James Cridland: A Trip Through Podland

The Sound off podcast The podcast about broadcast with Matt Kendall starts now.

This week we'll be spanning the Commonwealth to bring you this episode as you may or may not be able to hear the waves in the background of from Bermuda, where I am narrating this and our guest this week is originally from Great Britain, but now calls Brisbane, Australia home.

We last spoke to James Cridland in 2018 when there were a half million podcasts, and now there are 2.5 million and even more broadcast and podcast questions to answer than ever before.

I've got some radio questions to ask, including his appearance online at the Ontario Association of Broadcasters conference, and I've also recruited two of my podcast super friends who have both appeared on this podcast before.

John Gay from JAG in Detroit, podcasts and Catherine O'Brien from Branch Out programmes in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

James Home Studio is adjacent to some home renovations, so he joins me from his vehicle atop a hill overlooking Brisbane, Australia.

You recently appeared at the Ontario Association of Broadcasters.

What did you talk about this year?

I did.

I really enjoyed it, and I was talking about the different ways that radio is changing in terms of consumption.

But I was also talking about the differences in terms of younger audiences versus older audiences has been a lot of research around more speech content that younger audiences are wanting to have a listen to, but also the fact that live radio and live stuff is not something particularly that young people end up creating.

And so what I was suggesting is that we look at a strategy of both trying to get our live radio onto as many speakers as possible, but trying to get our on demand content onto as many headphones as possible.

And then secondly, what that means for us making radio.

Because clearly, if a lot of younger audiences are consuming us on demand, it may not be the best way to do a live radio show and then to chop up bits of that live radio show and make that into on demand.

Maybe we should be doing things the other way around.

How was it received?

It's always very difficult because, you know, I am 10,000 miles away and in a very different time zone.

But it's always nice seeing people having a chat on the zoom things.

I think people are beginning to understand that the days of live radio is still really important.

We should still be producing a lot of live radio.

Of course we should.

But the things that we do that work in terms of an on demand environment, we should probably be thinking about making those on demand and making those first and then broadcasting those of course on the radio.

And there's a fascinating thing that I noticed in a patent that Futuro Media has got recently.

And they said that there are radio stations across the US in their particular patent radio stations across the U.

S.

That are spending billions of dollars creating great audio that people only here once and I thought that is absolutely correct, isn't it?

Actually, what we should be doing is we should be taking the best audio that we have and making sure that we get the most amount of value out of that.

So not just broadcasting a great interview at breakfast, and then that's it.

And we never hear it again.

But actually making sure we know from our ppm details and other audience research, we know how much overlap we have between breakfast and afternoon drive or evenings or whatever it is we know when we can repeat stuff.

But radio seems not to want to repeat content, use content again in many ways.

And perhaps that's a mistake That seems rather odd.

Isn't Radio one of the originators of recycled content when you had breakfast shows that you know would have the bid at 6 30 then bring it back at 8 30 then bring it back again on the weekend?

It seemed that was something that was in radios, playbook.

They've stopped doing Yeah, and it's interesting I used to listen to in the UK I used to listen to a radio station, Radio five Live for breakfast.

I had no particular interest in sampling any other breakfast shows because I knew that it was a great breakfast show.

Yet I started listening to LBC over the weekend and they had a best of the Nick Ferrari breakfast show.

And I thought, actually, this breakfast show is really good, so I ended up sampling it in a different time zone, and I think that is probably a great example of actually using the content that you have and using it in different places.

Radio doesn't seem to be doing that particularly much, and I think radio certainly doesn't seem to be taking content from one day part and reusing it in another day part anymore.

And perhaps that's something that we could be doing a little bit more.

And it makes it easier if you're producing this content for on demand first, because then you can use it on the radio and it's already packaged up for you rather than taking something that you've broadcast live and then cutting it up and removing some of the you know, this morning mentions and all that kind of stuff.

So I think it's just a different way of making radio.

I thought it was interesting.

I saw a tweet from a radio presenter who said FML the future jury update.

Oh, my goodness.

So I'm not sure what that update was all about, but it sounds like it took a big leap forward.

Yeah, I mean, my understanding and I worked with future about five years or so ago, but my understanding with their post product is that they've made, you know, a tonne of enhancements to it.

But what it essentially allows you to do is if you broadcast something which was amazing and that you would like to share on social media, you just reach forward.

You press the big button mark post, and the thing automatically goes back into the audio archive grabs what you've just broadcast tops and tails.

It adds some video to it, shares it out on social media automatically, which is a really interesting, a nice way of taking some great content that you have that you want to share with a different audience on social media in other ways.

It's been 2.5 years since you spoke at Canadian Music Week and you talked about Canadian radio developing a relationship with the CRTC.

Perhaps get together.

Reform some of the regs.

I think we know there's been very little progress.

How far behind is Canadian radio from the rest of the First World radio nations?

Oh, I think that all radio markets a different Matt.

I don't necessarily think that individual countries are behind, but the thing that strikes me whenever I work in Canadian radio and I was director of Vista Radio for a couple of years.

Whenever I do work in Canadian radio, I'm very surprised by the amount of regulation.

It's very heavy handed regulation in Canada, and there are good reasons for some of that.

But I think that the regulation that you have in Canada is great regulation for the 19 seventies.

It's absolutely perfect for that time, but we're not in the 19 seventies anymore.

And there are certain things I think that worry me that there are, you know, whether it's Spotify or YouTube music or all those sorts of services coming into Canada or just radio companies being on a level playing field of being able to have to individual FMS in every market.

That would kind of make sense and there are a lot of markets where you end up with, you know, Rodgers having two stations or Paterson having two radio stations and then any other competition is kind of hobbled by the fact that they're only allowed one.

And so I think, you know, it's worrying to me that Canada and the US are the only large countries where radio revenue is declining as much as radio audiences.

And it strikes me that the CRTC s regulation maybe a little bit too harsh for 2020 or 2021.

I do believe we have a question.

A few of the podcast super friends that I gather with heard that you were coming on the show and decided to throw in some questions.

And the first question comes from John Gay from JAG in Detroit.

Podcasts.

Hey, Matt, longtime listener, First time caller James really enjoy pod news and thank you for all you do to support the podcasting community.

As a former radio DJ, I have to ask.

It seems the big radio companies like I Heart Odyssey and others are really focusing on digital, even though the bulk of their revenue still comes from traditional radio.

What does that mean?

Long term for local radio.

Is there any other way to survive besides smaller companies taking ownership of these properties back?

You'd never guess that he was a former radio DJ with that voice, would you?

That's fantastic.

Yeah, I think it's interesting.

One of the things that I do.

So I produce a daily podcast and newsletter called Pod News, and it looks at the podcasting landscape.

And one of the things that I do is I enjoy going through the quarterly financials from companies like Hot and Order C and working out what percentage podcasting is to the rest of the company's income and from memory.

I think I heart is somewhere around 8% offices, around 4% in terms of podcasting revenue for the entire company, So clearly it's still a very, very small space.

However, it is a space which is growing, and I think you know John is absolutely right, that there are question marks there in terms of what some of these companies, long term future, is for local radio and for individual stations.

I find it fascinating that I heart, for example, is essentially split itself into two.

So they've got I heart new and exciting.

I forget what it's proper name is, but they are the people who are running the I heart radio app.

They're the people who are running the podcasting and all that kind of stuff.

And then you've got I heart old and boring, which is the people running the radio stations and their transmitters and everything else.

And I think that that's a really interesting signal of I hearts, long term future.

They clearly see more growth happening in the online space.

And they clearly see, you know, the heritage company of, you know, running radio stations and transmitters as being an important part of their business, but as being a very different part of their business to the online world.

Pod news, by the way, has a bit of a radio connection.

Didn't you come up with the idea for pod news that the worldwide radio summit on a napkin over a beer?

I did, indeed, Yes, I was talking to a friend of mine and he was saying, Where do you get your news about podcasting from?

And I thought, Well, that's an interesting question, and at the time there was one person and he was very Boston New York centric, and I thought, Maybe there's something that I can do there.

And so whatever it is for 4.5 years later, Pod New says 21,000 people who are getting it every single day on email and another sort of 2, 2.5 1000 people who are getting it as a podcast, which is quite a scary number.

I wonder how many people there are in podcasting.

I wonder how many of those we have, who are getting the newsletter every single day.

Tell me about the flash briefing and how many people listen to that or access that, because that's how I get it every day.

Yeah, it's the predominant way.

I think that most people are getting it.

So if you have a Google smart speaker or a Amazon speaker, or indeed an apple one, then you can programme pod news to appear in that flash briefing in that thing where you say, Hey, what's the latest news and it plays you some news bulletins.

You know you can get pod news in there is one of those, and I deliberately make pod news to be about three minutes long.

So it's nice and short and it should fit in with that quite well.

And yet the numbers that I'm getting from that, particularly on Google, the numbers that I'm getting for that are really, really high.

And it's interesting seeing individual radio stations doing things like that.

And that's clearly driving an awful lot of consumption of radio news in a very different format.

You know?

Why would you wait until the top of the hour for the latest news on the beaver, all of the albatross or the stegosaurus?

Why would you do that when you can actually just ask a smart speaker what's in the news?

And it plays you the very latest news bulletin.

So it's interesting seeing how successful that's been.

We'll take a question from a podcast super friend who was a guest on Episode 2 66.

Hello, Matt and James.

This is Catherine O'Brien.

I absolutely love the Pod news website.

I think it's a tremendous resource.

Speaking of resources, do you have a little sneak peek for us of some of the resources that the site is going to include going forward?

Catherine, that's very kind of you thank you so much.

There's a bunch of resources in the pod news website.

One of them is just a full podcast directory, but it's a podcast directory that goes in and checks what podcast directories you are in.

So if you're in the I heart radio app if you're in the order, see app.

If you're in all of these other places, just to make sure that you're getting as many people as you possibly can, and there's a bunch of other resources there in terms of spotting when podcasts move from one podcast host to another and all of that kind of stuff, I'm always on the lookout to add more of those sorts of features because I think that they're quite useful and apart from anything else, they drive additional news stories, you know, because I can actually spot things going on.

One of the things that I did yesterday his I went to produce a list of the most popular podcast names, and there are over 300 podcasts, which are called podcast.

I would recommend not doing that, and there's also, I think, 700 different podcasts, which are called real talk, awful lot of podcasts called real talk.

And one of the difficulties, I think, is that new podcasters are finding is actually just good search engine optimisation good search results to make it really easy to find their podcast in a particular podcast app.

So calling yourself real talk or even worse, the real talk podcast would probably be a bad plan.

So that's one of the things I do is I use your website to check out the names of titles.

I will run titles through your website and see how many of them come back and see if it's a good idea or bad idea.

It's quite useful.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think one of the things that I've always admired Podcast For, which is a podcast company which is now owned by Spotify.

They came up with a really good idea of just calling their podcasts what their podcast was about.

So they've got a podcast, which is about serial killers, and it's called serial killers.

They've got another podcast, which is about, you know, true crime stories, and it's called true crime stories.

That's what people are searching for, and it worries me sometimes that some podcasters are there trying to think of something which is very clever and, you know, a bit of a pun, you know, etcetera, etcetera.

And they haven't necessarily realised that people are just searching for a simple, straightforward topic.

And if obvious podcast comes up with that topic, then they'll probably go and get that one.

And by the way, I think that that's the same in terms of radio, too.

There are lots and lots of radio stations out there who have dropped the phrase FM or radio or a frequency from their name, so that it's not actually obvious when you see something written down that this is the name of a radio station, and I think that's probably a mistake.

There's a radio station in the UK which, if you listen to it on air, it's called Magic.

But if you look at the logo or whenever they write it down, it's called Magic radio so that it's really obvious if you don't know that magic is a radio station and I think that there are quite a lot of radio stations out there and really missing a trick there in terms of making it really obvious that the moose is actually a radio station.

We have stations called the Moose in Canada.

I know you do yes and the goat and various other things.

But that is clearly if you have to start every conversation by saying hello.

I'm calling up from the moose.

It's a radio station.

Then that's probably not a great start.

How does the software work where podcasts are moving hosts?

Is it a sample?

Or if I move some podcast, which I'm actually doing right now, when will it appear in that function that you have on your website?

Yeah, So it's a function which looks at the sample of podcasts that pod news has in it's database, which is, I think, the last time I looked about 300,000, and it will check every two weeks as to whether or not any of those podcasts have switched host.

And it's essentially being driven by people searching for those individual shows.

So I'm not going to catch a podcaster moving instantly.

But I am going to catch a podcaster moving within a couple of months of them moving, and the reason why it's an interesting piece of data is that you can actually see who are the podcast hosts that podcasters are leaving?

Who are the podcast hosts that podcasters are moving to?

And certainly when you have a look at the different podcast hosting companies out there, there's a bunch of differences there.

There's a bunch of different features.

There's a bunch of different services that individual podcast hosting companies offer.

And you know, it's always interesting seeing what your peers are actually doing, who your peers are moving to.

Have you caught entire networks leaving and then sent off emails to say What's going on here?

Oh, yeah, I mean, you know, there have been quite a few networks who have moved podcast host, And so you end up with this massive, great big chunk of shows which all of a sudden have moved from one to another.

And so that's been a useful, you know, look in terms of the news story, but also, you know, the long term of seeing where individual podcast hosts are going.

You know, there are lots of very large heritage podcast hosts who are doing really well, but actually, once you start digging down into the detail, quite a lot of people are leaving them and they're not gaining too many new customers.

And so when you look at it from that viewpoint, then there's questions that you can begin to ask them in terms of What's the problem here?

Why are people leaving you?

Why are you gaining enough people moving to your platform?

So there's a bunch of that kind of stuff going on, and it's fascinating just because there is so much data out there around podcasting.

Well, I'm fascinated by it.

And of course, the most activity that I see on this all the time is to anchor and their actual podcasters moving to anchor or those just podcasts that are retired and people just need a place to keep it for free.

I think it's a bit of both.

I think if you're on a current, you know, heritage podcast host and you see all of the new and exciting things that Spotify are promising you.

If you host with anchor in their proprietary world, you know, video, podcasting and you know, potentially transcripts and all kinds of other things, then you know it might be something that you want to end up jumping to, particularly if you can save yourself $20.25 Canadian a month by shifting to anchor because anchors entirely free.

So I think there is some of that going on.

But I think that there is also, as you rightly say, quite a few shows who are going.

I'm not producing this show anymore.

I still want it available on the Internet, but I really don't want to pay my monthly fee for it to be available.

And so do dumping it onto anchor or onto Red Circle or any other one of the free podcast hosts out there is, I think, really interesting and absolutely viable in just a second more with James as we get into the Spotify versus Apple debate, who's bigger?

What should more independent podcasters be doing?

We also touch on ad tech AI and some great ideas on how you can use the dynamic ads feature you may be overlooking to insert dynamic content, and we take a trip into Pod Land, the weekly one hour podcast show that just turned a year old.

There's more to everything we're talking about on the episode page at sound off podcast dot com.

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And clearly you didn't have enough to do.

So you went and created pod land within the last year with Sam Sethi.

So tell me how that show came together.

Yes.

So I think one of the weird things about pod news is that most of the time I can't have an opinion on anything.

I mean, you know, obviously I can be sarcastic about some of the things, but most of the time I can't necessarily analyse something fully, have a proper opinion about it.

And so when Sam came to me this time last year, it's exactly a year old and said, Why don't you do a podcast every week where you actually go into a bit more depth and detail?

I thought, Well, that sounds like a really interesting idea, and I think one of the things about the pod land podcast is that it's not got a massive amount of downloads.

It does less than the pod news daily ones do.

But what it does have is the people who are listening to it are astonishing, you know?

I mean, I hear really senior people in podcasting who will occasionally, you know, text me or tweet me and say, Oh, I really enjoyed that interview last week.

I really enjoyed what you said about X, y or Z, and yeah, so that has kind of taken me quite by surprise.

And it reminded me that one of the most important things here isn't necessarily the raw numbers.

The raw numbers are great for the ego, but actually the type of people the audience that you get if you get a niche or a niche depending on where you're from, then that's a great thing, A really tight niche of audience who you can really focus on.

Pleasing is just as good as reaching 10,000 people every single week.

And one of the interesting things you did was you partnered with very tone just for one episode, and you managed to do an entire episode in Spanish just to show everybody.

You know that AI has come so far that you can actually do a show in a completely different language and it sounds practically fluent.

Yeah, that was really quite something.

So this is a piece of technology by very technical marvel ai.

And what it essentially does is you give it a bunch of your voice, you know, three hours they asked for of my voice, which meant that they could then train a machine learning model of my voice.

But once they've got my voice, they were able then to feed not just English into it and their English, To be fair, sounds a bit weird because they've given me an American accent and nobody wants an American accent, but also they've fed Spanish into it.

I don't speak a word of Spanish, but apparently I sound quite believable.

But I could do so.

That I thought was really interesting.

I think you know, nowhere near ready for radio yet.

I know that there are some radio stations have played around with artificial speech, but I don't think it's anywhere near ready for radio yet.

But I do think though, that there are some of these tools that can be used right now for things like correcting mistakes when you make a recording, you know, if you make a recording and you get telephone number wrong, then actually, a automated, synthesised voice that sounds like you that reads the telephone number correctly probably is going to sound absolutely fine in the larger context of full radio commercial or a podcast.

So I think that there's some really interesting things that you can do from a technological standpoint.

There what you can do with some of these new technologies being built for podcasting.

But you can also use them, of course, on radio as well.

It's really fascinating.

So you don't have a grasp of Spanish.

Your Hebrew is very limited.

Yes, and of course I'm referring to the pronunciation of what's, uh, yes.

At least I know how to pronounce Hartsburg now.

Well, a few of us I was in the car to, and I did not nearly drive off the road, But I knew what you were trying to say.

So I enjoyed that.

Yeah, thanks.

Do you know Italian?

I do know a little bit of Italian.

I did Italian at school.

I did manage to get an entire sentence of Italian into the pod news update yesterday, which I was particularly proud of.

So, um, and apparently it didn't sound too bad, so I know a little bit of it.

Yeah, well, I thought that was very good.

I only know enough Italian to get dinner, but I thought that was pretty good.

Well, thank you.

I mean, I think one of the things I do try and do on pod news is not just take lots of news from the US because, you know, a little bit bored of that.

But also see how much news I can pull in from the rest of the world.

I think that that's the unique selling point of the stuff that I do because, you know, I've worked in Canada and the US I'm obviously a British person.

Judging from this silly accent that I put on all the time, I live in Australia, you know, I've got a quite a unique worldview, I think, and if that's something that I can bring to pod news or bring to the radio stuff that I do, then I think that's really helpful, and it strikes me Certainly, whenever I'm speaking at industry conferences, it strikes me that much of the industry that we see both in podcasting and in radio is quite focused on what's going on in the US or what's going on in Canada.

And actually having a bit more of a worldview is really interesting, because there are some really interesting ideas that are happening in radio and in podcasting elsewhere.

Well, I think it's one of the charming parts of both pod land and pod news is to hear that news from around the world.

Yeah, well, thank you.

It's something that we enjoy doing.

I'm very much looking forward to going over to the UK I think I'm doing it in May.

There's a big podcast conference over there called the Podcast Show, and we are going to be doing an entire episode of Pod Land on stage, which are both Sam and I are terrified about.

They're still there.

We are.

So that might be fun.

So very much looking forward to doing that very much.

Looking forward to dusting my passport off using my new passport, which I've got.

I've got two passports now just to anger the Americans and looking forward to using those and to start travelling again, hopefully in March.

We've got another question here from a jag in Detroit podcast, and this one involves.

Spotify and Apple recently reported on how Spotify and Apple can both claim to be number one for podcasting, depending on which metrics they use.

Do you see a timeline on Spotify actually overtaking Apple to be an undisputed number one?

There's an interesting question.

So the reason why both of them are claiming now to be number one is that Spotify is number one.

In terms of radio language, Spotify is number one in cume and Apple is number one in terms of hours in terms of total downloads.

So the amount of people using Spotify is now bigger than Apple.

But Spotify users aren't listening to very many podcasts, whereas Apple users are listening to about five or six times more podcasts than Spotify users are.

So even though there are less of them, they are still accounting for the majority of all podcast downloads.

Do I see the being a change in that?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, at the moment Apple is only available on apple phones right So I think the last time I looked in Canada, 45% of phones in Canada were IOS.

55% were android.

So Apple podcast isn't available on the 55% of those android phones in Canada at all.

So I think that that's a mistake.

And unless Apple fix that and Apple TV is available on Android, Apple music is available on Android.

I don't see any reason why Apple podcast shouldn't be unless or until Apple fixes that.

Then clearly, they're not going to be available in as many places as many phones as spot fires.

I certainly see that Spotify will continue to grow.

The worry that I have with Spotify continuing to grow is that they are very proprietary.

They are very focused on making their product the only place where you can go to enjoy all of these individual podcasts, but also to enjoy all of these individual features.

And I don't think that's good news.

At the end of the day, for the future of podcasting, I think podcasting has always benefited from having an open ecosystem.

Interesting thing that I learned about radio here in Australia.

Matt is that when radio launched here in Australia in the 19 twenties, all the 19 thirties.

Then we had the same exclusive idea that Spotify is now trying to get on board.

You would go and you would buy a locked radio that would only pick up one radio station and you would pay a subscription to use that radio for a year.

And that money would go to making the content that you heard on the radio.

It was such a success that within six months the commercial radio industry had gone.

Oh my goodness, we've made a big mistake here.

Can't we have advertising?

And it strikes me that that sort of locked set mentality is what Spotify is currently going for at the moment.

And you know, I hope that it doesn't end up being the future of the industry.

You know, Spotify made a purchase and I heard this on hot news when they bought Find a way there in audio books, and I'm surprised there wasn't a bigger outcry from the voiceover community because a little flag goes up in my head that now you've got voice artists whose work is being used, likely without compensation on Spotify I don't know about that, but I do know that so find a way as an audio book distributor.

So it's in between the producers and publishers and the platforms.

So it's that sort of spot in the middle.

My suspicion is that the book publishers are going to still be getting their books into this particular company.

Find a way, even if find a way is now part of Spotify, so I don't necessarily think it's bad news for the voiceover world.

But it certainly Spotify parking their tanks on the lawn of audiobooks and clearly Audible has been around for quite some time with their own platform.

They're actually already 3900 audiobooks within Spotify, if you know where to find them.

And you know it's just very clearly Spotify planning to see if they can be number one for audio.

Whatever.

That audio might be so interesting to see them doing that, I think, and Catherine O Brien with another question.

That sort of dovetails what we just spoke about James.

I am a daily pod news reader, and my question to you is, is there something that you see independent podcasters consistently missing or overlooking, and also what do you see is the biggest opportunity going forward for independent podcasters.

Great question.

I think overlooking is promoting your podcast on as many places as possible, and ideally, that should be promoting your podcast on your website.

So having a great website is something that, astonishingly, quite a few independent podcasters don't do.

And there are a lot of services pod page or podcast page, which are two different services, almost the same name.

Those are great if you don't have a website and you just want something which is easy and simple and straightforward.

I'm an advisor for a podcast host called Captivate, which gives you a fantastic website as well.

If you want that so those sorts of services are really useful because then you can point people there.

You can get people signed up to a newsletter.

You can promote more things to your listeners.

All of that kind of stuff, rather than as I see a lot of independent podcast is doing slotting a link to apple podcasts or to Spotify in there.

That's not necessarily going to particularly help there, so I think that's one thing I think we've spoken about titles of shows because they are super important as well to actually get there.

But I think also just consistency as well.

There's lots of podcasters out there who will do a show when they feel like it, and that's fine.

But actually doing a show, which is a consistent experience where you always know just like a great radio station.

You always know what music you're going to get when you listen to that particular station.

You always know what kind of experience you're going to get when you listen to that particular podcast.

So I think that consistency is also really good thing.

That's quite a few independent podcasters in my experience, don't necessarily have grasped yet.

Do you really have to understand Google and how Google works?

And at the same time, you know, YouTube and I noticed that you also started to get into YouTube a little bit with some of your episodes.

Yeah, I mean, you know, making sure that your podcasts are available in as many places as possible is a good plan now.

You may not have an awful lot of plays from those additional places, so it's a toss up between how much work you do to get into these additional places and what you get back from it.

So as an example, pod news itself goes onto YouTube automatically.

It's part of a long and tedious scripts that I've written, and I've shared the code online as well.

For that that goes on there automatically.

And a typical episode of pod News within YouTube might get 30 or 40 plays.

That doesn't sound like an awful lot, but actually 30 or 40 plays would make YouTube one of the probably top 15 podcast apps that consume that particular podcast.

So if you think about it from that point of view, it's just another podcast app.

Then it is an additional place to get in front of people and to get people to consume, even if they're only consuming it once or twice.

And then they end up getting it on a proper podcast app.

So you've got that kind of stuff, but also just making sure that search engine optimisation is something which is really important for everything.

It's making sure that you can be found if you call your podcast the correct name.

If you use the correct titles in your episodes.

The only thing that Apple will search through is your podcast Name your name.

I e.

The name of the publisher and the names of each of the episodes.

It doesn't search through any of the descriptions that you have.

So from that point of view, you know that's a big difference because it doesn't search through the descriptions.

It means that that kind of information is blind to someone who is searching Apple podcasts to make sure that you get all of the important information about who's on your podcast, what they're talking about into the title of your particular episode and you will appear better in podcast apps.

So it's stuff like that, which is important, too.

Tell me about the partnership you have with Brian Barletta and sounds profitable, an ad tech and why people should care about ad tech.

I think advertising technology in podcasting is really important.

It's one of the ways that we earn revenue, of course, but it's also more than just advertising.

It's what you can do with content as well.

So Brian Barletta used to work at Megaphone.

He's a very passionate guy around ad tech.

He invented the first Shaka Ble advert, which sounds a horrifying idea.

But anyway, he started a year or so ago, producing a weekly newsletter called Sounds Profitable, which you can find It sounds profitable dot com and that really focuses does a deep dive every single week on the technology behind advertising in terms of podcasting.

Whether that's attribution whether that's dynamic content, insertion or just writing better ads is another important thing as well.

And it's been really interesting working with Brian.

He's in Texas.

I've met him once, but it's been really interesting working with him because he is absolutely, you know, switched on in terms of all of the opportunities that we have in the advertising tech space in podcasting.

What that leads us to be able to do and you use dynamic content insertion on this podcast.

I know that you know a fair amount.

What it leads you to do is not just do clever things around advertising, but it also leads you to do clever things around content.

And you can put messages in there about conferences that you're speaking out that you can get rid of afterwards automatically.

You can put messages in there that only people in Canada will hear or only people in Mexico will.

Here you can do some tremendously clever things that, of course, coming from a world of radio where everything everybody hears the same thing is very new and exciting.

So it's been really interesting watching what Brian has been doing there.

Actually, I just had a little bit of a flashback because you and him have collaborated.

And no matter what episode of sounds profitable, I listened to I will get the most up to date update from pod news from you So you will pop on with the latest news, no matter when the episode was published.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's called a vast tag and, weirdly, that again is taking its cues from radio.

Radio has been always very good at syndication and that sort of thing, and so there is a way of doing the same sort of thing in podcasting.

So if you listen to pod news every Friday, then you will hear a piece of audio from Evo terror, which is called your Minute of Pods n, which is just giving you something to think about at the end of a busy week.

So all of that kind of stuff again, all of that is automatic.

All of that comes into that particular podcast automatically when you download it, so you always get the very latest news.

There's a daily podcast here in Australia called the Quickie, which is produced by Mamma Mia here, and that's really clever.

It's one of those podcasts that dives deep into a particular story that's going on right now, and that might be climate change.

It might be electric cars.

It might be, you know, the problems that Scott Morrison, our current prime minister, is having whatever that might be.

But it's also got the latest news headlines, and they realise that actually, if you're doing a podcast about climate change, that's going to be pardon the pun, an evergreen piece of content that you can have available for you for many, many months.

So, actually, that particular piece of content needn't just be done once and then forgotten about.

But what you can then do is you can add the very latest news headlines in there automatically, and that will prolong the life of this particular podcast.

So people are using this dynamic content insertion in really interesting ways, I think.

Well, if you have access to dynamic ad content and you want to use the pre roll right now, why not just use it to wish everybody a happy holidays?

Merry Christmas.

Looking forward to a new year?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you can do all kinds of that kind of stuff.

And if you're clever about it, then you can only talk about Thanksgiving.

If you're in the US and talk about Thanksgiving in Canada at the correct time and talk about Thanksgiving in Australia, never, because we don't do it.

You can do all of that kind of stuff.

Which, of course, makes your podcast a much more personal and intimate lesson.

Yeah, If we were having beers and it will say in Toronto or anywhere on this planet, I would ask you, What's a Busta Graham?

I don't know what they are.

So what's a boost?

A gramme.

Well, so this is a different way of funding your podcast.

So we've had advertising.

Of course.

We've had sponsorship and a different way of funding.

Your podcast is as you listen.

You get a very small amount of money.

It's money in terms of Bitcoin in terms of Cryptocurrency because it's cheaper and less centralist that way.

But there is a thing called streaming sets where if you're listening on a particular podcast app, then you can send five SATs, which is a tiny amount of money to me for every minute that you spend listening to a podcast.

So you've got that kind of streaming SATs thing going on.

You then have boosts, which are tips.

So if you're listening to something that you really like, you can tip the podcaster and you can tip them maybe 500 SATs or 1000 SATs or whatever that might be.

And recently the podcast index has come up with the idea of booster grammes where you send a message along with your tip.

So you can actually say I really like this interview with such and such whatever it is that you want to actually say with your tip.

And they've called it a booster Graham, which is a dreadful name.

But nevertheless, so is the word podcast.

Frankly, that is now part of how some podcasters are earning revenue from their show.

I think in total pod land is probably going to make about $1200 worth of Cryptocurrency in the year if the current rate of this stuff is going so it's not massive, but it's an additional way of earning revenue from your audience that you might not have.

And I think this is some of the stuff which is really interesting and exciting that RSS feeds, which is the whole mechanism that podcasts work can be extend.

It can have new features put in them so that new podcast apps that support this can do all kinds of additional things.

James Thanks so much for being on this podcast.

It's great to speak to you again, and we look forward to seeing you in person.

Hopefully in 2022.

Yes, I'm looking forward to sharing a pint of steam whistle with you or whatever it is, as long as it's not caused, and I'm perfectly happy.

Whatever it is in Toronto or elsewhere, it's been great to speak to you again that the Sound Off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Kendall.

Produced by Evan SSurminski

Social Media by Courtney Krebsbach.

Bach Another great creation from the sound off media Company imaging, courtesy core image studios.

There's always more at sound off podcast dot com.