Daniel Ek's view of podcast ads; plus all the latest podcasting news

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It's very much like Acquired that similar sort of feel to it . They talk to industry leaders and this week they had Daniel Ekholm talking about the difference between Spotify and YouTube . Did you have a listen to that at all ?

They clearly recorded it at the Spotify studios in LA a couple of weeks ago because I recognised where the studio was there . You go , Listen to me . And it was recorded on the day of the big announcement about Spotify video and , yeah , they seem to get a few things out of him . Obviously , they asked how will the money really work and what are the figures ?

And Daniel says something like oh , I can't share any of that with you right now , and then goes off and waffles for a bit . What can we expect from a revenue perspective ?

But if that keeps going up , if people are shurning out and you do worse , then you have to fill out even more ads in order to get the experience to work , and then eventually , you know that's not a great way to manage a business , and so what I feel with this is we're giving creators another avenue . It's by far not the only way , by the way .

What did you get out of it ?

He was talking about dependability of revenue to podcasters , because advertising was up and down , and he talked about dependability of their recommendation engine , and he talked about the dependability to Spotify of consistent revenues from loyal audiences , and it seemed to be his word of the day .

Other than that , I think , yeah , one of the things that Daniel did not mention as you just said , james is about the numbers , and I think we'll talk about that in a second . I think that's going to be the big reveal in 25 . And I think that's when people are going to .

I'm not sure , so the other thing I did like , though although I have a sceptical hat too was him talking about multiple different ways that creators can make money , and he did talk about not podcasters , but creators , and there was a big lean into what is a creator and why is it not a podcaster .

You know if the numbers were going to look good , they'll be shouting about them . So Jim was talking about on average they receive . You know he was talking about music artists they receive somewhere between 0.002 pence and 0.004 pence , so you know , not even a penny per stream and he's thinking that that would be the same .

If you look at podcasting , per thousand downloads , about £2 , £40 or £4 . He said you're not going to retire anytime soon and I think that's being generous in terms of the amount that they will pay . I think the number will be even lower than that .

There's quite a lot of this that we don't yet know and my suspicion is we'll find out in very early January and it'll open up the floodgates again . But , as you say , quite a lot of people aren't yet convinced . Jim Salverson , not convinced .

There are a number of other people who we've been quoting over the last week in the newsletter and , of course , one other person that isn't convinced is Spotify's head of podcast monetisation . Now , I'm sorry , but if your head of podcast monetisation isn't actually posting videos on Spotify , but is posting videos on YouTube . There must be a question , mustn't there ?

That , of course , is Bill Simmons , who is posting a lot of stuff on YouTube , posting nothing on Spotify himself . Now he's apparently out of contract in early 2025 . He has refuted any idea that he might be interested in leaving Spotify , but what is very clear is he is not building a video platform for himself on the Spotify platform , so what's he doing there ?

If Spotify's head of podcast monetisation isn't using Spotify's monetisation for his podcast , which is essentially what's going on here , then there's something a little bit awry , and I would love to find out the reasons for that .

But we will get exhausted by them soon . They've added a new dynamic loudness control for podcast games . I don't know if you've seen that in your version of Spotify yet .

I'm literally just looking at it now , but you seem to be showing something which is entitled Playback , and in the playback section there are a couple of new things , one of them saying dynamic normaliser , so it will actively adjust the volume by levelling out the difference between quiet and loud parts of the audio . Do you mean a compressor ? Spotify ?

And also dynamic loudness control for podcasts Actively maintain optimal podcast volume level for a clear and balanced sound experience , which is interesting . I don't yet see that on my version , but maybe it's waiting for me in an update , who knows ? Yeah , isn't that your favourite overcast features ? Yes , pretty well .

So dynamic normaliser , by which they mean a compressor yes , absolutely , that's most definitely that . And in terms of loudness control , which will be something like clear voice , you know , making sure that you can actually hear the voices correctly yes , those two things that I love in Overcast when I was using that .

So , and something that if Apple Podcasts had half a brain , they would buy . So we'll see what happens .

So , um , they have spotify wrapped for creators , which takes a look at your podcast , works out how it's performed , how it's done , and you may have noticed that in yesterday's pod news we linked to how this show does , because you can actually link to every Wrapped for Creators thing . So , yes , that was nice to end up seeing .

Another thing that they did is they released a set of top 10 podcasts for each country . So far I've got the ones for the world , the ones for the US , uk and Ireland . So the UK ones are interesting in that . See if you can spot what's going on here and who is really succeeding . I mean obviously , number one , joe Rogan .

Number two , diary of a CEO with Stephen Bartlett , but number three , the rest is football . Number four the rest is politics . Number five the rest is history . Number eight the rest is entertainment . Goldhanger really really doing well , aren't they ? It's astonishing .

So they are doing amazingly well and , of course , they've got a brand-new podcast out as well . So , yeah , it seems to be that they've found their I suppose their mojo . Really , you know what works .

But interestingly , they did notice there was one day when I must have gone through the Beatles , a bit of Pink Floyd , a bit of who else . Was I listening to ELO and Wings and they noted- .

Um and uh , yes , and I think I listened to 61 minutes of music on that one day and they said , oh gee , you know , were you going on a road trip or something ?

Or you can say , give me a playlist of all my rap songs grouped by genre . Or give me my top rap songs for journaling . I mean , again , it's using AI to take in a personalisation prompt and I think , again , that's quite interesting .

I'm sure , from what Daniel said in the interview , that they're going to be extending that to podcasting as well , but he didn't call it podcasting , he called it talk . Kept calling it talk . Oh , that's interesting .

There are now over 300,000 . That's grown from June , which was 250,000 . So there are now an extra 50,000 video podcasts on the platform . Whatever a video podcast is , I was interested to find out how many video podcasts there were in OpenRSS . Have you any idea how many open video podcasts there are ? Sam , I'm going to go with 20,000 . 20,000 .

You're going to go with 125,000 . Yes , I was close , quite a lot . Quite a lot more than I was expecting . Certainly , and just to put that into context and the 300,000 into context , 14 billion videos are on YouTube right now 3Speak TV or PeerTube .

And you know one of the things whenever you start talking about video podcasting , you get some of the old guards saying we've had video podcasts forever . You know , apple Podcasts supports video podcasting and it does kind of , and so I was basically giving some of the problems that video podcasts have .

Now , if you listen to this show a lot , you will have heard me rehearsing some of those arguments , you know , basically going through some of the issues , one issue being two feeds .

So this Week in Tech is available in both video and in audio , which is a bit clunky and essentially means that both of them lose because both of them don't do as well in the charts as they really should . The second issue is you're giving one file , one very large file . If you look at this Week in Tech , it's full HD , it's 1080p .

Every episode is 2.8 gigabytes of data , which is 17 times the size of the audio files . That's a lot . That's a lot to shove in your mobile phone . That's a lot to yeah , that's a lot to shove in your mobile phone . So , yeah , you've got that , even if quite a lot of devices won't even play that , because you know it's such a large file and you know .

Obviously you can compare that to YouTube . Youtube creates I discovered 22 different videos for their service , at least 22 different videos for their service , at least 22 different videos in different formats , in different streams . And all of that because it just works .

When you're using YouTube , you press the button and it plays and you don't have to worry about what's going on behind . And then you've got , of course , the cost to podcast hosts as well , because 17 times the amount of traffic doesn't come cheap .

So , really , you know , I argued in that blog post that Apple Podcasts does support video , but it's not a very good experience and that's probably why , knowing a little about how Apple works , they don't want to promote it , they don't want to talk about it because it's not a good experience from anybody's point of view .

It fills up people's phones , it costs an arm and a leg to download on mobile or it would look bad on Apple TV if you're going to make smaller files and , yeah , you know , it just really doesn't work . So that's why I think that open RSS videos are not really something that anybody wants to get behind , even companies like Apple that actually support it .

You go to the hosting companies , um , and so hosting companies who buy basically wholesale bandwidth can then beyond that pre-transit fixed level . They don't pay any more .

So I'm suspecting that the YouTubes , the Spotifys of the world so I'm not saying it's going to be a low number , it may be a super high number and most hosts can't get to it but there is a point at which you do get to a fixed cost where everything beyond that is is basically free to them , and so that's probably one issue that they have to look at .

The second one is I wonder whether spotify will do the 17 or 18 different formats like youtube . Maybe that's youtube's secret sauce is that they do that .

I think , by the way , you're talking about peering there , and when I was working for a radio station we were a very successful online radio station Our bandwidth bills were very high , and one of the ways that we cut our bandwidth bills to almost nothing is we did some peering arrangements with some of the large ISPs , which essentially meant that if , for example ,

you were using BT , you know open world or whatever open zone , whatever the thing's called open world .

And my understanding is , youtube and Netflix have actually gone one better , and what YouTube and Netflix have done is not just the wire but they've actually put servers into the likes of , you know , bt and AT&T and you know Telstra and whoever else it might be , and those servers download one copy of the video and then all of the people watching that video are

watching it essentially for free in terms of the bandwidth costs , because it's not even leaving Telstra's building . So I think that that's perfectly possible . But that doesn't fix many of the other issues . You know that's the problem .

I mean it still means that it's a 2.8 gigabyte file which fills up your phone , you know , incredibly quickly and is way too big for your phone . You know it still means that you end up having you fixing the two feeds because you use alternate enclosure . There are ways of fixing the one massive file thing by linking to a streaming bitrate instead .

You can still download those , but you can stream it and you can stream it in different qualities and there are ways of fixing , you know , you know fixing all of the other issues with it , but a lot of it is , you know , it just adds complication and it also means that we all have to support that and currently very , very few people are .

So it's yeah , it's just not going to be easy . Particularly so I thought it was just worthwhile having a little sort of , a little sort of peek at why video through open RSS isn't necessarily going to be a thing that we can do anytime soon well , not everyone thinks that video as well .

And again , if you look at that , compared to Spotify , the number of subscribers who are on YouTube is very low . So are we conflating the numbers and will most people who do podcasts not even bother with video ? So why are we pushing , you know , pushing this number ? Because it's only going to be the top one or 2% who have enough team people around them .

You know , diary of a CEO , 50 people to actually produce the video of any quality that will actually then turn into listeners or viewers .

I think it's a real shame that he has only just woken up to some of the new features which are going into podcasting . He's only waking up now to , I mean frankly , how podcasting works , because all of a sudden he's producing a new show and I think it's just a shame that he's not . Yeah , that he's not been more present over the last five or 10 years .

Adam Curry hasn't gone away , but the other person who invented podcasting has gone away or had gone away , so I do think that that's a bit of a shame . But he's absolutely correct . He says we're losing the word podcast . People are beginning to just assume that it's just video interviews or talk in Daniel X phrase .

And , yeah , and he's there talking about , you know , taking advantage of the open platforms and you know , I mean welcome to the party , dave , but you are about five years late .

Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout replied to Dave Weiner you should promote the work of the Podcast Index and Podcast Standards . They're working to extend RSS . And I thought , yeah , again , dave Weiner's not been present , why , I don't know .

I also and I'm going to say this and I'm probably , you know , going to incur the wrath of Adam as well , but I think Adam is the figurehead for the podcasting Tudor community , but Adam doesn't like attending events or shows and I think it's a missed opportunity because , as much as many of us would want to be on stage talking about podcasting 2.0 , we aren't

the inventors of podcasting . He is and he has gravitas and he has kudos with it , therefore , and I think event organizers would give him the platform , but he doesn't want to do it .

So there's a big green button on the PodNews website saying become a Club Twit member . There are transcripts , albeit only HTML transcripts , so they're not very good , but nevertheless there are transcripts , albeit only HTML transcripts . They're not very good , but nevertheless there are transcripts in there .

So really good to see Leo or whoever it is who's doing that for him jumping in and actually properly getting involved , appear to be using something that is from Blueberry I'm guessing it's the WordPress plugin that Blueberry make , because I can see lots of raw voice stuff in there as well in his podcast feed , but it's really good to end up seeing that he's

supporting that . So you know , I'm really pleased to end up seeing that .

But I think just sort of seeing that it's just nice to end up seeing the fact that he's supporting a bunch of these tags , probably just because the PowerPress plugin supports them . But great to end up seeing that , so that's good .

But what I was more interested in with somebody like Jamie , who you know , obviously with the Daily Mail group , he is aware of micropayments and I'm pleased that you know the message has resonated outside of the 2.0 bubble to other people . So maybe you know there is hope still .

Podnewsnet is a short newsletter every weekday with everything you need to know about podcasting and , on demand , you can subscribe free at podnewsnet for new podcast launches , company changes , stats and no waffle . In fact , podnewsnet is so waffle free , it's really short , just like this promo . In the UK , listen has been nominated for a UK Television Award .

It's a production company . It makes podcasts . It makes these things called visualised podcasts , which is they've made a thing called the Traitors Uncloaked , which is a visualised podcast that you can't actually get on an RSS feed . So therefore it's not a podcast , it's broadcast on BBC television , so it's basically some cheap TV .

Anyway , they've ended up being nominated for an award , which is very exciting . So well done to listen . What else is going ?

If you sprechen die Deutsch , sprechen Sie Deutsch .

And many people said they might subscribe to Ashley's newsletter , but they don't want all the tech newsletters and the inflated price that goes with it . My question to you is A what do you think of it ? And B would you ever put Pod News behind a paywall ?

I'm not quite sure whether or not I subscribe and then cover what she is covering so that more people subscribe to that , or not . I really don't know . So I'm not quite sure how to really deal with that .

It was complicated enough when Ashley moved to Bloomberg , because some of their stories are behind the paywall but they are then republished by people like Yahoo in Canada or something , so you can actually find the story . You just have to link to a weird place in order to actually read it . It's going to be even harder with Soundbite going away .

So that worries me , and I think what worries me as well is we've seen PodPod go away over the last year or so , which was a UK podcast news thing .

We've seen HotPod go away , which of course , was kind of paid for , kind of not , and the Verge ended up doing a dreadful job in suspending that and trying to find a buyer after they'd completely ruined any value of that service , which was a real shame .

So there's been a lot of these news outlets going away or going behind paywalls inside , podcasting , of course , being another one , and there have been a number of other ones as well . And to one side , it's brilliant because it means you know , great PodNews ends up being the only freely available service . I'm really clear .

I've been really clear over the last couple of months . When you become a supporter for the PodNews newsletter , you don't get anything extra . You don't get anything extra other than the name credit . You don't get a secret Slack group , you don't get special meetups , you don't get any of that stuff .

You are paying for everyone else and thank you for doing it , which is a very strange way of running a business , I know , but that seems to be working , and I'm just worried that we are now at a position where you know I don't want it to be just me and Sounds Profitable as the two companies who are , you know , writing stories about podcasting , because we

can't necessarily all keep the podcast industry honest which I think is one of my jobs if there's only one or two of us . So , yeah , it's a bit of a concern , I think , from my point of view .

I think the answer is a very clear no .

But , as you've just heard , sounds Profitable has also joined as a gold supporter as well , and a number of the Sounds Profitable crew have also joined as personal supporters too , which is very kind of them . So crew have also joined as personal supporters too , which is very kind of them .

So , yeah , I mean , those people are funding the Pod News newsletter for everybody . That's the way that it goes , and I think you can probably argue that I've been running the Pod News newsletter on a value for value basis ever since I started in 2017 . I just didn't know it was called that .

He said New York Times is doing it , npr , pushkin , wondery and many more , and he also referenced the Ira Glass , this American Life , lamenting the one third drop in revenue . So again I go . Do you , James , think 2025 is seeing more and more ? We've just talked about Ashley Carman . Do you think this is the way forward for many other media journalists ?

Whatever it might end up being , I think we're going to see companies that try and increase the amount of money , the amount of different ways that they earn their money , and I think one of the things you know , when I set up the Pod News newsletter , what has essentially happened is that a third of the revenue coming in to the Pod News newsletter is from

supporters , A third is from the classified ads and a third is from the big display ads that you see , and I think having that diversification is really important .

So I suspect that we will see more memberships , more live shows as well as advertising in there , and that's probably how podcasting and , to be honest , many other creative endeavours are going to be paid for in the future .

We'll be focusing on multi-format content creation there you go . Also , the open forum stage , which looks to be the stage where everybody argues , which I'm all up for . It's dedicated to open debate and discussions around the hottest topics in podcasting . That's video again , then , is it ?

Yes , I'm sure that video will be talked about there , as well as the Independent Podcasters Hub , which is a new area of the event connecting independent podcast creators with a range of talks and networking moments . They keep on doing some very good things with that . I'm on the advisory board .

I was born in London as well , so I think I'm allowed to be , and PodNews is a media partner , so therefore , you can save money on tickets If you use the code PodNews10, . That's PodNews10, .

You can save on your tickets if you go and buy them now , which is thepodcastshowlondoncom , and the day before , just to plug my own little event , we were doing a PodCamp .

On December the 12th , so another week away you have got to remove your prefix , but you came up with a wonderful stat about how many podcasts might break as well .

I have spoken to a bunch of people in most of the big podcast hosting companies and , for example , if you're with Buzzsprout , our sponsor , you would have got an email from them in October saying that Chartable is going away . And these are all of the companies that they would recommend instead of using Chartable .

And then what Buzzsprout is going to be working on is actually taking out the Chartable prefix for you so that your podcast will continue to work . So Buzzsprout are doing it in an excellent way . Many other podcast hosting companies are doing it in an excellent way . Many other podcast hosting companies are doing it in a very similar way .

Some podcast hosting companies don't care , and so we'll find out how those work in the next couple of weeks . But yes , it's a big deal . If you don't take that Chartable prefix out , then at some point after December 12th , your podcast will not be playable at all .

But there's a bunch of different things that are available out there . It really depends what you're using chartable for , um . You'll find all of the details podnewsnet , articles , um and you'll see in there a piece all about chartable and what you can use .

You can pay a dollar and it comes back and it shows you where your podcast is in an Apple podcast search in the US and a Spotify search in the US for the word chicken . You could also use it for something more useful , but , yeah , quite a nice little plan Interesting to charge a dollar . A go , using Stripe , I would guess .

But yeah , it's worthwhile taking a peek at that . Just do a search for podcast rank report in the Pod News newsletter and I'm sure that you'll find it .

But it is a good number when you say that these are independent music artists who are putting their music up onto Wavelake and using RSS as a output mechanism to distribute their music .

software has made a couple of changes and things , but also has allowed it's doing things with what virtual devices ? What are they ?

But there you go and I stupidly upgraded just before the show . So my bad , my bad .

I didn't really know what I should be calling them , because 12 , you know , we were calling them the Magnificent 11 , and the Magnificent 12 doesn't really work . So B Densey says how about the delightful dozen or the dazzling dozen ? And the good news is it doesn't matter , because we don't have 12 anymore , do we ?

She's just put the trailer up so we will have her on the show in a couple of weeks time to talk about that as well .

Also Neil Velio , Rocky Thomas , jim James , david Marzell , cy Jobling , dave Jackson , mike at the Road Media Network , matt Medeiros , marshall Brown , cameron Mull and Rachel Corbett , who has just launched a brand new podcast called Me and my Tiny Human . Hello there .

We're all supposed to want that perfect two-partner family , and anything short of that is really just a consolation prize . But I never really thought that way and I've noticed that when I tell people that I'm a solo mom , I usually get a few responses from people who genuinely think they couldn't do it solo .

And if you have ever thought that but you really want kids and you haven't found a partner who would make your life infinitely better and you're wondering , could I do this by myself , like , is that an option for me ? Then this show is for you . So come and join me for me and my tiny human coming to your ears real soon .

So you work out what it's going to do in your own time , but I think you know you'll be keeping you , keeping your trousers on , won't you ? I hope so nobody needs to see that , nobody needs to see that um uh , but yes , so that that's one thing I've done . Um , I thought , uh also , it was quite interesting .

Um tom webster put out a post called wall gardens and rented land and he again said if we want open rss to survive in some iteration , there have to be more compelling audience reasons to use RSS driven podcast clients . Rss needs the benefit the consumer in a painfully obvious way , and I couldn't agree more .

I think I keep talking about in the podcast and 2.0 community . We understand the , what we do , how we do it . I still think the why question is missing .

Just don't just rely on those . Also have your own open platform as well . But there's no reason why you shouldn't be using these walled gardens and rented land because it's cheap and it might go somewhere , but just make sure that you're also doing your own thing as well . And I think it's a good piece , so worth a read , of what else have you got down ?

So what they've done is they've put the live item tag into all of their podcast shows and they've put medium equals radio and they've also put in a publisher feed and so , in true fans , what we can do is create a dynamic publisher feed of all their shows and , using the live item tag , we can then extract the start and end times and create a schedule of

that radio station .

So again , it's not , you know , it's not setting the world alight , we're not going to make a massive change , but it's a really interesting way of using some of the technology that's been developed before for radio , where , fundamentally , it really is a podcast being broadcast and what they then do is take that live show , put it out as a podcast , but we can

use that to create a dynamic page for them . So , yeah , so we've done that , and if you follow that radio station , anytime they put up a new show or take a show off , you get a notification Again just something different , very nice .

And John McDermott bless him . Thank you so much put up a very kind post . I think the post , though , is more poignant . He put up a post saying I'm kind of done with streaming stats . I love the idea , but someone has to make the whole darn thing easy . I think that's on the back of what we were talking about last week .

Yeah , I know exactly , and he kindly put and that someone will be sam setty . I hope it is me , but I'm not going to guarantee that one .

We're just going to stop supporting it for now , and I think that'll be a big shame , but I think that's probably the way that these things will work .

You know , there's just a lot of change , um , you know there's just a lot of change to be made in in under a month now , um , and yeah , and I'm not sure that that's really going to work particularly quickly .

So again , but being fair and neutral , because you know I am here with my PodNews hat on , not my TrueFans hat on you can move those sats today into Fountain , if you want as well . Yeah , yeah , which makes sense . The last bit , again , certainly from the podcasting 2.0 show .

They were talking about a company called LightSpark and something called Universal Money Address . There's a very good keynote I recommend people go and look at on the LightSpark . That may be something that might be the direction or arrow of direction I think that the group might take in the future .

So again , if you want to have a learning curve , certainly you highly recommend looking at that . And on the back of that I found an article on x I shouldn't be there , but I was um from a guy called david marcus who works at lightspark , and he wrote an article about how Libra was killed .

Now Libra was from Meta and it was a micropayment system and he said I've never shared this publicly before , but since Marc Andreessen opened the floodgates on Joe Rogan , I feel it's appropriate to shed more light on this . And he goes on to say as a reminder , libra was an advanced , high-performance payment-centric blockchain paired with a stable coin .

We built it . It would have solved global payments at scale , but it was killed for political reasons , and that , again , I think , is one of the other issues . You look at what Albee's had done to it . It wasn't Albee who made the decisions to stop wallets .

It was the political decision to put controls and finance licenses in place that basically priced them out of the market , and I don't know what the answer is , but it looks like governments do not want this without their hand of control all over it , and so I don't know whether it will actually be able to be done anyway .

Not very many of them In and Around Podcasting is one of those , but I think what I'm going to be doing next week is to allow people to submit where their show is on YouTube , because there still isn't really a very easy way of finding that out , and certainly finding out if it's a proper video feed , because I don't want to link people to a , you know , to

a fake video . So that is there , which is fun . One thing I would say to anybody that is doing a website of their own is to use Google's PageSpeed tool , which is brilliant , so so good . I was using that the other week for the podcast Business Journal .

In fact , we carried a big long interview with Stephen Bartlett at the end of last week , who's a very bright man , and I did some work on that website and I was just idly looking through Google PageSpeed and there were a few things that could both speed that website up but also , secondly , save me some money .

It's well worth doing and , by the way , making it more accessible as well . So well worth doing that on any website that you're doing . Don't just do it on the front page , do it on an editorial page as well , because that's worth a peek . So I've been doing those two things . My daughter graduated from primary school this week , which is very exciting .

Congratulations , yes imagine a ton of 12-year-olds jumping up and down , shouting to Frozen songs from Frozen at the top of their voice in the pub . That was what was going on last night . So that was nice . And yes , and I'm also trying to I'm grappling with some new glasses . These are sort of multifocal glasses and I'm feeling very old .