Announcer: 0:00

Next week, the industry looks back at the year and forward to 2026. This week, it's just these guys again. The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Kridlin and Sam Sethi.

Sam Sethi: 0:15

I'm James Cridlin, the editor of Pod News. Hello, I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of Tree Fantasy.

George Lejnine: 0:20

We have all the telemetry that we really need to make at least a directionally correct, if not a perfect, representation of your show from the data that Apple Spotify provide.

James Cridland: 0:31

George Lechneen talks about Pod Analyst, a new way to see how your show is really doing. Plus, Goalhanger's really good year, Sounds Profitable's very good data, and the Podcast Hall of Fame. This podcast is sponsored by Buzz Sprout with the tools, support, and community to ensure you keep podcasting. Start podcasting, keep podcasting with Buzzsprout.com.

Announcer: 0:52

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi: 0:57

James, let's kick off this long show of 2025 for us. Goal hanger. They shoot and they scored a hat trick this week, it seems.

James Cridland: 1:08

Yes, show of the year from Apple Podcasts. It's the first time that Apple Podcasts has given the accolade of show of the year to a show that isn't from the United States, which is excellent. The rest is history, is the show, of course. And they managed to interview the hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook as well. So good news for them. Yes.

Sam Sethi: 1:28

Now we had some financial news about Goalhanger. Again, not much because they don't have to declare a lot, but it seems that they've tripled their basically their their investments. They've got 4.6 million now in the bank in the last seven months. It imply a profit of 3.1 million. They're doing very well.

James Cridland: 1:51

They are doing very well, yeah. So if you're in the UK, as you know, Sam, you have to send your accounts to Company's House and they publish those. They are still a small, a small business, so therefore they don't have to publish all of their profit and loss, but they do have to publish some stuff. So yeah, they've basically got quite a lot of money in the bank now, which is nice. So they do seem to be doing pretty well. And that is to the end of December 2024. That was a weird seven-month period because they've changed the way that their accounts works. And so we'll have to wait for, gosh, another 12 months to learn anything more about their financials. But it does seem that they've done pretty well. According to reports, the company has doubled the total number of employees. They now have more than 50 different employees, which is quite impressive. But there again, they do have rather more shows, including the rest is Science, which has launched only a couple of weeks ago.

Sam Sethi: 2:48

Yeah, and they've also seen some of their shows like Goal Hanger hit more than 200,000 paid subscribers for the first time. And they're doing 70 million full episode streams per month. I mean, I think they've hit the uh, you know, the secret source of how to grow now. I think they know what they're doing.

James Cridland: 3:04

Yeah, I think they do. And, you know, very clearly they are big enough to sign big stars, they're big enough to have some really good sort of network effects between the rest is stuff. I find it interesting that, for example, Piers Morgan has launched a new show called History Uncensored, and you can imagine that there will be science uncensored and entertainment uncensored and all of those sorts of things coming soon from that company. So clearly, Goalhanger have totally understood how all of that stuff works. So, yeah, I think that that's pretty impressive. And of course, there's the Netflix signing. Uh the rest is football, will be on Netflix uh next year during the American World Cup or the Yeah, not the rest is soccer.

Sam Sethi: 3:48

Not the rest is soccer.

James Cridland: 3:50

No, indeed. And so uh yeah, they seem to be having a fantastic time of it.

Sam Sethi: 3:55

Yeah, and of course, they announced their uh The rest is Fest, which is out next September. And uh Tony Pasta, who's the co-founder and CEO of Goal Hanger, we've had hoped to have on this week, but he is Super Mac, so we will have him in the new year. But he has said he will come on the show. So very excited for that. One other person who tends to do something similar or is trying to do something similar, he said he wanted to create the Disney of podcasting with Stephen Bartlett. It looks like he signed one more new talent to the stable, I guess, the Flight Studio stable. It's called Hot Smart Rich, and it's basically a new podcast that they're going to be bringing out. Now he doesn't do what you know the rest is does. He doesn't have a synergy between each of his podcast brands.

James Cridland: 4:43

No, he's not he's not got that. And uh, I mean this Hot Smart Rich thing is from a journalist called Maggie Sellers Rayum, and I hope I've pronounced her name correctly. I've never heard of her before. Now, uh apparently it's a powerhouse media brand, Hot Smart Rich. But you know, it's reached over 1.8 million total downloads, half a million audience members in less than its first year, apparently. Stephen Bartlett does very, very well in the hype. I I've yet really to see too much about how he can actually bring all of these disparate things that he's investing in together. I mean, clearly he's done pretty well with uh he's got another show out on Flight Story as well, which was in the top 25 of the UK charts not so long ago. I do think that the secret with Goalhanger is that they have understood how to cross promote. And actually, just like McDonald's, if you see a The Rest Is show, you know what to expect. You know that it's going to be a show that comes out bi-weekly, you know that it's going to be a show with a couple of big stars, you understand how that is going to work every single week. And I think it's a really simple, straightforward, you know, move. And I am, you know, it it it's it'll be interesting to see how Stephen Butler, for example, pulls all of these different shows that he has uh together, because that you know is obviously is obviously an important thing.

Sam Sethi: 6:15

Yeah, I think talent selection is uh massively important. I mean, when they came out with the rest is US, the rest is politics basically US version. Um Anthony Scaramucci was not a natural person I would have lent to, right? He'd what had 11 days in the first Trump administration, didn't really strike me as somebody. He's brilliant, I really like him, but he would not be when they picked him the first person I would have chosen.

James Cridland: 6:44

No, no, but he's been really good in terms of that. He's done very, very well. So well done, Stephen Butler, and indeed well done, uh Girlhanger.

Sam Sethi: 6:54

Moving on, then, James, in the new year, we're going to have the inductees of the 2026 Podcast Hall of Fame. Um, some of them have been announced. The Hall of Fame, which will be at Podfest on January the 16th. Who's in it, James?

James Cridland: 7:08

Yeah, well, all of them have been announced. Apart from, my understanding is well, there's one person who is uh waiting to get a proper announcement. But apart from that, some really good names in here. There's Mark Asquith, founder of Captivase. Yes, he is one of the first British people to be made an inductee of the podcast hall of fame. So congratulations to Mark. I have already been joking with Rob Greenley that he'll need subtitles so that the Americans will understand him. Also on the list, some real podcast royalty. Uh, Dan Carlin, who of course does hardcore history, Pat Flynn, who is well known to a lot of people, who does smart passive income and various things in the podcasting world, podcast royalty in terms of sales as well and management. So we've got Kerry Hoffman, she is CEO of PRX, big, big podcast company and indeed radio company in the US. Also, Sarah Van Mosel, who has worked everywhere. Worked for Stitcher, worked for iHeart, Sirius XM, New York Public Radio. She has, if she doesn't know where the bodies are buried, nobody knows where the bodies are buried. So she will be there, which is great. And also Veronica Belmont, who I used to listen to on Buzz Out Loud, which was a long, long, long time ago. So some really good people on that list, which is great. Oh, and I should mention the internet's Arielle Nissenblatt.

Sam Sethi: 8:35

Yes.

James Cridland: 8:36

Yes, founder of Earbuds and a lot of other things too. You she's sort of infectious in terms of her excitement for all things podcasting. So great to see her being inducted into the podcast hall of fame as well. Now, James, uh I've noticed one other name on this list.

Sam Sethi: 8:53

Um a certain James Cridland. Congratulations. Yes, you're right. What have you got in? Thank you.

James Cridland: 8:58

What are you? Now you know why I'm having to go to Orlando in January. Yes, yes, very excited to find out. I was hoping that I would be the only non-American to be in this list, but uh Mark Asquith is also there as well, which I'm delighted for. So there'll be two of us who will speak a different language. So uh yeah, no, it's uh it's it's very exciting. So excellent. I'm I'm very much looking forward to going over there. Yeah, you've got to hand over five years worth of your social media before you get in, though. They're American, they don't understand what Mastodon is. That's fine.

Sam Sethi: 9:37

Excellent. Right. Well, congratulations to everyone on that list, all very well deserved. And uh, I look forward to the photo with you with a shiny little trophy somewhere. I don't know where, but uh and uh you and Mark sharing a pint.

James Cridland: 9:51

Yes, that would be nice, won't it? Yes, I'm looking forward to that.

Sam Sethi: 9:54

Moving on. Now, Sounds Profitable released their Creators 2025 report. It was very interesting. There was a number of things that Tom Webster pulled out that I thought was worth discussing. He's talking about a retention problem within our industry. People starting podcasts, but you know, leaving the industry after a period of time. He said that 35% create video only shows, 36% work across both video and audio, and 29% remain focused on audio only. So did you have a chance to read this report as well, James?

James Cridland: 10:29

Yeah, I've read bits of it, and you know, it is as good as a sounds profitable piece of work is normally. I I should obviously say that Sounds Profitable has a 50% business relationship with Pod News, which is I believe the phrase that we use. So I would say that, wouldn't I? But it is a great piece of work with some really good data in there. And yes, it does sort of concern concern you about some things. Now, interestingly, there is a gender gap for podcasts. If you remember, we were talking about the USC research a couple of uh weeks ago. There is a gender gap in podcasting, but only in terms of currently creating podcasts, people who are currently making podcasts, people who are still making podcasts, so the retention rate is actually higher just for females than it is male. So actually, there is some good news once you've started making once you've started making a podcast, then there's some good news in terms of you will continue making a podcast, equally if you're a boy or a girl. But that isn't necessarily the case when it comes to obviously starting podcasts as well. Some really, really interesting information also about video as well, and how people are producing video, and what they've done is they've split a lot of it up based on both uh gender, but also based on race and based on age and all of that kind of stuff. So you end up seeing, you know, yes, half of video creators are producing audio, for example, and all of that kind of thing. There's some really good uh information on there. It's uh highly recommended to go and take a peek at it.

Sam Sethi: 12:14

He said if you mainly listen to podcasts as audio only but try to create video content, you are setting yourself up to quit. Ie, he's saying that if the place that you consume content is audio, then don't try and do video. But if you actually consume a lot of video, i.e. YouTube, then yeah, probably you would want to go and create a video piece of content as well. Yeah. Um stick to your lane, I guess.

James Cridland: 12:37

Yeah, and I think I I'm always surprised talking to some podcasters who you say, Well, what other podcasts do you really enjoy? And they say, Oh, I don't really listen. And I'm always surprised by that. I I I find that really weird. How can you possibly do a great podcast if you're not listening to other great podcasts? It's just bizarre. It totally confuses me. So, yeah, it's some it's some good data in terms of that. So, yes, very much worthwhile taking a peek at. Soundsprofitable.com is where you'll find it.

Sam Sethi: 13:10

Uh moving on then, Fountain Friends of the Show, Oscar Mary, Nick as well, and Dovi Das. They've just announced that it's time to make video open. They've launched their video hosting platform. So a few months ago, they came, well, RSS Blue and Fountain merged together and then they launched audio hosting. So they've just launched their video hosting, James. Have you had a chance to play?

James Cridland: 13:36

Yeah, it's video hosting that uses the the alternate enclosure, and that seems to work nicely. And yeah, so from that point of view, that that's great. It's kind of what you would expect Fountain to end up doing. Now, Triton Digital has also announced video podcast hosting this week, but they're not using the alternate enclosure. I'm told that they have access to it in case people ask, but they're not using the alternate enclosure otherwise, which seems a bit of a miss. And in terms of how Fountain's thing works, it looks it looks fine. The interesting thing about what Fountain have said is if you're using their website, then the video will be the thing that plays because you're on a big screen, and so therefore it expects you to want to use the video. If you're using the mobile app, then the audio will be the first thing that plays because it expects you to use the audio on a mobile app. And I think that that is a really interesting idea because surely uh you you know the use case differs depending on what type of device you're actually on. Uh so I thought that that was interesting.

Sam Sethi: 14:47

I thought it was a great decision. It's something that we're going to copy here at TrueFans because it was one of those dilemmas. I posed the question on Mastodon, you know, what should we do? And yeah, this seems to be the logical choice, and it makes sense in hindsight. It doesn't stop you switching back to the audio on the desktop or switching to the video on the mobile. No, no, indeed.

James Cridland: 15:08

It it's just where it starts. Now, you could argue that the spec says what the default format is, and I think that that's a fair argument, but I also think that actually there should be a conversation around what you want showing on the, you know, on a desktop experience or indeed on a TV experience, because it would be stupid if you were using a TV app for you to connect to a show that has video on it, but not show the video. Because the specification says that the audio is the default. I mean, that would be that would be nonsense. So and I don't think anybody would argue against that. And so there's a conversation there, I think, to be had in terms of where you override that particular default to make it you know more obvious.

Sam Sethi: 15:55

Yeah, I mean, again, you know, we we tested it in TrueFans and it worked first time. It was very good. So yeah, I think congratulations to the guys at Mountain. Well done.

James Cridland: 16:06

Yeah, so Fountain are doing some excellent work in terms of hosting. Now, you on this show have been talking about hosting for the last six months.

Sam Sethi: 16:15

No, not six, at least since September, I'll give it that.

James Cridland: 16:19

Um for the last three months.

Sam Sethi: 16:22

Tell us, tell us if anything has changed. Well, until you get a press release, it's not released. That's the official answer. No, I keep teasing it out because we're working on it, and you know, it's great that we are doing it. We we are behind a few months behind the guys at Fountain, so congratulations to them. But I'm really excited that both of us are pushing the boundaries forward. We've got our audio hosting working now, and we've got our streaming analytics working, and we've also got people from our wait list now moving across. So cautiously, very pleased. But again, you know, I don't want to go throwing it pre-Christmas, you know, everything at the wall. So I think you'll get a press release, James, first one from me, probably, in the new year, and you know, maybe a second one following behind it very quickly. So the the idea is yes, we will also be going and using a video with HLS. We will like Fountain use the alternative enclosure. We already do. And the third part of that, and I'm sure Fountain's working on it as well, is going with live as well, having a live streaming option. So I think they're the three audio, video, and live will be, you know, in early 26. I think both of us will have that in the market space.

James Cridland: 17:39

Yeah, indeed. Which pulls us back to YouTube because one of the things I I noticed that YouTube TV, which exists in the US, which is a full, you know, TV service on YouTube, they're making some changes to how the how the packages work, and you'll be able just to buy news if you want, or just to buy entertainment or sports if you want. But it did occur to me, why isn't YouTube TV a thing anywhere else? Because surely there's a real opportunity there for YouTube to roll out that technology everywhere, because it kind of exists everywhere, to use all of their backbone, to use all of their stuff for TV channels. There are enough globally available TV channels these days now to be able to roll something out, even if it's five or ten channels for premium users. I'm r I'm surprised that there aren't you know noises from YouTube saying, well, we'll launch YouTube TV across Europe or in the UK or in the UK and Ireland. Because to me that seems like a really obvious one.

Sam Sethi: 18:41

Well, don't give them ideas, James. I've got enough domination of the industry. Please give us let us have a little slither of the industry left. Maybe that's yeah, no, it again, I'm pretty sure given all of the machinations going on with Netflix and Paramount and Warner Brothers, there is going to be a lot of MA in the media world and a lot of people scrambling for attention. And I'm sure YouTube will be sitting there looking at how they can get in front of people's eyeballs as well. Um more than just, you know, the standard stuff they do today. James, moving on then. TikTok didn't want to keep them out. The uh news, TikTok have announced they're gonna do a live podcast series launching with Demi Lovato, uh, and that's going out while it went out yesterday, December the 11th at 6 p.m. They've started to do podcasts, James.

James Cridland: 19:31

No, they haven't. No. No, it's not it's not on Apple Podcasts, it's not a podcast. Oh I am beginning to get I'm beginning to get a bit more grumpy now about the fact that people are producing things that they're calling podcasts, and then you go, well, where where is it in the podcast apps? Because it's not there in in Apple Podcasts, it's not there in Spotify either, so therefore it's not a podcast. It it's a it's a it's a cheap TV show on TikTok, well that's fine.

Sam Sethi: 20:03

They are doing the appropriation of the word podcast just as YouTube did the appropriation of the word podcast because it's quick marketing to people to understand the format.

James Cridland: 20:12

Well, I mean, you know, is it in YouTube? No, it's not in YouTube. So no.

Sam Sethi: 20:19

And I get that. And I think, you know, a couple of weeks ago I was saying to you, I think we talk about the term podcasting, but we actually don't market the benefit of RSS. I really don't think we do.

James Cridland: 20:32

I think No, I I I would agree, although I I think it does come back to what a podcast is. And one of the things that I was doing when I was walking around podcast movement in Dallas is I was wearing a t-shirt that said something for your ears when your eyes are busy, because that's what a podcast is. It's as simple as that. It can have video, absolutely fine, but it's something for your ears when your eyes are busy. If you just put it on a on a on a video-only platform, that that's not a podcast. That that that's that that's a TV show. If it's something which also works just with audio, it's a podcast. Something for your ears when your eyes are busy. And one of the things I was having a chat with the folks at Certified Crucial earlier on this week who make who make merch for podcast for podcasts and for podcast companies and for things like that. And I was saying, you know, what should we be doing? What should we be doing? And we were kicking around some ideas, but I think one of the ideas that I was kicking around is is a tote bag that says on the side of it, this is not a podcast. Because it's not. And just because you call it similarly, and so just because you call it a podcast, you know, no. And similarly, you know, TikTok. Yeah. I mean, great that they've sent out a press release that says that they've launched a live podcast series, but it's not a podcast.

Sam Sethi: 21:48

No, I I I get what you're saying, and I think I wonder whether we're we're fighting the King Canute battle. I think it's it's the mainstream of people now just use the word podcast. They know what they think they mean it means.

James Cridland: 22:03

Okay, well, so if there's advertising in this show, where is it going to come from? Is it going to come from the TV budget? Is it going to come from the online video budget, or is it going to come from the podcast budget?

Sam Sethi: 22:15

Oh, it'll come from a podcast budget because we are clearly an audio podcast, right? We aren't but No, no, no.

James Cridland: 22:21

But if there's advertising for this TikTok show.

Sam Sethi: 22:24

Oh, I see.

James Cridland: 22:24

I see. I don't know. Well, where where will that money come from? Well probably. And in fact, if you if you were then to ask that agency how much money have you spent on podcasting, would they include TikTok in the mix? No, they wouldn't. Of course they wouldn't.

Sam Sethi: 22:37

Not yet. But maybe next year.

James Cridland: 22:39

And so what we end up doing is we end up doing the industry down because money that's going into this thing that's called a podcast that isn't, is then not even going to be re reported as podcast revenue because it isn't. Yes. And so therefore, the $2.4 billion that we're getting for advertising in the US will go down. And so people will think, well, podcasting has had its day and it's all video now. And and all because we're sitting on our hands and going, well, you know, it really doesn't matter. You know, Rob, whether or not it's a podcast, whether or not it's an Apple Podcast, it really does matter. It might have video. It's all nonsense. And the more the more that we do this, then the worse it's going to become for podcasting, surely.

Sam Sethi: 23:29

Well, you could do the Hernan Lopez thing, which is appropriate all the revenue that's gone into YouTube as podcasting.

James Cridland: 23:37

Yes, of course.

Sam Sethi: 23:38

Right? So you could go the other way. Right. How big's the podcast industry? It's 7 billion in advertising. Well, how did it go from 2 billion to 7 billion? Well, we just took all the YouTube advertising web.

James Cridland: 23:48

That's not that's not what Hernan did. But yes, I think. But yes, I know what you mean. He he he he also included all of the international stuff, which that 2.4 billion doesn't. But yes, uh anyway, uh good for TikTok for launching another cheap TV show. Excellent. There we go. And yes, and the special guest, Demi Lovato, will she'll next week.

Sam Sethi: 24:09

Well, don't knock her down.

James Cridland: 24:11

We'll talk with Jack Coyne of Trackstar about the process of recording her latest album. That sounds like a thrill, doesn't it? Co-produced and sponsored by T-Mobile. Excellent. So so count me out. I I will be sitting next to my TikTok machine just in case anybody has the city idea of trying to turn it on.

Sam Sethi: 24:32

So I found the Grinch. Anyway, moving on. Substack. They've just launched desktop live streaming. Now, Substack is uh one of those companies I tend to watch quite closely along with Patreon. And again, they already have live streaming and now they've brought it to the desktop as well. Again, going back to what I said about Fountain and TrueFans and I think many other of the apps, we all have to do video and live, and it's showing here now that live streaming is coming to Substack. YouTube's had a good run at it and they do it very well. Surprisingly, Spotify doesn't do it yet, James, but it's good to see that Substack's doing it. I've long said that the lit tag is underused within podcasting, and I hope that you know more live podcasting will happen in 26. And this again isn't podcasting per se, but it's good to see that they're bringing creators the ability to do live.

James Cridland: 25:30

I agree. I agree. It'll be interesting to watch how Substack works. Now, Pod Analyst, very smart new tool. Launched in September. It helps podcasters unify their analytics across Apple, Spotify, and soon to be YouTube as well. It was built by a man called George Legnin, who uh who is very clever. He's worked for a bundle a bunch of different uh people, and it was also advised by the former head of product at Cadence13, Jim Saraco. And uh the good news is that podcasts with under a thousand listeners can use the product free forever. So you had a quick chat with George, and you started by asking, tell us more about Pod Analyst.

George Lejnine: 26:18

It's a new analytics platform, and we're following the ethos that Bumper and Dan Meisner have established of, you know, the famous article that they wrote, The Death of the Download. Back in the day, we had the hit counter of the internet on your eBay page, and that was considered sophisticated technology. But now that Apple and Spotify and YouTube are offering far greater telemetry, I think from the perspective of how am I performing, you really should just be looking at that. Downloads should be just an assist, really, for covering the overcasts and the podcast addicts out there that don't share telemetry yet. But John Spurlock has that project going on, but I'm not gonna hold my breath for smaller podcasts to implement anything to the degree that Apple and Spotify have done.

Sam Sethi: 27:08

The idea is that you use Pod Analyst to get first-party data back from your Apple account and your Spotify account, and later on, we will have a version that gets the YouTube data as well. So they're the big three players in the market, we understand. When you get the data back into Pod Analysts, first of all, is it you accessing your own Spotify for creators and your Apple creators dashboard, pulling in the data? Is that how you do it? Or is there a more automated way?

George Lejnine: 27:38

Yeah, so the general onboarding process from the perspective of the podcaster, they go into Apple Podcasts and to Spotify for creators, and they simply invite our special email address as if you're literally inviting us for the analyst role, which allows us to read your data and we have some automation set up to be able to pull in your data really quickly.

Sam Sethi: 27:59

So once I get the data back into my pod analyst dashboard, again, what is it that I get to see? What's the critical things that you've done that are uniquely different from what everyone else has done?

George Lejnine: 28:12

So I think everyone has to have kind of some table stakes measurements, which is unique listeners. That's the big one, listening hours or whatever variation of that terminology you want to call it. And of course, you get plays, followers if you still care about that metric. But the big thing that we are really focusing in on is your listener retention functions. We have a really interesting user interface to basically show you all of your episodes that you have done. And quickly at a glance, you can start seeing outliers beyond just like, oh, this episode had a thousand listens, this episode had a 700. What happened here? When you're looking at 100 episodes, you might get lost. And so we use a lot of color to kind of visually represent how you're doing in terms of cool things like someone creates a promo episode saying, like, hey, you know, vote for us in some award show. And it's interesting, we saw they got like one-fourth of the amount of starting listeners, but their retention was almost perfect. So everyone who was listening was either washing their dishes and just couldn't press skip on the episode, or these are your super fans. But like that's the kind of stuff that you just wouldn't even be able to do by looking at App or Spotify's, you know, they provide you this data, it's putting it together that is the real value in using Pod Analyst.

Sam Sethi: 29:39

So when you say putting it all together, so what would I do with the data that you've given me? How would I improve my podcast?

George Lejnine: 29:47

So that's the interesting thing. You know, we don't want to go down this AI route because quite frankly, I don't see it working really well right now. I'm not gonna speak for the future, but this is kind of the thing that I was talking with you before the show about the difference between, say, a bumper and a pod analyst. You need to come in and still apply some analytical thinking. We're gonna give you all the data and present it to you in a very visually appealing way, but you need to look at the numbers. Like we're saying, hey, this episode performed incredibly poorly. Why? Well, you need to go look at it and and you can click into an episode and and go into your retention curves and see, hey, we had 50% of people drop off because they they they heard your pre-roll and they're not interested. But that's a very common effect. Or why did people just straight up leave halfway through the show? Like, was the content I was doing poor? We provide you the ways to see that. But you at the end of the day still have to make that interpretation.

Sam Sethi: 30:52

Okay, so I get to see the histogram of how my episode has uh flowed. I can then make subjective changes to my next episode based on that. Oh, okay, lots of people fell off at 60 minutes of my show's one hour eighty. Clearly, no one's listening. Let's shorten the show, or that topic about a new product didn't really strike with anybody. So maybe I've got to be careful of what topics I use. Okay, so that's how you're looking at doing it. Now, it's currently in beta from what I understand, so so it's free for everyone still to use. And there is a version that you say that's going to be free for life, but there is two price points. What are they?

George Lejnine: 31:31

Oh, so so the the two price points is one is free, one is $49 a month.

Sam Sethi: 31:35

Right. Again, what would I get for my extra $49 then?

George Lejnine: 31:40

So I like to think of it as if you're on the free forever, the way we measure it is we say you can add all of your podcasts, so there's no limitation on that. What we do is we say, okay, across your podcast in the last 30 days, how many unique listeners did you have? If you had less than a thousand, we consider you a free forever user. You get basically almost the entire tool set. You miss out on some of the team planning type stuff, you know, bringing your whole team with you. In the future, there's going to be some tools to see at a network level how your whole network is performing. But those are really not tools. If you're running five shows and you get 200 listeners each per month, that's not relevant to what you need as a podcaster at that point in your growth. On the other hand, if you have millions of downloads, sure, 50 bucks a month for the premium plan, you get everything. Plus, you get better support directly from me.

Sam Sethi: 32:29

You recently leased a new version. That's still in beta, I assume. So you're not actually a release yet. So 2026 is coming up. What are you planning on bringing to the platform? When do you think it'll be a full release one candidate? And what else do you think you want to do in 2026?

George Lejnine: 32:47

Yeah, so we're getting closer and closer to that finish line. And when I say we, I do want to mention this is a team of one. So I am the founder, I'm also the developer, I'm also the support. But also I want to shout out to Jim Sarico. He is my advisor. He's formerly of Cadence 13. Great guy, really helpful. So going back in terms of 2026, January is probably where we want to cut it and say, hey, we're delivering you value. You know, from the hobbyist to the professional, there's something here that is now worth it. And we're already seeing this where I think it's something like 25 to 45 percent of our weekly active users are just coming back. There's a certain proportion that isn't surprisingly large amount that comes back literally every single day. I'm looking at these people logging in, and you can start seeing some patterns. But the big thing that I want to bring to 2026, which I have hinted on LinkedIn in comments and stuff, is to be able to share your podcast measurement information. And I want to really caveat this up front. We are not in the business of selling your data. If you don't want to have this feature, it isn't opt-in. You have to explicitly state that you want to share your data. You want to provide as granular of capabilities to this, going all the way from, hey, I want to invite my advertising partner. We've been doing this forever. You know, say, like an acquired and JP Morgan. Let's give Jamie Diamond a permanent access to this whole platform, let them see what's going on. Or, hey, we're working with HelloFresh, we're gonna just do these next three episodes, show them these three. They don't need to see everything else. Maybe we'll show them a few previous episodes, like this is how we normally perform, so they can set a good return on ad spend metric for themselves. And going all the way to, hey, I want to, you know, when Spotify said, hey, we're gonna share your numbers. And if you were in the club of awesome, I want people to know how I'm doing, then we want to offer, hey, here's your public information. And the huge advantage for podcasters and advertisers here is as a podcaster, you're probably used to, hey, you know, I'm Sam from Sam's awesome ad agency. Please invite me to Apple, please invite me to Spotify. Let's hope that there's no technical issues. You know, that's just a huge waste of time. One login, one invite for the advertisers, no in login at all, just to type in a code or something like that. Just really simplifies the whole process.

Sam Sethi: 35:17

Now let's just go back a little bit about George. So you've been in a developer mode for quite a while now. One of your first products you sold to a company called radio.co in Manchester, what was that product?

George Lejnine: 35:29

It was an iOS app called Pocket Streamer. It's still in the app store. And basically what it lets you do is if you have a Shoutcast compatible radio station or you're a radio.co customer, you could go live directly from your iPhone. So, you know, there's an awesome YouTube demo that they have done where they went out to do an interview in in some area of London and you know, they just brought a microphone, walked around. So that was kind of culmination from me having worked at Live 365 previously.

Sam Sethi: 36:01

And another product that you built was PodcastDB. What was that one?

George Lejnine: 36:05

So Podcast DB was basically think of like the closest competitors, I would say, is Listen Notes and Podchaser. So kind of a zoom info for podcasters is the best easy description. And that one has been sold and has just recently been sold again to some company in Dubai of all places.

Sam Sethi: 36:26

Now, with this one, I mean, what is your exit strategy? It sounds like you're going to build a really cool uh analytics platform with a big three eventually Spotify, Apple, and YouTube data. It does feel like it's one of those products that would live within another product as well. As in, I can imagine a hosting company saying, Yep, we want this because this adds super quick value. It could be an Aqua Higher Stroke product purchase. Is that your thought process or is it too soon? You're just building a product.

George Lejnine: 36:58

I would say it's probably too soon. I've definitely it's definitely gone through my mind about what this could turn into. I don't think Daniel Eck from Spotify is going to be writing me an email anytime soon for an acquisition, given that he already has half of the data, but maybe he's interested in the other half. And you know, I'm open to that conversation. But it's actually an interesting question. Working with hosting companies, I've heard so many people mention that to me, and I would love to do that. If BuzzSprout, I believe they're one of your sponsors. I love their show, Buzzcast. Listen every single Friday. I listen to this show every single Friday too. But you know, it would be awesome to work with them. I think it would just be a very awkward conversation with Apple and Spotify of like, hey, so we have a hundred thousand logins that we need to handle. Like, what do we do at that point? I think it's a more of a logistics problem rather than a technical problem. But it would be an awesome thing. So just to put this out there, the reason that we're even offering the free forever plan is because we want to encourage the whole industry to adopt that downloads are the new metric. And no one else is offering a free plan for anything right now. I'll call out my competitors and my friends here. So we've got obviously bumper, we've got listener.com, we've got podstock.io. They're all on the same mission. Hey, downloads is the new thing that we need to be doing. I'm gonna come in and say, hey, I'll take one for the team, I'll offer a free plan because this is what we need to be doing as an industry.

Sam Sethi: 38:29

You say downloads. I'm still not a believer that downloads is the metrics. I'm a believer that listen time is the metrics.

George Lejnine: 38:35

It's still early in the morning here in California. I meant unique listeners episode consumption. I said totally threw you for a quick one there. Here's the thing, we don't even measure right now. We would we would like to add support for a few of the big hosting companies because we shouldn't throw away downloads because depending on your show, for example, accidental tech, you know, they constantly say, hey, a huge portion of our listeners come from Overcast because obviously that same show is creating that podcast app, you know, Marco Armin. For them, downloads might actually make sense to analyze. But for the majority of shows, we have all the telemetry that we really need to make at least a directionally correct, if not a perfect representation of your show from the data that Apple and Spotify provide you.

Sam Sethi: 39:18

I think downloads are a good indicator. They are a metric. I think it's really interesting with a platform like yours is that people can see their conversion rate from I don't know, let's say 4,000 downloads to 600 plays. That again is a good metric to understand. Why am I getting all these downloads, but people aren't auto-converting into playing? That's another metric to look at.

George Lejnine: 39:42

I think something that has been on the mind, you know, the uncomfortable question of like me as a podcaster, right? Let's just pretend I've been working with Nike and we told them, hey, we have 50,000 downloads, they cut us a check every month, they have a fairly consistent return on and Investment return on outspend, however you want to call it, and we have George Nike 50 coupon code, and so they can track where it's coming from. And I think what's interesting to kind of look at here is well, if you were getting 50,000 downloads, but you're actually getting 10,000 unique listeners, and 10,000 of them actually listen to that ad, nothing changes fundamentally for Nike because they put in say $100 and they generate $300. That doesn't change. But now what you can say is, hey, we can now assign actual dollar values to listeners rather than back in the day where it's like, hey, maybe someone went crazy and started doing fake downloads to your show. Might be your hands might be clean, but you don't know that. We need to rip off the band-aid, have everyone establish a new baseline and work with that because the new baseline, which is you know, unique listeners and you know, retention consumption of the content, what portions consumed, should be the thing that we're looking at.

Sam Sethi: 40:59

Now, one of the other challenges that I've seen is currently AI bots all over the place consuming content. We did some analytic reviews recently and we were seeing Claude and OpenAI and the Facebook bot and the Google bot. And they are not just downloads, they're actually listen bots as well. They are actually playing the content and consuming the actual podcast. How are you dealing with that, both in the download number, but also more importantly, in the unique plays and the listen retention time? Because what you don't want to be doing is conflating the listen time number with bot listens.

George Lejnine: 41:40

So the good thing is if you're using app or spotify, I really hope that Claude is not smart enough to be able to access iPhone apps.

Sam Sethi: 41:49

We are seeing the bots actually. I mean, it might not be iOS, but web-based.

George Lejnine: 41:54

But but web-based access web-based is again going back to the download numbers. So with App on Spotify, you can actually even see this in your iPhone. You can go to the podcast app and tell Apple to reset my identifier. And then that way you get delinked. Or you're now being tracked as a new listener. But I think in terms of the amount of listener fraud and the whole bot activity, I think as far as Spotify and Apple is concerned, we're talking about getting that data from Apple and Spotify, not from your hosting provider saying Apple and Spotify, because I can lie about my user agent too. I can be on my Android phone and tell you that I'm listening from Apple Podcasts. It's very, very trivial. This is not trivial to break.

Sam Sethi: 42:35

So I think this is the world that we're in. I think I agree with our interview that we did with Dan Meisner and this interview here, that this is the new metric. We've been banging this drum now for a couple of years, and it looks like the tools are now appearing. We still have the ultimate problem, which is I like the big number of the download, and I don't like the small number of the unique listeners. That's the problem.

George Lejnine: 42:57

If you want a pat on your back, then go look at your download numbers. But if let's just say your your value of creating your podcast is to spread the message, not to generate ad advertiser interests, then you shouldn't be looking at the download number. You should be looking at your actual consumption because at that point you're just lying to yourself. You can still use pod analysts and you keep selling to Nike with your downloads. Because now what you can do is you can look at your content and see that hey, that pre-roll that we do, we lose 40% of our listeners every single time. People are not even getting to the content. We can see this, the data is there. Spotify and Apple and YouTube are telling us that. Let's remove, let's go one episode without a pre-roll. Or you know, maybe we do a cold open, we do 30 seconds, and then we throw in. I guess it's not technically a pre-roll at that point, but not a mid-roll either. See how that impacts it. Because let's just say a friend told me to listen to this podcast, and I'm listening to the 50th Geico ad this week. If I'm in a bad mood, I might just not listen to it. And maybe this podcast could have become the one that I listen to for the next decade. So you want to improve your content. Why wouldn't you want to do that?

Sam Sethi: 44:07

George, if I want to get onto the beta and onto testing pod analyst, where would I go?

George Lejnine: 44:13

Podanalyst.com. Just click any of the buttons that say start free forever. Right now, everybody, it doesn't matter the size of your podcast, how many podcasts you have, you can join 24 hours after you sign up, your data will start appearing there. And then somewhere in January, probably we're gonna switch over to a subscription. But as I said, the free forever, let's push the industry forward, let's encourage everybody to adopt this metric. And I would love to see people start using once the share feature comes out to see more public large podcasts come out and say, hey, this is actually how the numbers really look. Because I think that's the other thing. Get everybody comfortable. Hey, 10 million downloads, 1 million listeners. Same return on ad spend. But now you have that precision and you can see it.

Sam Sethi: 45:00

George, congratulations. Thanks for coming on the show. Happy Christmas to you. Thank you.

George Lejnine: 45:05

Happy New Year. You too.

Sam Sethi: 45:06

And good luck with the release candidate in January.

George Lejnine: 45:09

Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Announcer: 45:10

The pod news weekly review with Buzz Sprout with Buzz Sprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Sam Sethi: 45:19

James, in other stuff, it looks like LibSin, which I thought we announced a couple of weeks ago, but it seems the story's come back, has announced a price increase that'll start from January the 1st. Is this going to be something that the hosting companies are doing across the board? I know that Blueberry increased their prices in October.

James Cridland: 45:40

Yeah, so this is something that Libsin is doing across the board for all of their prices. So all of their prices are going up by around $5 each. And it's unusual because quite a lot of the podcast companies are putting up the prices for new customers, but not for existing customers. Blueberry and LibSin now are the two companies that appear to have put it up for existing customers. That's the big change that they have made. You could say that that was because their billing systems maybe couldn't necessarily cope with putting up the prices for new customers or not. I don't know. I don't think that that would be necessarily fair. But certainly the changes are there. Now, I would expect more podcast uh companies to probably put their prices up at some point, but Libsyn putting up their prices is quite risky for them given that there is a large amount of attrition from that platform at the moment. They're on their lowest figures ever, according to uh LiveWire. And you would expect Libsyn to be doing all that they could to keep their customers, and clearly whacking up the prices is going to be a thing for them. So it'll be interesting to see what happens there in terms of what that does to their churn figures even more.

Sam Sethi: 46:55

Yeah, I mean, I think sadly, I think we're seeing prices going up all over the place. We've talked about Spotify prices going up. I think one interesting commentary I heard was if Netflix does get Warner Brothers, then they have market dominance and expect to see the price go up there. I don't know. I think we're going to find a lot of people putting their prices up next year.

James Cridland: 47:14

Yeah, no, I'm sure that that will happen. Sure that that will happen. Hey, Cloudflare fell over again. I noticed. Brilliant. And so that for a very short amount of time pulls down Bunsprout and pulled down OSHA. Now it was only down for 25 minutes, and it was only specific sites that had specific Cloudflare setups and things like that. But gosh, that's not good for another another failure of Cloudflare. So interesting to spot that going on. What else is going on? Well, good news in terms of global ad revenue. That's apparently going to be rising 8.8% next year, which is an improvement on what people thought that it would increase by. So that's pretty good news. The Walrus, uh, which is a Canadian uh journalism company, they have bought a podcast company called Lead Podcasting. I'm assuming it's calling Lead Podcasting and not Lead Podcasting, because that would be a really weird name for a podcast company. Amanda Coupideau, who is their founder and CEO, says, I could not have picked a better home. They've been working together for some time now. Lead Podcasting is a branded podcast company, and the Walrus produces a lot of branded content. So I think that that fits quite nicely. So congratulations to them. And Vulture have published an exciting thing with Nick Khoir, of course. Uh the 10 moments that defined podcasting in 2025. As ever with Nick Khoir, it's very uh eclectic. The end of WTF makes it in there. There's not that much other things that I recognised having written about the industry for the last year, but but it's worth a read and you can read it outside of paywall, so it's probably a good thing. Now, next week, what's happening on this show, uh Sam?

Sam Sethi: 49:05

We're taking we we're off, we're gone. We that's it.

James Cridland: 49:08

Aribert cheeks. Yes, we're off, except we're not. We're not, no. Because we've got lots and lots and lots of people. We're having a virtual party, except except there won't be actually any partying going on. There'll be a lot of people, a lot of our friends, giving their 2025 highlights and their 2026 predictions just to whet your appetite for next week. We've got people from Spotify, we've got people from who else have we got? We've got some new Hall of Famers. Well, yes, and we've got people from Apple. Yes, who'd have thought it? An Amazon. Yeah. So it's going to be a biggie. You will definitely want to be using chapters, which of course should be out by then on Apple Podcasts for everybody. But uh, yes, it'll be an excellent show, and that's next week in this here feed, the with a pod news weekly review. Moving on, then James, people and jobs. What's grooving? Well, yes, people. So uh somebody called Misha Glenny uh is the new presenter of In Our Time. What's in Our Time? Well, it's one of the world's longest running podcasts. Who's he replacing? Well, he's replacing Lord Melvin Bragg. How do you pronounce his name? I don't know, but I'm assuming it's Misha Glenny. When does the show return? Oh, it returns in January. Thank you for asking. Sony Music. I'll get my coat if you're going to do your co-hosting yourself. Sony Music Podcasts. Hey, big changes in Sony Music Podcasts. Uh, Steve Ackerman, who has worked for that company for 25 years. It used to be called Something Else. It was then purchased by Sony. But he's worked for that company for 25 years. He is one of the nicest people in the world. And he's to leave. He's to leave Sony Music Podcasts. Lots of people on his LinkedIn expressing surprise, obviously, but wishing him all of the best. And uh frankly, if anybody has earned a rest, it's Steve. So congratulations, Steve. You you've you you have some exciting news about Steve.

Sam Sethi: 51:09

Yeah, well, I pinged him and we had a little chat, and I said, Look, you know, when you're ready in the new year and you've got something to tell us about your new project, do come on. And he said, Yes, I'd love to. So looking forward to interviewing Steve in 2026.

James Cridland: 51:22

Yeah, well, there you go. Uh that'll be well worth looking forward to. Laura Mayer has joined Talkhouse as head of podcast. She, of course, did the Shameless Acquisition Target podcast, which she was trying to get bought by a lot of money. It ended up being bought by Gilded Audio for not an awful lot of money, but still, you know, an amount of money. So that's nice. She was also at uh ABC News, of course. On the Time front cover, uh, CEO of the year is YouTube's Neil Mohan. Who would have thought it? So good to see Neil Mohan there. I'm not quite sure why, because I haven't read Time. So there we are.

Sam Sethi: 52:01

Yeah, Time is owned by the guy who owns Salesforce, Benioff.

James Cridland: 52:05

Oh.

Sam Sethi: 52:06

Weirdly. Well, they've all bought all media. So uh anyway, it's good to see. I mean, I think one one of the things that was interesting that Neil Mohan said in the article was he likes to be the quiet man of the industry. He doesn't want to be going and doing other flashy things that other CEOs do. He doesn't want to be on, you know, many other podcasts. He says, I've got one job, and that's to run YouTube. It's quite nice that he's he's he's gonna say, I'm focused, as opposed to a lot of other people who want to make a lot of noise elsewhere.

James Cridland: 52:36

Yeah, no, I think it's a good thing.

Sam Sethi: 52:39

Now, awards, James. I mean, we've talked about the uh the award that you're gonna be getting, but there are other awards as well. What are the other awards?

James Cridland: 52:49

What are the other awards? Well, the Golden Globes, I've heard of them. The 83rd Annual Globes. That's your next one.

Sam Sethi: 52:56

Make a bit more space on the shelf. Yeah, yeah, right. Two Webbies, one Amby, a lifetime. My God.

James Cridland: 53:04

Yeah, yeah. Well, yes, so the 2026 nominees for the 83rd annual Golden Globes were announced, including, for the first time ever, awards for the best podcast. There are six major shows which have been shortlisted for the new award. Armchair Expert, Call Her Daddy, Good Hang, Smartless, the Mel Robbins podcast, and up first. And the winner is Good Hang. Oh no, sorry, I can't tell you that yet. The awards are on January the 11th. They will be they'll be on the telly. Although, interestingly, the podcast nomination and announcement was made before they turned the TV cameras on. Right. Just just bear that in mind. Just bear that in mind. Congratulations, Sirius XM, who has half the nominations. So that is very good. And uh there were a few other shows in there. There were some sports shows from The Ringer and stuff like that. And there were a number of political shows, none of which have got in, which I thought was very interesting. So Ben Shapiro was paying a lot of money to promote himself. He was on the inside front cover of The Variety magazine, which doesn't come cheap. He was on a great big Times Square billboard, which again doesn't come cheap. He was on a round table for the Hollywood Reporter, which again doesn't come cheap because that will have been paid for as well. But he failed to be nominated. But then so did, I think the Midas Touch was in there. I think Pod Save America, Joe Rogan, of course, yeah. I think Making Catholics. Oh, and uh and the Tucker Carlson show. So none of those shows were nominated, and all of the coverage of the nominations basically said that this was the Golden Globes judges playing it safe and spotting these people and thinking, no, we're not going to have those on the stage talking.

Sam Sethi: 55:01

So to be fair, I think that's the right thing. Look, it's the first time they've included it, they don't want it to be controversial. There's probably enough in the globes themselves that might be, you know, more controversial.

James Cridland: 55:13

So the one thing that I found very interesting was you have out of the six nominees, uh you know, they they're all very good. Uh Up First from NPR on the Golden Globes website has no NPR branding at all. The name of the show is Up First from NPR, but on the Golden Globes website, it's called Up First. The Up First logo has no NPR logo on it. Whereas if you have a look at Smartness or if you have a look at Good Hang with Amy Polar, who's going to win, or if you had a look at uh Call Her Daddy from Alex Cooper, maybe might win. One of those two. Or indeed Wondery or you know, etc. etc. They were all plastered with the logos of the network that they came from. But NPR probably must have made a a decision not to brand it NPR and has just branded it up first, which I just thought was interesting. Why would they do that?

Sam Sethi: 56:15

I have thoughts, but I'm not going to share them. Moving on. Yes.

James Cridland: 56:19

I should hope so. Yes.

Sam Sethi: 56:21

After your hey, I've been admonished so many times by the Godfather.

James Cridland: 56:26

After you're telling off.

Sam Sethi: 56:27

Oh, I'm all the time, mate.

James Cridland: 56:29

All the time. Indeed. I'm in the naughty corner. Uh yes, in the naughty corner. Now, talking about awards, there are some new awards. The NYC Podcast Awards. Confusingly, you win a Libby Award for the NYC Podcast Awards. I know. Don't don't don't at me. Uh anyway, the organizers say it's launching in direct opposition to the download first culture dominating podcasting. The Libby Awards recognize craft, sound design, writing, acting, engineering, and the creators themselves as highly as audience size. Anybody would think that they have it in for the Golden Globes, but I think, well, good for you. So if you want to enter that, it's very cheap to enter. You've got until January the 10th. I don't know whether you need to be a New York podcaster in order to take part, or whether we can enter. I simply don't know. But anyway, you'll find it in the Pod News newsletter this week.

Sam Sethi: 57:21

Yeah, we won't be, though. Just to be clear, we won't be.

James Cridland: 57:25

We won't be what? Entering. Entering, won't we? Why? I've entered this show once. We come second every time. I've entered the show once. I might enter it again. Okay. Rumour is rumour is that the Pod News Daily podcast has been entered for the Ambys. Oh. Not by me either. I should say. Well done. And not uh and not in a category that I have any chance of winning. Sports and entertainment, yes. No, no chance of winning that. Actually, no, weirdly, best ad read. Best ad read. Nice, yes. Yeah. So I I stand no chance of winning because Conan O'Brien is going to win that one, obviously. But yeah, so I th I I I mean great. I'm I'm super looking forward to winning, but I won't be winning. Okay. So let's not forget that. And in terms of events, this is really exciting for the UK. PRX and Audio UK have announced a 2026 Podcast Creator Summit in London. It's on Friday, the 6th of February. It's being organised in partnership with Apple Podcasts, and it will be in the Apple Podcast offices in Battersea Power Station, which is very fancy. There's sessions, there's workshops and stuff like that. It's free to go to. Presumably, you need to be in the UK. Well, I mean, you can be anywhere, I suppose, if you want to travel. That's absolutely fine. You can sign up with a link that you'll find in the Pod News newsletter. I think that's really exciting and interesting seeing PRX finally moving out of just North America and doing stuff in other parts of the world and uh working with uh Audio UK. So again, it goes to show how much more global podcasting is becoming.

Sam Sethi: 59:08

I might even go to that one. That's quite nice. Right, moving on. Should we go to the tech stuff?

James Cridland: 59:15

Yeah, we'll do that.

Announcer: 59:16

The tech stuff. Tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 59:20

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology. Well what have you got for us, Sam? Lots of good lots of good news. I'm hoping.

Sam Sethi: 59:29

Uh yeah. Well, I didn't I'm not sure where to start, but we'll start with this one, which isn't good news. Podium.page has stopped. It was a podcast AI tool, and it suddenly announced it's to close.

James Cridland: 59:42

Yes, so this was a tool that produced transcripts, produced AI written show notes and blogs. Uh, it was white labeled by a number of podcast hosting products. I mention a bit coily in pod news this week. One of those was BuzzPro, our sponsor, but you will have noticed. That you are still getting transcripts and AI written show notes and blogs and all of that stuff on Buzzsprout. So clearly they have been working cleverly behind the scenes to make sure that it all still works. So congratulations to them for doing that. But uh yes, it's always sad seeing a company closing. It's sad seeing a company closing very, very quickly. And when that happens, probably one of two things has has uh happened. Firstly, it's just catastrophically run out of money very, very quickly. Or potentially there's been uh more personal reasons why that company has ended up uh closing. But yeah, it was a very sort of you know shocking message that was just posted on their homepage, just basically saying totally, totally abruptly, and we sincerely apologize. So we hope that everybody there is uh is all okay.

Sam Sethi: 1:00:56

Now, John Sperlock, friend of the show, has got LiveWire, which is his analysis of podcast companies and of episodes and and many, many other things. It's called OP3, and we've talked about it lots and lots. But he's now saying he's spending elbow grease filtering out auto-generated shows. He added a new note about TTS podcasts. What are TTS podcasts, James?

James Cridland: 1:01:21

Well, TTS podcasts is text-to-speech, or as as many people would call it, AI slop. And so some of those shows, but particularly, he seems to have, from the data that I can see, he seems to have taken all of the inception point AI shows out. Because, you know, he he just says they're not a reflection of the health of the podcasting world as it's been measured since 2021, and it just serves to obscure everything else. So he's pulled all of that information out. So as a result, you'll see PodTrack, for example, going down very, very fast in the tracking information because all of those 32,000 episodes that uh Inception Point AI is releasing every single week, that figure may be 3,200. I think it probably is. But anyway, all of those episodes are all measured with PodTrack, and those will be now no longer in the the live wire information. I think it's interesting. I'm not necessarily sure that I agree, but but I think it's a good, you know, it's it's good that John has been open and said this is what I'm doing. And so, yeah, what are your thoughts on that, Sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:02:29

Well, before I have my thoughts, I mean, what don't you agree with? I mean, I'm curious. I mean, you're the one who, you know, on this show, together we've talked about, you know, Inception Point AI, we've talked about AI slop, and John's taken a proactive decision not to include it to mess up with all of the other people's data, I suppose, because it it does cause a massive spike. I mean, Spreaker must see their numbers drop massively on live wire as well.

James Cridland: 1:02:57

I mean, Spreeker's figures are down, but then everybody's figures are actually down in this month. All of the big podcast uh hosts uh figures are all down this month, and I'm not quite sure why that is, but you know, Spreaker is, you know, clearly down. The reason why I don't necessarily like it is look, at the end of the day, we're all the these are still competition to us. Those 4,000 million shows that Inception Point AI are pumping out without checking any of the content first, are still appearing in the podcast apps alongside ours. So they're still part of the of the industry. They're still taking the ad revenue from programmatic advertising, they're still bumping up the figures from you know a number of different o a number of different organizations. So I do think that they are still part of the of the industry. Now, you know, if it was up to me, I would be saying, take them, you know, produce two different versions of the chart, one with and one without the the AI slop, and then and then we'll actually know how big the AI slop is, then. We'll actually know how big the problem is. But at the moment we've just seen those numbers just sort of going away. And I'm not sure that that's as transparent as we should probably be in this industry. So that's why I'm a little bit sad about it.

Sam Sethi: 1:04:20

I I like the comparative nature of that. That that's a lot of work maybe for John, but I think that would be an interesting comparison. As you said, it we we would know the extent of the AI slot. Should apps be blocking it then, James?

James Cridland: 1:04:34

Oh, I mean, you know, you would hope that apps uh not blocking it, but you would hope that apps would be downgrading this sort of stuff in their search anyway. And uh that that's probably how the how the algorithms are working. I can't imagine people, and I know that Inception Point AI won't necessarily agree with me, but I can't imagine people staying listening to episode three, four, and five of these AI-generated shows unless they're using them to fall asleep. And so therefore, you know, you you would you would imagine, therefore, that the searches in podcast apps would be automatically downgrading them anyway. I'm never a particular fan of banning things. I am a fan of of making sure that they don't appear as high in the algorithm as you know real human beings stuff does, because I think at the end of the day, the game that they are playing is to play the SEO game of we just want to, you know, we just want to steal the traffic from human beings and instead, you know, throw our stuff in. So if you do a search for Biography Flash, for example, Biography Flash is one of their brands, Inception Point AI's brands. Uh, and it's not just Inception Point AI, by the way, there are plenty of other things in in in here as well. But Biography Flash has these biographies for anybody that you could think of, is in there. I mean, the number one is Charlie Kirk, of course, but then you've got Freddie Krueger, Dean Withers. Freddie Krueger's not even real, uh, Dan Bungino, Rachel Maddow, Catherine, Princess of Wales, Zach Bryan, Kat Williams, uh, Warren Buffett, and so on and so on and so on. And they are all automated. They are all produced by uh scraping a Wikipedia entry. You know, I mean, fine, but at the end of the day, it's not going to be particularly, particularly exciting, is it?

Sam Sethi: 1:06:36

No, I mean, I I just did a quick search on uh true fans. I mean, we don't have them included, but we we index them from the podcast index so we can see them all here.

James Cridland: 1:06:48

Yeah.

Sam Sethi: 1:06:50

Again, you know, the way that we do it in TrueFans is the way that I think you taught me how to do it, James, which is we'll index it and show it if you do a search, but we won't add it to our database until the user clicks on it and and requests it.

James Cridland: 1:07:04

Yeah, until the user clicks on it, and that and that's how my my system works as well. But you know, I mean, if you do a search for Dan Bongino, then in Apple Podcasts, then number one is Vince, which is what used to be the Dan Bongino show. And number two is the Dan Bongino biography flash. And similarly, doubtless, if you were to search for Charlie Kirk, which I'm doing now, then the first thing in there is going to be the Charlie Kirk show. This, of course, is where the is is where the Apple Podcasts search API falls over. I can't tell you. But yes, the number one is the is the Charlie Kirk show. Actually, weirdly, now no. The number three is the Charlie Kirk show. The number two and the number one are both AI AI slop, AI produced content. And the number one right now in the pod news search, which is essentially Apple Podcasts with a little bit of a little bit of additional spice in there. Yeah, the number one is Inception Point AI, a show that just says Charlie Kirk. And and I I just look at this and I go, the reason why this podcast is doing so well is is all to do with SEO and nothing to do with content. Is my honest opinion, but you know, anyway, we will we will see.

Announcer: 1:08:29

Booster gram. Booster, boostergram, super comments, zaps, fan mail, fan mail, super chats, and email. Our favorite time of the week, it's the Pod News Weekly Review inbox.

James Cridland: 1:08:42

So many different ways to get in touch with us. You can use fan mail by using the link in our show notes, super comments on TrueFans, boosts everywhere else, and we uh share the money that we make from this podcast with ourselves. It doesn't go anywhere else into the exciting pod news HQ. So that's basically how that bit works. We got we were talking about a Spotify recap, weren't we, last week? And we were spotting about uh Spotify wrapped, YouTube recap, Amazon delivered, and all of that. And and I think I blew my mouth off and said, Why don't podcast hosts do any of this stuff? Podcast hosts should really be doing it, it would be a really good idea, blah, blah, blah. Something to that effect. Something to that effect. And Kevin from BuzzSprout, our sponsor, said.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:29

Did you not remember that Buzz Sprout has been doing a year-end recap for the last six years? Oh my word. Yes. The last two years we've called it Backtracks, and this year we're calling it playback. We'll send it out in early January so you get all of your 2025 data. Yes, we did.

James Cridland: 1:09:48

Well, thank you, Kevin. Sorry, Kevin. Yes, but yes, I will. Uh in fact, I'm looking forward to that then. So, yeah, interesting change. Calling it playback. So uh yes, I'm just trying to think if I uh do do do I remember that?

Sam Sethi: 1:10:06

I mean, I'm sure you press releases.

James Cridland: 1:10:09

I'm sure. Well, it might not be a press release, that's the thing. It might not be a press release. But I was wondering if I had it in my email from last year, and I I can't necessarily find it. But yes, very cool. Uh, in fact, yes, I can find it. It it says your 2024 podcast recap for Pod News Weekly Review. Being fair on us, it was sent on the 14th of December, this time last year, and there was a link to go and and uh check it out. Is that link still going to work now? 12 months afterwards. No, yes, 12 months afterwards, and the quick answer is not sure it will. But uh very cool. So thank you. Uh Kevin.

Sam Sethi: 1:10:50

What was the answer? I didn't, it skipped it. No.

James Cridland: 1:10:53

Uh but thank you, Kevin. That's very kind of you. Also, thank you to Seth Goldstein, who says, or Goldstein Goldstein, I never know. Sorry, Seth, uh, who says, My goodness, everyone has a recap. It's gone. Recap crazy, sending us a message through TrueFans. Neil Vellio, isn't much of podcast ranking made up. Oh, now now. Claire Wake Brown, what a good idea for hosting companies to give podcasters a year-in-review style roundup. So good, in fact, that Buzz Sprout already do it. Yes, all right. Anyway, if you want to get in touch with us, then uh please do. You can uh hit that uh that that uh comment button or a fan mail button or however it is that you want to communicate with us, or indeed email weekly at podnews.net also works. And thank you to our power supporters, including Lycia, Martin Lindescog, Ralph Estep Jr., who I notice has now become a supporter of the podcast index as well. So thank you, Ralph, Elias Strand, and uh Star Tempest for all being monthly supporters. That's very kind of you and excellently kind of you, in fact. So, what's been happening for you this week, Sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:11:59

Well, I've spent the week getting all the audio clips together for our highlights and prediction show, which has been fun. You have, you've been busy. Yeah, but it's been good. And thank you to everyone who who came back. So that's been great. And as I said earlier, we've started to migrate some of the podcasters on our wait list um over to live hosting now. So again, we just want to slowly do that, make sure that everything works. It's the most scary thing for me because screw that up, and I'm sure the world will know about it. So you do it with caution. Make sure it works before you start shouting about it. So, yes, we're we're quietly confident, but yes, that's what we've been working on.

James Cridland: 1:12:40

Always a good thing to make things make sure that things work. Indeed.

Sam Sethi: 1:12:44

Indeed. So, what's happened for you, James?

James Cridland: 1:12:47

So, what's happened for me? Not an awful lot, really. It's been an interesting week here here in Australia because the ban on social media has happened. Oh, yes, and and so that's been fun. So very unhappy daughter. Uh no, she's absolutely fine. I mean, she'll be slightly more unhappy when I block Pinterest from working on the uh uh on the uh home network uh this evening, which she doesn't know about. But but she thinks that we don't know that she's using it anyway. So um right, so there we are. But yes, I mean, you know, I wrote a blog post about it, having a bit of a grump about YouTube being on that list, because firstly, YouTube isn't a social media platform, obviously. And secondly, it doesn't mean that she won't be able to use YouTube, it means that she won't be able to use YouTube signed in. So it means that she'll get ads, whereas signed in she wouldn't because we pay for it. She'll see gambling ads and ads for alcohol because she can't opt out because she can't sign in. And it's it's just ridiculous. And I can't control anything that she sees. Genius. Another genius thing by by the Australian government. But you'll love the front page of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers on the day that the uh ban came in. Ah, the front pages were just ridiculous. The Courier Mail, which is our local paper, today childhood will be rebooted. Today is the day humanity reboots childhood. With Australian kids the first in the world to be banned by law from using social media until they turn 16. Not true. Lives will be changed, lives will be saved. These are laws that will unshackle our kids from an online world that they are not old enough to handle.

Sam Sethi: 1:14:27

So, anyway, I'll say one as a parent who's now got children who are 26 and 21.

James Cridland: 1:14:35

Yes.

Sam Sethi: 1:14:35

One of the things that we, our generation of parents, don't go outside, don't go to the park. There's paedophiles everywhere, don't do this, don't do that, stay at home, never go anywhere. So when we were kids, it was see ya, mum, I'll be back for dinner. Mobile phone didn't exist. So we were out and about, we got into scrapes and we did all sorts of things, and we came home and then we had our dinner, and that was it. We are a nanny parenting state, right? We nanny our children to death. And we say, Don't go out, don't go anywhere. It's scary out there, stay home. And then we say, you know, those digital playgrounds that you've created. Yeah, now you can't go there either. So, what do you want them to do? What do you want kids to do these days? They're going to circumvent whatever there is. You've just said your daughter's going to use YouTube in a way that it wasn't intended for you as a parent for her to use. It frustrates me. We we we clamp on them on one side, we clamp on them on the other side, and we never have that as our own childhood, but we do it to our children. And I'm afraid we're gonna grow up with snowball narcissistic children who are scared of everything because we won't allow them to do anything.

James Cridland: 1:15:48

Ladies and gentlemen, Sam Sethy has spoken. Well, I just I find it frustrating.

Sam Sethi: 1:15:53

We we say don't go out, they stay home, and then when they stay home, we say don't do this, don't do that either.

James Cridland: 1:15:58

I agree, I agree, and and I see this sanctimonious nonsense. The only reason that this has happened, let's be clear, the only reason that social media has been banned in Australia is that there was a lot of money in advertising in terms of social media. This is hurting the social media companies. Reddit has just announced it's going to take the the Australian government to court about it. And and the beneficiaries of that are the legacy media like Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. And that's why Rupert Murdoch's newspapers have been campaigning for the last three years for social media to be banned, as well as Google to pay for absolutely everything that they take with the Courier Mail's permission from the Courier Mail's website. You know, all of that nonsense. You know, the Google News and having to pay for linking to the Courier Mail when their entire benefit, you know, their entire business relies on links from Google to the Courier Mail. It's it's all nonsense, but it's all Rupert Murdoch. And it's there's one man who is still alive and he's still looking after the Australian government, whoever is in, the Australian government sits there and says, Yes, Rupert, no Rupert, three bags full, Rupert. And one day that won't be happening anymore. And that'll be an interesting day.

Sam Sethi: 1:17:23

I keep wishing for that day, but um I'm afraid his son will take over and he's not as uh lenient as we hope either.

James Cridland: 1:17:30

So yes, but I I wonder whether or not his son is actually not necessarily as powerful as uh true as as uh as Rupert is. But yes, you know, yes. Uh anyway, there's plenty of excitement there. Anyway, that's it for this week. So next week we will have all of our friends on telling us what to what they've enjoyed of 2025 and what to expect in 2026. But until then, all of our podcast stories for this week taken from the Pod News Daily Newsletter at Podnews.net.

Sam Sethi: 1:18:01

Yeah, please keep supporting us with streaming styles. You can give us feedback using the Buzzprout fan mail like we had this week, and you can send us a super comment or a boost. Even better, become a power supporter like the 22 Power Supporters at weekly.podnews.net.

James Cridland: 1:18:17

Yes, our music is from TM Studios, our voiceover Sheila D, our audio is recorded using CleanFeed, and we edit with Hindenburg, and we are sponsored and hosted by Buzz Sprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Announcer: 1:18:31

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