What Do Podcast Hosting Companies Actually Do? with Sharon Taylor

Sharon Taylor: But like we need to really hold the line in terms of like why the download is the. You know, of measurement for podcasting, and so that we stop having these kind of side conversations around, well, is it a listen or is it not?

Jeff Umbro: This is Podcast Perspectives, a show bringing you conversations about the latest news in the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of the Podglomerate. The Podglomerate is a podcast agency focused on production, audience growth, and monetization for some of the biggest podcasts in the world.

Today I'll be chatting with my friend Sharon Taylor. Sharon is the Senior Vice President of Podcast Strategy and Product Operations at Triton Digital. Triton Digital is the parent company of Omni Studios, of which Sharon is the head. Omni Studios is Triton's Enterprise Podcast management platform, meaning they work with large companies.

They host podcasts from folks like CNN, iHeart, All Things Comedy, Odyssey, Warner Media, and Cumulus. Triton, which was formerly owned by E. W. Scripps, was sold in 2019 to iHeart. Omni Studios is one of their two hosting solution platforms. Triton Digital is their advertising solution platform, but they all work really well together.

In today's conversation, Sharon and I spend time thinking about IAB podcast compliance, how hosting platforms like Omni, Simplecast, Megaphone and ART19 are measuring downloads, and what it means now that Omni is a part of iHeart Media, and if that changes Sharon's mandates as to what she's supposed to do every day. Thank you, Sharon for being on the show, and let's get right into it.

Sharon, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sharon Taylor: You are welcome. Thank you for having me.

Jeff Umbro: What do you do? Who are you? Who can answer that?

Sharon Taylor: What an existential way to start off. So I am Sharon Taylor. I, for a long while was the CEO of Omni Studio, which is a podcast hosting platform and we sold that a little while ago now to Triton Digital, where I now sit as SVP of Podcast Strategy and Product Operations.

Jeff Umbro: I love it and we'll come back to that 'cause there's quite a bit to unpack about like what you're doing day to day. But I thought we would start by just talking about like what is a hosting platform and what is the utility of it? 'cause a lot of people use these things every day, but don't necessarily think through like why and how they were constructed the way that they are.

So to start, what is a hosting platform?

Sharon Taylor: A hosting platform, I guess in the simplest sense, is somewhere that you upload your audio files or like podcast episodes and they are stored in a way that allows you to distribute them out to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, websites, embed players, social media - as the saying goes wherever you get your podcasts.

Jeff Umbro: And so I feel like a lot of this stuff 10, 15 years ago was like very revolutionary in my opinion. A hosting platform kind of has four unique services. It is, hosting the audio and the metadata. It is providing analytics, which I actually separate from like how they're tracking the metrics. And like the, the different data points within the system of how people are listening.

And we can come back to that in a second. But then the fourth thing is, in 2023, a lot of these hosting platforms are providing ad solutions. Would you call those table stakes in podcast hosting these days? Like is there anybody that's doing anything that's like significantly different or unique?

Sharon Taylor: Hmm. I think that it was a lot easier to be a standout 10 years ago.

It used to really be the Wild West in terms of what one podcast hosting platform provided as numbers to another, you know, how people built their system, how it, you know, connected to different directories. Those are table stakes now. Um, I think that the magic is in the nuance of how you build your system and the tool set that you provide.

And I do think that now there's something crazy, like 43 different podcast hosting platforms out there and there's , a few of us that are at the top that handle an enterprise market. There are some that are going particularly for like the B2B market.

Jeff Umbro: It's really interesting because you said a lot there that I want to dive into, but what do you mean when you say that historically different systems used to calculate their numbers differently?

Sharon Taylor: Yeah, I mean, and it's still a question that we get asked today by people that are self-hosted RSS. The beauty, or the burden of it, depending on how you look at it, is that it is just file delivery as a mechanism. And so you need to be able to run certain filtering and heuristics over the top to make sure that you get to what is a download in the eyes of, you know, the industry guidelines that we've got that came down from the IAB.

And you still see it if you self host with Amazon or Azure. Like every single data request, every file request might get counted as a download. And that was the case going back 2013, even 2015, 2016. Anytime someone or a device pulled down a piece of audio, the risk is that you'd count that as a download. And I remember us going through when the IAB guidelines first came out, along with a number of other podcast hosting companies, , to de-dupe the audience to make sure that you know, you were showing accurate numbers as opposed to just any old request that comes through.

Jeff Umbro: Now, just to break that down a little bit, when you say "any old requests that come through," like you're referring to bots or somebody pushing more nefarious activity onto their platform in order to purposely or inadvertently like boost their numbers or their ad sales or something.

So this governing body, the Internet Advertising Bureau, the IAB, has since come in and said, we are going to put rules and regulations in place. You are welcome to follow those guidelines, but know that your competitor is doing this, and if you don't do it, then people are gonna, think of you as an inferior product. Is that accurate?

Sharon Taylor: Yeah. I mean, I, I'd like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and I don't think there's that much nefarious activity. But yeah, it used to be that if you started an hour-long podcast and you push play, our server would see that it's a download request. And if you pause that and then came back two hours later to finish it, the system would see it as a new request and it would be counted as another download in some instances in some hosting platforms. And the IAB came in to tighten all of that up and give like filtering windows, you know, data center lists, etc. to get as clost to the listen as you can.

Jeff Umbro: So you actually pay to be a member of the IAB and to become compliant by the IAB. Is that correct?

Sharon Taylor: Yeah, they're two separate things, but yes. So Triton always sat on IAB boards and the IAB did tons of stuff outside of audio, you know, like it has web protocols and video and all sorts of things that are above my pay grade.

And then it got into audio. And so you pay to sit on the IAB bodies, and then you also pay as a hosting company to get your certification to say that you're counting and be audited in a certain way. And then they've only recently introduced a, a recertification process. That means that you continue to pay to make sure that your platform is up to date.

Jeff Umbro: And it's, it's significant dollars, right?

Sharon Taylor: It's not too bad. I think it's 12,000 a year or 12,000 for every period that you go in. And so obviously I say that at somewhere like Triton, quite a large company, like one of the, if not the largest, versus maybe a startup. Like if I think back to Omni Studio days at $12,000, a lot of money. And so it is prohibited, I suppose.

We're at a point in the industry and having matured now that if you have such wild differences between hosting platforms who might not be certified, then that's a price that we should be putting on people to ensure that apples are as close to apples as possible.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, that's a really good point because it is prohibitive for somebody new who's trying to enter the space, but at the same time, It's not an excessive amount of money to kick things off and make sure that everybody is playing by the same rules.

Sharon Taylor: Correct. But again, I mean there's 43 different hosting companies or something. I've lost count, but like maybe market is saturated. Not that I'm trying to get into that monopoly court or anything like that, but PSA for anyone looking to create a startup: podcast hosting is kind of stitched up. That's a hard nut to crack open.

Jeff Umbro: Now. It's a funny thing that you mentioned there, because there's so many stats that are showing, like depending on who you're listening to, Spotify has 12% of the market or 20% of the market, or Apple has 52% of the market. I'm making up all of these numbers, but it is a crowded market and a lot of people are trying to kind of go back and forth and steal market share from one another, or earn it from the listener, depending on how you look at it.

And it is really tough to really even get 1% of that market, and there's a dozen different apps that are currently looking for it. And you can see that in the news with stuff with outlets like Stitcher closing down their apps because they just don't have enough of that market share to, to really compete.

Sharon Taylor: It's challenging. I mean, Omni, when it first started, Omni was a consumer app, like way back before we decided to be B2B. Omni Radio was an app that allowed you to make personalized radio streams on your phone. Consumer's hard, consumer's, really hard. You are not gonna change consumer appetite or how people choose to interact with audio in that way.

Like New York Times is just starting to push people to their own and operated app. It's the reason that Spotify's getting into video and YouTube's getting into audio, like a standalone app that's got an uphill battle. But if you've already got a dedicated audience, I think branching out into new media on that audience, on that platform rather, is what they're trying to do.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah, it, New York Times is very unique because they already have this like massive digital ecosystem that they've put together. But it's interesting to look at this when you see like a Substack for example, who's trying to get into the hosting space. And I love Substack and think that they're bringing a lot to the table, but if you look at the tools that they're offering to the folks that are hosting on that platform, It's like an Omni or another platform was five, ten years ago, and it's just gonna take a lot of time for any newcomer to the industry to like really get into that position where they can command the best technology.

Part of the reason I'm so fascinated by this is this distinction between metrics and data and the analytics dashboard. So can you walk through how does Omni work under the hood, and then what does a user actually see on the other side, and why, and how do you make that distinction?

Sharon Taylor: There's a lot there.

So obviously Omni are the origin server. So every single time that a person using a device or a device attempts to access the RSS feed, we see the IP address, the user agent, and a modicum of like other details. And then we take all that in as raw logs and we look against IP addresses to see if it's on a deny list, if it's a known server farm or if it's a known like range of IPs that might come from Amazon data centers, etc.

We make sure that we haven't seen that combination of IP and user region in a 24 hour window. We do a whole pile of technical stuff that you can read about on our Omni website, we make that filtering methodology public, and then we crunch all that. We aggregate and we anonymize it so that we don't store any personal information longer than we have to.

And then we provide that to the podcast producer in the form of analytics on their screen so that they can see where the download came from, what episode was listened to, what device it was listened to on, and a range of other things.

Jeff Umbro: And how does something like a GDPR or the California Data Protection Act like feed into that? You mentioned that you anonymize the data, but like what are the things that you have to pay attention to in order to make sure that you're A, protecting people's privacy; and B, separate from those laws, how do you think about what is useful for the the podcaster to actually see?

Sharon Taylor: Yeah, I think privacy and podcasting is a challenging topic.

Like there's still a debate raging in some GDPR centers, whether an IP address is personally identifiable information, if it's like combined with other things. We obviously need to scan and make sure that we're compliant with all of that legislation at any one point in time. And knowing that 52 different states are gonna have different interpretations of privacy in America is obviously challenging.

Privacy and podcasting is hard, right? 'cause there's so many different pieces of that chain. You know? It's not like we are a website and we own that website and you are a listener coming just to that website. Like it's not as easy as a cookie policy on a website that you might listen as a general consumer of everything.

There's us as the hosting platform. There's an ad server that gets involved. There are different programmatic parties that get involved. You've got the likes of Podsights, or whatever they're called now. Spotify and analytics

Jeff Umbro: Spotify Analytics. Yeah.

Sharon Taylor: Charitable, like tons and tons of all these other players.

Then you've got the apps like Spotify and Apple, who in a dream world would pass back a privacy consent string to us. And that's a different set of conversations. And if you are the listener, all you know is that you are pushing play on something and you are bringing audio to you. We have Omni policy that we append to the bottom of all shownotes, so people that people who are listening can at least see what we get about them, which is that IP user agent, and then what we do with that.

It's challenging if you don't own all the pieces of that puzzle. And I guess podcasting, just in the same way that the delivery mechanism kind of got away from us before we thought too long and hard about is this the best way to distribute audio for monetization and other things.

I would say the genie is outta that bottle, and we just now have to do our best possible to ensure we're compliant at every step of the chain and take ownership where we can.

Jeff Umbro: Now, it's interesting that you, you mentioned that because Spotify is an example of somebody who does own a lot more of that puzzle than other organizations, and they use something called pass-through analytics because they're, as I understand it, they're taking the audio files from the hosting platform, self storing them on their own servers, and then serving those to their listeners so that they can maximize the speed in which they're able to deliver this.

The result of that is that they're the ones that are seeing all of that data and then pass-through analytics refers to the fact that they can pass that through back to Omni or whomever. Is that pretty accurate?

Sharon Taylor: Yeah, that's, that's pretty accurate. I mean, they still store a version of it, and they say that they only store it on a device for, I think they say it's like three hours or something like that.

But we've seen them hold an actual episode onto a device for a lot longer. And it's obviously to improve the listener experience so that if you come back to an episode that you were listening to, it's like locally available. And both them and Apple have like automatic downloads and download ability. But yeah they initially launched only with cached versions of episodes and then they put pass-through in many years ago now.

Jeff Umbro: So that obviously brings up a lot of potential different issues there, where it's like if a listener is accessing this cached version of the audio - I don't think this is a significant issue - but like it is possible that they're listening to an old version of the episode.

The hosting platforms are now reliant on Spotify to provide accurate data back to them, and I think it's pretty well understood that Spotify has some of the most accurate data on their proprietary platform. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong here, but as a marketer, I like seeing how Spotify is presenting this.

I really like what Apple has done in their, their own dashboard. It doesn't compare, in my opinion, to the ease of use of what you would get from an Omni or a Megaphone or something, when you can access all of that in one go.

But I don't know. I've never actually asked you this before, but like is that a big issue? Do you guys hate the fact that Spotify does that?

Sharon Taylor: No, I think that there's challenge and benefit. I think that the benefit of understanding how people are consuming your audio on specific platforms is really useful. If you hold in your mind the fact that it's a subset of your audience. And you know, like Spotify generally skews male and younger and comparing how your shows are consumed on that platform versus how they're consumed on Apple. You know, keep those things in mind, I suppose, I obviously would love to get all that data back.

Like I think that podcasting is challenged because it's fragmented. You know, like we have an integration where we allow you to upload your premium episode to Apple. We don't get those stats back at all, and you know, that's just another pull away from one single portal where you can get all of the insights to your podcast. Omni has consumption analytics if you are listening on an embed player or owned-and-operated app from a publisher that has integrated our consumption API, and that's another slice of that puzzle.

The dream is to obviously have it all in one. And so I think my non-Omni, non-Triton, my "what is best for the industry" hat is that to standardize measurement around the download so that we can all kind of like link arms and, I don't know... maybe it's naive and we're all just gonna like live at the end of a rainbow and have money fights with each other.

But like we need to really hold the line in terms of like why the download is the unit of measurement for podcasting. And so that we stop having these kind of side conversations around, well, is it a listen or is it not? But I think there are great insights that you can get and you take those insights into making content and publishing decisions.

Jeff Umbro: There was a point in time in which you could actually get the data from your hosting platform, from Spotify and from Apple and put it all onto a platform such as Charitable, and look at it all at once. And it was beautiful. And it was still missing quite a bit of information, but you can no longer do that because Apple and Spotify have decided to part ways on a platform that Spotify owns called Charitable, where they've essentially pulled some of the data off of that.

So now it's kind of siloed and you have access to that information, but not combined unless you build your own dashboard. And that's fine, but that's kind of illustrative of what you were just talking about, Sharon, where sometimes if we could all just come together like it would serve the industry better.

On that note, I actually think that there are still a lot of really useful ways for us to pull that data and, and see how it can impact editorial decisions and that kind of thing. At Podglomerate, we do a lot of reporting, and we call them a deep dive report where we'll actually go through and like pull a ton of consumption data and download data and like compare and contrast based on who's listening where, and how that impacts our marketing decisions, and blah blah blah.

And if anybody's interested in learning more, you can find us at listen@thepodglomerate.com.

I find that that information, it tells a story, but like it's kind of up to us as to like what story we want it to tell, which is a messed up way of saying that. Like it's really easy to kind of parse whatever you want or, or can based on like the story that you're trying to tell.

Sharon Taylor: Yeah, but I don't think that's a negative thing. I mean, I think that's indicative of podcasting, having matured as a medium. You know, like look at TV ratings, look at radio ratings. Like you don't all sing out of - it's the same hymn book, but totally different chapter in verse at times. Right?

Analytics are there to guide decisions and public analytics are there to be picked and said: I sound better if I frame it this way, versus that way, to market your shows to drive more numbers. And I like that about podcasting. I think it's great that we're now having these challenges and opportunities that other big mass media have. That's a good thing.

Is that too glass half full? I'm trying to be more optimistic going into 2024 and we've just tipped over the second half of the year, so...

Jeff Umbro: I completely agree with everything that you said. I think that you can paint a picture that shows people like how they can craft their editorial to support these initiatives. I also think that knowing the information exists doesn't mean you have to follow it. So if you know that people are falling off your episode at 10 minutes because you have an ad marker there, it doesn't mean that you have to take out the ad marker. Maybe it means that you wanna like craft the ad a different way or something.

Sharon Taylor: And like, it is going to get messier before it gets cleaner, and it might not even get cleaner. Like YouTube's coming into the fray. We're looking at ways to push episodes from Omni into YouTube, but you are not gonna get the same engagement if you don't tailor the episode or the content for the platform that it's on.

You know, people listen on YouTube in a different way to people listening on a podcast platform. And so if you look at the same drop off rate, you are not gonna get any insights since you actually tailor the episode. Like it might not be the ad, it might actually be the intro or some other element.

There's just so many things to A/B test.

Jeff Umbro: That's literally why one of, one of the big reasons why we're making this show is so that we can start to play with video and, and do it with our own shows as opposed to client shows.

I could literally talk to you all day about IAB compliance, which is is one of the...

Sharon Taylor: oh, it's such a Moorish subject, isn't it? Like I'm sure that our listeners at home are just like, please tell us more!

Jeff Umbro: Well, it is fascinating and, and I hope the listeners of this show are really intrigued by this because it does matter. That said, I think that there's a lot of other more exciting things we could dive into.

So can you just walk us through the difference between Omni, Triton, iHeart, Spreaker, and anything else I'm missing within the mothership?

Sharon Taylor: Oh, yep. Uh, the babushka set of dolls that is our company and parent company and sister company.

So iHeart is our parent company, so they own us through Triton. And when I say "us" there, I mean Omni.

So Omni was a standalone company that sold to Triton Digital in 2019, who at the time was owned by Scripps. Then Scripps sold Triton Digital, which at that stage, Omni was nested underneath, so it was one company.

They sold that to iHeart Media. iHeart owns a stack of different companies. They're very digital and audio focused, so they have a lot of different companies that they run, including Spreaker, who sit as a sister company to Triton where Omni lives.

Jeff Umbro: So can you explain to me five years ago who was the perfect customer for Omni? And today who is the perfect customer for Omni?

Sharon Taylor: Oh, wow. Okay. Five years ago, Omni was, I think, serving two core markets: we served broadcasting and we served podcasting. Nested behind podcasting, underneath it, we also served two markets: we served the enterprise market and then the kind of enthusiast, beginner, whatever you wanna call that group of people.

Since selling into Triton, and obviously now that like Spreaker is in the stack of companies as well, our focus is purely on the enterprise. So still broadcasters, so we look after most of the largest broadcasters around the world. And then any enterprise podcast network as well, just 'cause our tooling is geared more for the larger end of town and more enterprise needs.

Going back to what you first asked about, you know, can anyone build a hosting platform? Yes. And now, where we are in our sweet spot in the industry is all of the power kinda like under the hood and all of those specific features that you need, once you get to a certain level in your kind of podcast life.

Jeff Umbro: You probably can't answer this, but how many different podcasts are using. Omni. And how many total downloads are you seeing per month?

Sharon Taylor: Uh, I can answer one of those questions: so publicly, we do share how many shows that we host, and we host about 64 or 65,000 now. Size-wise... we are like very large. So we obviously host the iHeart Podcast Network whose numbers are public. We host a whole pile of stuff that you can go and see publicly their numbers on Triton website.

It's a substantial amount of traffic.

Jeff Umbro: It's safe to say that it's, it's many billions of downloads per month.

Sharon Taylor: Yes. I remember when Omni was a startup and I had just joined and it was like midway through 2016 and we had this dashboard that the devs had built and we all took bets on when we would cross over our lifetime first million downloads, and we were so ecstatic, like we were just... It was amazing.

I lost, I didn't get the right date, but that's fine. I haven't held onto that in any way, shape or form. But yeah. Now to think about that, given how many downloads we're serving is, yeah, it makes me smile.

Jeff Umbro: And you've gone through all kinds of like crazy journeys through Omni, you know, you've, you've gone to different continents.

Sharon Taylor: It's true.

Jeff Umbro: But I wanted to ask you, who do you view as your competitors?

Sharon Taylor: The competitors to Omni as a product... other hosting platforms who are also serving the enterprise market or are attempting to serve the enterprise market.

I think that Triton as a digital audio company has a lot of different pillars to it, not just podcasting. They have a streaming pillar, they have a measurement pillar and advertising a programmatic. And so obviously we bump up against other competitors. In those verticals, for the intents of this conversation, we think about the Megaphones, the Simplecasts, the top tier of those 40 odd, platforms.

Jeff Umbro: So we're talking about the ART19, which is owned by Amazon, the Megaphone, which is owned by Spotify, the Simplecast, which is owned by SiriusXM. You all are owned by iHeart.

I'm sensing a trend that these bigger organizations are also trying to own the tech stack. And, and I ask mainly because I'm just curious how you view like - and I don't mean this in a negative way - but like a Captivate or a Transistor who are just much smaller products that are often aimed or geared at like a much more niche kind of client.

Sharon Taylor: Yeah. I mean, I'll answer the tech stack question first, so I agree and , that's part of the reason we made the decision to move to Triton. Not just because they were just genuinely nice people, and it's nice when you sell a company that you don't end up with... there's an Australian term that I'll use, but I won't, so paint a picture with your mind. And so that obviously is another core reason.

But yeah, like you do, you wanna own all pieces of that puzzle, right? Like you want the hosting, you want the ad serving, you ideally want the programmatic marketplace, you want the app, you want an ad sales team, so you can have a full stack solution out there.

Like Mortal Kombat, you know, like the pick your fighter. We picked our fighter and all the other hosting companies picked theirs. Even Captivate, who you mentioned, like they went to Global, I'm pretty sure, in the UK.

Jeff Umbro: You know, I didn't actually realize that. That's, that's crazy.

Sharon Taylor: And my personal viewpoint in having run a hosting company, and sold it, and now I've been in this industry for more years than I would like to share, but I don't know who's left to buy a hosting company. And I don't know what that unique element is that - I think it's probably like taking out a competitor I would assume is one option.

But no, I think that we're about to see the next phase of podcast companies go for sale, like deeper analytics companies and maybe hosting companies that are serving a very specific, niche market, bought by someone else, advertising insights, those types of companies, I think are next.

Jeff Umbro: Well, and and that's actually a really great transition to my next question.

What do you do and how do you think about staying competitive in this space? Like how do you convince the next Fortune 500 company to join Omni instead of Megaphone or Simplecast or something?

Sharon Taylor: Knowing that they might listen to this, I won't give away all of our like secret sauces.

No, I mean, I think that there is a friendly and fierce battle between us and those top tier that I mentioned a little while ago, and it comes down to largely like what the customer's looking for.

You know, the support that you can give, like how your roadmap aligns better with what they're doing, if they are looking for someone with an outsource sales - Triton does not provide, like we don't, sell on behalf of our customers. We are like Switzerland. We're totally neutral. You can do whatever you want with our tech, and some publishers are not looking for that. They are looking for an in-house sales.

And so it just comes down to matching what it is that the publisher's looking for. There's certainly a lot of choice out there.

Jeff Umbro: And where are you at with your programmatic marketplace?

Sharon Taylor: Yeah, so I mean, Triton has had the biggest programmatic marketplace for, well since the beginning of time for audio. Like they won awards when they first released, it was called a2x back in 2008? I mean like some crazy early, like the streaming audio. And then that became Yield-Op, and then now our plan for Triton Audio Marketplace is to continue be the largest connector of demand and supply across all forms of audio. You know, we have at the moment, 36, 38 different DSPs that are hooked in to buy across all those many, many, many downloads with a number that I'm not gonna give you. And so matching that and playing the marketplace is really important for us.

Jeff Umbro: You're gonna make me ask this question, which I hate asking you to do, but can you walk through what is a DSP? What is an SSP, and how do you connect that with a hosting platform?

Sharon Taylor: Yes. I mean, I can tell you what the acronyms are. No, so, so let's use Omni as the hosting platform. So Omni, , connects into an ad server, which is Tritons ad server so that you can fly direct, sold ads, promos and things like that. And then through those same ad markers that you place, if you have chosen to connect to programmatic, you connect into our SSP, which is a supply-side platform and connects you and your content in either an open marketplace, or you can do direct deals, programmatic guaranteed... a whole pile of like technical terms that if anyone wants to know more about, like, shoot me an email and I'll either connect you with Bryan Barletta, who will teach you what these things mean, or I'll take you to a salesperson and then they can help you.

And then the DSPs are the demand side platforms. So they're the, the trade desks of the world, the ones that are buying the inventory in the programmatic exchange.

Jeff Umbro: So just to, I guess, simplify that a little bit, there are organizations that will kind of barter, supply and demand on the audio ad space and deliver that through integrations that appear on like the supply side or hosting platforms such as Triton. When you're talking about millions or billions of of impressions, these organizations can be lifesavers.

This is a little bit different than something like SPAN, which is the Spotify ad network because they have a real life sales team that's going out and placing these ads with like the Group Ms of the world and delivering that on their like proprietary platform, which might be your show if you're hosted on Megaphone.

Sharon Taylor: Exactly. Yeah. We, are more authentic, I guess is one word, or like traditional or I dunno, get a thesaurus out here.

Jeff Umbro: Both solutions pay creators, so I'm for both of them.

Sharon Taylor: Correct. Yes.

Jeff Umbro: Well, I think that we have a lot on this to go on, and, and I think we'd love to have you back to dive deeper into all of this.

I don't wanna take up too much of your time and any more questions I have, I know you're gonna probably not answer. But it, it was a pleasure as always. Is there anywhere that you'd like our listeners to go to check out you or Omni or Triton?

Sharon Taylor: Yes, you can find us at tritondigital.com, omnistudio.com if you want to see the purple website before we sold to the blue company, and a whole pile of socials. You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., etc., etc..

Jeff Umbro: And, I should also note that Sharon publishes, at least quarterly, on the Omni blog and it's full of insights that they're getting across the stable of their 65,000 shows and is really, really interesting data that you should all absolutely check out.

Sharon Taylor: Thank you, like and subscribe.

Jeff Umbro: I love it. Thanks, Sharon.

Sharon Taylor: Thank you.