James Cridland: 0:00

It's Friday, the 29th of November 2024.

Speaker 2: 0:04

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

James Cridland: 0:12

I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of True Fans In the chapters today. Keysend is dead. Long live LN Address. And is BBC Sounds going away internationally?

Nick Dunkerley: 0:27

Plus, I'm Nick Dunkley from Hindenburg, and later on I'll be talking about our audio editor.

James Cridland: 0:32

And we'll hear from John Thoday, who's the co-founder of talent management company Avalon, on the one thing you must do when you sign a deal for a podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout, with the tools, support and community to ensure you keep podcasting, start podcasting, keep podcasting with buzzsproutcom From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 0:56

Now. First let's just say happy Thanksgiving to all of our friends in the USA. Also, happy Thanksgiving to all our friends in Canada for last month, yes, I know. And also good day to all of our friends in Australia. It's bloody hot, mate, isn't it Time for a cold one?

Sam Sethi: 1:10

And can I just reverse that? It's bloody cold here, mate. Can I have a hot one?

James Cridland: 1:15

Yes, indeed. Now listen, we don't normally start with a heavy tech story, but this is kind of important, but it is kind of tech as well. It's all about payment protocols. If this does not sound like your thing, then that's cool. There's chapters in this podcast. Every decent podcast app, even Apple Podcasts, has chapters in it, so you can use that to skip forward if you don't want to hear about LN Address and Albi and Strike and all kinds of things. Sam, what is going on with all of this LN Address stuff?

Sam Sethi: 1:50

Well, let's start off with. Albi is a payment gateway or a payment hub, and most of the podcast industry were using that as its method for having a wallet and sending payments from listeners to creators and that seemed to be working. We're all very happy. There was a few road bumps along the way, but back in March we had a massive road bump. When we've learned that, due to US regulation, financial regulations uh, albi, who partner with Podverse podcast guru, true fans, and several others were going to stop enabling new us wallets, and it was like what, sorry, what are you saying? That was the first problem. And then recently, um, we heard from michael booman, or boomy for short, who is the CEO of Olby, that on the 26th of January, they're going to turn off public wallets, so existing public wallets will be going as well, and everyone's like scrambling. Now what do we do? Which wallet do we use? How do we get payments between listeners and creators? So that's the problem, really, right, how?

James Cridland: 3:04

do we get payments between listeners and creators. So that's the problem, really, right? And so, just so that we all understand where we're coming from, a wallet in this particular case is you load up a wallet that you have with Albi or with somebody else, but, as you say, most people have used Albi or Albi, and so you load that up with some money and then Albi is essentially the thing that deals with the payment through the Lightning Network, which is how we're currently paying everybody when you're listening to a podcast like this one, when you're using an app like True Fans or an app like Podcast Guru or the many others that have streaming payments in there, and so, essentially, it's a bit like a MasterCard or a Visa card, isn't it? But in a different way. It works using this Lightning Network, and it's that that's going away, certainly as a free tool, that a listener can actually get an account, if you like, with Albi. That's going away in January, right?

Sam Sethi: 4:11

Yeah, I mean, I use email as a better analogy for people. So you might have had an email provider, let's say Gmail. You don't understand the background protocols of how that email is delivered from your email to anywhere else, but it does magically happen, right. And now suddenly imagine gmail going well, we're going to take away your gmail accounts and we're going to give you this chargeable, more complex service called an albie hub, which really isn't like running your own email server from home. And people are going well, I don't need that, that's overkill. So who else can I go to? And I think that's a simpler analogy for people to understand. I think, right, right.

James Cridland: 4:49

Okay, so that's the way of receiving money, but also the way of sending money. So the way of receiving money, it goes into an Albi account or into other things. But quite a lot of people have been using Albi accounts and the way that a listener will send us money is quite often with an Albi account, because it's really easy to get, or it has been really easy to get an Albi wallet, really easy, if you like, to open an Albi account, and so therefore, that's how people have been paying us. So what's changing?

Sam Sethi: 5:26

So the method that was done was in your RSS feed there was a thing called a value tag, which was one of the new podcasting 2.0 tags, and inside of that value tag it was hard coded with a method called key send. Now I won't go into any more detail, but it fundamentally was a look up to what's the address. If I wanted to find James at getolbycom, how did I get the money to you? And we used a method called KeySend, and because that was hard-coded into the RSS and it meant that we as podcasting the community, it worked for us very well. But nobody else let's say Nostra or banks or anyone else using the Lightning Network for payments was using KeySend anymore. They had switched to a new model called LNAdress, and LNAdress is just a list of the ways that you can send a payment or receive a payment, and because it's a list, you can have multiple different options. And so that's what we're doing. It's just taking a hard-coded key send and now putting it into a list called LN Address.

James Cridland: 6:37

Okay. So the way that the internet works is when you type in googlecom into your web browser. It doesn't connect to googlecom, it goes off to a DNS server. It finds out where Google is on the internet, it looks up, if you like, the internet telephone number for Google or the IP address, and then your browser connects to that IP address. And this is kind of the same, except you can add more than one way of getting paid, I guess.

James Cridland: 7:05

So you can add yes, you know you can pay me through the Lightning Network this way, but you can also, maybe in future, pay me through a MasterCard this way, or pay me through, you know, an ideal account if you're in the Netherlands, or pay ID if you're here in Australia. So it's basically a great big list of the different ways that a creator might like to be paid, which actually opens streaming payments up to all kinds of things. It opens it up to bank transfers, opens it up, potentially in the future, to credit card payments. It's not perfect, because a credit card payment costs a lot of money, but it's a start. So LNAdress is essentially a way of opening things up so that an app can actually see all of the different ways that you can get paid right, correct and any new crazy way of making payments in the future that we don't even know about can just be added to that list.

Sam Sethi: 8:06

So we're not, I guess, tying ourselves down to one option only.

James Cridland: 8:11

I mean, obviously a podcast app will have to deal with how to make that payment, and so that may not be the brightest plan to add 20 different ways of getting paid, but I suppose, from the point of view of at least future-proofing this and making sure that, if the weird arcane numbers that we had to type in in the past ever change, everybody doesn't have to change all of their RSS feeds, it's a much simpler thing. So we've got LN address. Good thing, bad thing.

Sam Sethi: 8:41

Good thing. When you first heard about oh my god, here we go, we're gonna have to change it all, I think you put adamastodon is everything broken?

James Cridland: 8:50

and oscar came back and went yes, and I just went oh god, okay just yeah because I mean, it's so it does change everything and so essentially anything that takes streaming payments now will have to change. But on the other side, this is a much more future-proof plan and sometimes when you move fast, when you run with scissors, you make mistakes and I'm not necessarily saying that it was a mistake, it was a fantastic move forward. But other things have happened, which has meant that LN Address is super easy, super simple from a way of advertising how you want to get paid, so that part is pretty good.

Sam Sethi: 9:32

There are changes, but I mean there is backward compatibility, because the LN address can also store the key send address. That's currently hard coded.

James Cridland: 9:41

So the app developer would still need to do a little bit of work, but then there's a whole heap of other ways of paying, too right.

Sam Sethi: 9:48

You're correct, james, and I think. The other side of the coin that we need to look at, though, is how you get money into a wallet, and that's also changing Now. One option that's being proposed and it's one of many option that's being proposed, and it's one of many is to use something called the strike with a k strik wallet. Now that is both a money exchange and a wallet in one, so, if you, you can link it to your bank account, and you can also store sats within that wallet and then use that within apps like fountain, which I think are the one app that's already integrated with the Strike account and the Strike wallet.

James Cridland: 10:28

Right. So this is kind of a bit like connecting your credit card to an app so that you can actually pay somebody, but in this particular case, because we don't use credit cards for this payment, we're using Bitcoin. We're using bits of Bitcoin, which are called sats. You're essentially connecting your Bitcoin account, your Bitcoin wallet, to the app instead, and Strike is one of those ones that makes it really easy to do.

Sam Sethi: 11:00

It's relatively easy. I mean, I have to say, in the UK and I don't know what it's like in Australia, james but they ask a quiz about whether you know about micropayments and Bitcoin, and I have to say I failed the test, did you?

James Cridland: 11:15

Yeah.

Sam Sethi: 11:16

I mean you can see in the show notes you did not pass the test. I just thought you know, and I might like to think I know a little bit about this, so God knows how anyone else is passing this test. But good luck to you. But once you pass the test, and then you've done something which is called KYC know your customer, so provide a driving license or passport you can get a wallet. Now, to be fair to Fountain, I think what Oscar is saying is that it is easier because potentially there are hundreds of thousands of people already with a strike wallet and so all they would do is then just bring that and connect it to Fountain. They don't have to then redo the quiz, redo the KYC. So if you have got wallets and there are many others then there is a thing called nwc nostal wallet connect and it's badly named because it's nothing really directly to do with nostal, but it means, yeah, badly named and doesn't have anything directly. But what it is is um, I think it's the analogy I would give you is look in the.

Sam Sethi: 12:20

In the old days, 20 years ago, it was like connect to the internet. Great, how do I do that? Here's a browser. Which browser? Here's a basket of browsers. Pick one and you can get to the internet. Oh okay, great thanks. And most people who didn't know about what the web or the internet was and didn't really know how to use a browser just didn't want the choice, and so it was a difficult one. And then, when Microsoft put IE as a default into the operating system, I think that's when the web really took off, and so I think the problem is here.

Sam Sethi: 12:56

Albi offers the Nostal Wallet Connect, which is an OAuth integration. Right, sorry, this is getting a little technical, but what it is is you can go to Albi today and you can get multiple wallets. So you won't get the Albi wallet, but you can have multiple other wallets, and that all works, and that will work across any app who uses the Albi Hub, like TrueFans or Podverse or Podcast Guru and equally, fountain, can do that as well. So there is a way to offer multiple wallets.

Sam Sethi: 13:34

My personal view, as now TrueFan CEO, is that I think we are getting too overly technical. We seem to be forgetting that people A just want to listen to a podcast we don't even know if they want to listen to a podcast and make a payment and then, if your process is join us, get a wallet, do kyc, fill your wallet with something that you don't understand, and then maybe listen to your podcast and then give some money. I just think, wow, too many hurdles right now. So if you want to appeal to the 1% of people who understand what we just talked about, james, crack on. If you want to appeal to the 99% of people, I think there's a different way of doing it.

James Cridland: 14:13

Yeah, and I guess from my point of view. I mean, what TrueFans appears to be doing is you appear to be taking people's credit cards, turning that in the background into sats, making essentially a little hidden way wallet for that particular user Not that they really know about that and basically turning it into, you know, fairground tokens, sats, call them whatever you like.

Sam Sethi: 14:38

Tokens, they are tokens.

James Cridland: 14:41

Yeah, that you can then send to the creator that you're, you know, creator whose work you're consuming, and that's one way of doing it. Strike is another way of doing it. It sounds as if Nostowallet Connect, although I don't really understand. It is another way of doing it and I guess, from that point of view, we've had to go through Know your Customer and all of that kind of stuff for credit cards anyway. So you know, we're used to that and credit cards aren't perfect because they cost money. And you know, at the end of the day, mastercard and Visa are in charge. And if MasterCard or Visa or Stripe because you'll probably end up be using Stripe for this, because everybody does probably end up be using Stripe for this, because everybody does If one of those three people don't like what the podcast is about, then they can yank that payment as a plan, I suppose.

James Cridland: 15:34

So it's not great, but on the other hand, when you look at it the other way, it is something that people understand. It is something that people understand how to make payments that way. I suppose the trick that we've got to do here is to basically say look, you can pay that way, but it's a bit more complicated for us and it'll cost your creator some money. The better way of doing it is to use something like Strike or one of these other wallet tools. But yeah, I think you're right that that's 10% of the people out there, rather than 100% of the people out there, who are perfectly happy with their credit card or their pay ID here in Australia or their ACH in America or whatever ACH in America or whatever it might end up being. They're perfectly happy with that and there's no real reason for them to change to a different platform.

Sam Sethi: 16:35

Well, as you say, there is one way of doing it and choosing a wallet and doing all the KYC is one. True Fans has created a different way. We've integrated with Stripe God, why have we got Stripe and Stripe? But we've integrated with Stripe and most people have heard of Stripe as a payment gateway and what's really cool for us is that we can do one click Apple Pay, google Pay. We are deprecating, or the, the sort of front and center use of sats as a, as a terminology within the platform, and we think that's because I go back to the primary goal is I want to listen to a podcast or listen to an audiobook and then tell me about this other way of supporting podcasters as you unpeel the onion rather than front and centre it. And we've got in our beta now. We've integrated with UPI and with Swish in Sweden and UPI in India. Stripe has already got those integrations. It took us, I think, 30 seconds to turn it on. So now, with our platform, if you want to pay with a upi in india instead of dollars, pounds or cents and convert those into true fans tokens, crack on, it works and then on the withdrawal, we can then take those tokens and convert that back into whatever currency you want. So I don't think we have a problem.

Sam Sethi: 18:01

I used to think the problem was people don't understand what micro payments and wallets are, but actually in India there's over 300 million people using UPI. 74% of people in Holland wanted to use Ideal when it was offered to them, which is the digital currency option, so people get it. I used to think people don't get this digital thing. They get it and they're using it. We, as the podcasting community, have to go to where they are. I don't think we should tell them to come to where we are. I think that's the problem and I think we'll see. Look, this is now. Adam says it often. This is now down to the strategy of the apps and hosts how we're going to get a larger market share. Fountain's going one way and True Fountain's going another way, and we'll see whether the two meet or never. The twain shall meet.

James Cridland: 18:52

Yeah, but I guess on the other side, actually, you're both going the same way in terms of how you receive money, because everybody is going to be using LN Address going forward, correct? It's just that how a listener will send money is probably a little bit different on each side, and perhaps that's the thing.

James Cridland: 19:11

Yeah 100%, but I do think it's important and I think that streaming payments is important to get right and just sort of finish this, even though this change is going to be pretty painful. And my suspicion is that we will see apps which take out streaming payments for a bit and boosts and those sorts of things, because it's just too complicated for them. But they will come back eventually and I think that that's a good thing, but it is important to get right. Two things I'd say about that. Firstly, obviously this is a way for podcast apps to make money.

James Cridland: 19:49

Right now, podcast apps don't really get a look in in terms of ad revenue, in terms of podcasting, terms of pretty well any other part of the podcast industrial complex, but what they can get is a look in a part of this streaming payment.

James Cridland: 20:10

There is ample opportunity for you, sam, if you want to, to charge 5%, to charge 10%, to charge 25% if you want to Not that many people would like that very much On top of the streaming payments that are going to creators, and so that's a great thing for podcast apps because all of a sudden, you can actually see the more people who use this app, the richer I'm going to get, and that's not actually been the case in the past, I guess.

James Cridland: 20:36

So you've got that sort of side, and then you've got, of course, the side of creators themselves and a story from Suzanne Santo, who had a song played on Boostergram Ball last week. Within five minutes of that show ending, she said that she had earned $7.77, which sounds tiny, but that, she said, is more than she's received from Spotify after 28,000 plays I would point out, spotify via her record company. But anyway, that is incredible, particularly when you consider that Booster Graham Ball per episode gets about 1,000 plays and she's earned $7.77 from that 1,000 plays. That is incredible in comparison to Spotify's money. So it's a really important thing that we get right and it's just really important thing that we get right. And it's just going to be painful, I think, isn't it? As we make the LN address change and, as you know, we have to roll out other things as well.

Sam Sethi: 21:34

Yeah, look, I don't think the LN address thing is that big. The good thing, when I did speak to Boomi, is that they already support the underlying protocol that we can use, called LNURLP. I won't get into that, but the point is it's already there, right, so it is not a massive change. People think it's a massive change on that side. It's not. I think the challenge is, you know it had to be done and so there was a big, heated discussion. It's over, we're done, we're moving on.

Speaker 2: 22:02

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Sam Sethi: 22:09

Anyway, james, moving on, moving on. Now. You were in Denmark recently, along with me and several other people, but we never met. No, but you did meet up with the boys from Hindenburg. I did. So what happened? I did. Yeah, it's a year since Hindenburg, so what happened?

James Cridland: 22:22

I did. Yeah, it's a year since Hindenburg rolled out version two of Hindenburg Pro and it's a great piece of software that we use to edit this show, and I use it to edit the Pod News Daily every single day. A couple of weeks ago, you might remember that Georg Dahm said that it would be a good idea to have the folks from Hindenburg on this show. Said that it would be a good idea to have the folks from Hindenburg on this show and I thought, well, you know, if he sends it in as a boost, then yes, absolutely, I'm going to do that. So I rang a man who lives on a boat in Denmark no, really to find out what was up with Hindenburg and how things are going. And he's called Nick Dunkley and he is one of the directors of the company, and the first thing I asked him was what is Hindenburg?

Nick Dunkerley: 23:07

Well, basically, Hindenburg Pro is another DAW, a digital audio workstation.

James Cridland: 23:12

What do?

Nick Dunkerley: 23:12

you mean by DAW, just a digital audio workstation. So it's a piece of software where you can edit your audio. You can record your voices, you can add your interviews, add music, ambience, and you can mix them all together until you have a final piece.

James Cridland: 23:33

That's what it is in essence and I know that you hate this, but it's similar to something like Pro Tools or Audacity or Reaper or those sorts of tools, and we'll come back to why. You don't necessarily like that too much, but that's the sort of thing. Hindenburg Pro you make a piece of software for audiobooks as well, but Hindenburg Pro came out with Hindenburg Pro 2 about a year ago now.

Nick Dunkerley: 24:04

So what's new about Hindenburg Pro 2, if anybody doesn't know, well, very briefly, we might say that Hindenburg 1 had been on the market for nearly 15 years and it's been servicing radio journalists and podcasters all over the world, and we thought it was time to make an update. We hadn't made an update. Well, we had obviously made changes, but we hadn't charged for an upgrade in all those years. So that's one thing that's new for us, and the other thing was well, if we're going to do that, we definitely want to put some new features in there that users have been looking for. So we spend a huge amount of time, um, redoing the whole ui, which is how it looks and feels, but also adding new features to it. So we have transcription in there. We've expanded the clipboard, which turned out to be huge success, so we had to make an even better one, and we've also added other stuff, like you can import video, yeah. So it's been interesting and a huge amount of work, but we're really proud of what we ended up with.

James Cridland: 25:16

And the transcript stuff. You are doing, as some other companies are doing, editing by transcript as well, so you can highlight a paragraph or something, press the delete button and it goes away from the audio as well. Right, yes it works that way.

Nick Dunkerley: 25:31

I wouldn't necessarily recommend that you do it, not just in hours, just in general, but that's just because I'm a radio person. I think having a script there is an amazing feature for navigating your material, getting a better overview of your story, for searching for keywords and for doing rough edits. It's amazing really. It just speeds up your process, which is what Hindenburg is all about at the end of the day. Which is what Hindenburg is all about at the end of the day is you want to make high-end productions, but many of our users are professionals, so they're also at a tight deadline. So it's finding that sweet balance between speed and quality and the transcription really helps speed up things.

James Cridland: 26:21

Now Hindenburg Pro 2 has been going for, as I say, for a year as a user every day. I've seen some impressive changes in it. All of a sudden in the middle of this year, it became far faster to use the transcription tool and various other things. Has it been basically making it as flawless as you possibly can over the last year, or have you added a bunch of new features that we've not actually spotted over the last year as well?

Nick Dunkerley: 26:52

Our whole ethos when it comes to features is we don't just want to add features, just to add features. We really spend a long time thinking about the ones that we put in there and how we put them in there, Because if we just added new features every time someone asked us for a feature, it would probably well be bloated for one thing, but also the features wouldn't necessarily make sense for most people.

James Cridland: 27:18

Yeah, and I think you know the history of Hindenburg is. I mean, it used to be called Hindenburg Journalist a while back and it was really you know, as I've been explaining it to people. It's there as a tool for journalists to make great sounding audio really really quickly so that they can get it onto the radio really really fast. I don't know whether that's entirely the way that you would normally talk it up, but that certainly seems to me to be the real value of a tool like Hindenburg Pro, in that it is very, very capable and also does its job very, very quickly as well.

Nick Dunkerley: 28:00

And that is actually the value, because if, as you know yourself, if you're working towards a deadline, being able to meet your deadline is more valuable than anything else. So there might be tools out there that have more bells and whistles and there definitely are but again, for us that's on purpose. The point isn't what you potentially can make if you had all the time in the world. Our mission is how much can you make, how creative can you be within a very restricted time limit? And that's a completely different approach to a product.

James Cridland: 28:39

Nick, the reason why you're on is we got a boost the other week from Georg Dahm or George Dahm, as I may be incorrectly calling him and anyway, he says could you get the Hindenburg guys onto the podcast? I've got one of them. It would be great to hear how things have been going since the switch to a subscription model. It says here Now, hindenburg Pro always had a subscription model, I think, as well as a buyout model, so you can buy the software if you like or you can just essentially rent it every single month. That's not particularly new, is it?

Nick Dunkerley: 29:12

Well, to be honest, he's right, it is fairly new. We've had it for some years now. Before that, you can just purchase it as a perpetual license, so to speak. But then we introduce subscription, but we still have both you can choose. So we've just added the option because, again, it being a very niche product, it also has a fairly high price, and some people just found that price a bit too steep and were asking well, could you do a subscription model instead?

James Cridland: 29:47

and so we did. Yeah. Gail also asks how are you competing with all the transcript based editors out there? I mean, clearly, since hindenburg started, there has been quite a growth in things like descripts. There's eddieliner, podcastle, a bunch of these other tools. I think Adobe has just released one as well, which is supposed to be a really easy, simple, straightforward way of editing a podcast. And do you see yourselves as being in competition with those tools, or where do you sort of fit?

Nick Dunkerley: 30:27

The way that we approach our products and how we think of our core audience. They are professional audio storytellers and the way that they use transcription is for searching and doing rough edits. So it's a slightly different approach to if you're using transcription, in the sense that if you've never tried to do audio before, using transcription is the same as editing in the Word document. That's a very different approach to saying that. Our approach is having a transcription will just speed up your professional work on a day-to-day basis. So are we in competition? Well, yes, but the crossover is not that deliberate from our point of view. The crossover when it comes to the audience. We're not necessarily seeking the beginners. We would love to have them aboard. That's not the audience. We're not necessarily seeking the beginners. We would love to have them aboard. That's not the point, but that's not necessarily our target audience. It very much seems that when it comes to Descripts and Adobe, their approach is we want to target very specifically the first time podcasters.

James Cridland: 31:40

And worthwhile also mentioning that it supports things, like you know, transcripts in SRT or VTT format. So it works fine with Podcasting 2.0 and all of that and does a fine job, you know, in terms of all that stuff, and we'll even sort out your LUFS levels as well. More details on that on the PodNews website. So what's coming up for Hindenburg? You've had a change at the top recently. What sort of? Are there any changes to the way that the company will work in the future and any new products that you are currently working on?

Nick Dunkerley: 32:29

product that you are currently working on, yes, good. Well, this wraps up this. Any clues as to what might be happening? Um, I just have to be careful what to say about. But but yes, um, as you might be be able to hear from what we've already talked about, um, our direction now is very much on the professional market and, again, we're not trying to alienate anyone. We're not going to make it so that you can't use it. It's just we want to be able to expand it. Okay, let me put it in a broad sense. If you are working professionally with, uh, with storytelling and that could be as a podcaster, but that might also be you have to do some side work as a voiceover artist, you might be narrating audiobooks, that kind of thing. Where we're going looking into the future in the somewhat shorter term is that we want to be able to have more tools in there so that you, as a professional, can do all your different products in one tool. I hope that makes sense.

James Cridland: 33:40

Yeah, no, that does make a bit of sense. That's relatively cryptic, but that does make a little bit of sense.

Nick Dunkerley: 33:47

Well, I can't say too much about the specific features, but it's just to say that it's difficult enough as it is to try to get food on the table as a voiceover artist or a podcaster.

Nick Dunkerley: 34:02

So we're just thinking, okay, what, what can we do again to make your work as seamless and as fun, to be honest, as possible, but at the same time, make sure that you're um so effective that you can actually earn money, because many of the things that we do, we're losing so much money.

Nick Dunkerley: 34:21

If I come with an example, I know we're not necessarily talking about audiobooks here, but when it comes to people who are narrating audiobooks, um, they can spend a lot of time just on the uh reading of the book, but then they take a can take a large percentage of their income and give that to an audio editor for them to then go in and set levels and make sure that all the noise levels are set correctly, and they're not getting a lot of money in the first place just to do their day-to-day work. So some of the things we already have that in Nowator makes that easier, but we're going to be migrating some of those ideas back to Hindenburg Pro so you as a professional again can just have one tool that you can use for most of your jobs slash podnews, you can actually go there and get a three-month trial and a 30% money off on your first year of Hindenburg Pro.

James Cridland: 35:27

I only mention this because Hindenburg very kindly give me a year's free use of your tool, and so therefore, you know, I think that would be a good plan, but do go and have a play with it. It is most definitely the tool for the serious podcaster that just wants to spend less time mixing and more time being more creative. That would be a good plan, hindenburgcom, like the disaster slash pod news. Nick, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

Nick Dunkerley: 35:58

It has been, James.

James Cridland: 35:59

Thank you very much. Much for your time. It has been, james Well. Thank you very much, nick Dunkley, and there's much more from that in the Pod News Extra feed, including Nick talking about proof of work, which is fascinating and how that might work in an audio editor, and loads more as well. You'll find the Pod News Extra feed in your podcast app, and suggestions for next year in terms of how we use the PodNews Extra feed would be very welcome. Weekly at podnewsnet if you want to send us an email Suggestions on what we might end up doing with that, do we put the full length interviews into this feed as well? Instead, who knows, weekly at podnewsnet would be a good thing.

Sam Sethi: 36:41

Now, james, we talked about Spotify adding video. Well, we have probably for the last couple of weeks actually talked about it. Yes, sadly, we have to talk about it again. The videification of Spotify continued with a full-width horizontal preview of clips appearing now in the home feed. It's very similar to YouTube, but Spotify is now displaying auto-generated wide 14 by 9 thumbnails. So, again, that is just starting to roll out, so they are really pushing hard now in the app to show video. What are your thoughts here, james?

James Cridland: 37:16

Yeah, I think you know Spotify continues to move forward with all of the video stuff and you know and that is interesting I ran a test, sam, earlier on this week.

James Cridland: 37:30

The Pod News Daily was not its usual self, because if you had watched it on YouTube or watched it on Spotify, you would have seen that it was a full video and I thought I wonder whether the Spotify algorithm will make any change in terms of how discoverable that is, how many people see it. Everything else you wouldn't know if you just looked at the thumbnail, because it was the normal thumbnail, but as soon as it started playing you'd have realised that it was me on camera. So I thought will that make a difference to the particular show in terms of its numbers? And the answer is no. It hasn't made a single thing, which I thought was interesting. But it was interesting having a play with that, interesting seeing how much extra work and extra time it took to produce a video version. But yeah, you know Spotify clearly want you to produce video and it's going to look even smarter in the future.

Sam Sethi: 38:29

So that was how People Discover. Podcast that episode.

James Cridland: 38:34

Yes, it might have been actually. Yes, Episode 1957. Yes, and possibly the version that was in the RSS feed. Possibly your version might still be the audio version. Okay, yeah, but certainly you know it was worth playing around with, just to see if the algorithm would actually reward me for that. It turns out that certainly the Spotify algorithm hasn't. I'm not sure whether the YouTube algorithm has. In fact, I will tell you the YouTube algorithm hasn't either. It's just received its normal amount of views.

Sam Sethi: 39:17

But is that too quick a test? I mean, is that, you know, one video is not really.

James Cridland: 39:23

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I was just curious to see if I uploaded something that is obviously a full motion video, will that make any difference to the numbers of views that it gets? Ie, will Spotify or will YouTube see that and promote it in a different way? And the answer is no, which is fine, but it was just a fun piece of experimentation to play around with. But you know, yeah, there we go.

Sam Sethi: 39:53

Spotify wrap. The end of the year is coming up. Spotify are putting out lots and lots of messages across channels to say have you got the latest version of Spotify? Because you might not get your Spotify wrapped. That's a good way of making sure everyone's up to date, I think. Nice one Spotify, but yeah, it'll be interesting. Well, they do podcasts, you think. This year, though, james as well.

James Cridland: 40:16

Yes, I mean they've done podcasts for the last couple of years, If you remember. They do two different versions of Wraps. They do Spotify Wraps for listeners and they also do Spotify Wraps for creators as well, and doubtless they will be doing that again this year as well, I'm sure.

Sam Sethi: 40:34

It seems, spotify are putting out some stats now and they're saying that more than 170 million people have watched a video podcast on Spotify and the platform has seen an 88% surge in the number of people are using video. So this report came from an article you linked to called Tube Filter.

James Cridland: 40:53

Yeah, that's a website which is essentially a news source for video creators. I think it's interesting. I think there are two interesting things there. If more than 170 million people have watched a video podcast on Spotify so far, that is not you know. Spotify has many more people who use Spotify, don't they?

Sam Sethi: 41:18

680 million was the number.

James Cridland: 41:20

Exactly so. What we're saying is, after all of this, only a third of Spotify users have actually even watched one, and the you know people who have watched a video podcast. You know I always come back as soon as I see a stat like that. I always come back to people who have stood on a Lego brick in their bare feet. You don't do that twice. It's a very unpleasant experience, and so I don't think it tells you anything really in terms of how people are consuming them. But you know it's a nice figure. But even so, it means that two thirds of Spotify users haven't even bothered watching a video podcast yet, which is interesting, isn't it?

Sam Sethi: 42:02

Maybe they don't know it's there yet, but now you were on a podcast, I think, oxford Road, talking about how, potentially, if we go down the road of YouTube and Spotify, the podcast industry could be over, and Brian Baletta has also written something very similar, which he says wake up. It's a wake up call for the podcasting industry and he highlights that the monetisation options you may lose by using Spotify's upload video option. So give me the background to all of this, james.

James Cridland: 42:36

Yeah. So there is a bunch of things that you just need to be aware of if you are going to jump into Spotify for video. Thing number one is as soon as you upload a video as an episode, then Spotify will no longer ever look at the audio for that episode. So what that essentially means is that means no access to anything like your IAB download figures. They all go Dynamically inserted ads from your hosting platform. They all go Log level data or reporting within your hosting platform, within Buzzsprout, for example. They all go, because Spotify is just using the video file that you uploaded, whether they're watching or listening to it. So it also means that attribution prefix, urls and ad delivery tracking and all of that tedious stuff that all goes away as well, and it means that you can't sell programmatic ads with anybody other than with Megaphone, possibly.

James Cridland: 43:47

So it's a big, big change, and I don't think that the industry has fully got the fact that actually, just by uploading a video to Spotify as an episode means that essentially, you are kissing goodbye to all of the benefits of RSS from that.

James Cridland: 44:06

So you know, we don't know how much money people are going to make. We have no idea if a creator will make more from a share of the consumption of their podcast on Spotify premium than they would have done with advertising, because Spotify haven't shared any of that data yet. So I think all of this, just you know, you just need to be careful, I think, in terms of how much money Spotify is going to actually share with you, because we don't know that figure yet, but also what you lose by jumping onto the Spotify video bandwagon. And the same goes for YouTube as well. If you're using YouTube, if the majority of people are using YouTube to consume your podcast, again, you're not getting any data into Buzzsprout or whoever you host with. You're not getting any data in terms of you know, if you want to use the dynamic audio feature in the Buzzsprout app, then tough, because you can't use that on YouTube and so on and so forth. So you know, just be careful. I think is what all of these people are saying.

Sam Sethi: 45:07

Yeah, and the other thing I just want to ask you about, James, is if the amount of money that Spotify gets in from each subscriber is fixed ie £14.99 or £17.99. And that money was being used to pay music artists and record companies. That money is now going to be used, from what we understand, but there's no detail. Podcasters as well. I mean, they've added an additional fee to cover audiobooks, so there is extra money in the pot for those.

James Cridland: 45:43

Well, but there's some in terms of audiobooks, but then you get a free audiobook anyway per month, or you get 15 hours for free, which is the equivalent. So they pay for those audiobooks as well. So, yeah, so who is going to pay less is the question, isn't it? Exactly that's the question.

Sam Sethi: 45:59

Yeah, because fundamentally we're not going to see Spotify reduce their profits, so it's going to be music. Artists are either going to get less or the amount, and this is the critical part I think that Brian was trying to pick up as well and we talked about last week. The critical part is how many streams will a podcaster have to get before they see some payment? And, as you talked about earlier, you know that lady whose music was played on booster ground ball made $7.77 straight away but hadn't made anything like that or even close after 28,000 streams. Will they move that to 38,000 streams now and will podcasters have to have some crazy high number before they see any return?

James Cridland: 46:44

Yeah, well, we don't really know, and I think that's the interesting thing with all of this we don't really know. There are lots of people. Neil Velio posted a great piece, which you know. You can tell what it says just from the title the hidden risks of YouTube and Spotify that the suck-up podcast bros on LinkedIn won't admit. Of YouTube and Spotify that the suck-up podcast bros on LinkedIn won't admit. And I think he's trying to regain my crown after that whinge that I had last week, which I noticed John McDermott even mentioned in his newsletter. So, yeah, what is the concerning thing is that there are lots of people who are sitting there and going oh, spotify, they're going to save the world, youtube, they're going to save the world. And actually, you know, we New York Magazine, not the New York Times, it's very different.

James Cridland: 47:41

New York Magazine in the US published a piece which is called how YouTube Ate Podcasting and really it's based on one thing it's based on that Edison Research number that YouTube is apparently the most successful podcast platform out there, beating Spotify and beating Apple Podcasts. And he, john Herman, the writer of this piece, talks about RSS has almost certainly hindered growth of podcasting, but gives absolutely no background for any reason why that would be, and anyone with half a brain will argue back to John no, you've got it completely the wrong way around. Do you know? I think that there's a thing here around those Edison research stats, and I'm not saying that the Edison research stats are wrong, far from it. I think that they are telling the story of what was asked, which is to talk to podcast listeners and say what is the most you know, what is your most you know popular way of consuming podcasts. And everybody turned around and said YouTube. I think that that is absolutely true. However, what I would say is that the Joe Rogan experience has so many listeners that if you add those and Call Her Daddy and Crime Junkie together, which are the top three big video shows in the US, if you add those together, they will essentially swing the numbers for the rest of the industry, because Joe Rogan is so, so, so big.

James Cridland: 49:23

And if you were to take Joe Rogan off and Crime Junkie and Call Her Daddy and you were to ask the remaining people so people who don't listen to any of those shows what is your most favoured podcast platform, I'm prepared to lay a bet that the answer will not be YouTube, if you look at the numbers. For example, the Daily from the New York Times is seeing about 25,000 views on YouTube per episode, but back in 2020, not even now, but back in 2020, it was doing 4 million average daily downloads as a podcast. So 25,000 views on YouTube per day or 4 million downloads per day as a podcast even if downloads are always going to be bigger than plays on YouTube that's a phenomenal difference. So I do think that there is this whole Joe Rogan thing of if you were to take those shows out and then go back and ask normal people what's your favourite podcast app, they wouldn't necessarily answer YouTube is my thing, the freedom and control that comes from using RSS is worth holding on to.

Sam Sethi: 50:41

Yes, it is your RSS, you can take it and move it where you like. My worry is this, and you've been there as well, james we were in the industry when blogging was big, when it first came out, and RSS was the underlying mechanism for that as well. And then along came Facebook and Twitter and people en masse abandoned their blogs and went to those closed platforms and the worry was it was all about I wasn't getting any comments, no one was listening, I didn't know if anyone was there. And then they went to an aggregated audience and, bingo, they'd put some words up and someone had come back and respond and it was that affirmation that you were writing not into the void, but actually writing and someone had come back and respond. And it was that affirmation that you were writing not into the void, but actually writing and someone was responding.

Sam Sethi: 51:26

And I do worry that we are seeing maybe now with YouTube and Spotify, a similar thing. They've got 2.9 billion daily actives on YouTube and 680 million actives a month on Spotify. Are we going down that same road? I'm asking that, as a person who builds a open standards TrueFans app. That are we actually seeing the repeat of what we saw with blogging into social media, with podcasting into Spotify and YouTube?

James Cridland: 51:57

Yeah, and of course, one of the things that helped kill blogging was Google. That ended up essentially having the only RSS reader out there called Google Reader, and they decided to close it one day because it wasn't earning them any money. And that was one of the things that ended up killing the whole blogging ecosphere, because we let one company become too powerful. So we'd best not have that happen again.

Sam Sethi: 52:31

Exactly. One of the other things I saw was Spotify for Creators is discontinuing its US-only listener support programme. James, what are they doing?

James Cridland: 52:41

its US-only listener support programme, james. What are they doing? So this was Spotify's rather bizarre kind of copy of Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee, so in the US only. So this is for US creators only, but also, weirdly, for US listeners only. There was a way of you, as a turning on the listener support programme and listeners in the US could pledge you a monthly recurring amount to support your show. That is going away in January.

James Cridland: 53:26

My understanding is that it frankly wasn't being used very much. One of the people I spoke to at Spotify said that the average money that was being earned through Spotify's listener support program was $8 a month. Now, that's not a lot of money and, frankly, it's not particularly good for anybody. So, yeah, so they are shutting listener support down. I would argue they didn't launch it properly anyway, and I'm sure that if they launched it globally then it would be a different conversation. But anyway, that is going away. If you want to find a different company that is doing the same sort of thing, obviously Patreon that you're aware of, pod News, has a long-term sponsor called Memberful, which will do a very good job for you as well, and there are a bunch of other things like that too, but yeah, it's just another thing that Spotify have tried and they've worked out that it hasn't really worked particularly well and they've stopped trying it, basically.

Sam Sethi: 54:26

Let's park Spotify away, away for a minute.

James Cridland: 54:29

Oh yes, let's do that. That would be a good plan.

Sam Sethi: 54:32

Either this is the introduction to Brian Ferry's Avalon or there's something else that in the show notes we have Avalon for. Why have we got the show notes?

James Cridland: 54:40

Avalon James. There is a very good company in the UK which is a talent management company, so at its heart it's a agency for talent, if we can call them that. So people like Frank Skinner, people like John Oliver, people like the Taskmaster himself, alex Horne, and many other comedians and people like that. And I noticed something interesting when I reported a couple of weeks ago on Frank Skinner's show. Now Frank Skinner has a podcast. It's called Frank Off the Radio. Now he used to be on Absolute Radio but Absolute Radio said goodbye and Frank Skinner stopped doing his radio show.

James Cridland: 55:28

But I did notice that he managed to keep his RSS feed from Absolute Radio and has relaunched essentially his radio show as a podcast, which I thought was a really clever thing. And I wondered whether or not this was a thing that Avalon does and whether or not this was a thing that any good talent management company would do. So I found a half an hour in John Thoday's busy diary. He's the co-founder of Avalon and the first thing I asked him is how they managed to get Frank Skinner's RSS feed to continue now that he's no longer with Absolute Radio.

Jon Thoday: 56:09

We just had an agreement with Absolute that we could take the feed with us, and so we just made that agreement with them. Obviously, anybody who knows anything about podcasts knows that very ideally, you have your own feed and it follows you, and in general, I think it's better if podcasts are owned by the podcaster. But a podcast, if you want it to be portable, you need the feed. So it's not really any more complicated than that. We produce podcasts and we also represent podcasts, and we've been doing it, to be honest, since david verdeal and frank skinner did a podcast for the world cup in the early 2000s, before people knew what reeds were. So we've been doing it for quite a long time. And obviously the bugle, which was john o'leary and andy zeltzman going all the way back then, which was John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman going all the way back then, which was originally funded by the time oh, that was one of yours as well, was it?

James Cridland: 57:04

Yeah, gosh, it turns out that I watch very little television, but all of my favourites Taskmaster Last Week Tonight, russell Howard, it's all you, thank you. So, thank you for that. Well, it's really John.

Jon Thoday: 57:18

Oliver, alex Thorne and Russell Howard. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, thank you. We're lucky enough to work with some brilliant people, yeah so.

James Cridland: 57:26

So how important is podcasting for the kind of shows that avalon has?

Jon Thoday: 57:30

I wouldn't put it like that really. We we sort of came upon podcasts in the early 2000s when keith blackmore, who was then sports editor of the uh of the Times and he went on to be the deputy editor called me up and said have you heard of this thing called the podcast, which, to be frank, I hadn't heard of, and I think at that time Ricky Gervais might have been doing one with the Guardian. He was. So that's, that was how we got involved with podcasts. So because we work closely with talent, we tend to get involved in all sorts of media. So if a comedian wants to do a TV show, we're often involved with it, either, as I say, producing it or representing the artist If they want to do podcasting. Obviously, podcasting for me has quite a big parallel with stand-up comedy, because the thing about stand-up is essentially it's a comedian and a microphone and that is not much different to a podcast.

James Cridland: 58:30

That's interesting.

Jon Thoday: 58:31

So it doesn't have the cost of making a TV show or a film or a theatre play or anything like that, and it's got a low barrier to to entry, which is a great thing for podcasters yeah, no indeed, and I I didn't realize you looked after shag's married annoyed, which is a massive show yeah, we produce.

James Cridland: 58:53

Uh, we produce that, yes yeah, yeah, a podcast going to be more important for avalon going forward, or is it? Um, you know, is it, is it just, you know, one of the many things that Avalon do.

Jon Thoday: 59:06

Well, if, if, while people we work with want to do podcasts, they will be important and I'm hoping that the podcast will continue to grow. So, like you know, wtf with Mark Maron in the US we represent that. But but we have quite a lot of global podcasts that we work with or produce. It's super important. I've always been a fan of Radio 4. But actually, when podcasts came along, finally, there was an alternative.

James Cridland: 59:36

Yeah, indeed.

Jon Thoday: 59:38

And I remember going to the US saying to people there's no real Radio 4 in the US and people said there was no market for it. And I always thought there was. And. I think podcasts have proved that there definitely is.

James Cridland: 59:51

Yeah, yeah, no, indeed. So what do you tell the people that you represent? I'm trying hard not to use the word talent, because I've been told that we're not allowed to use it anymore.

Jon Thoday: 1:00:01

They are talent. I don't know why you aren't allowed to use it.

James Cridland: 1:00:04

Because talent, I don't know what yes, he said you can't use it. Oh, tim davey, you know what he's like.

Jon Thoday: 1:00:09

Yeah well, tim davey's wrong well, I mean, I don't know what he's talking about. The idea that we can change what people call talent.

James Cridland: 1:00:19

It's such rubbish what should talent be aware of when they're signing a contract for a podcast? I mean, I'm sure that you would say get a great agent. But what else should they be aware of?

Jon Thoday: 1:00:30

it depends on whose idea it is, is the answer to the question. If it's the person that has asked them to do its idea and they own the ip, I'd worry about certain things. And if they're like we manage Matt Ford, he does the British scandal for Wondery. It's a great podcast. Obviously it pre-existed and very successful in America, very successful here, and in that kind of situation, you're thinking more about just what's to see and does the artist want to do it? Will it be good for them?

Jon Thoday: 1:01:07

If the artist has thought of it, or the talent let's call them the talent then it's a case of trying to make sure that you're on the best platform and you've got you continue to have creative control. It's one of the slight problems with the BBC getting involved in podcasts because they have to comply, which is actually the whole point of a podcast. Is it the freedom of the creator? Yes, which is one of the things that's exciting about it, whether it be length, content, et cetera, and it's your idea and you own it is to try and make sure you retain as much of it as possible. Uh, to the extent that often the risk is taken by the podcaster so lots of podcasts also obviously going into video.

James Cridland: 1:01:53

Now I was in la last week, um yeah, with the launch of spotify's, you know video stuff for podcasting yeah, the streaming, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah what are your thoughts on podcasting and video?

Jon Thoday: 1:02:07

well. I think it's a way of increasing the monetization for people who are trying to monetize. Yeah, personally, I think really podcasts are an audio product and, unless you really like it, when you watch a radio show, being you know, like you know, there's cameras in the radio station I'm less convinced that it's something that. I think the podcast itself is a bigger step forward than a video of a podcast, in the same way that the radio show when radio was invented was a much bigger step forward than just filming a radio show, because they soon discovered that television required other sorts of production values. But that's the personal view.

Jon Thoday: 1:02:46

There are reasons to do podcasts on video. But I think, with regard to Spotify, spotify have got something right, which is that YouTube underpays its talent because the ad revenue CPM is too low. So if Spotify can make their streaming platform work, it's got a big advantage for people on YouTube, because it could be a case that they grab a fake over to Spotify because Spotify's in a lot of homes. But I am less sure about Spotify or a podcast per se.

James Cridland: 1:03:21

Yeah, yeah, and I think the devil is in the detail, and we don't necessarily know much of the detail quite yet. In terms of that, I've just got two other questions. I'm just curious how podcasting looks from your world. Is it a tiny part of your world? And, if it is, if it wants to grow, what's your advice to the industry?

Jon Thoday: 1:03:45

world and if it is, if it wants to grow. What? What's your advice to the industry? Don't ruin it with programmatic spot ads, is my advice for the industry ah, how, how do they ruin it?

Jon Thoday: 1:03:52

well, I think that I personally think that one of the great things about podcast is that the the read, the regional read, the baked in read, which is like mark marron, only does baked in reads in the uf, is very user friendly. I think if podcasts become ultimately monetized like radio, you're just going to end up with more and more advertising in it, a lower and lower cpm, and I think that potentially damages the user experience and I think the reason the podcasts work is there's a sort of relationship between the person that listens to it and the person that podcasts it, which is sort of different to radio.

Jon Thoday: 1:04:38

And I think the you know, particularly in america, the amount of spots for advertising, as it will inevitably go up and up and up and the way the advertising sold is often a smoothing operation by the platform, which isn't in the spirit of original podcasting. It was originally there, monetized through reads, to give an opportunity to create, for creative talent to kind of do the thing they like to do, and maybe people will like it or maybe they won't. And I think that's what's exciting about podcasts is the uncurated nature of it and how easy it is for a podcaster to do it. So a lot fail and a lot succeed, and I think that's what's great about podcasting. I'm a huge fan of stand-up comedy, the Edinburgh Festival, podcasting to some extent, writing novels, all of which are Novels. Obviously you have to find a publisher, but to some extent now people can do it on their own. They're all things which are pure creative items with relatively little curation. That is what can lead to the most exciting work.

James Cridland: 1:05:50

One final question. You did the first arena comedy show with Numan Abediel Shagged, married Annoyed have also done live shows as well. How important are live shows to the podcasting world? We're seeing more of them happen, particularly in the US. Are you organising more of them for some of the talent that you work with?

Jon Thoday: 1:06:12

We do lots of live stand-up and now we do lots of live podcasts as well, and there is a kind of hybrid between the two. I think the answer is if you can do a good show with a podcast, it's a really good idea. But I think you need to think about what your live performance is, to make sure that the user experience is good. People will come back the next time, so you know when chris and rosie get ready to do a live show. They put a lot of work into that.

Jon Thoday: 1:06:40

There's a development phase that you need to go through and it's certainly exciting that somebody can do podcasts, find that their podcast gets successful and then be able to play small, medium, big arena-sized venues without having to have a hit television show first. I mean just to say we're massive fans of podcasting and I think it's a great new media and relatively new medium, particularly when the hands of people that run radio four or so tied by all sorts of history, historical things. To be able to have the freedom of podcasting is something we should all cherish john, thank you, I appreciate it the pleasure, yeah, so there you go.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:24

uh, john Thode, you can listen to that interview as well. Is there an extra part to that as well? James, there isn't.

James Cridland: 1:07:31

I only got about 11 minutes with him, and so that is the entire thing. I should also point out that that was done over the phone because John is, I think, a busy executive. The easiest way of having an interview with him was to just have a telephone call, but I put it through Adobe's new enhanced speech thing. Executive. The easiest way of having an interview with him was to just have a telephone call, but I put it through Adobe's new enhanced speech thing, and that's why it sounded actually, to be fair, pretty good, better than a pair of AirPods anyway.

Sam Sethi: 1:07:56

Exactly Now. What was that one thing that he said you must do if you sign a podcast?

James Cridland: 1:08:01

deal. That one thing is keep control of your RSS feed, as he said right at the top of that. So that is a hugely important thing. If you are signing a deal with somebody else to produce your podcast, then make sure that it is in the contract, as it was in this one, that you keep control of your RSS feed. It was super good to have a chat with him. He does basically all of the TV shows that I love, so Taskmaster and Last Week Tonight, and you know I mean basically all of them. So yeah, so it was a bit of a moment.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:41

But I think you know we talk about Web 2, the loss of control from your blog and controlling your data, and we are trying to reinforce. This is what Spotify wants to do and this is what YouTube wants to do. They want you to lose control of your feed and totally own your data and customer and, at the end of the day, if you go down that road, as John said, you are going to lose control of everything.

James Cridland: 1:09:07

Yes, no, indeed, indeed. Well, let's go around the world. In the UK, stephen Bartlett's Diary of a CEO has reached one billion views and listens, which I thought was a nice number. Also, I thought was the nice number in this quote. I owe, said Stephen Bartlett, the success of the Diary of a CEO to the now 50 strong team behind the scenes. This is a result of those 50 people's hard work and talent. One podcast, 50 people.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:39

Wow. Well, I suppose if you reach a billion people, 50 is not bad, then is it? Wow? He needs more people working for him. 50 is not bad then is it?

James Cridland: 1:09:44

Wow. He needs more people working for him. Also in the UK, edison Research published the top 25 UK podcasts for quarter three, 2024. The rest is politics is the number one British made show in the country. It's number two after Joe Rogan. Remember how I was talking about how big Joe Rogan is earlier on. So Goldhanger having a storming time with their numbers. If you're interested, only two shows from the US in the chart Acast hosts nine shows, megaphone hosts seven and the BBC hosts five. And the Goldhanger team have a new podcast which has just launched. It's called the Rest Is Classified and it's all about spies and that sort of thing.

Sam Sethi: 1:10:26

Now, bbc Sounds you have a love-hate relationship with them, don't you, james? But they have done a deal with Goalhanger. Actually, they've now taken the rest is football and the rest is history. But I don't get it. I mean, I genuinely don't get it.

James Cridland: 1:10:41

Why are they doing this?

Sam Sethi: 1:10:43

Yeah well, I don't get why they're doing it but also I don't get the fact that they've got a delayed one. So if I listen to, the rest is football. That's one of my podcasts I do listen to. If Gary Lineker's talking about the game from last night and it's then on, BBC Sounds as a time-delayed podcast. It's irrelevant. It's like listening to the news three or four days after the news. I don't get it. With the rest, it's history. That's fine, you know, delayed by eight weeks, irrelevant. But I don't get it.

James Cridland: 1:11:14

The rest is football time delayed by two days, presumably so that somebody at Goal Hanger or somebody at the BBC can pull the ads out, because it won't contain ads on the BBC Sounds app and the swearing, but the shows well, yeah. So presumably because presumably it'll be complied to BBC editorial standards as well, which is, I guess, why the rest is politics isn't on there, because there's no way in hell that that show will ever get complied by the BBC because it is not balanced. But that's fine. So I just don't get it. I don't understand. I understand that the way that Goldhanger get paid for this is and that's your TV licence fee money that's going to this is that Goldhanger gets paid on total listens within the BBC Sounds app. There is a cap so that they don't get paid too much and it is a fraction of the fee that they would ordinarily pay if somebody was making a show for them.

James Cridland: 1:12:18

But I think there are two things going on here. I think, firstly, this is a put-up or shut-up to to Goldhanger from the BBC. If you remember, back in March April, the BBC was talking about its podcast monetisation plans in the UK, which is on third parties. We're going to have adverts and I think from that point of view you know, goldhanger was jumping up and down One of those companies who was saying this is a really bad idea, you should stop doing this.

James Cridland: 1:12:47

And now, all of a sudden, the BBC is paying them some money and that relationship changes. So I think it's a little bit to do with that. I think also, to be honest, I think it's a little bit to do with Gary Lineker is one of the presenters of the Rest Is Football. Gary Lineker used to be the biggest presenter on the BBC and maybe it's BBC Sounds going rather misguidedly in my view. Oh, people will be really missing Gary Lineker. We should make sure that there's some Gary Lineker on our audio app, and so perhaps it's a little bit of that as well, but I don't understand what BBC Sounds is trying to do if it's taking those shows, but it doesn't want to take this one.

James Cridland: 1:13:30

I mean, I don't know, I don't know why have you tried?

Sam Sethi: 1:13:35

Or maybe because you keep writing about them and calling them. Are they about to die, which we will move on to in a second.

James Cridland: 1:13:43

Well, yes, and so I did. I wrote a blog post called BBC Sounds Is it Going Away Internationally? It's a personal blog post, but there's a lot of contradictions in how the BBC works for podcasts. It's really confusing, particularly if you're outside. The UK is, and it's just a guess and I don't know anything more than that. But my guess is that BBC Sounds will be taken away from us, from us horrible foreigners, and that actually means that we won't be able to get you know Radio 1 or Radio 2 across the world anymore, which is probably fair enough, to be honest, and we will rely on podcasts, which they will stop time delaying because that makes no sense, but instead they will plaster with adverts all over everywhere, and I think that that's probably fair, but it's just at the moment. It's just such a contradictory mess. So I wrote a long post about that which you can go and find if you are so inclined.

James Cridland: 1:14:48

You also turned it into a podcast, if you're so inclined as well, which is available from rsscom yes, if you search for James Cridland, radio futurologist, and then you'll find that I really must get around to updating the photograph because my branding police is very sad a picture with me with glasses on which I'm I'm not supposed to have in any of my photo photo shoots. Yes, I really must do that anyway, and two pieces of news from Australia.

James Cridland: 1:15:19

Firstly, cameron Riley congratulations to him who, along with Mick Stanek, released the first podcast from Australia 20 years ago this week. Brilliantly, he called it a blog cast, not a podcast. It was called G'day World because of course it was, and the first section in that podcast was the problems with the name podcasting. How things have changed. So he actually ended up moving on to run the podcast network, which was very successful for a time. He was based in Melbourne. He's now based about 10 minutes walk away from where I live. I met him once and had a pizza. So, yeah, super, super good. But many congratulations to him 20 years ago this week for the first Aussie podcast.

James Cridland: 1:16:08

And also talking about Australia podcasting, the fastest growing ad format. According to data from IAB Australia which came out on Monday, podcast ads for the quarter were up by 26.5%. That sounds good, doesn't it? Entire podcast advertising in Australia 20.5 million US dollars. Tiny, tiny, tiny, really really small Podcasts account for 40% of all online audio ad spend in the country. Streaming gets 60%. There is a real difference between the amount of money that podcasting makes in the US and the amount of money that podcasting makes in every other country, and that is a really obvious example of that, but good to see that it is indeed growing.

Sam Sethi: 1:16:54

Now moving on to people and jobs. James, who's grooving and who's moving?

James Cridland: 1:16:59

All of the people at Rhapsody Voices are grooving. They have been acquired by Evergreen Podcasts Mike Jensen, who, you may remember, we interviewed back in September in 2023 in this very show, mike Jensen, who was the co-founder of Rhapsody Voices. He now becomes Chief Business Officer at Evergreen. That company is growing and growing and growing. It's based in Cleveland in Ohio. It seems to be doing amazing things. So many congratulations to them for that. And our favourite ACAST PR person, who begins with the letter M twice Molly D'Amelie has been promoted to Director of Marketing and Public Relations. She's American, so it's probably Molly D'Amelie, but anyway so congratulations, molly.

Sam Sethi: 1:17:51

However you pronounce your surname, mdm, they abbreviate everything in ACAST it's LP and now it's MDM.

James Cridland: 1:17:57

Yeah not sure that it works that way, but anyway, excellent, and it's always good to congratulate people with the budget In terms of awards and events On Air Fest is happening in late February, february 19th to the 21st. I won't be there because I'll be in Switzerland week. She will host the Podcast Business Summit as an invite only thing on February the 19th. If your name is not down, you're not coming in. However, if your name is not down, you can buy a ticket for Podfest Expo in Orlando this January. The Podcasting Hall of Fame is happening there, but also a bunch of keynotes, including JLD he is known as JLD John Lee Dumas and Kate Erickson Dumas from Entrepreneurs on Fire Don't worry, they're not really on fire. They've been announced as keynotes there, which is good, and congratulations to the winners of the Audio Production Awards in the UK.

Sam Sethi: 1:19:01

Okay, JC, let's move on.

James Cridland: 1:19:02

The Tech Stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review move on the tech stuff on the pod news weekly review. Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every monday in the pod news newsletter. Here's where sam talks technology. Have we not already talked enough technology for this show? I?

Sam Sethi: 1:19:16

know, I know, sorry everyone, but there is a bit more. But this one, this stuff's much more light-hearted, uh, and it's actually fun. So, so Podpage have now rolled out pod rolls. So what are pod rolls, james?

James Cridland: 1:19:30

Yes. So if you use Buzzsprout, for example, then you can list in your Buzzsprout dashboard podcasts that you think that your audience would like to listen to. It's also support by Blueberry, RSScom and Transistor, and if Podpage sees those in your RSS feed, then it will automatically create a pod roll page. I wish they hadn't have called it pod roll it's an awful name but a pod roll page of shows that you want to recommend to other people automatically in your Podpage website. You can also see those in places like Podcast Guru, in True Fans and in the pod news podcast pages as well, which is quite nice.

Sam Sethi: 1:20:18

Now, out of Switzerland, snit, which uses a lot of AI, have launched a new feature which I think is quite nice. They now use AI again through the transcript, but what they do is they process it to extract any mentions of books and then provide you with a hyperlink. So again, if you use Snipped, you can then click on the link and go and buy it.

James Cridland: 1:20:38

Somebody's discovered the Amazon affiliate deal, haven't they?

Sam Sethi: 1:20:41

They have indeed.

James Cridland: 1:20:43

Eleven Labs has launched oh good a competitor to Google Notebook LM. I think we'll hear more from Google Notebook LM next week, I think. Anyway, 11 Labs launching a competitor for that, for generating Gen AI podcasts Whoopee. What's CasterPod doing?

Sam Sethi: 1:21:09

whoopee. What's CasterPod doing? They're considering bringing out an open source desktop app for Linux, windows or Mac, and again, it has plugins to make the platform work, so for things like noise reduction or music insertion. So, yes, that might be a nice feature if you're into open source software. Casterpod out of France.

James Cridland: 1:21:25

Yeah, it's interesting that, because part of that open source is going to be noise reduction, mouth noise editing, audio editing, local transcription all that kind of stuff Looks really impressive if they can get it to do all of that, because there are quite a few large podcast hosts who I think would be very keen in seeing that sort of thing. So go, go, cast a pod. So far as I'm concerned, a few other interesting things. There's an app nothing to do with podcasting, really, but there's an app called Sill which sits there and rounds up the best links from your Blue Sky and Mastodon networks and Mastodon networks, which is quite a nice thing. I have been using an app as well this week which is called OpenVibe. It's got a little picture of an octopus on it and what OpenVibe allows you to do is it essentially pulls Blue Sky, mastodon and Threads all together as one timeline and when you post a new post it will go to all three of those, but you can reply to people on those individual platforms and everything else. It's a pretty nice thing. I find it a little bit confusing, just because I'm used to, you know, blue Sky looking a bit different to Mastodon. But yeah, I would recommend having a play with that. Openvibe is the name of that app and it appears to be currently free. Having a play with that? Open Vibe is the name of that app and it appears to be currently free.

James Cridland: 1:22:52

Podcastle Clearly think that the future of podcasting is in video, because they've launched a new in-browser video editor. They've had an audio editor for a while, so congratulations to them from Transylvania, romania, somewhere. And rsscom is doing the Lord's work. They're automatically removing chartable prefixes from your podcasts. If you're on rsscom, basically, chartable prefixes stop working on December the 12th and if you leave them in after December the 12th, your podcast will not work. No one will be able to listen to your podcast. It will just simply die. So rsscom is doing the sensible thing and automatically getting rid of those. I think everybody else should be doing that as well, and that's a bright idea. So congratulations to the good folks at rsscom for doing that. I'm an advisor, I should say.

Speaker 2: 1:23:46

Boostergrams and fan mail on the Pod News Weekly Review. For doing that I'm an advisor, I should say.

James Cridland: 1:23:51

Yes, it's our favourite time of the week, it's Boostergram Corner. And yes, this is how you can get some money to us, either using a credit card more of which later or by pressing the boost button in your podcast app. If your podcast app hasn't got one, you can get a new podcast app, although everything breaks in January, so, as you've just heard, but anyway, boosts that. We've got 5,000 sats from Silas on Linux. You may remember his grumpy thing from last week. You thought he was being polite and jolly and I thought he was being grumpy, jolly and I thought he was being grumpy, and he says James was correct. I do dislike the term OpenRSS. I'm sorry, sam. I'm sorry Silas, I'm going to carry on using it. Of course, both of you are great, though, and no, I don't want to make my own app. I have enough things going on. I actually need to finish one.

Sam Sethi: 1:24:43

Look, the reason why I use the term open RSS is because I want to try and make it clear that Spotify is closed. It's the opposite to closed right, and that's all it is. That's why I'm trying to use the term open, because that then gives people who don't know about the technicalities of RSS at least some sort of adjective to understand why we talk about it.

James Cridland: 1:25:08

Agreed. One of the people who doesn't agree with that is Adam Curry, who says that he sent us 100,000 sats last week but says that it's failed Failed on his end, I should point out, not on ours. Yes, you know so. He says that he sent us 100,000 sats, but that's not the same as doing it.

James Cridland: 1:25:27

I am only joking, adam, please, bdnc. Thank you for 100 sats. Love the perspective that video helps attract an audience and audio helps keep them along. That seems consistent with what I think we've been seeing. Yes, I would agree with that.

Sam Sethi: 1:25:44

The Late Bloom Ractor said YouTube and Spotify may win the market because 90% plus of users just listen or watch Podcasting apps. Rss, and especially podcasting 2.0, is a way beyond the understanding and care of most listeners. I agree with you to that extent. It is the future and we are trying to build the future, so sometimes it takes a while for people to catch up. He goes on to say a myriad of podcasting terms sats in relation to v for v, to name one of the many. Turn them away. Make podcasting to the oh, understandable and easy on the front end, like youtube is uh. It's the only way to win, I feel, and I again 100 agree. We are, I said earlier, deprecating the wording around sats and micropayments. We're hiding the wallets. We're not making it front and centre. I think we have got to go for the 99% of people who want to just listen to a podcast and have other great features like chapters, transcripts, and not focus purely on the money element.

James Cridland: 1:26:46

And I would say I don't think that the user, the podcast listener, needs to know what Podcasting 2.0 is. I don't think it's actually useful. I think Podcasting 2.0 is a brand for podcast creators and I don't think it's a brand for podcast consumers. I think all that podcast consumers need to know is oh, this app is pretty cool, it's got comments in it, or this app is pretty cool, I can help support the podcast that I listen to, and that is, I think, about as far as it's going to go. Podcasting 2.0 really means nothing to a user, because there is no podcast app out there that supports every single thing about Podcasting 2.0, apart from True Fans. Thank you.

James Cridland: 1:27:26

I was going to say thing about podcasting 2.0, apart from true fans, and so therefore, I think, from that, from that point of view, yeah, it's, it's. It's not necessarily a brand that we need to get out there is my humble opinion, um, but I do think that creators need to understand the benefits of uh, some of these new things, especially the new uh podcast location tag coming soon to a podcast app near you.

Sam Sethi: 1:27:50

Already available on TrueFans. Yes, yes, yes, there you go.

James Cridland: 1:27:54

I already do this. It's a t-shirt. Truefans already does this.

James Cridland: 1:27:58

That's what you need. And also thank you to our friend of the show, alberto, at rsscom, alberto Botella, who, by the way, you can follow on Blue Sky as betella, I think something like that. Yes, he's done a very good job there. Anyway, 7,000 sets, so thank you very much. I was unaware that you have to pay us if you're going to be a guest on this show in Sats, but that's a good thing. And in terms of power supporters, we've been talking about our magnificent 11 for a long, long time. It has moved up to the. We need a word that begins with D, which is not dirty, but it's moved up to the dirty dozen, or the, the tremendous dozen. Um, what's a good, positive word that starts with d, the delicious dozen.

Sam Sethi: 1:28:54

Well, we can use the french word douzain, which is where the the word uh dozen comes from. I mean, I don't know okay, the douzains, I don't know. This is a very bad section.

James Cridland: 1:29:20

We haven't thought it through Miss Eileen, who I met gosh many, many years ago. Miss Eileen Smith, thank you so much for being our latest person in the magnificent in the delicious dozen for now. So, miss Eileen, thank you also to Neil Velio, to Rocky Thomas, to Jim James, david Marzell, Cy Jobling, rachel Corbett, dave Jackson, mike at the Road Media Network, matt Medeiros, marshall Brown and Cameron Mull all very gratefully received, so thank you for that.

Sam Sethi: 1:29:57

They all have an email James as well from me, which is to do the five-minute interview of their predictions for 2025. And some of those have been rolling in, yes, many.

James Cridland: 1:30:12

Yes, Rocky Thomas gets some of the top marks for already having done that. Jim James as well. Yeah, well done.

Sam Sethi: 1:30:21

Yeah, the idea behind that, by the way, just so everyone else knows, is that James and I are going to be putting out three shows. One is going to be from our PAL supporters, one is going to be from industry experts that we talk to, and then one is going to be just James and I talking about our review of 24 and our predictions for 25. So keep an eye out for those over the next, I guess, december and January.

James Cridland: 1:30:46

Yes, that'll be fun. And yes, and if you have been donating us a lot through boosts and things, then we'd love to hear from you as well. Just send us an email weekly at podnewsnet and we will give you the secret link where you can upload that audio. So what's happened for you this week, Sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:31:05

We've moved on to another phase within TrueFan, so we're adding the gamification stuff that we started. So we've added leaderboards, charts and badges. So now every podcast can see who their superfan is. But the key part and this is why sats is still very important to what we do, or tokens is that you can earn 1% of any sats paid to that podcast when you are the super fan. So the idea.

James Cridland: 1:31:30

Is that nice right? I was unaware of that.

Sam Sethi: 1:31:33

That's very clever thank you, and the idea is that it makes you remain active, or if you're in the top 10 and you can see that you're just behind the super fan, you can then listen more, pay more, share more, comment more, whatever it takes um to become the new super fan, and then you get in the splits.

James Cridland: 1:31:52

Yeah, right okay, and so you can just have a look. Uh, if I was to go into search for, um, you know, the pod news, uh, weekly review, or the pod news daily, because it's because it's in front of me, then I can actually see who the super fans are. Yes, and again we. Sam sethi is the super fan who'd have thought it.

Sam Sethi: 1:32:14

Who'd have thought it? But uh, yes, but I mean again, you know it's, it's just rolling out and it's new feature that we've put in and yeah, you can see super fan overall leaderboards and charts, um, yeah, so it's just a nice little feature really Very nice.

James Cridland: 1:32:28

You've also added support, or you're adding support, for LN Address that we mentioned earlier. If you skipped past that, oh, you missed a classic. So, yes, that's available for you and you've also. I mean, we were talking about Spotify's listener support. Closing. You've built your own version of that, because of course, you have, haven't you?

Sam Sethi: 1:32:52

Well, yeah, I mean we had it anyway. It was really funny. Somebody pinged us and said look, they're going to be using what we call the support feature, so they want to put a budget of 10,000 sats and then any podcast that they support support. They will just pay in advance for the total value of that podcast episode. But we thought, hang on a minute, most of the podcasts that have a funding tag are empty right. There's very few that actually, within what we see across the whole list of podcasts, have anything in it. So we've added a feature in your creator's dashboard. You can now turn it on and it will be a payment through Stripe for adding the funding tag button to your podcast. It's a simple feature. It wasn't hard to implement. We just thought we'd do it. Very nice, very nice. The other thing, james, I went to the swanky offices last night of ACAST. That's very nice. So thank you, ross and the team, for all the drinks there, oh, yes.

James Cridland: 1:33:48

Oh yes, this is their new studios, is it?

Sam Sethi: 1:33:50

Yes, up in Shoreditch, near Old Street. So yes, so very close to Canva, very close to Wondercroft. They're all moving in there.

James Cridland: 1:33:58

Very nice. Well, there you go.

Sam Sethi: 1:34:01

And finally, I just thought it was an interesting one. Yeah, it's probably going to be edited out, but anyway, google may be forced to sell Chrome, but OpenAI is building a new browser that uses ChatGBT, and I thought it was interesting. We're beginning to see the new AI search engines like FromPerplexity and OpenAI. I think Google might have a bit of a problem on their hands.

James Cridland: 1:34:26

Yeah, yes, that's going to be fascinating to watch, but I mean very clearly, google is. You know, chrome is a bit of a monopoly these days and some more competition into that area would be quite helpful, I think. Interestingly, I've been using a browser which is on the Mac called Orion. Orion is a WebKit browser, so it uses the same tools as Safari does, but it's got ad blocking built in even does ad blocking for YouTube, I discover, which is quite impressive.

James Cridland: 1:35:05

It deals with both Chrome and Firefox extensions, so it runs both of those which is quite neat, but the main thing that it allows you to do which you can't, astonishingly, you can't actually do with Safari is you can't actually change your default search engine to anything that Apple doesn't want you to use with Safari. If you're using that on your phone, if you're using that on your desktop, you have a list of five, I think, search engines that you can use, and that's it. And tough, if you want to use somebody else and I happen to want to use somebody else I use Kaji, which is a paid for search engine, which is very good, and so what Orion lets you do is it lets you choose any old search engine that you want. It's built by the folks who also built Kaji, so therefore you would expect that Kaji is number one in there, but it will do all of that. It's a very impressive browser, seems to work very well, seems to be pretty good on battery and all of that. So, if you are on Mac or you're on iOS, give Cargy sorry, give Orion a go. It's free and it's in the App Store, although you can pay for updated versions every single week if you want to.

James Cridland: 1:36:30

So there's a. So there's a. There's a thing. What else has happened for me. I have closed temporarily the PodNews events section. Some spammers found it and they decided that it would be a fun thing to start posting Timu coupons as events, and so they were making up events. Type this into Timu and save yourself 20% on your first purchase and all of that kind of thing. And yes, so they realised that there was no approval on those Pod News events pages. So if you currently try and post a new event, you just get a horrible error. Anyway, so that will be fixed, possibly sometime over the weekend when I can be bothered.

James Cridland: 1:37:15

Also, I've added links to the PodNews podcast pages. Again, we used to strip links out. I have now worked out a way of essentially stripping all of the HTML out of a description apart from the links, so that's easier and the links are all marked as hey, google don't follow me. So that was good. I was on the Oxford Road podcast earlier on this week. They wanted essentially me to have a rant again about Spotify and YouTube, so I obliged them. Obliged the Americans. Again about Spotify and YouTube, so I obliged them, obliged the Americans on the Oxford Road, on the Media Roundtable podcast. You'll find that wherever you found this one. And yes, and that was very good. I don't think I've been on that show for the last four or five months. I used to be relatively regular, so it was nice to be back on there as well. And that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories taken from the Pod News daily newsletter you can subscribe to that podnewsnet and longer interviews in the Pod News Extra podcast as well. You'll find that wherever you get your podcasts.

Sam Sethi: 1:38:19

You can support this show by streaming sats, you can give us feedback by using the Buzzsprout thumbnail link in our show notes and you can send us a boostergram or become a power supporter, like the delicious 12 at weeklypodnewsnet yeah, delicious, doesn't.

James Cridland: 1:38:34

I mean the delicious 12 doesn't work, okay, but 12, I like that. The tremendous 12, tremendous 12. There you go. It's a decision. Our music is from studio Dragonfly, our voiceover is Sheila D, we use Clean Feed for our audio, hindenburg for our editing, and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting. Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.

Speaker 3: 1:39:04

Tell your friends and grow the show and support us and support us. The Pod News. Weekly Review will return next week. Keep listening.