Welcome to Podland. Podland is sponsored by Buzzsprout, the premier podcasting host, and a whole lot more there on buzzsprout.com. It's Thursday, December 17th, 2020. I'm James Cridland the editor of podnews here in Australia.
And I'm Sam Sethi. the editor of Sam Talks Technology, here in the UK. And I'm Galen Beebe from the Bella Collective. And later I'll talk about the 100 outstanding podcasts from 2020. Kate Bradley Chernis from Lately.ai. And later I'll be talking about automatic social marketing for your podcast.
Podland is a weekly podcast where Sam and I delve deeper into the week's most important news, which I cover daily at podnews.net. Let's start by saying, sorry, because on the podcasting 2.0 podcast, Adam Curry heard last week's episode, where we were talking about the new podcast namespace.
I'm a little bit irked James Cridland @podnews.net. He has a podcast called the pod news podcast. Is that what that,
but there's that? And then he's got a new one called Podland.
I don't know when I was listening to maybe it was Podland and all of a sudden he's like stealing our material. He's doing hot namespace talk. Excuse me. Yes. That's not. Okay. It's like a horning in on our business, Dave.
So maybe we should leave the boom Chicka. Wow. Wow. Namespace, talk to Adam and Dave. Anyway, there'll be on next week to tell me off in-person.
Excellent. I look forward to that now. The big story this week I felt was about podcast misinformation. There was a great report out in the guardian, by the journalist Ariel Bogle. She's a journalist and analyst at the Australian strategic policy Institute and she researches online disinformation. She was questioning whether podcasts are becoming. The new dangerous content space, social networks this week seem to be in the crossfire of every government. Twitter was fined in Ireland.
Facebook's been asked to label things because of misinformation. And Ariel was really asking, is it time that podcasts were looked at as well? we've had Steve Bannon basically coming out with claims that aren't true We've had Joe Rogan this week, hosting Alex Jones, who was banned from Spotify, but then he invited him as a guest on Spotify. James, do you think that podcasts will become in the crossfire or our podcasts to be treated differently than social media networks?
I think it's really interesting. So us rules are basically that if you do stuff on the internet then you can have anything on the internet, but pull things down. If you discover that they're bad. Reactive moderation such as that is basically the rule that most of the internet runs on. So internet providers, and that includes podcast hosts are basically there Not as publishers, they don't sit there and check every single thing that goes on their network. They're really there.
Like the postal service So it's very difficult to all of a sudden turn around and say yes, but podcast hosts should be really. Careful about some of the stuff that they put on there. Having said that you can look at it from the other side and you can say a podcast host is aware that there's something which is fairly unpleasant on their service, then they should take it down. And that will be a good thing for them to end up doing.
And, probably not to my credit someone contacted me about four months or so ago. And they were really concerned about a podcast that they had found on one of the big podcast hosts. And they said, is this the sort of podcast that really should be there? And it was from the UK. It was deeply racist, deeply unpleasant all kinds of things about all kinds of races were on there. And I thought that's really interesting.
I brought it up with the podcast host and the podcast hosts said there's our terms of service. You should go and read them. And I went to read them and I said, but are you saying that your comfortable keeping this material up there? And they said, yes our terms of service and that's literally all that they've said, it's still there by the way.
Okay. And can they just hide behind the terms of services that is that acceptable?
I mean to a point, so you've got, of course you've got, , the American first amendment, which essentially is all about free speech. But it doesn't actually include podcast hosts because podcast hosts are run by companies and companies can make a decision as to whether or not they want stuff like that on their service. This particular podcast host clearly does want to take money. From really unpleasant racists. And it's very disappointing that they're still doing that.
And to my embarrassment, I've not made a full story about it. I've not covered who that podcast host is. Primarily because I suspect that it's happening on every single podcast host out there. I suspect that there's really unpleasant stuff out there. And I think that may be, is part of what Ariel's talking about here that actually. This sort of thing is all over the place. And, we should probably be a little bit better as people in the industry of actually taking some of this stuff off.
But then that instantly moves into you're censoring people and, it's against my first amendment rights and the rights of free speech, which don't exist, but, it's against all of that staff and everything else. And so it becomes a very, quite unreligious conversation.
I wonder whether it's also part of section two 30 because Trump really got his knickers in a twist. I know he does normally, but he clearly got his knickers in a twist when Twitter started labeling his tweets as false. And also then Facebook suddenly got a backbone and decided to join the gang and start to label some of the stuff that was there. Clearly they realized Trump was leaving office and they were safer.
But given that he's trying to, as his leaving gift removed, section two 30 it would make Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks liable for the content they publish now. I wonder whether that will extend to podcasting and podcasting hosts or podcasts as themselves. Because if there isn't that safe Harbor, that's required to allow you to say what you want to say. Then you will be open.
Right now, Steve Bannon's war rooms still stating that the Merican general election was rigged, that the ballots were, dumped And he's getting away with it. And should that be allowed?
and I think there's a difference between just people being wrong. Everybody has the right to be wrong if you see what I mean. the reason why Bannon was taken off Twitter was he was advocating violence against somebody else. And that's not a good thing. Now. He may have been doing that as a joke, who knows But I think there's a real difference in between the U S view of, free speech against everything else.
And freedom is the most important thing, and I'm not going to wear a mask I'm just gonna, kill myself, nobody else. And most of the rest of the world who do understand that there is, a role for regulation and they role for the government and for other people in authority. Actually to an extent telling us what to do. And I wonder whether it's a cultural thing.
Like wearing a seat
Wear a seatbelt or, any number of other things, wear a mask. Think it's a difficult conversation. It begins to be a cultural conversation. It begins to be a legal conversation. And obviously at the end of the day, it's completely unrealistic to expect any online service to have to pre moderate stuff. That goes on there services, with the amount of new material that's posted onto Facebook. Onto Twitter every single day.
Nobody's going to sit there first and moderate that before you press the OK button. So it just gets difficult and you then just push this sort of stuff into the underground as well. It's going to be fascinating. What happens with that in 2021? Whether or not. Apple is in charge of what goes into Apple podcasts at the end of it. Spotify is in charge of what goes into Spotify podcasts in the end of it.
And that's one of the questions I think, around the podcast index is that they are deliberately saying, no, we don't do that. That. Potentially means that the podcast index gets used for all kinds of nasty things. And we just need to be aware of that. I think, and work out what we do with that.
I'm going to make a prediction. I don't think Joe Rogan will survive 2021 with Spotify.
Joe, Rogan's a whole extra barrel of fish, so to speak. It'll be really interesting seeing what happens with Joe Rogan. And that's just going to be really fascinating watching.
His first show that he put out he attacked transgender and the Spotify staffers were horrified by what he put out. And his basic response was two fingers back to Spotify saying you have no rights over my editorial control. So fundamentally I think he's going to be very controversial. And I don't know how the tension between Spotify as corporate. Brand and Joe Rogan's
brand it's a public limited company as well. From that point of view that's important to bear in mind. So , it's going to be really interesting seeing what happens in terms of Joe Rogan.
Okay, moving swiftly on the bellow collective has published its hundred outstanding podcasts for 2020 James. What's the Bellow Collective.
That's it. An interesting question. This is the fifth annual list of the 100 outstanding podcasts from 2020. I wasn't sure either. So I had a quick chat with Galen Beebe, Bello Collectives. Co-editor about the list and about the bellow collective. What is it?
The Bella Collective is a digital publication about the podcast industry. We publish podcasts, criticism, reported pieces about the industry op-eds profiles, playlists, resources for podcast, creators, a newsletter every other week, that kind of stuff. So
a hundred outstanding podcasts. It's chosen by a ton of great people. It's been quite a year as well. Was there any. Particular themes that you have spotted in that list,
washing the Bella 100, which is what we affectionately call it for five years. And this was our most of the moment list that we've published. So I can't tell you exactly how many episodes really on the list were about COVID or about black lives matter, but it was a lot of them and a lot of them were also. About politics, especially in the US this year.
And then there were also a lot of shows that aren't directly about COVID like field recordings or home cooking, which were two shows that were created during the pandemic and in response to the pandemic, but aren't, science news documentary about the pandemic. So one of our writers was listening through to many episodes on the list and noted that this is the year where. A lot of the shows already feel dated.
Which is interesting because normally we want a playlist essentially that you will be able to listen to him, that we want to continue to resonate and be evergreen in a certain way. But this was just a year that's so particular that I would guess that the majority of the podcasts are. Extremely up this moment.
What I like about your list is that I don't recognize too many of the shows that have been recommended. There's no nice white parents or that's a great show. There's no, Joe Rogan, is that a very deliberate thing? Do you look for those voices that maybe haven't had coverage in other media?
It's a balance for us, definitely between, a lot of us enjoy really highly produced. Well-resourced big name shows, and we do want to lift those up. But at this point there are a lot of year-end lists. And so I don't think it really serves readers to just see the same shows over and over. Part of our mission is helping people to discover new shows.
And so we don't exactly have requirements for our contributors, but we have strong encouragement to put a lot of independent shows, a lot of shows from outside the U S because we are a US-based publication, so that could easily dominate. And we also don't. Intentionally, don't call it a best of list. We're not saying these are the best shows of the year. We are saying these shows are doing something outstanding. And so we still really want to make sure that we're surfacing that for a reason.
Sure. And I noticed quite a lot of podcasts in the list that as you say, weren't from the U S or weren't even in the English language.
Yeah. Almost a third of our list. 32% of our list this year was shows. From outside the U S I believe that's our highest number yet. And so we always invite people from outside of the collective to contribute to the Bella 100. And this year we really made it a priority to invite people from around the world and people who really know the podcast really well in their regions. We don't require them. To recommend shows from their particular region, but that is an expertise.
And so we strongly encourage it. And we were really glad that people came through with that. Like you said, we are an English language publication, but we had Spanish speaking contributors. We have Spanish speaking writers on staff who listened to shows in Spanish. And so we. Open the door for contributions in Spanish. And we have eight, which I think is pretty good for an English language publication, with a hundred shows. And we included the recommendations in both English and Spanish.
And so that was, yeah, that was something we were very proud of this year.
Galen, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me.
Great. Now I've got some more listening to do over Christmas and new year's. Thank you, James. Now, moving on the we talked about them in episode two. they are the awards from the podcast Academy. They closed on the 15th of December. Did you enter James
I did enter I've entered obviously for pod news being the best news podcast. So clearly no competition in that category then it's going to be really interesting. , I'm looking forward to that. I think we've got two big award ceremonies in the U S early next year. We've got the iHeart radio podcast awards which are happening in January. Virtually and then in, I believe March is when the ambitions are announced.
I know that it's going to be a good ceremony because I've heard that podcast movement are working on it and podcast movement do know what they're doing. So that should be really good. And it'll be interesting seeing who's flasher who makes the industry. Appear as big as the industry is. And and fingers crossed. I'll be there picking up my award, although frankly, I would doubt it.
Now you've got a chance, James. And luckily I didn't go in the same category as you. I did enter as well, but I've gone for the technology category.
Maybe both of us will
commiserate with each other. You
mean? , maybe both of us have just wasted a hundred dollars. Now we've invested a hundred dollars into the podcast Academy. That's what we've done. So
exactly. Good luck to us both now. You covered a really interesting story today about music streaming is stalling. Why do you think music streaming stalling, and what does that got to do with podcasting?
What does it have to do with podcasting? So this is an article in billboard magazine. It's my will page. And we'll use to be a music economists, both for PRS, for music in the UK, and then for a Spotify in the U S and he's got all of the numbers and he's a very bright man. And he has pointed out that. Pretty well from mid-July the amount of music, audio streaming has not been increasing. So the growth has stalled and that's probably a bad thing.
And the question that he asks is podcasting replacing it. Is there more podcasts listening than in July? Yes, there is. Absolutely. There is. We've got the data showing that. Are people consuming more audio overall, quite possibly. Is music streaming a casualty of that? It'll be interesting seeing won't it. So I wonder whether that's pointing out, Spotify is plan and maybe Spotify, his plan is to have more people using their service but to have to pay less for the music.
Who knows, but , some really interesting data coming out of billboard.
again, one of my predictions for 2021 is that Netflix will by Spotify.
That's a prediction.
It's very easy. If you have a look at the board members of both Spotify and Netflix, it's not exactly a hard one.
I'm currently reading a new book, which comes out in January, it's called the Spotify play. And it's all about the history of Spotify. And it's absolutely fascinating. I didn't realize that Spotify started doing podcasting in 2015. That was a long time ago. Really interesting reading it because you get an idea and understanding of, what has been firing up Spotify and why they're in the game. , really interesting book.
I interviewed Faisal Galleria, their international development director. Who's now left about the growth of Spotify. Daniel used to work for him at Skype before he started Spotify. And then he took Pfizer with him.
Very interesting. There you go.
We will see whether I'm right or wrong now, Moving forward, Miguel and sounds profitable. Release the pod scape. I noticed that you were in there. Is it a map of Portland?
Is it a map of Portland? I think it might be. Yes. So sounds pod news is weekly ad tech newsletter. It's written by a very bright man called Brian Barletta who understands this space this week in sounds profitable. She'll find, it sounds profitable, calm. He talks about all of the technology, which is involved in monitoring podcasts, listening. Some of it's quite scary from a privacy point of view and all of that. And what the pod scape is it's a visual landscape of the podcast industry.
So you can see all of the different companies in each of the different areas of podcasting. And it's a great thing. Version one, launched a couple of weeks ago. It didn't have a section for podcasts news. In it. And I said to Brian, about this whole pod scape thing, how about getting something in there so that pod news can be in there. And so he's done that, which is really good of him. So version 1.1, one is available. It's free. You can go and download it.
You'll find a link to [email protected].
Now, one of the stories that did peak my interest was the story about the podcast taxonomy consortium, which was a group of 43 companies getting together. And they've posted the first white paper proposing stuff. And it's for job descriptions in podcasting.
So we are still a very young industry. podcasting hasn't been going on for a long time and because the industry is very us focused, it means that there's been this sort of cultural. Difference between the U S between Canada, between the UK Australia. And so actually knowing what somebody does from their job description is really difficult. And so what the podcast taxonomy consortium has done is they've produced a, essentially a list of jobs.
What the difference is between a technical director and an audio engineer. For example, apparently there is one who knew So pod jobs, which is a free jobs, website for podcasting will shortly be supporting the full taxonomy for all jobs listed, as soon as I get adjacent file of it. So looking forward to doing that, but I think it's just a really handy thing so that we can all be using the same language when we're talking about what it is that we do and who it is that we're looking for.
by chance, I've reached out to Daniel Rosenberg. Who's now going to tell us more about the podcast, taxonomy Daniel.
My name is Daniel Rosenberg. I'm the head of business development for staff Mia. That staff me up.com. We like to think of ourselves as the LinkedIn for media production. So it's a place where you can go to staff up your TV shows your digital projects. It's a place where you can go to find gigs to find work. And we've been around for almost two decades and something that we noticed a couple of years ago, organically.
A lot of people were posting podcast production positions on staff, Mia, looking for podcast producers, looking for assistance, looking for audio mixers and sound engineers. And we didn't have the structure on staff Mia to highlight that a position was specifically for the podcast industry. We're mostly focused on digital and television feature film. And we saw a job posting go out from one of the major studios in LA in the U S and so I got in touch and said, look, I would love to stop by.
I would love to hear a little bit more about why a traditional TV studio is posting podcast positions on staff meet up. And went over and spoke with three of the women who have joined this initiative, consequently. And we started to have a conversation about it and they said, look we're having a bit of a problem. We've used staff me up for 15 years. We come from television and we're posting positions with very specific job descriptions, looking for producers.
And the people that are applying the credits say that their producers, but it doesn't map to traditional TV positions. So we're not sure if we should be calling these positions by a different name to attract the right kind of people who have the experience within the podcast industry. And so we started to go through defining a couple of the positions and then.
basically what we thought of in that meeting was maybe we can just come up with a legend or some sort of a list of positions and have the map to the same positions in traditional television. And the first thing I did was called Arielle, who I've known for a couple of years now and said what do you think about this second thing I did was call the guys at pod chasers, spoke with Cole, Raven and said we should team up on this. And then nothing happened.
And then fast forward, six months later had another conversation about it. And we were like, , this is a great idea. And there's a need for this, there's a problem that needs to be solved and then nothing happened again. And then six months later, we had one more conversation about it.
And that was the first conversation where I started to hear from Cole and the team at pod chaser that it wasn't just a problem when trying to staff people for a podcast production, it was also an issue with people adding their credits. And you can do that on pod chaser. And so some people are putting executive producer. Some people are putting five credits because they did all five jobs for one podcast.
That there was more than just a need for the taxonomy of hiring people, but also recognizing people and crediting people. And so that's when we decided to really make this happen. We knew that in order for us to do this successfully, we needed to make sure that we didn't have an overwhelming amount of blind spots. We need to do be inclusive and include people from.
All different parts of the industry from different backgrounds from historically underrepresented backgrounds from different countries. Not only for quick adoption, but also so that we could do something that is representative of our community. And we all got on the phone and started, contacting, I say the phone, like we dial the phone. Got out there and we started reaching out to our networks and explained what the opportunity was. and everyone was excited about it.
From huge companies from small companies, people independently working in the industry, some people in traditional television, people in the podcasting world we created a private Slack channel community where everyone's sharing ideas and collaborating and we're starting to build this little community. And I think it's going to turn into something more. Think we're going to continue to evolve podcasts, taxonomy, but I also think it's going to be a group that's going to work together to solve.
new problems come up with new ideas. It's exciting. And since launching a couple of days ago, we've received about 25 30 different requests from people wanting to get involved with version 2.0 from all over the world from Brazil and France, and people wanting to translate this into different languages. Think it's really good early signal and we'll see where it goes. Brilliant.
Arielle. How did you get involved in this? And what's your role? Great
question. I'll introduce myself, my name's Ariel and this and Blatt, and I am the community manager at squad cast. I also have been running a podcast newsletter for a few years, which is how I got started in the podcast space. I actually was running a podcast studio at a coworking space when Daniel and I met, he was Working at the coworking space. So I was his go-to person for podcast questions at the time.
And what happened was that he returned from this meeting with the NBC folks and he pitched the question to me, Is this something that people are thinking about? Is this a need? And I said, yes, very much because while running the podcast studio, I came across a lot of people who were wondering, after we record who does this go to? Like what does an engineer do? What does a script writer do specifically when it comes to this kind of podcast?
And so that was definitely something I was thinking about. And. What I've done since is I consult on podcasts and people are always wondering, after you're done recording, where does the show go? Does it need to go to a fact, checker is a fact checker and official role, that kind of thing.
And I'm finishing up right now a semester of learning audio, documentary skills in Portland, Maine, and this is definitely a question there when it comes to radio and podcast production, it is absolutely something that needs to be defined. And I think more more than just defining it'll help when it comes to giving credits.
And I think that is huge because as podcasts become more mainstream and are feeding into IP intellectual property, we definitely need to know who did what and credit those people appropriately and accordingly. So my role, I guess I'd say right now I'm running the Twitter. I'm having a good time with that. And we're getting nothing but positive feedback on the Twitter. It has been lovely. You have a question.
What's the Twitter handle to help.
Podcast taxonomy. We're having a good time on there. I retweet most things. So please do give us a tag.
Excellent. Dave over at pod chaser. How did you get roped in by Daniel? How did he bring you into the fold?
So I'm Dave Connie, I'm the head of product and marketing over here at pod chaser. And to just bring you up to speed on what pod chaser is. We're like the IMDP of podcasting. On top of ratings and reviews and lists and metadata for podcasting we also track North of 8 million podcast credits. So hosts guests, producers, all of that. So as Daniel mentioned, we're often Inundated with users adding credits to our site. And, there's a different name for every single position out there.
So we've saw a need for a standard taxonomy to come into play for what exactly is this position? So we have a moderation process that reviews every credit submission but we needed a rubric to determine exactly, is this what an executive producer actually is? Daniel reached out to Cole. I came into the fold when we got a little bit further down the line and we needed to. Come into, okay. We have a list of positions. Let's start to call them.
We're coming from the video industry where we're coming from podcasting. Let's try to bring down and consolidate let's bring down our descriptions and really what that did is set the stage for our community to come in and react to something. So rather than having everybody raise their hands and start suggesting everything and kind of making it a mess It was really important that we started with a kind of rubric kind of spreadsheet that they can react to.
That allowed us to add a bunch of new positions that allowed us to Cole positions that allowed us to edit descriptions, . So that was extremely important when we When it came down to kind of brass tacks put together the white paper and the the website so that we can bring that in. And to Ariel's point, we've gotten a lot of positive feedback from everybody in the community, and it's actually brought more people into the podcast, taxonomy fold to contribute, to collaborate.
And I think that's really what this is all about is, This isn't something that comes from staff me up in pod chaser. This is something that is really coming from within the industry. And we have people from production companies. We have independent creators. We have people on the marketing side, people on the admin side and really what it is we're just trying to professionalize everything.
We're trying to solve the issue with standardized and credits and standardizing job descriptions, as we're getting. People on board We definitely have an eye towards inclusion and making sure that, if this is going to be a standard, that it represents everybody. And I think that's extremely important for what we do doing here.
So how many roles have you created? Obviously I've read the white paper. I forgot to count it by the way. So maybe you can remind me.
I believe we have, 43 roles right now
And when you create these roles were any left on the cutting floor, people argue, I know we're not having one of them. We're not having that role. That doesn't make sense.
We had a lot of iterations of this discussion. So I think initially we brainstormed the core group and then we put it out to the larger group. Where we choose specific where we not specific enough is a video editor different from a video assistant video editor, and we ultimately made decisions that we think are representative of The largest amount of people, how most people are using these names and classifications. People who work in the podcast space. Love working in the podcast space.
And I feel like that's a sentiment that extends all over and people just want to improve this space and make it one that reaches further reaches more people. And I think that is the spirit that brought so many people to want to be part of this initiative.
I think it's important to realize that, Podcasting is big media But it's going to grow so much more. We're still in the first, what, 15 years of podcasting. If this was television, we probably wouldn't have color TV yet. So this is something that is really Important to everybody in podcasting, because it helps us to grow as a medium and kind of a high tide lifts all boats.
So I think that's why you're seeing buy-in from people from across the industry in a variety of companies, in a variety of positions
one of the things that I hear about all the time is how people that are true podcast people. Whenever they're working with someone from traditional TV or film that are coming into the podcasting space. They're like they don't get it, or, They have 20 years of experience in traditional TV. They don't get podcast production and there's a disconnect there.
And I think as this medium continues to grow and expand, there are going to be people from all of these different genres and areas that are going to come together. And so I think this will help bridge some of those gaps and bring everyone together a little bit.
Now Adam Curry and Dave Jones are part of this consortium. With the podcast index, will you take the taxonomy and I'll ask Adam and Dave to turn a tag on for you so that not only can you say it's Daniel, Dave, or Ariel who do this cost, but Hey, it's the job role, but they actually have, so you could do, I want to search for everybody. Who's got, I don't know, editorial experience.
We're working with the podcast in text right now. So they're taking our white paper and kind of our collaborative spreadsheet where everybody can get on to that and turning it into a Jason file that can sit in the podcast index and the get hub. I believe James Cridlin actually suggested this. So that way as. The taxonomy grows, people who are using the podcast index can use whatever tags they want and it fits in there.
And, a standard doesn't mean much unless there's, uptake from the people out there who are hosting and producing podcasts. So I think that's a very important step for us as well. And then, when that goes out there, that's something that's going to allow the podcast taxonomy to. Reach more people bring more people into the collaboration and just get stronger and stronger as we go.
I've got Dave and Adam on next week's podcast. So we'll make sure that we get them to do that for you. Last question, I guess is what next are you going to create more job roles? Are you going to create bands for salaries? how do you see this evolving as a taxonomy? You said it's a live documents. Where do you see it next?
Why don't I start? And then let's all weigh in. I know that we want to continue to internationalize this. And make sure that different countries and different communities, different languages are represented. So I think that's one direction we can go in and in parallel we want to do what you mentioned earlier. We want to make sure that companies are adopting this and using this. and look, I think we're gonna get together with this big group of people early next year to brainstorm.
if people internationally want to get involved, where do they go? How can they get involve?
Podcasts, techsonomy.com. And from there, you can reach out to us. We ask you a couple of questions your professional background, why you're interested in being a part of it. Then we'll review as a team and ideally include you as we go forward. So podcast, taxonomy.com.
Ariel. Thank you so much for your time. Daniel, Dave, it's been a pleasure to talk to you all A fantastic initiative to take the industry forward. So thank you very much for doing it They go James now much more intelligent and clearly understand what the podcast taxonomies. Now we've got so much more to go in this show. One last story I really wanted to cover was Charles is launched their 20, 21 podcast privacy report.
It's a free PDF explaining online privacy rules and tech changes that will come next year. What's this one about James that you wrote about.
Podcast privacy is going to be a really important thing.
Next year it's already a really important thing this year and online privacy, generally particularly this piece from charitable, which of course is a clever piece of of work from them because they are seen in some quarters as being as sharing in some information with podcasts listeners because that's of course what they do, they're there to attribute advertising but they have put together a really helpful document, which is all about how the privacy rules, GDPR, CCPA all kinds of other.
New and exciting rules actually affect us in podcasting. It's a free download as a disclosure. Chartable is currently split pod news. But so really good read and it's well worth having having a look at so that we can understand where it is that podcasting is actually going. I'd be very keen that we highlight. Privacy, which is why the podcast pages on pod news actually show you whether or not your listener data gets shared with anybody, how that actually works.
What I mean when I say listen to data. So is really important. Now, one of my pieces of work for next year is to stop using any third party calls from the pod news websites. I've already achieved that from pot events and pod jobs and removing just means that there's less chance for Google, for Facebook, for everybody else, knowing that you're having a look at the pod news website which is probably an important thing. So , I think privacy is a very important thing to watch out for next year.
and I think it could be something that actually happens to a lot of the advertisers in the industry as well, because next year Apple's iOS 14 is going to turn on the identifier for advertisers. is IDFA. that will limit tracking for advertisers which means no more cookies. And it also means it'll tell you when any app is tracking you, so you can then say, Nope, don't track me.
I'm fascinated at that. I'm fascinated at how that's going to work with podcasts because a podcast app isn't responsible for where the audio gets downloaded from. So I'm really interested to see how that works. But I think it's good news actually, because if you look at what data podcast is a podcast hosts get and attribution companies like chartable and pod sites and others then they get the same sort of information that you get from a website where you haven't said yes to cookies.
So they get an IP address. They're going to use our agent. That's kind of it. So I think it's actually probably good news for podcasting because there'll be a level playing field in terms of the amount of targeting and the amount of tracking that we can do in podcasting as opposed to any other app out there. So perhaps it's good use forest.
Okay. Now one of the things we wanted to do in Portland is to spend a little time talking to those involved in podcasting.
That's right. So this week I talked with Kate Brantley Cherniss from lately.ai. Now, lately is a super cool thing. It takes your content. It automatically works out what the best bits are to share them on social media. At least that's what I think it is. I started by asking her what lately AI actually is.
This is a question I'm supremely bad at answering and it's supremely embarrassing. Cause it's my job. So I'll try in two ways, the high level way and the detailed, snazzy way. So high level, you push a button. We atomize your podcast into hundreds of mini movie trailers. So you can broadcast them out into the world. Like you are a marketing mega factory. The snazzy part that happens automatically in the background is that all of the snippets we make for you are automatically tested by AI.
That literally is learning what your customers want to listen to. In real time and updating all the time. So it's picking the smartest bits of everything you said in the podcast.
So it takes a number of those smart things that you say and turns them into social media posts. How does it do that? How does it know what works? What does it?
it's a combination of natural language processing and artificial intelligence and looking at sentence structures, so literally the formatting, but also the words very specifically, right? So I'm interested in making the world better copywriters. That's my secret endeavor. and so lately looks for words and strings of words that it knows are testing well and having high engagement and it looks to replicate them. And it does that.
Automatically by analyzing your, analytics, but also by the input that you, the human gives. So we encourage and kick people in the pants really, to get in there for every social post that it brings to you put a little bit of your voice on it or enhance it or fix it because sometimes it's not perfect. So that gives the AI the opportunity to learn your voice and to get smarter. And you say
multiple posts, why not just post one or two tweets? And there you go. what have you learned in terms of the amount of posts that really were?
So there's two parts of that question. One is that, there's the old marketing adage, which goes, are you winking in the dark? Not marketing is a winking in the dark. Get it. I can't see you cause it's dark out. So we know that you have to market yourself multiple times. That used to be seven times that I needed to hear read, or watch your ad in order for it to sink in. Now we know it's 12 to 14, Quantity is imperative. However, everybody's cottoned on to that. We're all spam alerted. Thank you.
Also Cambridge analytics for screwing that up with all the third party, social channels, Facebook, et cetera. So they've. squashed down on repetition and it's annoying anyways, no one wants to be annoyed. And because lately is giving you say 40, 60, or a hundred different social posts, different ways of marketing, the same thing you avoid all that. The other Avenue is that. Customers respond to different messaging, right? You can't not everybody's the same. You don't want to treat them the same.
That's annoying. So treat them like the smart humans they are and find out what access point is going to make them do handsprings.
So if you were helping people with their own social media for their own podcast, what tips would you actually give?
The most important thing is when you're writing anything, whether you're using lately or not, it doesn't matter is to have an objective and be very clear. The objective is not make more money and it's not make more listeners hear you. It has to be simpler than that. And so it's two things in social media. It's. Click or share those. Are your objectives, get a click or get a share now the smaller you are, the harder it is to get clicks. Shares are a lot easier.
People love to share content that resonates with them. Want the one-liners right? that's just so obvious. And so number one have that in mind. And then when you're writing your copy, there's a couple of mistakes that people make a lot, but, the most important thing is. You guys do this for a living all day long, read what you write out loud. If it in any way it feels awkward coming out of your mouth. It sounds awkward to me. So don't do that change up those words.
Think about what's natural for you to say and How you were being perceived on the other end, because if it's stiff, then that's what you're projecting. And nobody buys or shares anything from a stiff board, unless you're Charlie Watts from the rolling stones
and where can I actually go and have a look at a lately? Channel, if you like, just so that I can see how good the AI is and what the thing looks like.
Thanks for asking. so we love to meet people and learn from them. And so we demo individuals, we treat small companies just like there were huge companies with all the red carpet rollout. it's not oppressive. It's super fun. You can get [email protected] just clicked on my request. However, there's also a free tool on the site as well. And you can give it a whirl just to see. but warning though, your eyeballs might pop out of your, so just saying,
Kate, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
Kate and she's such an energy ball and Layli Dell. AI is super cool. Now, Gary V and I both use it for our podcasts and I interviewed Kate a few weeks back about her career as a serious XM, late night rock chick host. She had 20 million users and she married a famous rock star. And for some reason, she decided to switch all that out and start lady.ai. But if you want to find out why check it out on sound talks, technology. If you want the full interview,
now pod land is sponsored by Buzzsprout. They're a very good podcast host at buzzsprout.com. Sam, you are the person who uploads this podcast to Buzzsprout. Have you found it so far? Have you used it before?
I haven't no, my podcast is hosted on simple goals, but I was looking for a reason to use Buzzsprout sprout because it's working very closely with Adam and Dave on the podcast today, they've implemented a lot of the new tags and. One of the things I do like they've made it very simple to our transcriptions, but also chapters. And again, those are a great way for listeners to discover parts of podcasts that they want.
So it's at buzzsprout.com and there's a free trial.
James, what's coming up in pod land for you this month.
You asked. So I'm looking forward to chatting with Steve Pratt in a couple of weeks. He's a co-founder of. Pacific content who put together a brilliant list of podcasts predictions, which I linked to earlier on this week Steve will join me from Vancouver in Canada in a few weeks He's such a bright guy. So that'll be really good looking forward to hearing from him in a couple of weeks And next week, Dave Jones and Adam Curry. What about you, Sam?
I'll be interviewing Franz Josef. he's head of partnerships or hop in and we're going to be talking about the future of online conferences. If you haven't heard of hopping, they're a UK company that started in 2019. They raised 125 million for series B round a couple of weeks back. And that new capital was raised at the time. 2.1 billion valuation, making in a double unicorn I used Hoppin for my last two podcasts festivals, and I'll be doing another one in March, 2021.
Good Lord, double unicorn That's cool. Anyway and that's it for this week. If you enjoyed your trips upon land, don't make it your last, you can subscribe on all the major podcast players or you can visit our [email protected].
And don't bother to rate and review. As clearly as James told us Apple doesn't use it. So don't waste your time. But if you do want to do something useful, you can help us by telling your friends and share us on the socials.
Rate and review if you'd like to. It's pointless, but to write in our reviews, if you'd like to, that would be also absolutely fine. If you'd like daily news, you should get pod news. It's [email protected], or ask your smart speaker to play the news from pod news, podcasting news and pod news is where you'll find the links for all the stories we've mentioned this week. Music is from ignite jingles.
I use clean feeds to interview Galen and Kate and edited those on Hindenburg journalist pro cause I'm old fashioned Portland was edited by Sam Sethi and D scripts and were hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. And we'll see you in pod land next week. Keep listening.