0:00

- Strapping, we're gonna talk podcasting.

0:09

You're gonna break it down. - Everything

0:24

- Gonna - Story - Sharing

0:34

- Expertise, each episode a adventure.

0:42

- So turn out - The volume and let's get started.

1:31

- Here we are on the new media show, <laugh>,

1:37

uh, Rob, uh, what do you think of that?

1:41

- That's awesome. <laugh>. Definitely a, a more UpToDate kind of, uh,

1:46

music track for us, that's for sure. It, - It's a little bit long <laugh>,

1:52

and I guess I didn't check to see how long it was,

1:55

but would you believe that's AI generated?

1:59

- Oh, these days, nothing surprises me on that front,

2:02

so it's great though, - At suno.ai.

2:06

<laugh> - Suno, huh?

2:11

- S nno.ai. Yeah. That's - Interesting. Yeah,

2:14

- It is interesting. So, anyway, I don't know why it was repeated.

2:18

It was only supposed to be 30 seconds, but it was going on while, while,

2:22

- So what's the, what's, what's the copyright situation on that stuff?

2:26

Do you, do you have any idea, - Um, what's happening here?

2:32

Did we lose the stream? No. Lemme check mine.

2:39

Let me double check. Make sure we're still online. Yeah, we're still online. I, I, I think I, I did

2:45

- A, okay, I see it in mine. So, - Are we on Rumble?

2:49

Maybe that's what happened. I don't know. We didn't

2:53

- <laugh> it didn't, uh, didn't connect on Rumble.

2:56

- Uh, you know, I was, be honest with you,

2:58

I was like running, we, we were five minutes

3:02

before the show started. Lucky I had the studio already turned on <laugh>.

3:08

And, um, I had recorded something earlier

3:12

because we were in the middle of launching our AI system today.

3:15

And I, that launch went at two.

3:18

And then I'm just trying to, you know,

3:20

do the orchestra thing here. And I looked up at the clock and it was two 50, like 2 53.

3:25

Yeah. And, and, and I was like, a big F word come out

3:28

of my mouth. So we're getting - All the balls in the air, right? Yeah.

3:31

- We're, we're lucky. We are, uh, even on,

3:35

and it says YouTube is not receiving enough video

3:39

to maintain a smooth stream. Okay. Is it still complaining?

3:45

I don't know why it would, that would be the issue.

3:48

I'm looking here anyway. Um, I may, yeah,

3:52

- I'm seeing it too. It says, it says a a YouTube is not receiving enough video

3:57

to maintain a smooth - String.

3:59

Yeah. I don't know why. Because, yeah, I think I know why,

4:04

but, uh, it, it's, it's my mess up.

4:08

So anyway, it, it is, it is what it is.

4:10

We're gonna have to live with it. 'cause I was pushing too many buttons.

4:16

Um, no. So, um, yeah. All right.

4:20

So anyway, that's, my team was in the middle of launching the AI stuff.

4:23

So been a busy, busy week. Of course, Monday was a big day.

4:30

- Yeah. So let's talk about your, your video

4:33

to audio podcast product that you, uh, that you announced.

4:37

It's kind of, kind of cool. It'd be good to kind of give a little demo of that, uh,

4:42

of which I saw a, a video, uh, online that you,

4:46

that was linked to in pod news. I saw. So Yeah, there's

4:50

- Really no, no demo.

4:52

It's just basically you

4:54

- Screenshot or a screen share. - Yeah. You just, you know, you, you link,

4:58

let's see if I can get, find one, find a a show here,

5:02

because, uh,

5:05

you caught me all on it, unready. But basically all it does is you link,

5:10

okay, I, I've got one here. Hang on here, let me go find it.

5:13

Which show do I want to do? Okay.

5:16

- Or just pull, pull up that, that screen on your page or

5:20

- Something. Yeah. I'm making sure that I've got the right one here.

5:22

So, uh, nope, it's not

5:25

that show. I gotta get the other one here. - Yeah, I know that, uh, we've been talking about for,

5:30

for months now, the need for

5:34

the video creators over on YouTube Yeah.

5:37

And other platforms to be able to have a, you know,

5:40

an audio podcast version of their, of their YouTube show.

5:43

And it looks like Todd, your team has done a

5:47

automation process that can grab a, a

5:51

- Playlist. Yeah. So off - Of YouTube, - Essentially all, all the podcasts are,

5:55

they can either originate on our vid to pod

5:58

or if they're an existing podcaster. It's real simple. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

6:01

And when, when they're in our dashboard,

6:04

there's a place over here where we have, uh, show settings.

6:08

- Yeah. - So this basically is a place

6:10

where they normally set if they want a page blueberry

6:12

or if they want a free blueberry free WordPress site,

6:15

or if they have their own website. And if they own a website,

6:19

they can link it up and all that stuff. But down here we have a new feature.

6:22

It says, uh, vid to pod.

6:25

And all that really is, is, is we, we make it so

6:29

that you enter your at sign.

6:33

In my case, it's at Geek News. - Mm-Hmm. - <affirmative>. We pull up the,

6:39

in the onboarding process, we pull up the channel, then,

6:44

um, we show the playlist, our playlist,

6:48

and you have to select the right playlist. You confirm, um, that and certify,

6:55

and this is through the terms of service as well. There's a terms of service screen, actual terms

6:59

of service screen you have to do before you get to this screen.

7:02

Um, and then you decide you wanna use your own channel art,

7:07

or you wanna use, or you use your own cover art.

7:10

Do you wanna use your channel art from YouTube? Do you want all videos or you want

7:14

videos from a certain date? And once that is set, and once a podcaster agrees to that,

7:20

and again, the terms of service and why we have to have a separate terms

7:24

of service is pretty obvious. Number one. Uh, giving us permission

7:31

to pull their content, some other licensing stuff,

7:34

making sure they know number two, that if they have music in their video podcasts, that

7:40

the music licenses will not transfer.

7:43

And that they should not be using this service

7:45

because, um, they'll be liable.

7:48

Because if they've used YouTube music

7:51

as a copyright in their content, uh,

7:54

that copyright does not cover in an audio podcast,

7:58

they're, they're not clear. So we make them understand

8:02

that any music in your podcast has to be licensed.

8:06

It has to have the appropriate license for podcasting,

8:09

- Probably externally from, from right.

8:12

From YouTube that has the license to be able

8:14

to be on YouTube as well as, as a, as a

8:16

- Podcast. But if you, if you're using YouTube music Mm-Hmm.

8:20

<affirmative>, um, that is not licensed for podcasts,

8:22

that you, you can't bring that across and you're not eligible, uh, for, for this service.

8:29

And then once that's done, every 15 minutes, we go out

8:33

and well, what we do is we migrate you first,

8:37

and then when the episodes are, and what we do is we pull the media over

8:45

and what then shows up in the system

8:50

are new episodes. And we pull in the title, the description, the chapter file.

8:57

And, uh, we auto publish the media.

9:00

So anytime you publish a new mm-Hmm.

9:03

<affirmative> episode to a, to a playlist over on YouTube,

9:07

the playlist you've designated, uh, within 15 minutes,

9:10

we'll pick that up, pull it in, convert it,

9:14

and, um, auto publish.

9:17

You don't have to do nothing, set it and forget it.

9:20

Um, so they can still make additional episodes.

9:24

They can still participate in anything podcasting.

9:27

They can still set everything up just like a podcast.

9:30

Uh, but the main process here is we've just completely

9:33

automated so they don't have to do anything.

9:37

- And so I have a couple of questions. Is there a way that, let's say a YouTube creator can just go

9:42

to blueberry.com or whatever and,

9:45

and say, I I want to create a podcast,

9:47

and all they do is enter their, their, um,

9:52

their address to YouTube. Yeah.

9:55

- That's what happens during the onboarding be - Or something like that.

9:57

Yeah. That's what, and it will take you through the process. - Yeah. But they have to come to us via the vid to pod page.

10:04

The special link will set a, a cer a set of flag.

10:07

If they come to us just as from our hosting account,

10:11

they'll have the opportunity to do the vid

10:13

to pod option after onboarding.

10:16

It's not part of the normal process, but we can,

10:20

but it basically, we want them to start the process on our bid to pod page.

10:24

- Yeah. 'cause you might capture a lot of YouTubers

10:28

that are saying, well, you know, I'll just, this is easy to do. Yeah. I'll just,

10:31

- Yeah. We already have, - Go over here and I'll put in my,

10:34

my Path to my YouTube account. Yeah. And then I can select what channel I want to have.

10:38

We go into a podcast feed and it's, we we're pretty much done. We,

10:41

- We reached out to folks that already had podcasts.

10:45

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, um, on real podcasts, A AKA.

10:51

And, um, all of them that we reached out to have migrated

10:55

to us, or they originated with us,

10:58

and they changed the process so that they do not know,

11:01

do they do not do any additional work now

11:05

that they've migrated, they're over,

11:07

they just set it, forget it. So now they're saving 15 to 20 minutes.

11:11

They don't have to come in and create a post. Everything is done automatically. It

11:16

- Just transfers all that data outta YouTube. Yep. And just uses it Right in the RSS feed. Yeah. Okay.

11:21

- And, uh, yeah. That's awesome. And we convert it to high quality audio.

11:25

Um, again, what's

11:29

- The default kind of playback bit rate? Is it

11:32

- We're doing 128 k? I'd, I'd have to look if it was mine or stereo, but, okay.

11:38

- Um, yeah. - But I think

11:40

- Most of the stuff on YouTube, I think is in stereo, I believe.

11:43

- But so, and again, it's, yeah.

11:46

It's one of those things where the,

11:50

we just made this so that it would be simple.

11:53

Yeah. Um, - So is there any kind of, uh, authentication

11:57

of ownership of the - YouTube account?

11:59

You have to, you have to certify that it's your account. - Okay. - Um, we're, we get a daily running report

12:04

of who's added content that we're reviewing.

12:08

Um, so, you know, you basically have to certify,

12:12

and plus you have to have a credit card on file. You have to pay for this. This is, there's no free,

12:16

you know, there's basically, uh, um, what we've seen

12:20

and what we saw on other platforms is people on Reddit

12:24

and other folks have made all kinds of hacks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And they're putting, uh,

12:31

YouTuber's content into apps, um,

12:35

that are not even podcast apps. Um, yeah. And the YouTuber's getting no credit for it.

12:42

So way we set this up too, is that, you know, if a,

12:46

if a YouTuber's monetized and they're worried about losing monetization, you know,

12:53

they can turn on monetization programmatic here.

12:56

And again, it's, it's an audience way.

12:58

We feel this, this is a growth opportunity people are gonna

13:00

watch, continue to watch. And then those, is

13:04

- There any, any potential way that, let's say

13:08

some Joe Below podcaster types in

13:13

Joe Rogan's account and is able to create a podcast?

13:17

- If they do? Uh, it'll be caught really quick on our site,

13:20

because again, oh, it would, we're we're reviewing every day. Good.

13:23

- Good. - You know, and if we, and, and if we run into any type of issue,

13:26

then we'll go to authentication. But we just wanted to lower the onboarding process.

13:33

Um, you know, it's not something that's it.

13:37

It's, so again, they gotta, they're gonna have to pay to do that.

13:40

And not saying that that's, - Well, it might be worth it.

13:43

- Right. Well, not saying that. That's right. Um, but, you know, we're not,

13:48

we're gonna make sure associated accounts

13:51

are associated accounts. - I would say that's probably the biggest risk there is

13:57

people getting in and trying to hijack content.

13:59

- Yeah. But the question really then is for what, uh,

14:03

a few hours, you know? Yeah. I

14:05

- Mean, if, if there's processes that can catch it, I think that's terrific.

14:09

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had the same problem back when I was

14:11

working at Spreaker, um, where people were

14:14

cloning feeds in the platform,

14:16

and that caused all sorts of problems. - Yeah. We've seen very, very little of that.

14:20

Anytime you have to put a credit card on, and I got your credit,

14:23

- It does cut - Down on that. I got your credit card information, you know, your name,

14:27

your zip code, your billing information. - Yeah. Yeah. That's a different,

14:31

that's a different level, right. - Of - Yeah. Of engagement.

14:35

And if, I think we're mainly this kind

14:38

of stuff happened is on free, free platforms. Yeah.

14:40

- Right. Yeah. And there's a couple out there that doing this now for free

14:45

that I'm surprised that, you know. Yeah.

14:49

- Oh, oh, they are. Okay. - Well, there, you know, there's, there's a, yeah.

14:52

Not doing this now that creating an RSS feed. Oh.

14:56

But someone that's basically creating audio.

14:59

- Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's like a website that you enter

15:02

- Your Oh, it's, it's an app, your - YouTube account. Yeah. Right.

15:04

- Yeah. - And it, it exports all the audio

15:07

or all the video out - There.

15:09

Yeah. So yeah, I've - Seen those.

15:12

Yeah. Awesome. Is there any other details like this?

15:16

It sounds like, I mean, does it work outside

15:19

of the WordPress plugin and inside the WordPress plugin?

15:22

- No. It only works on the blueberry dashboard. - Just on the dashboard. It doesn't yet work in the

15:27

- No, - The plugin. Yeah. No, - No.

15:30

And we probably won't be put it

15:32

in the plugin, I don't think. Because again, so you have, if you have your own website,

15:37

uh, already, you can link that in the system.

15:41

So there is a way, um, if you, if you, again,

15:45

so far we haven't run into anybody that, um,

15:50

has been publishing via Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> their own website. And then you do, then,

15:54

we'll, we'll talk to 'em, figure out how we're gonna work it

15:56

with them with turn off auto publishing or something.

15:59

'cause then they would still have to manually publish on their own website.

16:04

- Yeah. 'cause that's what I'm doing doing with, um,

16:06

with your platform right now is I publish directly

16:09

to my WordPress instance that then goes into your Yeah.

16:12

Your system through, through the plugin.

16:14

- So I don't have a solution for you on WordPress now.

16:16

So again, it's, and we figured the majority of these folks

16:19

that were gonna coming over, you know, those

16:21

that are have a process are. But again, I've moved some people already off other web off

16:26

by their podcast hosting platforms to just want the ease.

16:31

And the only had over there was a landing page. Anyway. So

16:34

- Yeah. I think it's those that are, are creating videos that are,

16:39

you know, serialized o over there that have been put into a podcast playlist.

16:44

So th this is any of the playlists, not, not just the ones

16:47

that are designated podcast playlists. - Oh, it's anybody, yeah. Any playlist.

16:51

Tom says, there's so many reaction videos to license music,

16:55

and it seems impossible to police disclaimer or not.

16:58

Yeah. It's gonna be impossible to, it's on them, you know,

17:02

we've warned them, uh, right. You know, and

17:06

- Spotify's gonna catch it and take it - Back - And

17:09

- Yep. Right. We've warned them, you know, and basically, it, it's very, very clear that,

17:14

you know this, you better have a life if you've got some

17:18

music in your content. Matter of fact, you know, you have to click

17:21

and say that, you know, basically. And if they didn't read the paragraph, I can't help that.

17:26

But, uh, I'm sure some somebody's gonna,

17:30

and we'll get a take down on a Yep. - Well, it'll - Happen on a piece of content. I'm sure.

17:33

I'm sure it'll happen. - Yeah. And it also creates,

17:36

creates an interesting loop too, if you think about it.

17:39

Um, where you could, um, have a playlist video

17:42

that you import in your system, create a podcast feed,

17:45

and then that podcast feed could be submitted to YouTube Music <laugh>.

17:49

Right. - Rob? - What?

17:53

- We're trying to get 'em to come this way. - I know, but it could go both ways. That's what I'm saying.

17:58

- Right. Well, and they should already have that designated

18:00

as a podcast playlist anyway. Not set the Rss s feed.

18:04

- Yeah. Buting, that would just an audio only version.

18:06

Right? Yeah. So you'd have the video and the audio version.

18:09

- Guess that's, I guess that's true. - Yeah. - You know, so, and,

18:15

and really what it, what what this stemmed from

18:18

as I came back, you know, podcast we had, as you know,

18:21

I was talking to this gal, she says, I'm doing a YouTube channel Right.

18:25

Just quite adamant with me - Is - I don't have time,

18:28

I don't have time to do a podcast. - Yeah. It's a hill to climb to.

18:32

- And, and, and it was, you know, and she was pretty, and I'm like, okay, okay. No.

18:38

- Right. And it's automated once you get it set up. Right.

18:40

Right. So each time you uploads to, to YouTube,

18:42

it automatically generates it. And - Post, I emailed her yesterday

18:46

'cause I had her in our contact list. I said, Hey. And she goes, oh, that's cool.

18:53

And, you know, so you don't have to do any work.

18:57

- Right? Yeah. Yeah.

19:01

- So we will see how this works out.

19:05

I'm not saying that there is a, you know, there's,

19:08

there's lots of things. There's, you know, the interesting

19:13

product <laugh> - It is.

19:17

It is. And it, it, it changes the conversation

19:20

around working with, um, coming outta YouTube

19:23

and getting involved in podcasting, which I think is,

19:26

- And, and again, making that easier. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, I,

19:31

we really tried to emphasize on the product page

19:36

is, is, is the benefit, the bonus podcast centric opportunities?

19:42

Number one, they can get a free WordPress site with us if they want.

19:45

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they get an audio player, they can share pre, they can create premium content.

19:50

They can go into Apple Podcasts that can go into their own blueberry premiums.

19:55

So if they wanna do premium audio, they can Mm-Hmm.

19:58

<affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they can, if they decide they want to, they can add another show

20:02

and create a true video podcast. So we feel, feel these are all marketing, messaging,

20:09

training opportunities. They can do V four V, um,

20:16

they can do, um, promotions

20:21

for stuff that's gonna happen on their channel.

20:24

They can do pre-rolls into the audio content, say, Hey,

20:27

by the way, we're gonna have a, you know, we're having a live YouTube event in, uh, a week.

20:31

We want you to be there. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they could pre-roll this

20:34

into all their audio content. - Yeah. - And the best part is they never have

20:38

to worry about a platform taking down their content. So, you know, that's some of the bonus stuff, you know, um,

20:48

you know, monetizing immediately, distribution, analytics.

20:52

So, you know, the goal here is to, you know,

20:56

that's gonna be part of our messaging, is to educate,

21:00

you know, there's a whole nother world over here.

21:03

You got this great world you're participating in right

21:05

now, you're Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And again, this is really designed

21:08

for video first folks. So your video first, then we'll go from there.

21:15

- Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. I think there's, there's definitely a need for that.

21:20

So I think this is a terrific solution.

21:23

It'd be interesting if we were able to do more of these kind

21:25

of integrations, right. That can help content creators share content.

21:31

- Well, we're, we're not done, you know, with this,

21:33

we're gonna add some more. - I don't think you're ever done, Todd.

21:36

- Well, we're gonna add some more platforms to Vid Pod.

21:41

- Oh - Yeah. Why not? - Hmm. That has some interesting things to think about.

21:49

Sure. Hmm. Yep.

21:55

So you also, you also announced some AI tools, right?

21:58

- Well, it's, it's been, it's been released.

22:00

So I think the announcement is going out this afternoon.

22:03

So, um, but blueberry customers now have accessibility to

22:07

what we're calling Blueberry Pie.

22:09

PI, our Blueberry podcast, AI

22:15

nickname Blueberry Pie. And that's, that's, that's the name of the, you know,

22:19

a little, a little cheeky there. Um, so,

22:23

- So does Pie, is Pie an acronym or is it just,

22:26

- Hey, come on, Rob. Blueberry Pie. You know, it's just

22:30

- Fun. I know, I know, I know. - Well, yeah, so it's, it, it's PAI, so podcast ai. Yeah.

22:35

- Yeah. Yeah. - So - P Okay. PAI.

22:38

- Yeah. Okay. Yeah. PAI is how we're spelling not PIE,

22:41

- <laugh> <laugh>. - So yeah, the blog and the product page

22:46

and all that's probably coming to life as we're talking here.

22:49

But I saw the menu item in the dashboard, so anybody

22:52

that's in the dashboard can get to it now. - Okay. - And we, given all

22:57

of our customers five free trials of each product,

23:01

and, uh, the media clip creator is, uh, heavy in work,

23:06

I expect that and probably a month. So,

23:10

- So let's, let's play it off scenario. So you have a, a podcaster on your platform Yep.

23:15

That's doing audio now. Yep.

23:19

But yet maybe they have a YouTube channel

23:22

that has different content on it. Yep. How are you bundling that, um, to extend that,

23:29

to maybe that account having two podcasts?

23:33

- Oh, they could podcasts, they could add another. And again, we, this is just getting started here on that.

23:39

- Yeah. - So, okay. - Yeah. Because I'm sure there's examples of that

23:44

where people, people create an audio podcast,

23:46

but they create a different kind

23:48

of content flow for YouTube.

23:51

They might be able to convert that to an audio podcast as

23:54

- Well. And here's the thing. It's everything that a

23:59

normal podcaster does. Mm-Hmm.

24:01

- <affirmative> - Can do, they can do

24:05

creating new episodes, creating premium within that same channel.

24:09

- Right? - They're not limited to what we pull in.

24:12

They can produce premium, they can do whatever they want.

24:15

They can go to Apple Podcasts, apple Premium.

24:19

They can, so they can do everything.

24:21

They, and if they wanna create a new show, you have have the ability to create a new show.

24:25

They wanna become a video podcaster, they can become a video podcaster.

24:30

Hmm. So really, the sky's the limit.

24:32

The only thing that we're doing is auto publishing their,

24:38

- You might wanna think about doing a deal with, uh, X maybe

24:41

Todd, you know, I had to mention that. Well,

24:49

- Again, we're not done with Vid Pod. - Right? No, I'm sure

24:53

- That you're not done. So, you know, and you know, it is what it is.

24:57

Um, yeah.

24:59

So those of you that are on our platform, our episode plan, I won't go into everything.

25:04

There's gonna be videos out about this episode

25:07

planning. Mm-Hmm. - <affirmative>, - We've got the episode production tools,

25:12

and I'm just showing you the top, top of the menu system.

25:15

Let me show you an output. - So what's the scope of the AI capability?

25:20

What's the, well, the top level, let's, let's,

25:22

- Uh, here's, here's the one I did for Gee Central.

25:26

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I got, uh, transcript.

25:30

- Okay. - Title. I chose my own title.

25:33

I didn't like the titles. It came up to with on this one.

25:35

But we suggest 10 titles. I get a show summary, I get bullet points

25:42

of the content that's been covered. Uh, I didn't do episode Generation on that one.

25:47

Let me back up. Let me find one. I've got episode generation

25:54

episode art. - Okay. - And episode chapters.

25:59

So this is a full chapter list of every, you know,

26:03

the 30 plus topics I talked about in Ke Central.

26:05

It automatically mark the chapters, put the time hacks in.

26:09

I can upload images, do links. But here's the, so

26:13

- That goes into the, the player too, I would imagine.

26:18

- Yeah. All, all this transfers right into, if I come back

26:21

to Geekness Central and look at the last episode,

26:25

you can see the chapter markers on the player

26:29

that were, and also - Goes into the RSS feed too. Yeah.

26:32

- Yeah. Okay. And then basically, so it's also there too.

26:37

So we brought it into the Player, and it's also in the SS feed.

26:40

But if I go back and go to the top of the food chain here,

26:43

and I go over to the social promotion and the production, we've got the ability to do clips.

26:51

These are clips for Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Facebook.

26:56

And I've got the ability to do an email promo as well.

27:00

We added a little feature the last minute.

27:03

Um, 'cause what this does, it starts off with a, uh,

27:07

with episode planning, and there's a show profile.

27:11

So my name, first name, last name, email, bio,

27:16

podcast goal, podcast description, website, social media,

27:20

links, destinations. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then Desired audience.

27:25

So this is the folks you hope listen to your podcasting.

27:27

You actually set up a profile, and that goes into the episode planning section.

27:32

But in the end, when we get all done,

27:35

and we've done, we're doing a clip highlights, uh,

27:40

I don't think it'll show up on this one because we just added

27:43

- It. So that, that email capability there

27:45

that you're generating there, is that, um, moving towards maybe kind of a newsletter type of

27:50

- Capability? Well, this, this is designed, you cut and paste this

27:52

and put this right into your email software to

27:55

- Okay. Whatever email. Yeah, - Yeah.

27:57

Platform. Well, and you can edit it, of course. But it's, it does a great job.

28:01

And we just, I mean, literally in the last half hour,

28:04

we added, and I haven't created a new email, but we now embed within the actual email,

28:09

your social platforms, your email, your subscribe links

28:13

to the various, so we basically have that embedded in the AI

28:17

melds that in. So I don't wanna get too deep into this.

28:20

You guys can, those of you that are not blueberry customers, come on over.

28:24

We'll migrate you today. And here's the beauty.

28:27

Here's the beauty. It's just 10 bucks a month with it's part

28:31

of our Thrive Plan. So we've got

28:35

- 10, 10 bucks a month in addition to the hosting plan, or

28:38

- Yeah. But it includes, but it's part of our Thrive Bundle.

28:40

A Thrive Bundle's already got like six

28:42

or seven additional tools. So we've added a whole bunch of value

28:46

to our, to our Thrive Bundle. So yeah, 10 boxes. The is the cost per month.

28:54

So that's cheaper than anybody's AI out there

28:57

that's doing any AI stuff. And again, it's part of a bundle.

29:01

You, you get, uh, you know, you get just a whole bunch of additional features.

29:05

You get additional statistics stuff. It's, you know, and we're gonna Mm-Hmm.

29:08

<affirmative> the clip creation, um, you're able

29:12

to generate 16 episode images a month.

29:14

So we did set a limit on that. That's the most expensive part of the whole thing. Mm-Hmm.

29:19

<affirmative>, um, clip creation is, uh,

29:21

gonna take some overhead, but, so not trying to be a headliner,

29:26

but I'm gonna, with the clip creator, we're gonna provide everything that basically Headliner does

29:31

to a certain extent, except we're

29:33

not gonna publish to YouTube. - Right. So is there any

29:41

of these features that are getting bundled in

29:44

with your basic plans? - With the, so, no. So you have to have the Add-on.

29:51

You have to have the Thrive add-on Okay.

29:53

To, to get the, to get the assistant.

29:56

Um, but again, I, it's a, it's a hell of a value.

30:00

- That's what I was gonna say. I mean, it's that, I mean,

30:02

if you were to get the same capabilities, you'd probably have to have multiple

30:06

subscriptions with different - Platforms.

30:08

Oh. With a lot of different platforms. Yeah. So, well, you one, you could, you know, you could pick,

30:14

you know, and we went around and looked at all the pricing and, um, I,

30:21

I, I, I think we've, we've done great value on this to see if I can,

30:26

- Uh, - Let's see. Is that the page? No, it's not.

30:30

I don't want that. Where did I go? - Can you share what the AI platform

30:35

that you're using is here? Nope. To, - Nope. Nope.

30:38

- Okay. - We're not sharing, but I can switch.

30:43

So whatever I'm on currently, I can switch.

30:47

We've designed it. I could, if I'm on Claude,

30:49

I can go to OpenAI. If I'm on OpenAI, I can go to Llama.

30:53

If I'm on Llama, I can go back to OpenAI.

30:56

So we made the, you know, and basically choose the, the language model.

31:02

Okay. And somebody all of a sudden next week comes out

31:04

with something that's five times better.

31:07

We will test in a test environment

31:10

and then click the switch.

31:14

- Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, - I'm not,

31:17

I'm not locked into any model. So

31:21

- This has pre-written prompts behind them,

31:25

right? Is that how it works? Yeah. - Yeah. The beauty above says

31:28

- There's probably open, open areas in the prompt to fill

31:31

with information from each content.

31:34

- She says the beauty aboves, Todd, I notice images per chapter.

31:37

Does it mean you'll be able to produce an MP four?

31:39

No, we're not talking about, uh, doing that for YouTube yet.

31:44

Um, the, the,

31:52

the chapters are purely a podcasting 2.0 feature

31:55

that's supported in podcasting 2.0 apps.

31:59

And, um, - Hmm.

32:04

I can see where this might go in the future. Todd, it's interesting to think about the cross pollinations

32:09

that could happen between audio and video here.

32:12

Hmm. So when you

32:17

start thinking about the growing capability of, um,

32:20

AI video, where's that gonna take us?

32:33

- It'd be fun. - Yeah. - There's lots, lots of options here.

32:37

- Yeah. I was impressed by some of the AI video

32:41

that I've been seeing online lately. So, - Interesting.

32:45

Or not. But, you know, again, I'm not doing, uh, it's very, very expensive.

32:52

If you, okay, so let's say I have 30 chapters

32:57

to do 30 images. If I was gonna do 30 AI images to add to a chapter file

33:07

that's, uh, that's, that's not gonna be bundled into a $10 a month plan on top

33:13

of hosting, that'll, that happens. Now, is - There a lot of value in that anyway?

33:15

- Well, no. No. If someone wants to have three minutes

33:19

of this image, five minutes of that image, eight minutes

33:22

of another image, if you wanna switch the image every

33:27

that, I'm not gonna do video. That's crazy. I'm not doing a full motion video

33:32

off an audio podcast. That's, you know, at this time.

33:35

It's, it crazy how much that would cost. That would be crazy. Well,

33:41

- You know, it's coming though. - Well, you know, but it's, it's coming.

33:43

It's, but it's expensive. It's really, really expensive.

33:46

The, when you get into gen generating images

33:50

- Yeah. - It's just like that little audio clip I just paid.

33:54

You know, those are done on credits. Right.

33:57

So, you know, you're not getting that, that, that is,

34:00

that is, that is heavy lift. You know, you think about stressing you,

34:05

you get something like that. It's, it's not inexpensive.

34:11

- But Todd, I can totally see it happen. Oh yeah. So let's say you do an audio podcast and you just use the

34:16

- AI to create a, a 90 minute video of this show,

34:19

- Show of the same content. Right. And then just have a

34:22

- Avatar well have, just have, yeah. Okay. Well, I knock

34:27

and anybody can do that for under, like,

34:30

at this time, right? Under a hundred. Oh,

34:32

- It's still early. Yeah's still - Early. It's still early. But, you know,

34:36

do I wanna watch some swirling

34:39

bs on a YouTube channel? I don't know.

34:42

- Well, if you think about the, the potential production capability that could Right.

34:47

Be wrapped around that, um, it could be pretty impressive.

34:51

- So Dave, Dave Jones says, bid to pot is a beautiful product.

34:54

Massive kudos. The whole team. Are there any feeds in the wild yet? Uh, a couple. Yeah.

35:00

I think there is. Dave. You'll have to watch Podcast Index <laugh>,

35:02

because we're pinging when we make the make the Show.

35:06

So they would come from us. So 51 50.

35:11

I got a email from Darren or a, a, a Boost,

35:15

but said, we are live and lit. I guess, I guess the Bat Single did go out. 2222.

35:19

SATs from Darren Schwartz. Our church uses Rumbles a YouTube livestream backup when

35:23

YouTube sends us a strike received one already,

35:26

and have a, had a few older episodes

35:28

banned because of Covid. What's interesting is that is more

35:31

and more information comes out there, Mr. Shared in our America's Now Proven true.

35:35

There may come a day when we're having your own RSS feed

35:39

will be the only way to get your message out.

35:42

As of now, we publish YouTube Rumble and our own RSS feed.

35:45

Great. Episode 5 81. - Yeah. 'cause you might be able to do the same thing, Todd

35:50

with Rumble too. So - Another 2,222 sets.

35:55

Not answering your question, Rob <laugh> <laugh>, uh, this was from,

36:00

- Well, it's also, you know, what's interesting is that, um,

36:03

currently right now I have an account at at Rumble,

36:06

and then I have a YouTube account and I can synchronize those together.

36:09

Yeah, right. So they'll transfer videos out

36:11

of YouTube into Rumble, uh,

36:14

- That account. No, they won't do it that way no more. They quit.

36:18

I'm pretty They did? Yeah. I'm pretty sure it's only Rumble to YouTube now.

36:23

- Oh, so YouTube cut - It off? I think so.

36:27

- Okay. I kind of did wonder why it didn't look like my Rumble account was full

36:32

of my YouTube stuff yet.

36:35

- So 2022 stats from, uh, Darren Schwartz says,

36:38

sorry Rob, I'm with Todd on this one. If you dropped another show's episode in your feed,

36:43

you'd get an email from me. Oh, it's, this is from two episodes ago.

36:46

- Oh, this is the feed drop question. Yeah. - Right. If you continue to do it, I'd probably drop you.

36:51

I don't have time to listen to podcasts. I, I don't have po I don't have

36:54

time to listen to the podcast. I scribe to, as it is now,

36:58

a quick host suggestion if preferred.

37:01

Also, I like the Clipse Fountain does. I found a couple new podcasts that way. Go podcasting.

37:06

Um, let's see here. Uh, Sam Sethy sent, it was actually interview, uh,

37:13

interviewed by Sam yesterday, so I'm gonna be on Pod News on Friday.

37:18

Um, so anyway, that's what's going on with sat.

37:20

So anyway, live and lit everybody, uh,

37:23

on a new podcasting [email protected].

37:26

And we appreciate all of you that stream by the minute stream of Satoshi.

37:30

That is greatly appreciated. And, uh, it's an

37:33

- Incentive for us to just keep talking for hours and hours on

37:37

- It. Yeah. Well, you know, <laugh>, I,

37:39

let me check our Skype here. See if our guest came.

37:43

- Yeah, that would be great. I think we're over.

37:54

Oh, - Hey guys, how you - Doing?

37:59

Good. Now let me do some screen changes here

38:02

because I, to get you in here.

38:05

Two, three, I don't know. I don't want that one.

38:08

I want this one. Five. Ah, there you are. <laugh>.

38:12

It's what's happening. Red circle's, what's in the house? Get

38:15

- In right. - What's going on, Caden? Yes.

38:17

- Caden. Yeah. What, welcome to the show, Mike.

38:20

- Yeah, thanks for having me. I've been listening to you guys for a very long time.

38:24

I listened to you on like one and a half x though. It's a very different experience to listen to you live, uh,

38:28

and, and get you at, uh, at the natural pace.

38:31

- You do know that, uh, when you listen at that, that pace

38:35

that your brain gets jacked up

38:39

and people have found that they, when they go back

38:41

to one time speed, they have less anxiety in life.

38:43

So we definitely recommend one time Speed, - <laugh>.

38:47

Okay, thanks. I'll, I'll switch it back. Uh, it's, it's, uh, it's sometimes I'm listening

38:51

to the show, like, you know, it's a show about poker

38:53

or something for my, uh, for entertainment.

38:56

I tend not to fast forward. And then when I'm just trying to download, you know,

38:59

industry information directly into my brain, like the Matrix, uh, you know, I tend to turn things,

39:03

turn things up and speed it up. But, um, anyway, I've been listening to you guys

39:06

for years. It's cool to be on. - Yeah, thanks. So, uh,

39:10

you guys made an announcement today too? - Yeah, we did. It was a, a a,

39:15

a really interesting, uh, day for us. We launched a, a new product of ours that we call Open Wrap,

39:19

um, which I'm happy to tell you about. Um, many people think about Red Circle

39:24

as a podcast hosting company, which we are, you know,

39:26

we have a, a podcast hosting business and a a, a competitive product in that space.

39:31

Um, but the main focus for our business is on host Red advertising

39:36

and host Red Advertising Automation. And, um, the product that we released today sort

39:41

of takes all the stuff that we've been doing over the last several years

39:44

that helps us build, uh, and automate host red advertising

39:48

and brings it to podcasts that are not, uh,

39:51

hosted on Red Circle exclusively. So those things used to be tightly coupled our hosting

39:55

and distribution, which has its own dynamic insertion

39:58

technology and our ad automation. And now we're bringing our ad automation to podcasts

40:02

that are hosted on other vast compatible hosting platforms.

40:06

I just use a lot of jargon, so I'm happy to get into the details.

40:09

- Let me guess. You are intercepting the download link.

40:13

You decide if you have an ad inserted ad If it is,

40:16

you download the video reinsert and serve it,

40:20

and you incur the hosting bill to deliver that.

40:24

And if there's no ad, you deliver it from the host.

40:27

- No, we don't do it that way. I think that's the way, um,

40:30

what Dynamo did it, that was a product from Box Nest.

40:33

Yeah, from Box Nests. Yeah. I worked on that.

40:35

And that was an interesting kind of like, uh, end

40:39

around solution to the problem because, uh,

40:42

but the problem with that is then once you insert the ad

40:44

and you're the one delivering it, then you're, uh, incurring the bandwidth, which is no fun, but, but doable.

40:48

But also then can mess with the stats

40:50

that end up back on the, uh, podcasters.

40:53

That's right. Uh, host of Origin. Um, what we've done is that,

40:56

is we've used a technology called that Vast, which is supported by some of the like larger enterprise,

41:02

the more enterprise-y uh, hosting companies.

41:06

And what it does is, uh, it's, it comes from video, uh,

41:09

ad serving and it's a, uh, XML based protocol,

41:11

and it lets you kind of instruct the other ad server, Hey,

41:15

you know, insert this ad for me, uh, ping me back

41:18

after the a's been inserted. Um, and so we sort of talk server to server directly with,

41:23

um, the other podcast hosting company. - Yeah. So then you have to do an integration with the,

41:27

with the hosting company to do it. - Uh, yeah. It's an open standard

41:31

and it's, it's, it's supported by, you know, uh, megaphone

41:35

and R 19 and Omni and some, some ads with simple cast setups.

41:40

So it's supported by a bunch of those like enterprise hosts already.

41:43

Um, you know, there's always, when you do these kinds

41:45

of protocols, there's always little idiosyncrasies

41:47

to work out when you're integrating, but for the most part it's, uh, it's, it's functional

41:51

with all those places using the, without having to do a bunch of custom integrations.

41:55

- Yeah. When we did the Sounds stack for programmatic,

41:58

ours is a little easier because they just tell us whether they have an ad

42:02

for this particular, you know, so we serve it when, um,

42:08

there's no ad and they serve it when there is an ad,

42:11

and then they send us log files back so we get our log files back in the same exact format.

42:15

So we, we basically are able to maintain the,

42:20

the metric data and, uh, 'cause you know, they basically, we, we agreed on the,

42:25

on the log format and, uh, nice.

42:28

And then they, they just pop it back to us. So, um, you know, we thought about doing this

42:34

for programmatic as well, uh, kind of similar to

42:37

what you're doing, but it just, it's, uh, you know,

42:41

if if there's enough money, it's worth it.

42:44

You know? I guess that's the key. - Yeah. Well, so for us, uh, you know,

42:47

we've been successful in scaling up the host Red part

42:51

of our business, which is where we focus. And, um, Mm-Hmm.

42:54

<affirmative>, it was getting to the point where the main limiter for us was the amount of podcasts

42:58

that we could convince to switch to our hosting. Uh, and I think our hosting is great, um,

43:02

but I think there's lots of hosting providers that are out there that are great.

43:05

Uh, and so competing over there while also trying

43:08

to make my main business about advertising, uh,

43:11

was complicated from a, uh, and, and making it harder for us to scale

43:14

what we actually cared about, which was delivering hosted ads.

43:16

And so, while we still have a great hosting product,

43:18

and we're not throwing that away, or not gonna continue, uh, iterating on it

43:22

or anything like that, um, this enables us

43:25

to move fast on our ad product and,

43:27

and do it on podcasts sort of wherever, wherever they live

43:30

- Now, without revealing my entire

43:33

business relationship with Sounds Stack. Sure. You know, so I would just say

43:38

that their commission came outta my cut

43:41

- Uhhuh - <affirmative>, so I took a less of a cut.

43:45

Um, so basically they earned their commission.

43:49

I earned my commission. I just earned less commission

43:51

because, so how are you, how are you incentivizing me

43:56

to work with you, <laugh>? Yeah, well,

43:58

- The ad uh, the ad side of what we do is our own sales team

44:02

and our own direct relationships with brands and agencies.

44:05

And so, uh, there's nobody else that's like bringing the demand in from the other side.

44:09

Uh, it's us doing it and then we, we have a 30% rev share that we take from.

44:13

So it's in, in some ways it's sort of functions similar to how an ad rep would work.

44:17

The only difference is you're not dealing with, uh, a million emails and spreadsheets to pull that off.

44:21

Uh, you're just interacting with our application. - But, but if I'm giving you access to my host, what, what,

44:26

where's the, is there incentive for the host

44:29

to give you access to those customers? - You mean the podcast hosting companies?

44:33

- Yeah. Yeah, yeah. - Uh, yeah, there's a, there's,

44:36

there's different pricing models that those folks have.

44:38

They do charge like a small, uh, like CPM based fee

44:41

for the actual ad insertion over this technology,

44:44

but that's the extent of the, the fees

44:46

that are being taken by these hosts. - Yeah, that's interesting

44:49

because I, I wouldn't give up my

44:56

host for an insertion fee.

44:59

- Yeah. I mean, megaphones not letting me, uh, you know,

45:03

they have their own, their own thing called span,

45:05

which is like their programmatic thing that that runs above

45:08

anything else that is inserted into Yeah, the inventory.

45:11

- Sorry, you're getting whatever. Yeah, I underst ah, yeah.

45:14

- Their field's not super, you know, overwhelmingly high.

45:18

So there's plenty of inventory usually left.

45:20

No, that's curious. But they're, they're making sure that they get to, uh, to, to get the first dibs.

45:24

And there are other folks that I think, you know, recognize

45:26

that the publisher has an interest in being able

45:29

to source their own advertising and, you know, plug it in

45:32

and punch it into the, uh, dynamic insertion UI that existed megaphone.

45:36

Um, this isn't really that different. It's just happening a little bit more automated so

45:39

that the publisher doesn't have to, you know, copy and paste a bunch of measurement pixels

45:43

or make sure they get the dates correct when they, when they flight to campaign.

45:46

Right. All that is happening automatically on our backend instead.

45:49

- Yeah. - Hmm. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of what I wanted

45:52

to ask you about too, Mike, is, is

45:54

that you say in your announcement that you're automating all the manual steps, is it just

45:59

because you're, you're doing it through your own ad sales force,

46:02

or is there some other aspects of automating the manual steps here?

46:07

Are you guys doing that between your, your ad sales folks

46:11

and the, the brands? Is there something new going on there,

46:14

or is it just the automation of working with you guys

46:17

and not having to deal with it? - Yeah, so I mean, that's, that's the core of

46:22

what our product is, is, you know, we started,

46:25

five years ago, we released a free hosting just

46:28

to bring some podcasts on, and then we started selling ads by hand.

46:32

And I've heard Todd talk about this, and you can hear, yeah.

46:34

You know, you can't monetize the network and all these things.

46:37

Like, it's, it's so painful to run these campaigns by hand, right.

46:40

Uh, and you, you have everything from, you know,

46:44

podcaster says the wrong promo code to, you know, we forgot

46:47

to invoice, uh, or, you know, the agency didn't pay us on time or the pixel,

46:52

- Or make goods matter - For the stuff. Yeah. So every one of those things I just mentioned,

46:57

we have built systematically features for, to streamline

47:00

and make those part of our application instead of a bunch

47:03

of emails and spreadsheets. So, you know, as a podcaster, you get an invite

47:07

to an ad deal where we, we say, Hey, you know, here's the,

47:10

the, the dates and the terms and what's going on.

47:12

Like, are, do you wanna do it or not? They say Yes.

47:15

Um, and then from then on the platform is managing

47:17

everybody's deadlines. It's emailing the, the

47:20

advertiser saying, Hey, I need a script. I need a script. I need a script. The advertiser puts the

47:24

script in, uh, you know, it's then emailing the podcaster,

47:26

Hey, I need a read, a read. You know, you need to update in, you know, three days,

47:29

two days, one day, and we're sort of herding all these cats.

47:33

Um, and then again, the pixels and the reporting

47:36

and all of that stuff, these are features built into the platform.

47:39

There are things for, you know, podcast to read the wrong promo code or ad was not approved,

47:44

or, um, you know, putting the,

47:46

the right CTA and the R ss feed. All these things have, uh, features that we've built to try

47:50

and make this as streamlined as possible. And that's why we're doing, you know,

47:54

I, I don't know the number offhand. Usually like five to 600 concurrent host

47:57

red ads on the platform. We just have like one ad ops person that's kind

48:01

of being the glue whenever something isn't handled by the platform itself.

48:04

Um, but it takes a lot of focus and energy to just work on that

48:08

for many years. To get to that point, - Mike, you should have bought my Cams product.

48:13

- <laugh>. Yeah, - <laugh>. Because I've had this built for 10 years.

48:17

Yeah. Yeah. Not as deep,

48:20

but we built same thing, you know,

48:23

because it was like hurting cats. <laugh> Yeah. Was Cats and, and I was running it <laugh>.

48:28

Yeah. You know, so the Pi Piper, yeah, it, it was me,

48:32

you know, and, uh, it, it's, it wasn't as fancy as it,

48:36

it did automatically send reports to the media buyers.

48:38

It did send emails to the podcasters,

48:41

but we did true host reads. Nothing was inserted, everything was baked.

48:46

Because even today, this is what I don't understand,

48:49

95%,

48:53

96, 90 7% of podcasts globally

48:57

get 90% of the lifetime downloads in the first 96 hours.

49:00

So why, why do we even wanna bother for those shows

49:05

that are getting this maximum reach within the person?

49:09

Why even rebuild that? Why not just, just leave it in there?

49:13

You know? Um, sure. There's shows that have Yeah.

49:16

Long tail, they have Evergreen, you know,

49:19

but the majority of shows and podcasting looks like a,

49:22

a hockey puck, a hockey stick stood up on

49:24

end, you know, it's, yep. Right. So

49:26

- After the Apple changes, it's even more so, you know, the,

49:29

the back catalog stuff's kind of of even less, right?

49:33

Um, the reason why we focus so much on dynamic insertion

49:36

and don't do baked in at all, is not

49:38

because of the way it gets deployed into the content in

49:42

terms of the episodes it's in, but it's more about cat herding

49:45

and the efficiency of the process. Wow. By actually managing the insertion of the ad itself.

49:51

That means we're in a position to deal with the pixels

49:54

to make sure that it is flighted correctly, to make sure

49:56

that we, um, that we know when it went in

49:59

and when it came out, and all of those pieces. Mm-Hmm. Because I think there's been many other folks,

50:03

you know, pod in the past and others that are still around today that, um,

50:07

that have these, uh, uh, host read marketplaces

50:09

that have a bunch of, that sort of take all those emails and spreadsheets, right.

50:13

And move them into a web application. But then there's still that step at the end where it's like,

50:17

okay, podcaster, like, go take all this information, remember,

50:20

- And what you gotta do, do it - All correctly. And there's so many opportunities for mistakes, not,

50:24

not the Podcaster's fault, there's like 25 details in each of these deals.

50:27

Deals. And if you're doing three a week, it's, it's easy to make a mistake.

50:29

Um, and then, you know, you're sending screenshots of, uh,

50:32

reporting and stuff afterwards. So there's all this efficiency that comes

50:34

with doing it over dynamic, which is why, why we focus there.

50:37

- I, I still be honest with you, double middle fingers,

50:41

the media buyers that want pixels, you know,

50:44

are they really, are they really getting that much value?

50:47

No, I don't think so. I don't think so either. - Yeah. I think the, yeah, I mean they,

50:53

they're, I appreciate - <crosstalk> to hold over from another era,

50:56

- Right? - Yeah, yeah. But I think the, like the, like, one thing it is really good

51:00

for, and I, we find it really interesting when we get our hands on the data, is

51:04

to see the comparative performance of different podcasts.

51:07

So forget about like a real ROAS number that comes outta this thing.

51:10

Yeah. Right. But just to see like, hey, these two True Crime podcasts with 20,000 weekly listeners,

51:15

you know, that are reading the same set of talking points,

51:18

you know, one can perform five times better than the other.

51:21

And you know what the reason is for that?

51:24

Is, is, is anybody's guess, right? Is the, is the, the quality

51:27

of the ad read is the relationship

51:30

that Host has with this audience. And so, like, you know, me being able to see that

51:34

as the guy working with the podcaster and the advertiser is like very helpful.

51:38

But I understand also kind of like people tend

51:40

to over overvalue some of the data that comes out

51:42

of it in a way that, you know, sort of backs into like a hard ROAS number.

51:46

But it's still, you know, you gotta look at a, a much bigger picture than just a just one

51:50

one dot on a, on a graph. - So the universal question is,

51:54

and it still remains, which drives me absolutely crazy,

51:58

we're monetizing maybe four, 5%

52:02

of total podcasts out there. Um, you know, what does this do for the other 95%

52:08

who actually statistically,

52:11

'cause I've got years of data perform better

52:15

because audience are smaller and more intimate.

52:18

When are those shows, uh, when are those shows gonna be thrown a

52:21

bone or is it ever gonna happen? - Yeah, I mean that's, that's like the fundamental, uh,

52:27

motivation behind building why we chose to build this business.

52:30

Um, you know, we saw most of the dollars going

52:33

to the top 500 or top thousand podcasts,

52:35

but we believe more than just the number of podcasts

52:38

where there's like so many down the long tail, um,

52:41

but also kind of, uh, there's a huge kind of, uh, fat torso,

52:45

it's named after me, uh, of, of middle class podcasters

52:49

that are, you know, that have, uh,

52:51

a couple thousand listeners Yeah. Up to a couple tens of thousands of listeners.

52:54

And when you aggregate those up, they're actually bigger than the Yeah.

52:57

Just this middle school huge. And those folks, you know, they get an ad deal here

53:01

and there, they find better help or they have a relationship with an agency, um,

53:04

but they're way under monetized relative,

53:07

relative to the folks at the top. Um, and they represent a huge amount of, of space, uh,

53:12

for future investment from, from brands.

53:15

Uh, and that's, I think software like ours that, uh, aims

53:18

to like herd all those cats in a way that's possible,

53:20

where you can deploy 200, 300 podcast campaigns, um,

53:25

without having to pull your hair out, um, is going

53:28

to hopefully make it, I mean, over the last several years,

53:30

we've paid $16 million to podcasts like that.

53:33

I think we'll hopefully do more and more of that as we go.

53:35

Um, but that's what we're, that's, that's our main mission. That's what we're after this,

53:38

this product helps us move a little bit closer to the top

53:40

of the market too, because it's a little more focused on

53:42

those podcasts that are on enterprise hosts. But, um, but yeah, you know,

53:47

those two things together should enable us to continue to,

53:49

uh, to work with larger and larger brands and deploy larger

53:52

and larger budgets and make sure it gets distributed to podcasts of all shapes and sizes.

53:57

- Well, I would, I would love to see, uh, I'd love to see,

54:01

uh, you guys think about, uh, a way to, uh,

54:05

figure out a point system that incentivizes me,

54:08

<laugh> understood.

54:13

Yeah. I mean, I - Haven't thought about, - Yeah, in, in the end, you know,

54:17

let's be honest, I'm not greedy, but I'm gonna do the dev work to put something together,

54:22

which, you know, we can do, um,

54:25

that dev work's gotta be paid for in whatever overhead.

54:27

And then, you know, we obviously you can't cut the

54:30

pie 25 times. That's 'cause then you know

54:33

who gets screwed, the creator gets screwed. So for me, that's why when we worked with Sounds Stack, I,

54:38

you know, they took their commission outta mine

54:41

and I just took a lower commission. So, you know, and they, and,

54:44

and they provide all the, you know,

54:46

they provide all the inventory. I don't have to do nothing. I go to sleep.

54:49

And they, they manage it. So collect

54:52

- The paycheck. That's - Nice. Well, and, and not only that, I just, I give the, you know,

54:55

these are podcasters that would not have an opportunity

54:59

otherwise, you know, they can do value for value.

55:01

They can do all the other stuff that's available out there if they want.

55:05

Um, and we see a growing number of folks

55:07

that are using programmatic, which is good, but we both know where programmatic pricing is.

55:13

You know, that that'll never, you know, that'll never,

55:16

if it ever gets above 15, I think I'll, you know, I'll, uh,

55:19

you know, Rob, I'll probably eat that hat you're wearing <laugh>.

55:22

Um, but you know, right at I'd happy,

55:25

I'd be thrilled if it stayed at 12 or 13,

55:27

but usually it's 7, 8, 9, 10, you know, and,

55:30

but if we could get to find a way to,

55:35

to put money in podcasters pockets, guess what it does,

55:37

doesn't matter if it comes from, uh, value

55:42

for value, doesn't matter if it comes from donations,

55:45

doesn't matter if it comes from advertisers. We put money in podcaster's pocket, guess what they can do?

55:50

They hold up that check or that PayPal statement

55:53

or wherever that money's come in, and maybe they show their partner

55:57

or they buy themselves dinner, or they buy, make a car payment or whatever the number is.

56:04

This is a motivator. It's just as much as a motivator of,

56:07

Matt just sent us 2,112 SATs, he says,

56:10

watching the show from Spain. So that's, you know, that's again,

56:13

getting value back from Matt for saying, Hey,

56:16

I'm watching the show live. And then Dave Jones says, uh,

56:19

yo Mike hosting companies interviewing other hosting companies.

56:22

We live in a crazy world. Well, we're really not a hosting company there, Dave.

56:27

It's, we're doing a new media show. I happen to, you know, be a, a founder of one,

56:31

but doesn't mean we're doing, we're,

56:33

we're an open opportunity, uh, thing here.

56:36

And you can see I'm wheeling and dealing a little bit at the same time.

56:40

That was from Dave Jones. - Yeah. I think your point is valid.

56:44

These, these vast and programmatic integrations do a lot of work.

56:47

We've done them before. Yeah. And then found a hundred dollars on the other

56:50

- Side. It - Was a disaster. Um, you know, uh,

56:54

and so, you know, you do wanna make sure you're spending

56:56

your engineers wisely. Uh, I think the, like, the way, like I said,

57:01

the way these enterprise hosts do it is I think they charge

57:03

a fee for service. Um, that's just like another approach,

57:07

- You know? And, and I, and it's when it goes back to, you know, I,

57:12

I'm a creative first, it's, I, I don't think

57:14

that's any surprise. So, because I, you know,

57:17

I'm the one that's getting a check too. You know, I get a check from

57:20

GoDaddy and I, you know, I Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I, I protect every point of that, that I can.

57:24

Right. So, um, so I, so I get it, I really do do,

57:28

this is cool what you're doing there.

57:31

Yes. Um, yeah, this could be done another way.

57:34

This could be done the way we did it with Sounds stack

57:37

where it's not as complicated of an implementation,

57:41

so, Hmm. How, how are you, how are you working the insertion points?

57:47

- So yeah. That's all managed by the, by the podcaster in their existing,

57:51

- In their system. Okay. So they set their marker.

57:55

- Yeah. And they, the way this ends up getting flighted on

57:57

their end is it's almost like a camp, a low priority campaign in their dynamic insertion system

58:02

that says, you know, my stuff that I flighted

58:05

for the ads I sold myself go first and then go down and look

58:09

and what Red Circle has to offer. And meanwhile we see those bids that are coming out

58:13

or those bid requests all the time. So we get a feel for how much inventory

58:16

is available on these shows. And we can use that to figure out how to size campaigns and,

58:20

and, and, and, and what to expect. - And when that call comes about this day of the month

58:25

where the advertiser says, oh, hey,

58:27

I got extra 25 grand to spend. Can you move that for me in 10 days? Yeah.

58:32

Um, this is an opportunity to get a flight up fast in two

58:35

or three days and get that money spent.

58:38

- That's right. And I think, you know, people when they think about how to do that effectively,

58:42

their, their brain turns to programmatic solutions.

58:46

Right. And I think that, that in addition to, you know,

58:49

helping us spread the money around to a larger set

58:51

of creators by, um, by taking out all the friction

58:56

with this automation, it can also increase the speed at

58:58

which we deploy these budgets, which makes it possible

59:01

for those kinds of things to end up in like higher quality,

59:04

authentic host red ads instead of, you know, Sunday, Sunday,

59:07

Sunday radio ads that could sometimes end up being those last minute ones. Right. What's

59:10

- The fastest time you've ever flighted a campaign <laugh>

59:13

on one of those Friday day - Calls?

59:15

Like an hour or two? <laugh> not, - Not, - You know, not to a hundred podcasts,

59:19

- Right, right, right. - But, uh, we have a button in the platform

59:22

that's called Start Early. You know, our typical turnaround time is 10 days,

59:26

but sometimes if we have to hustle, you know, we hustle

59:28

and there's a button that just like makes it go. - Yeah. I think the fastest I turned one was three days.

59:33

So you, I kudos to you for a couple hours. <laugh>, right?

59:37

- Yeah. Yeah. It's like, uh, you know, some

59:39

of my sales guys have the podcasters, uh, you know,

59:42

phone numbers, uh, saved as their favorites, you know, um,

59:45

it's like we, we need, sometimes if you move fast enough,

59:47

uh, there's, there's dollars to grab for, for everybody. Right.

59:49

- You know, and, and, and you know, this should, and this is to all the podcasters listening,

59:54

check your email twice a day, please. <laugh>.

59:59

- Yeah. That's actually one of the things that, uh, that,

1:00:01

uh, that we, that we found. So, uh, what one of the things we did

1:00:05

that really improved the response time

1:00:07

you text them was adding tech. Yeah. We sent text, - Uh, - We sent text five days before, three days

1:00:12

before, two days before, one day before and four hours before.

1:00:14

Right. If you haven't hit, if you haven't hit a deadline,

1:00:17

- <laugh>. Right. That ding ding is a brilliant,

1:00:22

my, my system, my, my system. I haven't touched in a while, does not have that. But yeah.

1:00:27

If we were ever to update it, I think that would be, oh man,

1:00:32

oh, hey, you know, to get this email, Hey, does

1:00:34

that campaign two weeks? You know, after the deadline?

1:00:37

Hey, is that campaign still available? No, we told you.

1:00:40

Yeah, that's, we told you had 48 hours to respond <laugh>.

1:00:44

- Right. That's an interesting product problem for us too, right.

1:00:47

Where it's like, yeah. I mean, we can, because like I said, it's all automated.

1:00:49

We can like relight the campaign Yeah.

1:00:52

And send it to you the next day. Um, but there's like a,

1:00:55

a give a mouse a cookie problem there too, where, you know,

1:00:57

we want the deadlines to mean something. Yeah. So everybody keeps their hair. And

1:01:01

- Especially if you've got a media Go ahead.

1:01:04

- I was gonna say, as much as we have solved a lot of the

1:01:08

friction with software, there are still like fundamental

1:01:10

people problems involved with this. And any, any interesting software has to kind of figure out

1:01:14

how to best take on those challenges. Right. - You see this - <laugh> <laugh>,

1:01:20

- I I attest this to five to seven years of dealing

1:01:24

with media buyers and podcasters who didn't respond to email

1:01:29

and Yeah. Make, yeah. So I

1:01:35

understand why you guys built what you built. Believe me, I I I understand completely. Yeah.

1:01:40

Go, go ahead, Rob. - Yeah, I was going to kinda shift the

1:01:44

conversation a little bit. Um, I don't know if all of you guys saw the post

1:01:49

that Lisa Laport made. Oh, yeah. Who's the CEO of TWIT TV about the,

1:01:54

the advertising market and why she feels like podcasting is struggling right now.

1:01:59

Um, and her top pick was podcast agencies

1:02:04

demanding, um, massive ad tech in, in

1:02:09

what they expect around campaigns. This would be, you know, um,

1:02:13

- Pixels, all of - Pixel tracking, tracking, uh,

1:02:17

brand safety, suitability tools, all sorts of, um, you know,

1:02:21

uh, kind of attribution type type stuff.

1:02:25

Um, and whe whether

1:02:27

or not that's kind of adding this expense layer to the

1:02:32

advertising business and making it difficult for, you know,

1:02:36

uh, like a network to kind of run their own stuff,

1:02:39

which is kind of what Lisa's trying to do here.

1:02:42

Um, versus wor working with a hosting platform like,

1:02:46

like Red Circle or Blueberry or whatever, is really the only way going forward.

1:02:51

Now, are you guys feeling pressured on the,

1:02:54

on the cost side in the complexity side around the,

1:02:57

the expectation of agencies and, and buyers?

1:03:00

Right, right now around ad tech, around podcasts?

1:03:03

- Uh, some, I mean, we, we, you know, the, the,

1:03:08

the podcast media buying agencies and there's a relatively small set of them

1:03:11

and, you know, we wanna maintain as spectacular relationship with them as possible, right.

1:03:15

By delivering efficient operations so that they don't have

1:03:18

to deal with the exceptions and the problems and,

1:03:21

and providing high performance content for them to be on.

1:03:24

Um, mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And in the end of the day,

1:03:27

you know, they control a lot of the ad spend,

1:03:29

especially in Host Red. And so, um, right.

1:03:32

You know, if they are trying to add services

1:03:34

or add complexity to be able to service their client as best

1:03:38

as they can, you kind of gotta play ball. Um, you don't wanna be on their bad side

1:03:41

because there's a million podcasts and networks out there,

1:03:43

and you want to be, uh, servicing them as best you can.

1:03:46

Um, and, uh, you know, I, I tend to trust

1:03:50

that they have the best view of what, um, of

1:03:55

what they need to keep their clients happy

1:03:57

in terms of technology. Um, Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because they, they're the ones

1:04:00

who are really good at closing and maintaining those, those clients

1:04:03

and keeping that spend going. Um, and so I wouldn't say I have a problem with it,

1:04:07

but I, I, I completely agree with it's, it's a burden.

1:04:09

It's co it's complex. Um, and, uh, you know, our solution for that is try to build

1:04:15

as much software as we can to keep that simple. Um, but yeah, you know, sometimes we gotta copy

1:04:19

and paste 60 pixels into the software to make the thing work.

1:04:21

Right. Um, and that's a lot. - So there was one thing in her commentary that I kind

1:04:27

of took umbrage to, right.

1:04:30

And my reply, she complained heavily about the,

1:04:33

the drop because of iOS - 17. Oh, yeah, yeah.

1:04:36

- And - The drop in downloads and, and the changes in the consumption

1:04:40

- Side. And, and my, my response was that not everyone was hit

1:04:44

as badly as, and I said, then you need to be wiser in who you're picking

1:04:50

for a measurement provider, because, you know, as we've talked about on the show, yeah,

1:04:55

blueberry saw a little drop

1:04:57

because of some of the change in Iowa 17,

1:04:59

but I didn't get hit on the, the app having the issue

1:05:03

of doing the repeated downloads to try to download back catalog.

1:05:06

That wasn't ever an issue with us, which many other folks

1:05:11

seem to have an issue with. And I look at who I know who's measuring

1:05:17

Lisa's shows, and I go, Hmm.

1:05:20

So, um, you know, maybe, maybe, uh,

1:05:24

podcasters need to be a little wiser in, uh,

1:05:28

who they pick for measurement partner. Well,

1:05:31

- Yeah. I think you're shifting quite a burden onto

1:05:34

the podcaster there. Um, Todd, by by saying that because,

1:05:38

- Well, a podcaster, I - Dunno that a lot of people know the differences.

1:05:42

- A podcast, - Supposedly, if they're IAB, they're all doing the same thing, right?

1:05:45

- A podcaster in the adv doing advertising. Mm-Hmm.

1:05:49

<affirmative> needs to ask very tough questions

1:05:52

of the people that are measuring their shows. Right. And if they don't, I have, sorry,

1:05:59

that's your business. That's, that's your, that's your, your bundling.

1:06:04

And I'm gonna, if I'm going to some company

1:06:07

and they're gonna be measuring my show, I'm gonna be asking a lot of questions.

1:06:10

Again, people need to realize the IB podcast

1:06:14

and measurement guidelines are the minimum

1:06:18

standards. Right, - Right.

1:06:21

- Minimum. And when people realize it's the minimum, then

1:06:26

what are you doing above and beyond? And even with this new proposal that's coming out,

1:06:31

it's the minimum standards.

1:06:34

And I think podcasters need to get smart.

1:06:37

And again, maybe I'm just, maybe, okay, I,

1:06:40

I do have 19 years behind my belt on this. And

1:06:43

- Was it, yeah. Well, both of us do have a lot on this too,

1:06:47

but it's, it's more, you know, when you say minimum

1:06:51

standards, um, that I, that really means

1:06:55

that the better platforms will have

1:06:59

the capability of doing a better job of filtering, um, and,

1:07:04

and actually ultimately getting a lower number compared to other platforms.

1:07:08

- Well, that's, no one wants to ever get a lower number.

1:07:10

So better lies is the problem. Well, - That's, that's, that's the key to this whole conversation,

1:07:15

is that the IAB has not had a strict,

1:07:19

really standard here. Um, and, and not everyone adheres to it in the same way,

1:07:26

um, even on the up, you know, yeah.

1:07:28

Over the lower number side. Right.

1:07:31

Which just means that there's other filters being applied

1:07:34

that are not required by the IEB.

1:07:37

- It's just like now when people are saying, oh, we're seeing fraud.

1:07:39

Well, right. We saw fraud in 2007, so Right. And you

1:07:44

- Built filters to detect it. Right. - You know, and you, you haven't seen fraud in the past.

1:07:48

Well, uh, you know, usually if you're looking at your,

1:07:51

all your data right across the white stack, there's,

1:07:54

there's usually like a, a pipa

1:07:56

that pops up and you're like, what is that? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. You know, and that usually

1:08:00

that big pipper that shows up in your blog, you know,

1:08:03

if you, if you as a, a platform have a broad dashboard

1:08:06

to see all your traffic, not just one show,

1:08:09

you'll say, oh, what is that? And you go, oh, that, that's broad.

1:08:13

You know, because it sticks out like a red thumb

1:08:18

or whatever, sore thumb or whatever. No, I - Wonder why that podcast has, uh, 98%

1:08:22

of its traffic coming from, uh, iTunes on a Windows machine.

1:08:25

- Right, right, right. - It's not, it's not hard

1:08:27

to spot fraud Hunting is actually one of my favorite pastimes. Me too.

1:08:30

- Um, - I really enjoy it. Um, yeah, I think on, on this measurement topic, one

1:08:36

of the things I think is really interesting as well, uh,

1:08:39

is first of all, I think the changes that Apple made were important for the industry.

1:08:42

Yeah. You know, you can say what you wanna say about the,

1:08:44

like, how, how it was handled or so on, but like, those downloads were not high quality.

1:08:49

And so I'm glad they're gone. Um, on the other hand, uh, you know,

1:08:55

what you're hearing from people, and this is the range of hours, I think it was around 20%,

1:08:58

sort of what we ended up seeing, uh, as a change, you know,

1:09:02

20%, uh, decrease in, uh, in, in downloads.

1:09:07

- I know what you're gonna say. - Why is the price not up by 20%?

1:09:11

- Exactly. - You just, well, that's,

1:09:13

you just gave a nice big shave to the media buyers.

1:09:16

That's right. Uh, by not adjusting the prices com, uh,

1:09:18

- Accordingly this performance is the same - To me, this is a sign.

1:09:21

Yeah. Right. This performance is the same, but now you're paying, you know, 20% less price.

1:09:25

And to, to me, this is a sign that there's kind of still,

1:09:29

uh, not enough, uh, sort of pricing transparency and Mm-Hmm.

1:09:34

<affirmative> measurement tooling such that the market itself can find the

1:09:38

correct price for these ads. Uh, if it stays here at below 25, where it's been for a year

1:09:44

or two after kind of the economic sluggishness, um,

1:09:47

you know, that's a sign that something's kind of wrong, right?

1:09:49

That, that, that, uh, that, that the balance

1:09:52

of power shifted towards advertisers in a way that, um,

1:09:56

that, that is artificial. Uh, or, or, or was,

1:09:58

or it's been too far in, in publisher's favor for some time,

1:10:01

but why hasn't that moved? Uh, something, something funky about that to me. Well,

1:10:05

- It's, this is a second or third time there's been a haircut.

1:10:11

Um, the first haircut would've happened really probably

1:10:15

before most people in our space. It was when Lipson pod track

1:10:20

and us kind of, kind

1:10:22

of decided on a semi kind of spec.

1:10:26

It was actually the first eight pages of the,

1:10:29

we gave eight pages of the kinda the first spec

1:10:31

that we came up with to, to the IEB

1:10:34

and that kind of, well, this was back in like 2008.

1:10:37

Yeah, 2008. So there was a little, there was a big haircut then.

1:10:40

I mean, it was major because boy, it was, I mean,

1:10:42

we were, if - You're doing raw logs

1:10:45

- Before that, I mean, it's a big difference. Oh, raw logs and bots and everything else.

1:10:49

It was, you know, there was like a 60, 50, 60% cut,

1:10:53

you know, and when you found out that, uh, you know,

1:10:55

seven out of 10 downloads was a bot, you know?

1:10:57

Yeah. There was, so in 2008, there was, you know,

1:11:00

like I said, when an earlier, oh, I think I had about 40,000 people listen to my show.

1:11:03

It was more like probably 8,000 <laugh>, you know,

1:11:06

that was probably the real number. Right. But I was billing for 40,000, you know, so

1:11:12

then the second cut came when the IB first guidelines came out,

1:11:16

and everyone kind of tried to align, right?

1:11:19

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it ended up being kind of, kind

1:11:21

of like this, because like Rob said, you everyone's kind

1:11:24

of all over the spectrum a little bit. Um, and then this would be

1:11:28

kind of probably the third haircut. Yeah.

1:11:30

- It was a, the iWatch also was another - <crosstalk>.

1:11:34

Oh yeah. That was another one. Yeah. But a lot of us removed that before we were required to move it.

1:11:37

So again, you know, so, you know, three,

1:11:40

four little haircuts here, but you're right. Guess what? CP m's still 25 <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah.

1:11:45

- It's just, Hey, it's 25 is podcasting. - Yeah. You know, and, and the performance hasn't

1:11:49

changed, so. Right. You know, technically I was getting 25 in 2008.

1:11:54

Now think about that. Mm-Hmm.

1:11:56

<affirmative> or 2006 two, I was getting 25 then

1:11:59

- Factor inflation Right. With that too.

1:12:01

- Yeah. And now it's still at 25,

1:12:04

they're getting a heck of a deal. Yeah.

1:12:07

- Well, there's not a lot of transparency. Right.

1:12:11

- I was gonna say, it's one of these things where again, you can see Yeah. Not enough transparency. You can, you can kind of see

1:12:16

how there are remnants of this market from a kind

1:12:19

of a radio era Yeah. Where people are kind of, um, you know, kind of

1:12:24

have set this price and, and this is how it works, and this is what we sell at,

1:12:27

and everybody's comfortable there. Um, and it doesn't feel like, like, you know,

1:12:32

typical digital marketing where the prices are changing dynamically

1:12:35

with demand and supply. And I, I don't know if the result of a more transparent

1:12:40

and automated market is going to increase or decrease CPMs,

1:12:43

but what I do know is if the, if the, if the amount of value

1:12:46

that you're getting <laugh>, uh, go changes by 20%

1:12:49

and the price doesn't change, like something is, is off there. Right.

1:12:52

- Well then, and I, I put it back on your sales teams

1:12:55

to push, and I know that's hard, but I also remember going, uh, I, I, I went

1:13:00

to a city in Texas, let's just put it that way. I leave it random enough.

1:13:04

And I was in a meeting and, you know, I was, you know, talking with this, you know,

1:13:08

group, and they showed me a spreadsheet and it had factoring on it.

1:13:13

And the factoring was every

1:13:18

podcast network had a factor put on it, a negative factor.

1:13:22

No one had a plus. So if the base was this,

1:13:25

let's say the base was 20, the

1:13:29

a factor 50% mean you are only gonna get offered 10.

1:13:33

And matter of fact, I know one network we're only out of offered five, and Rob probably knows

1:13:37

who we're talking about there because they used to count by sixes.

1:13:40

So, you know, there was factoring that was put against every network.

1:13:44

So it's the media buyers in the end back, these,

1:13:49

this data, every, every deal they do,

1:13:51

they've had a spreadsheet, and then they, in the end, they don't ever talk.

1:13:55

Do you ever, how many times the media buyer told you

1:13:58

how many sales they had? They won't. - That's exactly the problem. - They won't tell you.

1:14:02

It's rare. It's rare. Five, five and 20 years. And

1:14:06

- They don't want you to know, - They don't want you to know.

1:14:08

And and six, just GoToMeeting was the one that I knew

1:14:12

exactly where our, and that's why we got millions

1:14:16

of dollars from them when they were advertising direct

1:14:18

before they went to an agency. And so if there's factoring being put a a against every

1:14:25

network, what they're really matching in the end is they're,

1:14:30

you know, they do the math, it's just a pure math program.

1:14:33

They, they, they back it out to Dr and see what their cost per acquisition was.

1:14:38

And um, they say they don't, but they do.

1:14:43

And they determine next ad spend on, on cost per acquisition when they Oh, no, no, no, no.

1:14:48

We never, we, we don't do that. They lie

1:14:52

- <laugh>. Well, I think they, I think they're pretty transparent

1:14:54

to me at least that about like, you know, they're gonna make smart buying

1:14:57

decisions on behalf of their client. <laugh>, I think the interesting part of that thing

1:15:01

that you just said is that it could go both ways.

1:15:04

Right? Right. So, you know, like if my network has been network X has been like

1:15:09

downgraded and is is worth 50% of the other ones, then like,

1:15:13

uh, I should be willing, I should understand that,

1:15:16

and I should be willing to take a $12 CPM, uh,

1:15:20

won't tell you if I'm not filling it for something higher, but podcasters also won't accept that either.

1:15:23

Right. So it's sort of going both ways, right? It's like everybody thinks it's 25,

1:15:27

everybody thinks they're worth more <laugh>, everybody thinks it should be, you know,

1:15:30

so there's just no transparency. Uh, and I'd like to see that start to evolve.

1:15:34

Uh, it requires, um, a sort of combination

1:15:37

of the performance information, uh, with the, uh, you know,

1:15:41

with the transaction itself, - Which know what's going

1:15:44

to share the direct CPM they ever get.

1:15:48

They're not gonna share their download numbers either.

1:15:52

- Right. And there's not gonna be any transparency on ROI

1:15:55

coming back from the advertising either, because that puts their, their buying

1:16:00

situation in a, in a compromise. - Yeah. Because they don't wanna show you how well they did.

1:16:05

You know, the example I gave of the biggest mistake GoDaddy they made with me

1:16:10

when I was renegotiating the very first time in 2005

1:16:15

when I asked her how well did we do?

1:16:17

And I was only getting, I I, I'll just say it,

1:16:20

I got 300 bucks that first month. - Mm-Hmm. - <affirmative>. And

1:16:23

because I didn't know what to charge, had no clue. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, well,

1:16:27

- They could lie to you too. - They, she, and she told me 3 87, 387 new customers,

1:16:32

and I went, huh, <laugh>.

1:16:34

And I said, that's a lot more - Than 300 bucks.

1:16:36

- Yeah. And I said, I can need to get back to you. And I went back and I did the math, I did the math,

1:16:40

I did the math, and I, there was nothing to go by.

1:16:43

Called her back the next day, and I gave her a number

1:16:46

and just like a good used car salesman when you've screwed

1:16:48

up, she said Yes immediately, <laugh>.

1:16:51

And I, and in my mind I'm like, I just went too low. Right.

1:16:55

And I recovered quick enough, and it's a thing that saved me was I said,

1:16:59

and I said, I want a bonus, a performance bonus.

1:17:02

And she laughed, there you go. And she said,

1:17:04

you underbid it, didn't you <laugh>?

1:17:07

And I said, yes, I did. Right. And, and literally that, that split moment decision

1:17:13

was the difference between some months getting

1:17:18

four figures and some months getting five figures

1:17:22

and, uh, nice and a return. So, but if I had not been quick, if I'd have been hung over

1:17:29

and not quicken up on the uptake, you know,

1:17:32

I'd have been stuck at a four figure number. So knock on wood, you know,

1:17:36

but again, we had nothing to go by. And, and she told me the performance numbers

1:17:40

and it made me go, but now if she, if

1:17:42

that conversation happened today, I'd have come back,

1:17:45

she said 30,000 a month. - Right. - You know, that's, that's the number, you know,

1:17:50

that's what you're gonna have to pay for this inventory. Um, and also companies will never tell you

1:17:57

how much they, it costs them to acquire a customer,

1:18:00

especially on dr. They'll never tell you the cost of the acquisition on TV,

1:18:04

radio, or if they're even doing print or digital.

1:18:08

They won't tell you that. I guarantee you

1:18:10

podcasts are performing better. Yeah.

1:18:14

- Definitely cheaper. So that's not, it's not really in their interest to do it.

1:18:16

No, it's not. They, um, you know, and,

1:18:19

and so, so again, I understand kind of that perspective.

1:18:22

Yeah. Um, but you know, in a digital transaction

1:18:25

where there is enough volume,

1:18:28

also there's price discovery from competitors, right?

1:18:30

Yeah. So, um, you know, it, it should be possible

1:18:34

to find a slightly, slightly more dynamic market

1:18:37

where the price gets set by what the value is instead of,

1:18:40

um, you know, who has the fanciest - Rate card?

1:18:43

My, my sign was, whenever I knew the campaign wasn't doing

1:18:45

well, is when you start getting asked for make goods.

1:18:48

And when, when, when a media buyer called me and asked for make goods, basically, guess what I did?

1:18:53

I gave 'em whatever they wanted because I wanted that check.

1:18:57

I wanted that renewal. I'd go podcaster, say, Hey, we're underperforming.

1:19:01

I I need two more spots

1:19:03

or one more spot from every show this month.

1:19:06

You, if you wanna stay in the campaign on

1:19:08

a, you gotta give them one. And then, then we would overdeliver to make sure

1:19:12

that we made them happy.

1:19:14

Mm-Hmm. So they would come back and give us another ad searching order, you know, so,

1:19:22

you know, so it goes both ways. If, you know, if you're, if you're chasing the dollars,

1:19:26

sometimes you got <laugh>,

1:19:29

- Right? Yeah. No doubt. Yeah. Ah, but sometimes that's worth it, right?

1:19:33

- Yeah. Sometimes, sometimes that's, - Uh, that's, uh, uh, you know, you save the relationship

1:19:37

with that buyer and they come back, they appreciate it,

1:19:39

and they come back to you sometimes you never hear from them

1:19:42

again, and it was all transactional. Yeah. Um, so you have to kind of get a feel for, for how,

1:19:46

whether it's worth doing those extra bonuses and added value and all that stuff.

1:19:50

- But I do, one thing I do hate with

1:19:52

where the industry is now is let me just do a trial buy,

1:19:55

let me buy one episode that's been going on forever, Todd.

1:19:58

Stupid stupidest thing. Yeah.

1:20:00

It's, it's the worst, it's the worst thing you could do.

1:20:04

It's two weeks or one week. Oh, they want one episode, episode,

1:20:07

one episode a month, right? Or just one episode. Let's see how it does on one episode.

1:20:12

I'm like, good lord, a person just has to fart

1:20:16

and miss your a your attitude <laugh>, miss your ad.

1:20:19

Come on. Right. You know, it's just it. Yeah. Yeah.

1:20:23

But, you know, they're 25 years old and they know the best.

1:20:27

- Well, - It had - Some buyers, it comes out - That they, go ahead, Rob.

1:20:31

- It comes out out of the era of, of

1:20:34

of click link marketing campaigns.

1:20:37

And a lot of these folks think that this is like a sponsored link on a Google search

1:20:41

results page, is that they should evaluate the campaign

1:20:43

based on instant results. - You know, and I, I, I haven't done a lot of deals lately,

1:20:47

Mike, so I'm kind of out of the outta the loop. You guys know what's going on.

1:20:51

So, you know, it's, you got a better handle for

1:20:54

what these buyers are asking for. - Uh, I think everything you've just said, uh, sounds,

1:20:58

sounds familiar to me, <laugh>. Um, but the, the thing I was gonna say is we have had buyers

1:21:02

that, sophisticated buyers who sort of said, you know, look,

1:21:06

we've done this for a long time, and we, uh, we, I'm sure there's one-off situations

1:21:11

where somebody farts or whatever you just said, <laugh>, right, right. Where, and, and missed an episode.

1:21:15

But generally, like when we look across the breadth of the data we have, we can buy one time and,

1:21:20

and get a feel for performance enough where we wanna, um,

1:21:23

you know, where we, where we, that's enough for us to make a, a long-term buy decision or not.

1:21:27

That's, that's amazing. And, you know, most of the time when that happens, we sort

1:21:30

of say, okay, then I, you know, we'll go look for other partners because the, the effort, uh,

1:21:34

for everybody involved Yeah. - For one is - Hard as a

1:21:36

podcaster takes all the risk. Right. - And I, and, and again, you know, my philosophy

1:21:40

and if you're a media buyer out there listening to just try my formula once, you gotta be on

1:21:46

for 15 days in every episode for 15 days.

1:21:48

And if that's a weekly show, they gotta, you gotta be in there twice.

1:21:51

And then you look at where your performance is at 15 days.

1:21:54

Just take those first 15 days. And that's, that's just good if anything comes through

1:21:59

and then after 15 days, then make your decision.

1:22:03

That's my, again, I guess I'm just old school, but,

1:22:08

- So also, um, Triton Digital,

1:22:13

um, that document that, um, that, uh, Lisa shared

1:22:16

or that post that Lisa shared also included a screenshot

1:22:20

to Triton, oh, digital's

1:22:24

comparison of weekly, average weekly downloads from 2024

1:22:28

to 2023, and it showed a 41% decline

1:22:33

across all a lot of the major networks,

1:22:35

or at least the ones that are being tracked by Tritton,

1:22:38

which isn't a complete picture. But

1:22:41

- What did contract, 41%, how much did PO Track drop do we know from year to year?

1:22:46

- I don't know. I haven't seen - That.

1:22:48

Now, Mike, how do you guys do your measuring? You just go off the Pixel fire? - Um, we, yeah, so we have our, for our podcast

1:22:55

that are hosted with us, we have our own stat system,

1:22:57

which is based on the IEB. Yeah. And then we have, but it's not certified.

1:23:00

And then for the, where we're getting, uh, ping backs from,

1:23:05

um, you know, there, there's the IEB like, uh, ad delivery.

1:23:08

Oh, okay. Uh, thing, and that's what these enterprise hosts use.

1:23:11

We get a ping back on a, on a, on a url, very similar

1:23:13

to Pixel to say, okay, that ad was delivered. Um,

1:23:17

- But maybe not listening to <laugh>. Yeah.

1:23:20

- It's the same, it's the same, - Same thing. Yeah. - You know? Yeah. It's not just means

1:23:24

that the bytes were downloaded and nothing else. Um, the, that, that Triton tracker thing

1:23:29

that you just mentioned, um, if you look on there, like some

1:23:32

of the, you know, 42% is not the median

1:23:35

between those networks. Uh, there were some that were down by like massive percent.

1:23:39

Oh, yeah. Uh, and those were ones, I think if you think about

1:23:43

who they are, from what I saw that have like sort of, uh,

1:23:46

a lot of daily shows, right?

1:23:49

Sometimes with like, uh, some, sometimes with shows

1:23:51

that have like, uh, multiple clips of a radio show

1:23:54

that are produced as multiple episodes released in a day.

1:23:57

Um, and so those are the ones with a massive back catalogs

1:24:01

that were receiving tons of background traffic, right.

1:24:04

That, um, that, that sort of all disappeared overnight.

1:24:08

Right. Um, so I'm not surprised to see those giant changes.

1:24:11

I think, you know, I <laugh> it's funny, I've been listening

1:24:13

to the, you know, all the podcast industry podcasts and reading.

1:24:15

Nobody wants to like say the number that they're at.

1:24:18

You know, there, there's February, which is a few days shorter <laugh>.

1:24:21

And so, you know, you don't know exactly the numbers or whatever, or like, yeah.

1:24:23

We're, you know, I heard somebody say like, what are, what are you hearing instead of answering the question.

1:24:26

Um, and you know, I think a lot of places are seeing,

1:24:30

you know, 15 to 25% drops

1:24:33

and it has to do with how long your back catalog was.

1:24:35

Yeah. And sure, it has to do with what you said Todd about like how, how much filtering of

1:24:39

that kind of stuff you were doing. Um, and uh, you know,

1:24:43

but there are some folks I think that, that including individual podcasts on our platform

1:24:47

that had these, you know, daily sports podcasts with 2,500.

1:24:50

- So, oh, the daily got hit hard, hardest - Where it was really pretty rough. Yeah. Yeah.

1:24:54

- Because I, you know, that and - Plus, plus a lot of these big networks, um,

1:24:58

canceled a bunch of shows, so that's gonna impact your numbers

1:25:02

- Too. Well, you know, and also there's this phenomenon and,

1:25:04

and the only reason I learned this is because we went one year and we recorded like 60 interviews

1:25:09

and I was putting out interview every day

1:25:12

and I was like, man, these, these are hurting,

1:25:15

they're not getting good numbers. So then we went to every three days

1:25:19

and of course that, that,

1:25:23

that podcast episode stayed in the queue long enough

1:25:25

that it was automatically downloaded, and then they come in third day later

1:25:29

and put another one in there. And of course, you know that, that not guaranteed they were

1:25:33

listening, but at least it was registering to download.

1:25:35

Right. Or a play. And, uh, so, you know, daily shows are definitely at a,

1:25:43

at a, at a disadvantage per se.

1:25:45

So mean we're at the bottom of the hour, Rob.

1:25:47

We're already, we've already made it through here.

1:25:52

- We did. - Wow.

1:25:54

You're gonna be out in, uh, you're gonna be out, out in la?

1:25:58

- I'm not, unfortunately. I have a seven month old at home

1:26:00

and we just had a company retreat two weeks ago.

1:26:02

So I, I, I've maxed out on my ability to travel.

1:26:05

Um, but my co-founder and the rest of the business, you know, a lot

1:26:08

of our team's in la so we have a bunch of - People there.

1:26:10

Oh, okay. Yeah, I, I damaged a rib on Saturday.

1:26:14

I fell down in a no bummer water in, in a rainstorm.

1:26:18

And uh, I'm going, but I'm gonna be stiff

1:26:21

'cause it's either cracked or displaced or something.

1:26:24

Um, it's not good. So, uh, I'll be wobbling around <laugh>.

1:26:30

Um, Rob, is there anything, any other questions you had

1:26:32

for Mike or any thoughts? - Yeah, Mike, uh, don't you share with us how a person can,

1:26:38

or where a person can go to, to find out more information about your new, new platform?

1:26:44

Is there a Yeah. Landing page or something? - Yeah, I mean, the easiest thing to do is just go

1:26:48

to red circle.com and then there's a, there's a button at the top or either ad platform

1:26:52

or in the feature section. There's the thing for open wrap,

1:26:55

depending on whether you're an advertiser or podcaster.

1:26:58

And we're doing a special deal. We're like, uh, zeroing out our commission on your first

1:27:02

host Red Deal with us up to 250 bucks.

1:27:05

Um, if you sign up for the wait list, we are doing a wait list because there are some of these,

1:27:09

uh, third party platforms that we theoretically can connect

1:27:12

to with Vast, but we haven't done yet. And so we sort of need to work through some

1:27:15

of those example podcasts. Um, but we've got the thing up and running now

1:27:19

and it's, uh, it's working great, uh, on a couple of hosts.

1:27:21

Um, but yeah, red circle.com is the place to go, uh, and,

1:27:24

and just, uh, sign up and add your name to the wait list

1:27:27

- And think about that other opportunity there, Mike. Yeah, I'll

1:27:30

- Shoot you an email - About that. That's interesting. Interesting way to,

1:27:34

you know, 'cause guess what? Uh, I, I'd rather you lose your hair than

1:27:40

me lose mine. <laugh>. - <laugh>. - I have nothing left. So

1:27:45

- There's obviously more to lose there, right? Yeah, <laugh>.

1:27:49

- Well, COVID already took a bunch from me,

1:27:52

but it's only better at time. - Rob. I I will be, uh, in LA next week.

1:27:56

So are, you're doing your own little thing,

1:27:59

are you gonna try to do a, a independent new media show

1:28:01

or, uh, what are you thinking? Well, - We could do one if you wanna do one earlier in the day.

1:28:06

Um, that, that's fine. - Yeah. Let's see, - A live show that I'm, I'm doing is at,

1:28:11

uh, 5:00 PM specific. Yeah.

1:28:14

- Yeah. This Vid de pod thing is getting my calendar pretty

1:28:17

filled up already, uh, by YouTubers

1:28:19

that are gonna be at the event they wanna, they wanna talk,

1:28:23

so it's not complicated. Just go over and sign up. Right.

1:28:27

Um, anyway, uh, [email protected],

1:28:31

at Geek News on X at Geek News at

1:28:35

and at Geek News chat on Macon.

1:28:38

Did I say that right, Rob? - On X Twitter as well at Rob Greenley

1:28:44

and then off of YouTube, um, at Rob Greenley as well.

1:28:47

You can find me over there and if you wanna reach out,

1:28:50

my email address is um, rob [email protected].

1:28:54

I'm happy to hear from you. So, - And we wanna thank all the live boosts

1:28:58

and streaming SATs that came in today. Were live. And I was gonna ask you, Mike,

1:29:01

before we left, do you listen to, uh, to Adam and, uh, Dave?

1:29:05

- I do. Yeah. I, I, uh, I'm, I'm a consistent listener

1:29:08

and I'm into all that stuff, <laugh> and I, you know, at one point Red Circle had a, had a,

1:29:12

its own lightning node running in our production infrastructure and I lost, uh, $300 of the business,

1:29:17

you know, when I corrupted some Bitcoin, you know,

1:29:19

so I've been farting around with all that stuff, uh, as well.

1:29:22

- We had some new from Get Albi today. There's something coming from them.

1:29:25

So, but anyway, uh, yeah, so yeah,

1:29:29

so you can't, can't, uh, monetize the network according

1:29:32

to Adam <laugh>, but you put $16 million in people's pockets.

1:29:36

So I think that's, something's working. You think that's pretty good, <laugh>?

1:29:39

I think that counts good. Yeah, I think that counts. Good.

1:29:41

Alright buddy, thanks for being here and, uh, we'll keep you advised via

1:29:44

social, uh, what's going on. If Rob and I are able to pull one off,

1:29:47

and if not, if we don't do it live then or do some weird hour, it'll be in the feed.

1:29:52

So everyone, thanks for being here. And Mike, thanks for, thanks for coming too,

1:29:55

everybody. Take care. Thanks for having - Me. All right. - All right. Bye bye. Bye bye.