Podnews Weekly Review
The last word in podcasting news.
Every Friday, James Cridland and Sam Sethi review the week's top stories from Podnews; and interview some of the biggest names making the news.
Support the show at https://weekly.podnews.net - or hit the boost button! Sponsored by Buzzsprout: start podcasting - keep podcasting!
Podnews Weekly Review
Bumper's dashboard; Apple's 30%; PodEngine.ai
We chat with Dan Misener from Bumper about the new Bumper Dashboard and a different way to measure your podcast success.
And with Joe Tannorella from Pod Engine, about his new podcast tool.
Connect With Us:
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Full interviews at https://extra.podnews.net/
It's Friday, the 16th of August 2024.
Speaker 2:The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.
James Cridland:Yes, I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and.
Sam Sethi:I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of TrueFans.
James Cridland:In the chapters. Today there are changes at Libsyn. Apple want 30% of your donations Plus.
Joe Tannorella:Hi, it's Joe Tanarello here, co-founder at podengineai. I'll be on later to talk about how PodEngine is an audio intelligence platform. We're audio mining podcasts at scale to extract deep analysis and insights across the world of podcasting.
Dan Misener:And I'm Dan Meisner, co-founder of Bumper, and later we're going to talk about the Bumper dashboard, our attempt to take some of the hassle out of podcast measurement.
James Cridland:See if you can guess which one of those two used to be on the radio. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout, with the tools, support and community to make sure you keep podcasting, start podcasting, keep podcasting with Buzzsprout. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.
Sam Sethi:Sprout From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review. Ah, James, hello. So this week, James, I just want to kick off with a little little tidbit that you left. How many employees are left at Libsyn, James?
James Cridland:Well, I don't know how many are left at Libsyn, but I do know how many have left over the past 12 months. I have a list of 28 names, 28 people who have gone. John W Gibbons, the interim CEO, left the company last week, but the company has yet to make any formal announcements. In fact, it's going to be more than 28 now, because we've just found out that Pear Networks was sold to your Online. Now your Online is a company out of Amsterdam, schmockner Pancake, and they own a number of internet companies, including Gandhi, who I use to get all of my domains through. So there we are. The announcement from your Online is interesting. It says Libsyn was looking for a good and permanent home for Pear as it shifts its full focus on its podcasting activities. Libsyn hasn't actually announced the sale. I've asked repeatedly for comment. They haven't given me any comment. They bought Pear in January 2018. So they've had it for what? Six years, but obviously we don't know how much that was sold for. But yes, so lots of interesting sales and departures going on at Libsyn.
Sam Sethi:So what is their strategy? Are they going to focus on their advertising arm? And that's it, James.
James Cridland:I mean they're focusing on podcasting. That's very clear. They've just announced more promotions for Libsyn ads. Libsyn ads seems to be doing very well 24% revenue up year on year, which is nice. They've just also announced that they've partnered with Barometer. So Barometer are one of these brand safety and suitability companies and Barometer will be essentially giving scores for every single podcast in Libsyn's marketplace. I thought that was across the entire podcast host, but no, it's just in their marketplace, so just the ads that they go out and sell. But yeah, so they seem to be doing pretty well, you know, in terms of the ad sales and you know, I guess they're just doubling down on that.
Sam Sethi:So is Rob Walsh replacing John Gibbons, or is he replacing Dave Jackson as head of customer education?
James Cridland:I think that Dave and Rob were both talking to some of the larger podcasters, so now it will be just Rob doing that. Rob was always head of podcasting relations, I think, at the company, so he will be doing that, I'm sure. I mean, my understanding is that it's going to be a slimmed down company, very much focused, as the Libsyn was. And you know, I mean Buzzsprout, our sponsor, is not a big company. There are not a lot of people who work there. Transistor, I think, has about three or four people who work there, so it's a tiny little company. So really, libsyn, I mean for them to have got rid of 28 people, it shows that there were probably quite a lot of fat in that organisation, so that's probably a good thing.
Sam Sethi:So will that mean, that Libsyn gets Libsyn 5 finished? Will that become a finished product?
James Cridland:Well, I mean you know they're still promoting Libsyn 4 for some of the functionality that that has access to. So I mean my guess is they have to keep on working on the tech. But I've not seen any announcements of any new features from that company for quite some time now. But you know, I mean your guess is as good as mine, because they're not talking to me.
Sam Sethi:So yeah, well, they're not talking to me and you, but they do have a podcast called the Feed, and this week they put out a episode it's been about a month or so and in it they were talking about podcasting 2.0, james, I don't think they like it too much.
James Cridland:Oh no, I don't. I don't think that's fair. I mean, Rob was very clear that he is not against podcasting 2.0.
Rob Walch:We're not anti-podcasting 2.0. We're just saying there needs to be more carrot, less stick and more reasons for the listening apps to adapt it, Do you?
James Cridland:know what he's talking about, with carrots and sticks.
Sam Sethi:Not quite. I mean, what's the incentives? I mean, is it incentives for him as a host or incentives for users? I'm not quite sure. And then, when he says the podcasting apps aren't adopting it, I think he just means Apple, doesn't he? He just means Apple.
James Cridland:Yeah, I mean, I think partially there's. I mean, obviously Spotify isn't supporting any of it either, but it's his concept of carrots and sticks that I don't understand. I don't understand who's threatening him with a stick, and he kept on saying it in the feed this week and I thought this was a really interesting bit of language that he used In the manner they tried to use a stick to get people to accept podcasting 2.0.
Rob Walch:If it is great, people will want to accept it. If they stop using a stick and start using a carrot, then maybe there would be more uptake and the road wouldn't be so long.
James Cridland:I don't understand what he means by accept. On the rare occasion when I've chatted with Rob, I've said how can we help you? How can we help you move things forward? He clearly sees that as being a threat and waving a stick about, and I don't fully understand that. I mean he said a couple of different things.
James Cridland:He said firstly that it's way too complicated talking about streaming sets and everything else, and I think we all agree it's way too complicated and hopefully we can make it easier and simpler to explain how that bit works, and TrueFans is a big part of that. But also he has said that Podcasting 2.0, quite a lot of the features that we're trying to do with Podcasting 2.0 are also features that already exist in the RSS specification and I would agree with him to a point on that. The images tag, for example, which I have a bit of a thing about, is a worse tag in the Podcasting 2.0 spec than one in the media namespace which we should be using and indeed YouTube is using. So I kind of get that. He likes the idea of the person tag as another example, but he says there's a way to do the person tag already. So this is his way of doing the person tag.
Rob Walch:Currently, the best way to do that is in your author tag. If you're hosting with a host that actually supports the episode author tag, you should go ahead and put in all the information about your hosts, your co-hosts, your guests, your producers. You know comma separate them, put them in the author tag, itunes author tag at the episode level, and that field is searchable. Now, not all podcast hosts support the iTunes author tag. Libsyn does.
James Cridland:The iTunes author tag isn't supported at an item level by Apple Podcasts and it isn't supported at the item level by Spotify. It's not on their website as a supported field. So either Rob doesn't know what he's talking about or he's trying to make a point about his company being really good at supporting something others don't. But I don't understand his attitude. His attitude appears to be it's a new idea and I am not going to give it any credence whatsoever, and I don't think I'm alone in thinking this. In fact, I know that I am not going to give it any credence whatsoever, and I don't think I'm alone in thinking this. In fact, I know that I'm not alone in thinking this. I don't know whether you've heard the new media show this week with Todd and Rob. Yep, this is from the new media show Todd talking about the feed.
Todd Cochrane:I'm just going to call a spade a spade. Rob and Elsie over at the feed and Rob Walsh's complete lack of even wanting to consider podcasting 2.0 and the benefits of that and poo-pooing it it you know that is it's Libsyn has made their bed.
James Cridland:Yeah, I just, I just don't fully understand Rob's real hatred towards podcasting 2.0. It may just be that he hates Adam Curry, he hates me, and maybe that's it. And so, therefore, anything that Adam wants to do, anything that I'm putting my name behind, he has a visceral dislike to, and maybe it's just that Could be, and in which case just say that, rob, and then we could at least understand why you're so. And, by the way, I don't think it's particularly fair for Todd to say Rob and Elsie you know Elsie was being very good in that show it's just purely Rob.
Sam Sethi:No, elsie was doing a great job in trying to get you know an explanation across as to why people might want to use and look at value for value. And I think if you take the streaming sats part out just for now and just said the person tag, transcripts, chapters, those things I mean person and chapters can't be hard for libsyn to implement. Okay, they've already implemented the namespace if they're using transcripts just in the same way Apple are, so it's not that they can't use it. And then I thought the funnier part was, if you do want to use it, go back to Libsyn 4 and you can hand code it. We support that yes.
Sam Sethi:Isn't that brilliant? Oh my God, isn't that brilliant.
James Cridland:Our new thing doesn't actually support what you want.
Rob Walch:So you have to go back to the old thing. Yes, anyway, moving on to more positives.
James Cridland:Quite enough about that. Yes, and positive news, I think this is.
Sam Sethi:Now I was very jealous this week because you got to interview Dan Meisner. Now I'm going to say this We've been doing this show for nearly three years and in that time I was looking back, I was thinking what interview have you or I done that I thought would be a game changing interview? And we've done some great interviews. But actually, hat tip to yourself and Dan I think this interview is probably the best interview we've ever done on Pod News Weekly, for what it will deliver, yeah, no, for what it will deliver for the podcast industry. If people actually listen to what you and Dan say and understand the wind of change, this is a seminal interview, I think.
James Cridland:Well, this is all about the Bumper dashboard, which is a brand new measurement tool. It combines podcast data from a number of different sources and, as you so rightly say, I caught up with Dan Meisner and I firstly asked him what Bumper is Bumper?
Dan Misener:is a podcast growth agency started by me and my co-founder, jonas Wust, just two years ago. We exist to help podcasters mostly enterprise podcasters increase podcast success and, for most of the teams that we work with, increasing podcast success usually means increasing the number of people who are spending time with their shows, increasing the reach of their podcasts.
James Cridland:So what have you launched this week for your second anniversary?
Dan Misener:We launched something called the Bumper Dashboard.
Dan Misener:There's this frustration that we had when we started the company around measurement proving that a show is in fact growing, and the frustration was largely fragmentation. Right, there's all kinds of really useful, strong signals of audience engagement and audience growth if you know where to look, and so, for years, places like Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Podcasters, and now YouTube Studio, your hosting provider, third-party analytics services. There are all these great places that you can go and check some facet of whether your show is growing, but none of them have the whole picture right. Apple can tell you what's going on among Apple podcast listeners and YouTube can tell you what's going on on YouTube, but Apple's never going to tell you, through their Apple podcasts connect dashboard, what's happening over in the Spotify ecosystem. So there's this fragmentation of all of this really rich, really useful data and, born of that frustration, we built some internal tools to help us wrangle all of these various data sources and create a kind of bird's eye view that would be useful not just from the marketing standpoint, but also from an editorial standpoint.
James Cridland:So I mean I can get total download numbers from my podcast host from the excellent Buzzsprout dashboard. I can also get my details from OP3. What is Bumper doing that I can't get from these tools, I think?
Dan Misener:they're telling part of the story but they're not telling the entire story, and I think for years the download has been the unit of measure for podcast success. But I think one of the things that our entire industry has woken up to, especially over the past year or year and a half, is that downloads may not be a great way to measure the reach of your show in people or to measure engagement or consumption of your show, Because last I checked, when I see a download number with my hosting provider or I see a download number in a pass-through analytics service like OB3, all I'm measuring is the delivery, or really the request for delivery of an audio file, not necessarily the consumption of an audio file.
James Cridland:Right, and whereas, of course, you can get from all of the dashboards out there that the platforms run, you can get total time spent listening, you can get where people were jumping in and all of that, and so you, with the bumper dashboard, you're pulling all of that data together, so that, with the bumper dashboard, you're pulling all of that data together so that you can actually see it in one place. Are you actually seeing that these numbers correlate? I know that we put this very show into the bumper dashboard and you found a fascinating correlation in a in a show of ours, you know, quite some time ago, where you could very clearly see people skipping forward to, um, you know, to get rid of the boring James and Sam stuff and go and go for an interview. It makes you feel great.
Dan Misener:I mean, boring is in the eye of the beholder.
Dan Misener:Maybe some listeners just have more favorite and less favorite parts of your shows.
Dan Misener:No, you're absolutely right, and what's been really really validating from the point of view of somebody who makes shows or is involved in the editorial or production workflows in a show is when this data seems to agree with itself, even when it comes from different sources. So it's that kind of triangulation of the truth that I think can be really really helpful. When you're somebody who maybe is early on in your podcast journey and you don't really know how long should my episodes be, or how many segments should I have, or where's a good place to put the ad breaks such that I don't lose lots of people through the ad breaks, how do I pull people through all the way to the end of an episode? My great love of these platforms is that they make this data available to us, but I think the challenge is you've needed to check one, two, three, four, five. We have clients who are checking six or seven dashboards on a regular basis, just so they can touch every part of the elephant.
James Cridland:We have so much research out there which is survey research, which is talking to a sample of podcast listeners saying that YouTube is now massive and it's the biggest platform since God created the world, and all of that, and actually the Bumper Dashboard appears to both agree and disagree with that. Certainly, in terms of audience, youtube seems to be massive, but that's not the whole story, is it?
Dan Misener:We've had clients using the Bumper Dashboard for the past couple of months.
Dan Misener:We've let, of course, our clients have the earliest possible access and we've been looking at a variety of platforms, including YouTube, and I think it is undeniable that YouTube has massive reach.
Dan Misener:We have not seen that translate into the same kinds of time spent listening, or what we like to call listen time or watch time, as on dedicated audio first podcast apps.
Dan Misener:So I might see significantly more people starting that episode on YouTube, but when we look at the amount of time spent, youtube, at least for the shows that we work on, tends to have lower average time spent listening or lower average listen time significantly lower average listen time or watch time than the audio first platforms, which I think raises the really important question should our youtube strategy involve publishing the exact same thing, or nearly the same thing, as we're posting on audio channels, or should we treat youtube as a distinct entity where the user base or the viewer base or the listener base has a different kind of need and a different kind of consumption pattern? We're just starting to dig into this in a really fulsome way, but the early signals suggest that, yes, youtube has lots of people, but for the exact same piece of content, like a podcast episode, we get higher average time spent listening on the audio-first platforms versus the same thing posted to YouTube.
James Cridland:What's the business model of this? Can anybody sign up for the Bumper dashboard? Or is it purely for clients and it's a benefit that the clients get?
Dan Misener:We've built this for ourselves and we continue to use it ourselves internally and it is available for free, at no additional cost, to anybody who is working with Bumper on sort of a consulting basis. So, yeah, it's a value add for our consulting business or our podcast growth consultancy. We don't have any immediate plans to make it pull out your credit card and sign up for an ongoing subscription, because the real value, james, I don't think is in the charts and the graphs. If you really want those, you can go and get those from all of the source dashboards. I think the value is bringing that together and in the storytelling, and I mean just one example of this is we've worked with so many teams where the download story, as of late, has been kind of a bummer right as we witnessed the impact of those iOS 17 changes.
Dan Misener:Downloads have been declining for a lot of the teams that we work with. But the really interesting part of the story is that when you look at what we would call verified listeners the listener numbers or the viewer numbers that come from Apple, they come from Spotify, they come from YouTube when you look at those viewer numbers, those numbers are growing and so we've got these two things going on in parallel. We've got audience numbers as measured in people, unique people who actually hit play those are growing, and at the exact same time we've got download numbers that are declining, and if your entire worldview is seen through a download-centric lens, that can lead to perhaps a misleading interpretation of your true audience size or composition. And so I think the real value is maybe not in the charts and graphs, it's in the storytelling and in the interpretation of the data, not a fancy dashboard with some charts in it.
James Cridland:So if people want to find out more, then I guess the first thing is 11 to 1130 on Tuesday in the industry track stage at Podcast Movement. You'll be there and you'll be not just talking about this, but you'll be talking about the whole confusing mess of podcast measurement, I guess. So that's one thing. What's another way for people to learn more about your new tool?
Dan Misener:Thank you for shouting out the Podcast Movement session I am running and, yes, it is absolutely not just about the bumper dashboard. It is about how anybody big creator, small creator, just starting, or been doing this for decades could use the data that is available in all of these different places. In addition to that, wearebumpercom is our website and you can contact us there. You can take a peek at the bumper dashboard We've got some screenshots up there. Always happy to talk to people about how they can try and make better sense of all of this really rich, useful information that's available, but can sometimes feel cumbersome because, well, Judy had the log into Apple Podcasts Connect and she doesn't work here anymore.
James Cridland:Dan, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks, James.
Sam Sethi:So there you go, dan Meisen. Apart from my intellectual bromance with Dan, I love that we're finally getting away from downloads. Look, I've been banging this drum you know that for at least 18 months. I heard him also on two other podcasts In and Around Podcasting and Sound Off as well.
James Cridland:Yes, me too.
Sam Sethi:And yeah, he's consistently saying it and what it is is a download, is not a listen, and when will we accept that's a true fact? The thing that you and I have talked about, because it relates very well to Pod News Daily, is a metric called percent completed, and I know that Dan actually clarified that for me on LinkedIn, because percent completed, along with listen time, is the way. So, james, your dailies are what? Three to five minutes, depending on on whatever. So if it was just on listen time, yours would look awful compared to somebody who's rambling for half an hour, who would probably have a greater listen time. So the percent completed means a lot more, and I think that's again part of the metrics.
Sam Sethi:The trouble I've got, though, is how does the industry get this first-party data from Apple, spotify and YouTube? I can't see that they're going to be opening up an API or giving OAuth access to third parties. Yes, you can get it if it's your own data from the Apple Connect dashboard and the Spotify dashboard, but if it's James Cridland who wants to do an analysis, or John Spurlock or a third party who wants to actually gain volumes of data, first party data is not going to be given by these apps out to third parties? No.
James Cridland:No, and I think that that's probably the right thing.
James Cridland:To be honest, I think that we probably shouldn't be sharing that without podcasters' consent.
James Cridland:Having said that, I think that podcast companies and Blueberry has done a very good job and I think Captivate has done a very good job in doing this of allowing you to publish your open figures and, of course, op3 is the daddy in this so that you can, if you want to, just check a checkbox and people can actually see your numbers, and I am astonished that there isn't enough of that going on. But also, then we need to make sure that there is an official way of doing this through Apple, through Spotify, through YouTube, through all of these services. And you know, I mean, what would be ideal, wouldn't it, is if there was a standard API. Just as there's a standard, you know, google Reader API, or there's a standard Mastodon API, you know, to all intents and purposes, a standard API for getting listen time data and verified audience data would be super useful. The Podcast Advertising Bureau should be doing that, but of course, the Podcast Advertising Bureau doesn't exist, and so perhaps that would be one of the first things that the Podcast Advertising Bureau might want to do.
Sam Sethi:Now. I'm going to say it because nobody else will. True Fans has been supporting Listen Time for 18 months. Yes, we already were supporting it.
Joe Tannorella:Jeez, I have to say that every week, I think.
Sam Sethi:But we do, and that's why you know, dan and I have spoken in the past and we have talked about Listen Time being the metric that we want, so we built True Fans with it in from day one and we actually that API that you're talking about I don't think is an API Again, I'm betting my shirt on it, so we'll see but I think it's the activity stream.
Sam Sethi:Just as we don't have an API for podcasts to get their access from hosts, we use RSS. It's a structured piece of data, it's XML, and we all know it's open and we know how it works. The two-way RSS is going to be the use of activity streams. So I will measure your play time and your percent completed, and that will be a piece of structured XML data that you, the user, can choose to publish or or keep private, and that's the data that can be shared, so that two-way rss is the way. I believe that data will be sent from the apps and aggregated from multiple apps back to their third party, who can then aggregate that all together. I don't think it's an api as we would normally call it. It's like RSS, but Activity Streams is an XML file which will give us two-way RSS.
James Cridland:Well, we'll see who ends up being right on that. I guess Dan is speaking. As I mentioned, he's speaking at Podcast Movement 11 to 11.30 on Tuesday and also he's on Stephen Goldstein's panel on Wednesday, a view from the top as well. Alongside, I think I noticed Elsie from Libsyn she is. Rob Walsh is not there, but Elsie is Also on that panel. According to the Podcast Movement app, which doesn't list Elsie, does list Andrew Mason from Descripts, a friend of the show, ross Adams from Acast, friend of the show, and Farid Haji from the Roost podcast network, who I haven't met. So I'd like to do that.
Sam Sethi:I've got FOMO now because that's one panel I really would like to go and see, but anyway.
James Cridland:Well, if you buy the ticket, you can gain access. You can gain access. You can buy a virtual ticket and you can gain access to all of the recordings afterwards. So there is always that.
Sam Sethi:Now moving on, james. So part one of the problem I think this week is download is not a listen, and how do we get listen time? Part two of the problem is how do we stop people skipping ads? Because there seems to be and I'm one of the advocates that I don't believe people will listen to that many ads. But anyway, we will agree to disagree. But this week you wrote about a company who says that podcast ads generate nearly the same level of attentiveness as TV and that they say 24% of podcast listeners never or rarely skip ads. I don't know how they know that, but tell me, james.
James Cridland:Well, I mean, they've done a decent survey to discover that and in fact, it's interesting. Yes, 24% of people say that they never, or very rarely, skip podcast ads. They ask the question the other way round you know who do you? Where are the ads that you avoid all the time? 33% say that they avoid all email advertising. Good luck with that. 37% say that they avoid all advertising in social media and on websites, and only 25%, right at the bottom, say that they avoid all ads in podcasts. So the vast majority of people are listening to the ads, and for anybody to claim that most ads are skipped in podcasts, it's really going to be correct, I would say okay, well, that's fine, I mean.
Sam Sethi:I mean, one of the things that Dan said to Danny Brown was he would not want to put an advert into a podcast if he couldn't be certain that it was actually being heard. And I would would be the same. I wouldn't want to put money into putting ads into podcasts if I couldn't get the metrics that told me it was actually heard. And at the moment I'm afraid as an industry we don't have that metric. Now there are crazy ideas to put in, like UID2 and ID5, and there's other ways.
James Cridland:I think you call it attribution payment, Cost per attribution and cost per action and all that kind of stuff.
James Cridland:Yes, I mean, there's a bunch of different ways. The issue with the whole attribution thing for podcasting is that it is really hard to do because of OpenRSS. And so you have the issue that Rob Greenlee has been talking about a lot this week about be careful what you wish for, because if we want 100% coverage for listen time, for example, well we know that Marco Arman isn't going to build that in to Overcast already, so we're already saying that we'll never get 100%. Maybe you say that your podcasts will only be on those podcast apps which gives listen time and which gives proper attribution, and in which case then we're going down a road of moving away from OpenRSS and going into the world of a proprietary app. So you know Apple Podcasts, Spotify and nothing else, because nothing else will support that right now, and YouTube, of course. So it's just a worry, I think, if we go all the way down. And you know, let's remind ourselves, 90% of podcasts don't contain ads anyway, that's true.
Sam Sethi:I mean I was listening to the Future of Podcasting with Daniel J Looser and the former Libsyn employee, dave Jackson. Sorry, I just had to get that in. Yes, they were talking about the interview you did with Micah and the podcast Blocker, which, again, in reflection, I don't think is going to work because I think it's just a negative way of doing it. But they were also talking about the way that YouTube has demanded ad-free podcast episodes be uploaded. You can't put an ad into it and think daniel was talking about a proposal. Where actually could you pay to have an ad free version? I'm thinking well, that's exactly fundamentally what spotify does, doesn't it? If you don't pay your subscription, you get ads. If you pay your subscription to spotify, you get an ad free version that's what apple does, you know?
James Cridland:obviously, um, but but the issue is for most people, people don't really mind too much about there being ads in there, or they don't mind the hassle of skipping them. And the other issue is that, you know, I mean, I think we do a pretty good podcast, but it's not worth $2.99 or $3.99 a month to most people. So it's that lack of, you know, of micro payments that means that you know it's just really hard to end up doing. But yeah, no, I would agree.
Sam Sethi:Well, I mean not that I think it's going to happen anytime soon, but I think there is a model where you incentivize people to listen to ads and not skip. Now, that's a crazy thing to say, but the the way of doing it is that you, the advertiser, will stream sats to you while you listen and the minute you stop listening and skip, they stop giving you sats. Now that would give advertiser a listen time metric. Ie James listened to 10%, sam listened to 20% and Adam listened to 100%. They would know that because the streaming sats would stop the minute you stop listening, and that, I think, would be a really good way to get a true understanding of who listened to the ad, how long they listened to the ad and what they did with the ad in terms of when they stopped and skipped or whether they clicked on it Again. I'm not going to go into detail now, but the technology is there to do it.
James Cridland:I think it's just a little early in the market for people to adopt it Indeed, and talking about it, from the other side, there's a bunch of data from Podscribe that came out this week which talks about a bunch of things. It's loads of performance benchmarks and loads of that sort of thing, so lots of jargon in it. I actually talked to Amelia Coomer, a friend of the show, this morning my time actually about some of the findings of this study. One of the findings I still don't quite believe and that is that if you play the same ad more than twice in the same show, then the whole performance for that ad goes down significantly, goes down by half. And I'm looking at that and I'm going I just from my history in audio advertising, I just do not believe that if you play an ad twice then the overall campaign gets worse.
James Cridland:Um, that, that. That to me seems really weird and I don't understand why that would ever be the case. So, so, um, but that's what the data says, apparently. Um, if you um, you know the uh shows, um, advertising you know works um, uh, very well, but it it halves in, pretty well, halves in performance If you play the ad twice. If you play the ad three times, it goes down even further, which is just really weird, really weird data. So yeah, it's worthwhile taking a peek anyway. The Podscribe performance benchmarks. You'll find it in the Pod News Daily this week. Hmm.
Sam Sethi:Now Apple. I have been going, oh, here we go, oh well strap in listener yes, this is not just me, thank god.
Sam Sethi:This is a whole bunch of people in the industry. So I've called apple a monopoly. I think the eu has called apple a monopoly. I think many people are calling apple's app store a monopoly. But uh, we talked last week about Patreon earning over 350 million a year on its platform. Well, just on the back of that, apple decided yes, that's too much money for you to have. We'd like 30% of that, please. So they've said that by November this year, patreon users will have to switch over to Apple's payment system and Apple will take 30% of Patreon's payments. I don't think that's very fair, james, do you?
James Cridland:Well. So I think there's a couple of things there. If I can sit on the side of Apple just for a second, but I will get off because it's already hot over here. But firstly, apple has been saying this for some time, for at least the last year, so it's nothing to do with the announcement that they made 350 million. Secondly, the issue here is only money that you pay to Patreon through the Apple App Store. So therefore, you as a creator using the Patreon app wanting to give $10 a month to PodNews, for example, podnewsnet slash Patreon then 30% of that will go to Apple and not go to the creator, unless, of course, I click the button that says just charge people who are using iOS 30% more.
James Cridland:So yeah, so it's a bit of a, you know. I mean, arguably it is Apple being fair because everyone else has to pay the 30% tax, but also arguably it's not being fair because the money is actually coming from the creators, not from Patreon. The money's coming from the creators directly, because we lose out on that. Also, if we were running an app, we could apply to Apple's small business program, which lowers that commission down to 15% instead of 30%. Now, 15% is actually not too dissimilar to the amount of money that we are paying Patreon anyway.
James Cridland:Patreon we pay about 8%, so it's not too dissimilar and at least that you know. We understand. You know what the costs are there, but it's just, yeah, it doesn't look particularly good. That said, of course Apple already takes 30% of our money. If we were to make ad-free versions of this podcast, for example, available through Apple Podcasts, paid subscriptions and there's no chance of getting the Apple small business program for that either. So here in podcasting land we've had this for quite some time Apple taking our money. So it's just Apple taking our money through a slightly different route, I guess.
Sam Sethi:Yeah, there's two parts of the report in TechCrunch that stood out for me. One was Apple has threatened to remove creator platform Patreon from the App Store if creators use unsupported third-party billing options. And then the last bit that really stood out for me is and this, I think, is contradictory to what we're going to say about Spotify in a minute, the company reminded creators that Apple's fees only apply to the iOS app, that creators continue to offer the same prices on the web and Android and, as we'll see very shortly, apple are not applying that same ruling to offer the same prices on the web and Android and, as we'll see very shortly, apple are not applying that same ruling to Spotify.
James Cridland:Yes, because, yeah, there's a carve out for music apps, I believe. So that doesn't make an awful lot of sense, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean it's weird because I suppose you could argue. Firstly, apple Podcasts, for example, supports RSS feeds from paid for services like Memberful, supporting, Cast and Supercast, and they don't get any money from those. Secondly, actually we've got a link in our show notes that says if you want to support us, go to weeklypodnewsnet, and Apple aren't taking 30% of that, and that is actually against the rules, if you were to look a little bit more closely.
James Cridland:So you know, I don't know, it's just a mess and I think if you're Apple, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. You know they kind of have to be fair with every single app developer out there. But also, in this particular case, it means that the creators are the ones that get hurt and I would imagine, if it's happening to Patreon right now, then I would imagine that for things like wavelake and for, you know, any um, any similar things, you know, I mean fountain, um you know, yeah, exactly, I would.
James Cridland:I would guess that that it'll it'll happen for all of those as well yeah, no, that was.
Sam Sethi:That was a point I mean. At the end of the day, okay, apple are trying to apply the same ruling to large companies like patreon, but it's the smaller startups like, as you said, fountain wave, like, etc. Who are using micro payments. Now we've already seen apple uh remove damas, which was a noster app that used micro payments, because they wouldn't switch and for whatever reason, and long may it last. By the way, they are not coming after podcasting apps yet.
Sam Sethi:But if you have an iOS app you're building, I think, on quicksand, because it only means that you're not on Apple's radar but as soon as you get on their radar, you will either have to accept a 30% tax to continue doing what you do or you'll have to try and find an alternative. Now, we don't have an ios app at the moment and we we use an approved stripe apple payment gateway, so we aren't falling foul of apple's ios payment police. But if we build an ios app, do I then not have the option of having within my progressive web app that capability? Or do I have to then like patreon, full foul and pay 30? And it's just one of those things. Now it's it's juggling between users who've been pavlovian taught by apple.
James Cridland:If you want an app, you go to the app store, not that you click install for a pwa no, and, and you know, this is, I'm sure, one of the reasons why Apple has made websites that work as apps PWAs so difficult to install, because this is a way around that for the creator, and you know, obviously Apple don't want that on their side. I mean it's you know. You can look at it the other side and say that you know, and here's a conspiracy theory for you, because the same thing will work on Google as well. Google will turn around at some point and say to Patreon yeah, you owe us 30% as well. So here's a conspiracy theory for you.
James Cridland:Apple Podcasts obviously they want to make an Android app because they're not stupid, but it's only worthwhile for the company if they can earn revenue from paid subscriptions. But Google Play, of course, has that 30% tax. So could it be that the only reason Apple hasn't launched an Apple Podcasts app on Android is because they want to avoid Google Play's 30% tax on revenue? And, yes, they could build something into their website for you to be able to subscribe, but of course, that's exactly what they're trying to stamp out from other people doing, so so maybe the reason why we don't have an apple podcasts app on android is actually tying back into this 30 apple tax and that's basically it well, this week, uh, spotify think they've got a micro win over Apple because they.
James Cridland:This is such a small win, yeah.
Sam Sethi:They are now allowed, through the EU ruling, to place the price of their products, so they can now tell you the price of their premium family or duo and audio books. But I love this and this is why I go back to a comment I made earlier they are not allowed to put a link or even a text reference to the site where they can actually purchase it.
Sam Sethi:So if spotify put in oh yes, and if you want to go and pay for this outside of Apple, you go to Spotifycom. Yeah, then it will be banned from the App Store, yeah.
James Cridland:They're not allowed to do that. It's like if you use the Amazon Kindle app and you want to try and buy a book, it just says, oh, you can't buy a book on this app. Right, and there are. If you try searching for buy Kindle book on iPhone, there are pages and pages and pages of helpful advice from other websites showing you how you can actually buy a book on your Kindle app on your iPhone or iPad, because Apple won't even allow Amazon to say you can, though, buy them on amazoncom. It's just, it's just hilarious, it's just a real mess. Moving on, right Now, you've you've found a. You found something called pod engines, um, who are doing all kinds of weird and wonderful things.
Sam Sethi:Yeah, we. We both saw a LinkedIn post from the co-founder, joe Tanarello, talking about they're using AI to transcribe. Well, first of all, they're transcribing all of the episodes of podcasts, then they're using AI to do audio mining and deep analysis. But one of the things he put out which is the the thing that raised, you know, my um interest was he said oh, we're going to analyze what podcasting 2.0 tags are in all of these podcast episodes and then we're going to rank them for you and blah blah, and I reached out, and I know you reached out. I thought, cool, this would be interesting and ask him actually tell me more about pod engine and tell me more about what is audio intelligence and audio mining.
Joe Tannorella:So PodEngine is an audio intelligence platform, so what we're doing is audio mining podcasts at scale, and that allows us to extract deep analysis and insights across the industry as a whole, all the way down to individual episode level.
Sam Sethi:That sounds really exciting. How are you doing that?
Joe Tannorella:So, using our experience in computer science and a basement full of servers as well as state-of-the-art models as well as open source models, we are extracting. First of all, we're transcribing episodes at scale so many thousands of episodes per day and then through that we're running our own pipeline of analysis. We extract things like who's advertising, who's guesting, what's their bio, what might the audience who listens to this be interested in? The topics and themes discussed? Sometimes the sentiment a bunch of stuff, and that enables us to do some pretty cool things.
Sam Sethi:So let's take Pod News Weekly, which has been going for about three years. I can't believe it's that long already. What could you do with something like Pod News Weekly?
Joe Tannorella:which has been going for about three years. I can't believe it's that long already. What could you do with something like Pod News Weekly? So right now, actually, pod News Weekly is one of the podcasts that we do the deep analysis on. So if you go to Pod Engine, you'll see that and search for Pod News Weekly. When you look at an episode page, you'll notice that we write a full article about the audio, which is great for accessibility reasons as well, as we highlight the key topics discussed. We're very specific with those. We elaborate on them, the key takeaways. We highlight who's advertising if there is an advertiser, the topics discussed in a weighted fashion as well, who the guests are and their bios, a variety of information, and very soon that will all be searchable not only in the pod engine interface but also through our API.
Sam Sethi:So let's break down a couple of those things. So, first of all, you talked about writing an article. I assume that's the AI not yourself and your co-founder writing an article every week for us.
Joe Tannorella:Correct. Yeah, I wish I could write that quickly and at high quality.
Sam Sethi:Now what I mean again, just because people will want to know is it an LLM that's open source, is it open APIs, the chat, GPTs, or is it another one that we haven't heard of? What are you?
Joe Tannorella:using. This is a great question, and a little bit of everything is what I would say. We lean very heavily into open source. So I think I mentioned our basement of servers earlier. We actually have a basement of servers and graphics processing and everything else going on. So we do lean into open source a lot for most of our processing, but where required, we also lean into state-of-the-art models and we use pretty much all of them for different reasons as well. So a good combination of them and of course, we run our own transcription as well now you talked about key topic are they extracted by looking at the transcript?
Sam Sethi:and then you talked about weighting them as well. Now you talked about key topic Are they extracted by looking at the transcript? And then you talked about weighting them as well. Tell me more about that.
Joe Tannorella:Yeah, correct. Yeah, so we do our best to extract the topics and provide estimated weighting and, of course, this data is improving week on week. At this point, and very soon, we'll be tying that to Wikidata definitions as well, so to provide even more enriched data and insight.
Sam Sethi:Okay, and then, lastly, you talked about the fact that you're going to be able to have a holistic view across the industry. How are you going to achieve that.
Joe Tannorella:Yes, I think it's really interesting. So today, down to the episode level, as we've talked about, we can look at topics discussed who's advertising, who's guessing, and so on. If we go up a level, then you can look at topics discussed who's advertising, who's guessing, and so on. If we go up a level, then you can look at the podcast, watch this podcast talk about generally, and if we need to extract trends there and who's advertising generally and so on and so forth, then there's a few levels up as well. So you could look at maybe the genre level, maybe it could be the location of the podcasters, which is some data we've started to extract, and really at any level it could be genre, it could be anything you can search and filter by. We can provide a 360 view of that using the data that we're extracting from. Really the lowest level is the transcript, but we bubble that back up to the top level then so today, from what I understand, you use iTunes similarities to abstract similar podcasts to each other.
Sam Sethi:Now we talked offline about potentially using a topic that James and I talked about something called RAG, which stands for Retrieval. Augmented Generation, which is an AI process for linking similarities and transcripted podcasts, is a very good use of that. What are you doing in that space?
Joe Tannorella:Yes, correct.
Joe Tannorella:So at the moment we do use RAG in a few places throughout our estate.
Joe Tannorella:So, just as an example of that, we were sending a free kind of curation and discovery email to our users, and the way that worked was they could tell us what they cared about in terms of kind of topics and then we would then each week, look at all the transcriptions that we'd processed that week and send them the best episodes, in our opinion, based on those topics. That's quite a basic view. So RAG is what most people are using when they're doing things like chatbots, for example, using AI. But the graph RAG really takes it a step further, because it's a way to connect similarity and identify similarity across, in our case, episodes and podcasts. If guest A is being interviewed on a certain podcast and particular brands being mentioned in that same context, then it makes it easier to spot the connection of those two things on different podcasts, different episodes and so on and so forth. So, yes, we're really excited to be looking at that because Microsoft, as I'm sure most of your listeners know, actually did experiment and train on podcast data when they released it.
Sam Sethi:Yeah, how does that get exposed within the application then? Is it a visual tool or is it a written tool?
Joe Tannorella:So if you go to the website today depending on when this is aired, you won't see it, but in the next couple of weeks, one of the first products we've built based on our API, which is using all this enriched data, is a guest booking tool. So if you'd like to place yourself or a client as a guest on the podcast, our ability to surface insights and transcripts and everything else makes it much easier to hone in on relevant podcasts more quickly, and so today that works. You know, it's great. We've had really good feedback on it and some people are migrating from other tools into ours, which is fantastic. But to take that step further, something that people are really interested in is they spend a lot of time writing outreach emails to the podcasters, and not only more often than not, the emails bounce, because not all emails in the RS is correct, but also it's very hard and time consuming to write that email. So one thing that they're really interested in is you know, we know the topics that they're writing about.
Joe Tannorella:In terms of the outreach, we can say we can look through the last 10 transcripts from a podcast and say, hey, you spoke about climate change two episodes ago, but actually we can find the white space as well. So you spoke about climate change two episodes ago, but actually we can find the white space as well. So you spoke about climate change in the context of farming, but actually you didn't mention this specific point. By the way, my client is an expert in that specific point. How would you like it if they came onto the podcast, kind of thing? So that's an area of finding the white space.
Sam Sethi:Good. Now. One of the other example probably projects or platform services that you've built is keyword search, which is the ability for maybe James or I would want to put a tracker on our names or on our podcast. You've already built that, if I'm right.
Joe Tannorella:Yes, that is live today, and we have some very happy paying users on that product. It was actually the first product we built. So initially, when we built PodEngine, we had this shiny technology. We didn't know how to surface it to paying customers or what problem solve exactly. So the first proposition was, like I mentioned, tell us what you care about and we'll give you good episodes. And we realized that, whether through ego or something else, people were putting in their own names, their brand names, their competitor names, into that service, and so we realized actually there's a position here for media monitoring across the podcast world, and so that's where we built the product initially. And so, yes, you can go to the website today. Everybody gets one free keyword alert and that's across four transcripts, and so that's a product that is near and dear and close to our hearts. It's the very first one.
Sam Sethi:Now, the basis of this is transcripts. That's what you're using as the ability to audio mine against. Now, if a podcast doesn't have a transcript today, are you transcribing that automatically yourselves, correct?
Joe Tannorella:That is correct, yes.
Sam Sethi:Would you make those transcripts available to purchase for the user? So let's say I'm a podcaster. My host doesn't support the ability to create a transcript. I'd really love one. Is there a way that I could come to PodEngine and say hey, I know you've got my transcripts for these episodes. Can I just have that as an exported file that I can use within my own RSS? Is that possible?
Joe Tannorella:Yes, absolutely it is possible, and that's available today. So if you go to the website today, search your podcast, and if it's being transcribed which is quite likely then you'll see the transcript there, and if you log in, you can just download it. If it's not there, then shoot me an email and I'd be very happy to start processing it for you. We've actually had a lot of interest from podcasters, because a lot of the problems that I think we're able to solve weren't really feasible to solve pre this board of LLMs and tech at scale, and so we've been asked to provide a number of other areas of functionality for podcasters. So, for example, if you go to an episode page, you can chat with the episode in a kind of chat GPT-like manner. So we're going to provide that to podcasters to embed into their own websites as well, and along with that, they'll get extra analysis that they don't get today.
Joe Tannorella:So what questions are people asking of the podcast? And even on PodEngine, when someone searches for technology, for example, like is your podcast which is about technology, is that showing up? If so, alongside which other podcasts? So, yes, we're building a proposition for podcasters today and very soon. We're taking feedback from podcasters on what would you love to see so?
Sam Sethi:knowing that we have this technology and the sky's the limit. What would you build with our tech? And yeah, that's our approach today. Okay now, one of the things you mentioned was an api, which is the way that my developer would be able to use to access some of this information. When do you expect to have the api available for developers to get stuck in?
Joe Tannorella:So we're actually onboarding customers at the moment and some of the use cases coming over to us are really interesting and, like anything when you're speaking to customers, you learn and you move forward with things. Just as an example of that, while we're on the topic, we're working with a I can't say who, but a US listed consulting company consulting company and they're looking to extract insights about the sentiment around the social housing market pre and post UK change into a Labour government, which is obviously extremely niche. Having started to look into this area for them and with them, there's actually a significant amount of discussion happening on that very topic. Another example is a pilot that we're about to run with somebody who's looking to identify climate change misinformation across the podcast world. So who's misinforming people? Climate change misinformation across the podcast world. So who's misinforming people and what can they do about that? Really, yes, the API is being used by us in production and from September onwards we're going to start to onboard more customers into that.
Sam Sethi:Excellent, joe, this sounds super exciting. If I want to go and find out more about it, where do I go?
Joe Tannorella:Head on over to podengineai forward. Slash podnews and you'll get 50% off your first month. Fantastic, Thanks Joe, Thanks Sam.
James Cridland:Let's jump around the world, then, very quickly. Firstly, iheartmedia releasing their financial report for quarter two 24. Podcast revenue up. Yay, podcast revenue up less than it was last year. Boo, a slight slowing of growth. It's only up by 8.1%. That said, up by 8.1%. When most of your company is an AM FM broadcaster, they must be delighted with that. So many congratulations to them. And Bob Pittman, saying a very interesting thing Our leadership position in podcasting is, in part, the result of the power of our broadcast radio assets. Essentially, he's there saying we advertise the heck out of the iHeartRadio app and out of the podcasts that we have, and that's one of the reasons why we are so successful in terms of this.
Sam Sethi:Now in North America, James, the Hollywood Reporter, announced the most powerful people in podcasts. I thought, oh, I'm going to have a look, see if James is in there. You're not in there, james, for some reason, but there are two Brits.
James Cridland:Of course I'm not in there. I don't live in the US.
Sam Sethi:That's what's going on there.
James Cridland:So who was in the list that anyone might know? Oh, I mean two Brits that have moved to the US, ross Adams and Steve Ackerman. They were in there. But yeah, it's sort of a strange old list of some people like Greg Glenday from Acast or Ray Chow from Vox Media. You know very senior business people, but then you've got, you know, julia Louis-Dreyfus. Or you've got Joe Rogan and you know they're not. Or you've got Joe Rogan and you know they're not. You know they're different, aren't they? They're talent, not you know big execs. So a little bit confusing I found all of that.
Sam Sethi:I think it's the intern Go and find 24 people to put on the list so we can put a PR in Excel. Yes, that's what it was.
James Cridland:I think there was a little bit of that. My favourite bit was when they were talking about they made another story because they asked everybody what do you think about listening to podcasts at over one and a half times speed? What I loved about the results is that Julia Louis-Dreyfus had no idea, either had no idea what somebody was talking about, or thinks it's really trendy to swear, because she said what the F is that. But then you got people saying I used to believe this was true psychotic behaviour from Greg Glenday. Somebody else Bill Simmons said it's for sociopaths and the definitely not psychotic or sociopathic. Ben Shapiro says that even two times might be too slow. So yeah, who knows what's going on there. But yes, it was a strange old list, but I'm delighted to know that there are no powerful people in podcasting outside of the united states.
Sam Sethi:So, uh, well done the us again john mcdermott, friend of the show, did say in his own personal blog about it. Personally, I'd argue james cridlin is the more powerful than some of the celebrities on this list.
James Cridland:So there you go well, that's very kind of you. In South America, Spotify is basically killing podcasting. According to a long piece Very interesting what they basically say is that Spotify piled loads of money because Spotify is essentially the monopoly. In South America, Latin America, 90% of consumption to podcasts happens on Spotify, and so lots of podcasters followed the Spotify money and that was brilliant. And now, of course, Spotify is spending nothing on it and all of a sudden, all of the podcasting corporations in Latin America are finding it very hard going because the biggest part of the company has pulled out. So, um, that's not a good thing.
Sam Sethi:In your backyard, james. In Australia, triton Digital have their podcast ranker. I'm off for a coffee. Tell me more.
James Cridland:You don't like this podcast ranker, do you Um?
Sam Sethi:boring Cause. It's the same people at number one every week.
James Cridland:It's the same people, hamish and Andy, still there at number number one, and it's very difficult to do a proper month-by and Southern Cross, austerios Listener, is number one sales representative. So troubles all round. And in the US, talking about things that stay the same, edison Research revealed the top 50 podcasts in the US, which is a decent list. It's measured by a survey, so every podcast gets measured. It's whatever somebody says that they listen to. No change in the top three the Daily at number three, crime Junkie at number two and Mr Rogan at number one. I did a little bit of research into where all of these things were hosted. 24 shows are hosted on Megaphone, nine on Simplecast. 24 shows that's 50% of the top 50 hosted on Spotify's Megaphone. That's 50% of the top 50 hosted on Spotify's megaphone. That's a pretty impressive thing. Podcast events on the Pod News Weekly Review.
Sam Sethi:Where are you off to next?
James Cridland:Now you say where am I off to? Where are you off to next, Sam? Are you coming to Podcast Movement 2024? Because we've been saying time and again on this podcast and've been saying, oh, I might have something to say in a week or two yeah, no, I I won't be at podcast movement 2024.
Sam Sethi:Sadly, I do have fomo. There are people and events there I would love to listen to, but I can't justify it. I'm in the middle of closing a round of funding and so, yeah, we don't have the spare cash and there is a Podcast Standards Project meeting where there will be a discussion point around me, so we'll see what comes of that.
James Cridland:Yeah, it's an expensive thing Once you tot up the hotel. I paid $118 just so I could check in early.
Sam Sethi:I'll be in the Windy City with you, James. In Chicago, the next one.
James Cridland:In the site of the Trump Tower, no doubt.
Sam Sethi:Will it be the Trump Tower still by then? Let's not get into that, let's not get into that.
James Cridland:Who knows? One other conference that you might want to consider coming to is the 2024 International Radio and Audio Conference. It's part of a set of conferences in Venice, in Italy, in early November this year. It'll have a podcast session too. I know this because I'm doing it, so that'll be the reason why, anyway, tickets are now available for it. It is essentially if you can think of a conference which is just full of Tom Webster and Pierre Bouvard, then that is essentially the conference that this is. It's everybody who is everybody in terms of research, so I always feel like the stupidest person there. They asked me to do the opening keynote and I actually said no. I said I feel too stupid, so no, so, but yes, very good, and I would heartily recommend it. And that is linked, as are many others at podnews. Podnewsnet slash events the. Tech Stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.
James Cridland:Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology.
Sam Sethi:So PodScribe is the latest company to now have IAB 2.2 compliance. I would get excited but I can't. But there you go. Well done PodScribe.
James Cridland:Well done, podscribe, headliner, doing some smart things, collaborations with Canva and also an AI text to video tool. So you can basically say I would like an image of a small dog holding an ice cream and it will give you one.
Sam Sethi:So, which is nice have you seen our friends over at X who've released their Grok 2 AI texture video tool and it's been producing pictures of Kamala Harris with guns. They've been producing Obama smoking cocaine, Taylor Swift very, very skimpily dressed. No guardrails at all on GroK 2. None at all.
James Cridland:Well, there you go. There's Elon Musk for you. Audio Audit is an interesting tool. I think this is an interesting tool not if you make a podcast, but if you are the boss of a podcast network. You're looking after 30 or 40 different podcasts and you just want a little bit of a glimpse into whether all of them sound okay, whether they're all loud enough, whether there are any big gaps in them or whatever. Audio Audit will basically let you do all of that sort of thing. And yeah, and you basically go to the website and you say the name of a podcast that you want to check and it goes and checks them and tells you whether or not you're any good Audioauditio, which is quite a smart thing.
Sam Sethi:Now, Blueberry also has an AI image editor coming out and a clip editor. It's in beta, according to Todd on his show, and thank you, Todd Cochran. Blueberry have finally supported the alternative enclosure, so now in the same RSS feed you can get both the audio and video back to video and then go back to audio. It's in the same feed now you do not have to have a separate feed and switch to a separate podcast.
James Cridland:Anycast Plus that's out. It's a note-taking translating podcast app, which is quite neat. I quite like the idea of translating. That seems like quite a smart thing. The weird thing is, though, that it also adds an AI chat function so you can ask what your favourite podcast host thinks about things. Jordan Harbinger's done something like this for the last year and a half or so, but interesting seeing any cast doing it for basically any show. So, theoretically it will you know. You'd be able to say what do James and Sam think about? You know whatever, and it'll tell you so yeah, so that's very smart. Tell me about Albi very quickly. Yes.
Sam Sethi:Albi yes, very quickly. So the Albi hub which we switched to in TrueFans is working very well. The company's just announced that it will cost $12 a month to companies to run that now and again. I fully understand They've got to make money somewhere along the line. This company Otherwise guess what? They'll go to the wall. So they're starting to give out free wallets I think it's called Uncle Sammy or something. It's some weird Americanism. But basically you can run wallets for other people if you run an Albie hub and, yeah, good luck to you if you want to run it for $12 a month. It works, but I still find it overly complex.
James Cridland:Nothing is going to go wrong there. I had good fun over the last week I say good fun installing tail scale on my umbral so that I can get hold of it wherever I am in the world, because I have a feeling I'll need that next week and also tail scale into my home assistant Gene Bean, this is all your fault. So I have a nice home assistant, green, and that has tailscale in, and what that essentially means is a couple of things. Firstly, that I can turn the garage lights on and off wherever I am in the world. Slightly less than useful.
James Cridland:But secondly, yeah, but secondly, it also enables me to VPN back through my home network back out into the world, which might be useful in terms of hotels and things. So, yeah, so it's a smart little tool, so I've been playing around with that. Alitu has added five new podcast 2.0 tags, which is nice. They've added episode locked, person, season and transcript. You see, locked. This is where I agree with Rob Walsh. Locked is just an utter waste of time. Utter waste of time. It doesn't stop anything from happening. No, it doesn't.
James Cridland:But anyway, so well done, colin and the team there. I wonder if they'll be at Podcast Movement. I'm sure that they will be. And what else we got? Pocket Casts is adding the ability to rate podcasts on the next version of its apps, version 7.7, both iOS and Android. Interestingly, you need to listen to two episodes or more, and you actually need to listen to at least half of those episodes each, I agree, for you to be able to vote.
Sam Sethi:I fully agree, which is quite nice, which is very yeah, apple, you don't need to listen to anything, just to rate it. Uh, I think spotify it's 10 seconds and then you can rate it. I think that's pretty poor on both counts. I think, yeah, if you really want to give something a rating, at least give it a proper listen. And I think well done to ellie and the team at pocketcast.
James Cridland:Yeah, I think that's very good. I actually did play with Pocket Casts this week and I thought well, this is pretty good on the iPhone, isn't it? So I was there thinking do I continue with Overcast or do I start using Pocket Casts? But I'm using Overcast for now.
Sam Sethi:And finally, just because we had the interview with Matthew Passy last week about his NFC-based watch that you're going to be using at Podcast Movement and a few other people have one as well, apple have announced that they're going to, in iOS 18.1, allow people to use the NFC for transactions on the iPhone, so they're opening it up to third parties, which I pinged Matthew with. Of course, there will be associated fees if you do so.
James Cridland:Yes, of course there will be, because of course they want you to use Apple Pay, your card, your bank card, because Apple earns from every single time you use Apple Pay, so of course they won't want to give that away for free.
James Cridland:So, yeah, in the same way that my bank has in the Android app, which is just brilliant, my bank has its own NFC thing. So if you go to a store and you want to pay using my bank card, then either I can just put my Android phone on the scanner and away I go, or I can open the bank's app, navigate all the way through and find the cards, and then I can pay a slightly different way, through NFC, which doesn't change the cost that I pay at all, but means that the bank doesn't have to pay Apple. Imagine how few people use that. Yes, but there we are. And one final thing Blueberry. If you were listening to the new media show, todd ended up saying that Blueberry is undergoing an IAB audit for 2.2 compliance, as most people have to do, and so it's just nice hearing that he's ending up doing that.
James Cridland:Well, yes, you can wait hours for a bus and then five come at once. It's the same with us and boosts. We got no boosts last week. We got loads of boosts this week, which is really nice.
Sam Sethi:Boomy from Alby centers 2,500 sats. Thank you, boomy.
James Cridland:Yes, andrew Grumet, 2,222 sats the row of ducks from for Pod News Daily. He just wrote cheers. So cheers to you, Andrew.
Sam Sethi:John Chidley sent 10 sats, which he basically halted the Pod News Daily, and so, yeah, by doing so, he sent you 10 sats.
James Cridland:Yeah, the Pod News Weekly Review. He halted this very show. John is based in Brisbane and I've still not met him, but, yes, so thank you for him. And thank you, uh, sam, for operating a true fan, so that I I got that. Similarly. Um, I think this is John McDermott from um, yes, from earlier on. Uh, who has sent 10,000 sats. Here's the sats. I wanted to stream from the beach All right, show off, but wanted, but forgot to switch apps. Uh, he says so. Uh, thank you for the 10,000. And thank you also the 10,000 from Adam Curry with an incendiary idea here. Just a thought. He says if Spotify don't care about our industry which we were saying last week then our industry should not let them come into our conferences. If the conferences don't care, then we should not go to the conferences that host their important people only. Entry.
Sam Sethi:Well, basically, I think what Adam is saying is if Spotify is a closed shop which it is and it doesn't allow people to come into the rooms unless you're important, then why should we let them at these conferences? And sadly, adam, I tend to agree with you, but the conference organisers like the moolah that Spotify provide them and they would not turn that money away. I'm fine.
James Cridland:I am very happy if Spotify wish to subsidise podcast movement to the tune of however many thousands that they are subsidising it by. I'm very happy to completely ignore what Spotify is doing. That said, I've got a meeting with the folks at Spotify, but I don't know if I'll be in the exciting room.
Sam Sethi:Champagne and caviar. Yeah, with the caviar and the free-flowing milk chocolate. You'll just press. You're not advertising, you won't be given any of that.
James Cridland:No, I'm absolutely convinced, cold coffee. I did notice that my meeting invite says in the location tab to be decided. So yes, bless him, gene Bean. Thank you, 2,222 sats. Bravo, sam. He says for for ditching x. You haven't really ditched it there, have you?
Sam Sethi:uh, I am uh, okay. So, uh, and I'll tell you exactly. Well, I've announced when I'm leaving, which is next week, and I've, uh, there's a reason why it's next, next week and not this week, which you'll hear at the end of the show. Um, but, yes, I am leaving. I went through every morning, like most people. I was doom, scrolling through and trying to see what was there? No bit of useful information on X this morning at all, and it hasn't been for weeks now. I'm just like I'm not missing it. I'm on Threads and I'm on Mastodon and I'm getting tons of value back from those two platforms and zero.
James Cridland:Well, good old Mark Zuckerberg, Who'd have thought that we'd ever say that?
Sam Sethi:Well, yeah, but they've announced on the 28th of August now that Threads API developers will have all of their content also federated. So again, they are pushing forward. So good luck to them, yeah very, very slowly.
James Cridland:Anyway, gene being carries on, I wish more people would acknowledge that X is a dumpster, fire and leave, and Danny Brown, a man who keeps on posting onto Twitter and doesn't seem to post onto his Mastodon account. Anyway, he says something that I wish I could read, but I don't understand Scottish. What does it say?
Sam Sethi:Hoping Descript gets Scottish accents right in a future update. Ah, that's what it says All I'd say to every Scottish friend is 11. 11. Voice recognition technology and a lift.
Joe Tannorella:And Scotland. They don't do Scottish accents. 11.
Speaker 2:Could you please repeat that? They don't do Scottish accents. Eleven Could you please repeat that?
Rob Walch:Eleven, eleven.
Speaker 2:Eleven Eleven. Could you please repeat that? Please speak slowly and clearly.
James Cridland:Eleven yes, I know exactly what you mean Also curly-whirly. Thank you also to Cy Jobling, who has become he's said some very positive things about us on Masternode over the last week and he's become our new power supporter. He's part of the Magnificent Seven, as I'm going to call them, while we have seven. He's part of the Magnificent Seven, as I'm going to call them, while we have seven. So the Magnificent Seven who are giving us around $5 each every month, and it goes onto a website. So therefore, apple will not be getting 30% of this Side jobling. Rachel Corbett, dave Jackson, mike Hamilton, matt Medeiros, marshall Brown and Cameron Moll. I saw Rachel Corbett being quoted in the Daily Mail a couple of days ago because she's very, very popular on the telly, and so she ended up saying something about this sainted Australian breakdancer, and I break dancer um and um, I think, jumped to yes to her defense, and why not?
Sam Sethi:so, uh, thank you all so much for that I just saw a brilliant meme, though, where they shared the australian break dancer dancing. Then they cut to a cat rolling on the floor and said I think the cat did better Stop it.
James Cridland:I don't really understand enough about that one to really fully understand what on earth is going on. Anyway, let's move on. What's happened for you this week, Sam?
Sam Sethi:So, talking about leaving Twitter, yes, so we have our new ActivityPub server. It's going live in beta today and so you will be able to, if you want, james, have an account, and every user will have an account, james at trufanssocial, so you will be able to publish your activity from TruFans to your ActivityPub client. So the outbox is TruFans and your inbox is your Tru fans account sorry, your activity pub, true fans account. So we have basically got the server live soon. As that is publicly live, which we hope next week, I will leave twitter because I then I have no further need for twitter. So, yeah, that's what am I?
James Cridland:well, there we are, so we're very close. Yes, well, that's exciting. You've got a stats counter.
Sam Sethi:Yeah, one of the things that people have asked us for is I just want to be able to see, while I'm playing, per minute, am I actually spending on this episode, and therefore, every minute, we do a recalculation for you so that you can see how many sats you've streamed and how many sats you've boosted, so you will know, as you listen, what you're actually spending.
James Cridland:Well, there's a thing and all kinds of other things as well, including a hover card and various other exciting things Reminds me that I need to update my person picture in your system somehow.
Sam Sethi:So I'll go and do that at some point Indeed James, what's happened for you or what's going to happen for you?
James Cridland:Well, yes, it's been a week of thinking, oh, I suppose I better do that before I leave. So, yes, and then I'm off on Saturday evening. I mean nothing's going to go wrong here. So we're going to the local pub or the local bowling club, as it is in reality. We're going there in the afternoon to celebrate my wife's birthday. There will be beer and wine drunk, and then at six o'clock I leave the bar and I get into an Uber and I go and do a 14 hour flight to LA. So nothing's going to go wrong there.
James Cridland:That's why you'll just sleep the whole way, you'll be fine, so we will see. Well, we'll see if my upgrade comes through, so that should be fun. I have also been invited to go and speak at the Dubai Podfest this year, so Todd Cochran was there last year and it's my turn this year, so I'm very much looking forward to that. I will have been on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for the previous seven days, so quite what kind of state I'll be in I don't know, but anyway, very much looking forward to spending a little bit of time in sunny Dubai as well.
Sam Sethi:You won't be drinking this, so it's fine, you're okay.
James Cridland:You will be. Will you If you're in the right hotel? Yes, you will be. Oh right, okay.
Sam Sethi:Knowing my luck, I'll pick the wrong hotel and get 10 years in custody.
James Cridland:No, dubai is all fine for that sort of thing, is it?
James Cridland:Yeah, some of the other places which are a little bit more entertaining. I was talking to one of the organisers there and she was saying you know, is it going to be your first time in the UAE? And I said I'm in your airport about every two months, but I last spoke at a conference in Dubai in 2007. So I'm quite looking forward to going back. I'm imagining it'll have changed a bit. So yeah, so that should be good, and that's it for this week. If you enjoy the podcast, the newsletter is better. You can find that at podnewsnet, the Pod News Daily as well, wherever you get your podcasts.
Sam Sethi:There are longer interviews in the Pod News Extra podcast as well. You can support this show with sats. You can give us feedback using the fan mail link in our show notes or you can send us a boostgram.
James Cridland:Our music is from Studio Dragonfly. Our voiceover is Sheila D. We use Clean Feed for our audio and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, Keep podcasting. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.
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