Wondercraft's ad studio; NFC Podcast Beacons; Podcast Discovery's virtual 3D studio

We hear from Oskar Serrander, CEO of Wondercraft, about their new AI studio that promises to revolutionise ad production. Plus, we explore the significant leadership change at Libsyn and the sale of Pair Networks.

We introduce Podcast Discovery's virtual studio, enhancing video quality with professional setups and 3D modeled backgrounds, thereby increasing the chances of your podcast clips going viral. We chat with Josh Divney.

And we learn about the NFC-enabled podcast beacon from Custom Podcast Solutions, with Mathew Passy.

Transcript

James Cridland: 0:00

It's Friday, the 9th of August 2024.

: 0:04

The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.

James Cridland: 0:13

Yes, I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News. Hello.

Sam Sethi: 0:16

I'm Sam Sethi Gosh wake up. The CEO of True Fans.

James Cridland: 0:21

I was wondering where you were there for a second. Yes In the chapters. Today. Podcasters earn more than $350 million from fans on Patreon. Amazon Music has launched a new AI-powered feature for podcast discovery.

Oskar Serrander: 0:35

Hi everyone, this is Oscar Sarander. I'm the CEO and co-founder of WonderCraft. We just released our new studio this week, so I'm very excited to be with you on the show today.

Mathew Passy: 0:46

Hi, my name is Matthew Passy. I am the co-founder of Custom Podcast Solutions and I'm excited to talk to you later about the podcast beacon.

Josh Divney: 0:53

And I'm Josh Divny, content leader at Podcast Discovery, a marketing agency for podcasts here in the UK, and later on we'll be talking about the new virtual studio we've created to help remote podcasts look great.

James Cridland: 1:10

They will. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout, with the tools, support and community. To make sure you keep podcasting, start podcasting, keep podcasting with buzzsproutcom. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review. Now, sam, just before we start chapters. Yes, I've always wondered if people actually use them.

Sam Sethi: 1:27

Well, if we put them, in, like last week, we forgot. But when we do put them in, yes.

James Cridland: 1:32

Gosh, I have had so many people from last week and, by the way, the chapters, I think, may be now in, but I've had so many people from last week saying where are the chapters? No chapters here. People tweeting saying where are the chapters? No chapters here. People tweeting saying where are the chapters? Buzzsprout, it's all your fault, it's not, it's not, it was my fault. So that was really interesting. If you ever want to test whether somebody actually cares about something, then stop doing it for a week and see what happens. So sorry about that, but the chapters are in this week, I promise yes, and the graphic arts, all the rest of it.

Sam Sethi: 2:06

Now, james, come on, spill the beans. You've left me hanging here. You said a major hosting company has lost its CEO and has sold parts of its business to someone else. We've heard from multiple sources. We've contacted those involved. Come on, come on. Can you say so? Who did you check with? Well, I didn't check with anyone. Todd Cochran tweeted out quite happily oh, I'm still the CEO of Blueberry. So he said it's not him.

Josh Divney: 2:32

Don't need me, Todd Cochran.

James Cridland: 2:34

Well, yes, no, it's John W Gibbons who is no longer the CEO of Libsyn. We understand His departure was announced to the team on Tuesday. The company has also said, interestingly, to have sold it owns a internet service provider, pair Networks. It's a website hosting company which also owns a CDN, interestingly, and it has sold Pair Networks to a company based in Amsterdam, but I don't know what company that is. And, as of recording, libsyn hasn't made a statement nor responded for comment. I have texted three people text I know as well as email, and I've said this is what I'm saying and have got absolutely no statements, no comment at all. But I've now heard this news from five separate people. So I think it's probably truthful, I think you're safe. News from five separate people. So I think it's probably truthful, I think you're safe. So we've both met John. I've met him in the flesh a couple of times.

Sam Sethi: 3:29

I've interviewed John as well.

James Cridland: 3:37

Yeah, indeed, he's on a previous version of this very show and yeah, and he's a good bloke, he used to run Pocket Casts. I think he used to be involved in a radio station as well, in Chicago, but I may have got that hideously wrong. But anyway, so no longer working at Libsyn. Would love to tell you more, but the company is saying absolutely nothing right now. So, yeah, so that's where we are Gosh.

Sam Sethi: 3:58

I wonder if we could say any more. No, move on, move on quickly. Move on, move on quickly. Right, wondercraft, james, have launched a new AI ad studio. It already enables you to do translations. You've been playing with it for weeks and weeks, but they've now launched this AI studio and you actually went away and played with it.

James Cridland: 4:22

So what are your initial thoughts? Yeah, it's very clever. It's an ad studio. It writes, translates and produces studio quality ads in one simple platform. I basically said go and have a look at the Pod News front page and write an ad. Would you like to hear what the ad sounds like?

Speaker 3: 4:36

I would Want to stay updated on the latest in podcasting? Join over 31,000 readers worldwide with Pod News. Our daily briefing delivers concise global insights right to your inbox every weekday. Melissa Herrera from Mimosa Sisterhood says every newsletter is jam-packed with knowledge and tips for this ever-evolving industry. Make the most essential five minutes of your day with Pod News. Sign up now and keep your data safe and private. Visit podnewsnet and join the podcasting revolution.

Sam Sethi: 5:06

That's pretty good.

James Cridland: 5:07

That is not bad. It's taken all of the right bits, it's not made anything up, it's not hallucinated anything. It sounds a bit boring, but you know it's pretty good at that. So yeah, I was quite impressed.

Sam Sethi: 5:19

Could you change voices? Can you change anything else, or is it pretty static?

James Cridland: 5:23

You can change pretty well anything. So that was the default voice that it would come with, but you can change the voices um to have different accents, to be, you know, obviously male, female and all that kind of stuff. You can change the music, you can change um, all of the um. You can change all of the words as well. If you want to, I mean it can. It can, uh, essentially give you, give you a bunch of scripts and you can go in and change that. It seemed to work very, very well. So, yeah, I was fairly impressed at that. Actually, all I gave it was here's a website address. Go and make an ad for it. So yeah, blimey.

Sam Sethi: 5:58

So, given your radio background I mean radio companies do you think they'll use this?

James Cridland: 6:05

Well, and it's interesting, a friend of the show contacted me and said what did you think of that? And he writes ads and I write ads and you know I used to write ads and I said there are no shortage of companies that are out there that will use AI to make something that's beige and relatively uninspiring but professional. And you know I mean there's nothing wrong with that. You know it's a perfectly serviceable ad. It's not particularly exciting but it's a perfectly serviceable ad. If I was a radio sales exec going out with that, I think that's really useful. This is how some of the other companies which are quite similar, like Futuri's SpotOn or Enco's SpecAI they're called that because the point is to give an advertiser the idea of what a radio ad might sound like. But then we'll do it properly. And if you're going to use it for that, it's pretty good. If you're going to use it as your actual ad that you spend money on, then yeah, I mean I think you could do better, but it's not a bad start.

Sam Sethi: 7:12

When I had my own radio station, one of the problems with doing ads for local businesses were they didn't want to pay the cost of a script writer, they didn't want to pay the cost of a voiceover artist, and when you combined all of that cost together plus the cost of you know the spots that they would have on different shows, they're like oh, no, no, no, far too much. You know, I I don't have that much money, whereas something like this would have been okay give us what your brief is, we'll stick it into here and there you go, and it would have been a really quick. Now, agree, it wouldn't have been the most exciting ads, but they would have been ads that sounded professional and good enough.

James Cridland: 7:50

So yeah, indeed, and I think you know you can certainly from a advertiser, from a local advertiser's point of view some of these local advertisers don't have the first idea about marketing, having written radio commercials in a dim and distant past of my career, and they really do not know how advertising works, and so actually that's a pretty good start.

James Cridland: 8:15

And I think you know you keep on being rude about Apple podcasts, because Apple podcasts, in your words, gives podcasts away for free. Well, newspaper advertising gives the layout of the press ad away for free, and that's why no local advertiser wants to pay for a radio commercial, because they don't see that there's actually any skill in layout, in copywriting, in all of that. And so you know, and unfortunately this will only you know move that issue a little bit further on. So yeah, you know it's going to be an issue, but if it opens new businesses' ideas to what their business might sound like on a podcast or on the radio, then I think that's a good thing well, I thought you know, to find out more about this product, we would talk to the source.

Sam Sethi: 9:11

So I spoke to oscar saranda, the ceo of wondercraft, and asked him tell me more about this new product you've got there is a lot of problems in the ad production kind of workflow for audio companies.

Oskar Serrander: 9:25

All around the table really, for brands to be able to produce audio ads as fast as they want to, at the speed of culture, meaning you can go live with something quite fresh and a fresh message way faster. That doesn't really exist today because of the lengthy and costly production workflow that exists. So there's something that I wanted to fix and I wanted to fix for my entire career, and we saw that we were really getting a lot of traction on that early on with the first version of the platform and since then, together with our partners around the world really studios, marketers, brands and a lot of ad media companies that need to have these capabilities more in-house we started building out these capabilities and the big release now this week was with our new timeline editor, sound effects, audio clips and everything centered around really empowering creatives to start working on copy, collaborate with their team and produce studio quality audio advertising and voiceovers for their projects, and we're super proud of it and we're coming out of the gate running quite fast. So it's been a busy week with lots of demos and showcasing these new capabilities and it's just a joy.

Oskar Serrander: 10:41

It's a lightweight audio editor and it is so much fun. Sound effects, for instance, one of my favorite new features. You can just type anything. Rainy New York with dogs barking in the background will generate those sound effects for you and you'll be able to edit that into your production. So it's a delight to create audio ads in voiceovers very quickly.

Sam Sethi: 11:02

Where or who do you see using this? Is it specifically designed for ad agencies? Is it designed for the average podcaster? Is it designed for the radio stations? Where do you see it fitting best first?

Oskar Serrander: 11:16

The way that I would answer that question is that we really want to bring everyone together around the creative idea and make WonderCraft a tool that you can use further upstream in the creative process, because one thing that bothers me a little bit, being in an industry, is that audio first, ad creation is often a kind of an afterthought. It's something that you oh, we need a radio ad, or we need a music streaming ad or we need a podcast ad quite late in the process, and what we want to do is allow for great copywriters and creatives all around the table to be able to start drafting ideas and have audio be part of their ideation way earlier, and it's a delight to work with it. And again, the fast way that you can create variations is also very important for advertisers and everyone producing audio, because you can then start creating podcast specific narrations or music streaming, which is different than podcasting right, and even radio, which is vastly different. You need to have a little bit more attention grabbing sound effects or or just a different composition of the ad music stream. You need an early hook to keep people on sort of don't zone out.

Oskar Serrander: 12:22

In podcasting, you can be a little bit more mellow and more conversational. As we know, it's a super powerful channel for that kind of messaging and it really allows itself for that. So what I really love about this is that you can create so many variations so quickly and start really testing out different formats, and I think that's a huge strength of the platform yeah, one of the things that I would like to try and work out is where next with wondercraft, are you going to get into a video?

Sam Sethi: 12:49

is this a natural evolution from audio to video for you guys, where you will produce video ads as well?

Oskar Serrander: 12:56

we're definitely thinking that long term. What we are very diligent on right now is the quality and for for us, it's about the workflow, it's about the tool itself how you can collaborate with your team and reduce all that friction that now exists in these workflows. My previous company we could rack up hundreds of emails for just one single campaign, right, and it's really hurting organizations that deal in podcasting and music streaming to kind of handle and onboard new advertisers. So my big dream here, and our big dream, is really to make audio more accessible to brands. That's the end goal, that's a mission, and we want to do that by creating something that is further upstream in the creative process, so brands can start thinking audio more. Because, at the end of the day, what I think for music and it's not only music but for the audio industry in general is that we need more advertisers in the space. We can just count the thousands of advertisers that are active in podcasting, and I don't think that's a sustainable way to do it. So I think there needs to be a creative tool that really unlocks more excitement around creating ads, and I think this is the way to do it. I think audio needs to compete a bit more with digital channels like Google and Meta and TikTok that provide the full A to Z tools to produce and deploy ads Video.

Oskar Serrander: 14:22

I'll get back to your question now. Sorry video let me get back to your question now. Sorry video is certainly on our roadmap, but we don't think that technology is really there yet to make it exciting and make it a really easy tool to produce that. But that's happening very quickly, so we are part of our r&d is actually exploring that as well. So eventually I think wondercraft will have a video solution for that type of advertising as well to add your own imagery or videos, but also maybe generating creatives in that format as well.

Sam Sethi: 14:51

One tool I use a lot is Descript. Now I use that to take interviews, like we're doing now, and I'll edit those within Descript. If I listen to what I can do with Wondercraft, I could take the recorded edit and I could translate that. I can clip it out. I could take that and ask it to take a subsection of it, summarize it. Is there any way that you will start to extend the reach of what Wondercraft can do? Maybe just have it as a audio tool for editing as well, a la Descript.

Oskar Serrander: 15:26

Not impossible, sam. I mean we've been live for six months. We're developing very fast. We're building out their team to be able to really build on the use cases that we uncover, together with a lot of our partners. We're blessed to have so many amazing customers on the platform that big teams, smaller producers, marketers that give us these insights into their needs, and we're building that way. So it depends on where this kind of takes us. We'd like to test things out and see how we can make this even a better tool, and I think where we are now is just the first start of it Just a couple of days in, and the new studio and the editor is fantastic, but we have a lot of ideas where we can take it. So, yeah, all of this is possible. We're just setting the roadmap as we kind of uncover these little pockets of demand for better services. So that's the best answer I can get on that right now, that's right.

Sam Sethi: 16:18

Let's see if I can tease it out of you. What else is on the roadmap then?

Oskar Serrander: 16:21

Well, one thing that we're excited about is that we've built this network of translators that we use for quality control and assurance. And, again, our stance on AI is really to improve the workflows, and I love that. Every user that we use that come on board, that are accustomed to whether you're sitting on agencies or brand side there are quite nowadays accustomed to using generative AI to just speed up their ideation, et cetera. I think that's an important part of what we're building, and then I think what we're looking at next is the translation within the studio. So we actually have quite a lot of customers around Europe and in Asia which is part of why I'm so tired, sam because there's late night calls with Asia and early morning calls with Europe.

Oskar Serrander: 17:07

There's late night calls with Asia and early morning calls with Europe, but what they see is a demand for being able to create ad copy for quite a long list of different languages. And if you don't speak, if you're sitting in Singapore and you're creating a campaign around many different languages but you don't speak Japanese, for instance, you need to have a kind of a human quality control function in there to be able to say that, okay, this is actually localized copy, so we already have that big network of translators that we work with, which is a beautiful thing we talked about in the last episode, and I think in this fall we're experimenting with lifting that into the studio so you can write copy across many different markets and actually have a quality control from a copywriter or translator who can help you make it perfectly localized. So that's one service that we're looking at.

Sam Sethi: 17:55

If I want to go and play with it. If people want to go and see demos of this, where would they go? Oscar?

Oskar Serrander: 18:00

Oh great, you can go to wondercraftai. You can also reach out to me or team at wondercraftai. We'd be happy to do demos. We make it really easy for people to come on board.

Oskar Serrander: 18:11

We understand that this is a very new and novel way of working, but it is truly. It has such a huge benefit for the time, cost efficiency and just, I'd say, making teams happier at work, because we remove a lot of the administration and a lot of the approval and a lot of the approval and a lot of the long email chains. So please reach out to us at team at wondercraftai we're happy to give you a demo. We also do training sessions for entire teams. We do open office hours for all the big enterprises that we bring on board to make sure that everyone gets quick solutions and help to produce quite quickly. But the tool is very intuitive and easy to use so people learn it quite quickly, which is fascinating. But we understand that it's new. So we want to really help service everyone that comes on board and be happy to do so for anyone who listens to this Cool.

Sam Sethi: 19:00

Oscar, thank you so much. I'm going to go off and play now. I'm going to actually go and try and create some ads and see what I can do. Probably never going to make public airing because I'll be that bad, but I'm not creative enough. But thank you so much. This is going to be a lot of fun, oscar, speak to you soon, my friend.

Oskar Serrander: 19:17

Thank you so much, sam. I appreciate you, and thank you for having me on again.

James Cridland: 19:21

Oscar Saranda. There's a full version of that interview in the Pod News Extra podcast and Oscar and his team will be at Podcast Movement in a couple of weeks.

Sam Sethi: 19:30

Now, James, I saw a story you wrote that said podcasters earned more than 350 million from fans on Patreon. Did you say Patreon or Patreon?

James Cridland: 19:40

Oh, I don't know. I think it's Patreon.

Sam Sethi: 19:41

But yeah, because you're a patron, you're a patron aren't you.

James Cridland: 19:45

So that'll be why? Yeah, yeah.

Sam Sethi: 19:46

So I thought that was too good to be true, because that, on average, would be $8,750 per podcaster. Now call me old fashioned, but that number seems totally skewed. So what's going on with Patreon?

James Cridland: 20:02

Well, I think there are. I mean, an average means, of course, that you are going to have many more people that earn an awful lot more from Patreon and an awful lot of people who earn an awful lot less. There are some people who earn an awful lot from that platform. That's a yearly figure, so $8,750. What's that divided by 12? That is $729 a month. I would imagine that there will be a fair amount of people who are earning that amount from Patreon. I mean, you know, that's the platform that PodNews uses for its monthly supporters, and I'll tell you now we are earning significantly more than $729 a month out of that. So, yeah, so I think there may well be quite a lot of people who are earning a lot. I do know that there are some people who are earning not just tens of thousands of dollars, but hundreds of thousands of dollars through that platform, so that will obviously be pushing that average up quite a lot.

Sam Sethi: 21:09

Podcasting is the second biggest category on the platform, with video being the first. How do you use it then?

James Cridland: 21:16

Well, so there are a number of different ways that people use the Patreon platform. Mostly, you are supposed to use the Patreon platform to give your users exclusive content and you know an extra podcasts and all of that kind of stuff. You can host a podcast with Patreon. You can obviously do newsletters to your subscribers. You can do all of that kind of thing. You can put videos behind a paywall. You know as well they don't tolerate anything that's naughty, and that may well be why podcasting is number two.

Sam Sethi: 21:55

X has got all of that now.

James Cridland: 21:57

Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly, so, yeah, so they seem to do a fair amount there, and the way that you would link to it is the way that I've heard some people link to it is they will say patreoncom slash podnews. The way that I would link to it is podnewscom slash Patreon, because I would prefer to own the first link that somebody goes to, just in case they ever want to change. But yeah, so that's essentially how that works. I think the interesting thing about Patreon is that it is a brand. It's a brand that people have heard of.

James Cridland: 22:31

It's a brand that people trust, and I actually coded my own because I wanted to, at the time, be able to allow people that didn't want to pay in American dollars to become a supporter, and at the time, patreon wasn't offering that, so I coded my own through Stripe. Very, very few people use that because they didn't trust my own brand and they would rather trust a brand like Patreon with their card information. So I think there's probably something to be said for having a good brand that people know and respect and using that as one of your tools to earn some money.

Sam Sethi: 23:17

I'm going to have a look at it much closer, because I think there's some things that are really interesting. Isn't there Now, james? Moving on then virtual studios. What are virtual studios?

James Cridland: 23:30

Well, this is very cool. So a company called Podcast Discovery, which is a podcast marketing agency. They have launched a thing that they call the virtual studio, and actually it's two things. Firstly, it's a camera and lighting kit that they send to each contributor. So if you are, you know, if we were to use their particular tools, then they would send us a camera and lighting kit with a green screen and everything else, but also they would build us a virtual studio that would sit behind us.

James Cridland: 24:03

So you're sitting there in riot-torn England with the smoke of the burning cars behind you and the smell of toasting racists, and I am here in Australia with all of the problems that we have, and instead of seeing our backgrounds, you would see a beautiful 3D modelled virtual studio. You may have seen it on the Pod News website yesterday. They've done some research as well that actually says that if you shoot video clips properly and nicely, then they are more than twice as likely to go viral than clips that are just shot on a scratchy old webcam. So I was quite curious about this. So I caught up with Josh Divney from Podcast Discovery and I asked him first what that company does.

Josh Divney: 24:54

Podcast Discovery is a UK marketing agency for podcasts, helping great podcasts get discovered At least it's easier if they're great. We work with Pod Save the UK, which is Nish Kumar and Coco Khan's politics podcast, a spin-off for Pod Save America. We worked with Pod Save the UK, which is Nish Kumar and Coco Khan's politics podcast, a spin-off for Pod Save America. We worked with Podimo on their sort of UK installation and efforts and we work with the Economist on some of their new releases and a whole array of podcasts new and some ongoing, always on podcasts.

James Cridland: 25:26

Very cool. So this week you launched something called the Podcast Discovery Virtual Studio. What is a virtual studio, Josh?

Josh Divney: 25:35

At Podcast Discovery we have something called Podcast Rex, which has a website and different facets as content lead. The bit I look after are our social channels, where we aggregate great podcast content, video with the view of getting people to listen to that podcast. And what became apparent really quickly in the podcast we were choosing to clip and publish is that, regardless of the content and the hosts and what's actually being said, the raw video quality matters massively. We saw that videos were twice as likely to go viral if they were filmed professionally rather than on a webcam. So I wanted to think of a solution that fixed remote webcam podcast recordings and made them look more professional to get over this hurdle. So the virtual studio is our idea to deal with that and it sort of comes in two large parts. The first is to boost the video quality that is happening on the remote recording. So we have box kits that we send out to contributors. These can be regular contributors or remote sort of one-offs. There's a very clear instruction manual that helps you set up a home record system and that can slot into any existing production process that you have, whatever it should be. We can work with you on that, and essentially it's a nice camera, some great lights, a good green screen. That means that if you put your arms beyond it, your arm doesn't disappear. We don't want disappearing limbs. So we like to make the video quality look as good as possible and our aim is to do that in a box kit that simply goes out to the contributor. We log on with them remotely or can go as a personal install, get it set up for them, make it look great so that no other video production expertise is required. It look great so that no other video production expertise is required. Then they have good looking video.

Josh Divney: 27:30

The next problem was backgrounds can be messy, they can be different, they can be unreliable. Mostly they lack a sort of visual identity for the podcast, which, when we build studios in the real world, we like to try and incorporate a visual identity that will at least tie back in some way to the podcast square, so that if you see a social video on TikTok as you're swiping through, we want people to be able to at least recognize the logo or the hosts on that podcast square, as in Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever. So we wanted to fix the background. So we do that with a green screen primarily, and then that's fix the background. So we do that with a green screen primarily, and then that's where the virtual studio becomes very virtual, because we built for our friends the retrospectors a 3D environment. So the joy of this is that we can put cameras at any angle in any location. We can modify it totally.

James Cridland: 28:28

The two bits that you're doing. Firstly, I'm just sort of curious about the studio in a box thing or the video studio in a box. What are the problems that you're trying to get over by sending out a decent camera and a decent green screen? Is it lighting? Is the lighting bad? Are the cameras that people use just the webcams in their laptops? What's the issues that you're trying to get over there?

Josh Divney: 28:56

The biggest issue is always lighting. An absolutely terrible camera can look quite good with a well-lit scene, so that's where about probably 80% of the efforts go is lighting things correctly, and often that will mean turning off the domestic lights in your room, which is something a lot of people don't realise. But it causes glare, it causes a nightmare. Lighting green screens. So we light the green screen correctly and we light the person correctly. We then do, in our kits, recommend having quite a fancy camera as well. The sensors in webcams are quite poor, especially in low light conditions and in terms of dynamic range, and one of the joys about the camera we recommend is that we are able to log on remotely and control this camera's attributes. We are able to log on remotely and control this camera's attributes, so if your contributor, for instance, has no idea about aperture, priority or depth of field or focus, we can log on remotely and adjust that camera without being physically there. So we do recommend that as well as part of the kit. That's very cool.

James Cridland: 30:02

That's very smart, and you said that you would help set up these cameras and things as well. So I guess if somebody is doing a long-term show from their house or whatever, then you would actually go and set that up for them.

Josh Divney: 30:16

Yeah, exactly, we're very happy to do that, location dependent, of course, but yeah, it does help to physically be there and to show people what to do. But we do hope that our instructions for people who are self-installing are very clear and it's not a case of just getting an Amazon delivery delivered to that address. For instance, we adapt light stands so that the heights are correct and there are markings on them and things like that, so we receive all the kit beforehand. Put it together in a way that is easier to assemble for that contributor than just receiving a bundle of boxes the day before the record.

James Cridland: 30:55

The 3D studio which you will help build. That's something that you need to, I guess, understand what the podcast is about and actually work with those people to get what you put behind each individual guest, I guess.

Josh Divney: 31:15

Yeah, absolutely so. That's something we worked with when we did our sort of proof of concept with the retrospectors. We thought about themes of the show, um branding they wanted to include, and the joy is that it's very, very easy to adapt these sets. It's not a case of, for instance, when we helped design the pod save the uk studio adaptation. Um, you have to get things printed off and maybe they're not as bright as they looked in your renders, and then you have to wait three weeks for an LED sign to be made and delivered. The collaboration is much easier on these 3D studios because you can pop in a poster within a matter of minutes. You can see the effect. You can change your position very easily, so it's very easy to collaborate with clients and it's an important part of making sure they're happy with the space.

James Cridland: 32:07

Yeah, and it looks very, very smart. I mean the one that you have done, where you are in front of a large, expansive studio. You know it looks. It looks, you know, 100%, as if it's there, which is a very smart thing. But I guess quite a lot of this is all about branding as well.

Josh Divney: 32:24

Exactly, yeah, so we look at sort of two things, which is a general look and feel. So you're talking about lighting, colours, the sort of atmosphere you want to create. Is this something that's filmed up in an attic? Is this something that wants to look like a TV studio? And branding is very interesting because a lot of people who build studios at the minute make a beautiful looking studio with fantastic branding and it looks great. As soon as you crop that vertically for TikTok, you lose almost all identity in some instances. Yes, so something we spend quite a lot of time working on is okay. Okay, studio looks great. What does it look like when we put a vertical crop on the video? Have lost all the beautiful logos. Is there a little logo on display? What colours on display? So we think an awful lot about how it will look on social media once it's out there on TikTok and YouTube Shorts and Reels.

James Cridland: 33:21

Yeah, very cool. So if somebody wants to find out more about the Podcast Discovery Virtual Studio, whereabouts would they go?

Josh Divney: 33:27

So if somebody wants to find out more about the Podcast Discovery virtual studio, whereabouts would they go? So there's a wonderful explainer video on podnewsnet, as well as podcastdiscoverycom forward slash services, where you can find out more about how we build the 3D studios and exactly what's involved.

James Cridland: 33:40

That's very cool, and you mentioned Podcast Rex earlier. That's Rex, as in Tyrannosaurus Rex, as in a small dinosaur, or a large dinosaur, I guess which is a good website if you want to learn more about some of the big shows coming out both in the UK and in the US as well, and that's podcastrexcom. It is indeed Excellent. Well, there we are, josh. It's been a great pleasure and good to talk again. Thanks so much.

Josh Divney: 34:07

Brilliant. Thank you, James.

: 34:08

The Pub News Weekly Review. With Buzzsprout Podcast hosting made easy.

Sam Sethi: 34:16

I put up James last week that I'm leaving X. I've had enough. I think the platform is awful. I think Elon Musk is awful. Platform is awful. I think Elon Musk is awful, but I'm not the only one who thinks the platform is awful. There's a company called Garm who's being sued by X. Now, who is Garm and why are they being sued, james?

James Cridland: 34:38

Well, yes, it's not necessarily a company, it's an alliance of different advertising organisations. Garm basically produces something called the GARM framework, which helps you categorize material to make sure that if you are a nice, polite company, you don't want to be advertising next to awful, dreadful content. So some people use it. For example, if you're an airline, you don't want to advertise on a webpage which is talking about an air crash uh, that would be a mistake and so GARM helps you do that. But GARM also goes well.

James Cridland: 35:18

Actually, there's quite a lot of talks about drugs here, or there's some heffing and jeffing that's going on, um, uh, in this particular podcast or this particular YouTube video, and so therefore, automatically, we will flag this particular thing and you won't advertise next to it. And the advertiser says brilliant. And of course, x is deeply upset, because companies who have been using GARM have basically been saying, oh my goodness, x is full of racists and swearing and far right nonsense and it's all dreadful and you, mr Klein, shouldn't be advertising on it, and this is costing X millions and millions of dollars. And so, yes, and so they've got very upset and they are suing both GARM but also the World Federation of Advertisers and a few individuals as well. I'm not quite sure who the individuals are, but they are deeply, deeply upset.

Sam Sethi: 36:15

Well, didn't Elon Musk say F advertisers, we don't want you.

James Cridland: 36:18

I mean, yes, he did, don't advertise, you don't want them to advertise.

Oskar Serrander: 36:22

No, what do you mean If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with?

James Cridland: 36:30

advertising. Blackmail me with money, go f**k yourself but go f**k yourself, is that clear? So I don't think he's really got a a leg to stand on here. I, you know, I mean imagine being either donald trump's lawyers or elon musk's lawyers. I mean that must be a pretty thankless task well, no, not really, I think it's.

Sam Sethi: 36:51

It's very Imagine being either Donald Trump's lawyers, or Elon Musk's lawyers?

James Cridland: 36:53

I mean, that must be a pretty thankless task.

Sam Sethi: 36:55

Well, no, not really I think it's very lucrative actually because they just pick up the bat phone and go Sue, Just sue someone else. Sue someone today.

James Cridland: 37:01

Yes, I think that's probably it. But yes, Linda Iaccarino, who is X-Corps CEO, she posted a video. I wondered if you'd seen any of that video, Sam. Yeah, I saw the comedy hour. Yeah it was very good. There was quite a lot of acting in there. I mean she starts by saying how shocked she is.

Linda Yaccarino: 37:17

I was shocked by the evidence uncovered by the House Judiciary Committee that a group of companies organised a systematic illegal boycott against X. It is just wrong.

James Cridland: 37:30

I mean, it's not a systematic illegal boycott against X, it's a warning that you're advertising next to a bunch of racists. But anyway, and she then went on, and I did quite like, I have to say, I did quite like the little quote at the end of this little clip, the evidence and facts are on our side.

Linda Yaccarino: 37:48

They conspire to boycott X, which threatens our ability to thrive in the future. That puts your global town square, the one place that you can express yourself freely and openly, at long-term risk. People are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is constricted. No small group of people should be able to monopolize what gets monetized.

James Cridland: 38:14

Now, I disagree with everything that she says there, apart from right at the end. No small group of people should be able to monopolize what gets monetized. That's a nice phrase, and she's absolutely correct there. It isn't a small group of people, though, and that's not how all of this works. But yeah, it was quite a thing. But yes, they are very, very huffy about it. I mean, linda Iaccarino used to work for an advertising company. She must understand that brands don't want to advertise next to objectionable stuff.

Sam Sethi: 38:49

I mean, she's got the title of CEO, but she might as well have the title of a window cleaner or washer-upper, it makes no difference. I mean she only does what Elon tells her to do, so it really makes no difference. I mean, kara Swisher, who knows her personally, has told her to get out of the cesspit. I mean her career is going down faster than the Titanic and she just doesn't see it or she doesn't care. And you know X, if you just want to go after Elon tweeted about civil war in the UK and I've tried to block Elon on Twitter, I can't unfollow him, I can't block him, I can't do anything.

Sam Sethi: 39:25

It's his platform. He just pops up in my stream and so I just read through the, the comments below his his tweet. And if you just want to know what a cesspit looks like, just read those. I mean it is awful. And any advertiser who wants to put anything onto that platform against those comments, well, good luck to you with your advertising, because you're wasting your money and your time. But, um, hey, you know elon wants it, he's got it, it's his placing, it's his little playground, um, I'm sure on and well, I'm not sure, but I hope, even if he does try to sue them because he tried to sue open ai. He's tried to sue so many others. He does that as a threat because he's got lots of money and then he pulls back when he realises he's just going to lose.

James Cridland: 40:09

Yeah, no, I mean, imagine driving a Tesla. How embarrassing must that be? So I think I mean you know. The only thing that I would say is that there is a small amount of truth to what is being said, not that Twitter is a place for you to advertise on, because it very clearly isn't, but that some of these brand safety tools don't work too well and, as a result, some people are being, some publishers are being, unfairly penalised because these tools don't properly understand what it is that they actually do you also wrote about a brand safety tool that incorrectly categorises black-hosted podcasts as risky.

Sam Sethi: 40:57

Now that doesn't sound good.

James Cridland: 40:59

Well, no, and interestingly, sharon Taylor also wrote something about this recently as well.

James Cridland: 41:05

Yeah, I mean, there are some of these tools.

James Cridland: 41:08

If you're talking about a basketball player taking a shoot, you know shooting and scoring, then that you know.

James Cridland: 41:17

I mean shooting could mean with a gun and scoring could mean drugs, and so quite a lot of these quite blunt keyword-based tools were categorising conversations, particularly conversations from diverse people, as being risky, when they absolutely weren't called the Black Podcast Coalition.

James Cridland: 41:45

It's being run by Barometer, which is a brand safety company, and DCP, which is a company that makes shows, and it's a black podcast network, essentially, but shows will be tracked and certified for brand safety using the Barometer tools, which are a little bit less blunt than just looking at words, and that group says the shows that are part of the Black Podcast Coalition are actually more suitable and less potentially risky than the average show in the Edison Top 50, which is interesting to see. So I think there is a risk there of being miscategorised and there are benefits from better brand safety tools being used. So I think there is something to be said about that. But, as for all of the rest of the Twitter stuff, yeah, it's not a platform that I really feel particularly comfortable on anymore, a platform that I really feel particularly comfortable on anymore.

Sam Sethi: 42:47

Is this the danger, though, with all these types of brand suitability tools? We don't know the algorithms or what's the precursor to deciding what's safe and what's not safe. Do they publish them? Does Sounder say these are the criteria we use before we make a decision?

James Cridland: 43:10

we use before we make a decision. Well, so the criteria are up to GARM, and the GARM group have all of these criteria, but what GARM doesn't do is it doesn't turn around and say this is how you must rate a particular show as being risky in terms of, you know, talking about guns or whatever it might be. Or, you know, heffing and jeffing I mean swearing is relatively easy to spot in comparison to you know, some of the other things. So, yeah, so I don't think it's ever going to be as easy as that, but yeah, so I absolutely share some of the concerns there. As Linda Iaccarino says, no small group of people should be able to monopolise what gets monetised, and I think that she is absolutely right. That does say, though, that things like value for value are a good thing, because you're not relying on advertisers, and, frankly, it's the advertisers who are monopolising what gets monetised. Anyway, if you say the wrong thing, no advertiser is going to want to be on your platform, and so you know you always have that as a risk.

Sam Sethi: 44:14

Now Veritonic. We've talked about them a few times. They've released some new research about shopping and podcasting. What have they said, james?

James Cridland: 44:21

Yes, they have, and it's normal.

James Cridland: 44:24

You know research that says that podcast advertising is brilliant and everybody loves podcast advertising and you should be podcast advertising and blah, blah blah.

James Cridland: 44:33

But there was an amazing stat in the middle of it which said 46% will make a purchase from a podcast ad using their desktop computer. Now, more than 90% of podcasts are listened to on a mobile phone, so that basically says 46% of people will make a purchase from a podcast ad using their desktop computer, which means that 46% of all sales directly attributable to podcast ads are not being measured because they won't be on the same IP address. They won't be using the same user agent in the majority of cases, and so, therefore, I thought that was a fascinating number, because there are so many of these large companies who are basing their entire success on attribution, which is based on IP address in the main. Now, if I'm downloading a show on my home IP and then I drive to work and then I'm buying that thing on my office laptop, it's never going to be attributed to me, and I thought that was a fascinating thing to see.

Sam Sethi: 45:44

Is there a way around that? Is there a system, where it wouldn't be IP-based, that you could track across it?

James Cridland: 45:51

There is. There are two brand new systems. We spoke about them last week. One of them is called UID2 and one of them is called ID5. And those are astonishingly bad systems that basically yes, I mean they basically put your name next to everything, or put a unique ID of yours next to everything that you do online, and it looks like a privacy nightmare. So, yeah, it's the inevitable problem that you have of wanting to track that a podcast ad works, which inevitably means that all of your privacy goes out of the window, because, all of a sudden, you can't you know you can't do that without actually telling people who you are. Basically, um, yeah, and UID. Uid5 is just astonishing, absolutely astonishing, in terms of the uh, the spec and everything else. Dave Jones, the pod sage, was having a look at it last, last week and, yeah, he ended up um, he ended up being astonished, as I was when I first read the particular specification. He ended up being absolutely astonished about how the whole thing worked.

Sam Sethi: 47:10

Moving on, James, now podcast stats. It seems that 9.9% of podcast episodes were published on Spreaker in July. That sounds very good, doesn't it?

James Cridland: 47:20

Yes, 9.9% is pretty good. That makes them the number two podcast host, according to John Spurlock's Livewire, although they've got a long way to catch Spotify for Podcasters, though, who are number one. During July, 25.1 episodes were published with Spotify for Podcasters.

Sam Sethi: 47:39

They're a big old thing, so, yeah, always interesting to keep an eye on those numbers, well, also interesting to keep an eye on what they're doing, because it seems that Spotify for Podcass is now heavily marketing its competing hosting services. On its Spotify dashboard, you saw this. What are they doing?

James Cridland: 47:57

Yeah, they're very. I think that they're being a little bit cheeky here in that if you are hosting your podcast on a platform that is not Spotify for Podcasters, when you go into the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard to have a look at how your show is doing on Spotify, it says oh, you should be hosting with us. And there's a big thing on there that says host with us, switch your host to Spotify for Podcasters, distribute everywhere, get 24-7 creator support and monetize all for free. Well, that looks pretty good. It does, yeah, so I think they're doing. I think they're doing. I think it's a little bit cheeky, to be honest. But you know, I mean, of course they can do that, but they're not really playing fair with the rest of the podcast industry by basically turning around and saying and marketing themselves to anybody that wants to use their particular platform. So, um, yeah, I just thought I was a little bit cheeky, to be honest.

Sam Sethi: 48:54

Okay. So Spotify being cheeky or they're being very competitive and very aggressive in their marketing, depends which way you want to look at it. What are the hosts doing to counter it? Are they going to block, uh, the directory of Spotify, or are they just going to fall over and just simply have Spotify tickle their tummy and people move across? I mean?

James Cridland: 49:19

I would imagine that the hosts really can't do anything about that. Um, you know hosts need to link to Spotify. It's the number one app in most countries. Um so um, if you're a hosting company and you don't allow your podcast customers to list your show on or to list their show on Spotify, then you know people will leave you pretty, pretty quickly. So, yeah, I think just hosts have to have to grin and bear it. But I think you know it's just, it's just a bit cheeky of Spotify. I completely understand why they're doing it. Of course it's a good business decision, but is it the right thing for the industry? Not really, I don't think. Do they care about the?

Sam Sethi: 50:03

industry. I mean, we don't think they do so. Fundamentally they're not bothered.

James Cridland: 50:08

No, and I will bet you that in two weeks' time they will be at Podcast Movement. They'll have a little hidden room somewhere with, I don't know, free champagne and you know, and spa baths and and the likes of you and me won't be able to go in because they have no interest in the industry. The only people that they really care about are the big, are the big advertisers, and that's basically it. So, yeah, it's just a shame. I mean you know it won't be as bad as the podcast show where they ended up having the biggest space on the floor which you couldn't get into. Everybody was just turned away.

James Cridland: 50:54

I'm afraid you can't come in here, you know so, yeah, so I don't think it'll be quite as bad as that, but that was awful. But I think, yeah, spotify clearly don't care, do they? They don't care about anybody else and it's just them. But you know you're a big fan. It seems to be working for them. I'm a big fan of their strategy yeah, they are aggressive and they really are I mean even this.

Sam Sethi: 51:17

You know, I'm like if I was inside and doing their marketing, I'd be like go for it because you know what? Yeah, of course you would. Why wouldn't? The point? The point about it is they've got to hit revenue numbers, right? I was thinking about it last night. Everything they're doing, they're not making much increase in their music. Podcasting won't give them that much either. So they've added events, everything else they've been adding recently, and we'll talk about some of that later on. But this is just another way of getting more people onto the platform. And then guess what that gives them? Share price kudos, right?

James Cridland: 51:52

You know what I mean. I think that Spotify for podcasts, the podcast host, the anchor, I think that is something that is a cost sink for them. They have to pay for support, they have to pay for hosting, they have to do all of this stuff. It doesn't earn them specifically any money. You know there is no money earned from someone who is hosting a show on Spotify for podcasters. I mean, surely they should be trying to encourage as many third party podcast companies to be linking to them and to be using them, you know, as they possibly can do so, because that'll be cheaper for them overall, won't it?

Sam Sethi: 52:39

Yes, but it's less than one exclusive. Come on, it's cheaper than one exclusive, so they're okay. They've got rid of all the exclusives, so they've got tons of money lying around. But also the video thing they did a couple of weeks ago, where they're allowing you to upload video through Spotify for podcasts. I think they're saying, look, you know, we still want you to put video up, we still want you to do all these other things. Yeah, we'll see. It's their new strategy, I guess. So we'll see if it takes off. I mean, the numbers will show in September and October.

James Cridland: 53:09

Yeah, no, indeed, indeed. It'll be interesting to see. Now let's go around the world. The good folk at Goalhanger have been posting all kinds of good numbers, haven't they?

Sam Sethi: 53:18

Yes, I liked your intro to this. He shoots, he scores, yes, yes, very good. Now, yeah, goalhanger, jack Davenport, gary Lineker and the like. They've been putting out numbers of tens of millions of downloads. I mean, I think it helps when you've got the Euros, so Gary Lindner's show, the rest is football. I think it helps when the politics of an election are going on. So I think their numbers have gone up considerably because of those two events. But, yeah, very well done to Goldhanger.

James Cridland: 53:49

No, I think they've done very well, so it's impressive. I mean, they're talking about tens of millions of downloads for each of their shows, so that's a very smart thing. Moving to India and India is the third largest consumer market for podcasts, according to Deutsche Welle. But a really interesting video of theirs. It's only three minutes long, but it explains why podcasts are so popular there. And one of the reasons why podcasts are so popular there is, well, lifestyle. There are a lot of people who are doing a lot of things and they're very busy, and so audio is good for them. Easy access as well in terms of, you know, access to mobile phones is very, very cheap in India. But the third one which I thought was really interesting, was something about censorship and there not being any censorship, and I was thinking is India really very strong for that sort of thing?

Sam Sethi: 54:45

I would say India's got a very strong censorship. I mean, if you look at any Bollywood movies, they are very, very strict on bodily contact and anything else. And I don't know enough about it to say for certain, but based on a cultural knowledge that I have, I would say censorship is very high. In terms of, yeah, it's a strong right-wing government of Modi. I would assume they would have a strong censorship. Maybe they don't.

James Cridland: 55:15

Well, and one of the interesting things I do know about India is that news on the radio is banned. You're not allowed to carry news on the radio at all. So if you run an FM radio station, there is no news on there. The closest that you get is things like horoscopes um there is no news on there. The closest that you get is things like horoscopes Um, but uh, you're not allowed to cover news. Only all India radio can actually do that. So perhaps, perhaps that's one of the reasons why podcasts are very interesting, because, of course, you can do news on a podcast.

Sam Sethi: 55:48

Uh, Jake Warren, friend of the show, was at the Guardian Foundation this week. He had some Indian podcasters coming over and he said actually quite apt, the Indian podcast market is somehow both still nascent and the third largest in the world at the same time. It is. Podcast events on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 56:10

Podcast movement is, of course, happening. August the 19th Code, pod News, will save you some money if you've not yet booked. The podcast movement 2024 app is now available as well, which you'll find in your app store. I've just been announced as a speaker, which is nice. I think I'm speaking four times, so you won't miss me. But come to the OSHA stand, which I think is on the Wednesday. It might be on the Thursday, but anyway, I'm doing stuff about AI tools and stuff like that, which I'm looking forward to doing, if only because it's live demos, and live demos is always fun. Quite a lot goes wrong if you're giving live demos, so I'm looking forward on doing that. It's 4.30 on the Wednesday at the OSHA stage, if you want to see that. Also, the Diary of a CEO Stephen Bartlett's there and somebody else is coming, isn't he?

Sam Sethi: 57:02

Yeah, Matthew Passy. Now, Matthew is somebody who's been doing something really interesting. He's got a product called Podcast Beacon. James, You've got a podcast beacon what is it?

James Cridland: 57:13

Yes, well, I've got a podcast beacon coming to me. Don't quite have one quite yet, but the idea is you bump your phone on this podcast beacon thing and up pops your podcast. It's a really easy way of sharing your podcast Well.

Sam Sethi: 57:31

Matthew Passy. I thought I'd reach out to him. He recently sold his company. He was basically twiddling his thumbs getting under his wife's feet, so I asked him what's your new idea? What's podcast speaking?

Mathew Passy: 57:43

Yeah, I thought I was going to have a lot of free time, but then we adopted a puppy, so that totally just made it to everything. So the funny thing is, when I was running the podcast consultant, I had lots of ideas. Things just kind of tumble out of my head as far as podcasting and I didn't have time to entertain any of them. So a buddy of mine and I we started a company we're calling custom podcast solutions and under that umbrella we're basically just going to throw out all these ideas that we have, test them all out. See what we're doing. We've been doing engraved wood blocks for people in their podcast. We're going to be doing custom podcast studio build. So if you want a studio, just go and talk to Todd Cochran. He needs a studio. Oh, he does. Oh well, I'll see if I can harass him at Podcast Movement about to see if we can help him with his next one.

Mathew Passy: 58:27

But so the thing that we're working on right now that is front and center because Podcast Movement is coming up is something we're calling a podcast beacon, and a podcast beacon is this idea of when you meet somebody in person and they ask you about your podcast. There's this awkward interaction of. How do you get them to check out your show? Right? Oh, you have a podcast. What is it? It's called blah, blah, blah.

Mathew Passy: 58:49

Okay, they've got to go to their phone, open up whatever their podcasting app is, search for the name. Then they got to click on it, turn it around and be like is this the show? Right, cause there's 87 with the same name on it. And then they can finally hit, subscribe or follow. We are trying to reduce that friction by creating these NFC enabled devices. Right now, we're doing a bunch of wearables like bracelets, key fobs, and the idea is simply just that you wear this, we program it with a link that'll take you to a special page for your show and, instead of all that work, it's just boom, tap onto the show and it makes things almost like a link tree with website rss, feed your apple, your spotify, and then figuring out ways to expand upon that.

Mathew Passy: 59:31

Give you more, more links social video, your store if you're selling stuff, and analytics. So just starting out. But that's the idea is to be able to what we say share your podcast in a tap. I like that.

Sam Sethi: 59:44

So your test bed is going to be at podcast movement.

Mathew Passy: 59:47

Yeah, we have a few that we are bringing to podcast movement that we've made special for a few folks that we like and know who we think will get a lot of benefit out of it. And then we're bringing a bunch of vinyl ones that we'll just program for people on the spot in exchange for their email address so we can get them on a newsletter and be able to share more information about these and other things that we're working on okay, so a couple of questions in my head.

Sam Sethi: 1:00:09

First of all, what's the price of these things?

Mathew Passy: 1:00:11

we are looking at somewhere in the range of like five dollars for the cheapest little vinyl ones up to maybe fifty dollars for these rubber ones that we can actually customize and put your logo on there, and the amount of things that have nfc in them are incredible. So we're really going to see what the market wants, what kind of products we. At one point we had put like a somebody talked about doing a pin on their chest and I had a bunch of ladies who were like, please do not put a pin on my chest where creeps are going to put their phone by me. So we're going to listen to the market and see what they want.

Sam Sethi: 1:00:43

One of the things that's gone straight through my head is the ability to bump phones and exchange your contact details. So I wonder whether a future version of this product that you're building is actually an app on the Apple Watch, where I bump it on the watch and it comes up with the same NFC enabled credentials. Or I can see that you're bringing to market the prototype and testing the prototype and seeing if that's the right product. But maybe it's just a nice app that simply allows you to do a phone to watch or phone to phone, even because I think there is that technology.

Mathew Passy: 1:01:18

I think that would be fantastic and one of the things right now that I think is limiting with the NFC. That, to your point, would be nice changes. You tap and you've got this notification. Then it's a fleeting notification. Right, it comes and it goes. What we'd like to see is that tap actually store that information, almost like a book list or a favorite, so that it's like oh, I tapped your watch great. Later I can go through and say all right, what were all the things that I tapped great, subscribe, click. And I think we're in the early stages of nfc technology and there's way more applications for this beyond podcasting. It's just this is the space we know and these are the people we know.

Sam Sethi: 1:01:53

So we figure why not try it here first and then take it from there and you said you know, within the consult scene, the group that you're working with now, you're going to have other ideas. What are your other ideas?

Mathew Passy: 1:02:02

Ooh, all right, so I will give you one that we are very close to showing off. We have a prototype that's almost getting ready, a podcast case. One of the things that I struggled with when I was consulting and working with clients was people who were away from their home studio or people who were working with guests. The equipment for podcasting is great, but it still all requires setup. It requires lining things up, plugging things in, checking this, checking that.

Mathew Passy: 1:02:31

We are really dead set on trying to make a product that you open, you hit record and you are ready to go. Everybody looks good, sounds good, everything is captured in high quality, and so that's really where one of our big focuses is going to be is on this podcast case. We have, like I said, we have a single person prototype that we're just going to get ready to finish up and actually lend to somebody to see how it works. But we've already got dreams for a two and four person one in the works. Nice, I can't wait to see one of those in the wild and yeah, that'd be great.

Sam Sethi: 1:03:04

May you bring a prototype to podcast movement. Maybe see it there.

Mathew Passy: 1:03:07

Oh, that would be lovely if we can. I'm not sure, but tempting, very tempting. I'm not sure, but tempting, very tempting. You've got two weeks, matthew, you've got two weeks. It's less about the prototype and more about will we have it back from our test subject by then?

Sam Sethi: 1:03:21

That's the bigger concern, because he's taking it on his little vacation really putting it through the wringer, matthew Passi, look forward to seeing you at Podcast Movement, so thank you very much.

: 1:03:29

Matthew, my pleasure Sam. The Tech Stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 1:03:34

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where Sam talks technology.

Sam Sethi: 1:03:38

So, James, the first one up is Ophonic has launched a speaker diarisation transcription tool. Diarisation, not a word I would have used.

James Cridland: 1:03:48

No speaker. Detection is probably the word that I would have used. Yes, it works.

James Cridland: 1:03:52

It works out who talks. Basically, they've had it for a while for multi-track, but that's cheating, really. This is for single track, so if you upload this podcast to them, they will automatically work out that there are a number of different voices, as the Buzzsprout tool already does, in fact, and it's very cool. Interestingly, the transcription tool that you get for free at Apple Podcasts doesn't have speaker diarisation, so if you do want speakers to appear in your podcast transcript in Apple Podcasts, the only way of doing that is uploading your own transcript, and this looks like a pretty good way of doing it transcript and and this looks like a pretty good way of doing it.

Sam Sethi: 1:04:39

Now, good news here um, new version of pod verse, version 5, is coming out. Um mitch, who has been very quiet. He even put out hey, podcasting 2.0. Sorry, I've been mia missing in action for so long. After working on pod verse for evenings and weekends for nine years and never making a paycheck off it, I needed to take some time away. But it's back to my main focus and I'm working on a totally new version. Everything will be rewritten from scratch, starting with the database and API. We'll be sharing brief updates here to the documents, progress and I hope 2024 is going well for everyone else. Go podcasting. Yeah, mitch, put that up on to Mastodon and all I'll say Mitch is welcome back and look forward to seeing Podverse 5.

James Cridland: 1:05:23

Indeed, yes, it's great to see Mitch back. There are quite a lot of people that do get a little bit burnt out by this sort of thing, and it's great to see him back, so that's a good thing.

Sam Sethi: 1:05:33

Now I don't know anything about this next story, other than you covered it back in February, a story about a company called Metacast.

James Cridland: 1:05:45

That's launched version one of its podcast app for Android. Tell me more. Yes, metacast, who we did cover in February when it was in very early beta. Yeah, I had a quick chat with them. I was a little bit worried about easy ad skipping, for fairly obvious reasons, but it's easy because it offers transcripts for every show and the transcript helps you read the ads and skip forward if you want to. That's basically what they mean by easy ad skipping. That's all right then it uses Apple Podcasts if you want to be listed in the thing, and it doesn't yet support creator-produced transcripts, but I have a feeling that it will do relatively soon. Always nice to see a new podcast app. It seems to be put together by a couple of people out of the northwest of the US and, yeah, available both for Android, but also available for iOS as well too.

Sam Sethi: 1:06:34

Nice. Amazon Music we said last week they're not doing much. It seems somebody must have rattled their cage, because they've launched a new AI-powered feature for podcast discovery.

James Cridland: 1:06:45

They have and it's very nice. It's a thing which is called Topics. It's only available in the US and I did ask them why it was only available in the US editorial reasons, apparently. And I did ask them why it was only available in the US. Editorial reasons, apparently. But it's based on automatically extracting things spoken about in podcasts. Do you remember we were talking about Microsoft's Open RAG or whatever that weird tool was called a couple of weeks ago? Well, it sounds Graph RAG. Yes, it sounds basically like that and yes, so if we talk a lot about Teslas, then there will be a little button underneath that says Tesla and you can press that button and it will show you other podcasts which have also talked about Teslas. So that's the sort of thing. Anyway, it appears to only work across top podcasts for now, presumably those podcasts that they are generating their own transcripts from. But worth a peek and if you're in the US, give it a go and see if it's any good, don't Acast do something similar called contextual advertising.

James Cridland: 1:07:42

Yes, I think that's basically the way that Acast does it, but it's not consumer focused, so you won't ever see it if you're, you know, obviously because Acast has no apps. But yeah, so I thought it was a nice you know experiment in terms of podcast discovery and that sort of thing.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:01

Now another podcasting app um PodLP has migrated to use the podcast index James.

James Cridland: 1:08:07

Yes, it used to use its own scrapers, its own RSS uh tools and uh. Basically, thomas, who um makes PodLP, has said it's far too complicated to end up doing that, and he's realised that it's going to be much easier if he just uses the podcast index for everything. So that's what he's doing now. That's an app that nobody will have heard of, but it is massive in certain parts of the world. It's available on all of the very cheap mobile phones, the flip phones that you can go out and buy for $10 or something, and so the podcast index now completely powering that particular app, which is great news.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:47

Another app, podcast app Castro has released a new version.

James Cridland: 1:08:51

Yes, which is nice. It's good to see the new owner of that is spending a little bit more time. Still an awful lot of technical debt stuff and not too much new features. But the new features come soon. So we're told. There was a podcast industry report from a company called Podmatch which was published for August. It seems to be full of relatively bad news in terms of the number of active podcasts, which fell last month. Only 12% of podcasts have reached 50 episodes. I think the point of it is, bluntly, to sell more subscriptions to the Podmatch service, which will ease the method of making a new show. But you know, there are some useful numbers in there which is worth a peek at, and I also covered something about podcasting 2.0 super app, true Fans. I'm not sure I called it that, though.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:49

Hey, if I've got to be the producer occasionally, I can get to edit it occasionally as well.

James Cridland: 1:09:54

So yes, you can get me saying anything.

Sam Sethi: 1:09:59

Indeed.

James Cridland: 1:09:59

Anyway, what have you done recently?

Sam Sethi: 1:10:01

Well, a couple of weeks back we did one click Apple Pay and so we thought we'd take it one stage further and we now allow you to do a monthly subscription as well. So, if you want to, you can now get a wallet with true fans. You can do a manual top up with apple pay or google pay via stripe, or you can now say, actually weekly, I'd like five dollars or five pounds, or monthly, and we will just take that amount from stripe through your credit card and then put that into your wallet and you just have a fit and forget solution. So yeah, we've done both manual top up and subscription based top up.

James Cridland: 1:10:40

Very nice. I've given the manual top up a go and it works, and it works very well, so hurrah. Thank you very much.

Sam Sethi: 1:10:46

So James Podcasting 2.0 has got a number of new tags that are being proposed. I don't know if it's called phase eight or have we finished Phase 7? I'm slightly confused. One of those is called the Content Link Tag, which Nathan Gathwright's been very keen on. It's been enhanced so that it's not just for the live item tag, and again his product is called Episodes FM, which he says is very close to launching full support for all RSS feeds now, not just shows in the Apple directory.

: 1:11:19

So expect a new version there, boostergram, boostergram, corner, corner, corner. On the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridland: 1:11:26

Yes, it's our favourite time of the week, it's Boostergram Corner. Except no boosts this week. No boosts at all. Oh, not a single boost. Who'd have thought it?

James Cridland: 1:11:36

But we did get a bunch of streams from Adam Curry, from Gene Bean, the late Bloomer actor, nick at Fountain, papa HD, jave Jackson and Dave Jones, which I think just does go to show that a bunch of people having a listen, even if there weren't any chapters in this show last week, and still a fair amount of money coming in and value coming in through those streaming sats. So that's still a good thing. So thank you those people and also thank you to our power supporters who are all paying us around $5 a month Rachel Corbett, dave Jackson, mike Hamilton, matt Medeiros, marshall Brown and Cameron Mole. Very kind of you. Any value that we get from this show gets shared between Sam and I. Equally. It's not part of the main Pod News newsletter and so therefore it means that Sam can drink more wine and I can drink more beer, and that's a good thing. So what's happened for you this week, sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:12:34

So we launched our new audio player. Yes, we added a few new bells and whistles, but one of those is the ability to replay any episode or any music tracks. That's quite nice, but the coolest thing we added was real-time streaming and a boost counter. So you're just talking about the people who were streaming this show, but what we now do is we show you, as you're streaming, how much you're actually spending.

Sam Sethi: 1:13:01

um, so every minute we just do an update in a little pop-up window so you can see oh yeah, so at the end of the show, we will tell you how much you've actually spent, and we, of course, aggregate that in a dashboard for podcast creators. So yeah, so we added that Very good.

Sam Sethi: 1:13:20

We updated our full screen desktop player, james. I don't know if you won't remember. It's a feature I've wanted for a long time. I think we talked about it. Talk about a long time ago, two years ago. I said I don't understand why we have a separate show notes chapters. I said I don't understand why we have a separate show notes, chapters, transcript fields right, because actually it just looks like a Word document to me or a Google Doc. And so in our full screen viewer, what we now do is we aggregate those three fields into one view, so you can basically compress them down just to see the chapter headers. You can expand them to see the transcript within line with the chapter headers. So the actual chapter headers sit above the correct timeline and then comments or boosts will appear in line with the content of the transcript. So it makes it much more logical as you're following along. If a comment then appears, it is related to the point of the audio and the transcript.

James Cridland: 1:14:19

Oh cool, that makes a bunch of sense. Makes a bunch of sense. So, yeah, it would be interesting to have a listen to I don't know, something like the Podcasting 2.0 show through there.

Sam Sethi: 1:14:29

Yeah, and then seeing boosts coming in at the point of the transcript. I spent this week on two different podcasts, so that was quite nice. And also, on a personal note, I had a little bit of a meltdown last week, actually on Friday. It's really hard sometimes and I think you know people like Mitch we talked about earlier was missing in action because, again, you know, being a solo developer like he is or he's got, I think him and his brother, I mean me and Mo do this one for True Fans. I'm sure that you've got Nick and Oscar. Again, it's really hard, I think. Martin, over at Podfriend, we are trying desperately hard to push the boat hard and some weeks I think we probably can hit a wall. I think I hit a wall last week. I'd worked really hard and I just didn't feel that, you know, I was getting further with it and I was just like, hmm, and I don't think I'm alone. Somebody sent me a clip from a person called Simon Hampshire and I thought it would be worth playing.

Simon Hampshire: 1:15:35

Featured. Development and then marketing of those features is really hard to get right. When you're doing it on your own and you've got no real direction. You've got some basic vision and the ability to kind of build stuff out rapidly, it can be very easy to just build and then move on. And I'm trying really hard to get into the frame of mind of, okay, I build this thing to a certain point and then I spend some time effectively marketing the thing.

Simon Hampshire: 1:16:15

So a feature, um, and you know what I've done? I've made a video of something that's not quite ready really, and then, whilst I'm watching the video back and I'm editing, I'm seeing parts of it that need more work, and then I'm going and doing this work. So now when I launch my video and my feature, the video is immediately out of date. It's like out of step with the actual look of the feature, which isn't that bad In this case, it's not like a huge issue, but it's. It's so annoying If you don't plan these things out and get it in the right order. And I just I, you know, I'm trying to move quickly and this is the problem. I'm kind of trying to move too quickly and it's making me think like, should I do a bit more planning? Should I have like an idea of what the finished article looks like?

Simon Hampshire: 1:17:16

And then, time when I record my videos, or just does this just not matter? Like is it not a big deal enough in this case, or for me as a solo person, I realized, doing this thing, I'm recording this video about this thing that I've said is finished in my head, and then when I'm reviewing the video, I'm seeing it really isn't. I need to do a bit more work on it. And then I'm like now I've got to go back and do the video. I'm not going to go back and redo the video because I don't care, but it's an interesting problem. I don't know, is anyone else facing this? Do you do this? Am I just mental? Bye this.

James Cridland: 1:17:58

Am I just mental Bye? That's great, isn't it? That's a really good. That's a really good thing. And and, yeah, I, I, I completely get that and I, I think I'm very lucky in that there are some days when I don't want to do any work at all and I've got a weird job which I have a daily, um, you know, a daily time to hit and I have to have something out by that time and that sort of that's an artificial push to get me to do stuff.

James Cridland: 1:18:25

Um, but I'm also very, you know, I spent much of yesterday fiddling around with Amazon cloud front and Amazon, you know, aws and everything, trying, trying to get my bill down and going oh what have I been paying $20 for there? Oh, that was a service that I tried once and then stopped using virtually instantly. Why have I been spending all of that and just wasting my time doing? I mean not wasting my time because I've saved some money, but, you know, playing around with that sort of thing instead of going and writing a newsletter which will then help me hit my, you know, 9pm target. Easy, I think, for all of us just to focus on an awful lot of work, but not necessarily the right work all of the time, and particularly if you're just working for yourself or working with only one other person, it can be really, really hard, can't it?

Sam Sethi: 1:19:28

Yeah, and I think what it was was what we're trying to do is, you know, it's a competition, right, we, we are in coopetition with some other the apps but we're also trying to attract people to the platform and we were hoping that. Sometimes you wonder is it the next feature? That's going to be the one, and it never is, because it's actually in the round. It's the whole thing together and I think you know one of the things I think Matt Medeiros was like I can't keep up with you know your pace, and I'm like you're right, we should probably slow down. But then I feel at the same time, I'm not exactly where I want to get to, and I know where I want to get to.

Sam Sethi: 1:20:10

So it was a. It was a bit of a meltdown between should we slow down? I'm probably burning out, and should we just go back and do these videos? Should we go back and do all of the marketing of what we have today and not worry about what we could build tomorrow? So, yeah, um, I think it was just something I just wanted to put out there. I think a lot of people sometimes look at us, and not just me, but I think at Fountain, I think at other companies. You know Podverse. Yeah, it's a hard game. It's a hard game building this stuff and sometimes I think you know it's just worth being open. It can get to us. I had one of those weeks last week.

James Cridland: 1:20:53

Yeah, no, indeed, and yeah, and I think, yeah, it's very easy just to assume that everything is all jolly good and we're, you know, powering on, and most of the time we're doing that because we enjoy it, but some of the time it can get slightly less enjoyable. You're absolutely right.

Sam Sethi: 1:21:12

So, james, anyway, less of me, more of you. What's happened for you?

James Cridland: 1:21:16

Well, I have just been coding. Funnily enough, instead of writing a newsletter, I've been coding the episode pages on the Pod News website, just because it was beginning to annoy me that I couldn't actually see the episode descriptions, so I added those, and then I added a link directly to the episodesfm page so that you can go and listen to an episode, whatever episode you want to listen to, in the app of your choice. So, Nathan, don't go changing those URLs. That would be nice, but at least I've written something which is all in JavaScript as well, which I'm quite proud about. So that's nice to have done. And an interesting thing that I just thought you might find amusing I discovered that here in Australia there is a quite fancy clothing brand called Farage no, no, no, no, no, no, if you can imagine such a thing and apparently they pop up and advertise every so often and you're there going what Wear Farage? Why would I want to do that? But there we are, so yeah, it's a different world.

Sam Sethi: 1:22:29

I might get one and walk down to the EDL with my Farage t-shirt and see what happens. That would be entertaining, oh my.

James Cridland: 1:22:37

So there we are. Anyway, that's enough for this week. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the newsletter's better, you can find that at podnewsnet, the Pod News Daily. Of course, wherever you get your podcasts, Please send us information and feedback and everything else. If you wouldn't mind. That would be lovely. There's a fan mail link in our show notes. You can send us a boostgram too. I'm reading Sam's bit now for some reason, and there's longer interviews in the Pod News Extra podcast as well. Sam has been on the road this week. Whereabouts in the world? Are you actually Sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:23:11

I'm in my mother-in-law's in Chelmsford. She's 93 and every four to six weeks we have to take her to hospital.

James Cridland: 1:23:18

so yeah, there you go, essex, that's where that is. So that's a good Farage country, indeed, indeed. That's a good couple of hundred miles away from where you normally are. Hence the slight crackles every so often that you might have heard Because you know the internet in Essex. I tell you it's not the internet in fancy Berkshire.

Sam Sethi: 1:23:37

More Berkshire. We have the Queen's internet over there.

James Cridland: 1:23:40

Yes, exactly the King's internet. I think you'll find.

Sam Sethi: 1:23:42

Oh, yes, of course Done.

James Cridland: 1:23:46

I think Essex still has the Queen's internet. I think that's half the trouble. Anyway, our music is from Studio Dragonfly. Our Anyway, our music is from Studio Dragonfly. Our voiceover is Sheila Deer. We use Clean Feed for our excellent audio and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting, get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet. Tell your friends and grow the show and support us and support us.

Sam Sethi: 1:24:10

The Pod News Weekly. Review will return next week. Keep listening.