 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Mark Gibson, Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey, and our lifetime supporter, MTJ. On this episode of DTNS, is Reddit finally going public? Who will win the AI search engine wars? And is podcasting dead? The following program says no. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 18th, 2024 from Studio Animal House I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dungaloo. From Deep in the Art of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh boy, are we going to talk about podcasting being dead? Clearly not, because here we are, all of us, and, you know, I would say... I feel alive, I feel alive. Yeah, we're the most bullish of all the podcasting pundits. But, let's start the show with the quick hits. Google CEO Sundar Pachai said in an internal memo to staff that recent layoffs are about removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas. Pachai also confirmed additional layoffs are coming, but said role elimination nations will not be at the levels of 2023. That's when Google cut more than 12,000 jobs. Pachai also said, quote, we have ambitious goals that we will be investing in in our priorities this year. The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices. The U.S. State of Iowa is suing TikTok on grounds the app is lying to parents about the accessibility of mature content on the app and setting the app store page, or should say this app store age rating too low. Wednesday, Iowa Attorney General Brenner Byrd claimed in a lawsuit that TikTok is making this kind of content easily accessible to young users while maintaining an inaccurate 12 plus age rating on the Apple app store. EA has announced the third installment of the very popular Plants vs. Zombies mobile game. Plants vs. Zombies 3, welcome to Zomberbia, has soft launched in select countries like the UK, Netherlands, Australia, the Philippines and Ireland. EA says PVZ3, as it's known for short, will become available in more countries at a later date while it collects feedback during the soft launch period. Apple's Vision Pro makes reality headsets, and will launch pre-orders tomorrow for $3,500, but Netflix will not be part of the initial partnership. Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Max and Paramount+, all have special applications for the Vision Pro. Netflix, however, told Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, our members will be able to enjoy Netflix on the web browser of the Vision Pro similarly to how members can enjoy on Netflix's own Macs. That's a diss. OpenAI announced a deal with Arizona State University where students, faculty and staff will have full access to chatGPT Enterprise and plans to use it for our coursework, tutoring, research and more, starting in February. ASU Chief Information Officer Lev Gonek first visited OpenAI's HQ six months ago after the university faculty and staff's earlier use of chatGPT and other AI tools were already in place. Those were the cool kits. Let's talk about Reddit going public. Alright, now this is just a rumor, but boy has it been a long-standing rumor. Social media platform Reddit announced plans to launch an initial public offering by the end of March, March 2024. Moving forward with the listing, it has been eyeing for more than three years. Now Reddit was valued at $10 billion back in 2021. It's now looking to sell about 10% of its shares. The company will decide on that valuation as it gets closer to the time of its listing, making its IPO in February, if that happens, followed by a roadshow in early March. Reddit's IPO would be the first of a major social media company since Pinterest back in 2019. Now normally a company maybe or maybe not going IPO isn't huge news. This is what lots of startups do, but this is Reddit. Justin, what are you thinking about this? Well, Reddit obviously has long been gestating and has had an up-and-down relationship with its relevance in terms of social media, but now it's old growth. It is something that has been there for a long time. Reddit's reputation of being kind of the wild west is sort of, I think, more of a reputation and less of a reflection of the website that it is now. They've done a lot of content moderation. However, if you are going to take this public, then I do think that there are some questions about some of the, let's say, adult content that does exist on Reddit. Does that change? But by and large, I think this is kind of a long time coming. It feels that way to me too, but Rob, we were talking before the show that, you know, once you go public, especially something like Reddit may change quite a bit. Hopefully, it won't be too much, but something has to change because if they're publicly traded, they're going to have a CFO who has a financial responsibility to grow shareholder growth. That is what they're there for. So Reddit's going to have to think about different things, or I should say think about things differently because they are publicly traded and they do have that fiduciary responsibility. But hopefully, and this is what you said, Justin, they've kind of been operating in big boy company mode for a while now, even though they have a reputation of not having done that. But that reputation really stems from years ago. Lately, they've really run like a company. So we'll see how this goes. I hope not too much changes, but something has to, if you're publicly traded, things are different than the day before you were. Yeah, I think some of the decisions that they've made over the last year make a lot more sense depreciating third party apps so they can make sure that they have an integrated ad experience. That's going to be a huge, huge deal if they go public. Because like you said, Rob, it's better that they make that decision before than it is after where everybody is blaming the share price. And let's not forget that the whole GameStop situation was something that was birthed on Reddit, right? Like this is something that existed there. This is a very, very active user base. It's a very engaged user base. But if we're going to look at this compared to other social media companies, I think that Reddit has been far more responsible, mostly because they have a strong mod culture, something that used to be a bedrock element of Internet message boards. And since the advent of social media has been pretty well depreciated. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm sorry, Rob, Reddit to me, you know, at this point is there are certain subreddits that I follow. Our DTNS one is one of those. But in many cases, to search for something on the Internet these days, because you get just the Wild West, speaking of Wild West, of search results to condense that down to like, well, what are they talking about on Reddit? For example, I am in the market to buy a new television. You know, do I just say new TV go? I mean, I can. But like the Reddit subreddits of people who are like talking about TVs all day every day is great. That is what Reddit is great for. Now, an IPO isn't going to make any of that stuff go away. But yes, moderation policies may change. And, you know, certain subreddits that, you know, either prolificate now or might in the future, you know, sort of remains to be seen. Yeah, Reddit is a social media network. But Sarah, you made this comment in the green room. It's almost a search engine as well. In fact, I actively go search things and I'm trying to find the truth for on Reddit. When I just see something on another social media platform or that doesn't really sound right. Let me go to Reddit to see, you know, what the Redditors are saying about this and maybe have additional links to go find out whether or not something is true or not. Well, because if anybody is going to be crabs in a barrel and drag down anything for any reason, it's going to be a message board. And Reddit right now is the biggest version of what we once knew as the message board. Right. Like, yeah, they are. It is a community that has some interoperability. You can start any board that you want and ultimately the ones that succeed are the ones that are moderated the best that that is, you know, old school, the way we used to do it on the Internet of information dissemination. I don't think that moderation necessarily will change because as we pointed out, Reddit made a lot of those decisions probably about five years ago. What I do think is that Reddit monetizing themselves will be more and more of a way to do it because there's only so far that advertising is going to spread. Reddit has always consistently had a problem with getting a full ad load and selling as many ads as they possibly can. However, are there ways that you can maybe wire cutter ask some of those, you know, television subreddits like you mentioned, Sarah, maybe. And I think that those might be more of the fights going forward, maybe less affiliate links unless you also cut Reddit in. So Microsoft's AI assistant launched as part of being search engine. About a year ago, it was then called being chat today. It's called co-pilot. But as much investment as Microsoft has put into AI, being according to data from Stack Counter gain less than 1% market share up to 3.4% and is still a distant second from market leader Google with over 91% of search. By most accounts, Microsoft's co-pilot is quite good as an AI chat bot. Is the slow crawl of being search market share more to do with just people not thinking that being is a search engine? Or, you know, is it does it have to do with, you know, using chat bots is kind of a new thing? Or is it maybe a combination of the two? Does Google's market strength in search give, you know, does it, you know, because Google is just so far ahead. Does it does it seem like Google ultimately is doing better because Bard is not quite there yet? It has to catch up. You know, I want to get your guys's thought on that. Well, I would say that Google is just, I mean, I mean, we, if you listened to DTNS yesterday, you heard me say like, I just use Google for everything. I know I have other options and I use them when necessary. In fact, I'm on Firefox for the show. But, but, you know, that's a browser as far as a, you know, the search engine experience. We are all programmed to know how to use that search engine because of the capabilities that it has. However, the landscape is changing. You know, co-pilot, great example of this. Microsoft doesn't have a huge, you know, obviously does not have a huge market share as far as search engines go. But does that change in five years? Does it take two or maybe fewer? I'm not shocked by this. Google is the definition of search, literally, for the vast majority of their, you know, the available user base. If you want to search for something, you Google it. That's that. Right. Few things that we need to remember here. Microsoft does not need Bing to succeed. Google needs search to succeed because they need AdWords to succeed. That's what keeps the lights on there. If Microsoft went really, really, really hard on Bing, let's say in the Super Bowl a few weeks from now, the first ad is a Bing search ad, or a co-pilot ad that is giving you the co-pilot challenge switch from Google to co-pilot and, I don't know, we'll give you $100 or something like that. And then a year from now, we still saw them in the ones and twos in terms of market percentage. I would think twice about it. But I don't think that the average user thinks of a chatbot as a replacement for search right now. Will that change over the next two years? Five years? Ten years? I do think so. But right now, it's mostly people who are plugged into this kind of stuff that even think of it like that. And I think we might be falling into a little bit of the inside the tech bubble by saying, well, I've been talking about chat GPT for a year, and they only have 1%. It's got to be failing. No, no, no. This stuff takes time. The existential crisis is if we did start seeing meaningful percentages being eaten into Google's dominance, that's like five alarm crisis for Palo Alto. Yeah, for Google. That is absolutely Mountain View. Sorry. That is an absolute freak show for them, because they need, need, need that. Microsoft sells Azure. They're into AI so they can sell their version of the API to their customers that they have been working with for 40 years now. That's where they're making their money. It's not on search. I tend to agree with you, Justin. But I did think that with just all the hoopla that was coming out about chat GPT, which Microsoft put a significant investment in, that being chat at the time was powered by, what co-pilot is somewhat powered by. I thought that they would do a little better in the search engine. I'm not talking about 10%, 12%. I was thinking maybe 2%, 3%, 4%, maybe even 5%, just making a dent because Google wasn't doing it yet. It was something that was kind of novel, and I thought that people would say, oh, let me go check this out. Well, I guess a few did, but it was just a few because they were already growing at that rate. Not really catching up on Google, just taking a bit of market share from everybody else. So it really didn't, didn't play at all into their growth as far as how big Bing is as a search engine. And I don't want to say that that's shocking or surprising. I just thought that it would be a little bit more. I thought that it would be, you know, kind of where I was thinking. I think we're getting into, you know, a situation where it's sort of, we have to ask ourselves like, okay, the old way of searching where you understand keywords, you use the keywords that are going to apply to your query the most, but it isn't natural language necessarily that in theory is supposed to change with something like Microsoft's Copilot where you just sort of go like, hey, robot, I'm looking for a TV. Here's the things I'm interested in. Help me. Help me find the thing. And those, those are two very different experiences. Now I'm aging myself a little bit by saying, well, I'm kind of good with keywords, but that's because that was the only option I ever had. And I think there's a retraining situation that some of us are going through. And that's why, you know, we kind of sit around and go, well, is this really going to work? I think if Copilot works well, then yes. I mean, and the kids will show us the way. Well, you know, you know who talks about this stuff? AI Name This Show. So if you, if you want to get more into the world of artificial intelligence, because it really does move fast, what you need to do is listen to AI Name This Show each week, Tristan Jutra, and Tayshia Kastodi keep you informed on the latest news in the AI world. Catch it at www.aimamethisshow.com. Semaphore's Max Taney wrote a story titled The Incredible Shrinking Podcast Industry. Ooh, the focus is on the impact on podcasting, specifically stemming from Apple's decision last September to turn off auto downloads on shows that subscribers weren't listening to frequently. Now, if you subscribe to a lot of podcasts, this might apply to you, but you might not have known what was going on under the hood. Shows that publish frequently, like our show, or the New York Times is the daily, date line, tawny notes, all the most heavily impacted. Now you might agree, changes are necessary. We want to, you know, not necessarily deflate a podcast bubble, but know a little bit more about where those numbers are coming from and exactly what they are. But they've also called into question add deals made previously under different assumptions, namely that shows were getting more listeners than they're actually getting. And viewers, depending on the show, because of this change, how dependent is media on large tech platforms? Justin, podcasting isn't dead. Look at us right now. But do we think the industry may have been overvalued? Yes. There were some stories that came out around the pandemic time that were absolutely gobsmacking. Let's forget about the Joe Rogan deal. Let's forget about Spotify buying the ringer, buying Gimlet. Let's forget about them offering Harry and Meghan millions of dollars so they could produce six episodes. There was a lavish overspending in the world of podcasting because of the promise of numbers that came out of the pandemic. Was that wise? No. In hindsight, there was a lot of overspending. Although I do wish that I could get $10,000 an episode to publish podcast for dog and pony show audio like some other people did according to the New York Times. With all that being said, it is not necessarily necessary, but it is a reality that if you eliminate dead downloads, un-listened to downloads from the totals of some of these episodes, you're going to get a better sense of actual listenership even if it comes at the cost of raw numbers for which you sell advertising against because that's really what this is all about. Advertisers want to know it's CPM, cost per thousand listeners or thousand downloads that they are getting their money's worth. Eliminating the dead downloads makes that more of a real number. Does that make the industry as a whole less valuable? For raw advertising, yes. But I would argue that's not the strength of podcasting. It isn't. And when you really think about this from a numbers game, it's just the iOS 17, that update actually took away some of the download numbers that you're going to get only within the podcast app. I don't use an iPhone, but what is it called? It's just Apple podcast. So that's just one app. And I want to say they're in the 13 to 15% range. So even if that number goes down pretty far south, which it looks like it has in the case of a lot of these companies, that's still just a fraction of the overall number of people that are listening to shows. If I remember correctly, I think that actually YouTube is now the number one way that people get their podcast listening as far as weekly users are concerned. And we know that Google is putting ads all kind of ways inside of all of that content. So I think a bigger part of this and you alluded to this, you know, is that it goes back to the pandemic. And one of the things that companies always do, and this isn't just media companies and podcasting companies. This is just companies in general. Whenever they have a boom that was not because of anything they did, in this case, the boom to podcasting was because of the pandemic. They always do a very, very poor job of podcasting what is going to be like after that time goes away. So as you were saying, you have all of these companies that we're putting out just millions of dollars in many cases to get podcasting content, not thinking about, well, wait a minute, when people go back to work, when people become creatures of the habits that they had formed for the last, you know, 50, 60, 70 years of media, how are they going to go back to that as compared to what we are in now just for this two and a half, three year period of the pandemic? I don't think that they forecast it well, but this was very foreseeable. If you really just thought about, people are going to go back to work, people are going to get back to doing things the way they used to do them, and they're just not going to listen with the fervor that they did when they were captive audiences inside of their living rooms. I mean, look at all the companies that are laying people off now, being like, yeah, we over-hired, or we hired for what was right for us at the time, and it no longer is. You know, podcast industry is not exempt from that. Being behind the curtain on our podcast that we're doing right now, but also others that I work on on various bases, I mean, the number one question I get from people who are like, okay, Sarah, you know how to do this, but we don't, what are our numbers? And it's like, okay. Here's my best guesstimate of what your numbers are based on the information that even I as the producer have behind the scenes. We all know how this goes. If you're just listening to a podcast, you might not know how hard it is to tell somebody with authority, this is how many people listen to your last episode last week, because when RSS feed does wonders for numbers, but it only goes so far, it's very confusing. And I think we're in an over-correction period now where advertisers are sort of like, well, what are your numbers really? And Apple's like, yeah, we probably shouldn't be counting like these downloaded numbers of someone who is for sure not listening to your show. Not even because they don't like the show. They just, I don't know. They've got other options. They got busy, whatever it is, those are numbers that shouldn't be counted in theory. But when you're somebody who is depending on Adreve for your livelihood, that's where it gets really tricky. And that's where it's hard for me to say, yeah, slash those numbers, give me the real deal, because it's a rude awakening. I would love inflated numbers. I would love it if somebody, and look, there's a reason why television people will complain about Nielsen, but we'll never go away from Nielsen because it's a coin flip. Sometimes it says nobody watched and sometimes it says way more people than actually watched because of the way that they do their numbers. It'd be nice to be television, but the reality is the podcasting is not a passive medium. Podcasting is an outgrowth of not radio, but talk radio, a very specific brand of art, which has never been gigantic because it is extraordinarily passive. Now you're always going to have your monsters in the world of talk radio, and I'm sure the names that you're thinking in your head probably stand out. Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Colin Coward, the list goes on and on. However, the one thing that is real about talk radio is not the raw numbers, but the passion. And passion being monetizable is relatively new compared to the kind of advertising that we were talking about here, which is pretty dumb pipe stuff. You have number, you have demo, here is product. Read this script. We move on. Passion though, like we see on Patreon, like we see through direct donations, that creates a monetizable reality that I don't think supports the same kind of staffs necessarily that people might be thinking if you want to transfer radio to podcasting, but it does create a lot of opportunity and the kind of content that listeners really, really like. So while raw display programmatic advertising may be something that's really hurt by this and Rob, I hear your point, podcast might not be the biggest, but it is the oldest. And that means that it has more of this problem than a younger platform would because you've just subscribed to for people that have been on that platform forever, you've just subscribed to a million podcasts and some of them have just fallen out of favor but keep downloading. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I compare this to as a, as a consumer of content, there are only so many hours in the day. I might like 10 podcasts a lot and I only have my certain hours in the day. Some of those just can't not be consumed. It can't be done. So, you know, and television, to your point, Justin, Nielsen, Radiance, a little, a little iffy sometimes, but we all know that. No one is like, oh, Sarah, did you watch 24 hours of television yesterday? No, of course not. That's impossible. But podcast numbers have always been a little muddy in that regard. So, yeah, I guess we're just, we're, we're getting back down to reality at this point. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Not every day we get an email from somebody who cares a lot about NASCAR but today's that day. Joshua in frozen Indiana, Joshua, I hope you defrost soon said, you're talking about the NFL game that was exclusive to Peacock, reminded me about the new NASCAR broadcast contract that starts with the 2025 season. NASCAR consists of three main series, the 23 NASCAR truck series, the 33 race NASCAR Xfinity series and the 38 race NASCAR Cup series. Starting in 2025, all 23 races of the truck series will be broadcast on the non-Disney part of Fox Sports. The Xfinity series will all have practice, qualifying and race day broadcasts shown on CW. Are you keeping up with Joshua? He goes on. Race day broadcasts for the Cup series will be split as follows. The first 14 races will either be on Fox or FS1, then five on Amazon Prime and the next five are on TNT and simulcast on the BR Sports ad on to Max. Final 14 on either NBC or USA Networks. Practice and qualifications for the first half of the season minus the two exhibition races and the Daytona 500 will be on Prime Video. Practice and qualifying for the second half of the season will be on True TV. Fox pertains the rights for practice and qualifying at the two exhibition races and Daytona. Joshua says, as far as I'm aware, this will be the first time a points pain NASCAR event will be exclusive on a streaming only network, that being Amazon Prime. Joshua says, the only reason I pay for YouTube TV is to watch sports, be it NASCAR, NFL, MLB or NCAA football. But now that I'm writing this, maybe YouTube TV is cheaper than getting it all a cart. Boogity boogity boogity. Oh man. I learned a lot about NASCAR just now. Joshua is into NASCAR. Yes, he is. Also, even if you're into NASCAR, I could see where your options are very confusing. Maybe you can save some money here and there, but boy, you really got to know where that race is before you get the network. The reality of this is that sports rights have been in a gigantic spike for about 15 years now, if not more, where the number has just gotten astronomical and astronomical, as the advent of the DVR meant that live mattered a lot more. And the only thing that still matters live is news and sports. That's it. Everything else you can catch whenever you want now that everything kind of floats around. But to keep up the pace of all that money, a lot of these leagues, including the NFL, have to start making deals with the big tech power players and they're going to demand exclusivity. And if that's the case, then you're going to get wacky stuff like this, where the chiefs and the dolphins are on peacock and half this NASCAR season is going to be on Amazon Prime. I mean, there's not as many NASCAR fans as there are NFL fans, but there are a lot of them. And I would have to imagine that if you've got to jump through all these hoops to watch your race, that's going to get really, really frustrating after a while or you need to be signed up to multiple services, whether it be streaming over the air, whatever the case is. If you've got multiple things you've got to hook up to just to be able to watch your race, that's going to make you feel some kind of way. That's going to lead to all the NASCAR grandkids that are going to have to do some real hardcore tech support for their family over this year. Yeah, thanks to Joshua for writing in with all that information. And yes, if you have thoughts on how this could be more easily consumed, do let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. So you know who else we also need to thank? Justin Robert Young. Hey. Well, I am fresh out of the cornfields, the frozen, and I mean, negative 20 degrees frozen cornfields of Iowa last weekend for the Iowa caucus. And I will be in the air tomorrow morning at six o'clock so I can be in the granite state of New Hampshire for the first in the nation primary. Yes, friends, it is primary season and politics, politics, politics is on the ground for it. Find it in any of those pod catchers that we mentioned in the previous segment. So you too can get independent on the ground journalism where it matters. Politics, politics, politics. Patron sticking around for the extended show Good Day Internet. We'll talk more about the wading through the news gunk and how it's getting harder, not easier. Just a reminder, we do the show live and you can watch us live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. You could listen as well. We don't care. We just love to have you. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow. Len Peralta will be joining us. Talk to you then.