James Cridland: 0:00

It's Friday, the 27th of October 2023.

Intro: 0:04

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

James Cridland: 0:14

Good and Targ. I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News in Munich.

Sam Sethi: 0:19

Ah, good morning. My how. Yes, it's Sam Suthey here back in cold, wet, rainy England.

James Cridland: 0:25

It's good to have you back in the chapters today. Spotify back in black-ish. After their cuts. Libsyn is cutting for profitability. Podcasts kill the radio star. Can't believe you just got me to say that, sam. No, the car, the radio car, radio car yes, it was a play. Yes, RSS music and RSS radio coming soon. Wondery turn to TV channels. Reviews matter, it turns out. Why are Gen Z listening faster than normal and more YouTube RSS details?

John McDermott: 0:58

Plus, I'm Johnny Mack, john McDermott, co-founder of Caleroga Shark Media. My partner, mark Francis, and I will be on later to talk about short form podcasting.

James Cridland: 1:07

They will. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout. Last week, 2,864 people started a podcast with Buzzsprout. Podcast hosting made easy with powerful tools, free learning materials and remarkable customer support. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi: 1:27

Well, james. Thank you to Gene Bean first of all for standing in for me. Yes, y'all love that. I did as well. Yes, roaming around Italy listening to it is very good. Thank you so much.

James Cridland: 1:38

Yes, while you were enjoying your truffles or whatever else that you were doing.

Sam Sethi: 1:42

I was drinking red Barolo wine, which is beautiful, and truffle hunting with dogs. There you go.

James Cridland: 1:47

Well, there's a thing, and there will be other people enjoying a quick tipple or two because Spotify is in profit again.

Sam Sethi: 1:56

Yes, Spotify says it's back in profit again and technically it is. It surprised analysts with expecting the company to lose money this quarter with a revenue of 11% up. But, James, what's the detail behind this? Because it doesn't feel like it's a full yee-ha. Let's go and open up the shampoos.

James Cridland: 2:14

Well, you know, I mean it surprised analysts for a start, which is good. Then all of the numbers are higher than the company was expecting and the analysts were expecting. So revenue up 11% and revenue up 16%, which is even nicer, and apparently podcast advertising revenue growth remaining in the healthy double digit range, driven by significant year over year growth in sold impressions, partially offset by softer pricing. So you've got some quite nice numbers and other numbers that are nice monthly active users up to 574 million. That's up 26% year on year. Just to compare that, though, to YouTube YouTube shorts not YouTube, but just YouTube shorts reached 2 billion monthly active users last year, so it's just a little bit smaller than that. They've got room for growth, james. That's all it is.

James Cridland: 3:12

Oh clearly, clearly room for growth. And actually one of the things that was interesting is listening to the earnings call. We heard both Daniel Eck and CFO Paul Vogel saying that podcasting will still lose money for the company for the next 12 to 24 months, but they're very comfortable in terms of where the business is going. Here's Paul first.

Paul Vogel: 3:35

And so on the podcasting side you've already seen us this year sort of right size parts of the business where we thought it made sense. But moving forward, we'll continue to invest. But we also think we're going to continue to get lots of efficiencies and that's through being smarter about where we spend that podcasting budget and also continue to grow the advertising on top of it. So we feel like we're on track. I think we gave it the investor day, sort of a one to two year timeline to break even on podcasting. We're right in line with that timeline. We should actually get the break even in podcasting pretty soon and we feel really good about the trajectory of the podcasting trends, having gone from a pretty big drag a year ago to something that's a pretty minimal drag, to something that should be positive to gross profit in the pretty short term.

Daniel Ek: 4:15

Unlike, say, the music business, which has more of a variable cost structure, podcasting has more of a fixed cost basis and a variable too. But the biggest proponent so far has been the fixed cost basis structure. So what helps there is obviously if you take down the fixed cost base structure. But the other thing that helps is more scale. So if you bring in more advertising dollars across that, you'll start seeing gross margins improving. So both of those things have been true. We've been raining back on some of the spending, but we have also increased the revenues on podcasting too.

Sam Sethi: 4:46

So it's all good then, right, sam Well it is when you say it, the way you've said it, but the way then you look at the detail, it's 1% is in operating profit and it's just 1%. And when you then start to dig a little bit deeper, it's through cutting that they've made that 1%. Yes, the numbers of people joining the platforms increase and yes, they've increased advertising, which is all good metrics, but it actually only achieved the goal of profitability by cutting. I think it was a operating decline of 13% year on year. They lowered their marketing spend, they lowered their personal costs and that is how they've got there. I thought the most telling part as well was about the profitability, or lack of the two years in podcasting. Thanks, dawn, thanks for spending the budget. And at the other end of the scale, they've got 9,241 full-time employees globally. Can I just say that number may be below 9,000 by next quarter.

James Cridland: 5:49

Oh yes, so I would have thought. So we should have had Richard Kramer on, shouldn't we? Because Richard is always very good at seeing through the bluster and all of that sort of thing. I thought, yeah, I mean, it's still nice to see Spotify get back in black. That's a nice thing. But, as you so rightly say, a lot of this has been achieved by cost cutting. But if that means that they can still make profit next quarter and the quarter after then, that's probably not a bad thing.

Sam Sethi: 6:22

I think one of the things that came out of the reporting was that Spotify looks to AI rather than original content for its podcasting future growth. That's the AI in terms of disco or DJ or whatever it wasn't they want to call it this week, and the voice translation. What do you think, James, about those being their profit goals?

James Cridland: 6:41

Well, I suppose you can certainly see that there's opportunities there, particularly in terms of multi-language opportunities. If you can translate Joe Rogan into an equally ignorant Spanish version or Portuguese or anything else, I suppose there are opportunities there, who knows? But their big name talent is pretty small now. Yes, joe Rogan. Yes, alex Cooper. Yes, they've got things like their Marvel shows, which they're really at pains not to call podcasts, which I always find really interesting. They are podcasts but they're definitely not calling them that. So all of that stuff going on, I think it's interesting.

Sam Sethi: 7:31

Yeah, but nobody asked about those stars, right? The renewals of that talent's coming up. If you listen to Paul, the budget and that's the first time I've heard him say budget is not going to be spent on exclusives. Are they going to spend it on retaining Joe Rogan? I'll take it back with you now. I reckon Joe Rogan will be on YouTube sometime in 2024.

James Cridland: 7:52

Yes, I think that's been your guess for a while, hasn't it? I was very interested in when I posted something earlier on in the year, I think I said Joe Rogan's contract is up for renewal and I got a very, very quick contact from Spotify's press office saying no, it's not, it's not up for renewal this year. And I said when is it up for renewal? And they said it's not up for renewal this year. And I said has it been renewed already? And they said it's not up for renewal this year.

Sam Sethi: 8:28

So who knows? You see, joe Rogan I mean one of the reports out this week in Pod News Daily was about Joe Rogan is still the number one search term. Joe Rogan is still the top of every chart when you look at it. Still the top of every report that comes out. So Joe's not done anything wrong right?

James Cridland: 8:44

No indeed, and still exclusive, which is, of course, interesting too.

Sam Sethi: 8:49

So if he's got a manager and I bet he has who's sitting there going 200 million last time, hey boys, I want 250, that is going to be the deal breaker for him.

James Cridland: 8:59

Well, yes, indeed, and I hear, by the way, it was more than the 200 million that has been talked about as well.

Sam Sethi: 9:06

I always wondered why Joe Rogan looks so happy every week. Now I know. Yes. What else is Spotify doing, James?

James Cridland: 9:14

Well, I got an interesting email on their results day talking about them testing public comments. So they have a feature called Q&A and that feature allows you as a podcaster, to ask people questions and you get the answers directly within the Spotify for podcasters dashboard and all of that and they are talking about, for select shows, the opportunity of making those public, so as long as they meet Spotify's content guidelines. So you'll end up seeing a bunch of in-app comments on Spotify, which is interesting. Of course, there are in-app comments on YouTube music as well, and doubtless, of course, you have kind of in-app comments through Apple Podcasts in terms of reviews, except, of course, we as creators have no control over what those reviews actually say do we?

Sam Sethi: 10:11

No, and that is a problem itself. But I think there's a bigger problem coming. But adding comments is one thing we've always wanted to do. That's what the podcast industry wants. We want that interactivity. But I hasten to add there's two things that will happen.

Sam Sethi: 10:25

First of all, my wife used to run MSN and comments were the bane of their life because obviously people were putting up anything and everything and it was a game of whack-a-mole taking down comments, taking down comments.

Sam Sethi: 10:38

So that's one thing. So podcasting 2.0 apps have a slight advantage in that there's a micropayment attached, so hopefully trolls and idiots won't put comments up that you don't have to take down all the time. But the other thing is the UK online safety bill has just received royal assent, and so that means that as of today, in little Britain, as we are, if you use a platform, you may be liable for the content that's put up there, and that's going to cause serious problems, I think, for something like that. So if you're going to put comments up and you have no real control, I think Spotify adding a little bit of control. I thought it was important when you said they can take them down. That's going to cause a lot of headaches in terms of if you're staffing, you're going to have to staff high for this sort of thing and of course, there's more changes as well in terms of megaphone, which.

James Cridland: 11:32

So? Megaphone is Spotify's enterprise podcast hosting company and they've started to shift the Spotify data for those shows away from megaphone's downloads and into a new section of megaphone and also onto the Spotify for podcasters dashboard, where, instead of seeing download information for Spotify consumption, you now see streaming information instead, because obviously they've got that data, so why wouldn't they? I ended up having a number of different people who are using megaphone who are a little bit peeved, having signed up for this beta test, to discover that they need to look into two different places now to find out how their podcasts are doing. The data from Spotify consumption is now no longer appearing in their automated uploads from the megaphone platform and so on and so forth.

James Cridland: 12:38

Lots of to and fro with Spotify as well on this and whether or not my sources were correct or not, and mostly we worked out that they were correct, which is a nice thing, but an awful lot of change going on there. But I thought very interesting that megaphone are essentially moving away from download data for the Spotify platform and everything will be streamed in future. I should say that Spotify have been sponsoring the pod news newsletter this month, but just like any other advertiser, spotify have no control over the editorial. I can be as rude as I like, so it's just worthwhile bearing that in mind.

Sam Sethi: 13:23

Yeah, just put the PR people out the door now, james. That's fine. Just leave them outside, they're fine. Now talking of Spotify, final bit of Spotify news they are saying that Gen Z, or Gen Z, is Spotify's fastest growing generation of music and podcast listeners. Why is that, james?

James Cridland: 13:40

Yes, and that's in the UK, so I think it is Gen Z. It wouldn't be Gen Z, would it in the UK?

Sam Sethi: 13:46

No, no, no, we gave them a language. They ruined it, but yes anyway.

James Cridland: 13:52

So, yes, so that's what the data says. So, in the first half of 2023, they claim that Gen Z listeners are playing 58% more podcasts year on year. Interestingly, 39% and this is a figure that Adam Curry will like. 39% of Gen Z listeners listen at a faster than normal speed.

Sam Sethi: 14:15

Busy, busy people, they are busy, busy people.

James Cridland: 14:18

Yes, either that or we old people talk way too slowly for them. Pardon, come on grud dad. But what they also say is that around half of Gen Z podcast listeners in the UK say that they've learned about a community they're not part of as a result of listening to a podcast. Who knew podcasts can be educational as well as entertaining.

Sam Sethi: 14:41

Yes, I was talking about this a couple of Gen Z people last night and it's fundamentally, I think Spotify is growing because, actually, mum and dad are using the family account to keep them on it. My daughter turns 24 today and basically, yeah, I'm not paying for my Spotify account, dad, thanks, can you keep it going? So, yeah, I wonder if there's part of that going on.

James Cridland: 15:04

Oh, there'll be an awful lot more of that, I'm sure to come. Yes, indeed. Now let's move on to other things. You're going to make me say a Bugles, lazy, bugles headline in a minute. I am, but first lots of details about new platforms.

Sam Sethi: 15:21

Yeah, Auditoria is a new platform for India audio drama. Given what we've just said and the interview we've just had with Dovidas about hosting music, this is in the UK. It promised the very best of independently produced audio drama, enhanced audiobooks and audio theater. I thought sounds interesting. It provides a home for previously broadcast content now out of license. It sounds like a little interesting platform. Have you seen it? Played with it? Looked at it?

James Cridland: 15:47

I've not yet seen it, but I know some of the people involved. I have pointed them in the direction of Evo Terra, who of course knows an awful lot about audio drama podcasts. The endfyi is his newsletter, but Auditoria, or Auditoria or whatever on earth you're supposed to pronounce it.

Sam Sethi: 16:10

I think you're going to write first time Sounds much better, the first time, yeah who knows?

James Cridland: 16:14

But the interesting thing around this is that it's a particularly UK platform. It's an app that you can. You'll be able to download and find all kinds of bits of audio drama. But the way that audio drama has mainly worked in the UK is there's this very large broadcast I called the BBC. The BBC still broadcasts audio drama. They have to because of the terms of their charter. They have to dole out a percentage and I think it's 25%, but it might even be higher of program promotion and program production to indie audio producers.

James Cridland: 17:00

So, if you remember, we were talking a couple of weeks ago about Sony Music Entertainment pulling out of some of those.

James Cridland: 17:08

But there are lots and lots of companies like Sony Music Entertainment who have been making audio drama for the BBC and the way that this works is the BBC gets the rights for an amount of time I think it's three years, it might be five years. After that, all of the rights go back to the indie production companies and so they are sitting on this produced stuff, which is all very nice, which they own the rights for and which they can then do other things with. But of course, most companies haven't looked into podcasts, haven't worked out whether podcasts is a good plan, and so this is kind of a little bit of a stopgap in the middle where they'll be including podcasts, yes, but they'll also be including some of this deep catalogue material from some of the indie production companies. So I think it's a really interesting move of just getting the very most of the IP out of these shows which were made and which some companies have 20, 30 years worth of content in there. So it should be really interesting, I think.

Sam Sethi: 18:19

So that's good. I have a look at it Now. Talking of platforms, here's another one. Podio, the largest Arabic podcast platform, has partnered with Anuvu, an in-flight entertainment supplier to a number of large airlines, to bring its podcast to the skies. Again, it looks like. Oh yeah, while I was away, I think there was a deal that Elon Musk's Skynet's done with Qatar Airlines to provide 350 meg to a seat directly. So again, I don't think there's going to be a bandwidth problem up there, gosh no, indeed.

James Cridland: 18:51

Well, anuvu actually owns a satellite themselves and they deal with an awful lot of very large companies. Qatar is one of theirs, but also basically all of the big Arab Airlines Emirates, who I'll be flying back with on Sunday, but also Saudi and various other airlines as well. They're also look after parts of United Airlines in the US and various other companies. Anuvu is a new name. It used to be called Grand Eagle and then it went bust and then they started up again with a different name, which is always entertaining, but yes. So podcasts.

James Cridland: 19:31

Of course, getting into airplanes isn't necessarily new, but I think what's quite interesting with this is that, because Anuvu actually has satellites up there and does the connectivity there, what this could actually mean is, instead of some old podcasts being on the in-flight entertainment we've all seen them you might be able to get the very latest podcasts in the in-flight entertainment, which might be quite a change, and, of course, you might actually get some download numbers out of that too. So interesting and worthwhile having a peek at If you want to learn more about how airline in-flight entertainment works. The podcast business journal at podcastbusinessjournalcom has an interview with a different company called, I think, skyfax, off the top of my head and they explain exactly how in-flight entertainment works, so it's worthwhile taking a peek at. There's another product here called NewsDirect, which has recently launched the NewsDirect podcast channel, looking at providing podcast guests and creators with a high traffic platform to reach a broad and engaged audience. What's this all about, sam?

Sam Sethi: 20:40

No idea, I was going to ask you. Actually, this was basically a press release put out by them. It just seemed to fit into another platform coming out trying to target a specific group of users and then trying to then advertise against that niche. It was just an interesting you know. Look, this channel is trying to produce NewsDirect podcasts. You've got the one which is Arabic podcasts. You've got one which is old IP content. It seems just as a trend. That's why I included it. It looks like we're going down not walled gardens, but simply podcast platforms saying, look, we can't be everything to everyone, so we're going to go and basically curate our content to a specific audience.

James Cridland: 21:26

Well indeed, and there's a whole new company called Caleroga Shark Media. We mentioned them a couple of weeks ago, focused on short form podcasts, and that is a brand new company starting with a slate of 16 shows. You managed to catch up with John McDermott and Mark Francis from Caleroga Shark Media and started off by asking what was Caleroga Shark Media?

John McDermott: 21:50

It's an outgrowth of the Palace Intrigue podcast. So a few years back I was watching the Crown and I thought, oh, the Royal Family is a fun subject. There's a lot of gossip. I wonder if there's a daily to be done here. But I sound like this and I didn't want to host it. So I reached out to my old friend, mark, and I said if I write this, we voice it, and we started putting out a daily podcast about the British Royals.

John McDermott: 22:13

I had mapped out a long-term editorial calendar. I didn't know the dates, but there were predictable events coming. Prince Philip was 98. The Queen, I believe, was 93 when we started. So you looked at it and you went there's going to be some pretty big Super Bowl level events coming at some point. So we started doing it. And then Megs, it happened, and then they went on Netflix and then Harry wrote spare and this thing just totally grew and we kept talking about the short form format and how it's great you can build a loyal audience. They're easy to turn around. And we brainstormed some ideas and I paired up some of the things I was doing with some of the things Mark was doing and combined the companies and Calaroga Shark Media was born.

Sam Sethi: 22:54

Excellent. Now, mark, you're the man with the British voice as well, so welcome. So what's your background in podcasting?

Mark Francis: 23:00

So it's actually not British, it's Australian. But to most Americans they think it's British.

Sam Sethi: 23:06

So we got away with having oh, okay, that's fine, you got away with it then, okay, fine, excellent, well done you, yes.

Mark Francis: 23:12

But no, my background was for the last few years I was a diversion audio as a co-founder there. We started a podcasting company, had a couple of hits with Dream Team Tapes, Royals of Malibu, Good Assassins, and prior to that John and I both worked at SiriusXM. Then my beginnings were terrestrial radio. My father's been in radio in Australia, or wasn't radio in Australia, for 60 years so long lineage there of audio history. But we got together and we started this palace intrigue as a hobby and something fun and something I had learned over the past three or four years, especially with the ad market as it is. We spent a lot of money building these long form shows and they came out great and they were beautiful shows and beautiful pieces of work and they won awards and everybody loved them. But in this market and with the opportunities that we have at the moment, the short form and creating something that's easy to make doesn't require a lot of talent fees or writing fees. Getting that out there was just a much better return on investment. Cool, Now look why 15 minutes?

Sam Sethi: 24:20

I mean, most people start off with this hey, I'm going to do a daily, which A is very hard to do, I know James will tell you. Getting a daily news blog out there is a news podcast out there is really hard. But what struck you by that 15 minute mark? Most people say, oh, let's just do half an hour, get three ads in, get 45. So why 15 minutes?

John McDermott: 24:40

So I think, like anything else, any podcast in the history of podcasting, any radio show in the history of radio, you go back and you listen to the first few episodes and you go, oh my goodness, those were awful. And it takes you a minute to find your voice. So when I started daily comedy news, I set out to do five minutes and it quickly became 10 and quickly became 15. I've pulled the diehards who are in the Facebook group hey, how long do you guys think it should be? And the feedback they've given me is whatever amount of news you have, do that much, and that's kind of been my spirit animal, especially on the comedy pod. Whatever's there is there and I don't have it.

John McDermott: 25:16

And if Will Smith smacks Chris Rock, well then this today's episode might be 22 minutes. Palace, we've kind of gotten into a rhythm of, you know, gossipy stories at the top, something quirky, and then what in radio we used to call a kicker towards the end. So that winds up being more seven, eight minutes, and the newer stuff so far seems to be falling into that same kind of range, following the Palace intrigue model, half of our shows are unscripted, half of them now scripted, the.

Mark Francis: 25:44

I think when you're doing an unscripted show, 10 minutes is enough of me or you or John as one person speaking. Once you hit that 10 minute mark, you want guests and you want other things to you know, to make the show entertaining on an unscripted level. So once you hit that 10 minute mark it becomes a lot more work exponentially. So keeping it short, keeping it simple, gives us the ability to make more, and I think more is just a volume idea.

Sam Sethi: 26:13

Now you've got quite a few 16, I think, in your current slate. Give us a flavor of some of them.

John McDermott: 26:18

Sure.

John McDermott: 26:18

So Taylor Swift today was kind of a good bet. She had a pretty good summer and then the whole Travis Kelsey chiefs thing happened and we're like, oh, that was fortunate for us. So you get lucky. Sometimes with these things you catch a little heat with the media. We're doing one about Elon Musk, who's a character you know. Part of that I'm hoping he notices it, gives us a retweet. That'd be nice. Hi, elon A ghost.

John McDermott: 26:44

So ghost is a lot of fun. Poor Mark has done so much work on this because I woke up out of bed one day and said what if we did 31 ghost stories in 31 days and then James Cridlin will write about it in his newsletter and we got some attention for it. And year one of that was a bit of hey, look at us play. And then we'll definitely do that again. Year two, a ghost will continue as a weekly. We're planning on doing the 12 ghosts of Christmas, but that was one that was a lot of fun. And we also have Murder Weekly coming out and Romance Weekly and we've got a ton of ideas. It's just a matter of making them all.

Mark Francis: 27:19

Yeah, I mean we are two people, but taking on this short form kind of project allows us without the guests, without the writing, without the talent, without the lawyers, without the marketing. We've both been in startups many times before and once it grows beyond the two people, it becomes very complicated and it becomes very time consuming. So, while it is the two of us right now, you can get a lot done, and I think we're going through the process of building this company, building a library, building content, building a brand and a name, and right now we have that ability just to pump shows out.

Sam Sethi: 27:56

Now, John, I mean, how do you amortize this? What's your model?

John McDermott: 27:59

Loyal fans, putting out regular stuff, creating habits being part of somebody's daily routine, that if you put out enough episodes, you've got enough inventories. So you fill the holes with some spots, live reads and doing good live reads in the middle of it. One of my big pet peeves are the people like oh, we've got to pay the bills. Now here's that annoying sponsor. We love sponsors. Please sponsor the show. I will happily endorse what you're asking me to endorse. I never understood that mentality. So you do these things five days a week or seven days a week and you've got enough holes.

Sam Sethi: 28:33

And I mean again looking forward. I mean, why do you pick certain podcast show? As you said, Taylor Swift is fairly obvious, the Royal Family one was on the basis of doing one before, but how do you two sit down and oh, you know, I've got a great idea? Or is it just literally that eureka moment I mean the bath suddenly wow, yeah, there we go, that's the one we do next. How does it come about?

John McDermott: 28:55

I think you've been reading my text to Mark. I do often wake up in the morning and go, hey, how about this? And I'll usually tag it with punch me in the nose if this is stupid. So we've got a spreadsheet of some stuff we're working on. You know, I don't think it's wise to launch 97 shows and not do any of them well, so I think it's like a TV network. We've got 16 shows. I hope we go 16 for 16. Not everyone does you know. There might be one that doesn't work Again, just being honest, and maybe not everyone in the industry would be that transparent. But if one of them doesn't work, all right, let's sunset it and try something else.

Sam Sethi: 29:31

So, mark, you called it a startup. I mean, you know I've done several and you've always got a business plan. You've always got either external investment or you've got an exit strategy or an acquisition. What is it? Are you going to be raising money next? Are you going to be then trying to grow further, and where's the exit? I mean, what is your plan?

Mark Francis: 29:52

Obviously, the plan is to grow and we're starting out small. We need to build our audience. As for what one good position we are in now is that we're already profitable in the sense that we don't have a lot of expenses. We don't have major people who have invested so far that we have to pay back. We're starting from scratch, but we're building all this on our own with our own bandwidth. Our bandwidth has been our expense and our time, but if you can get through that and build something that becomes viable, sellable, we grow from there.

Sam Sethi: 30:31

John, you said that you listen to pod news fairly regularly, so you all have heard James and I talk about podcasting 2.0 and some of the Valley for Valley stuff and monetization there. Is that anything that interests you? Is that far too early in the bandwidth? Is that far too early in the cycle for you?

John McDermott: 30:49

So it absolutely interests me. I was anticipating our interview and thinking about some of the subscription models and I'm not sure that that has cut through, and we've seen some of the medium to majors cut back on subscriptions. I do think value for value is the future. I've personally seen some nice success from buy me a coffee type thing. I totally love what you're up to.

John McDermott: 31:13

I think the challenge for all of us as creators is going to be educating the audience. A lot of people will use the default apps. So how do we get either the default apps to play along and maybe they don't play as long as quickly as us creators would like and then which of the third party apps becomes the one that breaks out? But yeah, I think for an audience member, especially the younger generations, of just going hey, I like this show, let me send them some. What's the phrase? Time treasure whatever Curry says that and talent Yep, that would be great. It's just going to be an education thing of hey, everybody, go use this other app, because you're asking people to push a couple buttons.

John McDermott: 31:57

But I'm very positive about it medium to long term.

Sam Sethi: 32:02

So, mark, what comes next? What's next on the slate? Ok, john says he's got 16 for 16. So what's dropping and what's coming on, has he told you? That's the question.

Mark Francis: 32:11

Well, I've always gone along with. John has a mantra called play the hits and that's kind of a foundation for what we're doing. We're not in a position to do a lot of niche shows. We're trying to appeal to a very broad audience. We're playing, we're producing shows that have broad appeal that will pull in the biggest audience. So that's our goal.

Sam Sethi: 32:36

And John's watering the plants while I seed them and we just keep coming up with more and see what grows, John what sort of numbers are you hitting now, without going into it far too much, because you may not want to reveal it, but you must have. As you said, john, you've spread a target audience for each show. Are you hitting those target audiences?

John McDermott: 32:57

The new ones, ghost has picked up over the 31 days. So that's one of those things that you know. You're putting out the first two or three and nobody's heard of it. How do you find it? But that has seen the nice graph that you would like to see. Palace is, in itself, a big show. Daily Comedy News is probably about a third to a half of that size, and the new ones they've been on about a month. So what you would expect? A podcast with a month worth of growth behind it. But we see the numbers going up every day. We see the listeners go up every day. It's a marathon, not a sprint, right? So we're doing it.

Sam Sethi: 33:30

While talking of marathons, you're about to do the New York marathon, so I wonder whether you've got enough content to actually listen while you go the whole way around.

John McDermott: 33:38

It's funny, I almost always run to podcasts. I'm not hogwashing you. You guys are usually part of my Friday morning routine, thank you. But for the actual race day, I'm doing a music playlist that I was test driving this morning. Just need the extra boost.

Sam Sethi: 33:54

Excellent. Look, gentlemen, it's lovely to meet you. Congratulations on Calaroga and what you're doing. Interesting 15 minutes. We're seeing all different types of output. We're seeing James with his three or four minutes, we're seeing you with your 15. Then you get the long form. So yeah, no, it's interesting to see everything's hitting the market. Look, if everyone wants to go and find out more about what you're doing and look at the slate, where would they go?

John McDermott: 34:17

Calarogacom, so C-A-L-O-R-O-G-Acom. Calaroga, like Spinarama Calaroga.

Sam Sethi: 34:24

OK, I've got to ask where is Calaroga? Is it a town in Australia that no one's ever heard, or what was the thinking?

Mark Francis: 34:30

Yeah, close enough. It's the street I grew up on in Adelaide, Australia. Ok.

Sam Sethi: 34:35

I have that sort of Aussie sound to it so I thought it might be. Gentlemen, lovely to see you and lovely to meet you both. Take care and good luck with it. Thank you very much. Thank you, yes, john McDermott there. He's very interesting and he's also running the marathon, new York marathon, so we were very lucky to get him in between his runs.

James Cridland: 34:54

Wow gosh, there's a thing Should you just use a car?

Sam Sethi: 35:00

I actually did the New York marathon in 2012. Oh yeah, of course you did. No, look, hey, it was really bad. It was the. It was after 9 11 and we went out there, me and two mates, and yeah, it was damn cold. I didn't expect that it was freezing. At the start line, all the food had gone, no coffee. It was 6 am. It wasn't a happy start. I wasn't a happy bunny. No, it's great fun doing it. But yeah, good luck to John with that one Gosh. I have given up running to that degree.

James Cridland: 35:29

Yes, Well, talking about the correct way to get around, which is cars, we saw some really interesting data from Edison Research showing about what happens when you have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto in your car, because it turns out that the amount of AM, FM radio that you listen to goes down by a third and everything else basically doubles, including podcasts, which I thought was really interesting. It just goes to show decent user experience just kind of makes you listen to that kind of stuff a little bit more. Do you use Apple CarPlay or anything like that?

Sam Sethi: 36:05

Yeah, I mean, since we get in the car, yeah, it comes up.

James Cridland: 36:08

I mean, what I would say is I personally don't listen to a lot of radio, music Radio that is, and I think I'm not unique Talking about Android Auto and indeed Apple CarPlay Podverse now has Android Auto, which is very exciting, literally just launched and looks very spiffing and very smart.

Sam Sethi: 36:29

Other podcasts. You might want to have a little chat about Chris Fisher's Office Hours 2.0, which we went out on the 3rd of October. They talked with Alec Gates, who's done a lot of the work around the radio medium, and how it can be used and what's the plan. So yeah, highly recommend it. If you're interested in what's going on with audio in car via podcasting, then have a listen to Chris Fisher's show, office Hours 2.0.

James Cridland: 36:55

Very nice, and we've talked about podcasts in planes, we talked about podcasts in cars, now podcasts on the TV.

Sam Sethi: 37:02

Yeah, come on, James. What's this? One Wondery is turning its podcast into three TV channel. Why?

James Cridland: 37:08

Well, because Wondery is owned by Amazon and Amazon Free V is owned by Amazon, and so Amazon Free V is, I think, somewhere like 150 different channels that you can get for free on your fire TV stick in the US, and Wondery has very brightly gone hold on a minute. Maybe we should put some of our content on there as well. So they basically have three different channels. One is a true crime channel, one is a sports channel, one is an entertainment and pop culture channel, and you tune into those and you get Wondery podcasts with some visual accompaniment playing on Amazon Free V. I think it's quite a nice idea really to get Wondery podcasts in front of a brand new audience. Yes, now, james, probably a little bit of a bit of a bit, of a bit of a bit.

Sam Sethi: 37:59

a couple of years ago, I think, you came out and said reviews don't matter. They don't add to the values that you will receive in terms of Apple. Don't use them to promote your show or boost your show, so don't bother with them. Well, it seems that one negative review, however, on Apple podcasts might mean 42 percent fewer listeners. This is a report out from the Journal of Marketing Research. So, james, do reviews matter?

James Cridland: 38:24

Well. So this scientific research that came out from the Journal of Marketing Research is interesting. It's to do with reviews for products, not reviews for podcasts specifically, but if you see a negative review for a product that you are going to buy, then apparently it leads to 42 percent fewer sales of that product, and so one of the things that this study suggests is that you might not want to show latest reviews. If you run an e-commerce site, you might want to show a selection of reviews that maybe you might want to slightly bias in terms of good reviews or helpful reviews, those sorts of things, and Amazon does a little bit of this, as does Apple podcasts as well. But, yeah, if you see a negative review, then, yeah, you may get significant fewer listeners from it. So it's important not just to ask your listeners to review a show, you would guess, but to at least ask them to review a show positively. So perhaps that's a, that's a thing, perhaps that's a change, of a change of heart in terms of whether reviews are important.

Sam Sethi: 39:43

Yeah, it feels like a bit of NLP Neural Linguistic Programming. It feels like, you know, if you see something negative, you might then think the whole thing is negative rather than review the rest of the reviews. Brian Caldini, a brilliant guy, wrote a book called Influence and they talk about if you're going to sell a car or a suit, sell the most expensive thing first, before the cheaper items, because then you'll just won't care and it's feel like put your best reviews first and then the rubbish ones can go to the bottom. Yes, indeed.

James Cridland: 40:11

Indeed, now podcasters are doing books and magazines and all kinds of things. There's a new sort of newspaper type thing. I've called it a zine. I don't know whether Dane likes this or not, but still, there we are. You didn't put the word pod in front of it, a pod zine, oh nice, I'm liking that. Anyway, it was announced in May published its first issue and if you want to get it, goodtapedcom Pod news will give you money off if you use that as a code, and it looks very nice.

James Cridland: 40:43

Mine is winging its way from New York to Brisbane and I suspect that's going to take about six weeks, so it'll be very out of date by the time I get it, but I'm looking forward to it. Put together by Dane Cardil, who is a good man who works at Gumball, and also crooked media have said that they are producing their first book, democracy or Else. It's part of the folks behind Pod Save the US, of course, and, yes, john Favreau, john Lovett and so on and so forth. It's apparently a useful and illustrated guide to saving American democracy and it'll be out June, the 4th next year.

Sam Sethi: 41:27

Who said it won't be out of date?

James Cridland: 41:29

So I mean, I look at the book industry and I'm there going. How long does it take to release a book, to write a book and then to release the book, I mean, if it's announced now and it won't be out for another nine months, you know? I mean, you know, pregnancies happen faster.

James Cridland: 41:50

Well, yes, you know, but anyway, if you're a fan of the crooked media folk and you think that Pod Save the US is a good podcast, it is called that, isn't it? Pod Save the US? Yes, because of course, I listen to Pod Save the UK a lot and I can never quite remember what the US version is. But anyway, then, yes, democracy or Else is coming out for you next year. You can pre-order now from a link that you'll find in the Pod News newsletter, and that link will give us a little bit of money but will also support your local bookshop, which is always a good thing to. Now let's jump into some job news, and we start sound with some quite sort of negative job news. Really, Quite. A lot of people have lost their jobs, haven't they?

Sam Sethi: 42:42

Yeah, libsyn have made a number of people redundant on Friday last Friday. Among them software developer Nick Michaels, product manager Yvette Méniz, web developers, software engineers, customer service, app security people and a host of other roles as well. Sounds like not a good thing going on at Libsyn. What's happening, james? Yeah, and I'm trying to understand.

James Cridland: 43:07

I mean, libsyn gave us a very anodyne quote, which I suppose we should read Libsyn is strategically allocating resources.

James Cridland: 43:14

That include reducing the numbers of specific roles and the creation of new positions in our priority growth areas.

James Cridland: 43:21

These changes will allow us to align our resources with our companies evolving needs and objectives, which has almost nothing, doesn't it?

James Cridland: 43:30

But they do appear to have made an awful lot of people redundant over the last few months, and you kind of do wonder, particularly making people in tech redundant, given the state of Libsyn 5, which still isn't finished, and Libsyn 4 still limping on, because that offers some functionality that Libsyn 5 doesn't quite why they're getting rid of a lot of software engineers don't really understand that one, but I had a chat with John W Gibbons, the acting CEO podcast movement, and you know he's a very nice man and he was telling me, though, that he sees the future of Libsyn as being an advertising company, not a podcast hosting company. Particularly, and he can see a point and I don't know what your views are on this, sam, but he can see a point in the next few years where you can't really run a podcast hosting company because there won't really be any money in that, so it has to be based on the advertising side of it, you know, instead. What do you think of that?

Sam Sethi: 44:38

Yeah, look, the technology escalator that goes up means that hosting is becoming a commodity. It's just a. It's not a differentiator between any of them. I think Alberto from rsscom said on the podcast index two to Oshows that you know they don't think of themselves as a hosting company, which you know was like whoa, hang on a minute, you're not a hosting company, what are you? And it's like well, we're a technology company and we provide all these things and other things, and hosting is just one of the things we do, and I think that's pretty much where I think the rest of the industry is probably going to head. So if you want to say that hosting isn't your primary because I guess Spotify is, you know, giving it away then you better have something else in your offering, or guess what? You're not going to have many customers.

James Cridland: 45:25

Yeah, and I think you have to have something which is different, something which actually offers, you know, a good reason to come to you rather than go to the big green free company you know around the corner. So I guess from that, from that point of view, you know, it's interesting seeing you know. Libsyn from my, my outsider view, looking in, seems to be a company where it could really do with some decent tech and maybe, to be fair to them, maybe they're getting rid of some people who aren't very good and maybe that's part of the problem that Libsyn have had over the last 10 years or so of not necessarily keeping up. But also maybe they don't actually have to. You know their heritage podcast hosting company the first in the world and the people are choosing them because of the Libsyn name, not necessarily because of the feature set that they actually offer.

Sam Sethi: 46:22

One of their customers who's been with them since the beginning, practically a friend of the show Neil Viglio penned an open letter to Libsyn CEO John and I'll put a link in the show notes. But fundamentally he said you're falling behind, your technology is really not there and you're forcing me to have to look elsewhere. He said I think I can save money by moving elsewhere and give my customers more of the features that we talk about the podcast two to features. Sadly, john, or gladly or sadly depends which way you look at it. John did respond to Neil and I have to say it wasn't a great response, johnny, it wasn't very much. This feels like a cleaned PR response. While we've stayed laser focused in the last year on helping podcasters at all download volumes earned dollars via Libsyn's automatic ads. We also see and love all the exciting products aimed at improving podcasters workflow. Didn't get a sense of anything had changed.

James Cridland: 47:25

And in fact also interestingly, mike Lenze, who used to work at Julep, which is based here in Germany. He has left Julep and moved over to be the group business director at ACAST in Germany, so it looks as if Libsyn's Julep company here in Europe is also losing some people as well, which is, you know, just worthwhile keeping an eye on, I guess. Also congratulations to Marilyn Hague, who's been promoted to senior business development manager at Mopod. If you're looking for a job, pod News has podcasting jobs across the industry and across the world. It's podcasting's largest jobs board, according to me, but I have nobody's yet proved that wrong. They're free to post as well. It just takes two minutes. Podnewsnet slash jobs. The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 48:24

Oh, now this is the tech stuff, the bit of the show where we talk about technology and all of that kind of thing. We do this every Monday in the pod news newsletter and, yes, sam, lots of talk about the YouTube RSS ingest.

Sam Sethi: 48:41

Yes, they had a thing you were talking about. Last week they had a pow-wow somewhere on campus where they invited lots of people and told them how it's all going to work, and it seems that they're slowly revealing what's behind the commode. But what is the sum of it all, james? What's?

James Cridland: 49:01

behind the commode. Is that not the expression? I've never heard that expression before it's probably wrong.

Sam Sethi: 49:08

Don't get me wrong, I am not very good at these times Gosh, wow.

James Cridland: 49:15

So yes, it was a conversation that happened last week and sadly it wasn't a fancy meeting at Mountain View, it was a Google Meet, so people just sat and watched for an hour as the good folks explained how the YouTube RSS ingestion works. Now this is probably a time where I need to fess up and say that the pod news daily has been using the YouTube RSS ingest for the last couple of weeks. I managed to invite myself onto the beta test, but now it's being rolled out. I think that I can probably talk about it a little bit more, but yes, so basically the way that it works is YouTube is caching your audio. It's actually re-encoding and re-hosting your audio and, because it's in the YouTube ecosystem, you can't change uploads once you've made an upload to YouTube. So if you upload some video which needs editing, the only way of doing that is to delete that and to add a new upload with, therefore, a new URL and everything else. So there's no way of actually editing a video that you upload. And the same goes for podcasts as well, because podcasts are essentially still videos on the YouTube system. So that's a bit of a problem that you can't actually change the audio which has been uploaded. There's also a bit of an issue around analytics as well, in that there won't be any delivery of analytics to podcast hosting companies, but what they can do is they can do the code to interface with YouTube's analytics API, and that will only work if you, as a podcaster, give your podcast hosting company permission to grab that data. So there's a lot of Oauth dancing going on there in order for you to actually get that. So that would be interesting. And of course, youtube stats aren't IB compliant anyway, so you can't add those together with your podcast hosting stats because that wouldn't be the right way of doing it. So interesting conversations going on there.

James Cridland: 51:32

And of course, there's that whole thing about the fact that YouTube do not want advertising in podcasts. So sponsorship credits, like the sponsorship credits that we give Buzzsprout, is absolutely fine, but we couldn't have a 30 second ad from Buzzsprout telling us all about the Buzzsprout stuff. That wouldn't be allowed under YouTube's terms and conditions. And the weird thing is YouTube doesn't necessarily if I've understood the comments that I've heard back from that meeting YouTube doesn't really understand how to properly signal to podcast hosting companies. Hello, we're YouTube, we've come for that copy of the audio. Can we have it ad free? They're hoping that you use the user agent, and there's another HTTP header which they're going to use as well, which I know, but I'm not going to publish because they're really easy to spoof those. And once you've worked out how to spoof them, then you too can get ad free podcasts, which, of course, nobody wants.

James Cridland: 52:39

So I think that that's a bit of a mistake there from YouTube's point of view. But, yeah, I think. So what I understand happened at the end of this meeting is that those people that were invited, who can actually talk and who can actually ask questions and stuff, quite a few of them turned around and said we don't think you're doing this properly and we are not going to be promoting the fact that we have YouTube integration and we think that you're not doing it right. And my understanding is that was led by Todd Cochran Surprise, surprise but there were others involved in that as well and, yeah, I think YouTube appears not necessarily to have talked to as many people as they could have done when they came to change this particular service.

Sam Sethi: 53:40

Well, two things there. First of all, we have invited or I have invited on our behalf Kai and Alison at separate points, to come on in this show to explain what they're doing. Strangely, neither one's responded. So thanks YouTube. And also, I listened to Todd and Rob last night. I think he's updated the get your owncom to get your own YouTube channel. I'm not helping you, so yeah.

James Cridland: 54:04

Yes, I mean, you know I've been seeing what some people have been saying about YouTube. I think the right thing to think about it is it's just another podcast app and if you have a podcast and you want it to get listened to, in most cases you, as a podcast creator, are doing exactly the right thing if you end up making your podcast available on YouTube. This podcast available on YouTube and looks pretty good Thanks to Headliner, and there are many other podcasts available on YouTube. I think that for a podcast creator, it's a good thing to get your podcast onto YouTube. I think if you're a podcast hosting company, it's a dreadful thing, but they should probably be putting podcast creators first rather than their own corporate interests first. And I think this is what we're seeing with a fair amount of podcast hosting companies is that they're a bit grumpy about YouTube and a bit fearful that YouTube will put them out of business, but from a podcast creators point of view, it's a great place to be.

Sam Sethi: 55:10

Now there's some other people have been talking about it as well. Amrita Khalid, who's been writing hot pod for the last six months, has written a final update looking back at the last six months. She writes about the industry concerns around YouTube, so it's have a read of that and hot pods Errol Shapiro returns next week.

James Cridland: 55:27

So there you go, yes, which will be nice to see her back. Matt Deegan has also posted about a podcast strategy for YouTube as well, and he shares my opinion, because he's a very bright man. You need to get your shows there, otherwise you'll be missing out on listeners. Wherever you get your podcasts really does mean wherever your listeners get their podcasts, and he's got screenshots of what the RSS ingest trial looks like in YouTube studio in there as well, so that's worthwhile taking a peek off. So, yes, some interesting times when it comes to YouTube and the tech behind it.

James Cridland: 56:02

And we did something quite neat in our chapters for the podcast daily last week. We asked for boost messages, but we asked for boost messages so that they would appear in chapters. It's something that John Spurlock put together called reflex, and you can see how that worked If you play back last Monday's pod news daily, where you can see some of the boosts appearing in the chapter files is a fun thing to experiment with. Not necessarily sure whether that is going to be the future, but what did you think of that when you, when you, were there on on holiday with your truffle hunting?

Sam Sethi: 56:41

Yes, Well, I had to put down the dog and then get on board to deal with this. Love John, and he was doing this on the basis of what Adam had been trying to do, which is get cross app comments going. And I looked at it and I saw what you requested and we sent a boost through. Blah blah, blah blah. All all happened right. The downside was John called these boost chapters and then decided to reveal them in the UI under the chapters tab for most apps. Realistically, I went back to John and said these aren't chapters, these are boosts, and I like the idea. And if he could then allow me to put them into a boost tab, which is separate. Good first step, john, but needs a little bit more thinking before a apps will implement it and be it becomes a useful tool.

James Cridland: 57:30

Yeah, I mean, I think of course it's implemented in all apps right now. But it's implemented, it's just additional noise in the chapters file. And I would agree, I think, probably reworking the chapters, jason, to basically say, okay, this is a chapter or this is a boost, so that UX you know UI can essentially grab that and go okay, that's a boost that lives over here in the UX and this is a proper chapter mark and so that lives in the chapters bit. I think that that makes a bunch of sense and that, to me, would be also backwards compatible, in that if there are some apps out there who've implemented, you know Jason, chapters anyway, they don't want to do any additional work, then fine, the boosts will appear in those in those chapters and that's a good thing. But I think, yeah, it needs to be splitable If you have a more aware podcast app, I mean.

James Cridland: 58:30

The other thing, of course, is that it's also opened up the fact that chapters shouldn't really be cashing those. You shouldn't really be ingesting those into your own system. It should be when you hit the play button. That's when it should go away and grab that chapter file. And I think what it's very much shown is that quite a lot of podcast apps have been grabbing that chapter file once ingesting that, and so therefore any changes in the chapter file haven't been instantly visible in that podcast app, and that's probably a mistake too. So it's been some really helpful bits of work. But I would agree, I think it's most certainly half baked, but you know, a half baked loaf of bread is better than no food at all. So I suppose from that point of view it's probably a good step. But yes, I think needs more work is probably the plan, is that?

Sam Sethi: 59:29

another new saying that we're bringing to the market this week, because me and my commoding new and your half baked bread, we're doing well here.

James Cridland: 59:40

It's always interesting times when somebody who's very good at coding just basically flings an idea together that Adam gave out last a couple of weeks ago, you know, in the podcasting 2.0 show, and just basically produces it, and then it of course it kicks up loads of questions on how you actually implement this properly. But it's great that there are people doing that and I think John has done a sterling job of, you know, testing this out, particularly since I then jumped on it very, very quickly and promoted it.

Sam Sethi: 1:00:15

Running with scissors, as Adam and Dave would call it.

James Cridland: 1:00:18

Indeed, running with scissors. Indeed, let's talk about some upcoming things going on. The UK's Audio Production Awards happened on November the 22nd, but they've just announced the nominations for the UK's Audio Production Awards. I was going to make a joke and say they're all from the UK. That's not very good, is it? Except they're not. So I can't even make that joke, because there have been a couple of US companies who've been nominated this year. The host of the event will be Pod Save, the UK's Nishkumar and Coco Khan, and the awards are organised by Audio UK. Looks like a good thing.

James Cridland: 1:00:56

The Independent Podcast Awards 2023 is happening on October the 30th. The Webby Awards you should be getting your entries in. The early entry deadline is today, but don't worry if you miss it. They've got their normal deadline, which is coming a little bit later on this year as well, and I'm looking forward to speaking later today at Audio Days in Denmark. I say later today, that's later today, friday, but of course yesterday when I'm recording this, I'm in Munich and looking forward to speaking at Median Targa Munshan Talking about the future of radio. Good luck with that, everybody. What did you say earlier?

Sam Sethi: 1:01:42

Don't listen to it, can't be bothered there, so that'll be fun.

James Cridland: 1:01:45

And also speaking at PodCon MX in Mexico City in early November. I've just got details of the hotel that I'm staying in, which is very exciting. That's being presented by rsscom, who I'm an advisor for, so that should be good too. And there are more events, both paid for and free, at PodNews virtual events or events in a place with people and if you're organizing something, tell the world about it. It's free to be listed at podnewsnet slash events. Boostergram corner corner on the PodNews Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 1:02:20

Well, we've got plenty of boosts and things. It's our favorite time of the week. I should be saying, shouldn't I? That's the catchphrase it's our favorite time of the week. Hope we got boosts from Sam.

Sam Sethi: 1:02:32

I won't try and do the accent, but it's Dave Jones giving us 5150. Again, I'm sure that's a rush boost or something like that, a Southern accent on the PodNews Weekly Review. I've got the vapours. I think he's a happy boy.

James Cridland: 1:02:46

Yes, absolutely From Gene Bean, of course, last week, and that was all very good. Adam Curry himself Also supporting the show. He says boosting is loving 33,000 sats. That'll do nicely.

Sam Sethi: 1:03:04

Yes, well done.

James Cridland: 1:03:06

So that was good. Who else have we got one from?

Sam Sethi: 1:03:09

Well, your co-host from last week, gene Bean, said sometimes, when listening to how people consume their favorite shows, I start thinking I'm doing consumers a disservice by not publishing on YouTube and Spotify. Correct, I don't think either is good for the industry, but I'm also not sure pretending that they aren't where my target audience is is the best decision either.

James Cridland: 1:03:30

Then he senses a row of ducks 2-2-2 sats, yes, and I think, 2-2-2 sats, and I think, yes, absolutely correct. Number one, from my point of view, is the listener. Number two is the creator, and the podcast host comes very much further down in that list. If people are expecting to listen to you wherever they get their podcasts, then you should be on YouTube. I'm afraid you should be on Spotify. I'm afraid, but some people don't necessarily agree with any of that, but that's certainly my view as well. So thank you, Gene, and thank you for being an excellent co-host last week as well. And the optimal living daily podcast says yay, I found where I can connect my RSS feed in the YouTube studio.

James Cridland: 1:04:19

Boo Terms of Service makes it sound like I can't because I run programmatic ads. I think we read that last week, but it's worthwhile reminding us of that again. No, you can't run programmatic ads on YouTube, and even the Buzz Sprout ads that sometimes pop up in this very show, we can't run those on YouTube either. So you know. So you won't hear any of those either. What if you left them?

Sam Sethi: 1:04:47

in what YouTube can they do?

James Cridland: 1:04:49

Well, I mean, we've been leaving them in for some time.

Sam Sethi: 1:04:51

Exactly.

James Cridland: 1:04:52

You've done anything, but yes, I think you make a good point there. Anyway, if you get value from what we do, the Pod News Weekly Review is separate from Pod News. Sam and I share everything from it and we really appreciate your support so we can continue making this show. You can support us with cash at weeklypodnewsnet or support us with SATs by hitting the boost button in your podcast app or indeed just streaming SATs while you listen. That's very kind. If you don't have one podnewsnet slash, new podcast apps will help you find a new app. So what's been happening for you this week, sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:05:28

Well, I was, as I said, truffle hunting in Italy, drinking a Barolo, and also I've just bought some budgie smugglers. I'm coming to Australia in February, james, so that's going to be good.

James Cridland: 1:05:40

So, kyren, he's coming. He's coming in February. I mean he's going to Dirty Sydney, but nevertheless he's coming in February, yeah.

Sam Sethi: 1:05:48

What did you call it?

James Cridland: 1:05:49

Brisfagus or Bris, I think he called it Brisfagus or Brisneyland. I'm not doing any of that, or I mean frankly, it should be meandjian if you asked me, but anyway that's not open that one.

Sam Sethi: 1:06:05

You lot voting. Don't get me on that one, Please. 60% of the white population said nah, 60% of the racists.

James Cridland: 1:06:13

Yes, 60% of Australians proved that they were racist.

Sam Sethi: 1:06:16

Yes, indeed yes, even more than the Brexit 52% Well done.

James Cridland: 1:06:20

Australia. Indeed, I should point out that my local I could even find out, not just my local electoral area voted yes, but I could even see on the data, I could even see how my local polling station voted, so I can actually see how many of the I think 120 different votes that there were at my local polling station, how that ended up. The good news is that the racists don't live near me, so that's all OK.

Sam Sethi: 1:06:55

All I've got in my head right now is the song Neighbours Everybody.

James Cridland: 1:06:59

Needs Me. Yes, yes, yes, it's deeply disappointing.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:04

Well, yes, I stick a few more tinnies on there, karin, I'm coming down, so there you go. And then last night I went to City University's wonderful event that they were running with the British podcast winners. We had some of the production teams and some of the producers and it was really interesting hearing their stories. So Best New Podcast was there, best New Winners, and so, yeah, it was really good. So well done to the team down there. But one of the sadder things was I spent a bit of time talking to a lot of interested people around and asked them did they even know what a micropayment was, what a wallet was? Had they ever heard of podcasting 2.0? And guess what? James Nudder, not a dicky bird, not even. And this is supposedly a technically focused podcasting at the edge audience. And they had not heard a word.

James Cridland: 1:08:00

Yeah, no, indeed, it's difficult to end up per doing and I think we just have to persevere and carry on.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:06

Yeah, I mean the podcast dance committee. It seems defunct. I do get frustrated when the lovely people at Buzzsprout, who are our sponsors and our friends, don't embrace wallets, they don't even embrace pod roles and they bloody came up with the idea Jesus, come on, holy moly, I mean, do that one at least. It took me, and Mustafa of course, to say, mustafa, I just said, can you do it? That's all I said. But it took us half an hour to implement that Nothing.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:40

It's not complicated to implement, honestly, and you've got companies like RSS Blue trying to be innovative looking. We talked about hosting.

James Cridland: 1:08:51

Blueberry as well, doing a fantastic job there, lives in doing nothing and now getting rid of the people that could actually have been implementing it, and, of course, apple doing absolutely nothing as well I think one of the frustrating things for me is hearing so much negative stuff about YouTube and they're not doing this and they're not doing that and blah, blah, blah.

James Cridland: 1:09:14

And there's Apple merrily rolling on with their proprietary tags for all kinds of things all not proprietary tags, but proprietary implementations of things, like the author tag, for example, where there's a picture of me in this very show and the picture of me in this show. I had to email a photograph and then I think I had to sign a piece of paper or something with Apple's support team to actually get my photograph in there. I mean, you know there's an open standard for all this. Why are you not supporting the open standard? But Apple seems to get a free ride by all of the podcast hosting companies, and I don't understand it. I simply don't understand why the podcast hosting companies turn around and say Spotify is the devil and YouTube is even worse. But oh, Apple, why don't you screw us again by coming up with something else that we've got to do? Yeah, it's, it's.

Sam Sethi: 1:10:17

Anyway, I got a love letter from Apple, or love email from Apple after my little rant a couple of weeks ago where I said, look, if Apple would just bloody well charge and stop, then everyone else would have to pay for podcasts, who wouldn't have this free model. And they said well, what do you want us to do? You have a go when we talk about subscriptions. You have a go. When we give it for free, we give up. And I went. I can sort of see your point. But actually Apple the one thing they could do, apple pay tomorrow could do micro payments right with fiat currency. They could just remove all the fees and allow you to do micro payments. They could do that, but they won't. And that would solve all the. It's Bitcoin and it's a sat and all that and it would just go away tomorrow and the whole industry could then jump on board behind Apple pay. And it will be because value for value doesn't state it has to be a Bitcoin, just has to say it's a value.

James Cridland: 1:11:12

They could absolutely do it In terms of, in terms of Apple pay or indeed Google pay, you could absolutely pay, you know, an amount into your podcast, your podcast app, to then pay out as you listen. All of that kind of stuff could happen very easily because Apple, of course, and Google have all of the regulatory, you know stuff to go away and do that. So, yeah, absolutely, and it's a frustration, but of course they're not actually doing that. But I guess, from their side, why would they do that if they're not necessarily going to earn any money out of it? Or maybe there is a way of earning money out of it, I don't know Well there would be because it could take a fee like the rest of it.

Sam Sethi: 1:11:58

You know, in the splits they could do things. I mean not not to the extent of 3%, but they could do things on a scale that could do do something. I suspect Tim can't even spell podcasting because it does nothing to the bottom line. Maybe doing micro payments through Apple Pay will actually give the Apple podcast team a revenue that they could then take back to Tim and say can we have some more features please? Sir.

James Cridland: 1:12:20

Yes, well, indeed, indeed, it's. Yes. It's always surprised me really, Apple's view on on all of this, but still, it's not going to be me that ends up changing it, is it Nope, normally?

Sam Sethi: 1:12:34

now. Yeah, the other thing we talked about just briefly earlier was the UK online safety bill. This week came out in the UK and I'm afraid this is going to cause a lot of problems in the UK. So watch this space. But other than that, James, that was my week. I'm just very happy to be back.

James Cridland: 1:12:51

Yes, yes, the UK online safety bill is quite a thing.

Sam Sethi: 1:12:55

What's happening? With you Hair flick.

James Cridland: 1:12:59

Well, so I am yes, I'm speaking here in Munich today, thursday, as we record this. Tomorrow, friday, I'm in Copenhagen for audio days in Denmark, which should be nice. On the way out, I have to say very, very impressed at Qantas, my airline, because there I was, got onto the plane in Brisbane, sat down at my seat and the head purser or whatever they are, you know, the person in charge on the plane walked over to me, put down the beer that I always order on the flight and says there's your beer, mr Cridland, welcome on board, you've been flying too much, James.

James Cridland: 1:13:50

And I thought that's really impressive. And I said to him how did you know? And he said oh well, you know, we know these things and went away. And I just thought that's really impressive. If you're going to turn around and you're going to, I mean, clearly they've got it on a. You know, on my customer record somewhere always orders this beer. But I just thought that's a very clever thing.

Sam Sethi: 1:14:14

So I suppose in first class you have to expect that because you know yes, I was not in first class.

James Cridland: 1:14:23

I was not in first class.

Sam Sethi: 1:14:24

You must be.

James Cridland: 1:14:24

Gold Plus. You must be that said I was not in.

James Cridland: 1:14:28

I was not in economy either. I got my first ever operational upgrade, where you walk onto the plane and they go oh actually, mr Cridland, we've changed your seat, so that was very nice. So again, full marks to them for that. But yes, but yes, I am platinum because I do do rather a lot of flying, you do, but still. So that was all good. But you know, accepting that I had a, you know, a good, a good time of it over the last couple of days, and looking forward to going home and then going to Mexico in a couple of weeks time and then not doing any more travel.

Sam Sethi: 1:15:05

So are you not going to Oktoberfest in Germany?

James Cridland: 1:15:10

Ah, now you see, you would have thought that Oktoberfest happens in October, wouldn't you, wouldn't you? No, it turns out, and in fact this is going to be my opening joke, because it turns out that, yes, you know, come to Munich in October. They said, oh, yes, please. I said because you know the Bavarians wouldn't be stupid enough to finish Oktoberfest on October the 3rd, would they? Oh, yes, they do so, yes, so none of that, although probably a good job, because, frankly, I couldn't think of anything worse than having, you know, drunk American tourists wandering around Munich.

Sam Sethi: 1:15:50

But German Weisbeer is worth having. Have you had Weisbeer?

James Cridland: 1:15:54

Oh yes, weisbeer and Weisbeer Dunkel, which is the dark version. Yeah, that's lovely, that's really good.

Sam Sethi: 1:15:58

That's the Curryverse.

James Cridland: 1:15:59

Oh, that is heavy. And in fact I had, yeah and the Curryverse. In fact, last night I went to a very nice taphouse brewery type place which had what did it have? It had 40 different beers available, no fosters, no Forex Gold. So obviously very, very strange. But yes, so that was really nice. So yes, they do do their beer very well, and what was the 39th?

Sam Sethi: 1:16:28

like James, how did you think that went?

James Cridland: 1:16:31

Do you know, I only had one because I'd already had a couple already. But I went in there because they did a, because they did beer and they also did, you know, sort of snacks and things, not Curryverse, but they did chili, I think. Anyway, it was all. It was all very nice. So quite enough of that. That's it for this week.

Sam Sethi: 1:16:51

Yes, you can give feedback to James and I by sending us a boostergram, and if your podcast doesn't support boost, come on then, grab a new app from podnewsnet. Forward slash new podcast apps.

James Cridland: 1:17:03

Yes, our music is from Studio Dragonfly. Our voiceover is Sheila D. We use clean feed for our main audio and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout podcast hosting made easy. Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.

Paul Vogel: 1:17:20

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