podcasting 2.0 for April 16 2021, Episode 33 serving
billions daily.
That's what you're supposed to do in podcasting now just say
whatever it is we do a billion of those 100 million of them.
Welcome everybody. It's another Friday time for the board
meeting here podcast. 2.0 everything that's going on in
podcast index.org and on the mastodon in the socials. I'm
Adam curry, in Austin, Texas. And now ladies and gentlemen,
the man who has the pub for your sub.
Jones
he finally came back came back from vacation.
Yeah, I have to admit, I missed you.
We had weird parties while you were gone. Did you really know
Yeah. buddies to boss beer they were 2021 sorry, dad,
even though we did have a great episode with with Ryan Gentry
from lightning labs. I missed it. I missed the update. You
know, when I was on vacation trying to relax and I'd already
you know distancing myself from my from my from my day job.
That's not too hard to just stop watching the news. And just just
eliminate myself from that. That's no problem for me at all.
But when it comes to this man, podcasting 2.0 check on the
mastodon see what's happening here. This little promotion.
Hey, what's satsa streaming got let everybody know. It was
hard to hear. Eric was like, Adam, stop. Just stop posting to
the signal chat. Just enjoy yourself. Like you're like,
Okay, fine. You know, like you 30 minutes later, okay, boom,
you know, you get your bags, like, stop, just relax.
Yeah. And then I also somehow was able to get into a huge
argument with Eric, that was interesting. Oh, yeah.
I love you know, I love bro fights. Like, it wasn't like, he
Bubble bubble. You know? Like, what? Why would you ever do
this? And then it's like, okay, we're done. Alright.
Alright, man. Let's move on now,
bro. Hug done for beers. We're done. The whole thing last, like
20 minutes.
It was so funny. It took me a long time to figure out what
went wrong. But it was obviously I broke my cardinal rule. You
know, there's no context in text. So it was just dumb.
Anyway, after that, I got real relax.
Yeah. Okay, good. Go ahead and get it out and get the get the
lever spat out of the way. Yes, exactly. Get back here. Get
back to the relationship. Exactly. So this is the board
meeting. There's a lot to catch up on a lot of things that
taking place and I kind of kicked it off with what has been
one of the most active conversations in the past.
Probably the past couple days is an activity pub for podcasting.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's a huge deal. Like, I'm, I'm having
trouble. We've got so many specifications here. And I've
got them all printed out. I'm having a little bit of trouble
kind of keeping up with the pace of content. If people are
thrown, you know, thrown in there. But the activity pub
thing, we're going to talk about it tomorrow on the developer.
Right. That's it. What time is that? Is that? Like, seven?
Seven central time? I think something?
No, it's like, it's gonna be it's right around lunchtime,
maybe one o'clock Central.
central time. Right, right. Right. Right. Right. Okay.
Okay. Yeah, that So Alex Gates is going to give us a like a
activity pub one on one. Cool, which will be good because it's
a con. It's, it's, I've read, I've read the activity pub spec
a couple of times. It is not difficult, but there's a little
bit like it's not difficult to comprehend. But the there's some
there's some gotchas there where the protocol is almost, it's
almost open, it's almost too open to be able to really put
the pieces together inside. So it really helps to have somebody
explain it to you. I can't. It's kinda like Bitcoin.
Really? Oh, it was really like that. Okay.
Yeah, not not in the difficulty level, but in the, in the idea
that like, you can get to an understanding of how it all
pieces together by getting by going through the documents, but
it's a whole lot easier. Somebody can just sit there and
explain it to you. Okay, you can explain it if somebody who
really knows it and understands it can explain it in five
minutes, versus you spending two and a half hours going through
trying to figure it out.
Right, right. Right.
But but man is awesome, though. I mean, like if we can get this
work, and that would be that's
something that we run is that distributed? How does that how
does that play out?
distributed? Basically, I mean, ice activity pub is what makes
mass
mastodon work right? federate,
right. Yeah. So the idea would be
hosting companies have their own anybody.
Yeah, pod friend. The hosting company, blueberry best Brown,
right? arsa could have their own the services like, like in a
tube tube can have them the pot, you know, podcast players
podcasters. Anybody could have an activity pub instance. And as
long as it conforms to the spec, then everything just then
everything can federate. So if I go and leave a review of a
podcast, in pod friend, well, then that review could show up
on the actual podcasters. website.
cribe Yeah. Oh, boy,
boy. Exactly. Yeah, totally. Everything. federates everything
federates. And so like, cool. You know, like, just take
somebody like captivate. They can have their shows, each one
showing the comments in the reviews right from and somebody
in pod verse makes it Lisa leaves a comment or a joke shows
up everywhere, shows up right there on everybody's stuff.
Now, does that mean you have to have Okay, I guess the only the
really the app has to have an account in that case, right? Not
every, or does every person have to have an account?
Now they like is the there's a few different way and this is
this is what we got to work out is there's three different ways
you can do it. Because in activity pub, everything's sort
of, for lack of a better term and identity. And so you can you
know, you can do it multiple ways. I mean, each each podcast
can be an identity, each app can be done to him or not, those are
things we get a workout in. So whatever, however that lands,
there will be some sort of at. So when Right, right, right,
right, right, right. You know, and like, you know, each well,
like one way you could do it would be that each pod friend,
I'm just gonna use them as example. Okay, each pod friend
user account could have an identity on pod friend.
Okay, so you don't necessarily, so I'm just looking at scale, I
guess because, you know, running our own mastodon. I know what
the scale is running that. And that's no joke. But that's the
mastodon part. That's not the activity pub part. So you're
really just pinging this API with a little bit of data?
Well, you register in each activity, pub server, compliance
server registers federates with with other ones. And so then
this sets up an a stream between the two between these instances,
so that when something happens on one, it gets replicated to
the other ones, for the people who subscribe to that.
Activity Stream, maybe it's maybe my question should just be
refined, does it scale?
It does if we do it if we if we design it. Right, right. So
like, because originally I had said, Well, this would be great.
Why doesn't that podcast index run an activity per instance.
And we just could subscribe to every podcast, like every
podcast could be an identity, right? We could just subscribe
to it. And then we would be able to like see all the traffic.
Yeah,
that doesn't scale a bit.
Yeah. And that's what Alex was like, Hey, no, I don't think you
want 3 million. million identities? No, because you're
pushing tons of bandwidth. So
it's a nightmare.
Yeah. Because I think if we do it, right, we can have it where
each individual, you know, login. Really, I think it works
best. If each individual podcast app, their user base has an
identity within their instance. And then that thing federates
Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. And
he has some accountability to you don't want to miss right.
Well, that's the next thing. Of course, it's circumvents my
dream of having this all being Satoshi chat based. I can see
why why this will go first. This makes a lot of sense.
But I don't think it's circumvent, like, circumvent,
maybe, but I don't see why it I don't think it precludes
it's not incompatible. No, no, it's not inevitable. And I put
myself you know, I lay that down next to me, like, let's get this
thing working. Because this is what Moe keeps beating me over
the head about, he says, You've got everything lined up, you've
got the boost, which is a Super Chat. And he says, but you need
to have people to be able to interact with comments. That's
it. That's the thing. That's what's missing. And no one's
ever done that in podcasting.
Well, he because and this is finally a way that you can do it
without siloing Yeah, without being in love without being
dependent on one central location. Because if everybody
federates and then let's just say pod friend goes down one
day, there's like, this is too much trouble. I'm not I'm not
gonna do this anymore. It doesn't affect anything. One
mastodon instance, offline, everything just still exists,
right? Right. It's beautiful. If we can get it working. Yeah,
yeah raise us tomorrow. Okay, cuz I got it like a million I
want to attend. But I also kind of promised a ghost. No agenda
meet up. I gotta figure out what time everything happens.
Yeah Now it's, I'll be I'll be there. Good.
Yeah. So that's by the way anyone who's listening to this
if you're not listening in podcasting 2.0 compatible
browser you're missing out and you're cheapskate. And if you
are, you're probably a cheapskate, the crank crank up
those value sliders hit us with a boost.
Yeah, I'm watching right now
I woke up this morning. And I was and I looked at my my node
which pretty much is for no agenda only and half thermofax.
And I had like, like, I got some massive super boosts I think I
got 50 bucks or something totally con believable. I could
have these charts. You know, there's rudimentary charts that
are command line. Like, what is this phallic thing doing here?
What happened there? And I tried to find the source of it. And I
think you found it that it came from, from the Sphinx tribe.
That was existed.
Yeah, but for some reason that didn't show up. In in my app. I
don't know. I'm on graphene. Oh, so God knows what's what's going
on?
Yeah, so
I'm not. I'm quick to blame Sphinx. They could easily be
just, yeah, this is not meant to run the Android stuff that Well,
whatever.
Every time I see a big boost go through on anything. I'm always
my first thought is mastery. I'm glad that channel was big
enough.
So that's the first thing I did is like, Oh, shit is that where
did that come from? I want to make sure I got some channels to
work in. Because it was a lot. That was huge. That was like
200,000 SATs or something was crazy.
The way we got like, the analogy for channels is always like the
abacus where you're sliding gaps from the right. Like you always
think when you see this huge boost to some I grabbed the
abacus and just turned.
Yeah, they all got to the right.
Exactly. For those of you who don't know, we're talking about
apps such as pod friend breeze, swings, chat, and the pod
station, browser extension, all of them with their own
individual look and feel and thoughts and interfaces. And and
I had a huge wins. I've never, ever participated in an issue on
a GitHub for a serious project. And I've never been taken
seriously. Score. But I went to the, you know, I saw someone had
posted a number of people actually posted about I think
might have been Brian of London or some other people chimed in
about the breeze, boost. And really, the more the boost
functionality than the than the SATs per minute. It's like you
only do it in increments. And people want to do specific
numbers. They want to do like have a 33 in there, or 69 or a
1337. There's all these little codes that people really enjoy.
And it'll be it's more relevant in a in a situation like like
like a Sphynx chat tribe. But I can see with the activity pub,
why wouldn't a boost also go through as a and show up in the
comments or in maybe in a special boost section with, you
know, the alias of the person who sent it in the amount, you
know that we know that this is this is a gamified thing that
people really enjoy doing. But you can't do those numbers. And,
and so, you know, someone had posted that. And then there was
in the breeze developers like now we're not going to do that.
That's makes no sense. And I said, Well, here's my experience
with it and went back and forth a couple times. And then all of
a sudden was like now Alright, you've convinced me done. We're
doing it like wow.
Yeah, okay, I'm good.
Wow.
That's it. Like, that's an important thing, because I
always boost. I've got this pattern now where I boost twice
when I start listening to you. And then if I have to stop and
come back, basically, every time I'd begin listening, either from
the beginning or pick it back up, where it left off, I throw a
boost in there, right? And then I always give it usually a
couple of booths at the end. So it's like I'm going broke, but
it's Same, same same thing. Yeah, I've
been going pretty broke myself, you know, cuz pot frame is, is
1000 sets of boot boost fixed at the moment? It's a little Yeah,
little wrench for me, you know, because I'm a 500 set guy. Like
I might hit you four times in a longer show, depending on what's
going on. Or I'll hit you. Yeah, quick cup. Like, I always boost
Cridland. Yeah,
right. Yeah, boost
employee, always 1000 SAS and if he says something nice about us,
give me another 1000 many times, like how can I just I'd like to
remove some stats from what I just heard.
To get a refund.
I was listening to pod land which I stream stats to them for
that I really enjoyed pod land. And Holy crap, man. Had the, the
host on from the libsyn podcast, which is all about libsyn. And
oh my gosh, she, I, okay, she's the face of their company for
the podcast with man. She's hypee without saying anything.
And then he asks about what you guys going to support
podcasting. 2.0 and she wanted this whole lot, which is like,
stop. You're killing me. Give me some sense back. I don't want to
hear it like this. Just Say No. Just Say No, you're not really
doing it yet.
A d boost. D boost Exactly. Down Down the down boost, huh?
Let me see, we got a lot. And I want to make sure that we get
some of this stuff out of the way, because we're going to go
in completely the opposite direction with our guest today
in the boardroom, who was dropped by to let us pick his
brain and hopefully vice versa. Oh, yeah, just want to mention
that the podcast index, which should be receiving
approximately 1% of the of the transactions taking place. Right
now we're, we're, it's we don't really have a big enough sample
size because of, you know, like, when Martin's when podcast, pod
friend came online, you know, his massive, massive boosting A
lot of you know, things have normalized a little bit now. I
would say the index is receiving somewhere in the neighborhood of
$9 average per day, which I'm super excited by. Now, first of
all this, this means that, you know, there's $900 flowing
through the system. Yeah, I love that. That's like, Whoa, that's
$100
a day
a day. Yeah. And by the way, if, you know, there's also the,
whatever the amount of transactions is, the same goes
to podcast app developers. So and, you know, all I see is I
see a flywheel. You know, I see this thing, turning and every
single minute of every of the 24 hours, there's at least a
Satoshi, sometimes three coming through. And it's just, it's
just a perpetual motion machine. So all we need to do is get more
people going, get more listeners, using apps do a
better job of promoting our apps doing a better job of onboarding
people doing a better job of explaining. What are we up to
now, but 150 155 podcasts that are enabled value for value
streaming payment enabled? Think so
I can look that up? I think it was like 150 maybe 160 1000?
Okay, cuz it was like one, man. Let me just do the demo. Look up
here. I need I need to put that on the website.
We have a stamp. Yeah, yeah.
We have a number of that. We've been talking with Eric to we got
to get some some stats. Because we have interesting stats,
actually. And it seems like the industry is surprised that we
have so many podcasts in the podcast index in the podcast
index that are not listed on the I don't know Apple like oh, gee,
go figure.
Of course we do ever. That was very good. I thought that was
very interesting. What
doesn't surprise me at all.
I mean, like, there's one some host, he was talking about a
large host. He's evidently the name but a large host. It's only
50% of their shows are not during the apple date. Right.
Right. All right.
Does that mean that you know, that's kind of crazy. Clearly,
Christopher I seen.
Oh, now that we have the secret weapon. Yeah, we have the secret
weapon is
there's almost no, there's almost 3 million in there now.
Right?
Yeah. No, he gives it every day. The first thing I see is is only
274,000 left to go.
Because I was like, so we got up to I really misunderstood him at
the beginning. Because I thought he was saying that we're total
that we would end up around 2.7 million. And when he finished,
but then he's like, no, he said, Well, we were at 2.7. We got
540,000. He goes Oh, crap. Okay. Anything about backup
strategies. This database is getting rather large. Yeah, I
bet. I'll bet Yeah.
Yeah, it's the it's the episodes table that is just like
gargantuan now. I mean, it's, I don't even know how many it is
10s of millions of episodes.
So one of the exciting things that that's kind of been taking
place over the past week has been a tight collaboration with
ln pay. And I'm excited about this. And I've had a long long
think about and the vacation was good for this and we we kind of
left a day or two after we pre recorded with Ryan Gentry and so
I got a much better understanding of some of the
religion of the lightning network, which I'm not I have no
problem discussing. It seems like it's a lot of hush hush but
but the you know, the religious issue here is custodial versus
non custodial. And noncustodial. Meaning that you run your own
node or you have a path such as breeze, which is very close to
running it is it is your own full node. But you know, there's
some channel management that they're doing. versus a much
simpler to set up system, which is custodial, such as ln pay
where your $20 of podcast money is sitting on a node that
someone else that you don't own the keys to, let's put it that
way. And so that's where you hit the monitor, not your keys, not
your Bitcoin. True. And I think for onboarding of podcasters not
for app for apps right now. And when I look at will breeze is
obviously super, super slick. And you know, they help you
onboard by getting Bitcoin and Yeah, they do have some some
podcast, player issues that they need to focus on. Because people
don't just want to pay and, and send value, they also want the
features they like. And I think that they'll they have listened,
I think they know most of what they want to do. pod friend is
fantastic experience. Certainly, if you if you already have
satoshis. But if you have a separate wallet, I mean, that
just is slick, and I love his explanation. For podcasters,
though, we really don't have great solutions. I love the
tribes that that Sphinx chat has, it's not really great for a
receiving station for your podcast, streaming payments. Now
you have the breeze voltage, and this is all stuff that pops up
if you if you're ready to register and start receiving
payments, and the voltage node cost $17 a month is gonna get I
mean, that's like I use one, it's guaranteed it's gonna be
up, it's great, it's solid is fantastic. You do have to do
your own channel management. I'm sorry, I know a breeze breeze
manages your channel. So you don't have to do that. But it's
lacking in much else. You have some lightning network node
management tools, they do have a podcast tab, which shows you
what you received in a graph over time, but it really doesn't
have any level of statistics. And, you know, having worked
with Tim and lm pay for Well, shit for since almost since we
started this. I mean, he's super stoked to work on, you know,
creating a good onboarding experience working on
statistics, so we can get something cool for podcast.
Yeah, this is what the Satoshi stream guys have. And if you
don't know what I'm talking about, then you're just lost I'm
sorry. But the Satoshi stream guys, they have a lot going for
them. Except you know, it's not really structured. They don't
have the same, you know, they're really sharing one node similar
to lm pay, but I think lm pay has been around has got a lot
more going for it to host podcasts or wallets.
The there really needs to be more than one level of this
thing, I think is what we're discovering at this point,
because you're going to have and this is probably fits in real
well with with what we'll talk about with our guest today. But
like there really needs to be probably a custodial service.
And this may creep all the lightning people out. But I
mean, like, Oh, you know, quote him from yesterday, he's like,
you really don't need to worry about it. If it's kista He's
like, what you don't really need to be noncustodial for $2?
Well, exactly. It's like the it's like the store where you
have the cash drawer. And then you want to take it to your
bank. So every night the way I what I plan to do is I want us
and of course it's easy to switch you just you know, you
switch it in podcast or wallet calm, you switch your node,
boom. And it's going in everything streaming somewhere
else. I'd like it for the statistics. And then you know,
every night I'll just poop it out, send it to my end to my
bank, which is my, my, my big node.
Well, you know, the Satoshi stream guys showed that there is
a need for for onboarding small podcast Yes. Big because, like,
okay, so if you're, let's just say that you're Tim Poole or Joe
Rogan, or some some big podcast, is this doing a whole lot of
revenue and has a humongous listener base? Well, I mean, $17
a month for a voltage node is not a big deal. You probably
you're probably, you know, able to pay a guy to manage your
channels for you. So Exactly.
There's a lot of people who have anchor feeds and they take what
they get, and when they want to be a little more structured and
get some shit going and they move to a paid solution. That's
exactly it's the same analogy. I
agree. So the cost of having a custodian Do podcaster wallet,
having that option available to you, if you're making, you know,
$50 a month on your podcast that you know, 17 bucks is a big
percentage of your 50 bucks. Having a custodial service it
makes makes sense. And then if you get big, big enough, well,
then you move to a noncustodial service. And the whole time even
if it is custodial, you can be autumn you can be sending your
SATs to a off to air to your own Raspberry Pi or what? Yeah, the
phaser nothing. So
yeah,
I think it's necessary. I completely
agree. And, and I like the work that Satoshi streams has done
and is doing with statistics, they've really driven a lot of
the TLV record adoption and, and you know, which is already kind
of working almost everywhere. And once we get that published
properly, I mean, it's going to be great, we'll be able to
recognize, hopefully a lot, a lot of things, whatever we want
that or whatever people will want. But what
we need those we need, there's a couple of things I want to talk
about on this. So with, with the records, attended, Ellen pay,
has, he's got his custom records he needs for his routing.
There's some custom record routing based routing that
Snake's needs as well for private channels. So we there is
a there are two properties in the value block value recipient
tag called custom key and custom value. And so the that is for
primary routing. And I think I saw this morning that this
stream was like, I am disappointed that this is in the
spec and it's not got room for more key value pairs. And
there's a misunderstanding there like that, that custom key
custom value probably is poorly named, it should probably be
routing key routing value. Because what what what I'm
intending that for is just, this is the thing that's going to be
if, if a route is needed, on the on the destination side, we can
easily put in an another attribute in the value recipient
tag holder that holds a bigger payload of key value pair. There
they go there yeah, that can just it can just be something
like payload equal or to be equal. It can just be key colon
value, semi colon key colon, but it could just be you just parse
that out. But do we have no way is it is shutting that down?
Okay, good, good, but it seems like we need to merge some of
these things because everyone's got TLV numbers and a lot of
stuff going on there.
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and finish that up. Because I'm back
in the namespace a little bit right now getting doing that and
I'm in that mindset right now. So I'm go ahead and put that in
there and I'll talk to them about it and make sure that what
we put in is is going to be useful
over there on the corner is our guest for today. If he hasn't
fallen asleep and we apologize it's just it's been so long for
us to catch up. We have a I call him the man with the bag you
know he's holding the big bag and all the cool stuff the other
side of the table but isn't really welcome to the to the
board meeting Brian Barletta of sounds profitable. Hey, thanks
for having me.
Yeah, I'm glad you're still here.
No, it's great listen you guys catch up I actually been
listening to the last few episodes right before this so
missing that week gave me a little bit of time to make sure
I was up to speed with everything
you get you're not you're not full of stale cheap boardroom
coffee and ready to go
yeah that half donut sitting there was perfect
you know when when us whenever I see your name I think I see it
in print I always read it Beretta the old TV show you you
got you've got that you got that Moxie for me like the guy that
you're talking about before the show like the guy that everybody
hates on both sides the as the the non the privacy guys hate
you. Well, that's good. But you're really on both sides of
it.
Yes. Look get a little background on Brian here because
just saying sounds profitable sound sounds profitable. Calm is
not enough. You know, you're you're around us and I think the
connection there is James Cridland, but not quite sure how
the connection works. I'd love to hear a little bit about
sounds profitable, where your where your, what your background
is, and then how we can save you from James Cridland because you
know, you must clearly be a hostage of some sorts. No,
no, James honestly I'm so thankful for him. We met at
podcast movement after years of me following his his work and he
gave me the ability to talk to more people and give me a
platform. So yeah, Brian Barletta from sounds profitable,
and I Write about podcasts, ad tech and advertising in general.
I have been working in advertising technology for 12
years as either a product manager or a sales engineer. And
the last six have been in podcasting, specifically with a
stint at barometric and then Claire to us as one of the
founding members there, and then a shorter period of time with
megaphone running data and monetization for them. And we
started actually right around the same time. So in September
of last year, 2020 was when sounds profitable, started as a
newsletter, and I pulled up the email as two weeks into it. And
I sent you an email and I was like, I'd love to talk to you
about this, because I love what you guys are doing here. And it
was really cool to just see that we we went at it from different
sides. Like we said, these are conversations that need to be
had. There's technology and developers and engineers
involved in these things. It's more than just salespeople. It's
more than just content creators. And I think we kind of took
different sides of the same approach, and have been starting
up the conversation. And so it's, it's awesome to be here.
I'm very, very excited to be talking about,
did I reply to your email?
You did? Oh, my
God. Oh, my God. I said, I said, I need some time to step away
from me. I need. You said, Well, I
think it was where you were, because I was like, hey, let's
talk about advertising. And here's like, I got thoughts
about it. But I gotta let them marinate a little bit. Yes,
yes. Okay. I remember now, and I have
seven and a half months isn't appropriate. marination. And I
mean, all three of us have really been on like a rocket
course with.
Yeah. And I want to make something clear from from the
get go right off the bat, that I have no problem with marketing
and advertising. You cannot live in a world without marketing and
advertising because it would be very dull, very boring. But just
like we have, I think retooled podcasting, I think we can
retool advertising and I seeburger get to that. So just
upfront, even though I do feel that advertising is you can just
say it censorship, because at the basis, you're never going to
say anything negative about your advertiser. There's something
that is overlooked. I feel, and it's exactly what you're doing.
And it's exactly what James is doing is the idea of a
newsletter. And it made me chuckle I was, of course I was
listening to I can't, I might it might have been pod news, I
don't remember what it was, or maybe pod land. And James was
thanking a gold sponsor is and he said, me, I want to thank so
and so for returning as a gold sponsor, so that we can do
independent journalists. You know, I understand what he's
saying. But of course, is horse crap, because it's not
independent if you're being paid by the advertiser who you then
subsequently do stories on. But that's okay. Because everybody
knows what's going on. And when you have a newsletter, or a
product, which is sponsored, or somehow you're monetizing, with
companies in the industry, so I was, you know, PC Magazine,
brides magazine, you know, whatever it is, then if Vogue,
Vogue, to me is the best advertising in the world, the
content is actually the ads. So this is very beneficial to
people, and everybody understands it, but we have a
lot of misunderstanding about what advertising is. And so I
think where the industry is going, and then I'll shut up
because I really want to hear what you have to say, is towards
programmatic slamming stuff in doing it with the attribution
figuring out exactly where people live, what they smoke,
what they drink, how they, how they act. And, you know, and,
and then cross profiling, whatever, whatever we can do, to
deliver, you know, the audience to the advertiser. That's how it
feels, which is not what I ever envisioned for podcasting, but
that's the obvious path that it is taken. How's that going?
Oh, not good. happening. It's what I love about podcasting is
like, first of all, like, I'm with you on a lot of this stuff.
Like I think podcasting technology is neat. I like the
tools like, I'm not the best at like selling ads or like
successfully running a campaign. But I know the tools that people
smarter than me can use to do that. Nobody likes bad ads.
Nobody likes ads that don't fit either to them, or ideally also
to them in the context. And they stand out like a sore thumb. And
so there's this mindset on like, the bigger side of it is that
everybody wants programmatic. They want that Sunday, Sunday,
Sunday ads slammed in there that
was everybody. Brian, when you say everybody is that the
advertisers, the agencies, the ad networks, the podcasters, the
listeners,
I said the voices that are talking about this world of
programmatic In the world of like invasive data, the world of
radio ads slammed in and programmatic I think, are just
the naysayers. They're the they're the industry, people
drumming up the hate for the people that are just like slowly
on the tail end of that listening in, right? Because
like, the further higher up, you get into that space, you don't
have to deal with that. Like I think programmatic has a cool
place. I think it's a neat technology. I think it's order
management. But there's no company out there that's just
like, Hey, I got eight ad slots, put whatever you want in there,
right? They're gonna drop down and downloads, they're gonna
drop in rankings. And the bigger you get, the more you don't even
have to do advertising. As we look at like buy impressions and
conversion, you can just do sponsorship. Right? There are so
many different ways to go at it. So this fear of what
programmatic can be this fear of invasiveness is something that
people in like this mid level, talk about, and hype up the
negativity around, and then pass it down to the people that are
as close as possible to the consumer level. So more of the
longtail and it gets that fear going. But the The truth is, is
it's just not. It's not there. Like we're getting so little
data and podcasting. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean,
like we're ahead of the curve, just because we couldn't get
more IP and user agent user agents useless. You can't buy
anything inside the Spotify app, so that just a dead end. It just
tells me what app you're on and what device you're on. IP
address. Yeah, it's personally identifiable information. But
there's regulations and stuff going on there. And there need
to be a little bit more, and it's gonna help,
but it'll get Isn't it? Isn't the problem? It mean, just at
the at the basic problem is, it's an open system, no one has
a lock on it. I mean, you and the industry in general talks a
lot about what Spotify is doing. Isn't that exactly the direction
they're taking what they call podcasting?
I mean, at the end of the day, do you call the news on Facebook
news? Or is it Facebook's curated content?
Well, no. But my point is, they're doing the programmatic
inserts, dynamic streaming insertion, wherever it's called.
I mean, that seems to be their dream, which to me is like,
Well, yeah, 2009, we were looking at that, and then it
started to suck, then.
Yeah, and I think Spotify is an interesting case, because
everybody tries to call it podcast advertising. And I make
it a priority to call it app advertising, where the contents
podcasting, or music. Right, because it is the app, the Joe
Rogan podcast, if you listen to it, 10 seconds into it, there's
a streaming ad insertion point. And that what happens there, if
you look at the like the marquee that's streaming, it'll say the
name of the episode The 10. Second markets, your app
immediately starts naming the file, which is the advertiser.
And in the app has paused the mp3 is inserted, like the app
has taken control. Now it knows that you're exactly listening to
it. If you hit play for two seconds turn on airplane mode,
when you get to that 10. second mark, the app just fails, the
episode is done. Because the app can't make that call for the
streaming add the podcast experiences interrupted, which
is an ideal for anybody. I'm sure Spotify will change that.
But when we talk about podcast advertising, and push Spotify
firmly to the side, because they're an app whose content
includes podcasting, but when I talk about programmatic, I talk
about when someone presses play on a podcast, it's setting their
IP and user agent and the content they want. And they're
taking that info and saying, What do I know about this
episode, the time of day, and this listener, that I can fill
these potential ad slots based on what's available for
inventory, and some of it can be direct sold. Some of it can be a
second seat sellers, like their teams like megaphone and a cast.
And all these partners will sell whatever you don't directly
sell. And then the third part can be programmatic kicked up to
an open marketplace or private marketplace, where you set rules
of what they can do with that data, and what they can send
back and how much visibility they have. But I mean, like I
can open up my inventory to programmatic. And I can simply
just say, I want to approve every creative. And so that
means I might miss out on campaigns. That means it's a lot
of account management, but I can stop that control.
You have a very varied background, but all in this in
this general industry. I've I've made the assertion and maybe you
can help me with some data that you have or is there a suspect
that Spotify cannot actually fulfill the inventory they're
promising to advertisers and when I saw the Michelle Obama
podcast open up all of a sudden it was not exclusive. It was
available and other apps. To me, it was like hmm, are they able
to deliver can they deliver the the rates that they that they
launched with and they promised to advertisers? Do you hear
anything about that? You know,
I mean, I truly believe Spotify bought megaphone for the sales
team and the reach I think Spotify what they have set up
for Spotify as the streaming ad insertion product, they're
filling out like I don't think that they have a problem with
that but not a lot of their shows that are directly owned,
even use that I mean, I believe the bill Simmons podcasts that
they own doesn't. It sounds like it's baked in how it's set up. I
could be wrong. And kudos to that producer for making dynamic
ad insertion some baked in. But I think that the truth is, is
that not enough podcasts? Not enough podcasts on the Spotify
app have implemented that technology yet. And when you see
these things about exclusive, I actually think it's more about
the creators expressing control. Right. Like, I think that they
looked at it. And they said, We could go about this that
specific way and make it completely exclusive. But I
think that the, you know, in the Michelle Obama example, I think,
I think that was more creator controlled an advertorial is.
Yeah, because you're not going to hear anything but baked in
ads for for the Renegades and the Michelle Obama, right?
Because they need that level of control. Like,
is renegades open to? Is that subscribable outside of Spotify?
I don't think it is. I think that that one is only in the
app, but that one, to my knowledge, he is going to be
baked in ads, because that's a level of control the the content
creator gets a shirt because they say like my brand, and
reputation is critical. And I can't provide you anything that
you can insert something to and accidentally put an ad in that I
didn't agree with. Right?
what's right, that that tells me that there that there may be
some sort of like internal tension or struggle,
there's got to be I tried to do this kind of network. It's
sucks.
I can't imagine a lot of because you're, you're dealing like
you're dealing with like five separate companies, right to
technology companies through content companies. And
then here's what happened. here's, here's what happens.
Those guys get all the big exclusives. Well, they got the
cool Pro, how can we get the shit product, we don't get
enough exposure on the homepage. I've
heard it all man. And then add in the worst part of it all like
that. It's a publicly traded company. That sounds cool when
you're like running a startup, like sell an IPO and all that
stuff. But like the pressure, you lose a lot of ability of
what you can do not like not necessarily on like the like
skirting legality sense, but in the sense that you're beholden
to way bigger structures. Yeah, you can't add and move.
I don't understand the exclusive thing at all. I mean, why if
you're, if you're trying to sell if, if you're fun if your
primary funding comes through ad sales? Why would you limit your
reach to an app that has the at most 20% of the market? 25% of
the marketing
I can answer that is because it's a technology company.
They're valued as a technology company. And so all of their
sizzle comes from look at this cool technology. Look at the
streaming ad insertion. Take it from me, they're bound by
technology. Now they've sold it as such.
I just don't like yeah, it's got to be some. It's got to be
something like that some sort of internal tension where Yeah,
it's like, oh, one set of people says we want we want to grow the
app. We want to grow listeners, monthly active users, whatever
we got.
They want subscribers, they really want people's credit
card. They want subscribers. Yeah.
Yeah. And the other side of it is the ad. The ad sales
department. It's like guys are killing us. We could be we could
be getting right. This many more.
Struggle right there. There's your struggle. Absolutely.
Do you think that sounds like something that could that's
going on? Yeah,
I definitely do. I think that the bigger part of it is that
it's like Spotify is focused on what they're building. And they
want to be that content hub and that aggregator and like, we're
not. I mean, you couldn't, there was no, I mean, I guess,
broadcast television, like you could set up a satellite and
just ingested in however you wanted. But like podcasting and
the RSS feed is so cool and unique. And everything that
we're building off of it, all these aggregator tools have the
ability to say, well, it's my audience and kind of silo it
off, and they're trying to do that they're trying to be I hate
the cliche, like the Netflix of audio and, and all that. It's
just ugly. It's gross, right? I'm, I'm shocked. You don't have
a sound bit for that out. But, but that's I mean, that's the
truth of it. Right? That's, that's how you sell that to an
investor or that's how you sell it as a as a technology pieces
that you're going to create that silo the next Facebook, the next
Twitter, the next whatever. And and podcasting is a cool bit of
content. It also doesn't hurt that every time someone's
listening to something that's not music, Spotify benefits from
it, but I agree with you on the ad sales team. I mean, that's
like, that's a really hard thing, right, the distribution
of the ads, but also, supposedly, you can charge more,
right? If you can say, I know this user, I know this listener
as an app through first party data where I have their name,
their email address, their you know, all of their actions,
their habits, and I have their consent because to sign up for
my service, they have to give that consent. I can sell that
for $100 CPM and I got a half the impressions or a fifth right
but if it's open and wide, I can't I might struggle to sell
it for Due to our CPM because now I'm talking about I don't
know, all that first party data. Now I have to say, Well, you
know, it is the, you know, the Obama podcasts. And that's like
really important. And so I should be able to sell it for
whatever. But I don't have the listener data that I
think that that's flawed logic anyway, because that show was
terrible.
But it's a ripoff of Moe facts, let's be honest. We're poor,
poorly done by the salespeople, right, these
salespeople are not equipped with the right knowledge to go.
Well, this is this is the next topic. And I think it plays into
something we just learned in this past week. And so it's
really what the the polite word I've learned is attribution.
It's really tracking, tracking of listeners. So listeners who
are disregarded in the entire conversation up until now. And
one of the things we discovered is, is a lot of a lot of things
are wrong with even simple attribution that is used in
compiling statistics about the industry, such as the user
agents, and I don't know if you follow that, Brian, but maybe
Dave, you could explain what was discovered. And and the
significance of it and how that pertains to. I think it's
important, what apps are getting traffic, you know, for
advertising and just knowing the industry? What exactly because I
think I understand it, did we discover?
Well, the I don't think it's anything that we discovered that
what Well, I guess we discovered a couple of things that the
problem has been for a while, that area, and it really came to
the forefront when buzzsprout decided to remove the apple core
media user agent from his stats page. And when they when they
did that it dropped apples, the apple podcast app share a market
share of Listen, you know, plays down from like, sikinos, 60%,
plus, down to below Spotify. So they're each neck and neck at
roughly, I think it's like 28%. So that tells you immediately
that you have roughly 30% of the of the listens, the depth of the
GET requests that are that are coming through in the user agent
as apple core media, which is a UI specific user agent string
that so we knew sort of everybody knew that was
happening, but then nobody knew. Okay, which apps are reporting
themselves incorrectly as apple core media. So John's Birla go
ahead
of me and show me and James actually wrote about this like,
right in the first couple of months. And the the main idea
that we push is that when the RSS request comes in, pass
something back that identifies that requests uniquely. So that
you look at the RSS user agents so that when the episode comes
in, you can differentiate all the apple core media.
So john Spurlock did something brilliant on the mastodon
server, and he created essentially, a, it's a fake RSS
feed. This serves one single fake show all the time, this
dynamic and in you. So if you request the RSS feed, it just
gives you back a new MD every excellent Well, it doesn't even
serve the mp3 then it gives you back a new an XML feed with the
user agent string as the description in the feed. Listen
to the episode. When you listen to the episode, it dynamically
generates an audio file every time with the user agent string
that requested it as the audio. And so you can look in here
verbally. And I've got two examples. So first, the first
one clip is called reflections. podcast index,
podcast index.org at 1642 GMT
podcast index.org is the user agent string that we request
that that that came from. So then the next one is reflections
apple core media,
apple core media, at 1649 GMT from IP address.
So what we did was was, I tried to SDI into as many different
podcast apps as I could, and then just test it. And in
predictively, every time you've downloaded an episode, you got
the correct user agent string. So like if it's down, if you
stream it, if you stream it, it comes through as apple core
media ship.
I haven't downloaded a podcast in years, I'm always streaming.
And I think a lot of people are so like pocket cast is a perfect
example. Pocket cast when you stream it reports itself as
apple core media. And so they're just leaving, they're leaving
market share stats on on on the floor. Yeah. Yeah. James
James talked about. He had a Twitter thread where I guess the
developer identified that you actually can change that user
agent from apple core media, you can add things to it. So I'm
excited to see if people do that. But getting the app
developers to, like take that stance and and do more in unify
is, I think, the roadblock that we're hitting. And I want to I
want to loop this back to what you were saying with tracking
and attribution, you can definitely call it tracking. I
mean, that's what it is. attribution is the one marketing
word for it. But at the end of the day, I mean, like, first
off, it's just IP, right? So that IP is matching to a
database that has data that you've consented to share. Do I
wish was
that's already not true? Okay, you hit my IP at home, you have
data that I did not intend to share, but I know what shows up.
I know what shows up, it shows right down to the address, it's
very close. So
now show for geo targeting. So with geo targeting with IP
address, it's a 10 kilometer variance for for Wi Fi. And so
like for me, I'm like a kilometer away from my physical
location. If I'm on cellular, though, I, when I was in Austin,
it was showing me and either San Antonio or Houston. Right. So I
guess I guess
what I'm saying is, forget geo targeting. Sure. There's
databases, you hit my IP address, it comes back with my
name. Yeah, that's out there. And I'm sure
that the collection of data I'm not comfortable with how all of
these databases have been created, and I'm excited for
this whole look at identity that's going to reassess what is
allowed to be stored and created and how and how it's going to be
allowed to be tied together.
What is this? What is this identity? identity talk you
speak of?
Yes. So they're moving away from the mobile device IDs and the
cookies. And the intent there is that everything is going to be
first party collected data. So you log into a website,
and they just don't understand who's driving this.
A Nielsen loaded me live ramp. And why are they doing this?
Because the mobile device ID and cookies was a goldmine. They had
so much information. So now they have to move at a way that
allows your your specific site and my specific site to collect
collect first party data, but then join it together in one
central place that doesn't allow you to see my data me to see
your data, or advertisers should just pull and get a request of
ID Oh,
so we just we just trust the industry on this one. Cool.
I will laugh nervously with you on that one.
This sounds like this sounds like flop. This sounds like the
whole thing.
Talk, there you go.
But the biggest thing about about attribution on these
things, right, like so, you know, a lot of these companies
and podcasts and you have a big global presence, and they do
honor GDPR. And it's actually from my understanding, a
nightmare to honor GDPR only in those territories, and not
worldwide, so most of them will adhere to it. But But here's the
problem. A podcast host doesn't have a way to interact with a
pod. Like a listener. The podcast apps, depending on their
size, have to adhere to GDPR and ccpa, and all the other
regulations. And I don't know why they're not. So when I log
into Spotify, or pocket casts or overcast, I don't care what the
app is, I am a listener of that app, that app should be asking
me for my consent or give me the option to opt out depending on
how narrow they want to get. Did they want to just let me do it
only in California and ignore me in Texas because there's no
regulation. Cool, do they want to do GDPR style regulation
everywhere, awesome. But because I as a listener have no way to
interact with the app, which is my only listening portal to
determine my consent framework. And that app has no structure to
pass that consent down the line. Now, you still have to pass the
IP address in useragent. There's absolutely structural things
that need it. But if there was a consent flag passed with that by
these apps, these major hosting platforms and publishers would
honor it, right? There's no reason why they wouldn't because
it is if I can say I own an app, my users opted out. And here's
their information and opted out, I have an audit log, I have
something that they can absolutely confirm that they
received, I have something that they can prove what they can and
can't do with it. Because with the opt out, you can do less
with it. There are still ways to do attribution. With opting out,
you can do direct IP to IP match with no data augment, it still
shows the efficacy of advertising, buddy.
You're saying? What you're saying is that you don't think
there's a way to just kind of jump in a few steps ahead. And
you don't think there's a way to fix that anywhere other than the
product? And by that I mean the privacy invasion aspect of all
this stuff. You think really where the rubber meets the road
is that the app is I think yeah indicates with the podcast.
Whoa, wow, this
is this is very This is very good, because that's where my
solution goes as well, which I'm going to still hold back on.
While I think me and you should partner with it unless you
completely disagree with my idea. Now, the thing, the thing
here is that like these apps, get all this content and I
understand it's a chicken in the egg right who made what
podcasting successful The app or the content, and but the problem
is, is that everyone tries to beat up on these attribution
companies, pod sites and Chartwell and whatnot or the
hosting platforms, right? The thing is, is that they're the
little guy, right? These publishers are trying to squeak
by and get as much as possible, if a publisher could get direct
information about their listeners that their listeners
opted into if a publisher could communicate through their
hosting platform in one central location, directly to all of
their listeners across all apps, because there was some sort of
app required framework like you're doing with the RSS feed.
But getting more buy in, it would be amazing, because we
keep talking about, oh, well, when I log into an app, I want
to opt out of these three podcast tracking me but I'll let
these four know don't split hairs. And forget the fact that
every time you don't opt out of Spotify, or Apple or Google or
whoever, they get all your info, and they're just determining
what you don't pass down the line. So all of those apps are
incentivized and motivated to get as much data from you as
possible. So the opt out should happen in the app, because the
app is the directing for, like control with you. And the the
app should be responsible for passing that consent flag to the
rest of the stream. So
is that what you're proposing, that's I would love to do that I
talked to Marco with over at overcast and he said, by
default, he's gonna like you, if he did this, he would opt
everyone out, because he will not never let anybody opt into
the app. And I'll tell you that the the attribution partners are
cool with it, they'd honor it, a lot of the hosts will honor it,
a lot of the major publishers are dying for this type of legal
coverage, because you got to remember, if I want to opt out
of an NPR podcast, right now, I have to, I have to opt out of
the app itself. And PR directly, I have to know their hosting
provider and opt out of it, I have to know their prefix
tracking partner and opt out of it, I have to somehow magically
know their server side attribution partner and opt out
of it. And then if there's data collection with the host, or
like, if they use like Nielsen targeting, I have to do that,
too. That's seven different places, each one of them have
their own way to honor opting out, some will accept that I'm
in Texas, and they'll cover me under GDPR ccpa. Others might
say you're not in a protected territory. And so I as a
listener have to do that. And worst of all, I have to do it on
the home IP address. Because cellular and business IP I
know I mean, it's it's stomach churning. And just hearing you
talk about stuff that it is possible. I'm being I'm sitting
here going What the fuck this is exactly what I hate.
But so if there's a Is there any part that the feed itself can
play in this? Because I don't know that? You know, what you're
saying is like a do not track style header
for which everybody hates?
Gentlemen, it's much deeper than that. In 57 minutes, we have not
that the listener, the listener, is completely ignored and abused
in this entire process. We're abusing the listeners
information, we're abusing their everything, and then we're gonna
throw ads at them. I don't know it. To me, it seems like this is
a very short sighted way of going about making money and
good product. It just goes against everything. Because what
I haven't heard is the promise we used to get at least it was a
cool promise, you'll get an ad for exactly what you're
interested in. That was the prop. That was the promise. That
was awesome. And no, I disagree. You want to hear my idea goes
here. So what we've done with podcasting 2.0 is we have taken
out several middlemen silently, the deadly one is we've we've
taken out forces that can be bad. So we've taken out the
centralized corporate controlled index, known as Apple, we have
at least a sneakernet distributed version of that,
which is you know, by no way robust, but at least the
information cannot just necessarily die. And we're
working on decentralizing and making the the core index more
robust. With value for value streaming payments, we've
eliminated all middlemen in all payment structures, except for
the onboarding, which is still a process of getting your money
fiat money into an appropriate cryptocurrency. We've also
eliminated a royalty organizations Performing Rights
Organization. So we do direct royalty split payments from a at
the moment of, of consumption or sending a value from the person
who's receiving whatever value they're getting from an mp3
typically, that's huge. So we need to remove some middlemen
from this process to end. Let's fulfill the one promise because
the again, the promise was There are two promises made early on
about the internet. One is your refrigerator will no one to
order the milk. And I'm completely convinced that the
refrigerator can do that today. But we've we've forgotten that
promise. We've done all kinds of other stupid shit to build to
track people. And we never fulfill the one promise, you'll
get the ads you're interested in. So that that we failed, and
I've been a part of the marketing ad. Now, let's just
put serendipity aside, because you of course, is always a pro.
I didn't know I wanted that product. Of course, that
happens. But maybe this is not the appropriate forum. I'll go
back to brides magazine, Vogue magazine, fishing magazine, Hot
Rod magazine, Bitcoin magazine. When I listen to Tales from the
Crypt, Marty bent, I'm streaming value to him. I'm streaming
satoshis, I'm boosting him. I do however, listen to his ads,
because he's got Bitcoin services companies that I'm
interested in their product, and I'll see it then I go, okay.
Now, I may not want to listen to the same ad three times, you
know, by may want to skip through and maybe if the ads
different, I'll listen for a different offering. But I know
that it's going to be Bitcoin related, because that's who
advertises on Tales from the Crypt? So how about this? Why
don't we change the whole thing? I love your idea of the apps
because I think that is exactly where this needs to be managed
from. And the app developers, and that's one of our two
mission statements is they've always gotten screwed. They've
been left out of all deal flow. And all of it, you know, podcast
at Joe Rogan's money now app, the apps didn't get any of that
money, none of it. And yet all the apps pass it on through
quite happily Now, did they benefit maybe by featuring him?
Sure. All kinds of stuff can be done. Some would run ads if they
have a popular app, but they're really not in the deal flow. So
what if we say, we have a podcast, I'll just take Tales
from the Crypt as an example. And I have a Bitcoin widget
company and I'm advertising. And I want to spend $50. CPM. So
I'll pay $50 for every 1000 people who have listened to my
podcast. Now, the first thing I have in the traditional
scenario, is all the numbers, all the data, everything that
people have to tell me that my money is working, or the old
joke, half of my marketing money is working. I just don't know
which which half
is bullshit. Because the elephant in the room, the two
elephants really is, is this just something that downloaded
and it's sitting there, and I know that there's all kinds of
algorithms and IAB standards, and we've dusted that over a
little bit. So we have so well, at least we all agree that this
stinks, is poor, but we all agree on the poop. But then the
shape, but then the skipping of ads, this is the elephant and no
one wants to talk about skipping of ads. That's what Spotify went
after, you can't skip the ads on Spotify. That's their streaming
insertion. That's the whole USP that they have. So what if you
go to you're going to do a media buy, I'm going to go to five
apps. And the reasons for that should be apparent to me as a
marketer, or maybe as a representative of someone who
wants to market a product. And I'll say, okay, pod friend, I
want to pay a $50. CPM. Let's just start with $50. I want to
be on this podcast. And that's Marty's podcast. And Marty says,
Yeah, sure, that's good. What happens is, the minute that ad
hits, my streaming, satoshis stops, it reverses. And the ad
by that the Bitcoin widget company made with pod friend now
starts to pay from their wallet, which sits at pod friend starts
to pay the podcaster, Marty, but also it's going to pay me for
sitting through the ad, which I can then recycle and put into
other podcasts. And it's going to pay the app. So now I'm being
paid for my attention, which is their investment in me you're
literally investing in convincing me with money to to
listen, it's like a pitch for a bad timeshare.
You're, you're a boat, and I have a feeling. And if I skip
it, then Marty doesn't get paid app doesn't get paid. I don't
get paid. Okay, but let's talk and talk to that for a second.
So there's got to be a line that we draw on this. I like your
idea, but I everything I'm doing with sounds profitable is
talking to and it's such a shitty word for it. But like the
industry of podcasting, you got a paycheck and you got a 401k.
Right. The other side of it is you're trying to generate that
paycheck. On that side. If I'm a smaller publisher, and I'm
trying to generate revenue, I want it in every way I possibly
can go about it. But pod friend is not big enough for these big
publishers to log into yet another system
On a second, you want a
$50 CPM.
But I don't, but I don't want what happens if in. So let's say
that I, there was an example I heard there was a podcaster that
had a Fiji water Add dynamic insertion, they put it live,
they got Twitter bombed by their followers about how terrible
Fiji water was, they removed it immediately, I was talking to
this other company that their entire idea was to make clips of
podcasts, they opened up with their like we checked with their
lawyers, we have the legal right to do that. And then what we're
gonna do is we're going to take that clip and then sell
advertising to it and that we're gonna have that super bad idea i
there was the media first thing I said, I'm like,
congratulations, you're legally able to do that podcasters are
gonna light you on fire. Right and but so they're like people
can log in the podcast or can log in and claim that and I said
show let me get this straight I'm the podcasts are removed
Fiji water Fiji water comes to you, it matches the targeting of
that clip, and you just run Fiji water against my content without
my permission. So I'm here,
I think you're missing. You're missing my point, though. And
before we do, cuz I understand where you're going just wanted
before you go all the way down the path. This This only works
if pod friend does active ad sales, because as you pointed
out, and pod friend or Piper catcher or Mayo, pod station, or
breeze or whatever, they have all the information, they should
be the ones cutting the deals. I'm just see,
as you view it the other way, get them all to unify so that I
as the publisher can get all that.
Of course, that's that's the next step, of course,
because if that's all unified, I'll just give them a check.
aspects, think
about the Think about what can be done with an app itself.
These two these app developers have so much experience they can
add, if they understood that they can receive money for it.
Look, yeah, I don't care if if my app is promoting one, one
podcast over the other, that actually might be enjoyable. I
want my podcasters to recommend and maybe we have a whole
namespace tag for this. All of these things aren't come through
the app and the app developers have been beaten into submission
from day one, to shut up and just listen to what Apple does.
And look at all the stuff that they can be doing.
I think I think the only flaw is they have to unify and come
together like they have the IAB for the hosts and the
publishers. And I think there's some good and unification there.
And there's plenty of flaws with it. But the app developers, if
they all came together and said, this is the stuff that we're
going to accept, we all accepted, you can pass through
polls down to the audience, you can pass through ads. And you
can know we'll let you know listener, why
does it why did why does it have to be? Why does it have to be
unified, I don't understand
that if I if I log into my hosting platform, and I set up
the ad in my hosting platform, knowing that that ad a specific
type of ad can react nor a regular RSS feeds. And let's
call this like the RSS 2.0 aspect, right? That you're
working on if or the podcasting 2.0. If it lands on a podcast
app that honors that and it gets more data, they get a cut of it.
But in one central location,
we have a fundamental, fundamental difference in
approach. Okay, I this is brides magazine, I have beautiful
brides gowns,
I want to talk to Marty, I want to talk about how the message is
be conveyed. I want to make sure that his audience this is this
is not a Oh, let me log in and buy some ads. That's the problem
with advertising. We're not thinking anymore. When I'm
talking about buying the ads I'm talking about. I'm the
publisher. And I want to sell My Brides magazine, it feels like
how you're talking about it is advertising on the newsstand.
And I'm talking about advertising, a unique version of
My Brides magazine to specific newsstands that bought into my
type of marketing and I pay them extra for it. And then the
regular brides magazine that goes to everybody else so that I
as sounds profitable selling ads on my inventory. I say to an
advertiser, I say 50% of my inventory runs on with these
cool features that I can show you listener data just like
Spotify. And it's $5 more CPM because I pay that guy, but I'm
just saying back to
hopes the whole point the whole point of mice and then I'll shut
up about it. That my audience, my audience as brides magazine
podcast, you know what the fuck my audience is? You sell brides
dresses, you know that this is where you don't need to know
their IP address. You don't need to know their spending habits.
You don't need to know anything whatsoever. Except I'm brides
magazine. I'm hot rod magazine. I'm fishing magazine, whatever
it is that I just don't believe in any other type of advertising
for podcasts. It's right. It's got to be related and look at
where the money's being made. newsletters. You're doing it
with advertisers, you don't have BMW tied? Oh, yeah. So that but
that's a much more personal sale. And I think that if we
focused on that, because it is making content again, people,
but that's a scale issue. I agree with you on that one. And
this is a great example. I think that like the the luxury of a
bigger podcast can do sponsorship. I am a huge
advocate for contextual advertising over this
identification, your IP address.
But wait,
wait, wait, wait. But wait, boy, if I know that 1000 people
listen to my ad on the brides magazine podcast is going to be
much easier for me to measure. And even with a with a chapter
URL, click through, it's gonna be much easier for me to measure
the effectiveness of that than anything else. You understand
what I'm saying? Because people are going to be, they're going
to be buying a quality product, a big product. I mean, it's just
not good for everything.
I promise you, we see this the same way. It's just where the ad
is place. And I don't believe that it should be automated by
the buyer, just buying in mass all the time through these
pieces of technology, there needs to be that relationship
that you want. Bride magazine, I just mean that like there's a
level of publisher that can't spend time logging into every
unique podcast app and setting up this is my blockless I just
don't like tobacco ads. I don't like.
Okay, all right, well,
you got to protect their brand. And
the ad can only come with their consensus.
I think the brand protection thing, this is a problem that I
have with what the current like
get over yours. If you have to take ads, get the fuck over
yourself with your brand protection business, please.
And I've got a perfect example of this. I'm listening to some.
Okay, I guess my basic premises there's that modern advertising,
there's this group of, sort of, you know, I guess, just the
modern advertising mindset has shifted to where brand safety is
the number one thing and that it forgets the fact that people
like danger. They like things that are scary. And like it. So
play, I got a perfect example of this. It's play the clip art
build trigger warning.
This is where we'll take questions about anything in the
world of the occult. This is going to be something again, I
serve up the warning that if you are frightened by this kind of
material or unduly disturbed
by it, turn your radio off.
Or in other words, don't
listen. Now
that that's like when you give the warning. It keeps people
listening fake. Yeah, it's a fake warning.
But what what I heard Brian say is the podcasters want to
protect their brand because they don't want shitty ads. My point
is their category is weddings. So here's my category pod friend
hyper catcher. Sell to me what you got weddings, wedding
dresses, wedding venues, wedding DJs, all this stuff. Bring it on
in. That's good.
Yeah, but the thing with that, though, is that you have if you
have a podcast that's like, Okay, look, don't listen, like
if, if you're a slave to video podcast, don't be like, I'm
gonna warn you. There's gonna be some skimpy wedding dresses
coming up. You need to turn this off. If that's you know if
that's against your
right. But I heard Brian St. Didn't say the brands were
afraid. But I heard Brian says that the publishers, the podcast
creators don't want shit ad. That's what I heard him say. But
you could have a specific reason why you don't want to work with
a specific advertiser. I mean, like you, you could have
competitive separation, you've already sold them directly. And
you don't want them to have a way to get your
that's why it's not. That's why it's not programmatic. That's
why you can't buy without having a real connection, and a
valuable one. We've gone too far, we've gone too far with all
this technology.
Now, if you're seeing the app has to like as they sell the
inventory, they reach out to you and say do you want to purchase?
That's great, but I would just love a unified framework for
that. I'd love the ability for me to also sell into their
technology and pay them for that added technology that they've
all unified around. Well,
it's never gonna happen. All I know,
is. And that's why I keep focusing on the fact that right
now, you're right, that the listeners are being abused. But
the truth is, it starts with the apps, they have to pass consent
over to everybody else to honor and they have to hold them
accountable for it. Right.
That's that sounds kind of, you know, I think you're right, I
think you're 100%. Right. But it's also kind of, it's funny,
there's this, there's this shared lie that goes on within
the industry that, oh, we want more accurate stats. But no,
you know, we
really don't want more accurate. Yeah, and, and I hear the other
the other side of that is what I hear you saying, Brian, is that
there's also this shared lie of look, we don't want your data
because GDPR and it's really complicated and all that kind of
stuff. But we're not actually going to stop trying to get your
data unless you give us a header. Imagine
that. Yeah, but imagine that TechCrunch article talks like in
the top 10 apps, five of them are not the big names there.
They all get together and they say, Hey, we're gonna pass opt
out. So if a listener logs into the app, it says, Do you want to
opt in or out of this data and that app on Is it for its
entirety and passes it downstream to everything it
does. And then the apps say, Okay, what hosts are going to
honor this? If no hosts or publishers honor, imagine the
TechCrunch article on that. Imagine the press release on
apps, protect privacy, and downstream. Okay. So that's why
all these
people, the only, the only difference we have here of
opinion, is that the think, the approval process, which
whichever way it goes, for the listener for the advertiser for
the podcast, or for the app, it shouldn't be about whether
you're tracking somebody. So I'm saying no tracking, zero
tracking, turn it all off. No one needs to know shit, other
than here's guaranteed proof by a cryptographic hash agreement,
that this person is interested at this very moment in this kind
of ad, bring it, that's all you need. And otherwise, you're just
wasting it pissing people off. I mean, that's the other half of
your money.
I'd take that anyway, if on the on the request came through, it
said this app is verified that this person likes these things.
And that's why you get to know about them. A hosting platform
would target that. But what I'm saying is to be unified.
Okay, it's easier to make a unified for everybody to say,
but we'll do ads in this specific way, when the person
agrees by a cryptographic agreement, saying yes. And that
typically is because I will accept a one Satoshi payment for
from you. Right. So you have a transaction there that I'm
agreeing to this being put in my face. That's all you need to
know.
Yeah, the blockchain is the buzzword of the of the century,
it seems like ad tech ad, ag tech and dude can jump on that
bandwagon. And
I don't disagree. And I think
fundamentally, the the industry does, I think fundamentally the
industry is addicted to data is addicted to knowing is addicted
to charts has huge infrastructure of analysts who
are addicted to data, they don't use
it, nyan, they abuse it, they've collapsed.
They resell it, they abuse it and do all kinds of crap with
it. And it lays around everywhere. Yeah. So yes, you
can get 100% everybody will agree to a system that says no
tracking whatsoever. Here's how we handle an agreement that
someone wants to listen to something. Here's how the
podcast here it can be done in one transaction. It's very
simple. There's a consensus.
That's right need help from you, guys, we need the apps to buy
into this, we need them to unify and agree on how they're going
to tell everybody upstream one, my guess
I can guarantee you I can get everybody to not track,
you got to give them that as the app, that entire app has to say
I will not collect your data, I will hold it to these standards,
I will not do anything, we'd be
happy to do that if they have a way to help the advertising. And
my and my idea, while not it's not sexy, like spewing ads all
over the place, I think they'll make more money. And I would
tend I personally, I want this feature I want I want to learn
stuff about stuff that's really deliver on that promise. That's
what we promise,
I promise. I want targeted ads that actually sell me things I
want all the time, all the time.
But you know, that's not gonna happen.
No, correct. But,
but this is why I say let's just forget that. Because it's not
possible. It's a pipe dream. Let's just agree that what
whatever the content of that podcast is, I'm going to get ads
that the host has selected for me. And there's going to be a
way for me to skip through it without feeling guilty, or to be
compensated for my attention for the pitch, bring the listener
in, bring him in for once 100%.
It just needs to be a framework that everybody can adopt, and it
can be sold from app up. And from host down. Okay,
Dave, what are you doing Tuesday?
I mean, you guys are the right guys to make this happen. Like
I'm talking to the advertisers and technology partners in the
agencies, everybody wants more accountability. Everybody wants
more information that can actually work and drive these
results. They don't want useless data, right? They don't want to
guess at the 2000 segments that my house identifies with. And
some of them might be my wife. Some of them might have been my
mom who came to visit and haven't expired yet. And they
serve me an ad based on those like that doesn't help anybody.
So more data is fine paying people for that data in the
chain. compensating the app for providing that is fine. The
problem is, it's got to be at scale, because the higher up you
get these advertisers, I was talking to someone at Westwood
One and they mentioned that a big agency was just like, I
don't care about targeting my audiences, people who brush
their teeth. So it's everybody in the world, hopefully,
right? Well, the fast moving consumer goods sector is always
good. That's how they work. That's
that's exactly that much inventory that we need to pare
it down with targeting contextual works. Great general
interest works great shows that will You know, like, there's
room for advertising everywhere. We need to bring more
advertisers in here. We absolutely do. Like that's how
we're going to grow. But I'm with you. Like, I want to see
you guys. And I want to help you guys organize these app
developers, because the second is agreed upon framework that
they'll all implement, then the hosts will implemented because
the publishers want it. NPR had rad a listening spec. The
problem was the abstinent implemented. So the host and an
implemented NPR didn't even have a chance to their app.
No, no, I understand. Because believe me, this is this is what
the 10 year non movement has been in podcasting is for
exactly that chicken in the egg problem. Yeah, so this is not
going to get so what we the reason why we're successful, you
can't organize developers. It's like, here's a bunch of cats.
Okay, now go herd? No, that's not gonna work. itself, it's
self organizing organisms, they, all we did is we said, Hey,
here's, here's what we here's our skin in the game. And let's
develop something together. That works. So for any additional
feature, what we're doing right here is is the best I can do.
And but I think that the goals still aren't aligned. It's very
easy. For app developers to agree and have consensus on
something I've seen it, we've seen it multiple times. It
happens in big things, little things. And it's enthusiasm, and
it's an usually benefit to humankind. So we
can't tell you what I can tell you what developers want.
Developers are motivated by, by want. Ultimately, one thing and
I mean, when I say developers, I mean developers that are in it,
for the love of the technology and the experience of developing
a product, not as somebody who's just working as a pro programmer
on the staff somewhere, people, people like Marco, like, Xavier,
from podcast addict. Like Martin, and Mitch, and Jason,
and all these guys, they're what motivates those guys, more than
anything, as a developer is creating something really cool
in having people have an enjoyable experience and talk
about the What a great experience it was using their
thing. So a perfect example of that is john Spurlock. He spent
his time developing this way to detect the user agent header
from apps that you don't control. And the motivation for
him was doing something really unique and cool. And the joy
that people got from experiencing the thing that he
built. And so it anytime you if you want to get developers to
all join in and on a common cause, the way you do it, is by
letting them letting them have that experience by joining in,
in developing something that makes other people happy. And
talk in in generates talk about the thing they did you can you
can say it's, it's not really like, selfishness or narcissism.
It's more just, they want a room the reward of the experience of
seats white, both white people write songs
stiff.
Yes, exactly. Yes. Perfect, perfect example. And if you can
do that, it doesn't matter if it's ad tech or anything else,
you will get people on board. The the what doesn't get them on
board with does not enjoy a good developers excited is saying,
here's a spec. But it's, it's 14 pages long. And and it's not
really, if you implement it, nobody's really ever gonna know,
you're just gonna have maybe a press release Sunday.
Okay, so let's, let's flip it around, right? Spotify is
implementing some really neat publisher features, you'll be
able to send polls, you'll be able to do subscriptions, we
can't argue that these are cool features being rolled out slowly
in a walled garden. So it would be super badass if all those
publisher all those podcasts apps, all the developers got
together, replicated all of those features and created as a
unified frame framework. So any host could participate and use
those Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold
on a second. The way I see it, we're driving features. We're
driving shit. The other guys are just now catching up to. I mean,
we've got so many features note. I mean, they need to implement
our stuff. We're not going to replicate anything that
Deathstar does test
you're not doing polls or anything like that.
Now we're about to champion Oh, yeah. Wait, wait until we put
the activity pub together. Oh, yeah, polls are gonna be
there'll be I mean, go look at mastodon right now. They got
polls. We'll have all All of that stuff.
And that's so cool. And as a as a publisher on a hosting
platform, if I could log into washko, which is what I use, and
be able to set a poll that would send through my RSS feed,
knowing that I have to pay the podcast apps to polled the
listeners that we combined have access to a dude in a second.
That's cool.
Yeah. But that's, that's the thing. What we need is we need
to understand all the apps and get them all together. And then
I'll No, no,
no, no, no, no, no, listen, please, Brian, listen, you don't
get all the apps together. It's just not how it works. Because
we have exactly the same issue that you're looking at. We have
some, some hosts who have just more skin in the game for
themselves, ultimately, which is how it should be, who have
implemented many more of the namespace tags than others. We
have some who said, Well, fuck it, you can, like Lipson, you
can just throw whatever you want in there, and it'll work. We're
not really doing a UI for it. And the argument that why
they're not doing it is well, to two Part one is there's no apple
and Spotify aren't going to use it. So why bother. And the other
one is not enough people are requesting it. So it's a true
chicken in the egg. We've done very good moving that needle.
And I think that this unavoidable, um, that the
hosting companies are implementing what we're doing.
And now what Spotify is doing. And I, so I'm with you on
everything. But fuck Spotify, there. Oh,
yeah, we're removing them. Apple and Spotify aren't going to play
ball on this. So get everybody else.
Because I mean, all we have is apps. You know, we have we have
a lot more apps. And I think we have some apps that are a lot
more successful than people know. By No, because I whatever
all these numbers confuse me even more as to what apps are
really being used. And, and I think that the experience we
bring today is already better. And every single time Spotify
kick somebody off is another group of people who are looking
for an alternative. And you're probably I don't know, if you're
an older millennial, but I see that, you know, 25 to 35 year
olds, decentralizing and moving away from stuff, they're sick of
it. But that doesn't mean that there's not a place for
marketing and advertising, where appropriate that we that we can
absolutely deliver on but it has to be the mission has to be
stated before the let's get everybody together and do it. To
what what is the mission? If the mission is okay, we're not we're
just going to make everyone not track people have people opt out
so that we can really track the shit out of people who want to
be tracked this no one gets any joy from that. But if we can say
we absolutely will, we'll get people exposed to products and
things they really do want, because they're saying they want
it. And it's because of this relatable, or contextual
advertising as you call it. Maybe that's the only thing
that's appropriate. We're not we're not for for toothpaste.
That's the billboard is up. And this is the hard part here
because it's about scale. Because if I'm a major podcast,
I can just transcribe, and then contextually target ads against
keywords and then that text, their ads was you can do that
with that. And that can be directly like host read ads
targeted that way. It can be programmatic, it can be whatever
you want. And that's the scale I want. I want to see more
involved. I want to be able to say there are millions, but I
just don't show a specific app that I can target ads to
Yeah, I just don't believe that, that audiences want that
anymore. I don't think podcasters want it they do it
out of necessity. Because they were sold a dream.
I think as you
know, good. Now she'll say I want to switch gears for a
second because I want I think this is important. And I want to
get your opinion on this. Brian. Yeah, if it's so let me try to
figure out how to how to explain this. Part of what something I'm
concerned about is the sort of centralization of the
advertising spending that's going on right now in podcasting
around VC money. Like if you look at Africa, where the chart
was, and I tried to find it just a minute ago, I couldn't I
couldn't put my finger on it. But if you look at the top month
over month, spin spenders, are spending the most amount of
money on ad sales each month on like host reads and stuff. The
that list is dominated by things like betterhelp Squarespace, and
I think that long term, you know, people expect the podcast
industry advertising market to continue to grow. But what I see
is a basically a table with one with with one leg that's almost
broken in half. If you have that VC VC money is not dependable.
evaporate with the slightest amount of economic, you know,
disruption. So if you had, you know, if betterhelp is
responsible for 15% of the of the advertising market every
month? I mean, if that company goes belly up, which many VC
exit strategy type things do? I mean, that could just be gone? I
mean, what I guess what I'm saying is, I think there's a lot
of, there's a lot more danger, in the podcast, ad revenue
space, then people are even talking about, I wonder what
your initial thought is on that.
So those tools are able to tell what podcasts what ads are in a
podcast, by reading the show notes, or transcribing the
episode and getting one of the dynamic ads hard part about
dynamic ad insertion is that they could be rotated, you'd
have to download it multiple times a day, multiple times a
week, different countries, states, whatever to get that. So
it's not really hard to easy to detect, for hosts read, you're
getting it to the show notes. But it's only the shows that
they choose to monitor and nobody is transcribing or
grabbing the show notes from everybody. betterhelp is huge.
They're spending massive amounts, but based off of what
900,000,015% of that over, like if it was evenly spent over 12
months, you're on 11 million a month that seems high. That
seems high that they're the ones spending that much. I think the
truth is, is that we're not detecting all the advertisers, I
think there are advertisers that are spread out in different ways
that we're just not getting that are buying through programmatic
that are buying on wider reach instead of hosts read in
detectable ways. I mean, progressive is a huge proponent
of podcast advertising. And so I think there's more money in
there, but the ones that are visible are these performance
marketing, like you said, VC funded companies that are
spending heavy getting decent results. But yeah, it is a
little bit scary. But that's that's why everything I'm
writing is to help empower the sales people's in agencies to go
out there and say to these big advertisers, like, Hey, we're
closer to radio than we are to digital, we got more data than
social media influencer marketing, we can accurately you
know, drive conversions for you and effectively drive them
because these are engaged, active listeners tuned into this
and like the hosts. And there's more there. And that's the goal
of sounds proper was to get those people to arm the people
with their salespeople to get those advertisers in here, the
bigger ones that are holding up industries a little bit more
sturdy, I would say,
well, the other version of that, though, is the same thing. It's
sort of the same, the same issue. But it's sort of like
materializing in a different way is if, if I go back in time, and
I listened to an episode of Let's just say, this week in
tech from eight years ago, I can probably hear the exact same
Squarespace ad that I hear from from that same show this week.
It's like the and and that's a problem because these are
companies that like it's Squarespace or Casper mattress,
or Warby Parker, or Baba, Baba, we all know these, these, these
ads that you hear these same one over and over and over every
week for years. That doesn't seem exactly like a healthy
advertising market either. Because I mean, like, you know,
what we're used to within the larger bigger price media space,
you know, the the multi billion dollar a year media space from
like network news and these kinds of things in primetime
television is, is advertising from companies that rotate and
they have new products they want to sell their their a it's just
a larger, more stable, more mature market. I just hear just
something about the advertising space within within podcasting.
Makes me think that this is just I don't know, it's it seems very
immature and very unstable to me, I guess is what I'm pulling
in.
And that's a great observation. And I was while you were
talking, I looked and I see ziprecruiter Geico, which of
course is huge indeed, Squarespace simply safe quip
Robin Hood's any optical Madison Reed Casper Skillshare third
love care of stamps.com progressive. I did not realize
that since I've been so removed from it, that we are indeed
still with the same see List advertisers that we started
with, you know, 15 years ago, because it's really hasn't
improved that much. It seems that it's never going to work.
And the reason why don't have the bigger advertisers come in
is canceled culture and we have an unconscionable system.
believe that the big a name brands, except for perhaps even
the fast moving consumer goods, so it would be so simple. You
know, don't just use one tweet Gillette, I can't believe you're
advertising on this podcast, boom, done, it's pulled, they
don't want to do it. And they're never going to because it's not
controllable. They can't call Mark Zuckerberg, they can't call
Tim Cook, they can't call Daniel Eck. That's why it's not going
to happen, you will always remain with this. Which doesn't
mean that you can't turn this into 10 or $100 billion. But you
have to approach it differently.
I but I think that that's a hard one, right? Because I you know,
back in the day, I could have recorded a TV show always ads
and everything on VHS. I can record radio to cassette tape,
downloading a podcast, mp3, and me having that copy with the ad
in it forever, is the same thing. I mean, I agree with you
that like there are there's fear from brands on that end. And
that is why, you know, they're they have trouble with that,
right? Because your episodes could be exactly what they're
looking for. And then you could just take a departure, and
they're associated with previous episodes post radbeacon dynamic
ad insertion, it doesn't matter. Someone has a copy of that
episode elsewhere. So that does kind of hold them back. But I
don't know. I mean, here's the truth of it. I'm not James
Cridland with like awesome views of the podcast space. I'm not
Tom Webster, who gets all this in the data. I'm the nerd who
plays with this tech and says, what happens if we did premium
feeds and instead of charging for them, we figured out cool
ways to customize the listener experience so that they got the
exact level of podcast they wanted out of it. What happens
if we did ads that were content and did them sequentially
throughout an episode? Like I, when I first started, I
read your piece on the membership.
And it's fun, like that's the cool part of it is is that
everybody looks at these tools and say they're their serve ads
and ads are boring, and you pardon me for my ad break, and
then you're excused from it. No, it's one complete file. So
everything I wish I had more understanding to be able to
hypothesize about the space. But the truth is, I'm just trying to
take these tools and be like, No, no, your creative guy
doesn't get to tap out here. Like they should 100% be driving
this and here's a cool way to look at it makes something way
cooler. And that's really what I want to drive. I mean, I have
these lofty ideas for how to get the apps involved and get paid
and how to do all these other things. And ultimately, like I
hope they succeed, but it's not where I'm doing the best good.
The best good is i'm saying is your ads are lazy, do better use
this technology, there's more you can do and you don't need
invasive information about people to succeed.
Could I could I interest you in, in, in writing some articles
about profitable podcasting just now sounds profitable as a great
brand, because you're not necessarily sounds profitable.
But you, you feel like you're only exclusive to AD tech. I
think advertising and how to use,
I think that the use of the ad tech is important because when I
was in that space, the truth of it was like I wasn't educated.
And when I joined a podcast company, nobody was like sign up
to pod news, check out these podcasts read this. Or here's
our insider newsletter. Heck, I've been at companies that
didn't even teach me the tool, they gave me a login and told me
good luck. So I'm trying to educate these people who are
overworked, and are undereducated and their decision
makers who are lying through their teeth, about their
knowledge about the space and the sea levels above them before
just holding on and hoping everything works. And I'm here
to say like, this is how this technology works, you need to
stop thinking about it as just ones and zeros. There's a whole
alphabet of options that you can do with it, show you the grunt
that's doing this, you the person that needs to become the
decision maker in three to five years, you have to be better
than your boss. Now, you have to be better educated. And here's
some things ask for time to play around with it. So I think that
I mean, that's the market I was that person, I was in a
situation where my boss would walk into a meeting that I
wasn't invited to sign on for a tool that I ultimately would
have to be the owner from. And I think it's have any input and I
was like, this sucks. It doesn't do anything. Now I want it
works.
That's the heart of tech. Yeah,
yeah. Here's my goal. My goal is to help those people not be in
those situations anymore. And hopefully, then those people
will get better and better and better. And we'll get into a
situation where we're not recycling the mistakes of
advertising in the past. We are not saying that, oh, the podcast
is expertly created by all these amazing content creators and
editors and producers. And but please ignore our five minutes
of we have to make money. It's not our fault.
Well, what? Sorry, go ahead,
Dave. One thing that I think was interesting that came out over
the last week really, what we're actually talking about it at the
beginning of the show was that there's this now this
understanding that only, let's just say some large podcast
networks, only 50% of their shows in Apple can Apple's
directory. And if that's true, then and the real scope of the
podcast landscape is 50% bigger than we think it is. And then
there's a whole set of untapped territory out there. And that
really puts the screws to this idea that you can make a show go
exclusive and be in be more and be more successful than you can
and it can in the open, open ecosystem, you know, like me,
because you, you have, there's this, if you know that you're
missing out on what you thought was, you know, 70% of the
market, when you go exclusive to Spotify, and now, you know,
you're missing out on 170% of the market. Well, then, you
know, that's, that's a huge swing back in favor of
exclusivity is, is the joke. And
I so I think that every publisher should have as much
control as possible. I'm having such success with my premium
feeds aspect. I have my it's a podcast about podcasts, ad tech,
right? Like how, like, I'm not even just a podcast about
podcasting. Like this is like even further deeper down the
line. There are there, there are 33,000 people that read my
newsletter, and 6575 of them sign up for my premium feed.
Like there's, if you if you release a weekly podcast, and
you have six ad slots, and it's $50. CPM, I think the maximum
per listener you could earn is $15.60. Right? For a year,
right? We need to think creative ways to help people make money,
we need to think of how to use these tools in different ways
than they were intended. supercast was like, hey, it's 59
cents per listener per month for that feed. And I was just like,
what happens if you were just the landing page of podcasting
complete, unique RSS feeds. And these people are looking at
these tech in different ways. And that's the goal, because I
could bring my podcasts completely exclusive outside of
Spotify, owned by me in the RSS feed that I allow everybody to
use, right. So you have to sign up and give me some other
information. I could just put it in podcast, podcast index. And I
guarantee you I'd still have the same number of downloads,
because all my podcast is not a lot of Spotify listeners. And
that's okay. And I think we need to be comfortable exploring all
of this and the technology that powers it. And so when I say ad
tech, I mean, like at its fundamental level, the hosting,
right? Yeah, your host is ad tech analytics, or ad tech adds
a component of
it. I look at Spotify and Apple subscription based podcast
membership, whatever you want to call it. I see that is like, if
it materializes within the next year or two, it just feels I
don't know, it feels so wrong to me, too. Because they're it's
like a, it's like they're doubling down on the
exclusivity,
part of it. Think about this as a publisher to be exclusive or
to have a subscription on Spotify after host on anchor. So
does that mean I have to host my podcast in two places my primary
hosting platform and anchor specifically for the
subscription, meaning that Spotify has to do some magic
where they take my main feed in my subscription feed and make it
not look like to ugly feeds on their platform? Or is this their
goal to get me to move over to anchor and host everything on
there? which feels weird because the type of people who do
subscriptions primarily are going to be want to be on
something like megaphone which they own. But you can't do the
subscriptions on megaphone yet. It's specifically says for
anchor hosted podcast. So I think we're gonna see a lot of
roadblocks. And I think the biggest thing that I'm trying to
encourage everybody to do before then is play around with this.
Ask your audience would you sign up for premium feed, figure out
tools like Yapa and community and all and everything you're
doing to interact with these your audience and get that
direct relationship and and figure out what works because
general marketing and advertising will gain new
listeners. And that's cool, but talking to your audience about
how you get them excited to be part of it. And you guys do a
fantastic job. Your growth through word of mouth has to be
the hugest part of what you do that that's what's cool about
podcasting.
We're not even in the apple index, or we are not we are
no, no, no, this
show is not in the I don't believe you are.
But that How cool is that? I would love to know your stats on
Apple podcasts. But
you know, I have no idea not interested. All we look at is do
we get enough money to pay for the machines? And speaking of
that,
day is on here and currently reaching for the cardboard box.
Yes, this is a
this is a value value for value proposition This podcast is
which means whatever you get out of it, we would like you to
return the favor time, talent or treasure. We got a lot of time
and talent being spent on on everything podcasting 2.0 and
luckily, people are still contributing. Well, you know
where we're at with the satoshis we're at our about $9 a day
average, which, by the way, is is not far off from being kind
of autonomous for the current setup we have right?
Yeah, that's pretty, I mean, like
12 $15 a day and then then the servers run. It's like A true
perpetual motion machine.
Yeah, yeah.
Our hosting is add everything up is a little bit less than 400 so
we're getting close and then I'll sell sustainability
brother.
Nice and then we can we can pay by linode through their partner
and Bitcoin so we keep it all within the ecosystem. I don't
want to give
away the Bitcoin Why give that to linode?
Let's, let's thank some people who supported us financially.
Oh crap, Brian, we made you miss your thing, right?
No, that's fine I cancelled it.
Oh geez I sorry I completely forgot the time.
This was a this was a blast and I really hope that we can have a
chance to talk. Wait, you're not
we're not letting you go yet. You can say a few more minutes.
I got it. I get 10 minutes.
We'll do five. Okay.
See Kevin Kevin Bay, sent us 100 bucks and says I need to send
you is that I need to send more treasure. Thank you both for
responding to me personally for my Sphinx wallet screw up. Dave
especially does yeoman's work. That's right. Yeah. Hell yeah.
Doesn't editorialize. He helped me figure things out at 11pm I
felt so bad when the light bulb went off in my head and to fix a
non problem. I was like the guy who needs to be told to make
sure his computer's plugged in. I can't thank you enough.
Thank you, Kevin. Yeah, that's very kind. Well, there you go.
Although actually Dave charges 200 but okay.
Yeah, let's give you a discount. We get Michael wing it. He gave
us $50 and he says, just wanted to throw some support to the
project. Bruce city Mike. Thank
you. Bruce through city Mike. Yeah, Mike. He works with Gene
sir Jean.
Oh, okay. Right. Yeah, um, yeah,
I know. More he supports surgeon he's a big supporter.
Yeah, I want to personally thank Jean for standing me up and not
in telling me to come on his podcast and I showed up and
waited 15 minutes and he never showed us Oh my word.
We doing donations because I don't want to leave Brian
hanging I want to
know we got a couple okay. We got and I'm just kidding Jean.
just messaged me. Let's see. I don't see a name on this. Oh,
no. Here it is. Lauren ball. And he gave us $48.40 and no just
says thanks.
Thank you. Judith let them
see $33.33 from Dame Jennifer. always there for us. It is she
says in the morning y'all. Show bleed over your project
continues to be hot. If any, if any generous. Okay, if any
generous with time. Do name Ben wants to help me get my own rest
raspy Blitz notes set up. It would be so grateful. I am
Jennifer and Jennifer on nogen. To social care, hugs and kisses
named Jennifer PS Dave is the originator as the originator of
talking hot math. Had to send the jingle to Adam behind your
back it would have been way less fun if you knew about it.
When you talk
to me
that's it ladies gentlemen. Dame Jennifer
it's hard to be from the future when you're legend. Thank you
David for Ray Fleischmanns and is $25 and I do not see a note
on the right. Thank you
Ray. And
flying through the stack here and I do not know how to
pronounce this name. Oh sir. Oh s s you're in it. The OCR has
the oom lot above it. two dots as
I will, sir. Oh, sure. Yeah,
sure. Johansson. I'm gonna say, Oh,
it's from a Scandinavian country. Okay.
Yeah, he gave us $10. And I do not see a note. And that's
millions of kronor. Thank you.
literally millions of Chrome. And then a sad puppy. We had
somebody cancel the subscription.
Sad puppy.
I'm gonna have to Nuka server
sorry. All right, well, one goes down three go up. That's that's
our group. Good group. Good. You can support us by going to
podcast index.org. Scroll down to the bottom. And there's a big
red Donate button, click on that to send your COC bucks through
Pay Pal or just boost us in any of the podcasting 2.0 compatible
and certified apps and raise those value sliders up as far as
you can take them. Brian Barletta, I really appreciate
you coming on because I am. You're brave and brave, but I
also really appreciate and Don't sell yourself short. You
absolutely have vision in this. And just because we don't agree
on some fundamentals doesn't mean that your brain power isn't
Appreciate it. And I think useful because you're on to a
lot of things. And you see you have a big overview. And I'd
love to be able to work with you to figure out how we can make.
And I think it's actually beneficial that the advertisers
that are still in podcasting, or I'm just gonna say, kind of low
rent, we're, we're missing part of that conversation with them.
Or with the potentials, you know, the the the marketers that
I don't see them showing up anywhere saying, here's what we
want. So I'd love to see that. And let's keep the lines of
communication open. Because there's somewhere between where
you are and where we're where I am. I think there's there's
middle ground. And let's see if the app developers have any
takeaway from this. No, I know, they listen. I
agree. I know that. Listen,
that's I'm right there with you. At a minimum, I think that we
agree on like 80% of it. And what we both want to do is drive
all three of us want to do is drive this industry forward to
help everybody. Right. So I I'm so excited that you guys had me
on here. I definitely prepared myself for a little anti
advertising talk. And I think we talked more about good stuff.
But let's collaborate as much as possible. I'm available to you
guys. I'm available to any of your listeners if they want to
talk about this stuff. And yeah, I think this is really great.
Do you have a podcast? Brian?
I do. Yeah, that sounds profitable podcasts. And so we
send out my articles.
Can you can you lightning enable that for some value for value?
Yeah, you know what, let's talk about that. afterwards. I use I
host for bushka. And they've been really excited to, to work
with any innovative things like that. So if it's something I can
do myself, then I'll ask for your help on it. And if it's
something they need to do, we'll see about getting it on their
roadmap as soon as possible.
For anybody who's interested. Just find your podcast on
podcast. index.org hit the lightning bolt and you're off to
the races. The process starts there.
Yep. Awesome. Cool. Thanks, Brian. This is fun show. Friday
show.
Dave anything for you for the for the final minutes here at
the board.
No, no, man. I'm just glad to be back on the horse.
Yeah, well, I know you've had a real busy week at the day job.
So you know, all the stuff you're doing is so appreciated,
man.
Yeah, man. Yeah, no
problem is not like, like, you know, like lazy, lazy bums like
me and just cavorting around and vacationing and taking all this
time off. I feel guilty sitting on the beach.
Margarita,
Ryan, thank you again and of course we will return next
Friday with another board meeting as we take a look at
what's going on with podcasting 2.0 right here on podcast
index.org.
You have been listening to podcasting 2.0 This is
podcast.com for more information.