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.
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Podnews Weekly Review
Faith, Radio, and Podcasting 2.0 - Adam Curry and Dave Jones
We talk about Godcaster, and also catch up with the week's news. (A long interview with Adam and Dave on Monday here).
Why Should I Trust You?Bold, unfiltered, and uncompromisingly honest, Why Should I Trust...
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It's Friday, the 7th of March 2025.
Speaker 2:The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.
Speaker 3:I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News, in a blowy Brisbane, and I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of True Fans, in a very misty, cold, wet England.
Speaker 4:We really made this whole thing about first party data, understanding what people are doing. You can really see what's working.
Speaker 1:That's Adam Curry. He's talking with Dave Jones about Godcaster Plus. How powerful are live podcasts? What does Apple verified actually mean? What's happening with Wondery and YouTube? One billion listeners, really. 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.
Speaker 3:Now Adam Currie, the co-inventor of podcasting, and Dave Jones, a key innovator behind podcasting 2.0, have a new project called the Godcaster godcasterfm if you want to go there. It's a new podcasting platform with a simple mission to empower local broadcasters, churches and ministries to reach wider audiences through innovative podcasting and monetisation tools. Have you been to Godcaster yet?
Speaker 1:James, I have been to Godcaster. I think it's a very interesting solution to a particular problem in that part of the media. You started by asking Adam Curry what is the Godcaster and why did he want to bring it out?
Speaker 4:The Godcaster came about over a year ago. Someone who had seen me speak at the Spark Media Conference in Houston came to me and he said you know, I've got this thing. It's not an app, it's a service. It's for radio stations. I hear all these cool things about the podcast index. Can you tell me about it? So I chatted with him and then he came back again. He had some more questions and by the third or fourth time his name is Gordon Marcy. By the third or fourth time his name was Gordon Marcy. By the third or fourth time I had started to put together what was going on, and he's been in the radio business all of his life at big networks like Salem, and these are all faith-based broadcast organizations and stations. The solution he had was a podcast player for radio stations and as I was talking with him more and more, I learned that there's a real conundrum with radio, not like we didn't know it.
Speaker 4:Local programming has gone away. Most of this is nationally syndicated content which also is available on a podcast. The stations are literally sending their audience away to places where they can get podcasts. This is an interesting part of faith-based radio in the United States. It's pretty much value for value. The stations ask for support, and between the stations and the content programming, there's been this issue for 40 years of how do I know that someone was listening to your program on my radio station, gave you a donation, but I don't know about it, and so we're supposed to share revenue. In some cases, the big content providers will buy the airtime. Again, they need to know where did it come from, and it's been this big problem that's been discussed even at the National Religious Broadcasters Conference, where I was last week, where 5,000 people show up. It's been this issue where they just can't figure out what they call attribution.
Speaker 4:This can all be easily solved with a lot of these 2.0 features that we've developed over time. The oh wow moment of all these broadcasters who said wait a minute. Now the station knows that someone hit donate and we know it as well. Why, yes, oh, you've solved a 40 year old problem, seems simple to us. Sometimes you just need some fresh thinking. We really made this whole thing about first party data, understanding what people are doing in the player, whether it's in a podcast app or whether it's their own app. You can really see what's working, and this is another thing. Well, in podcasting in general. We've never really had that. As of yesterday, we now have, I want to say, 249 stations who are using Godcaster. Any radio station could use it, obviously, but for Dave and I it has the added advantage of we're doing this for Jesus, so we're super happy about it.
Speaker 3:Okay, dave, hello, how are you? I'm good. Sam, now Adam Curry, you've known for how long.
Speaker 5:Oh gosh, 15 years, 15 years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, adam's come to you on several occasions to say hey, I've got a great idea for a business, how about you do it with me? The last one being the podcast index, obviously. So what did you think when he said I've got this great idea for Godcaster? And what did you think, yeah, let's do it all. Oh, my God, not again.
Speaker 5:There's always an equal amount of both involved in every one of those. But my standard answer to Adam whenever he says hey, let's and so is yes, and then we'll figure it out later. We'll figure out actually how to do it later. So I just always answer yes first and then figure out later if it's actually possible, you know.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, the same same thing here I love it that jim carrey film yes man where he says yes to everything exactly, exactly okay. So let's, let's take a little step back. How long is it taking you to build this platform? And where did you start? I mean, you've got a blank piece of paper, you're looking at it and you're going how do I build this thing? So what did you do?
Speaker 5:We sort of took over an existing product with Gordon's product that was called Glorystone, and so I determined early on that I was just going to rebuild that thing from scratch. It was an older platform, I mean. It still worked well. It was an older platform that had been sort of upgraded over the years to have sort of more modern features, but the core of it was still sort of an old LAMP-based application, php MySQL that was just showing its age. So I just determined to build from scratch and initially replicate all the features that we thought that the current customers couldn't live without and then at the same time sort of weave in the newer stuff that we knew we were going to be needing to bring the product up to what we wanted it to be.
Speaker 5:So it took I mean it was rapid lots of you know late night, early morning coding sessions to get this thing up and running in about five months. So it went from zero to you know launched in five months to be ready for discussion about it and selling it in RB for people who would want it. So that was the time frame. We pretty much hit everything we wanted to achieve by then. The way me and Adam have always worked has kind of been that way. We just go, go, go, go, go as fast as possible and then trying to hit a target, and then at the end we kind of sit back and say, okay, where are we at, let's go clean up the mess, let's go. You know polish things up here and this kind of thing, so that's, we're kind of used to working that way.
Speaker 4:We were building it, you know, building the airplane in flight, to be honest, you know, because we had customers. There were existing customers who had migrated over, and it would literally be the customer would say hey, you know, my window popped out here, I'm about to get sucked out of the airplane and we go Dave, we've got, we're losing passengers, man. So it was, it is the way we've worked. It's nothing more fantastic than working with live customers. It's also nothing more scary with working with live customers. And I just want to say, as you said, I've worked with Dave on many projects. Some things have just been for us. Some things have podcast index, which is the most successful, but of course we have, we have zero income from it, which is which was never the intent. The things that Dave builds are rock solid. They stay the system, stay up, and he's never really done a user interface. He's done user experience, a UX, but really a beautiful UI is something he's never done and, man, he knocked it out of the park. It really it's a beautiful, beautiful product.
Speaker 3:Thanks, congratulations to you both. So what is the platform? Because it's not what I would have thought you would have gone for originally, which would be a native iOS app. That's what we're all told to do, so why did you make the decision to go and build what Adam's nicely called a universal web app rather than a progressive app?
Speaker 5:Like with everything that we do, it's a little hard to explain.
Speaker 5:This really isn't a podcast app. This is something really different than that. The thing about the linear to digital transformation for radio is that if all you do is just transfer that broadcast linear audience to a website player, you've really done nothing. The problem with Glorystone, the old player, was that it was purely just a website player. It was no different than a podcast app. But you just had to go to this radio station's website to do it. So that's just as restrictive as broadcast, maybe even more so.
Speaker 5:What we did was we said okay, you're going to have a web player because that's helpful to the customer. Their audience wants that. We're going to build a web player that's installable on any radio station's website and they can plug in all the different content, all the different podcasts that they play on air in a player on their website. But every player they build also spawns an RSS feed that has all of those shows in it and that RSS feed is branded to the station. So the station gets their own RSS feed that will hold all of the podcast content and gets essentially redistributed back out to the podcast index and other directories so that now KHCB's customers or listeners can subscribe, not to just Focus on the Family. They can subscribe to KHCB itself and by doing that, they're going to get Focus on the Family and all of KHCB's other national content and KHCB's other national content and KHCB's local content. They're going to get all of this stuff in a single feed that they can then subscribe to in a normal podcast app, something like True Fans, apple Podcasts, overcast, podverse, podcast, guru all the 2.0 apps. It's a standard podcast feed with 2.0 namespace enhancements in it. Standard podcast feed with 2.0 namespace enhancements in it. That's the thing that we took to. It is we, yes, our player, we're proud of it and we're glad that it, that it works well. But we're just as happy for people to not even use our player at all but instead to subscribe to these radio stations podcast feeds in their own podcast app.
Speaker 5:Now you're allowing your listener as a station. You're allowing your listener to listen to you, including your live broadcast, because it uses we use the live item tag. Now they can listen to you in their own most convenient, preferable way, which is the podcast app. It really doesn't matter who's listening to your content and where. We want to accommodate all of that and then give them some stats that will show them what's happening. We support the live tag, we support funding, support the value tag chapters. We pass all that stuff through and then we add some of it as well for like location tag. We also support pod ping, of course, for live broadcasts and all that stuff through, and then we add some of it as well for like location tag. We also support pod ping, of course, for for live broadcasts and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 5:A lot of that stuff is interdependent and we built it, built that out.
Speaker 5:But then we also have this other huge list of things we have to support and that's going to be what comes next. So we have, you know, we're going to be supporting soundbites and transcripts, publisher, publisher feeds, all the value time splits, just pretty much all this stuff is on the to-do list to allow the radio stations to make it easier to push their own content out through the traditional podcast hosting platforms that we always have had good relationships with you know Buzzsprout, rsscom, blueberry, all these you know all these guys, and then even in the newer 2.0 focused hosts as well. So we're going to leverage all those you know relationships we've built over the last, you know, nearly five years to help the radio stations build up their own content catalog and then we'll be able to put all that stuff into a publisher feed like you're talking about. Then the radio station has their own master feed that shows their brand and everything and then underneath that all of their content. So yeah, I think you're just sort of anticipating where we're headed as well.
Speaker 3:So, with all of this now out in the open and you've got a clear pathway forward, just very quickly you've got this other project, podcast Index 2.0. Where do you see that taking shape in 2025? What's going on in your heads that you think you know we're healthy? This is happening. Where are your thoughts on it currently?
Speaker 5:You know, I would say that I think we're. I think we're in a good place. You know, the podcast index and the namespace they've hit a point where things are. People are comfortable with the technology, I think now, and so we just had a big discussion this week about the images tag and about how to read, you know, re-engineer that thing to be to be good. And so now we're looking at you know, I'm processing things mentally as how do we need to sort of shape, uh, the way we do tags and the way we do namespace work, going forward to sort of fit this new model?
Speaker 5:You know, in the beginning it was nobody knew what we were doing, nobody understood any of this stuff. You know we're having to deal with pent up demand for new features for the, you know, for 15 years worth of content. So we were just going to, you know, go, typical fashion, just go, go, go, go, go as fast as we can. That really has changed and so now things are at a slower pace and I think, you know, going forward, I think we're probably going to focus on just one or two things with each phase of the podcast namespace, because there's still I mean there's still, I mean there's still dozens of apps out there that don't even support a single tag. You know, even though there's 600,000 feeds out there that support the Podcasting 2.0 namespace. You know there's maybe more than that. I haven't counted in a while. There's so much content that has the Podcasting 2.0 namespace tags in it, but many, many podcast apps just still don't even support number one, the very first one, something easy like transcripts. So I think there's no need to just rush, rush, rush anymore, but at the same time I think we need it's.
Speaker 5:It's good, because now we can just slow down, have our focus on one thing and then, with the namespace and then on the index side, you know, I think we're shifting focus to decentralizing, because we don't want to just become another Apple with a directory that everybody's dependent on, even though we're, you know it's, it's open. So we want to decentralize that as we can we, I think we're. You know it's it's open, so we want to decentralize that as we can we. I think we're getting to the point in the index and the namespace where we were we're a mature technology and now we're. Our focus gets to shift to a sort of mature, more important things.
Speaker 4:So what Dave said about decentralizing the index, you know we have kind of said, from the get go, the podcast index, our job is to eliminate ourselves, and that means there's. You know we have kind of said, from the get-go, the podcast index, our job is to eliminate ourselves, and that means this you know, whether it's distributed hash space or however, we wind up doing it and there's some amazing things being done. I would love to see Podping integrated more. I did a presentation at NRB in the ballroom and I showed the tilespodpingorg and people just their minds were boggling like wait a minute, this exists. How does that happen? How do I get my podcast updating that way?
Speaker 4:And with Godcaster itself, I hope that we can show a path for developers. You know you're doing this with TrueFans is to show that you don't have to just create another podcast app. You can create an experience or an interface or a service for a group of people who want to use podcast technology and specifically podcasting 2.0, since there's so such a rich environment. So this, I think, is where you we can have great success instead of, you know, as I lovingly call the podcast industrial complex, focusing on what share does this app have? Well, that's going to remain kind of the same for a long, long time. But meanwhile, as we've proven with value for Value in general, you can make a living, you can make your product successful with a smaller demographic in this highly connected world. Its own beast is to show more of that, and as more of these experiences are developed, I think you'll see the rest of the industry come along with that.
Speaker 3:Adam Curry. Dave Jones, I could talk to you for hours on this, but thank you very much. Now, where would anyone go, Adam, for getting more information about the app itself?
Speaker 4:Well, the the service, Godcasterfm, godcasterfm, and really appreciate the work that you do, Sam, and that James does. Power, as we call it. Power is certainly one of my weekly listens. I wish we would have coordinated better for this interview when we all would have had a glass of red wine to go with it, because we know that that's usually how you're listening to our show absolutely the only way.
Speaker 3:And dave, um, for anyone wanting to help get involved with it, um, maybe give you some uh, you know, get involved with the api. Where would they go for any of that stuff?
Speaker 5:just just reach out to me and we can. Uh, we can help them out on that. And you know, we the the thing about Godcaster is under the under the under the hood, you know don't sort of double under the hood, it's all podcast index. So, uh, anybody who is already familiar with the index and the way can help here too. So we're sort of eating our own dog food in that way.
Speaker 3:And on behalf of the community, just for me, I'd like to say thank you to you, both publicly, for all the work you've done for the podcast index. It's massively appreciated. You may not hear it all the time, but just know that we do appreciate what you do. Thank you, sam. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Adam Curry, the co-inventor of podcasting, and Dave Jones. There is a much longer version of that interview that you will hear in this very feed on Monday.
Speaker 3:Sam, what did you think of that? Well, it's great that they built on podcasting 2.0 and the podcast index so they built a application platform for themselves. I mean, adam's track record in radio gives him an insight into some of the problems that radio stations are now facing with audiences moving away from amfm to streaming and how those platforms are not getting, I guess, the details that they need to give advertisers the certainty that people are listening to the radio station. So, adding things like the funding tag, adding things like management tools, I guess it gives those radio stations things that we in the podcasting 2.0 community have already been using. But now it's coming to the radio stations themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, all of that certainly sounded very interesting. There are new figures that have come out of US radio this week and, interestingly, everything's up. Most age groups are up 16% in terms of time spent listening, and radio listening itself in terms of people is up by 3%. That's amazing news. Do you know how they've managed to end up doing that, sam?
Speaker 3:No, because I don't know how they get the reports that everything's up as well. But there you go.
Speaker 1:Well, exactly. So what they've done is, until this year, a radio listener used to be somebody who would listen to five minutes of a radio station or more. This year, it's three minutes to a radio station or more. So, surprise, surprise, everything has gone up. So, yes, it's a very different world and I think, listening to the Podcasting 2.0 show last week, what's very clear from Adam talking excitedly about talking at a conference is that everybody was super thrilled and super excited about everything that Adam was talking about and because they are coming at this from a completely different world and we think that we have, you know, solved this and this is old news and everything else, but, my goodness, not to many of the people that he was talking to. He's brilliant when talking at a conference. I wish he would do it more, but super good. So, yeah, that was really interesting, I thought.
Speaker 3:Yeah well, I'm looking forward to the time when that report then says 30 seconds, so maybe they'll get to 1 billion listeners. That'll be the way to do it 30 second listens on radio. We have 1 billion listeners. We'll talk about that more later. But the one thing that adam and dave did talk about is the lit tag and the live item tag, and I did ask them about whether they would be a provider of services such as hls or shoutcast and the answer was very clearly no, which means that the onus is now back on to podcasting hosts, to that, and I'm sad to say that I'm not seeing any traction there. Rsscom were very keen to do it and they got 95% of the way with all of the fields for it, but not the last bit, which is the server right?
Speaker 1:Yes, no exactly. But there again, the server needn't necessarily be run by a podcast host. It'd be easier if it was, I think, what we need to do, and I certainly learned this when I was working on a piece of technology. It was interesting Again listening to the Podcasting 2.0 show last week. There was one point where Adam starts talking about listening to a radio station over the air and driving away from the transmitter and he was saying you know, cars these days, if the signal goes too bad, it'll say would you like to continue listening to the station online? And Adam was very excited by that. You know what? That was my technology. That was the technology that I was a co-founder of 15, 20 or so years ago, and so wonderful to hear Adam talking about that too. Hooray, well done you.
Speaker 1:But I think that what I learned with that technology is that's actually relatively easy and straightforward to do. It needs a file putting on your web server and it needs one additional entry in your DNS. And it's as simple as that. And we thought a man called Nick and I who came up with the original specification with help from many others we thought well, that is so easy, every radio station will be able to do it. The quick answer is no. I mean even talking about your DNS server and adding a text field to your DNS server or adding one, you know, xml document to your website.
Speaker 1:That was beyond the knowledge of a lot of these radio broadcasters. So I think you know, with all of this, it's very easy to come up with. You know, here's the lit tag and this is what you have to do. And you know, I mean even, even, you know, getting a podcast host to support it. But at the end of the day, it's still hugely, hugely complicated to most people out there, and so it needs to be as easy as possible, and the American way is to just hire that in, and so if you've convinced yourself that there's a business in there, you just hire somebody in to come and fix all of that for you. You never even learn how any of that stuff works. I happen to believe that that's the wrong way of doing it, but nevertheless, that's the American broadcast radio standard way of doing it.
Speaker 3:I think it needs to be a radio live service in a box, right? Yeah, I think people need to have it as simple as that.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe we should be talking to the likes of Radioco, which is a company based in Sheffield which also hosts podcasting podcastco. I think I know them well. So either we need to talk to those folks or, of course, Live365, because who owns Live365? Soundstack and we had Rocky Thomas on the show a couple of weeks ago. So if there's anyone that would be really good and potentially actually to test some of this stuff out, maybe Rocky is the right person here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, now I connected her with Adam and I'm having a loop back with Rocky to talk about some other stuff to do with live, so I'll let you know what goes on.
Speaker 1:Talking about Soundstack, as we were. Congratulations to them. They have achieved version 2.2 of the IAB podcast measurement guidelines. This week Also achieving version 2.2 are OmniStudio, triton, voxnest and Spreecat, so that's actually pretty good news because that means that pretty well all of the people that were visibly dragging their feet have now achieved the recertification, which is a good thing Moving on Now.
Speaker 3:James, you shared a story with me for a company called Tunefm. Who or what is Tunefm?
Speaker 1:Yes, and I didn't cover this in the Pod News newsletter because it's not really podcasting, but it's definitely something of interest to this podcast, which is well. I will read what the website says when the music gets played, the artists get paid.
Speaker 3:I thought that was lovely. Actually, I thought that's really well put this sounds.
Speaker 1:Yes, this sounds similar, though, doesn't it? It sounds like the idea behind the Booster Ground Ball and you know, and streaming payments and all of that stuff, and streaming payments and all of that stuff. So, yes, it is essentially another solution for the artists, because you earn something called jam Jam today, jam tomorrow. You earn jam for every second your music is streamed. I'm assuming that's some form of cryptocurrency or something. Yeah, our micropayment technology enables instant settlement of streaming royalties. Yes, earn upwards of 10 to 100 times more than you can on Spotify or Apple Music. Well, yes, because that's how all of this works. And then they start spoiling it all by talking about NFTs.
Speaker 3:NFTs yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know, I mean not only are we giving you things called jam, but we're also giving you things called NFTs. Yeah, and you know, I mean not only are we giving you things called jam, but we're also giving you things called NFTs. So, yes, but our cutting edge technology, it says, delivers cutting edge. What you mean five years ago with the podcasting 2.0 thing? Yes, anyway, our cutting edge technology delivers micropayments at the rate of one penny per minute, streamed. You know we are doing significantly more than that with streaming payments. So, yes, so you know Tunefm. It's another one of these things where it's frustrating that companies like this don't look around before they launch a product, because they could be earning quite handsomely out of streaming sats, and you know, and so that's a little bit frustrating, but the way that they are talking about it is quite nice. So, yeah, so it's a good thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean the things as I said. You said it already when the music gets played, the art gets played. I think that's so succinct, and I liked that they do talk about tokens and not sats. They do talk about Web3 a little bit too much, but for every second the music's played, so they're talking about pay-as-you-go value for value. I couldn't work out though, though this is the critical part who pays the 1p per minute of stream, or one cent, right?
Speaker 3:Is it the listener, who has then a wallet, who then gets given tokens, these jam tokens? How do they get the jam tokens? What's the mechanism for purchasing them, and then, how do they actually give them? Because if it's a token, then it's not actually a physical one cent or 1p stream, it's a token of value. Is that token now worth 1p? All of these are questions that I you know. If I could interview the ceo, andrew antar, I would be asking because I don't think it's very clear from the website what is the way that they actually enable all of this? They talk about the things that we talk about in podcasting. Is the way that they actually enable all of this? They talk about the things that we talk about in podcasting 2.0, but they actually don't talk about the how, and that's the problem yes, indeed, I mean, it would be lovely to talk um with them.
Speaker 1:Now, weirdly, they they sent me a press release. I I looked at it and I thought, well, it's not, it's not a pod news thing, but I thought that you you might find that interesting, given you know true fans and everything else um. And so, yes, I've reached out to them.
Speaker 3:That makes a bunch of sense and yes, and they haven't really.
Speaker 1:They haven't really said anything, have they? They haven't, they haven't come back to us as yet. Um, now, we're recording this slightly earlier than normal this week for reasons you'll find out in. Uh, in james and sam's week, um, but uh, so I don't know. It just says all the way through this artists receive instant royalty payments for every second their music is streamed. Well, every second in this particular deck that I'm looking at, not every minute, but yeah, but, as you say, it's not very clear where that money is actually coming from. You do, though, get demographic information about your listeners, which is interesting.
Speaker 1:Also built in to the app is direct messaging. Not quite sure how that works, and I do notice in one of their decks, they do have a screenshot of the app and it says wallet on the top of the screen. So, yeah, so there is a wallet going on there. There is something called a jam price and a rate per minute, and all this kind of nonsense. I mean, you know again why they have to make it so complicated. It was complicated enough with sats and now it's all about jam. Uh, yes, but, but you know, really interesting, and I I wish that it would be good to talk to these people and learn a little bit more. I should say that they have um, got 20 million dollars in funding, um, so, um, they've clearly got some cash there, okay.
Speaker 3:I can now see who's paying.
Speaker 1:Well, yes, exactly, exactly. So, yeah, and they've, you know, and they've got some nice coverage in things like Rolling Stone and TechCrunch and Fast Company, so you know who knows. But anyway, that's certainly one to look at, because you know. I mean, why shouldn't they be talking about podcasting as well in there?
Speaker 3:Now moving on, james. There's a couple of stories about Wondery I've been wondering about and I thought we'd have a little chat about it. Yay, yes, amazon's Wondery has said that there are a number of small job layoffs in the company, and we talked last week about how they've closed operations in Brazil and Mexico. So what's going on with Wondery James? Are they in trouble?
Speaker 1:I don't think they are in trouble. I think that they are doing what any good company does and looking every so often at the cost base and going, oh, we're actually making money out of that. Well, let's stop doing that, then. And I mean, they have cut what the company calls a small number of jobs. Someone talking to Reuters, who had this particular story, said that the number of affected people was dozens and dozens. Amazon says no, no, it wasn't. I would suspect that for Amazon, it is a small number of jobs, but for human beings it's quite a large number of jobs. So I suspect that's how that works, because Amazon is so large. I mean, I think it's telling that both content and advertising teams have been affected as well. So, yes, not quite sure, but certainly, having a look at you know the wider picture. There have been quite a lot of right-sizing I believe might be the phrase there in terms of how Amazon's staffing actually works. The new boss there, who is called Jassy Andy Jassy the CEO yeah, I'm sure he stays in your village. Andy has apparently already slashed tens of thousands of corporate jobs at Amazon and he's reorganising business units in order to reduce the ratio of managers to individual contributors.
Speaker 1:And, of course, you know, shares closed up. So I don't think it's anything that we should particularly worry about. I think it's really more just, you know, keeping an eye on. It was an interesting Monday because I was covering news about what was going on at Amazon, but also news that was going on at WNYC. Who've lost jobs, I think Monk Studios in Berlin has lost a managing director and it basically looks as if that company is all but closed, and so on and so forth. It did look a pretty miserable Monday, so you know hence why. Hence why you know the only positive story ended up making you know the main headline, because I don't really like negative stories. So yeah, you know I thought that was interesting, but I don't think there's anything to worry about.
Speaker 3:I think they're all suffering a case of the Elons. Let's just cut, cut, cut and see what happens next. Yes, great, I think they're all in that mode where they think you know, well, look, you know, I talked to my wife is on a number of PLC boards and they're all doing the same thing, right, Not in the digital space.
Speaker 1:And they all think, yes, DEI gone, yes, closing all their DEI Job cuts gone, yes, exactly.
Speaker 3:Yes, AI will replace that horrible cost of humans with automation. Let's all go that way, and that's all you ever hear them talk about nowadays, so I can expect that as well. Now look, talking of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, and Andy Jassy, who used to work there, was the head of it before he took over from Mr Bezos. You asked the question is hosting a podcast on Amazon Web Services a good idea? What was the answer? James?
Speaker 1:Yes, I did, given that I've been doing it for the last five years, and what was interesting is going back and essentially I was updating a post which I had made way back in 2019 to basically go OK, what does it look like now? The interesting thing about Amazon is that they have a free tier and they have recently changed the free tier which is why I updated it, because somebody asked me and their free tier is pretty generous now in terms of CloudFront, so serving files, it's a pretty generous free tier and it does mean that if you were to look at the PodNews Daily, which I host on my own server, then normally let's ignore what's currently going on, but normally that would be about a price of about US$42 a month to host the PodNews podcast, which then, because Amazon has a big free tier, essentially means that it will be free. Big free tier essentially means that it will be free. So yay in terms of that, except, of course, the Pod News daily podcast is only six minutes long and if you were to turn that into a one hour show, then it would cost $513 to serve. So the quick answer is yes, it's good for us, but no, it's not good for most people, but it was interesting doing that. This is why podcast hosts exist that, actually, if you are a proper podcast host, you have a much better deal with whether it's Amazon or whether it's someone else, and so therefore, you can actually do quite nicely in terms of the numbers that you end up doing.
Speaker 1:But, yes, it is very expensive to do it for yourself. There are cheaper ways of doing that, but they're nowhere near as effective, and, of course, you need to write your own RSS feeds. You need to do all of that kind of stuff and everything else. The interesting thing, though, that I did see is, if you look at our costs, you know our monthly costs, then $42 to serve our audio, but also $11 just to serve our RSS feed. We've only got one RSS feed, but it's costing us a quarter of all of the audio just to serve the RSS feed. So it just goes to show that the conversations that we've heard in the past, especially from our sponsors, buzzsprout, about being cautious, not to add too much to the RSS feed, is absolutely well founded If you can see that. You know, 25% of our cost is actually just serving the RSS feed.
Speaker 3:Moving on, james and right. So last week we heard the wonderful stat from YouTube 1 billion viewers, active monthly viewers and we thought, wow, that's amazing. Well done YouTube. Not everyone's quite convinced that that's true, or maybe they might think what's behind that number. So John McDermott, friend of the show, wrote a Substack blog post about YouTube's claim for 1 billion monthly active viewers and then he did some stats, james, what did he do?
Speaker 1:Yes. So he pointed out and maybe I should have done this when I blindly reported the YouTube 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content. He pointed out that the population of the world is 8 billion, so already YouTube podcasting reaching one in eight people. He also points out the fact that 60% of podcasts are in English, which would tend to suggest. Which would tend to suggest I mean, certainly not everybody in the world speaks English, certainly good enough to enjoy an English language podcast, and actually only 5.5 billion have internet access. So if you were to look at this, you could go okay. So YouTube podcasts, look at this, you could go OK. So YouTube podcasts realistically, youtube podcasts are reaching about one in five people online. One in five people online. Is that creditable? Is that a believable stat? I don't know, but I don't know what a believable stat is.
Speaker 1:Spotify claims that it has 170 million people using podcasts on a monthly basis. Is 170 million believable? Probably what would be believable from a YouTube point of view? A billion, 500 million, 250 million? I don't know. But it was interesting because it did make me sort of stop and think. Are YouTube podcasts really reaching one in eight people on the planet? And I wasn't necessarily convinced that eight, nine, ten actual plays.
Speaker 3:But then John points back very clearly it's active viewers, not views. So my whole argument is then broken down. So that's what I originally thought.
Speaker 1:Your argument is sort of slightly broken down, but what I would say is what this doesn't say is logged in viewers. It just says 1 million viewers. Now, if I use YouTube and I don't sign in here at home, and then I use YouTube and I don't sign in at work, then I'm two people. I mean, I work from home, but you get my point. So, and actually, if I look at YouTube on Monday, wednesday and Friday, then I might not actually have the same IP address every single time because you know I might have had four hours without any power and it's reset my IP address.
Speaker 1:And so therefore, you can see that if YouTube's figure is signed in viewers, well that's very impressive. If YouTube's figure is using the IAB definition of a listener, which is a unique IP address and user agent, well you know you can imagine that that might be rather larger than it is, which is why Spotify's number of 170 million is interesting, because 170 million in terms of a number is 170 million signed in users, because you can't listen if you're not signed in to anything on Spotify beyond 30 seconds. So I think there's definitely sort of something there. The devil is in that detail, and I don't think we've necessarily got that detail from the folks at YouTube.
Speaker 3:I do worry that we talked about earlier radio, reducing the listener from five minutes to three minutes to increase what would seem the amount of time people are listening to radio. Um, I'm getting a little bit worried that we have this attention economy where clearly there's a lot of people watching YouTube, there's a lot of people listening to podcasts, because the numbers are always going up. Yeah, more going to radio, more to TV. I mean, where are these people? I don't have more than 24 hours in a day and my attention span cannot increase, but seemingly the world is increasing the amount of time it spends online with all of these services.
Speaker 1:The world is increasing the amount of time it spends online with all of these services. Yes, and Edison's Infinite Dial is showing a bit more and Edison's share of ear studies are showing, you know, numbers in terms of total audio. Certainly, numbers in terms of total audio consumed in the UK is going up, which is interesting, and you know, and so you get those sorts of figures. I have to say I'm most interested in the number that we never see, which is time spent listening, and I would much rather have you know, attention is hard to measure, but time spent listening shouldn't be hard to measure. But we can't measure that um, and you know that that is much harder um to look at in terms of. I mean, we don't get that in terms of podcast stats unless you go and sign into the um. You know apple podcast connect and so on. Um, that's that's the thing that I'm most interested in is time spent listening.
Speaker 1:Actually, reach or QM is much less interesting to me than total time spent listening and we have no open data which really shows that. The closest we can get is RageR in the UK has just released that 9% of time spent listening in the UK to audio is to podcasts 9% Now, 28% of people in the UK are listening to podcasts, but only 9% of time spent listening is to podcasts, which shows to me that there is considerable space in the growth of what we can achieve in terms of podcasting, because if everybody listened twice as long, we could really succeed there. So I would love to see more of that data, but that data is much harder to come by. Interestingly, both Apple and Spotify both have that data. I've asked Apple and they won't tell me how long people spend listening. Youtube are unlikely to tell me that, spotify unlikely to end up telling me that either, but they are the people with that data and it'd be fun to find out, wouldn't it.
Speaker 3:Well, that, I think, is what the bumper dashboard is trying to do, isn't it? It's trying to aggregate that first-party data into a client view. And as you said earlier, they're not doing it through an official API.
Speaker 1:They're getting their clients to give them access.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, indeed, now we were sent an um from a friend of the show who has more concerns about youtube numbers. They said I've discovered something kind of suspicious that youtube is doing with podcasts and of course that raises our interest. Um, some of the channels I watch, including buzzsprout, have a bunch of random playlists that are not intended to be podcasts, but they've been marked as podcasts. Now you, you've read this as well, james. What were your thoughts?
Speaker 1:Yes, it's interesting. So you know, youtube sometimes just elects the fact that you have a show that looks a bit like a podcast and then ticks the podcast box in YouTube Studio. So therefore it counts as a podcast for that 1 billion users number. And this listener tells us that YouTube appears to set a show as a podcast if the creator uses the word podcast in the title. So that's an easy way for YouTube to guess that it might be a podcast, except it might not be, and there are some good examples of something that is weirdly marked as a podcast even though it really isn't. So, yeah, so that I thought was interesting, because actually we got last week the definition of a podcast from YouTube and that definition was the creator has ticked the box marked podcast. Anyway, it now turns out that YouTube is ticking that box for creators in some cases as well. So there's a thing.
Speaker 3:Now Spotify, spotify Open Access, which I think is badly named. I don't know why it's called Open Access, but we'll come back to that in a minute. Ivoox, or however you're supposed to say it, has announced an integration with the Spotify Open Access. What have they done, james?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so iVoox or iVoox, I don't actually know, james, yeah, so iVoox or iVoox, I don't actually know. They're a podcast hosting company and they have a system with their app which allows you to pay for a podcast, pay access to a podcast, but of course it only works on their app, and so they've signed up with Spotify Open Access so that, if you want to, you can also listen to that show through Spotify as well, and I think you still have to sign up on this podcast website. But you can then listen in your Spotify app rather than in the Evux app, and you know that's a pretty standard Spotify Open Access thing. That isn't meant to be anything more than you know. You've paid for this content. You can listen to it in the Spotify app because that's where you listen to everything else. So there's no conversation around security or you know anything else. It's just a no-auth sign-in Super easy, super straightforward.
Speaker 3:But I would say it is security, because what they're doing is passing a token back through the oauth to say yes, we confirmed that this content has been paid for. Therefore, you can allow it to be streamed on spotify. That's the way it works, and I think um, that's certainly, that's certainly security.
Speaker 1:But what they're not doing is the recent way of downloading that content as a specific file, as there would be in an open podcast player, because Spotify doesn't work that way, and YouTube, sorry, spotify seems to be doing the same.
Speaker 3:We also had an email from somebody saying that the numbers are out now for the Spotify Partner Program related to video, and the highlight of that email to me was video versions of their podcast. This is clients of this company. Throughout January, who enrolled in the Spotify Partner Program actually lost them nearly a thousand dollars. Yes, how do you lose a thousand dollars? I mean what do you negatively place something? I mean I don't get that. How do you lose a thousand dollars, james?
Speaker 1:Well, so this story and we covered it this week in the Pod News newsletter. It's from Amanda McLaughlin who works at Multitude, but it's an anonymous client of hers, and this particular podcast was using Span, the Spotify advertising network ie ads in the middle of a show. Audio ads was using that to monetize, but getting an awful lot of their plays through the Spotify platform. Now, as we know, when you turn into video, then it takes the audio from the RSS feed away and all you get to listen to in your Spotify app is the soundtrack of the video, and that essentially means that you can't do any programmatic advertising anymore. You can't do any dynamic advertising built into that, it is just purely the soundtrack of the video.
Speaker 1:So therefore, actually, yes, they got a payout in January $579. Hooray but they didn't get the normal payouts that they would have done through Span from the dynamic ads that were put into their audio of somewhere like 1,500. So, as a result, paying all of this extra money to make videos, then uploading those up to Spotify, has ended up essentially losing them $1,500 from the podcast and they only earned $597 from the video version. So it's clearly not worth their while and they're opting out of that. So it's clearly not worth their while and they're opt video and it was a mistake for them to start uploading the video stuff, quite apart from the additional costs of that.
Speaker 3:I love the line here she goes. This stings particularly for us when Spotify just claimed that the Spotify partner programme made hundreds of podcast creators $10,000 plus in January. That claim sounds impressive on the face of it. She says but how much of this span revenue did those creators lose? Again, what did they get? So she's actually her client has decided to opt out of this partner programme from Spotify and stop pivoting fully to video. And again, yeah, as you said, devil in the detail, and the detail seems to be.
Speaker 1:It's not worth it right now, and I'm surprised that Spotify hasn't clearly done the maths in terms of that, because, you know, one would assume that Spotify would have worked out how to get the maths to balance so that you would earn more from the video stuff that they clearly want, rather than from the audio stuff, but they seemingly haven't actually done that, which is, you know, a surprising thing again.
Speaker 3:I've just got to read it from what she said. My client and I decided to opt out of the spp program, spotify partner program, um, but in the meantime they're requiring podcasters to give up a proven revenue stream for an untested programme with secretive maths, that is it.
Speaker 1:You can't say it better than that really yes, no, it's really good. So, yes, it's well worth a peek. You'll find that in Wednesday's Pod News Daily newsletter.
Speaker 3:Let's move on, James. Let's fly around the world a little bit. What's going on in Canada?
Speaker 1:Yes, let's do this nice and quickly. So in Canada there's a new online magazine for Canadian podcasters launched. It's called Canadian Podcaster and it's free. If you prefer a newsletter, you can also, of course, get Pod the North, which is very good. Down in Australia, ARN, who runs iHeart. They have announced a cost cutting exercise over the next three years. Flat revenues for that company here in Australia. It actually went up overall, but only because they own some posters in Hong Kong, would you believe.
Speaker 1:But anyway, flat revenues here in Australia yes, but their digital online revenues are up 28%, which arguably means that their broadcast radio revenues were down, but anyway, they only made 15.7 million US dollars in terms of digital audio anyway, but, and so that may be one of the reasons why they're looking at a cost-cutting exercise. Of course, sca, which is their competitor, made a ton of redundancies, eliminated a ton of roles, according to their CEO, lafontaine Oliver, who said how much that it was sad and that it pained him. So far as we can work out, he's earning around $800,000 a year, probably not paining him that month. Monk Studios in Berlin appears to be not having a particularly good time of it. They've lost their managing director and it looks as if that, uh, that company is winding down, although Monk Studios elsewhere seems to be doing quite well.
Speaker 1:And finally, in the UK, um, more details from Rajar in terms of podcast listening. Rajar saying that um podcast listening is 26% of all British adults, but, as I may have mentioned earlier in this podcast, if I haven't edited it out only 6% of all audio listening. Even, by the way, the most popular age group for podcasts, which is 25 to 34s, which I thought was interesting, but the most popular age group for podcasts. Podcasts only get 11% of all audio time, live radio, of course, doing significantly higher in terms of that. I was interested in seeing that popular age group for podcasters thing being 25 to 34. What is going on with the 14 or the 15 to 25 group, I wonder?
Speaker 3:They're still stuck on TikTok and Snapchat and all those other things.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and if they're still stuck on that, then in 10 years' time they will be the 25 to 34s, and will they be switching over to podcasts by then?
Speaker 3:I don't know, I mean anecdotally a on a sample of two. Um, but uh yeah so, so don't hold me for this. People but um, yeah, I look at their age and taste changes. You know they're in the attention model of tiktok and you know that quick fix and then eventually they get a little bit more into commuting and then they're going on trains and they're getting into work and other people have influenced them yeah, there's the commuting, which is a definite, a definite thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, um, uh, people news, uh, congratulations ruth fitzsimons, um, who many will know from audio boom or from sports social or from pod front uk. She is now director of digital for bauer media in Ireland, so congratulations to her. They own radio companies over there and magazines and things, so that's nice. And Christopher Avello has joined Libsyn as VP of Marketing Now. He is an interesting person. He'd worked for Audible for a considerable amount of time 14 years, I think and so he completely gets how to market audio, completely gets that. He's also worked for an audio book seller as well, called Chirp, and now he's working for Libsyn, which, of course, has a new CEO relatively recently. So I would expect him to be at Evolutions, so it'd be interesting to see if I can bump into him and have a chat, but that looks as if Libsyn has made a good signing there.
Speaker 3:Now talking of Evolutions, James, let's talk about events and awards. You're going to be there. I'm not going, but there's going to be an exclusive that you announced about Ira Glass. What's going to happen for him?
Speaker 1:Yes, he's going to win an award at the Ambiance Hooray Hooray, Ira Glass. Yes, he's winning the Governor's Award at the Ambiance from the Podcast Academy.
Speaker 3:So they're giving an award to an American. Who would have thought, well, it's the American Awards anyway, so what's the point? It's no surprise. Who would have thought yeah, as we say, you know, name a foreign podcast and announce it at the Ambiest.
Speaker 1:And many people are going to Athens in Greece this weekend. There's a big radio and podcasting conference going on there, radio Days Europe, which starts on Monday. I am down as a speaker on Monday and I'm down as a speaker on Tuesday, and we'll see quite how that works.
Speaker 3:Whether you get there More details coming up.
Speaker 1:Quite how that works. More details coming up. Let's do the oh. And there is one more thing, which is, of course, the PodCamp podcamplive, to find out more information about that which is happening in London the same week as the podcast show in London. How is that going for you, sam?
Speaker 3:It's going well. I mean we've got more speakers lined up. I've got a very important call today, straight after this, with Jason from the London Podcast Show.
Speaker 1:Oh yes. So, I really hope.
Speaker 3:Am I asking a favour? Of course I'm asking a favour. Black steel and burrow yes, yes, Please, please, please. And then after that I will really accelerate into what we're doing, but it is a case of we've had to tread water.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've had to tread water.
Speaker 3:And it's not what I wanted, but we'll get there, indeed. So more details, fingers crossed, next week. The Tech Stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology. Gosh, we've talked technology quite a lot already, but let's have a little bit more technology. Trident Digital, you say.
Speaker 3:Well, I don't really, I just copied what you wrote. So you say Go on, you tell me. So you say go on you tell me.
Speaker 1:Well, our good friends at Omni Studio have announced a thing called podcast feed drops, and it's essentially an easy way for podcasters to get additional shows into their feeds. If you're a big podcaster, like ARN in Australia, who've been using this already, it allows you to cross-promote new shows that you have, and they've just basically built the tools to enable that to happen, so they've built a few other interesting things there as well. Interestingly, omni Studio apparently hosts over 70,000 podcasts across the world, so there is a thing. What else is going on? Spotify seems to be launching social things. Have they actually launched that yet, or is this still sort of playing around?
Speaker 3:Yeah, some of it's launched, some of it's coming. So if you go to your user settings, you can now see the social settings in your player. They are going to allow you to show what playlists you have on your profile and who's listening to what and who's currently active. Some of that was there before, when they had Spotify, the sidebar, which linked into Facebook, but now they're bringing that back into their own platform and then in the beta they've got new emojis around comments and stuff, so now you can put hearts, likes, thumbs up, all those sorts of silly things. So they are trying to get more into social. I'm not sure how well it will be when you move it to mobile.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean of course, that's what you've got in terms of YouTube social. I'm not sure how well it will be when you move it to mobile. Yeah, I mean, of course, that's what you've got in terms of YouTube, which has a bunch of social things, lots of comments, lots of you know thumbs up and thumbs down and everything else, which even works in terms of YouTube music as well, so perhaps they're just chasing their competitors there in terms of that YouTube music. By the way, this week saying that they now have 100 million paid subscribers to YouTube Music, which is nice, we need to check those numbers as well, though, james Albeit, 265 million are subscribed to Spotify, so they've still got quite a long way to catch up. True Fans, which apparently is a podcast app do you know anything about, uh, true fans, sam?
Speaker 1:no, let's move on um, you're now supporting opml both in and out, uh, which is a nice thing. Opml is not quite as easy as it looks, is it?
Speaker 3:no, um, but I actually the standard's pretty good, I mean, although most the apps or I say the apps implement it two different ways. It's like some apps implement opml1 and some apps implement opml2, so there's just a difference in one of the tags. So we decided to support them both at all. And then we started support import and export. And then we looked around for testing, so we did fountain, we did antenna, pod, pod verse, all the others. They all work. We got them working and then we noticed quite a few of them don't do export and we thought oh yes, funny that you can get your data in, but it'll never leave.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And you did ask me why I didn't name them. And I'm going to say now because I do this show.
Speaker 1:And well, no, genuinely look, don't feel that you're here.
Speaker 3:No, look, I have to tread a fine line. James One, I'm very cognizant that Pod News is your brand right and True Fantasy is my. You know SEO, but you know I can't. If I shout out certain apps who are my competitors and I go ha ha ha, you don't do it, we do it, blah, blah, blah, right. Then when I want to interview them for this show or you need them, then I think I might, you know, cause an issue. So I am very careful and cautious not to be negative and call people out. I will say you can go and look and see for yourself and it will become very obvious and look and see for yourself and it will become very obvious, but I won't name them.
Speaker 1:No, a couple of other things going on. Deepcast has done some interesting things rebranding their Deepcast Pro product, which I never fully understood who that was for. It's now called Deepcast Creator. They've launched a thing called Podsites, which is a turnkey website solution for podcasters. One of the things that I'm actually waiting for is I'm waiting for somebody to essentially make and maybe Godcaster is the closest to this somebody to essentially make a thing that looks like a podcast app. It might happen to be on a website, but it looks like a podcast app, but it's just for one podcast. I think that's probably where the future is, and quite a lot of these pod sites or pod page or you know other similar services are busy building a full, a fully featured website. I think just having a player that looks like an app basically would be a really interesting idea. So, yeah, that's a thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you know we talked about it a few weeks ago. How you know, a lot of the hosts have their own webpages and again, I can see these being improved over time. Again, there was a proposal in the podcast in 2.0 for a banner tag and there was a whole discussion which I actually tuned out of, actually about images last week.
Speaker 1:Yes, I don't blame you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was like should I listen to images or should I go out with my wife? I'm going out with my wife, so I haven't really heard.
Speaker 1:I don't blame you, I did enjoy. There were two things that I enjoyed about the Podcasting 2.0 show last week. One of them was Adam Curry again saying how much he enjoyed speaking at a conference and how amazing it was and how he got so many people oohing and aahing about Podcasting 2.0 and then in the next breath saying but I'm not going to do it again. So I thought that was great. But also, secondly, dave Jones, who has been implacably opposed to getting rid of the podcast images tag because it has completely failed, then turns around and says well, maybe we deprecate the podcast images tag. And I go really.
Speaker 2:Boostergram, boostergram, boostergram. Super comments, zaps, fan mail, fan mail, super chats and email. Our favourite time of the week, it's the Pod News Weekly Review Inbox.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so many different ways to get in touch with us. There's fan mail by using the link in our show notes, the super comments on True Fans, boosts everywhere else, or email, and we share any money that we make too. Now I have had four hours of no power, and one of the things that hasn't rebooted cleanly is my home assistants, and therefore I'm sitting in mostly darkness now, and the other side is the Umbral Box, which has also failed, which I need to give a tickle to, so there may very well be boosts waiting for me on the Umbral Box. My apologies, but I won't be able to read those this week. However, we do have some excellent news. We have a 17th supporter, a sweet 17 supporter.
Speaker 3:I feel there should be a jingle right now, but I don't know what it would be Right.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, well, yes, exactly. So thank you to Brian Entsminger. Brian is super helpful and useful in the Hindenburg community on Facebook, among many other things. Super useful in terms of that. So, brian, thank you so much for that. You join the rest of the power supporters, who are David John Clark, james Burt, john McDermott, clare Waight-Brown, mazzalene Smith, neil Velio, rocky Thomas, jim James, david Marzell, si Jobling, rachel Corbett, dave Jackson, mike Hamilton, matt Medeiros, marshall Brown and Cameron Moll. We really appreciate that that money is split equally between Sam and I. I know that Sam spends it all on wine. No, he doesn't spend any of it on wine.
Speaker 1:I don't spend any of it on wine, because I'm a wine importer.
Speaker 3:I don't have to.
Speaker 1:Yes, of course, no, of course, no. He spends it all on True Fans, I believe. So that's always a good plan.
Speaker 1:That's so true, and yes, and I save it for a rainy day, but we really appreciate that. So thank you so much for that. Now we would like to know is there anything? Obviously, if you're a power supporter, you get to come on this show once a year and you get to tell us what the future of podcasting will be, which we do at the end of every year, which we will be doing again. Is there anything else that you want from us, power supporters? If you would like something like a WhatsApp group to annoy everybody else with, or something else like that, I don't know what would you like. Is there something that you would like, or are you perfectly happy just supporting us? We would love to know. You can send us an email weekly at podnewsnet and, even if you're not a power supporter yet, you can say what might make you become a power supporter. Is there something that you would like? Is it a meet up at Evolutions where I put some money behind the bar and you can drink your money back again?
Speaker 3:I don't know one straw, one bottle. That's all he does, mate. Yes, one straw, one bottle.
Speaker 1:That's all he does, mate. Yes, that'll be because I'm not a beer importer. Then please do let us know. Weekly at podnewsnet is the right address to catch both Sam and I. So what's happened for you this?
Speaker 3:week, Sam. Well, first of all, I spoke to David John Clark and I found out his secret, but I'm not allowed to tell you now anymore. So now I know I can't say so yes, but there you go. So congratulations, David. By the way, yes, Well done to you. Now, moving on, we obviously did the OPML which we talked about earlier. We've also added, finally, the OAuth support to blue sky, which is an absolute dog. So well done to transistor for doing it. It took us hours to do that one.
Speaker 1:Um right.
Speaker 3:And and and you know I don't understand why they've made it so complex, but now you can publish, uh, your activity, not just comments, out of true fans to your profile if you wish, and of course in out of TrueFans to your profile if you wish, and of course in your user settings you can choose what's published, anything or nothing or something. So yeah, so things like you can publish your play listen time, whatever you want. Comments James, you had a bit of a comment about LinkedIn this week. What would you like to say about LinkedIn? Because I've got it here if you want.
Speaker 1:What I like about Mastodon is that I can say things and very few people read it, and so that's okay, or at least I think that's the case. But certainly when a slightly rude comment about LinkedIn that I posted, basically saying it's full of self-important wankers trying to show off and brag about fake accomplishments, and then adding and if you're American, a very rude word coming up if you're an American. If you're not an American, this is absolutely fine. But I then added I try to keep up, but honestly, it's a shower of utter tits, isn't it? Yes, I wasn't necessarily expecting that to reach as many people as it did, but there we are. Yes, gosh, I hate LinkedIn. I really do hate LinkedIn. But yes, if you think that it will be useful to auto-post to LinkedIn, then I'm sure that that's a wonderful thing. Yes, but you're going to also launch a social sidebar. It's almost as if you've looked at Spotify and you've gone oh, that looks like a good idea. I'll do that.
Speaker 1:But, why not? But why not? I think that's a great idea. I would love more social stuff. I mean, obviously be careful being a social podcast app, but I would love more social stuff and certainly in terms of Spotify. I discover new music that way because I go, I respect this man or this woman I'm listening to. You know, I noticed that they're listening to such and such. I'll go and listen to that and that is all it is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're recording on Wednesday, but by Friday you'll be able to click on an icon in the header which will just show you the people you've chosen to follow and those people what they are currently playing live or what they played in the last seven days. So it's their last activity. We're not going to give you the last 25 things they've done. You can then go and look at that in another way. That's available, but no, it's just a nice social sidebar which allows you to go and look at that in another way. That's available, but no, it's just a nice social sidebar which allows you to go and discover quickly yeah, yes, no, that is um.
Speaker 1:That is all all excellent. Um. You've also launched a podcast, uh, which is called fan zone. Um. Now you say it is now on newpodcastsnet I don't say that.
Speaker 3:I said it's going to be.
Speaker 1:Ah, there you go because I was there looking at the approval queue and going no, it's not, no, no, not yet it's been really interesting looking at newpodcastsnet, looking and seeing who's using it, who's sticking stuff in, how they're writing it, because I'm going in and rewriting them. But it's much easier going in and rewriting than starting from scratch. So, yeah, so it's been really useful doing that. Newpodcastsnet, if you want to take a peek, don't go to http slash newpodcastsnet, because that I discover doesn't work at all at the moment. For some reason I need to forward non-secure stuff over, but I'll get that sorted at some point. But yes, so that is going well. It says here investor meetings, that's investor meetings for true fans. Indeed, yeah, that's sounding positive.
Speaker 3:Very so again we are very, very close to announcing. But then I got taken last night to another investor circle, jerk, where basically Was it on LinkedIn.
Speaker 3:Oh, I think they all were. I certainly had people asking me for it. No, it was just that I haven't been to these for years and it was one where you get the. I've made my 55 million quid and this is how I did it. I was a scrappy this and they sit at the front and tell you their life story of how they've made it and everyone in the room oohs and aahs at the things and then everyone tries to get to that person or they try to. It was just awful. I hated every minute of that meeting last night. I just wanted to leave.
Speaker 3:I'm happy to take your money, but please don't make me do those things again. They are boring, they really are.
Speaker 1:Well, there we are. There you go, yes, well, yes, I would love to avoid any of those. Are you doing any more of these Thames walks?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're just going to, you know, obviously have tea with Charles. Now Zelensky's left, we're going to go and pop into Windsor, have a little cup of tea with Charles and head over to Henley. So that's the next stage of our walk. Yes, looking forward to that. Very nice, come on, james. What's happening for you? What's?
Speaker 1:happened. It was announced at the end of last week that I will be co-presenting the Infinite Dial 2025 from Edison Research.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Yeah, I'm super excited I've got no idea why, but super excited Presented in a free webinar on Thursday, march the 20th it's at 2pm Eastern time, which will be very early in the morning for me, but I would very much appreciate your company on that. Edison Research Vice President Megan Lazarevic is doing all of the hard work and I am occasionally butting in and asking some questions. I have a feeling. Thank you to Odyssey and Cumulus Media and SiriusXM Media for paying for some of the research as well. But yeah, it's a piece of research that I have been reading for the last 15 years and I'm super excited to be actually co-presenting it. No idea why, but that's going to be great fun, so very much looking forward.
Speaker 3:Never meet your heroes but there you go.
Speaker 1:I know Very much looking forward to doing that. The Pod News Report card closes on Sunday and that has been really interesting to run this year. We've got a few questions to ask you. If you haven't yet filled it in, please do. Podnewsnet slash report card. It essentially helps podcast companies prioritise the work that they have to do the big podcast platforms, so that would be really useful. This year we managed to get targeted by bots. So I know that I've had 20,000 people taking part, but I also know that 19,500 of those are robots. But the good news is I've got some code on that page which is sorting that out for me. So it's one SQL query and then they've all gone, which is significantly more than I managed last year. So, yes, I'm very much looking forward to that. And why are we recording on Wednesday? Well, we're recording on Wednesday because of tropical cyclone Alfred.
Speaker 6:Good morning from what has been a wild night here on the Gold Coast, cyclone Alfred now just hours away from making landfall. Right now, across southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales, everyone is feeling the full force of this storm the southern Gold Coast copping wind gusts of 100km an hour, recording wave heights of around 12 metres, and across the border, the Northern Rivers region already drenched 150mm of rain, falling in Lismore in just the last 24 hours. And the worst of these conditions is still to come.
Speaker 1:It's going to be pretty damaging. I mean, everything is talking about everywhere is closed from tomorrow, thursday, on, and we're suddenly planning to lose power again and to lose internet and everything else. I'm going to be writing Friday's pod news later on today, wednesday, just so that it's there, just so that I've got something. So yeah, it's the first tropical cyclone that I've ever lived through and, my goodness, it's quite scary. It's quite scary.
Speaker 1:The only slight problem that I've got is I am supposed to be flying to Radio Days Europe in Athens in Greece on Friday afternoon. I wouldn't do it. That plane lands into Brisbane airport, should be landing into Brisbane airport Friday morning at 6.30 in the morning. It won't be. I'll tell you that for now, and so therefore, I'm definitely not flying on the Friday. I don't think I'll be flying on the Saturday because I don't think there'll be a plane ready and waiting for me, because, of course, it has to land Saturday morning and you know, friday is the big day. So I have a feeling that I'm going to have to call off going to Athens, which is a real shame because I've been to every single radio days that have ever existed. So that's a frustration, but still, there we are Better to be, you know, alive. I suppose I think the word's safe than sorry. Yes, exactly exactly, but yes. So if you're wondering particularly why the Bodneys newsletter has looked a bit sparse over the last couple of days and I've not replied to any of your emails and that's probably why I've had quite a lot going on. So we'll see how all of that works. But yeah, I've never listened to as much ABC local radio as I have.
Speaker 1:But learning all about stuff have. But you know, learning all about stuff. I mean sandbags, for example, because obviously a cyclone brings floods, and so sandbags. You live on a hill, I know I live on a hill, but lots of people don't and a quarter of a million sandbags have been given out over the last couple of days. It's astonishing. I mean really, really quite something. So you get an awful lot of you get wind up to 120 kilometres an hour, and then you get all of the rain, and it's the rain which is going to be really hard, and then everything finishes and you go, oh, that's lovely, and then you realise that you're in the eye of the storm and then everything happens all over again. But yeah, it's going to be quite a thing, anyway so there we are, so good luck for me.
Speaker 3:Look on James's YouTube channel for videos of us.
Speaker 1:Yes, don't look on my YouTube channel, because all you'll see is, you know, random pictures of me finding bugs in pieces of you know home electronics. But still, but yes, it's going to be an interesting time, shall we say. Anyway, that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories taken from the Pod News daily newsletter podnewsnet.
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Speaker 1:james weeklypodusenet yes, our music is from studio dragonfly. Our voiceover is sheila d. We use clean feed for our audio, we edit with hindenburg and we're hosted and sponsored by buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting, get keep podcasting. Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.
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