Announcer 0:00

The Pub News Weekly Review uses chapters. The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pub News Weekly Review with James Cricklin and Sam Seth.

James Cridland 0:12

I'm James Cripplin, the editor of Pub News, and I'm Sam Seth in the CL Trickland.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

A line slop for broken pocket can be annoying, but a lani's lock for a health podcast. Giving wrong recommendations to people can be dangerous.

James Cridland 0:34

And what we should do about it. And Sirius XM and iHeart Media. Are they really going to merge? This podcast is sponsored by Bunspram with a tool supporting community to ensure you keep podcasting. Start podcasting. Keep podcasting with BunSPram.com.

Announcer 0:48

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi 0:53

James. So the big story of the week is is iHeart serious about a merger?

James Cridland 0:59

Haha! I see what you did there. Yes. Yes, the story is theoretically that iHeart and Sirius SM are about to merge. That's what the stories are, apparently. Not convinced. Not convinced. What typically tends to happen? So this was um uh initially the subject of a set of reports from Bloomberg, Ashley Carmen involved in that, friend of the show, and and uh Lucas, who works uh with her, not a friend of the show. And uh they he was incredibly rude to me on social media, and I'm not forgetting it. They uh started reporting stuff, they got some of it wrong, to be fair. It's in talks to merge, it probably isn't going to be a merger. Um, Sirius XM is bigger than iHeartMedia in many ways, and certainly in terms of podcasting, uh, it's certainly bigger um than iHeartMedia in many ways. Of course, Sirius XM owns a lot of satellite radio stations in the US. iHeart own a lot of um FM and AM radio stations in the US, but of course they also own podcasting stuff, and Sirius XM is probably twice as large, I would guess, than um iHeart in terms of the money that they make from podcasting, although that is going to even increase further because of uh the whole uh YouTube thing that um uh Sirius XM is about to do. They are about to be selling audio ads for YouTube, so that's exciting. But um yes, would be exciting if it happened. I'm not so sure. I think it's there to flush out some conversations with the uh the big shareholders of Sirius XM and of course the big shareholders of iHeartMedia as well, I think.

Sam Sethi 2:45

Does this have any implications if it did go ahead for Global?

James Cridland 2:49

Yeah, so Global is um who of course is the owner of Dax and Captivate and a lot of radio stations in the UK. Global has been stalking iHeartMedia for a while. So back in 2020, the FCC allowed iHeartMedia to be 100% foreign-owned if it wanted to. Um, that's actually a pretty big deal for the US. Um, now that hasn't happened yet, but as of right now, so far as I can see, Global owns almost a third of iHeartMedia. And on March the 5th of this year, the FCC allowed an application from iHeartMedia around some ownership of um global shares switching from the Bahamas to the UK, where their investment companies are based. So, what does that mean? Well, I mean, it could mean theoretically that Global ends up owning quite a sizable chunk of Sirius XM. So that might be exciting, but it might also be that actually Global would quite like to own all of those radio stations and much more podcasting stuff in the US. So, you know, from that point of view, it's kind of watch this space, I guess.

Sam Sethi 3:59

One of the things that uh I read was it said that last year, for the first time, more people listen to podcasts daily than talk radio. This was Edison Research. Now, you've always said to me that radio is six times bigger than podcasting. So, how come Edison are reporting it this way?

James Cridland 4:16

Well, Edison are reporting two things. So, firstly, Edison reporting that podcasts are bigger than talk radio, not bigger than radio, but bigger than talk radio. So that's the first thing that they are talking about. The second thing, in terms of um total time spent listening, is that radio is still actually massive. I mean, really, really, really large. Edison's own figures showing that radio is 64% of all of the ad-supported audio that we stick into our ears. 64% in the US. Podcasting, only 20%. Uh, streaming music, by the way, only 10%. So there is a big difference there. Radio is still very, very large. Now that's ad-supported audio. That's from Share of Ear uh from quarter three last year. Um, there's similar research that happens in the UK, not from Edison Research, but by a company called Rajar, and they have put together uh figures that isn't ad-supported but is, you know, total uh audio, 65%. So two-thirds is live radio, and then podcasts just 10% in those figures. Spotify and Apple Music and stuff like that, 17%. So again, you know, podcasting is um is large, but uh live radio is much, much larger. And so clearly, if you own both a ton of live radio stations and also lots of podcasts, then that's quite an exciting thing for an audio advertising business.

Do we have a spam problem?

Sam Sethi 5:46

Let's move on, James, then. Um, is Apple getting itself in a jam with spam? Um it's easy now for Apple Podcasts or people to push Spam into Apple Podcasts. What's going on, James?

James Cridland 5:59

I am going to ask you, Sam, before I answer that question, uh, are you wearing an Anorak this uh morning?

Sam Sethi 6:05

Oh, yeah, I am. Yeah, sorry. Let me is it rustling? Sorry, let me take it off.

James Cridland 6:10

It's sounds like you're fighting under some plastic. There you go. Right, we are rustle-free. Wonder how much of this I edit out. Yes. Wool is the thing. So is Apple um under um target for spam? Or frankly, is all of podcasting under target for spam? And I think you know, the the conversations that I have been having recently, and frankly, the stories that I've been publishing recently have been pointing out that the amount of spam in the uh directories is getting out of hand. I mean, I'm looking uh at the moment at some data from a couple of days ago. 2,100 new podcasts uh went into the podcast directories a couple of days ago, just in one day, 2,100 new podcasts. Of those, 60% were legitimate podcasts, uh, 1,300. But when you look at the other stuff which is going in there, it's very clear that there is a large amount of spam and a large, even larger amount of AI uh slop, slopcasts, uh, if you like. So, for example, 25% of all of the shows that were being um put into uh podcast directories uh in this day that I'm looking at, 25% of them were possibly from AI. It's quite easy to uh check that. 15% were spam, gambling, and stuff like that. And then you've got another sort of 2% which are there um just to promote um you know things like TMU codes and that sort of thing. So clearly there is an ordinate amount of spam and other stuff uh going into the directories. And yeah, I'm curious to see what has uh happened in terms of all of that.

Sam Sethi 8:03

I asked the question, I think I've asked it before. What responsibility do hosts have to stop this spam? I mean, Dave Jones at the Podcast Index has written an API that tracks out these uh uh spam and AI slopcasts, but you know, is it Dave's job or is it the host's job not to publish to the podcast index and to the Apple and Spotify directories?

James Cridland 8:26

Well, I think it's a little bit of both. There are a number of podcast hosting companies out there who uh are being used because they have free tiers, being used to try and get uh spam uh into the system. I think that those particular podcast hosts really should be being a little bit more proactive than they currently are. There are there are a bunch of them. Uh it's very easy to point to Spreeker. Spreaker, of course, are the people that host Inception Point AI, which is a major publisher of uh slopcasts, 269, 12% of all of the shows in this one day I'm looking at came from Inception Point AI. Massive amount of shows uh in there. But there are other podcast uh hosts also involved in this as well. And I think that you know, really all of them should be doing a little bit more to stop all of this stuff from happening.

Sam Sethi 9:26

Dave Jones posted that the latest threat to podcast directories is people reposting free public domain recordings of books from uh LibriVox. Um he says that this is a Spreaker that it's allowing this to happen. I mean, clearly Spreaker are monetizing this, and do they not have a moral duty or or is this just business as usual?

James Cridland 9:51

Well, uh I mean I think Spreeker is the the main offender um around this because it is mostly Inception Point AI. But Spreeker aren't alone, you know. As I say, um there's a company called Jellypod um who is doing um AI stuff. Um rss.com, BuzzSprout are in there as well, Red Circle are in there as well. Decent companies, but they are being used by people, uh, particularly in their free tier, to uh try publishing uh all kinds of uh stuff. The difference, I suppose, is there are two things here. One of the things is people earning money directly from the podcasts. So when you listen to a show from Inception Point AI, for example, you will hear a couple of ads first, followed by the show starting. It's only then that you realize that you're listening to a slopcast and and you click away. But uh Spreaker don't presumably care about that because they'll get 30% of the revenue. So, but there is also on the other side people just using this to get uh links into directories, which will help them in terms of SEO. Um, so if you have a Timu coupon, then you can earn money. If you have Amazon affiliate um uh codes, then you can earn money if you can get as many links to those as possible. And unfortunately, pretty well anybody that is giving out free trials uh is seeing them being misused in this way.

Interview: Alberto Betella, RSS.com

Sam Sethi 11:16

Now, one of the companies that we talked about uh doing all of this was a company called Lightnot Studios, which was taking um cover art, turning it slightly differently, but trying deliberately to confuse people into thinking they were listening to a different podcast and then putting their own content behind it. I thought it would be good of us to go to rss.com's Alberto Batella and find out what is rss.com doing as a host to try and stop this AI slopcasts. First of all, let's define the problem. What is the problem of AI slop?

SPEAKER_01 11:56

I'm glad you said AI slop because the main problem in the conversation is also the taxonomy we use to define AI-generated podcasts. We cannot put all of them in the same bucket or the conversation is not gonna progress and move forward. So we have AI podcasts which are curated by humans. Those could be a finance podcast, for instance, where I have a daily briefing taken from an authoritative source like Yahoo Finance and just tells me the movements up and down in the market. It's not the most engaging podcast, it doesn't foster the strongest parasocial relationship with the host because there's no host really, but it can be acceptable and it may do its job. So those could be acceptable. Then we have AI spam, and we had an example with LightNot Studios a couple of weeks ago. We have spam and copyright infringement or IP infringement. Those are very simple. This is not a problem with AI per se at all. These are taken exactly the same way we address spam and SEO baits in podcasting. These are easy. If we find them, we identify them, we remove them. So given this taxonomy, the third category is AI slop. These are podcasts that are made to seem real, and most of the time they want to exploit monetization systems like programmatic arts. And that's the problem we are facing. They're growing at scale thanks to the democratization of AI tools, the low pricing, and they're very difficult to find because they have professionally designed, apparently, cover arts, the description sounds good, and even then transcripts sometimes cannot give away really what the content is unless you get the whole context. And again, AI slop is dangerous for the ecosystem because AI slop for a true crime podcast can be annoying if there are hallucinations, it can be annoying, but one doesn't listen to it. But AI slop for a health podcast, giving wrong recommendations to people can be dangerous. So that's the problem we are facing with AI slop. AI slop can be dangerous and it can break our ecosystem.

Sam Sethi 14:19

But to play devil's advocate, so let's take something like Inception Point AI. They will tell you that they are human verified, although we know that they aren't because we've seen that. But let's say, given the benefit of the doubt, let's say that some of them are, or many of them are. Is what they're doing illegal? It might be annoying, we might not like it, but wouldn't we let the market vote with its feet if no one listens to this AI slot? Will they just die on the vine?

SPEAKER_01 14:50

I have a personal opinion here. I don't think what they're doing is illegal per se. There are radio stations with weather forecast 24-7 and they are AI generated. I think it doesn't work when you don't disclose what you're doing and the sources and the methods. Now, James pointed out to some of their shows in a past episode where you get a prompt from an LLM in English in a show that is in Spanish. And that's just bad. It's not dangerous, it was a podcast which was generic. But then when you think about again categories like health or psychology, this becomes dangerous. And especially when you create these personas which are called Dr. XYZ. That's exactly what can be dangerous. This is what I believe could be considered illegal in some jurisdictions. I didn't analyze. The problem is that AI slope is not binary. If it was binary, we would have already solved it, true or false. AI slope is a spectrum. If I have an English prompt read in a Spanish podcast talking about, I don't know, golf, fine, it's just annoying again. If it's about some sensitive category, sensitive recommendations, sensitive topics, that can really bleed into a big danger. And the problem is that it's not easy to put everything in one bucket.

Sam Sethi 16:21

So Lightnought Studios was a company that was hosting with RSS.com. They were using your programmatic advertising to monetize. And once you were made aware, you removed them from the platform. They're probably with somebody else right now. I don't know. We probably should check. But Spreaker are well aware that they are hosting Inception Point AI. They're putting out two to three hundred new podcasts, not episodes, podcasts every day. And now Dave Jones from the podcast index has said Spreaker is also allowing LibriVox, which is audio books, to be reposted via Spreaker to the podcast index in order to monetize through advertising. So do hosts have a duty of responsibility? RSS.com clearly took action. But should something like Spreaker take action and say, okay, this isn't acceptable to the ecosystem and remove Inception Point AI, or are they making enough money from it that they'd rather not take any action?

SPEAKER_01 17:20

So again, getting back to the taxonomy, I wouldn't put Inception Point with Lightnot Studio in the same bucket. Lightnot Studio was hosted by RSS.com, and as soon as we were told there were some podcasts which were copycuts basically of others, they were exploiting the intellectual properties of others. That bucket was AI spam, AI IP infringement. So that was the easy bucket. Okay, that's easy, that's clear, there's nothing to discuss here. Whereas I guess the conundrum from the Spreaker side, which I don't know personally in terms of I don't know their internal conversation, they are friends. I mean, it's a company we respect, but you know what? AI slop is not well defined. And one thing I've been reflecting on recently is also if a podcast is not great in quality, but it's not dangerous, and if it has real human listeners, do advertisers care if their advertisement ends up in those podcasts? I don't know. And I bet most advertisers or some advertisers do not care. And this is why this is the whole problem. I think the first step that we took at rss.com, but Spreaker took before us was creating an AI disclosure. At the end of 2025, they added elements to their UI, Spreaker, to disclose the use of AI. It's voluntary. We did it in March 2026. We went a step further, so we added this signal in the RSS feed, and a few days later, Spreaker followed as well. So what I think, because I cannot speak for them, is that they are working on it as well. And as of now, having this, it's not the end, it's not the solution at all, but it's a great step towards being able to address more efficiently and effectively the problem. So it's a bit like the explicit tag, really.

Sam Sethi 19:21

It's creator decisions on whether they want to self-report that the content is AI or the host is AI. A lot of people are saying if the content was generated, like the research element of it, then you shouldn't declare it. It's whether the host is a spoken AI character. That's when people would want to know that there was an AI disclosure on it. Now, Apple Podcasts also requires a disclosure, but there's no policing of that either from Apple. Should we be less a voluntary disclosure and more a mandatory disclosure?

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Well, that's that's a point. The disclosure is voluntary in the sense that you have an element when you are uploading an episode where you can specify whether the podcast contains elements of AI. We'll get there later. You need some guidelines there, because elements can be anything. But the voluntary disclosures paired to internal policies at Apple, for example, in platforms or even institutions, can become mandatory because if you are in breach with Apple terms of service because you didn't disclose, then they can act. So the nuance of non-disclosing, once there is a disclosure and you are required to do that, even if it's voluntary, if you don't do that, then you are in breach. So there could be an action taken. That's where I think the detail is very important. So an episode which is generated by AI that should be disclosed, AI voice, AI script, no curation, it's in English and you or it's in Spanish and you get English English prompts from an LLM. That is made by AI. If you don't disclose, someone removes the episode, and I think they have the right to do so, depending on the platform service and terms and conditions.

Sam Sethi 21:11

Now, the EU is about to implement Article 50 in August 2026. It's going to put fines of up to 15 million euros or 3% of your global turnover. What is this new EU AI Act?

SPEAKER_01 21:27

Yes, August 2nd, 2026, I think. And it's about disclosing AI when it's used to create matters of public interest. So communication that are of public interest. And here the cutter, the medium of podcasting fits perfectly in most of the cases. So disclosure as a starting point, okay, it can be a simple yes no disclosure initially, is perfect because it also helps going towards an being future proofs with this regulation, both from platforms like Apple podcasts and institutions, organizations, and and and even you know jurisdictions, in this case the EU AI Act. So as a hosting company, at the moment, Spreaker and RSS.com have the disclosure in RSS feeds. Together, based on live wire stats last month, we have 15% of the new episode market share. It's a decent amount. If more hosting companies join this is a great step forward also to become part of the infrastructures that facilitates this compliance with regulation. Because it's all about transparency in terms of step one. Step one is transparency. Then we can take it further. And if we don't foster disclosure, how can we say, how can we prove to the EU, for example, that we are compliant with the with the regulation if we don't allow an easy disclosure to our podcasters. That's why my appeal to the industry is that we should all have a disclosure in the RSS feed. It doesn't have to work exactly as we do. It could be a starting point we can change but that's crucial to go to the next level.

Sam Sethi 23:22

Talking of the next level you created a website called shouldidiscose.ai what's that framework?

SPEAKER_01 23:30

It's a so one one uh context here is that I have a background in uh in AI. I have a PhD in uh in a field called affected computing today is called Emotion AI, which means in academia I was exposed to AI conversation early on and after that I was in a big corporate in a moonshot factory which is a an RD long-term disruptive technology where AI is at the core. So years ago we we we were working on AI ethics we had consultants on the topic what I'm saying is that I was exposed from in a previous life and so when I joined full time the podcasting industry I always thought that was a past life nothing to do with podcasting but recently I feel I hope that what I learned there can help giving some example to foster new conversations. So I like to be very simple sometimes in my approach which doesn't mean it's it's simple doesn't mean necessarily that something it takes little time. Simplicity is complex. So I try to be simple and be concrete so I created a framework where you can answer to a questionnaire and it helps you it guides you on whether you should disclose or not the use of AI and I called that the substance test. When Apple says Apple podcasts that a material portion of AI usage require disclosure I try to go the next level as we were saying the next level is what does it mean? So if you use AI to improve your audio for transcripts for some background music or even for an intro like Pod News Weekly Review which is not even 1% of the episode time you don't need disclosure because the substance so the reason why the listener is there listening to the podcast is made by humans. So it's very important I tried to come up with uh uh an a framework which I didn't make up I read all the regulations I compiled a table with all all possible use cases and edge cases and that's a start I don't expect it to be a standard but I would love for more people to do something similar to adopt mine to change it uh and it's creative commons I just wanted that many people are barking in this period you know they're just saying that's a problem we have to solve it it's about money and advertisement but really if we disclose we follow regulations and we together as an industry go towards the same direction this is a problem that can be solved really and I try to be as pragmatic as possible so there is a website shouldidisclose dotai and that's a questionnaire with the explanation of the rationale behind the questionnaire. You may like it you may not agree it's a start build your own take mine but I just want it to be pragmatic and offer some ideas to the industry.

Sam Sethi 26:28

Yeah we in TreeFans I'm the CEO of TreeFans as well in our hosting side we've add a link to shouldidisclose.ai right next to the AI tag so that if someone's not sure whether they should or shouldn't they complete your test and then make their own decision. I think once you start to get fines appearing and it starts to become much more mandatory rather than voluntary I think people will start to make sure and check. Now if we don't address this if we don't come across an industry wide solution to deal with AI slopcast.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Well we for sure we are gonna lose trust and when I say trust it's trust from the listeners in the first place which is the target that are the people we work for we strive for but also advertisers so by disclosing as a first step again that's not the solution it's a step by disclosing we foster transparency. By doing so we give a choice we give a choice to apps that read this signal to do something with it. They can filter out the some podcast they can simply label them they can do nothing but be aware of the ratio of AI podcast they are proposing in their algorithms in their highlights and to advertisers we can just give the signal where advertisers that don't care about being in an AI podcast as long as the listeners are human they just ignore it. Advertisers that care because of brand awareness and whatever reason they can opt out. So that's what I'm seeing if we don't do anything we are gonna lose trust from the listeners and the advertiser which is everything our industry strives for therefore I think disclosure is it's really what we need to do as a starting point.

Sam Sethi 28:22

I think also all hosts should be supporting the AI tag that you propose it's a simple one using the the TXT tag. I think all apps should then be able to read that tag and then make a clear indication in their UI to somebody that this podcast contains AI uh voices. So I think those are the two things I know Russell at Pod2 has also recommended a sliding scale because at the moment the way that AI is sort of marked is yes or no which is on or off it's very black or white and so he's suggested that you know as you said Pod Newsweekly review has AI in it. We have voiceovers and announcers and various bits in sections but the the core as you described is not for AI. We're not asking people to come to an AI podcast and what he was suggesting is with transcripts maybe we can use those to set a percentage marker which then also gives the user an acceptability so you might accept I don't know having 30 or 40% of a podcast with AI. I might accept 50 or 60% somebody might accept more or less we're not all the same. So Russell at pod two is suggesting maybe a scale of AI so that we aren't just doing a simple oh it's got a little bit of AI that's it you have to mark that. Any thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Yes before coming out with our elements which are basically yes no or I don't disclose I don't say anything which is also a signal if I don't say anything and it's a no or it's let's say an explicit no is a explicit no I reviewed and followed and read again once again over one year of conversations in the podcast standard projects in the podcast index github and of course Russell idea makes sense but let me wear for a moment my scientist hat as someone that conducted experiments had to publish peer-reviewed paper being criticized and by iterating had to you know improve their methods in research in science I don't exclude the use of a scale in the future but it's much harder to standardize a scale and how you measure the scale than having a simple binary value as the start. So what in statistics this is called normalization the way you collect the scale in true fence or in rss.com the even the slider width it can influence the rating. So if my ratings are skewed towards the upper quartile for example and yours are the third quartile just because your slider is vertical mine is horizontal and this is stuff I've seen in experiments I reviewed also papers for ear it was my job it's not gonna work so absolutely we can follow Russell's idea of building a scale but we are looking at the moon and we need a rocket ship we don't even have a bike now and maybe the bike is the binary disclosure maybe that's even a motorbike and that's what I'm trying to explain like really professionally as a former scientist the easiest approach is the one that works and then we can take it from there in the future we can even say how much how which percentage of AI I used to create the script and what agent I used. We can but we have to start somewhere and somewhere is having a bike not a rocket ship.

Sam Sethi 31:58

So the London podcast show is coming up Alberto and you and Ben are coming over to the show which is great news I'm sure there will be a podcast standards project meeting. We had one at every previous podcast movement and London podcast show. Last year the topic was all about video and HLS and look where we are today. I suspect the topic at this year will be very heavily about AI slop. So I look forward to having a longer conversation not just with you but I guess with the rest of the industry as well to see if there's any other ideas we can all come up with.

SPEAKER_01 32:30

Likewise I I'm very much looking forward to it.

Sam Sethi 32:33

If anyone wants to know more about what you guys at rss.com are doing regarding AI and AI slop and how you're monitoring it where would they go?

SPEAKER_01 32:41

Well shouldidiscloseai has a page that explains the framework. And at the very bottom there is an article I wrote which explains the narrative but from the regulatory point of view it's a bit more verbose but useful. So that's a nice article to start from brilliant.

Sam Sethi 32:59

Alberto my friend it's always good to see you and hear from you and I look forward to seeing you in London for a lovely glass of something.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

Likewise looking forward in three weeks I guess yes see you soon friends.

James Cridland 33:10

Take care Alberto thanks Alberto Patella from rss.com I have questions into Apple Podcasts because I would like to understand quite what they are wanting in terms of disclosure of AI. I have pointed uh a few shows to Apple Podcasts which aren't following the AI disclosure guidelines but also it's not particularly clear for an inception point AI Slopcast for example the main show description does not prominently say in fact it does not say at all that it is made using AI but more to the point made in conjunction with artificial intelligence which is what they write in each individual episode is not necessarily explaining that this has been made wholly with AI and a human being has not checked this before it has got published which is what Inception Point AI have said. Perhaps this is something where the industry really ought to be working together.

Sam Sethi 34:09

I'm looking forward to the response from Apple James and let's see what they say. Indeed because it's in their as you said it's in their terms and conditions isn't it so yeah it's in their terms and conditions.

Spotify financials

James Cridland 34:19

I mean I've reported using the Apple Podcasts report um uh tool I've reported one of the shows um where there is no mention in the audio that this is AI and I've reported one of those shows there um that was more than 24 hours ago still waiting uh for that I reported it not using my email address but a different email address that I can read uh because I know that um uh Apple are monitoring everything that I do um and uh you know if there is anybody from Apple listening which there is please do not pull off my arms and legs look we we we talked about it the other day Apple are transcribing every podcast they will know if the content of that podcast contains AI as Alberto told us they could adopt the AI tag like the explicit tag and auto set that on I'm not sure they'll go that far but um they have it within their realm to know what is AI and what isn't because they are transcribing everything. Yeah I mean they are whether or not that transcription of course is enough to actually work out whether something is um AI or not I don't know. But I'm not disparaging at all here. But if there is one guy who also owns chickens and works at an accountancy firm in the heart of Alabama who has managed to fix this then I think probably the most valuable company in the world should probably be able to fix this too. So let's hope that Apple have a plan in place for all of this because it is a real concern. If you are an independent content producer you are being swamped by these slopcasts and by people that frankly don't care about you. They don't care about the audience they don't care about anything other than can we make another two pounds 20 by fooling people that this is a real human being or even worse by calling someone a doctor a spam voice but calling them a doctor and giving medical advice which may or may not have even been checked by a human being terrifying absolutely terrifying there is a session by the way at the podcast show in London which will be going into AI a little bit more. Janine Wright will be there from the Slopcast company Inception Point AI there'll be somebody from the BBC there as well Nikki Birch who has been working on their AI stuff there will be a moderator there as well no thank you that's not going to be me but um that will be uh certainly uh one to one to one going to that one for certain absolutely I think there'll be a queue out of the door for that so I'm looking forward to all of that. Moving on then James Spotify James they've just released their Q1 financial report how was it they have yes um uh it uh I mean uh it on the face of it lots of good news um uh some interesting news but lots of good news so in terms of monthly active users they've added 12% year on year they've added 9% of paying subscribers so that is all good a few interesting things if you look at Spotify in terms of ads so auction based revenue so that's things like the Spotify Ad Exchange and Spotify Ads Manager. That is now nearing 25% of all ad revenue. So all ad revenue has never been that high in terms of this automatic stuff. It's been stuff which has been uh sold uh directly so that's a big deal having said that um their ad revenue is cratering um down 5% year on year down 25% quarter on quarter now I know that the last quarter is always the biggest quarter in terms of ad revenue but even so down 25% quarter on quarter. So I think it does show that Spotify's ads business is still in trouble. I hear lots of stories about how Spotify ads money uh is um much much less now than it ever has been for podcasters who are on that particular platform um but I can never get anybody to actually speak on the record on that. So I can never actually write a story on that. But the way that I saw it um in their slides profit from ads is just 8% of total profit for the entire company. So the ads business is not so firstly the ads uh the ads stuff in Spotify is half as profitable as premium uh revenue so already it's a less profitable thing but it's also tiny in comparison to everything else so I I was interested in seeing in seeing that but um that may well go uh towards um the reason why shares fell 14% um they uh gave out a disappointing income forecast which the stock market didn't like but um maybe there are people also taking a look at these figures and going well hang on a minute if you are an ad-supported company which you have been in a while why is that amount of money cratering and uh I'm not sure that anybody's got the answer.

Sam Sethi 39:37

Yeah I think they need to look at how they can justify the increase in costs. They need to also look at where they can get new users from because again if they've saturated the market with music users and maybe podcasts. I mean the Spotify audio book servers not having much impact um according to the report here it says it's less than five percent of listening on the service um you know which is a quarter of podcasting so you know the big push into audiobooks hasn't really worked um so you will see a slowdown I think in active users if they don't find new ways of bringing subscribers onto the platform.

Libsyn jump into video

James Cridland 40:13

Yeah which is the interesting thing because actually this this is data by the way uh from Sweden um it's from a company called MediaVision but there's not nothing to suggest that Sweden is any different to anywhere else. And they say that music is 75% of total time on the service. Audiobook is uh audiobooks are five percent of the service so that means that podcasting is only 20% of total time spent on Spotify. So for all of this talk about how big Spotify is in terms of podcasting well you know it's it's uh it's tiny in comparison to music isn't it which is uh which is interesting to see now one of the things they've never broken out is also the video revenue um that they hand out to creators we're still waiting on them to do that but Libsyn has just announced that they are now going to be distributing video to Spotify so maybe this will help what are Libsyn doing James well so uh Libsin are uh using the Spotify distribution API that was announced in January and uh is already in use in quite a few different uh podcast hosting companies including Transistor but Libsyn have just turned this on for anyone spending more than$25 a month. Of course all Libsyn customers can still upload manually on Spotify's website. They also say that um they offer video functionality for everybody. Now what that means is actually that it's MP4 video episode. So those are the old-fashioned um uh videos uh that uh Apple Podcasts deals with and Pocketcasts deals with and many other people uh deal with as well um those are the things that um libsyn uh has now when I covered this story um the only information that was available to me on the LibSyn website was the amount of monthly storage for uploads which is tiny tiny tiny if you're talking about video so you know 540 megabytes for the$25 a month plan this is storage space not um not not uh you know traffic which is the way that uh true fans uh charge but just storage space 540 meg is not going to be um a large amount now uh I uh saw that and I uh and I said you know well that doesn't seem you know um that doesn't seem an awful lot of money anyway libsin have now told me that all libsin creators can now upload up to 100 gigabytes of storage a month for video files not for audio files so for audio files you're still stuck if you're on the$8 plan you're still stuck with 162 megabytes for video files though 100 gigabytes weird i I'm sorry I had somebody just got an a marker pen and gone sticker zero on the end of this by mistake because I mean how do you go from 540 meg to 100 gig well a spokesperson told us it's really important to us that our creators can lean into video in a way that makes sense for their show without overly restrictive limitations. I would just say a hundred gigabytes of storage per month for video but only 162 meg for audio or 540 meg. So Libsyn is basically going uh we're a video company now we don't care about audio we're not we're not going to give you enough space for uh for audio we're gonna give you all the space in the world for video that's absolutely fine what a weird thing to do what a weird well we know we know they've become an ad company I think they're trying to mirror a cast in many ways they've they're they're they're they're not

Sam Sethi 44:00

They they were like Buzzsprout and RSS.com and Blueberry, much more of a hosting company now. They've become much more of an ad platform and a video company looks like, and which is really where ACAST is heading as well.

James Cridland 44:12

Well, why not just turn around and say we're going to give everybody a hundred gig of storage per month? Everybody. Yeah. It doesn't matter what you upload then. I uh I don't I don't understand why video gets a free pass, but audio, um no, you you still have to work out. And let's not forget, by the way, that Libsin's terms and conditions let them push you onto the pro plan. Now the pro plan charges you for bandwidth. It's a uh it's an expensive but professional um hosting service for enterprises. Libsin's terms and conditions let them push you onto that pro plan without any notice and for any reason. That's wrong. So if they want to, if they want to, there's no upper limit. Uh that they can just basically turn around and say, oh no, no, no, no, you you owe us you owe us additional money now. Uh so um, I mean, I I was wondering why Brendan Monahan, uh who has been doing the media rounds, he's written for um Inc. I think uh this this uh this week. He's been on uh Podbiz, uh he's been on the new media show. I did wonder why they that they hadn't contacted us. Now I've realized why.

Sam Sethi 45:23

Well, you'd ask them serious questions.

James Cridland 45:27

Um but uh and I was listening to, I don't know whether you heard the new media show uh with uh Brendan uh with that that uh Rob put out earlier on in the week.

Sam Sethi 45:36

Bits and pieces of it. I didn't listen to all of it, no.

James Cridland 45:38

Yeah, so in the middle of it, um uh Rob starts talking about the alternate enclosure tag, and Brenda Monaghan just says, Oh, well, you're you're at the limit of my technical knowledge now. Um excellent. And then and then and then and I had to uh check who said this uh because in the transcript it said um it was talking about podcasting 2.0. Um and uh and I thought, oh yeah, podcasting 2.0, well this'll be so this will be interesting seeing. Um so um someone said that podcasting 2.0 is a fringe idea that is not going anywhere. And I thought, what a thing for Brendan to say. And then I went to have a listen to it, and it's Rob Greenley saying that podcasting 2.0 is a fringe idea that's not going anywhere.

SPEAKER_07 46:27

Wow. There's been a lot of criticism that was pointed at RSS for many years that it wasn't innovating and it wasn't improving, it wasn't getting better. And you know, this was a this was a criticism that was well known that came out of you know some of the early leaders at um at Anchor um with the hosting platform about RSS is that it wasn't innovating, right? Um, and that we can do it better um through our own proprietary platform. And so the industry spun up, you know, this whole movement around the RSS 2.0 project and the podcast standards group project and and started coming up with some new ideas for RSS to extend the the namespace and to add capabilities. Um but the industry's been a little slow to adopt those ideas. Um and I I think there's a lot of reasons for that that that are you know that are fair and and that um really fundamentally get back to well, will the big platforms support these changes? You know, will Apple embrace alternative enclosures? Will Apple embrace you know sharing comments across platforms? Will you know all these kind of more advanced capabilities that RSS could do if we all chose to? But for some reason we we we have it. I know like this show has uh has an alternative enclosure in it because some of the podcast listening apps do support alternative enclosures, which means that in my video feed I can have uh a link to the audio file, and in the audio feed I can link to the video file. Um but then you look at what Apple is doing now with uh HLS streaming stuff, where they're basically taking the audio track from the video and making that the audio experience. Um what's your thoughts on that tension there of capability and how that might impact the audio side?

SPEAKER_02 48:28

Yeah, you're starting to give it that that extent of my technical knowledge here, right?

SPEAKER_07 48:33

Oh, it's okay. It's all right.

SPEAKER_02 48:35

But uh no, I think honestly the question I have is how is each platform controlling that distribution mechanism to drive where people actually listen and consume? And what is the driving force behind Wall Garden expansion perspective?

SPEAKER_08 48:56

Right.

SPEAKER_02 48:57

And I always like to I my perspective in general is that uh the broader market tends to go towards more towards open in general. Um but as you point out in this question, that that's not where everyone's headed. So how do we how do we balance that? I don't have a good answer.

SPEAKER_07 49:15

And is it okay? That that's the other thing too. You know, if you're a smaller app developer and you've built uh you know like a fountain or some of these smaller podcast consumption apps that are out there um that are trying to differentiate themselves um in the in the market to grow market share uh as a competitive platform to the big guys, right? Uh Apple, Spotify, and and YouTube. Well, the only pathway to really do that, I guess, is to somewhat create a better master app of sorts, right? Create a more expansive and um new type of experience in their apps. That is the power of these RSS tag extensions that are available to them, and a lot of them are are embracing that. Um, but the broader industry of podcasting has not. And it's because we've been really driven by whatever Apple chooses to do is what the industry does.

SPEAKER_02 50:09

Yeah. Well, and I think as you as you're pointing out, and we're seeing the the manner of which people are consuming this content and the breadth of platforms that are out there, Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc., is maybe lightening that influence to the point where people are consuming in the manners they want, in the places they want, and Apple, Spotify, etc. have to decide how much they're willing to compromise on things that they've said in the past or are firm line. Um and ultimately I'm a big believer in the market deciding where these things go, and some of that translates into are people gonna use an alternative third-party app, or are they too married to, hey, this is where I get my music, this is where I get my podcasts, this is where I get my audio books, this is where you know I do all of that activity and what's in it for that ultimate technology platform.

SPEAKER_07 51:07

Yeah, I think that is really at the core of why these these kind of newer newer type of techniques and things that could be available inside of RSS have not happened is because we do tend to gravitate towards um platforms and the influence of those platforms to to drive audience and to drive engagement and that all benefits um the whole ecosystem. Yeah, um, you know, these fringe ideas and things like that don't always catch momentum because they came from another those ideas came from somewhere else. They didn't come from the big platforms.

Sam Sethi 51:48

So can I just point out chapters, transcripts, and apple? I know.

James Cridland 51:53

Just just thought I'd just put that in there, just a little caveat. Chapters, transcripts, and um and actually when you look at pocket casts, which is not a small thing, which is not going anywhere, you know, they they support, you know, all kinds of additional stuff in there as well. Overcast even joined the game. Yeah, indeed, didn't you know, and the pod roll and everything else. But you know, unfortunately, if that's the way that uh podcasting 2.0 is being seen, so depressing to to end up uh uh seeing that.

Sam Sethi 52:22

So um yeah, so all big was no, go on. How big was the video for that show?

James Cridland 52:27

Oh yes, the video for that show, because I did take a look, um, was 3.1 gig. Right. So if you wanted to uh download, and that's oh it's it's only an hour, um, so it's 48 megabytes a minute. Um and it I I mean it's massive. Um I did take a look at uh this week in tech, which is twice as long, um, the same resolution, 1080p, and it was half the size. So I'm not quite sure what's going on there. Um, but of course, you know, um uh they get that um, you know, the new media show gets that um bandwidth free from Blueberry anyway. Um I think from my point of view, an MP4 um download uh you've got a number of issues there. Firstly, yes, the cost of your bandwidth, but also the cost of loading time for audiences, the cost of the available storage on your viewers' device as well, and even frankly, the screen that they're watching on. So I think if you're producing video, absolutely produce it in 4K, make it lovely and excellent for um for uh Apple Podcasts, make it lovely and excellent in 4K for YouTube, absolutely fine. For Spotify, absolutely fine. Um, but if you're producing an MP4 download that gets downloaded onto your audience's devices, I think probably 4K or even 1080p is a bit too big. And I will probably have a look at something which is 720p. Um, transcoding your AAC audio down to 128 rather than whatever the default will be, probably 320k. All of that kind of stuff is probably important. Um, but you know, 3.1 gig uh it's just a bit rude, isn't it? Just to sort of drop onto this machine.

Red Seat Ventures adds another show

Sam Sethi 54:14

Just to throw it in there as a CEO of TriFans, we've streamed the MP4s, we don't download it, and we do 720 um 120k uh audio stereo. And uh yeah, I mean I I think you know if someone's downloading D onto my phone, I'm not gonna be worried about um just a little story you haven't got to tell you. I'll just talk it's an hour of direct. I just want to do uh two things we've been talking about. We interviewed uh supercast the uh um recently. Yeah, yeah. Um we we talked last week about um buying uh company multi-party with a live company company called. It's interesting. We're gonna have every version using Supercast, they're gonna have Video and Toby, which is also one of their platforms. Um and um I just feel that this is the uh story being pulled together now. So it's an error of direction, I just think we just need to watch. Red Seat Ventures pulling a client and a hosting company and now pulling in content as well.

Round the world

James Cridland 55:25

Yeah, they are doing something very interesting. Uh, and you know, they've clearly got a wide range of products that they wish to help monetize. So the fact that the press release mentioned Supercast directly, the fact that they have mentioned, you know, additional shows and all of that um is really interesting. That that's most definitely um, you know, um uh a way uh forward and and and a line there. And I think it's interesting seeing that alongside uh the new Heights podcast, which um, of course, as you know, is um is a sports ball podcast uh with the Kelsey brothers. They are doing a live show in LA, for example, in the opening week of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. That's proper sport. Um, so that's gonna be um uh interesting, but I think that shows again that um you know Amazon, they are there doing live shows, they're there with their uh fancy website uh selling new heights, branded, you know, coffee mugs or whatever it might be. Um and so there are a lot of people doing as much monetization as they possibly can from the IP that they own. And that's um really coming out with these two uh announcements, I think.

Sam Sethi 56:38

Let's whiz around the world. Let's go off to Africa first and Nigeria. There's 233 million people living in Nigeria, so podcasting could be a massive opportunity in the country. What's this one about?

James Cridland 56:51

Yeah, so this is um uh somebody who we've had on the show, Tony Doe, um uh Tony Ong Shekwa, who has written for Pod News about um Nigerian podcasts. 88% of them are in English, but almost a third have either podfaded or are on pause. It's a really good uh article. It's part um of um the bit of Pod News where we look at other uh podcast uh marketplaces, and uh it is a fascinating article. I would heartily recommend it. Uh you'll find that at podnews.net slash articles. Talking about um other places in the world, um Ivox. I thought it was pronounced ivox, it turns out Ivox. Um, and how do I know this? Because I've seen the TV ad for them.

Announcer 57:38

Nada de ovox, el mayor catálogo de podcasts in espanhol.

James Cridland 57:42

Uh so Ivox is a Spanish language podcast app. They have produced a uh rather lovely TV ad, um, which is running across Spain on the uh TV. I added English language captions to that um and uh chucked it up on uh the website complete with coloured uh captions. I thought I I was doing very well there.

Sam Sethi 58:02

Very nice.

James Cridland 58:03

I would like to say, can you see what Ivox is doing? They've just done a TV ad for a podcast app. Apple. Can you see what they're doing there? They're trying to grow the business by doing a TV ad for a podcast app, Apple. Would you like to do that being the richest company in the world? TV ad for a podcast app. Thanks very much.

Announcer 58:23

Ivox, nondevible podcast.

Sam Sethi 58:25

I'll take a bet with you now, James, that we there will be no mention in WWDC about podcasting.

James Cridland 58:32

Well, that'll that that there's a bet. When's WWDC? Geez. Oh, I won't uh I won't be seeing you quickly after that, will I? No, that's a show. Uh yes, well, yes, who knows? Who knows? Anyway, a TV ad for a podcast app. Who'd have thought it?

Sam Sethi 58:50

You could store it.

James Cridland 58:51

Who'd have thought it? Also, uh, you know, I mean, Apple run, you know, Apple TV. Um, uh, they don't do ads on Apple TV, do they? Amazon do ads on uh Amazon Prime Video, and Amazon also have Amazon Music, which is a very capable uh podcast app that not very many people know about. Uh, we watch stuff on Amazon Prime Video. Uh, we were watching The Night Manager. Um, it's got some ads in there. Why not an ad for the Apple Music um uh app um that talks about podcasts?

Sam Sethi 59:22

You know, on Amazon.

James Cridland 59:23

I don't think they'll let that through on Amazon, you know, the Amazon Music app on Amazon that will be free for everyone. Why not? Um takes takes notes for meeting in a couple of weeks' time. Uh so there we are. Uh so that's going on in uh Spain. Um uh more Americans than ever are listening to podcasts. This is new research from SP Global. Not quite sure why they've bothered, but anyway, usage by the population is up 10% year on year according to the data. Apparently, it's because of the rising popularity of video, uh, which is uh nice. There's also more um uh data coming out in the next uh couple of months, um, more globally as well, which I'm looking forward to covering uh here on this very uh podcast. Um, and um there's a company called First Story, which is one of those uh companies that are supporting Apple Podcast Video. I mentioned to you um when they were announced that I had no idea who they were. Um it turns out that uh they are a hosting platform in the in a hosting platform in Asia Pacific, which I frankly should have known about. Um so there we are, but they are going to be um the first to support Apple Podcast Video in this part of the world, which is uh nice. Um, and uh again this is a coming soon thing, but uh hopefully we will see that uh soon. Talking about coming soon, uh Captivate say that they will be rolling out Apple Podcast video from next week, uh which is exciting, isn't it? Uh talking about the UK, uh Bauer Media Audio have done some uh research which they've not shared, but they've shared a press release, uh, which is always nice. Um basically it says that um there are tons of people who really like audio across Europe. Forty-seven percent of advertisers intend to increase their podcast investment. 82% say that podcasts reach highly engaged audiences. Uh Bow Media, in case you've not heard of them, they own a bunch of uh radio companies and podcast companies in uh many European countries, including Poland and uh Norway, uh the UK, Ireland, uh, Portugal, and many other places. So they're a pretty big deal uh really. Uh congratulations to Stephen Barlett, um, Diary of a CEO hitting 16 million subscribers on YouTube. Um uh this month they had 90 million downloads and views, which is a new record. They've added 600,000 new subscribers to the uh show. Would be nice, wouldn't it? Um, if there were subscriber numbers for podcasting as well. But of course, RSS means that we can't do that, which is a bit of a shame, isn't it? Um yeah, yes, but still, but there we are. Uh and uh Goalhanger, many congratulations to them. They've been named Audio and Podcast Winner at the Campaign UK Media Company of the Year Awards 2026. Uh, so congratulations uh uh to them uh for that. Remember when they used to talk to us?

Sam Sethi 1:02:24

Oh um, yeah, when when they were a scrappy up and coming up. Oh, when they were smaller, they used to talk to us. Yeah, when we're not at the bottom of the pile, yeah. There we go.

James Cridland 1:02:36

And then finally, um uh the BBC, this is brilliant, and you should go and watch this, uh, especially for fans of Adam Curry. I know there are some out there. Um, but the BBC have just reposted an archive TV clip. It's from a TV show uh called The Culture Show uh in November 2004. We've added it if you want to uh see it, podnews.net slash articles. Uh, you'll find the history section in there. And the history of podcasts in the UK page now has this. It's brilliant. Um, it's um about probably two months after podcasting was invented. It contains an in an interview with Adam Curry, who brilliantly and for no reason at all, arrives in a helicopter and then welcomes the BBC journalists with Welcome to Curry Castle.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:28

I've come to Belgium to meet Webb Millionaire and podcasting daddy Adam Curry.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:33

How are you? Very well, thank you. Welcome to Curry Castle. Thank you.

James Cridland 1:03:36

And then walks in and um and sits in this ostentatious room and pretends to do his show uh by shouting at his MacBook. He's clearly not doing a show, but he pretends to do his show. It's just brilliant. Um so you should definitely watch that. There is also a man with yellow teeth who is worried about people skipping the ads. Um so some things never change. But um, it's a brilliant video. Uh, you should hardly watch that. Uh hidden away in our history of podcasts in the UK page.

Sam Sethi 1:04:07

They say never meet your heroes, but I do hope to meet Adam Curry one day. Um Adam, come to the London podcast show. You've still got time to book a flight.

James Cridland 1:04:14

Have you not met, really? Oh, you must have, yeah, you weren't at the two uh yes, you weren't at the two podcast movements. Well, you know, somebody will somebody will have to um lure him over. Um but yeah, it's not it's not far away from um uh wherever Curry Castle was. Uh so you should because Curry Castle was in uh in Flanders, uh uh it said. So that can't be right. It can't be Flanders, that's Belgium. Adam wouldn't have lived in Belgium, would he?

Sam Sethi 1:04:46

No, he he was a Dutch boy.

James Cridland 1:04:48

Yeah, exactly. I keep on uh whenever I mention Adam Curry on this show, um uh my um my uh there's an inner voice in my head, and it's the very considered wise voice of Stephen Goldstein from Amplify Media saying, I really like your show, James, but I wish you'd stop talking about Adam Curry. Okay. Um moving on then. And in terms of events, there's Netflix is a joke fest, which is running at the beginning of May in Los Angeles. If you want to work out uh in terms of live podcast recordings, what's going on there? Great Pods has just published a full list, which is really good and well worth recommended. Uh, and uh the podcast show 2026, of course, which is um in May, May the 20th to the 21st in uh the UK. And um, I will be there, Sam will be there. Um, all manner of exciting people will be there. Now, if you are a power supporter, uh please drop us an email, weekly at podnews.net, we will tell you where the drinks are, and that's for power supporters. Uh, if you are a power supporter, uh Rachel Corbett's already coming, um, then um weekly at podnews.net is our email address. And we will tell you exactly where our drinks are. You'll be more than welcome. It's on Tuesday afternoon at a secret location somewhere in central London. And that's all that we'll say. Yes. Very easy.

Sam Sethi 1:06:13

Yes, keep it easy to guess. But it is sponsored by our sponsor, Buzzprout.

James Cridland 1:06:18

Oh, yes. And we should uh thank them for uh that. And um I I did enjoy uh managing to get uh start podcasting, keep podcasting into a story yesterday as well. So I I I I thought that was very good. Uh so many so many thanks to uh Buzz Sprout uh for that.

Sam Sethi 1:06:38

And we've also got a sponsor for our our live show as well.

James Cridland 1:06:42

Oh yes, go on then, tell tell us that.

Sam Sethi 1:06:44

Have they said yes? Yes, Flight Path are going to be bringing beers to our live show. So yes, looking forward to doing that as well. So those people coming along to the live version of this show at the London Podcast Show, there will be beers as you walk in. And yes, excellent, excellent.

James Cridland 1:07:02

Um, we are in uh a room which is not very big as ever. Um, so uh be there uh nice and early, otherwise you're not getting in. Um so uh there you go.

Sam Sethi 1:07:12

And you're gonna get one beer to share, so don't spend it all at once. No, I'm joking.

The Tech Stuff

James Cridland 1:07:16

Yes, and thank you to Flight Power, thank you to Sean Howard uh and the rest of the team there. That's uh really cool.

Announcer 1:07:23

The Tuck stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:07:27

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology. What have you got for us, Sam, this week?

Sam Sethi 1:07:34

Well, James, you've been a bit sort of geeky and very cool this week. You put a little report in Pod News Daily about something called agents.md. I was like, I'd never heard of this. I was like, wow, what's James up to? So what is agents.md and what does it do for you?

James Cridland 1:07:47

Yes, well, agents.md um is a file that you put in your you know, GitHub repository or something, and uh it tells AI agents looking at the code how it all works and stuff like that. And I just thought to myself, well, I wonder if people are looking for that. I wonder if agents are looking for that on websites. And it turns out that agents are, but agents are also looking for a file called llms.txt. Um, so lms.txt, if you visit that podnews.net slash llms.text, then you will see a piece of markdown um which is uh instructions for an AI agent to go and have a look around the podnews website. What you can do, what you can't do, please could you do this, please could you not do that. Um, and I thought what a waste of time this is going to be, but you know, I thought it was worthwhile giving it a go. Anyway, it turns out that um there have been agents already looking for LNMs.txt on the website. Um, and of course there wasn't anything there, um, but um they were still having a look just in case. So now there is something there basically saying don't use our directory uh and all that kind of stuff. Um, so that's gonna be really good. Um so I'm just curious to see whether or not it um has any effect on um what uh the uh AI agents are going to do when they're um hammering our website, as they have a tendency of doing.

Sam Sethi 1:09:16

I assume this is very similar to robots.txt, which Google used to use or look out for when they were doing scraping of websites and SEO.

James Cridland 1:09:25

Yeah, exactly. And um Google still uses that, and um lots of other people use that. I mean, frankly, agents also ought to be using that, but they're not. Um but uh yeah, so um so it's kind of a similar thing, but it just basically explains to an agent um what they should be doing. Um, but you know, I mean it's been really interesting uh sort of diving into this because I have been working quite hard on working out well why why all of a sudden am I being charged um an additional seven uh dollars a day for some of the content that I have. I don't really understand why that is. Um, and then digging into some of the uh stats, it turns out that Amazon has now put a new uh report onto um the Amazon website, which shows you which bots are using your website and which of those are AI and which of those are just SEO or search engines and stuff like that. So, for example, for the Pod News uh website, um I can tell you over the last uh couple of weeks that um uh I mean basically 30%, a third of all of our traffic is AI bots, a third of it. And when you then have a look at uh our images server, which is a different um uh server, um then um uh you know again you're seeing a large amount, 31 um uh 31 out of 56, which is what 50% or so, um, is all um AI uh traffic. So um there's a lot of AI stuff out there that's really hammering our site, and I know hammering the podcast indexes site and various other sites as well. Um, so quite interesting to end up seeing that.

Sam Sethi 1:11:18

Yeah, I'm glad we built an AI bot blocker for our hosted service so people who can see all the streaming AI bots and then they can go, yep, don't want you, don't want you, don't want you. And we put a little um description of what they are. So, you know, just in case somebody presses the wrong one, they can always unpress it. But you know, again, I I was shocked, genuinely shocked, when we looked at the statistics of all the data coming through of how many bots were scraping. The numbers were enormous. Now talking about AI and platforms, uh, Spotify says it's integrated with Claw to deliver personalized audio discovery. So the idea is that you can uh ask for podcast suggestions for a commute. Uh you can use this if you're both free or premium on the platform, uh, and they've integrated it to include Spotify Connect functionality. So I don't know if anyone's gonna use Claude to do this, but it's very similar to what they did with playlists and prompts, I suppose. Um any thoughts for you, James, on this?

James Cridland 1:12:23

Yeah, I mean, you know, I I'm sure that a few people are going to do that, but really at the end of the day, just go to Spotify and use and use that service. They've got enough AI stuff anyway. Um, I mean, I think I think the interesting thing is seeing uh so this is if I understand this correctly, this is an MCP. So this is something that you actually connect uh Claude or your AI bot to. Um and um uh the thing that I have found very interesting uh is that uh Fastmail and another email service just this week have also announced MCPs that allow your AI bot to do certain things with your email, but not other things with your email. And that is very interesting to me to actually give an AI agent access to my email to work out what to do with that. Um, it might not be able to reply, it might not be able to delete anything, um, but it might be able to categorize them or you know, edit them or however it works. So I find that fascinating, and you know, clearly, you know, if Spotify want to end up doing that. Um, there was a um uh a podcast hosting company, it's Beehive. Um, they have just um uh launched an MCP as well. So Beehive you can plug into Chat GPT and you can start asking, you know, things like that as well. So um yeah, there's a there's a bunch of that going on.

Sam Sethi 1:13:49

Fountain of Launch 1.5. Uh they've updated the trending feed, they've now got uh an improved offline mode, and this was the one that I thought was interesting. They've got one tap zaps, zaps are like likes or hearts. Um, you can send your default amount, which um you know could be 10 sats, or you can press and hold to customize it and add a message, but isn't that a boost? And so I'm like confused, but anyway, it's a zap that you can hold and send a message with the zap now for some reason.

James Cridland 1:14:21

Excellent. Well, uh I'm sure that all of that makes sense. Um uh Fountain is doing some really interesting things um with their app. It is worthwhile taking a peek at, even if I I'm not entirely sure that I understand it so um anymore. Um, but uh yeah, um uh well worth uh taking a peek at. You uh were in London uh at the Fountain music event, were you not?

Sam Sethi 1:14:44

Yes, it was a discussion panel about um how you can get music using RSS. So where Wavelake seems to have sort of faded away, I think Fountain now is you know trying to lead the charge. They've got a$1 hosting fee for music artists, and obviously Dovi Das from when he was with RSS Blue did a lot of work on HLS and streaming and live. So I think they're putting a lot of effort into that space uh and good on them for doing that. So yeah, it was an interesting event, and then after it was a concert as well of independent music artists, so nice job.

James Cridland 1:15:19

Excellent. I won't ask you what it was like because you haven't been yet, but uh that's very cool. Um, podcast hosting company Castos has added pre-roll and post-role audio capabilities in a new feature that they have dubbed Castos campaigns. Of course, you can get that from our sponsor, Buzz Sprout, as well. And um, Patreon is doing some uh entertaining things um uh in their app, which um given that um Patreon, uh frankly, Patreon is the thing that keeps the Pod News newsletter going. Without uh the Patreon supporters, that uh I wouldn't be able to do um the pod news newsletter. Even then, I do not have the Patreon app on my phone because why would I need it? Um but this is a new tool for the Patreon app. Um, it's ways that you can um get little messages out and uh good for discovery, apparently, good for um all kinds of things. There's a short form posting tool called Quips. Um, there's a redesigned home feed, collaboration posts as well, and uh the idea is that you reach shared audiences with other creators as well. It's a very cool looking. Um, Jack Conti, um, who's the CEO of Patreon, sent me a very excited email where he sounded very, very, very, very excited, and then I realized that he was sending it to everybody else as well. Um, but it was Oh, you weren't special. I know it wasn't special. I like your band, Jack. Um, but uh yes, but anyway, um, so yeah, um uh you know, I mean, Patreon is massive for podcasting. I think that Quips is probably going to be a great place for podcast clips and for sharing that sort of thing, particularly for some of those shows that do an awful lot of Patreon money, things like fiction podcasting and that sort of thing. Um, so worthwhile keeping an eye on. Um, and I suppose I ought to install the Patreon app at some point. Right, there's a uh one final story about uh tech stuff. Uh it's all about stable coin. Sam, your be quick, your your task, if you can achieve it, uh, is to make this interesting to me. Go.

Sam Sethi 1:17:37

Right. So uh stable coins are basically a way for cryptocurrencies to be attached to a fiat currency, and so you can then have it on your visa or MasterCard or wherever. Stripe are very big into this, and uh there's a lot of money moving around. Already they reached a 7 billion annualised run rate, which is up 50%. I believe that this is the way that micropayments and podcasting will go. I don't believe the Bitcoin methodology that we've tried to do for two or three years, which hasn't really gone beyond the geek, uh, is the way forward. I think once a big company does something with stable coins and you just get it with your bank account and you get it on your credit card or MasterCard. Um So what's wrong with the British pound or the US dollar? Because of the amount of money that gets taken by gateways and also the Who charges that? Well, it's it's PayPal, um, it is the banks themselves, but it's Visa. Well, it's also to do with the interbank payments that they have to do through Swift, which they're trying to get around. It's those payments, so that means they have to charge extra money to us the people transferring monies around. So I think they're trying to look for a different way. What I found interesting though is uh Meta um obviously have uh opened this up in Colombia and the Philippines um and they're using Stripe. Uh we saw YouTube recently paying creators as well via PayPal. I don't um I I have reached a point where uh I spoke to people this week around TrueFans and we were talking about micropayments, and it was just talking Swahili to them. They just don't get it. It's not it's not connecting. Um we've tried this for for so long. The the the mess that we made with Keysend and Alan address. Um we'll talk about it when we talk about you know um comments coming back. You know, the format looks wrong from true fans. It's uh it's I'm just exhausted by doing it. I'm doing it because you know that's what we in the industry want to do, but I don't believe in it anymore. I think I've reached the point where I think uh the Bitcoin micropayment model isn't the way forward, and I think stable coins will be because bigger companies will use it, it'll then get mass adoption, and then we will have uh people say, Oh, I understand it now. I just don't think we've got the method and the message correctly across.

James Cridland 1:20:06

Yeah, I'm not I'm not even sure that you using uh you know talking about stablecoin or anything else is is gonna is gonna help particularly given that actually you know a stable coin, I mean the point of it is it's a it's a US dollar, right? Or it's a British pound. It's attached to it, yeah. It tracks it, it's a tracking currency. Yeah. So and and you can change it anytime you like to a British pound or to a a US dollar, right? So so therefore uh the the there's no uh there's no benefit to talk to anybody about stablecoin shortly, because it it's just the same as a British pound, uh isn't it?

Sam Sethi 1:20:44

It's it's the fundamental movement of money. So if you wanted to if you for example, we we are very fortunate to get BuzzBrout pay us, you get it paid to you, you transfer it to me, we do it through WISE. It's it's three days before that's done, right? It's all sort of sort of inter-bank money transfers. Thanks forever in a day. And this is a way that it should be real time and instant. And I think that uh plus the fact that you can then do micropayments with it as well, um, pennies and pounds um or cents and dollars, I think is the way forward. And and the fact that it will come from your your visa or master card or your bank account, I think, again will add that level of I don't know, um I I guess um brand awareness, you know. Yes, it's my bank giving this to me, not not, you know, a I don't know, Moonpay or a you know, somebody else they've never heard of.

James Cridland 1:21:36

Um, I can certainly see that, but you know, so I mean it yeah, I I I think the proof will be what happens with Visa, are they still going to be charging you, you know, um uh uh three three percent plus five uh plus fifty cents to um make a payment? Or you know what what's Visa gonna be doing about that? And I still don't see any any um evidence that Visa is going to go, oh, you can do all of this for free, and we're we're not gonna take a penny. Um I'm I'm sure that they are gonna take a penny.

Sam Sethi 1:22:08

There will be payments. I mean yeah, stripe take it, stripe take three percent still, um, and I think that's where it will be. But um I I'm still I'm still in that phase of I'm not sure which is the right direction, and and I don't think anyone is, and I think it's still early days, so uh I I'm watching Stripe and I'm watching stablecoin because I think I think that will be the way forward.

The inbox

James Cridland 1:22:34

Yeah, I I find the whole thing fascinating and also uh very confusing. I wish it was less so.

Announcer 1:22:41

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

James Cridland 1:22:55

Yes, it's our favorite time of the week. Uh, so many different ways to get in touch with us. Fan mail by using the link in our show notes, boosts, or email. Uh, we share any money that we make uh as well. If you are a power supporter weekly at podnews.net is where to send us an email and we will tell you where our drinks are at the London Podcast Show, and that will be excellent. Um, we got some fan mail, didn't we, uh Sam? The first one from a 35-year-old in Idaho. I don't believe she's 35. I think she's much younger than that. So uh a 35-year-old from Idaho sends uh sends us a message. I appreciate that you both understand how strange and humorous it is to be referred to as a 35-year-old podcast listener from Idaho in the Wall Street Journal. No mention of my podcasting expertise or that I work for Buzz Sprout. Oh well. The only thing that matters to me is James agrees with me. I'll take that uh as a win. Uh that's Jordan from Buzz Sprout, of course. Um, you should listen to the BuzzCast podcast this week, where Jordan actually explains how she ended up in the Wall Street Journal, uh, which is uh very cool. So uh yes, that was a very cool thing to end up seeing.

Sam Sethi 1:24:02

We also got one from Dave from Canada, James, but we got it as a voicemail.

SPEAKER_08 1:24:07

Hey James and Sam. This is Dave from Canada, podcaster who loves listening to pod news and everything that you guys do. Thank you, thank you for talking about more than America. We need that, we need that in podcasting. Thanks guys. I have a question about Apple HLS. Uh the whole thing about Android. I don't hear a lot of Android conversations around HLS and what it's gonna be for Android users looking over the wall into Apple. What's it gonna be like for us who don't have Apple devices? Is there anything for us with all these announcements? I don't hear anybody talking about this. I want to participate, I want to be able to enjoy this without having to come to the dark side or Apple. Uh so love to hear, guys. Thanks for everything you do. Let's keep podcasting, everybody. Take care.

James Cridland 1:24:59

Dave, thank you uh so much for that. What a great question, as well, Sam. Yes, do you know what the answer is? No, I don't. Uh Apple Podcasts uh you can install on Android phones. You can. You can uh you go to podcasts.apple.com and you then uh save it uh using Chrome to your home screen. That then makes it look like an app. And the amazing thing is you can log in and you can watch video on your Android phone. Uh so uh yeah, it will work that way. Apple probably aren't going to launch an app, uh, has to be said for podcasts. Um, so I wouldn't imagine that that is going to happen, but you can install it as a web app, it does work that way, so you can watch um video on um on uh Apple podcasts in that way on an Android phone. Um, the other hope is that most people also put an alternate enclosure uh in, which would mean that other podcast apps could also deal with this video. Um that may or may not happen. Uh who knows, but um uh worthwhile at least uh having a think about. But uh yeah, great question, uh Dave. But um try just visiting the Apple Podcasts website on your Android phone and then saving it to your home screen, uh, and that should probably do the job for you. Super comments, James. Have we had any? We have, we've had um uh plenty of uh super comments. Uh I should say we have had loads of SAT. So this week uh we have had whatever um two times twenty thousand nine hundred and two is. Wow. What's that? 40,800, uh 41,800. What did I just say five minutes ago? This thing doesn't work. Um yes, yes, I know, exactly, exactly. Um so that's up uh nearly 300% uh week on week. So thank you all uh for doing that. 7, um 700 is from uh streaming uh as well. And that figure, by the way, includes um the Pod News Daily uh podcast uh as well. Um but uh yes, um the ugly quacking duck, uh it's Bruce, uh sending us uh a row of ducks, 2,222 sats using podcast guru. He says it's a strange world we live in. We complain about things taking over and use those same things to make life easier. We are fickle beings. I think he's talking about AI there. Uh maybe we like walking a tightrope too much. Have a good week. Thanks, 7-3. Yes, I think uh absolutely uh correct. And then a ton of messages. Um, so uh Seth Goldstein, the Lizzie Hale interview sounded a bit scripted, which you guys didn't script it so much. Whoa way, dare a second Goldstein. We didn't script anything. Lizzie Hale scripted everything. Um, that was the only way of hearing from her. We're very grateful that she uh answered a ton of questions. Which you'll see in Monday's um pod news, last Monday's um pod news uh newsletter. I think you'll find the Spotify lawyer scripted at all, actually. And she wrote everything uh and uh she very kindly uh read some of the answers out to us. But yes, we were uh totally up front um that that was going on uh in last week's uh show. So I've asked her a ton of questions to her via email, uh Sam, but she's very kindly recorded some of her answers for us too. I think it's better to hear from people that um for whatever reason don't want to do um an interview live. Um I'm absolutely cool with that, uh, as long as everybody is up front and uh we were certainly up front uh on that. Uh but Seth, understood. Um, and uh yes, some of it was a little bit wooden, but you kind of expect that. So Neil Vellio um uh sends us Dan Meisner does not look like he sounds correct, super smart man, and one person I look forward to seeing speaking at the podcast show in London when his talks don't clash with mine, that is, like last year. No danger of that this year, as I've been clearly I've been snubbed this year. No, Neil, it's just that you have to be very special to speak uh at uh at uh every single year since it started. Um uh Neil, I'm looking forward to seeing you um in uh London. Um uh and yes, Dan Meisner is a very bright uh and very clever uh thing. Um, any idea what Shelley Hopkinson is uh talking about, Sam? No.

Sam Sethi 1:29:33

I don't know if that's true, fans. I don't know about what else. I mean, she says the app's very difficult to use. It's spam with stock episodes in the feed, needs to have a reboot glitches. Well, I have no idea. I will Shelley. Would have been helpful. She could have been talking about Spotify, she could have been talking about Apple Podcasts, she could have been. Who knows?

Sam and James' week

James Cridland 1:29:50

Who knows what she's talking about? No idea. David John Clark um uh sends us um a message saying, I'm with Jordan too. There you go, Jordan. There's more there's there's more than just me. Uh in relation to podcasts referring to images that the listeners obviously can't see. At the very least, podcasters should utilize the chapter art feature and place the images there. At least listeners can see them later, or open the app to see, or better yet, most car screens display chapter art now, so you'd see the image while driving. Uh, you absolutely can. Um, you're absolutely right in uh saying that. So, David John Clark, uh thank you uh so much. Uh Seth Goldstein also sent us two more messages. The Ambis need to branch out. That's what we're doing with the MPN Awards, trying to be more than just North America. The MPN Awards, what does that stand for? Uh, these are the Marketing Podcast Network uh awards. Uh so uh yes, so and there are uh shows nominated so far, and all of that's very exciting. Uminations close on April the 30th, so they've just closed. Um, and the awards will be uh notified on May the 31st. Uh thank you, Seth. He also says, just for the fing fun of it, here's another few fs. Laughing out loud. Uh cheers, Seth. Uh thank you for that. Takes a long time to uh bleep out uh the word fk, but uh thank you very much. I've now got to do it all over again. Uh so uh great. And thank you to our uh 24 power supporters. Um uh there's beer waiting for you in London if you're going to be in London. Uh Brian Ensminger, uh David John Clark, who we've just heard from, James Burt, uh Neil Vellio, who we just heard from, Seth Goldstein, who we've just heard from. Hello, I think there's a I think there's uh something going on here. Um also Ms. Eileen Smith and uh John McDermott. Uh he's coming to London uh as well. So uh that's all very excellent. Uh you can join them uh if you could. That would be excellent. Um weekly.podnews.net uh is where to uh help us there. So um what's happened for you then, Sam?

Sam Sethi 1:31:54

Um not too much, but we're experimenting with a new full screen video playback option. So the idea is that we detect now when there's video in the alternative enclosure and we show a little video icon or in the primary enclosure. But now also um on the desktop um when we see there's video, we give you the option on your user setting to say go full screen so you can get a uh a full removed Chrome age um video, and then if you slide um the option to the side, you get to see the show notes and follow along with the transcript, you can leave a comment. So yeah, we're playing with that. It's a nice little video screen. But uh very much like um David John Clark said, um you can also go full screen for audio and see the chapter art as it goes by. So, you know, again, if people start to put more interesting graphics into their chapter art, you've now got a full screen in which to show that off in. So maybe someone's got a chart with a pie chart or something on it, or um you can see it in full screen rather than a postage stamp. So, yeah, something we're playing with. That's very cool. Very cool. James, so what's happened for you?

James Cridland 1:33:03

Well, uh I have uh essentially had uh lots of Australian tradies um uh doing things to my house. Um uh they are replacing the roof that was damaged with the hail. I do not understand Australian tradespeople. Um uh we had some people turning up at six o'clock in the morning, six o'clock in the morning, to uh put a skip uh somewhere. Uh so that was nice. And then um uh the other day uh we had somebody turning up at 20 to 6 in the evening. It was dark, and they were saying, Oh, we're here to remove your solar panels in the dark, on the roof. Um, anyway, as I was thinking about it, I thought, actually, if you're gonna remove solar panels, probably removing them in the dark makes sense. I didn't I didn't think about that before, but I suppose. I suppose that's probably a little bit safer. Um, but yes, Australian tradespeople work out when you're gonna work, for heaven's sake.

Sam Sethi 1:33:58

It's a bit too hot during the day, though.

James Cridland 1:34:00

Very bizarre, very bizarre. Not now, it's winter. Uh, but yes, but that's very bizarre. Um, and that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories taken from the Pod News Daily Newsletter at Podnews.net.

Sam Sethi 1:34:10

Uh, you can support this show by streaming Sats. You can give us feedback using the Buzz Sprout thumbnail link in our show notes. You can send us boosts or you become Power Supporter like the 24 Power Supporters at weekly.podnews.net.

James Cridland 1:34:22

Yes, our music's from TM Studios, our voiceover Sheila D. Our audio is recorded using Clean Feed. We edit using Hindenburg, and we're hosted and sponsored by the excellent folk at Buzz Sprout, including a 35-year-old from Idaho. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Announcer 1:34:38

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.