James Cridland: 0:00

It's Friday the 10th of February, 2023. The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly review with James Cridlin and Sam Sethy. I'm James Cridlin, the editor of Pod News. And I'm

Sam Sethi: 0:17

Sam Sethy, the CEO O of podcast fans launching at podcast movement in

James Cridland: 0:21

Vegas. Ooh, in the chapters today, Google Loses podcast From search, or do they? What's the latest buzz from Buzz Sprout? Have you got a trailer? What makes a chart topping podcast at news about something called. Pod News Live also.

Jordan Harbinger: 0:38

Hey, it's Jordan Harbinger and I'll be on later to talk about how to grow and monetize your podcast, but also what I think of Value For Value and Spotify

Sean Glynn: 0:46

exclusives. Sean Glenn here, the c e o of Novel. I'll be on later to talk about our closing of our 5 million series A investment. This is Tom

Tom Rossi: 0:54

Rossi from Buzz Sprout, and later I'm gonna be talking about Buzz Sprout subscriptions.

James Cridland: 0:59

They Will. This podcast is sponsored and hosted by Buzz Sprout. Last week, 4,018 people started a podcast with Buzz Sprout podcast hosting made easy with powerful tools and remarkable customer support. And now you can turn your listeners into supporters with Buzz Sprout subscriptions from your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly review.

Sam Sethi: 1:21

Let's kick off this week, James with, oh, I feel like a queen. Hit another one. Bites the dust. Uh, Google. They're at it again. They're going to the Deadpool with Google Podcasts, or are they James? It seems that I might be early giving them the death now. What have they done, James? Come on, gimme the

James Cridland: 1:39

beef. Well, What they've done is they've announced that something is going to die. Uh, they confirmed the story that if you remember, we had last month about Google Podcasts disappearing from Google search, and they announced in the Google Podcasts Manager, which is where you go, and you, uh, look after your podcasts in, uh, Google Podcasts. They announced that they were getting rid of the podcast carousel. And basically that that tool isn't gonna give you any more information about how people find your show, which was actually quite useful. And that goes away at the end of this week. You know, if you read the announcement, you are there going, okay, so there's gonna be no more podcasts in Google search. And that's a bit sad, but still, but there we are. After reading the announcement from Google, I double checked it with, um, somebody from PR at Google and they said, oh, no, no, no. Uh, what's happening is they're not going away. They're being replaced with a new feature. Uh, and the new feature is called What to Podcast, except it's not called What to Podcast. It's, that's just Google's internal name for it. Um, but it's a, um, quite nice sort of carousel type thing that is, uh, appearing only in the US and only on mobile and only if you speak English. It links to both Spotify and to Google Podcasts. And uh, yeah, it's just what an utter mess that they announce that they're gonna close something. and then they've actually not closed it, but they're just changing it so that it's linking to Spotify as well as Google podcasts. It's just a mess. And I said to the PR person at Google, uh, I said, look, uh, you know, I, I'd really like to be helping you tell the story here, not forcing you to, you know, clarify something that you've already announced. Can, can I, you know, how can we work together on this? And he's just said, oh, it's okay. No worries, . It's just a very strange old thing. But yeah, it's just an, it is just a bit of a mess, isn't it, Sam? It's just another Google mess.? Sam Sethi: Well, I look, I apart from search and YouTube. Um, I think all Google products end up in the Deadpool. Um, I don't invest time, energy, or effort on them anymore. And I suspect, um, with the announcement of Bard, I dunno if you saw that, the AI that came out with a wrong answer on the. Well done Google , um, that, uh, and 9% down on the market. Um, Google got their hands tied with a lot more things than worrying about podcasting. So now I'm not really gonna spend any time there. I think you're absolutely right. I think that Google is sitting there going, uh, oh. Um, all of a sudden we've got quite a lot of problems and fires to put out and, um, we really don't care too much about podcasting. But you know, I mean, nice to see that Google is now helping Spotify, uh, in terms of, um, being even more of a market leader. I wonder how much of it was, you know, the. The eu, um, you know, antitrust stuff that actually Google really shouldn't just be linking to its own, uh, podcast. It should be linking to somewhere else. Um, and so that's why there's this new product of Googles that now links out to Spotify as well as to Google Podcasts. I don't know, but it's all, it's all very confusing.

Sam Sethi: 4:55

Yeah. They've also got problems with the fact that they've bought the search engine slots in Safari in Firefox, and the DOJ in America are not happy that they've got that monopolization of search.

James Cridland: 5:07

So yeah. If they stop paying for Mozilla f for being the default search in Mozilla, doesn't that essentially mean the end? Of, of, uh, Firefox entirely, probably,

Sam Sethi: 5:18

unless Bing comes in.

James Cridland: 5:20

Mm. You never know. But I mean, why would Bing pay for, you know, pay the millions of dollars that Google have been paying for something that, you know, uh, well, I dunno. I mean, maybe they will. Okay. I mean, Bing has also, of course, announced their own AI powered search, which you can already get on the, uh, on the wait list for, and I've already signed up, so, um, you know, who knows? We might be switching to Bing. Oh, don't, don't. That could be interesting. I can't see quite why I would, but still, but there we are.

Sam Sethi: 5:47

The, the one thing that I did think about, you know, when you said Spotify and Google were listed as the destinations in Google Podcasts in the Carousel mm-hmm., I wondered whether then the RSS as the host of a podcast, you could actually state. Within the name space where you wanted your primary and tertiary, um, placement. So could you say, yeah, instead of Spotify and Google being my primary ones, I want Fountain and Pod First to be my Prime Ones, or Customatic or, or Pocket or whatever. Could you could

James Cridland: 6:22

do that. That's really interesting. I mean, there was a, there was a proposal a long, long time ago for podcast Id, I think it, its name was, and the idea was that yeah, you would put your links in there for all of the platforms that you are currently on. And I really like the idea of being able to prioritize one. One of the things that I've been saying recently, and I was saying this on a Twitter space on Tuesday, is wherever you get your podcasts is a really annoying phrase. And what we should really be doing is we should be. Promoting the podcast app that we want somebody to have listened to. Mm-hmm.. So if you are listening to this show, listen to it on On Fountain, please don't listen to it on Apple Podcasts. If you listen to it on Fountain, then you're helping support us and you get additional features, like seeing comments in there. Um, I think that's probably a good thing. Mm-hmm.. Um, so yeah, so I, I'm, I'm liking the idea of that and perhaps that's something that podcast hosting companies can just automatically add into the RSS feed given that they know where, where podcasts are in various places.

Sam Sethi: 7:24

Yeah. And also be the opposite of block, I dunno what you'd call it, but it is the opposite of block. Instead of saying, don't put it here, you are being positive and. Please place it there first.

James Cridland: 7:34

Yeah, well, talking about one of those podcast hosting companies, buzz Sprout, uh, launched a fabulous new thing, uh, only the other week and already over a thousand Buzz Sprout podcasts are using it. I'm talking about subscriptions and a way for you to support this show. If you go to weekly dot pod news.net, you can, uh, hit a button and become a power subscriber or a power supporter, I think we call it, uh, where you can, uh, give us a small amount of money, uh, every single month. And that will be a lovely thing, even works if you don't listen, uh, which is always a thing. So I caught up with, uh, Tom Rossi from Buzz Sprout and I asked him what Buzz Sprout subscriptions were. Bus Sprout

Tom Rossi: 8:15

subscriptions is our. Best thinking around building a listener supported podcast, bringing everything that you need, uh, to be a listener supported podcast.

James Cridland: 8:26

So you, you can use it for member only content or you can use it just as a regular payment, which is what we are doing, uh, for power subscribe subscribers. I think we are calling it Power Supporters. Uh, I, I must have thought for literally, uh, seconds, uh, about that, but yeah. So what, what's the difference in between sort of regular payments and, um, the member only content We think.

Tom Rossi: 8:49

There's a lot of podcasts that can take advantage of those kind of value. For value concepts. Without having premium content, you're already providing value in the work that you're doing. And so being able to say, look, if you get any value out of the show, consider supporting the show at $3 if it's worth$3, $10, if it's worth $10. But asking, making that ask of your listeners to be able to support the show and then giving'em the ability to provide premium content is just another tool in the toolbox for a podcaster to be able to provide. But we think that that's a smaller, you know, there's a smaller number of podcasters that can really take advantage of that right now as they're growing and you know,

James Cridland: 9:28

building their audience. Yeah. Cause it's a lot of work to put together additional content and everything else.

Tom Rossi: 9:32

Yeah. And it may not even be necessary. You might not even need to to do that if you can generate listener support just in the value that you're bringing already in the content. Mm. Mm.

James Cridland: 9:41

Yeah, I know, I know. One of the things, uh, when I started doing the pod news newsletter, um, you could be a personal supporter and you got nothing back from that, other than a warm feeling inside. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I don't think that there's a problem with that really. No. And

Tom Rossi: 9:55

there's a great, there's a great, uh, Option to do things like shoutouts in the show where you're gonna get a a, a shoutout or we're gonna send you a coffee mug, , or we're gonna send you a t-shirt, we're gonna send you something as a result of you supporting the show. But I think creators, especially, we, we just got back from Pod Fest in Orlando and I was talking to a lot of podcasters and you know, they can forget that you're creating value. You're creating something. And even though the listener isn't paying for it, that doesn't mean that it's not valuable. And if we're learning anything in, you know, this new attention economy, we're learning that things that are free aren't really free. And I think podcasters can really remind their listeners, Hey, it, it, it costs me money. It costs me time to build, uh, this podcast. I hope you enjoy it. But consider supporting, cuz that'll really help us, you know,

James Cridland: 10:43

continue to do what we do. Yeah, there's um, there's a podcaster here in, in Australia called Ronsley Vaz. And, um, I saw him doing a couple of talks around sustainable creativity and he, and he very much says, You know, you, you, you, you're not starting to, you're not starting a podcast to give up your day job to do, you know, um, to, uh, own a yacht, all of this kind of stuff. Actually, what you might be doing is starting a podcast to pay for a nice meal out or for your car payments or whatever it, whatever it might be. And I think that that's a really interesting way of, you know, having a think about that. There's so

Tom Rossi: 11:21

many ways to get a return on your work, right. When you're building a podcast. Besides just the straight monetization, right. I was talking to someone at podcast and they were saying that they look at their podcast as their business card, right? Because anybody that listens to it, they now find out about them. And now they might reach out to them as a consultant. They might have classes that they can sell. They have all these different services that they can sell on top of it. So there's so many different ways, uh, and bus brought. We just wanna provide all of those options to our, our podcasters so that we make it easy for them to be able to enter whatever makes sense for their podcast. So we don't recommend that everybody does everything , but we have the tools that are out there. So when they need 'em, you know, they've got 'em. So

James Cridland: 12:02

is the plan to interface with Apple subscriptions as well? Is that, is that coming up?

Tom Rossi: 12:06

Yeah, absolutely. For the premium content, being able to upload that subscriber only content to Apple through their delegated delivery, it's definitely something we're working with Apple on. Cool.

James Cridland: 12:15

Now we've got five subscribers. Uh, Kevin Finn is on. Tom Rossi. Uh, excellent.. Uh, I think one of the big differences in between this and other services that I've seen, uh, you know, especially apples, is that, uh, I can see people's email addresses and I can get in touch and find out more information if I want to.

Tom Rossi: 12:33

Yeah, definitely giving that information to the podcasters so they can connect. Right. We know that listeners are interested in more connection with the, with the podcaster, and so providing them the information so they can actually connect is definitely something we wanted to do. Another important, you know, distinction is you're looking at other, other things that we do. The unified feed, I think is huge, the ability to actually sell your premium content. If you're a podcaster that has premium content, we actually include it in the RSS feed. where people can see it and it's got a little lock on it and they can hit play and it'll play a little audio to tell them this is premium content, consider subscribing to the show. So I think that that's a big, uh, differentiator as well. So if you are taking the time to build that premium content, we wanted to give them away to market that premium content. And what better way than to put it in your RSS feed where you

James Cridland: 13:25

already have people listening. That's really neat. That's really clever. And, and it makes it far less invisible, um, to people who haven't subscribed, which is a nice thing. You used the phrase value for value earlier. And I, I think, um, you know, the, the pro, probably the, the thing that would make this proper inver com as value for value is instead of having those five or three, or however many it is, price points, then there's an extra one that I can put in$20 or $40 or anything else. Is that, is that a feature request I can put in? Absolutely.

Tom Rossi: 13:54

Yeah, that's definitely something that we'll be doing. The first rollout, you know, we want to get it out there and start to see how people use it. And we know that mobile is king when you're listening to a podcast, and so we wanted to make it really simple for them to be able to just in a couple clicks, to be able to start supporting that show. And so, uh, Yeah. But we'll continue to learn and, and get better. Yeah. But I love, I love that concept of how much is it worth you tell me how much it's worth, put that number in and hit the button and you're off to

James Cridland: 14:21

the races. Yeah. And I like the way that you, that it, it, it's a 15% fee for you guys to run the whole thing, but actually that 15%, if I've understood it correctly, includes all of the payment costs and everything else, which is something that doesn't necessarily happen with, uh, others of these.

Tom Rossi: 14:37

Yeah, exactly. What we wanted to do is be transparent. There's no smoke, there's no mirrors, there's no surprises. It's just straight 15%. And I, I even at Pod Fest, I could see as people get confused cuz they're like, well, wait, what am I paying with My current provider said, well, you have to go do some research because they don't make it easy to figure out what you're actually paying. So we said, look, we're just. did the 15%, we'll pay the credit card fees out of that 15%. It's already, we already included with every, anybody who's paying for a subscription. So we're not trying to make money on the service, we're just trying to cover the cost associated with running it. And uh, that was, that was how we ended up

James Cridland: 15:15

where we ended up. What other exciting things are you guys working on at the moment? Can you give us any? Exclusives. I don't know if

Tom Rossi: 15:22

I am authorized to share.

James Cridland: 15:25

There we go. I don't know if

Tom Rossi: 15:26

I'm authorized to share exactly what we might be working on, but we definitely have some really cool things that are out there that we, there's no shortage of ideas, there's no shortage of things that we could be working on to continue to help that the indie podcaster grow their audience to be able to, to monetize or to be able to find that the value, the objective, whatever the thing is that they're trying to do with their podcast, whatever success looks like for them. There's no shortage of ideas of things. And so,

James Cridland: 15:53

yeah, because I find it interesting that you have, uh, embraced some of the podcasting 2.0 stuff, but you've come at this very much from a user interface point of view, from a, making it really simple for your user's point of view. And I think you. Buzzsprout seems to be just, um, focusing on making stuff easy and straightforward. W w would that be about right?

Tom Rossi: 16:15

Yes, absolutely. That's, that's totally. And so we're, we're following it all. We love podcasting 2.0. We love all the work that's coming out of that. It's just a matter of figuring out how we can make it. Kind of transparent to our subscribers because, or our, our podcasters, cuz they really don't, they don't know, uh, a lot of those things. So a good example is, I, I will tell you this, we are gonna work on the, the podcast text field, the txt uh, putting that in the RSS feed. And so it's one of the things that we talked about with the team of how do we do this in a way that it's not, I don't wanna have, what do you want to put into your podcast TX T field, right? Like, you wanna make it so that they don't have to know the underlying details. And so we're looking at how we're gonna incorporate that into podcast verification, where now they can put in a value, but they don't even realize where it's going in the RSS feed. Now we know, but that's, that's what our implementation will look like because that's kind of the Buzz Sprout version of making that available. And, and Buzz Sprout subscriptions, I'll say is our value of. Our, uh, expression of value for value right now, right? Because the crypto stuff can just get really difficult. Um, and so we wanted to just do it with the technology that we've got now in a simple way, and that's another great example of how we can kind of translate the podcasting two oh concepts into our audience.

James Cridland: 17:35

Now, at the beginning of the show, we read out a number every single week, um, which is, uh, an always changing number of how many people have joined Buzzsprout and everything else. Uh, am I just reading a, a, a random number generator there, ? Uh,

Tom Rossi: 17:48

it is, it is not a random number, but I'm sure it includes every podcast that's created,

James Cridland: 17:54

so I'm sure it does. Yes, it does. I'm sure it makes us look very good, but it's an excellent thing, so thank you for doing that. And you've just been at. Pod Fest. Um, you, you said, you know, the bi, the big, the big journey to Pod Fest, which must have been what, an hour in the car for you, right? Just a couple hours. Just a couple hours. Yeah. It would've been considerably more for me and that's why I couldn't make it. Um, what was, uh, what was Pod Fest like? It was

Tom Rossi: 18:18

great. It, for us, it's so much about being able to connect with our podcasters, cuz you interact with them maybe on Facebook or by email and support, but actually being able to have'em stop by the booth and, uh, I love watching them work. Wh where you'll bring up the, the computer and let them. Click through and show you their podcast, or they'll show you how they've set some something up and you can watch when their eyes light up, the things that they're excited about. Uh, so I love, I, I just love being able to interact with podcasters and so Pod Fest provided no shortage of opportunities to be able to, to hang out and meet with our podcasters. It's always

James Cridland: 18:53

a weird thing when you watch somebody else use the website that you have built. Uh, and you go, why have you clicked that? What are you doing now,? Tom Rossi: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And you mentioned. Cameron Cameron Mall, uh, joined our team and he was able to go down there for a day. And so it's great for him as a designer to kind of see how it resonates with our customers and the kind of words that they're using as they describe it, and, uh, the things that they love about it. And so it was, it was a really good opportunity for him to be able to hear that. Yeah, no, that was, that was, uh, really good. And we'll see you at, um, podcast movement evolutions. I guess

Tom Rossi: 19:28

we'll see. I'm not gonna be there, but somebody from our team should be there. Las Vegas is a little bit further of a drive, eh,

James Cridland: 19:36

I'll tell you what, I'm going to Las Vegas in February, and then I'm going again in March, uh, which means that I'm going to Las Vegas twice more than I want to.. I've been to Las Vegas many times. Don't really want to go again, but still, but there we are. Maybe I'll get to go to on the, on the Hyperloop, and that'll be a really exciting thing. Is that open?. Yeah, I believe it. I, yeah, I believe it's open. I believe it. It'll be open. I mean, certainly for the n b show, which is why I'm going there in March. Um, it, it, it's, I mean, it's basically under the convention halls, uh, I mean, it seems, it seems the most pointless thing, but

Sam Sethi: 20:10

still living here,. Tom Rossi: But I, I would still

James Cridland: 20:13

want to go see it. I would still go see it. It's Vegas. Vegas is full of the most pointless things. So, uh, so, uh, still, um, if people want to get in touch with you, Tom, uh, how do they do

Tom Rossi: 20:22

that? They can do it on Twitter. I'm Tom Rossi seven, or they can email me tom buzzsprout.com.

James Cridland: 20:27

Tom, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Sam Sethi: 20:29

There you go. Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout. A wonderful new feature that Buzzsprout, I've added four subscriptions and is working well for us so far, James. So

James Cridland: 20:37

indeed it's working well for us and working well for lots of other people too. But it's, uh, really nice seeing people's names, uh, in there. Maybe we should do something special, uh, for the people who are becoming to. Uh, who are becoming a supporter, uh, in there. Uh, maybe there's something that we can do later on this year. Who knows? Anyway,

Sam Sethi: 20:56

now moving on, uh, novel, uh, raises at 5 million in funding. That was a story you wrote about last week. Mm-hmm. novel is founded by Sean Glenn, uh, back in 2019. It's based in the uk in London, and they got 5 million series a investment from Vgc Partners James. So

James Cridland: 21:14

well done to them. Yes. They've got a significant amount of money, and I remember. Hearing about novel, um, about what, 18 months or so ago. And then all of a sudden, Julie Shapiro, big, big name in podcasting, uh, used to look after Radiotopia, used to work at, uh, prx. All of a sudden she, uh, Announces that she's leaving Radiotopia and prx. I thought she was rusted onto that company, but no, she moves over, um, to become executive creative director at Novel, which she ended up doing, uh, in the middle of last year. So all of a sudden I thought, wow, that company is taking things really, really seriously. And it's, um, really grown, uh, hasn't it? And it's got, um, what, 41 shows now? Yeah. 41

Sam Sethi: 22:01

shows, which they've been doing on behalf of the bbc, Spotify, audible, Wondery. Um, they've got the award-winning podcast, belling Cat and the Superhero Complex, which you'll hear about more in the interview, which might go to TV or film. You never know. They've also got some other ones you might have heard of James Call Me Mother. Uh, and they recently launched for Wondery this Week, stolen Hearts, which is, uh, an interesting, uh, again, set in Wales

James Cridland: 22:27

podcast. So you caught up with founder and managing director Sean Glynn, to find out more about novel. Sean,

Sam Sethi: 22:34

congratulations first of all on the investment in a nutshell, how long did that take to get on board? I know funding is enormously difficult to do, so when did you start the process? Yeah, we

Sean Glynn: 22:45

started the process really in Q2 of last calendar year, but then really got into it in third and fourth quarter. The world changed a lot between us deciding to take on funding for first time for a with a Series A and when we were close to closing. An awful lot happened in that time. So yes, it was tough, overjoyed. It's now done and very happy with our new partners.

Sam Sethi: 23:06

Yeah, and you've been on a hiring spree before the funding even, so you took on a Julie Shapiro. You've taken on a few other people as well into the group. You've taken Neil Krishna. What's the goal? Is this the funding for more growth in terms of hiring or internationalization, or what is the money for. Yeah, great question.

Sean Glynn: 23:27

So I'd really break it down to free things first, one of which is audience. Julie coming on board with great, uh, originals experience. We want to continue working with all our partners, but we also want to fund, distribute and fully own and operate our own shows. So we wanna build an audience with a mix of narrative shows, which we've done many off for, some always on shows, and what we see as So in between those two are what we call Elevated always on. So perhaps a few more than uh, uh, truly always on shows, but, but higher production values. So one is audience. Second would be ip. We have many exciting deals with likes of iHeart, Wondery Studios, all kinds of things to help us generate our ip, uh, ideas, and then execute them with distribution, with a big eye on adaptation. And that's when Neil comes in, which I can come onto. And the third one is brand. You know, we spent quite a lot of time thinking about how we. Look and how we sound and I want to build that up because I think there's a bigger space for a great brand in a podcasting space than what exists today.

Sam Sethi: 24:28

Okay, that sounds great. You mentioned Neil, so he has come on board from Universal Studios. What is his specific role then? Yeah, so Neil is

Sean Glynn: 24:37

the head of tv and Phil, he's based in la uh, with Julia Bromberg, his creative executive. She joined from a 24. At that at the moment is really looking at the vast number of shows you mentioned 41 shows that we've done over the years. Most of the time, some of the time those are fully owned by others, but most of the time we've got a pretty strong backend position, not only on 50% or so, and we are looking to take that out, uh, to film and TV partners, you know, often based in LA and say, what can we do together on this? So the superhero complex is currently, you know, it's been optioned and we're looking at extending that out further for with universal N B C. Many other shows that we've done over the years, more recently, and shows that are in production now, what kind of life they can have in a derivatives world. You know, that's really big area of growth and excitement for us, and Nia and Julia are just such a superb team to execute

Sam Sethi: 25:26

on that. So when you have your own IP shows, where does the origination come from? Who's producing those in terms of the content? Yeah, absolutely. So,

Sean Glynn: 25:38

you know, a big, helpful novel from the time of when we started really growing Fast was a big development department internally. So this made up of current and former journalists, researchers, all sorts of people, and they originate ideas all day. You know, sometimes the original investigations from us on the ground up. And there's a particularly exciting one that'll be coming up later this year with Wondery, or we approach people and say, we love your work. Here's the work we do. How can we develop something together? Or perhaps you have something already and then that often works. And as we are becoming more well known and more well, uh, liked for the kind of work that we do, people approach us with stories. So development is at the heart of what

Sam Sethi: 26:17

we do now. You just launched Stolen Hearts for Wondery. How long did that take to produce just out of interest?

Sean Glynn: 26:25

Oh, good question. About nine months. Okay. Yeah. These things aren't done fast. You know, there was lots of access to be done, uh, access to be, uh, unlocked wondery of fantastic partners. They're very careful and that's how long these things

Sam Sethi: 26:42

take to do well. That was shot down in cold, wet whales. How did Covid affect you in terms of production? What was the impact to you guys, if any, just what you would

Sean Glynn: 26:51

expect? Really, there was the on location, uh, recording just increased with time as Covid kind of, uh, fell away. So it was unhelpful across both stolen heart and all lover productions. To begin with, but nowhere near as disruptive as our friends in the TV film industry. So it was a challenge, but you know, other people certainly had it harder.

Sam Sethi: 27:14

And 23. So we've talked a little bit about it, you've got more shows coming out. How many more shows do you expect to produce in 23? We currently have

Sean Glynn: 27:24

25 shows in production.

Sam Sethi: 27:26

Okay. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Well, and does that funding accelerate that or just That's what you pitched for? So you pitched the funding investors that were producing 25 and they went Yep. Five millions about the right number. We want to get involved with it. So

Sean Glynn: 27:41

those 25 shows actually aren't any originals. So those 25 shows are actually all shows we are making as part of output deals we have with others, such as, uh, our iHeart Slate and our Wondery Slate and various other, uh, partners. So our originals work will actually be on top of that. So lots going on. Sam Sethi: Okay. So you're gonna be hiring quite actively. You know, we have 50 staff, so. There will be more hiring, but you know, people come off of shows like Stolen Passes, just finished production so people can d be distributed on new shows. So there will be some hiring, but we can often, uh, uh, you know, we've got a lot of people on staff already to, to execute on

Sam Sethi: 28:18

some of this stuff. So, uh, you've got some rapid growth, uh, obviously occurring with the new funding. Does internationalization then outside of the US as well play into it, foreign language, other countries? Where do you see that going?

Sean Glynn: 28:31

Yeah, that's definitely a focus of ours. Staffing-wise, you know, we have a lot of people in the uk, us, Canada, few European countries focus for other language shows. It depends because if partners of ours, and sometimes they do want this, we can do it. And we've done it in the past for Audible and others, and when it comes to originals, we will get to that point, but at the moment we're figuring out exactly what we want to. How are we going to do it? Levels of funding and then looking at all derivatives, but also what other languages we couldn't put into. Obviously looking Spanish language first. So yeah, that's all on the agenda for us. When we're doing it in a work for hire or partnerships capacity, it's all on the partner of what they would like to

Sam Sethi: 29:11

do. Okay, cool. Now, uh, here's a fun question. What's on your podcast list? What do you listen to? And you can't say your own stuff, anything but your own stuff.. Sean Glynn: Well, let's see. I'm listening to the, I'm not a Monster podcast at the moment. The one on Shima Bega. I think that's doing very good work. I listen to Pivot the car, Kara Swisher. Yep. Uh, Scott Galloway show. I'd rather Boringly have become a big listener to business and entrepreneurial and founder based podcast. Yep. So that's been quite a big one for me recently. Uh, the crazy ones is one I would recommend from that list. I think that does a really good job of finding. Unique founders. So I really like that show. Lots of sports shows too. Enjoying, uh uh, guardian Football Weekly, things like that. What else am I listening to at the moment? Listening to Tata's Output, I think Tatas are doing mm-hmm. like, like really good shows, like really consistently, I think their outputs really strong. Yeah. So that's kind of what's on my list at the moment. And which ones showed Do You Wish Novel had produced From all time? Anytime. Yeah. What's the one that you think, gosh, that got away, wish we'd produced that. Do you know?

Sean Glynn: 30:22

I'm actually going to say what I've already said, just because we were quite close to getting it, the Shaima Baum story on I'm Not a Monster. We were working on that for quite a while until we were like, they had the access that they had. So I think that story lends itself very well to audio storytelling. It requires the unpacking and length that this sort of format, uh, gives you so, I wish we got there, but I think the guise of sounds are doing a great

Sam Sethi: 30:47

job on it. Yeah. You can see that one being iped up into a film or something else, can't you? So, given everything that you are doing and everything that's going on, where do you think 23 for podcasting is going? Do you agree or disagree? I guess that advertising is gonna get harder in sponsorships, so where's the monetization do you think? Yeah, I

Sean Glynn: 31:07

think the advertising downturn is going to, I think it's going to bounce back a lot quicker than what people are saying. I think, you know, recent economic output and data from the US from which everyone really follows, it's much more promising than what people would've thought. Uh, and I think advertising will follow that. I think, you know, the obvious thing about there being probably fewer feeds, but listenership still going up regardless, I think that that will happen. Monetization subscriptions is a very interesting area for us. It's something we're gonna be looking at very closely for originals. So yeah, those are the areas that we are looking at and I don't think it's as dire as what some predict it could

Sam Sethi: 31:46

be. Yeah, no, I agree with that. Sean, thank you so much. Now before I go, before you go, more importantly, where can everyone find out more

Sean Glynn: 31:54

about Novel? Sure. Yeah. So novel.audio is our site and all our shows are up on there. Uh, we spent ages getting that site done to the level it's at. We're quite proud of it. Uh, and then on social media sites, we're at novel podcasts. That's Instagram, Twitter, uh, those are the two we really operate

Sam Sethi: 32:12

from. Sean, thank you so much. Thank you sir. There you go, James, Sean, Glenn. Um, interesting that they are looking to own IP and use the money for international growth. That is certainly what the money's there for, and they certainly wanna produce their own stuff rather than produce stuff more for everyone else. 25 new shows in the can for 23. And that doesn't include their own shows that they want to produce, uh, with ip.

James Cridland: 32:39

Let's move on trailers. Sam?

Sam Sethi: 32:41

Yes. Um, you had some wonderful data and, and, and it seemed when I was putting the script together this week that trailers were everywhere. Um, so. The first bit is how many podcasts have trailers in their feeds? James, what's the answer?

James Cridland: 32:56

Well, not that many, it turns out. So, um, the way that, um, the pod news, uh, podcast pages work is we automatically scan RSS feeds for, for trailers and things. So I went to have a look at the podcast that we've updated over the last three months. That's 360,000 of them, but only 14% of those podcasts have an episode marked as a trailer. And I thought, well, that's interesting, isn't it? There aren't really as many trailers out there for podcasts that I thought that there were. Uh, but then Dan Meisner from Bumper, uh, added to the data that we know about trailers because he looked at that figure and he then looked at the Apple Podcast's top 200 and the Spotify top 200, the us, um, uh, lists of that. Uh, and turned out that 54% of Apple Podcasts top shows have trailers and 50% of the Spotify ones do too. Although Spotify's are worked out in a slightly different way. So actually, if you have a look at the most successful podcasts, quite a lot of them have trailers. If you have a look at just the, the full list of shows out there, not very many of them have trailers. Is that something that we can learn from possib? Yeah,

Sam Sethi: 34:15

we, I think trailers, um, somebody said it very well. It might have been new even, um, , just in case it was you, I just thought, just in case. Thanks. Um, trailers are the new elevator pitch, uh, uh, that, you know, podcasters should be putting out if you want. You know, when, when you have a startup, you have an elevator pitch, uh, as to why your startups cool and you get it really tight. Yeah. Normally, one sentence to one paragraph. Podcast trainers look like they're the same thing. Um, Ariel Nien black friend of the show, she has the Earbuds podcast Collective, which she puts out, which has five podcast episodes every week from different people. That's a great way of finding new shows. But she's also launched this thing called Trailer Park with, uh, Tim Avilas, I think that's how you say your name, Tim. Uh, which I thought was really interesting. They put out their trailer for their new trailer show, which was a little bit meta, but it was actually a very good trailer. Um, and they're gonna feature every week new trailers of shows as another way of finding out about discovery. So I thought that was a nice, uh, new show that people should latch

James Cridland: 35:24

onto. Yeah, and I think also what they're doing is that they're actually talking to the creators about how they've, uh, how they're putting the trailers together and the shows together as well. Um, because if you're a fan of trailers, and you want to have a listen to, uh, uh, as many trailers as you possibly can. It's a great way to find a new podcast. Go and have a listen to, uh, new podcast Trailers is, uh, available from, uh, pod News. Now, you won't find it in, uh, apple Podcasts because, uh, they won't let it in. Um, but you will find it. Um, if you go to pod news.net/trailers, uh, and, uh, you'll find it there. And it's basically a, an rss, um, uh, um, feed with all of the trailers of all of the shows that Pod News has promoted over the last, uh, week or so, uh, in there. So loads and loads and loads of new shows, which is, uh, well worth having listened to. So, uh, you can get that in your favorite podcast app, but not in Spotify, cuz they don't support rss. You, you can even get it in in Apple podcasts as well. But you just have to visit pod news.net/trailers and hit the button from there. Mm-hmm.

Sam Sethi: 36:30

Now moving on, James, uh, what makes a chart topping podcast? Tell me. Well,

James Cridland: 36:35

there's a thing. Um, re phonic who helps pod news with, uh, a ton of, uh, review data. They have a lot more data and, uh, they did some, uh, studies into the data that they have there to work out. That top shows tend to be weekly, which is like this one. Top shows tend to skew mail in audience. Um, which is, uh, I think like this one to be fair and, uh, him and top shows, um, uh, are more likely to be newer shows. So newer shows have more chance of appearing at the top, and that's probably because of. The way that the algorithms work, because of course the Apple Podcasts chart is all about new subscriptions. And similarly, the Spotify chart, um, is around, uh, recency, uh, as well. Um, so that's, uh, interesting stuff to uh, learn about. I dunno whether that means that in order to be a top show you need to be weekly or not. Um, that may or may not mean that, but I think it was, uh, a really interesting piece of research from the folk at, uh, re phonic and so worthwhile having a look at.

Sam Sethi: 37:45

Uh, I think it also helps knowing the people at Apple and Spotify who do the chart, that might be a good way to get populated in today. New noteworthy. That's another way I'm just being, you know, saying if you'd know them, send them. No, send

James Cridland: 37:57

them a book. I think, I think, you know, the Apple, apple has editorial teams in each individual country. I've met the Apple editorial team. I've met her from, uh, Sydney, um, uh, who looks after, um, Australia and New Zealand, and I think, you know, yeah, they, they have individual, uh, people who are looking after, uh, each individual, uh, territory. There. They have no, uh, impact on the charts, but they do have impact on, you know, clearly new and noteworthy. And if you have an Apple subscription, then, uh, that makes you even more likely to be, uh, pushed. Uh, so we're told. So, uh, yeah. So that's worthwhile, uh, knowing you had a, a, a chat with a man who knows how to make a chart topping podcast, haven't you? I did,

Sam Sethi: 38:41

yes. Uh, I caught up with a lovely guy called Jordan Harbinger. Now he gets 5 million downloads a month and he is very prolific in growing his audience. He basically, uh, spends a lot of time off network working his, uh, way into other podcasts. Well, I thought I'd reach out to him and find out a. How does he do it? How did he grow his network to be so large? And B, also, what does he think of Spotify exclusives? Would he become the next Joe Rogan? I

Jordan Harbinger: 39:13

have thought about this and I've had some tempting offers in the past, but the answer is usually no. Now, if you offer me$200 million , let's ask two part two. Where I eat those words, we'll have it on my yacht. Right. Okay. Um, we'll record it on my yacht. I got

Sam Sethi: 39:29

that stored here. I'm coming.

Jordan Harbinger: 39:30

Yeah, ex. Exactly, but not really. And the reason is because thought about this, and I may be missing something, but Okay, let's, let's say that I get an exclusive deal from Spotify, and let's say that it's 20 million over five years, whatever, spitball. Now I go to Spotify and I can retire after that, but I really love doing my show. All right? So I go to Spotify and I do this for five years, and then when it's time to leave, I go, you know, you gotta renew me for 20 million more dollars for five more years, or even perhaps better. And they go, you know, not really, because when you went from everybody being able to hear you, you had, and for the sake of math, let's do a hundred thousand downloads per episode. That's not what would get you that MG on Spotify, just to be clear. But when you took your a hundred thousand member audience and you became exclusive on Spotify, we saw maybe a 60% drop. And I bet you it's more like 80, but whatever, let's say it was 60%. So now when they go to renew your contract, your audience is. Okay. Uh, well, I'm gonna not be exclusive. Okay? Good luck going back into mainstream everywhere and then trying to rebuild your audience, because that's not really going to work. You're, you've still lost everyone, so now you've gotta somehow advertise that you're available everywhere. Good luck. How are you gonna do that? What are you gonna do? Tell your existing listeners to tell their friends, fine. Like, no one's ever thought of that. That's not gonna get you, your audience back. So you're constantly giving away leverage because you're constantly decimating your audience. Now again, if you're Joe Rogan, you don't really care. You've got enough people that are just migrating over to Spotify. That was the idea. But if you're the average Joe, and you're gonna give your audience up for, let's say it's 5 million over five, Well you, you're probably leaving a lot of money on the table. Could probably make a few million dollars a year, not going exclusive. And then you can do it for as long as you want to instead of trying to just hope and pray that Spotify's gonna renew your deal and it's not gonna be what I think it is cuz you have no leverage now. So I wouldn't do that because I'm not necessarily optimizing for. Where am I gonna get the biggest deal if Podcast one offers me 2 million and P, Spotify offers me 2.5, but I gotta ditch half my audience to do it. I'm not taking that deal. It's a bad deal. And I've seen a lot of creators get really screwed over. I've seen, I won't mention the show, but there was a, there's a couple shows that I'm thinking of where they, they were so smug. They went to Spotify, they got an exclusive deal. They had this massive show that had really just taken off, and it was just an absolute smash hit. They went to Spotify exclusively. When their deal ended, they didn't get a renewal. They came back and nobody cared. Crickets. Why? Because there were a million clones that had already started to take off in the mainstream, decentralized podcast ecosystem. Nobody cared about them anymore. Nobody knew about them anymore. And so now they're like, oh, well I'll start a new show. And it's like, oh, I guess we actually just caught lightning in a bottle. But they threw it away. They took an exclusive, And I've seen a lot of

James Cridland: 42:27

creators do that. A little clip of Jordan Harbinger now to keep this show nice and tight and short. You'll find the rest of that interview in Pod News Extra, which is an extra podcast that you'll find right here, uh, where you can hear the whole interview. It's a great interview too. And looking forward to seeing Jordan Harbinger. He's speaking at the podcast show in London in May. Uh, and uh, will probably be, uh, in Vegas as well, I'm guessing, uh, for the, uh, podcast movement evolutions too. But, uh, really looking forward to uh, seeing him. Hi. Hi him again. He's a top man. Yeah, he is. Lovely

Sam Sethi: 43:03

guy. Uh, apart from the fact he was one o'clock in the morning when I did the interview, cuz you didn't remember that. I'm in the UK and time zones do affect people, but other than that it was fine.

James Cridland: 43:14

Um, are you, are you making excuses there, Sam?

Sam Sethi: 43:16

Uh, if, if you can hear the snoring in the audio, that's not my fault. I tried my best. Yes. Now moving on, uh, still talking about chart topping podcasts. Freakonomics Radio has announced a new YouTube channel with its podcast. Tell me more, James.

James Cridland: 43:32

Yes. Um, the, the YouTube, uh, um, takeover of podcast seems to be continuing. Uh, Freakonomics radio has jumped in, and, uh, basically if you go to their YouTube channel, which is youtube.com/at sign freakonomics radio, uh, then you'll find, uh, all kinds of, uh, stuff in there including, uh, basically their entire back catalog. Um, they're all, you know, uh, typical audiogram type things. But, um, one of the things that, that the network talks about is that it'll help with searchability for their shows, cuz loads of people use YouTube. It'll help make the content more accessible with captions and transcripts and stuff like that. So, of course the first thing that I did is, Hey, have you. The new podcast namespace and the podcast transcripts tag. And I know that, uh, I managed to get, uh, the big boss of Freakonomics Radio talking to the Pod Sage himself, Dave Jones. Um, and, uh, apparently that conversation went very well. Uh, and there is more conversations going on, which is a good thing. So Dave is doing, uh, an excellent job, as he always does. So, um, so that was nice. And POD uses also on YouTube as. Um, you can find us, uh, there, youtube.com/outside pod news. Um, and, uh, as of a couple of days ago, because I have a new Mac and it's much more powerful and I can do this sort of thing, uh, you'll find that, uh, the versions of the pod news Daily, which has been updated, uh, onto pod news now have a built-in transcript in the actual, uh, video just to make it look a little bit more interesting. Uh, so you can find out more, uh, information, um, about that. If you go and, uh, have a look at us on, uh, YouTube, where you'll also find this particular show as well, although we do look quite dark., Sam Sethi: well, hey, it's six when I start this one, so, hey. That's why we

Sam Sethi: 45:18

don't run video Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Have you, oh, it's not a pretty sight. It's not a pretty sight. Uh, in People News. James, who's moving? Who's grooving? Come on, tell me what's going

James Cridland: 45:28

on. Well, uh, Robbie Ashcroft is a new, uh, signing at, uh, free Turn Entertainment, which is a, uh, UK podcast company. He joins from Densu, the Story Lab, which funded new shows, and you've probably heard a show which has been funded by them. Um, so, uh, quite a big, uh, signing in, uh, the uk. They're also signings, uh, across, uh, Lipson, uh, for new Spanish offices for their Julep Media company in, uh, Europe. Uh, they've also made, uh, Mike Lindsay, country Director for Dak, uh, which is the German speaking countries in, uh, Europe as well. So they seem to be doing pretty well. Sound Stack has made a number of hires. Uh, Ray Hawkins, uh, has left iHeart Media. From, uh, podcast strategy, uh, he's taking a moment to check out what else is happening in the podcast space, he says, um, and Matt Maize finally has been appointed as a director of podcasting and head of Pacific content, uh, Rogers Sports and Media. I'm sure he doesn't want to be known as the new Steve Pratt. Um, but that's kind of what he is. Uh, he's been with Rogers for more than four years and, uh, looked after branded content and commercial integrations, and I'm sure we'll be an excellent person and I'm looking forward to seeing him at Radio Days North America, uh, in the beginning of June as well. If you are looking for a job, POD News has podcasting jobs across the industry and across the world. They're free to post. It'll just take two minutes. Pod news.net/jobs, the tech stuff, tech stuff on the Pod News weekly review. Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where we do all of the tech talk. We do indeed

Sam Sethi: 47:09

now, uh, Dave Jones, he of the pod Sage, who's been very busy with uh, uh, other people. He's also found time somewhere to add a new podcast index API output. So if you are looking to integrate with the podcast, Index database, uh, for all of podcast listings. The feed itself, you can now go to two end points that he's created, uh, which, uh, I'll put in the show notes and you can, instead of doing API calls, you can just simply get every 15 minutes, uh, an update and an export of the data. So again, if you don't know how to do the API calls, here's. Jason filed that you can use within your app or whatever you want

James Cridland: 47:50

to use it for. He's a bright man. Uh, CloudFlare have announced a thing called Wilder Beast, which is basically a much simpler to use Master Dawn, uh, server. It's, uh, using all of Cloudflare's uh, stuff, uh, all of the, uh, clever stuff that they have in the cloud. Everything from image resizing to storage to all of that kind of, uh, stuff. So it's basically a master oncom compatible client, but it's, um, much easier to, uh, host. So that's a nice, uh, thing. When I, um, tried to set up my own Master Dawn server, it was not a good plan, I have to say. Um, I did, uh, do an upgrade on the POD News Master Dawn Server, which is actually AMA Server, uh, the other day. And, uh, whatever they've done to the code, they've made it much better and much easier to use, uh, on an Amazon, uh, E two, uh, instance. So I'm, I'm grateful to them for doing that., that's a great help. Um, but, uh, yeah, so, um, that we should hopefully mean, why am I talking about Masteron all of a sudden? Well, that should hopefully, uh, help, um, podcasters do stuff around cross app comments, which is something that everybody wants to see, but nobody seems to actually be doing yet. Um, and, uh, perhaps this makes it easier to host the Master Dawn server that you need under the hood. To run cross app comments. Uh, so that would be a good thing too.

Sam Sethi: 49:13

I also highly, highly recommend reading the blog posts that CloudFlare have put out around Wilder Beast. It is brilliant. Uh, if you are a geek and you want to get into things like web finger and activity pub, and you wanna understand all of the security layers underneath they have gone on for page after page, it is absolutely brilliant. So whoever wrote that round of applause to you now, uh, anyone who, uh, listens to the podcast Index show on a Friday night, uh, which I do regularly, uh, will have heard a couple of things last week that were slightly confusing. The first one, Dave James, was trying to explain why James. SATs, fees and splits within the value block don't have to add up to a hundred percent. You can have 150% in the value block. And I was pulling my hair out, screaming down, boosting like mad, telling them, no, don't do it. Don't do it. And Adam, to be fair, was agreeing with me, but obviously he couldn't hear me screaming at him . Um, but the show was lit and so I did have some sort of form of recall to get back to. But yeah. Dave was suggesting was that, uh, anyone could put any amount of, uh, SATs into a value block for a certain person, a guest, uh, a, a service, whatever. And uh, it's up to us, the app developers to then take all of those SATs, work out the number of people that it is, and then do some clever maths on our side to work out what that percent. I was like, Hmm. And then, then I thought about it for a little bit because, uh, what there is, is this a feature in the value book called Fees. And I've never used it and I've never knew what it was, cuz it's badly documented, by the way. Um, so fees it turns out, should be used where you are an app provider. Say if Fountain wants to take a percentage, or pod first wants to take a percentage, or you are a service provider. So if somebody's providing like, uh, a chapter or a transcription service and you have a fixed fee for that for every week, then you should call that a fee within your value block. And if it's a guest, a producer, People based, uh, then you should do splits. And that, I think is what I took away from the conversation last week.

James Cridland: 51:38

Yes, it was, uh, it was a, uh, I was listening to that while I was, uh, cutting down trees in the garden. And, uh, I, I got hugely com hugely confused, and I, I particularly liked multi Python, comes back every time. Yeah. I particularly liked the, I'm a lumberjack

Sam Sethi: 51:54

and

James Cridland: 51:54

I'm Okay I particularly like the bit in the middle where Adam was basically saying, okay, Dave, if you ever have to explain that again, don't, don't explain it that way.. Yes. Which I thought was, which I thought was pretty good, but Yeah. Um, I mean, I, I see, I, I, I think one of the, um, one of the issues with a lot of the specs on the new podcast namespace is that, um, they kind of forget that, uh, actually they're not for humans. They're for computers to read. And it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. Um, um, you know what, what, what a human will think of them. It's a really easy job for a computer to go. How many, how many shares are there? Here? There are 80, 80 share points. Great. Okay. Well, we know what 20% of 80 is. Um, and, and that's basically how that bit works. I, I, I'm, I'm absolutely cool with all of that, and I think that that all makes, uh, all makes a bit of sense. But yeah, fees for absent for services, um, absolutely being, uh, being used as extra. Uh, and that makes a bunch of sense to me. But it was a, yeah, that was about 20 minutes wasn't it, of a. Of an explanation, which was a very complicated explanation. Yeah, it was.

Sam Sethi: 53:06

I, I tried to stay with it, Dave, if you're listening, but wow. Wow, wow, wow. Anyway, I think we got to the end of that one. So, uh, hopefully there'll be some clarity in this week's show, uh, from Dave and Adam, and we can then implement it properly now. Um, treading carefully on this next part of their show, podcast txt James. Uh, what happened was I did an interview with Todd Cochrane from Blueberry who mentioned that he supports podcast TX t the new feature which allows hosts to remove email from your r s s feed. James, I think you seem to have got the, uh, brunt of it, but actually I don't think you have anything. Do with it, which is, uh, a conversation happened in, uh, LA last year about the spam that Acast was putting out into the industry bus Sprout and several other hosts were getting really cheesed off with a a originally Alberta from rss.com. And, you know, you and I, I think we're looking at a more OAuth type solution, but, um, Ted from Apple seemed to suggest. Apple would support podcast T X T if it was implemented. So that seemed to weigh heavily. That was then implemented by transistor. What happened was a conversation over coffee between somebody in bus route, I won't say who, and Todd just resulted in cross wires, which is, Hey look, be careful. Tread carefully when you implement this, Todd, because it may result in a bit of confusion and some support. Cause that's sort of got inflated into podcast. T S T causes lots of support issues. It doesn't, um, and. Listening to the boys from Bus Brow, Tom Rossi said, I still think it's the right thing to do. Podcasts can certainly put their email address in their description if they still want and provide their contact information to the world. So, um, end of this conversation is that I think, uh, fingers will point it wrongly in your direction. I don't think you were the instigator or the propagator of this. And I also think that podcast, T X T has been half baked into RSS as an app developer. I find it frustrating because it's hard to find as an end user where to go and reenable it. So just to be fair to you, James, um, I don't think you were the person pushing for it or the person who's implementing it, cuz you're neither a hosted nor

James Cridland: 55:37

an app developer. No, I, I, I think, I think one of the things that I was very keen to. End up doing is to do the right thing for the listener, as I've always, uh, done all the way through this and, uh, make sure that there was a decent, um, a decent replacement for the email address in a feed. Um, that unfortunately was sort of, you know, rather overlooked when someone from Apple said, well, if you do this complicated thing, then we'll, we, we, we, we might support it. Uh, and everybody went, oh, but it's Apple, so therefore we've got to do that. Uh, and so rushed, uh, to that end and, um, yeah, I'm, I'm not necessarily sure that it was the right plan, but, um, it's the plan that we have and it's the plan that we will, um, uh, presumably stick, uh, with, there have been a couple of interesting ideas in Podcast Index social, uh, around how to make that better. Um, but, uh, yeah, so we will, we will see how that works. Um, Yes, let's move on then, shall we? Um, podcast RSS feeds and artwork and transcripts. Just a reminder that if you don't have a valid cause header, it means that if you are a, uh, a web app and you are trying to access this stuff, then your web app can't. Uh, and so therefore, if you are a podcast host, make sure you have valid cause headers. At some point I might have to put some kind of a test for that in the pod news., uh, podcast pages. Um, and, uh, I just a, a, a quick thanks to Headliner as well. Headliner is a very excellent tool that we use to produce, uh, this very show on, uh, YouTube. We don't, um, give it an awful lot of love, um, because, uh, because frankly I've not, uh, I've not really looked into it properly, but it's a great tool, um, to, uh, basically produce a video of your podcast for you. Now, when you press the button that says Go off, you go produce a video for you, then, uh, what Headliner does is it says, okay, while you are waiting for this video to be made, here are some podcasts to go and have a listen to. And Pod News Daily is one of those, uh, which was a very lovely thing. So, um, thank you so much to, uh, Oliver, uh, at, uh, headliner for, uh, sorting that and. Good thing too. So thanks. Yeah,

Sam Sethi: 57:53

we like Neil and Oliver. Well done chaps. Now, uh, transcriptions, it's something that we, on this show have been talking about for a long time, about the legal requirement for them as well. Um, but, uh, friend of the show, John, spur up. Pointed me to an article in the New Yorker about downloading whisper, um, onto your local laptop. Now you've got your super duper new Mac James. You might be willing to do that as well. Um, you've done it. Oh, you've done it well. There you go. Look at you. Mm. Um, and basically you can then put your transcription up there. Now there's three different training levels. A light ander are super heavy. Um, and yeah, that's one way of doing it. You can do that within your console. Um, the article was very bullish on it. It said nearly perfect. Speech recognition has become not just an application, but a building block for applications. As soon as this happens, things move very fast. And I tend to agree because on the back of great speech recognition, um, I was thinking the other day, you could use then chat g b t against all of the transcriptions within an application to then find deeper, uh, rather than simple. Title search or person search, you could actually find much more information using something like an AI to go and look

James Cridland: 59:07

at the transcriptions. Yeah, absolutely you can. And in fact, Jordan Harbinger's, um, podcast has exactly that. If you go to Jordan Harbinger's website and you click the AI link at the top, then it gives you a chat, g p t type, um, uh, uh, search, which goes deep into the content of every single, uh, show, which is a very smart thing. So yeah, I think there's a real set of opportunities, um, around, uh, transcription. Benjamin Bellamy has written a really good blog post, uh, very recently about, um, adding Whisper cpp, which is, um, a, uh, a super-duper, uh, fast version of, uh, whisper for transcription for podcast apps. It's now what, uh, Pod News is, uh, produced with, in terms of the transcriptions for the Pod news Daily. Um, so that is working very, very well. And there's, uh, all kinds of, you know, there's paid for versions if you want to get the paid for versions, um, which I think Daniel J. Lewis has used Mac Whisper Pro. Um, but there's also free versions that you can download. There's also a, a tool out there called Good Tape, which is worthwhile taking a look at a secure transcription service for your interview tape. It's aimed at journalists and gives you, uh, a couple of different, uh, transcription, um, uh, outputs from that and talking about transcriptions and things. Well forget that I mentioned the word transcriptions, but I'm gonna talk about Hindenberg Pro 2.0. Hindenberg, uh, pro is the, uh, excellent, uh, audio editor that we use for this very show. and there is a thing called Hindenberg Pro 2.0, which they've just announced. Um, it is, uh, going to be revealed on February the 13th, which is World Radio Day. It has an additional and very, very cool feature. Uh, we've not just been talking about transcriptions at all. Um, but if you go and you have a look at the link, which you'll find in the pod news, uh, daily newsletter, uh, from uh, Thursday, then you will find, um, a little graphic that says transcriptions on it. Not quite sure what's going on there. Anyway, all will be revealed on World Radio Day, February the 13th, and Hindenberg Pro 2.0 as it enters into, uh, alpha or beta. Uh, so you can actually play with the thing, whatever that might.

Sam Sethi: 1:01:33

Great news I saw last night, uh, pod verse has a new version out and they're now supporting value for value streaming in videos on

James Cridland: 1:01:41

the application. Yeah. And they've been doing an awful lot of work under the hood, um, changing all of the audio, uh, streaming technology that they use. Uh, and it all works really nicely. So, um, it's, uh, you know, it's becoming more and more polished, the app. It's a really smart thing. So, uh, congratulations, uh, to that. Um, there's a bunch of other interesting things. Hey, here's an interesting thing. Lipson, uh, Lipson's the Feed podcast has added a podcast soundbite audio clip from the new podcast namespace into their RSS feed. I thought that, uh, that, uh, that particular podcast really didn't like the new podcast name space, but it turns out that they clearly do. Um, and what's even

Sam Sethi: 1:02:23

nice, it's. Dave's been out there again. He's, he's doing his evangelistic work,

James Cridland: 1:02:27

I think. Yeah. That, that clearly must be it. Um, anyway, um, uh, the audio, which has been clipped up is, uh, Rob Walsh, uh, agreeing with, uh, what I was saying about the big decrease of new podcasts and not, not actually being a thing. Uh, so that was nice to end up seeing. Mm-hmm.. Sam Sethi: Uh, and last but rss.com now supports multiple podcasts under the same account. So well done to the boys. There. Well done to. Now let's have a quick look around the world. Um, I have been, um, uh, publishing lots of stuff about podcasting in East and Southeast Asia on the pod news website. Uh, we expanded it this week to have a look at the Philippines, where true crime isn't a thing for one very good reason cuz everybody talks about all of the crimes that other people do, uh, and Indonesia and Vietnam, who are of course two different countries, but the same kind of habits, you'll find those@podnews.net. Uh, lots of research around, uh, audience listening to podcast ads. Uh, 97% of Americans apparently have taken action after listening to a podcast ad. Doesn't necessarily say what the action was. Maybe the action was turning the podcast off. Um, but anyway, , that was new research from Acast. Clearly that wasn't the action. Um, but, um, yeah, but some good research from, uh, from Acast there. Uh, and uh, here's a thing. If you are a person aged between 13 and 34 in the us one third, Of those people listen to a podcast every day. One third, which is quite a thing. Uh, events going on. Uh, the, uh, it's, uh, Africa Podcast Day on Sunday, so congratulations to them on Air Fest happening, uh, towards the end of February, podcast movement, of course, in early March where we will be, uh, you'll be speaking, uh, there on Wednesday the eighth at 11 in the morning, how micropayments can drive podcast monetization and listener engagement. And you're speaking with Moritz from Alby. Uh, so that's all very exciting, isn't it? It is. Yeah.

Sam Sethi: 1:04:29

We'll do the first public showing of pod fans. So, uh, not nervous, not excited. Not, not, not. Yeah. Press the button. Let's see

James Cridland: 1:04:37

what happens next. Oh, you'll have to write it by then. Oh,

Sam Sethi: 1:04:39

yes you go. But okay. Going. See ya. Good. James Cridland: Uh, also radio days, uh, Europe, which is happening towards the end of March in Prague, uh, which has a specific, uh, podcast track in there. The New Zealand Podcast Summit in Auckland, assuming it's dried out May the 13th and the podcast show in London towards the end of May as well. Loads more events, both paid for and free at pod news. Uh, they're virtual events or events in a place with people. If you're organizing something, you should tell the world about it. Uh, it's free to be listed at pod news.net/events. Hmm. Maybe there are some other events that we should be adding onto that list. Maybe Sam, we should be running our own live events.. Wow. That is no idea for you, James. Uh, and in fact, we are going to be doing that. Are we? Yes. So let's, let's announce this first one, uh, Manchester on the 13th of June. We are going to be at the Larry Theater doing Pod News live, uh, in the Compass Room. We'll be putting out more details in the next couple of weeks. So if you are interested in coming along to that event, uh, ping me or James, um, and let us know if you are interested. But we also are looking for sponsors. We have a number of people already, uh, lined up. I'm really excited. We have, uh, the head of. Podcast commissioning from the BBC coming along. Uh, Manchester's great actually James cuz it's got so many good, um, podcast production companies up there as well. So I'm looking forward to that. And we will be announcing one in London in September. And who knows, James, might we go further? Well,

James Cridland: 1:06:18

who knows, might we? Um, I should point out, of course, as any full knows that the Larry Center is in Sulfur, not Manchester. Hold those ats uh, , you know, don't Watford, who knows? Don't get, don't get, don't, don't get all antsy with me on maam, uh, about that, you know, full well. Um, but anyway, yes, very much looking forward to Pod News Live. Which is in Manchester on the 13th of June or in Salford. Um, uh, it'll be in, at the Compass Room in the Lowry Theater, which, uh, I haven't been to since, uh, the radio festival was on there. So looking forward to that, very much indeed. Um, pod News Live City, uh, going on in London in uh, September as well. Um, you can find out more information at some point in the future@podnews.live booster Graham Booster Graham Corner, corner corner on the Pod News Weekly review. Yes, it's time for our favorite, uh, part of the week, booster Graham Corner. Uh, Matt. K. Thank you so much. 5,000 SATs. Enjoyed the Leo Laport interview. Thank you, Sam. He says, I'm glad somebody did. Kyron from the Mere Mortals Podcast, a row of darks. Leo is a fascinating guy, much to admire in what he's created. Super baffled that he doesn't get Bitcoin or podcasting 2.0 though hopefully he'll come around at some stage. I agree. Mike Dell 1000 sat really enjoying the weekly show. Looking forward to seeing you guys in Vegas. Yes, I'm looking forward to seeing you, Mike, in Vegas as well. Um, should be a good thing. We should, um, share a beer. Or two, um, a, uh, boost from something rather than nothing. Podcast 250 sets. Thank you. Nice to find you here. Uh, nice to find you there too. Uh, something from, uh, I think it's sorting. I'm gonna say sorting. Anyway, S r t n probably stands for something. Uh, 250 sat. Thank you. Keen work as always, uh, with a little, um, uh, star emoji. Uh, so thank you for, for that. And real coach Andy, a hundred SATs. Great. Guys, glad you guys are back. Where did we go? Yeah, I

Sam Sethi: 1:08:24

dunno., James Cridland: where did we go? Who knows? Um, and, uh, an email from, uh, Peter, from Peter Nache, uh, who is, uh, the, the producer and host of Veril, a podcast that comes out of Ontario in Canada. Uh, he says season two, episode 11 with a, was a very interesting and enjoyable listen, that was the one with Leo last week. I've been following you for years and really appreciate your daily pod news. All the best in 2023. Peter, thank you so much. That's very kind. And Norman Celler, uh, tweeted, um, uh, at Old Sam Sethi. Is that one of your, uh, uh, Twitter accounts, old Sam set? No, I'm trying, I'm trying to change my old Twitter handle and move it over to another handle and of. Bloody Musk doesn't allow you to do it. No. So I'm, that

James Cridland: 1:09:12

doesn't work that way. Yes. Yeah. I'm frustrated. Just stop, stop using Twitter and use something better instead. Okay. Anyway, he says Sam Sethy on the POD News Weekly review, talking to City University about their masters in podcasting, which of course, uh, was an interview last week has actually made me consider going back into uni again. Either that or something more all medium encompassing or generalist. Uh, Norman Chen, of course, uh, based in kl and, uh, it was great to see him, uh, last year. I'm looking forward to hopefully seeing him again at the beginning of September at Radio Days Asia as well. Uh, one last thing before we go. The pod news report card is back for 2023. It's your chance to be heard. Um, we've feedback an awful lot of information from the pod news report card straight to Spotify, straight to Google, as you mean that that company still exists, uh, straight to Apple, I'm sure that company will. Um, and, uh, it's a great way to, um, get some feedback back to those. Um, if you haven't taken part in it yet, please do pod news.net/report card as well. You'll find that pod news.net/report card and I will be unveiling the results, um, uh, podcast movement evolution. So if there are no results, it'll all be your fault. Um, so please go and, uh, do that. Now what have I done? Now, um, what's happening for you this week,

Sam Sethi: 1:10:31

Sam? Well, I did it James. I made the city university a wall of fame, even if it was for one hour or one day. I don't know. Um, you did Sandy

James Cridland: 1:10:41

Ward. Sandy Ward, yes. Tweeted a, a very nice photograph of you Horridly printed out, uh, on a color printer and blue tacked onto the wall , which is very

Sam Sethi: 1:10:50

cool. Made my day. That was all I could say. Thank you, Sam. Yeah.

James Cridland: 1:10:54

Yeah. Made. And, um, I'm, yeah. And, uh, of course not having gone to City, I'm not even eligible for the, for the wall. Uh, so there we are. Um, uh, tell me what else you've put in these show notes. It says here, snort. What on Earth is Snort?

Sam Sethi: 1:11:11

No, it's, uh, it's an account, but, um, I was gonna say fancier a Zap James, uh, which is the new term that's coming to the Lightning Network from what I can understand. So Zaps are light likes on Twitter, and, uh, if so, you can zap someone with a short amount of Satoshi's. Uh, and actually if you look at Fountain already, they have something already similar to that, which is when you heart something in Fountain, you pay 10 SATs. So if. Then changes that to a Zap icon, uh, and fundamentally says you're now zapping someone rather than arting them. Then he will be on message with what's going on currently with the Lightning Network.

James Cridland: 1:11:53

Well, yes, but that will be worse ux. So, um, yes, here's hoping he doesn't do that in my, in my humble opinion, but we will see, uh, I would imagine that the amount of people using Fountain is significantly higher than the amount of people using Nasta at the moment, although who knows what the future is there.

Sam Sethi: 1:12:12

Indeed. James, what's been happening for you?

James Cridland: 1:12:15

Uh, I have been mostly rebuilding the, uh, the publishing tools for pod news under the hood this week. Uh, it's one of the reasons why you may have noticed a slightly broken graphic earlier on in the week because, uh, my new Mac didn't have the same font as my old Mac, it turns out. But, uh, yes, I'm using. Um, I'm basically using Hindenberg now to just export web files. And then, um, I've got a, a, uh, much better written, uh, set of scripts that, um, generate the correct formats in the correct bit rates and everything else, and add all of the images and, uh, make them all so that they work, uh, nicely and, uh, fast start and everything else. So that has taken most of the week, but that was, um, that was all quite fun to do. And, uh, yes, and that's basically what I've been doing. But blindly, I'll tell you what, if you have used a Mac for the last eight years and you then get a brand new M two, uh, MacBook, um, it just moves so fast, it's capable of so much more. Uh, so it's been a very good thing. So Harra are finally updating . My, my, uh, Fashion Mac to a, a decent, uh, decent experience now. Yes. 16 gig I assume. Uh, yes. It's got 16 gig of, uh, ramming it and it's got 500 giga Bobs of s s d story, so that it was, yes, because if you got, I don't need that. But if you only got the 256, uh, giga bob, uh, thing, then apparently it works much slower. So you see, I did my research, did my research, um, and that's it for this week. Uh, you can give us

Sam Sethi: 1:13:51

feedback using email to weekly@podnews.net, or you can send us a booster gram, which we love. If your podcast app doesn't support boosts, and grab a new one from pod news.net/new podcast apps.

James Cridland: 1:14:04

Yes, and we would recommend Fountain, or at least I would. Our music is from Studio Dragonfly. Our voiceover is Sheila D, and we are hosted and sponsored by Buzz Sprout Podcast. Hosting made easy. Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter@potnews.net. Tell your friends and grow the show, and support us and support us. The News Weekly review will return next week. Keep listening.