Welcome to Podland Podland is sponsored by buzz sprouts. The easiest way to host, promote and track your podcasts [email protected]. It's Thursday, February the 25th, 2021. I'm James Cridland the editor of pod news here in
Australia. And I'm Sam Sethi the editor of Sam Talks Technology here in the spring Lake UK.
And I'm Michael Magneto from anchor and Spotify. And later I'll be talking about the new announcements you've made this week.
He will Podland is a weekly podcast where Sam and I delve deeper into the week's podcasting news, which I cover [email protected].
Please get involved with this podcast, send us a voice message to questions at Podland don't use, or you can tweet us at Podland news. Let's get on with the stories from this week. There seems to be one big story. The big one of course is. The Spotify announcements. James, what did Spotify say?
00 AM on the end of your bed? listening to
Daniel? No, I did not stay up instead. I had this blizzard of. Press releases just so many announcements. So the big one for Podcast, as I think is that anchor announced the launch of paid subscriptions later this year. There's a demo, which if you slow it down, you can see that Podcast has, can choose from $2 99, $4 99 or $7 99 a month subscriptions as a price point for your Podcast, which seems quite high.
Then the Spotify audio network for advertising around podcasts, anchor, and WordPress are doing a thing. So if you want your podcast to sound as if it's a robot reading out a blog post, and you can video podcasting, if you use anchor, you can add video to your podcasts. There's interactivity with Q and a and polls and 80 new countries, which is 1 billion potential, more people and Spotify Hi-Fi. And more daily mixes, quite a thing.
The one thing I did do after reading all of those press releases is I caught up with a co-founder of anchor and the head of the Podcast mission at Spotify, Michael . I was not as you'll hear using this fancy microphone, Michael lots of announcements from Spotify and anchor this week. Which of those announcements are you most proud of?
I think that I'm really proud of. The entire thing, especially the notion of this new future formats strategy that we talked about today.
You announced paid subscriptions, which is one of the things that will catch a lot of podcasters eyes. It's going to be launched at some stage soon as a limited beater in the U S do you have any idea of timeframes on that? I can't
give you an exact date right now, but what I can say is that, we expect that this feature will come into beta sometime this spring.
And is Spotify going to take a cut of the revenues,
Spotify? we'll be taking a very small fee. we're still figuring out exactly what that fee is. we're figuring that out through a combination of research and talking to creators and talking to our listeners. But the creator will be taking home the large majority of the payment from the listeners, because at the end of the day, what we're really trying to do is give creators ways to make a living off their art. And it's really true to the spirit of our mission.
To enable creators to monetize their work in whatever ways they see fit. Yeah.
And I think that's one of the exciting things about a lot of what you've announced today. You've also announced anchor and WordPress, which went live today. how do you see people using your new partners?
there are so many craters out there in the world on the internet who are sharing ideas and expressing themselves through the written word, but. As I'm sure, you're a big fan of podcasts and audio as am I many people especially more and more, it seems every year wanting to enjoy an experience content through their ears, through audio. And so we thought that it would be great to partner up with. The biggest blogging platform in the world, right?
You've got Spotify, the biggest audio platform in the world and WordPress, the biggest blogging platform in the world to Tema and make it possible. So that, that these written texts, creators could express themselves now through audio. And so the integration is really great and easy and seamless.
if you have a WordPress blog, You can connect it to an anchor account and we make it super easy for you to take your posts, your blog posts, and quickly translate them into audio that can, that can be consumed as a part,
I guess you've also announced interactivity things like Q and a and polling is the plan to make the Podcast audience a bit more engaged with the shows that they're listening to that. Yeah. And I think
it's also a way to get the creators more engaged with their fans as well, Yeah. Podcasting has really always been a one-way street, with very, very little opportunity for direct feedback in either direction. as podcasters have had to take to other platforms such as social media to understand who their audience is and what they're looking for and to interact with them. But because of. The unique Podcast distribution process that exists between anchor and Spotify.
We're in a position to change this. We can create direct connections between creators and listeners. So I think you're absolutely right. we're really excited to give creators and listeners access to things like Q and a and polls, which will, will allow podcasters to ask their audience questions and get answers directly on Spotify.
And that goes above and beyond the current stats that you give Spotify creators on the platform as well.
Yeah, so yeah, I do, due to our integration with Spotify, I think one of the really cool things that we've been able to do inside of anchor is give. Creators more unique insights to what they're typically used to, that they might get through a standard RSS feed. I think if Q and a and poles as just another great capability that we can build on top of. the existing channels of distribution
video podcasting is coming later on this year to anchor users and to Spotify. Will those videos be only on the Spotify platform or if I happen to have a different podcast app, will I be able to see them there as well?
Because of the way that the technology works and how we're distributing the content these videos for the creators that have access to this feature, these videos will only appear on Spotify. The goal with these is not to turn Spotify into a video platform, but it's really to offer. Content that complements the audio being shared. So for some podcasts, we feel like it may make sense to have a visual component to enhance what the listener is hearing.
And that's really what we're trying to enable here
in terms of the numbers. I launched something the other week that showed where Podcast. Creators are moving to a lot of people are migrating it over to anchor. you now host I've worked out more than 650,000 shows. I don't know whether you have a more up-to-date number than that. What's your end goal here? Are you still very positive about the open nature of podcasting?
Yeah. So what I can share is that as you've noted. Podcasting is just becoming more and more popular for not only listeners, but creators. And, we have launched a lot of podcasts and lots of creators are coming over to anchor to do that. In fact, in 2020, the year 2020 alone, anchor launched. More than a million podcasts. so we're, we are seeing massive growth, but at the end of the day, what we want to do and what we think we are in a position to do by being on the same stack as Spotify.
Is providing the best experience for creators. We think there are things that we can do for creators that really technically haven't been possible on other platforms. We want to provide the best experience for podcasters that's pulling in not only new creators, but anyone that wants to take advantage of the tools and the idea of this strategy that we've talked about at length today. This feature format strategy.
The goal of these features, the feature format oriented features are to build on top of the existing audio experience, not to prevent innovation and listening outside of Spotify, but to create experiences that are only possible because Spotify is podcasting ecosystem contains both the creation and the listening Technology yeah. I
mean, you can certainly have a look at the current RSS spec. And say that actually, you know, accompanying video isn't possible in the current RSS spec nor is questions and answers and all of that kind of stuff. So actually what you're saying there is podcasting will always be open, but actually the additional interaction and the additional features that you can offer are made possible because you are so tightly integrated with the Spotify playback. Yeah.
I think we're saying there's a, there can be a better experience for creators and listeners. And we can think bigger for creators. We can think bigger for listeners. We don't have to be confined to just what we've been used to. And we want to hold ourselves to a standard to give both the creators and the listeners that better experience.
Michael, thank you very much for your time.
Thanks so much,
James. Great to talk to you. So James there's Michael, what did you think though, of the Spotify
announcement? If I was in charge of Spotify, as PR, as I'm sure that somebody is incredibly rich and in charge of Spotify, PR I would have released one of these every day. There are some really big stories here that kind of get a, by the way, they've also done X, Y, and Zed. So the interactivity, for example, I thought was really interesting to see. Questions and answers, polls, all of that kind of stuff. Video podcasting as well. We've got video podcasting of course, in podcasts.
But what you have to do at the moment is you have to search for another different podcast, which is called probably, this week in tech video, rather than this week in tech audio and use that instead with the result that you don't know where you got up to and everything else, it's all a bit of a map. Whereas what this thing seems to do is it basically will let you have a big. Button much short YouTube music.
They love me saying that a big button where you can flip between audio and video, which is really cool, but it only works on anchor. And then the paid subscriptions thing, which I thought is exactly the sort of thing that I've been waiting for Apple to do. They haven't done it yet, but anchor and Spotify have jumped in. I think that sounds quite interesting. So what did you think of the image? I was
really enthused by what they're doing. Look, industry itself has been a laggard for 10 bloody years. Apple's done bugger all to nothing with it. And along came Spotify decided to get into podcasting and then, everyone woke up and, Adam dusted down wherever he's been for 10 years and decided to get back into podcasting finally. And. What we suddenly found that's me counsel from the Adam Curry show.
By the way, what we suddenly found was that, innovation started to come back into Podcast and suddenly people were talking about Podcast again, I've said it a couple of weeks ago. I think streaming is the way forward. And I think downloading is a legacy of an industry that had a bandwidth problem. That's what originally. IPods and Paul dial up internet and active two megabit per second board band that we had to deal with.
All of that meant downloading was a sensible way to go forward, but now you can be anywhere, anytime, any place and just get Spotify and streaming. I can get it in my car. And that was one of the things that Daniel X said, it's a ubiquitous platform it's available everywhere. Even when Apple isn't on Android, Spotify is, in it's on Apple, it's in my car. As a platform, Spotify is everywhere as streaming it's everywhere and Sam crowd the from a million ad set, a really good thing.
He can work out location time of day. How many ads have been read? I think all of that leads to a very good thing. The other side of the coin is. You may not even have to have ads. If subscriptions come in, we're all waiting for Apple to do something. It could be Christmas. It could be next year before we get Apple subscriptions, I don't know when they're going to do it. They talk about stuff. The East has been doing this for a long while.
Look at him, a layer, $7 billion last year they made and they'd been charging. We just need to get a move on in the Western. And if this Spotify announcement gives Apple the kick up the pants they need, then good on them.
Great in some ways, but it is basically Spotify and anchor building, lots of proprietary things that no one else can play with. So video podcasting, that clever thing where you can choose to either watch the video or the audio of a podcast that could be possible with the alternate enclosure that Podcast index are working on.
And that could frankly have been the way that anchor and Spotify had done it all so that this works on everything, but they've decided that they're going to make something which is their own system, which is only going to work within anchor out within Spotify. Now, Michael was very clear in that interview. He was. Basically saying, Oh, I said it doesn't currently let us do that. And the benefit of anchor and Spotify being so conjoined is that we can do this type of innovation.
And I think he's got a point, but I think actually we're anchored to work with the rest of the industry and Spotify to work with the rest of the industry here. Then they will still be doing it the best, but at the very least they would be able to allow other people to play along. And that would probably be a better thing for the industry. Having said that it's probably not going to help the Spotify share price, No. I look, they've
made a massive investment in Gimlet in anchor. They're not going to go and then say we're just going to open the commode and let everyone have access to our technology. This is just not the way it's going to work open. The
commode was
that. Yeah,
good work. Yes. But no, they're not. They're not going to do that. Are they? And their Spotify audio network for advertising, which they're expanding to also include megaphone. Brian violator basically turns around and says, look. This is all about advertising in an app. This isn't Podcast advertising. This is advertising in an app and the app is Spotify. And that's basically how that works. And I think he's fair in doing that.
The question is, I suppose, if, depending on whose numbers you look at, but if Spotify is about 20% of all podcasts downloads, that means that there's another 80% of podcast downloads out there that Spotify can make money out of. If they actually was to share some of this technology with the rest of the industry. But again, it comes back to my boring point, which I probably make every single one of these shows, which is that we lack an industry group. We lack a best practice group.
We lack a lobbying group because we haven't grown up yet enough as an industry. And so therefore. We don't actually have anyone that Spotify could go to and say, Hey, we've got this idea to make podcasting better. Why doesn't everybody work on it because there's no one for Spotify to talk to. So I suppose it's our fault. Really?
It is. And I think in the absence of that, Spotify just got on with it and we in the West need to get away from just an outlet model in everything. And I'm not just talking about Podcast. I would pay happily for a Twitter account, a Facebook account. I pay for medium. I pay for the Ft. Flight to quality is what we need. And I think we got to get away from this. I'm the product, therefore advertising can be stuck around me and I can be blasted with it.
And I think once we get away from it's all about advertising, isn't it gov and that's the only way to make money. And then we will start to see different models. And I think. I don't know if the model that Spotify has put out in terms of the payment, two 99, four 99 and seven 99 to good number, but it's a starting number and it's like the same with anchor.
anchor came out, we all had a little bit of a laugh, but he did a few things because it got people interested, but it wasn't a serious hosting platform. they'll get better. Look at music and talk, That is pretty average. If you're a radio broadcast, you can't make, she can't talk over the end of the track, but what did it do? It allowed Podcast is who do music Podcast is suddenly get a license. How long has this industry, the PRS, the PPL, and everyone else been sat on their hands.
Oh, I don't know how it affects this. So we just have no Podcast from radio stations that can go global. Guess what Spotify goes and fixes. I should be in their PR team. I really should. I created a solo show the other day in Spotify, just playing with it, using my road mixer. I created it not great. I probably wouldn't put it out, but I'm testing it because guess what? If this comes to the point where I can put a subscription against it and push it out as a brand new show. Happy days.
And I'm sure version two of mix and talk will allow me to blend over the top as I would on a radio station. And so suddenly we're all going, Oh, it's crap. It's not good enough yet. It's good enough. And it's the innovator's dilemma. The Apple have done nothing and nor has the industry. And Spotify has come along and said, you know what? it's proprietary, but we'll start at that point. And maybe they'll open the door and share their technology with the industry.
But as you said, who, with there, isn't an industry body to
share it with. Yeah, and they're hardly likely to share it with Apple and frankly, Apple hardly likely to want to listen to anybody else. Having said that, I think the one thing that Apple could do very quickly to kill a lot of this work is for Apple to release Apple podcasts onto Android. And for Apple to turn on a subscription model on their service, they already have a subscription model for their app store. They've got all of that technology in place.
It's not going to be difficult for them to turn that on. And certainly, the there's been rumors that Apple is currently. Adding Apple podcasts for Microsoft devices. I think the X-Box is the one that I'm hearing about, which is a strange choice, but if that's true, then that will show that Apple podcasts can exist on more devices than just a Apple computer or phone. And I think that. Will probably be a big kick to Spotify.
And so Spotify maybe is making all of these announcements in one day in their stream on video so that they can actually then make that point and make them sound as if they are brilliant, because frankly three-quarters of what they announced. Isn't here. Three quarters of what they announced is we're working on this. You know, you heard Michael earlier saying that the paid subscriptions will be a limited beta in the U S starting in spring. That's not open to everybody and it's not available now.
I guess we've got that sort of side of it as well.
Yeah. But I think they've got to announce stuff to set the market for 2021. it puts a stake in the ground for them, they were in X number of countries as a music service. Now they've just launched 83 more countries or whatever the number was. And so yeah, Spotify is doing the right thing. I still have my bet. Yeah. William Hill, which is that Netflix and Spotify will merge. And I think that's going to be a safe bet. I think you'll get squeezed.
I think one day, I think you mentioned Apple could turn on subscriptions, but so could Amazon. it doesn't take much for Amazon to
say no, and it, and it certainly seems that Amazon are very aggressively looking at growing their side of it, which I think makes a bunch of sense. I think, you know, we glossed over, I glossed over earlier on 80 new countries. They're in, I think 85 countries at the moment. So this nearly doubles the amount of countries that they're in. It's 1 billion potential new listeners now, or be it that many of those listeners won't have the phones and the capability of doing it.
But they've basically turned on all of Africa. They've turned on a lot of Asia that didn't have Spotify in the past. That could be a massive game changer. Podcasting is going to be in most of those new territories that they're in. I mean, even that by itself, forgetting everything else, even that by itself is a tremendous move forward. So one of the other
things I wanted to ask you about James was the squeezed middle. As I like to call it the hostess in the middle. would you see Apple buying a hosting company themselves? If you think about the role of hosting, it says to upload your podcast and then disseminate that to other fundamentally Google, Spotify, or Apple. That's the main places where majority of content goes. We talk about subscriptions, but I think the other dangerous anchor is now the host partner for.
Spotify, that's their clearly driven goal to get all of that. What would Apple do if they bought a hosting company? What would happen in there industry?
As I understand it, Apple was sniffing around anchor when anchor was still independent, Apple was sniffing around and considering buying them. And I think it's a bit of a shame that they haven't done. That will be really interesting. Wouldn't it? If you ended up with a product like anchor or megaphone or someone else that would allow you to then upload stuff that was exclusive on Apple podcasts that you could charge for, then that would have quite an effect. To the industry.
even more of an effect to the industry that anchor is currently having. And we'll probably come back to that a little bit later, but I think yeah, there's a, there's a bunch of questions isn't that all around. What would happen if Apple took this industry seriously?
Yeah. and that, and the difficulty at the moment is that you look at the amount of money just in terms of advertising and by podcasting over the last year, that amount of money is around $800 million in the U S and Apple earns that amount of money about every 12 hours. So Apple, frankly, they can look at podcasting and they can go, how much is it really worth? Really? It's just change. It's just chump change for them.
But who knows, maybe they see Spotify as beginning to be quite a potent competitor. And maybe that's something that they do want to end up fighting against. I
liken Apple to the toys in the hair. They are the top choice in the industry. They never go fast. They never. But they always seem to get ahead of the game eventually.
And I used to do exciting radio things online for a living. I moved from Virgin radio and we were the first to do all kinds of things first to stream online in Europe. First to get a mobile phone app first to do all kinds of wonderful things. I moved from there. To the BBC and one crusty old BBC guy says that Jamie's wherever you come from. And I said I've come from Virgin radio. Oh, what's that? And so I explained all of the firsts that we'd had and everything else.
And he said, Oh yeah that's all very interesting. But you see here at the BBC, we don't do things first. We do them properly. And I saw and I thought maybe, maybe that's Apple, we don't do things first. We do them properly and you can probably have a look at everything that Apple has in inverted commas invented from widgets on the home screen to wireless charging, to Bluetooth headphones, blah, blah, blah. They haven't done any of these things first. But arguably they have done them properly.
So maybe that's being fair at Apple or maybe that's what they Excel at doing.
The other story that came out was you've been doing a little bit of inspector clues , so, uh, Buzzsprout pod bean spray, and captivate. Just to name a few, we're all subject to a denial of services week and took the services down. But you found out who did it, James, what's going on? Why were they all being attacked?
Yes, I was doing my very best inspector. So you do realize that inspector clues though is completely inept at anything. and when we, when we were talking before we came on, you said you've been a bit of a Colombo. I like Colombo. He used to fix things. He used to, he used to get to the bottom of things. He would say just one more question, Alicia, one more thing. And it just it'll just take
a second. And he would do all of that stuff. Wasn't that? Where Steve jobs got his. He's a famous lung problem.
Yeah. One more thing, but there is one more thing. Yeah. So there's been a guy called Jesus out there. He's a hacker. He was targeting a lot of Podcast hosts. So he spent some time targeting Buzzsprout, which had quite a bad couple of days of it. been as well. Hasn't had too good, a time Spreaker and captivate, who I advise for we're also hacked. I understand also that he threatened, but didn't hack transistor.
They all had a denial of service attack, which is basically lots of computers, all accessing their systems at the same time and basically stopping anything from happening. So I talked to the guy behind it. He's a man called Jesus. I'm sure that's not his real name. He says he lives in. I'm sure he doesn't really, he says his mother's very ill, which I'm very sorry to hear. And he desperately wanted $1,500. Payable by Bitcoin, please, to help his mum.
But he also said that he had a group of another four people who were behind these particular attacks. I understand that one of the Podcast houses actually had a look at his Bitcoin account and seen that his Bitcoin account has another, had quite a few payments in it recently. so he's clearly been successful with some of the attacks that he's done. None of the Podcast hosts have.
Either had any problem with losing any personal information, but also none of the Podcast house have paid him any money, which is I think a good thing. And, I had a chat with him, none of what he said made very much sense. I discovered by the way that it's Stonier is much like the UK in that it's got free healthcare. So if his mum really is in hospital in Estonia, then she doesn't need $1,500 worth of Bitcoin.
She, she can get whatever it is that she needs done on the state as any civilized country does. So therefore yeah, it was, but it was interesting talking to him because I was just. Curious to find out is this because you really hate the Joe Rogan podcast? Is this because you have a real thing against, Glenn Beck or Ben Shapiro or whoever that person might be. And now he's got no interest in podcasting at all. It's just an extortion thing. And he just wanted some money.
I suspect he lives in South America somewhere. Certainly there. The stuff that I've understood about him. I suspect that he's in Uruguay or somewhere. And I suspect that, it's an awful lot of money for him and, it's an extortion thing. And that's about as far as we've got the next episode of buzz cast, which is buzz sprouts, Podcast who are our sponsor, they will be talking in great detail. So I understand about their. Denial of service attack.
And I know that Tom Rossi was working incredibly hard earlier in the week, making sure that everything still worked. thanks to them and to the other podcast hosts who were affected.
Yeah. I managed to get hold of his mother by the way, James and I got a quote from her and she says,
Very good. That's the second Monty Python reference in 24 hours. I made one today in pod news as well, where I was talking about a new podcasts that the New York times has put together, which is called the argument. And I finish it by saying that a it's not just a five minute argument. It's the full half hour. So thank you very much. Story. Number three, I launched something new
didn't I Sam you did now before we talk about it, because it was launched what you launched at the end of last week's podcast, but we couldn't talk about it because it hadn't actually launched. And then you came up with a fancy name for a graph as well. So I was going to ask you what. Is that graphing. Then you can tell us all about what the report was about.
Yeah. So this is a fancy graph that shows movement from one place to another. And in this particular case from one Podcast host to another, it's called a Sankey graph. And it's called after the man who invented it, which was a man. called Mr. Sankey. I believe that would make sense. it's very nice. This was a new piece of data that I released last week. It's actually data that updates every single day and the data, it shows the changes on Podcast hosts.
So if you leave one podcast host and you move to another, it shows those changes in a fancy Sankey diagram, which will all make sense. If you visit the website, pod news.net/articles/hosts. Slash changes and you'll see where people are moving from and where people are going to, the big story that I got from it. And the big story that is continuing is that there are a lot of people leaving, paid for hosts and moving to anchor.
And I hadn't fully appreciated how many people have left, paid for hosts and moved to anchor. By looking at this graph, you either see on one side people leaving a podcast host, and on the other side, people joining a podcast host. If you're a decent podcast host, then hopefully you should be smaller on the left-hand side than you are on the right hand side. I see more people moving to you than from you. Buzzsprout is roughly equal at the moment.
Libsyn, lots of people leaving SoundCloud and lots of people leaving pod bean roughly equal, but anchor is the company, which is just scooping up so much traffic and so many Podcast as it's quite a thing.
There you go. Thank you for backing up my argument from earlier.
Yes, exactly. I mean, to be fair, it lists individual shows it doesn't show clients. So there's a bunch of podcasts leaving art 19 and going to either simple cast. Or Omni studio and to be fair, having spoken to Lex it art 19, it's two clients cast media and there's one other. And so it's not necessarily a particularly fair thing, just having a look at numbers of podcasts, but it still gives you a very interesting view into what Podcast is are doing and where they're moving to. Now. One of
my favorite expressions is from your fellow Australia. And I can call you that now, which sounds very odd with your English accent still is Edward de bono. and he was the inventor of lateral thinking. And one of the I, one of his favorite or his favorite sayings, and my favorite expressions is complexity is failed simplicity. And that is where I think anchor is going to be. Popular, because it's just simple to do it's on your phone. You can do it at it. You can get going and it's free.
And I think that's the, probably more the keyword than simple it's free. And I think that's where they're going to see a big uptick.
Yes, I think so. But then, lots of people leaving SoundCloud. There are people migrating to red circle, but not very many of them. So I think it's more than just being free. I think it is the UX and I think it is the opportunities that you get. It is very simple. And one of the difficulties that many other podcast hosts have with anchor is that. They've done some clever sort of hacking if you like into the Apple podcasts system, which just means that it's easier to get into Apple podcasts.
And none of the other podcast hosts have done that possibly for the right reasons, but you can understand why some of the podcasts hosts quite angry at them and want to talk them down as every opportunity. So what
can Podcast hosts do? I talked a few minutes ago about, what if Apple bought a hosting company and then I talked about. What are the squeeze middle as far as I'm concerned. Cause Spotify is going off and doing one thing hosting itself, hasn't evolved all either. we talk about Apple, not doing anything, but has the hosting industry done much?
certain hosting companies now are adopting Podcast index is tags and moving it forward, namely Buzzsprout our sponsor has done it and there are many others who are now doing it. But why is it that they haven't done it, sooner? and what are they in the video? Cool chain between making money, hosting, providing services, pod Paige who you, we, you interviewed, Brenda Mulligan has done a better job of him proving the Podcast hosting landing page than the whole of the industry has done for decades.
why are they so
slow? the Buzzsprout pages are very nice. The captivate pages are very nice. I think that it's, it's difficult to look at the amount of money that Podcast hosting is generally charged at about $20 per person of which bandwidth does cost quite a lot. It's quite difficult to work out, how much money you can plow into new technology, into new. Ideas. And I think also you have the old card. Who are they going? No one must change our audio. that's really important. Nobody has changed our audio.
And actually, if you're going to read it, I really do a great job at being a great podcast host. Then one of your jobs is to re transcode the audio to make it sound brilliant at as low bit rate as you possibly can. And that's what anchor does actually. Yeah. as well as other Podcast hosts as well. So I think, there's a bunch of these truths that have been passed down by the great old guard of your and anchor.
I think one of the reasons why anchor annoys these people so much is that anchor have come to the podcasting world with different ideas and basically gone. It looks as if it's really difficult to get into Apple. Podcast we'll just hack away in. That's fine. You can just do it under our own account. That's dead easy. what else can we do? Oh, we'll, we'll make, 'em, we'll make, questions and answers and, and videos work. they'll only work with their Spotify, but that's enough.
and they've just gone ahead and done it. And you try getting that through some of the larger Podcast house in particular, and that that's a difficult, difficult job
now. We'll move on. So one final story, James, that caught my eye was on the Mastodon thread. And I noticed that there's a whole story about categories. We talked about categories a couple of weeks ago. We had a question from a listener called Mark asking us about the value of categories. We talked about Apple. Owning the category segment. And then we had that final story about whether there will be a climate change category.
we said that, wouldn't it be great if there was a bottom up rather than top down taxonomy. Now it seems that, the Podcast index guys are working on some new ideas around categories what's going on. Yeah.
So this is the Podcast index Mastodon which is at Podcast index.social. I think. And it's always worthwhile having a quick peek in there. There's all kinds of conversations going on and they're talking about categories now. I think that they're doing a couple of things. I think one of the things is that they are trying to reinvent the wheel a little bit. there is an iTunes category tag in RSS, but what happens if you don't use the iTunes namespace while you'll need a category tag?
And so therefore this. Think is them working out what's the category tag should be if we're not going to use iTunes. I think we are going to use iTunes for a long, long time. So I'm not entirely sure of the relevance of that work. But having said that, one of the things they are talking about in terms of categories is either coming up with a great big list of categories.
And already the get hub is filling up with people wanting an I'm wanting tabletop games, please, as a category, because there are lots of podcasts about tabletop games and then somebody will come along and say, I want a category about underwater knitting, please, because I think there's a good, and so all of that will happen and I've put forward the idea that instead of.
Categories, as you say, top down categories, think of it the same way as we used to put tags on our photographs with flicker, for example, or hashtags with Twitter or subject in medium, those sorts of things. And actually, that means that you can type in anything you like.
And if enough other people are typing in the same category, then eventually you get to a point where you have a set of pretty good categories, which are malleable in which just work and potentially if you have a look at the type of people who are involved in the Podcast index at the moment, they're all like me. They're all white men of a certain age who come from a very Western background. And that's probably not the right people to be setting. A set of global categories for podcasts.
So I wonder whether the idea of tags rather than categories might be something that more people might get behind. I don't know. No, I think
that would work. I dirtied myself yesterday and used Facebook and I put a hashtag in there. And actually what was quite interesting as I created my own hashtag that I wanted for the post. And then Facebook informed me nicely that 1000 people had only used them that tank. So it was a very low tag usage. That's great.
So I think that's a great way of actually using that bottom down ability to tag something and create it and then find out if there's a. Group of other people using that same take, there is a method.
Yeah, no, I think so. And, when you add a category to a medium post, for example, it shows you again how many people are following that medium category. So you can actually work out, do I want this in Podcast or do I want this in podcasting? Oh, I clearly want it in podcasting because podcasting is four times as large as Podcast, for example. So it's that sort of thing. And I think, yeah. Something which is.
A little bit more open and would allow anyone of any culture of any backgrounds to be able to work out what categories their podcasts should be on there. And if there are no categories, brilliant use the iTunes categories. I don't know. Maybe that's the plan, but we'll see what other people do. And the wonderful thing about the Podcast index is that it is a very open and. Democratic thing. And everybody is entitled to their views, no matter how wrong they
are, but I think what you said that last part there, James was telling, which is discoveries, one of the biggest challenges in podcasting. And I think if I could follow a category that I. Was particular to, because in the long tail of podcasting, it's always going to be a small niche market.
And so if I could find all the people who did underwater knitting, I would be very excited and I could follow their Podcast and that discovery element, because they could create their own hashtag means that you can build bottom up communities rather than this top down. We tell you what you can go into in which box you're allowed.
Yeah, I think there is something there. And I think Eric Newsom who was instrumental in NPR, getting into podcasting and is now running his own agency. He. Said something very clever on a panel that I was on. Not so long back, he was talking about the amount of podcasts out there, which at the moment is 1.9 million. And he was saying that they are 1.9 million niches. It's very different to radio radio is broadcast.
You're trying to reach as many people as you possibly can with a Podcast you're almost trying to reach your niche or your niche if you're American. And so really 1.9 million niches as a way to think about podcasts or 1.9 million communities, and I really liked that. And I think that's a really good definition between. What radio is really good at, which is reaching lots of people and what podcasting is good at, which is potentially reaching lots of people, but actually reaching the right people.
Yeah. I,
I love Kevin Kelly and he's got a thousand true fans is one of his books and that's fundamentally how I base podcasting around. I think you've got find your 1000 true fans and with subscriptions, get them to pay. A small micro payment, and therefore you have a sustainable business, which is what Michael was saying, allowing creators to make a living off this. I think that's the model. I personally, I think the advertising model can stay at the top end of the table.
And I think, people like Joe Rogan and the top end can play with advertising. I find it messy. I think dynamic content rather than dynamic ad insertion is going to be how I like to call it because I think I can use dynamic content insertion. In my Podcast to do clever things like events, speaker announcements, other things, and it doesn't always have to be about a sponsor or an advertiser, which just makes. Making a podcast for me doubly hard 98.
Now, one of the other things, as I was trawling through the lovely mastered on a thread was I noticed that a couple of people have started to integrate the new. Value for value funding model that Adam and David pushing forward, given that we're talking about Spotify subscriptions and Apple subscriptions and 10 pods added it into their Podcast catcher, what do you think is going to happen there? Jane?
Yeah. there are two bits of funding or value for value that Podcast index is working on. One of those things is a simple, straightforward funding tag, which is, I think the one that antenna pod is currently working on, which allows you to put in your podcast, feed a link, which is basically a support this podcast link. We used to have something relatively simple that Marco came up with from overcast.
And I think, that's a simple, straightforward thing that quite a lot of Podcast apps could put in there. There's another thing, which is the value for value thing, which has to do with cryptography it's to do with SATs, which are a Satoshi is the scent. Of a dollar in a Bitcoin world. If you see what I mean. So lots of Satoshi's make up one Bitcoin.
And so the idea behind the value for value thing is that as you listen to a podcast, you are paying the podcaster or paying the Podcast and their co presenter and their hosting company or whatever you are paying them a small flow of Satoshi. And you can listen to pod news in that way.
If you have this Fink's chat app and I will get a tiny amount of Bitcoin every time you have a listen, one of the problems I think with it is that it's a value system, which works on how long you listen to a podcast, not how valuable that podcast is. So pod news is only three minutes long or four minutes long. I would like to think it's quite valuable. This Podcast. Yeah. Is I think this week it'll be about an hour long.
I would think that it's also quite valuable, but not necessarily the same value per minute that you might get from the pod news. Podcast I think, we need to be wary of encouraging Podcast is not to edit encouraging Podcast is not to be concise just because they'll actually get more money if their Podcast is longer. I'm not sure that that's a clever plan, but there may well be lots of other ways of doing it. But as you've heard me. Talk all the way through this. It does sound quite complicated.
Doesn't it sound? It does. So
you don't think it's a bunch of Tosh then? you do think they might be,
I occasionally upset Adam in there because I'm talking about, when can we expand the value for value tag to include real money? And, and Adam's very upset because I think Adam believes that the future is Bitcoin and, and a bat and a theory there may well be weird and wonderful
may well be, Bitcoin exceeded the value of gold briefly this week. It doesn't exist.
Sam wow. It
does.
Does it doesn't exist? What is it? 20% of all Bitcoin lost. That's the figure that I've heard 20% of all Bitcoin will lost that's because they'd never existed in the first place.
No, they're locked in the side of wallets that no one can get into. That's even funny.
They never existed. anyway. Yes, cryptocurrency it's it's the future. It's not
right. you better have a chat with Ilan then. Okay. Now that's the end of this week show. So James, what's coming up in Podland for you.
I am speaking at pod Fest tomorrow, tomorrow night. My time I'm speaking at pod Fest, it's two 30 in the morning. Nothing's going to go wrong there, particularly nothing's going to go wrong there because the previous one night is a trivia quiz at the local school, which is quite a well-known trivia quiz for all of the parents to get quite drunk. And then I'm speaking at Podcast at two 30 in the mornings. So that's going to be good, but anyway, join me.
If you can, if you don't have tickets for pod Fest, then use the code pod news and you can get in for free. I'm also speaking at rain, the rain Podcast business summit in New York in a couple of weeks, and do a web search for that. That's a very fancy. Industry thing that you should get involved with, I will be chatting with Brian Moffett, who is the big cheese at MPR. I'm sure he's got a proper job title, but that's what I like to think.
And then there's radio days, Asia coming soon as well, which is radio days, asia.com. What's coming up for you. You've you've been launching a. Radio station. And one of the things, normally when I'm here looking at you through these Podcast interface that we use, I can see all of the things that's, that's written on your whiteboard, but I noticed this week you've made your background blurry. So I can't really all of the things that you're planning on your white
board. That's probably the wisest thing. yeah, the list is longer than I have time. That's the problem. Now I, we launch on Monday, my God, six 30 in the morning, I will be in the studio seven o'clock. We launched river.radio, which is very exciting. And why am I doing, I have no idea. Some days when I think about all the conversations we had about how radio is dying and podcasting is the future. So why go and launch a radio station, but there you go. We'll see what happens next.
That's me for Monday
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