Speaker 1: 0:00

It's Friday, the 16th of February 2024.

Speaker 2: 0:04

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

Speaker 1: 0:13

Sam Suthey is away this week. I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News. I'm all on my lonesome today. It's just you and me. But in the chapters today, ACAST is in profit. For the first time, More things leave Spotify and it's good news from AntennaPod Plus hi, I'm David Locke.

Speaker 3: 0:33

I'm the founder of the Locked On Podcast Network and the radio announcer for the Utah Jazz. Later on this podcast I'll be talking about the one-on-one connections that we've built Locked On Podcast Network about.

Speaker 4: 0:43

Hi, I'm Amelia Kumber, head of growth and marketing at PodScribe, and later I will be talking about PodScribe's Q4PPB, the PodScribe Performance Benchmark Report.

Speaker 1: 0:53

They will. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprouts Podcast hosting made easy with easy and powerful tools, free learning materials and remarkable customer support, and we're sponsored by a new show called why your Podcast Isn't Growing. It's a show to help you get more listeners, and they've just posted how SA Grant grew his podcast to 50,000 monthly downloads using unconventional growth strategies. You can find why your podcast isn't growing wherever you go.

Speaker 2: 1:23

This podcast From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 1: 1:29

So let's dive in to the big story this week, which was a cast in profit. For the first time, I used the word profit in inverted commas. It was positive adjusted EBITDA. I always thought it was pronounced EBITDA, but Ross Adams ended up pronouncing it EBITDA, so EBITDA it will be from here on in that's.

Speaker 1: 1:48

According to its Q4P423 financial results, they made a positive number of US$1.5M in the quarter. It did, though, post an operational loss of US$7.3M. So in profit, not in profit, who knows. Anyway, sales grew by 18% last year, which is good news. Total listens went down by 12% after those changes in iOS 17. We'll come back to those a little bit later on. Those changes ended up costing ACAST $7.2M because they had to do a one-off contract revaluation. Now, $7.2m was essentially the operational loss that they posted that quarter. So who knows, they could have been in profit proper profit slightly earlier. But yeah, it's quite a big change, all because of those Apple Podcast changes in iOS 17. Now today in Pod News, a full look at how Apple Podcast changed in terms of iOS 17, and a full look at the job that Apple Podcasts did in terms of communicating it all. We've spoken to a bunch of people who understand all of the changes that were made because frankly it's a bit complicated and a bit in the weeds but it's well worth understanding. So you'll find that today in the Pod News newsletter. I say today, tonight, if you're in Australia and if you've just woken up and you're listening to this and it's a little bit early, then Pod News of course comes out at 6am Eastern. Another thing from ACAST, by the way, just as an interesting thing, the company earns four cents from every podcast listen. So 100 listens, $4, which is quite a nice thing to know. And, who knows, maybe you might want to evaluate your own podcast that way and see how much money it could be making.

Speaker 1: 3:45

Now this month, along with Buzzsprout, this podcast is sponsored by another podcast. It's a new show called why your Podcast Isn't Growing. It's not any old podcast growth show. There is a bit of a unique twist. So half of the shows, anthony and Teague have a Roast the Show session. They get one of their listeners onto the show. They give their podcaster live audit. It sounds terrifying. The other half of the show, every other Monday, a big podcaster getting more than 10,000 monthly downloads gives you a little bit of information. It's only five to 10 minutes long sharing the pivotal points of growth on their journey. It's worth a listen. There's also bite-size episodes every Wednesday and Friday as well. It's called why your Podcast Isn't Growing. You can find it wherever you got this podcast.

Speaker 1: 4:34

Now things have moved away from Spotify. Megan the Duchess of Sussex has signed with Lemonada Media. Lemonada Media get the first season of archetypes and in fact I think it's going to be the only season, from what I can understand which of course, was a podcast that Megan the Duchess of Sussex or Megan Markle, to give her her muggle name ended up doing when she was exclusive to Spotify. But also Lemonada Media are going to develop a new show with the podcast network as well. So interesting seeing one ex-Spotify exclusive moving on. Another ex-Spotify exclusive has also announced that she is moving on Brené Brown, bringing her former Spotify podcast to Vox Media. Unlocking us and Dare to Lead will be available on all platforms. New seasons of both will be launched within the month. So they say, and I am interested to know what it does to her book sales. It was always said that her book sales went down when she went to be exclusive on Spotify. Now that she's no longer exclusive on Spotify, will her book sales go up again. You would kind of assume that they possibly would. So interesting to have a look at that.

Speaker 1: 5:49

Spotify are also doing some closing down stuff of their own Because they've managed to get rid of a bunch of their own tools. They now have a partnership with Riverside. Now if you're a Spotify user, then you will get Riverside's free plan from here on in that offers unlimited single track recording. I said earlier on in the week that it only offers up to two hours free to get going. That's not entirely true. It offers unlimited single track recording. But that's what you get. And what have they taken out? Well, they've taken out a bunch of things. They've taken out music and talk. That thing allowed you to present a music show. You might remember it was launched as shows with music. It's not called that anymore. It's called music and talk. So there we are. Interactive audience tool voice messages has also been removed. Remote recording tool record with friends and background music and sounds. The company tells us it's a shift away from legacy creation tooling and towards tools for better audience growth and engagement.

Speaker 1: 6:52

I had an email from one person that is really quite sad about that, because they used to record a podcast on their lunch break, walking through the park, using the Spotify app or using the anchor app, presumably, and, yeah, and they're not going to be able to do that anymore. So I think that that's rather a shame. And I would also say I can't remember how long this show the Pod News Weekly Review and indeed Pod News Daily has been on Spotify, but many, many years. I got the first email from Spotify only yesterday saying one fans, one fans, one fans have responded to your Q&A. You've got one new responses.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Somebody at Spotify doesn't understand, obviously, single and plural words. Anyway, your audience wants to join the conversation about pod news daily podcasting news. This has never happened before. This is the first time that somebody has actually bothered to leave a little message. I'm not bothered to read it, of course, but that's after how many years of being on that platform. Very strange, strange, old thing. But anyway, that's what's going on in terms of Spotify. Earlier we heard from Acast and they're doing well with revenue, so we thought we'd have a chat with the boss of Locked On Sports, david Locke, to see how he's doing. They're doing some interesting things in terms of communicating with listeners directly using SMS, which I asked him about, and, as you know, I am a consumer professional and at no point did I forget to change the microphone and record all of this on the MacBook internal microphone. Oh, no, no, no, that clearly didn't happen. Anyway, first I wondered how his revenues were going.

Speaker 3: 8:32

So I'm going to knock hard because I do understand what's going on in the industry. We're doing great, but I think we have a unique product. It's why some of the SMS stuff also works for us in the same way. But we're able to sell to a client local passion on a national scale. There's really nothing like sports right.

Speaker 3: 9:01

Whether it's a cricket match in Australia or whether it's a Super Bowl Sunday, the whole world stops.

Speaker 3: 9:08

Whether it's a soccer match in Europe or whether it's just your local basketball game, last night in Salt Lake City 20,000 people were going bananas during the. You just don't get that anywhere, that passion, that connection. So for us, when we take the combination of the local host, who's your local expert, who's connecting every day, we do it Monday through Friday, so we, our listeners, or we call them every dayers, they're with us every day. That's a pretty amazing connection for an advertiser to be able to tap into that relationship between the fan of their favorite team, where they wear the jersey and the sweatshirt, to the host that brings them that content, and we're able to do that across an entire network. It's about a million listens a day with that type of connection. We're doing beautifully with ad revenue right now, but we have a unique product that is maybe not having some of the other problems that the rest of the industry is susceptible to right now because of that connection and the format that's different than what everybody else is doing.

Speaker 1: 10:18

Yeah, it's the community of common interest. It's why radio is stroke was so large and I guess why your network is as large as well.

Speaker 3: 10:28

I mean, I was a long time talk show host, right, that's those people I used to at first, I'll admit, like when I was in my very baby stages this and someone would walk up to me and talk to me.

Speaker 3: 10:37

I was very uncomfortable, I didn't know what to do about it and then somewhere dawned on me like oh, wait a second, this person's driving home with me every day in their 35 minute commute and listening to the show. They just spent two and a half hours with me a week. I don't talk to many people two and a half hours a week. So the connection that we have and that's what our number is now at 30 minutes, where our shows are supposed to be about 30 minutes a day, if you're listening to four of them, four of the five, I'll call you every day and you're spending two hours with me. Like luckily for my wife, I don't spend two hours a week with her. It's a really intimate connection that we have with our listeners and I do think that's where, when suddenly I'm talking about one of our sponsors, it's a connection. It's also where I think that connection can come out in many other aspects for us in a business sense.

Speaker 1: 11:25

What impact have you seen from the changes in Apple Podcasts recently? The most recent iOS update.

Speaker 3: 11:31

With having a source of your level here in this conversation. There was zero chance that I wasn't asking you that question before I left today, so I will. What do you think industry standard is at this point? Because I'm super curious on that. I know what our number is and I think we're. I ran them, literally ran them last hour. I think we're losing about half the audience that the industry is, which is really interesting to me because I would have thought, quite honestly, daily podcasts we're putting out 250 episodes a year. Our hosts have been here with us for six or seven years that they're getting close to their 2,000th episode with us. If we had some gaps of weird downloads in Apple, I thought I was reading about that with some real trepidation. We're not seeing the 20, 25% that everybody else is. Are you seeing industry standards at 20, 25% right now?

Speaker 1: 12:27

Look, I've seen some numbers from some people where their figures have crated and they've literally halved the total amount of numbers that they've been getting. But quite a lot of the numbers that I'm seeing around 10% down total. It really depends on the type of show. I would be surprised that you weren't more impacted. I'll be honest, given that you are doing an awful lot of daily shows, those are the shows which seem to have been affected the most, I guess.

Speaker 3: 13:02

So we haven't had that crater, that catastrophic aspect of things, which is fortunate, I think maybe our listeners, clearly we didn't have as many false numbers. We're still, and then when you add the video views, we're still having really tremendous growth despite overall have tremendous growth, despite the fact that the podcast listeners are down I mean, everyone's are down with the recalibration but our overall numbers are still trending really nicely.

Speaker 1: 13:30

Now talking about the ad revenue, the removal of third-party cookies shouldn't be having an effect, because podcasting doesn't use cookies, but I guess attribution services do right. Are you concerned about the whole cookie Armageddon that is plans to happen any moment now?

Speaker 3: 13:50

So we've had such a good renewal rate on our clients recently. Any change is unnerving right Because our renewal rate is so consistent with our clients. Like I can speak to my show, like my clients have been with me and maybe they've been with you know they've now been with me for eight, seven, eight years. I'm assuming that nothing hopefully some attribution change doesn't change the loyalty after seven or eight years. But we just are. I think our five biggest clients all just renewed for a second if not third year.

Speaker 3: 14:20

So anything that changes in that when that's going on as a company can we just keep everything the same. Like you know, changes always can bother someone right. And attribution, I think, is good because it makes our clients feel comfortable about what they're receiving. Again I kind of go back to we're delivering a unique product in that connection between the fan and their host at the most passionate moments. That is maybe different than a national show that's just talking about the chiefs or the Niners or the Bucks or the Celtics on a given night, and so I would assume that we'll still have the same success rate for our clients.

Speaker 1: 15:01

So what else are you doing to earn revenue?

Speaker 3: 15:04

I think obviously our parent company made an investment in a newsletter company recently. I think we'll see a way to do that. And then I'm a big proponent, for multitude of reasons, of the kind of the texting format, the direct one on one connection. I mean, it's just already from what I've said to you today, james, like it. Just it intuitively matches right. We're talking about fans walking into a stadium. If I have an injury update 35 minutes before the game and I can hit you on a text message that's of great value to you. You really care If I write up an extended text about the game and the three points I thought were most important after that game for you as you come home.

Speaker 3: 15:44

In this day and age, the idea that you're supposed to search through X or search through something else to go find the news about the game you just experienced, that's an antiquated idea. So let's hit you directly If I'm going to. It can also be as simple as, by the way, shows posted today. Here's the four things we discuss. Well, now you're driving listens for me also, so I'm a big fan of our.

Speaker 3: 16:08

Whole model is based on this connectivity I keep coming back to. I don't mean to be a broken record about it, but it's truly what we're talking about. So if I can hit you with a text message, well, that's increasing our relationship. If you do it through, we're doing it through subtext, they literally you're texting back and now you have actually do have a one on one interchange. Let's just go with just a basic play here for a second. James, you happen to be a Utah Jazz fan. Now this is new for you. You remember the greatness of Australian Joe Ingalls, who was on our roster for a long time, and the other young Australian, dante X, and as a child you chose the Jazz as your team because you had these two Australians on the team. I know all these names.

Speaker 3: 16:46

Always. Yes, okay, they are great Australians who played in the NBA. I should have gone to Lauren Jackson, one of the great women players of all time, who was the Seattle Storm and won a championship, and another Aussie so. But let's say you're a fan of the Jazz because you grew up as an Australian and this was your NBA team. You were watching it two o'clock in the morning on some grainy feed and now all of a sudden I'm connecting with you on a one on one text message or I send you a note about hey, joe Ingalls, over the last 10 games, are shooting 42% from three. And then you fire back to me hey, I noticed Joe was doing this with his shoes. Do you know what shoes he's wearing? And I go check with Joe and say what in he? Oh, he just signed a new shoes those are his autism shoes to about his son, jacob. And now I've connected with you. You're listening to my show more. Now You're not just pleased with the text message, but you're now more connected to the team and me. So you're not going to listen. If you were listening to my show three times a week, you're now going to listen a fourth time. Well, that's a 33% increase in my audience right there on that one listener, right Like that's. That's the math. We're playing by doing a five day a week podcast that if we can get you to listen three days, that's great, but if we get you a fourth, you just pumped our numbers 33, 25%, depending how you look at it, and so that's. I really believe that the subtexting format is building that connectivity and I believe that we're providing a great service for a fan right, direct content. I think we're increasing connection.

Speaker 3: 18:12

And then the last thing was just like let's not ignore the elephant in the room. X is a disaster. Like I mean, I can post something on X and all I got is five porn stars coming back to me telling me about how great my post was and whether I wanted to go check out their fans only site like or whatever it's called. Like it's just a joke, right. Like I mean, I used to post something on X and I have, like I think I have 50,000 followers. I don't even know anymore, but if I posted something about the jazz on X, I'd have 50 people respond to me in some capacity.

Speaker 3: 18:41

I now have three humans and 17 bots. Like they're not people, right Like this, and it's the same 17 every single time, with their various promotions. So X is a disaster. So why are we? Why are my hosts this is the thing I talk to my host why are you putting your content there? Yeah, yeah, like, don't put your content there because nobody's reading it, so put your content to fans who've signed up for something that you connect, connected to you, and get some value back from that. I mean, I get it. We're like obsessed with the dopey and rush of a fake number on the bottom that tells us that somebody actually viewed it, but nobody did.

Speaker 1: 19:14

But I think that's the difference with you, in that you are doing a lot of one to one stuff. You have newsletters, which, of course, are one to one, because I needed to give you my email address, sms numbers as well, you know. Again, that's a one to one conversation and that's not something you can necessarily get from Apple podcast subscriptions. That's not something that you can ordinarily get from podcasting at all, and I think that that's an interesting difference of what's locked on is doing here to get closer to your audience.

Speaker 3: 19:48

Yeah, I mean, it's a funny concept because it's a play by play. Announcer, which is my for the Utah Jazz, which is my other job, I literally write down on the side of my primary prep sheet James 41. Maybe you'll take that I don't know how old you are.

Speaker 3: 20:07

Athletic new fan because he just found out about Joe Ingalls and then I kept I build that broadcast that night for that fan, like that's how I do it. So the goal, the concept, is that a five broadcast directly for you in a one on one format. So let's say you're a new fan. So I might explain the rules a little bit more. I might, in my mind you know, if it's a, for example, if we have a five, a New York game for us, that's a five o'clock game in the commute. That's a different broadcast than a game that's airing at 830 at night to fans that are really consciously going to the radio. That's the five o'clock game is going to be more storytelling, more fundamental. The night broadcast probably be more stats geek. Those are diehard fans if they're tuning in.

Speaker 3: 20:48

But it's all based on a one on one connection. That's my point here is that, like I'm broadcasting every night as a play by play announcer, I think about one person. So I try to get our hosts all 200 of them do the same thing, like find the individual you're doing this show for. If you do the show for one individual, the 10,000 will all be happy, I promise, cause they'll all feel that direct connection, this one on one type. That's what we should be doing in our podcast, not just in our newsletter, in our SMS, in everything we do in communication. That's how we should be doing this.

Speaker 1: 21:21

I hear a hundred radio consultants agreeing with you. David, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3: 21:26

My pleasure and thank you for your work. I'm a. I'm a. You have my email address. I'm a reader every morning. It's a. You've really done a. You've done a fabulous work for us in the industry, for those of us who've made a living or making a living out of it. I really can't thank you enough. It's a. It's a fabulous resource. It's a incredible collection. If someone's I assume we're talking an ecosystem where everybody has subscribed, but for some reason you're new to this and if not subscribed and you're interested in the podcast industry, I think it's a must. So I congratulate you. I hope it's been fruitful for you. I'm sure it has been. The work has been appreciated and I hope you have great dividends from it.

Speaker 1: 22:01

David Locke from Locke on Sports SMS, seemingly doing quite a good job, and I would point out from all of that that actually, the big story there is Crossout comments. Crossout comments are a really big thing for him. He gets Crossout comments through SMS messages, and that's fine. Let's get Crossout comments running using something. It'd be nicer, though, if Crossout comments worked through other platforms as well. I know that lots of people are working on that. I know that lots of people have been working on that for the last two years. We've never got any any further further, but nevertheless, david Locke, talking a fair amount about the real benefits of one-to-one communication with your audience so good to hear that. Hopefully, that will spur us all on to getting those Crossout comments up and running. Now it's only the middle of the month. We've already beaten last year's number of respondents for the Pod News report card, which is good news. If you've not taken part yet, please do give us your views on the large podcast platforms. They're read by each of them and it really helps them understand how they're doing. You'll hear the results at Evolutions by Podcast Movement this March. I will be on stage and I will be talking through the results, and it will be a rather more scripted experience than this is, so that's good news for everybody. So, yes, pod News report card is on the Pod News website. Podnewsnetcom is where to go to fill that in. I'll be very, very, very grateful.

Speaker 1: 23:32

Another story this week from PodScribe. Podscribe released a new set of data about the effectiveness of advertising and it turns out ads are doing better after iOS 17. At last, some good news in terms of iOS 17. It's a great piece of information from Podscribe. There's all kinds of information in there, including DAI versus baked in the best performing placement groups. So that's whether it's a pre-roll or a mid-roll except we're not allowed to call them that anymore, apparently. Top performing show genres and more. I spoke to Amelia Coomba from Podscribe to learn a little more.

Speaker 4: 24:11

We are a third-party independent IAB certified. I love to throw that in podcast advertising attribution, analytics and verification. Company and provider.

Speaker 1: 24:23

So you do a quarterly performance benchmarks report. What were the highlights of it for the last quarter of 2023?

Speaker 4: 24:32

Yeah, so some interesting things we saw here.

Speaker 4: 24:35

Primarily, and I think one of the important things to call out is there's been a lot of discussion around some of the iOS 17 updates and looking at visitor rate, conversion rate and some of those, let's say, higher funnel metrics that are really critical to understanding not just how things are performing but where they're going, where there's room to optimize.

Speaker 4: 24:57

We saw some improvements there and obviously we can't pinpoint this 100% to one given thing. It's the ecosystem is evolving in general, but when it comes to visitor rate, in Q3, we saw about a 0.47% visitor rate and again, visitor rate is really how many visitors that were exposed to an ad, over the impressions that were delivered, came to the site. So it was about 0.47% in Q3 of 2023. And since Q4, it actually went up to 0.56. And again, with the iOS 17 updates removing I believe it can be about 10 to 30% of these back catalog automated downloads, we saw an improvement, which I think is a real indicator that the industry is moving in the right direction. We're standardizing what a download means and again, we're actually able to attribute and we're seeing higher rates of genuine visitors going to people sites.

Speaker 1: 25:53

Yeah, so although the Apple podcasts changes have resulted in significantly fewer podcast downloads, we do know from your data release that they are being listened to, which is really helpful actually.

Speaker 4: 26:08

Which is huge, yeah, and I think again as an industry working together because this was the iOS 17 stuff was really a collaborative effort across the board. Outside of those download numbers being a little bit decreased, I think we expected and we were hoping to see better performance, because these were genuine people listening to podcast episodes with ads that again these ads had impacts and drove people to the site. So again, a really strong top of funnel metric that we are able to see. But we also saw James conversion rate increase as well. So not as high, from that 0.47 to 5.6, but we saw it go in Q3 from 0.24% to 0.27%. So not only are we driving more genuine people to site and we're driving them to site at a better rate, but we're also converting them at a higher rate as well, which, again, it's just one step after another to continue driving and, it may, improving out the impact of podcast ads.

Speaker 1: 27:07

So podcast advertising is working better, which is always a good thing. To know Pre-rolls and mid-rolls and post-rolls I know you don't call them that anymore because it's not always very clear what's a pre-roll and what's a mid-roll, but which of those sorts of things work better? Does it work better the further in you are to a podcast or as close you are to the start of the podcast? Does that work best?

Speaker 4: 27:33

Yeah. So again we saw that what we call the first group, which typically is a mid-roll, because pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll I mean everybody has different terms for how they categorize them so we look at it as those ad groups and in Q3, we saw the first group really outperform the second group and the third group, and this quarter it still was the highest performer, but by a much lesser degree, which was really really interesting, to the point that we almost can't make the definitive conclusion that placement one or that first group outperforms the others, which I think again speaks to a lot of different things. But ad creative is becoming an important topic and people are really optimizing for that, especially if they can see some of those top of funnel metrics from a pixel-based attribution provider, whether it's us or Spotify or you name it, and so that was interesting because again we saw that it still was the leading performer, but it was much less of a degree when it came to its performance compared to the other placements.

Speaker 1: 28:39

Yeah, which is really useful to learn, and actually so mid-rolls and pre-rolls, or at least the first and the second placements, seem to be very, very close now in terms of how well they perform very, very close.

Speaker 1: 28:55

Two other things that I'm interested in. One of them is HostRed versus well PresenterRed or a pre-recorded ad. I always find it complicated because, again, our industry hasn't yet worked out exactly what we want to call things. But HostRed, ie a live read, versus a pre-recorded read, which some people call a presenter read, which I find very confusing. What works better in terms of that? I guess HostRed ads, live reads work the best right.

Speaker 4: 29:26

Yes, and that is what we found. We actually saw the percentage of performance where those HostRed ads were used actually increased. So in Q3, it was almost a 50-50 split 44% that were not HostRed, they performed worse. And then 52% of all of the ads performed better and they were HostRed and we actually saw that switch. So, answering the question is HostRed better in Q4? About 67% of all the ads that we looked at, comparing both HostRed and ProducersRed, they performed. So we did see that uptick and I think the interesting sort of next steps to break that down a little bit more is are we seeing more HostRed? Are we seeing less HostRed? And we obviously take those things into account when we're looking at this data. But I think that understanding the impact of what a HostRed ad and that influencer that is a podcast host talking about a brand and how it can be easier to convince people to purchase when they hear it from that third party we're continuing to see really outperform.

Speaker 1: 30:30

Yeah, which is really good, and ad lengths. The longer the ad, the better. It works kind of up to a point, right.

Speaker 4: 30:38

Yes, yes, so this one was tricky and we used what was called like a correlation coefficient analysis, and so it's basically a way to compare or measure two variables across a certain data set, and so we saw that the ad length had a 0.8% or a 0.8%. It's basically a number correlation between the length and the visitor, which in layman's terms basically means as ad length increases, visitor rate also increases. And what we also saw more interestingly was that, on average reads that are two plus minutes long, 120 seconds plus actually outperformed anything that was 60 seconds or less by about 20%. So the longer the ad read, we are seeing a direct correlation to that improving performance, and I think again, that speaks to a lot of different things. But yeah, there is a strong direct correlation between the length and then how well you can drive visitors to site.

Speaker 1: 31:40

Yeah, and I guess it's. You know, if you're talking for more than two minutes about a particular product, you're giving more and more reasons why somebody should go and have a look at the website, and so therefore, actually you know it's just because you can give more reasons. I guess is that right.

Speaker 4: 31:57

Yeah, and I think you know a lot of it is exactly that, but you know we'll see ad lengths that, again, are above those two minutes Sometimes. You know we saw the 105 second spot actually, you know, have the greatest correlation to increasing visitors to site and people don't sell, or publishers don't sell, 105 second spots, right? So I think it really speaks to the fact that exactly what you said you know these hosts are, or you know they're, pre produced. Most hosts are talking about the brand and the product. They're sharing their personal stories. You know they're going really above and beyond just whatever that script though those talking points were, because they, you know, personally resonated with that product.

Speaker 1: 32:38

Well, it's a great report and I know that it comes out every quarter. There's quite a lot of detail in there and it's sometimes can be quite complicated for somebody that's not embedded in this kind of stuff to fully understand. I'll be honest. But where can we find the report and learn a little bit more?

Speaker 4: 32:56

Yeah, so all you have to do is go to pod scribecom. We've got an announcement banner on there. It's pretty hard to miss and you'll be directed to, you know, basically a button that allows you to view it. All we ask is that you enter your email and you'll be able to view and download the report right there. So, yeah, pod scribecom super simple and, like you said, we'll be putting these out every quarter.

Speaker 4: 33:19

We're continuing to improve them, not only from an analysis perspective. As you know, we're looking at more data and taking into consideration you know what. You know both buyers and sellers are looking to have answered. But you know we're also adding a new thing. So this, you know, this quarter we added in some more details about how podcasts versus streaming performed and you know what are the top performing show genres. So you know we're always interested in improving these and you know we encourage everybody to. You know, drop us a note if they have anything that they'd like specifically to be analyzed or to look at. But yeah, they've been really, really great so far and I think our helping sort of just, you know, push really how podcast advertising is performing and helping more buyers get into the space.

Speaker 1: 34:01

Well, it's super useful stuff. Amelia, thank you so much for your time today Of course Podcast events on the pod news weekly review.

Speaker 1: 34:09

Yes, events are happening and I'm looking forward to getting back on a plane next month. Podcasting is coming to South by Southwest, that is, in early March, which I'm not going to far to Texas. For me, however, podcast movement evolutions is happening in LA. In fact, let me tell you where else I am actually going, because I'm going to a vast amount of exciting places before podcast movement evolutions. So, as you can hear typing in the background, having a quick peek, there we go, here we are. So I will be in Oslo, in Norway, on March 15. The Norwegian local radio association are getting to speaking things from me, one of them talking about podcasting tools and one of them talking about other things. Maybe I will see you there, who knows? Then Radio Days Europe in Munich, in Germany, march the 17th to the 19th, I'll be celebrating my birthday in Munich and looking forward to that. I've got a day in London on March 21. Not quite sure what I'm doing there yet. I might be speaking at City University of London, which Sam spoke at about three or four weeks or so ago. Can't let Sam have all of the glory? So hopefully I'll be doing that, followed by evolutions by podcast movement in Los Angeles. I'm actually rock up in Los Angeles a couple of days early, so I will be kicking my heels around LA and looking forward to seeing a bit of the place. That'll be quite nice. So, evolutions very much looking forward to that and I'm looking forward to that, and one of the reasons why I'm looking forward to that is that the infinite dial 2024 for the US will be unveiled at evolutions by podcast movement. That's happening on March, the 28th. It's the gold standard study from Edison Research, america's longest running survey of digital media consumer behavior, and this year, with support from Odyssey, cumulus Media and Sirius XM Media, it's the number that we all sit and wait for to find out exactly how many people are listening to podcasts and to many other things as well. So it's worth a peek at the Infinite Dial 2024. You can read the Infinite Dial 2023 on Edison Research's website right now.

Speaker 1: 36:27

What else is happening? The New Zealand Podcasting Summit is on May 11th in Auckland and the podcast show in London is happening on the 22nd to the 23rd of May in London. I will be there for that. I'm kicking my heels in New York on May, the 27th. May the 29th to the 31st I'm in Orlando for Momentum 24. And then up in Toronto for Radio Days North America in June, june the 3rd to the 4th, so hopefully I might see some of you there. The beer situation in Toronto is much improved. I was very grateful to find out when I was there recently, so looking forward to popping up and seeing rather more of those. Anyway, there are more events, both paid for and free, at Pod News virtual events or events in a place with people and if you're organising something, tell the world about it. It's free to be listed at podnewsnet slash events.

Speaker 2: 37:24

The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 1: 37:29

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter, and here's where James talks technology this week. And firstly, congratulations to AntennaPod, an open source podcast app for Android. It's a really good app. It works really well. It looks simple, straightforward. It's an app where everything happens on your device, so they don't have a central server keeping tabs on what you're doing. So that's a good thing. Now, one of the things that they have said is that, according to Google Play, they have hit 150,000 monthly active users, which is great news. The app saw a lot of growth on September the 26th, and why is September the 26th an important date? Well, that was the day that it was announced that Google podcasts is to close. So quite a lot of that growth in fact, most of the growth for AntennaPod is in the US. It's in mainly in use in the US and in Germany, which is where quite a lot of people who work on that product work, and, of course, it's properly translated into German. So why not? One of the volunteer project maintainers told us, while we undoubtedly have a small market share, we're proud of this increase and so you should be. And, unlike iOS, android users actually have the choice of other app stores as an open app. You'll find AntennaPod also listed on fDrive. Fdrive doesn't give any user data at all. My suspicion, because AntennaPod is by far away the best podcast app on fDrive. My suspicion is that you'll see probably that again in terms of fDrive. So they're doing very nicely.

Speaker 1: 39:03

Other things, just to mention. If you want an OPML feed of the latest podcasts that we've mentioned in Pod News, then our new podcast trailers page now has an OPML feed which, hopefully, is updating itself. That's what. That's what I've coded it to do anyway, so pop along and you'll find it. Podnewsnet, slash trailers, truefans that Sam's thing. He has launched a podcast RSS feed podcasting 2.0 validator.

Speaker 1: 39:31

He's supposed to be on holiday. He's down here in Australia. He's currently in a place called Nusa, which is to the north of us, about two or so hours to the north of us, except he's going down to Sydney again next week, followed by coming up and doing this show from Brisbane, which will be fun. But yes, he seems to be hard at work. So have a holiday, sam. Have a holiday.

Speaker 1: 39:54

And did we mention a new website explaining what podcasting 2.0 is all about? I mentioned it last week chatting with Dave. Podcasting 2.org is the website for you to go to. It's looking even smarter this week. Daniel has done a ton of additional work and, as you might have suspected, that website is completely open source. We'd really appreciate your help in expanding it, and in fact, we've had one Spanish speaker who's quite keen in translating the whole lot into Spanish, so that would be pretty good. It would be nice if we could translate it into other languages as well. So if you fancy any of that, then podcast 2.org and just have a click around and you'll find the GitHub repository for that, and that would be a good thing.

Speaker 2: 40:39

Boostergram corner corner corner on the Pod News Weekly Review.

Speaker 1: 40:44

Yes, it's our favorite time of the week. Well, it's my favorite time of the week. It's Boostergram corner, and this is where I read boosts from both the Pod News Weekly Review and the Pod News Daily. And the Pod News Daily had a thousand sets from Andrew Grummit. I was wondering who Andrew Grummit was and it turns out that Adam Curry has sent us 10,000 sets. Thank you, adam, for the Pod News Weekly Review, for this very show explaining who Andrew Grummit was.

Speaker 1: 41:10

He was one of the first developers of podcast applications ever. He invented iPodder, which you might remember. It had a lemon. It had a little lemon as a logo, but it wasn't a lemon. It was a very good piece of software. I remember using that. In fact I remember linking to it from the Virgin Radio website way back when. He's an unsung hero of podcasting, says Adam, thank you for the 10,000 sets, adam, and thank you for the 1,000 sets from Andrew. And he is busy working on something clever which he's not quite ready to tell people about yet, but when he does I'm sure he will.

Speaker 1: 41:46

Thank you to Kyren Roveduckz double, two, double, two Sats, he has said publisher feeds sound like exactly what I need. I've been thinking of creating an All Feeds podcast, and this would suit perfectly. Go Pod Sage, go Pod Sage, indeed. Yes, looking forward to publisher feeds, I think there is a Pod News publisher feed but I don't think it's to spec, so I should probably take a look at that. More Roveduckz from Dave Jackson double two, double, two Sats. Really enjoyed the first time.

Speaker 1: 42:15

Pod Festa oh yes, that was Claire Waite-Brown from last week and I am now trying, says Dave, to figure out what being American means. Is trying to figure out what being American is something an American would do? No, no, it's not. No, yes, big American it's all a bit. American is a phrase that I think, if you're an American you might not ever get. It's like the word ironic and the fact that you don't understand that. Or, like you know, spelling of the word color or pronouncing the letter Z, all of those things you don't fully understand. But that's all OK, dave, we like you as you are, a thousand Sats from Lehman Creations. It was good to hear Dave Jones on this episode. Thanks, dave. It was good to hear Dave Jones on the episode last week. If you missed it, go back and you can find that it was very good. So thank you, dave, and appreciate the Sats. Andy, it's certainly better doing this show with somebody else rather than just doing it with yourself. It sounds as if you go a little bit sort of mad doing it yourself. Alan C Paul, 777 Sats.

Speaker 1: 43:28

Love Claire's discussion about Pod Festa. Yes, well, we're back on to Claire Waite-Brown Again. Great to know that podcasters outside the US felt right at home at Pod Festa and already he says liking what I see at podcast2.org. Yes, very early days, we need pictures, by the way, definitely need pictures. The more pictures that we can get the better. Otherwise it might be that boy shouting at the unplugged microphone if we're not careful. Podcast2.org is where to go for that Creativity. Found 1000 Sats on fountain, I should point out. Thanks so much for having me on the show. That's Claire Waite-Brown, shout out to that random guy in the queue for the bar. Yes, indeed, absolutely correct. That was Medus, apparently. So now we know.

Speaker 1: 44:15

And Gene Bean 5000 Sats, the amount of data Triton must be pulling from data brokers to get all those detailed metrics about the listeners of podcasters. Just reminds me. He says how surveilled we all are by private industry. I dream of a day when the surveillance economy is not so ubiquitous. Indeed, and I think one of the things around Triton's data that I find interesting is that you can't actually know very clearly whether or not your data is going to Triton, and one of the problems I know that many of the other podcasting companies have is that Triton is actually owned by iHeartMedia. So what you're basically doing, if you're giving all of your stats to Triton you actually give your entire log files to Triton to comb through is that you are giving them to iHeart. Now, clearly, triton are very good at keeping all of that data separate. I know the folks there quite well. I know that they will be doing a very good job of doing that, but you can also see business pressures and all of that must occasionally rear their ugly head. So I'm always slightly nervous about the amount of data that used to go to Triton and still does go to Triton in terms of that and quite what they end up doing with it. But, as I say, I know a lot of people from Triton and they're lovely, but they might be lovely now, but who knows what the future might bring.

Speaker 1: 45:50

Thank you so much for everybody that's sent in boosts. Sam and I do share the boosts and we really appreciate it, particularly since Sam has discovered that he's flying up to Brisbane and it's quite cheap, but flying back again to Sydney the following day is really, really, really expensive, because there's an up-and-coming singer called Taylor Swift I think that's her name and she's playing in Sydney, and that has made all of the airplane flights incredibly expensive. I think it's somewhere like $600, which is Australian dollars, so they're not real but nevertheless very expensive. So the SATs and the support that you give us are all super helpful and super useful in terms of that, and one of the things I should be doing, of course, is saying thank you to those people who are supporting us with fiat money, with actual dollars. So thank you to Dave Jackson, to Mike Hamilton, to Alec Armandaris, to Dave Jones, to Matt Medeiros, marshall Brown and Cameron Moll for your very kind amounts of money. I can tell you that we are earning currently, through Buzzsprout, $29 per month from that. And what else can I tell you? I can also tell you the Buzzsprout ads, which is a little thing that earns us money. Occasionally, you might hear an ad in this very podcast I hope he doesn't make it to the YouTube one, because that wouldn't be allowed and over 20 months, over 20 months. We have earned $240 from that. In case you're curious, buzzsprout, of course, are a sponsor.

Speaker 1: 47:42

So what's happened for you this week, james? Well, I'm glad you asked, james. I have spent much of the week trying to find out why the Pod News website has been falling over religiously. After about 24 hours and I think I found out it's because the standard version of Apache that ships on Amazon Linux 2023 doesn't seem to have a timeout on it, and so everything was filling up because of all of those podcast pages that I run and, of course, they go off and they look at other people's RSS feeds and other people's images and stuff like that, and not everybody's servers all works, and so that was pulling my server down, so that was a very hateful experience, but I think, touchwood, that's the second time that that has happened in this podcast, but I think, touchwood, we fixed that, so hopefully no more of that.

Speaker 1: 48:32

I've also been fiddling around with CloudFront's turnstile thing because I was getting completely swamped by random robots who are subscribing to Pod News, which is lovely, but no, stop it. Thankfully, I've got a double opt-in, so none of those actually ever made it to the figures, but they're filling up databases and I didn't like it. So I think we've managed to fix all of that. Now what I may have done is I may have broken other websites that rely on that code as well. So hopefully I've fixed all of that.

Speaker 1: 49:04

But yes, that's been fun and what I am doing is for next week, looking forward to drinks. We've got a lot of drinks which we are having on Thursday night when Mr Sethi is up here in sunny Brisbane, we are going to be having drinks at well, I'll tell you where they are at Felons, which is under the Story Bridge, in the CBD, which means the centre of Brisbane, the central business district, and it's not a comment on anything else, the CBD, anyway, yes, so looking forward to doing that. That's on Thursday night. You are more than welcome to turn up.

Speaker 1: 49:45

If you wouldn't mind, do a quick search for Humanitix Pod News. That's Humanitix Pod News and you can just get your name down, just in case we need to change the venue If it pelts it down with rain, which it's been doing with monotonous regularity over the last couple of months. So that would be nice. So please do come along if you happen to be in Brisbane, but, of course, as most of you aren't, please don't try and travel all the way here because, as you've just heard, taylor Swift and that's it for this week.

Speaker 1: 50:16

Thank you so much to our guests, to Amelia and to David. You can also listen to the Pod News Daily it says here, and subscribe to the Pod News Newsletter for more of these stories and much more. You can give feedback to Sam and I by sending this show a booster gram, and if your podcast app doesn't support boosts, then you should be grabbing a new app for podcasting2.org. Our music is from Studio Dragonfly, our voiceover is Sheila Dee. We use clean feed for our main audio and we're hosted and sponsored by why your Podcast Isn't Growing a new podcast for podcasters and by Buzzsprout Podcast hosting made easy. We'll catch you next week.

Speaker 2: 50:55

Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at PodNewsnet.

Speaker 1: 51:01

Tell your friends and grow the show. And support us. The Pod News Weekly.

Speaker 2: 51:06

Review will return next week. Keep listening.