Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:06 Hello, and welcome to the audience podcast. I'm your host Craig Hewitt from cast us in this episode, I'm joined by James Cridlin founder of pod news, pod news.net is the industry leading newsletter for all things related to the industry of podcasting from distribution and hosting the monetization and content creation. And in this episode, James and I chat through all of those aspects of podcasting and what he's seeing from a really unique perspective to have insights into each of these different aspects of the industry, things that are really interesting things that we might all need to be aware of and some opportunities for us all to improve and further our shows and reach a wider audience. I hope you enjoy this interview with James Cridland from pod news
Speaker 0 00:47 Spin.
Speaker 1 00:52 So, James, I know I first kind of met you at podcast movement two years ago now, almost in Philadelphia and you run the hugely popular pod news.net and industry newsletter. How long has pod news been around? It's been around for about three years now. So yeah, so I started doing it. There was a radio conference that I was at, which was an American radio conference called the worldwide radio conference, I think called the worldwide radio summit. So very American because it was worldwide in that, uh, there were two people left from not from the U S and, um, yeah, and it was a good conference. And I was chatting in the pub afterwards with a friend of mine who was saying, where do I go to get news about podcasting? And I thought to myself, aha, this possibly something that I can do here. So started doing it about, as I say, about three years or so ago.
Speaker 1 01:40 And it's been going well ever since, and you're supported by kind of Patrion and, uh, advertisers mostly. Is that right? Yeah. So there's a bunch of different ways, but it's mostly Patrion. So, um, which can be done from a company point of view or, or a personal point of view. And then, uh, yeah, there's some advertising opportunities in there as well as we were chatting before we started recording. I really want to start by kind of digging into what I might call like the future of the industry of podcasting. It sounds very traumatic. I know that I'm saying that out loud, but I think you have a really unique perspective, uh, and kind of the lens of seeing the industry from a distribution perspective. So, you know, Apple and Spotify and Google from a hosting perspective like ours, from a content creator perspective, from an advertiser perspective, I'd love to kind of dig into a few aspects of that.
Speaker 1 02:30 And I think the most apropos right now is, is talking about Spotify a bit. So Spotify announced last week that they signed the Joe Rogan experience for a hundred plus million dollars for exclusive rights to distribute on their platform. And I know you've written kind of extensively about this, but what's your reaction here a few days or a week after that's kind of sunk in? Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting. So Joe Rogan is by any stretch, the most popular podcast in the world. So actually seeing that being taken by Spotify and moved as an exclusive under Spotify platform is a really interesting, you know, I mean that's a proper power move from Spotify, isn't it? So I think that that's been really interesting, seeing interesting. I mean, if you look at the amount of users that Spotify has, it has 289 million. If you look at the amount of downloads that Joe Rogan gets, it's about 190 million.
Speaker 1 03:24 So they're actually relatively close, which should mean that a bunch of those people who's been, you know, downloading Joe Rogan on other podcast apps or maybe on YouTube moves over onto Spotify. And so Spotify should benefit quite well out of that. One would assume, but you know, Spotify, depending on which figures you, you look at, Spotify is still pretty small in terms of podcasting. So if you look at Libsyn's figures, for example, it's about 9.5%. If you look at, um, blueberries figures, apparently it's 7.5%. So it's not a very large player in terms of podcasting. So it's still, I'm certainly a minority in terms of that. And the question I suppose, is what happens from Apple's point of view, Apple has sort of 60% of the market, but if you include everybody else that uses their database, then you're probably looking about 75% of the market.
Speaker 1 04:20 Will Apple just turn around and say, yeah, that's fine. You know, just go ahead or will Apple start being a little bit more aggressive in this space? And it'll be interesting to find out what Apple's answer is going to be. It seems like they haven't had a, Apple has not had a kind of strong response in the last, you might have been in the industry for five years and they haven't really done much to I'll say, support podcasting or monetize podcasting or, or anything like that in the time I've been in them. I think the biggest advances, you know, the podcast connect dashboard that you can now log in to see your stuff, whereas before it was just this black hole that you submitted your RSS feed to. I mean, I've heard a bit about Apple looking at creating original content, kind of like a Wondery ex model maybe, but I haven't seen much of them in terms of buying shows or anything.
Speaker 1 05:09 Like, I mean, Spotify has been really aggressive there. Yeah. And I wonder whether, you know, from Apple's point of view, I wonder where buying shows is, what they're interested in. They have one bit of exclusive content and that bit of exclusive content they've got is they've got a little bit of Apple TV these days, and they've also got beats one, which is their radio station, which apparently is still going. Um, it's five years old this year. Yeah. There you go. It's a hiding in Apple music. It's paying lots of very good radio presenters, a lot of nice money and that's basically it. And so I wonder whether owning content is in Apple's DNA. I mean, what, what occurs to me is that Apple has a real opportunity. They have access to all of the payment systems that they use for the Apple app store. So they can take money in, they can take small amounts of money in maybe 99 cents or something.
Speaker 1 06:02 They can pay that out to millions of people because they're already paying that, that sort of money out to millions of developers. So they can certainly pay that out to millions of podcasters. So it seems to me that it's kind of a no brainer, why wouldn't Apple put the plumbing in place to allow people to charge for a podcast if they wanted to that, to me kind of makes sense. And then you've got a good business reason for Apple to make Apple podcasts for Android, which would then make Apple instantly would turn Apple podcasts into a number one podcast app for Android one would assume. And then once you've got that, well, that is a real strong, powerful competitor without actually spending any money in terms of grabbing content and doing any of that. Because all of those podcasters who are going to be selling their podcast essentially will actually, you know, get the benefit of that and be promoting Apple podcasts over anyone else.
Speaker 1 06:58 So to me that that's the obvious strategy for Apple. It clearly isn't obvious enough for Apple because they're clearly not doing it. So, so I suppose the question is, you know, what happens there? Apple has been really good to podcasting over the last 15 years or so. It's invested a lot of time in things like categories. You know, we wouldn't have standard artwork in podcasts if it wasn't for Apple, you know, there's all of this stuff that they've done, which has been really helpful, but it does almost feel as if they've been a bit sort of negligent about taking it forward a little bit further, being able to change things, being able to move our industry forward with things like, you know, attribution with things like a donate buttons with, you know, all kinds of stuff like that really needs Apple to say, yes, we'll do that.
Speaker 1 07:51 Um, and if Apple says no, then basically any of those ideas just never happened. So it would be lovely if Apple was a little bit more interested in taking our industry forward, I found it really interesting. They, they treat podcasting. I feel like you an open source side project or something where it's just, it's not bringing in any money. It's not a business focus for them. I think maybe their model is kind of shifted. I mean, they're really much more of a hardware company now than software. You know, the operating system is free and updates are free. I mean, they're a hardware company, but they're also a services company as well now. And they never used to be a services company. They never used to go out and sell stuff other than their own hardware. So I think that's interesting. I mean, what I find fascinating.
Speaker 1 08:35 So as we record this, uh, there's new data, that's come out from a company called Scientia mobile. And what they do is they look at mobile phones being used across the world. And so the very latest data for that is, is that a 56% of people in the U S are using iPhones. So 43% in, in the U S using Android phones, but then you have a look virtually everywhere else. And Android is in the lead by far so France, 70% of people use Android, you know, across Asia, 72% of people use Android and so on and so forth. So actually, you know, there's great opportunity if we can get Android into the whole podcasting thing, but because there's been no strong player in that field, then we haven't really seen that. And I think that that's a, if someone can unlock that and maybe it's Google, who knows maybe it could be Apple if they made an Apple podcasts app, but whoever it is, I think that there's some real opportunity there to really grow podcasting and grow the amount of people who are consuming podcasts.
Speaker 1 09:42 You mentioned the opportunity for paid distribution via the Apple platform. But I think in general, it's an interesting concept to talk about. And we've, we've seen some kind of conventional podcast apps delve into this space and certainly tools like super cast, kind of the, one of the new players in this space that is an glow that are kind of paid only podcast hosting platforms. What is been kind of your impression of those platforms? And have you seen folks really make it work, I guess, in terms of making a proper living by charging content for their podcasts? I think one of the things I love about pod news is that I get to see an awful lot of case studies and an awful lot of people saying we've done this, this worked for us. This didn't work for us. And I have yet to see a positive case study yet about paying for podcasts, a premium podcast.
Speaker 1 10:35 Now, I don't know whether that's because people just want to keep quiet about it or whether there are other reasons for that, but I've yet to see anything that actually would show me that that's a good way to earn a lot of cash. I mean, clearly you've got Stitcher premium, which is doing a similar job in that you pay an amount, it's a bit like Netflix and that you pay an amount and you get access to additional shows that you otherwise couldn't luminary. Of course being another example that didn't necessarily work so well, but still that we are. Um, but, uh, you know, so we've, we've not necessarily seen any real show having said that, you know, there are an awful lot of, uh, podcast hosts who are getting involved in this space, not for paying for podcasts, but for keeping podcasts secret or private so that, um, you can do a podcast for your employees or for your organization or for your club or whatever it is.
Speaker 1 11:33 And maybe that's where part of the future is it's not necessarily building an entire platform, but it's actually adding a paid for podcast or a premium podcast into something that you're already paying for elsewhere. And the financial times has tried a bit of that in the past. There are other companies trying a bit of that, maybe that's, um, you know, part of where we're going. Yeah. The news paper kind of online newspaper analogy is good. One. You know, we look at New York times, a lot of the papers and Europe are the same way you have about half the content being free, half of it being paid or more. And if I think about, you know, premium podcasting or paid podcasts and content, that's how I would do it is, and that's what we envisioned. We're working on this at Casto square. You would have kind of two separate podcasts, essentially.
Speaker 1 12:20 It's all the same kind of content topic, but you have a free podcast that is, you know, generates awareness and leads, and then you convert some of those to, to a paid subscription, kind of like, yeah, the New York times. But I agree and we've run a lot of numbers on this and for a podcast or to be successful at $5 a month that their subscribers are paying. They need to have a lot of them, but I think the same is true for, unfortunately the same is true for a lot of podcasters that rely on CPM based advertising. You know, you have a conversation with somebody about, Hey, yep. You can get $20 per thousand downloads and you probably know the data better than I do, but the vast, vast, vast majority of podcasts on our platform don't get a thousand downloads per episode. And so you talk about making money by podcasting.
Speaker 1 13:05 If you know the membership premium style isn't going to work and the advertising model isn't going to work. I think the hope of podcasting turning into a way to make a living for content creators is I don't want to say reaching a dead end, but there has to be another option out there. Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, the average, uh, Libsyn says that the average or the median amount of downloads that an episode gets is 125. So if you're doing more than 125, you're doing better than 50% of podcasts out there. Hooray. I'm just doing so you can look at that and yeah, absolutely. I mean, which is why I think when you look at advertising, when you look at that sort of revenue generation, it's quite difficult to work out where that makes its money and, you know, you need five, 10, 20,000 downloads per episode to really make it sensible because obviously, you know, an advertising agency isn't going to touch you if you're only doing 10,000 downloads, because frankly you're too small for them to earn money out of as well.
Speaker 1 14:09 So, you know, you've got that sort of side of it as well, which is why I'm, I'm actually interested in quite excited about opportunities where people can sell additional content, you know, selling content as a business model works and works very well. You know, and we don't have to have all of our content covered with ads for Casper mattresses and for Geico insurance, thankfully. Uh, so, you know, if we can actually take what we know works, which is people paying for content and use that in the podcasting space, alongside everything else, then I think that's a real, that's a real opportunity. Having said that quite a lot of people are in podcasting not to make money. And quite a lot of people make from very different ways. And if you're a wedding photographer and you happen to be doing a podcast about wedding photography, well, that will get you more work anyway.
Speaker 1 15:00 So it's not necessarily is as simple as just having a look at, you know, how much money can I make from this podcast. It's is this podcast helping my whole business grow a little bit more in the answer for many people is yes, it is. So, uh, yeah, it's not quite as cut and dry, I suppose, going to looking back at the distribution and the distribution platform, discussion of Apple podcasts and Spotify, Stitcher, Google, what do you feel like we were chatting you and I were chatting before we started recording about Alexa devices and the traffic that you see for your show from there. What do you see that most podcasters are missing from a distribution perspective? Oh, I mean, I think number one is Android and the amount of podcasters that I see sharing the Apple podcasts link folks, try following an Apple podcast link on an Android phone because that's not a great experience.
Speaker 1 15:53 I mean, it will play, but it's not a great experience. So that will be the number one thing and the most obvious thing for different podcasts, different things work better. So if you, I mean, obviously if you have a look at things like Spotify, Spotify works better for younger people, people are more interested in comedy on that platform, less interested in news as an example. So there are different types of people who use the different platforms and then you have, you know, real opportunities from smart speakers, if you are a particular podcast. So pod news is a newsletter, but there is also a podcast that goes with it. And the podcast, the pod news podcast is on both Google and Amazon Alexa as news briefings. So you can wake up to pod news if you really want to, uh, every morning or however it is that you want to actually consume it there.
Speaker 1 16:47 And that does amazing numbers. I mean, properly amazing numbers. Probably half of my downloads are through either Amazon Alexa or through Google's news briefing, because it's a short three minute thing, but you think it's because of the format and the kind of topic of your show. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that it would work if you were a two hour show with an interview in it. I think it works best if you are a very short update daily update. And of course, you know, daily podcasts have benefits in that they typically garner more downloads than a weekly podcast because obviously you're downloading them every single day. So there are obvious financial benefits there as well if you sell advertising in there. But I think it's, you know, horses for courses, it's different podcasts work well in different environments. And it's interesting, you know, the stories that Amazon is getting into podcasting and that's exciting.
Speaker 1 17:40 And currently, if you want to listen to a podcast on your Amazon speaker, then that goes through tune-in, but the way it goes through tune in means that actually your podcast probably only knows that it's Amazon Alexa and doesn't necessarily know that it's coming from tune-in tune-in is a really important place to be in because it gets you into all kinds of other places. But maybe Amazon will change that if Amazon are going to jump into podcasting with both feet and make that open to everybody, then you know, you can certainly see that that would be a very interesting place to be. Yeah. I think that particularly, if you look at the podcasting industry, it's largely focused in the U S in terms of consumers and content creators, I think. And so the bias towards looking at Apple podcasts as a platform and a listening tool, I think is, is logical.
Speaker 1 18:30 But I agree, you know, now living outside the U S many, many, many people don't use Apple devices. And so we're all kind of blind to this, but, but I also think that Google has made it really confusing, even for me, like I'm in the, I'm in the podcasting world, 24 seven, and the difference between Google play and Google podcasts and YouTube, and all of this is just really opaque. And I know even like last week, I think they announced that the ability and kind of the path to cut a close down Google play for podcasts, transfer your shows to Google podcasts itself. And there's a way to do that now, but there's no like, official way to do that all on the Apple podcasts, you know, the podcast connect portal that you log into. And I just think that that might be a big reason why Google has not garnered the share like Apple has because they amazingly made it more difficult.
Speaker 1 19:20 I would completely agree. I mean, now there is a, an equivalent of the, of the podcasts connect thing, and it's called the Google podcasts manager and you go there, podcasts manager.google.com. So finally, within the last month, they've actually made it simple and easy for a podcast to, to go and add your podcast into Google podcasts, which is a tremendous step. I mean, let's be honest. The next step might be, you know, all of those Android phones that you sell Google and that you sell through other people like Samsung and everybody else make sure that Google podcasts is there on the front screen or on the, as a mandatory inclusion into the Android stack. Like for example, YouTube music is now make sure that Google podcasts is, is in there as well. And it's a frustration to me every time I see a new Google pixel phone come out where Google is in charge of everything on that phone that Google podcasts still listened in there, and you have to download and play it.
Speaker 1 20:19 Now, if you're going to be strictly accurate, the Google podcasts player is in there, but the Google podcasts app isn't, but, um, just to make life even more complicated, right? Just one more thing to keep track of. Yeah. You know, so I mean, to be honest, you know, I look at Google podcasts and it is actually the fastest growing podcast platform right now, but it's still growing very, very slowly indeed. And I think Google really need to, and maybe will, once they finally got rid of Google play music podcasts, which was a strange United States Canada thing, which they'll finally get rid of, but maybe once they've done that, then they'll actually step it up a bit and actually spend some money on telling podcasters guys, this is how to make sure that you're there. This is how to get all of the stats. And, you know, I mean, if I was Googled tomorrow, I would hire one, two, three people and I would get them to visit the top 1000 podcasts, visit their websites and get in touch with them and give them all of the buttons that they need size the buttons, the right size, the Apple button, which is already on there, give them a mock up of how it would look if they had both Apple and Google on there, make sure that it actually worked and sat and really properly worked with podcasters.
Speaker 1 21:38 But at the moment, Google seems to be very robotic and very, they will come to us because we're Google and not if you're 1.8% of the market, we weren't. So we need to move on a little bit there. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's interesting. I had heard, and I don't know where this stands, uh, that, you know, Google is starting to index the audio content and podcasts. And I think that's probably happening behind the scenes. I don't know that we're seeing that in the search results yet, but, um, I do think, you know, getting shows into Google podcast will increase our discoverability. Even if that content is not written in show notes, but just the audio being indexed and people finding it, podcasts are definitely showing up in the search results. But I don't know to what extent from a pure audio perspective that's happening just yet, but it seems like a natural extension.
Speaker 1 22:20 It used to be that you had to look for podcasts with the word podcast at the end, for anything to appear in, in a Google search. Now you don't, now it does, it does appear to, you know, throw up podcasts of whatever you're searching for, which is really good and really helpful. And I think the more of that, the better at the moment. Yeah, you're right. I think that they are using show notes and titles more than actually grabbing the audio. I know that one of the things that they were planning on doing was automatic transcriptions. The problem with that is that if you have dynamically inserted content, then it doesn't work because, you know, the might be a 32nd ad at the beginning of this show and, or a 22nd ad, depending on who or who else hears it, or a 42nd ad dependent, depending on who else hears it.
Speaker 1 23:06 And so therefore every everything is out. So maybe they have to rewind a bit and go, well, actually, if we're going to do transcripts, we've got to do it on the device rather than in mountain view. Maybe we should be doing it on the device instead. But what does that mean in terms of, you know, skipping to a bit of the, of the podcast and so on and so forth. So I think there's lots of hard, complicated things there, but you know, the very easiest simplest way would be to make sure that every Android phone, just like every Android phone has Google drive on it. Every Android phone also has Google podcasts on it. It's a 100 K file. So it's not going to fill the, fill everything up, but if that's not there, then I think that that really hampers Androids take up of podcasting.
Speaker 1 23:51 And that's a real shame. I think we've talked about kind of platforms and a bit about monetization, but what is from all of the kind of perspectives that you see podcasting at pod news? So again, like creators industry monetization, what is the thing that has you the most excited right now? I mean, I think that there is clearly a very, there's a lot of excitement in the industry. There's a lot of excitement in the industry after the Rogan announcement, but then there's been a lot of excitement in the industry around Gimlet turn the ringer and Parcast, and all of these companies, which have been pulled into a Spotify and some of the deals going on because actually the deals going on are also helpful for the industry because it raises the industry standing in the investment space, which means that more money comes into the industry.
Speaker 1 24:39 And it doesn't always follow. The more money in the podcast industry means more success just to ask a luminary. But if you look at other people, then, you know, there's clearly a lot of money being invested into podcast content right now and all of that kind of stuff. And I think that should be very exciting for anybody that's involved in podcasting because you can clearly see that our industry is growing and growing very, very fast. What I think has also been very useful for us is because podcasting is relatively simple in terms of the production process. It means that actually the Corona virus that we've just been through or going through, I should say, we're very lucky here in Australia. We're beginning to, we're beginning to use the past tense, but the coronavirus that we're going through actually hasn't impacted podcasting much if at all, downloads went down for a little bit as people readjusted and have bounced back.
Speaker 1 25:36 And in terms of the amount of new podcasts while, I mean, you know, uh, there are 91,000 new podcasts in April, which is the, the record for the, for new podcasts. So that probably says quite a lot about where our industry is going right now. You could argue as some people have that actually we have too much content now and not enough people consuming it, which is probably I think fair to a point. And I think one of the things we do need to bear in mind is the Rogan deal. As one of those examples is going to make a big change to the amount of people who consume podcasts. And if we can get that number up, then all of us really, when, you know, in terms of, uh, overall consumption that piece of work isn't, isn't yet done. But I think, uh, that's probably great news for us in the industry.
Speaker 1 26:26 So yeah, I think it will be, you know, it's interesting times right now, but I think it's very exciting times in terms of where we could be going. Yeah. I know a lot of people that I've chatted with about Spotify and, and Joe Rogan are scared of consolidation. You know, what does this mean for my ability be an independent podcaster and can I survive without selling out to Spotify? I think the reality is most of us won't have the fortune of having to worry about selling our shows to Spotify. So that's probably not a bridge we're going to have to cross. I would agree with that. And I think that, you know, we always try, or I always try to see like, what is the analogy of, of podcasting to both blogging into YouTubing. And it's not a perfect analogy either way, but I think you can kind of pull a bit from each of those worlds.
Speaker 1 27:15 And podcasting for me is, is more distributed than YouTube because not all podcasts are in one place, maybe that's where we're going, but, but I don't think so, but just the nature of it is the RSS feed means that you can subscribe to my podcast without it ever being an Apple podcast or anywhere just with the feed. And so that makes it maybe more like blogging where there's not a place that you listen to podcasts. I think you, you can subscribe to your podcasts or to my podcast by just knowing the RSS feed. I would question whether or not that is actually consumer behavior. And I think most of us essentially end up using the Apple podcasts directory, which powers most of the podcast apps out there. If you do want to, as Google have found, and frankly as Spotify have found, if you do want to add a new podcast directory, it's an awful lot of work and you need to go out and you need to get all of that data and try and convince podcasters to sign up with you.
Speaker 1 28:12 So I think, yes, we have a open technology, but I'm not sure that we've got an open ecosystem. And I think the difference there is an important one because you know, RSS will always mean that you can be open and if you're annex Jones and you say ridiculous things that gets you banned from Apple podcasts, then absolutely people can still go and get your show if they really want to. But on the same way, being taken out of the main discovery tool that people use to find new podcasts, the directory is probably a bad thing. So yeah, you know, I think it's interesting. Spotify is interesting in that it has about 10% of the market share out there. So it's, it's certainly not going to come along and take us and take us all away, but it's doing some interesting things in terms of open API APIs, it's doing some, you know, things in terms of, you know, a lot of very careful discovery tools.
Speaker 1 29:11 So it's putting new podcasts in front of people. And I think that's a really interesting time, you know, what, wouldn't it be interesting if Spotify, you know, started really getting the recommendation right, and doubled the amount of consumption of podcasting out there that would make a big, big, big difference to us. I look at what Spotify is doing now. And I look at what I think SoundCloud could have done, you know, four or five years ago where they are a mixture of music and podcasts in one place. And the opportunity for this kind of cross pollination of people who are just listening to music on there to find a podcast and the recommendation engine to cross people over like that, I think is a unique opportunity when Apple took podcasts out of iTunes, that kind of went away, Google kind of natively, that that's not an opportunity.
Speaker 1 30:00 So I think for, from a Spotify perspective, the opportunity for people who aren't already podcast consumers to get exposed to podcasts is really interesting and pulls a lot of hope for just the expansion of the listenership. Overall. I think there's something to that. I mean, I come at this kind of the other way having, so I worked at the BBC about 11 or 12 years ago, hang on a minute, busy trying to work it out yes. About that. And, um, and one of the things that I did is I moved the radio services that the BBC was running. I moved to those services, um, from its own thing, which was called the radio player and moved those into I player. So I player is the big video service for the BBC. So if you're going in, you want to catch up on any of the TV shows from there six national channels, then you can watch them on, on the I player.
Speaker 1 30:54 And we thought, brilliant, that's going to mean so many more people seeing our radio shows for the first time and actually being able to link, you know, certain shows on TV, you know, Jonathan Ross show on TV with the Jonathan Ross show on the, on the radio and, and, and vice versa. And that will be absolutely brilliant. And did all of that work to discover that the amount of people who were using I player for both TV and for radio was 2%, not 20%, 2%. It was just tiny. And I learned very quickly from that, that either those numbers are wrong, which, who knows might've been the case, or actually people are using, uh, using devices in different ways for different behaviors. And you can argue perhaps that Spotify has more of an opportunity because it's purely audio and, you know, you want to listen to something, but there's still a question Mark to me in terms of their Spotify daily drive, for example, that has music.
Speaker 1 31:54 And then, and then a 20 minute podcast and then a couple of other music tracks. And then at 20, a 10 minute podcasts, you know, what kind of consumer is that aimed at? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think, you know, it'll, it'll be interesting seeing how well they work and interesting seeing as well, whether or not we get to actually see the data of how well those sorts of things work cause Spotify may well keep that behind their, their wall of their wall of secrecy. And, and why wouldn't they, James is really awesome to, to chat through kind of your view and perspective on kind of what's going on in the podcasting world right now, for folks who want to check out more about pod news, where's the best place to go? Well, the best place would be the website, which is pod news.net. And you can subscribe there and you can also find pod news on your favorite podcast platform and on Spotify.
