May 15, 2024 • 46 mins
Today's episode looks at podcast measurement standards. We discussed the challenges of open-source analytics, the critical need for integrity in data, and how industry standards like IAB certification are shaping the landscape.
We explored how these measurements impact both podcasters and advertisers. Our conversation also underscored the necessity of community support in fostering sustainable models that respect creators and listeners.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The future of podcast measurement.
Daniel, future of podcast episode number 43,
(00:23):
the future of podcast measurement. Everybody
bust out their rulers or something, I don't know, to, measure that with
this, inspired by our good friends at Spotify who
have left the IAB. And,
I guess they're just gonna let their certification. They're no longer certified on
I think we're up to 2.2 now for the IAB certification. Yeah.
(00:45):
2.2 just came out. And the one thing I liked I saw in there
where this whole thing of we're not certified. We're
Compliant. Compliant. Yeah. Yeah. IAB compliant,
which that was a trademark issue to begin with,
and I'm glad that they're focusing on that. So what is it that they're they're
actually standing here on? I always thought that was weird and it just
(01:08):
kinda has the whole, oh, no. No. We're compliant. Trust us. You know? I'm
like, yeah. That's anytime I've ever heard of any kind of government
agency or anything at all that has to police itself, it usually
does not end well. And you find out later that, oh, yeah. They weren't even
close. So it's interesting to see. I know a lot of people are
throwing out ideas about it'd be nice if we could come up with,
(01:30):
some sort of separate entity or or if it's not the
IAB, then what is it? I don't know. What are your thoughts? Yeah. We do
need a standard of measurement, and that's the difficult thing. The podcasting
landscape is not like it used to be. In the original
days before there were all these bots scraping podcast and
such, a download was done by a person. Yeah.
(01:52):
And so you could know if this file was downloaded, it was
most likely downloaded by a person. You could maybe
easily filter out certain bot download scrapers but I'm not sure if they would even
touch something like an MP3 file. Certainly not from an
RSS feed because RSS feeds just aren't indexed by
the web really that much. Since then though, there have been all these
(02:14):
other things that have happened. Like, do you remember several years
ago, Dave, when Apple sent that confusing email
that said a couple technical things? They said, make
sure your podcast cover art is hosted on a server that supports HTTP
head requests. And they said, make sure your
media files are hosted on a server that supports byte range
(02:37):
requests. Remember that? Because we're all like,
byte range. Got it. And then we all looked at each other and went, what's
byte range? What did you Exactly. But
then it made perfect sense why Apple was saying that because at
that time, they didn't support what we call, with
massive quotation marks around this, streaming which is where
(03:00):
you press play and it starts playing immediately and you can skip to anywhere in
the episode without having predownloaded the episode. It's
streaming from that point or it's pre buffering or it's downloading
in the background. It's not technically streaming, but all that aside.
So they gave us that technical stuff. That changed
how stats worked because then you weren't
(03:22):
downloading the whole file. You might be downloading only a portion of the file.
But then as Internet connection speeds, both mobile and
wired and wireless and everything, have caught up. Now
when you press play, even if you haven't downloaded the episode, it's very likely
the entire episode downloads in the background within only a few
seconds. Whether you're on WiFi or you're on mobile data, it's
(03:44):
really fast now. That's changed but still there is some of that kind
of partial streaming. We've also got things where if someone is
streaming and for whatever reason the whole file doesn't download right away,
then if they're mobile, their IP address could be changing
as they are moving around or even just joining different networks.
And how do you track that? What if there are multiple people in the same
(04:07):
location downloading an episode? All of this stuff. So all of these
things plus the whole manipulation field
and bots and servers and things that you can set up to
download this stuff automatically, there is a need to
have a standard of this is a
legitimate download and this is an illegitimate download and therefore don't
(04:29):
count it. I think that's important for
advertisers, of course, because they need to know what they're paying for,
how many people they're actually reaching. It's also important for
podcasters to have a good idea of how many people
are they reaching so that they can know how to
approach their show. Even things like, if you get feedback,
(04:52):
if you get one negative feedback about a new section in your
podcast, well, is that one out of 10,000
people? So the other 9,999
love that thing or don't say anything about it? Or is that
one out of 10 people, and therefore, it's 10% of your audience
thinks that thing? So it's important to know that, and that's why we need
(05:14):
the standards. Yeah. And, also, if some media
host comes up with new features and you decide to move, you
kinda want the numbers to be somewhat in the ballpark
where, you know, SoundCloud hasn't updated anything as far as I
know since 2017 because that's when the the
new Apple categories came out. And those, to the best of
(05:36):
my knowledge, are still not in SoundCloud. And I don't believe
SoundCloud is IAB certified. I know if you if
you Google, you know, SoundCloud plays, you can buy, you
know, thousands of plays on SoundCloud for a very little
bit of money. So no sponsor will touch you. You so, yeah, it's
one of those things where if somebody moved right now from SoundCloud
(05:59):
to Lipson or Captivator, Buzzsprout, or whoever, they're gonna take a
serious haircut because, you know, it's just they haven't kept
up. And who knows how they're calculating what a download
is, but it's gonna be, I'm assuming here, pretty different
than if you go to somebody who's been certified. Yeah.
And there can be all kinds of ways to manipulate
(06:20):
downloads too. And I stumbled across one of them even myself
a couple of years ago when I did that podcast speed test
thing where I started comparing the speed of RSS feeds and
then started comparing the speed of hosting providers and discovered some are
significantly slower than others and it in the end, it just didn't really make all
that difference. I was basically building a bot farm
(06:42):
to automate this testing from multiple regions. And the most
interesting discovery, actually, in all of that research was that
some of the podcast hosting providers and analytics were
counting those bots. Yeah. And I did nothing
to try and disguise them as legitimate downloads. They
were clearly identified as being from
(07:05):
whatever software package I was using to cause those downloads,
and they were coming from a server. So
some of the companies counted every single
download I did. So I knew, and I even played with it
a little bit. I knew all I have to do is make it download this
file 20 more times and it will show in my numbers 20 more
(07:27):
downloads. While others, I could make it download as many
times as I wanted and it never counted. So whether
they knew by the user agent, the technical identifier of
what's downloading it or maybe they knew that IP
address is blacklisted because it's coming from a
known server farm or data center. Whatever case, they
(07:49):
knew to filter that out. And that's thanks to the
standards that we have with podcast measurement. Right. Because that's one of the things you
get from being certified is there is a
blacklist of all these bots and things like that that you can
easily implement into your system. So, again, there's a little
bit of everybody's kind of on the same page to a certain
(08:11):
extent so that we know, oh, yeah, that particular
location or whatever is false. So don't count that.
And if you were going back to the, hey, we're just compliant.
Well, you don't get that list. So you're kind of
guessing. Okay. This, you know, this giant building
that's, you know, AT and T and it's all their employees.
(08:34):
Do we count that IP as 1 or do we count all
the ones in turn? How does that work? Those kind of things where if we
can all come together and count them the same, we don't really matter which
one it is. It just if we have some sort of consistency in
how we count, then it just makes it easier to
move forward with everyone somewhat on the same page. And I
(08:56):
think that might be for the podcast hosting providers and analytics
providers who are thinking of joining the IAB. That's almost the
more valuable part is getting that list. And that's
where I think it doesn't necessarily have to be
an open list, like, available for anyone to
see because then when certain things like that when blacklists
(09:17):
are made public, then it it can be easy to manipulate some of those
things. But think about some of the email spam
lists out there. There are multiple ones and some
email service providers will track multiple
or subscribe to multiple lists so that they can keep themselves off of
it or know what gets flagged and such. So I could see that maybe
(09:39):
coming in the future where it's decentralized then. I
mean, the list itself is centralized, but you can get
similar lists from other places. Like, I know Blueberry
has done probably the most foundational work of anyone
in the IAB for developing the standard, building those whitelists and
blacklists. And Blueberry could I mean, maybe they have
(10:02):
some kind of noncompete with the IAB about this. But that's something that
Blueberry could do, is they could offer an enterprise feed of
their whitelists and blacklists. So, yes, they're competitors, but, hey,
they get money from their competitors then. But their competitors, like
anyone else out there, could subscribe to that list to then get
that. And it's decentralized. It's supporting the company that
(10:25):
actually built the list, and then there's not the need for the
huge expense for certification. Now that's something that we haven't even brought up,
although probably most of you listening right now know about chapters
that there is a huge expense and it's different for each company because it's based
on revenue, not just ad revenue anymore, but it is based
on the revenue of the company, how much you pay to be a member
(10:47):
of IAB. And then you also have to pay I've heard it's
something like 15,000. Does that sound about right? And that's
where I thought I had these backwards. I thought it cost
a lot to get certified. And so I heard where James Cridland
had kinda done some math and gave a very rough, you know,
estimate of, like, a half a $1,000,000 for
(11:09):
Spotify. And I thought that was to get certified, and that's not. That's to be
a member of the IAB. So I forget where I'd said
that. That was wrong. That's how much to be a member. So but
they still could've. I don't think the certification has anything to do with how
much money you make, and they could have easily still stayed certified.
And so that is kind of the head scratcher, but I just have this feeling.
(11:31):
I have nothing to base this on. It's just my gut. I can see Spotify
coming out with their own kind of measurement because they,
you know, they have Chartable. They have the app in Spotify. They've
got Megaphone. They've got, Spotify for so they kind of
control every aspect of the listening aspect of from hosting to
listening to where they have a really decent feature
(11:53):
set in terms of statistics. I'm not sure how you would tie
outside people to that, but I just I can just see them saying, oh, no.
We're not IEB certified. We're Spotify certified
because we're measuring our own stats and just trust us. They're
they're accurate. Are you actually suggesting
that Spotify I mean, hear me out here.
(12:16):
Are you act do you actually think Spotify
would build something proprietary? Well, if you
think about it, so I've got a big show. Let's say they're on, I don't
know, Buzzsprout. And an advertiser comes to them
and says, oh, we wanna give you lots of money to be on your show.
And they're like, great. They're like, but we use, you know, the Spotify
(12:38):
measurement thing. And they're like, that's that's the one we trust. So, like, great.
Okay. So how do I do oh, well, you have to move your show to
Megaphone to Spotify for Chapters because you only you know, you have
to go into their ecosystem again. I could
see, part of me goes, no. No. No. Because they would have to move so
many shows, and that would be crazy. I don't know. It's just I
(13:00):
just have this feeling that they're gonna try something to make their own because
they've never been they they kind of teeter totter. 1 minute
their RSS is holding us back and then the next minute they're, oh,
we love the open ecosystem. And I'm like, okay. Which one is it? You know?
So but I so I kinda have a feeling they could try to do their
own thing just based on their polls that
(13:21):
originally only worked in Spotify. The video podcasts that only
work in Spotify. So I can see them kind of coming up with their
own little stats package or something. I'm hoping they prove
me wrong on that, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. I think there
is an aspect to all of this where someone could look at this and
say, alright. We were certified 2.0.
(13:44):
We can make whatever adjustments come out in 2.1 and
2.2 and so on. We don't need to be certified
anymore and therefore, we don't need to be members
anymore. We'll just follow along because the guidelines are
open. Anyone can read the guidelines. And there was even a period where
people could comment publicly on the guidelines and
(14:06):
provide feedback to the IAB about those guidelines. So that's where
this whole compliant thing even came up as it's not just saying, oh, yeah, we
follow in principle. It was people who would read the guidelines
and then design their software to follow those guidelines.
But I love the line from the Pirates of the Caribbean, The first
one, where Elizabeth Swann says, hang the code and hang
(14:29):
the rules. They're more like guidelines anyway. And
that is the truth with the IAB guidelines, is they are
merely guidelines, and some of them are open to some
pretty wide interpretation that can lead to
some significantly different results. And just one of those
things could be even an IP address by itself. Like,
(14:51):
if you have I'm sure they don't have only one IP
address. But if Apple corporate headquarters had only one public
IP address and everyone at Apple was listening to
your podcast. And that IP address
was well, I mean how your stats look would depend
on whether that one IP address was white listed
(15:14):
to allow then every download from the IP address account
as a separate download within certain other filtration? Or would it be
blacklisted where it could be thousands of downloads from
legitimate people downloading the episode, listening to it separately,
all count as 1. That one difference
alone is significant, but that's not even a measurement. That's just
(15:36):
a a whitelist, blacklist thing. Right. But when it comes to some of the other
technical stuff, there's room There's lots
of wiggle room in there for someone to I I don't really want
to say inflate because that sounds that
sounds manipulative Right. In a negative way. But it is basically to
end up with numbers that might be bigger than they should
(15:58):
be, or maybe even the other way might be smaller than they
should be. So if you have only just guidelines,
you're going to end up with a lot of variety because people will
follow and apply guidelines differently. Yeah. It's open to interpretation.
Yeah. But I think that we also see, like, with Spotify,
(16:19):
with, according to some people recently,
Spotify actually overtaking Apple in downloads.
I really want to know if that's just network wide. There are a
lot of factor. You know, I'm mister caveat. I think of all of the caveats
to some of this data and things. For example, is that let's take,
SoundCloud, for example. We'll throw them under the bus. SoundCloud has never
(16:41):
and will never have an integration directly with
Spotify. JSON was the first to have an integration with
Spotify to get podcasts on Spotify and JSON encouraged many of
their users to submit to Spotify. SoundCloud has no
communication with their users. So Lipsyn's data
is going to look significantly different from SoundCloud's
(17:03):
data because of podcaster education. Right.
And because SoundCloud is an opt in platform. Along
that same line, they have the ability to
track what happens in their player and track even
more data than you get from downloads. Maybe
they've decided that they just don't care about that anymore
(17:25):
because they think they're the big shot smarty pants now and that they're the number
one place to consume podcasts. So maybe they think their
own downloads that they see in their platform are enough for all of the podcasters
using them, all of the podcasters who are on Spotify. Maybe they think
that's enough for them, and that's it. Yeah. I know in the past, James had
said that Spotify had more users,
(17:47):
but Apple had more downloads. And now I'm not
sure where that data is coming from. But, yeah, I heard James report
that Spotify now has more downloads. And
Spotify has more podcasts because they've got all those is this thing
on? Is anyone listening? That's it. Alright. This is my first test
episode of a podcast. Woo hoo. Lights are blinking. Okay. Cool.
(18:10):
What do you wanna talk about? I don't know. What do you wanna talk about?
Alright. Thanks. Thanks for coming, everybody. Yeah. So they do
have those. So because we need stats on those. Let's see what the
completion rate is. Right. Point
05%. That's odd. But now that you bring up completion rate,
that is the other thing. Now others have been talking about this time listened
(18:31):
metric, and that matters to sponsors. I like to think more
of a percentage listened because time listened is
an absolute, and it's difficult to measure
in that kind of absolute when the length of episodes
is not an absolute. So for take Pod News
Daily, for example, very short couple of minutes per
(18:53):
day and so time listened both per day
and even per week is going to be much shorter than
a podcast like any other podcast. A standard
weekly podcast that's 30 minutes or so in length. Or look
at Dan Carlin's podcast that are hours in length but released very
infrequently. So I think percentage listened is
(19:16):
a better metric. But then again, that comes back to like, in this thing
of advertising and measurements, we have this battle of what
do the podcasters need to know about the size of their audience and what do
the advertisers need to know. And so much of this is being focused
on the advertisers because the advertisers care about minutes
listened. They care about that absolute, the minutes,
(19:38):
because there's this basic number
in their mind of for this many minutes of
content, we can have this many ads. That's
not really the way that podcasters think. Right. Podcasters might think I don't
want any more than this many number of ads. I don't want
the ads to last this many minutes in my podcast
(20:00):
regardless of how long the episodes are. For me with my own
podcast, my number of sponsors that I'm willing to accept on
my own podcast right now is 0. I am the
sponsor of my own show. Exactly. Yeah. And,
again, I always say, you know, radio is about
20% ads. Like, that is not a benchmark we're looking to.
(20:22):
Oh, we're almost up to radio. No. No. That's we we wanna stay away from
that benchmark. That would be, something to avoid. There have
been initiatives in the past, and there are even still now, to try and
give us a better metric. And I do support this, but the difficult
thing is advertisers want more information.
Developers want to give less information. Yeah. So the
(20:44):
advertisers want to know what you had for breakfast
while you're listening to this episode. The developers
don't wanna give any of that. Right. Think about Marco, for example, with
developer of Overcast. He has said, he will not
build anything that helps people track
the audiences. And that's even, at least from
(21:07):
the community, that seems to be part of the reason there's some pushback
against podcasting 2.0 features is they
think, I'll say incorrectly, that some of these
features can be used to track people and that's just not the
truth. Some of these things can't be. But there are ways that you
can measure some of this stuff without violating
(21:29):
people's privacy. Just look at, like, we get the streaming satoshis. And
this is one of the things that some of these places this isn't the best
approach to do it. This is where that whole activity pub and activity stream comes
into this, but what some of these places allow you to do is you
say, I'm going to send 1% of the sats that I
receive from value for value to this other
(21:51):
place that will then analyze those. So if anyone is
streaming Satoshis to you, you can see on a
chart where that happened. So you
can maybe make an assumption. That's a very important
word to keep in mind whenever you're looking at stats is there are assumptions in
place here. But you can make some kind of assumption that this is
(22:12):
generally where my audience listened. But then again, I would challenge that
with the caveat to say, well, the person who's streaming Satoshis
2U is a super fan, so they are going to
listen to all of the episode most likely because they're a
superfan. So statistics from them using them
as your benchmark is not accurate because they
(22:34):
are a superfan. You need a benchmark of your overall audience. And that's where
one of the things that could potentially be done with Activity
Stream is an app could send
back ticks or milestones or whatever for
every, maybe it's 1%, maybe it's every 5%, maybe it's every
30 seconds or something. Nothing that compromises the listener's
(22:56):
privacy. So not Right. Like sending their IP address or their name or anything
unless the listener consents to that. And there could be a place
for a listener to do that. But by default, privacy by default, that's my
policy, privacy by default. So it could just simply report back
that this one listener listened was listening at 5
seconds and 10 seconds and 15 and 20 and so on and so on and
(23:18):
so on. But they stopped at about 75% through the episode and they didn't
play it again. You can get that information without knowing anything about
the listener. I know advertisers want to start getting into that
like, alright, what's the demographics of that JSON? Right. Oh, you know, 18 to
34 year olds only listen to half of the episode, but 50 year olds and
up JSON to 75% of the episode and all of that demographic blah
(23:40):
blah blah. Yep. And that's where we've kind of on one hand, we
started with newspapers and radio, and those metrics were
hideous compared to what podcasting provides.
But then we have Facebook and other
places that can tell you what you had for lunch
on the second Tuesday of the month if you're a Republican in
(24:03):
this city. You know, it's just crazy. It's, you know, advertisers are
like, oh, this is amazing. And if you if anybody ever shares
that, you're like, that is amazing and creepy. You know, it's
always a lot of, the AI right now that I'm
seeing is, oh, wow. That's kinda cool and kinda creepy.
And these advertising different parameters
(24:25):
are, again, kind of like, wow. That's really specific.
And how did you get that data? So it's and I
that's why I think podcasting is just instead of trying to make podcasting
Facebook, just go, okay. Here, look. Newspapers
and magazines and radio, not so great metrics,
but, you know, they've been working for years. I mean, we always hear how much
(24:48):
the radio budget is 1,000,000,000 more than than podcasting. And
then you go, but look, podcasting actually gives you better statistics.
And then, you know, and then you've got Facebook and we're like, yeah, we're not
Facebook, but we're not newspapers. And you still send monies to
newspapers or, you know, some of these other places. So it's
it's one of those where I'm like, can't you just be happy with what you
(25:10):
got? Do you really need to know what I had for lunch 3 weeks
ago on a Tuesday to sell me some shoes? To quote from
another movie and book, Jurassic Park, your scientists
were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they
didn't stop to think if they should. That's it.
Then then the dinosaurs ate everybody. So who's the dinosaur
(25:33):
here? Exactly. Depends on how you define dinosaur.
But I think the future, there are 2 different ways we
can look at this. The future gets more invasive.
Google it's crazy that Google is trying to bring in this
cookieless Internet as they describe it or some people have called it,
where they are kind of shooting themselves in the foot by
(25:55):
advocating for this with Chrome. And this is
Google, the company who makes money
by tracking you across the Internet Yeah. Is an
advocate for not tracking you across the Internet? I
always wonder again, and I this is just my hunch because it is
Google. Are they gonna come up with some proprietary thing
(26:17):
that's not a cookie but smells and acts like
a cookie, but it only you know what I mean? Are they gonna come up
with their own way of tracking where everybody can use cookies
now from what I understand? Are they gonna come up with some sort
of Google thing that only works on Google stuff
and you have to have Google Analytics to see it and everything
(26:38):
else? So it just seems like everybody's instead of trying to do
things for the industry, they're all out for themselves, which is called
competition, and I get it. But I'm just like, ugh. Yeah. Competition
is good, and that's what we need more of. Like, who is the competitor to
the IAB? Or even just for podcast measurement
standards. Yeah. There is no competitor right now. I think it
(27:00):
was on Pod News Weekly where they were talking about the
fact that the IAB measures podcasting and
banners on the Internet and a bunch of other things that are
we big enough to break off on our own and have just
the podcast and or advertising bureau instead of, you
know, the Internet and have our own thing where we can really then, you know,
(27:22):
niche down on what kind of stats do we need and come up with
that. I like that idea. I don't know how it works or who handles it
or who runs it or whatever, but I
like the idea, not that the IB is doing a bad thing, but it does
have its hurdles. Well, and that's what I think the podcast
standards or podcast standards project, whatever you wanna call it, that's
(27:44):
what those should be for. And that's why I started trying to build something like
that myself, and then podcast standards project came along. That is a
great place for this kind of thing because I'd love to see
PSP, podcast standards project, set these
standards influenced by the community and other
people in the space, but set these standards and they be open
(28:06):
standards that everyone knows this is the
standard way to measure a download, and we could have our own
2.0 and 2.1 and 2.2. There could be some
certification processes. But here's the thing that I've thought about. Ever since I
built that bot system that would measure the download speeds of the
hosting providers, I thought, why can't we have that same
(28:28):
kind of thing where we have an app
that all you have to do to test someone's compliance
in order to certify them is you run this app that has
secret algorithms inside so that way no one can try to game the app
and illegitimately count and block things. But the
app can then do its special magic to
(28:51):
test all of these things and then compare that
with what does the actual analytics show to
see, does it show this? Like, we expect the number to
be 2. Is the number 2? No. It's 3? Alright. If it's not 2,
if it's anything other than 2, then you failed on this mark. You need to
change something here. And then the app could maybe reveal. But all
(29:13):
of that can be done with an app, I I think I mean I have
not gone through the certification process But in my mind
that it could come down to it being that simple and that could be something
that maybe, yes, there is because this kind of thing requires
time. Time is money and people are worth
their time. That's the other very important thing to keep in mind. There is a
(29:36):
limit to the community's free will.
So to have some kind of certification of a
standard, there does need to be some kind of payment
just to cover the expenses Right. Of the value,
anything like that. Because somebody's gonna have to you know, if
whatever the technology is behind it, updating
(29:58):
any kind of lists, anything like that, and just and then the whole
if you think about it, if that became a standard, you have to have somebody
so that when Bill opens up Bill's house of podcast
hosting that they go over, make sure Bill's, you
know, certified or not or whatever or checks to make
sure who is you have to maintain the list of who's certified and who isn't.
(30:20):
So there is some overhead to it. But my question is
and again, I know nothing about any of this, but I is
it more or less or the same of what you're paying to the
IAB right now? Right. And the other thing I I
wonder because if you think about it, if we had and this would never happen,
but it'd be great if there was some sort of what if we had a
(30:41):
universal stat system that somehow every time you hit you
know, how we have those redirects. Right? The little prefixes. What if
everybody use the same prefix so that everybody was literally using the same
stat system? That will never happen. But, you know, to
dream the impossible, you know, because then you would You're talking about
the Tower of Babylon solution, basically. Yeah. That is when the
(31:03):
Lord will come down again and say, uh-uh. You gotta stop this. You
got you got one tracker. And when you have only one tracker, there
is nothing that you will not be able to do. And so, therefore, I'm going
to confuse your tracking and Yeah. Create all of these other
trackers and spread you across the world. That's it. Yeah. So I
know that's never gonna happen, but it'd be neato. It would be doggone neato if
(31:25):
it would. So we'll see. And I think that's where it's
really awesome the initiative that John Spurlock has with 0p3@op3.dev.
I can remember that site, but I can never remember his other
site like livewire. I don't I don't
remember that what comes after the dot. It's not dotcom. It's not dotfm. I don't
think it's dotio. Anyway, but his thing, he's
(31:48):
made it completely open source. So you can see exactly how he is
tracking things. You can use it on any podcast. The thing
that podcasters might not like is that it does make their
stats open. Now maybe there's a monetization opportunity there
for John or any kind of business to say, alright. You use this.
This is this open standard. If you don't want your stats to be
(32:11):
public, then subscribe for $5 a month or
whatever. But the thing is, that service,
OP 3, while it's free for everyone to use, it
is costing John Spurlock money. Yeah. The last I saw, I think it was
costing him a few $100 per month Oh. To run that. Mhmm. He
has some sponsors, which is great. But at some
(32:32):
point, that's gotta cover at least its expenses, let
alone, I think, pay the people for the value of
their time. Right. That's just for the hosting and, you know, the
hardware and stuff. Poor John's not getting paid for his
time for maintaining it and writing in the first place
and everything else. So, yeah, that's one that in
(32:54):
theory, when he comes along and says, okay, it's time. You you need to pay
for this. I personally wouldn't have a problem going here, whatever it is, you
know, because he's earned it. Value for value. Yeah.
And he has made it all open source, and I think he's
even said anyone else can take this and use it if they want
to. So while his code could be,
(33:16):
like, let's imagine this, that o p 3 could be the standard.
Then his code is open source. Anyone can copy
it. They copy it onto their system
and maybe even John has some kind of integrity check
to make sure that the the version is up to date or something like that.
There, you know, any sort of thing like that that verifies that they haven't
(33:38):
tweaked the stats to their own manipulations.
But that could be something where we're all following the same code base
to measure downloads, or there could be the multiple companies out there
providing whitelists and blacklists that companies could subscribe
to. Although I know there's the thing of its proprietary data. Like
for Blueberry, they've built this list pretty much themselves
(34:02):
over the decades now that they've been doing this.
And that's not something that they wanna just give up. That is
part of their unique selling proposition, their
USP. So there needs to be some openness, but there also
needs to be some exchange of value. And in all of this, there needs to
be the respect for the audience, their privacy.
(34:24):
While I would like to know certain things about my own
audience, like their age, their sex, their
device, like how many people are on iPhone versus Android, what apps are
they using, what country are they using, Or what country are they in?
What state are they in? Maybe even what
local metropolis they're near. I don't need to know their
(34:46):
exact city, you know, if they're in Waka Hockey, New York or
whatever. I I don't need to know that. I just wanna know, are they near
New York City? So maybe I could plan that for if I'm
doing a live event somewhere, I could say, hey, everyone. I'm gonna do
an event in my biggest cities and that's New York City, Los Angeles,
Cincinnati, and whatever. But I don't need to know
(35:08):
where they live. I don't need to know where they
shop. I don't need to know what other podcasts they listen
to, although that can be kind of interesting, but I don't need that.
I just need to know, do they consume my podcast,
and how do they consume it? I don't need to know who. I
just need to know how. Yeah. I was looking at John's site.
(35:31):
The April invoice for the month was $791.97.
So 7.92. You can sponsor,
there's a $500 gold sponsorship, a $100, and that's a month.
Then there's a $100 a month OP 3 sponsorship. And if you
are using either one of those, apparently, you're listed on the home
(35:53):
page, which is great now. If you're like, well, that's a little rich for my
blood. There is a $10 a month early supporters sponsorship.
Now you're not on the front page, but it is a way to say thank
you. And and right now, it's Podnews, FlightPath, Refonic,
Transistor, Podium, and Captivate, our sponsors. Because I
looked at him, like, why can I give John $10? Holy cow. $10.
(36:15):
So that's, interesting. But he spent for
the year so far, just 2024, he's at $2,943.
So about every month, it's like 7 30, 740
ish, 700. So and that's him
again looking for ways to improve it. Keep it running.
Everything like that. So it's one of those things that, you know, I still wonder
(36:39):
how Albie is staying in business because I don't see any
business model over there yet. You know, they have said at some
point, I thought it happened by now, that they would be
charging a fee or taking a fee, which I can understand that. And I think
that's reasonable if they say something like, alright, you can receive
as much as you want, but for anything you're going to withdraw Right. There's a
(37:01):
4% charge. Maybe they say anything you send, there's a 4%
charge, or maybe they say only if you withdraw
back onto chain, which is just the technical Right.
Way to describe, basically, like, getting your Bitcoin from Albi
into, for example, Coinbase, and then Coinbase,
then trading it for dollars and then withdrawing the dollars, that kind of thing. That's
(37:24):
what you have to do. You have to get that Bitcoin back onto the chain,
the Bitcoin chain. It can't just stay on the lightning network.
But, yeah, at some point, they'll do that, and I think that's reasonable for them
to have some kind of small fee like that. Yeah. Because we want them to
stay in business and free is not a good business model. We've said that
before. Well, you know, there's there's an interesting thing about
(37:45):
that. So the whole value for value concept, there's
a huge risk to that. And it's
working for some people, not working for
others. Right. In that information you saw about John
Spurlock and what it's costing him, did it show how much of that is
being paid for? Let me see. Like, is he running
(38:07):
in the red or is he in the green? Because when I look at
op3.dev, you can scroll down to the bottom and
see the icons for the sponsors that he has. Now we don't know
how much these companies are paying. We just know they've paid that threshold
to be on the front page. So Podnews, FlightPath,
Refonic, Transistor, Podium, and Captivate.
(38:30):
Some of these are radically different companies. Right. Like, Transistor,
Captivate, and Podium are hosting companies. Pad News is
not a hosting company. Right. That's a news company, although it does a lot
of stuff in the podcasting industry. Refonic does a lot of stuff
with industry data and is in the podcasting industry.
And this is a nice collection, and I'm not sure if you'd get this
(38:54):
kind of good collection of sponsors if you just
told everyone this is what it cost to use the service. I recently
spoke at NRB, which is the National Religious Broadcasters
Convention, and I was sharing a stage with
someone from Focus on the Family. And if you've ever listened to a
Focus on the Family broadcast where they have a guest who has a
(39:15):
book or they're talking about a book, they frequently say something
like this. They'll say, we'll send you this
book for donation of any amount, and they mean
that. Mhmm. And the gentleman from Focus on the
Family on stage said that they knew they were
taking a risk. And sure, some people call in and they
(39:37):
say, I want the book. I'm not sending a donation. So
focus on the family loses money on that. Some people call
in and they pay about what the book would sell for. And some
people, the value for value thing, they call in and they give a
$100 or $200 to get a $10 book. Right.
There is a risk to that though. And that
(40:00):
risk is mitigated when there's a relationship, I think,
but you have to build that relationship first. Yeah. And how do you
build relationships within the podcast
measurement industry where there's so much competition.
That's where I think you have to have the structure of something like
podcast standards project to help with that. And
(40:22):
a standards body that can ratify standards
across many aspects of podcasting, not just measurement, not just some
of the technical stuff of this is what goes in an
RSS feed, but also these are standard advertising rates to
pay for this certain things like that. I think that's what I've
always envisioned for a podcast standards board and why I've predicted that standards
(40:45):
would emerge in podcasting, and we're finally seeing that. I don't
like that our measurement guidelines are basically
influenced by a company that's only interested in advertising. Right. I'd
rather any such standards come from an a company
that's interested in the privacy of the audience, providing
only as much data as podcasters need and the same
(41:07):
thing for podcasters to take action on too. That's the big thing.
Data that they can use and giving
advertisers only as much data as they actually
need. Yeah. As opposed to when was the last time I
washed my right foot? Right. Just don't need all that stuff.
Statistically, people who wash their right foot within the last 24 hours are more
(41:30):
likely to buy our products. I mean, they've got crazy statistics
like that. Yeah. And some of that I just kinda wonder, like,
really? Yeah. Why? What does that matter?
Who funded that research? Yeah. Exactly. Doctor Scholes.
So Daniel, any
boostograms from, our last episode from now till
(41:52):
then? We did. We got a boostogram from Sam Sethi from
truefans.fm. He sent 41 100 sats. He didn't include
a message with that, but we are very grateful for that. Now 41100,
do you know any significance to that number? No. Only going back
to my days as a copier technician. There was the Minolta 41100.
It was an old machine. It was a good machine, but I think, really, Sam
(42:15):
just wants to cement his on top of the leaderboard
when we log in to, whichever one we're using, get Alby
or Conchax or one of those Saturn. One of those has
a a list of top contributors. So thank you, Sam. We deeply appreciate that. And
I will say, not that he bought a plug, but the
ability that he's made to where you can just take a credit card and it's
(42:37):
$10 US and it fills up your wallet is so
ridiculously easy now. You can only buy $10 right now. It's in
beta. So that's like, as I record this, it's like $14.
And so that'll last me a couple weeks and then it runs out. But I
just go back to Truefans and hit okay. Fill up my wallet. Here we
go. And, so that's working very, very well because that's not
(42:59):
an actual app. It's a, what is it? P was it web
app based? Progressive web app or PWA, which no one
knows what that stands for or even what it means. It's just fun to say
pois, you know, so that's always fun. But, speaking of
peas, we also have the podcast positivity
point of the show. So, Daniel, are we, pointing
(43:20):
positively at someone with a podcast? Yeah. I know that sometimes we
complain about some of the stuff happening in the podcasting industry, so it'd be nice
to end on some positivity. And for this episode, I
want to highlight Podcast Guru. I know I mentioned them previously,
but I noticed something neat that they do since I've been using them
a little more steadily for some of the podcasting 2.0
(43:42):
featured podcasts. And I noticed that just like an
Apple Podcasts, you get that beautiful thing that happens based
on some podcast cover art where it changes the color
of the whole interface to match that podcast cover. Podcast
Guru does that too even at the chapter
image level. Oh. So as the chapter
(44:04):
image changes, if you're looking at the app,
the whole app interface changes to
complement the colors within the podcast chapter
image. And I thought, oh, that's that's
a nice little thing. That's like icing on top of the cake. I like that.
That's it. So that reminds me, Daniel, as you brought up podcast
(44:27):
guru, Oscar from Fountain sent out
a survey that said, hey. How can we make Fountain better? And, of course,
I said, I love me smart playlists. I want to be able to say
that. And I explained what it was and I said, I can almost do it
in fountain with tags. You can tag a show so that when a new
episode comes from whatever podcast you want,
(44:49):
you could say tag this as say health. Then you can click on
the tag, and anything that's been tagged as health, there it is. And
I said the problem is I'll listen to the 1st episode in that list,
and then it will go to that queue. So maybe in my queue, I was
listening to David Hooper or somebody. I'm like, no. I wanted to go to the
next health tagged 1. And he's like, I think we can do
(45:11):
that. And he he seemed pretty sure that that was possible. So
if he does that, then Fountain would have smart
playlists. And I was like, oh, because I know that's the one feature. I
know Podcast Guru has said they're working on it, so
it'll be interesting to see, you know, who can get there first. But that was,
I found that very encouraging that they they could do that because that's really my
(45:33):
the one feature that I like. I really need that. And I know, Fountain has
done some things to make it easy to, you know, fill your wallet over
there. And they have a whole there. The boy, if you love stats, Fountain is
the app for you. They have all sorts of community things going on over there.
But, so a positive shout out to both Podcast
Guru and Fountain for, keeping up and and making
(45:55):
your apps better and making them do more things. We appreciate that. And with
that, I think we're gonna call it a day on this episode. So
thanks so much. If you enjoyed this show, if you could do us a favor,
share it with a friend if you want to. If you feel so inclined, you
could always send us a boost to gram, and we appreciate everyone who's been streaming
the sats to us. We deeply appreciate it, and, we'll be back real soon with
(46:16):
another episode of the future of podcasting. Keep boosting
and keep podcasting.
The future of podcast measurement.
Daniel, future of podcast episode number 43,
(00:23):
the future of podcast measurement. Everybody
bust out their rulers or something, I don't know, to, measure that with
this, inspired by our good friends at Spotify who
have left the IAB. And,
I guess they're just gonna let their certification. They're no longer certified on
I think we're up to 2.2 now for the IAB certification. Yeah.
(00:45):
2.2 just came out. And the one thing I liked I saw in there
where this whole thing of we're not certified. We're
Compliant. Compliant. Yeah. Yeah. IAB compliant,
which that was a trademark issue to begin with,
and I'm glad that they're focusing on that. So what is it that they're they're
actually standing here on? I always thought that was weird and it just
(01:08):
kinda has the whole, oh, no. No. We're compliant. Trust us. You know? I'm
like, yeah. That's anytime I've ever heard of any kind of government
agency or anything at all that has to police itself, it usually
does not end well. And you find out later that, oh, yeah. They weren't even
close. So it's interesting to see. I know a lot of people are
throwing out ideas about it'd be nice if we could come up with,
(01:30):
some sort of separate entity or or if it's not the
IAB, then what is it? I don't know. What are your thoughts? Yeah. We do
need a standard of measurement, and that's the difficult thing. The podcasting
landscape is not like it used to be. In the original
days before there were all these bots scraping podcast and
such, a download was done by a person. Yeah.
(01:52):
And so you could know if this file was downloaded, it was
most likely downloaded by a person. You could maybe
easily filter out certain bot download scrapers but I'm not sure if they would even
touch something like an MP3 file. Certainly not from an
RSS feed because RSS feeds just aren't indexed by
the web really that much. Since then though, there have been all these
(02:14):
other things that have happened. Like, do you remember several years
ago, Dave, when Apple sent that confusing email
that said a couple technical things? They said, make
sure your podcast cover art is hosted on a server that supports HTTP
head requests. And they said, make sure your
media files are hosted on a server that supports byte range
(02:37):
requests. Remember that? Because we're all like,
byte range. Got it. And then we all looked at each other and went, what's
byte range? What did you Exactly. But
then it made perfect sense why Apple was saying that because at
that time, they didn't support what we call, with
massive quotation marks around this, streaming which is where
(03:00):
you press play and it starts playing immediately and you can skip to anywhere in
the episode without having predownloaded the episode. It's
streaming from that point or it's pre buffering or it's downloading
in the background. It's not technically streaming, but all that aside.
So they gave us that technical stuff. That changed
how stats worked because then you weren't
(03:22):
downloading the whole file. You might be downloading only a portion of the file.
But then as Internet connection speeds, both mobile and
wired and wireless and everything, have caught up. Now
when you press play, even if you haven't downloaded the episode, it's very likely
the entire episode downloads in the background within only a few
seconds. Whether you're on WiFi or you're on mobile data, it's
(03:44):
really fast now. That's changed but still there is some of that kind
of partial streaming. We've also got things where if someone is
streaming and for whatever reason the whole file doesn't download right away,
then if they're mobile, their IP address could be changing
as they are moving around or even just joining different networks.
And how do you track that? What if there are multiple people in the same
(04:07):
location downloading an episode? All of this stuff. So all of these
things plus the whole manipulation field
and bots and servers and things that you can set up to
download this stuff automatically, there is a need to
have a standard of this is a
legitimate download and this is an illegitimate download and therefore don't
(04:29):
count it. I think that's important for
advertisers, of course, because they need to know what they're paying for,
how many people they're actually reaching. It's also important for
podcasters to have a good idea of how many people
are they reaching so that they can know how to
approach their show. Even things like, if you get feedback,
(04:52):
if you get one negative feedback about a new section in your
podcast, well, is that one out of 10,000
people? So the other 9,999
love that thing or don't say anything about it? Or is that
one out of 10 people, and therefore, it's 10% of your audience
thinks that thing? So it's important to know that, and that's why we need
(05:14):
the standards. Yeah. And, also, if some media
host comes up with new features and you decide to move, you
kinda want the numbers to be somewhat in the ballpark
where, you know, SoundCloud hasn't updated anything as far as I
know since 2017 because that's when the the
new Apple categories came out. And those, to the best of
(05:36):
my knowledge, are still not in SoundCloud. And I don't believe
SoundCloud is IAB certified. I know if you if
you Google, you know, SoundCloud plays, you can buy, you
know, thousands of plays on SoundCloud for a very little
bit of money. So no sponsor will touch you. You so, yeah, it's
one of those things where if somebody moved right now from SoundCloud
(05:59):
to Lipson or Captivator, Buzzsprout, or whoever, they're gonna take a
serious haircut because, you know, it's just they haven't kept
up. And who knows how they're calculating what a download
is, but it's gonna be, I'm assuming here, pretty different
than if you go to somebody who's been certified. Yeah.
And there can be all kinds of ways to manipulate
(06:20):
downloads too. And I stumbled across one of them even myself
a couple of years ago when I did that podcast speed test
thing where I started comparing the speed of RSS feeds and
then started comparing the speed of hosting providers and discovered some are
significantly slower than others and it in the end, it just didn't really make all
that difference. I was basically building a bot farm
(06:42):
to automate this testing from multiple regions. And the most
interesting discovery, actually, in all of that research was that
some of the podcast hosting providers and analytics were
counting those bots. Yeah. And I did nothing
to try and disguise them as legitimate downloads. They
were clearly identified as being from
(07:05):
whatever software package I was using to cause those downloads,
and they were coming from a server. So
some of the companies counted every single
download I did. So I knew, and I even played with it
a little bit. I knew all I have to do is make it download this
file 20 more times and it will show in my numbers 20 more
(07:27):
downloads. While others, I could make it download as many
times as I wanted and it never counted. So whether
they knew by the user agent, the technical identifier of
what's downloading it or maybe they knew that IP
address is blacklisted because it's coming from a
known server farm or data center. Whatever case, they
(07:49):
knew to filter that out. And that's thanks to the
standards that we have with podcast measurement. Right. Because that's one of the things you
get from being certified is there is a
blacklist of all these bots and things like that that you can
easily implement into your system. So, again, there's a little
bit of everybody's kind of on the same page to a certain
(08:11):
extent so that we know, oh, yeah, that particular
location or whatever is false. So don't count that.
And if you were going back to the, hey, we're just compliant.
Well, you don't get that list. So you're kind of
guessing. Okay. This, you know, this giant building
that's, you know, AT and T and it's all their employees.
(08:34):
Do we count that IP as 1 or do we count all
the ones in turn? How does that work? Those kind of things where if we
can all come together and count them the same, we don't really matter which
one it is. It just if we have some sort of consistency in
how we count, then it just makes it easier to
move forward with everyone somewhat on the same page. And I
(08:56):
think that might be for the podcast hosting providers and analytics
providers who are thinking of joining the IAB. That's almost the
more valuable part is getting that list. And that's
where I think it doesn't necessarily have to be
an open list, like, available for anyone to
see because then when certain things like that when blacklists
(09:17):
are made public, then it it can be easy to manipulate some of those
things. But think about some of the email spam
lists out there. There are multiple ones and some
email service providers will track multiple
or subscribe to multiple lists so that they can keep themselves off of
it or know what gets flagged and such. So I could see that maybe
(09:39):
coming in the future where it's decentralized then. I
mean, the list itself is centralized, but you can get
similar lists from other places. Like, I know Blueberry
has done probably the most foundational work of anyone
in the IAB for developing the standard, building those whitelists and
blacklists. And Blueberry could I mean, maybe they have
(10:02):
some kind of noncompete with the IAB about this. But that's something that
Blueberry could do, is they could offer an enterprise feed of
their whitelists and blacklists. So, yes, they're competitors, but, hey,
they get money from their competitors then. But their competitors, like
anyone else out there, could subscribe to that list to then get
that. And it's decentralized. It's supporting the company that
(10:25):
actually built the list, and then there's not the need for the
huge expense for certification. Now that's something that we haven't even brought up,
although probably most of you listening right now know about chapters
that there is a huge expense and it's different for each company because it's based
on revenue, not just ad revenue anymore, but it is based
on the revenue of the company, how much you pay to be a member
(10:47):
of IAB. And then you also have to pay I've heard it's
something like 15,000. Does that sound about right? And that's
where I thought I had these backwards. I thought it cost
a lot to get certified. And so I heard where James Cridland
had kinda done some math and gave a very rough, you know,
estimate of, like, a half a $1,000,000 for
(11:09):
Spotify. And I thought that was to get certified, and that's not. That's to be
a member of the IAB. So I forget where I'd said
that. That was wrong. That's how much to be a member. So but
they still could've. I don't think the certification has anything to do with how
much money you make, and they could have easily still stayed certified.
And so that is kind of the head scratcher, but I just have this feeling.
(11:31):
I have nothing to base this on. It's just my gut. I can see Spotify
coming out with their own kind of measurement because they,
you know, they have Chartable. They have the app in Spotify. They've
got Megaphone. They've got, Spotify for so they kind of
control every aspect of the listening aspect of from hosting to
listening to where they have a really decent feature
(11:53):
set in terms of statistics. I'm not sure how you would tie
outside people to that, but I just I can just see them saying, oh, no.
We're not IEB certified. We're Spotify certified
because we're measuring our own stats and just trust us. They're
they're accurate. Are you actually suggesting
that Spotify I mean, hear me out here.
(12:16):
Are you act do you actually think Spotify
would build something proprietary? Well, if you
think about it, so I've got a big show. Let's say they're on, I don't
know, Buzzsprout. And an advertiser comes to them
and says, oh, we wanna give you lots of money to be on your show.
And they're like, great. They're like, but we use, you know, the Spotify
(12:38):
measurement thing. And they're like, that's that's the one we trust. So, like, great.
Okay. So how do I do oh, well, you have to move your show to
Megaphone to Spotify for Chapters because you only you know, you have
to go into their ecosystem again. I could
see, part of me goes, no. No. No. Because they would have to move so
many shows, and that would be crazy. I don't know. It's just I
(13:00):
just have this feeling that they're gonna try something to make their own because
they've never been they they kind of teeter totter. 1 minute
their RSS is holding us back and then the next minute they're, oh,
we love the open ecosystem. And I'm like, okay. Which one is it? You know?
So but I so I kinda have a feeling they could try to do their
own thing just based on their polls that
(13:21):
originally only worked in Spotify. The video podcasts that only
work in Spotify. So I can see them kind of coming up with their
own little stats package or something. I'm hoping they prove
me wrong on that, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. I think there
is an aspect to all of this where someone could look at this and
say, alright. We were certified 2.0.
(13:44):
We can make whatever adjustments come out in 2.1 and
2.2 and so on. We don't need to be certified
anymore and therefore, we don't need to be members
anymore. We'll just follow along because the guidelines are
open. Anyone can read the guidelines. And there was even a period where
people could comment publicly on the guidelines and
(14:06):
provide feedback to the IAB about those guidelines. So that's where
this whole compliant thing even came up as it's not just saying, oh, yeah, we
follow in principle. It was people who would read the guidelines
and then design their software to follow those guidelines.
But I love the line from the Pirates of the Caribbean, The first
one, where Elizabeth Swann says, hang the code and hang
(14:29):
the rules. They're more like guidelines anyway. And
that is the truth with the IAB guidelines, is they are
merely guidelines, and some of them are open to some
pretty wide interpretation that can lead to
some significantly different results. And just one of those
things could be even an IP address by itself. Like,
(14:51):
if you have I'm sure they don't have only one IP
address. But if Apple corporate headquarters had only one public
IP address and everyone at Apple was listening to
your podcast. And that IP address
was well, I mean how your stats look would depend
on whether that one IP address was white listed
(15:14):
to allow then every download from the IP address account
as a separate download within certain other filtration? Or would it be
blacklisted where it could be thousands of downloads from
legitimate people downloading the episode, listening to it separately,
all count as 1. That one difference
alone is significant, but that's not even a measurement. That's just
(15:36):
a a whitelist, blacklist thing. Right. But when it comes to some of the other
technical stuff, there's room There's lots
of wiggle room in there for someone to I I don't really want
to say inflate because that sounds that
sounds manipulative Right. In a negative way. But it is basically to
end up with numbers that might be bigger than they should
(15:58):
be, or maybe even the other way might be smaller than they
should be. So if you have only just guidelines,
you're going to end up with a lot of variety because people will
follow and apply guidelines differently. Yeah. It's open to interpretation.
Yeah. But I think that we also see, like, with Spotify,
(16:19):
with, according to some people recently,
Spotify actually overtaking Apple in downloads.
I really want to know if that's just network wide. There are a
lot of factor. You know, I'm mister caveat. I think of all of the caveats
to some of this data and things. For example, is that let's take,
SoundCloud, for example. We'll throw them under the bus. SoundCloud has never
(16:41):
and will never have an integration directly with
Spotify. JSON was the first to have an integration with
Spotify to get podcasts on Spotify and JSON encouraged many of
their users to submit to Spotify. SoundCloud has no
communication with their users. So Lipsyn's data
is going to look significantly different from SoundCloud's
(17:03):
data because of podcaster education. Right.
And because SoundCloud is an opt in platform. Along
that same line, they have the ability to
track what happens in their player and track even
more data than you get from downloads. Maybe
they've decided that they just don't care about that anymore
(17:25):
because they think they're the big shot smarty pants now and that they're the number
one place to consume podcasts. So maybe they think their
own downloads that they see in their platform are enough for all of the podcasters
using them, all of the podcasters who are on Spotify. Maybe they think
that's enough for them, and that's it. Yeah. I know in the past, James had
said that Spotify had more users,
(17:47):
but Apple had more downloads. And now I'm not
sure where that data is coming from. But, yeah, I heard James report
that Spotify now has more downloads. And
Spotify has more podcasts because they've got all those is this thing
on? Is anyone listening? That's it. Alright. This is my first test
episode of a podcast. Woo hoo. Lights are blinking. Okay. Cool.
(18:10):
What do you wanna talk about? I don't know. What do you wanna talk about?
Alright. Thanks. Thanks for coming, everybody. Yeah. So they do
have those. So because we need stats on those. Let's see what the
completion rate is. Right. Point
05%. That's odd. But now that you bring up completion rate,
that is the other thing. Now others have been talking about this time listened
(18:31):
metric, and that matters to sponsors. I like to think more
of a percentage listened because time listened is
an absolute, and it's difficult to measure
in that kind of absolute when the length of episodes
is not an absolute. So for take Pod News
Daily, for example, very short couple of minutes per
(18:53):
day and so time listened both per day
and even per week is going to be much shorter than
a podcast like any other podcast. A standard
weekly podcast that's 30 minutes or so in length. Or look
at Dan Carlin's podcast that are hours in length but released very
infrequently. So I think percentage listened is
(19:16):
a better metric. But then again, that comes back to like, in this thing
of advertising and measurements, we have this battle of what
do the podcasters need to know about the size of their audience and what do
the advertisers need to know. And so much of this is being focused
on the advertisers because the advertisers care about minutes
listened. They care about that absolute, the minutes,
(19:38):
because there's this basic number
in their mind of for this many minutes of
content, we can have this many ads. That's
not really the way that podcasters think. Right. Podcasters might think I don't
want any more than this many number of ads. I don't want
the ads to last this many minutes in my podcast
(20:00):
regardless of how long the episodes are. For me with my own
podcast, my number of sponsors that I'm willing to accept on
my own podcast right now is 0. I am the
sponsor of my own show. Exactly. Yeah. And,
again, I always say, you know, radio is about
20% ads. Like, that is not a benchmark we're looking to.
(20:22):
Oh, we're almost up to radio. No. No. That's we we wanna stay away from
that benchmark. That would be, something to avoid. There have
been initiatives in the past, and there are even still now, to try and
give us a better metric. And I do support this, but the difficult
thing is advertisers want more information.
Developers want to give less information. Yeah. So the
(20:44):
advertisers want to know what you had for breakfast
while you're listening to this episode. The developers
don't wanna give any of that. Right. Think about Marco, for example, with
developer of Overcast. He has said, he will not
build anything that helps people track
the audiences. And that's even, at least from
(21:07):
the community, that seems to be part of the reason there's some pushback
against podcasting 2.0 features is they
think, I'll say incorrectly, that some of these
features can be used to track people and that's just not the
truth. Some of these things can't be. But there are ways that you
can measure some of this stuff without violating
(21:29):
people's privacy. Just look at, like, we get the streaming satoshis. And
this is one of the things that some of these places this isn't the best
approach to do it. This is where that whole activity pub and activity stream comes
into this, but what some of these places allow you to do is you
say, I'm going to send 1% of the sats that I
receive from value for value to this other
(21:51):
place that will then analyze those. So if anyone is
streaming Satoshis to you, you can see on a
chart where that happened. So you
can maybe make an assumption. That's a very important
word to keep in mind whenever you're looking at stats is there are assumptions in
place here. But you can make some kind of assumption that this is
(22:12):
generally where my audience listened. But then again, I would challenge that
with the caveat to say, well, the person who's streaming Satoshis
2U is a super fan, so they are going to
listen to all of the episode most likely because they're a
superfan. So statistics from them using them
as your benchmark is not accurate because they
(22:34):
are a superfan. You need a benchmark of your overall audience. And that's where
one of the things that could potentially be done with Activity
Stream is an app could send
back ticks or milestones or whatever for
every, maybe it's 1%, maybe it's every 5%, maybe it's every
30 seconds or something. Nothing that compromises the listener's
(22:56):
privacy. So not Right. Like sending their IP address or their name or anything
unless the listener consents to that. And there could be a place
for a listener to do that. But by default, privacy by default, that's my
policy, privacy by default. So it could just simply report back
that this one listener listened was listening at 5
seconds and 10 seconds and 15 and 20 and so on and so on and
(23:18):
so on. But they stopped at about 75% through the episode and they didn't
play it again. You can get that information without knowing anything about
the listener. I know advertisers want to start getting into that
like, alright, what's the demographics of that JSON? Right. Oh, you know, 18 to
34 year olds only listen to half of the episode, but 50 year olds and
up JSON to 75% of the episode and all of that demographic blah
(23:40):
blah blah. Yep. And that's where we've kind of on one hand, we
started with newspapers and radio, and those metrics were
hideous compared to what podcasting provides.
But then we have Facebook and other
places that can tell you what you had for lunch
on the second Tuesday of the month if you're a Republican in
(24:03):
this city. You know, it's just crazy. It's, you know, advertisers are
like, oh, this is amazing. And if you if anybody ever shares
that, you're like, that is amazing and creepy. You know, it's
always a lot of, the AI right now that I'm
seeing is, oh, wow. That's kinda cool and kinda creepy.
And these advertising different parameters
(24:25):
are, again, kind of like, wow. That's really specific.
And how did you get that data? So it's and I
that's why I think podcasting is just instead of trying to make podcasting
Facebook, just go, okay. Here, look. Newspapers
and magazines and radio, not so great metrics,
but, you know, they've been working for years. I mean, we always hear how much
(24:48):
the radio budget is 1,000,000,000 more than than podcasting. And
then you go, but look, podcasting actually gives you better statistics.
And then, you know, and then you've got Facebook and we're like, yeah, we're not
Facebook, but we're not newspapers. And you still send monies to
newspapers or, you know, some of these other places. So it's
it's one of those where I'm like, can't you just be happy with what you
(25:10):
got? Do you really need to know what I had for lunch 3 weeks
ago on a Tuesday to sell me some shoes? To quote from
another movie and book, Jurassic Park, your scientists
were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they
didn't stop to think if they should. That's it.
Then then the dinosaurs ate everybody. So who's the dinosaur
(25:33):
here? Exactly. Depends on how you define dinosaur.
But I think the future, there are 2 different ways we
can look at this. The future gets more invasive.
Google it's crazy that Google is trying to bring in this
cookieless Internet as they describe it or some people have called it,
where they are kind of shooting themselves in the foot by
(25:55):
advocating for this with Chrome. And this is
Google, the company who makes money
by tracking you across the Internet Yeah. Is an
advocate for not tracking you across the Internet? I
always wonder again, and I this is just my hunch because it is
Google. Are they gonna come up with some proprietary thing
(26:17):
that's not a cookie but smells and acts like
a cookie, but it only you know what I mean? Are they gonna come up
with their own way of tracking where everybody can use cookies
now from what I understand? Are they gonna come up with some sort
of Google thing that only works on Google stuff
and you have to have Google Analytics to see it and everything
(26:38):
else? So it just seems like everybody's instead of trying to do
things for the industry, they're all out for themselves, which is called
competition, and I get it. But I'm just like, ugh. Yeah. Competition
is good, and that's what we need more of. Like, who is the competitor to
the IAB? Or even just for podcast measurement
standards. Yeah. There is no competitor right now. I think it
(27:00):
was on Pod News Weekly where they were talking about the
fact that the IAB measures podcasting and
banners on the Internet and a bunch of other things that are
we big enough to break off on our own and have just
the podcast and or advertising bureau instead of, you
know, the Internet and have our own thing where we can really then, you know,
(27:22):
niche down on what kind of stats do we need and come up with
that. I like that idea. I don't know how it works or who handles it
or who runs it or whatever, but I
like the idea, not that the IB is doing a bad thing, but it does
have its hurdles. Well, and that's what I think the podcast
standards or podcast standards project, whatever you wanna call it, that's
(27:44):
what those should be for. And that's why I started trying to build something like
that myself, and then podcast standards project came along. That is a
great place for this kind of thing because I'd love to see
PSP, podcast standards project, set these
standards influenced by the community and other
people in the space, but set these standards and they be open
(28:06):
standards that everyone knows this is the
standard way to measure a download, and we could have our own
2.0 and 2.1 and 2.2. There could be some
certification processes. But here's the thing that I've thought about. Ever since I
built that bot system that would measure the download speeds of the
hosting providers, I thought, why can't we have that same
(28:28):
kind of thing where we have an app
that all you have to do to test someone's compliance
in order to certify them is you run this app that has
secret algorithms inside so that way no one can try to game the app
and illegitimately count and block things. But the
app can then do its special magic to
(28:51):
test all of these things and then compare that
with what does the actual analytics show to
see, does it show this? Like, we expect the number to
be 2. Is the number 2? No. It's 3? Alright. If it's not 2,
if it's anything other than 2, then you failed on this mark. You need to
change something here. And then the app could maybe reveal. But all
(29:13):
of that can be done with an app, I I think I mean I have
not gone through the certification process But in my mind
that it could come down to it being that simple and that could be something
that maybe, yes, there is because this kind of thing requires
time. Time is money and people are worth
their time. That's the other very important thing to keep in mind. There is a
(29:36):
limit to the community's free will.
So to have some kind of certification of a
standard, there does need to be some kind of payment
just to cover the expenses Right. Of the value,
anything like that. Because somebody's gonna have to you know, if
whatever the technology is behind it, updating
(29:58):
any kind of lists, anything like that, and just and then the whole
if you think about it, if that became a standard, you have to have somebody
so that when Bill opens up Bill's house of podcast
hosting that they go over, make sure Bill's, you
know, certified or not or whatever or checks to make
sure who is you have to maintain the list of who's certified and who isn't.
(30:20):
So there is some overhead to it. But my question is
and again, I know nothing about any of this, but I is
it more or less or the same of what you're paying to the
IAB right now? Right. And the other thing I I
wonder because if you think about it, if we had and this would never happen,
but it'd be great if there was some sort of what if we had a
(30:41):
universal stat system that somehow every time you hit you
know, how we have those redirects. Right? The little prefixes. What if
everybody use the same prefix so that everybody was literally using the same
stat system? That will never happen. But, you know, to
dream the impossible, you know, because then you would You're talking about
the Tower of Babylon solution, basically. Yeah. That is when the
(31:03):
Lord will come down again and say, uh-uh. You gotta stop this. You
got you got one tracker. And when you have only one tracker, there
is nothing that you will not be able to do. And so, therefore, I'm going
to confuse your tracking and Yeah. Create all of these other
trackers and spread you across the world. That's it. Yeah. So I
know that's never gonna happen, but it'd be neato. It would be doggone neato if
(31:25):
it would. So we'll see. And I think that's where it's
really awesome the initiative that John Spurlock has with 0p3@op3.dev.
I can remember that site, but I can never remember his other
site like livewire. I don't I don't
remember that what comes after the dot. It's not dotcom. It's not dotfm. I don't
think it's dotio. Anyway, but his thing, he's
(31:48):
made it completely open source. So you can see exactly how he is
tracking things. You can use it on any podcast. The thing
that podcasters might not like is that it does make their
stats open. Now maybe there's a monetization opportunity there
for John or any kind of business to say, alright. You use this.
This is this open standard. If you don't want your stats to be
(32:11):
public, then subscribe for $5 a month or
whatever. But the thing is, that service,
OP 3, while it's free for everyone to use, it
is costing John Spurlock money. Yeah. The last I saw, I think it was
costing him a few $100 per month Oh. To run that. Mhmm. He
has some sponsors, which is great. But at some
(32:32):
point, that's gotta cover at least its expenses, let
alone, I think, pay the people for the value of
their time. Right. That's just for the hosting and, you know, the
hardware and stuff. Poor John's not getting paid for his
time for maintaining it and writing in the first place
and everything else. So, yeah, that's one that in
(32:54):
theory, when he comes along and says, okay, it's time. You you need to pay
for this. I personally wouldn't have a problem going here, whatever it is, you
know, because he's earned it. Value for value. Yeah.
And he has made it all open source, and I think he's
even said anyone else can take this and use it if they want
to. So while his code could be,
(33:16):
like, let's imagine this, that o p 3 could be the standard.
Then his code is open source. Anyone can copy
it. They copy it onto their system
and maybe even John has some kind of integrity check
to make sure that the the version is up to date or something like that.
There, you know, any sort of thing like that that verifies that they haven't
(33:38):
tweaked the stats to their own manipulations.
But that could be something where we're all following the same code base
to measure downloads, or there could be the multiple companies out there
providing whitelists and blacklists that companies could subscribe
to. Although I know there's the thing of its proprietary data. Like
for Blueberry, they've built this list pretty much themselves
(34:02):
over the decades now that they've been doing this.
And that's not something that they wanna just give up. That is
part of their unique selling proposition, their
USP. So there needs to be some openness, but there also
needs to be some exchange of value. And in all of this, there needs to
be the respect for the audience, their privacy.
(34:24):
While I would like to know certain things about my own
audience, like their age, their sex, their
device, like how many people are on iPhone versus Android, what apps are
they using, what country are they using, Or what country are they in?
What state are they in? Maybe even what
local metropolis they're near. I don't need to know their
(34:46):
exact city, you know, if they're in Waka Hockey, New York or
whatever. I I don't need to know that. I just wanna know, are they near
New York City? So maybe I could plan that for if I'm
doing a live event somewhere, I could say, hey, everyone. I'm gonna do
an event in my biggest cities and that's New York City, Los Angeles,
Cincinnati, and whatever. But I don't need to know
(35:08):
where they live. I don't need to know where they
shop. I don't need to know what other podcasts they listen
to, although that can be kind of interesting, but I don't need that.
I just need to know, do they consume my podcast,
and how do they consume it? I don't need to know who. I
just need to know how. Yeah. I was looking at John's site.
(35:31):
The April invoice for the month was $791.97.
So 7.92. You can sponsor,
there's a $500 gold sponsorship, a $100, and that's a month.
Then there's a $100 a month OP 3 sponsorship. And if you
are using either one of those, apparently, you're listed on the home
(35:53):
page, which is great now. If you're like, well, that's a little rich for my
blood. There is a $10 a month early supporters sponsorship.
Now you're not on the front page, but it is a way to say thank
you. And and right now, it's Podnews, FlightPath, Refonic,
Transistor, Podium, and Captivate, our sponsors. Because I
looked at him, like, why can I give John $10? Holy cow. $10.
(36:15):
So that's, interesting. But he spent for
the year so far, just 2024, he's at $2,943.
So about every month, it's like 7 30, 740
ish, 700. So and that's him
again looking for ways to improve it. Keep it running.
Everything like that. So it's one of those things that, you know, I still wonder
(36:39):
how Albie is staying in business because I don't see any
business model over there yet. You know, they have said at some
point, I thought it happened by now, that they would be
charging a fee or taking a fee, which I can understand that. And I think
that's reasonable if they say something like, alright, you can receive
as much as you want, but for anything you're going to withdraw Right. There's a
(37:01):
4% charge. Maybe they say anything you send, there's a 4%
charge, or maybe they say only if you withdraw
back onto chain, which is just the technical Right.
Way to describe, basically, like, getting your Bitcoin from Albi
into, for example, Coinbase, and then Coinbase,
then trading it for dollars and then withdrawing the dollars, that kind of thing. That's
(37:24):
what you have to do. You have to get that Bitcoin back onto the chain,
the Bitcoin chain. It can't just stay on the lightning network.
But, yeah, at some point, they'll do that, and I think that's reasonable for them
to have some kind of small fee like that. Yeah. Because we want them to
stay in business and free is not a good business model. We've said that
before. Well, you know, there's there's an interesting thing about
(37:45):
that. So the whole value for value concept, there's
a huge risk to that. And it's
working for some people, not working for
others. Right. In that information you saw about John
Spurlock and what it's costing him, did it show how much of that is
being paid for? Let me see. Like, is he running
(38:07):
in the red or is he in the green? Because when I look at
op3.dev, you can scroll down to the bottom and
see the icons for the sponsors that he has. Now we don't know
how much these companies are paying. We just know they've paid that threshold
to be on the front page. So Podnews, FlightPath,
Refonic, Transistor, Podium, and Captivate.
(38:30):
Some of these are radically different companies. Right. Like, Transistor,
Captivate, and Podium are hosting companies. Pad News is
not a hosting company. Right. That's a news company, although it does a lot
of stuff in the podcasting industry. Refonic does a lot of stuff
with industry data and is in the podcasting industry.
And this is a nice collection, and I'm not sure if you'd get this
(38:54):
kind of good collection of sponsors if you just
told everyone this is what it cost to use the service. I recently
spoke at NRB, which is the National Religious Broadcasters
Convention, and I was sharing a stage with
someone from Focus on the Family. And if you've ever listened to a
Focus on the Family broadcast where they have a guest who has a
(39:15):
book or they're talking about a book, they frequently say something
like this. They'll say, we'll send you this
book for donation of any amount, and they mean
that. Mhmm. And the gentleman from Focus on the
Family on stage said that they knew they were
taking a risk. And sure, some people call in and they
(39:37):
say, I want the book. I'm not sending a donation. So
focus on the family loses money on that. Some people call
in and they pay about what the book would sell for. And some
people, the value for value thing, they call in and they give a
$100 or $200 to get a $10 book. Right.
There is a risk to that though. And that
(40:00):
risk is mitigated when there's a relationship, I think,
but you have to build that relationship first. Yeah. And how do you
build relationships within the podcast
measurement industry where there's so much competition.
That's where I think you have to have the structure of something like
podcast standards project to help with that. And
(40:22):
a standards body that can ratify standards
across many aspects of podcasting, not just measurement, not just some
of the technical stuff of this is what goes in an
RSS feed, but also these are standard advertising rates to
pay for this certain things like that. I think that's what I've
always envisioned for a podcast standards board and why I've predicted that standards
(40:45):
would emerge in podcasting, and we're finally seeing that. I don't
like that our measurement guidelines are basically
influenced by a company that's only interested in advertising. Right. I'd
rather any such standards come from an a company
that's interested in the privacy of the audience, providing
only as much data as podcasters need and the same
(41:07):
thing for podcasters to take action on too. That's the big thing.
Data that they can use and giving
advertisers only as much data as they actually
need. Yeah. As opposed to when was the last time I
washed my right foot? Right. Just don't need all that stuff.
Statistically, people who wash their right foot within the last 24 hours are more
(41:30):
likely to buy our products. I mean, they've got crazy statistics
like that. Yeah. And some of that I just kinda wonder, like,
really? Yeah. Why? What does that matter?
Who funded that research? Yeah. Exactly. Doctor Scholes.
So Daniel, any
boostograms from, our last episode from now till
(41:52):
then? We did. We got a boostogram from Sam Sethi from
truefans.fm. He sent 41 100 sats. He didn't include
a message with that, but we are very grateful for that. Now 41100,
do you know any significance to that number? No. Only going back
to my days as a copier technician. There was the Minolta 41100.
It was an old machine. It was a good machine, but I think, really, Sam
(42:15):
just wants to cement his on top of the leaderboard
when we log in to, whichever one we're using, get Alby
or Conchax or one of those Saturn. One of those has
a a list of top contributors. So thank you, Sam. We deeply appreciate that. And
I will say, not that he bought a plug, but the
ability that he's made to where you can just take a credit card and it's
(42:37):
$10 US and it fills up your wallet is so
ridiculously easy now. You can only buy $10 right now. It's in
beta. So that's like, as I record this, it's like $14.
And so that'll last me a couple weeks and then it runs out. But I
just go back to Truefans and hit okay. Fill up my wallet. Here we
go. And, so that's working very, very well because that's not
(42:59):
an actual app. It's a, what is it? P was it web
app based? Progressive web app or PWA, which no one
knows what that stands for or even what it means. It's just fun to say
pois, you know, so that's always fun. But, speaking of
peas, we also have the podcast positivity
point of the show. So, Daniel, are we, pointing
(43:20):
positively at someone with a podcast? Yeah. I know that sometimes we
complain about some of the stuff happening in the podcasting industry, so it'd be nice
to end on some positivity. And for this episode, I
want to highlight Podcast Guru. I know I mentioned them previously,
but I noticed something neat that they do since I've been using them
a little more steadily for some of the podcasting 2.0
(43:42):
featured podcasts. And I noticed that just like an
Apple Podcasts, you get that beautiful thing that happens based
on some podcast cover art where it changes the color
of the whole interface to match that podcast cover. Podcast
Guru does that too even at the chapter
image level. Oh. So as the chapter
(44:04):
image changes, if you're looking at the app,
the whole app interface changes to
complement the colors within the podcast chapter
image. And I thought, oh, that's that's
a nice little thing. That's like icing on top of the cake. I like that.
That's it. So that reminds me, Daniel, as you brought up podcast
(44:27):
guru, Oscar from Fountain sent out
a survey that said, hey. How can we make Fountain better? And, of course,
I said, I love me smart playlists. I want to be able to say
that. And I explained what it was and I said, I can almost do it
in fountain with tags. You can tag a show so that when a new
episode comes from whatever podcast you want,
(44:49):
you could say tag this as say health. Then you can click on
the tag, and anything that's been tagged as health, there it is. And
I said the problem is I'll listen to the 1st episode in that list,
and then it will go to that queue. So maybe in my queue, I was
listening to David Hooper or somebody. I'm like, no. I wanted to go to the
next health tagged 1. And he's like, I think we can do
(45:11):
that. And he he seemed pretty sure that that was possible. So
if he does that, then Fountain would have smart
playlists. And I was like, oh, because I know that's the one feature. I
know Podcast Guru has said they're working on it, so
it'll be interesting to see, you know, who can get there first. But that was,
I found that very encouraging that they they could do that because that's really my
(45:33):
the one feature that I like. I really need that. And I know, Fountain has
done some things to make it easy to, you know, fill your wallet over
there. And they have a whole there. The boy, if you love stats, Fountain is
the app for you. They have all sorts of community things going on over there.
But, so a positive shout out to both Podcast
Guru and Fountain for, keeping up and and making
(45:55):
your apps better and making them do more things. We appreciate that. And with
that, I think we're gonna call it a day on this episode. So
thanks so much. If you enjoyed this show, if you could do us a favor,
share it with a friend if you want to. If you feel so inclined, you
could always send us a boost to gram, and we appreciate everyone who's been streaming
the sats to us. We deeply appreciate it, and, we'll be back real soon with
(46:16):
another episode of the future of podcasting. Keep boosting
and keep podcasting.
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