Future of Podcast Revenue: Beyond Advertising #577

- Todd and Rob in the afternoon. Hey, - Afternoon - With Todd and Rob. Oh, yeah. - Well, welcome to the new media show. My name is Rob Greenley and I'm, I'm here alone. My co-host, Todd Cochrane isn't, uh, with me right now, but, uh, he's gonna be back probably next week. I think we'll do the new media show probably, uh, a little later in the day, 'cause he's, um, outta the country right now.

So, um, so look, look for us probably 8:00 PM Eastern next week, but I've got a terrific, uh, show lined up for you. In the meantime, as you can probably see on your, your right here, I have Mark Askwith here with me. Uh, he's calling in from the, the uk. Um, and he's the GM of, uh, captivate, and that's now part of Global and was really, I think, the founder of Captivate. Um, so I've been trying to get, uh, mark on the, on the program for, for a few months. So I'm, I, I'm excited.

You know, there, there's been a lot of things that Mark has posted over the last, uh, few months that have been, you know, kind of pushing the envelope on the perception of podcasting and, and I'm kind of doing the same. So I figured us getting together would be probably a pretty good idea. So, so Mark, welcome to the, to the new media show Again, I think you've been on before. - Yeah, it's been a while my friend, but no, thank you for having me.

Always, always a fan. I Ms. Todd, obviously, but it's always great to catch it with you, um, in person and virtually as well, so no, thanks, thanks for having me, my friend. And for the persistence, I'm a, uh, I'm an evasive one of a UK evening. I, uh, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm turned into my old hermit days where I just wanna curl up at 8:00 PM .

- No, I, you know, after a long, long day of work and stuff, it actually, you know, it takes a lot of, you know, fortitude to get on the mic in the evening too. I get that. So, but anyway, I wanted to just kind of, um, have a little bit of a conversation, you know, on that, that's what we do on this show, uh, about podcasting and the, the industry of podcasting and kind of where it's going. And, and so I wanted to do, do that with you too.

I know one of the things that we kind of bounced around, uh, prior to the show is the significance really of the Joe Rogan deal, um, and what that means for, for podcasting, um, in, in the bigger context. I think that there's a, actually a, um, quote that was put out by the CEO of, um, Spotify who was involved in that. And I wanted to pull this up so we could kind of look at it and kind of analyze it to some degree.

Um, mark and, and Daniel Eck Elk said in the earnings call, he said, while some of these exclusive deals worked, generally it wasn't aligned with what creators wanted. I thought that was very interesting. Um, I would tend to agree that they probably didn't want that. Um, and that the creators wanted to have a broader audience with these new deals. We are in a position where we'd be better aligned with creators. So it's an interesting de development.

Um, we can both develop growth rate and we are equally incentivized to drive our audience growth. So I think he's looking at more from an ad revenue if he can get on other, other platforms, and that's kind of where he is going here. And of course, then also driver revenue growth because we both share in the upside. So today, and this is probably, um, probably probably the most significant part of this quote, uh, is Spotify is in many cases the number one podcasting player already.

Uh, so, so his contention now is exclusivity makes sense when you're a smaller player trying to gain share. But when you're a bigger player, the additional value of of exclusivity is for smaller players. Um, and so from a values point of view, this is better aligned with where we are at Spotify. So, so what's your thought on that, mark? I'll give you my thought on it too, but, uh, I think it's an interesting change in perspective for Spotify. And where do you think that's coming from?

- I, I think it's coming from that, um, the, the sentence that Daniel goes through there. You know, exclusivity makes sense when you're the smaller playing trying to player, trying to get em to scale. Yeah. I mean, the bigger player, the additional value and so on. I think that sentence is quite telling because I, I, I think it's worth always worth contextualizing Spotify. I, I, I think first and foremost, Spotify has got such a long game mindset, and it's such a long game mindset.

And when we think of long game, we think three years, five years, 10 years, their, their goal is to become the number one place for audio. And as you, you mentioned Rob, for many people, they're not only the number one place for podcasting, but they're the number one brand for audio consumption. And that's down to and positioning. It's down to the way that they align themselves with, um, their target markets.

The younger people in particular, and I'm talking about their advertising here, you know, very much targeted being that place to go for audio. And he said that a couple of years ago on the earnings call, you know, which is why we've seen some of, some of the, um, some of the audio books that have been added. It's why we saw podcasting, um, very much become a major part of their strategy in what, 2018 ish. And back then they were the smaller player.

They were the smaller player in podcasting. Yeah. Maybe not in audit, but in podcasting there were the smaller player now. Yeah, MRGs minimum revenue guarantees the exclusivity deals. The contracts, some of the crazy contracts that were signed, some of them were wild, don't get me wrong. They were wild. And if we even just look at Joe Rogan's initial grab of 250 million, allegedly in the original contract, the exclusivity deal, a lot of that for me was a lost leader.

Don't get me wrong, it's a huge loss leader. It's, yeah. To anyone that doesn't have their strategic mindset or, or their revenue and their willingness to forego revenue for such a long period of time. It's a wild number. But I think a lot of us saw that as a bit of a land grab. It was a user grab. And, and, and I, I think to a degree, and this, this brings us up to date, I think with some of the context, yeah.

Very often, my, uh, the, the people friends of mine that aren't in tech, they aren't in podcasting. They, they only listen really in two places. And it's a weird thing. They listen on Spotify or they listen on YouTube, which I know we're gonna come to later. And it, it happened about the same time with Spotify that Apple started to explore their ecosystem. They started to, uh, Eileen, uh, they started to pull out their music from their podcasts and create all of these different apps for that.

And so it was a very opposite strategy from Apple and, and Spotify. Yeah. So it was quite, quite an interesting time. Spotify, I think to a large degree, has achieved its goal in becoming the place for audio for so many people. That's to, as I said, that's to do with the brand, the positioning, the recommendation engine, the ability to, they don't always get it right, but the ability to, um, I listen to Springsteen, here's an interview with Springsteen.

I listen to someone else Co Wong, here's an interview with Cory Wong. And you don't really get that anywhere else. And I think it's, I say that only to add a lot of context because I think that brings us back up to date with where Spotify is. Sure. We, we can't write all this off as a, as a loss leader, we can't write it all off as a user grab. It's a very expensive user acquisition process.

If exclusivity and minimum revenue guarantees are the way that they were always gonna do it, that's clearly worked to some degree, but it's also been a bit of a failure to some degree as well, in that it became very expensive and maybe they didn't see quite the result that they wanted. So for me, this feels very much like, I don't wanna sound cynical, but I'm not sure it's a win for open podcasting. I think it's more of a fail forward for Spotify, if that makes any sense.

I don't necessarily think it's a loss for them. I just think that experiment failed. They've moved forward with it, they've had discussions with the creators. It's the stuff that we all know, the creators have to be everywhere. It's that classic, you have to be on each channel, and that's what open RSS gives you. Um, but I, I, I just, I like to look at these things from a couple of different perspectives.

So whilst I think it's fantastic that we, we've seen this and we can advocate for open podcasting as much as we ever do, I'm not sure it's the win for open podcasting that we'd almost like it to be. I think it, I don't necessarily see Spotify playing any better with open podcasting. I think their goal remains the same as much time on site, as much time in app. And I think back to that statement, Rob, if they can share in the upside, now when they talk about the upside for me, of course it's ads.

Whether the ads come from, um, direct sale host reds, whether it's programmatic, whether it's something through an ad partnership, which of course they've got, they've got access to with Spotify, or whether it's to do more with, or a combination of things like the increasing leverage that creators have with membership subscriptions or with other forms of live touring revenue share, and so on and so forth.

Whereas we're seeing, uh, thi as we're seeing the IP of podcasts become more valuable in other mediums. Mm-hmm, that upside is a much broader upside than exclusivity and ad revenue through the single Spotify platform. So I think it's a diversification, I think it's a fail forward for Spotify. I think it's nice to see for open podcasting. Um, I reserve some cynicism for whether or not Spotify will do anything to help with open podcasting.

Uh, we saw Apple Podcasts finally, and whether they'll do anything else, we're not sure, but finally, adopt at least one podcast in 2.0, tagging, uh, iOS 17.4, um, with a transcript tag. Is Spotify gonna do the same? Huge bit of cynicism, but a a lot to digest, I realize. But, but that's my take.

- Yeah. And I do kinda wonder if, um, if Spotify maybe feels that they extracted the, the audience that they, um, feel like they are gonna gain by having an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan on the platform. They've, they've gathered as many new users as they're going to gather, um, or as maybe worth the, the investment. But, you know, it is interesting that they went for this strategy of, um, going beyond their platform.

Um, this, this opinion, and maybe it's also a sign of a shift to more of an emphasis on the, the revenue opportunity of Joe Rogan, um, outside of their platform, right? Can he achieve greater scale on a global basis outside of their platform? Um, you know, it, it's an interesting tension too, because of the, of the availability of Spotify outside of the us um, is, is much more so than Apple podcasts.

Um, so it's, it's just, you know, to the potential audience, I think they've, they've been able to scale that. I just wonder if this is just, you know, it's really a shift in revenue model, um, for them, uh, maybe back to a more of an advertising approach. And, but I did see that they kept, uh, what appears to be his video version as an exclusive on Spotify, but I'm not exactly sure of that.

I think there was some talk about doing more with YouTube, so that that's an interesting shift in their strategy too, I thought, I don't know what you think about that. - That could be quite interesting. Yeah, absolutely. I never considered the video element of it. Um, and I, I've not looked into whether the exclusivity remained on that one.

I think it's a great point, Rob, about the, uh, potential, I wouldn't say attrition, but the, the slowing down of acquisition of users once you have exhausted the pool of rogue and users that you are gonna sign up to Spotify or Spotify Premium. I I think that's a great point that I'd never considered in, in any depth. So I think that's very, very, very, very important. And, and it, because I think it's, it's, it's worth remembering.

And I think maybe sometimes I've, we forget this, like he's still signed to Spotify for, for the Joe Rogan show brand, as you said. So yeah, that, that's a very interesting perspective. And the, there's a lot of value in that brand. There's a lot of value in the positioning of that brand amongst the wider Spotify audience. And I, as I said, we, we signed, we, we see a lot of the time with, um, you know, you see with, um, Kevin Smith does a lot of it.

You see Aaron Mankey, our friend Aaron Mankey from, from Grimer Mild, um, originally of, of the law podcast. We've seen such success in his induction into the podcast Hall of Fame, uh, only last week. And, and, and we've seen what, what people like he and Kevin Smith have been able to do where they've taken that brand and they've expanded it out and it's become so much deeper.

Even, even people like more, I don't wanna say more original than Joe Rogan in terms of timing, but people like say Tim Ferris, even Arnold Schwartzenegger, where they take content that came from, from one medium and they build something else, they build a book out of it. The Arnold Schwartzenegger book, the Be Useful whatever, the Tim Ferris books were the big tools, or Titans, I think it was. Yeah. Um, the very simplistic approach.

I'm not saying that is what Joe Rogan will do, but the brand of the Joe Rogan show, whether we like it, whether we don't like it, is super valuable. And I think that's why, I think that's why it's quite interesting to, to just stop and think a little bit about the ramifications for open podcasting versus actually, is this a brand move? Because, you know, we love RSS, we love the way that that works, but I'm not, I'm just not sure that Spotify cares anymore about it.

I think they're just, they're just a media business and podcasts and the Joe Rogan show in particular's just another media to them. - Yeah, that's probably true to some degree that, that I think that they are focused on driving users and revenue on their own platforms. So I think that their, their priority is always their platform. There, there, there's no question. Uh, and that, that is a relatively proprietary platform.

So, but yet, um, I do think about this opening up of Joe Rogan and realizing that exclusive deals, and it looked like, at least from the news, that it was a more highly valued deal, uh, with Joe. But that could just be because Joe's value in the market has increased over the last few years too. So it may not be a direct reflection of, of, um, the revenue opportunity off platform.

But, but I do wonder if this is a positive sign to the podcast community based on RSS, that this is a confirmation by Spotify, that open distribution onto other platforms is a key revenue strategy, um, that, that is, that helps support RSS as a concept, as an open medium. I don't know if the open part of it is really the most important part to Spotify. I think it's just more if they can reach more eyeballs to generate more revenue for the show, it's gonna be better for shareholders, right?

- Yeah. I I think you're absolutely right, Rob. I, I, I, I, I think you've, you've put that really eloquently. I think the open aspect of it, as you said, is probably far less of a concern, um, to Spotify. But as you said, being reaching a Spotify audience that isn't yet on Spotify could be quite interesting for them. And I, I wonder if we think about this from, let's, let's sort of flip it and think about it from a data perspective.

You know, if you are, if you are Spotify and everyone that listens on Spotify to Joe Rogan is gonna be logged in to Spotify, their data, their, what they do, their behavioral data, everything that goes on with that user can be analyzed far deeper. It can be, it can be interrogated and cross-referenced in such a way that, um, the user becomes more valuable because they become not just a download, they become a listener.

And it is something that, you know, we've talked about it for years in podcasting, whether it's pixel tracking, whether it's trying to build a listener idea up. Um, we had that whole opt-in opt out debate a few years ago that, that I know a lot of our good friends, people like Rob Walsh had a a lot to say on, and it was, it was all very, very valid, um, discussion.

But we've always been, as an industry third party, of course, we have, you know, we, we captivate, we are a third party platform that distributes out and many of these first party platforms that we distribute to. So Apple Podcast, Spotify, let's use those as the example. Mm-Hmm. , they, they, they inevitably get more data than we have.

So I, I do, I do, I wonder a couple of things from a, from a standpoint of a, of, of, of the data, I think number one, I wonder at the most basic user acquisition level, you know, is there a play here where, if I'm on Apple Podcasts, as you rightly pointed out, Rob, which I think was a wonderful point, if I've stopped acquiring Joe Rogan users, just frankly because he's on Spotify, it could be worth actually advertising to Apple Podcasts users, right?

That Spotify exists, but then that's a really like simplistic like, sort of startup mindset. - But, but I think it makes a lot of sense if you think about it from Spotify's perspective, right? Where are the users that we want to grab, we want to grab 'em from, from Apple, - Right? Yeah. Where do we, where do we get them from? Where do we get more from? Because we've seen the investment of - Million YouTube and YouTube, right? - YouTube absolutely. Such and such a big one.

And then I think when you, if you were to put that together with, okay, here's audience A, which is the original Joe Rogan, uh, experience listeners, here are these new people that are trickling in, probably not quite as much, um, because it's first party data, because they're logged into Spotify, the behavioral data's there. Okay. Rug and listeners then go on to listen to Cory Wong or onto to Foxy Shazam, or to Springsteen or whoever. Mm-Hmm. . That data is so much more valuable.

So then that sort of leads me to believe, all right, let's assume that Spotify is moving into purely treating this deal as an ad space thing. Let's forget everything else. Let's just assume it's an ad play and we'll share the upside on whatever.

Yeah. The advertising capabilities to someone that is listening on Spotify are far greater than just using, um, A DSP to just inject ad programmatically into everything that goes to Apple, that goes to wherever else that goes everywhere that's distributed via open Ss. If I listen on Spotify as a listener to the Joe Rogan experience, I've got history with Spotify.

The goal of Spotify is to keep me on, on Spotify and listening so that every event can be tracked, every skip, every rewind, every forward, every scroll past, every search, every recommendation, every, like, every add to playlist, every playlist created, all that data can be aggregated against me. And I, I get profiled and I become more advertised in valuable. I become more valuable to the people that are looking on the demand side to buy an audience.

So I'm just, I just sort of thinking out loud here from the perspective of if I'm Spotify and I'm working with brands, I'm, I've got my supply line coming through from Joe, the Joe Rogan experience is sticking out X amount of episodes per month, getting 180 million downloads, whatever it is per month. If 50% of those are coming from Spotify for argument's sake mm-hmm, , that 50% is arguably more valuable than the other 50%. So can I start striking different deals?

Can I start offering different CPMs, offering different rates, offering, um, different types of demand side deals? So I, I'm just, I'm just thinking out loud here, but I just, I think it's interesting that they've opened it, but, but they still have the first party play as well. I think that's a really interesting, uh, juxtaposition for a lot of podcasts. - Yeah. Yeah. I was also thinking as you were talking about that, I was thinking about metrics, um, and data on, on users, right?

Uh, on listeners in this case or, or increasingly viewers. Um, you know, Spotify's not gonna get as much data out of Apple as they get out of their own platform, right? So, you know, this is, this is a little bit of a compromise for them because I believe that probably Spotify's been able to do better and higher CPM deals for Joe on their platform on Spotify's platform, because they have that deeper metrics of how far people are listening and, and what a real user is.

Right. And, um, so, but it's also, I, you know, is I've watched, you know, how much advertising is Joe Rogan actually running on his program? Is the other question. And that may be part of the change that's happening, is we may see more host endorsements on his podcast than we've, we currently see.

Um, so, but I, it's the, it's the metrics piece that's always been an advantage for doing exclusive deals for Spotify is that they can, they can deliver to the advertiser a much deeper set of metrics on the consumption of that podcast. And is it a podcast if it's only on , Spotify, - Right? Oh, right. Right. We'll get to that one I guess in a bit that, 'cause I know you and I have got some strong views on that, but it's, um, right.

And, and I, I think, do you know what I, we, we, we talked off air earlier about the challenges that events have. Okay? You know, you've been in this space longer than I, but I've been in it long enough now to, I came in, came into the space 2013, so coming up for 11 years, which is terrifying . And the, the space that we got into was very much creator economy and the revenue that was in the space. Yeah. Of course, there was some advertisement, there was very little supply.

Uh, and when we talk about supply, we mean podcast, you know, supply and advertisers with, um, the ability to advertise. And - What, - What happened is that it became an industry. We've seen it, we know that it's become an industry. And we talked to a fair about the events, you know, so all the big events in the podcasting space have to now tow the line or make a decision there. They decide that we're a creator event, a creator economy event.

Mm-Hmm. , or we're a industry of podcasting, the media event. Okay. The media of podcasting event, or they have to try and balance the two. And it's very, very difficult to do that. Right? I think when we consider brands like Spotify, when we consider companies that are highly focused on rapid growth revenue, and in particular where there's a user base that can be measured, right?

We've gotta, we've, I think we've just gotta keep remembering as an industry that they see podcasting, the media giant to be, they see podcasting, the billion, 2 billion, $3 billion industry where very often podcasting. And this sort of leads onto the next six. I guess I'm assuming that, that, that what is a podcast debate? But, you know, we, we all want to see podcasting as podcasting the thing that we knew, which was amazing, and it still exists, and it's still amazing.

It's open, and we get together at these events and we have these amazing times and everyone knows each other, and it's a beautiful place. I love it. I would never want to work anywhere else. Mm-Hmm. . But it is different. And I think this is where the, it's where the interesting problems begin to occur because Spotify, and even Apple to a degree, it's, it's media. You know, it, there's a reason that Netflix focuses on being Netflix and doesn't really care about our home movies.

So, you know, it's, I know that's a weird example, but, um, it's the, the, the, the gap becomes further and further apart. The, the, the gap widens as the industry grows, you know? And we've seen that. - Yeah. And I think it's a little bit of a fallacy, um, people's understanding of the medium as being, you know, this binary choice of proprietary versus open. And, and I think, you know, podcasting has always been in integrally linked up with proprietary platforms.

It, that's always been the case. Um, so there's nothing new on that front. So the question gets back to is what is new here? Um, I'm not sure that there is a lot new here, other than I, I didn't get a sense, and I haven't heard this kind of rhetoric out of Spotify for many months now, about, um, the lack of innovation and the desire to move on from RSS, right? So, which, which perfectly wrapped around this, this discussion around exclusivity, right?

And that's what threw up my red flags was, you know, and then we're seeing Apple roll out their, their premium podcast platform, which is like direct upload to them, and they take care of all the distribution. It's only heard on their platform and things like that. Um, as kind of like, I saw that as a kind of a bigger trend that was going on.

But what I'm in increasingly thinking now is that what we're seeing is both, um, we're seeing this pursuit of, of, um, proprietary platforms, which is really kind of a continuation of what we've seen in the medium for many years. Um, and less rhetoric around trying to get rid of RSS. And I think that the podcast 2.0 project is an interesting example of kind of diffusing that argument that somehow podcasting isn't attempting to innovate around RSS - Yeah. Uh, great respect to as well.

I mean, I, I wholeheartedly agree with you in that I've never seen it as always needing to be binary. I've never seen it as needing to be this or that. And, and, um, the, the RSS thing is, is, is interesting, alright. Let's be honest, as you said, okay. We've always been at the whim of Apple, right? We, we have, we've just always been at their whim. They can do what they want. They've always been able to do what they want, whether we like it or not.

And the, the beauty of RSS is that you've got your own control over it. I could still, I could host my files somewhere and I could still code my own RSS feed to using xml. That's cool. I don't want to do that. We've got hosting platforms that do that. I don't wanna - Do that. Right. - Back in the dream, we so - Prone to making, making errors. I don't, I don't how many times, you know, I put the wrong comma in my, uh, my,

my item post, right? , - They're like the worst things to find out there as well. The slightly off commerce, man, they keep you up all night, you know, - The wrong time. I used the wrong one, right? Yeah. In a broke feed, right? Yeah. - Oh man. But to the, it really is, mate. There's some charm about it, but it terrifies me thinking about going back to that.

Yeah. But the, um, yeah, the, the innovation in RSS is always fascinating from, from a, from my perspective because look, I run a company that provides RSS for Captivate provides RSS if you like. I, you know, as much as any other hosting platform, have as much to lose if our assess goes away. But I do think that anything that is an open platform and anything that has open, um, standards as such and where anyone can help with this.

So the podcast in 2.0 project and everything that has been done there is brilliant. We're staunch supporters, one of the biggest supporters in terms of the amount of things that we support, uh, from podcasting 2.0 is Captivate. But there's little doubt that it, we know it needs adoption from the other side. It needs the players to adopt it, and everyone else, it needs education with users. Um, which can be very dangerous. You know, creator economy, people are very, very busy.

They're, they're really, yeah. Very often they're struggling just to produce their podcast. It's a labor of love. And it, it's, you know, it's some new tech that you've, that you should probably learn if you want to be cutting edge. Like it's, it can be scary from them Yeah. For them. But when we then think to ourselves, okay, here's podcasting, that's then become the media. It's become, it's become this big industry Mm-Hmm.

where certain things may need to move more quickly, whatever that might be. Whether it is, um, the ingestion of an episode, um, and, and you know, not counting Pod Ping and all that stuff, that fantastic stuff that we support, let's just assume that ingestion's a problem. Well, isn't it easier if as Spotify or as Apple using delegate delivery through Captivate or whatever, or direct upload, isn't it just easier if we just use an API call, which we can, that's that's, that's instant.

Yeah. Agreed. And it, it, it's, it's, that's not, as you said, it's not to put down RSS, it's not to say that it has to be RSS or nothing else. The point is that because the industry has become such a medium, a multi-billion dollar industry, there are people within it that need and needed certain things to move more quickly than RSS and even the open RS and podcast in 2.0 was able to provide.

And that, I, I, I think that is an inherent challenge we see, we see with WordPress, we've seen it with WordPress over the years in that the releases are good, but they're, they, they can be few and far between, and you don't always get what you need. So if you are a company that's coming into podcasting as a Spotify or a whatever, and I need these features and I need this thing to happen, I need as a great example of this is, um, early access bonus content. You know, we do it at Captivate.

People like Super cast do it, uh, lips and do it through Glow. Um, blueberry do it, I think, and, and whatever else, Patriot, of course, it, it, it, it has developed so quickly because there's been a need for it. Right. And original RSS as it is simply can't support it. It's one feed. Yeah. And here's what it is. Yeah. We, we could, we could play with authentication in Apple Podcasts, which is, I think even Patreon used to do that. I dunno if they still do. Yeah.

But it's just easier to generate a new feed based on a series of conditions, and that's, that person's paid for feed. Right. So you, you do, again, not to, not to put RSS down because it drives everything and we love it, and this is what we advocate for, but there are circumstances where it can't move as quickly as the industry and the people looking to generate revenue need it to.

- Right. Or, you know, certainly one of the history lessons to be learned from proprietary is that it, it does have capabilities that Open doesn't have. And that's one of the big reasons why Open doesn't really exist that much . Um, and why it's such a rare thing. Um, 'cause most of these platforms are proprietary.

And that, you know, even Tom Webster on the show, LA la last week was making that point too, is like, you know, if we wanna become the, the full potential of this medium, I think we do have to embrace more proprietary, um, into the ecosystem. Right. And I think what we're seeing with Spotify right now may be an indication of that, um, is that there is kind of a growing momentum.

We're seeing YouTube support RSS feeds now, and we're seeing, you know, so you're starting to see, instead of fighting it, they're joining the opportunity of it. Right. And that may be a good sign. Um, but Danny actually posted a good comment in, in here that can maybe take us in a little different direction of our conversation. But, uh, he's, he's quoting the latest numbers showing just a hundred thousand video podcasts on Spotify.

Um, so it's, you know, so that's less than 4% of all podcasts on the platform. Um, do you think they've missed the boat when it comes to taking users from YouTube? I think it's a very competitive thing, um, to compete with YouTube right now. They, they've got so much momentum around what they're doing. Uh, they've got so many creators over there. Um, you know, it's, it's a, it's a question mark.

Uh, you know, really how much of an impact even embracing podcasting is gonna have on what they do, because podcasting is relatively small. I mean, in, in the context of YouTube . Um, and I do the know the Spotify wants to play in that video space, and they wanna be a competitor of YouTube. But, you know, the scale of YouTube is just, it's not easy to achieve. So, you know, you're, you're probably gonna lose . - Oh, I mean, YouTube about that. - Yeah. - YouTube's a fight to have, isn't it?

Because I, I, I think there's sort of two ways to look at this. There's the generous way, and there's the, the, the not so generous way, the generous way that, you know, I think I got into podcasting at about 120,000 shows. You were in it before then. Um, and no one - Said, and my Zoom catalog when I was working at Microsoft had, like, th i, I, I think my maximum amount of shows that I had in the platform was like 34,000 . - I love that. I love that. I love hearing your Zoom stories as well.

They're some of my favorite event, um, evenings or when we go back there. I love those tales. Um, and, and I would, I think to that, from that perspective, I would, I would say that, you know, the generous part of me would say, well, you know, back then no one said we missed the boat on taking radio's traffic, even though there's a hundred thousand podcasts. However, right.

Um, I would, the more cynical and probably, uh, um, podcast focused side of me would say, I don't know if it's about missing the boat. I think it's just about picking the wrong fight. And I think it's a difficult fight, as you mentioned, to have that, that, you know, kids these days, they want to grow up to be a YouTuber, . That's a career path. You know, , no one grows up.

Literally. I can't think of anyone that I've ever, you know, any child that I've ever spoken to, I said, you know what, mark, I don't wanna be a YouTuber. I want to be a Spotify podcaster. Right. So it's, it's that, that's a very flippant way of illustrating how much YouTube is in the modern psyche. Yeah. In in that, it, it, it's, it's the default search engine, in my view, for anything that's not Google.

You know, I know that sounds very - Well, it is part of Google , so they've got wrapped up, don't they again? Of course. Nailed it. There's a lot of talk now about AI could be replacing Google, um, in a lot of people's use case. So it's, I can see it in having an impact on my daily use too. Um, I'm, I'm kind of leaning more inclined to do queries in chat GT four than I am about doing it in Google. 'cause you know, if, if I do it in Google, I have to hunt and peck to find the answers.

Now granted, they've, they've integrated more of the BART functions into, into the, the, the search engine, which is helpful. And then Bing is a whole nother, um, type of deployment. But I know we're getting a little off topic here, but the, but the whole video thing is, is a very interesting phenomenon happening right now. And, and I just wonder if the combination of video and audio podcasting, um, will unlock the potential. And, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll put you on the spot here. Mark.

Uh, has Captivate ever considered, um, making a video, um, sourced RSS feed available, uh, on your platform? Or are you guys gonna remain primarily a audio only platform, do you think? - I think we've probably talked about it 10 times a year since we started. Oh, you - Have? Okay. . Okay. So it keeps coming up. Okay. - Always comes up. Um, the reason that we don't genuinely, there are two main reasons for it, you know, how expensive it is to host video and, you know. Yeah.

- But is it getting cheaper because of the bandwidth cost dropping? That's - It is, it is. That's right. But what's also in my pers from my perspective in, in my view, getting cheaper is the, um, the commoditization of podcast hosting as a service. It's becoming, yeah. People expecting cheap, more cheaply, more cheaply, more cheaply, more cheaply, because people are starting to unban understand bandwidth more. But then you've got hosts out there that Right.

You know, they've, everything's a freemium, or, you know, we will give you free hosting, but we'll take some revenue share on your adverts or, you know, anchor, which is now Spotify for podcasters. So I think podcast hosting is becoming more commoditized. And even though the video hosting costs in terms of bandwidth are coming down, there's still the, the, the, the relative, uh, - Definitely - Still higher. Yeah. It's quite a challenge.

The second thing genuinely is almost like, why bother when YouTube exists? It's the same fight as Spotify. Like, what? Just let them pay the bandwidth. Go and do it. Yeah. Um, and I've, you know, we've got some strong thought. You and I spoke about this before about the whole YouTube and podcasting thing, which, which we may maybe we'll touch on, but the, it's almost pointless because, you know, someone - Could've locked up, right?

Is that what you It's, it's the same issue that, uh, Danny pointed out about it. Is it too late for Spotify to get in the video game? So yeah. - It's a huge fight to have. - Yeah. And then to add another layer on top of this, um, on that topic would be to think about the podcasting 2.0 spec. And I know you've probably looked at it, so you're fully aware of this too, has two things in it. It's got the lit tag, and it's got alternate enclosures.

And, and there's, there's been some talk, I know I've talked about it with Todd Cochrane a little bit too, and he like pushes back on this. But being able to use that alternative enclosures to include a link to a YouTube video in yours, speed. Mm-Hmm. . And could, could we see at some point, and that act that could be enabled with the lit tag as well, to activate your podcast consumer in the one of the modern, uh, podcast apps to let the user know that there's a live version of this show.

Kinda like what we do with this show, with the new media show. We're, we're live, and then we're also on demand on video and audio podcasting. But to be able to combine these technologies together and offer that as a, as kind of a next generation solution to these podcast consumption apps out there. And, you know, who knows, you know, if we get enough of those apps to support it, maybe having the ability of a MP four to be in that, uh, alternative enclosure tag.

So you basically have two enclosure tags in one item in your RSS speech. You have one that's audio, and then, then you have one that can either be a direct, uh, MP four file, or it can be a YouTube link right. To that video file, um, as a, as an alternative going going forward. And I, I don't know if that'll ever be fully embraced, but it's just a concept that's possible right now with the new podcast 2.0 spec. - No, I wholeheartedly agree.

That's this concept that Kieran and I have, have, have landed on as well. A few months ago we talked about that idea of just why not, like, I, I, I see absolutely no reason why podcast hosting platforms, and it is something that we're exploring. And, and, and like I said, we probably talked about this, um, maybe four months ago, just because, you know, the, the, the way that I use podcasting and video together, right?

I don't, I don't want YouTube to ingest my RSS 'cause I don't think that ingestion is up to scratch yet. I think it's a little cumbersome. And I think some of the way that they handle the data that they get from the feed is, is, can be a little cumbersome. Okay. I've got a couple of shows. I'm a, I've got like two things in my background. I've got Star Wars and a putter and a golf mat. So I've clearly, I'm a, I'm an addict in podcasting. So I've got a Star Wars podcast and a golf podcast.

The podcast we, we do as a YouTube podcast, all right? It's set up as a YouTube playlist, and it's a podcast playlist. But what we do is we take the video, do a little bit of cleaning up, really not much, and we put it onto YouTube as a direct video. We don't call it a YouTube video, we just call it part of the podcast.

It's on YouTube. And I, there is absolutely no reason, and again, something that we've talked about as Captivate, there's no reason that Alternate Enclosure tag cannot be used for that. 'cause the thing that YouTube doesn't do or right now doesn't do is generate the RSS feed. Um, so yeah, I, I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I think there are, you know, if we approach this from a Captivate standpoint, I'm sure someone else will do this.

Um, but if we approach this as Captivate would approach it, we would want to automate that as much as possible. Mm-Hmm. , we would want to try to make sure that I didn't need to go and enter the YouTube URL into the field and Captivate. We'd want to try and take some of that heavy lifting from people. Um, and this for me is where the, the, the hosting companies like us have a responsibility to the podcaster.

Because if we want podcasting to grow as a medium, and, and, and we, we aren't always working with big media, you know, as Captivate, we host shows like the news agents, the newly announced sports agents today, you know, these are, uh, multi, multi multimillion download shows a month. They do really, really well. But most of the users are creator economy podcasters, like you and I, we love Star Wars. We love what we love. We want to talk about it.

If we as a hosting platform and as a team of hosting platforms, you know, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a collective. Don't continue to think along the lines of how can we, how can we open the ever expanding possibilities of being a podcaster to the average podcaster without adding more burden and time pressure to that busy podcaster That has got to be our true North. It has to be. So I, I, I see no issue with the alternate enclosure there, Rob. I think I, I, I think it will start to happen.

And we've certainly looked at it. - Yeah. And I think it would require probably a deeper API integration with, um, with YouTube, right? Mm-Hmm. , and who knows o over time that probably, you know, to do exactly what you just said, to be able to treat that link to that video file as almost like a permanent link. Um, and then have it come back to your, your tool. Uh, right. But you would probably have to publish the video to YouTube first. Mm-Hmm. . So that would be enabled in the ecosystem.

But, um, but I wanted to bring up a slide that James Cridlin, uh, put in, in a, um, recent newsletter, uh, about, you know, it's this, uh, report card that he did in for coming out of 2023. And I thought it was interesting, um, case, I'll pull it up here and we can look at it a little bit here. Um, it says around the concept of innovation, which is, is everybody's buzzword around this, um, that there's a few, you know, interesting trends here, um, around perception.

This was a, a research, um, that James Cridlin did with pod news.net, um, with creators. And this is a perception that creators have around who's doing innovative, um, ideas and features. And the, the number one came up as, uh, podcast Index, which is the podcast 2.0, um, project. Um, but that's no change. So they've kind of maintained that. And then number two was Spotify at 2.08 was up a little bit from 2.7, and then Apple Podcasts is seen right behind Spotify on that.

But that was a significant bump up for them from 2.2 to 2.7. So I would say Apple has really kind of risen in its, um, perception out there around, you know, adding new things, which is an interesting kind of thing that you wouldn't naturally think, right? That people have that perception. And then, then YouTube kind of followed, um, which I, I think is an interesting trend. What's your thoughts, mark, on what you're seeing here?

Do you think that there's a misconception of, of the content creator here, the podcaster on who's innovating? - I think it's a bit of an onion on this one. I think there's a few layers to it. I, first and foremost, if you subscribe to the wonderful pod news, huge fan of James M's. A really good friend and pod news is, is is diligently and vigilantly put together, it's a very well done. Yeah. But it does target the creator who has got an interest in the podcast in industry. Not every creator.

It's a creator who has an interest. Correct. So they, - Well, it's a 30,000 pool, right? - Of how many podcasts? 4 million, let assume active. Yeah, - Exactly. He's got 30,000 subscribers to his newsletter. Um, so that's just a small sample of the industry, right? - Yeah. And, but I think that, and the number's admirable, but I think it's just, it's the type potentially of the people being surveyed.

And I, there's nothing wrong with this one, but I think it just requires that little bit of a lens sometimes. Mm-Hmm. . Um, because, you know, I know a lot of people that create podcasts. I live in a little village. The mayor of the Village creates a podcast. He doesn't know what the podcast in index is. , he doesn't, he asked me, he asked what Mike to get in the pub. Um, so I given my Amazon Link affiliates, obviously. . No, just joking, Richard, if you're listening, I didn't.

But the point is that the, the, the, the audience is already very tightly focused on the industry. So, you know, they know about the Podcast Index, they know about Apple Podcasts, they know about, um, Spotify and whatnot. The interesting perspective is that Podcast Index has not moved, everything else has really moved up. So that, that's actually a bit of a ground loss.

There's a bit some of the clear sky between Podcast Index, Spotify, and Apple Podcast, uh, has actually that some of that Clear Sky is gone. It's a bit, everything's a little bit tighter. Again, I don't, there's nothing wrong with that.

My, my point is this, that it illustrates that things like the Podcast index require a lot of education and a lot of adoption from, you know, let's get pocket casts, let's get good pods, let's get every, let's get Overcast, let's get Marco working on some of these Podcast 2.0, podcasting 2.0 integrated features. Um, and let's try and, well, not, let's try and, but let's be aware that the podcast Index and podcasting 2.0 is still on that startup journey.

And it's very much still in the early adopter phase, both from the partnering apps and the podcasters that roll it out. We, we, at Captivate, we had a, um, we rolled out a massive podcasting 2.0 features, like we are alongside Blueberry, I think one of the top hosting companies that support the, the, the sheer number of tags that we support. Yeah. Um, but we held off and we got lambasted for it.

We got lambasted by a lot of people in the industry that, that, that was, why are you not supporting it?

I, and I had to explain, I said, look, it's not that we don't support it, it's that if Eileen on Captivate is busy and she's creating a podcast and she's editing it, she's doing the marketing for it, and all she's hearing is actually your podcast isn't growing 'cause you're not doing enough marketing on it, and we don't have time to do marketing on it, and we can't do all this other good stuff. And the production levels are not really where you want 'em to be.

'cause again, you don't have time for that. If we suddenly as captivate start rolling out feature after feature after feature after feature, when it's not adopted enough on the other side for it to matter, there's a very real risk that people are gonna worry and that they're gonna not really want to podcast anymore. Because this, the, that's the straw that broke the camel's back the time thing.

The reason I say that is to contextualize the challenges in growth when it comes to things like podcasting 2.0 in, in, from my perspective in that we know, and Todd said this a lot, um, and I again, wholeheartedly agree with him on this one. We have to sell the benefits of it, but we can't sell the benefits of it. Guess, guess what? We love podcasting. We love RSS, we love tech. We love ery.

We love seeing what is possible, not what is useful or what is going to be useful today, but what's possible because that's where we live. That's the, that's the place that we roam in. And, and I think what it will need to help to pull those figures up is education and marketing almost like Spotify did by saying, Hey, podcasts exist to people like my mum Yeah. Who now listens on Spotify.

It needs people like a good pods or whoever think, you know, pick an app to come out and say, okay, here's podcasting 2.0 for you, the listener, and here's then how the listener will benefit to you, the creator. And that education has to come from the people that are delivering the benefits, not the people that are enabling the benefits, the people that are delivering them. Mm-Hmm. . Does that make sense? I know that's quite Yeah, - It does. Yeah. Abstract. No, it makes, makes perfect sense.

And I wanted to also pull up, um, um, there was some other kind of info that came out of this, um, this, uh, report card from Pod News and James Cridlin. Um, YouTube is eagerly awaited. These are some quotes from people that, uh, took his, his survey, I guess. Um, uh, YouTube ha YouTube has been great. The podcast episodes I've placed there somehow through the magic of their algorithms, find interesting viewers. Here's another quote. Uh, YouTube has the best platform for discovery, period.

I get the best engagement on YouTube. U YouTube also grows more organically. And next one here is, uh, YouTube seems to be the best for helping find new listeners. My YouTube video podcast is growing faster than my podcast on Buzzsprout. Hmm. Interesting observation. Um, on that front, uh, it, it does unfortunately fly in the face of a lot of the discussion in the podcasting space about YouTube.

Um, and I do wonder about that, um, this, this kind of difference between how people in the industry view YouTube and how, um, podcasters view YouTube and, and that's why we're fee feeling this tension that's in the medium right now about YouTube and maybe apprehension about them having too much influence and power over the medium. Right. What's your reaction to all that - ? It's, again, it's, it's an interesting one, isn't it?

I think YouTube without a doubt, if you, if you, if you don't just dump your podcast on there and you, you treat it as a YouTube platform, and you work with the YouTube algorithm and you work with, um, work with YouTube within its boundaries of how it wants discovery to work, it is the best platform right now for gaining new listeners. There's no doubt about that. We've seen that with the golf podcast, without a doubt.

What is also interesting though, Rob, is the wording, and this is a, this is what I'm talking about with the education and the perception thing. My podcast is now outgrowing or is growing faster now on YouTube than it is on buzzsprout not growing faster now on YouTube than it is as distributed to other first party apps via bus sprout. So what be, what's happening is that pod being captivate, bus sprout, lips in blueberry are being compared next to YouTube when actually they're not.

They're the bit in between where YouTube doesn't have that bit in between. It's creator YouTube direct upload with podcasting via RSS, it's creator host distribution, first party listening app, um, yeah. To the listener. And so I think that perception amongst creators is very, very interesting.

We see that in the Facebook groups. It's, it's interesting to see that that is what's happening, the brands and the, because YouTube does the hosting of the video content, they're being compared, it's almost apples and oranges. They're being compared incorrectly. And I think that's one of the challenges with open RSS because open RS is essentially responsible, responsible for those Buzz sprout, captivate pod b blueberry lips in numbers.

Mm-Hmm. when in actual fact it is not, it just, it's just that Apple podcasts and Spotify and whatever else one doesn't have the audience of YouTube two doesn't have the algorithmic sensibilities and, um, the algorithmic experience that, that YouTube has got, apple and Spotify just simply don't have that for discovery. Um, right. But, but the reputation that YouTube will gain because of that will, it will be very hard to educate against that because, because that's just how people see it.

So, yeah. It's an interesting one. Some interesting points from Matt as well that are worth looking at. That one bring, bring the, bring the time one up. That's fascinating. That is, yeah. I mean, we, we, that's the, the interesting thing there is we have done, we've got 20 odd features. The point is, it's when you invest the time and it's how you invest the time, it's - The timing and is the market ready for it and stuff like that. Yeah. You have to balance some these issues. You do.

- It's the creators now, you know, we, we, we work with tens of tens of tens of thousands of podcasters, and the biggest worry that they've got is that they are gonna struggle with time. Mm-Hmm. , they're missing out on something. Um, you know, let's, let's look at, uh, value for value as an example of this. Yep. If I say value for value, is good for monetizing. There's instant, this is amazing. Instant. What is that instant fear? Because, oh my word, is it something else to do?

Um, I think with open podcasting, it's not necessarily the, the loss. Let's, I'll be completely honest with you. Implementing most podcasting 2.0 features is like a half day job. Yeah. We're building our S tags and putting forms on the back backend. These aren't difficult things. They're not difficult things at all. It's, it's more about, we genuinely, in my view, as a hosting company, and this is why we build what we build at Captivate, we've got a duty of care, right?

If someone, if I make a decision to get some good PR for my company and it stops 50 people podcasting because we just wanted that pr but it scared them. It's made them think, I don't have time for this. So that's it. It's the stroller breaks camel's back. That's on me. And that's silly. That's just, it's not fair.

It's not right. Part of the responsibility of a, of someone at a hosting company level is to, is to understand when and where to put things that will help people and how to educate 'em. 'cause we can't put things out a hosting company, it doesn't matter whether it's us or whoever else, can't put things out without then educating the user. That's irresponsible. Yeah. So I think it's, this is, this is where new technology, I mean, look at the Apple Vision Pro, right?

All of the early adopters, they look amazing. It looks brilliant. All of the early adopters are taking that and they're making that many YouTube videos that eventually everyone else will be educated on it. And it's a, it's a, that's a really big B2C example, but it's the same with anything. So it's, I think it's, I think it's less about, it's less about the time. 'cause these are easy features. You are, they really are. They're easy to implement.

It's just the sheer pressure that podcasters face every single day is real. You know? So there's a responsibility there. - Yeah. And I do think it's, uh, it's the old adage, uh, you know, is it the chicken or the egg, right? From the standpoint that, uh, do you do things in advance of the market?

Um, especially, it's especially challenging for an established company, um, to, to do that, um, to invest resources and invest time into features that may create frustration in the part of their users, because they may be too early. So I think a lot of this is about timing. And, and I think a lot of the magic tricks that, that you have to play, and I did too when I'm working at Spreaker or Lipson or any of these platforms, is to, is to time, uh, features with the market, right?

And to have those features add value to, to those clients or subscribers that you have to your platform in a way that is easy to understand and that you've had the time to escalate your support as well as even your organizational understanding of the implications of those new features and functions that is, is sometimes difficult to get across. And, and I think value for value definitely fits into that scenario of a big challenge.

Um, and, and I'm not sure that the industry and most podcast consumers and podcasters are ready for that. And, and I think, um, I kind of wonder if they, if there will come a time when they will be, but I'm not entirely convinced that it's easy enough to do it. I've, I've been through it and I, I've got an ALB account and I get, you know, I get Satoshi's all, all the time on, on doing this show.

Uh, it's usually when Todd does it, 'cause he activates the, the lit tag and gets people engaged and all that kind of stuff. On that side. I don't do it as much here. 'cause I, I don't control his network, which is, this is also available on his platform too. So, um, but the innovation is kind of a dilemma, especially for existing companies.

And my, my thought at this point is, is that if the industry and the bigger players in the industry don't push that envelope, that they're leaving themselves open for a new entrant to come in and do all these things and, you know, kind of chart a new path. Not unlike what Tesla did, uh, with the automotive industry.

Um, and you think in combination with AI technology, um, in combination with podcasting to technology, and you can see where there may be a window of opportunity for someone or some entity to come out and just trans transform the, the space. And, uh, do you ever worry about that Mark? - Not particularly. Mainly just because I, I'm back to cre Well, two parts to that. Yeah. I'm always back to creator versus big media podcasting, right? Big media podcasting.

I ain't, I ain't gonna put any money at all on Joe Rogan accepting Satoshi's . - Just, I'm not either. I'm not either, right? That's not gonna happen because - It's up there and it's, it's that if that, if it becomes mainstream, right? Okay, well maybe we'll start accepting it in 5, 10, 15 years. And I do genuinely think those would be the timing for it. Then I'll look at the creator economy space. Most creators don't use a hosting platform because they wanna get blown away by technology.

Right. They use a hosting platform because it's - Easier. - Yeah. Yeah. It's easier. And they've gotta use a hosting platform. Now, could someone come along and do something different? Of course they could. Mm-Hmm. . But 99% of podcasters still don't care about the technology. They care about that. - Getting it done, right. - That and getting it out and getting it in there. And it's, so I think it's an interesting thing.

Like I've got a Tesla and I listen to Spotify and my Tesla now Apple podcasts with the most recent opening. - I've got model three myself. - Exactly. So you'll be the same. I've got a model three. Um, and I like Tesla. I'm a tech guy, but I don't care that much about cars. Right. And I didn't, so I didn't buy Tesla because I'm into tech. I didn't buy Tesla because I want to be an edge. - Though you could make the case that that is a advantage of getting a Tesla, right?

Is that you are at the cutting edge of tech. Right? - It is. It's also a disadvantage when it doesn't work. It's also a pain in the neck when the blooming, when the, I live in a place that freezes me. I can't get into my car most of winter. - Oh, no kidding. Yeah, - It's a laugh. But the point is, I, I got the car 'cause it's really fast. It's fun to drive. Oh, it's

- Agreed. Yeah. - And it's, so it's, I I it, I I feel that the runway for transformation is so great that we all, we all will have moved on by then. Like when we came into the space is captivated. We, I, I don't want, this is starting to sound as flippant as it's going to, but we, I think we changed the way that certain podcast hosting companies market, no one did product announcements before. No one was doing live streams about their products.

No one was branding their products like we branded it. And suddenly a lot more of them are, and I'm grateful for that. We all ships rise and I just feel that all ships are rising anyway. We're all helping each other. Like there's no animosity in podcast hosting. I Right. Love God, I love Rob, I love you. Others, every, we share drinks, we share meals with break bread. It's always been that way and it will be. Right.

And I, because we're all moving together and some of us are moving there, and some of us are moving there and some moving a bit quicker than others and slower than others, but we're all moving forward that, so I think the transformational runway required when you've got an audience that doesn't necessarily like tech, they just have to use tech. My dad's an electrician. He doesn't like screwdrivers. He is just gotta use one.

So when you've got an audience that is like that plus a range of service providers and new entrants coming in that are all sort of moving together, the, I don't think a flash transformation or a flash disruption disruption, um, could happen in, in, in the way that we were talking about that, that we intimated. I think it would be very much more of a steady process and we were all sort of moving in that direction anyway. Right? Right. I might be completely wrong.

There'll be something in pod news tomorrow and we're all dead , but , you know what I mean? I just, it's - The next big shiny thing, right? That's, that's what the, you know, you know, I keep hearing these conversations, um, especially on YouTube of these prognosticators talking about how we're, we're coming into an era of, um, multiple exponential trends converging, right?

Um, and how our whole society and our culture and our technology and how we live our lives and, and whatever are, are going to be transformed into something new, right? And, and so you have to think, well, is there a real history of that? Um, most of these transformations usually happen over many years. And there, there's sometimes, you know, not easy pathways to, to traverse. I mean, there's disruption, there's change.

And I think, you know, I I think what we're seeing with the automotive industry is a good example. And I do wonder if, you know, maybe podcasting will miss this, um, this type of scenario, um, because it is a technology laden industry, um, that they are keeping up with the adoption of technology, but there's gonna be some inflection point. And, and I do wonder about the whole video in combination now with podcasting.

Now, if I think back to my history and podcasting, when I started working in this industry, um, the video side of podcasting was 30 to 40% of the market when I started. Um, a lot of people are shocked when they hear me say that, but it, it really was, there were whole media companies that started, and some of 'em, some people know today. And one of 'em is how stuff works.

Um, that later got, got acquired by the Disney Channel, or not Disney, but uh, discovery Channel and then later got acquired by iHeart. Um, they started out as a video podcasting, um, platform company, and they got multimillions of dollars of venture capital and all that stuff. Um, so we've somewhat been here before. And so when I hear people talking about, well, you know, podcasting is an audio only medium, they're really, they're missing historical context.

Um, and I do wonder if as we move into, it's kind of like a generational thing happening right now, I think that there's a lot of younger people that are coming into the medium now, and we're seeing the fastest growth happen in that what that 18 to 24 age group is adopting, uh, consumption of this, uh, faster than the older generation, which is typically they were younger podcast consumers, now they're older podcast consumers, but, um, that, that they're going

to transform this industry into something, um, you know, slightly different than what we experience now. Um, do you think about that 18 to 24 demo, uh, and the impact on podcasting as you kind of think about your product? - Uh, abs absolutely. From a creative perspective and from a consumer standpoint, it's, it's where things like the idea of the alternate enclosure, the, the, the, the the yeah.

The ability to enable something to help that demographic and that type of person, that is used to a multitude of media options when it comes to podcasting, not audio, right? Social - Platforms, all this stuff, right?

- Absolutely. Even things like the live tag, you know, the, if we tar, let's just be cliche and target the, the sort of Twitch angle, you know, the people that are used to being able to do that , the, um, I, I think it's very important that we are mindful of what people not only might want to consume, but how they might want to create in the future.

And when it comes to, like we talked about that inflection point, you know, let, let, let, if we look at a couple of others that led us to podcasting, broadband internet plus the original iPhone that led us to the app store, it led us to creation over consumption. Uh, came about what the, around the same time as the old web 2.0 trend. And I'm not talking about the dodgy graphics, I'm talking about the ability to not just consume on the internet, but to create on the internet.

They all came around the same time. And then we entered this Uber world where a car will come to me when I want it to come to me. And guess what? At the same time Netflix started to appear and Spotify started to appear. So any, anything that I wanted, Deliveroo, whether I want food, whatever I want Amazon Prime, that was the next, for me, the next inflection point.

Every 10 years or so, um, over the last whatever call it last 34 years, I can think of one that has led us to where we are in podcasting. You know, suddenly there was an inflection point for creation. Suddenly there was a consumer inflection point for everything on demand, which led us to where we are today. And, and as you said, those things will, will, will continue.

And that, that convergence might be, let's go blockchain and AI creation and monetization in one, in one fell swoop, decentralized, uh, monetization. Um, that is driven by, by AI that we, that that will allow us to maximize our revenue with doing very, very little work or whatever. Whether it's simple content creation, whatever that might be, these convergences will not stop, but the essence of podcasting will remain.

And I think it's up to us to be sensible enough to understand that podcasting, the phrase podcasting, the industry will continue to evolve. And if, if we, if we continue to say, well, a podcast is only this thing, it's like saying, you know, that's not, actually, I'm not gonna go hoover up. I'm gonna go use my vacuum cleaner, or I'm not gonna Google it. I'm gonna query the old search index.

It's a very, again, two flippant examples, but because we're so close to podcasting, we don't often want to see that it's evolving through and it's becoming something else. So that demographic that you just mentioned there, Rob, 18 to 24, they sort of don't care. I wouldn't have imagined. They don't care. Well, I listen to a podcast on YouTube.

If someone comes up to me and says, listen to you Star War podcast on YouTube, my answer term is not gonna be, actually, did you strictly listen to my podcast? I'll actually say to them, that's amazing, thank you. Let me know what you thought. Yeah, totally. So, you know, there's, there's a, there's a lot to unpack with that generation, but as they become the creators as well as the consumers, which they are, they're becoming creators much younger these days.

Mm-hmm. , the, the industry will have to oftentimes probably accept a little bit of humility and say, well, okay, maybe it is time for us to think a little differently. I wouldn't necessarily say worry too much about people coming in and transforming it through the conversions in technology, but I would, I would, I would certainly, from my perspective, I dunno, maybe this is just 'cause I like thinking about this stuff, but yeah, I would, I find it exciting that maybe we could integrate ai,

maybe we could integrate blockchain. Maybe we could. Yeah, - I did too. - Whatever the next thing you know, whether it's wearables or vision, whatever, whatever neural link, let's go wild. The, I think it's just exciting to see that podcasting could have a part of that evolution. Um, and some people will drive it, some people won't, some things will work, some things won't work, some will stick, some won't stick.

And I think we've sta I do think we've started to see that, like with the value for value stuff, I think that is a really good example of we're trying to be bleeding edge and people like Sam Seti are doing fantastic work over at True Fans f fm, uh, the, the, the, the, the road to education is so great. Yeah. It's that, I don't know, I don't know if it will reach mass, mass market. I want it to, but will it? I'm not entirely sure.

- Well, it's gonna have to transform into something that's deployed a little differently than what we have today. Uh, I think for it - Gotta be clickable, isn't it? - Option clickable. Right. And it's, and it's a, it's like any other tech, right? That you think about that's new. Um, it, it oftentimes starts rather klugy and clumsy and hard to work with. And, but over time it becomes easier to work with. Um, and that just could be the pathway that we have here.

I mean, my understanding of that Satoshi Bitcoin and I keep hearing that Bitcoin is gonna have a big place in the future. And so you can, you can definitely map to this that, you know, there will come a time, I don't know how many years in the future this is going to take. Um, but the idea behind it is just so good. I mean, it's just, it's, it's mouthwatering, it's so good.

I mean, it's like being able to share revenue with the, the consumption platform, the podcaster as well as the audience, and have it be a three-way kind of like, um, exchange, right? As is something that we don't have today on any other methodology that can really be an incentivizing, uh, process for everyone involved. And, and, and that's what we've needed. You know, the consumption platforms have struggled to justify their existence.

And this has been going on since I started podcasting is like, well, why is, why is Apple investing in podcasting and they don't make any money from, it was the argument for many years in the podcasting space. Well, apple deployed some revenue generating capabilities in there and they used it as a justification to sell devices and, and that was their business model with it.

Um, but I think as we move to the future, I think that, you know, a lot of the other consumption apps need to have some sort of a business model around their, their, um, their existence so they can pay for their developers and they can keep in innovating and improving and things like that. And that's been one of the challenges on the consumption side is that there hasn't been a lot of revenue opportunities for those, you know, like a pocket cast or a, or a, um, even Spotify for that matter.

Now granted, they've got their own music model revenue wrapped around this, which has really made the opportunity available for podcasting. It's the same thing I did when I was working for Microsoft on Zoom.

It was really a music and movie and TV consumption platform that just happened to have some podcasts in there that, um, kept everybody kind of engaging with the platform on a more regular basis than other, other than just coming in and watching a movie or two, or listening to a few tracks of music in the platform. Um, so it was more like regular consumption and, and things like that. Especially if they were like daily podcasts or weekly or whatever.

It just, uh, it creates kind of like, uh, frequency right of consumption is what I saw on the platform when I was using it. Um, you know, I was managing it. But, um, but it's, it's an interesting thing to think about and I think about it a lot, as you might imagine. And I, I can tell you do too, um, what's right around the corner, what's, what's two years out, what's three years out, where do we see AI coming into play?

And, and frankly, how can I encourage AI to come in to make it easier for podcasters? And that's, that's how I really think about it. I don't think it's a big benefit for listeners ai. I think it's a big benefit for the creator. Um, so I don't know. Yeah, if you have any follow up thoughts on any of that ? - I, I agree. I I think that should be our litmus test as well. It should always be. It certainly is.

When we, when we roll things out with Captivate, it's, it's very much a, you know, does what does this do for the creator? When we first launched, we had that whole world's only growth, focus, growth oriented hosting platform. And, you know, a few of the hosting founders kicked up a video first. You know, he's saying that we don't care about growth for our, our creators. And, and, and the answer was always, oh, we're not, we're not saying that.

What we're saying is that every decision that we make will be run through the filter of does this save someone time? Right? Does it save someone money or does it make someone money? That is literally our decision making process. - I think that makes perfectly good sense, reasonable sense. You know, you're a business, you have to pay salaries, you have to pay taxes or, you know, whatever that might be.

So, you know, thinking about those things, and that's what's interesting about the, the, the whole Satoshi model and the value for value model. Um, and, and will that scale? I mean, what's your gut feeling if we're able to streamline that and make it easier for people to, to start out with some Satoshi's? 'cause I had to get funded by, um, by actually engaging in some content.

I struggled to get my, my Visa card accepted, um, in, in the, the Satoshi ecosystem with Albi, uh, because a lot of the banks block that nowadays. So, you know, there's some infrastructure issues that I think are gonna get worked out. If we can make it easier for the conversion of fiat to, to, um, Satoshi, then you can really fuel the ecosystem.

- Yeah, absolutely. I think those growth challenges are, are interesting, you know, from a pure onboarding standpoint, someone like Sam at True Fans, you know, what he's doing and, and, and giving you some Satoshis to start with just to start playing with - . That's how I got started with it, is working with, uh, Sam. So yeah, - Same, same.

And it, I, I don't do that much in that space just 'cause it's, it's, I just, it's a bit of a busman's holiday once I've done eight hours at work and then, you know, to, to play on my own stuff on a night. But Right. The, the, um, I think the interesting thing is that it it's the scalability, you know, outside of the onboarding, here's some, here's some SATs to get on with. Here's some chips on the table to start gambling with.

You know, outside of that, it has to, in order for it to scale, it has to, it has to really, it has to speak to the non-technical quote unquote normal podcast consumers sensibilities around what value actually means. Which means if, to me that means if I, if I'm listening to you, Rob, if I press a button, you know, like remember I'm Vine, I press the like, but I see all these likes streaming and I see it streaming. I see the number of SATs going up and going up and going up.

What does that give you? What am I, what am I doing? What's that as a, as someone that understands bartering, as someone that understands transactional value? Because that's what we're all brought up with. If I do this, why does it mean more than just pressing like a few times, which is no inherent value, right? And, and could you, can you fund something? Will it, will it help with something for you? Is there tangible value to it?

And I think that's, if we take away all the technicalities and all the technological implications, challenges in education that is required, that to me feels like the biggest piece of the puzzle is that how do we take something ethereal and make it tangible for the person that is granting these ethereal bits of value? Because that's what it feels like to people. And that, that's a huge challenge.

And I think what you mentioned earlier that adoption, the scalability of it, and potentially how long that might take to just seep into the, to the masses a little bit more. I think that why that's potentially why that runway is so big.

Because in most other, in fact, every other funding method of, from a podcaster's perspective, listener support, whether it's membership selling, bonus content, exclusive content, early access, advertising dollars, selling products on the backend, whatever that upside is, it's, it's tangible. So that runway's gotta be so big. So yeah, it's an interesting challenge though. It's fascinating to talk about.

- Yeah, and I think, I think the, the two ways of doing is that, is that I think that the Satoshi Exchange, um, kind of process needs to be one gamified and it needs to be enabled in a way that is easy to be adopted, right? Um, and platforms are, are incentivized to just give some satoshis to new users as like a maybe an acquisition strategy to kind of fuel the ecosystem, um, and then have that exchange happen in the app.

Not unlike just like what you said, mark, I think it's a great example of, of how this could be deployed as similar to, you know, the, the hearts and the, and the things that scroll up, but they're little, little satoshi um, kind of icons, right? Um, and you get them coming into your account too, so people are sharing them with you. Maybe the content creator is sharing Satoshis with its audience based on how long they listened.

'cause one, one of the things that was really interesting about, um, the discussion that Todd and I have about this whole process because we're signed up for, 'cause we, we have a certain amount of listeners to this show that we'll stream stream Satoshi to all of us, um, based on how many minutes that we do our show . So it's like two Satoshis for every minute. So it's an incentive to go longer.

I keep teasing Todd, that, you know, maybe we should do a two hour show 'cause we'll get more Satoshi, - . - So, so anyway, and, and just so for those that you know, may be watching this that aren't familiar what a Satoshi is, it's a, it it's a fractional exchange, um, coin of sorts, um, for Bitcoin, right? So it's actually, I mean, you can exchange 10,000 Satoshis and maybe, uh, really exchange in fiat currency like 50 cents or 25 cents.

So it's, it, it's a lot of Satoshis for very little amount of money. So it can be easily gamified as something that feels more significant than it actually is . So, so it makes it fun. But, um, anyway, - Such an interesting thing that the, sorry to jump in. The, the fun element I think is huge. 'cause I think the, the way that the creator economy around podcasting is going is very much focused on the engagement.

It's always been this way. The, the, the engagement, the connection between the listener and the creator. That's always been the power, which is why the host Red ad system works so well. Yeah. It's why the results are so strong. It's why brand recall is so strong. We know that that relationship is key.

And I think, I think the, that what you said about the gamification, you know, adding an element of fun to giving value, but then making sure that, that it's seen, that that value is genuinely tangible. It's not just something that is, is, is, is just there to be gamified. I think I, I I think that is the path to education. 'cause people do want to, they want to do what the host asks. If they're a fan, they want to be part of that club. So it's how do we make that part of the club?

- Yeah, I think it's a, it's a community building strategy too. You know, especially if listeners can exchange Satoshis with each other, which, um, they should be able to do, um, and to incentivize and gift these to each other, or it just creates a completely different kind of dynamic to the interaction within a piece of content. You know, I, you know, that's why I love live so much is that it, it does have the ability for me to bring in a, um, comment from the audience, right?

Like this, you know, you know, to be able to show that that audience member contributed, you know, like Todd has like a little, um, bell that goes off in a studio when somebody contributes some satoshis to, to the program, right? Um, so it creates like an event in the program, um, that is kind of like a fun thing. It's like gamifying it to some degree, like I was saying.

So, so, you know, I've always thought that there was this potential that somehow, somewhere, somehow some way we would be able to get past advertising and not have to do advertise.

I, I, I just have this, I don't know about you, but, and this is a controversial view, but I, I just keep thinking that how we advertise is kinda like a dead model if you look 20 years from now, I just, I'm just not sure that people are going to, I'm just not sure that's gonna be the model that people are gonna accept anymore. It, I don't know what you think about that, mark.

- I do think that it, the advertising models will come under increase in pressure and, and, and scrutiny just because you are, you know, you are - Real, right? - Yeah. And it is sort of a, it is sort of a, a, a weird position for podcasting overall right now in that it was okay to sell impressions when podcasting was a bit of a, a punt for people and for brands.

And on the demand side, - You - Know, if you look at contract renewals, renegotiations, people are constantly asking for more and more, well, what did we get for our money? Okay, we got the impressions we get, but what did we get? And that led, as we know, that led to that the, the advent of the old classic coupon code, go and get a mattress with this coupon, whatever.

And it, it, it's, it's been unable to evolve I think because the, it's very difficult to do anything over and above that because the ecosystem from a consumption perspective is so fractured. There are so many ways that I can listen to a podcast. Yet the people that have on the demand side that are spending money and investing money in podcasting, turn it into this multi-billion dollar industry, they are under increased pressure to prove that podcasting is working for them.

And there's only so far, in my view, that brand recall will take us, and I, I, I don't disagree with you. I feel, I feel that, um, we're now entering the age where we've seen it with Heather and, uh, true native, um, doing a lot of work around frequency capping and talking about frequency, frequency capping. And, and, and we're seeing it more and more where the only way to increase revenue is to add another mid role is to add another couple of spots. Mm-Hmm. . And it's, I I agree with you.

It feels as if it's got a runway. It, I dunno what the answer is, but it feels as if there's a runway to it and it's rapidly running out. Um, - Yeah, - I, I dunno what the answer is, but I I, yeah, I agree that it's facing some challenges over the next five years. - Yeah. And, but um, that's probably a good, uh, good note to end on, um, on this, uh, show.

I appreciate Mark, uh, you spending time with me on the, on the new media show and talking about some very pressing issues that are really kind of, I think at the cutting edge of where we're at with the medium, um, and for us to think more about as we, um, go forward and try and create the kind of medium that we all kind of can envision and, and, and see. And, and that's gonna take some out of the box thinking to get us there.

So, so how can, uh, a uh, viewer or listener of this program, uh, get ahold of you, follow you, hear what you're doing, um, I think you did make some sort of tease online that you have some big things coming around, some content that you're working on. So I dunno if you wanna tease a little bit more about that too. - Oh yeah, I should get you involved in that. You're on my list actually. I list, um, I've got, yes, you are on the list for that one.

Yeah, I'm just, uh, interested in doing, I, I do a lot of content in the podcasting space anyway, but I want, I'm, I'm gonna be pivoting some of the content that I produce. Um, I'm just enjoying doing more of these again. Um, I went through a long phase of doing, doing a lot of solo stuff on the podcast Accelerator 200 something episodes. Um, and I ju I'm just enjoying talking to people. It's a covid hangover, I think Rob . I just wanna be talking to people more.

Um, so I will be, I think, what are we on, we're recording this seventh of Feb. There will certainly be news, um, before Podcast Movement Evolutions in March. So yeah, look out for that one and I'll, I'll be reaching out to you and Todd for it as well. Uh, and thank you for having me, my friend. It's good to see you. I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing you in person, uh, pretty soon. Will I, will I see you in, in Los Angeles? Are you gonna be there for - Peter?

I don't know yet if I'm gonna make it or not. So I mean, we usually do this, this show live on stage 'cause we just did it, um, at, at at podcast live on stage. It was a very kind of a challenging production, but I, I did use some, some recording tools that, um, that enabled me to get good audio out of trying to do the show live on stage in the middle of the exhibition at Pod Fest, which was very noisy.

Wow. So, so, but if you wanted to go hear that episode, it's in the RSS feed right now and it, it's pretty clean because of, I used a technology called Nano, um, oh, nice. I'm sure you've probably heard of them before, but it's a, yeah, it's a, it's a recording platform that has a little lavaliers and has the ability to filter out noise. So I use that to create that episode. Um, and then the video of that is gonna be coming out here anytime now.

Um, so I put up on the screen your URL to Captivate fm. Um, so that's a good place. Um, you're also on Twitter and are, are you actively creating content on any platforms right now? - Not so much. I'm getting ready to pivot. Do the Pivot. So I'm in that in, I'm in that few weeks period of not doing that much. We've gotta captivate blog, but the, the place I'm most active is twit, uh, Twitter, uh, at Mr. Asquith on Twitter and a little bit on LinkedIn as well.

But the, um, yeah, I will be, I will be coming out with some new content very, very soon, uh, and getting, getting you guys involved in that hopefully as well. So yeah. Awesome. I'm in, I'm in the rebrand period, my friend. - Yeah, yeah. Always, uh, always happy to do shows and content with, you know, with you. Mark, you've been a, a, a great leader in the industry for many years now, so, so I'm, thank you, appreciate - That. - Honored to have you on the program,

so thank you so much. It - Means a lot, my friend. Thank you. Yeah. Coming from you that Doest means a lot. Thank you. He, thanks for having me and I'll, I will, uh, I will hopefully see you in Los Angeles. - Okay. Alright, well thank you everybody, uh, for, that's been watching for 90 minutes of this program. I, I certainly appreciate that. And I'll be back with Todd next week, next Wednesday at 8:00 PM Eastern.

So it'll be like 5:00 PM on the west and, but that, that'll be pretty late up out in the uk so probably won't get too many listeners in the, in Europe. . - I'll be fast asleep mate, I can tell you. Yes, you'll girl, that will be getting up two hours from then, so I'm gonna get catch some Zs - , right. Alright Mark. And thank you so much for everybody for watching. I'm gonna, I'm gonna shut the stream down here in a second and it looks like we got, uh, one more comment that came in here.

Uh, thank you Danny for the compliment here. We appreciate it. So good night everybody. Thank you so much. Or good afternoon, wherever you're watching this. Good evening, um, if you're in the uk so good night everybody. Bye.