Human Announcer 0:00

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

Sam Sethi 0:09

I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod news, and I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of TrueFans.

Tyler Denk 0:14

What both creators and publishers want less of is managing five different platforms and five different tools with five different logins, five different payment subscriptions.

James Cridland 0:24

Tyler Denk from Beehive talks to us about the platform's new podcast host. Plus.com.

Human Announcer 0:58

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi 1:03

James, before we get into the show this week, I think a little happy birthday is in order. It's Apple's 50th birthday, James. How old do we feel?

James Cridland 1:12

Yes, well, exactly. And Paul McCartney playing at the special Apple party, which must have been pretty cool. I bet he finished with Hey Jude. And I bet Hey Jude went on for slightly too long. That's what Paul McCartney does. Bless him. Let it be. Just let it be, James. Yes, exactly, exactly. And I bet he sang his new song and no one no one recognised it at all. It's a good song. You can very much hear that his voice is going, um, but it's definitely a good song. So uh anyway, I'm sure that he uh is trousering all of the money for that. Um and uh well done him and well done Apple for booking that. That that's uh made me quite jealous.

Sam Sethi 1:52

Yeah, well, where was your invite is the question.

James Cridland 1:55

Where was my invite? Um, person who listens to everything I do. Where was my invite? Maybe I should post it on Mastodon where she'll see it as well. Oh, really? Stalker. Yes, exactly, exactly right. Anyway, uh enough about Apple. I don't want her to pull my arms and legs off, so let's so let's move on.

Sam Sethi 2:18

Let's talk about our sponsors, Buzz Sprout. Um they didn't send you a press release because I didn't see it in Pod News, but obviously they talked about it in Buzzcast. So they've announced transcriptions for all paid plans and they're free, James. Tell me more.

James Cridland 2:35

Yeah, this is very good news, very, very good news. And no, they didn't send me uh uh a link. Um, so thanks, Alban. Um, but yes, um uh big updates for transcripts on Buzzsprout. So, everyone, if you are using a paid plan with BuzzSprout, um you will get your episodes transcribed automatically for free, which is good. So it's part of what you get when you sign up for BuzzSprout. The other update is inside the transcript editor you can now add chapter markers, which is good because chapter markers obviously um very helpful. Um we use them uh, as you just heard, uh in the intro. And um, yeah, and um uh they're particularly useful actually for things like AI, so they say. I'd not thought about that, but yes, you're absolutely right. Um uh AI is useful. So uh yes, I think uh all of that is good and um good that Buzz Sprout is doing the accessibility stuff for free, as I believe that everybody should be doing. Um so hurrah for that.

Sam Sethi 3:37

Yeah, I'm I'm really excited, and congratulations to Buzz Sprout for doing that. I have a question. We talked about Overcast last week doing transcripts, and obviously we've talked about Apple doing transcript. Just a thought that went through my head. Is that the right place? Shouldn't it be where it is with BuzzSprout? Shouldn't the hosts be doing transcripts? So it's a one transcript, many apps rather than individual apps doing transcripts so that the overcast transcript is not available anywhere else. The Apple transcript is not available anywhere else, and now you've got overlap.

James Cridland 4:13

The reason why Apple is producing transcripts is that Apple can produce a transcript um uh for the shows that don't have them. And ideally, what should be happening is um you produce a transcript for yourself, um, you go through it and you make sure that everything is correct, and when you publish your episode, that is what is published. Now, the problem with um uh podcasting is that not everybody is producing a transcript, and it looks pretty rubbish if your podcast app has transcripts for some shows but not for others. And so what both Apple and Overcast, I understand, have is a fallback that if there is no transcript, then that um then the app will make the transcripts for you. And I think that that's also fine, um, but I would prefer that the podcast hosts were making the transcripts. Now, at the moment, my understanding is that Overcast isn't actually uh looking at the inbuilt transcript with the RSS feed, and I think that that's a bit of a mistake to Marco. I have told him so, um, and I'm hoping that he is going to fix that. He says that actually that quite a lot of the code is already in there, uh, it just needs some wiring up. Um, so um hopefully he will fix that. But I do think that a transcript should be the bare minimum that we do as podcasters, that we do as creators, and uh that is what should appear everywhere. And I'm really pleased to see Overcast um giving you access to transcripts for free, and also Buzz Sprout now giving you um access to create transcripts um for your shows for free, essentially, um, with any paid plan. So I think all of that is very good news.

Sam Sethi 5:58

Okay. Now I haven't seen the Overcast transcripts. Do they provide speaker labels with the transcript or is it timed transcripts only?

James Cridland 6:09

Um that is a good question, and I can't remember from um the transcript that I went to have a look at. I don't think it did, um, because you end up with something that says speaker one or speaker two, um, and it doesn't look um uh really as good as you would want it to. So I think um from that point of view, probably no, but um uh but yeah, I mean, you know, the only one that I have, to be honest, looked at is the transcript for the Pod News Daily, which is just me, and so therefore there's no speaker diarisation, is I think the phrase you're looking for. Yeah, in terms of that.

Sam Sethi 6:47

Yeah. I I mention it because Buzz Pratt do a great job of providing speaker labels, and then what we do in TrueFans is use the person tag to associate to the speaker label so then we can show an image against it. And so the two parts work well. Does Apple provide speaker labels?

James Cridland 7:05

Um Apple does if you provide them. So if we fix them as we have done in the BuzzSprout um dashboard, then uh and this is the big benefit of doing your own transcripts, is that if you do all of the speaker label stuff, then that appears within Apple Podcasts uh automatically. Um but it only appears if you are providing that.

Sam Sethi 7:29

Yes, because Apple don't provide that, do they?

James Cridland 7:31

Because Apple Apple don't know the name of the people, right? Um and so therefore it's very difficult for Apple to to turn around and say, well, you know, this is what James sounds like and that's what Sam sounds like. So Apple can't do any of that stuff, so they are a little bit hamstrung in terms of that. They could um um put different speakers in different colours, I suppose, but you know, you're you're really clutching at uh straws there. I think it's a good thing if if if you can add that. And I think what Buzzsprout do, and I may be wrong here, but I think what Buzzsprout do is that they is that they link the speakers in the transcripts with the podcast people tag uh in the RSS feed, so you can actually see who's on that particular episode. I think that's what they do. Um so if you have a look at last week's uh uh uh episode, it should appear in the individual um podcast person tag uh for the episode that I was on, but also Barry from Pod Home was on, um, you know, etc. etc. uh as well as you, Sam. So I I think that's what they're doing, and of course that makes perfect sense.

Sam Sethi 8:36

Yeah, and I think um I go back to my point then, which was I think hosts should do it. I think the way that Bus Sprout have done it is the bet better way. Apple could extend because they don't support the person tag within uh the Apple podcast, and I remember talking to an Apple executive at Podcast Movement saying they don't see any value in it. Um so I don't think they're gonna ever support the person tag. But if they did, they could then extend it to allow you to put guests in and also put speaker labels against the person tag.

James Cridland 9:12

But again, yeah, they could. Um they could, but on the other, on the other side, um firstly, th that should be coming from the podcast hosting company. So um so that's the first thing. The other thing is that um what Apple is very keen at doing again is to make sure that everything is as consistent as possible. And so therefore, if you have 15% of the podcast out there with a person tag and 85% without, then that's not particularly helpful either. Um, and so you end up with a not consistent um uh view. Um, and I think also there's the other side, which is everybody is trying to spam Apple every single um uh time. And of course, you know, we could pretend that we've got Joe Rogan as a guest, we could put Joe Rogan in in the in the person tag, we could, you know, and and then all of a sudden um Apple would kind of claim that Joe Rogan was a guest in this show, which he which he wouldn't be. And you know, so I think I think there's all of that stuff that we need to be careful of as well. Um and I totally understand why uh Apple has a slightly different way in terms of um linking uh hosts and guests and that sort of thing.

Sam Sethi 10:24

Now, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, James, is there's been a discussion related to transcripts on the podcast 2.0 community around adopting VTT and removing SRT. Now you're one of the people who's heavily involved in that conversation. So what's going on?

James Cridland 10:43

Yeah, and it's not around adopting VTT, well, because everybody is using VTT, it's around uh simplifying the tag, it's around making the tag simpler or the feature simpler for podcast app developers and for podcast hosting companies. At the moment, you can produce a version of your transcript in VTT, which is um a uh a good standard that everything supports, including browsers. You can support SRT, which is a less supported standard and is not supported in browsers. You can support, and by the way, really easy to transfer between um VTT and SRT. Um it's a really easy transform. Then you can uh support a text file which has no particular um no particular formatting in there, and then you can support, well, either an HTML file which has some formatting in it, or an HTML file which doesn't have any formatting in it and is just a link to where the transcript is on the web. You can support all of those things, um, and that's fine, but we don't need to support all of those things. And it's a typical podcasting 2.0 thing. Sorry, I know that some people are going to get annoyed, but it's a typical podcasting 2.0 thing of going, what's the most complicated thing we could possibly do when we are working out what this tag does? So my recommendation has been that we remove the SRT file and the txt file completely from the um spec. Um and so we're left with the VTT file, which is for captions if we're going to be strictly accurate. Um, and um we can still use HTML files for a link and those um weird and wonderful JSON files that link every single word, and that's absolutely fine if you really want to do that, just to make life simpler, because at the moment the um the podcast transcript tag is twice as complicated as as it needs to be.

Sam Sethi 12:43

Yeah, and it I think it's that word-by-word um follow-along that most people like to see in the transcription. Now, Apple have done it some weird way because they use VTT, but they don't use JSON, and yet they still have word-by-word follow-along.

James Cridland 13:00

Well, again, this comes back to Apple trying to avoid spam because um what is going on when you upload a podcast with a transcript to Apple is that it looks at the transcripts, it compares the transcripts with the word-by-word version that it has already produced, because it's still producing transcripts, um, and then it goes, oh, okay, well, the transcript that this podcast creator has supplied looks to be more than 95% accurate, or whatever that figure is that they use internally at Apple. And so they just switch the transcript over to be the creator-led transcript. That's I think what they're doing. Um, so actually it's got nothing to do really with the VTT file, it's got more to do with um just that uh Apple is producing uh a word-by-word transcript anyway, um, and they're using that to just double check that what is in the audio, but also what is in your creator-produced transcript, um, looks about right, because otherwise, again, you might end up spamming and putting all kinds of stuff in there. So, again, I think I think you know, uh, this is typical Apple thinking about it really, really hard, working out what they can possibly do. Apple supports both VTT and SRT, but you can well imagine that it would be much easier for them if they were just supporting the VTT uh transcripts. So um uh just making life easier and simpler um uh is I think uh a good plan. So that's what the plan is currently. I'm asking a ton of people who are already consuming the transcript tag, would this be a problem to you? Um so far, um I've had lots of people saying, no, this would be absolutely fine. Uh, this would completely simplify our life. We don't have to produce lots of different versions. Um, and I've had one person who has said we need a conversation with our PR person. Um, and it's that one person who uh needs a conversation with the PR person um that I'm still waiting to find out what it is that they actually want.

Sam Sethi 15:02

So Oh yes, because I'm sure the PR person is very clear on whether a VTT or XRT is the way forward.

James Cridland 15:08

I know, exactly. But uh it turns out that if you're a journalist, you are tainted with that uh for for everything. Oh including including that. So uh I you know I I completely understand, I I completely understand why they're doing it. I don't want them to pull my arms and legs off, but um uh also I I just need to be, you know, man, really? This isn't really what you want me to do. But okay, yeah.

Sam Sethi 15:32

Okay, moving back to our sponsors, Buzz Sprout, they've also added a new feature called the Super Power Editor. I don't think that's actually what the feature is, I think that's what Jordan called it. Uh but what's very cool is uh if you do, and this is interesting actually, James, because you talked about TXT files being removed. But if you want to with BuzzSprout, we do, it automatically creates AI generated chapter markers. Um you can then go and edit and change those in a visual editor. But if you're one of the power users and you want to just do a TXT-based, then Jordan was talking about it on BuzzCast about taking uh she uses Adobe podcast and she cuts and pasted chapter markers out of that, and now she can put it into this new Express chapter editor, which is a text box, and it will automatically create the chapters for you.

James Cridland 16:26

Yeah, well, that that sounds excellent. Or if you're using Hindenburg Pro as as I use to edit this particular podcast, then you put the chapter points in there as you as you're editing, uh, and that's and that's even easier. And the good thing is you just upload the MP3 to BuzzBrout, and BuzzBrout knows that there are chapters already in there. Um but yeah, I mean more ways of of editing chapters are really helpful. And again, this is something that Apple does. If you don't have any chapters, it will make up its own. But if you do have chapters, then that's cool. Um and you can uh and you can use those instead. Uh exactly the right way, I think, for any podcast app to be working there.

Sam Sethi 17:06

The last bit I uh I really found uh neat with what um Buzzsprout done. You can now in the transcript uh see the chapters down the side, uh like an index, but they've also put the chapter titles above the transcript or they've embedded it within the transcript. So you're reading down the transcript and it'll say, right, this is where we're talking about Buzzsprout. And so you'll have the title and then below that the transcript. So I think it's really cool that you've merged them. I think you and I talked about this I don't know, three years ago, right?

James Cridland 17:42

Well, they they've they've merged them in the Apple Podcasts app ever since transcripts launched. Um, so chapter titles have have always been in the transcripts, and I think that that obviously makes sense. And so to be able to see them next to one another in the Buzzsprout editor as well uh is really cool. I have to say, there are a number of things that I'm uh, you know, I'm sorry to uh bang on about our sponsor, Buzzsprout, but there are c there are a number of things that they have done which I have been very impressed at, and I don't know whether you're aware, but all of the AI stuff that was producing titles and producing um the transcripts and and everything else, they were all being done by a third party a while ago. And that and that third party disappeared. And I thought to myself, oh no, well Buzzsprout uses those under the hood, and so Buzzsprout will be screwed then, won't they? But then I went to Buzzsprout that week and everything was still working absolutely fine. And it turns out that they had quietly brought all of that stuff in-house um uh a few months previous, because I did notice everything had changed UI a little bit. So they brought all of that stuff quietly in-house, and no one really spotted that. No one really spotted, oh, okay, they're doing it themselves now, rather than using a third party to produce all of this uh stuff. And it was still the same high quality, uh, it still worked as you expected it to. And I just thought that's a very impressive thing to, you know, that that's like refueling a plane while you're still flying it. Um I thought that that was a particularly smart thing, so um, so hurrah for them. And they've launched another thing which we'll get on to a little bit later on in the show, too.

Interview: Tyler Denk, Beehiiv

Sam Sethi 19:25

Now, moving on, James. Um Beehive. I don't know if anyone's heard of Beehive. They may be if they use newsletters, but um they have made a push into podcasting. What are they doing?

James Cridland 19:38

They have. Um they um did something earlier on in the uh year uh where they were launching a way of you plugging your RSS feed into your newsletter, and then your you know your your your podcast would sort of magically appear on your on your Beehive website, which they also run. But now, um as of uh today, they have launched a brand new thing. It's proper podcast hosting. And given the last conversation that we were having, it includes transcripts for free, uh, which is very cool. I thought that this was um really interesting, and I thought it was worthwhile having a quick chat to the CEO, Tyler Denk.

Speaker 4 20:21

My name is Tyler Denk, and I am the co-founder and CEO of Beehive. I also run the product team here, more so in the day-to-day.

James Cridland 20:31

And so for anybody that doesn't know, what is Beehive, first of all?

Speaker 4 20:34

You're asking at an interesting time because we are evolving as a platform. Uh, I think maybe a few years ago, even maybe a few quarters ago, I'd say we're a newsletter platform. But we are shifting to this platform for anyone that has an audience to be able to create content, grow their audience, and monetize it. It's a working tagline, we're still kind of workshopping that. But yeah.

James Cridland 20:55

Yeah, it's a it's it's a thing. And and I think um, you know, lots and lots of changes uh happening in owned media, uh media owned by the creators that create it. You've just launched uh this week a brand new podcast hosting service. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Speaker 4 21:13

Yeah, and so the thinking behind that is a lot of our existing customers already actually have a podcast hosted on another third-party platform. And what both creators and publishers want less of is managing five different platforms and five different tools with five different logins, five different payment subscriptions. And the ability to consolidate that tech stack into a single platform is great, one for cost, it's great for ease and efficiency. Um, but we also think as we enter this like new era of Beehive, that it allows the ability for us to extract insights about who your audience actually is, which is better for the publisher. I think a lot of our publishers don't fully understand, they they write about sports and they assume that they have. Have 50,000 people that like sports, but they don't know gender, they don't know household income, they don't know what types of sports. Is it NBA? Is it NFL? Is it rugby? So I think there's like a whole audience insights layer that we can actually do better than anyone now that we are bringing newsletter and website and podcast all under one roof. And so that's kind of like the working thesis behind it. And yeah, podcasts are something that we're super excited about because it is a pretty one-to-one overlap with our core audience. A lot of them do have podcasts. And we think that it's powerful to be able to bundle a subscription with your podcast and newsletter. It provides a better, coherent experience to your audience, and that's what we're really looking to deliver.

James Cridland 22:42

So you've got uh analytics which are built to the IAB standard. So um podcasters who are somewhere else will notice that um they get much the same uh analytics from you as well. But talk to us about monetization because um obviously Beehive has a lot of that built into it already. Um I'm guessing that this will allow um something like um private podcasts. Would that be would that be right? Um and the with that you can pay to access? How does that work?

Speaker 4 23:14

I guess to take a step back of where we are today with monetization, primarily on the newsletter front, there are three ways to monetize your newsletter. We have an ad network. So we have advertisers like Nike, Netflix, HubSpot, et cetera, Roku, whatever. Um you don't have to have a direct relationship with any of those brands. We have this network. If you're going to send your newsletter later this afternoon, you can see that HubSpot's willing to pay a $3 CPM or $5 CPM. You can add that ad to your newsletter, you get paid out a few weeks later. So we have this globally scaled ad network for newsletters. We also have a paid subscription product, which means that you can charge $10 or $20 per month for private content that is like exclusive content just for paying readers, not dissimilar to like a New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal type of subscription. And then we have like a co-registration network called Boost, which is kind of like recommending other publishers in the network. And in return, you get paid for sending them new readers. So that's like the three levels of monetization that we have today on the platform. With the launch of podcasts, we are starting off with subscriptions. And so, as you alluded to, a private podcast feed that is only available uniquely to paying subscribers unlocks basically the ability to group your paid newsletter with your paid podcast. And so now you have more of like a bundle approach to the subscription that your audience is paying. That's available today. The evolution of that and coming soon will be more of like a freemium version of podcast, where maybe it's not all or nothing, but most of your, you know, call it two-thirds of your episodes are free, and you have an extra episode. You basically choose on an episode per episode basis, which is behind the paywall. Um, so that will be coming later this quarter. And then later this year, what we think is one of the big unlocks is the ad network. And so the ad network that we have today is only for newsletters. There will be a world later this year where the ad network expands to both website and to podcast, and we'd have auto-inserted ads. And of course, with AI, there's a lot of really cool things you could do where perhaps the host uses 11 Labs or some voice recording service to basically have an ad host read in their own voice that they actually never recorded. So I think there's a lot in the innovation and AI space that we could do to kind of push that. But yeah, the goal is monetization for podcasts.

James Cridland 25:44

And how much are you charging for all of this? Uh, I'm imagining that that this isn't going to be free, is it?

Speaker 4 25:50

Depends. So we are grouping podcasts in with our existing subscription plans already on the platform. And so the way that that looks is if you're on our free plan, you get one episode per month. To do more than up to do up to four episodes per month, it's like the scale plan, which is like our lowest our lowest cost plan. And then unlimited episodes is on what we call the max plan, uh, which the way that we charge is based on list size. So for very small content creators just getting started, even that like top max plan might start at $79 a month for unlimited podcast episodes. Um, but if you are a very large content creator with you know millions of contacts, then that could be a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month.

James Cridland 26:36

Yeah, but it's it's it's all built into the current plan.

Speaker 4 26:40

There's no additional costs just to do podcasts uh in terms of no no add-ons, no new exclusive podcast plan that's five times the cost of our other plans. They are bundled into our existing. Yeah, exactly.

James Cridland 26:53

And and you've not just sort of launched this as a podcast hosting platform and gone, there you go, there it is. Um, because you you've also added a few dozen shows um uh already which are on your platform. There are um some quite clever uh titles, such as the Create a Spotlight podcast, for example, the AI Report, uh not right now, and so on. Why did these people want to jump in and move their podcast to be hosted with you?

Speaker 4 27:22

Yeah. Obviously, we don't want to just build in the dark, launch this new feature, and hope that people sign up. We obviously make the product better by listening and getting feedback from people who are intimately familiar with launching a podcast and telling us what they want to see. Um I'm pulling up this message now, actually, which is it's really the thesis of kind of like the direction we're moving in. One of these incoming podcasts that is now being hosted and distributed on Beehive said they migrated their old email platform, which was much more expensive, over to Beehive and canceled that subscription. They migrated their podcast over from Red Circle and cancel that subscription. They used to have a Linkin bio on another platform, they canceled that, and now they have their Linkin bio on Beehive, and then also their website subscription, which was another third-party platform. And so they were paying for another tool that they had no real brand affinity for that was charging them maybe a couple hundred dollars a month to host and distribute their podcast, but they were already using our tools for their website and for their newsletter. And again, going back to the initial thesis that we started with, just the ease of use and um consolidation of having all of your audience insights and content in a single platform that you trust, and that moves as quickly as we move to innovate on the product and provide the best user experience that we can, uh, seems to resonate with all of these people who were not reluctant whatsoever to move their podcast over. And we think that the launch will be pretty successful because of those insights as well.

James Cridland 28:52

And it's not a bare bones thing as well. You you support a number of different um of different audio uh formats. You do automatic audio normalization, um, which is something that not every podcast host does. Um you also do transcripts as well, which is uh interesting. And you give every single podcast uh a website because of course it's part of a uh of a wider thing uh as well. Um the transcripts you do, will those transcripts get into places like Apple Podcasts as well? Or or is that something that you're working on?

Speaker 4 29:26

No, we're actually one of the few providers that actually has that direct integration with Apple where they do support the transcripts that we're passing. So anyone listening on Apple Podcasts can see the full transcript on the Apple Podcast listener. Um But yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head in the sense that we are not taking the approach of, I think some companies go for consolidation and they launch a bunch of features that are like a four out of ten. And they think that the the value of consolidation is better than offering actually unique and comprehensive features in each one of those individual offerings. We think we're a nine or a ten out of ten on newsletter. I think we're like a seven or eight out of ten on website, and we want to be a nine out of ten on the podcast front as well. And so as you alluded to, yes, we do the audio normalization. We every audio file that's uploaded, we do a full transcript. The transcript feeds into Apple Podcasts as well. And then I think the problem that we've seen a lot of content creators and publishers run into is when you publish a podcast across all of these different platforms, you don't know if your audience actually prefers Spotify or Apple or YouTube. And so you end up choosing one of them, which turns off the other 50% that doesn't use Apple Podcasts or Spotify. But by creating a website page that's SEO optimized for every single episode, as soon as you publish your podcast, we create a website page that is hosted on your website. It's SEO optimized, it has the transcripts, but it also serves as like the one destination you can send your audience, and they can choose whether they want to listen to Spotify or YouTube or Apple. And so I think it's a better audience experience and it's more consistent. And obviously, there's a lot of benefits for SEO and AEO and AI and everything else to be able to have those dedicated web pages.

James Cridland 31:14

And you've got also, you know, obviously the benefit that um uh people on your platform know who their subscribers are and know who is um paying to get additional shows on the podcast, which is uh something that is uh impossible to do with Apple, for example. So actually, um uh it's certainly a way of getting much closer to your audience there uh as well. Um, one of the things that um Sam, my co-host, would be chiming in and uh saying if he was awake at this time, but but he's not, as we record, um, is that um he sees a future where um the future is very much driven by um people paying to listen to individual shows and not using advertising? Um and I think it's interesting that you have chosen to do both, um both paid for um premium shows, but also adding advertising in there as well. How do you see advertising and paid subscriptions sort of fitting together if we look at in the medium term in a couple of years' time?

Speaker 4 33:10

Whereas if you think that your audience is less likely to convert on subscription, but very interested in ads, and we can do very high-targeted quality ads that serves your audience well, we want to provide the tools and infrastructure to do that as well. So I don't know if I fully believe the thesis that there's going to be one emergent better way of monetization for podcasts over the long term. I actually think we're gonna see more experimentation and monetization across the board for all of them. Um and I think a lot of podcasts may even just choose that their real monetization strategy is engaging an audience to drive down funnel conversion to a community or to an IRL event. And so I think it varies, and I think we don't want to be the ones, the arbiters of what is correct. We just want to be flexible and allow our users to be able to monetize and experiment however they like.

James Cridland 34:03

Tony, it's been great to uh talk with you. Where do people go if they want to find out more about Beehive?

Speaker 4 34:09

Well, you if first you have to spell the company right. So B-E-E-H-I-I-V dot com uh is where you would find us. And we are pretty easy to find on social. So on X and LinkedIn. Um, if you follow me, you'll see every update that we launch as well. So my name Tyler Denk across socials.

James Cridland 34:27

Tyler, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Speaker 4 34:29

Cool, appreciate you having me.

James Cridland 34:31

Tyler Denk from uh Beehive B double e H I I V. Uh it's a podcast and um newsletter hosting platform. Um, I have to say, when I was looking at um, do I want to keep on running my own newsletter software or do I want somebody else to do that for me? Beehive was the number one choice that I was going to go with. Um so I thought that that was uh interesting. And I think that uh Ariane Lissenblatt uses it for earbuds and all of the other 250 different podcasts that she runs. Um and I believe that uh Tink Media and other people use that uh as well. So it's um it's a nice tool if you want to uh take a peek. Also, Podcast Movement uses it. Uh, and I believe Sounds Profitable also use it. So it's a it's a good uh tool. What did you think of um what uh Tyler was uh saying there?

Sam Sethi 35:22

I mean I've had uh a lot of positives. I think we have talked on this show about uh you know the uh arrow of direction with Substack, I think Supercaster we interviewed a few weeks back as well. Um we've talked about podcast portals as a term. Uh Adam Curry talked about it as the Rachel Maddow problem many uh months ago, which was Rachel Maddow complaining that why can't you get a branded portal basically and get all of our content in one place? Um and I think that's what you've seen the industry do. And I think Beehive have woken up and said, hmm, I think this is the next thing we need to add to add newsletters, um which has been their bread and butter or their honey. I don't know which term I should be using.

James Cridland 36:07

Um nice, nice honey, yeah. Um I think they're nectar.

Sam Sethi 36:11

They're nectar. Um I think the thing that Tyler said, which is what I 100% agree with, is consolidation. The whole is better than the sum of the parts. So they're looking at yes, add podcasting, add newsletters, add other functions, but I'm pretty sure they'll get into video, I'm pretty sure they'll get into live. Um that's exactly where Substack have gone. Um we know Patreons got into hosting. So I think um, you know, I think hosting is becoming a commodity within a series of services that are provided by a platform, and I wouldn't call that platform a host, I would call it a platform.

James Cridland 36:51

And I think No, it it it yeah, it definitely is. And I think the interesting thing with Beehive is that they have understood that the way of earning money for creators isn't all in one bucket, it's not all in the membership bucket. Uh, it's not all as well in the advertising bucket. There's a bit of both, and there's, you know, boosts or you know, tips or whatever it is that you want to call them. Adam is saying boosts. Um, but um, you know, there's that sort of side in it as well. And I thought that that was an interesting switch. So Substack is not that, but Beehive is most certainly seeing, okay, there's some ad money, we'll have some of that. There's some um there's some money in terms of uh the memberships will have some of that as well. And actually that's quite a clever way of thinking about it.

Sam Sethi 37:43

Yeah, and I think uh it was interesting they talked about premium content, something that they want to do with podcasting, where they will have a fixed fee charge. Um I what I found most interesting though is the question they were talking about they have an ad network, and I think you know, given the newsletter, they've got a strong ad network and they want to bring that into podcasting as well. That's team using DAI. They've got a lot of tech that they've got to build out because you know, as I said, they've got no live, no video. Um they've got no speaker labels either on transcripts. That was one of the things I noted very quickly. Um so they've got to upgrade that as well, I think. Um their model is based on per user charging. And this is where I think um I I think fast forward six months, maybe a year, I think there'll be five or six platforms that offer multiple services under one platform.

James Cridland 38:35

They do have a very impressive list of advertisers, but then you know, if I was to do the same job for the Pod News newsletter, then I could uh I could work out a pretty good list of uh of advertisers as well. Apple spons uh Apple advertised once. So uh, you know, we'll put them in. Spotify advertised a few times, we'll put them in, so on and so forth. Um but uh yeah, so they've got Notion and PayPal and Quint, um, Shutterstock, Superhuman, um the Black Tux, whatever that is. Um so uh yeah, so they're doing a fair amount of that sort of thing as well. On the same line, uh Transistor has announced an integration with Ghost. Ghost is an open source CMS, um, and you can use Ghost's paid membership tools to give access to a transistor private podcast, which is pretty cool. So um much the same as on Beehive, if you want to do a private podcast, you can absolutely do that. And as soon as somebody stops paying, they stop being able to access the show that you are um delivering uh to them. Um very uh clever of uh Justin to end up um doing uh that. Uh and you can learn more about transistors integration with Ghost in the Pod News Daily Newsletter.

Sam Sethi 39:45

James, I'm gonna throw in a bit of a wrench now, I'm sorry to say. Uh yeah. What I think podcasting 2.0 hosts are missing, and I've said this consistently for a while now, is they are allowing private feeds within their platforms, but they're not getting a cut of the subscription revenue. So Justin has enabled it, but I would love to know whether he then gets a cut of the subscription revenue that Ghost generates. And I think hosts need to get into the game of offering both freemium and premium. I don't think allowing private feeds and enabling them is the right way forward because you're not making a revenue on that. You're you've done the engineering, you've done all the work. Yes, people can then use it. But does the ghost content appear in the RSS feed that transistor distributes? I don't know. No. No. So what's the point then and and if he's not making money on the ghost subscriptions because ghosts make all that money, then why bother?

Spotify news

James Cridland 40:48

Um I mean that's a question for Justin, of course. But um, I mean you you can well see that if somebody is thinking about a monetization uh option, then um, and they're already using ghost as many large companies are, um, then you can then you can certainly see that an integration might be helpful to them. I suspect that what's actually happened here is one of uh transistor's big uh clients is using Ghost. And they've said, is there a way that we can link our paid uh show with um with our ghost platform? And Justin has said, oh yeah, that that that sounds like uh sense, but has built it in such a way that it works for anybody on Ghost. I think that's probably what's happened. Okay. And um uh talking about uh BuzzBrout as we were earlier, of course, just a reminder that they do have a paid subscription. Um you can um offer subscriber-only uh content like premium and bonus episodes and early access to episodes and all of that. Um it integrates with Apple Podcast subscriptions, which is also very nice as well. Um, and uh, in case uh Mr. Sethy is interested, 15% flat fee on all transactions is how BuzzSprout works. Um if you're with BuzzSprout, then hurrah for you. You'll find it under the monetization tab and it's marked subscriptions. Now it's time for a jingle.

Human Announcer 42:13

We're sorry, but now it's time for more news about Spotify on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 42:21

Haven't used that one for a while.

Human Announcer 42:22

Oh good.

James Cridland 42:22

Oh good. Uh Sam. Why, why, why, why? Why? Why indeed? Why um why should this survive the edit?

Sam Sethi 42:35

Well, okay. Thanks. Thanks, put me under pressure. Here we go. Start for 10. Um Spotify come out with a couple of new advertising formats that they're introducing now. In the main, I don't normally get excited by these. Uh but the first one is, you know, um, they're talking in the press release about time spent in the app is rising by 26%, click-through rates on audio and video, and ads are up by 14%. All good stats. But the first ad that they're putting in is the ability to have brands in playlists. So they have New Music Friday, they have other playlists, and now you can have a visual placement in that playlist so you can, I suppose, sponsor or brand enable your major playlist. So they're selling a bit of real estate, no issue on that. Second one though that did catch my eye. We've been talking about podcasting Twitter and potentially a new merchant tag coming in or a store tag, whatever it's going to be called finally. And one of the things that YouTube and Spotify have done well for creators is allow merch to be associated with their content. So if you're Bruno Mars and you've got a concert in London and you want to sell some t-shirts, well, the t-shirts appear below. And when you click on the link, it goes out to a third party. Well, they've added a new character. caro ad now which you can then put with the music playing so instead of the cover art of the album playing or the single it will now be the visual of product let's say if you wanted to enable that and it's a carousel not a not a static single image you can then sort of whip around and see five or six different products you can click on it expand it out while you're listening to the music or a podcast and you know purchase that so now you have just said while you're listening to a music or a podcast well I'm assuming because I I look at it as a music in the video uh in the image we've got in front of us but why wouldn't you be able to do it with a podcast?

James Cridland 44:41

Well why wouldn't you exactly um but carousel ads at the moment don't appear to be um well they don't appear to uh specifically mention podcasts which I thought is interesting here um it's a new feature rolling out soon in beta to eligible markets in Spotify ads manager I should say whenever Spotify say rolling out soon in beta then um this is this essentially means that Spotify will never actually launch this uh we're still waiting for Spotify to do transcripts properly for a start um let alone uh half of the other things that Spotify rolling out in beta um but um but yeah um I I think it's interesting I think it's probably telling that the Spotify team haven't PR'd this to me because I think that that probably tells you that um this may just be a music thing rather than a podcasting thing but um I can always go back and ask. But uh yeah it certainly looks um it certainly looks like an interesting additional revenue stream perhaps for how Spotify wants to uh work.

Sam Sethi 45:47

Last thing that Spotify announced Daniel got very excited um he's announced something called song DNA now uh they bought a company I'd never heard of called Who Sampled um they bought it last year and the idea is you can explore new ways to look at how the song was made um what the cover was what the influences were so it's a sort of digging deep this might be for you James with the Beatles I don't know or maybe you know everything but um I I don't know I really don't know but I think that's a sort of use of though targeting somebody who wants to get behind the music and find out more about the artist more about the influences of that artist and I only mention it I wonder whether they'll extend that into podcasting in any way. Can you see a way they might do that?

James Cridland 46:35

Well so Song DNA which we've had in Australia for a while actually so it's um so it's nice that uh the the rest of the of of the world is getting it um song DNA is quite nice in terms of it gives you more information about um some of the contributors to that particular um to that particular track um uh as well as um you know remixes and stuff like that um which is quite nice and covers uh so um uh at your prompting I am busy looking at the song DNA page for uh Drive My Car by the Beatles from the 1965 album Rubber Soul um and the contributors as you would guess are the Beatles John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison Ringo Star but also George Martin um because of course he's the producer of this particular uh uh track so you've got you you've got that already then you have um uh where this song has been sampled in and there are a bunch of different places where the song has been sampled um you've got covers which you can save as a a total playlist so if you want a playlist of people singing drive my car then you can you can absolutely do that and I would estimate there are probably about 70 on on Spotify. So there's all this kind of information and but it's exactly what I think Spotify should be doing. I tell you what Spotify is missing from that there must be a podcast about the rubber soul album from the Beatles. There must be right yeah um what they need is um some human curation in there to be able to link the the the the many podcasts that I'm sure exist about that particular album to this particular um um you know album entry uh into song song DNA I'm surprised that they haven't done that yet um but there's a bunch of stuff there's a bunch of really useful um useful information I believe it's only available for premium subscribers um but uh you know why not um but uh yeah it's um it's uh exactly what um I think uh Spotify should be doing and as you so rightly say they could well use this sort of thing this is obviously where um the people tag um could end up going in terms of the contributors um you know carousel in here um and you you could also see uh uh pod role being used here um you know as well so there are a bunch of a bunch of things that you can build in um possibly song DNA is not the right name for for something which is about podcasting but you know what I mean.

Sam Sethi 49:19

But I think you know for example you're on multiple podcasts as a guest. So let's say somebody goes oh I want to follow James Cridland right okay now I want to I know he does these three podcasts I've seen is pod roll. Brilliant okay now where's my guest something like that.

James Cridland 49:35

You can well see that that would be very useful. And that by the way is something that you can already do with uh Apple Podcasts um but they they are using human beings to generate all of that information um so that's um that's pretty hard but uh yeah or maybe they're using the transcript with AI now to detect no no no no no no no no no no as a man as a man that we both know called Dave Jones do you really think that they will be using transcripts to to find to find anybody called Dave Jones and putting putting them all together? I don't think that's gonna work.

Interview: Tom Leone, Brkthru

Sam Sethi 50:11

Okay all right that's the end of the Spotify you'll be glad to know great right move on you'll never get their PR people to talk to you again. Now moving on so James talking about advertising there's a lot of talk at the moment about a return on investment for advertisers.

James Cridland 50:29

Tell me more James Yeah um so um the there's a bunch of uh of uh tools obviously um the Pod News daily newsletter is being sponsored by Podscribe all this month uh and they do a very good job in terms of um podcast attribution um so helping uh advertisers understand what's working for them and what isn't um we could now have a 15 minute argument about that Sam but we're not going to um but there's also a bunch of um AI powered uh tools as well which are um doing this job uh too um so instead of using promo codes vanity urls there's other things that other companies are doing as well uh one of those companies is a company called Breakthrough it's it's very um it's very uh Web 2.0 in that it's breakthrough without any vowels at all other than a U at the end.

Speaker 3 51:18

Um but I ended up speaking with Tom Leone who is the vice president of media services at Breakthrough to find out more and I asked him what breakthrough was Breakthrough at its core we are a services company we just happen to specialize in paid media that's interesting a lot of times people mistake us as an agency but we actually are not an agency agencies in fact are our clients so we work really closely with a lot of agency partners to help power their uh media buys on behalf of their clients we're platform agnostic so we work across about 23 different buying platforms across all digital mediums uh and you know we really hang our hat on service to those clients and help meeting uh the client KPIs and and driving results through exceptional service.

James Cridland 52:11

Okay.

Speaker 3 52:12

Well I mean and talking about driving results you've just um announced uh a new uh tool which um helps better measure uh advertising um before we get into that tool firstly what's wrong with things like promo codes and vanity URLs that's what most people use right it it depends like I wouldn't necessarily say anything's wrong uh with them I think it's just kind of different use cases for different circumstances so I do think that there are times when a promo code for instance has its benefits but it's going to be largely dependent on what the end goal is what the vertical is you know if it's for e-commerce or or takeout um you know getting a pizza like that's one thing where promo code you know could work in your advantage and help you measure something more personal like a medical screening or something like that. In a case like that, you know, I wouldn't necessarily recommend a promo code uh because you just have to be very mindful of your audience and what the outcomes are but then also how you intend to measure.

James Cridland 53:16

If your sole source of measurement is going to be how many people are uh utilizing the promo code um that could be a bit short-sighted a bit narrow not really give you the full frame of reference because quite a lot of people just forget to type the promo code in um you know which which is certainly a thing and I think you know if you're if you're given a promo code but you actually just just Google the name of the company well that just means no attribution to the podcast or to whatever the media was so I suppose you've you've also got that side of it as well.

Speaker 3 53:48

Yeah absolutely I mean it it's a full journey right I and I think podcasting is interesting because it's an audio medium and audio has always been kind of upper funnel brand recognition, not as much direct response but now with the advent of podcasting and being able to watch it on various devices and video forms and getting so niche in your targeting etc it's kind of led to some more attribution focus despite it typically and historically being more of an upper funnel tactic.

James Cridland 54:19

So what's your solution to better measure advertising? How does that work?

Speaker 3 54:24

So we really kind of holistically at the campaign it's very rare one of our customers is running just a podcasting campaign with us it's part of the entire story kind of going back to what we were just discussing we really try to attack it from a full funnel approach and utilizing podcasting to help drive results down the funnel. Now we also run search engine marketing campaigns and programmatic campaigns, native campaigns, etc so we're able to see the results of those campaigns that happen with lower funnel attribution. So we also like to look more holistically at you're looking to drive results, you're looking to drive more people to your website more engagement across your socials, more unique visitors uh getting to your homepage, things like that, because that's essentially your virtual storefront. So we look at the baseline of where we started and as the campaign's running if it's going up and to the right and those measurements that I just mentioned it's typically a good attribution that we we're driving positive results.

James Cridland 55:30

So you're looking at the numbers are you using you know web bugs and IP addresses and stuff like that or is there some AI in the mix or how you actually working out whether a campaign is a success or not?

Speaker 3 55:45

Yeah all of the above. So typically we have uh we work within a Google Tag manager where we're deploying a container across a client's website, checking the various page visits and areas of the page where individuals are visiting post um you know ad listening, ad viewing via cross device graphs, etc and it we do use AI to some extent, but mostly to help us slice and dice the information. I mean there are a ton of different log file reports that we receive and the advent of AI has helped us kind of pull quicker insights and sparse a lot more information together than and and faster than we ever have been able to do before.

James Cridland 56:28

Yeah sure. Does Google Tag Manager work with um podcasts then?

Speaker 3 56:34

Yeah well when we're running if we're driving traffic to say a home page for instance, right? Like we're what we want to do is track the conversions and if it's getting um tied to a device which typically podcasts are being listened to on an iPhone or an Android or even now with podcasts happening on TV there's cross device graphs happening with your CTV device in your home. Yeah yeah so it we could map that all together as well.

James Cridland 57:02

Yeah yeah um your your release talks about delayed conversions and I always find delayed conversions really interesting. There was some research that I saw recently talking about radio advertising and saying that radio advertising can work up to 48 hours after the spots have gone out uh as people remember what they were uh hearing while they were while they were driving and then and then you know once they're at home they can actually have a look at stuff. How how does how does that work?

Speaker 3 57:30

Is it the last the last um uh media that um that uh gets the ad do they get the credit or how does d delayed conversions work uh in terms of this yeah typically we want to look at the the whole picture right so we might it you're gonna look at last 48 hours from the last touch but you could also go back and say okay well we touched this user five days ago three days ago one day ago and it it's all part of that journey right like this is what's why we try to zoom out and look at the overall um traffic getting driven to a website for instance because someone might see a a truck with a brand on the side of the road and then see a billboard and then pass the storefront and then hear the radio ad and then see it on social and then convert, right? So who gets the credit there? So we want to take that whole journey into account when judging the success of a campaign. Yeah so every everybody gets a bit of the uh a bit of the credit uh in terms of that correct so what what's the secret source that breakthrough is is offering here um because there are quite a lot of people who are doing attribution what makes you guys different yeah well we we pride ourselves on being platform agnostic so like I mentioned at the outset we're running across 23 different platforms so it allows us to find the audience a lot more efficiently than say some of our competitors may be able to because just for instance taking podcasts out of the equation um for a second like if if someone wants to run on Amazon if you're not working with the Amazon DSP you're not gonna be able to run on Amazon for the most part right so the fact that we're running across such a wide variety of platforms allows us to play within various walled gardens as well as outside of them. And and that takes a lot of um expertise right like our we have a I have a team of 40 plus media traders that are working on our behalf and they need to be um fluent and and have a lot of expertise across all those various platforms in order to execute the campaigns on behalf of our clients.

James Cridland 59:58

Yeah yeah you you your um your release talks about um the uh the the work that you've been doing in terms of um host red ads which are of course are a big part of podcasting um do does your model have any uh any advice for us in terms of how to do a good host read ad uh are the are there things that you've uh that your tools have uh spotted um that uh would be good if we were all doing yeah I I think you want to be selective there you want to work with hosts that have a good following and that people trust right and you also want to mix in a dynamic ad insertion as well I don't think you want to rely entirely on host red because it you want to diversify right diversify and track but I do find host red being um particularly when your message is up front you want to avoid the skip button right you don't want people reaching for that 30 second fast forward so you really want to capture their attention in that first few seconds but also you're seeing that the host red is more native to the format and it's not dynamically getting inserted it's typically resonating with the audience more and increasing recall. Yeah and I guess the there is also you know if if you're McDonald's for example and you're using your little your little audio jingle in your in your ad uh obviously you can't really use an audio jingle in a host red ad. So there are benefits in doing both I guess aren't there?

Speaker 3 1:01:35

Yes yeah that's a great point. So where do we go to find out more about um about what you offer uh definitely check us out on all of our various socials on our LinkedIn page also can visit breakthrough.com as a full um uh full readout of all of our offerings how we work again we're very customer service focused so a lot of it is centered around that we're not as product of a driven organization we more tend to try to bring some solutions so if there's something that you're looking to do give us a call chances are we're able to do it.

Podnews Report Card

Round the world

James Cridland 1:02:14

And um as is always the way with um with uh internet companies uh breakthrough is spelt with uh no vowels apart from the you because because everybody needs you uh so br k i u um that's really really interesting thank you so much for uh spending time with us the pod news weekly review with buzz with buzz brought start podcasting keep podcasting now moving on uh it's coming back James the pod news report card it's back it's gonna be at the London podcast show so what's it all about this year yes so we've been running the pod news report card now for five years this is the fifth year of um this it's an annual piece of uh research into what podcast creators think of the platforms uh that we all use things like uh Apple and Spotify and Amazon Music and various other things um now um the there's a couple of uh interesting things with this um I get invited by pretty well all of the platforms now to share the results of the Pod News report card they actually take it quite seriously which is uh interesting I'm already booked in um uh for both Apple and for Amazon um and um what we have also seen over the last couple of years is that things that people have been pointing out in the Pod News report card have been fixed by the platforms. So Spotify um fixed control of comments. People were very upset that they didn't have any control of people going on to their um podcast and leaving a miserable comment or a libelous comment and Spotify unlike Apple have now given us that choice so that's good from Spotify's point of view and similarly Apple Podcasts an awful lot of feedback was how difficult it was to get your podcast into Apple Podcasts initially and so they made that an awful lot easier and clearly the Pod News report card had something to do with it. It probably wasn't the pod news report card but clearly it had something to do with it. So anyway if uh you're listening to this uh hooray um uh you should be also going to podnews.net slash report card and uh fill out the questionnaire there. It'll take you about 10 minutes and uh that would be very uh excellent of you if you wouldn't mind doing so already 50 people have already done that um so we're already off to a flying start but I would like more please uh so podnews.net slash report card and if you want to find out what everybody says um then come on time for the podcast show in London um that is where I will be unveiling um the results of the pod news report card in the first session of the day 915 uh get there and get it the get there early um and uh you'll be the first to find out what everybody is saying.

Sam Sethi 1:05:07

This was around the world, James uh Japan, what's going on in Japan?

James Cridland 1:05:12

Yes uh more people are listening to podcasts in Japan than ever before this is a news survey um the uh one of many that Otonal and the Asahi Shimbun Company have uh produced. Um Japan uh podcasting is still relatively small it is definitely not an audio country. There are a few of these countries in the world uh Korea is one of them Japan is another one of those um but uh of the people that are consuming podcasts more than three quarters of them are watching video podcasts at least once a month the number one platform for podcasts overall is YouTube it says and among younger listeners podcast usage is bigger which I thought was interesting bigger than Amazon Prime Video or Netflix or TikTok. So I thought that that was um that that was interesting. More details on that in the podcast Pod news uh newsletter staying in Japan. Um, there is a podcast hosting company called Listen, which is publishing HLS video hooray to open podcast apps. Um, the feature is now available to all users, including those on the free plan. Gosh, that's uh that's brave. Um, and uh those are delivered to anything that understands the alternate enclosure tag um in terms of uh video, which is uh very clever. Um, moving to the UK, um Bower Media Audio is doing some fun stuff with um uh Android Automotive and making sure that its podcast and radio app called RAIO is available in some of those uh cars. And in Brazil, um TikTok is seeking approval from the Brazilian Central Bank to operate as a lending and payment uh financial company. Brilliant. Uh that's exciting. Uh they've applied for two licenses. Um, one would allow it to operate as an electronic money issuer, offering prepaid accounts for users to hold balances, receive funds, and make payments within its app. There's exciting, Sam.

Sam Sethi 1:07:10

Well, you don't think it's exciting, James, but No, I do.

James Cridland 1:07:13

I I I think it is exciting for that audience in that country. I think absolutely no, this is this is very good.

Sam Sethi 1:07:21

I think we have struggled to get across the concept of wallets and micropayments in podcasting. We've been banging the drum for three years, pushing the rock up the hill, pick your analogy, and it's been a hard sell. And I think uh we well, I I got a little bit more excited, although I know it was X, but you know, Elon Musk did hint that he was about to bring out wallets. Um I remember Twitter was talking about micropayments before its sale, and I thought it would require a large social media company or another platform to bring micropayments in and to make the learning of wallets and how you can use micropayments before it would roll over into podcasting as a uh a mechanism for you know people to reward podcasters. Um if TikTok is the platform that then gets this um licensing and then allows payments on their platform, and people can then start to reward content creators with micropayments and then on the back of that, you know, buy product and all the other things they do. Great, it needs to be somebody. It's not gonna be TrueFans, it's not gonna be Fountain, it's not gonna be Podverse. We are big enough to move the needle.

James Cridland 1:08:40

But I mean, yeah, the one the one thing I would say is that wallet apps are everywhere in Asia, everywhere. Wallet apps are um quite uh available in many of the Nordic countries now. Um, unfortunately, I think this is something. I mean, great that they're doing this in Brazil, but I think that this is something that it really needs um the insular people in the US to finally understand how micropayments might work um for this to move uh forward. And I'm afraid whatever TikTok wants to do in Brazil, well, great, but you know, it's it's completely irrelevant to the myopic view that comes out of the US. So um, you know, once we get um a um a way of doing this in the in the US, I think it'll it'll make uh much more sense. We can do micropayments here in this country, uh in Australia, using an email address as our payment address. Um we can do that today. It's all programmable, it's a thing called pay ID, um, and there are no costs to it. But um, you know, again, nobody in the US has seen it and gone, oh, that's really interesting. We should be doing something uh s similar. So unfortunately, it's a uh a rather typical case of not invented here. Um so I wonder who is going to be first. Maybe it is going to be Elmo with the X app. Um, but uh who knows?

Sam Sethi 1:10:04

I I find a couple of things that just made me laugh when I was last over in the US. Um contactless payment, and then I still had to sign a receipt, which didn't Oh, I know that blew my head. And then the other one was Well, you know why?

James Cridland 1:10:18

No. So that you can add a tip on the bottom. Oh, right. Okay, got it. You can sign it Mickey Mouse. Yeah. No one no one will care. It's just purely so that you can add a tip on the bottom.

Sam Sethi 1:10:29

Got it, got it. And then the other one is that you they come to the table and they take your credit card away, they don't bring a machine to your table, which you know, most of the world stopped doing that.

James Cridland 1:10:38

Um I wish they'd stopped doing that.

Sam Sethi 1:10:41

I think we um you talked about um MasterCard and Visa getting into stablecoin, and again, not to go and repeat that whole conversation, but I do think that's gonna be the way that America brings forward micropayments, and then that will be what we see roll out across the world.

Human Announcer 1:10:58

People news on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:11:03

Well, let's look at people and jobs. Congratulations to Owen Grover, who has been appointed uh general manager at Nomono, Nomano, Nomino, do, do, do, do, do. Uh at Nomono. At Nomano. Anyway, uh, it's that company which has that sort of um uh amazing um uh little mobile microphones and uh and the big box and everything else. It's very cool. Uh Owen joins from TrueFire Studios from Pocketcasts and iHeartMedia. And Chris Bourne, I'm going to say, is how you pronounce his name. Anyway, he is the new CEO of Audio UK and he has just started. So congratulations, Chris, for that. And he will be on this show to tell us about his plans for Audio UK in the next couple of weeks. Also coming in the next couple of weeks, Sounds Profitables, Brian Barletta, um, who uh is uh who basically lost his voice at Podcast Movement Evolutions and it still hasn't come back. And he'll be um spilling the tea about uh podcast movement in New York and the Sounds Profitable event in New York. Um he's telling us how much the tickets cost. Good news if you want to go to podcast movement, because the tickets are quite nicely affordable, which is good. Um, and um it's a different conversation when it comes to the Sounds Profitable event. Uh, but more on that when you hear Brian Barletta in this very show next week.

Sam Sethi 1:12:26

Will it be on at the same time as the World Cup, you know, two for one?

James Cridland 1:12:30

Uh it's in early September, so I think the answer is no. No, no, no, no. Oh well. No, I'm afraid none of that. Awards and events. Uh just very quickly, um, we got a full list, an exclusive list of the podcast nominees for the 30th annual Webby Awards before anybody else. Um, and it's interesting that they've got dedicated categories for video podcasts as well now. iHeartMedia in the lead with 16 nominees, Audible with 10, Sirius XM and Wondery having six nominees each. My suspicion is that that will be the last time that you see Wondery having six nominees, because of course Wondery um is kind of disappeared uh now. Um, but in any case, the winners' ceremony will be on May the 11th, but I think we get the winners a little bit earlier uh than that. Uh, there's also a short list out from the Golden Lobes, which is a comedy podcast uh awards in the UK, the New York Festival's Radio Awards as well, uh, and also looking forward to the New Zealand Podcast Summit. That's not an award, um, uh uh as well. And moving on to uh events, the New Zealand Podcast Summit um is in May the 9th in Auckland in New Zealand. I spoke there a couple of years ago. Um, they're doing some um pretty fun things. If you are in in Outer Roa and you would like to go, um, then you should. Um uh it's uh very cheap to go uh and you get to um uh go to the pub afterwards. What what more could um could you want? Uh the New Zealand Podcasting Summit 2026 is where to go uh for that. And there's uh plenty of headliners uh now announced for Crosswires, uh, which is taking place in Sheffield in July, the 2nd to the 5th of July. I now have been invited. I need to work out whether or not I can actually be in Europe at that time. But um at least you got an invite.

Sam Sethi 1:14:20

I didn't get one.

James Cridland 1:14:21

But all kinds of people, you can go, you can go, it's free to go. I know good luck.

The Tech Stuff

Sam Sethi 1:14:27

You know, it's occasionally nice to be invited. Here we go. You went last time, didn't you? Uh no, I was going to, and I went to the Edinburgh Festival instead. But yeah, I I do want to go to it. No, all all truth be known, I do want to go to it, and so I probably will be up there. But uh so you should.

Human Announcer 1:14:43

The Tuck stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:14:47

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology.

Sam Sethi 1:14:52

Great Pods, the podcast discovery platform has relaunched with an expansion of its user-facing feature, so a new website. So congratulations to them. PAVE Studios has announced it's expanding into video. Um I thought they were video only. Um, the new video first series and the addition of a weekly video plus two audio shows. Um, interestingly, they're only on YouTube, no video on Spotify or Apple as of yet.

James Cridland 1:15:21

No, I think Pave, um I think Pave hosts with megaphones, so that may explain that one. But uh yes, uh, I am trying to, whenever somebody tells me that they're doing a video show, uh, I'm trying to actually go in and check on all three platforms as to whether or not you're really doing a video show or whether you're or not you're just doing a YouTube show. Exactly. That's my thinking there.

Sam Sethi 1:15:41

In other news, Riverside is shortly to be using Ophonic service to improve audio quality. Uh, isn't that the technology behind magic mastering for BuzzProw?

James Cridland 1:15:50

It is, yes. So it's a thing that does all kinds of stuff. We use it for automated de-umming and de-airing. I know that there are lots of ums in this podcast. There are even more before Orphonic automatically edit quite a lot of those out. Um, it also does dynamic audio leveling and noise reduction and all kinds of other things. It's a great tool for you to go and use uh yourself as well. Um BuzzProut's magic mastering only uses uh a very small amount uh of that. Um but uh yes, interesting to see Riverside um in one of those uh exciting uh GDPR subprocessor emails uh talking that they're going to be working uh with them, so you can probably guess what that is all going to be um working on.

Sam Sethi 1:16:34

And finally, uh Thomas Radamaker um has been working on a product for the iPad called Boosts with a Z at the end. Uh he says it's a replacement for Helipad. It uses the Noster Wallet Connect, um, which is basically allowing you to use any um payment uh wallet uh over the Lightning Network. Um it's available in the beta now. Uh it looks pretty nice. Um, it doesn't require a back end, Dave Jones was asking. Um it only requires that you are online. And so yeah, I don't know. I don't use Helipad and I don't use NWC, but you use Stripe uh Strike with a K. Um I use Strike with a K, yes, absolutely. It might be something for you to look at, maybe.

James Cridland 1:17:21

Yeah, no, that um that that sounds uh interesting. I don't know whether Strike with a K goes into Nosta uh yes, it does, yeah.

Sam Sethi 1:17:30

You can use it with NWC, yeah.

James Cridland 1:17:32

Right. Oh well there you go. Um this I thought was interesting, Podclaw. It's a new podcast hosting company without a front end at all. You just use API calls to post shows onto it. Um using uh, I mean, it'll you know get to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and YouTube and blah blah blah. It's free forever. Um, if your show gets less than 10,000 downloads a month. Um, but I thought it was uh, you know, here here we are now where specific new products are being built just for AI agents to help them um uh publish their podslop, uh new word podslop, um, into into as many places as possible. What have we become?

Human Announcer 1:18:17

Boostergram, boostergram, 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 1:18:31

So many ways to get in touch with us. Uh, fan mail by using the link in our show notes, boosts or email, and we share uh any money that we make uh too. Um we got a very nice uh fan mail message um uh using the link in our uh show notes um from uh Kevin at Bunsprout saying, Thank you for the super nice co-host mention after the interview with Barry, to which I replied, it's what you pay us for.

Sam Sethi 1:18:55

Uh so that's not what I replied, I have to say.

James Cridland 1:19:01

So that was good. Um, but something weird and wonderful has happened to fan mail. Um, and this is very cool because I got another fan mail, and this is it.

Speaker 2 1:19:13

James, Sam, how's it going? This is Alvin from BuzzSprout. All right, so in the Pod News Weekly Review inbox, you've got this great stinger, um, Boostigram, Super Comment, Zaps, fan mail, super chat, email, and I hope you have space for one more because we just launched voicemail for fan mail. So listeners can now send voice messages straight into a podcast like I'm doing right now. Um then you'll be able to read the transcript of what I send. You can listen to the audio, you can download the audio and use it in your podcast. I've always loved those end-of-the-year episodes that you do with the wrap-ups, uh, where you get all the supporters to send in uh audio messages and then you play them on the podcast. And my hope is that this will make it easier for other shows to do something similar. Thanks for everything you do, and thanks for a great show. Talk soon.

James Cridland 1:20:07

And one of the really clever things about this is it limits you to 60 seconds as well. Uh Albin, this is super cool. Um and it sounds great as well, doesn't it? That's using your iPhone uh microphone. Um, and um, but you you can you can use it on any device, of course. Um, but yeah, that's uh that's a really cool thing, Sam. What do you think?

Sam Sethi 1:20:30

No, I like it. I mean, it's we are in an audio medium. So nice to get an audio reply from people. We had another one as well, didn't we? We had another voicemail.

Speaker 1:20:40

We did, uh and this is it. Saludos from Spain, James Sam Sam. I'm David Marzal, and I miss the jingles.

James Cridland 1:20:48

I do not know what he means by I miss the jingles. David The Spotify one we had earlier. Oh, that one. Oh, well, there you go. Uh well, it there you go. I've played it. Um, so David Martal, who I have been pronouncing David Marzell. Uh David, thank you. Uh so you see, this is why voicemail is going to be so useful to us. Um, it's a super great thing. Uh, by the way, another thing that BuzzSprout have also launched um is uh you can actually reply uh to um uh messages which have been sent as well, um, which is uh really nice too. So um so lots of movement from uh our good friends at BuzzSprout. Uh if only they press released some of it. Uh but still there we are. Um uh so really cool. If you would like to leave us a voicemail, um I've moved the link uh in our show notes right to the top. Uh you'll see it says leave James and Sam a message, uh, and you can click on that link, whatever uh device you are using, uh, and leave us a message. Uh comment on any of the things that we have met uh that we have talked about this week. Uh it would be great to hear your voice uh in the inbox for next week.

Sam Sethi 1:21:58

Can I add a feature request? Can I add a tip with it? No, joking, joking.

James Cridland 1:22:03

Joking.

Sam Sethi 1:22:04

That's not that's that's not a bad idea.

James Cridland 1:22:06

Not a bad idea, yeah. Uh there's been a bunch of uh super comments uh through uh TrueFans as well, haven't there?

Sam Sethi 1:22:13

Yes, Martin Lindescog sent us 11,235 sats and said uh Nomono Sound HQ is in Trondheim in Norway, offices in Oslo. Uh James, here is a symbolic tip to ensure proper service at the pub in London. It's a Fabinacci sequence. First no beer, then one beer, then another beer, two beers next, three beers, five beers. So that's why it's one, one, two, three, five. Nice one. Thanks, Martin.

James Cridland 1:22:42

Wow. That's a good tip as well. So uh thank you for that. Uh what other m messages have we got in uh True?

Sam Sethi 1:22:51

Uh Martin said again, it looks like my super comments from March 18 were lost in space. Yes, we were refactoring. So here's a Starship Boost 1701. I clicked on the pay button before I changed the default of 222 SATs. I had I hadn't to top up my wallet, yes you do, in order to send the digital telegram. Neil Vellio is now informed that his super fan position, right? James, happy birthday. Yes, we all forgot to wish James a happy birthday. What are you now, James? 900? No?

James Cridland 1:23:22

Says you.

Sam Sethi 1:23:23

Yeah. Yes. Uh how was the concert in London? It was very good. And here is a super comment uh which he left above. So yes. Thank you very much indeed, Martin.

James Cridland 1:23:35

Yes, uh, that's very cool. Seth Goldstein sending um us uh He was not happy with you, I'll tell you in a minute. Oh, okay. Well, firstly, he has said, I I like the idea of transcripts, I prefer it's on the podcast or our host, not these apps. Agreed. Uh he also says James is clearly not a fan of Goldhanger. LOL, it's pretty clear, love the snark. Uh thank you, Seth, um uh for that. I'm a fan of um the the the stuff that they put out um uh when when it's it's a decent audio experience. Um so yeah, um oh that was snarky again, wasn't it? Oh well there we are. Um and also 2222 sats. Yes, you can guess who it's who this is from already. It's from the ugly quacking duck uh using podcast guru. Um he says, I really enjoy hearing about other people in the world. One of the best things about your podcast is that you don't just center on things from the States or from the UK, it helps to hear many different people and the podcasting in their lives. Thank you for the episode 7-3. Uh 7-3 to you too, Bruce, uh, and that's uh very kind of you. Uh, thank you for being our biggest um uh person in terms of um sats uh to you know normal sats um uh through through the system. I I know, but you know, true fans, uh it's it's not it's still a bit um still a bit confusing uh how the money is coming in and all of that.

Sam Sethi 1:25:00

Yeah, this was last week, not this week. So you're fine. We'll we've we've sorted it, but we'll talk about that.

Sam and James's week

James Cridland 1:25:06

Well, yes, we will we will continue to talk about that off the air. Uh uh, I think. Oh okay. Um but uh oh dear. Um here's a bug report. Anyway, and thank you to um the many people who um are our power supporters. Uh genuinely appreciate this. Um, it really helps us with uh things like planning where the drinks are going to be in London uh for the podcast show, more on which in a future podcast. Um that includes um uh David John Clark, the late Bloomer actor. It includes John McDermott, uh Claire Wait Brown and uh Neil Vellio as well. Thank you all so much uh for that. If you would like to join our power supporters, please do. Uh weekly.podnews.net is where you go for that, and transcripts and uh to leave a voicemail and anything else that you want to end up doing. So uh what's been happening for you, Sam, this week?

Sam Sethi 1:25:59

Well, um I'm too frightened to tell you now. Um, so last week we successfully refactored all of the old B API and payments. Um we've added a new payment queue. Um, one of the problems with um L and address is it doesn't have a batch mode. So uh with key send, I know this is very geeky, but with Keysend you could batch um up all the payments into one uh addressable payment. And therefore for the user, they said, okay, 222 sat click, off it went, and then we dealt with the splits in the background because we could batch do the payments. With Ellen Address, you have this sequential payment model. So shows like podcasting 2.0, Adam and Dave's show, um, have about 15 splits, and it just timed out, it would just took forever. So we built a payment queue, which means that we can build a queue.

James Cridland 1:26:51

That's what you need.

Sam Sethi 1:26:52

Yes, yes. Yes, so it mirrors what Keysen does um in the background and means that we can retry if we have a failure as well. So um, yeah, nice little update. Now, one of the things that you're gonna tell me is that um our method of sending comments is not clear because we're not sending the metadata with the payment. So what we've done is we've copied the proposal from Fountain, which wasn't actually a accepted proposal, it's a considered proposal, but we think it's a good idea. So we're now using the metadata within the description field with a URL, the same as Fountain. So yes, we will now be able to put where the payment came from. Oh, it's been done today. Oh it's gone out. Excellent. Yeah, it's l it's live.

James Cridland 1:27:40

There you go. So I don't I I don't need to grumble at you for that. That's brilliant. Brilliant news. Good. And I tell you one one of the things, using Strike, so uh you know, having something on your phone, I am seeing a lot of people listening to whether it's the Pod News Daily, whether it's the Pod News Weekly Review, a lot of uh of just things coming up. as you as I'm doing something else on the phone and it says, oh, you've just been paid another eight sats, you've just been paid another 23 sets, you've just been paid another 83 sats. And that's just really nice to end up uh seeing. It's a good sort of um it's a good sort of m motivator to keep you doing stuff. So uh yeah it's been it's been interesting seeing that.

Sam Sethi 1:28:19

I'm also going to be speaking at the London podcast show so I know you were talking about you're the keynote on day one at nine o'clock. Don't be late. I don't know what day I'm speaking on but I am speaking on the future of podcasting so I'll be talking about um streaming hosting and publisher feeds and other things um which are more at the extreme end of where we are with podcasting. Yeah very nice yeah and uh I'm also listening to you're right the Empire of AI um by Karen Ho. I think is a really good book if you're into she spent a lot of time with uh OpenAI the team there she's not very complimentary about Sam Altman at all and it's a very good inside book from what's going on in the world of AI.

James Cridland 1:29:09

Very good very good excellent well uh I I that that won't be one that I instantly instantly jump to. What I am currently reading at the moment is I'm reading um uh a book which is very very fearsomely negative about Qantas the airline uh it's called the Chairman's Lounge the inside story of how Qantas sold us out um and it's uh going into all of the illegal things that Qantas as an airline has done over the last five years or so I mean they they had so much free publicity after Rain Man.

Sam Sethi 1:29:41

How can they screw that up?

James Cridland 1:29:44

Yes that was a long long time ago um so that has been good um uh I have put my little electric car in long journey mode um because uh on Saturday I am uh driving for five hours um uh up up north to Bunderberg um where I'm going to be spending uh a a bit of uh a bit of Easter up there um uh the rest of the family have have already gone but I used recording this podcast as an excuse to stay home so so um uh so that's all uh all very good I'm looking forward to um uh playing around with that um and uh in my uh big list of things to do over the next couple of days is to understand the new pricing model for Amazon Cloudfront. I say new it's a new thing that's been happened for the last six months or so um because I need to understand how it works um and whether or not I should be switching to it or not. So that's my next um that's my next plan. And the one thing I was going to mention in here as well was that I've been playing around with um with uh um the um the method of um uh of encoding video um for Apple podcasts you know so uh although I'll never be able to uh because Apple Podcasts aren't going to sign me up as a podcast host um I I was still curious as to what it takes to encode video as an HLS stream that would work in Apple Podcasts. So I've ended up doing that and that's been quite that that that's been quite interesting uh doing I'm three quarters of the way there I don't fully understand how the um the iframes work uh which are those things that you see as you're um scrolling through so I've yet I've yet to fix that but I've done everything else I'm using AV1 to to do the video encoding rather than uh what it was and using um you know AAC for the audio and all of that kind of stuff and so what it does in case you're curious is instead of having one 25 megabyte mp4 video file I now have 178 files and 34 megabytes of disk space and if anybody wants to play it then instead of it being one request it's now going to be 84. So uh it's it's it's the future kids so that's how that works. Um but uh still playing around but um once I get the iframes in then I'm going to stick the HLS um back in as an alternate enclosure and we will see what happens there I guess. Uh anyway uh that's it for this week. Uh all of our podcast stories of course taken from the Pod News daily newsletter at Podnews.net.

Sam Sethi 1:32:27

Uh you can support this show by streaming Sats. You can give us feedback using the buzzprout thumbnail link or voicemail link now in our show notes you can send us a boost or become a power supporter like the 24 power supporters at weekly dot podnews.net.

James Cridland 1:32:42

Our music is from TM Studios our voiceover is uh Sheila D. Thank you Sheila for re-recording some new things because Albin mentioned it our audio is recorded using CleanFeed we edit with Hindenburg and we're hosted and sponsored by BuzzProud.

Human Announcer 1:32:56

Start podcasting keep podcasting get updated every day subscribe to our newsletter at podnews.net tell your friends and grow the show and support us and support us the pod news weekly review will return next week. Keep listening