The Future of Podcast Measurement

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:
The future of podcast measurement.

Dave Jackson [00:00:18]:
Daniel, Future of podcasting episode number 43, the future of podcast measurement. Everybody bust out their rulers or something, I don't know, to, measure that with this, inspired by our good friends at Spotify who have left the IAB. And, I guess they're just gonna let their certification. They're no longer certified on I think we're up to 2.2 now for the IAB certification.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:00:45]:
Yeah. 2.2 just came out.

Dave Jackson [00:00:46]:
And the one thing I liked I saw in there where this whole thing of we're not certified. We're

Daniel J. Lewis [00:00:52]:
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?

Dave Jackson [00:01:06]:
I always thought that was weird and it just kinda has the whole, oh, no. No. We're compliant. Trust us. You know? I'm like, yeah. That's anytime I've ever heard of any 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.

Dave Jackson [00:01:23]:
So it's interesting to see. I know a lot of people are throwing out ideas about it'd be nice if we could come up with some sort of separate entity. Or if it's not the IAB, then what is it? I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:01:36]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:01:52]:
Yeah.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:01:52]:
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 other things that have happened. Like, do you remember several years ago, Dave, when Apple sent that confusing email that said a couple of technical things? They said, to make sure your podcast cover art is hosted on a server that supports HTTP head requests. And they said to make sure your media files are hosted on a server that supports byte-range requests. Remember that?

Dave Jackson [00:02:40]:
Because we're all like, byte range. Got it. And then we all looked at each other and went, what's byte range?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:02:45]:
What did you

Dave Jackson [00:02:48]:
Exactly.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:02:49]:
But then it made perfect sense why Apple was saying that because, at that time, they didn't support what we call, with massive quotation marks around this, streaming, which is where you press play and it starts playing immediately, and you can skip to anywhere in the episode without having downloaded the episode. It's streaming from that point, or it's pre-buffering, or it's downloading in the background. It's not technically streaming, but all that aside. So they gave us that technical stuff. That changed how stats worked because then you weren't downloading the whole file. You might be downloading only a portion of the file. But then as Internet connection speeds, both mobile and wired and wireless and everything, have caught up. Now when you press play, even if you haven't downloaded the episode, it's very likely the entire episode downloads in the background within only a few seconds.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:03:41]:
Whether you're on WiFi or you're on mobile data, it's really fast now. That's changed but still there is some of that kind of partial streaming. We've also got things where if someone is streaming and for whatever reason the whole file doesn't download right away, then if they're mobile, their IP address could be changing as they are moving around or even just joining different networks. And how do you track that? What if there are multiple people in the same location downloading an episode? All of this stuff. So all of these things plus the whole manipulation field and bots and servers and things that you can set up to download this stuff automatically, there is a need to have a standard of this is a legitimate download and this is an illegitimate download and therefore don't count it. I think that's important for advertisers, of course, because they need to know what they're paying for, how many people they're actually reaching. It's also important for podcasters to have a good idea of how many people are they reaching so that they can know how to approach their show. Even things like, if you get feedback, if you get one negative feedback about a new section in your podcast, well, is that one out of 10,000 people? So the other 9,999 love that thing or don't say anything about it? Or is that one out of 10 people, and therefore, it's 10% of your audience thinks that thing? So it's important to know that, and that's why we need the standards.

Dave Jackson [00:05:15]:
Yeah. And, also, if some media host comes up with new features and you decide to move, you kinda want the numbers to be somewhat in the ballpark where, you know, SoundCloud hasn't updated anything as far as I know since 2017 because that's when the the new Apple categories came out. And those, to the best of my knowledge, are still not in SoundCloud. And I don't believe SoundCloud is IAB certified. I know if you if you Google, you know, SoundCloud plays, you can buy, you know, thousands of plays on SoundCloud for a very little bit of money. So no sponsor will touch you. You so, yeah, it's one of those things where if somebody moved right now from SoundCloud to Lipson or Captivator, Buzzsprout, or whoever, they're gonna take a serious haircut because, you know, it's just they haven't kept up. And who knows how they're calculating what a download is, but it's gonna be, I'm assuming here, pretty different than if you go to somebody who's been certified.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:06:16]:
Yeah. And there can be all kinds of ways to manipulate downloads too. And I stumbled across one of them even myself a couple of years ago when I did that podcast speed test thing where I started comparing the speed of RSS feeds and then started comparing the speed of hosting providers and discovered some are significantly slower than others and it in the end, it just didn't really make all that difference. I was basically building a bot farm to automate this testing from multiple regions. And the most interesting discovery, actually, in all of that research was that some of the podcast hosting providers and analytics were counting those bots. Yeah. And I did nothing to try and disguise them as legitimate downloads. They were clearly identified as being from whatever software package I was using to cause those downloads, and they were coming from a server.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:07:12]:
So some of the companies counted every single download I did. So I knew, and I even played with it a little bit. I knew all I have to do is make it download this file 20 more times and it will show in my numbers 20 more downloads. While others, I could make it download as many times as I wanted and it never counted. So whether they knew by the user agent, the technical identifier of what's downloading it or maybe they knew that IP address is blacklisted because it's coming from a known server farm or data center. Whatever case, they knew to filter that out. And that's thanks to the standards that we have with podcast measurement.

Dave Jackson [00:07:55]:
Right. Because that's one of the things you get from being certified is there is a blacklist of all these bots and things like that that you can easily implement into your system. So, again, there's a little bit of everybody's kind of on the same page to a certain extent so that we know, oh, yeah, that particular location or whatever is false. So don't count that. And if you were going back to the, hey, we're just compliant. Well, you don't get that list. So you're kind of guessing. Okay.

Dave Jackson [00:08:27]:
This, you know, this giant building that's, you know, AT and T and it's all their employees. Do we count that IP as 1 or do we count all the ones in turn? How does that work? Those kind of things where if we can all come together and count them the same, we don't really matter which one it is. It just if we have some sort of consistency in how we count, then it just makes it easier to move forward with everyone somewhat on the same page.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:08:55]:
And I think that might be for the podcast hosting providers and analytics providers who are thinking of joining the IAB. That's almost the more valuable part is getting that list. And that's where I think it doesn't necessarily have to be an open list, like, available for anyone to see because then when certain things like that when blacklists are made public, then it it can be easy to manipulate some of those things. But think about some of the email spam lists out there. There are multiple ones and some email service providers will track multiple or subscribe to multiple lists so that they can keep themselves off of it or know what gets flagged and such. So I could see that maybe coming in the future where it's decentralized then. I mean, the list itself is centralized, but you can get similar lists from other places. Like, I know Blueberry has done probably the most foundational work of anyone in the IAB for developing the standard, building those whitelists and blacklists.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:09:59]:
And Blueberry could I mean, maybe they have some kind of noncompete with the IAB about this. But that's something that Blueberry could do, is they could offer an enterprise feed of their whitelists and blacklists. So, yes, they're competitors, but, hey, they get money from their competitors then. But their competitors, like anyone else out there, could subscribe to that list to then get that. And it's decentralized. It's supporting the company that actually built the list, and then there's not the need for the huge expense for certification. Now that's something that we haven't even brought up, although probably most of you listening right now know about chapters that there is a huge expense and it's different for each company because it's based on revenue, not just ad revenue anymore, but it is based on the revenue of the company, how much you pay to be a member of IAB. And then you also have to pay I've heard it's something like 15,000.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:10:52]:
Does that sound about

Dave Jackson [00:10:53]:
right? And that's where I thought I had these backwards. I thought it cost a lot to get certified. And so I heard where James Cridland had kinda done some math and gave a very rough, you know, estimate of, like, a half a $1,000,000 for Spotify. And I thought that was to get certified, and that's not. That's to be a member of the IAB. So I forget where I'd said that. That was wrong. That's how much to be a member.

Dave Jackson [00:11:19]:
So but they still could've. I don't think the certification has anything to do with how much money you make, and they could have easily still stayed certified. And so that is kind of the head scratcher, but I just have this feeling. I have nothing to base this on. It's just my gut. I can see Spotify coming out with their own kind of measurement because they, you know, they have Chartable. They have the app in Spotify. They've got Megaphone.

Dave Jackson [00:11:44]:
They've got, Spotify for so they kind of control every aspect of the listening aspect of from hosting to listening to where they have a really decent feature set in terms of statistics. I'm not sure how you would tie outside people to that, but I just I can just see them saying, oh, no. We're not IEB certified. We're Spotify certified because we're measuring our own stats and just trust us. They're they're accurate.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:12:10]:
Are you actually suggesting that Spotify I mean, hear me out here. Are you act do you actually think Spotify would build something proprietary?

Dave Jackson [00:12:24]:
Well, if you think about it, so I've got a big show. Let's say they're on, I don't know, Buzzsprout. And an advertiser comes to them and says, oh, we wanna give you lots of money to be on your show. And they're like, great. They're like, but we use, you know, the Spotify measurement thing. And they're like, that's that's the one we trust. So, like, great. Okay.

Dave Jackson [00:12:42]:
So how do I do oh, well, you have to move your show to Megaphone to Spotify for Chapters because you only you know, you have to go into their ecosystem again. I could see, part of me goes, no. No. No. Because they would have to move so many shows, and that would be crazy. I don't know. It's just I just have this feeling that they're gonna try something to make their own because they've never been they they kind of teeter totter. 1 minute their RSS is holding us back and then the next minute they're, oh, we love the open ecosystem.

Dave Jackson [00:13:13]:
And I'm like, okay. Which one is it? You know? So but I so I kinda have a feeling they could try to do their own thing just based on their polls that originally only worked in Spotify. The video podcasts that only work in Spotify. So I can see them kind of coming up with their own little stats package or something. I'm hoping they prove me wrong on that, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:13:35]:
I think there is an aspect to all of this where someone could look at this and say, alright. We were certified 2.0. We can make whatever adjustments come out in 2.1 and 2.2 and so on. We don't need to be certified anymore and therefore, we don't need to be members anymore. We'll just follow along because the guidelines are open. Anyone can read the guidelines. And there was even a period where people could comment publicly on the guidelines and provide feedback to the IAB about those guidelines. So that's where this whole compliant thing even came up as it's not just saying, oh, yeah, we follow in principle.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:14:14]:
It was people who would read the guidelines and then design their software to follow those guidelines. But I love the line from the Pirates of the Caribbean, The first one, where Elizabeth Swann says, hang the code and hang the rules. They're more like guidelines anyway. And that is the truth with the IAB guidelines, is they are merely guidelines, and some of them are open to some pretty wide interpretation that can lead to some significantly different results. And just one of those things could be even an IP address by itself. Like, if you have I'm sure they don't have only one IP address. But if Apple corporate headquarters had only one public IP address and everyone at Apple was listening to your podcast. And that IP address was well, I mean how your stats look would depend on whether that one IP address was white listed to allow then every download from the IP address account as a separate download within certain other filtration? Or would it be blacklisted where it could be thousands of downloads from legitimate people downloading the episode, listening to it separately, all count as 1.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:15:31]:
That one difference alone is significant, but that's not even a measurement. That's just a a whitelist, blacklist thing. Right. But when it comes to some of the other technical stuff, there's room There's lots of wiggle room in there for someone to I I don't really want to say inflate because that sounds that sounds manipulative Right. In a negative way. But it is basically to end up with numbers that might be bigger than they should be, or maybe even the other way might be smaller than they should be. So if you have only just guidelines, you're going to end up with a lot of variety because people will follow and apply guidelines differently.

Dave Jackson [00:16:12]:
Yeah. It's open to interpretation.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:16:14]:
Yeah. But I think that we also see, like, with Spotify, with, according to some people recently, Spotify actually overtaking Apple in downloads. I really want to know if that's just network wide. There are a lot of factor. You know, I'm mister caveat. I think of all of the caveats to some of this data and things. For example, is that let's take, SoundCloud, for example. We'll throw them under the bus.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:16:40]:
SoundCloud has never and will never have an integration directly with Spotify. JSON was the first to have an integration with Spotify to get podcasts on Spotify and JSON encouraged many of their users to submit to Spotify. SoundCloud has no communication with their users. So Lipsyn's data is going to look significantly different from SoundCloud's data because of podcaster education. Right. And because SoundCloud is an opt in platform. Along that same line, they have the ability to track what happens in their player and track even more data than you get from downloads. Maybe they've decided that they just don't care about that anymore because they think they're the big shot smarty pants now and that they're the number one place to consume podcasts.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:17:31]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:17:42]:
Yeah. I know in the past, James had said that Spotify had more users, but Apple had more downloads. And now I'm not sure where that data is coming from. But, yeah, I heard James report that Spotify now has more downloads.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:17:58]:
And Spotify has more podcasts because they've got all those is this thing on? Is anyone listening?

Dave Jackson [00:18:03]:
That's it.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:18:04]:
Alright. This is my first test episode of a podcast. Woo hoo.

Dave Jackson [00:18:08]:
Lights are blinking. Okay. Cool. What do you wanna talk about? I don't know. What do you wanna talk about? Alright. Thanks. Thanks for coming, everybody. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:18:16]:
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.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:18:25]:
But now that you bring up completion rate, that is the other thing. Now others have been talking about this time listened metric, and that matters to sponsors. I like to think more of a percentage listened because time listened is an absolute, and it's difficult to measure in that kind of absolute when the length of episodes is not an absolute. So for take Pod News Daily, for example, very short couple of minutes per day and so time listened both per day and even per week is going to be much shorter than a podcast like any other podcast. A standard weekly podcast that's 30 minutes or so in length. Or look at Dan Carlin's podcast that are hours in length but released very infrequently. So I think percentage listened is a better metric. But then again, that comes back to like, in this thing of advertising and measurements, we have this battle of what do the podcasters need to know about the size of their audience and what do the advertisers need to know.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:19:28]:
And so much of this is being focused on the advertisers because the advertisers care about minutes listened. They care about that absolute, the minutes, because there's this basic number in their mind of for this many minutes of content, we can have this many ads. That's not really the way that podcasters think. Right. Podcasters might think I don't want any more than this many number of ads. I don't want the ads to last this many minutes in my podcast regardless of how long the episodes are. For me with my own podcast, my number of sponsors that I'm willing to accept on my own podcast right now is 0. I am the sponsor of my own show.

Dave Jackson [00:20:13]:
Exactly. Yeah. And, again, I always say, you know, radio is about 20% ads. Like, that is not a benchmark we're looking to. Oh, we're almost up to radio. No. No. That's we we wanna stay away from that benchmark.

Dave Jackson [00:20:27]:
That would be, something to avoid.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:20:30]:
There have been initiatives in the past, and there are even still now, to try and give us a better metric. And I do support this, but the difficult thing is advertisers want more information. Developers want to give less information. Yeah. So the advertisers want to know what you had for breakfast while you're listening to this episode. The developers don't wanna give any of that. Right. Think about Marco, for example, with developer of Overcast.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:20:58]:
He has said, he will not build anything that helps people track the audiences. And that's even, at least from the community, that seems to be part of the reason there's some pushback against podcasting 2.0 features is they think, I'll say incorrectly, that some of these features can be used to track people and that's just not the truth. Some of these things can't be. But there are ways that you can measure some of this stuff without violating people's privacy. Just look at, like, we get the streaming satoshis. And this is one of the things that some of these places this isn't the best approach to do it. This is where that whole activity pub and activity stream comes into this, but what some of these places allow you to do is you say, I'm going to send 1% of the sats that I receive from value for value to this other place that will then analyze those. So if anyone is streaming Satoshis to you, you can see on a chart where that happened.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:22:01]:
So you can maybe make an assumption. That's a very important word to keep in mind whenever you're looking at stats is there are assumptions in place here. But you can make some kind of assumption that this is generally where my audience listened. But then again, I would challenge that with the caveat to say, well, the person who's streaming Satoshis 2U is a super fan, so they are going to listen to all of the episode most likely because they're a superfan. So statistics from them using them as your benchmark is not accurate because they are a superfan. You need a benchmark of your overall audience. And that's where one of the things that could potentially be done with Activity Stream is an app could send back ticks or milestones or whatever for every, maybe it's 1%, maybe it's every 5%, maybe it's every 30 seconds or something. Nothing that compromises the listener's privacy.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:22:57]:
So not Right. Like sending their IP address or their name or anything unless the listener consents to that. And there could be a place for a listener to do that. But by default, privacy by default, that's my policy, privacy by default. So it could just simply report back that this one listener listened was listening at 5 seconds and 10 seconds and 15 and 20 and so on and so on and so on. But they stopped at about 75% through the episode and they didn't play it again. You can get that information without knowing anything about the listener. I know advertisers want to start getting into that like, alright, what's the demographics of that JSON?

Dave Jackson [00:23:32]:
Right.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:23:32]:
Oh, you know, 18 to 34 year olds only listen to half of the episode, but 50 year olds and up JSON to 75% of the episode and all of that demographic blah blah blah.

Dave Jackson [00:23:41]:
Yep. And that's where we've kind of on one hand, we started with newspapers and radio, and those metrics were hideous compared to what podcasting provides. But then we have Facebook and other places that can tell you what you had for lunch on the second Tuesday of the month if you're a Republican in this city. You know, it's just crazy. It's, you know, advertisers are like, oh, this is amazing. And if you if anybody ever shares that, you're like, that is amazing and creepy. You know, it's always a lot of, the AI right now that I'm seeing is, oh, wow. That's kinda cool and kinda creepy.

Dave Jackson [00:24:21]:
And these advertising different parameters are, again, kind of like, wow. That's really specific. And how did you get that data? So it's and I that's why I think podcasting is just instead of trying to make podcasting Facebook, just go, okay. Here, look. Newspapers and magazines and radio, not so great metrics, but, you know, they've been working for years. I mean, we always hear how much the radio budget is 1,000,000,000 more than than podcasting. And then you go, but look, podcasting actually gives you better statistics. And then, you know, and then you've got Facebook and we're like, yeah, we're not Facebook, but we're not newspapers.

Dave Jackson [00:25:02]:
And you still send monies to newspapers or, you know, some of these other places. So it's it's one of those where I'm like, can't you just be happy with what you got? Do you really need to know what I had for lunch 3 weeks ago on a Tuesday to sell me some shoes?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:25:17]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:25:27]:
That's it. Then then the dinosaurs ate everybody.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:25:31]:
So who's the dinosaur

Dave Jackson [00:25:33]:
here? Exactly.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:25:35]:
Depends on how you define dinosaur. But I think the future, there are 2 different ways we can look at this. The future gets more invasive. Google it's crazy that Google is trying to bring in this cookieless Internet as they describe it or some people have called it, where they are kind of shooting themselves in the foot by advocating for this with Chrome. And this is Google, the company who makes money by tracking you across the Internet Yeah. Is an advocate for not tracking you across the Internet?

Dave Jackson [00:26:10]:
I always wonder again, and I this is just my hunch because it is Google. Are they gonna come up with some proprietary thing that's not a cookie but smells and acts like a cookie, but it only you know what I mean? Are they gonna come up with their own way of tracking where everybody can use cookies now from what I understand? Are they gonna come up with some sort of Google thing that only works on Google stuff and you have to have Google Analytics to see it and everything else? So it just seems like everybody's instead of trying to do things for the industry, they're all out for themselves, which is called competition, and I get it. But I'm just like, ugh.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:26:48]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:26:59]:
I think it was on Pod News Weekly where they were talking about the fact that the IAB measures podcasting and banners on the Internet and a bunch of other things that are we big enough to break off on our own and have just the podcast and or advertising bureau instead of, you know, the Internet and have our own thing where we can really then, you know, niche down on what kind of stats do we need and come up with that. I like that idea. I don't know how it works or who handles it or who runs it or whatever, but I like the idea, not that the IB is doing a bad thing, but it does have its hurdles.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:27:38]:
Well, and that's what I think the podcast standards or podcast standards project, whatever you wanna call it, that's what those should be for. And that's why I started trying to build something like that myself, and then podcast standards project came along. That is a great place for this kind of thing because I'd love to see PSP, podcast standards project, set these standards influenced by the community and other people in the space, but set these standards and they be open standards that everyone knows this is the standard way to measure a download, and we could have our own 2.0 and 2.1 and 2.2. There could be some certification processes. But here's the thing that I've thought about. Ever since I built that bot system that would measure the download speeds of the hosting providers, I thought, why can't we have that same kind of thing where we have an app that all you have to do to test someone's compliance in order to certify them is you run this app that has secret algorithms inside so that way no one can try to game the app and illegitimately count and block things. But the app can then do its special magic to test all of these things and then compare that with what does the actual analytics show to see, does it show this? Like, we expect the number to be 2. Is the number 2? No.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:29:04]:
It's 3? Alright. If it's not 2, if it's anything other than 2, then you failed on this mark. You need to change something here. And then the app could maybe reveal. But all of that can be done with an app, I I think I mean I have not gone through the certification process But in my mind that it could come down to it being that simple and that could be something that maybe, yes, there is because this kind of thing requires time. Time is money and people are worth their time. That's the other very important thing to keep in mind. There is a limit to the community's free will.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:29:39]:
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.

Dave Jackson [00:29:51]:
Because somebody's gonna have to you know, if whatever the technology is behind it, updating any kind of lists, anything like that, and just and then the whole if you think about it, if that became a standard, you have to have somebody so that when Bill opens up Bill's house of podcast hosting that they go over, make sure Bill's, you know, certified or not or whatever or checks to make sure who is you have to maintain the list of who's certified and who isn't. So there is some overhead to it. But my question is and again, I know nothing about any of this, but I is it more or less or the same of what you're paying to the IAB right now?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:30:33]:
Right.

Dave Jackson [00:30:33]:
And the other thing I I wonder because if you think about it, if we had and this would never happen, but it'd be great if there was some sort of what if we had a universal stat system that somehow every time you hit you know, how we have those redirects. Right? The little prefixes. What if everybody use the same prefix so that everybody was literally using the same stat system? That will never happen. But, you know, to dream the impossible, you know, because then you would

Daniel J. Lewis [00:30:58]:
You're talking about the Tower of Babylon solution, basically. Yeah. That is when the Lord will come down again and say, uh-uh. You gotta stop this. You got you got one tracker. And when you have only one tracker, there is nothing that you will not be able to do. And so, therefore, I'm going to confuse your tracking and

Dave Jackson [00:31:15]:
Yeah.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:31:16]:
Create all of these other trackers and spread you across the world.

Dave Jackson [00:31:19]:
That's it. Yeah. So I know that's never gonna happen, but it'd be neato. It would be doggone neato if it would. So we'll see.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:31:26]:
And I think that's where it's really awesome the initiative that John Spurlock has with 0p3@op3.dev. I can remember that site, but I can never remember his other site like livewire. I don't I don't remember that what comes after the dot. It's not dotcom. It's not dotfm. I don't think it's dotio. Anyway, but his thing, he's made it completely open source. So you can see exactly how he is tracking things.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:31:53]:
You can use it on any podcast. The thing that podcasters might not like is that it does make their stats open. Now maybe there's a monetization opportunity there for John or any kind of business to say, alright. You use this. This is this open standard. If you don't want your stats to be public, then subscribe for $5 a month or whatever. But the thing is, that service, OP 3, while it's free for everyone to use, it is costing John Spurlock money.

Dave Jackson [00:32:23]:
Yeah.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:32:24]:
The last I saw, I think it was costing him a few $100 per month Oh. To run that.

Dave Jackson [00:32:28]:
Mhmm.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:32:29]:
He has some sponsors, which is great. But at some point, that's gotta cover at least its expenses, let alone, I think, pay the people for the value of their time.

Dave Jackson [00:32:40]:
Right. That's just for the hosting and, you know, the hardware and stuff. Poor John's not getting paid for his time for maintaining it and writing in the first place and everything else. So, yeah, that's one that in theory, when he comes along and says, okay, it's time. You you need to pay for this. I personally wouldn't have a problem going here, whatever it is, you know, because he's earned it. Value for value.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:33:04]:
Yeah. And he has made it all open source, and I think he's even said anyone else can take this and use it if they want to. So while his code could be, like, let's imagine this, that o p 3 could be the standard. Then his code is open source. Anyone can copy it. They copy it onto their system and maybe even John has some kind of integrity check to make sure that the the version is up to date or something like that. There, you know, any sort of thing like that that verifies that they haven't tweaked the stats to their own manipulations. But that could be something where we're all following the same code base to measure downloads, or there could be the multiple companies out there providing whitelists and blacklists that companies could subscribe to.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:33:54]:
Although I know there's the thing of its proprietary data. Like for Blueberry, they've built this list pretty much themselves over the decades now that they've been doing this. And that's not something that they wanna just give up. That is part of their unique selling proposition, their USP. So there needs to be some openness, but there also needs to be some exchange of value. And in all of this, there needs to be the respect for the audience, their privacy. While I would like to know certain things about my own audience, like their age, their sex, their device, like how many people are on iPhone versus Android, what apps are they using, what country are they using, Or what country are they in? What state are they in? Maybe even what local metropolis they're near. I don't need to know their exact city, you know, if they're in Waka Hockey, New York or whatever.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:34:50]:
I I don't need to know that. I just wanna know, are they near New York City? So maybe I could plan that for if I'm doing a live event somewhere, I could say, hey, everyone. I'm gonna do an event in my biggest cities and that's New York City, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and whatever. But I don't need to know where they live. I don't need to know where they shop. I don't need to know what other podcasts they listen to, although that can be kind of interesting, but I don't need that. I just need to know, do they consume my podcast, and how do they consume it? I don't need to know who. I just need to know how.

Dave Jackson [00:35:28]:
Yeah. I was looking at John's site. The April invoice for the month was $791.97. So 7.92. You can sponsor, there's a $500 gold sponsorship, a $100, and that's a month. Then there's a $100 a month OP 3 sponsorship. And if you are using either one of those, apparently, you're listed on the home page, which is great now. If you're like, well, that's a little rich for my blood.

Dave Jackson [00:35:57]:
There is a $10 a month early supporters sponsorship. Now you're not on the front page, but it is a way to say thank you. And and right now, it's Podnews, FlightPath, Refonic, Transistor, Podium, and Captivate, our sponsors. Because I looked at him, like, why can I give John $10? Holy cow. $10. So that's, interesting. But he spent for the year so far, just 2024, he's at $2,943. So about every month, it's like 7 30, 740 ish, 700.

Dave Jackson [00:36:29]:
So and that's him again looking for ways to improve it. Keep it running. Everything like that. So it's one of those things that, you know, I still wonder how Albie is staying in business because I don't see any business model over there yet.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:36:44]:
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

Dave Jackson [00:37:00]:
Right.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:37:01]:
There's a 4% charge. Maybe they say anything you send, there's a 4% charge, or maybe they say only if you withdraw back onto chain, which is just the technical

Dave Jackson [00:37:12]:
Right.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:37:12]:
Way to describe, basically, like, getting your Bitcoin from Albi into, for example, Coinbase, and then Coinbase, then trading it for dollars and then withdrawing the dollars, that kind of thing. That's what you have to do. You have to get that Bitcoin back onto the chain, the Bitcoin chain. It can't just stay on the lightning network. But, yeah, at some point, they'll do that, and I think that's reasonable for them to have some kind of small fee like that.

Dave Jackson [00:37:37]:
Yeah. Because we want them to stay in business and free is not a good business model. We've said that before.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:37:43]:
Well, you know, there's there's an interesting thing about that. So the whole value for value concept, there's a huge risk to that. And it's working for some people, not working for others.

Dave Jackson [00:37:56]:
Right.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:37:57]:
In that information you saw about John Spurlock and what it's costing him, did it show how much of that is being paid for? Let me see. Like, is he running in the red or is he in the green? Because when I look at op3.dev, you can scroll down to the bottom and see the icons for the sponsors that he has. Now we don't know how much these companies are paying. We just know they've paid that threshold to be on the front page. So Podnews, FlightPath, Refonic, Transistor, Podium, and Captivate. Some of these are radically different companies. Right. Like, Transistor, Captivate, and Podium are hosting companies.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:38:37]:
Pad News is not a hosting company.

Dave Jackson [00:38:40]:
Right.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:38:40]:
That's a news company, although it does a lot of stuff in the podcasting industry. Refonic does a lot of stuff with industry data and is in the podcasting industry. And this is a nice collection, and I'm not sure if you'd get this kind of good collection of sponsors if you just told everyone this is what it cost to use the service. I recently spoke at NRB, which is the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, and I was sharing a stage with someone from Focus on the Family. And if you've ever listened to a Focus on the Family broadcast where they have a guest who has a book or they're talking about a book, they frequently say something like this. They'll say, we'll send you this book for donation of any amount, and they mean that. Mhmm. And the gentleman from Focus on the Family on stage said that they knew they were taking a risk.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:39:34]:
And sure, some people call in and they say, I want the book. I'm not sending a donation. So focus on the family loses money on that. Some people call in and they pay about what the book would sell for. And some people, the value for value thing, they call in and they give a $100 or $200 to get a $10 book.

Dave Jackson [00:39:55]:
Right.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:39:56]:
There is a risk to that though. And that risk is mitigated when there's a relationship, I think, but you have to build that relationship first.

Dave Jackson [00:40:06]:
Yeah.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:40:06]:
And how do you build relationships within the podcast measurement industry where there's so much competition. That's where I think you have to have the structure of something like podcast standards project to help with that. And a standards body that can ratify standards across many aspects of podcasting, not just measurement, not just some of the technical stuff of this is what goes in an RSS feed, but also these are standard advertising rates to pay for this certain things like that. I think that's what I've always envisioned for a podcast standards board and why I've predicted that standards would emerge in podcasting, and we're finally seeing that. I don't like that our measurement guidelines are basically influenced by a company that's only interested in advertising. Right. I'd rather any such standards come from an a company that's interested in the privacy of the audience, providing only as much data as podcasters need and the same thing for podcasters to take action on too. That's the big thing.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:41:11]:
Data that they can use and giving advertisers only as much data as they actually need.

Dave Jackson [00:41:20]:
Yeah. As opposed to when was the last time I washed my right foot? Right. Just don't need all that stuff.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:41:26]:
Statistically, people who wash their right foot within the last 24 hours are more likely to buy our products. I mean, they've got crazy statistics like that. Yeah. And some of that I just kinda wonder, like, really? Yeah. Why? What does that matter? Who funded that research?

Dave Jackson [00:41:43]:
Yeah. Exactly. Doctor Scholes. So Daniel, any boostograms from, our last episode from now till then?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:41:53]:
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?

Dave Jackson [00:42:06]:
No. Only going back to my days as a copier technician. There was the Minolta 41100. It was an old machine. It was a good machine, but I think, really, Sam just wants to cement his on top of the leaderboard when we log in to, whichever one we're using, get Alby or Conchax or one of those Saturn. One of those has a a list of top contributors. So thank you, Sam. We deeply appreciate that.

Dave Jackson [00:42:29]:
And I will say, not that he bought a plug, but the ability that he's made to where you can just take a credit card and it's $10 US and it fills up your wallet is so ridiculously easy now. You can only buy $10 right now. It's in beta. So that's like, as I record this, it's like $14. And so that'll last me a couple weeks and then it runs out. But I just go back to Truefans and hit okay. Fill up my wallet. Here we go.

Dave Jackson [00:42:55]:
And, so that's working very, very well because that's not an actual app. It's a, what is it? P was it web app based? Progressive web

Daniel J. Lewis [00:43:05]:
app or PWA, which no one knows what that stands for or even what it means.

Dave Jackson [00:43:08]:
It's just fun to say pois, you know, so that's always fun. But, speaking of peas, we also have the podcast positivity point of the show. So, Daniel, are we, pointing positively at someone with a podcast?

Daniel J. Lewis [00:43:22]:
Yeah. I know that sometimes we complain about some of the stuff happening in the podcasting industry, so it'd be nice to end on some positivity. And for this episode, I want to highlight Podcast Guru. I know I mentioned them previously, but I noticed something neat that they do since I've been using them a little more steadily for some of the podcasting 2.0 featured podcasts. And I noticed that just like an Apple Podcasts, you get that beautiful thing that happens based on some podcast cover art where it changes the color of the whole interface to match that podcast cover. Podcast Guru does that too even at the chapter image level. Oh. So as the chapter image changes, if you're looking at the app, the whole app interface changes to complement the colors within the podcast chapter image.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:44:17]:
And I thought, oh, that's that's a nice little thing. That's like icing on top of the cake. I like that.

Dave Jackson [00:44:23]:
That's it. So that reminds me, Daniel, as you brought up podcast guru, Oscar from Fountain sent out a survey that said, hey. How can we make Fountain better? And, of course, I said, I love me smart playlists. I want to be able to say that. And I explained what it was and I said, I can almost do it in fountain with tags. You can tag a show so that when a new episode comes from whatever podcast you want, you could say tag this as say health. Then you can click on the tag, and anything that's been tagged as health, there it is. And I said the problem is I'll listen to the 1st episode in that list, and then it will go to that queue.

Dave Jackson [00:45:03]:
So maybe in my queue, I was listening to David Hooper or somebody. I'm like, no. I wanted to go to the next health tagged 1. And he's like, I think we can do that. And he he seemed pretty sure that that was possible. So if he does that, then Fountain would have smart playlists. And I was like, oh, because I know that's the one feature. I know Podcast Guru has said they're working on it, so it'll be interesting to see, you know, who can get there first.

Dave Jackson [00:45:29]:
But that was, I found that very encouraging that they they could do that because that's really my the one feature that I like. I really need that. And I know, Fountain has done some things to make it easy to, you know, fill your wallet over there. And they have a whole there. The boy, if you love stats, Fountain is the app for you. They have all sorts of community things going on over there. But, so a positive shout out to both Podcast Guru and Fountain for, keeping up and and making your apps better and making them do more things. We appreciate that.

Dave Jackson [00:45:58]:
And with that, I think we're gonna call it a day on this episode. So thanks so much. If you enjoyed this show, if you could do us a favor, share it with a friend if you want to. If you feel so inclined, you could always send us a boost to gram, and we appreciate everyone who's been streaming the sats to us. We deeply appreciate it, and, we'll be back real soon with another episode of the future of podcasting.

Daniel J. Lewis [00:46:19]:
Keep boosting and keep podcasting.