Podland on tour in LA with Alban Brooke at Podcast Movement talking about the Podnews Report Card, The Ambies, the Infinite Dial 2022 and YouTube's no show.

Welcome to Ponte lands. The last word in podcasting news. It's Friday the 25th of March, 2022. I'm James crude and the editor of pod news.net.

And I'm Sam, Seth of the MD of river radio.

And I'm Melvin, Brooke, the head of marketing of bus sprout.

This is exciting. Isn't it? And we're in a podcast movement in LA. Portland is sponsored by Buzzsprout podcast. Hosting made easy last week. 427 million people started hosting with bus crabs, uh, 3,886. You can do it by sprout.com. And if you use chapters in your podcast app, then a Buzzsprout supports those two. And so do we.

So we found out what that number was, the booster ground number. Didn't

wait, we did outlet. do you wanna

say, I found out as well, Kevin told us on bus casts that he was doing all of the boosts. How many people you were reporting, the bus brought was signing up each week. So we appreciate that. And I guess that means a big boost is an order this week.

It would be good if that works. so yeah, it's been an interesting, uh, an interesting week here, hasn't it?

Yeah. the first thing is we've just come out of a packed room. literally it was floor to floor it was YouTube making rethought, some

announced. Yes. We thought that he would be making some announcements. Didn't we? I mean, you weren't, very excited out. you are there, tweeting or, you know, this is so exciting, I suppose, is the most exciting thing.

It's exciting. Two ways where we know all the great things that YouTube has done for podcasting, but once Google starts focusing their eye on something, you know, there can be big changes quickly. And the room was definitely packed out for that announcement. And we heard things may be announced sometime in this.

Yeah, we did. uh, he said, do we think that YouTube is the perfect platform? He being a from a YouTube? Do we think that we are the perfect podcast platform? No, of course not. That's a lot of things that we can do, but that being said, even today, we think YouTube can be tremendously valuable to many podcasts as blah, blah, blah. Over the next few months, you'll hear some announcements from us as to how we plan to continue supporting the podcast ecosystem.

that's where you're leading me on this. So I know

what I mean. You know,

YouTube is

YouTube, isn't a podcast ecosystem. Is it? YouTube is its own thing. And yes, it's good for discovery, but it doesn't use RSS feeds. It doesn't import from great podcast hosts. Like Buzzsprout, it doesn't do any of that stuff. what do you think he means by over the next few months? We'll hear

what we talked about. A lot of things we talked about discovery. We talked about their ability to help people monetize and building a community in the comment section. So we talked about was a lot of what YouTube does great for video can also be done for podcasting. So we could see something like a rebranding of Google podcasts and bringing that under YouTube podcasts, we could see something where YouTube starts turning YouTube channels into podcasts.

Paul to me actually thinks there won't be anything. I think they've really comfortable. I think when they set it up, it was like, we provide comments. We provide monetization, our algorithms are great. We do discoverability and it felt to me like, actually, we don't need to do anything more. You just need to come and use our plans.

Yeah, you make a great point there. we, we've heard so many rumors over the last couple of weeks. I dunno what rumors you've been hearing, uh, Alvin, but I've been hearing everything from Google podcasts is closing and podcasts are being moved into YouTube. And I mean, who knows maybe that might happen in the future, but this seems no real benefit to them doing that. They can monetize video content really easily. They've got the technology to do that. Monetizing audio is much harder.

we have heard announcements of them paying, creators to start putting content on YouTube and actually creating video first podcasts. They have an audio element, but the video is the primary way for people to consume the content. So we can see more announcements about them working with creators, because the thing that YouTube will be able to provide is the listenership and the viewership. They have the people using the YouTube.

this wasn't the only, mention of YouTube here. there's a headliner here who, um, the most popular thing now on headliner is sharing to YouTube and they've done automated stuff. They're also Adori labs, and answering all kinds of YouTube integration. with a, quite a clever system that basically, adds, moving images and that sort of thing to your podcast and sticks it up there automatically. They've worked with podcast one. They've worked with iHeart radio as well, and a few other people.

one of the things that we love doing with Buzzsprout is adding chapters and chapter art and James knives spoken about in the past that if we posted Portland to YouTube, a static image is really dull. And really what YouTube could do is take chapter art and chapters and actually present it like a small PowerPoint, At least that would be a little bit more useful. I think clever FN takes the audio transcription looks for hyper. And present some show cards.

Are there any plans that you have to, work on your YouTube integration with, prosper?

That's actually a feature set that we have decided not to ever really work on. I know that it's very popular and a lot of other podcasts has have it, but I think we're solving that problem from the wrong side everybody's talking about. Well, I know some podcasters they'd like to be. But really the problem is how do we get something that is primary to YouTube on YouTube? So how do we create actual visual assets that make it so people would want to watch it?

Yeah. it's going to be really interesting to watch and a fascinating, just to see what happens in terms of YouTube and

podcast. Yeah. friend of the show might dig and wrote a report about podcasts is using video. And he said, by the end of the year, it's going to be essential. That podcasts are creating proper video versions, which is what you just said of shows. Uh, went on, say if you're making a podcast now be ready to produce that video version, whether you liked the idea of doing it or not.

Yeah, I think, YouTube is going to be one of those interesting things that more podcasts has have to think about. And whether that means that we are making more crappy TV rather than break podcasts is my concern. But, uh, I don't know about that. You do, you do loads of video, don't you for podcast and for.

Yeah. So we do a lot of our tutorials that we know the visual component is additive. we have experimented at times with bus cast being a video podcast, and we realized we weren't adding anything to it. And so you're like, we're just showing, some board white guys talk to you about podcasting. And so we said, you know what? This is better as just the audio version. And we decided to focus on that rather than adding a visual element that really wasn't adding anything to the car.

It's why James picked me for diversity. That's it? That's the only reason on my hair. Anyway, let's move on. YouTube said nothing really is this. They'd be James. You said a lot at podcast movement. you were the keynote speaker.

I was the first keynote speaker of many. I'm very excited. So I was the warm-up man for will Ferrell. I have stood on the same stage as will fair, although not unfortunately at the same time. Um, uh, so that was fun. yeah, so I unveiled the comments around the pod news report cards. We got a ton of different pieces of feedback from, more than 120 different publishers.

subscribed to blue apron. That was the first thing I did. I think, what it showed was these platforms need to engage with the podcast community. They're not really doing it. Uh, and the feedback they're getting, is, what they need to hear, and they're not hearing it from their own channel. Good on you for producing

it. And I think it was telling that I'm only two of the three big podcasting apps decided to hear the, what you had to say and what you'd already compiled for them. So if they're not using their own channels, you'd want them to at least use the ones that, uh, journalists like yourself we're putting together.

Yeah. And I think so what I'm doing is I'm sharing every single comment, With, both apple and Google who asked and Spotify who've now asked. so all three do want to end up seeing them, but, I thought that it was interesting the first time when I went to Spotify, they had no interest in what I was doing.

but I'm so glad your mum answered the survey as well, because, Apple's unavailability on Android is hurting the. Yeah,

no, no. Lots of people said that lots of people said that. And I thought that was interesting. when I was chatting to the folks at apple about this, I said, there is a lot of comment that it would be great for the industry. If there was an apple podcasts app on Android and in typical apple fashion, they smiled and looked benignly at me. And that was about as far as it went. Do you think that.

I would love to see, especially now, it's been a year since we've had apple podcast subscriptions, right. And the problem for people to have to go and upload premium content to Patrion, and then to Spotify, through anchor and then to apple, and maybe even a free, um, feed through something like bus route, and you have to go and do it four times. That's a lot of work for creators. Apple could simplify that quite a bit with an Android app. And then now you can.

talking about apple, they made a big announcement about apple connect. What were your thoughts

on the James? Yeah, so they have announced that there will be follower numbers in apple podcasts connect. So you'll be able to see now that's not your total subscribers because people listen in things that other of course, than apple, but that does mean. Apple and Spotify and Google the top three apps. we'll all have follower numbers in there. So for the first time we can probably make a good guesstimate in terms of our total subscriptions. Um, overcast also sends those back to podcast hosts.

but do you think open

every time we get more data from apple, from the podcast apps, The better that can be standardized and made more transparent to the listeners and to the podcasters. The better.

Now, one of the other big announcements at podcasts movement was the, annual Tom Webster show or the infinite dial show as I should call it. And he did a great job, very humorous, but very informative.

Yeah, I think that, the big story of course, was the fact that the number drops for podcasting. Yes. Lots of, increases in terms of, online audio and everything else. But I think in terms of the actual, monthly, podcast listener figure that dropped from 41% last year to 38% this year, there was an audible gasp in the room. which was quite a thing. Yeah,

we'd seen stuff ourselves and we validated through other data points. We were like, it seems to have slowed quite a bit. The industry is still growing, but the number of people listening on a consistent basis tapered off a little. but yeah, audible gasp around the room and, uh, no.

No, I, I was expecting a very American, whoops and rounds of applause and everything else. And we got none of that. It was like being at a funeral. but Tom explained it very well that actually it's mostly 12 to 35 year olds and it's people going back to school, go back to work after the pandemic, their data was compiled in general. So we should bear that in mind, but January really was the beginning of the return after the pandemic. and so maybe that's it.

I would think that it's more, that we had a moment where things were crawling forward. So it's not that it stalled or that it's turned and gone back lower. It's just that we had a period in time where a lot of people tested positive. And that was really good. Spotify, YouTube helped drive some of that testing. And then some people said this isn't the right for me, I'm enjoying the Twitch streams that I'm watching. I'm enjoying YouTube content.

Yeah. I some of the other highlights where, in car podcasts, things increase, everyone go back to work. The other things that stood out for me were the lack of radios within homes and the use of smart speakers. But, we've talked about it last week, James, that, it's difficult for people to get their podcasts, to work on small speakers. It's not intuitive yet. and then the other highlights, Tik TOK surged.

Yeah. it's a good job that you've got us a tick tock, account. Uh, that's a really helpful thing.

And later on leaves and death with James will be dancing at podcast movement on Arctic talk channels and make your way over there to see that once in a

lifetime moment. Yeah. Yeah. I know it was interesting seeing that, on the radio receiver ownership, um, that isn't a story about radio. That's a story about hardware and there's still an awful lot of radio listening, going. It's just that we listen in different ways and, it's very easy to look at that figure and go, radio's dying and everything else, and that will be completely wrong. a video or indeed smart speakers, haven't killed the radio star in many cases. they've actually helped that.

I'd love to talk a little bit about that Tik TOK number. We've experimented with Tik TOK for Buzzsprout and I'm starting to think of it as a perfect corollary with politics. Podcasting is the ultra sticky, but very difficult to grow medium. you build relationships with people, stick around with podcasts for years and years. Tik TOK is the exact opposite, incredible reach, incredible vitality. If you get lucky, but people do not stick around.

Yeah. there was some great numbers in there. You're right. and, 35 to 50 fours Tik TOK is now bigger than Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat and Lincoln. Um, you know, doing some fantastic figures and 36% of people in the U S currently use that service, which is a increase of 57% over last year. So, yeah. You know, it's clearly doing something. Maybe I should sign up to it at some point. No, James

don't do it. Just don't do it. moving on the we're here at podcast movement. It was the night before the event started. We went along, James. The winner of it was, nine 12.

Yes. Nine 12, from Amazon music from pineapple studios and Wondery pineapple studios doing incredible, work at the MBAs. Um, but it was what a great, uh, ceremony it was because for the first time, I think, zoom awards shows are fine, but they don't feel that. And I think this was the first time that actually it felt like this is an industry event. This is something which is, exciting, inclusive, um, loads of people there. And I just felt.

of the ambitious? No, I was landing a Delta flight, but I was following all the aerials.

No, just sitting back there. I'm not a mega talents. Always bring the plane I'll have too much to do

when I was able to follow a lot of it through Ariel's tweets. And, yeah, it's exciting to see us starting to have some of our real events and for podcasting to get a little bit of.

Yeah, no, it was a really nice, uh, really good event. And, I very much enjoyed standing at the back and you know, Jay Shetty very well. I believe he may be coming on

monk. yes. Yeah. He's stolen a life in London coming out of his Buddhist hole and we know him very well, so he's going to come on to Podland and George, the poet as well. So congratulations to both of those. What I would have loved to have seen was maybe an international card screen, not just UK or English speaking language. I think it would have been nice. Have there been other countries brought into that maybe next year, that's something that the ambiance can look out.

Yeah, no agreed. And, great to see the podcast academy who are now doing a director, you know, you can vote for the new board of governors and 40% of those people are going to be Indy. And, so that's good to end up seeing what else is on your list, Spotify? Oh, yes. I've heard of

them. It's their policy last night. So thanks for that guys. but other than that, they've not had another good week. they seem to be going through bad weeks. Gem word on variety. slated them for their recent, sponsorship of Barcelona for you. That's football, soccer. I don't know what you want to call it, James. I'm not sure. You know what that is, but Barcelona I've see have gratefully accepted $310 million from Spotify. And I think the point that he wrote, was very good.

I've got no insights there. I think the quote that I took from that, story was that there's just a lack of self-awareness, in that company from the bottom, To the top. And I think that's probably a fair thing. It's just something for Spotify to bear in mind that You know, you lose your reputation quite fast and it takes a time to rebuild that. But, it's easy as I keep on saying, whenever we mentioned Spotify, it's very easy to kick Spotify.

So one of the things I asked several spots fires last night who's the final say on podcasting, they couldn't answer it. They couldn't tell me it was the megaphone guys that couldn't tell me if it was Dawn Ostroff. And that said more to me about the internal structure of that company that needs to be fixed because if there isn't one person whose job it is to set the direction strategy, um, what they doing, then they haven't got a whole.

Yeah, a lot of this is actually completely news to me. I didn't know that there were any sort of football sponsorships. I'm almost not unaware of football as a sport, so I don't have much insight here as well.

me too, that makes two of us. So there you go.

So they share price obviously is tanking. It's a 1 43 this morning, which is close to its all time low. so my bet that Netflix is going to buy Spotify is looking good, Jameson.

Yeah, you just keep on betting that I'll keep on betting. The apple podcast will launch an Android app and what one or other of us will be proved completely wrong by the end of the year.

Spotify has other big announcement this week. Was that the green room out there, their clubhouse competitor, is going to be rebranded to Spotify live. Does that mean James? You'll be jumping on board and running a green room or a Spotify.

Uh, I think if Spotify clever and crafty, they will focus on music, which is what they are best known as they will use that as a platform to bring in some big stars and things like that. I think at this moment, it's not that interesting. And I think the infinite dial data around these social audio apps, shows that it's just incredibly low. So I'm not that excited. You are you excited about Spotify?

The one thing that stuck out to me in the infant dial data was that, Twitter spaces was actually the top of all of these apps. And it really drives home. The important thing is your social graph being tied to these rooms. And so when new apps are trying to join and say, we're going to do the creator experience better, we're going to make it even easier.

other announcements where child's bull are going to deprecate their charitable small ant. Is that something that they should be doing Jane?

Yeah. charitable is basically going away. So if you have been using charitable, my understanding is that, basically gets folded into megaphone and. You as a third party will not be able to use it in the future. Pots sites continues as a third party service though. but that probably comes as no particular surprise. Spotify has also updated our list of partners that it has for Spotify, open access.

as he says,

yes, and they're also getting. testing the Spotify audience network, which is the advertising thing in the country. The one thing that Spotify does, which I think is brilliant, or one of the many things of course, that Spotify does, which I think is brilliant is their R and D blog, which is deeply techie, but really interesting. They released a paper last week around how search has been changed for podcasts. So semantic search, so you can know.

it's got all that, oh God, he's not on YouTube. So anyone could be anything they like on this

podcast. But, Spotify is still making all of the announcements aren't they, Alvin and, still pushing forward with their plan to take over.

This would have been, announcements that would have also have loved to hear from the YouTube team today. we've for a long time, been looking at how they surface podcasts for Google search. And, it's always felt like it was maybe 20 years behind the rest of Google search. maybe we'll get some announcements there as well. I liked this modifies doing this. It'll help more people be exposed to podcasts, especially who are looking for specific things around weight loss and. Getting slim.

Now, moving on. One of the things that we've talked about in the past is transcripts and the lack of transcripts. You've been lucky that John Spurlock and Benjamin Bellamy have given us some great data about actually how little transcripts are included in our Buzzsprout do a great job of including that. And we do include our transcript in all of our shows, but I wonder, I think we had a private conversation a little while back. why do we have show notes, transcripts, and chapters.

one of my favorite podcasts conversations with Tyler's Tyler, Cowen, the economist, that's actually how they do their show. They do a human edited transcript, and then they use that to compile the show notes. So it's links inside of. I think that's interesting. There's not a lot of standardization around that right now. but it is unfortunate that we still are only seeing one to one and a half percent of podcasts is using transcripts.

uplands supposed to by reading needs to turn it on. Don't they James, they don't have anything

yet. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really important. And I think, a lot of this will, depend on the outcome of the Sirius XM court case, that disability advocates have brought, and I don't want to be that guy, but it's 20, 22. We shouldn't be having a conversation about whether the transcripts are a good idea. We should be having a conversation with apple and Spotify about when are you putting them in? and how fast can you actually get them there?

it's always been surprised to me when you look at the production value, going into a lot of these shows, they are not, cheap. They're doing a lot of work is really highly produced. And yet we can't find an intern or $75 to go to rev.com and get a human edited transcript. And I'm not sure where the disconnect is because it's not a money issue and it's not a technology issue.

well, what's your space and see if apple and Spotify do anything. I'm not holding my. Now James, you had another big announcement this week. You've grown the empire explain.

Yeah. So the pod news network is now three. we obviously have helped, Brown by letter 18 months ago with, sounds. very good, ad tech newsletter and all of that stuff, And, wanted to do the same with podcasts, listeners, and ways to discover new shows. So really pleased to be able to announce that, the earbuds podcast collective from is joining the pod news network. So we'll be working together.

Cool now, moving on, we were very lucky. The boys from rss.com took us out for dinner on the first night of podcast movement. Very fancy. so our house and one of the comments we talked about was, a cast and, a cast basically spamming the industry. I think the title of last week show was, spam, spam, spam, and spam from the Monty Python. Did that get in trouble for that?

I had a very good if slightly frosty power with, our friends at ICAST, the other day. And they were basically saying, what did we do wrong? And I said, I think, you know what you did wrong. but yeah, the, there was clearly, a privacy issue with having raw email addresses in RSS feeds. it would be good if the industry where. Help sort that out. I don't see too much evidence of the industry caring enough though, which is a bit of a shame. have you had any emails from any other podcast hosts?

we've seen this for years and years that every once in a while, somebody that buys the list, just scrapes the list and decides to email. I think what really stood out to us was that nearly every bus pro podcast got the email on the same day from a cast and they also reaching out. Was Buzzsprout compromised. Why are we getting these emails, from your competitor? And so we felt we needed to be able to reach out and explain, this is not something that we've exposed instead.

Yeah. and, I think from my side acorns doing it, when they also offer a service to stop your email being used by spammers in the RSS feed is just, a little bit. but yeah, there are excellent people at ICAST and, uh, go Sweden. So one of the

things we did talk about that was possibly using OAuth as a way of making, hosts the verifier of that account. Buzzsprout or RSS would then have that, uh, Wharf jump, because look, we put our credit card with you with we've spent a lot of time, so you know who we are. So the OAuth could simply just like the Facebook jumped. Yeah. Wait with both SPRAT click, you verify it. And off it goes rather than spamming. Would you look at something like that? Yeah,

I think there's a lot of ideas in this space. James had one where you could turn on and off for the, email address to be inside the RSS feed. There's some push in the podcasting 2.0 spec. I even had someone come up to the table today or yesterday and, um, a blockchain solution. Uh, it was based on some proprietary AI, so I'm not sure if these are buzz words or a solution, but, hiding these email addresses, the web was built on being open and, it turns out that people will have.

Yeah, no, indeed. and Sam just said that has our credit card information. no, we don't. We're sponsored by bus pass. Yes.

Most of the point, see you at the policy later, James, moving on then, some awards event corner. if you want to be a judge at the Irish podcast awards, you still have a chance. Entries are open until April. and also the British podcast awards. you've got three weeks left if you want to enter the British podcast awards.

Yeah. Which is all good. it's always nice seeing podcast awards, ceremonies from different countries. And I think there is a good place to have individual countries having their own, podcasts. arguably you could claim that the ambiance or the American podcast awards, but that may be being slightly unfair. But I think certainly being able to give Irish podcasts, their place in the. Alongside, you wouldn't have any place in the drizzle. then that's a good thing.

one more event. That's come up on the calendar. This one's in New Jersey is put stock. Uh, have you heard of this one yet? Open? No, I haven't. So you might, you wouldn't be going

to it then? I think, maybe five conferences a year is about my limit. So are you coming to London? I'm not, I had another trip planned. I'm able to make it this year. You'll have to let me know for

next. We will.

yes, we'll give you some nice warm, flat, British beer. And you'll be delighted with that,

she podcasts live, 20, 22 tickets are on sale. Now I caught up with Jess actually here at podcast movement and she's announcing, or we'll be announcing, she podcast's coming to Europe or. Oh, wow. Uh, what she's space? Yeah, she

was very excited. It's something she won't be announcing it now as we've done, we've just announced it.

there you go. I got the exclusive and I'm pre-announced was I embargoed? I don't know. I might've been embargoed.

what else have we done, this week? Has it been fun being here this week? Sam, it's been a thrill and a delight to. Presenting a podcast with you for a year and a half to finally meet you face to face. That's been quite fun. Yeah, he

did say it was the last time he wants to do it though. Set. He's got to do it with me in London, but how was it? It's been great actually. I have never gone to a podcast movement or podcast event. I've been in the tech industry and done events before. I'm meeting up with Heather. All's good. And Jess Koufman and Todd and Rob from new media show, obviously itself going out, having some drinks, Paris Hilton, let the side down a bit. Last night, she can't DJ catchy. She can't eat.

And how has pot podcast movement been for you album? I

guess movement is the premier podcasting event. We've come to them every year, since the very first Kickstarter in 2014. And we will continue to come. as long as they have them, this is always the best place to get feedback from customers and new ideas and connect with everybody in the podcasting industry. Highly recommended. It's really good.

coming up in Dallas in August, you should go to podcast, movement.com to grab your tickets.

It was for you,

Knackering is the answer. I have realized that it's trying to produce a daily newsletter. Doing full-on podcast movement probably doesn't work too well. So maybe I need a little bit of help next time. Firstly, I need to write the tech, to allow other people to help, but that's the thing. Yeah, no, it's been really interesting and it's been great to be out of Australia for the first time in, two years. Thank you. Scott Morrison, our current prime minister. there's an election.

Um, music is from ignite jingles, and we're hosted and sponsored by, and I can say it now that you're right next to us, our good friends from Buzzsprout.

Thank you for coming Alvin.

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure and

keep listening.