I listened to it and initially I went, Wow. The Joe Rogan voice, uh, I thought was pretty accurate. Um, you know, if somebody had told me that was Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, I would've gone. Oh, yeah. Okay. I get it. That is Joe Rogan pretty close to the Steve Jobs one, in my opinion, sounded computer generated and. I did see somebody say a really good reason. It's because they've got more content currently of Joe Rogan to train the ai, but they have very little content of Steve Jobs, so they're sort of back filling the gaps, and that's why it sounds a little bit more computer generated.

James Cridland: 28:48

Yeah. Yeah. And I also think, you know, obviously all of the text was AI as well. Um, and I think it would've been funny had someone sat and written, um, the text that they would've said rather than, you know, the kind of nonsense that you heard them saying. Um, you know, I think that would've been, you know, interesting. But, uh, yeah, I mean very, very clever. Does bring up quite some ethical questions though, doesn't it? Um, uh, you know, what would Steve Jobs's, um, Estate. Think of that. What would Joe Rogan think of that? You know, I'm, I'm not quite sure what that says about anything really, other than of course, they've been very clear to make sure that everybody is aware that this isn't long lost archive. This is actual, you know, um, AI generated, uh, stuff. But are we going to hear stuff in the future, which is AI generated, but which actually isn't necessarily, um, you know, promoted as being, uh, as being so, um, from, you know, horrible people like Alex Jones trying to, um, you know, trying to put words into people's mouths.

Sam Sethi: 30:02

Yeah, I mean the, you can go and listen to this for yourself@podcast.ai, which again, I, I dunno, where's the.ai domain from? James

James Cridland: 30:13

I wasn't expecting that question.

Sam Sethi: 30:15

Sorry,

James Cridland: 30:19

Well, there we go. It's the internet country code, uh, top level domain for GUI Aguila, uh, which is a British overseas territory in the Caribbean called Safe the King. But obviously quite a lot of people like using, uh, ai, um, as their, um, as their domain name these days. Um, I always found it interesting that whenever anybody was giving out Bitly, short, uh, addresses, B i t dot l y, and Bitly was actually in Libya, uh, . And there's a, there's a thing as well, so, uh, yes,

Sam Sethi: 30:53

okay, you better get ready for this one then. Uh, cuz the voices are powered by play ht. So where's HT From James

James Cridland: 31:02

Oh, here we go. Uh, well now I'll tell you that, uh, play do HT is I think it's the Hindustan times, uh, if we're gonna be strictly accurate. Uh, I think that's what that is. But um, if you're wondering where.ht is that is in Haiti.

Sam Sethi: 31:20

All right. Okay,

James Cridland: 31:21

you go. Yeah.

Sam Sethi: 31:23

done. You see I've got a new name for you. I've got the podcast font, the font of all knowledge.

James Cridland: 31:31

Well, I always, I always wanted to get, uh, when I was working in radio, I always wanted to get a.dj cuz I thought that that would be really cool. Uh, and it's the official country code domain for Digi Booty of course, or Gibuti. Um, and, and I thought, well, that would be great, but unfortunately you can only get it if you, um, have a company actually based there. Um, and so that ended up being quite complicated in order to, um, go , go and register a company just for that. Um, but uh, yeah, and I think.au used to be really hard to get hold of as well. And now I think anybody can just get a.au, which of course is Australia. Um, but uh, yeah, who knows?

Sam Sethi: 32:13

so going back to this, uh, voice thing, I did actually go in and play with the voice, uh, technology itself. You can just write your own script, click a button, you get 23 goes, and it will translate it into 20 or 30 different voices being American English,

James Cridland: 32:32

Oh wow. Is, is, is there a Joe Rogan in there,

Sam Sethi: 32:35

No, no. There's nice names like Olivia and Steve and John, so you've got some very nice names like those, but I don't think they're podcasters personally.

James Cridland: 32:46

Yes. No. Um, I, I have been using, if you've been listening to the Pod News Daily podcast this week, then I've been, uh, playing around with, uh, artificial voices as well for the Pod News Daily podcast this week. Cause I wanted to quote something that a lawyer was saying, and I wanted to quote something else that Spotify was saying. And, uh, the quote from Spotify was from their uk um, PR department. And so I, uh, gave that to a UK artificial voice. And, uh, the lawyer I wanted to quote was, um, a, uh, a lawyer of color in the US and so I went to find a artificial voice, um, you know, who fitted that as well. And it, it's quite an interesting way of being able to quote what people said without me just saying it.

Sam Sethi: 33:55

I mean, of course I've been playing and, and so you and many other people with, uh, Descript who've had this capability to take your own voice and have it computer generated. Um, I've still not found a good reason to use it, although I have a generated voice, but, uh, it's great fun trying it. That's all I will say.

James Cridland: 34:15

Yes. No indeed.

Sam Sethi: 34:17

moving on, cuz, uh, talking about, uh, computer generated voices. This one

James Cridland: 34:21

Yes. And and indeed we were talking about dot coms and our own domain names. Get your own.com

Sam Sethi: 34:27

Indeed that'll get as a boost anyway. Now, um, the, the voice there, of course was, uh, iCarly, uh, like Todd Cochran, um, the OG himself. now Todd's geek News Central podcast turns 18 years old this week. Uh, the first episode of the show was recorded on October the ninth, 2004 in a hotel room in Waco, it was one of the first shows to launch using the Word podcast, and it has 1,628 episodes. James, we haven't got to a hundred yet, mate. Um, we will be well and truly pushing up daisies. We'll never get to that number. That's quite amazing.

James Cridland: 35:09

Yeah, it's a pretty amazing thing. Todd has been in this, uh, for a long, long time and has done a, uh, really good job. I mean, you know, he's up to 1,600, uh, odd. The Pod News Daily podcast, by the way, is up to 1,403. I just thought I'd mention it. Um, but yeah, uh, he has done an amazing thing and also he's literally written the book about podcasting. Um, I found a copy of his book, uh, from 2005, uh, online the other day, and it's just brilliant. You know, all of this information about podcasting, which is completely changed now. Uh, but you managed to, uh, catch out with him, didn't you?

Sam Sethi: 35:50

Yeah, I thought I'd reach out to Todd and ask him, you know, how did he get into podcasting? What's the journey been like? Uh, he's also obviously got the new media show with, uh, Rod Greenley and just again, uh, where he sees the whole podcast industry going in the next few years as well. Episode 1,628. That is mental.

Todd Cochrane: 36:11

Yeah. And it's like the first 10 years I never missed an episode. So I've taken a few off in between since then. Now look,

Sam Sethi: 36:19

cost your mind back. 2004. What made you wanna start podcasting? You know,

Todd Cochrane: 36:25

it was a series of events. I had been hurt in a swimming pool accident in Bahrain when I was so active duty military. Okay. And I was laid up, couldn't do too much. When you're laid up in the Navy, they f frowned upon that. So when the opportunity came to basically do contract enforcement for some airplanes that were being modified in Waco, Texas, I said, Hey, that's a good job for me to fly a desk. And that's what I did. I was living in the clam shell at the time in Waco, in October is not necessarily spring weather. It's a hundred degrees in the shade still. So I spent a lot of time in the hotel room and I was familiar, maybe a little bit with Dave Weiner and scripting. Okay. Cause as a blogger already. But then I heard about this Daily Source Code podcast with Adam Perry Day Wi Man. It was like I, I caught the fever, went across the street to Walmart and.$13 lab tech, microphone. We had a condenser about the size of maybe half the size of a penny. And uh, well, I'm sure those first two or three episodes sounded wonderful. Where

Sam Sethi: 37:26

did you

Todd Cochrane: 37:27

host it? How did you put it out? There was no host and I was running on a moveable type at the time. Yeah, that was a content management system, and so what I did, And this is where it was crazy, was every shared hosting account, they give you 500 gigs of bandwidth. And so the first show, no problem, didn't use the bandwidth, but episode two, all of a sudden I got a message from my hosting provider, said, Hey, you're out of bandwidth. So ultimately, to keep the show online and Lisson was probably a year out, maybe 10 months out for the first. eight months. I rotated the show every episode to a different shared host and sometimes I didn't make it. So I think at one time I had three Dream host accounts. I spread 'em all over the place and I had eight different domains. And really what we did is we had to update the RSS feed with all the new URLs because, So I'd have to upload the media to eight different hosts, cuz I never knew. Shared hosting service was gonna run on bandwidth, and then I found GoDaddy, got a virtual dedicated server, got my bandwidth up, but the show was not inexpensive to distribute because it just went like a rocket ship. I laugh because I say probably in that first year I thought I had 40,000 listeners, but it was probably more like. 10,000 because until we got some filtering later on, we had no idea how many people were listening. That's

Sam Sethi: 38:54

great. That's the world Wild West. I was blogging and I remember a movable type and I got into a bit of podcasting and I pod faded fast. I really did pod fade, but going back, looking at it, was it always called the Geek

Todd Cochrane: 39:07

Show? Yeah, it was from the beginning. Here's the thing, I had a, I was a blogger, so I already had geek new central.com and the history of that is even more crazy. We can go all the way back to 1988 and talked about how that evolved, but ultimately, I was a failed blogger. I may have two or 300 people come into the website on a weekly basis if I was lucky. So when I launched the show, I just. The name of the podcast to be, what the blog was. And of course at that time there was no social media, there was nothing. You, you were on your own with your own website. And then they had places where people hang out in forums and stuff. Use net. Most people don't even know if that is Yeah, I do had people that hung out and shit chatted about different topics and using that was a big place where people were like stealing software and stuff. But there was also segments of it where, Tech discussions. So hung out there. And then really it was because there was so few podcasters in the beginning. I estimate one of the first 40 or 50, I don't really know where the number truly lays, but to be honest with you, handwriting our, our assess feeds, it was really, you had to be a total nerd to do this and it's hard to believe where it has come from there. So talk,

Sam Sethi: 40:17

just to put this in some chronology for people, you started a few months after Facebook. Before Leola port's tweet in 2005 and before Twitter in 2006, that is fairly pressing interview to be doing it that long and that early.

Todd Cochrane: 40:36

Yeah, and I think even Facebook was still a college thing. It really wasn't. There was no semblance of that. And this was a year, Well then maybe 10 months before Apple added podcasts to then the software version of iTune. So it was early and you build an audience. People complain about having to build an audience now, now, the early helped, but it was still hard and the hoops we had to jump through to get the show out, it was really pretty crazy. But I think being early definitely set me in being in the right position for a whole bunch of stuff to happen afterwards. So

Sam Sethi: 41:12

in your career, when did Blue Break kick in? When was the idea and when did that kick?

Todd Cochrane: 41:18

Yeah, so in December of oh four, I got a book deal to write the first book on podcasting, and that came out, or was announced in May. The book I believe, launched in June of oh five. It did very well, and then there was a call that I got from GoDaddy. He said, Hey, we wanna sponsor your. There's a whole story about that cuz I'd been bashing them a few months before because of some issues I'd had and went through that conversation and they sponsored a podcast and I had no idea what to charge. I just needed to cover cost. So I think I charged 'em 300 bucks for that first month and having no idea. What the value of the show was. And we got done with that deal. They called me back and said, Hey, we wanna renew for a year. And I said, Well, how'd we do? And the conversation evolved and I took some time and did some math. And if you've ever bought a used car and made an offer on a vehicle and the salesman says, Sold right away, you've known you've underbid. So that was kind of the, that what happened with the GoDaddy deal, cuz I came in with a great number that I was like ecstatic about and she agreed so fast. I was like, Crap. So I said, Can we add a bonus component to that? And she laughed. She said, You underbid it, didn't you? I said, I had no idea what to charge So anyway, we signed a deal for a year, and then at the end of that call, our name's Chris Redinger. She's retired from GoDaddy. Now she's really probably the genesis moment for where Roby and Blueberry came from. And she says, Do you know other podcasters that would like to advertise with Godad? And I said, Yes, I. And I had launched a tech network, so there was already 13 shows that were working together, and I went to those guys and I said, Hey, I got a deal here for you, but I'm probably gonna be forming a business. So on my podcast, literally the next episode, I said, I need a lawyer. I need a biz dev, someone with an mba, I need a graphics person and I need someone that's a programmer. We're having a call on free conference call.com in 10 days, and if you are interested, let's be on there. So when the call started, I said, Hey, if you don't have some money to invest, please. Exit, and I don't know if I said the amount, it wasn't that much. Maybe a thousand bucks or something like that. And what I was left on the call was a lawyer, an mba, and a graphics guy. And the graphics guy knew a programmer. And I said, Get him on the phone. He got him on the phone, talked about this business idea, and we formed Raw Voice, which is the parent company of Blueberry over the telephone. And we all chipped in a little bit of money for our checking. And that was the start. We didn't even meet face to face for probably six to eight months before we actually met face to face, the people that were involved in the company. And we just went on blind faith. We all had jobs and we put sweat equity and worked massive amounts of hours. I think I was down to three, four hours a night's sleep. And our first product that we launch was actually something called podcaster. And it was way early before its time. It was designed to be a site where people would do short snippets of local content, and that failed. But in the meantime, we built a stat system, which came out in oh six, I believe we officially released that, but really it was trying to figure out where we fit. And at that time we were doing ad deals. We weren't doing any services at all. And then ultimately what led us into the service business was us, uh, creating the PowerPress podcasting plugin for WordPress, and then seeing the market change where the money was going down for small advertisers. About the time Adam Corolla jumped in the podcasting space, the big dollars were rolling into those bigger shows and the smaller podcasters were being left behind. I said, Hey, we gotta. If we don't pivot, we're gonna be out of business. And we pivoted and started doing the service component. So as revenue went down from the advertising, the service business kind of crossed in between. And of course at that time, maybe we had one employee, I think Angelo the dev, went on payroll. But we're all still doing sweat equity. Man, it was crazy times for sure. Yeah, no, it

Sam Sethi: 45:30

sounds like it was all hands to the pump. Now, of course, you've got another show called The New Media Show, which you launched in 2013. Yeah. Did you have other shows

Todd Cochrane: 45:38

in between? No. It was Geek News Central, and what I was thinking about was making a network of tech shows that I had a little tighter control of. and Rob Greenley was one of the original, He did a tech show. Matter of fact, he was doing live streaming and doing radio before podcasts started. So Rob had been part of Tech Podcast Network and Rob and I hitched up and we were doing this Saturday morning Tech show. But what we found, I don't know, went on a couple of years with that name and then one show I'm like, Rob, this is dumb. We're just talking about podcast. And I, I said, I think we should rebrand. And he says, Well, and I don't know who came up the name. It was me or him, and I actually bought new media show.com on GoDaddy. Right. Live on the show. Wow. And the next Saturday we came back is the new media show, and we've been talking about podcasting ever since. Of course, Rob's had like five different jobs in between, so it's been entertaining to see. So that show has been mostly a weekly show that we did that show twice weekly during Covid, and then we just backed off. We're back onto a weekly now. So yeah, that one's been 500 some episodes on the

Sam Sethi: 46:44

Now. Fast forward to today. I'm Aer of the New Media Show. You've been kind enough to have me as a guest on your show as well, episode 4, 8, 4. Now on that episode, I remember this is January, 2022. Talking to you about booster grams and Satoshis, if you listen back to that show, I, I, I'm not gonna say you are a skeptic, but you were a skeptic. The words were that I need to build for the 97%. Uh, I can't put development to it and I don't think this will take off. And now you are one of the biggest advocates out there for Booster Graham Sat and Value for value. I had a

Todd Cochrane: 47:23

mind shift. and it's true. I said in the beginning and, and it's more, I'm thinking as the CEO and bringing revenue, and then we spent two years during Covid rebuilding Blueberry Complete. We dynamin the whole system and rebuild it and relaunched it and bringing, So the team is on a rocket ship right now as far as stuff that we're re releasing and. I got to thinking about this and I think what it was, I listened to Podcast 2.0, I wanna say episode 94, or there was an episode I listened to in my car and I was driving somewhere and I'm like, I haven't been thinking about this wrong. And it really, that episode flipped the switch on me a hundred percent. And I said to Dave and Adam, I said, I need you to talk to my team cuz I can talk about this. And they're shoot, you know, over their head. They don't fully get it. So Dave and Adam are kind enough to come in and spend an hour with my team and just talk to us in depth about this. And we got done and I turned to the team and I. do we understand why we need to do this? And it's the carrot, It's a chicken and egg thing. And basically have to be the chicken, Yeah. Or egg, depending on how you wanna put it. I have to bring these podcast 2.0 features to the platform in order to educate. The podcasters so that the podcasters then will demand of the app developers to please implement this versus vice versa. Yeah, I think I have a, and, and I think if we work it both ways together with the app developers implementing and hosting providers, and, you know, don't get me wrong, but Sprouts here, rss.com, us, there's a few others that are being very proactive in thinking about podcasting 2.0. Mm-hmm. and.. I think that it's critical for us to think about how we're going to not only serve listeners going forward, but how we're going to help podcasters. You know, my part of my company mantra right now, our theme is Publish, Analyze, Grow. Mm-hmm. and the grow piece is probably, 80% of that mantra, How am I gonna help podcasters grow because this is what they're asking me every day. I'm gonna wanna grow my show and grow my show. So I gotta give them the tools to grow their show and have this interactivity and build community and all these things that I believe Podcasting two Point is going to bring along with the, you know, I'm a strong proponent of owning your staff. Mm-hmm. Rob Walbert Lipson, him and I had this back and forth for years about where I said, Own your own dot. Control your own feed, control your own brand, because you never know when a business model's gonna change and a company's gonna say, Oh, we're doing something different, and you're left high and dry. Or you say something outta character and you get delisted. So I wanna make sure, you know, so I said that for years and literally took a lot of heat for it. And now people are starting to finally realize, and maybe they don't completely agree with me on owning your own RSS feed, but that's the basis of how we think we're different because of Google and SEO and everything else. But podcasters gotta be able to own their stack and. Just like this little thing that PayPal did the other day. Yeah, yeah. You know, PayPal said it came in under an aup, said, Hey, if you say something that's misinformation, we're gonna find you $2,500, for instance. And of course they had massive pushback, but I talked about on the tech show, I'm thinking if they had continued that and put that into policy, I relied on PayPal for my business and for my podcast for years. Where do I go?, what do I use? What do I shift to to protect myself? And I don't know if I even have an answer for that right now, but Podcast 2.0 has the potential over time to allow content listeners to make micro ordination to the shows that would not be possible. If someone wants to send me two bucks, it's gonna be 50 cents of processing. Yeah, exactly. So, I'm not a Bitcoin Satoshi investment expert, and I don't claim bbi. It's as a donation model.. It works good. If people can just think about it as a token token to a podcaster, that value is gonna go up and down. But if you don't really think about, you buy the Satoshis and get so many for a value, but in the end it's gonna be a number 10,000. Satoshi. I don't even know what that's worth. Is that a buck or whatever it may be? If you make a contribution of 10,000, to me, that is, the number is 10 K. It's not really the dollar. Ultimately, it backs out the dollar and I can cash that money out. But as a host, and I understand this, But I gotta explain this to a podcaster that doesn't know how to right click a mouse.

Sam Sethi: 52:26

Yeah, and I think it's beholden on us who are at the bleeding edge of this stuff. To simplify, one of my favorite sayings is complexity is fail simplicity. And it fundamentally is when you send an email from me to you, I just ask for your. I don't need to know about smtp. I don't need to be routing. I don't need to know about the servers. Yeah. And in the same way, if I wanna send you 10,000 sat, I just need your lightning address. I don't need to know about the various ways that it's going up and down and back and forth and whatever it's doing. That's right. So maybe in six months time, I think we will be there. It's happening fast. Yeah. But it's maybe a little bit. Too early still.

Todd Cochrane: 53:04

So, and that's just one piece. That's just one thing of what 30 things that are being worked on. The lit tag, the, the cross app comments, all that stuff is, there's just a whole bunch of stuff there. So, You Basically, our approach is we're going to, you know, and be honest with you, it's simple to implement some of this stuff. It's just a text field. The, the key really is though, is making sure that we have the education, the backend process to make the listener or the podcaster understand this is why we're doing this. This is something you can opt into. Here's the information you can put in. And so you know, we're all in. We really are. Now, I've laid the gauntlet down a number of times on the new media show, encouraging other platforms to get involved.

Sam Sethi: 53:51

Now, uh, giving you longevity and time within podcasting, where do you think we will be with podcasting in the next couple of years? I mean, things seem to have changed so dramatically in the last five years since I got involved back in podcasting. Where do you see it though? Todd L

Todd Cochrane: 54:06

Let's break it down by who's creating content. The majority of the podcasting space is still made up by independent content creators that are creating their podcast in their. Bedroom closet at a bar, and that's the 90% of content creators that are out there today creating content. Those content creators are challenged. We've tried to help them monetize and do things the official way for years, and now we implemented programmatic advertising as a bridge, and I didn't come up that term. Tom Webster did a bridge to get them to the point where they decide what they wanna go. But really most podcast goals, it doesn't always revolve around money. It could be funnel, it could be someone that's trying to gain authority, and there's a whole scope of reasons. People do content. Sometimes people do it for therapy and. So that 90% of content creators are not gonna be affected by anything that's going on in the space, except they wanna continue to grow their shows. The other 10%, while that market is gonna be, depends on what happens to the economy, could be upended dramatically. What we saw in 2008 during the last recession was content creators kept creating content. But the advertising dollars tightened up a little bit and there was some changes in models and I think those companies that completely rely on advertising as part of their business, I think they, they may be in trouble a little bit, not completely, cuz there's gonna be a bit of a tightening. It's not gonna be complete. Let's say if they, well pull back 20%, that still means 20% of the people that are currently employed in a company that makes. Their money. Primary advertising are gonna be out of a job. Well, we've seen that, haven't we? With, We've

Sam Sethi: 55:48

seen some of that 38 people laid off at Park, Houseton. Gimlet and some of the exclusive shows who I thought it was very telling. One of the shows said that they were signed by Spotify, then asked to go exclusive, but no money was put into promote it, right? And the audience disappeared. That's

Todd Cochrane: 56:03

classic of this rinse, wash, repeat. We've seen this many times and the sad thing is, well, hate to say it, Spotify just doesn't know the history. And we've seen this type of activity happen before, this should not come as a shock, but for the overall podcasting community, we've stayed steady three, four, 5% growth year after year. During Covid, we saw this huge increase in creators, but now everybody's going back to ballet lessons, gymnastics and football games, and everything that goes on for sports or whatever that's going on in life. Those extra content shows are gone and now we're back to this normal line again of growth. One thing it does concern me just a little bit is watching the frequency of episodes of people we've been hovering on 400, 500,000 have updated shows, have updated an episode in the last 30 days. That number's down. So that's got me a little concerned, but I'm going back and backing this into Blueberry's Financial Network and I'm like, are we seeing more attrition? Are we seeing a higher cancellation rate? And my nutrition rate hasn't changed. My nutrition rate's already been historically low, so I'm not seeing that on the financial side. So what it tells me is there's a huge attrition somewhere, and I'm assuming the huge attrition is largely on the platforms that offer free because people that are paying for a service. Are gonna wanna get their money value out of that service. They are dedicated. They have a different goal. So from my perspective, yes, growth is slower, but I'm not going minus, I'm not going backwards. So knock on wood, that continues. And with so many competitors out there, we've seen two brand new hosting companies launched this week. Yeah. Which , good luck to them. It is a fierce competitive market. So podcast hosting now is just a commodity. You have to make it up in doing cool things like we're trying to do. Yeah. And a adding value to the product. I think some podcast companies are stubbornly not going to change and I think. Well, I'm not gonna give 'em strategy, but I, I think that gives me competitive advantage over the long haul. Plus the companies are adopting this podcast 2.0 stuff. I think that gives, Buzz Sprout, gives rss, gives us, and whoever jumps on the bandwagon, just a little competitive edge, uh, when it comes to, here's the stack of stuff we have for you. We'll see. But again, I think the podcast 2.0 stuff. Over the next two years is gonna be dramatic and the change we're gonna see there, I'm really excited about it. But as far as the podcasting space in general, it's here to stay. We're 18 years strong. We're headed to 20 shows are gonna come and go, but there's always someone that wants to hear their voice heard. And with it being easy, not like it was in 2004 where you had to be a rocket scientist to do this thing, the barrier to entry is very low. And we see more women creators coming in than men right now, at least at Blueberry. I do. We see diversity and podcasting at an all time high. We see other countries open up and starting to do podcasts. I'm getting ready to go to Saudi Arabia and talk about podcasting in Saudi Arabia, right? Oh, now I like what? Go to Saudi Reedman talk about podcasting and I'm. And I Googled about what's going on in Saudi Arabia has blown away the country's transformed the last three years. Politics aside, women are driving, they don't have to be covered up. Women can be with their boyfriends on the street holding hands. So if Saudi Arabia is trying to open up and allow a creator society, that itself, you think about the risk and. Because people are gonna say what they're gonna say and they're not gonna be constrained in, They're gonna talk politics , and that's gonna drive change. So I'm excited to see if Saudi Arabia can open up for creators if they truly open up for creators. And I'm going over there and talking about that exact topic, what the rest of the world is gonna follow. They've been the most closed society. There. Some more of them, probably more extreme, but.

Sam Sethi: 1:00:19

Yeah, no, it is. Wow. We are look at potty MO raising 172 million to do foreign language podcasting. So right there is a real market. Two last quick questions for you, Todd. You've been doing video for a long time now. Live video as well. You famously say, I haven't got time to edit. And so YouTube, where do you see them playing in the pan?

Todd Cochrane: 1:00:40

Well, I'm the person that is the naysayer on YouTube or consumption. Maybe add some discovery maybe for some shows. I've done the look just like others have looked, and you don't see a lot of successful podcasts on YouTube. If people say they're discovering podcasts on YouTube, I'll take that for it's worth live for me, YouTube aside was for one reason and one reason. I did a solo show for many years. So when I started doing live video for the Geek New Central podcast, it was about being able to have some interaction, Have someone from Australia, cuz I was in Hawaii at the time. Someone in Australia say, Hey, I'm listening and doing great, or throwing a jab at me, whatever it may have been. And I think for me it's that interaction piece that makes it exciting. So I truly think that the tie in between live and podcasts will continue to. But still today, 97, 98, 90 9% of my audience follow or subscribe and half 1% or less join me live on a regular basis. Probably it's less than 1%, but I think it serves a purpose. I, I strongly believe in, in doing live and tying it together. But a lot of podcasters, even though they're doing live video, they don't have a true video podcast. I do. I have an audio and video podcast in Apple Podcast and the apps that support it, not a lot of podcasters do. They have the YouTube live or Twitch or wherever they may put it, and that's it. I think that's a mistake. I think podcasters should do a true video podcast as well, but we'll see if that growth.

Sam Sethi: 1:02:16

Okay, Final question. What gets you to keep going? Todd, 1600 plus episodes. No pod fade. Yeah, nothing in sight. When are you gonna hear episode 2000? How old will you be by then, do you think?

Todd Cochrane: 1:02:29

Oh, we'll see. It'll be a couple years behind the, See I'm done 18 and I'm at, I'm 180 episodes, so it'll be sometime. What's that gonna be four years from now, probably, or no? Probably more than that. It's probably gonna be five or six years from now. Yeah, we'll see if I make it to 2000. What I told my audience from day one is, as long as I'm having fun doing the. I'll continue to do the podcast when it's no longer fun and I'm not getting enjoyment out of it. I'll hang up my head. I've been lucky enough to have a sponsor the entire time. That makes it a little. That puts little pays for the lights, pays for the insurance, all this stuff that goes on in running a studio and running a business. Blueberry doesn't pay for any of that. This is all on me. I think that's part of it. I, I, so far so good. I haven't pod paid. I'm still having a good time. And I'm sure there will come a day where I'll hang up the headphones. At least one show. I don't know though. I haven't even really thought about it. I'm still excited helping content creators. I'm sure he'd be

Sam Sethi: 1:03:27

going that after me, that's for

Todd Cochrane: 1:03:29

certain. I'm 58 and I'm not saying I'm gonna go to, I'm 80. I told what he wants to hear an old man talk, but I'm a boomer. I'm the last year of boomers, so there's this whole community of boomers. I'm dragging 'em along. I started this when I was 40 years old, so I'm dragging that. Into, into retirement time. So the show maybe will shift a little bit. I don't know. We'll see. But the podcasting space still is fun. I, to be honest, I've said it a couple times, I'm having more fun now in podcasting than I've had in many years. It's the most fun I've had with my clothes on in probably 10 years because of the podcasting 2.0 stuff. It's exciting. It's new. It's not the same. Same, Yeah, it is. And when people start to realize that, you know, when Apple. Announced the iTunes integration in 2005. Innovation stopped. It stopped. Hammer stopped. We've seen some inflections over the time. You know, you see the iPhone come on in, in, in serial and a few inflections. We are in a time now of a new inflection in podcasting where we're expanding the space and growing. And many of the folks that are listening to pod land, they understand this. We just gotta. The other 500,000 active podcasters to understand it and say, we want this. And when they do, I don't care what Spotify does, I want Apple come along. I don't care what Google does, but we'll make our own way with or without them and the space is gonna be better for it. Todd,

Sam Sethi: 1:05:02

thank you so much. Congratulations on your journey so far, and glad to hear it's not over by far. Where can people find you, Todd? Where can they find the shows where they can find.

Todd Cochrane: 1:05:13

Yeah, so easy on Twitter for me at Geek News. Of course, the Geek News centrals@geeknewscentral.com. New media shows, new media show.com podcast insiders, the one they do for blueberry@podcastinsider.com. Again, all domains you can easily go to. Followers, subscribe to the show. I'm todd@blueberry.com. Blueberry without the East cuz we couldn't afford the east. There were $2 million, so B L U B r y.com. So that's the easiest way to remember.

James Cridland: 1:05:38

The OG himself, Todd Cochran, uh, from the Geek News Central Podcast, and of course the new media show. Um, uh, really good, uh, to, uh, hear him talk. So, uh, thank you so much, Sam for that.

Sam Sethi: 1:05:51

Now another show celebrating a milestone is the Europeans, which celebrates its fifth anniversary next month, cohost Katie Lee, who's uh, a Brit living in Paris and dominant Kramer, a Brit living in Aam, will be making the milestone with interviews with a major European leaders. It's not a podcast that I listen to James, but again, anything that's reaching that sort of milestone should be applauded.

James Cridland: 1:06:15

Yeah, indeed. You know, they, they started in 2017 and, uh, have really focused on Europe and obviously, you know, Brexit has happened since. Um, I love the fact that, uh, so, um, uh, Katie Lee is a reporter. That's the type of person that you would expect to be making a podcast, isn't it? A reporter, uh, Dominic Kramer, though, is an opera singer because obviously why, why, why would he not be? Um, so, uh, yeah, and it's just been, uh, nominated for a pre Europa, um, which is a very, uh, fancy, um, award, uh, that, uh, if they win that, then they will be, um, very truly recognized. Um, so, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's a good thing. So many congratulations to.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:03

Hmm. Now moving on. Another friend of the show is Auburn Brook. Of course Auburn is head of marketing app. Buzzsprout a lovely guy that he is. Um, he also has been very kind or Buzzsprout, have been very kind to sponsor this podcast from the very early days, from the get go even. Um, and they've been launching some new stuff. Uh, uh, in the middle of the year. They launched bus brow ads, which we use here on this podcast, but also they've just recently launched Bus Sprout footers. Um, James, have you seen the footer yet?

James Cridland: 1:07:38

Yeah, it's a really clever idea, isn't it, just to add a template, which, um, has all of your contact details and everything else, which you can put at the bottom of every single podcast that you do. It's a really simple and clever idea, so, uh, many congratulations.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:54

Yeah, well, I thought I'd reach out to all, We haven't spoken to him in a while and find out what's going on with their plans for the footer, but also with what other things they've got in the pipeline as well.

Alban Brooke: 1:08:04

In your episode description, I kept seeing there was a lot that was repetitive and people would always put in. Hey, here's our Twitter accounts and here's where you could donate some Satoshis if you like to do value for value. Or if you want to give us a call in this phone number, leave a message, you know, whatever it may be. Leave us review an Apple. They would put all the same content in the show notes. And I started looking at it and I was like, You know what we really need is a consistent section that is in every single uh, description so you don't have to copy and. And then if you update anything, it updates throughout all hundred episodes or something. And so that's what we did. We call it the episode footer, and it's at the bottom of the description. You click it, you add in your links, your important things, and it'll be added to every episode, the back catalog, and into the future.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:58

Amazing. Now we've already done that. I know you've done that on your podcast as well, so if anyone wants to go and see it, they can go to pod land.news. Click on an episode and you'll see our footer. It just brings up a question in my head. Will you bring a header out then ? I

Alban Brooke: 1:09:13

don't know if there's anything that needs to be the beginning. So, Well, I've seen other people talk about what if this was like a full template and they wanted a template for the entire show notes. and when I was looking at least the shows I listened to and the shows that I helped create, there wasn't enough consistency between all the episode descriptions that it weren't at a full template, but there was this one repeated section, and so that's the part we decided to focus on. There wasn't, at least now that I see a use case for the header, so that always has to be up at the.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:50

Yeah, it's like an email footer really, isn't it? It's the same concept that repeatable content that you wanna put out. And what's nice is it goes through every one of your episodes so you don't have to manually go back and put it in, which is great. Now just remind me, is there a limitation on the number of characters in a show note There

Alban Brooke: 1:10:07

is in Apple, so Apple does 4,000 characters. There are other players that don't have a limit of 4,000. I, I did this math the other day that ends up being about 700 words in standard English. I think that's enough for descriptions. And so we just adopted the apple, which is the most restrictive in the episode description, so that it would populate in all podcast apps the same way. And then the footer, we said 500 characters is enough for this section just because we wanna make sure. That you have space for your episode description to fully be displayed, and then this to be appended to the end. Okay.

Sam Sethi: 1:10:49

If you add in bus brow also sponsors, does that take up space from the show note or where does that take the space from?

Alban Brooke: 1:10:57

It does. It goes into that episode description as well, so there's multiple ways that something might show up in that field. It's the episode description that you're putting in there yourself. Maybe you put in some dynamic content that has a link. Maybe you have a sponsor or a Spark. The show link, those would all get dropped in dynamically, and so we are making sure that we're not going to be running over that limit, or if we do that, we're truncating from. Episode description itself, so it's not hard math, but we're trying to make sure that it's easy so that people see what they expect to see. So when they're putting in their information, they're running into those limitations on the front end when they're actually writing, not later on finding out, Hey, the link wasn't included in Apple Podcast because they've got a little bit more of a limit than maybe a different app.. Cool.

Sam Sethi: 1:11:51

Now you talked about dynamic there, just as a word. Let's move on to something you did a few months ago, dynamic add insertions. So you came out with bus brow ads and you recently updated those with the ability to control the midroll as well. So talk to me about the thinking first of all, cause we've not interviewed you since you, you launched it. What was the thinking behind bus brow ads, why you brought them out and what you've done with them? Since

Alban Brooke: 1:12:16

bus brow ads is our time to. Indie podcasters monetize their shows, and Indie podcasters have quite a few struggles that they're trying to solve that are different than the largest shows. They often don't have a team to go out and get sponsors. That back and forth is too expensive for them time wise. They often have a back catalog that gets a majority of the.. So if they are going to add a new advertisement, they would have to go replace audio files for a ton. Mm-hmm., or if they're picking insertion points to go pick insertion points in a hundred episodes, that's a multi-week project for some people. I actually talked to a podcaster who switched from, I think it was Lipson to megaphone, and then she had to go through and reselect all those insertion. and I was like, Man, that's just a painful process. And so the development team built a system where we scan the episode and then we identify the best places for ads, and that's where we drop buzz spread ads. There are times where people say, Yeah, that was a pause and it was a change in speaker, so I get why you picked that. But it was in the middle of a conversation about something very intense. Somebody's talking about a health issue or a diagnosis, and so we have the ability now where you can either tweak those spots or you can totally remove them. So you could pick an episode. I think this came from somebody who was building a podcast about living with Parkinson's disease, and he said, This was just such a heavy episode. I don't want any ads. Even though I monetize the other shows, we said, Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you now have full control over where those ads are, if you want, and the ability to remove them and have no ads in an episode if that's something you prefer. I saw a

Sam Sethi: 1:14:13

tweet I think from you, which is the amount you've now paid out to podcast creators. What's the amount today? Oh,

Alban Brooke: 1:14:22

I wish I'd pulled this for you. I remember that was probably 12 days into bus for ads, and we paid out, I wanna say it was about two weeks and we paid out a hundred thousand. So since that a hundred thousand, I haven't rerun the numbers. We were waiting for that one so that I could click set on the tweet, but I'll have to go back and pull that data.. The other thing we recently added for bus brow ads is the ability to monetize the full back catalog. And so now when you accept an advertisement in bus spread ads, that can be included in all of your episodes, so that's pretty important for a show like Pod Land, you may want to have ads all the way back to episode two. If somebody went back to listen about the Facebook podcast launch , they then they'd be able to get a monetized download. Talk

Sam Sethi: 1:15:09

to me very quickly about the creation of the ads. What's the process and how does it.

Alban Brooke: 1:15:15

So from the advertiser side, right now the only ads are podcast promotions. So a podcaster would go and would upload a 42nd advertisement talking about their show, a promotion, and we'd pull in a little bit of information. Your Apple link, your Spotify link. and some artwork, things like that. And then we use information about your show to help you match you to really good podcasts. That would be a good fit. You want there to be crossover between the subject matter of the podcasts. So if we see one show is in art, that's one of their categories. We're gonna try to find other podcasts with similar categories and then. We always had the ability for people to opt out. They say, Hey, I don't want my podcast in that show. So you always have the ability to say no. And then on the podcaster's side, they have full control so that they can accept only the ads they want. And this was just after being in the industry long enough there were enough funny and sometimes sad examples of dynamic ads dropped into the wrong shows. Accidentally dropping in while Turkey ads into a sobriety podcast, or that one was I think a true technical fluke. But then I remember there was one beginning of Covid where they're talking about a cruise ship that had really bad covid issues, and right after it, Royal Caribbean ad that said, Hey, if you wanna go to cruise, come to Royal Caribbean. Just like if somebody actually had to click yes to that ad, that would've clicked in their mind, this isn't appropriate, but you wouldn't think. Let's run back through those dynamic ads and make sure we change categories. So we're doing a full opt in, because the person who's always at risk is the podcaster, right? Their reputation is at risk. Most of the people listen to that sobriety podcast. Probably now know why that happened. But if they're going to be mad at anybody when they hear it, it's the hosts of the show. Yeah. And they may think, Oh, you were being cheeky and you thought it was funny to do this. It's not funny. And they turn off the show and now you don't have the opportunity to rectify that. So it's why we're putting a little bit more caution, a little bit more thoughtfulness around accepting a.

Sam Sethi: 1:17:41

Now another confusion I want you to help clear up is when we look at the amount we are paid from a particular ad, sometimes it's a large amount and we're like, Wow, that's brilliant. And sometimes it's a small amount. Now can you explain that there is a fixed. Cost for the ad, but why the variability within the payout please? Sure.

Alban Brooke: 1:18:05

So there's a lot of these ads that are being split among a lot of different podcasts. So we're targeting not just one show, it's not one ad to one show, it's one ad to hundreds of shows at times. And so if you're paid a small amount, it's not because the CPM or the cost, the amount that you're making per download is lower. That's always the part that goes to the podcaster is a $14 per thousand downloads, so it's $20 cpm, and then 30% goes to bus brow. The reason you would see a small payment is maybe because that ad is almost finished. You know, they bought 50,000 download. And you're jumping on right at the end, and you only got maybe a thousand of those, so you only see $14. It's just because, uh, that ad was almost finished. Now that makes

Sam Sethi: 1:18:54

it very clear. I understand. Now, moving on, you've done some other things as well with the stats. You've made it so that they're much more understandable. What have you done? Oh,

Alban Brooke: 1:19:04

so this , it's funny, Going to podcast movement. I always think we get really good information and feedback from customers and potential customers. There's some types of questions that I don't know why, they just seem to pop up each year. And one of the things we heard a lot at Podcast Movement this year was, I have to run reports for my podcast at work, and I need a specific date range, and I need to know how many downloads there were, and I need some information. We never had this functionality, so we went back and added it. So now you can go in and pick custom date ranges and pull all the stats for your podcast for that date range, and then add it. Send it out to your boss or whoever needs to see it. So we added that ability. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I just love going to conferences is you pick up on themes every few times that you go.

Sam Sethi: 1:19:57

No, it's great. Talking of conferences, where's the next one that we can see Bus route.

Alban Brooke: 1:20:02

I think the next one that I will be at is Podcast Movement Evolution. So I think is that one in. I'm getting a Vegas confused. Vegas. Okay. I've never been to Vegas. Vegas will be the first time.. Will you be there? If

Sam Sethi: 1:20:15

I will be and you and I are gonna go and do the zip wire from the top of the tower.

Alban Brooke: 1:20:19

I have no idea what that is, but I'm meant. Sam Sethi: Good. You. It's brilliant. You can actually go to the top of like this massive tower on these strip and you do a zip wire all the way through the middle of Vegas. Oh

Sam Sethi: 1:20:32

wow.. Yeah. So I think we're gonna have to do that one mate. That's a given. Auburn, thank you so much for your, Thanks for the update on what you guys are doing. We will be having you back very soon cuz some exciting stuff coming down the pipe. I know, but we're not allowed to talk about it today so we won't. But yeah, again, remind everyone if they want to get their bus brow account, where they go and how they can connect with you.

Alban Brooke: 1:20:53

Uh, yeah, go to bus brow.com if you'd like to sign up for a podcast. You can move one over if you already have one, or you could start a brand new show. And if you ever need to reach out to me on at Alvin Brook on Twitter and I'd love to chat.

James Cridland: 1:21:07

Al Brook from Buzzsprout, our sponsor. And uh, I have a very beautiful podcast movement, Dallas t-shirt from them, which I wear occasionally. It's one of these quite smart and cool t-shirts that it doesn't say on it. I'm a free t-shirt from a podcast conference. Uh, it's just random, uh, pictures of microphones in that, in that particular case, and you have to look really closely to see that it's a buzz proud, um, uh, shirt. So, um, I proudly wear that when I'm out walking the dog . Um, so thank, thank them for that. Um, and also thank you album for coming on. Should we move on to the tech stuff?

Sam Sethi: 1:21:47

Yeah, uh, I got an email this week from YouTube. I'm sure that a million other people did as well. I don't feel very unique, but it was YouTube handles, uh, are rolling out and I was like, Well, what's YouTube handles? So I had a quick nose and it seems that, uh, if you want to customize the branded URL for your channel, you don't have to now wait until you've got a thousand followers. You can actually now have a youtube.com/user 1 23. So your username. So I thought I'd test and see if mine worked, and yes it did. So you can go to youtube.com/sam and that is my YouTube handle being added to my YouTube channel url, which I thought was quite cool. Really.

James Cridland: 1:22:36

Very nice. So that works now and you don't have to do any, any extra work for it.

Sam Sethi: 1:22:40

I don't, but it doesn't work for our pod land one. I went and tried that and that didn't work. So I dunno why they've chosen some to work and others not. But they are rolling it out. But the bigger question, James, is why are they rolling it out? And I guess for me it feels like they're building a social network within YouTube.

James Cridland: 1:23:01

Brilliant. It's the new Google Plus. That's what we all need, isn't it? Uh,

Sam Sethi: 1:23:06

where that had gone.

James Cridland: 1:23:08

That's gonna be fun. Well, something to, uh, keep an eye out on. And of course, YouTube, uh, made lots of noise earlier on in the year about, uh, their plans for podcasting. Uh, these days. Of course, uh, uh, we're still kind of waiting for that. But, um, uh, who knows what might happen there. Uh, fountain. Oh yeah, . Yeah, that, that'll be exactly it. It'll be Joe Rogan. Um, Fountain has, uh, launched, uh, a new version of, uh, their app, uh, 0.5 0.2, uh, which, uh, now includes Android Auto. Um, there are some bug fixes in there as well. Uh, so if you're using Fountain, a quick update to that. And while you're at it, uh, hit that boost button as well. Um, and, uh, if you are finding this value, uh, that would be very kind. Uh, what's hit clip? Uh,

Sam Sethi: 1:23:57

I was gonna ask you the same question. Um, uh, it's a beatta version of a product that launched this week. You can now edit, clip and transcribe your podcasts and webinars. So another tool, you know, and more the merrier, uh, to help all of us podcasters to, um, create discoverable pieces from our audio.

James Cridland: 1:24:19

Oh, well that sounds fun. Um, one of my favorite podcast apps, uh, Antenna Pod, which is available for Android and is completely open source. That has launched version 2.7. What they've done with this is that they've added a new view, which is called the inbox, which is really cool, I think. Um, because it allows you to add episodes to the play queue or to remove episodes completely. It's basically like your email inbox. Um, and if you've used, uh, Castro, the podcast app, um, On, uh, iOS, uh, that was Castro's big thing, uh, about five or so years ago. Um, so this is something which Antenna Podd has now, uh, done. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think, I think it's a pretty, pretty cool, smart thing, uh, which is worthwhile having a play with. I think Antenna Podd is probably one of the best podcast apps out there, and it's surprising that it doesn't get more, uh, people using it on, uh, on Android. And I, I think personally really surprising that nobody has taken that user base, uh, or the code base and, um, produced something which has all of the new podcast namespace in there as well. Um, you know, it's a great base to, uh, do all of that kind of stuff and produce a fork, uh, which you could do that kind of, uh, thing with. So perhaps that's, um, you know, an opportunity for somebody who's listening.

Sam Sethi: 1:25:41

Mm, Well I've never tried that product, so, uh, you know, I'm not one of those people who uses that Strange thing that you use, Android, I think you

James Cridland: 1:25:50

Android. Well, you know, there,

Sam Sethi: 1:25:51

Haven't you got a new watch and phone and stuff like

James Cridland: 1:25:54

I've, I've got a new watch as well. Yes, I've got a new watch. We might, might get onto that, uh, a little bit later on, but Yes, you're absolutely right. Um, phase six of the new podcast namespace, um, is, uh, up, it's, uh, lots of proposals for new tags. Um, what's your favorite new tag of phase six? Uh, Sam.

Sam Sethi: 1:26:14

Um, I'm not really, I think the podcast events one is the one that I'm most interested in. So, a little while back I was having a chat with, um, Dave Jones about how Pod Ping, uh, has an ability to alert you to a new episode or a new show. Okay. And that was great, but it made me realize that, well, if you've. An alert system, a notification, could you use that for other activities? So, um, I was building something at the time and I was thinking, Well, could I alert people to this activity that's just occurred or that activity? And could I use Pod Ping and Dave? Um, and had a little think about it, but we never got any further. But podcast events allows for real time communication back to the podcaster where events are secure, web hooks that you've got a new review or you've made a clip or someone has pressed play on your podcast, which is exactly what I was looking for. And this has come from John Spurlock as a suggestion.

James Cridland: 1:27:19

Yes. And it's, uh, a very well thought out suggestion as well. There's lots of security on there. I think. Um, this part, partially, this is a bit like, uh, NPRs rad idea. Um, Uh, if you were to just have a look at the analytics side, if you wanted to build that bit, but the problem with, uh, one of the many problems with NPRs Rad is that, uh, anyone could spoof a play just by, uh, taking a look at the, uh, the audio file and, and, and sending it back. Um, whereas this is not, uh, spoof. So, um, it works, Uh, it works pretty well. So really interesting that one podcast events, events being JavaScript events, not, um, events like, you know, podcast movement or anything like that. Um, I have put together podcast has guests, which is basically trying to, um, uh, allow podcasters to say that they have guests or that they don't have guests, so that you don't get people trying to us guests if we don't have any. Um, so we'll see if that go, goes anywhere. Um, and there is also another interesting one, which I suspect we will be coming back to, uh, in a number of weeks podcast. Txt, which is for freeform content, and it's all about feed verification. Apple is getting rid of the email address. Uh, and there will need to be a way to verify that your podcast is really, your podcast and podcast txt will form a big part of that. You'll never hear podcast txt being used by your podcast host, but it's a pretty cool, um, thing. Um, and I suspect there will be you coming back to that in, uh, in a couple of weeks. Once, uh, it has gone through the, uh, this phase of the podcast name space.

Sam Sethi: 1:29:07

Hmm. I think it's great to see that it's evolving still. I mean, one of the challenges I think, and we've touched on it in the past, is while we are pushing ahead with new tags to the RSS extension, uh, namespace, um, some of the hosts are not implementing. So, you know, we talk about the person tag not being implemented by all host share, or we talk about value tags. And so it feels like, um, I think you said it many, many years ago, or at least two years ago, cause we've only been doing this for two years, um, that some of these tags will just die on the vine. Really. You know, some will get adopted and some will die.

James Cridland: 1:29:48

yeah. Absolutely. And I don't think that necessary that, that, that's a particularly bad thing. I th I think it's great trying to see what works. You know, there's some really good ideas, There's some ideas that I'm not particularly, uh, a fan of, but nevertheless, um, uh, I think all of these ideas going into the podcast name space, some people will use them, some people won't, and that's all fine by.

Sam Sethi: 1:30:11

Yeah. Now moving on, uh, Podcast is publishing transcripts of podcasts, which is now powered by Open AI's Whisper and Snipped is also doing the same. Um, have you had a little play with Open AI Whisper? I'm gonna go and have a play with it this week. I know.

James Cridland: 1:30:28

Yes, I've not played with Open AI Whisper, but I would quite like to do that because I would like to work out how to do a proper transcript, you know, an s RT transcript for the Pod News Daily podcast, cuz that will be nice. We publish one for this podcast, uh, because we edit on D Scripts, but Pod News Daily is edited on Hindenberg and so, um, I want to see if I can work out how to do that. But, you know, I think, have you looked at the pod graph website?

Sam Sethi: 1:30:57

No, not had a chance yet. Um, uh, again, it, it was just one of those things that I thought, Oh, we talked about open ai, uh, whisper last week as well, and I think it was called the Holy Grail of transcription last week, um, which seems a little bit grand.

James Cridland: 1:31:13

good. By, by sounds of it, you know, it works pretty well. I think what worries me slightly about the pod graph website is that, um, it's all kinds of things, uh, all kinds of transcripts from podcasters that haven't necessarily, you know, agreed for this transcript to be published online. And it may be incorrect, and it may be wrong, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, I, I, I'm kind of looking at it, at it and going, you know, respecting the creator is probably a good plan, but, um, yeah, it's, you know, it's a thing. Anyway.

Sam Sethi: 1:31:46

Yeah, a couple of weeks back, Ivo Terra said he was gonna produce a podcast, have it transcribed automatically using open ai, then have that spoken by another AI bit like the podcast ai, and then release that and keep going in a circle to see how far he'd get with it.

James Cridland: 1:32:04

Yeah.. That'd be interesting, wouldn't it? Uh, Worthwhile having a play with, um, worthwhile, also having a play with Is that Boost button in your podcast, uh, app, Uh, because it's now time for Yes. It. Oh, yes, I forgot about that bit. Yes, it is a absolutely, it's time for Booster Graham Corner. I've got them open on my screen. Um, Sam can't see them. Well, you could if you, if you're logged into Saturn. Um, but you haven't. Um, so there we are. Um, so, um, Moritz from LB sent us 5,000 SATs. Thank you Moritz. Uh, he says, Thanks Sam James for another great episode. Sam James, have you noticed that? Sam James

Sam Sethi: 1:32:49

it, it, it's, it's like ans and deck. He just can't get it right. Can you? It has to be James and Sam.

James Cridland: 1:32:55

Sa Sam James a a,

Sam Sethi: 1:32:57

A top billing for once

James Cridland: 1:33:00

Um, Kyron sent us double one, double one sets all the ones, uh, and he says boosting just cause. Uh, thank you for your boosting. Just cause. Um, Dave Jones, the pod Sage himself, uh, is sent us a big rush boost of 21,000 sets from curio caster. Great idea for using O P three to find new and unknown user agents. Top work James. And then he's put a picture of a top hat. Oh look, emojis.

Sam Sethi: 1:33:27

See, there you go. The pod font himself.

James Cridland: 1:33:32

So yes. So we will see on that, uh, Adam Curry, uh, 10,000 sat. Thank you. Adam is a proper size boost. Um, uh, and he's busy talking about both o P three. If, uh, if, uh, no agenda is still the largest contributor of data. Uh, he says it may be skewed since I promote new podcast apps in every show. Uh, but it also shows you what a bit of promotion can do. Indeed. He's also thanked you for the value for value plug with another 10,000 SAT boost and another 10,000 sat boost. So if you remember last week we were talking about Acast who said that they were the word press of podcasting. And I think both you and I raised an eyebrow about that. Um, Adam has explained why, um, because, um, capital markets are potential investors and investors like comparisons. And Adam says, automatic, has an estimated market cap of 800 million. So by Acast saying where the WordPress of podcasting, they create the illusion of increased value.

Sam Sethi: 1:34:36

They do indeed. And, and it Adam's exactly right. I mean, whenever I've done a pitch deck, um, you've always done, We are the X of Y, uh, because it allows the investor to hook as well very quickly, uh, their mind to what the product could be. Um, so yeah, when I had a business before it was the, we are the Google of Fashion. Uh, it was a search engine for real time price tracking of fashion items, and it just made it really simple as a one line statement. Uh, and you can see they, they were nodding very quickly. I get what you're doing now as opposed to, let me tell you 10 things for next 10 minutes about what my product does. It's a great.

James Cridland: 1:35:15

Yeah, no, I can, I can well see that. So thank you, uh, Adam for that. And, uh, Adam has su uh, you know, an awful lot of experience in, uh, how investors, uh, understand, uh, things. So it's really helpful to get his, his point of view, Um, and an Israel boost, 1948 from Brian of London. Uh, and he explains the Israel boost. He says, I'd like, I like to say Israel was reestablished in 1948 when the rest of the world decided to recognize Jews achieved something. No other indigenous peoples have managed yet regained long lost sovereignty in our indigenous lands. But let's not get too hung up on the details. Brian, uh, thank you for. Much appreciated. In fact, there is some sovereignty conversations going on in this very country where we are talking about indigenous people here being given their own voice in Parliament, which is not a moment too soon in my humble opinion. But anyway, we will see whether or not that happens when it's put to the Australian people at some point in the next two years.

Sam Sethi: 1:36:19

Well, Dan Meisner, uh, put out a post the other day saying that Apple are looking for Native American podcasters to feature in their Native American month. So yeah, if you are a Native American and you want to have a voice, then uh, ping apple. They're very keen to get you to do a podcast.

James Cridland: 1:36:39

Well, well, there we are. Well, if you'd like to send us a boost, then, uh, you are more than welcome. Please do. Um, you'll find a boost button in a, uh, in your new podcast app. And if you are not using a new podcast app, you won't have a boost button. So go and get one pod news.net/new podcast apps. Um, that would be a splendid thing, and you can, um, give us a bit of value. Whatever value you think that this show is worth to you, we, uh, humbly appreciate it. Um, uh, it's one of the reasons why we do this. And, uh, we would love, um, for you to, uh, give us a bit of value back if, uh, that is your jam, uh, using a new podcast. Um, so what's been happening for you this week in Pod Land? Sam,

Sam Sethi: 1:37:22

Well, most of the stuff that, uh, I've been working on, you know about, but we can't say still. Uh, but I've got my new podcast called Off the Mic coming out in a few weeks time, so I'm gonna start to put the trailers out for that.

James Cridland: 1:37:36

you gonna be recording it? Off the mic as well,

Sam Sethi: 1:37:39

yeah, I'm going to go and have a dog walk and, and just use my road mics. I think I might just try that one. No, I think.

James Cridland: 1:37:47

and welcome to Off The. No, no, I'm

Sam Sethi: 1:37:53

Ah, yeah, Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, that'll be a different angle on it. Gotta find something new.

James Cridland: 1:37:58

quite literally a different, a different angle. It'll be this angle. Uh, yes. Quite, It's quite enough. Now what, what will off the mic be? Sam

Sam Sethi: 1:38:08

Well, I just, I, there's so many great people in podcasting. One of the things I've come to podcasting much later than you, James, and certainly much later than people like Todd, but one of the things that I have enjoyed about joining this group in this industry is the wonderful people within it. Um, and some of those people just have great stories outside of just, you know, what's, you know, their latest episode or what we are talking about. Um, you know, how do they get into it? What do they do? I mean, some of the standard questions be, you know, what, what's your kitten? And stuff like that. But I just also wanna just get behind the person. So we'll see. We'll see if it's an interesting enough, hopefully for people to want to listen to and more and more of it.

James Cridland: 1:38:50

Yeah, indeed. Well, I'm looking forward to that and looking forward to the other things that you keep on looting to that we can't mention. Uh, this week for me has been, I, I've, I've been on a couple of podcasts. Uh, I've been on the media podcast for example, uh, which is always good to be on. That was, uh, normally done by Matt Diegan, but, uh, Jake was doing it this week. Um, And I ended up, um, uh, doing a number of different things, including, um, uh, what was quite a, a bit of a sort of small thrill for me was appearing next to Maggie Brown, who I used to listen to on that very podcast when it was run by the Guardian a long, long, long time ago. Um, so it was, uh, very exciting to be part of that. Uh, and also a book, which I've, uh, written literally three pages in, um, is now available in the US and in Europe. It's called The Power of Podcasting. I will earn nothing, uh, from it, but nevertheless, um, it's written by Shon McQue. Chaon actually spoke at, uh, podcast A 24 in Sydney last week. Um, she was very good. She was one of the highlights if you ask me. Uh, and um, it's a great book, which I read, uh, a while back. So you'll find my, uh, my words, uh, inside and also on the back cover, um, which is always fun. Um, And, uh, if you want it, you'll find a discount code is in our show notes, uh, as well, Pod land.news. Um, so, um, yes, it's always nice seeing books and things like that.

Sam Sethi: 1:40:18

Well, it's better than, uh, Liz Trust who claimed to write a book or be part of writing a book, and then when pressed on it, uh, was told that all she did was photocopy pages. Uh, but she took the credit for it.

James Cridland: 1:40:31

It's the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom there. Uh, you must be very proud. Uh, and that's it for this week. If you liked this episode of Pod Land, tell others to visit, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts will be back next week with another weekly review and analysis of all things podcasting.

Sam Sethi: 1:40:47

You'll also find all our previous shows and interviews on our website, Pod land.news. You can give us feedback using a booster grab, and if your podcast app doesn't support Boost TTU up, then grab a new one from pod news.net/new podcast apps.

James Cridland: 1:41:04

Yes. 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 app.

Sam Sethi: 1:41:12

Our music is from Studio Dragonfly and we're hosted and sponsored by our good friends, Buzz Sprout and Squad Cast. So thank you to both

James Cridland: 1:41:19

Keep listening.