Captivate CEO Mark Asquith talks about the global acquisition and their future. Castos CEO Craig Hewitt talks about supporting Value4Value and why it's a better model than advertising for podcasters

And now the way that Buzzsprout works it out in terms of the public global stats, is that they only count things that are absolutely apple podcasts. So if it says apple core media, that's not apple podcasts, at least it's not guaranteed to be so therefore, this is really good. apple podcasts increasing to 37.2% in January Spotify decreasing to 28%. So really interesting seeing that wonder why that is,

So from a point of view of, everybody wants to be in my favorite murder. Everybody wants to be in Joe Rogan. it's a clever sort of plan to actually get them buying other parts of the network as well. Plus of course, the benefits of in, my favorite murders, case, the benefit of, a week's worth of exclusive, which means that At least my favorite murder will be talking about Amazon music, and getting people to download the Amazon music, app, cause my goodness, it could actually benefit from that.

so I think, it's part marketing and it's also part sales leverage to actually get more sales into other shows across the Amazon, network.

we might go into some of the reasons why Cirrus is also doing some other interesting things.

Team of Sirius XM has announced, is the introduction of this thing called audio ID, which you, as a listener can opt into, I'm not entirely convinced. It's going to be very obvious that you're opting into it. but that way, audio ID is essentially your ID for all of their apps.

So for Pandora, for the Sirius XM app, Stitcher, and anything from AdsWizz as well, potentially in the future, and they call it the future of listener identity, basically another way of working out what advertising, they should go out and sell you.

Like about our media in the UK, who I think use answers, and various.

Whereas this is specifically around tracking around working out how many times you've heard an ad before, around working out whether or not you're in the market for a new car, or, some, fashion clothing or whatever. and then working out what to do from that point of view. So I think they keep on talking about privacy centric and all that kind of stuff, but this is very much about targeting ads to you better.

and you thought that after Joe Rogan put his mere Culper out. Where he said, if there's anything that I've done, that I could do better, it's having more experts with differing opinions right after I have the controversial ones. I do all the shifting myself somehow. I don't believe that. And I don't always get it right.

Somehow Joe, I just don't believe you do that might, but anyway, but on the back of that, Sharon Stone, she of the famous cross uncross legs, basically has said, to address Joe Rogan, they're going to put disclaimers on his podcast sheets, put he should put a disclaimer that he's an a-hole and that his behavior is dangerous. So she's not impressed. and, Rosanna Arquette has said, she's going to take her podcast of Spotify. so Neil young, starting a little trend, Mary Trump.

The niece of set ex president has tweeted on removing my podcast from Spotify as well. and a few other people, Graham Nash and in the area. So it doesn't seem to be going away. Now, what's your thoughts now? I've had mine.

and then he removed his music from title this time last year, because it was moaning about the fact that they were calling his high res, and QA audio on that platform as masters. so basically he's a grumpy old man. He's seeing this as a convenient excuse to giving Spotify a kick.

and I think it says everything that a day after putting his music from Spotify, Um, Neil young, put something on his own, website saying how, dreadful Spotify is audio quality sounds, and promoting four months free on Amazon music, which has a high res service. he's not actually saying that's, a commercial deal with Amazon. which is against FCC guidelines, because it clearly is because he's been quoted by Amazon music in the past in press releases saying how good their high res format is.

I think Neil young is being, a little bit dodgy, in terms of that. And I think frankly, you've got a lot of musicians who either don't understand how Spotify works or are just a little bit grumpy that, life isn't like the old days, 30 years ago, when you used to go in and buy a piece of vinyl or a cassette and earn an awful lot more money out of it. and they're basically, you know, using that to.

and a bit more, just to basically jump up and down and go, oh, so Spotify rubbish, old Spotify, Nils Lofgren for heaven sake, Joni Mitchell. Great. These are all old people. These are old Canadians. These are all people meals, loft, grin isn't, but these are all people who, you know, who aren't necessarily, th the, the most popular, music, artists of today, do we really need to care what they think to be honest?

said that he, he had expressed his concerns about king of Australia. He said he had expressed his concerns about vaccine misinformation, to Spotify management in April last year. Maybe that explains why he's been too lazy to record another podcast.

you do look at this and you think, and you think that there's something a little bit strange going on, how it stern has supported, people coming off Spotify and saying that he's not against censorship, but he does think that particular podcast has gone a little bit too far, but there are going to Howard stern has an awful lot of, shares in a competing product from Sirius XM.

again, you've got all of that and James blunt, who I think is hilarious, British musician, James blunt, who threatened, he would release new songs. If Rogan doesn't go, very amusing, but he's realized again that actually, maybe he's blown a lid on this and shown that, it's basically. Has been musicians who are all of a sudden thinking, maybe this is a way for people to recognize how brilliant I was and to start listening to my music again.

Don't really like the fact that Spotify had bought them. science versus for example, when the zoo come in and blind TRL, say they will no longer make the science versus podcast, which is a Gimlet production. and of course, therefore paid by Spotify, except they will continue making them if they are intended to counter misinformation, being spread on Spotify.

and, Rogan ends up saying in the video that he released on Sunday night, he ends up saying, look, I've got people on who were saying things that aren't very popular, but actually history shows that quite a lot of them have been. Right. people were saying, in the beginning that if you get your vaccine, that won't stop you from catching COVID or from passing it on. And that's now a scientific fact and Rogan, claims, a number more of these sorts of things.

Is he just ahead of the time, Uh, playing devil's advocate.

I learnt the difference the other day. Oh, go on this Well, disinformation deliberately making a statement that is wrong. You knowingly know it and you make a statement and put it out there. Misinformation is more of a, oh really? I didn't know. and it's that misinformation, which is what, Fox use a lot. It's not us. We just thought we put the news across, but oh, did we get it wrong? misinformation.

And I said, this is just as bad as what you're alleging Rogan to have been done. because you've literally made something up here. why are you claiming that? And he got very upset with me. but

but my suspicion is that's Morgan Stanley's client note, is more concerned with, the figures which have come out, over the last 24 hours with the figures, for the last quarter, which of course don't include any of. actually, and, what that ends up saying, by the way, is that monthly active users grew 18% year on year. Ad revenue grew 40%. what Spotify is podcasting plan. It's all ad revenue. It's nothing to do with, paid for premium customers. So that seems to be working.

they've managed to, last quarter, they made some money, but this quarter they've lost some money. They've lost 44 million it's dropping the ocean. What was brilliant is that they then said that they expect to lose 75 million in the next quarter. So I'm not quite sure why that is. But, they seem to be doing okay.

And I think Morgan Stanley's point is that they have done quite an interesting pivot away from premium subscribers, which used to be the main way that Spotify was going to continue earning money into focusing a bit more on ad revenue and that sort of thing. And so from that point of view, playing devil's advocate, they've done exactly the right thing. They're focusing on the content that they have.

and if Neil young wants to go away and they lose a few premium users while they lose a free premium, useless.

So outrageous now Landish, and that that ended up in court and the legal issue will prevail, which means that somebody will coffer a large amount of a fine now, what can we do? is this something that we just go, let's just wait until that happens. And we keep going, because the thing that you wrote about this week, that I had to question, I know you're only reporting it. It said Spotify has removed 20,000, episodes related to COVID that were wrong. was I misreading that?

Is an interesting, problem, for people to have, because at the end of the day, if Spotify is choosing these particular shows to be on their platform, and particularly in this case, choosing to pay for that show, or if I can be as strictly accurate, because I know that I'll get a booster Graham from Adam Curry, if I don't, they're paying to license this show. but, if they're paying to license this show, then that's their choice really.

but they'll always be plenty of other places to find these particular shows, even if they get, chopped off, apple podcasts or chopped off Spotify, playing devil's advocate.

and it's a really interesting tweet because it does show that actually, even if Spotify and they've said that they're going to be doing this, puts these mandatory, content warnings in there, people are just going to skip past them anyway. so I what use is that to anybody?

look at the end of the day, If podcasts are out there that break the law in terms of, medical advice or they break the law in terms of financial investment or they, libel somebody or anything else, then we've already got great laws to stop that from being an issue and great, they will end up in court if they end up doing that.

so I guess, the question playing devil's advocate is, there a content moderation role here or is it just actually that somebody is, a little bit concerned for Spotify as brand

Danny Sullivan has said, we appear to have mistakenly pointed to a duplicate version of the podcast. You don't say. and, this has happened before and it's actually happened to this very podcast, not a pirated copy because nobody's gonna pirate this. but, a version come on, it'll

and similarly, weirdly I had a test podcast feed in Google podcasts and Google managed to switch that from a version of the RSS feed with a snatch on the end to aversion of the RSS feed without a slash on the end, which 3 0 1 redirected to the one with the slash on the end. What are you doing? Google? Are you drunk? Go home. So don't really understand that. And I think it does say everything. I know that a member of staff left Google podcasts in mid January.

so there's one less person working for Google podcasts. My suspicion is that they now have two people there. secondly, Google podcasts, no, I'm being perfectly serious. my that's

We should go look at the shiny thing over there. And that seems to be what's going on, which is a real shame because if Google were actually going to do this properly, they could do really successfully. All that we need now of course, is apple to release their Android app. and, and everybody will be happy.

so if you remember, 5, 10 years, there was this a time when everybody had a Facebook like button on their, website and what that was very cleverly doing is that was feeding back to Facebook, all of the websites that you were going to visit so that they could get their advertising algorithms better. and that's a prime example of how this stuff works.

of course, if you embed a Google font from Google onto your website and Google have someone in the region of 2000 fonts that you can embed onto your website, then Google, learns all kinds of information about your visitors. or they can look at that IP address and they can, I'm not saying that they do, but they can, take that IP address and work out. Oh, that's Sam Sathi because he's logged in on his phone on the same IP address. so I did a quick audit of the top 10 podcast host websites.

and, seven of them were using Google fonts in that way. So anchor Buzzsprout Spreaker, Libsyn, Podbean, Omni studio, and captivate, all linking to Google fonts and essentially all giving Google all of the information about their visitors as well. I should point out because I'm very proud of this, that, pod news, phased out Google fonts and indeed all third party content wherever possible, more than two years ago because of exactly this reason. just something to be aware.

If you're listening, using the BBC sounds as a stream, I, you just press the button. and it starts playing then the 257 million doesn't include. So actually the figure is rather higher, which is interesting. What the BBC have now decided to do is that they are going to take, some of their radio originated podcasts to make those exclusives as well on the BBC sound's out for 28 days, which is very clever because some topical shows the news quiz in the now show, will now be.

only available 28 days later on, RSS feeds, it's a decision, isn't it. and the other big show, which is affected in that trial is, in our time, which was the first ever podcast from the BBC. And I think the first ever podcast from a broadcaster in the UK in November, 2004, so interesting to see. Coming off. the BBC says that gives license fee pairs even more value in the typical twisted way that the BBC says. Cause it clearly doesn't. but still they would go.

interesting seeing, that, but some great figures from the BBC. And I think it's worthwhile pointing out that some of the BBC's biggest shows are ones produced by the BBC world service, which won't be going anywhere soon. and, ones that are, proper journalism rather than, some of the more, entertainment focused shows that.

And I think if you are a declining medium, which, radio is, albeit slowly declining, then the most important thing you can do is put your content where people can listen to it, not force people to download an app that you don't really want.

And so therefore when the amount of people living in the UK goes up, so does the amount of people listening to the radio. but, 89% of the UK adult population and are listening, every single week, which of course is considerably higher than, podcasting. I would say though, that the average Brit listens for only 18 hours a week, 10 years ago, that was 20 hours a week. research methodologies have changed, but you can clearly see that the, is an erosion there.

And it's important for radio companies to keep, relevant and to keep their content on as many platforms as possible. I would say being a certified radio future on.

I'm here with mark Asquith, the co-founder and CEO of captivate. Hey mark. How I

And what I mean by that is we are after working with every single podcast that we don't have a free plan to attract as many people as possible. we don't focus on the creation side of it or the editing side of it. What we focus on is if you define yourself as being someone that is willing to spend time in growing, measuring, and just really. Move in your show forward, then captivate.

is the home view and the feature set and the approach and the content that we put out the team, everything is really geared up for that one. So we occupy a very specific corner of the podcast host in market and work with a very specific set of podcasts, as I think So

And so We just love podcast. And I was podcasting about star wars and all sorts of DC comics and all sorts of stuff back in 20 11, 20 12. And that's where the H came from. So it to visit the re. Catalyst for putting the foot down and building captive.

It was coming off our other business podcast websites at the managed service platform for again, the series, the podcast that worked well, still serve a lot of customers with that platform, but a lot of people wanted to work with us for our customer service levels we're both pretty straight no BS people. That's my sort of personal brand in the space. And people wanted more of that, but they already had their website of things handled. So we created.

Really to, give ourselves what we needed as podcasters that wanted to grow our audience. And the catalyst was we'll look, all the other hosts say that they want your podcast to grow, but no one when we'd created captivate, no one had proved it. I could not see on any other hosting company's site, how there were proven that they wanted my audience to grow. So we just built something that I think does stand up to that.

And, to the former creating good quality show notes is either cost money, or it costs a lot of time, or we just don't do a good job of it. But as podcasting is becoming busier and creators are coming more serious about what they do. We know that show notes becoming more important. We really focused on, okay. Captivate controls, a lot of data points for the podcast, and we've got a free, fully featured, integrated guestbook and an interview management platform.

We've got a single promotional link that measures traffic through to apple and Spotify. If you use it. And so on, we've got our first party attribution links, our link shortener that you can use for your own promos. We've got our dynamic content engine, AME audio monetization integration engine. There is another set of data points.

Started to explore this idea of aware to second, why don't we just give people the ability to use all of these other connected data pieces within captivate to automatically build shownotes based on, what they want to create. And that's what we've done. So we've released our show notes builder, which gives you unlimited notes templates. It gives you what we call blocks on limited blocks, which are pieces of reusable texts that you can use in multiple templates. It gives you our shock.

Which solve independent, either custom shortcuts that you can put in yourself. So the good example of that is something like a hiatus message. When when a show goes on hiatus, it's very important to let your podcast is know that you're going to come back so that they don't just the feed doesn't degrade and they that you spot a lot of attrition. So a great example of these shortcodes are Papa hiatus message.

Stick that in all of your show notes templates, it's a dynamic field that will update as you update it. It will Recurse and update all of your previous episodes. And when you're not on hiatus after you've told someone that you are, you can just get rid of that message, leave it blank. And again, you're showing those will be updated and then we've got our in-built captivates, your shortcode as well.

So things like your single promo link call you first party attribution links, your any donation on monetization links that you've got in there. Just a litany of things. But. All the other guest book and information. So Sam, I'm a guest here on, on Podland. You could dynamically and automatically insert my data into your show notes without having to touch a thing. And then if I get in touch and says, those 10 episodes that we did over the last five years, you would you spelled my name wrong?

Captivate allows you to just treat that in one place and it, again, it will just straight through all of your past episodes. So it's really powerful. And the last thing that it does, which I think is probably my favorite bit is when our use Amy to dynamically insert content. What I can now. He's attached pieces of text to the audio that I'm inserting. I can tell captivate that one of my measurable attribution links is also related to the audio that, certain.

And when I answer a pre-roll either on mass, across all of my thousand episodes in the back catalog or for my future episodes, I do a post role or a range of minerals, captivate. Automatically rebuild your show notes. Based on that dynamic audio, it will put the text in that you've associated with. It will put the measurable link in there. So fantastic for sponsors. Fantastic for horse reads. And obviously as We move through to Dax integration and more dynamic content. So powerful.

So I love this feature cause I'm like a lazy podcaster. This is just for me, Sam. This is just for me.

Plain text, fundamentally SLT file, which has no links and no formatting. And actually the content of the transcription. Probably you could summarize the show notes from, so using an AI tool, you could just extract. And I just, I got to my head where I was like, why is an industry two? We have three different bits of content that actually say the same thing. It just seems an odd thing for me.

You've then got to start with hosts, working with hosting companies and you've got to get buy in and we've seen, with podcasting 2.0 and all the fantastic work that collectively as an industry that we're doing this. It's about choosing the right time to do things and to implement them. So I love the idea of it completely on board with the idea of it.

But I think it's one of those it's a lovely thing to have, but then we rely on the adoption of it so much that if we don't get it right, it might not take hold. That is such a fine balance with everything. As we know, as I said, podcasting 2.0 is the greatest example.

From our perspective with captivate, we've always had a very pragmatic approach to it. I'm very much focused personally on like the day-to-day podcaster and I'm, where you and me and the rest of the industry on the bleeding edge podcast technology the day to day person that recalls once a week to talk about star wars, actually it, some of the stuff that we could implement with podcasts in 2.0, wouldn't serve that. Immediately.

So I always find the balance really tough because we adore what's going on and we contribute to it. We put a lot of comments in just today on the GitHub repo. And obviously we want this to take, hold on mass whilst also saying, look at. We still have to spend dev time doing other things as well. So it's a tough balance I have to admit is a tough balance, but no, we love it. Like I said, the latest addition is that If the person tag which we see more adoption that in the apps, the listening apps.

And I think as the listeners potentially become more savvy about wait a second, I don't just have to listen to these two podcasts. I can go where, if I listened to salmon on Podland, I can listen to him elsewhere. I think that the education is becoming. Something that the, I suppose people that are outside the industry are becoming a little bit more aware of now. I love it. When then the tipping points like that start to.

You were a very happy boy, I'm guessing over Christmas because pre-Christmas, for those who don't know a certain global radio group, a quiet captivate, how did that come about?

We never set this up to be acquired. It was never the intent to, quote unquote sell, but then what happened was we started to get all of these offers. And what tends to happen with that is that you. You as a startup founder and as someone that frankly, I pay for my child's education and a healthcare from the proceeds of captivate. You start to think to yourself wait a second. How long can I keep up with waking up at 4:00 AM being worried.

Both sprout going to implement the lock tag and what will the PR what PR will come from that and is that going to shed on captivate? And should we have to do with that? Like they add a legitimate for am, whereas for a startup founder, which a lot of people don't see, they don't necessarily think that. So what happened was Karen and I got to this point where we said has taken a lot of risks.

We've put a lot of features that had, I can't think of any other podcasting company on the whole ever that has put as much as those out in, in a shorter space of time. And what tends to happen then is that you start to think to yourself How many more risks can we take before we start to think to ourselves, we've got to play it safe because we just need to keep it create increase in signups. Like we could adopt to the bus sprout model and do a freemium plan and give vouchers out.

But that wouldn't serve our audience. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not for us. But you get to this point as a founder where you think maybe we've got to do. Because in order to keep doing what we're doing, we just want to keep signing up more users. And frankly, we didn't want to do that. So we started thinking to ourselves, how can we de-risk captivate?

How can we make sure that no one's going to come and take the house so that we can then swing for the fences even more and we can continually swing for the fences. So I don't want to say put captivate on the site, but we registered with a service called micro acquire where people kick the tires of software companies in order to buy them. We were never going to sell it on there. Ever. What we wanted to know was how would we feel if captivate got acquired?

And we got a lot of offers, we went through some due diligence and we hated it, man. We here today because the people that were looking to buy. didn't want to uphold the mission they didn't want to uphold what we wanted to uphold it wasn't the right thing. So we took ourselves off the market. We said, that's it we're out. We don't want to get a quiet here. And I just said, we'll get our heads down.

And we'll find other ways to the risk a little bit, I don't want to get into the depths of, I do it on the captivate insider episode about some other options that we've got which don't include acquisition. We start having conversations with global, they came to us and they said, look, we're in the UK. We see what you do. Here's what we want to do, which is pretty much what you want to do. Shall we have a conversation?

So we went through with the due diligence, we spoke to our advisors, James Cridland, Evo, Terra, Daniel, J Lewis, Jordan harbinger, Christo. All advisers to captivate. We spoke to them and every one of them unanimously said at global, a fantastic company, genuine, Ashley who runs the company accessible. And the important thing is that they're basically said, and they've proved it. that what they said when they said, if we acquire. You will keep running.

You will come in at a very high level at global, and we want you to do the thing that you are good at, which is growing captivate. So it was really the mix of things and the two big things that swung it for us where the, we could de-risk and stop the 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM workups. And I you do that every day for three or four years. It easier, it's tough. we were able to stop them because there was no worry of what happens if our signups drop overnight, how are we going to pay the bills?

That's a real founder problem. So that got rid of that worry, but then the big thing was, the users were completely unaffected. There were completely looked after. Obviously the team stayed in place. users still get the captivate experience. We released the show build, we've got our next major release on February 10th. this year will be the biggest year for captivate and it's the stuff that we're putting out there. Just things that other people have not five.

And we can only do that because we aren't worried about the rug being pulled out. So that was it. And I suppose that's quite a personal thing to share. Cause a lot of people see captivate or they'll see me online and it's I'm very buoyant. I'm pretty outspoken, I've got a very given mindset, which is a very genuine thing.

But buddy H tough, we are, at the end of the day, we are still people trying to bring up children and trying to make sure that we can be the best dads and that we can be the best partners and that we can make sure that the bills are paid. And when you're running a SAS company inside an industry where consolidation is going crazy, finding the right opportunity and the right partner that just doesn't come along very often. So that was the, I suppose that was the main reason.

Second, is that what Global's thinking of? Whether you guys taking their live shows. Podcasting them out or is there another goal for global or was it just a coming together two minds that said, look, we like you, you like us, we'll acquire you, but we haven't got a plan yet.

And in particular, globally is very much focused on the key stakeholders of a platform, which are the users on the creator side. When it comes to something like captivate, I, our podcast is, and also the listeners, so the Merino of global. Global player of docks of captivate. And the other things that we're working on is It's a very obvious coming together of minds.

I think, and like I said, I can't speak too much to the plans, but what I will say is that it is all intended to make great content available as easily as possible, but also to allow those who are creating to keep doing what they do, that is our goal. It's always been my goal, Whatever your goal is a podcaster is I will help you to enable it as long as you are serious about it. Like we are the home for you.

So I know that's a very, I feel like a politician, that's a very abstract answer, but it's it's as honest as I can get with that, I think, he's a very genuine answer.

I also see that what I personally see as the split between indie podcast in the industry and big podcast in the media industry, I start to see that split getting bigger and bigger, especially when you start to see Spotify doing what they're doing with your Rogan. Apple clearly. Being very nonchalant about things and almost having, I love apple and I love the team there, but there's a level of perceived apathy there with apple that is a very difficult to shake.

And so I think when you start to consider that look, podcasting the media, the big production, the budgets, the big ad revenue. There's clearly got one set of goals, cross level IP. When you're looking at multiple kinds of acquisitions and tying up rates for every possible version of a podcast that you acquire. That's very different to the creator. That's producing a niche podcast out of Florida for Sarasota real estate brokers, and I think that's. We'll become more evident.

And I think the split will become more evident from a technological perspective. People like captivate people like Craig and the team people like Alvin and the team and all these great hosting platforms that really care about the open ecosystem will move to support that much more and work deeper with independent apps, like good pods and so on.

And where the bigger industry, the quote unquote media industry, I think we'll start to nurture that mid-level talent more and look to almost look to future proof, their slit with up and coming stars that aren't quite there yet. And I think that can only be a good thing because the fear of independent podcast is, or the fear for independent podcasts is how can I possibly compete with Dr today?

You probably shouldn't even be thinking like that, but because we're all bundled together in the same place with the same labeling, with the same algorithms, with the same tech, with the Sam, everything it's difficult not to compare. So I predict that split between the Indian, the big will become more pronounced. And I think that is only a.

Where do you think the line draws on the responsibility of the hosting partner platform captivate in this case, for example, and the podcast owner, the creator whose responsibility.

I should handle that in a pragmatic and I should have handled that in an approachable and very proactive where, however, I think there's a lot of responsibility that lies with the Korean. I do believe that they've got to be diligent and they've got to, regardless of belief systems, I think when you put yourself out there and you have a platform, you are responsible for doing your diligence, but then I think there's also the added complexity of.

When you have a profile, he's always the example of like soccer players, football players here in the UK. They are held to a different standard than Mia multiples and rightly So because their decisions affect a greater portion of the population and the people that idolize them than the Pope football, or that plays Sunday league at 9:00 AM every Sunday in front of 15 people. And I think there are just levels to this. But what I will say is my belief is that.

situation should be handled with just openness and transparency and whoever is running the show at the places, whether it's the creator, whether it's the host in platform, whatever, whoever is collectively running the show should be the people that are stepping up and saying, this is on me. I might not have the answers right now, but. Believe me, I will find them by this date. And I will let you know, because I think there's just too much of the BS that goes around. There's too much deferral.

There's too much book pass in. There's too much politicizing of everything. And this is probably very naive. This is probably very naive, but I just believe that if we all just act as human beings, you probably won't go far wrong. And I realize how naive that sounds, but I just don't see a better way of approach in a complex system.

You transcribing the podcast or is that the podcast to being allowed to upload their own SLT file?

A priority on the road because frankly other people do it better than us, and I'd rather integrate with them and let those experts shine at what they're due. So in short, we allow for the manual creation of the model paste in end of the text and the timestamps or we allow the upload of the SRT files or a direct integration with the script team as well to get your episodes from the.

At 50 users on a specific location, with your own small podcast it's a responsibility thing and it's classic Spiderman, you've got the power, you better be responsible with it. And that's the situation. I think these days with.

it's the way that the consumer wants to listen to it. And I think if globalists looking for an expert like mark and his team to come in and help them understand how they can take their content and easily podcast it bit like did when they went to Spotify. Then that's a great reason. The other thing though, they've got a big announcement coming out next week. Mark. Couldn't tell me. we are all ears waiting for that one.

but I also asked mark a question that I wanted to ask you, James, which is, every week, after this podcast recorded, I go away and we put together our show notes. You put together chapters and we upload the transcript. and what. Suddenly dawned on me is why do we have three separate sections to a podcast when actually we thought it through carefully, that could actually be one single document. So let me just explain.

I go into D script and I take the transcript and it's beautifully formatted and I've got chapter headers in there and everything else I could export that cause captivate and Buzzsprout support the script. And that would actually. Take those chapter headers and, the far, but then it strips it back down to SRT. So there's no formatting. And I spoke to open this week, the head of marketing over at Buzzsprout who said, I can go back in and I can use HTML tags if I want.

I can make bold and paragraphs and page breaks and I'm like, hang on a minute. It was there five minutes ago before I uploaded it and stripped it out as an SLT. Why did I do that? Why? And then the chapters with a timestamp on it would be great. Actually. Why don't I just have one document, which is my show notes, which is a summary with chapters that I can expand into the transcript and it's all together.

And then maybe gosh, like medium listeners could put comments against that, which would then be on the timeline. It just seems like we were making a lot of hard work for all podcast is to try and make notes and chapters within podcast.

I might, pay a podcast 50 cents every minute that I listen. That's actually a pretty big thing too. And currently that's not very visible at the moment. So now there's a end point, for a JavaScript file to take a look at that. It'll be interesting to play around with that and see if we can get that to work,

And I think one of the things that, you know, and I've heard Adam Curry saying this a long time, I think one of the things that we need to be a little bit cleverer about is to get the right wording to get the right talk up around this. so that it isn't seen as a way of tipping people. It's a way of paying for the podcasts that you really enjoy, which is a different conversation.

So I think we should be, spending a long time on these podcasts, companies basically saying, come on, guys, you need to support this because it's very clear that there is a piracy issue in podcasting, as we were talking about earlier.

And one of the companies that I caught up with this week was castoffs, caught up with our CEO and founder Craig Hewitt, to find out about the new version that they launched, which includes website templates, but also what they're doing to support the podcast index tags as well. I'm joined today by Craig Hewitt. He's the CEO and founder of Castile's Creek. Hey, how are you?

So it can a long story short, we acquired the seriously simple podcasting WordPress plugin, which was at the time and still is entirely free. But you could use the plugin on your WordPress site, self host and podcasts for free with WordPress, which is awesome because WordPress is also free. an open-source. And, and we built the cast as platform as an optional kind of add on to that as a hosting platform and fast forward, about nine months, we opened it to where you can use by itself.

So like you would use a simple cast or something like that. and at this point about a half, our customers use WordPress and about half. So that's kinda where we came from.

And then there's going to be like a dedicated page about you, a subscribe page where you can populate all your subscribe links. So From our WordPress world, like what are the things that a good podcast website has? And we built all that into Costos and all like entirely free every podcast gets their website. they can turn them off if they want, if they have an external site. So they don't want duplicate content. But, we really think it brings us.

Past feature parody to really, being like a very complete solution for what folks.

you want that to happen, but if you're, in your basement, podcasts about the green bay Packers, you probably don't need a full-blown website. You need to focus on just creating content. And that's what not having an external website does is just, Go in, publish your podcast and cast us the websites, all taken care of for you. You can customize it if you want, but you don't have to. but I think it's really important for you to be able to apply.

Listeners somewhere that is not apple podcasts or Spotify to learn more about you. And I think most podcasts see this evolution over time as they get, more successful and more attraction and want to expand the footprint of what the podcast is to have a website, to have an email list, to market something to those folks, very few, really successful podcasts. Don't have.

Other stuff going on, all this like typical internet marketing stuff that a lot of folks scoff at, but look at the biggest podcast. And maybe it's heresy to say that like all of them have a lot more going on than just a podcast.

value is to me is a way for listeners to support a podcast with crypto. and for, from our perspective, we're just enabling our creators to say, Hey, where's this supposed to go? and then listeners are the ones through their mobile app to say, Hey, want to stream, SATs to.

I said very geeky, but if you happen to have a, an umbrella server, which is like a personal server, and running heli pad, you can actually see in real time, those boost diagrams coming in or boost messages coming in. So it's very early days. But, Craig, I don't know if you've noticed, but in the U S Twitter has enabled this within the client already.

I don't know that it is as transformational as the internet, like a lot of people say, but if you look at Twitter Stripe, the really popular payment processor, tripe supported crypto a year or so ago, and then made an announcement last fall that they're like bringing on entire crypto team, to start supporting it again sometime in the future. And so we look at.

frankly like really big leaders and innovators in kind of the digital space saying, Hey, we're, fully back on board that tells us like from a credibility and kind of acceptance perspective that Hey, this is somewhere that we want to focus on. I personally am. Kind of more, more ahead than that, but as a business we have to, and as a relatively small business, we have to be a little more conservative and follow a little bit some of those bigger players.

But I see crypto as really transformational in how people transact value. and that means a lot of different things, From anywhere from SATs to NFTs to a whole lot of other stuff that, that I think is really hard to wrap your head around right now. but I think that's the cool thing is. The internet analogy is like, when I was like in high school, right? Like I'm 41. Like when I was in high school, the internet was just like games and weird websites and stuff.

And the concept of e-commerce and Amazon and stuff like that, it was just way out there. and I think that's where we are right now is all this concept of crypto as like a transfer of value and a store of value is really nascent right now. but. We're definitely not ignoring it

I'm using SATs, not Eve. Oh, okay. That's fine. It's just one coin versus another cord and then the terminologies and the language will just become common day. Vocabulary is just new and people shy away from you a little bit, but brilliant. So that's in next release, not this release or a future release.

And probably when you guys started, I got started seven years ago, to where the content creation part is I think like about as easy as it's going to get the room for me for innovation is around. Okay. It's easy for folks to understand how to create content. It's easy, relatively easy for them to distribute it through platforms like ours. now how do we enable empower creators to monetize their content directly without this weird affiliates stuff or anything like that?

That is just this circuitous route, to maybe what folks perceive as value. And we feel very strongly that it is not in advertising. Advertising is just a hold over from terrestrial radio days. And I think has almost no place in podcasting. And I know that's a very controversial thing to say, but like for me, the more natural way to say, okay, I have an audience of people that get value from listening to what I have to say.

There probably is a subset that would pay me money for more of that content. And they would get more value from that. And that's where we're putting all of our eggs is in the private podcasting basket. and so that has two flavors to it. So apple and Spotify have they're very closed versions of that on their platform. We have a version of that on our platform and our enabling payments directly within our platform as well. a content creator can say, okay, I have my public podcast. It's all here.

You're available. It's in all the directories, apples, Spotify, Google, Stitcher. I also have this premium, private podcast. That's 10 bucks. and if you want, you can pay for access to it. So that's one way. and that's coming really soon. Like in the next couple of weeks, from our end, we're going to have a native integration with Stripe, again, like really huge payment processor. You bring your Stripe account. We don't take a percentage or anything like that.

Like a lot of the other really popular platforms, we just enable you to make money. the other one also in the private podcasting basket is there are a lot of people out there with existing audiences that are engaging with them in some way already. They have a Facebook group, they have a course on. Teachable or something like that.

They have a big email list with convert kit, and we are building automations to tie in with these tools that creators are already using to automate the adding and removing a private subscribers from private podcasts. So think about take the convert kit example.

You have a big email list when someone joins like the super premium part of that list or buys a product or something like that, you can trigger something in our platform to say like, when someone purchases this item from convert kit commerce, add them to my private podcast. That's only for customers and the feedback we're getting from customers. There is just luck. where were you guys? Two years ago? This is the best thing.

Our competition is reeling because we're adding so much value and it's almost no extra work for me. Cause folks are able to create this content like really easily, and then everything else about the permissioning and the distribution is fully automated through our integrations. so for us, that's where we're going, like where the industry is going. I think that a lot of there's a lot of hold ons to the advertising model. and I just think that if you do the.

For the vast majority of podcasters, they just can't make any money. You can't make any money at a $20 CPM. but you can selling a $10 membership and that's, we think is the best way to enable creators to make money and then like really follow that passion and just to be a podcaster. you don't have to go do a whole bunch of other stuff and sell ads and do contracts and stuff that like a lot of creators don't want to do.

So thank you for doing that.

It's not our group. Of course, it's Adam Curry and Dave Jones, but we have jumped on the back of it and we're using it. So thank you so much for being a new listener. I thank you for your 8,000 plus SATs. That's very kind of you

And it will take time to get to the point where podcast is making significant revenue from this, but we will get there. agreed. Oscar of course is, the boss of a fountain, which is a very good podcast app.

so if this podcast is valuable to you, download something like fountain, from the app store it's available on, both, Android phones and on toy phones, and you can download that and, press that boost button and Send us some cryptocurrency, whatever you think is right for the value that you get from this podcast. and, I appreciate all of those.

Please send some confirmation out.

I'll tell you now I won't be there, so not quite sure what's going on there. but I may be speaking from a far, or I may not be speaking at all, who knows we'll find out. but that should be good. It's on the 22nd of February, or as you note two to two 20.

and again, I'm talking about, Joe Rogan and trying to be as balanced as I possibly can be after the emails. so we are, that's it for this week.