Jordan Blair 0:00

I just upload one file to Buzzsprout and it distributes to all the podcast directories, regardless of if they are video or audio, which is great.

James Cridland 0:08

Jordan Blair from Buzz Sprout on the company's enhanced video service plus.

Morgan Absher 0:13

The first place you look is the charts, and you're like, there wasn't many women at the top.

James Cridland 0:17

Morgan Absher Spotify's first equal podcast ambassador on elevating women podcasters.

Announcer 0:24

With James Cridland and Sam Sethi. This is the Pod news Weekly Review with BuzzSprout BuzzSprout. Start podcasting, keep keep keep podcasting.

Sam Sethi 0:36

James,

Spotify's first EQUAL podcast ambassaor

Sam Sethi 0:37

so obviously the big story this week is Spotify. Yes. Not the one that everyone's expecting, first of all, of course, but let's start with Spotify, the new Equal Programs Podcast Ambuster. What's the Equal Program, James?

James Cridland 0:51

Yes, I'm glad you are. So this is the big Spotify story, obviously. No. But it is a good thing that Spotify does, and it deserves to be first. It's an extension of Spotify's Equal program, which has run since 2021 for music. It focuses on aiming for more equality for women creators. And for the first time, the company has extended this out to podcasting, with the first ever Equal Podcast Ambassador.

Interview: Morgan Absher

Speaker 7 1:18

My name is Morgan Absher, and I'm a full-time podcaster these days. I host the crazy show based on Reddit stories called Two Hot Takes.

James Cridland 1:27

Yeah, so tell us about that. It's a big show. It's been in the Edison Research Top 50. Uh, what's the show about?

Speaker 7 1:33

So I like to describe it as a modern day Dear Abbey, a modern day, you know, relationship advice column. We're pulling stories from the internet. And now, since we've grown so much, our own subreddit and essentially just reacting to people's crazy life problems, giving them advice and just really creating a sense of community and village for people to deal with their problems and kind of come together and crowdsource solutions and advice.

James Cridland 2:01

And so how did you get into uh the podcast? What made you start doing that show?

Speaker 7 2:07

It was a total accident. Um, biggest random blessing of my life. I actually moved from Minnesota to Los Angeles for grad school. Graduated April 2020 with a doctorate in occupational therapy, but pandemic was hitting, and so I couldn't get a job in healthcare. I I applied to hundreds of places.

Speaker 1 2:27

You would have thought that's the one place where you should have been able to get a job.

Speaker 7 2:30

I know. You would have thought it would have been easy. They would have been like begging for me, but no, I think it was all hands on deck and unable to bring on new hires. So my boyfriend at the time, now husband, and I was on Reddit constantly. I'm like, I got nothing else going on. I'm gonna be on Reddit. And I was like, what about a podcast? Like I can't I can't keep sending these to my friends every day. They have jobs, they're working. So he bought me all of the equipment, taught me how to edit, and I just kind of hit the ground running. And it blew up overnight.

James Cridland 3:02

Very cool. You you've been doing video for a long, a long while on both Spotify and on YouTube. How has video been for you?

Speaker 7 3:09

Yeah. Video is everything for me. I started video day one. So back in February 2021, the very first episode always had video. Right. And it's really been, I think, the sole reason I've grown as quick and as big as I have. I think, you know, people, especially reaction type content, they want to see the people, they want to see the faces, the jaws dropped. So I think video adds just such a another big component and also makes you feel more real and that sense of community too, if you can see the person and really feel like you're connecting with them.

James Cridland 3:42

I've done one video show so far. Uh that's been it so far.

Speaker 7 3:46

What do you think? What do you think of it?

James Cridland 3:48

I'm still plucking up the uh courage. Uh after uh after doing radio for 30 years, this this whole idea of a TV, uh, I don't know. Um you you're also with Pave Studios, you're doing a true crime show called Clues, uh, and you won a Webby for that. Did you pick up the award yourself?

Speaker 7 4:05

I did. I have it now.

James Cridland 4:07

Um What what was your five-word speech? Can you remember?

Speaker 7 4:10

I was basically just thanking the listeners. We we did it thanks to you, something like that. But I mean, yeah, both shows, especially I think two at takes like it wouldn't exist without the listeners. So I'm always just very thankful.

James Cridland 4:26

Yeah, yeah. So Spotify's extending its equal program uh until now that has supported women in music. It's now also supporting women in podcasting, and you are the first equal podcast ambassador. Why is that important to you, Morgan?

Speaker 7 4:43

I mean, it's huge. I it just still feels surreal. I don't really have all the words to kind of encompass how I'm feeling. But, you know, when I started podcasting, the first place you look is the charts, and you're like, how do I do it? How do I do it as well as the top? And the best is doing it. And there weren't very many. I think, you know, Crime Junkie and Ashley Flowers was really my blueprint, but beyond that, there there wasn't many women at the top. And so to start having more inclusion and a way to amplify, you know, women-led podcasts, I think it just really helps. And even if you look at the top, you know, 100 today, there was that um Annenberg study or report that came out. And even still the top 100 are mostly men, even though, you know, listenership and everything is women are really starting to like be up there and listening to more episodes every week. So I think a program like this really just helps kind of get us on some even playing field and makes that, you know, the success stories a lot easier to come by. And I hope to hear more of them.

James Cridland 5:51

What what should the industry be doing better, do you think, for women's equity?

Speaker 7 5:55

You know, I think Spotify actually does a great job of this, but there needs to be more events and community-building things. I think, you know, early on in my career it was it was really hard to get guests, you know, especially guests that were at a higher level than me and could help cross-pollinate and promo the show. And Spotify puts on a lot of good events of like something as small as just a social meetup for people that are podcasting, or you know, they have Jordan Newman come in. He's like, here's your show art and your cover art, and here's how you hack the system and make it so your art speaks and helps grow your show. So I think more partners need to do that and like these these courses of how can you be the best? Because there's still not a lot of transparency out there, you know, that speaks to this is what I did, exactly how I did, and here's how you replicate it.

James Cridland 6:46

Jordan is very good. Um, who do you look up to in terms of um podcasting?

Speaker 7 6:51

I would say Ashley Flowers is a big one. I really love NPR Life Kit, which kind of has a variety of hosts, but I feel like more of the the journalistic style and like the storytelling of it, I really love. Um, I love relationships with Cammy Crawford. We've got Hannah Berner, Giggly Squad. My co-host on Clues, Kaylin Moore. She is absolutely remarkable. I I genuinely think, you know, she's probably up there with me on how hard we're working. She has such a drive and an ability to research well and tell these unique stories. So she is someone I really kind of look to as well.

James Cridland 7:32

You mentioned that um the top, certainly the top 10, the top 15, the top 20 seems to be mostly blokes. Um why do you think that is? Because we know that women listen to podcasts just as much as men do, if not more. So why do you think that the men have risen to the top of the charts?

Speaker 7 7:51

It might be a little bit of a hot take, but confidence. I think as a woman, I really doubted myself. I doubted my ability to be able to do this. And am I good enough to do a show? Who's gonna listen? And I think there's a a lot more imposter syndrome. Because otherwise, I don't know. I think you know, a lot of people now are like podcasting's oversaturated. And I think that's so opposite. I think now more than ever is the time for women to start podcasts and climb our way up there because there's there's just a demand for it, clearly, based on you know, all the listening stats we've been seeing. But yeah, I think, you know, radio also kind of more historically male-led shows. So I think it's just the time's kind of catching up and maybe a little bit historical and maybe a little confidence.

James Cridland 8:39

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are um a ton of um really useful events now uh going on. The International Women's Podcast Awards, which you can enter. Uh I think you I I think we've got a week left to enter uh that. I hope that you'll be entering that um uh too. Do you think that um yeah do you think that specific awards like the International Women's Podcast Awards and specific events for women are useful, or is it more of a case of just making sure that big events like Podcast Movement, for example, are as diverse as they possibly can be in terms of gender, but in terms of other parts as well?

Speaker 7 9:14

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. Like I think these award shows help get eyes and you know, notoriety recog recognizability on these shows. I mean, there's so many shows that, you know, looking at my webby categories that I'm like, I've never heard of this. And then you listen and you're like, wow, like thank thank God this show got put on this platform because otherwise, like I'm living under a rock and I never would have known. So I think those awards are great to again add what's the word? Like levity, where like, okay, I won an award. Oh, Morgan's the real deal. I'm gonna go on her show. So I think it it really helps there. And I think the podcast movements as well, and the speakers and the panels and the topics they cover, like I think that really moves the needle as well.

James Cridland 10:03

And uh do you think video has been helpful in terms of women getting into podcast uh creation, or has video been something which has just sort of added to the imposter stuff?

Speaker 7 10:17

Yeah, I think it's a little twofold. I look at my career and I wouldn't have it without video. And I think if you look at, you know, the influencer of it all, I think, you know, there's kind of that stat that more influencers are are women. And so I think having video does get it out there more. But I could see how it could, you know, make an imposter syndrome for someone where it's like I need a video and I need mics. It doesn't have to be that. Like I started and I used my iPhone and it was grainy. And I think people liked it more. Like there's almost like something to that where it's like that underdog quality that people just want to root for you. So I think as long as the education is out there of like, no, no, no, don't overthink it. It's not hard. There's actually less barriers to entry than you think. And so we just have to meet that that again, transparency with education and the information that you can do it. Forget imposter syndrome.

James Cridland 11:13

Yeah, yeah. Morgan, where can we uh find out more about two hot takes?

Speaker 7 11:17

You can find two hot takes everywhere. Um, Spotify first and foremost. But any platform you get your podcasts, we are there. Instagram, TikTok, everything, all the socials.

James Cridland 11:27

Super cool to speak to you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 7 11:29

Yeah, thank you.

Announcer 11:30

From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Spotify's Skip Ahead feature

Sam Sethi 11:35

Okay, so that's the good stuff that Spotify does. Let's get into the other stuff. Well, let's start off very quickly. They put out their financials um for Q2, James. What's the highlight?

James Cridland 11:47

I mean, the highlight is really hitting 300 million premium subscribers uh across the world. That is a pretty good highlight. Not sure necessarily that investors kind of liked it. Shares dropped 5% early on before uh slightly rising above afterwards. But uh yeah, they're talking about um AI stuff, they're talking about personal podcasts. Ooh, good, generating short private, personalized audio directly inside Spotify. And they say that 25% of their users are already utilizing AI features, but the actual financial bit um is probably the most important. Revenue rising 14% year on year to 4.8 billion euro, powered by gains in premium subscribers, of course, 300 million premium subscribers worldwide, 7 million gained in quarter two alone, and they've got 777 million total monthly active users, which is 111 more than 666, the number of the devil. So um they have done pretty well in terms of their numbers, which is uh nice to see.

Sam Sethi 12:59

Yeah, they did see a slowdown in the numbers. They were projecting 778 million, so they missed their number by um 1 million. Look, that's not bad. Um the CEO or one of the co-CEOs, Alec Nordstrom, said that you know, basically they're reducing their support for certain Android devices in uh India and in the Far East, and that's seen a drop-off. Um overall, I think their focus on AI is something that we're gonna talk about a little bit more in a minute, but um that seems the arrow direction. Get more users, move them more to premium, get them off the free platforms, reduce the number of lower-end supported devices, and go for the higher-end paying premium users. And I think that you've said this in the past, you know, we can't keep measuring the number of users in podcasting as a metric because it will flatline eventually. And so I think it looks like Spotify's probably doing the same. They're going, yeah, we might be growing our user base, but actually we want to grow revenue per user. And I think that's going to be a bigger metric for them going forward.

James Cridland 14:08

Yeah, I think that that that's absolutely right. And you can well see that Spotify may wish to be focusing a little bit more on um the uh premium uh side of their business as well, given that they make so much money from that than the ad funded side.

Sam Sethi 14:24

And let's move on to an exclusive that you reveal this week on Pod News. Um famous Australian TV show, Skippy, the bush kangaroo, shows our age, James, if you remember it. Um but the little boy in it used to say, What's wrong, Skip?

Speaker 2 14:39

What's the matter, Skippy? What's got you all excited?

Sam Sethi 14:41

And I'm gonna say, James, what's wrong, James? Because Spotify's done thing very wrong with Skip ahead.

James Cridland 14:48

Yes, this is a new feature which it is testing in its app. They haven't announced this. It is a button. Now, the button appears on the playback screen when you are listening to something that Spotify thinks you might want to skip. For example, intros or sponsorship messages, or ad breaks, entire ad breaks. And as soon as the ad break starts, um you can listen to the you know the ACAS noise, the North Star uh playing. Instantly that skip ahead button appears. Uh, it's bigger than everything else on the screen. And as soon as you hit it, it skips to the end of the ad break and you're back in the show itself, which is a big, big change to what Spotify has offered in the past. So obviously, Spotify has offered skipping ahead 30 seconds or 15 seconds or whatever it is in the uh user interface. And of course, that's uh still available and has been available on all of these different podcast apps for a long, long time. But what this is doing is it's encouraging, in my view, encouraging listeners to in verto commerce skip ahead when Spotify feels that that would be a good idea. So showing ad breaks are skippable, intros, sponsorship messages, even mentions of premium subscriptions are skippable. That to me is, I mean, it's astonishing. It's something that is happening for both Spotify competitor advertising, ACAST or Odyssey or the New York Times. It's also happening within Spotify's own shows as well. And there are all kinds of problems with that too. But to me, that is a real threat to ad-funded shows, where Spotify is basically saying, no, we're just going to put this big skip ahead button in the app and listeners can just skip past the ads if they don't want to hear them.

Sam Sethi 16:46

Is it a threat? Because let me just play devil's advocate for a minute. The industry currently measures on downloads. And if the industry reports Spotify, the podcast was downloaded, therefore pay your ad revenue to me because the ad was downloaded. Because no one's asking for a play number yet. No one's asking for a percentage completed of the advert. And they're not being paid on those metrics, they're being paid on a download metric. So is it post-download delivered? Thank you very much. Now you can do what you like. Skip ahead, because you can do it manually, we're just doing it all programmatically. I I'm playing devil's advocate because I don't like this either. But I'm just trying to see, is there a position that Spotify could take which says we're not affecting the ad revenue because the ad revenue is being paid out on the download metric?

James Cridland 17:43

Well, Spotify has said to me that they are not affecting ad delivery, which is technically correct. If you assume that ad delivery is to the device, not to the listener's ear. Correct. If ad delivery is to the listener's ear, which is actually what people are paying for.

Sam Sethi 17:59

They're not paying for it.

James Cridland 18:03

Well, it's not how they're charged, but it's what they're paying for, is for those ads to be heard by human beings. Okay. And if those ads are not being heard by human beings, then those ads aren't reaching those listeners. And if you're deliberately encouraging, and and and let's be fair, this is deliberately encouraging, a big button that appears as soon as the ad break starts, is a very different thing than skipping ahead 15 seconds. And apart from anything else, this is happening in shows where Spotify is selling the advertising for. So you've got one half of Spotify going out there and saying, we can reach all of these people for you with advertising, please advertise with us. And then you've got another part of Spotify going, advertising is bad, we'd like you to skip past it. Some people say that that's fraudulent. I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but I do think that it's certainly unethical. Um because the ads have been charged for, the ads have been stitched into the audio, but the listener has been actively encouraged not to listen to them. And that's just bizarre from my point of view.

Sam Sethi 19:09

So if I pay for a premium Spotify, sorry, I'm just because I don't actually know the answer to my next question. And the ad is inside the podcast. Do I still hear the ad if I'm a premium user?

James Cridland 19:25

Yes, because um, you know, i it it it it it's a third-party piece of content, it's uh a piece of content that's been uh paid for by ACAST, or you know, maybe the there's an ad in there from Buzzsprout ads, our sponsor, or there's an ad in there from Libsyn or from the New York Times or whoever it is. Um yeah, I mean that's the typical way that any podcast app works. And so you still hear the ads if you are a premium customer of uh Spotify. Now, what Spotify is doing is they're putting, if you're a premium subscriber, uh they're putting this big button in there to encourage you to skip ahead. What's to stop them, Sam, from going, you know what, actually, people are using that skip ahead button. Why don't we just turn that on automatically? Yeah, so every ad that goes into Spotify, the ads are skipped. And guess what? I went to have a look at the terms and conditions of uh Spotify. There is nothing to stop them from doing that. Nothing to stop them from doing that at all. And let's be just clear about that that would destroy the ad-supported ecosystem that podcasting is. Spotify in some parts of the world is 75% or more of all podcast downloads. It is a massive, massive player in this market. And yes, there are 500 million Spotify free users, but there are also nearly 300 million paid-for Spotify users, Spotify Premium, who all of a sudden um, well, I mean, at the moment are being encouraged to skip the ads, but all of a sudden might even be um just automatically removed because you know why why on earth would Spotify not not do that?

Sam Sethi 21:07

So again, playing playing pretty dumb because I am. Um these are the ads that are coming from third parties like Acast and and Triton and AdWiz. Do ads from Spotify, from the Span Network, appear in premium podcasts, or are they only in the non-premium payment?

James Cridland 21:26

No, ads from uh Spotify still appear uh when you're listening on premium. And and I think there's a there's a different conversation around whether or not that should happen. Whether or not if I'm listening to a Spotify show on Spotify, whether or not as a premium subscriber, whether or not I should be able to opt out of the ads. I think that that's a different conversation to um whether or not Spotify should be able just to edit the ads out of this show. Not that this show has any, or to edit the ads out of the New York Times or out of you know an ACA. Show or a goal hanger show. I think there's a different conversation there. I mean, Spotify claimed that all this skip ahead button is showing is where other people are skipping ahead, which I'm not entirely sold on, but if that's what Spotify say, I mean they wouldn't lie. But it doesn't, it doesn't get away from the fact that people won't hear the ad. It doesn't matter how good the ad is, it doesn't matter how relevant the ad is, the ad simply isn't going to be heard in that case. And so that essentially means that for anybody who is wanting to monetize their show with advertising, that it won't be available to them to do that on Spotify. And similarly, actually, Spotify also skips, you know. I mean, I I I linked to Search Engine. Uh Search Engine has a paid subscription model called Incognito Mode. And the read up of that, PJ Votes read up of um, you know, you should be getting onto incognito mode and blah, blah, blah, that was skipped as well. You know, so Spotify was even skipping the ad read, if you like, for their own premium membership service. Um, and I I'm just I I mean, I don't really understand why Spotify is doing it, other than maybe Spotify just don't care anymore about playing nice with the rest of the industry.

Sam Sethi 23:24

I don't know. Or is it the left arm not talking to the right, as in the AI team saying, Look what we can do, we're very clever and we can build this feature, and the ad team going, What the hell are you doing over there? I don't know.

unknown 23:39

Yeah.

James Cridland 23:40

Yeah, no, exactly. But I think you know, it it is a it is a concern. Now, some people have said, Oh, but you've been able to skip for years and this is no different. But of course, this is very different in that in that a button that only appears when it's stuff that Spotify thinks you should be skipping is a start. And also the fact that it just skips you automatically to the end of the ad break without having to, you know, skip for 15 seconds, listen, is this still an air? Okay, skip another 15 seconds, listen, oh, is this still an air? Blah, blah, blah. I mean, you know, that that would be nine taps on the skip 15 seconds button instead of just this one tap. And even then you overshoot and you have to go back. So it's a it's a big difference. It's a big, big difference. And the fact that third-party uh podcasts are on this service where the ads are getting stripped from it, makes it very different to something like YouTube, where uh YouTube um does sometimes allow you to skip some of the presenter-red uh sponsorship messages on YouTube. But on the other hand, YouTube are paying that uh paying those those people money for being on YouTube, and there's no payment from Spotify for this show to be on Spotify. So, you know, again, there's a there's a big difference there.

Sam Sethi 25:01

We talked about Podastic last week. Um $2.99, buy the app, skip the ads. Is this any different? Is Spotify just a bigger version of Podcastic now?

James Cridland 25:12

I mean, it it's different in the case of, you know, in the Philippines, Spotify's 72% of all podcast downloads. In Mexico, Spotify's 47% of all podcast downloads. Podtastic will never be that big. I'm not saying that Podtastic should be just allowed to do whatever it is that they want, but at the end of the day, they're not going to materially harm the podcast industry. This is going to materially harm the podcast industry if those sorts of numbers, a third of all podcast downloads in Australia are done through Spotify. If Spotify is going to harm the podcast industry to that extent, then that yeah, I I think is a real concern. And also sets a precedent for all of the other podcast apps to go, oh well, you know what, if Spotify are doing it, then we can do that too. When will we see the effect?

Sam Sethi 26:03

When will the advertising companies, do you think, I don't know, stop advertising, start pulling their ads or doing something? Do you think is there a lag, or are we going to see Spotify change and and remove this feature?

James Cridland 26:17

I mean, I would hope that Spotify respects the creators. All of the history of that company suggests that they don't, uh, and that they are incredibly poor at understanding what um uh what creators want. Similarly, you know, the responses that I've got from Spotify seem to show just a total misunderstanding of how the podcast industry works, uh, which is more concerning to be honest. But in terms of when the advertisers will notice, I mean, the advertisers will notice when the ads don't work as well as they used to. And at the end of the day, if the ads stop working, then the advertisers will walk away. And we will have no opportunity to bring them back. Because, you know, they will say, Well, we've tried podcasting and and it it just doesn't work for us anymore. And so we're going to go off and try something else. We're going to try YouTube or something.

Sam Sethi 27:06

So going back into their financials, that the one line they had, the platform also credited favorable podcast impacts with helping push its profit margin to an all-time high. So yes.

James Cridland 27:18

I find it uh uh uh uh quite depressing and quite sad that Spotify would do this sort of thing, would knowingly do this sort of thing against the creators that have built up that company. But uh, you know, as I say, it part it's part of the course for Spotify. They don't seem to care too much about creators, and there is nothing to stop them from automatically skipping all of the ads, whether you're a premium user or whether you're a free user, because you're the terms and conditions that we all signed actually allow them to do that if they want to. And that should be a real concern for all of us. But uh that uh you know seemingly is something that we'll have to fight another day on.

Sam Sethi 28:03

Now, related to all of this, Netflix is reportedly asking traders it's bringing on board to stop including baked-in brand integrations. Now, we saw this with Spotify for a while and with YouTube. Um, they want more, this is Netflix, want more control over advertising and sponsorship. Again, are we just seeing closed wall gardens saying remove third-party advertising, we're gonna sell it ourselves and control the whole medium?

James Cridland 28:28

Yeah, I mean, you know, whatever Netflix wants to do is up to Netflix because they're paying for these shows, one would assume. So if Netflix want to turn around and say, actually, we don't want any of that uh brand integrations in, then um, you know, that that's probably up to them and the handful of shows, and it is still a handful, um, that are on the Netflix platform. I'm not sure that Spotify has done it, but I know that uh you're absolutely right. YouTube have rules that is basically um uh brand integrations are fine, but um spot ads can only be sold by YouTube. So you can't have a 30-second ad in the middle of your show if you're on the YouTube platform. Um but you know, again, I guess you know, YouTube does end up paying. So, you know, there is obviously that sort of uh side of it as well. But certainly in terms of open RSS delivered podcasts, which is what Spotify has historically been and what uh Apple Podcasts continues to be and many others as well, I think that would be a uh that would be a big change if we saw that happening.

Sam Sethi 29:33

Let's move on, James, then. Um

More podcast hosts add video

Sam Sethi 29:36

video uh for everyone. It seems that the Apple API video um that was going to be done by the likes of ACAS, and now everyone seems to be doing it. We've talked about USHA last week, we've talked about Fountain, um, many other companies now have added the Apple API video support. ACast, it seems now are opening the door even more and saying that they're seeing an increase of around 25% in weekly sessions on Apple Podcasts. So it all seems to be going swimmingly.

James Cridland 30:08

Yeah, I mean Acast would say that, wouldn't they? Acast and Apple seem to be very, very close at the moment. If you were at the London Podcast show, you would have seen Apple Podcasts on stage with some Acast people talking about how great video was and how great ACast was. Um so of course ACAST is going to be saying nice things about about Apple Podcasts. And also, arguably, of course, 25% increase in weekly sessions by adding video on Apple Podcasts is not a surprise given that that it that video seems to be the only thing that Apple Podcasts is really giving a big push to. Um and so if you're if you're in video, then you're pretty well guaranteed that uh you'll get pushed a little bit more in terms of how all of that stuff works. Um but yes, um ACast have just announced that anyone can publish video to Apple Podcasts through the Acast Podcast hosting platform. Uh that feature had previously been invitation only, and I know that quite a few people who asked were basically told, nope, you're not having it yet. So it's nice to see that ACAST have now opened that up. Um, all creators have potential to earn from video as well through Acast's Marketplace. So if you want to get uh involved with that through Acast, $39.99 a month on an annual plan is the video plan which they have just uh launched. So that's obviously a nice thing from the point of view of ACast, and I think that's good news for Apple because there are a lot of big shows on Acast that all of a sudden can now just get their video onto Apple Podcasts in ways that they haven't been able to in the past. And so Apple should be rubbing their hands together and going, brilliant. Um, this is uh very good news for us. So they join uh a number of other people who have enabled Apple Podcasts. Of course, BuzzSprout enabled Apple Podcasts a while back, and um there's good news from our sponsor, Buzzsprout, right now, uh Sam, uh, in that they've expanded their video hosting to now supporting Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify, all three of those. So that means that the company's users can now deliver 1080p video to all three platforms, and the audio and video plan starts at just $25 a month on an annual

Interview: Jordan Blair

James Cridland 32:24

plan. Uh I thought I'd find out a little more.

Speaker 6 32:27

I am Jordan Blair and I am the podcast producer at Buzzsprout.

James Cridland 32:31

So, what's BuzzSprout announced this week?

Speaker 6 32:33

Ooh, uh so we announced a while back, you might remember, that we um integrated video distribution through Apple Podcasts through HLS. And now we have extended it to also include YouTube and Spotify for video distribution.

James Cridland 32:52

So why would a typical podcaster find that useful?

Speaker 6 32:55

Well, I don't suppose a typical podcaster might, but if someone is producing video for their podcast, it is a huge improvement. So um, you know, with Buzzcast, we were kind of dog fooding the video podcasting because we have to test it out, especially if we're developing it, like we have to also be doing uh video podcasting and going through all the pain points that other people are going through. And it's it's really interesting because uh I found out very quickly how painful it can be to uh distribute video podcasts. And so now, you know, I just upload one file to BuzzProud and it distributes to all the podcast directories, regardless of if they are video or audio, which is great. And for anyone who has published a video podcast before, this, as I said, is a huge improvement to something many podcasters have learned to tolerate. Um, so it's it's now part of the exact same like workflow that people have to go through in their podcasting process. So yeah.

James Cridland 34:00

Now obviously we we we would never do video on this uh show, but we did do a video uh version of this show about three weeks or so ago. And um and the Spotify uh stuff was working at that point, and that worked fantastically uh for uh for me because I was uploading the video file, edited in uh iMovie. Look at me, as if I know what I'm doing. Yeah. Um but uh I still had to go into into YouTube, so now the whole thing is um is really easy. Some podcast hosts who are doing video limiting the quality down to 720p. What's Buzzsprout doing in terms of the quality?

Speaker 6 34:39

Uh the quality is uh 1080p, so it's full HD video. If you look at uh probably the uh Pod News Weekly Review episode that you did that was in video, it was in 1080p, right? And then um Buzzcast, we also do that in 1080p. And you can you can literally see the pores on people's faces if they're using a kind of camera. Great. So it is clear.

Speaker 1 35:02

Great, great.

James Cridland 35:03

I only mixed ours in 720p because I've got a I've got a small, sad computer. Um that's basically how that works. What's the reaction been so far? I know I was in the Buzzbrout subreddit, which is a great place to go if you've got questions and things. Um I know that people were clamoring for this. Uh people are people happy about it so far?

Speaker 6 35:25

So happy. It's really great because a lot of people were kind of like holding back on the video podcasting thing because they were like, well, you know, I'm not gonna do it if I can't also distribute my my video to YouTube and to Spotify. Like, I'm not gonna juggle all those platforms, which I mean understandable. So I was I was very excited. I had like a note list of all the people that I needed to like reach out to and let them know that we now had YouTube and Spotify along with Apple, and they were very excited about it. Um we've got a few thousand podcasters that are now distributing their uh video podcasts to all the major platforms. So yeah, it's it's been great. We've been really happy with um how happy our podcasters are, which is great.

James Cridland 36:14

Yeah, yeah. And and we saw some figures only yesterday in the pod news uh daily newsletter that uh 17% of people who listen to podcasts are listening the most on their TV.

Speaker 6 36:28

I saw that.

James Cridland 36:28

Which just blows my mind.

Speaker 6 36:31

I know.

James Cridland 36:32

But obviously, that's a really important thing as as uh TV gets more and more important in the podcasting world, more and more important to make sure that you've got good quality video which is available there on whatever platform anybody wants to create. Uh Apple Podcast video isn't yet available on Apple TV, but will be in the next couple of months. But obviously, we've got YouTube already. Um there's there's Netflix if you're one of the set seven people who are on there.

Speaker 36:59

Yeah. Good luck.

James Cridland 37:01

But uh but also a ton of other places as well, Rumble and uh and all kinds of places. So it's very, very much more important. Uh, have you seen any good videos? Um, any good video podcasts that you'd um that you'd recommend? Or is it still is it still early early doors in terms of that?

Speaker 6 37:18

You know, it's very Buzzcast, obviously. I mean, okay, yes. Thank you. You softballed that to me and I almost missed it. Um yeah, BuzzCast is obviously great, but uh it's really funny because I first and foremost consume my podcasts in audio format. I I love it. Like I know I did a video podcast, but there's very few things that I will actually watch as video unless they're one of those podcasts that is kind of like leaning video first and they reference a lot of things on the screen and they talk about clips and stuff like that that I can't see. In that case, I usually would go to video, but I I try to avoid stuff like that, to be honest.

James Cridland 37:57

So, Jordan, will we be seeing you in New York next month?

Speaker 6 38:00

Yes, you will. I will be at podcast movement and I'm so excited. I I literally told myself I hope that they can like hop over the pond and come see us. Yeah. It'd be great to visit.

James Cridland 38:09

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh yeah, I'm uh I'm I'm looking forward to it. I uh are you doing any talking?

Speaker 6 38:15

I I I don't know if they've officially announced it, but I did get an email that my session was selected. So fingers crossed that that is excellent the case and I should be on stage.

James Cridland 38:25

Excellent. Yes, they've they've sent me an email saying that uh my session about the history of podcasting, I've got 20 minutes to talk about the history of podcasting.

Speaker 6 38:33

Oh wow. That's 20 years. So you get you get one minute a year, right?

James Cridland 38:38

And I'm afraid it's not it's not 20 years because the the first podcaster was in 1949, Jordan, which I'm going to I'm going to argue.

Speaker 1 38:46

I'm not necessarily well, obviously I need to go to Yeah I'm not I'm not necessarily sure that people are going to believe that, but anyway, we'll give that a go.

James Cridland 38:53

Um so excellent. We look forward to, or at least I look forward to seeing you there. Sam has some you know excuse about it being his 60th birthday. Oh so uh yeah, which is a rubbish excuse as far as I'm concerned. But anyway, but I'll I'll be there and I'm looking forward to that. What's a good podcast where people can go to learn more about Buzzprout and everything that you guys do?

Speaker 6 39:15

Oh well, you know, I have to I have to plug the podcast that I co-host and produce, and that's Buzzcast. I I co-host that with Alvin and Kevin. And um, we also have great podcasts for uh learning about podcasting, like podcasting QA and Buzzsprout Weekly, if you want to keep up on our newsletter. So yeah, we've we've got a handful of good ones. But yeah, if you just search Buzz Sprout, you'll see them.

James Cridland 39:39

Yeah, and I'm also a fan of uh Happy to Help, which is all about customer support, which uh which you guys do really good. Thank you so much for for your support. I'm looking forward to seeing you in New York.

Announcer 39:49

I can't wait. The Pod News Weekly Review with BuzzSprout with Buzz Sprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting.

Sam Sethi 39:59

So, James, that's really good news for our sponsors, Buzz Sprout, um, and it's good news for consumers, I think. Uh seeing different rates

Blubrry new time-based plans

Sam Sethi 40:07

now. I think one of the things we talked about when Apple first announced its API was you know, the market was all over the place in terms of pricing. You had flight costs $150 a month, and you know, you had Libsin, it was massively high, and then you had other companies very low pricing. And I don't think we've really come to a medium number where the industry settled, because I think we're all still trying to find how much usage do we get and how much usage we don't get. Now, what's interesting is Blueberry also has announced that they are supporting audio and video, and they've also announced, I think quite interestingly, a time-based hosting plan rather than a data delivery plan. What have they done?

James Cridland 40:52

Yeah, so this is a new time-based hosting plan for new customers. Um, the company describe it as a simpler way to choose a plan. So instead of having to worry about uh storage or you know, file size or megabytes or or anything else, which frankly um people don't really understand, um uh now they're doing it just simply based on how many hours of content do you plan to publish? And uh if it's a nice and uh simple answer, then uh hey presto, there you are. So if you're going to, for example, publish up to three hours of content a month, not this show, um, then you would be uh spending $15 a month. Um this show, I'm guessing, shows that need up to six hours of monthly publishing, probably that's us, which is advanced six, which is $25 a month. Um, you also get advanced podcast stats in there uh as well. Um so I thought it was quite an interesting new way of um thinking about podcast hosting and podcast plans. And the one thing that that's enabled them to do is to launch a new um uh smaller um uh package, which is uh just seven dollars a month for one and a half hours uh of audio and video content per month. So that's quite a nice sort of um uh entry level. So I think that that's uh not bad. What do you think?

Sam Sethi 42:19

No, look, I I looked at this very closely because I think the time-based metric is very sensible. People will understand that much better. I I get that, and I thought about that for my own company, TrueFans, but um I had a question because it says all new time-based hosting plans include audio and video, and I went, okay, so the audio file, let's take uh you know an average show, 100 meg, and then video. That could be one gig. So do I get the same six hours for the same amount of data, whether it's audio or video, or what happened? Because clearly that's 10x difference if I'm doing video to audio. Does Blueberry still let me have my six hours, or do they do they let me on the advanced six program with six hours for $25 a month, put up video?

James Cridland 43:13

Yes, they do. So yeah, you get you get video with all of these. You get video with all of these, which is really nice actually. So they've built that in. I'm guessing uh that um there'll be a percentage of podcasters that bother with video, and most of them don't, and that's basically why they can afford to offer it in that way. But yes, audio and video, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and more. Um so there you go. So yes, it's um uh you get v video built into that as well, which is nice.

BBC numbers

Sam Sethi 43:43

Talking about big screens, James, and you were talking about you know YouTube and Spotify, sorry, YouTube and Apple, um there's new figures from the BBC that claim the corporation podcasts and YouTube are now up seventeen point four percent. So again, um YouTube seeming Uh growing quite nicely.

James Cridland 44:01

Well, yes, either YouTube growing quite nicely or the BBC putting um more of their stuff onto YouTube, which I suspect is the case really. Um it's only 4.7 million views. It's not very much. Um, the BBC should be um doing bazillions of views on YouTube if it wanted to um completely adopt YouTube as a platform which it's on. Of course it won't because it doesn't control YouTube and it's an American um uh company and it probably frankly shouldn't be on YouTube uh as much as uh as much as some people want. Um I think that there are um good reasons why the public service content should be on there, you know, the worthy public service content, news and that sort of thing. But I think any anything entertainment should probably um keep on iPlayer only in the UK. Um but nevertheless, uh yes, good to see numbers from the BBC there. And while we're on the BBC, we might as well cover the other numbers which they're doing. Um total BBC podcasts um outside the UK up 4% year on year, 215 million global downloads, um, which is you know quite uh you know quite a lot uh in in the in the uh uh you know in the scheme of things. Uh you know, 215 million global downloads for BBC Podcasts is 45 times more than they're doing on YouTube. Uh just saying. Um, and also in the UK, 831 million plays of content on BBC Sounds. Now that might be a live radio station, it might be catch-up radio as well as podcasts, but that's um still pretty nice. It's up 19% year on year, although as with all of these numbers, we don't actually know what a play is.

Sam Sethi 45:48

Moving

The EU's AI Act

Sam Sethi 45:49

on, James, this one is an interesting one. The EU has uh brought out its Artificial Intelligence Act and it comes into law this week. Um, it's basically if your content is consumed in the EU, like all podcasts are, then Article 50 requires clear disclosure if you use AI to generate or manipulate audio or video content. Is this what we've been waiting for? Legal requirements placed on production companies who do podcasting.

James Cridland 46:21

Yes, I mean I think so. Uh the question is whether or not the EU will police it. Now they've been doing a very good job of policing the GDPR, it has to be said. And so whether or not they will be doing the same sort of job to police this in terms of AI, I don't know. Listening to Inception Point AI's most recent shows, they are not saying that they are AI produced at all in the audio. And I suppose the question is going to be is a mention in the uh show description, but not the show notes or the audio, is that going to be acceptable? Is a description that just says made in collaboration with artificial intelligence, is that enough to actually classify as a clear disclosure? Um, and so the proof uh of this will be in the eating, I think, uh, in terms of um what the EU uh actually says, but it's pretty important. Fines can reach a maximum of around 40 million US dollars. Um, and so it's pretty important to actually get the clear disclosure correct. But essentially, if you are using AI to generate content or to manipulate content, so so that's not denoising, that's not repairing, that's not using AI editing tools, that is um taking Sam's voice and making him say um you know naughty things that he otherwise wouldn't, um, then you need to be very specific in terms of clearly disclosing that that is uh actually AI use. And I think it's a good thing. So there's a couple of things here.

Sam Sethi 47:57

One, I think America won't give a damn about this. Um they don't give a damn about GDPR really, um, other than blocking you if there's a GDPR requirement. I think the magnificent seven AI stocks is what's holding the American economy together. Add to that um, you know, the open AI anthropic uh IPAs that were held back but will happen at some point. Um I can't see America going, yeah, let's put restrictions on AI. I think it's it's just gonna be ignored. So it'll be interesting to see if the the fines are implemented, that changes behaviour. Let's see. I mean, Apple, you've talked about has in its T's and C's that you know you have to disclose AI. Has Apple done anything? Not a thing. So I can't expect uh this is gonna have any um effect unless the EU really have some teeth.

James Cridland 48:51

Yes, no, I think uh I think that's uh important. There are also um all sorts of talk about AI uh music, of course. Um I think uh a number of uh music companies have said that uh in order to qualify for music charts, um then music needs to be substantially human-made. Uh I'm kind of looking at that and thinking, no, I don't really agree with that. I think you know, if if AI music is good, AI music should be fine as long as people know that they're listening to AI music, and maybe that's the thing.

Sam Sethi 49:21

Now, the last thing I'd ask on this one, James, is more of a technical one. There is a proposal that came out from uh Alberto Botella from RSS.com about an AI tag. It was a simple declaration, but that isn't actually formalized in the podcast index 2.0 spec. Do you think this is going to accelerate that? Will we see that now adopted?

James Cridland 49:45

Well, I think the only way that it'll be adopted is if people firstly agree with it, but also secondly, that all of the podcast apps put it in there. And if it's not put in there, um then of course you won't be compliant. So therefore, no podcast producer is going to be just ticking the box that says made with AI and hoping that that's going to be enough. So again, it comes down to the problem that we have, the benefit that we have of OpenRSS, but the problem that we have of OpenRSS in that there is no way for us to turn around and guarantee that every single podcast app out there is going to be um clearly uh using that podcast um AI feature. Um so unfortunately, I think you know it's a great idea, and wouldn't it be nice if if if it was to move forward? But at the moment, I'm not sure necessarily that any lawyer would be comfortable with using that as the sole method of disclosure.

Sam Sethi 50:49

Well, I guess if the fines start coming in, apps might start doing something, production companies might start declaring a lot of things.

James Cridland 50:55

Yeah, well, I mean apps apps won't care because there won't be a fined.

Sam Sethi 50:59

So Yeah, okay.

James Cridland 51:01

Yeah, well, yeah. Which is all which is the the big conundrum with podcast apps um that earn nothing from the industry that they serve. Don't we know it. No exception of Spotify. Don't we know it?

Sam Sethi 51:14

Now um

The SiriusXM court case is nearly over

Sam Sethi 51:15

this is an interesting story that we had many years ago, and I think it led to the inclusion of transcripts within podcasting. It's the Sirius XM settlement. The uh case was brought by the National Association of the Deaf against Sirius XM for the lack of podcast transcripts. Um, I think Apple on the back of that preempted the judgment and brought transcripts forward, which of course then led to the whole industry adopting transcripts. But what's happened since, James? What's going on with this case?

James Cridland 51:51

Yeah, so this was back in December 2021, with the National Association of the Deaf and the disability rights activists, who are their lawyers essentially, suing Sirius XM for not providing podcast transcripts in its app. Now, in 2022, Sirius XM uh it took them nine months, but they kicked back and said it was unnecessary and unreasonable. But since then, uh, as you say, uh Sam, Apple Podcasts, Pocketcasts, Overcasts, Spotify, even Sirius XM adding transcripts into their podcast apps to the point where it's now an expected feature. Um, it now appears that the court case that probably, as you say, kicked all of this off. Um, that court case is um likely to finish later on in the year. The two sides have apparently reached agreement in principle on all key terms after more than a year of negotiations. Um, the judge Jeanette Vargas has allowed a final deadline extension of October the 30th. And I think you're right, Sam. I think, you know, this court action was what helped make podcast transcripts mainstream. I think that people saw this court action. Perhaps they were quite clever in going after Sirius XM and not going after Apple because Apple has quite a lot of good lawyers, and I suspect that they went after Sirius XM because arguably Sirius XM doesn't quite. Um, and so firstly, I think that that was a very clever move of them, and I think that the National Association of the Deaf should be congratulated because this definitely put podcast transcripts on the top of the list in terms of um making them um a thing. Um but I would also say that continued negotiation now helps no one but the lawyers. Um, lawyers are lovely, especially lawyers with beards. Lawyers with beards are the best so far as I'm concerned, but I also think uh enough already and um that they should just shake hands. Ideally, Sirius XM should pay some of the um disability rights activists bill um for all of this legal stuff, and um and everybody should should shake hands and move on, in my humble opinion. Um, but if we're gonna sit and and have another three months of of this uh stuff, then I guess you know lawyers are gonna get paid somehow.

Sam Sethi 54:16

Yeah. Well, I mean, Judge uh Vargas has said that unless a settlement is completed by late October, she's made it clear the case will move forward rather than remain in mediation. So I think she's just trying to say, right, enough's enough. We're going yes, going to a settlement.

James Cridland 54:32

Now easiest court case that she's had.

Sam Sethi 54:35

Yeah. Now,

SiriusXM financials

Sam Sethi 54:37

talking of serious XM, uh, they had their podcast revenue jump 30% in Q2, James. So at least they can afford to pay for this judgment. What's happened here?

James Cridland 54:47

Yes, which is good news. Now, it's another sort of weird thing going on in the financials, in that if you look at their financial results, they don't mention podcasts at all. There is something weird called the Pandora unit, and the Pandora unit has gone up slightly. Um, but uh it turns out the podcasts are in the Pandora unit. Um, and uh if you listen to the um clip of the um uh of the earnings call, then uh Jennifer Witz um uh ended up uh um uh spilling the beans in terms of podcast revenue going up.

Speaker 5 55:27

Podcasting revenue grew 30% year over year, driven by rising CPMs, increased sell-through, and an ongoing appetite for our culture-defining content.

James Cridland 55:36

So it it's interesting, I think, with all of this, that actually there's quite a lot of news in terms of financials, but the podcasting stuff is getting harder and harder to find. So you've got this from Sirius XM. Um, you've then got Amazon who aren't um releasing podcast-specific earnings either. Um, they've uh uh made uh revenue of $200 billion in quarter two, up 20% year on year. Um, but um the only uh clue that we get is that advertising revenue is up 26%, but uh that that's got all kinds of stuff in it. And of course, Apple, our friends at Apple, quarterly revenue of only 109.4 billion dollars. Come on, new Tim Apple, whatever your name is. Come on, John Apple, uh get with the program. You've been you've been uh new CEO for long enough. Uh anyway, um we'll we'll uh find out what uh they are doing. But of course, they're not releasing any podcast specific revenue in that number either. Uh and so it's actually getting harder and harder because of the consolidation in the industry, getting harder and harder to learn exactly what's going on with podcast money.

Sam Sethi 56:46

This all goes back to your comments, to Dan Granger's comments, to m multiple other people actually as well, saying what is a podcast? If we can't define it, you can't um show it in the metrics. And I think this is the problem. If we keep hiding it inside the financials, then the industry can't metric itself as an overall size. I agree, I agree.

People news

Announcer 57:07

People news on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 57:11

Right, people news, and the first one all about the European podcast newsletter Eurowaves, which has announced an advisory board with somebody called Sam Sethy on it, which is very exciting. Well, hang on a minute. When did that happen? No, I knew it.

Speaker 1 57:25

Um You're on it too, mate. Oh, yes, I am on it too. Yeah, absolutely. No sleepy shoulders from you. That's correct. Um, so this is I look forward to our dinners. That'll be lovely.

James Cridland 57:35

Oh, yes, that'll be lovely. Yes, because I'm sure that there's going to be plenty of those. Um, so Euroways, if you don't know, is uh uh uh another podcast newsletter, uh, but this one focuses very much on Europe and um does a great job. Andrea Koskay, who of course we've had on this show not so long back. Um, she is very excited uh about that, and uh I'm very excited, as I'm sure you are, Sam, uh, in being involved with that.

Sam Sethi 58:01

Well, I I I'm actually genuinely pleased for Andrea because I remember when we got her on the show a couple of years back when she first started this. And I think one of the things is that you know, Pod News Daily is brilliant, you know, we all know that, and you cover the globe, but but there's so many big stories that come out from English-speaking countries that seems to predominate. And I think Andrea's tried to go one layer below that and try and scratch the surface for Italy, Spain, Portugal. And the stories aren't really big often, but they are stories in themselves, and it's good that someone's covering them. So well done to the team there.

James Cridland 58:36

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree wholeheartedly with that. So that's uh very good news. Uh, also um uh interesting news, Claire Davy has joined Fresh Air, a senior partnerships manager, Brett Schreiber, moving from ad results media over to Fox advertising, um, which is probably good news for Fox. Um uh slightly less good news, but interesting news nonetheless. Andrew Goldsmith, somebody who we've had on this show, uh, formerly the CEO of Adolitius. Uh, it's been just over a year since Adelicious was purchased by Audio Boom. And uh coincidentally, uh Andrew Goldsmith has now left the company. Um, I'm excited to see what comes next, he says in the post. Um, so there is uh always uh that. Congratulations to you, Andrew, for for weathering the consolidation of those two uh companies and good luck in whatever it is that you're doing next. Um and um brilliant news from um uh Patreon, uh really excellent news. Uh CEO Jack Conti has said that Patreon's core business is healthy and strong. And he told us this while he was announcing that he was firing 93 people, approximately 20% of the workforce because AI. Uh well done, Jack Conti. Another triumph. I look forward to the IPO, because that's clearly what this is lined up to do. That's clearly what he's lined up to do. He he's he's got a good band, um, but uh but no.

Events and awards

Announcer 1:00:04

Podcast events on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:00:08

Yes, awards and events. Um, let's focus on uh some of those. The International Women's Podcast Awards. If you are listening to this and you qualify, uh and by the way, if you think you qualify, then you do qualify, then you now have until August the 14th to enter. You can enter that from anywhere in the world. Uh it's just $50. Um, your um uh creator's um uh podcast with Claire, you could enter that, couldn't you?

Sam Sethi 1:00:34

No, because I'm a man, James.

James Cridland 1:00:36

No, you're a man, but Claire uh Claire produces it and and all of that. She can enter that.

Sam Sethi 1:00:41

She's entered her own one, so we left it there. I think it's a bit ambiguous.

James Cridland 1:00:46

Well, I think you can I think you can you can probably uh enter that as well. Okay. I think that would be a good idea. Right. Do it. You should do it. Uh anyway, uh August 14th uh is the closing date uh for that. The New Zealand Podcast Awards is now officially open for entry, even till October the 9th to enter that. If you're in Autora, uh pricing is as low as $50 uh New Zealand dollars. How much is $50 New Zealand dollars, Sam? Uh $10. $10 is $30. $30, I'll have you know.

Sam Sethi 1:01:16

No idea on international currencies as you can tell.

James Cridland 1:01:19

Exactly. So anyway, uh, if you are a podcaster in Autoroa, then uh you should be uh entering. Um uh that's the independent podcaster's price, the professional podcasters price is um $100, I believe. So uh there you go. And in in terms of events, uh Podcast Movement has shared the first 40 sessions for Podcast Movement New York City as voted on by the public, uh, which is very exciting. So if you follow the link you'll find in the Pod News newsletter, then you can see all of those 40. I'm very much looking forward to going to Podcast Movement. I am also going to the um to the Sounds Profitable um event as well, which is on the Monday and Tuesday. And then on the Wednesday, instead of taking a day off, which any sensible person would be doing, uh, I'm going to the IEB podcast upfronts, which will be the first time for me. Uh looking forward to seeing seeing the um the uh glamour and excitement of what the advertising industry uh ends up uh doing. So that should be uh a fun thing as well. So looking forward to uh end up doing that. Rob Walsh is also one of the speakers, uh, which should be fun to see.

Sam Sethi 1:02:26

I think quite a few people are looking forward to that session. Uh not just yours. I mean, I think all of the event, uh I think it'll be a good one. Yes, no, indeed.

The Tech Stuff

Announcer 1:02:34

The tech stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland 1:02:38

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

Sam Sethi 1:02:43

Well, we were talking earlier about all the various companies that are adding support for Apple and Spotify and YouTube. Uh here's another one.

James Cridland 1:02:51

The only one you need to remember, of course, is uh Buzzsprout, our sponsor. But if you don't want to uh remember Buzzsprout, our sponsor, then alongside Buzzsprout, our sponsor, you will also find Co-Host, who are now supporting Apple Podcasts video on all co-host plans at no extra cost. And also OSHA, who are now supporting automatic video uploads to YouTube. Um, so lots of video uh stuff in terms of that.

Sam Sethi 1:03:18

Now here was an odd technical story I saw. Um, Spotify has added a new user notes. Um, you can add customizable captions to individual tracks within playlists. Not quite sure what this does. Is it that I listen to a track and I go loved it, hated it, um, thought that the third, I don't know, verse was really catchy. I don't know what it is. Is it personalized user notes, I assume?

James Cridland 1:03:45

I mean, I guess it might be. If that would be quite a nice feature to enable people to understand why you've added these things to your playlist. Um, or maybe it just says um uh skip the ads between three minutes and five minutes. I mean, I don't know, but uh but it looks quite a nice idea. It's it's probably the the the the sort of idea that um that that uh you've you you would have done in in uh true fans about six or so months ago.

Sam Sethi 1:04:11

Yeah, it's it's I I really must check which Spotify executives is a true fans user. Um seems like seemed to copy. No, we we added private notes. I thought it was a nice feature six months ago. Um if I'm listening to a podcast, and I actually to be fair, it came from Kevin from Skipped. I think he had the original concept and idea, and I thought it was a great idea. You know, as you listen, if you have things you want to make a mental note of, you can do those, and they only appear to you. I think um Kevin's uh Snipped platform is one of the first that did it.

James Cridland 1:04:46

Uh what else is going on? Uh Reddit, oh brilliant.

Sam Sethi 1:04:50

Yes, and well, I'm not a Reddit user, but you are. So uh it lets you listen to Reddit threads as an audio in the background. Again, just I mean, we've seen this with WordPress blogs, we've seen it with lots of places now where you can have an audio version of the written word. So it's not that new, but it's interesting that Reddit's added.

James Cridland 1:05:09

Yeah, uh the CEO Steve Huffman uh teasing the feature is coming on later this year. Uh so you too will be able to enjoy people trying to be funny in the answers of r slash what is it. Go great.

Speaker 1 1:05:21

Um, which uh have you have you have you any idea what r slash what is it is? No, no, I don't use Reddit, so no. It's brilliant. It's brilliant.

James Cridland 1:05:28

So r slash what is it, if you've not obviously been onto Reddit. Um it is normally concerned parents posting a picture of something and saying, I found this in little Bobby's room, what is it?

Speaker 1 1:05:42

And normal and normally the answer is it's it's the cap of a biro. Get over yourself, love. Um but whatever it is, but some sometimes they're really interesting in a sad sort of way.

James Cridland 1:05:54

So, you know, people taking photographs of um of something that they've seen on on a telegraph poll by the Of the street and going, What's this? And somebody then says, It's absolutely fine. It's just uh it's just monitoring the amount of traffic that's go that goes past, it can't see you, or any of this kind of uh stuff. It's really, really interesting in a sad sort of way. Yeah, it's still not going onto Reddit, so you're okay.

Sam Sethi 1:06:17

Um, what else is in here? Um, YT Shorts, another AI tool for getting uh long form videos into small TikTok available clips. You know, again, there's so many IDs, but yeah, if you like it, there's one called white shorts.ai. Um, and then there's also Podlex, which plugs into Claude or ChatGBT and lets your imaginary friend think and knows about your podcast. And it claims to have access to 4.8 million podcasts, so the podcast index. Um, yeah, again, not sure what Podlex does or adds value to, but yeah, another MCP injection.

James Cridland 1:06:53

It's an it's an MCP. It's it's obviously just somebody that's worked out how to interface podcast index with an MCP. One would assume that uh, you know, Dave, if you think if if if you're listening, you could probably you could probably do that relatively easily on on the podcast index platform, although God knows why you'd want to. Um, but uh and I very much enjoyed you reading out my sarcastic lets your imaginary friend thinks it knows things about podcasts.

Speaker 1 1:07:20

I I am a fan of talking about AI as an imaginary friend. So there you go. Artificial assistant.

Sam Sethi 1:07:29

Yes. Now this is an interesting one. Uh and I hat tip from Josh Margoli, he's a one of our listeners, sent this in to me and said, Um, Cloudflare's introducing wallets that will allow you to store stablecoin, purchase services, and receive funds across the web. Now I read this obviously, very interested to understand more about it. I've got a little bit more reading to do, but what they're trying to do is make this work for agentic AI. They're not trying to make this work for humans particularly. They're saying that the biggest stumbling blocks for agentic AI is that there are too many steps for AI agents to onboard, and they're trying to provide a faster, quicker way to bypass login or sign-up sequences. Um, the Cloudflare wallets again are going to be using uh, I assume X402, and I'm gonna have a play with it later, so maybe we'll talk about it next week. But um, yeah, an interesting thing if you're looking at different platforms and wallets, and I think Josh sent it to me going, so on the last few pod news weeklies, we've talked about this dying, the micropayment platform and Bitcoin and Albi and all this rest of it, and he said, Has it died? or here comes Cloudflare.

James Cridland 1:08:48

Well, there's been uh no end of um of uh white knights on their steed coming to try and fix um micropayments. Sadly, not quite sure whether any uh white knights or steeds have quite managed it yet, but uh Cloudflare are pretty big, they know what they're doing. So uh yeah, it's worth uh taking a peek at.

Sam Sethi 1:09:08

Now, Ford and Lincoln drivers will be able to listen to location-based audio stories. Tell me more, James.

James Cridland 1:09:15

Yes, they will be able to listen to location-based audio stories about where they're driving thanks to a new app from Autio. I looked at this and I thought to myself, ah, I used to be on the advisory board of maps.fm. So good they closed it down. And from that, we got the idea of the podcast location feature, which could do exactly that. Um, sadly, neither of those two um have uh really gone anywhere yet. But isn't it lovely to see that Autio is doing pretty well the same sort of thing? More than 12,000 stories, saying it's similar to a podcast experience, and you'll be able to jump into the car and say, you know, I'm just about to drive past such and such. Tell me more about it, and it will do. Um, so that's uh a very smart thing. So um, hooray and also boo, because podcasting

Inbox

James Cridland 1:10:06

should be doing that.

Announcer 1:10:06

Fan mail mail and voicemail, our favorite time of the week. It's the Pod News Weekly Review inbox.

James Cridland 1:10:14

Yes, so many different ways to get in touch with us, although slightly less uh different ways than before, and uh voicemail, of course, uh by using the link in our show notes or email uh too. And uh we've got some excellent voicemails, including uh um not the first, but the second from School of Podcasting and Podpages, very own, Dave Jackson.

Speaker 9 1:10:35

James, hey, it's Dave Jackson. I want to thank you for asking the question to Dan Granger that I we scream at my phone, which is why are we holding podcasting up to a standard that we're not using on you know TV and radio? And I like Dan Granger, but I hated his answer. His answer was, well, we don't want to be radio, it's a melting iceberg. And I'm with Sam. I think the way you measure success in advertising is I don't know, did you sell more stuff? And I don't think it's the download that's holding us back because we get report after report after report on how great podcasting is. Uh, to me, uh, it sounds in a course I'm a teacher, it sounds like an education problem that the buyers need to understand exactly how powerful podcasting is. Anyway, keep up the great work.

James Cridland 1:11:24

Thank you, Dave Jackson. Uh, and keep up your great work as well. Uh yes, I I I agree. And I I particularly around the download. And what's been weird over the last couple of weeks has been lots of people, and I know that you you two have jumped on this bandwagon as well, Mr. Sethy, but uh lots of people. Me on a bandwagon lots of people jumping around and saying that uh downloads are rubbish and we should be moving on from downloads and blah blah blah. Um, and uh I think I think Dave makes a good point. He's not the only person making that point. If you listened to In and Around Podcasting, that's podcast with that brilliant jingle, then you would have heard Rob Walsh and Elsie uh giving their views about the AMP Accords. And on downloads, Rob said this. Don't crap on the download.

Speaker 8 1:12:13

The download is really all that we have today and tomorrow and for the foreseeable future. And crapping on the download without something in place and agreed upon and tested to replace it is not virtual signaling. It's not showing support for AMP. What it is is stupid and short-sighted, and it will put more media buyers on the sideline, or worse yet, get them to leave the stadium completely.

James Cridland 1:12:37

I have to say, I think that's pretty good advice. And I think what we don't have at the moment is we don't have an alternative. So if we're basically saying downloads are rubbish, uh downloads are no good for podcasting at all, um, then what we're actually saying, uh, as Rob is saying here, is uh uh don't bother advertising on podcasting because you know downloads are rubbish, aren't they?

Sam Sethi 1:12:59

Um well, first of all, I think that's gonna be a great t-shirt. Don't crap on the download. Don't crap on the download. Oh, that's a t-shirt. Wow. Yes.

Speaker 1 1:13:10

Yes, go on, Rob. Yes, go on.

Sam Sethi 1:13:13

Secondly, I I I think we said it earlier. Look, um, the download is the only metric. I I I'm negative to it because if I was an advertiser, I don't think the industry provides the type of metrics I would have won. You know, I want to know if my ad was actually played and how long it's played for. Look, that's not a thing that's too hard to ask. And I think within the models that are evolving now around HLS, that's gonna happen. So maybe it's not till 2027, but let's let's not say it's not possible, because it totally is. But the download, yes, okay, Rob, it's the only thing we have. And that goes back to what I said about Spotify and even Podcastic to an extent. And if all we're measuring is the download, then guess what? Spotify said it, they ad or the platform delivery was done, and then post that we started playing with the audio. So we can't have it both ways. Either you don't touch it and and and because it's not playing the ad, or we'd say you don't pay for the download, you pay for the actual play and the streaming of the ad. I don't know. There's something missing in this that I don't like, but yes, okay, Rob, that's all we have today, but I don't think it's sufficiently good enough.

James Cridland 1:14:26

Well, uh, you know, uh, I not not good enough means well, don't bother spending any money on podcasting right now, and that's the last thing that we want. So I'm yeah, I understand that. I don't want to do that either. But I do totally agree with Rob's um uh point on that, and uh that doesn't mean that we can't get better, but it does mean that that at the moment we we should be careful how much um sagging off of the only thing uh that we have in this industry at the moment um that we that we do. I mean, you know, I have been very careful in terms of the IAB podcast measurement guidelines, which I know that Rob has been involved in. I've been very careful in not saying what I think about them. Because if I say what I think about them, then what am I actually doing? I'm destroying the only um the only currency that we have in this industry. Um and that that's not a very responsible thing to end up doing. And so through gritted teeth, you know, there I am saying, Oh, you know, the podcast measurement guidelines, there they are, they're very good. Um because frankly, you shouldn't necessarily be saying anything else until we've got something lined up. And as for whether or not we do have anything lined up, um Rob uh gave his own personal uh opinion, I should say, about the AMP Accords.

Speaker 8 1:15:49

The biggest issue, in my opinion, privacy. Whether or not the AMP Accords happen, it is all down to the privacy lawyers at the biggest aggregator apps, and more specifically at Apple and Spotify. And he went on by saying why would you spend the money on the privacy lawyers if Apple and Spotify as privacy lawyers haven't come out and said, yes, we're behind us?

James Cridland 1:16:12

And he ended up um uh saying that people who were asking for podcast apps to earn a bit of the money in um you know, in return for giving some of the data. Um he I I think he was saying, that's a brilliant idea, James. But have you considered that that means that these podcast apps are selling personal data? And have you considered how difficult that is, even in the US? And I have to say, I had not. Um so I thought that was an interesting, an interesting part of it as well. But yes, no, I think it's all it is all fascinating. Thank you, Dave, for getting in touch. Thank you for being a power supporter as well. Um, if you are a power supporter, by the way, you can also get into the uh super exclusive power supporter um WhatsApp group, um, which is up and running, um, and uh lots of uh nice people in there saying nice things. So uh it's a good part of the internet if you would like to be in there. Weekly.podnews.net uh is where you can join. Here's another uh bit of uh voicemail, and it's Neil Vellio again.

Speaker 1:17:19

Hi chaps, it's Neil Vellio here. You might be surprised to learn I'm not gonna comment on Bartlett's office rocket. I had enough Bartlett drama on LinkedIn last week, which took up eight hours of my life. James, I wanted to agree with your views on Apple Podcast stats being bullshit. Last week you read out 182% average consumption off Apple Podcast Connect. I think you said 82 plays on a four-minute show. And this has always been my problem with Apple Podcasts. They do things in secret, shano mechanics, and then put a copy on their site saying, Everything you think you know is wrong. We have a secret formula and you don't know what it is, so there. Like when they were indexing transcripts for SEO and telling people the only way of ranking for keywords was still in the title and author fields, and then wondering why companies like Voxalize and OSHA monetized their platforms SEO. Oh, and if anyone can tell me where I can see my HLS stats for B2B podcasting insights with Inconnect, I'm all ears because I don't see them anywhere. Cheers, lads. Never, never knowingly underspoken.

James Cridland 1:18:24

Yes.

Speaker 1 1:18:25

Very impressive that he plea that he pre-bleeps the word bullshit.

Speaker 2 1:18:31

Um I was gonna hope it was Buzzsprout. I thought, I thought, was it Buzzsprout the voicemail that did it?

Speaker 1 1:18:37

Well, now that would be very clever. I have a feeling that that uh that uh that was Neil. I was I was I mean, if that was Buzzsprout, wow, that was that's quite a thing.

James Cridland 1:18:48

Anyway, uh well done, Neil. Uh another another triumph uh messages also from Martin Lindescog, um, who keeps on promising that uh he will send us uh a voicemail, uh still hasn't. He he does warn us that he will sound a bit like the Swedish chef uh when he does so, um, uh which I'm looking forward uh to. But he very much likes um uh reaching the top of the True Fans gamification uh uh uh feature, uh, which is uh excellent. Um uh so uh he's he's just uh yes, uh getting very excited about uh boosts and streamsats and everything else. And uh Seth Goldstein saying, RSS.chat looks neat. Yes, I nearly got to set up my own RSS.chat server the other day, and I went onto my uh onto my apps box um uh where wherever it is in Dublin somewhere, and I uh noted that it needed um a bit of a uh a kernel upgrade, and so I did that and it crashed halfway in the middle of the kernel upgrade, so brilliant. Um, and so had to rescue that and still haven't set up my RSS.chat uh thing. That by the way now supports WebSub, which is very interesting because Dave uh Winer was always against WebSub. And so seeing him now support WebSub is uh is an interesting uh move from that. But anyway, uh what does Seth say? I like that RSS is still relevant as well, it should be. Good job to Dave, but do we need another social network? That's the question. No, of course we don't. But um, nevertheless, uh I think it's something worthwhile playing around with. Anyway, we've got 24 power supporters. You could be the number 25. Um you want to go to weekly.podnews.net to join.

Sam and James's week

James Cridland 1:20:33

So, what's happened for you this week, Sam?

Sam Sethi 1:20:35

Oh well, we had a great interview with um Giles from Cheerful Earful that you did last week. And on the back of it, I decided to create a uh an event page based on the publisher feed standard that's in podcasting 2.0. So we already do it for awards, and I thought this isn't too hard to go and find all the people who are going to be at Cheerful Earful. So we did that, aggregated it onto a single page, created a publisher feed format, and then created a tag called Podcast Events, um, and put that into every one of those RSS feeds. Obviously, it's only on TrueFans, but it it was something that I wanted to try and experiment with. I'm going to submit it to the GitHub on podcasting 2.0 and see if we can get it as a approved tag. And the idea behind it is very similar for discovery reasons. So one of the podcasts will have this podcast events feed. Apps can then read the feed and go, oh, look at all the other podcasts that are at this event, and then create a landing page with it in the same way that we did with publisher feeds or podcast networks. So I showed it to Giles uh because I I he saw my post and we had a chat this week. He really likes it. We're developing something for him, um, and hopefully, fingers crossed, um, that can be then rolled out for Cheerful Earful before their event. And yeah, so it's just based on the publisher feed, but it's it's uh it's an interesting idea uh that I've been playing with.

James Cridland 1:22:08

Very nice. It's uh always worth playing around with stuff um and uh seeing if they work and if they don't. Uh so uh yes, very cool.

Sam Sethi 1:22:15

And then the other thing was we did the one but last leg. So this Sunday I do the Seven Sisters last leg of the South Downs, which will then be uh a night of uh eating and drinking in Eastbourne, which I'm not sure that's the best place to end up, but anyway, that's where we will be. Yeah, James, so what's happened for you, mate?

James Cridland 1:22:34

Well, uh uh two uh interesting and exciting things. First thing, uh time zones. Um it it turns out that um time zones, if you live in Australia, it's the bane of your life is time zones, but particularly so when apps don't end up using your um your device's time zone. So for the last th three years, I I've been uh sort of shouting at my gym app. Um, because my gym app always when I go into it, it says, nothing for today. And you go, well, why not? Why not? It's Thursday.

Sam Sethi 1:23:10

I've got so many things going through my head about what your gym app says.

James Cridland 1:23:13

It says I I you know, I I'm I'm saying it's Thursday, it's when I go to the gym, I've got something booked in, and then I skip forward and it goes, oh, here's your thing. And I'm there going, Oh, uh but but it says Thursday, and so I was there writing a bug report to the app developer explaining how time zones work, and basically saying, Yeah, you're using New York time zones instead of uh Brisbane time zones because it uh you know because it's not it's not appearing today, it's appearing tomorrow. And then I realized that they've got a setting in their app of what time zone are you in, which is the most annoying thing. Um, so if you're running an app, please could you use the time zone which you can get from the device to set the time zone and not have another place to set your time zone? That would be really helpful. Thank you very much. Uh so that's the first thing, coding with James. Um uh and the other thing is I have moved to Apple Mail, um, which is something that I have not used. Moved back or moved first time? Moved first time to Apple Mail. Well, you'll be disappointed. I tried Apple Mail uh about a year or so ago, and it was buggy and it didn't work properly um with my iMap. So I moved it back here. Um new Apple mail in new version of uh macOS. Um it's flawless. It works absolutely fine. I use a uh an email service called forwardemail.net, which is very good, which gives you full uh gives you full iMap accounts and calendars and notes and everything else. Uh it's very, very geeky. You can forward your emails to um to other places, you can forge your emails to webhooks if you want, you can do all kinds of weird and wonderful things with emails, but it also runs its own IMAP uh service. And I have to say, it's been really good, it's been rock solid, both on the Mac and on my iPhone. Um, it's really nice being able to see those uh summaries which um Apple AI automatically does. And uh yeah, I've I've really enjoyed it. So that's been uh that's been an an eye-opening thing. So maybe at some point soon I might turn off the forwards to Gmail and uh maybe Google won't have uh a copy of every single piece of email I've ever had ever, um, which would be which would be interesting, wouldn't it?

Sam Sethi 1:25:39

Yeah, I mean I've been listening to you talk about uh the beta developer versions of iOS and Mac OS. I think you've said it's fairly stable, so I'm thinking, okay, I might try it.

James Cridland 1:25:52

Really stable, way better. I mean, virtually everybody on Reddit, you'd you'd have known this if you were on Reddit. Uh uh virtually everybody who's used it. Yes. Virtually everybody who's used it has said uh actually this is way better. It's faster, it's about 20% faster. Um uh, you know, all of the kinks have been ironed out of the previous version um of the of the OS's. Um there's really nothing that's gone wrong. Actually, he says this. The reason why I'm using Apple Mail is that uh I've ended up um just getting annoyed at uh the fact that my uh Gmail uh software that I'm using, I'm using uh uh an app called Mimestream, um, keeps on crashing. And I'm assuming that that might be something to do with the beta, but to be honest, I'm not even sure it is. Um so anyway, it's um it's very impressive. So I I've uh I I've certainly enjoyed it. And it's quite nice actually using proper IMAP and um trying to keep on top of my email. I've only got 10 unread emails at the moment, and I and only 16 emails in my inbox, and I intend to get rid of them. So maybe I can manage this. Who knows?

Speaker 1 1:27:07

And that's it for this week. God knows how much of that we're going to edit out. Uh, all of our podcast stories were taken from the Pod News Daily Newsletter at Podnews.net.

Sam Sethi 1:27:16

So you can give us feedback using the Buzz Sprout voicemail link like Dave Jackson and Neil Bellio did this week. In our show notes, you'll find it. And all better still become a monthly power supporter. Join our secret WhatsApp group, but you can find all of that at weekly.podnews.net.

James Cridland 1:27:31

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

Announcer 1:27:44

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.