The Future of Podcast Measurement

The future of podcast measurement.

Daniel, future of podcast episode number 43,

the future of podcast measurement. Everybody

bust out their rulers or something, I don't know, to, measure that with

this, inspired by our good friends at Spotify who

have left the IAB. And,

I guess they're just gonna let their certification. They're no longer certified on

I think we're up to 2.2 now for the IAB certification. Yeah.

2.2 just came out. And the one thing I liked I saw in there

where this whole thing of we're not certified. We're

Compliant. Compliant. Yeah. Yeah. IAB compliant,

which that was a trademark issue to begin with,

and I'm glad that they're focusing on that. So what is it that they're they're

actually standing here on? I always thought that was weird and it just

kinda has the whole, oh, no. No. We're compliant. Trust us. You know? I'm

like, yeah. That's anytime I've ever heard of any kind of government

agency or anything at all that has to police itself, it usually

does not end well. And you find out later that, oh, yeah. They weren't even

close. So it's interesting to see. I know a lot of people are

throwing out ideas about it'd be nice if we could come up with,

some sort of separate entity or or if it's not the

IAB, then what is it? I don't know. What are your thoughts? Yeah. We do

need a standard of measurement, and that's the difficult thing. The podcasting

landscape is not like it used to be. In the original

days before there were all these bots scraping podcast and

such, a download was done by a person. Yeah.

And so you could know if this file was downloaded, it was

most likely downloaded by a person. You could maybe

easily filter out certain bot download scrapers but I'm not sure if they would even

touch something like an MP3 file. Certainly not from an

RSS feed because RSS feeds just aren't indexed by

the web really that much. Since then though, there have been all these

other things that have happened. Like, do you remember several years

ago, Dave, when Apple sent that confusing email

that said a couple technical things? They said, make

sure your podcast cover art is hosted on a server that supports HTTP

head requests. And they said, make sure your

media files are hosted on a server that supports byte range

requests. Remember that? Because we're all like,

byte range. Got it. And then we all looked at each other and went, what's

byte range? What did you Exactly. But

then it made perfect sense why Apple was saying that because at

that time, they didn't support what we call, with

massive quotation marks around this, streaming which is where

you press play and it starts playing immediately and you can skip to anywhere in

the episode without having predownloaded the episode. It's

streaming from that point or it's pre buffering or it's downloading

in the background. It's not technically streaming, but all that aside.

So they gave us that technical stuff. That changed

how stats worked because then you weren't

downloading the whole file. You might be downloading only a portion of the file.

But then as Internet connection speeds, both mobile and

wired and wireless and everything, have caught up. Now

when you press play, even if you haven't downloaded the episode, it's very likely

the entire episode downloads in the background within only a few

seconds. Whether you're on WiFi or you're on mobile data, it's

really fast now. That's changed but still there is some of that kind

of partial streaming. We've also got things where if someone is

streaming and for whatever reason the whole file doesn't download right away,

then if they're mobile, their IP address could be changing

as they are moving around or even just joining different networks.

And how do you track that? What if there are multiple people in the same

location downloading an episode? All of this stuff. So all of these

things plus the whole manipulation field

and bots and servers and things that you can set up to

download this stuff automatically, there is a need to

have a standard of this is a

legitimate download and this is an illegitimate download and therefore don't

count it. I think that's important for

advertisers, of course, because they need to know what they're paying for,

how many people they're actually reaching. It's also important for

podcasters to have a good idea of how many people

are they reaching so that they can know how to

approach their show. Even things like, if you get feedback,

if you get one negative feedback about a new section in your

podcast, well, is that one out of 10,000

people? So the other 9,999

love that thing or don't say anything about it? Or is that

one out of 10 people, and therefore, it's 10% of your audience

thinks that thing? So it's important to know that, and that's why we need

the standards. Yeah. And, also, if some media

host comes up with new features and you decide to move, you

kinda want the numbers to be somewhat in the ballpark

where, you know, SoundCloud hasn't updated anything as far as I

know since 2017 because that's when the the

new Apple categories came out. And those, to the best of

my knowledge, are still not in SoundCloud. And I don't believe

SoundCloud is IAB certified. I know if you if

you Google, you know, SoundCloud plays, you can buy, you

know, thousands of plays on SoundCloud for a very little

bit of money. So no sponsor will touch you. You so, yeah, it's

one of those things where if somebody moved right now from SoundCloud

to Lipson or Captivator, Buzzsprout, or whoever, they're gonna take a

serious haircut because, you know, it's just they haven't kept

up. And who knows how they're calculating what a download

is, but it's gonna be, I'm assuming here, pretty different

than if you go to somebody who's been certified. Yeah.

And there can be all kinds of ways to manipulate

downloads too. And I stumbled across one of them even myself

a couple of years ago when I did that podcast speed test

thing where I started comparing the speed of RSS feeds and

then started comparing the speed of hosting providers and discovered some are

significantly slower than others and it in the end, it just didn't really make all

that difference. I was basically building a bot farm

to automate this testing from multiple regions. And the most

interesting discovery, actually, in all of that research was that

some of the podcast hosting providers and analytics were

counting those bots. Yeah. And I did nothing

to try and disguise them as legitimate downloads. They

were clearly identified as being from

whatever software package I was using to cause those downloads,

and they were coming from a server. So

some of the companies counted every single

download I did. So I knew, and I even played with it

a little bit. I knew all I have to do is make it download this

file 20 more times and it will show in my numbers 20 more

downloads. While others, I could make it download as many

times as I wanted and it never counted. So whether

they knew by the user agent, the technical identifier of

what's downloading it or maybe they knew that IP

address is blacklisted because it's coming from a

known server farm or data center. Whatever case, they

knew to filter that out. And that's thanks to the

standards that we have with podcast measurement. Right. Because that's one of the things you

get from being certified is there is a

blacklist of all these bots and things like that that you can

easily implement into your system. So, again, there's a little

bit of everybody's kind of on the same page to a certain

extent so that we know, oh, yeah, that particular

location or whatever is false. So don't count that.

And if you were going back to the, hey, we're just compliant.

Well, you don't get that list. So you're kind of

guessing. Okay. This, you know, this giant building

that's, you know, AT and T and it's all their employees.

Do we count that IP as 1 or do we count all

the ones in turn? How does that work? Those kind of things where if we

can all come together and count them the same, we don't really matter which

one it is. It just if we have some sort of consistency in

how we count, then it just makes it easier to

move forward with everyone somewhat on the same page. And I

think that might be for the podcast hosting providers and analytics

providers who are thinking of joining the IAB. That's almost the

more valuable part is getting that list. And that's

where I think it doesn't necessarily have to be

an open list, like, available for anyone to

see because then when certain things like that when blacklists

are made public, then it it can be easy to manipulate some of those

things. But think about some of the email spam

lists out there. There are multiple ones and some

email service providers will track multiple

or subscribe to multiple lists so that they can keep themselves off of

it or know what gets flagged and such. So I could see that maybe

coming in the future where it's decentralized then. I

mean, the list itself is centralized, but you can get

similar lists from other places. Like, I know Blueberry

has done probably the most foundational work of anyone

in the IAB for developing the standard, building those whitelists and

blacklists. And Blueberry could I mean, maybe they have

some kind of noncompete with the IAB about this. But that's something that

Blueberry could do, is they could offer an enterprise feed of

their whitelists and blacklists. So, yes, they're competitors, but, hey,

they get money from their competitors then. But their competitors, like

anyone else out there, could subscribe to that list to then get

that. And it's decentralized. It's supporting the company that

actually built the list, and then there's not the need for the

huge expense for certification. Now that's something that we haven't even brought up,

although probably most of you listening right now know about chapters

that there is a huge expense and it's different for each company because it's based

on revenue, not just ad revenue anymore, but it is based

on the revenue of the company, how much you pay to be a member

of IAB. And then you also have to pay I've heard it's

something like 15,000. Does that sound about right? And that's

where I thought I had these backwards. I thought it cost

a lot to get certified. And so I heard where James Cridland

had kinda done some math and gave a very rough, you know,

estimate of, like, a half a $1,000,000 for

Spotify. And I thought that was to get certified, and that's not. That's to be

a member of the IAB. So I forget where I'd said

that. That was wrong. That's how much to be a member. So but

they still could've. I don't think the certification has anything to do with how

much money you make, and they could have easily still stayed certified.

And so that is kind of the head scratcher, but I just have this feeling.

I have nothing to base this on. It's just my gut. I can see Spotify

coming out with their own kind of measurement because they,

you know, they have Chartable. They have the app in Spotify. They've

got Megaphone. They've got, Spotify for so they kind of

control every aspect of the listening aspect of from hosting to

listening to where they have a really decent feature

set in terms of statistics. I'm not sure how you would tie

outside people to that, but I just I can just see them saying, oh, no.

We're not IEB certified. We're Spotify certified

because we're measuring our own stats and just trust us. They're

they're accurate. Are you actually suggesting

that Spotify I mean, hear me out here.

Are you act do you actually think Spotify

would build something proprietary? Well, if you

think about it, so I've got a big show. Let's say they're on, I don't

know, Buzzsprout. And an advertiser comes to them

and says, oh, we wanna give you lots of money to be on your show.

And they're like, great. They're like, but we use, you know, the Spotify

measurement thing. And they're like, that's that's the one we trust. So, like, great.

Okay. So how do I do oh, well, you have to move your show to

Megaphone to Spotify for Chapters because you only you know, you have

to go into their ecosystem again. I could

see, part of me goes, no. No. No. Because they would have to move so

many shows, and that would be crazy. I don't know. It's just I

just have this feeling that they're gonna try something to make their own because

they've never been they they kind of teeter totter. 1 minute

their RSS is holding us back and then the next minute they're, oh,

we love the open ecosystem. And I'm like, okay. Which one is it? You know?

So but I so I kinda have a feeling they could try to do their

own thing just based on their polls that

originally only worked in Spotify. The video podcasts that only

work in Spotify. So I can see them kind of coming up with their

own little stats package or something. I'm hoping they prove

me wrong on that, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. I think there

is an aspect to all of this where someone could look at this and

say, alright. We were certified 2.0.

We can make whatever adjustments come out in 2.1 and

2.2 and so on. We don't need to be certified

anymore and therefore, we don't need to be members

anymore. We'll just follow along because the guidelines are

open. Anyone can read the guidelines. And there was even a period where

people could comment publicly on the guidelines and

provide feedback to the IAB about those guidelines. So that's where

this whole compliant thing even came up as it's not just saying, oh, yeah, we

follow in principle. It was people who would read the guidelines

and then design their software to follow those guidelines.

But I love the line from the Pirates of the Caribbean, The first

one, where Elizabeth Swann says, hang the code and hang

the rules. They're more like guidelines anyway. And

that is the truth with the IAB guidelines, is they are

merely guidelines, and some of them are open to some

pretty wide interpretation that can lead to

some significantly different results. And just one of those

things could be even an IP address by itself. Like,

if you have I'm sure they don't have only one IP

address. But if Apple corporate headquarters had only one public

IP address and everyone at Apple was listening to

your podcast. And that IP address

was well, I mean how your stats look would depend

on whether that one IP address was white listed

to allow then every download from the IP address account

as a separate download within certain other filtration? Or would it be

blacklisted where it could be thousands of downloads from

legitimate people downloading the episode, listening to it separately,

all count as 1. That one difference

alone is significant, but that's not even a measurement. That's just

a a whitelist, blacklist thing. Right. But when it comes to some of the other

technical stuff, there's room There's lots

of wiggle room in there for someone to I I don't really want

to say inflate because that sounds that

sounds manipulative Right. In a negative way. But it is basically to

end up with numbers that might be bigger than they should

be, or maybe even the other way might be smaller than they

should be. So if you have only just guidelines,

you're going to end up with a lot of variety because people will

follow and apply guidelines differently. Yeah. It's open to interpretation.

Yeah. But I think that we also see, like, with Spotify,

with, according to some people recently,

Spotify actually overtaking Apple in downloads.

I really want to know if that's just network wide. There are a

lot of factor. You know, I'm mister caveat. I think of all of the caveats

to some of this data and things. For example, is that let's take,

SoundCloud, for example. We'll throw them under the bus. SoundCloud has never

and will never have an integration directly with

Spotify. JSON was the first to have an integration with

Spotify to get podcasts on Spotify and JSON encouraged many of

their users to submit to Spotify. SoundCloud has no

communication with their users. So Lipsyn's data

is going to look significantly different from SoundCloud's

data because of podcaster education. Right.

And because SoundCloud is an opt in platform. Along

that same line, they have the ability to

track what happens in their player and track even

more data than you get from downloads. Maybe

they've decided that they just don't care about that anymore

because they think they're the big shot smarty pants now and that they're the number

one place to consume podcasts. So maybe they think their

own downloads that they see in their platform are enough for all of the podcasters

using them, all of the podcasters who are on Spotify. Maybe they think

that's enough for them, and that's it. Yeah. I know in the past, James had

said that Spotify had more users,

but Apple had more downloads. And now I'm not

sure where that data is coming from. But, yeah, I heard James report

that Spotify now has more downloads. And

Spotify has more podcasts because they've got all those is this thing

on? Is anyone listening? That's it. Alright. This is my first test

episode of a podcast. Woo hoo. Lights are blinking. Okay. Cool.

What do you wanna talk about? I don't know. What do you wanna talk about?

Alright. Thanks. Thanks for coming, everybody. Yeah. So they do

have those. So because we need stats on those. Let's see what the

completion rate is. Right. Point

05%. That's odd. But now that you bring up completion rate,

that is the other thing. Now others have been talking about this time listened

metric, and that matters to sponsors. I like to think more

of a percentage listened because time listened is

an absolute, and it's difficult to measure

in that kind of absolute when the length of episodes

is not an absolute. So for take Pod News

Daily, for example, very short couple of minutes per

day and so time listened both per day

and even per week is going to be much shorter than

a podcast like any other podcast. A standard

weekly podcast that's 30 minutes or so in length. Or look

at Dan Carlin's podcast that are hours in length but released very

infrequently. So I think percentage listened is

a better metric. But then again, that comes back to like, in this thing

of advertising and measurements, we have this battle of what

do the podcasters need to know about the size of their audience and what do

the advertisers need to know. And so much of this is being focused

on the advertisers because the advertisers care about minutes

listened. They care about that absolute, the minutes,

because there's this basic number

in their mind of for this many minutes of

content, we can have this many ads. That's

not really the way that podcasters think. Right. Podcasters might think I don't

want any more than this many number of ads. I don't want

the ads to last this many minutes in my podcast

regardless of how long the episodes are. For me with my own

podcast, my number of sponsors that I'm willing to accept on

my own podcast right now is 0. I am the

sponsor of my own show. Exactly. Yeah. And,

again, I always say, you know, radio is about

20% ads. Like, that is not a benchmark we're looking to.

Oh, we're almost up to radio. No. No. That's we we wanna stay away from

that benchmark. That would be, something to avoid. There have

been initiatives in the past, and there are even still now, to try and

give us a better metric. And I do support this, but the difficult

thing is advertisers want more information.

Developers want to give less information. Yeah. So the

advertisers want to know what you had for breakfast

while you're listening to this episode. The developers

don't wanna give any of that. Right. Think about Marco, for example, with

developer of Overcast. He has said, he will not

build anything that helps people track

the audiences. And that's even, at least from

the community, that seems to be part of the reason there's some pushback

against podcasting 2.0 features is they

think, I'll say incorrectly, that some of these

features can be used to track people and that's just not the

truth. Some of these things can't be. But there are ways that you

can measure some of this stuff without violating

people's privacy. Just look at, like, we get the streaming satoshis. And

this is one of the things that some of these places this isn't the best

approach to do it. This is where that whole activity pub and activity stream comes

into this, but what some of these places allow you to do is you

say, I'm going to send 1% of the sats that I

receive from value for value to this other

place that will then analyze those. So if anyone is

streaming Satoshis to you, you can see on a

chart where that happened. So you

can maybe make an assumption. That's a very important

word to keep in mind whenever you're looking at stats is there are assumptions in

place here. But you can make some kind of assumption that this is

generally where my audience listened. But then again, I would challenge that

with the caveat to say, well, the person who's streaming Satoshis

2U is a super fan, so they are going to

listen to all of the episode most likely because they're a

superfan. So statistics from them using them

as your benchmark is not accurate because they

are a superfan. You need a benchmark of your overall audience. And that's where

one of the things that could potentially be done with Activity

Stream is an app could send

back ticks or milestones or whatever for

every, maybe it's 1%, maybe it's every 5%, maybe it's every

30 seconds or something. Nothing that compromises the listener's

privacy. So not Right. Like sending their IP address or their name or anything

unless the listener consents to that. And there could be a place

for a listener to do that. But by default, privacy by default, that's my

policy, privacy by default. So it could just simply report back

that this one listener listened was listening at 5

seconds and 10 seconds and 15 and 20 and so on and so on and

so on. But they stopped at about 75% through the episode and they didn't

play it again. You can get that information without knowing anything about

the listener. I know advertisers want to start getting into that

like, alright, what's the demographics of that JSON? Right. Oh, you know, 18 to

34 year olds only listen to half of the episode, but 50 year olds and

up JSON to 75% of the episode and all of that demographic blah

blah blah. Yep. And that's where we've kind of on one hand, we

started with newspapers and radio, and those metrics were

hideous compared to what podcasting provides.

But then we have Facebook and other

places that can tell you what you had for lunch

on the second Tuesday of the month if you're a Republican in

this city. You know, it's just crazy. It's, you know, advertisers are

like, oh, this is amazing. And if you if anybody ever shares

that, you're like, that is amazing and creepy. You know, it's

always a lot of, the AI right now that I'm

seeing is, oh, wow. That's kinda cool and kinda creepy.

And these advertising different parameters

are, again, kind of like, wow. That's really specific.

And how did you get that data? So it's and I

that's why I think podcasting is just instead of trying to make podcasting

Facebook, just go, okay. Here, look. Newspapers

and magazines and radio, not so great metrics,

but, you know, they've been working for years. I mean, we always hear how much

the radio budget is 1,000,000,000 more than than podcasting. And

then you go, but look, podcasting actually gives you better statistics.

And then, you know, and then you've got Facebook and we're like, yeah, we're not

Facebook, but we're not newspapers. And you still send monies to

newspapers or, you know, some of these other places. So it's

it's one of those where I'm like, can't you just be happy with what you

got? Do you really need to know what I had for lunch 3 weeks

ago on a Tuesday to sell me some shoes? To quote from

another movie and book, Jurassic Park, your scientists

were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they

didn't stop to think if they should. That's it.

Then then the dinosaurs ate everybody. So who's the dinosaur

here? Exactly. Depends on how you define dinosaur.

But I think the future, there are 2 different ways we

can look at this. The future gets more invasive.

Google it's crazy that Google is trying to bring in this

cookieless Internet as they describe it or some people have called it,

where they are kind of shooting themselves in the foot by

advocating for this with Chrome. And this is

Google, the company who makes money

by tracking you across the Internet Yeah. Is an

advocate for not tracking you across the Internet? I

always wonder again, and I this is just my hunch because it is

Google. Are they gonna come up with some proprietary thing

that's not a cookie but smells and acts like

a cookie, but it only you know what I mean? Are they gonna come up

with their own way of tracking where everybody can use cookies

now from what I understand? Are they gonna come up with some sort

of Google thing that only works on Google stuff

and you have to have Google Analytics to see it and everything

else? So it just seems like everybody's instead of trying to do

things for the industry, they're all out for themselves, which is called

competition, and I get it. But I'm just like, ugh. Yeah. Competition

is good, and that's what we need more of. Like, who is the competitor to

the IAB? Or even just for podcast measurement

standards. Yeah. There is no competitor right now. I think it

was on Pod News Weekly where they were talking about the

fact that the IAB measures podcasting and

banners on the Internet and a bunch of other things that are

we big enough to break off on our own and have just

the podcast and or advertising bureau instead of, you

know, the Internet and have our own thing where we can really then, you know,

niche down on what kind of stats do we need and come up with

that. I like that idea. I don't know how it works or who handles it

or who runs it or whatever, but I

like the idea, not that the IB is doing a bad thing, but it does

have its hurdles. Well, and that's what I think the podcast

standards or podcast standards project, whatever you wanna call it, that's

what those should be for. And that's why I started trying to build something like

that myself, and then podcast standards project came along. That is a

great place for this kind of thing because I'd love to see

PSP, podcast standards project, set these

standards influenced by the community and other

people in the space, but set these standards and they be open

standards that everyone knows this is the

standard way to measure a download, and we could have our own

2.0 and 2.1 and 2.2. There could be some

certification processes. But here's the thing that I've thought about. Ever since I

built that bot system that would measure the download speeds of the

hosting providers, I thought, why can't we have that same

kind of thing where we have an app

that all you have to do to test someone's compliance

in order to certify them is you run this app that has

secret algorithms inside so that way no one can try to game the app

and illegitimately count and block things. But the

app can then do its special magic to

test all of these things and then compare that

with what does the actual analytics show to

see, does it show this? Like, we expect the number to

be 2. Is the number 2? No. It's 3? Alright. If it's not 2,

if it's anything other than 2, then you failed on this mark. You need to

change something here. And then the app could maybe reveal. But all

of that can be done with an app, I I think I mean I have

not gone through the certification process But in my mind

that it could come down to it being that simple and that could be something

that maybe, yes, there is because this kind of thing requires

time. Time is money and people are worth

their time. That's the other very important thing to keep in mind. There is a

limit to the community's free will.

So to have some kind of certification of a

standard, there does need to be some kind of payment

just to cover the expenses Right. Of the value,

anything like that. Because somebody's gonna have to you know, if

whatever the technology is behind it, updating

any kind of lists, anything like that, and just and then the whole

if you think about it, if that became a standard, you have to have somebody

so that when Bill opens up Bill's house of podcast

hosting that they go over, make sure Bill's, you

know, certified or not or whatever or checks to make

sure who is you have to maintain the list of who's certified and who isn't.

So there is some overhead to it. But my question is

and again, I know nothing about any of this, but I is

it more or less or the same of what you're paying to the

IAB right now? Right. And the other thing I I

wonder because if you think about it, if we had and this would never happen,

but it'd be great if there was some sort of what if we had a

universal stat system that somehow every time you hit you

know, how we have those redirects. Right? The little prefixes. What if

everybody use the same prefix so that everybody was literally using the same

stat system? That will never happen. But, you know, to

dream the impossible, you know, because then you would You're talking about

the Tower of Babylon solution, basically. Yeah. That is when the

Lord will come down again and say, uh-uh. You gotta stop this. You

got you got one tracker. And when you have only one tracker, there

is nothing that you will not be able to do. And so, therefore, I'm going

to confuse your tracking and Yeah. Create all of these other

trackers and spread you across the world. That's it. Yeah. So I

know that's never gonna happen, but it'd be neato. It would be doggone neato if

it would. So we'll see. And I think that's where it's

really awesome the initiative that John Spurlock has with 0p3@op3.dev.

I can remember that site, but I can never remember his other

site like livewire. I don't I don't

remember that what comes after the dot. It's not dotcom. It's not dotfm. I don't

think it's dotio. Anyway, but his thing, he's

made it completely open source. So you can see exactly how he is

tracking things. You can use it on any podcast. The thing

that podcasters might not like is that it does make their

stats open. Now maybe there's a monetization opportunity there

for John or any kind of business to say, alright. You use this.

This is this open standard. If you don't want your stats to be

public, then subscribe for $5 a month or

whatever. But the thing is, that service,

OP 3, while it's free for everyone to use, it

is costing John Spurlock money. Yeah. The last I saw, I think it was

costing him a few $100 per month Oh. To run that. Mhmm. He

has some sponsors, which is great. But at some

point, that's gotta cover at least its expenses, let

alone, I think, pay the people for the value of

their time. Right. That's just for the hosting and, you know, the

hardware and stuff. Poor John's not getting paid for his

time for maintaining it and writing in the first place

and everything else. So, yeah, that's one that in

theory, when he comes along and says, okay, it's time. You you need to pay

for this. I personally wouldn't have a problem going here, whatever it is, you

know, because he's earned it. Value for value. Yeah.

And he has made it all open source, and I think he's

even said anyone else can take this and use it if they want

to. So while his code could be,

like, let's imagine this, that o p 3 could be the standard.

Then his code is open source. Anyone can copy

it. They copy it onto their system

and maybe even John has some kind of integrity check

to make sure that the the version is up to date or something like that.

There, you know, any sort of thing like that that verifies that they haven't

tweaked the stats to their own manipulations.

But that could be something where we're all following the same code base

to measure downloads, or there could be the multiple companies out there

providing whitelists and blacklists that companies could subscribe

to. Although I know there's the thing of its proprietary data. Like

for Blueberry, they've built this list pretty much themselves

over the decades now that they've been doing this.

And that's not something that they wanna just give up. That is

part of their unique selling proposition, their

USP. So there needs to be some openness, but there also

needs to be some exchange of value. And in all of this, there needs to

be the respect for the audience, their privacy.

While I would like to know certain things about my own

audience, like their age, their sex, their

device, like how many people are on iPhone versus Android, what apps are

they using, what country are they using, Or what country are they in?

What state are they in? Maybe even what

local metropolis they're near. I don't need to know their

exact city, you know, if they're in Waka Hockey, New York or

whatever. I I don't need to know that. I just wanna know, are they near

New York City? So maybe I could plan that for if I'm

doing a live event somewhere, I could say, hey, everyone. I'm gonna do

an event in my biggest cities and that's New York City, Los Angeles,

Cincinnati, and whatever. But I don't need to know

where they live. I don't need to know where they

shop. I don't need to know what other podcasts they listen

to, although that can be kind of interesting, but I don't need that.

I just need to know, do they consume my podcast,

and how do they consume it? I don't need to know who. I

just need to know how. Yeah. I was looking at John's site.

The April invoice for the month was $791.97.

So 7.92. You can sponsor,

there's a $500 gold sponsorship, a $100, and that's a month.

Then there's a $100 a month OP 3 sponsorship. And if you

are using either one of those, apparently, you're listed on the home

page, which is great now. If you're like, well, that's a little rich for my

blood. There is a $10 a month early supporters sponsorship.

Now you're not on the front page, but it is a way to say thank

you. And and right now, it's Podnews, FlightPath, Refonic,

Transistor, Podium, and Captivate, our sponsors. Because I

looked at him, like, why can I give John $10? Holy cow. $10.

So that's, interesting. But he spent for

the year so far, just 2024, he's at $2,943.

So about every month, it's like 7 30, 740

ish, 700. So and that's him

again looking for ways to improve it. Keep it running.

Everything like that. So it's one of those things that, you know, I still wonder

how Albie is staying in business because I don't see any

business model over there yet. You know, they have said at some

point, I thought it happened by now, that they would be

charging a fee or taking a fee, which I can understand that. And I think

that's reasonable if they say something like, alright, you can receive

as much as you want, but for anything you're going to withdraw Right. There's a

4% charge. Maybe they say anything you send, there's a 4%

charge, or maybe they say only if you withdraw

back onto chain, which is just the technical Right.

Way to describe, basically, like, getting your Bitcoin from Albi

into, for example, Coinbase, and then Coinbase,

then trading it for dollars and then withdrawing the dollars, that kind of thing. That's

what you have to do. You have to get that Bitcoin back onto the chain,

the Bitcoin chain. It can't just stay on the lightning network.

But, yeah, at some point, they'll do that, and I think that's reasonable for them

to have some kind of small fee like that. Yeah. Because we want them to

stay in business and free is not a good business model. We've said that

before. Well, you know, there's there's an interesting thing about

that. So the whole value for value concept, there's

a huge risk to that. And it's

working for some people, not working for

others. Right. In that information you saw about John

Spurlock and what it's costing him, did it show how much of that is

being paid for? Let me see. Like, is he running

in the red or is he in the green? Because when I look at

op3.dev, you can scroll down to the bottom and

see the icons for the sponsors that he has. Now we don't know

how much these companies are paying. We just know they've paid that threshold

to be on the front page. So Podnews, FlightPath,

Refonic, Transistor, Podium, and Captivate.

Some of these are radically different companies. Right. Like, Transistor,

Captivate, and Podium are hosting companies. Pad News is

not a hosting company. Right. That's a news company, although it does a lot

of stuff in the podcasting industry. Refonic does a lot of stuff

with industry data and is in the podcasting industry.

And this is a nice collection, and I'm not sure if you'd get this

kind of good collection of sponsors if you just

told everyone this is what it cost to use the service. I recently

spoke at NRB, which is the National Religious Broadcasters

Convention, and I was sharing a stage with

someone from Focus on the Family. And if you've ever listened to a

Focus on the Family broadcast where they have a guest who has a

book or they're talking about a book, they frequently say something

like this. They'll say, we'll send you this

book for donation of any amount, and they mean

that. Mhmm. And the gentleman from Focus on the

Family on stage said that they knew they were

taking a risk. And sure, some people call in and they

say, I want the book. I'm not sending a donation. So

focus on the family loses money on that. Some people call

in and they pay about what the book would sell for. And some

people, the value for value thing, they call in and they give a

$100 or $200 to get a $10 book. Right.

There is a risk to that though. And that

risk is mitigated when there's a relationship, I think,

but you have to build that relationship first. Yeah. And how do you

build relationships within the podcast

measurement industry where there's so much competition.

That's where I think you have to have the structure of something like

podcast standards project to help with that. And

a standards body that can ratify standards

across many aspects of podcasting, not just measurement, not just some

of the technical stuff of this is what goes in an

RSS feed, but also these are standard advertising rates to

pay for this certain things like that. I think that's what I've

always envisioned for a podcast standards board and why I've predicted that standards

would emerge in podcasting, and we're finally seeing that. I don't

like that our measurement guidelines are basically

influenced by a company that's only interested in advertising. Right. I'd

rather any such standards come from an a company

that's interested in the privacy of the audience, providing

only as much data as podcasters need and the same

thing for podcasters to take action on too. That's the big thing.

Data that they can use and giving

advertisers only as much data as they actually

need. Yeah. As opposed to when was the last time I

washed my right foot? Right. Just don't need all that stuff.

Statistically, people who wash their right foot within the last 24 hours are more

likely to buy our products. I mean, they've got crazy statistics

like that. Yeah. And some of that I just kinda wonder, like,

really? Yeah. Why? What does that matter?

Who funded that research? Yeah. Exactly. Doctor Scholes.

So Daniel, any

boostograms from, our last episode from now till

then? We did. We got a boostogram from Sam Sethi from

truefans.fm. He sent 41 100 sats. He didn't include

a message with that, but we are very grateful for that. Now 41100,

do you know any significance to that number? No. Only going back

to my days as a copier technician. There was the Minolta 41100.

It was an old machine. It was a good machine, but I think, really, Sam

just wants to cement his on top of the leaderboard

when we log in to, whichever one we're using, get Alby

or Conchax or one of those Saturn. One of those has

a a list of top contributors. So thank you, Sam. We deeply appreciate that. And

I will say, not that he bought a plug, but the

ability that he's made to where you can just take a credit card and it's

$10 US and it fills up your wallet is so

ridiculously easy now. You can only buy $10 right now. It's in

beta. So that's like, as I record this, it's like $14.

And so that'll last me a couple weeks and then it runs out. But I

just go back to Truefans and hit okay. Fill up my wallet. Here we

go. And, so that's working very, very well because that's not

an actual app. It's a, what is it? P was it web

app based? Progressive web app or PWA, which no one

knows what that stands for or even what it means. It's just fun to say

pois, you know, so that's always fun. But, speaking of

peas, we also have the podcast positivity

point of the show. So, Daniel, are we, pointing

positively at someone with a podcast? Yeah. I know that sometimes we

complain about some of the stuff happening in the podcasting industry, so it'd be nice

to end on some positivity. And for this episode, I

want to highlight Podcast Guru. I know I mentioned them previously,

but I noticed something neat that they do since I've been using them

a little more steadily for some of the podcasting 2.0

featured podcasts. And I noticed that just like an

Apple Podcasts, you get that beautiful thing that happens based

on some podcast cover art where it changes the color

of the whole interface to match that podcast cover. Podcast

Guru does that too even at the chapter

image level. Oh. So as the chapter

image changes, if you're looking at the app,

the whole app interface changes to

complement the colors within the podcast chapter

image. And I thought, oh, that's that's

a nice little thing. That's like icing on top of the cake. I like that.

That's it. So that reminds me, Daniel, as you brought up podcast

guru, Oscar from Fountain sent out

a survey that said, hey. How can we make Fountain better? And, of course,

I said, I love me smart playlists. I want to be able to say

that. And I explained what it was and I said, I can almost do it

in fountain with tags. You can tag a show so that when a new

episode comes from whatever podcast you want,

you could say tag this as say health. Then you can click on

the tag, and anything that's been tagged as health, there it is. And

I said the problem is I'll listen to the 1st episode in that list,

and then it will go to that queue. So maybe in my queue, I was

listening to David Hooper or somebody. I'm like, no. I wanted to go to the

next health tagged 1. And he's like, I think we can do

that. And he he seemed pretty sure that that was possible. So

if he does that, then Fountain would have smart

playlists. And I was like, oh, because I know that's the one feature. I

know Podcast Guru has said they're working on it, so

it'll be interesting to see, you know, who can get there first. But that was,

I found that very encouraging that they they could do that because that's really my

the one feature that I like. I really need that. And I know, Fountain has

done some things to make it easy to, you know, fill your wallet over

there. And they have a whole there. The boy, if you love stats, Fountain is

the app for you. They have all sorts of community things going on over there.

But, so a positive shout out to both Podcast

Guru and Fountain for, keeping up and and making

your apps better and making them do more things. We appreciate that. And with

that, I think we're gonna call it a day on this episode. So

thanks so much. If you enjoyed this show, if you could do us a favor,

share it with a friend if you want to. If you feel so inclined, you

could always send us a boost to gram, and we appreciate everyone who's been streaming

the sats to us. We deeply appreciate it, and, we'll be back real soon with

another episode of the future of podcasting. Keep boosting

and keep podcasting.