 Podcasts was roundtable round 112. Just calling it Google Podcasts. A little bit of a PSA. We've done these sort of public service announcements, special rounds before, but I think we might get a new roundtable. We'll find out. But what is Google Podcasts? Are you in it? Does it suck? Did they finally do it right? We're gonna find out all those. This hopefully will be, at least for now, a one-stop shop. One-stop, one-stub, whatever. One-stop shop for everything you need to know about Google Podcasts. But this is a special round for more than one reason. Making his return, you guys have been asking, where's Daniel? He's right here. Welcome back, Daniel. Co-host Daniel J. Lewis. Thank you from the audacity to podcast.com in case everyone has forgotten me. You know, I do stuff about podcasting. Now I only host one podcast, sort of one and a half, two and a half, three quarters. It's gonna be really confusing in the coming months. That's all right. We're all about, you know, a podcast is always an experiment. So we're always trying different things. We like it. And if you wanna catch up with Daniel, definitely go to audacity to podcast. Daniel pours his heart out there. You can get an idea of what's going on, and how he's doing, but just the fact that he's back, that's big time. That's a good thing. So welcome back, Daniel. We're super happy to help. To help. We're happy to have you here to help, especially when we dig into something technical like this, cause Daniel's our resident digging deep expert. And so he's gonna help us walk through Google podcast today. Podcast, what am I from Ohio? What's going on? Why am I saying podcast? So I'm hanging out with you guys. Dave Jackson, who is from Ohio. Welcome back, buddy. Yeah, Dave Jackson from the school of podcast. You almost sound like you're from Baston. Baston. To podcast. To podcast. Something. All right. Well, again, we'll get it right. Maybe. But let's dig into this. What the heck did Google do? What did they finally do? This is their third try at podcasting, so to speak, right? We used to have Google listen and we had Google play music, which we'll talk a little bit about cause that still exists and podcasts are still there. Then they brought out this thing called Google podcast, pretty much just like Apple podcast. The little subscribe badge that you can put on your website actually looks just like the Apple one. Just like it. So they actually look good together. And we'll talk about how you get one of those. What the heck do you link it to? All that stuff. So my question off the bat is, is this an app? Cause I keep using air quotes around app. Daniel, is this an app? It's a web app. Yeah. Really, it's not a standalone app. Like most Android users don't even have to install it. And that is huge. The podcast app, which is fantastic. Yes. So that they made it a web app is well, first of all, that it's a Google thing again that we'll have official Google. It's native essentially, right? It's international. Yeah. Whereas Google play music. Yeah. But that it's a web app takes what Google does best, search and indexing and web apps and brings that to the Android side. I think this can be really good for the industry. Yeah. It does one of the things. I already saw this a few weeks ago. I don't know how long it's been now that they sort of introduced this to the search function on Android and Google, right? That you could search for a podcast and it would have some play buttons and some subs. I think you could subscribe. So this was the precursor to, this is the app essentially. What you find in Google search when you search for your podcast is the app. And for I understand the app, the badge that sits on your home screen or you can download as an app. It downloads so fast for a reason. It's basically a hyperlink. You've seen this on iOS or any other devices where you go to a webpage and it says, add this to your home screen. It's just a link to the web. That's what Daniel's saying when you're saying a web app. That's what the app basically is. It's a link to the functionality inside of Google search but it also gets you on their other voice platforms, right? What other voice platforms? Dave, you're the woman in a box expert here. Do you know the other platforms that gets you on and they're person in a box? I don't know that this gets you on the person in the box, the Google home box. Yeah, it's using the same database. So if you're visible inside of a search, inside of Google podcasts, you'll also be visible inside a search or listenable inside a search with Google home. Nice, so I can run out of my kitchen later and ask it to listen. You start yelling into the ether of your kitchen. Cause I've got one sitting on my fridge. And if anybody's confused, like what's a web app? This is kind of one of those, if it looks like an app and smells like an app and tastes like an app, for all intents purposes, it is an app. It's a very, what I would call light app, especially when you go to the features and there's two, but don't get confused with the phrase web app. I mean, that's technically what it is, but if you look at it, it looks and acts like a very, very simple app. Cool, so I'm curious, what is it not? And I have in brackets, Google Play Music. It's not Google Play Music, but what's the difference? So we have podcasts in Google in two different spots now. What's the difference between Google Play Music and Google Podcast, which Daniel, you sort of hinted at, right? That it's global, that's one. Yeah, and by global to clarify that in case anyone isn't familiar, Google Play Music is, the podcast section is only available in certain countries and you can only submit your podcast to it if you're in certain countries and people in other countries have had to use proxies or get friends, submit their podcast for them. It's just a big mess over there. And it's been pretty much dead for years. Nothing new has been developed on that side, but whereas this is global, anyone from any country can use this functionality, can get their podcast included in this, can use the web app. That's a big difference right there. So regardless of the country someone is in, which is especially important because outside of the United States, Android usage far, far surpasses iOS usage. So now there's this option for everyone outside the US. Then the other nice thing about it that I love is instead of where Google Play Music, they make a copy of your file and they serve that, which then when you go, oh crap, I've got 10 seconds of silence in the middle, I need to replace this, it's a hassle. Now they're serving it directly from your media host. Which means a lot of different things. It means probably easier for stat implementation maybe for your host and it also means they're not going to degrade that file. They're not going to inject anything in your file. They're not gonna change your file. That's a beautiful thing. And sort of going back, it's sort of what Daniel hinted on, I tweeted this out earlier, I said with Google's new implementation of podcasts on Android, the app that's on all devices, it's there. It's built into Google search essentially, which I think, I understand you have to sort of have on most Android devices, most, I say most. It's not gonna be all, but nothing's ever all. It says, I should say, we should truly now know if Android users are not podcast listeners and if the lack of the app was a barrier, Google changed the game overnight finally. So this whole idea, we've seen for a long time that Apple has dominated as a platform on smartphones for podcast listening. That's where the Apple podcast app is number one. And what's the reason why don't Android users also listen to podcasts the same way? Apple does and maybe this was the barrier but this should give us some idea over time. I'm hoping this will give us some insights. We'll find out are they actual podcast listeners? That's gonna be the question because I was listening to Paul Culligan's podcast and he made the point that there are, there's Pocket Cast, there's Stitcher, there's Google Play Music, there are other apps on the Android side that if somebody really wanted to listen to a podcast, it's not like they're going, well, I would but there's no app. So just a matter of, and I think there are even some free versions of different apps. So that is gonna be a good question to see. Now, I will say this makes it easier. I was watching a video from James Cridlin and he shows that even if it's not installed, if you've got a listen on Google podcast, it instantly brings it up. You click subscribe and boom, it's there. And that's what I'm saying. It's essentially a native. It's, you know, you get an Apple device, you get an iOS, you're gonna have Apple podcast. You get an Android device. You essentially now have Google podcast because you do not need this quote unquote app which is a hyperlink. It's easier than subscribing. See, this is an interesting question on phone. I know on desktop, you click on somebody's thing, it takes you to that web version of iTunes where you then have to say view on iTunes and then you click on subscribe. I'm not sure how many clicks you have to go through on if you're on a phone. I think it just brings up Apple podcasts and you click on subscribe too. Two clicks. Yeah, you click on the listen on Google podcast link and then you click on subscribe. Here's my question. Is it already better? What Google has done, I mean better than Apple on smartphone implementation. We're talking from all aspects. If someone comes to your website, clicks on a link. You know what I mean? Getting to a podcast, is it now theoretically easier on an Android device? Opinions. It's so new. It's so new that we, it's only gonna get better. So people are already complaining that it's not, they're like, yeah, but there are no yeah, buts. We started. This is a stellar first step. It'll get iterated on. And I say, I tweeted back someone today and I said the Apple podcast app itself still needs several things to make it where you want it to be, right? But this is a great first step. So, but I am curious already where we've seen this, you don't, you know, that you can search essentially a web search. Okay, it might surface more podcasts in a Google search on an Android device. So is it better? Is it better for discovery? Dare I say the word? I think it is because, well, yeah, discovery separate issue, but we're going to see this, I think, as one of those other inflection points. Rob Walsh talks from Lipson, talks about the inflection points in podcasting. And a big inflection point was when the official Apple podcast app became available on iOS. That was the big inflection. That was also a big shift in the industry of podcast consumption. So a lot of things happened at the same time. So I don't think we'll see as big of an inflection point, but we could see something bigger. The integration with the search, I think makes this better than Apple podcasts, because what this means is that when someone does a search in Google on their Android device, podcasts will be suggested along with their search results and they'll be able to listen inside of it, tap on play and even subscribe very quickly from the search results on a web search. You can't do that on iOS. Yeah, and this is, I mean, clearly Google was listening to the round table. That was my pitch. It was the one thing, it was my million dollar idea that I wanted them to have me consult on, but no, I wanted it so bad. What I'm curious is, do you think we'll see this show up in desktop? I want this on all Chrome, I mean Google searches. Do you think we'll start to see this sort of play? Do you think we'll get podcasts servicing on the desktop and browsers? I think somewhere in their documentation it did say something about future Chrome versions. I really wouldn't be surprised because they control all of that code. Seems natural. Yeah. Seems natural. Cool, so how do you find out if you're even in Google podcasts? You're a podcast, a podcaster. How do you know AKA, how do you submit a show to Google podcast? I guess the first thing to say is you don't submit shows, right Daniel? Right. Yeah, that's the kind of weird thing, but also the kind of good thing. Yeah, cool and potentially difficult, but you're probably already there, right Dave? Yeah, I know for me, everything I did was already in there. In fact, I've only found one person that wasn't and I just sent her to the Google kind of developer sheet where it says you just have to put this code in your, I believe it's in your header and then you just wait, that's the weird part. You put it there and you have no idea, like when is Google? You can ping them, can't you though? You can tell them, hey, this is here now, right? And sort of index this. Yeah, I would think you'd be able to go over and put it in and then. There's a tool for that. Yeah, you can submit a page to Google, so. So again, how do you find out if you're indexed? Dave, do you mentioned it? There is this podcast publisher tools. It's not a friendly URL that I know of. We will link to it of course in the show notes, podcastredroundtable.com slash 112. Hopefully it'll be in your app. You can click right there. That's one way via desktop. Daniel, how else? Or Dave. Well, what that does, just to explain what it does, you go to that page and it asks for your RSS feed. So you put in your RSS feed and it then spits out this rather nasty looking link that is your link to your show in Google Podcast. And you can basically put that on your website. They've got. Well, there's two things here. So we'll get into that because that's how you do make a link. But on the same page, it actually tells you preview your podcast and Google search results. So if you put your feed URL into that box, you'll also know, and it shows up, you'll know that they have your podcast. You don't have to worry about all this is my RSS on my website silliness. I say silliness, but you won't have to go through that. There are other ways though. The way I did it was on my phone and I have an iPhone. I have no Android device. Daniel's gonna show us maybe what it looks like on an Android device, but I have iOS. So for if you're on iOS, don't have an Android device, mobile device, you can use the Google Assistant app on iOS and then just say, you gotta use the keywords play, podcasters round table, podcast. So play the name of your podcast and then podcast. And if it comes up, you're in, you're already there. That's another way to find out, especially if you're not on Android. Yeah. And their little preview thing is a little bit weird because it requires an Android device to search it. There is a way that if you're using Chrome, you can with the developer tools built into Chrome, you can change Chrome to tell a browser that you are using an Android device. You're tricking a website basically into thinking you're browsing the web with an Android device. And when you do that and you do the Google search thing, just searching for your podcast in Google, it will then look as if you were doing that search on Android. So you'd be able to see it then, which is still kind of weird. I'm sure that very soon, they're going to have a better way to do this, especially something that works for people who aren't on Chrome or aren't on Android devices. So even the, so the browser on Chrome, if you put your, if you put your feet in there, it won't tell you, because I'm on, I'm on a Mac. Yeah, when I, if I had preview. If I'm in there, it gave me a QR code and I tried this on my iPhone. And I'm, you know, usually you just take a picture of the QR code or somehow the Apple phone will, will scan that. And it was like, not happening. Yeah, but the key is for Android. And then I used my tablet and which is a kind of light version of Android. And I couldn't get the, the QR scanner to scan it off the computer screen. And that's when I went forget it. And but the key is, there's a key here. So to answer this question, if you're not on Android, if it gave you a QR code, you're in, I only, I want to know, are you in? I don't care what it looks like. Right. We want to know if producers want to know if you're in, right? So if you're not, can you do that via browser via their podcast publisher tools? I think you can. Yeah, cause I'm going to, I'm going to put in a wrong address. I'm going to do it right now to the round table. If I put in in the tool and I get preview to preview your podcast and Google search results, it's there. I get my QR code, which means I'm in. Yeah. And if you don't, it says this feed URL is not valid. Exactly. Right. It's always even be a browser. It won't show you what it looks like the preview, but you'll get the QR code, which just lets you know, hey, I'm in. It's one way to know. No, actually, I just tried a feed that is a valid podcast feed. So that's the thing is that if you enter a wrong URL or an invalid feed, it will tell you it's an invalid feed. Sure. Okay. But I have a valid feed that's not authenticated or anything like that, but it's a feed that last I knew as of a couple of days ago was not in Google podcasts. And I just tried it in that preview section and it still gives me a QR code. So what if- I'm still trying to get my phone to scan that QR code. Yeah, that's the part I couldn't get. I'm like, come on. What do you need? What about the generate direct link? So, okay, here's another thing. If you want to make a link to your show in Google podcasts and you put in your RSS, it'll give you, it'll generate a link. Now, does that, Daniel, did you try putting in that one that you say is not listed into the generate and does it give you something? Cause what are they creating at that point? Now, that's what's really cool. It gives you this link which the geeks are going to love this part. It's simply your URL, your feed URL, base 64 encoded. So in English, it just means they're encoding the URL that you give them your feed URL. They encode that in a special way and they tack it on to the end of their own little URL scheme. If your podcast is not already in Google podcasts, that URL that they give you when you put your feed URL in it can still work to let people subscribe to your podcast through Google podcasts. As long as it's not a URL that's behind a paywall or authentication, like a Patreon feed or a premium podcast feed, something like that. If it's a public podcast feed, it still works which is fantastic. Yeah, it's funny. I've missed you so much. So Daniel is awesome. How did you look at that and go, you know what, that's just base 64. Because he's a nerd. Because he's David J. Lewis. He said the geeks will love it and there's a reason. Yeah, I looked at it and just thought, this has got to be something simple. Like can I just replace this weird code with simply my URL? No, that didn't work. So it must be encoded. Hey, let's just try an encoder. I didn't even think base 64. I just loaded encoder and found it base 64 and realized that, wow, that matches up. I told you, we dig deep, we have that covered. We have it covered now. Again, this is why we have co-hosts show. Okay, cool. So there are different ways, whether you're on iOS or you're on Android, there are different ways to figure out if you're in there. But if you're not, how do you get in? Because you don't submit. We sort of mentioned that this is based off, it's scraping your website for an RSS feed to a podcast, right? Yes. Okay, so. I mean, we can't dive into it. What does a podcast producer who's listening to this show or watching, you should be watching on YouTube. We're almost at 500 subs. We need you to go over and sub youtube.com slash podcasters round table. We definitely do that. But if you're watching this and you want, and you found out you're not listed, as you saw, you can still make a link. People can subscribe, which is really cool. But what do you do? What if you don't even have a website? Let's not go there yet. But can we dumb it down and make it easy without getting into the deep stuff of what a person needs to do next steps? If you're using something like SoundCloud. I would get those people. Because I'm not, and I'm kidding. We'll come back to you. But. SoundCloud feature, yeah. How Daniel, how is this even happening? How is Google getting podcasts? They are, it's a little bit circular. Whenever people tell you you have to put this code in your header, take the ER out of that. It's in your head of the HTML that's in your website. So the head section of your web code. Like when you say header, people think that's where your logo is, your menu, your navigation, that kind of stuff. It's not there. It's nothing visible. So even if your website has a simple link like that says click here for my RSS feed or something like that, that's not what Google is looking for. They're looking for code that's hidden inside of the head section of your HTML. And that's where other stuff like your CSS files, your JavaScript files, some of the other metadata is inside the head section. So this isn't something that's all that easy for you to put in. But, like manually that is, but it is something that many tools will make available. Like if you have PowerPress, you already have your podcast feed URL in the head section of your website, most likely. If you're using the Libsyn website that they create for you, most likely. Actually, I know that they do have your correct podcast RSS feed in the head section of your code. And other tools I think will also ensure that this is done for you. So the circular part of this comes in where the way that Google discovers that feed is by indexing your site. They see that you have the feed linked properly in the head section. Then they index the feed inside of the feed. They look at the website URL for your podcast which should be what they call a homepage quotation marks around that. Homepage for your podcast. They go back to that, index that and whatever primary RSS feed is in there. So that's where the circular part comes in and that explains how I have two listings for my podcast inside of Google Podcast because there is my main site feed which is on my homepage and my homepage is linked to as the, my front page, I'll call it that. My front page, the audacity to podcast.com. Nothing after that, just the audacity to podcast.com. That's my front page of my website. That's what's linked to as the quote, homepage for my podcast unquote inside of my RSS feed. So when Google discovered my RSS feed it then went to my front page of my website and saw that in the head section of the front page of my website the RSS feed I'm linking to is my main site feed. So I indexed that as well. So it gets a little circular in that way. If you have a simple site that has only your podcast feed on it like a Lipson page or something like that then you don't have to worry about this stuff. If you have multiple podcasts from the same website each podcast needs its own homepage on your site and that homepage needs to link to only one of the RSS feeds for that specific podcast. So just kind of think of siloing everything every show needs to have its information all siloed together on a single page for that show. Yeah, for the most part if you don't understand that you probably won't figure out how to do it. I mean, it makes me wish we did have some kind of submission portal for the people who just, I mean, you know to be honest with you, I didn't know if I had it right and I was quite sure there was probably conflicts that they were talking about WordPress and the comments feed versus the regular feed. I don't think I have any of that right and guess what my podcast is still there. I think, Dave, you said you've only found one show. The good news is that most people, they're there. Most people are there. Yeah, that's the part that's confusing is by default WordPress makes a feed and then a comments feed. So you've already got two feeds on your homepage. And I remember Rob talking about this on the feed saying, well, there's way too many feeds in here. And he was saying that the Zach or whatever his name is from Google had said, no, it needs to be one feed. And that's when I went, well, that's gonna cause a problem. So I'm glad to hear that it's not causing a problem because by default WordPress comes with multiple feeds. The way that Apple built the app to sort of deal with a lot of badly formatted feeds, I'm hoping Google like learns how to deal with a lot of problems. Google is a little bit forgiving in that because they're looking at, even if there's only one feed in the head section of your page, they're probably looking at what is the first one. So like I'm looking at the source for my own site right now. And to try and see which is listed first and the first, yeah, the first feed listed on my site is the actual main RSS feed, not the comments feed. So what they're probably doing is taking that first yeah, probably taking the first feed that they find. And so there's always, we've talked about this in the past. We've said, do podcasters need a website? Do you, those questions have been asked. So we've always said, yes, this is probably a big reason now and why you should have some type of at least basic site beyond all the other reasons we've given. But what if you don't have a site? So you sort of hinted, I'm saying that a lot. I'm done with that. Just stop me when I say that. Daniel or Dave SoundCloud users. So I'm joking when I'm writing those people off. Hopefully you get off SoundCloud. This is probably another, yet another great reason. But how would a user who's on a platform like that, maybe Anchor, these platforms you shouldn't be on for various reasons. Square space. Square space is not going to be able to, really? There's no feed coming off of Square space. Well, that's the thing I'll have to see is how they have their websites. I would think. At least if you're on Square space, you have a website. But people, they're podcasters who have no website, right? They live on the internet, they don't live on the web. Well, I think like a Square space is probably going to be okay because it's going to link to an RSS feed but the problem could be it's linking to the wrong one and you could end up with multiple podcasts inside of Google Podcast like I have. What if you're on Libs in it but you don't have the blog page? Or do you always have? You always have an RSS feed. Even with upload only? What if you do the upload only? So it's not going. No, there's nothing in the feed. So it's in back. Exactly, so that's a problem. Yeah, if you're doing for download only on Libsyn, then you're generating your RSS feeds somewhere else anyway and that somewhere else probably has a website. It's probably your PowerPress or whatever. Which we know PowerPress has great tools and all that stuff, Blueberry. The big ones are all ready for this. And that whole thing about making sure that each podcast is siloed. If you have multiple podcasts on the same website, PowerPress is going to provide that option for you in a very soon update of some sort where you'll be able to specify that this is the homepage for this podcast and therefore this feed should be what's displayed at the top. This is the right one, yeah. So again, I think someone said they were still confused about how to find out their show. There's the podcast publisher tools which we'll link to search Google on an Android device. You can just search Google. You don't have to do the app. You can go get the app as well, download a hyperlink essentially. You can search via the Google Assistant app that's on iOS. Probably on, you can do Google Assistant probably on your Android device. So there's definitely few ways to find out if you're indexed. You can also ask a friend. Like what's the trivia show? Ask a dial a friend, whatever. Do that, but ask one of us. Maybe we can find out for you. What's the, oh, what are you gonna say? Oh, now this is interesting. I finally found a QR code scanner that I could get to work on Android and it's littered with ads. I do not miss Android at all and I just made a bunch of enemies, but that's okay. So I tried that QR code that they gave me and it brought me to the search results which is kind of pointless a little bit, but it helps a little bit. So this was for a podcast that I thought was not in the directory. Then I went back to the podcast app, searched for that podcast by name and I see it now. So I'm wondering if by using this tool, somehow that did submit the podcast to Google Podcast and now it's indexed, or it's possible that the podcast has since been discovered automatically by Google because this is not my own podcast. So I don't have control over it. It sounds like they're picking up stuff rarely, pretty fast, like they're scraping up. I read one thing where it's like, it'll see updates usually within like five minutes, it'll crawl, I don't know. So, I mean, who knows? But check that site, that's one way to do it. There are different ways. If that's not working for you, there are different ways. I'm curious, what's the best way to send people to your listing on Google Podcast? So you know you're in, you've got a show, it's in Google Podcast. What's the best way to send people? You know someone's got Android. Dave, how are you gonna tell your Android listeners to go get your show on Google Podcast? Well, this is where you go to that preview and you can get the link to your site in Google Podcast. And so there is a branding, basically better known as buttons that you can probably just Google images at, but there's, I've got a blog post about it there. I'm sure you just Google Podcast images, you can find some, but basically get that link and then from there, you can add it to your website. I always recommend that people make something like your website.com slash subscribe. That way you don't have to say, hey, subscribe to me and Apple Podcast at my website.com slash iTunes slash Google Play Music slash tune it, you can just say, go to my website.com slash subscribe and there you have all the ways that people can subscribe. So you just have to add that now to that page. And so it's one of the things you do once, you get the link, you add a button or if you wanna have a text link, whatever it is, maybe you wanna make a, if you're using pretty link, you could set up my website.com slash Google that goes to Google Podcast, but you basically get the link from that tool and then however you wanna add it to your podcast, be a text link, be a widget, be whatever it is, you can add it. What if you meet someone on the street, are you going to then tell them to go to this URL on your website or are you going to show them on your phone, what would you do? I'm just curious. I would grab their phone. That's right. Give me your phone. Grab their phone, go to my website, go to my subscribe page, click on that button and bam. Or search for it, yeah. And Google, right? All right, so first, before I bring out this thing, a few ways that you'll be able to easily place that link is well, yeah, like Dave said, you could get the badge that Google provides and that's available through one of the links we'll have in the show notes for this episode. But also the next version of PowerPress 7.3, which is coming out probably very soon, might even be out by the time you're hearing this, that includes support for Google podcast. So you can use that in their subscribe page or their subscription buttons and all of that. Also the WordPress plugin that I sell, social subscribe and follow icons is launching an update with the Google podcast or you can simply put that link in there. Something I wanna go back to is the thing about a feed that's not indexed by Google. I was testing a feed that I do not want publicly available to Google. And I was just testing it to see what would happen, how would it work and it's now searchable in the Google podcast app. So- Can't you put a block on that? Yeah, I probably can. So I just need to look at the code to see what kind of block I need to put into place. But what that kind of tells me, or this is my theory, it could be that because I played with it on my phone already, I'm getting a personalized search result. Yeah, yeah, that's what we're talking about. That means no one else would find it, only I would. But what it also could be is that by generating the feed URL in Google and visiting it, that may have indexed the show and therefore put it into Google podcasts. Yeah, we don't know yet if that's, if we're sort of submitting that waste, telling them, hey, this feed, pay attention to this feed, which would be interesting. I love Emily Prokof in the chat, the best answer. She says, if you meet someone on the street, you say, hey, Google, listen to the name of the podcast and then you clip on the script. You just force yourself on their phone. They're pretty invasive, but yeah, you just yell at their phone, their voices, if they have that on, that's funny. And I'm just gonna walk the street saying, hey, Google, play a podcast around the table. Hey, Google, play a podcast around the table. You need it as you get through speakers. Yeah, yeah. Put them on the top of your car. Try it down the street. Ooh, this is Dave's new best way to grow your audience. This is Dave all written, all over it. People used to get the low riders and pump tunes, we'll just be going. Hey, Google. I want you to Teen Wolf it and I want you to stand on the roof of an ice cream truck and play your guitar. Hey, Google. Awesome. Yeah, that's it. Teen Wolf, that's that date, that dates us. That's pretty nice. You're like, what are you talking about? Wolves that are teens. Is that a vampire show? I don't understand. Oh, yes. All right, back on track. What elements of my podcast show up in Google Podcast? So do we get show notes? Yes, with clickable links. Wait a minute, I heard they weren't clickable. No, but the one on my mind? I heard they stripped out the HTML. So maybe this is like, this could be super recent. They could be iterating on this thing very fast. Yeah, when I, let me pull this up here. By the way, that's an advantage to it being a web app where the code is running on the internet, not on your phone, is that they can iterate quickly and all of those changes that they make instantly or nearly instantly propagate to everyone without everyone having to update their app. Because the app is really just a frame for their web app. And this is one of those things that I've heard feedback on already. People are like, oh, yes, but it strips out the HTML and you can't do clickable links, but maybe you can already. It's not as pretty. It's stripping out some of my headings, but I see here on my page here that the links to curiosity.com and a couple other ones here, even one that wasn't a website are clickable. Let me scroll down a little further. Yeah, and that's where when you're looking at the notes, there is a button at the bottom where you can tell it to download the episode. Everything else is basically, we're all gonna call it a stream. It's not technically a stream. It's a progressive download, but again, the average person is gonna call that a stream. And but if you want to, you can download it. That's the one thing I saw that I thought was kind of missing is there's no way to tell it, always download the episode, but. And the weird thing is that, now when you said clickable URLs, is that the URL in plain text or is it a hyperlink, like saying click here or something like that? That's what, from what I see, the one is curiosity.com. I'm noticing they're all websites. So that's where I need to go. It's hyperlink text. It's not an actual ugly looking URL, right? Right, it's like, you know, one is, they're all websites basically. So that's where I'm going back to see. You two just said two different things. Is it a URL or is it a hyperlink? It's hyperlink text. Let me put it this way. They're all URLs. Do you see the URL? Yes. What? Wait, show it again, Dave. I thought it was like a. There's about trucking.com. There's curiosity.com. Do you see HTTP? No, I see WWW. The one is not even WWW. And at the very bottom, there's a link to the school of podcast. Well, it looks like the podcast app is pulling from the description field, not the content encoded. So the description field might only have a limited number of characters. The description field, even according to the RSS spec, is not supposed to contain HTML. So if, so the question would really be, if you put HTML in there, like text that says, click here and then there's the HTML that makes that click here link to something, would that work? I think probably not. But if you put the URL in plain text, it's probably automatically hyperlinking that, like many apps and services do. So there's a hack right now. Yeah, I'm sure it'll change, but there's a hack. Because I'm looking at my actual show notes and I can see where the phrase curiosity podcast is a link on my website, but it's not here in the notes. What about album artwork? Do we know if it's, this is getting way ahead of ourselves, but if it's switchable per episode, what Daniel, do you have a view of? This will be a reason you should be watching on YouTube. You can also, of course, go to podcastroundtable.com and it's always embedded there, but Daniel can share, I think, the screen so we can get some view of the, what do you think of the logo? I guess think of the logo, Google Pod. I already put it on my site. At least one. The logo's interesting, yeah, for sure. Okay, so I will share my screen so you can see Android device. It was buying time with our graphic. Then I'll click on yours. So there we go. This is Daniel's Android device. He's clicking into the, for the audio only list. I am so unfamiliar with Android. Yeah, so I'll describe things as we're going through this. So if I'll search for the Audacity to podcast, because I use separate episode artwork. Are you working right now as if you didn't have the app installed? Right, I do not have the app installed. Daniel's walking us through that whole thing. Which it functions the same whether you have the app or don't have the app. Yes, but quotation marks are helpful. Exactly, if the person doesn't and they just searched, this is what you'd get. It actually looks good. Nice new logo. Yeah, very, very clean. It's very clean. So if you play an episode that has individual artwork for that episode, that individual artwork does not change. Right. It's showing only the show level artwork, which is fairly normal. And as I say, completely normal. I did lock on Daniel Dave. And not for you. Dave, you're not seeing Daniel's screen because I'm locked on him. That's right, I'll lock on him. All right. The show notes apparently coming from the description field instead of the full content because you know I write extremely thorough show notes. But when I look at one of my episodes, like here I'm looking at episode 333, I'm seeing only the one paragraph that I write as my description of the episode. Which according, is that according to RSS or according to Apple, that's what they want? Both. Yeah, okay. According to the RSS spec, description should be only a summary of the content, whereas content encoded is a separate tag that contains all of the content. And even for Apple, you can have a summary and a summary and description are kind of the same on the Apple side. One is a fallback to the other, whereas content encoded is your full show notes for Apple, for overcast, for many other apps out there as well. All right, so what's next? So if you, so you can play your apps, anything else? How about the app? This is the app. I know, I know. That's the beauty, but like can you, I guess we don't need to see the app icon. Right. What it does do is if you don't have the app installed and let's go, well, if I clicked on my podcast from my website and gotten to this section where we could see my podcast inside of Google Podcasts, even if I don't have the app installed. Well, let me change that. If I don't have the app installed, when I come back to Google Podcasts, it will display this little banner up at the top saying, get the Google Podcasts app in the Play Store for quick access. And you have two options, not now or get the app. And if you tap get the app, it takes you to the Google Play Store where you can install the app, which is basically just a frame for the functionality that already exists. But what it does do is it gives you a shortcut on your screen, home screen on Android that takes you to the app to be able to more quickly get to your podcasts. And each podcast as well can have its own icon on your screen, which is something you can't do on iPhone. So if I tap into the dot, dot, dot inside of my podcast, there's an add to home screen option. You can almost make a podcast, quote unquote, podcast app for every podcast. Like if you want individual podcast apps, you can kind of fake it. It'll just be a direct link right to that podcast, essentially. And I think it even supports notifications. So if a new episode comes out, I think there would be a badge on that specific, I think it says new. Yeah, something that would indicate that this specific podcast as an episode to it, that's if I've created a home screen icon for that podcast. And it makes sense because it does that essentially on the web app. So why not just carry it right over to the badge that it created, right? It's connected. And Daniel, is that a power press feed? Yes, it is. Okay, because I think, because power press uses more of the content encoded for the full description, where I believe it lips and just uses, I think they have both basically, because I know for me, my full show notes are in the app. So let's think. So let's look at school of podcasting. It's podcasting. Padcasting. Oh no. I was gonna say, do I not come up? That's gonna be embarrassing. Okay. There's always the part of the new media show that bugs me. One of my favorite shows, but because they're always constantly looking on the web for stuff. Well, maybe I'll add it in the, I'll just look for the dead spots in the audio. Yeah, so Dave's content is showing, yeah, with his quadruple eight phone number. Nice, thank you. That's a special number for podcasts for Daniel. No wonder it's not clickable, yeah. No. And what I'm gonna do just, I'm gonna put my phone down for a moment and look at Dave's RSS feed on my computer. I won't be sharing my screen for that, but just to see how does this information actually look in Dave's RSS feed? And so one thing I have on here at the end, but I'll talk about it now. Any features of the app that do something better than Apple? And I took James from podnews.net. You should go over there. He has a video. It's a really cool walkthrough of what you'll get. And I'll try to embed that. I don't think you could join us for this one, but I pulled some stuff because he has good writeups over there on podnews.net. And quotes, I'm quoting right from there. He says, the front of the Google podcast app shows suggested podcast based on a listener's previously enjoyed podcast. I like this, this is cool. Some of them show other podcasts by, this is similar to what you would use to get in the, this is what I've been wanting Apple to give us, to this person listens to this. You know, they also listen to this. It says, and link to every other podcast you've produced. So I guess it's connecting you across podcasts, which is interesting. I'll have to see if all my shows sort of show up underneath my own show. I'm not sure I have to look at that. There are trending podcasts based on listening habits and categories. Also kind of cool because if you are in a certain niche, you probably want to see other shows in that niche. It says it's designed to make listeners discover more new podcasts, including yours. So I thought that was, that's again, another, I think huge advantage to this, to this platform. All right, I'm going to put it back on you, Daniel. So what I discovered looking at Dave's RSS feed on my computer, a couple of things in this episode, what episode number is this, Dave? When in doubt, ask your audience. Six. He doesn't do that anymore. 14. Oh, it's 623, it's right there in the show notes. There you go. So in your second paragraph of these show notes, it says, Brenda, from my tech tool belt, in, I'm looking at your raw RSS feed, and in both the description and in the content, you have my tech tool belt hyperlinked with the appropriate HTML code. So that hyperlink is not showing up in here. Right. Same thing with Curiosity Podcast in the first paragraph. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I hadn't seen that one. It does seem like there are some other things being automatically added potentially, like bullet points or asterisks instead of bullet points, which are not in your notes. You have an unordered list in your notes in both the content encoded as well as in the description field. And no asterisks in your notes. So that to say, Google is reading that this is a list and it's putting the asterisks in there. So it is seemingly reading some HTML as well as paragraph tags. We're learning in real time here, people. Learn with the round table. We're figuring it out on the fly, which is also fun. I think I didn't make clear. I don't think that, and I'm not sure Daniel can clear this up. You have to be on the most recent version of Android to see any of this, right? No. In fact, you don't even have to have a very recent phone. I'm doing this on a Galaxy. That was a thing, I thought. Did they change that? No. I thought that was a thing. No. That's weird. This is a Galaxy S6 that I'm working with, Samsung Galaxy S6. So this is, I think, three or four years old. I'm sorry, your Google search on Android, that has to be updated. Yes, the app itself has to be updated. The app. And that's Google, what do they call that? Google, it's not a browser. This isn't a, I mean, it's Google search app, right? Right. Okay, so the Google search app. Yeah, or... Which sometimes appears as just a search bar on an Android screen sometimes, right? It's not using, I don't know what the heck. One of the pre-installed apps, I believe. Like when I look at my... I think it's Google search. I didn't have to install anything for this to work. But the app that it's based on has to be updated to see this. For people who are searching and not find, maybe their search app, the Google search app, is not updated. It can be an old device with an updated app. But most likely because this is one of the apps that Google pretty much requires all manufacturers to include along with stuff like Google Maps, Google Play Music, Google News, Google Drive, that kind of stuff. Did we clear up the Google Play Muse? We have our podcast in two sources now. I'm assuming at this point, Google Play Music doesn't matter. And in fact, I think they're gonna kill it. As far as, yeah, I think they're gonna kill the whole thing. What I love about it is Google Play Music would only show you stats if you got more than 10 downloads in a day. And I've done it once. June 6th of like... I've done it once. 2016. The rest of it was just nothing. Here's what I'm saying. Go ahead. Yeah, just to me, I don't know if the whole thing's going away, but... It's gone. Somebody said, where do I need to list my podcast? I don't know that I would list Google Play Music. I mean, it doesn't take any... It takes five minutes to do it. So why not? Don't point people there. Don't tell people to go there. And I think James said on his site that he has seen that Google Play Music was gonna be replaced by YouTube Music. So it's another experiment that Google tried. Didn't work. And so I think it's gonna be replaced. I just, as a podcast producer, podcaster, I wouldn't say it's very relevant. Like I said, people aren't, in general, listening to podcasts there anyways. So I wouldn't worry about it. Well, what I think they'll probably do is right now they say in their documentation that putting these certain tags and doing this kind of stuff does not necessarily affect one or the other. But it is good Google Play Music or Google Podcasts. Like adding the tags, the appropriate tags to your RSS feed and such. That was the next question. What feed tags are relevant? Google specific. Yeah, okay. Backing up, what I think they'll probably do is probably eventually drop the Google Play Music podcast thing that we've known for the last few years and hated. And maybe when they get things working properly with Google Podcasts, I think they'll probably bring Google Podcasts into Google Play because that way in Google Play, it's a store for everything that you can consume. TV shows, movies, books, music, apps. I think podcasts will be part of that but probably populated by Google Podcasts, not Google Play Music Podcasts. Because you want it to have its own app anyways. But basically Google, hey, don't screw this up. We think you're in a good spot. We know you watch the show because you take my advice. Don't screw it up because I think it's good, right? Do you guys think this has a shot as opposed to what we've seen before? Google Listen Killed, Google Play Music, no one's listening to podcasts. It's better than Google Play Music where it was like they stuck their toe in the water. This is, as we already said, worldwide. It's a shell of an app, but it has the basics. Like there's no, you're not gonna have any kind of speed up or silence trimming or- You can speed up. Well yeah, I'm sorry, but I mean not speed up but the- I know what you're saying. The voice, the silence trimming, yeah. There's no playlist. Not now though, but who knows? I mean, it can only get better. I think it can only get better. So what I was thinking about is like, Edison Research says like the average person listens to maybe five podcasts a week. This is perfect- Podcast episodes. You hit on my sore spot on that one. But to me, this is perfect for that person. The non-power user, I want to listen to podcasts kind of thing. And I just hope that they continue then to develop it. They will. I mean, as long as they don't kill it in a year. Right. Yeah, if you already listened to podcasts, this app is not for you. Right, right. You've already chosen your podcast app. It's fine. This is so key because it is for the, it is the make podcasts super simple. And it's their version of that, right? It's for the person who, like you said, if you listen to podcasts, probably not for you. You might enjoy it. It might be something you switched to, but this is making it easy to try to reach that audience in Android that we've, for whatever reason, have not been able to reach. And I don't really think that, there are theories that those people are just different and they buy phones for different reasons. At this point, maybe in the beginning, but I don't think that's it. I'm hoping that it's easy. I'm hoping this does, it is again, like I said, another inflection point. We've seen these markers. I don't think it's gonna happen, but I would wet my pants if Google made a commercial that said, now on Android, Google podcasts. Now they're never gonna do that because there's no money in podcasts. Yeah, but for Google, there could be. This is essentially browser-based at some point. This is ads, right? This has the ability to do what Google does. Search, it's surfacing podcasts in search. So yeah, it could mean money for Google. So Google will wait for that cool, all white background Apple ad. Yeah, and Emily asked, is there a user agent yet? And I know Rob addressed this in the feed and I don't think there is one yet, but there, Daniel? Why would I care about that, you guys, for the new business? You can see how many people are coming from. This is stats, right? I have a question on my list here. Stats question mark. How was Google Play handling stats? Not well. It was difficult, right? You already said, Dave, that it took 10 before they even reported it or something? Yeah. So how is this going to do stats? And are we going to get stats? Is it going to be easy to get them from your host? Yeah, you would get your stats from wherever you already get your stats. And the Google Podcasts app does have its own user agent. So you're going to know in your stats even that people are coming from Google Podcasts. Yeah, it's GSA for Google Podcasts on Android and there's a separate one for Google Podcasts on smart speakers and that's Google Chirp. So inside of your Lips and Stats or any dashboard, stats dashboard that shows you the specific user agents. That's what you're looking for. GSA for Google Podcasts or Google Chirp. Of which I have none at this point. I have Google Bot, Google Bot Video, G-Potter, G-Streamer but no, whatever you just mentioned. You know, guys like us, our audience, our podcasters. We're probably going to get one or two people just trying it out probably, not actual startups. We should each have a stat for all of our shows if we tried on our own. Dave, go press on your show and see how quickly it comes up with your stats. Daniel had it right there. I think he already did. Yeah, you're all turned down the volume. I want to, can you put up, can you pull up your screen for your stats? I want to see one pop up as soon as you play and play it longer than 10 seconds. I'm kidding, we don't have to hear that. That's just a joke, but... I did download it, so technically it should see it as a... Okay, did Dave, Daniel, didn't you say somewhere about this whole download versus playing? Like what counts as a stat, right? Yeah, that's, this is something that James Cridland brought up in a blog post that I thought this is a really good way to look at it. So aside from all of the debate about download versus what we call stream, more like progressive download, but aside from that debate, something that this does for us is that if you see the stat that someone has used the Google podcast app to download an episode, that's a much more intentional indication on Google podcast because Google podcast is not automatically downloading episodes. Now in other apps, like in Apple podcasts, if you're not listening to a podcast after so many episodes that have downloaded, you haven't consumed those episodes, you haven't deleted them, nothing like that. You haven't engaged with those episodes at all. After five episodes, some other apps are a little bit differently, the podcast app will pause your subscription. So you can see Todd Cochran talks about this a lot. You can see the trend then. If you continue to receive consistent downloads, then it indicates because of that trend that people are consuming those episodes because their podcast apps are not pausing their subscriptions, therefore they are engaging with your episodes in some way. Whereas on Google podcasts, it won't download automatically at all, at least currently. So you have to either press play on the episode for it to download or you press the download option on the individual episodes. You have to be intentional. So if you see podcast downloads from Google podcasts, then you know that's someone who chose to download that either by pressing play or manually downloading. Almost as if you summoned him, James shows up on the round table. Hey, James, how are you? Hey, I'm really good. I'm really good. And let me tell you, if you talk about tomorrow to an Australian, what they think is they mean tomorrow, i.e. the day after today when you're planning something. So apologies for that, but hello, greetings. Awesome, James. Is that whole time zone thing? It is, yeah. James, what is your podcast? What is my podcast? Well, I run a thing called podnews.net, which is a- Yeah, we've already quoted it and plugged it. So just- Well, there you go. That's right. Excellent. And there happens to be a podcast on the back of that as well, which I notice is now number three in the iTunes, it's not really a chart in Slovenia. So that's exciting. Number three is Slovenia, concretely. Slovenia, it's the only country with love in its name. We're all number three somewhere in the world. That's all right. Find your country where your love the most. Maybe move there and be a king. Yeah. No, we don't do kings. All right, another debate. Welcome. We fulfilled our new round table. I wouldn't say requirement, but we'd like to have a new round table or it is James first time on the round table. We have gotten near the end. Sorry, James, I actually didn't even know where you're located, but awesome that you could jump in. We'll definitely have you back. But I was going to quote right from podnews.net. Actually, in my next sort of question, I have next step for podcasters. What to do? And from podnews.net. I should probably just leave this to James, but he puts how do I know I've linked correctly in your article with your video, which I sent people to and I'll be embedded in the show notes. And you talk about searching for your podcast on podnews.net. Why would we do that? You do that so that you can, because I've written something that will very easily check that you have linked correctly from your website to your RSS feed and that the link from your RSS feed back to your website is also correct as well. So I've essentially written something that just checks that basically for you. Now, yeah, it's a validator. It'll also check whether or not you have a secure RSS feed as well, which is also handy. And the reason for that isn't necessarily because you won't be in Google podcasts without it. The reason for that is that you will definitely be in Google podcasts with it and you will definitely get your listing in Google search correct as well. So there are many podcasts out there where Google search has, for whatever reason, attached the little play buttons in the search results to things like your listing on iTunes or weirdly on one of my podcasts, the listing on Castbox, which is a strange old thing. And so getting those links right will actually really, really help that. Very cool, yeah. Again, the secure RSS, we talked about that on the last round and then some compliance issues if you have with Google and Apple, the More Info tab, I had a search for that, but I found a little button that says More Info will give you some additional sort of those validator things, which is very cool. Yeah, it will indeed. And I'm planning to sort of make that a little bit larger in the fullness of time as well. Very cool. I'm curious, what's the best subscribe called action for podcasters now? I mean, Apple will tell you, hey, don't tell people to get podcasts wherever you get podcasts. That's what we hear most now. I feel like we're hearing this in the big shows, but Apple will say, you send people to Apple Podcasts. Of course, Apple says that, but now we have a very easy way for people to get on Android. I think you have to have two different links, one of them being Apple Podcasts, one of them Google Podcasts. Get rid of the rest, because actually, if you're using pocketcasts or you're using overcast or anything else, you know how that thing works. You know how to search for a podcast in there and all of that kind of stuff. But if we're gonna make it really easy for people, then making it really easy for people essentially means linking to the stuff that we know that they will definitely have. And that's one link to Apple Podcasts, one link to Google. If it was me, I will put the Google one on the top because there are more Android phones than there are iPhones, but you may differ. But that's absolutely cool. But make sure that they're the same size, make sure that they're the same weight because nobody likes to feel second best. So wouldn't it be awesome if, you know, for WordPress users, they had a plugin that could allow people to subscribe and follow that might someday automatically detect and prioritize the right button? Wouldn't that be cool? Well, so on the Pod Newsnet podcast pages I'm exactly doing that. So I'm linking to podcast apps so you can get this particular podcast on the device that you have looked at this page on. And so absolutely, the only issue with that is that there's no API yet for the Google podcast. So there's no way of finding out that weird feed ID from Google, which is a real shame. And if there was an API, then hey, Presto, we could do that tomorrow. Yeah, there is a way. I mentioned it earlier. It's base 64 encoded. It's simply the feed URL encoded in base 64. Right, I'm gonna write that down. I'm gonna build that. I'm gonna build that later today. Base 64. We're gonna have a competing bill. I feel like, Daniel. So do we think, Daniel, have you any word on if subscribe on Android is going to then automatically come up? It will. Yeah, subscribe on Android will support Google podcast probably in the next week or so at the time of this recording. Now, the bummer thing about that though, subscribe on Android works fantastic for those people who have one of those, I think now 15 or more podcast apps installed. I even tried it on my Android device. I loved how easy it was. What is unfortunate though, is that Google will probably never implement those 12 lines of code that Blueberry has created that would allow the simple two-click subscription option that subscribe on Android offers. However, what Blueberry is probably going to do with subscribeonandroid.com, that's what we're talking about, is they'll probably make it that the Google podcast link might be up at the top and they might even be able to put in some kind of code that says, all right, if none of these apps are installed, automatically take them to Google podcast. They might do that. They might not. We'll see. There's also no reason why you couldn't intercept the request for Google podcasts and open that in pocket casts. I mean, it happens right now if you try and click on an iTunes link, on an Android phone, it opens pocket casts. So there's probably no reason why you couldn't actually intercept that in terms of other things as well, but it would need to be an app thing rather than a subscribe to Android thing. Packet casts and BeyondPod are the only two Android apps I know of that do interpret iTunes links and open them themselves. That's cool. So, Dave, I just want to ask it, James, because you're on the other side of the pond and you have a pretty wide reach of what you get to see. How optimistic are you with this launch? Is this something where you're going, oh, this is great? Or are you going, eh, it might be something? Are you just like that? It's never going to work. I mean, I think I'm personally very optimistic. I've been somebody that uses Google products and Android products for a long, long time because I find Apple a little bit stifling. So I think from a point of view of podcasters, I'm pretty optimistic that one concern that I have is that podcasters themselves might not do it because every podcaster I've ever met uses iPhones and probably doesn't quite understand what the deal is. I think on the other side, I'm concerned that podcast hosts won't put the analytics in to actually show podcasters how well Google podcast is doing. And I'm concerned to discover that there are quite a few podcast hosts out there who simply aren't tracking that yet. And that's a really important thing. And as soon as Google podcast launches, it should be listed in your dashboard, so you can actually see how well that works. And I think particularly when you start having a look overseas outside of North America, where the amount of Android users is so much higher, this is a real step forward, I think, because you look at Spain, for example, Spain has 80% Android, 20% iPhone. Here in Australia, actually iPhone is in the lead, which is even more prevalent than the US, but there are certainly great pockets of the world where Android is the predominant platform and that can only be good news for podcasters if they link to the podcast feed from their website. And it's not doing that. That's a hugely important thing. What has been stopping Android listeners? Is this the thing that has been stopping, not really having a native way to get podcasts? Easy for the non-techie person, the person that listens to this show. Is this the thing? Is this what is gonna change listenership? Why the dominance of iOS for podcasts? You said producers, a lot of producers use it, but why the listeners? Why aren't they listening on Android? There's so many more of them. Is this it? Yeah. It may be. I mean, it's difficult to know, isn't it? I mean, Google Play in terms of podcasts was such a disaster that Google have never really sort of had a look at this. I mean, I think just from a really basic way for a podcaster to be able to, with one or maybe two links, to be able to go listen to this podcast now or follow or subscribe or whatever words that you want to use, and a button that actually works, whether or not you're using an Android phone or an iOS phone, so easy, so simple, so straightforward, that can only benefit where we are. Now, will it, I mean, it should theoretically, it should theoretically at least quadruple the amount of podcast downloads that we actually have. Will it do that? No, of course it won't. But will it have a good effect? I would have thought it does as long as we can actually see that effect in our lips in, in our omnistudial, whatever thing. As long as we can see that. Any respectable host will have your stats. And going back to that, is there no, there's no way we can get stats from Google, right? They're not going to have an ability to log into anything like a podcast connect to see stats, say that we're not on a platform that is supporting stats, we won't know, right? And I know Libsons are already working on that, so that, and I'm sure, the big ones that will have it. But you know, why are companies working on that when this has been in the, you know, this has been talked about for the last six months. This functionality has been in Android phones for two years. Why are podcast hosts, oh yeah, maybe we should consider this. You know, that's balmy from my point of view, but then, you know, that's my point of view. I think what could be happening is it depends on how the podcast host is coded. Libson, for example, and I just posted this to ask the Libson team, maybe Dave knows, but Libson, for example, you can look at the user agents. They specifically call them that, the user agents that have downloaded episodes. And I wonder, does Libson just automatically pass whatever through or do they whitelist first? So like, for example, with the new GSA and Google Chirp, user agents, are those showing up automatically or does Libson have to say, okay, any user agent, I mean, let this user agent show up? Does Libson have to change any backend code? I don't think they do because you can see the actual user agents. I think it might be some of the other podcast analytics companies. Blueberry, they're really on top of things, so I don't expect them to have any lag in this. But I think some of the other companies where they do filter the user agents to just tell you, like, mobile apps. How does the IAB standards come into play there, do you think? There is this whitelisting, but that's not, that's just not user agents. What I mean by whitelisting is a whitelisting in the wrong term, more like passing through exactly the data they receive versus categorizing it or labeling it, relabeling it. Like a speaker or a pod track might readable to say, okay, anything that's coming from Stitcher and GSA and Overcast and Pocketcast and Google Chirp, let's lump all of these together and simply label it mobile apps. So if a stats company does that, then yes, they do need to update their code to say also include GSA. But if they simply pass the user agent through, like I know at least Lipson does, or probably does, then Lipson might not have to make any change. I think the only thing we've ever done is if we found a bot, you know, I remember Rob talks about there was somebody that made an app and their user agent was changed this later. That's a great point. Why haven't we done this? For me, I think it's just the Google Graveyard. I felt bad, I was in Nashville and they were rolling out this thing called Google Bulletin. It's only available, I think, in San Francisco. And they said, what do you think about this? And I said, well, I'm not putting anything worth value in this. And they said, why is that? I said, because you guys kill half the stuff you make. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that's part of the, it could be. You know, it's like, sure they're gonna make an app. Sure they are. So we'll see, but now that it's here, I'm with you. I'm fairly optimistic. After watching your video especially and seeing what happens even if it's not installed at all or whatever, I was like, oh, okay. That's really important. That's really important. The fact that it just works, the fact that they've managed to get a podcast experience onto every phone out there. And there's a lot of conversations on Facebook and stuff about, but this needs to be an app and it needs to be installed on every single phone. Like kind of is already installed on every single phone. And I think the presence of a little icon saying podcasts clearly isn't that exciting to anybody that doesn't know what a podcast is and doesn't know why they should listen. We should be leading first with content rather than leading first with, there's this thing that you don't understand called a podcast here. Why don't you press this button? Because that's never gonna work. So I'm pretty excited about it. And I think particularly for ex-US stuff. I mean, on the other side, the needs to be, if Google are clever, then they will give you, give podcasts to you. They will give you, give podcasters some form of stats. They will do the podcast trending chart as Apple has done. It's a great thing to motivate podcasters. It's a great thing to get podcasters excited. Number three in Slovenia in the podcasting category. So actually, that's a really important thing. And it would be great to see Google doing some of that social reaffirmation of this is a podcast app that lots of people are using and you should be using it as much as you possibly can do. Because without that it's gonna fail. What's the number one podcasting category out? Who's beating you out in Slovenia in the podcasting category? Because I bet it's not a podcast or a podcasting. Yeah, I've got absolutely no idea. You're not as obsessed as you sound because most people would know. I literally, I'm using a piece of software which is brand new. It was in pod news a couple of days ago which actually sends you emails every single day of your ranks. It's called podcharts.co and it's completely automatic and I had no idea. I'm number 89 in Australia. How exciting, but I don't care that much to be honest. I think there's an extremely ironic joke here that Google made something that just works. Way to go, way to go. Hey, Daniel, I know that Colligan had maybe some flip side thoughts of this. Unfortunately, he couldn't join us to, Paul Colligan couldn't join us to supply those thoughts but you guys were almost having a little bit of a debate. Did he have some flip side to this that you can present or he can give it to us later? I think his basic flip side was that it's a cheap start. Yeah, and it wasn't installed, I think was his thing and that's when I saw James' video went, okay, nevermind, that's off the charts. That's not a real relevant, yeah. My thing at this point is kind of what James was talking about is number one, we've got to put links on our website. I go to so many podcasters that are like, I have somebody have a client next week I'm working with. They're like, how can I get more downloads? I go to their website, they have one button that says subscribe, it takes them to iTunes. I'm like, well, there's an easy one right there. Give, you know, 80% of your audience has a phone that you can't, you're ignoring. And so I always wonder sometimes, and I'm not taking anything away from Apple. They've done a lot for podcasters, but I always wonder if it's the chicken or the egg. Yes, they gave us, they were the first person to give us one click subscriptions, but then we've done nothing but drive people to vote and subscribe and review and vote. So is it big because they've done so much or just because we keep talking about them? So if we took all that effort and now cut it in half and gave that much love to Google and saying, hey, it's on the website, go and click on subscribe if you're on Android, you know, maybe we can get those Android numbers to go up. So Dave, that goes back to my call to action. Are you going to specifically promote, you know what I mean? You're gonna have a call to action to subscribe to your podcast. Are you gonna be specific about where to do that or are you just gonna go with what you normally do which is your generic subscribe link on your website? Or are you gonna actually make an active push? I will do both, like this week because it's brand new. I'm gonna obviously be mentioning it here. I'm gonna, and I'm gonna set up, you know, schoolofpodcasting.com slash Google, it's not there yet, don't go there now. And then I'll say, and if you're not on a Google Android, just go to schoolofpodcasting.com slash Android, I've got every link you need imaginable. But yeah, we definitely need to talk about it and we need to make it, again, obvious. Don't make subscribe buttons that are, you know, 50 pixels by 60 pixels, make something that's big that you can see on a phone and put it in their face. One of the things I'm really excited about from, sorry to use this word, but discovery is this, this can actually address that discovery issue that some people debate whether it exists. We're okay on this show. We can go discovery, it's all right. What's really neat, so this is Google. Google knows more about you than your spouse does. And what I've heard many people say is things like, wow, the app knows what kind of podcasts I'd like because it suggests to them certain podcasts, like Emily Prokop, for example, I think posted a screenshot that showed that it suggested school of podcasting and the audacity to podcasting. These things, how did it know that? It knows that because of her search history. So there's one thing that once people get into the app, it's going to know that, wow, you've searched for podcasting related things or you've searched for underwater basket weaving related things for the last year. We'll suggest some of these podcasts to you that seem relevant to these searches. That's really cool. What's also really cool from the search aspect and discovery is that because Google is integrating the podcast discovery into search results, people on Android devices who are looking for topics are going to start seeing podcasts suggested among the search results for those topics. Now I've tried a couple searches myself that I thought for sure would show up a podcast, but it didn't, but at some point that probably, I don't know if it's just an indexing thing or a priority or ranking in the charts or what, but I need to do more testing. Again, you're welcome, Google. So that means that a lot of other people are going to see, oh, here's this thing that's relevant to what I just searched for. I'll just press play on it and it takes them to the built-in podcast app, giving them the option to say, hey, do you want to subscribe to this or hey, do you want to add an icon for this to your home screen? I don't want to subscribe because that clearly means I have to pay for it. Yeah. Is that an option? I never, I think these days, I don't know. We should be okay. Anyways, that's a joke for noobs. I'm excited about it. You know, I had on, does this change podcasting? We kind of talked about it's, I think, another next, one of those mile markers in the sort of road we've gone down and we've seen these sort of steps. I think this is definitely one of them. But, you know, I think if you're a podcast producer, we've helped you discover if you're on Google Podcast, how to get there if you're not. Definitely get in touch with one of us if you're having trouble with that because we kind of fumbled through and that can be a little difficult if you're not there already, but most people will be and you can check how to do that. Podnews.net is a great way to check for several reasons. And yeah, I mean, I think this is, it's a big enough deal to give it its whole round. So again, Google, you're welcome. Free advertising, but as we go out here, if there's anything else you think a podcast producer needs to know that we haven't covered, go ahead or maybe give us your thoughts on if you think this changes podcasting, whatever, Dave will make you go first. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, Dave Jackson School of Podcasting.com. I think this definitely has potential. I think it's up to the podcaster now to, they've given us something to play with. Now we gotta make sure people know it exists and make it easy again for them to subscribe. If you go to school, if we talked a lot about this, if you go to schoolofpodcasting.com, I have a post on this called linking to your show on Google Podcasts app. And I've got a video that shows you how to do it. So if you're a little confused, feel free to look me up and check that out. Yeah, and I think, I mean, as Daniel just talked about that what is also really exciting is that it's not just on the podcaster. Obviously you need to be in there, but at some level, Google's taking that away, not needing the podcaster. If it's on your site, it's RSS, maybe on your host, whatever, they're just taking it and they're populating things. You may not even know you're there, people are listening there, but also it just helps, takes the producer and the listener out of it and just kind of puts those together automatically in some cases where it's gonna surface in search results, which is what I've just always wanted to say, there is a podcast about this thing that you love. So I'm hoping that it does take some of that need to that sort of onus on the producer or the listener to go out and get an app, takes that out of their hands and just starts showing them podcasts. So I'm excited in that way too, but Daniel, thanks for joining. Thanks for coming back. Thanks for being okay. We're so happy to see you and that smile. We got deep tech smiles, Daniel's back. We're so happy, so welcome back. Thanks guys, and I appreciate all the support. Two things I want to close out with, one is that you need to try this app yourself. If you don't have an Android device yourself, go out to the store, go out to Best Buy or somewhere, try the app, play around with it a little bit so that you can adapt your language to be more universal or even more specific when you want to talk about how to subscribe on Android so that you're not telling everyone, hey, rate and review me in iTunes or anything like that. I mean, iTunes even as a name, I think iTunes, by the way, as a brand, it's gonna go completely away, I think in the next couple of years, I think, but play with the app so you get familiar with it so you know what kind of experience your potential audience might have and that way you can give proper instructions. You can make sure those links work. The second tip is if you are testing one of your links, like if you're doing something like Dave mentioned, schoolofpodcasting.com slash Google or Google Podcast or whatever little URL you use, or if you're testing your links, don't panic if they don't work inside of your Google Android browser because there's something I've noticed a little strange where if you put the URL in the address bar, it doesn't work or it takes you to the store where you can download the app, but if you click on a link inside the browser, it does work. So it's just a little weird behavior, so don't panic. If you wanna test it yourself, just put that link on your page, tap on that instead of trying to enter it into the browser. I'm Daniel J. Lewis from theodacitytopodcast.com, coming back very soon. All right, and James, thanks for joining us here at the end, unfortunately I didn't get you in, that's partly my fault, but we will have you back because you have a ton to offer to the round table and to the audience, thanks for joining us. It's great to be here, thank you very much. And where should we go, where do we wanna find, we know, this actually has been a pretty good plug for podnews.net, but you should definitely go there to keep up with the podcast. I miss most of it. It makes it more credible that you weren't here and we plugged it anyways. What's the one link that people can use to, you have the one link that people can use to test? Yeah, so if you just visit podnews.net and you search for your own website, sorry, you search for your own podcast, then that has all of the testing on there and just checks that you've got everything set up. And it also links to the FAQ, which, and basically from my point of view, make sure you're listed in Google podcasts, add that direct link and use the badge, very important to use the badge. Always promote your website, stop promoting iTunes because that's silly, because you're annoying 50% of your audience and subscribe to podnews.net because it's very good and it's free. Very cool. All right, well, thanks everyone for joining us. Who's still here in the live, but if you're not live, thanks for listening, because that's where most of you, we know, it almost still comes from the download, but we have the super user here. No, it's for the people who can make it. Live is difficult. Try to spread around these times. This is a different time of day. Oh, it's the same time of day, different day. So anyways, we will try to serve everyone best we can. We will continue to keep going in round 113 next time, podcastersroundtable.com slash guest. If you want to be on the round table, you can submit there. I need to change it up a little bit because our format's slightly different, but this one's different. I've always pitched the show as an experiment, so we just keep playing around. Hopefully you enjoy it. Thanks for subbing. Thanks for hitting that YouTube page. Wherever you're coming from, we really appreciate it. And we'll see you next time. We'll talk to you next time. We do both. Wave goodbye. See ya. Thanks, everyone.