 Podcast is roundtable round 122. Is there any hope for Google podcast? Didn't we just have like a round where we talked about, oh my goodness, Google podcasts is here, but we'll dig into what that means. And of course, other articles slash new stories, whatever you want to call them that we've chosen for this round. But let's meet the actual roundtable, what we have so far. Hi, Dave Jackson, cohost, welcome back. Yeah, Dave Jackson from the School of Podcasting.com. Very quick to be here. Yeah, and John, is this your first roundtable? This is my second roundtable. The last one I was on was with Minion Fogarty. So that was a while ago. And now you get Paul Colligan right next to you. Now I get Paul Colligan. John Wilkerson from the Wired Home School. Man. Glad to be here. And of course, the voice of Mr. Paul Colligan, welcome back. Yeah, thank you. I'm sorry, John, for Minion to me. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? All right, so Daniel will be joining us later on. So let's dive into, I guess we can lead off with the teaser of the title. Is there any hope for Google podcast? Now we did, this is pretty new. Paul, how old is Google podcast? How long have we been doing this? My memory is so bad. How long have we had Google podcast in the wild? What was last podcast movement? Yeah. So June, July, May. Sounds about right. All right, a little longer than even I thought. So that's good. We have an ample time under our belts, but I don't know that it's doing what we'd hoped it would do, at least let's say that much. Although podcasting is a slow growth medium, I think that we can probably agree on that. Maybe it's just growing at the pace of podcasting. But there's a cool article and forgetting the name. Let me see, I do have it pulled up here. It is from Steve Goldstein on rainnews.com. Of course, the links will be in the show notes, either in your app. You should be able to swipe and find them if you want to read the articles later. If you're watching live, Dave will post the link in the chat. All right, if you are watching live, podcast.downtable.com slash live, that would be cool. You can put your opinions in the chat, but rainnews and yeah, podcast.downtable.com slash live is where you watch the live and chat and then the links will be in the show notes, which I said that said this article gave a bunch of, it interviewed via texts a lot of people like Rob Walsh, James Cridlin, Todd Cochran, Seth Ressler. So a couple of people who have their ear in the space and ask them, why is the Google Podcast app failing so hard? That's the premise. That is what the title of the article says. And there's some good advice in here, stuff that I think Google should listen to and follow hopefully because, I don't know, Dave, do you think, have you been satisfied with Google Podcast and what it's done for podcasting? Has it done anything for us? It's done something for us, but you know what I mean. There's two things that I think is part of the problem. I was at somebody's website today that was saying how there was a discussion on our ever popular topic of new and noteworthy and somebody said, oh, this person really shot it. Well, they only had Apple on their website. That was it. That was the only way you could subscribe. And I'm like, well, apparently they don't care about anybody in Europe. And so it would be interesting to see if we gave the same amount of promotion to Google Podcast that we do to Apple Podcast, if that would help anything. But the other thing is, for me, I don't promote it a whole lot because the app is almost not an app. I mean, that's the thing that really surprised me. I expected it to come out with at least the ability to make a playlist, the ability to have downloads. If it's gonna match overcast, I love the fact that in overcast, I can set the play speed per episode or per podcast. So when Paul comes on, it's definitely 1x. When somebody else comes on, it's 2.5. And so I was really surprised when it came out that I went, wait, is this it? I was like, where's like, you still can't tell that app. Hey, when I subscribed to a podcast, just download it to my phone. So it doesn't, I mean, it's a new app. We don't expect it to work wonderfully. I mean, people still complain about the Apple Podcast app, but they certainly recommend that app. And there's apps that work better than that app. I mean, I use Pocketcast, Overcast, these are better apps than Apple Podcast, but it doesn't stop us from incessantly saying, subscribe in iTunes or Apple Podcast or having a link, like you said, to only an Apple link. So is that the whole thing? I mean, that is a good question. Paul, would you promote an app based on if you think the user experience is good or not? No, my big thing is I promote shows and then I let the user figure out how to consume it. I think that's part of our power is however they want to consume it. They're the ones who won't do anything unless it's overcast, and they're the ones who will, my mom listens to podcast on the iHeart Radio app on our Kindle Fires. So I don't necessarily promote the app. And I think that's part of it. And I also think we're in a stage where we, I mean, Apple's gonna get the most downloads followed by Overcast, maybe Spotify through demographics, right? And it's sort of a chicken and an egg. We're not promoting Google Podcast because it's a tiny number. And because we're not promoting Google Podcast, it's a tiny number. I do have an interesting twist to bring out of this conversation. I've got a client who quietly launched the video version of his podcast and didn't tell anybody. So a very popular audio podcast quietly launches his video version with no promotion at all. And what's interesting is the Google Bot Video User Agent, which is what I'm guessing it would be for a video podcast, is actually higher than Overcast, higher than Cast Box, higher than Pocket Casts. So when people are searching the internet for this particular person, Google Bot Video is performing better than some of the others out there. Had another client who did not promote at all for the first about month and a half. And Google Podcast did pop up in the top 10. So there is some being found in search. There is some, but the problem is, it's just a freaking mess. I was trying to clean this up for a client and I reached out to Zach and I said, hey, Zach, the podcast isn't popping up on the browser. What phone do you have? Basically Google Podcast, right? Yeah, exactly Google Podcast, yeah. And Zach asked me what phone it was. Like the results for podcasts are different per phone. Like what the heck is that about? So I think, so we got a client who's being searched for, he's being found in Google Podcasts. But at the same time, it doesn't seem like Apple. I mean, that very statement that Zach is Google Podcast doesn't necessarily give me a lot of hope as to how much Google is actually throwing into this. And Google doesn't have the best history of staying true to their first date. This is like podcast app number five with them right now. Is it number five? Really? Well, there was Google listen and Google play music. What else am I missing? That's technically. But that was me. When I heard Google was getting in to, we're gonna make an app and we're gonna double, wasn't it? We're gonna double the number of listeners and X amount of time. And I really expected a team. And as time has gone on, it's like, it's a team. It feels like a one man project. But Zach seems like a nice enough guy, but he just seems like the only guy. The key is that it's supposed to be native. And this is what people love about Apple Podcasts is that it's on the phone. And I guess this is one of the problems is it's not actually a native app, right? Yeah, it's weird. It's there. There, it's not there when you. So, okay, let me dig into that a little bit more. Well, the fun thing is you can't see it until you listen to a podcast. And then poof, just add water and there it is. But it's not, so it's there, if you're looking for a podcast, but it's not where Apple Podcasts, there were people who knows how many, but a couple I would think that went, what's this purple thing? And they clicked on it and went, oh, search. And so they might've come around the other way. They found the app, which then led them to podcasts. Google is going, I hope they look for a podcast because if they do, this app will show up. And that's one of the things, Rob Walsh, he says, the question is, why doesn't Google Podcasts appear to be taking off? Rob says that it's not truly native. He says, there's not that moment when someone unbought as a new Android device and looks around at the pre-insult apps and find Google Podcast. And what you're saying, Dave, is you have to find a podcast first, right? And so I don't think, you know, people also, there was another response here, Eric. He said, in order to try people away from the app they are currently using, there needs to be tangible benefit to the user not to distribute. And I think this is for the new podcast listener. This isn't for us. This isn't for the person who's already converted to be up. They have an app. Those people have apps, right? What are you gonna say, John? So I can speak to the why it's not native on the device. So in my day job, I do mobile device management for a university. And the biggest headache that we have is, well that we had until recently was that someone could bring in a Samsung, someone could bring it an LG, someone could bring in any number of different Android devices. And the OS is different on every single one of them. There's no standard except for kind of the basics that come with it. And so putting an app on there, it's not as easy as with Apple because their OS is just, it's for the iPhone, it's for the iPad. Whereas with the Android, the interface that they have may be different. The way that it handles some requests may be a little bit different. So I think the reason that Google did it that way was that so it would be compatible with as many devices as possible and backwards compatible with older OSes as well. Because one of the things that we run into is if someone has an older Android device, they may not even be able to be eligible to use, to use our mobile device management system, which means they can't get their work email on their device. So they have to buy a new device basically. So it can be difficult when you're dealing with Android because the operating system is so forked that, it would be like if Ford and Chevy, every time they made a car, they built a different chassis instead of building everything off of a single chassis and just changing the way that it looks, which is kind of what you have with Android is you have one chassis, which is the Android and you slap different bodies on it, but that affects the performance of the vehicle. It affects the performance of the device that you have as well. And quite frankly, Verizon and AT&T may not want to ship the Google podcast app with their OS that they have branded with Samsung because they have an exclusive device with them. So there's really a lot that goes into that. And I think the way that they've done it is the best way to get it to as many people as possible on as many different devices as possible because they're so, so different. And if you think about it, if you're someone who's in a country where maybe the last device that you have, it only goes up to Android 6 and that's the best device that you can get. You can still run Google podcasts on that, even though the latest version is Android 9 and that device might be six or seven years old. You could, but if you don't know the existence of podcasts, like what's the point, right? Like, so the question is, okay, maybe it's working the most for the most people who are looking for podcasts, but is it doomed? Is Google podcasts doomed? And if it doesn't get traction, are we just looking at another product that Google is gonna pull the plug on? I mean, obviously we're just totally doing in the dark here. We're guessing. I think if Google podcast doesn't get traction, it's because- On Google means- Podcasters. That's partially on podcasters because if all we're doing is saying rate and subscribe to us in iTunes, then that's where everyone's gonna go. And I think until we get off this iTunes fixation. Yeah, but that's like, if somebody comes here to Akron and they go, Dave, where can I get a pizza? I'm not gonna send them over to Little Caesars when I can send them over to Luigi's. It's just a better restaurant. So in the same way, if somebody goes, okay, I'm on Android, what should I use to download podcasts? I'm gonna go beyond pod, pocket casts, something, but Apple podcasts. Again, Paul, is the point though really to get new listeners who aren't asking other people what should I get for a podcast? Those are pretty, it's pretty someone who's already sort of in the funnel, so to speak, right? So I'm talking to people who just own androids. This was the promise that there are so many more Android phones than anything else and that a lot of people are gonna find podcasts all of a sudden, right? So I mean, we're back to this thing, I guess in these, so one of the cool features was that Google will surface podcasts in the Google search app on mobile, right? So if they would do this on a browser, that would help, but are you guys seeing this? Are they surfacing podcasts in search on mobile? They are, and I'm seeing some traction from it, but you have to look at the numbers, see everybody in the Android school, camp, religion, whatever you wanna call it, there are more Android devices than there are iOS devices exponentially, which is absolutely true, but there are also more toasters than there are iPhones. The number doesn't necessarily matter for anything and there's this concept that millions of people around the world have been waiting to listen to my show, but they couldn't because they couldn't figure out how to download podcast. If this is the world of Android users, you gotta take the amount of Android users who actually wanna listen to podcasts, which is like this, I'm sorry, but that's what it is. People aren't into Android to make it do things. They wanna make their phone do things. They buy iPhones unless they're big nerds, and if they're big nerds, God bless them, I'm one of them, but they've already figured out how to get podcasts. So if this is Android, this is people who wanna listen to podcasts, then you gotta take from this tiny slice how many people haven't already figured out how to listen to podcasts? And there's this mythical idea that there's millions of people sitting around going, you know, I would start consuming podcasts that there was just a native app on my Android phone. What about, but I mean, I'm thinking of people who don't, who aren't thinking that, who like Dave said- Wait, all four of them. Or Rob said that they open up and they say, what's this app? And they explore, right? So people surfaces a podcast because someone's looking for something else and saying, hey, there's a deep dive on that, right? So getting people who aren't converted yet, they don't even know they really wanna listen to podcasts. Not so new sitting there saying, I really wish I had an app, right? I don't know. So for me, it just, the whole process reeks of, we didn't talk to podcasters, which is sad because I know they did because they asked me at podcast movement the year before. They go, how can Google help? And I said, make a native app. But even the process of getting into their app is a pain in the butt. I mean, I went through the one time I put the code in my website. I went to Google Webmaster Tools, which in many cases right there that's a deal breaker for many people. And I told it to index my site. It said, I indexed your site yesterday and I still wasn't in Google podcast. And I was like, what are you gonna do to get into this thing? So it's hard to get in. Right. And then the app isn't that great once you finally get there. And it's just, to me, I'm just like, so this is not how I would have done it. And I guess- I'm gonna interrupt you, Dave, sorry. That's all right. Todd Cochran, he said, don't auto list shows. So you're mentioning what the way Google is getting podcasts in is they're scraping RSS feeds from the web and they're picking up podcasts. The most podcasts are in there already. If you have a podcast, you're probably in Google podcast. There's ways to check that. But I think him and both him and Rob said there needs to be a submission portal. You gotta make podcasts or submit to be listed, which also helps with the issue of- But it goes back to the idea that if we submit that there are actually people going, oh, thank God, Dave Jackson's school of podcasting has finally been submitted to the official podcast tab. I am now going to listen. Yeah, but so what I'm talking about also is that this will help podcasters promote it because a lot of podcasters may not even know this exists. I mean, we have a lot of podcasts who don't circle our drain, right? That we live in here in this toilet bowl of conversation. There's so few of us- It's just readable right there. Yeah. I have a high opinion on myself. But you know, so why aren't people promoting it? Well, a lot of podcasters who just do a show, they create content. They don't know these different things exist or that they should even be promoting another app, right? So, I don't know. But like, why would podcasters- Like, when's the last time you ever heard a podcaster say, and when you visit my website, make sure you visit it on Chrome? Well, okay, so that's the question. This is also weird to me because people always say that they always hear people say subscribe to us on iTunes. I don't actually promote that. Like, it's like subscribe to the show. Like, I mean, I don't push particular apps. I mean, tech dies. Like, you're really sort of dating yourself when you name tech in your sort of podcast. I mean, it's always been okay for Apple in a way because they've been around since podcasts. But, you know, they might not be around and then what? So, I don't know, how are you guys promoting? First of all, the question is, are you promoting? So, John, do you promote subscription? Is that your call to action? Is it one of them? Is it any of them? It is right now. How do you do that? Do you tell people where? So, yes, but it's a page that I send them to where they can pick how they want to subscribe so they can pick their poison. One thing that I have also been doing is Spotify allows you to share to Instagram. And when you share it to your story, even if you don't have 10,000 followers and you're not verified, it provides a link to Spotify where someone can listen. So, that's something that is immediately actionable. So, I would like to see that on more platforms. I'd like to see that, you know, if Google had a way for us to do that, that would be great. Hopefully, Pandora will have a way to do that in the near future. But, no, I don't typically promote a specific platform. I will, on occasion, on Twitter or on Facebook, send a link to two specific platforms. But in my podcast, I don't promote a platform. I have a question. Who is listening to a podcast somewhere they can't subscribe? So, if you're going to hear my show, how the heck are you listening to it if there isn't a subscribe option available where you're hearing it? A lot of fancy hands-on marketers send people to websites to click play. Right, and your players better have either, you better either have links below the player or links in the player. I mean, that just exists now in every player, modern player. So, when we started talking about Google Podcasts, I thought, let me look at my stats and see how many people are listening on Google Podcasts for last month. And my number two platform is unknown. So, I don't know what that means. I don't know if that's Google Podcasts. I don't know. It's certainly not browsers. Daniel, Daniel, welcome to the round. If he's got his audio on, I think he does. Thank you. Bill Stolling, I think he does. Daniel, what does that mean? When John sees unknown, do we know what that means? If you're looking at Lipson, right, John? Blueberry. Blueberry. Unknown is either, as the name implies, that it's an unknown user agent. So everything goes back to user agents, which is when your app or browser, whatever technology you use to access something over the internet, communicates this user agent. It sends data over to say, this is what I am. Please send me this data back. And some apps identify themselves correctly by saying Windows Podcasts or iTunes or Spotify or something like that. That's the user agent. It's this long string that contains that information. Some apps don't do that. They simply download the file without telling what kind of app it is. So that would be one thing that shows up in unknown. Unknown could also be where it's such a small number of downloads for a particular user agent that it's just lumped in with all of the other not really known or unknown user agents, unidentified user agents, all lumped together. So for that to be your number two, though, that's pretty... Yeah, it's 26% of my downloads. I see high numbers of unknown, too. I mean, I have seen that before. It's my number one client is unknown. So... They don't pay well. Unknown clients don't pay well, right, Paul? They pay well. My space. All right. Well, I forget where we were going with that part of it, but... Well, I'm wondering if maybe Google Podcasts isn't reporting correctly. Blueberry and Lipson. That's not the problem here. The problem. Yeah, and I know when it first came out, the first month, they had some sort of update. And then another three weeks later, there was another update. And I know the last update was you can now stream your podcast to Chromecast on your TV. And I'm not really sure I was looking for that, but... High in demand. Thanks a bunch. James Cridlin, he says, as far as he can see, numbers are decreasing, not increasing since launch. He said, people tried it and abandoned it. Google's not promoting this at all, except a piece of paper and podcast movement. Delegate badges, literally nothing else. So as Google is launch and forget, it sounds like. And I heard you guys talk about how it's just Zach and it's probably mostly just him. So Google launches this thing. I think Cridlin also mentioned something that he sees it more as a competition thing and then promoting the space, right? Then growing podcasts, as it's not altruistic. It's like, we need to be here. And that's never going to go well when it's a, we need to do it too. Right? And in fact, I thought originally, I'll be why- That's a whole nother round table, but- Why SoundCloud did it? I mean, I'm Pandora. That's why Spotify, Pandora, while all these others are doing it too, because you kind of have to now. It's content that people are listening to. But those seem to be doing a better job. Oh, here's the question. Why so well as about Spotify and people aren't going crazy? So people will certainly tell you that their podcast is now on Spotify. They won't tell you they're on Google Podcasts. Why is that? Why is it because Spotify is a really well-born out platform already? Yeah, because people have no idea what a podcast is, know what Spotify is. And so if you can tell someone, hey, just search for me on Spotify or even better, you can put a link in your story on Instagram and they can just click on your podcast and go listen to it. Then that's why I think everyone's making a big deal out of Spotify. Now, I haven't seen huge numbers from it, but I am seeing some numbers. So somebody on Spotify is listening to my podcast. When is YouTube just gonna, when is Google gonna give up and just give podcasts to YouTube? Wait, they're already there, don't you know? You know, on the Spotify thing, circumstantial, but fascinating. You know, we hear reports from Rob and others that, you know, there are certain shows where a demographic, you know, of the 25 ages, half on Spotify or that type of thing. I was working with a client looking at his stats and he interviews different people every month, you know, about entrepreneurs. No, actually he's in the real estate industry. It's a whole fascinating show. But one of his people was, we were looking at the stats and for one show, like a third of all of his downloads came from Spotify. Wow. And I think it's because this guy promoted the show on Spotify. Episode, right? Yeah, yeah, one episode, 33% almost exactly of the downloads were actually from Spotify, that particular one. And the Spotify went up after that point and he's at about 12% now average, which is far more than I've seen anywhere else. Oh, so the Spotify is a legitimate product. They're actually stuck. Like, you know, with these spikes for one thing that gets promoted somewhere, but do they come back as a question? Yeah, he went from about eight to 12, so not bad. Eight listens to 12 listens? No, eight percent to 12, no. Because that sounds like a Spotify to me. Actually, I'd be doing well. An increase of four would be like amazing. No, he's at like 4,000 downloads on Spotify. Wow, those are pain. And like eight on Google podcasts. So I think that's why people produce Spotify and not Google podcasts. All right, well, we've been on this already. This is a trend that we start off the story and we kind of stay there for the first half of the show on one story, but at least it's the main story, I guess. We should probably move on to something else, but I don't know if anyone else has some last thoughts about Google podcasts. Is it a wait and see? And when I say wait and see, is it, are we, we never know what Google's gonna do. That's really the problem, right? When does Google- It's DOA. But it's DOA. It's DOA. I like it. That should be a perfect transition into rad conversation, which I announced DOA. Well, see, DOA indicates at some point there was live, at some point there was breath, and then that breath stopped. I think rad is more a concept that never passed the stage. Rad, a great movie in the 80s about BMX bikes. Yes. That's under a great movie. Classic, cult classic. All right, so do we wanna move in? Do we have anything for Rad? Dave, you said, do we wanna mention it, but do we have that? Well, I just, I put a link, and it's weird, there's a link on TechCrunch. So are we going there? Are we? Okay, well, let's go there. My main takeaway was I don't understand it yet. I haven't dug in enough. What the heck is rad? What are we talking about? For the people who are listening to this to me, I'm like, okay, it's not a movie. Yeah, it's a, for lack of a better phrase, it's a tracking technology from your good friends at NPR. It solves what problem? This is a perceived problem. Well, what it's going to do is track when people start and stop. Don't we have that? It's called Apple. Yeah, sure do. Now it's, now in the same way that Apple, the only place you can get that kind of information is from Apple. And this is the part that I don't get. The rad which stands for radio, something, something he said trying to- Remote audio data. Yes, remote audio data. It basically on your phone sends back information and this is the part I don't get. To some sort of server somewhere, like some little stack collector in the sky is going to grab your stuff and then you can say, hey, this person made it to X percentage of the way through. So it's a great tool for advertisers in a nutshell from what I see. Their own app is not supporting this. So Pocketcast was purchased by NPR and it sounds like this was a deal made when they bought it. It's recent, recent acquisition. Pocketcast is saying and they reiterated we're not implementing rad, which is to me interesting because it is owned by NPR. Yeah. The question is why is NPR, what is this? What are they trying to do? Is this for them? They have their own app called NPR One and that was originally developed I think to gather more data about who's listening. Then they, is this just that tech they made sort of quote unquote public for app developers who wanna use it and they're gonna monetize that? I don't know, Paul, do we know why they even developed this in the first place? Ads, you gotta prove that the ads are being listened to. So it's funny because we never had to do on radio. Yeah. We never had to do on TV. We never had to do in newspapers or magazines but somehow podcasting doesn't follow that rule. And the fact that they called that the first word the first letter in the rad standard is radio. No, it's not. Oh, it's not, okay. Promote, Daniel? Promote audio data. Oh, well, there we go, okay. But the fact that I could even fall for that. You know, it's just, it's like you spoke to earlier it is a solution to a problem perceived by a very small part of the audience. And the audience, it's not even the audience, right? It's that people think they can't get big advertisers if they don't have more data than we already have and we already have already had. I know a lot of shows doing perfectly fine and advertisers who are perfectly willing to give lots of money without any of this data. I don't know, Daniel, do you? Yeah, I think it's important to distinguish this from the kind of data we already get from Apple Podcasts as well as what we've been able to get from Stitcher. And you may even remember from many years ago Media Gauge was a company that had similar technology where you could see how much of an episode was listened to. What RAD is trying to do is not to show you how much people listen to your episode but to see how many people make it to certain checkpoints in your episode. Think of it like those racing games where you know, checkpoint reached. That's what it's like with your audio where the producer, at least this is for the version that they've announced right now. This could change in the future but right now their idea is that you would place markers inside of your audio through their tools and Hindenburg is one of those tools that will support this soon. And you can put those markers wherever you want. It could be at every point that you're making in your 10 point presentation. It could be when you have a sponsorship placement, it could be every quarter of your episode, wherever you want to place those markers. And then what RAD would do is when the audio player that supports this technology, only those audio players that support this technology, when that player hits that check mark or that checkpoint, it would then send that information supposedly anonymized back to some server which you could probably specify. Think of the technology of web hooks or APIs or something like that where it's sending some data back. Kind of like if this, then that or Zapier, is Zapier, sorry. So it's registering how many people make it to this particular point in the audio, whatever that point might be. And I can see some beneficial uses for this and their focus really is all on the producer, not on the consumer, but there could be some potential benefits to the consumer if this technology expanded into other areas that could be tied to identifiable information. For example, you watch a video in a course and you make it halfway through that video, but don't get any way further in the video. And then after two weeks, the course software automatically emails you to say, hey, our software, notice that you only made it halfway through this video, we want to remind you about this. Now that technology already exists in other platforms, but RAD could become a standard for that kind of thing. But in the podcast space, they really want to know, I think they want to know, was this ad listened to and by how many people? If their own app isn't going to support it, who supports this? This is why I sort of said as DOA, actually it's more reason because does you ever see a scenario where Apple? It does not sound like Apple. We know Overcast, you know, Marko is dead set against it. And I'm curious as to why, what are the issues that people are so concerned about? You said that the data is anonymized and Apple has this kind of data and it's anonymized. So what's the problem? I think part of it is, because I was listening to Adam Curry on the No Agenda show and he basically started off the segment going, hey everybody, spying is coming to podcasting. And his whole thing was like, look, there's so much information about you on your phone. If they somehow can get that information about you and send that back and that's the whole thing. You have to believe that honest, just like Facebook, we're not gonna sell your information. We promise, we're not gonna, again, we won't sell your information again. So you have to really trust, in this case, NPR, that even though- I don't like Daniel isn't, you said it's something the producer puts in, it's just a ping, right? It just says they, this person hit this spot. Right, but a ping, you can send whatever data you want with a ping. You can send a photo of the person. You're not relying on MPR, but you're relying on the app developer to protect that point. Right, right. Yeah, and that's, they're in the, in the TechCrunch article, it says, and this is where I was kind of confused. It said, we need to take painstaking care. This is the vice president of new platform partnerships at NPR. Joel Suckerman says, we need to take painstaking care to prove out our commitment to the privacy of listeners while providing a standard that the industry can rally around in our collective efforts to continue to evolve the podcasting space. So when I read that, I'm like, all right, I don't see what the problem is. Then you got Marco basically birds a wave and going over my dead body. He says, yes, I understand why huge podcast companies want more listener data, but there are zero advantages for listeners or app makers. I won't be supporting any listener behavior, tracking specs and overcast. Podcasters get enough data from your IP address when you download episodes. So I decided to, I mean, who knows that? I would have thought they were tracking it all along. They decided to release it to us, the data from their app. So is it because it's not theirs? What would stop them from having implementing this in their app? Daniel, what do you think is, what do you think that the idea is that, I mean, we know Apple generally is protective of people's privacy, they seem to be, but this doesn't, you know, I don't know. Well, how often have you seen Apple incorporate someone else's idea into their products? Is someone else's idea that they offered to Apple, not one that they stole? Yeah. By the way, Instagram. Yeah, I think they would also see that the data that they're providing is good enough. And I would say that, yes, as far as data, it is good enough. You have to interpolate some and interpret some of that data. It's not, it goes back to, these are fundamentally different kinds of tracking. Rad is checking if you made it to, or it listened to a certain point. Whereas with Apple podcast data, you have to look at it and see, my ad was so many minutes in, and yes, most of the audience was there and then do your math yourself. I just don't see Apple wanting to implement even more tracking when they already have what we want. I wonder if maybe NPR is trying to capture that percentage of audience that isn't listening on an iOS device. So perhaps advertisers are coming to them and saying, oh, this is great, you know, you can give us this information from Apple, but what about everyone else who's listening? And depending on what their listenership is like, they could have a large chunk of people who they can't collect information on. Podcast on the video. I mean, I have, I mean, my podcast has always attracted weird stats. I get a lot of people who listen on the desktop, on Windows desktop. And I don't know why that is, but for some reason they do. It could be because of all the traffic that I'm getting. I get a lot of a big boost from the homeschool community every once in a while on Facebook, which is very, you know, they're very active. And so they're pushing them to my site. They're not pushing them to iTunes. They're not pushing them to Google podcasts. So they're playing it right from the website. So I get a lot of, a lot of Windows users. For a while, the Windows media player was my number one platform that my podcast was played on. Awesome, awesome. Awesome. Who's in favor of Red? I don't like the potential as a producer. As a consumer, I don't care. As a consumer, I don't want to jump in, right? What do you want to do as a producer? What excites you about it? I would be interested to know how many people listened to certain points and possibly do something with that data. And that's the idea of it calling back to some other web destination. It would be interesting, but for me, since I don't do advertising on my podcast, for me, it's purely of curiosity. Where do we get the stats from? See, that's the part that I'm like, it goes in, it sends it back to a server and I'm like, that's the part that I go, okay, and who owns that server and how much are they gonna charge me to get that data? So that's- Theoretically, it could be your own server. Like maybe there'd be a WordPress plug-in someday or maybe Blueberry or, well, actually, yeah, Blueberry has already said that they'll partner in Libsyn and others. So there might be, you know, you'd have a string, a URL string that would be Libsyn.com or Blueberry.com or something like that. That would be that destination or it could be someone else's server. Paul, what happens if enough apps implement and we get this amazing data, what changes? Nothing. Nothing. We don't get, do I get to just, is Pepsi gonna sponsor the podcast around the table? Is that what we're waiting for, right? Everyone always talks about brand advertising and like it is something I want that I think is useless to the majority of this audience but what do we, what's left? Like what is, what are the people waiting for they think is coming, is out there? It's money, I think money is missing is what they're looking for. But is money missing? You know? They think, that's what I'm saying. They think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's human nature to blame someone else, you know, and it's human nature will be okay once Google finally has a native, you know, podcast app or it'll be okay once we can report back what the Windows 95 desktop users are finally doing in the podcast space. You know, we tend to want it to be okay later when, you know, and there are people justifying their jobs, you know, I mean, the app guys at NPR, you know, when NPR bought Pocketcast, they had to ask, wait a minute, what's my job here? So, you know, you begin to create things to justify your existence, you know? And in the meantime, you have people quietly like Tim Ferriss, you know, 100 CPM for a show, you know, which is six minutes of ads in the beginning of every episode because he's coordinated the right audience and he's coordinated the right buyers and he's just rolling in the cash, you know? And NPR is going, you know, our future is this standard, you know, not, you know, gold fashion, pavement beating and negotiation and, you know, handshake kind of thing. You know, it doesn't change anything and that will be a new topic. That's an interesting question. Does this then negate the IAB standard? Cause now if we know that they made it to this part, I don't have to count downloads anymore. I'm counting how many times I was pinged or whatever I'm counting completion or. Are the argument is getting away from download as a, as the metric, right? Well, I remember just like downloads are easy to farm off to China, so would be pinging and pinging would actually be less to hand with. You know, Daniel down there in the left-hand corner could easily make any of our podcasts, the level of cereal with the spinning of a server. So it's just as ripe for fraud as anything else is. Daniel's servers are busy at the moment, so we can't help you with that. No, not for 40 more minutes. Oh, 40 more minutes. I'll spin up a hundred more, buddy. The round table needs some more views and ratings and reviews, Daniel. Could you give us those? We know you own these, too. Hey, so, okay, let's just, will we be always better off if podcasting would just fail? Like fail, right? Like everyone's talking about, we've been fine. What we do with podcasts has always been fine. Podcast is not going anywhere, right? You can make an RSS feed and put it out there and we know we can find an audience. There's this next step of podcasting where it becomes mainstream, right? That's where we're heading. Yeah, it's not mainstream right now. Right, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. I like working towards it, we per se, but that is the perception, right? Or maybe that's when it's become legitimized in the majority view, but, hey, what? I mean, at this point, just let it fail. Let the big money walk away if they're not satisfied because we're not at a place where that even matters. Right, you know, anything that is mainstream involves advertising dollars. And I think perhaps the radio industry, they're already behind the eight ball, but they're trying to catch up to where we are right now and they don't wanna want to happen to them what has happened to newspapers and magazines and television where people just aren't even looking at that medium anymore. And so maybe what they're trying to do is get ahead of this. They're seeing the advertising dollars come in, and so an advertiser's wanna know, hey, since we're using technology, why can't we track this? We couldn't do that with a newspaper. We couldn't do that with a radio buy or a television buy. We can do it with podcasting, so why don't we do that? And so to me, I understand where someone like NPR is coming from, you know, they need their supporters just like everyone else does. But I think that's what it is. They want to find a way to quantify this because they weren't able to in the past and now technically there is a way that they can do that. Yeah, because I think the thing there will be is it going to be able to tell that I just fast forwarded through seven minutes of Joe Rogan ads? Right. If I make it to the nine minute mark, do I? Well, if you do a ding, see, if you do a ding after every ad and so you fast forward through the seven ads and then, you know, ping one happened and ping nine happened because two through eight didn't happen, we'll know that you fast forward through them, so yes, we'll know. Yeah, yeah, I think so, I think so. If you guys hit on track that day, I saw some speculation that if this information is out there like timestamps and where the data lives that inevitably some apps going to just have a feature that skip all ads, which I think is that is dangerous because to be honest with you, I don't skip every ad but it's because I have to do 30 seconds skip whenever that ad appears. And sometimes I'm glad I didn't skip the ad because the beauty of podcast ads oftentimes is it's host read and they can be original. But if you had it pre do that for you that would be a problem, I think. Yeah, but it depends on how those checkpoints are actually used in the audio. I also understand where people getting where the app developer would know where the pings are, right? I guess so they could just say on these markers. It's the same thing Kibo's doing with their ad skipping. It's the same exact thing. People can report it, you know, there's different ways to do it. It's not that complicated. Question is how many people are gonna do it? So this goes to sort of pre-defined ads, right? Whereas like a host read can, the host can sort of like right now I could just be like, hey, go, hey, I love this beer. This is so and so beer. Like I just decided to insert the ad as opposed to if that ad I'd put it in as, well the audio podcast will hear and there's now I put a marker and it would just pop up. But that would be information that you would, the app would know ahead of time. I guess the thing that drives me nuts is half-baked ideas being thrown out to the world to see if they're gonna float or not. Because if you think about it, if I was doing a presentation- Now you're talking American politics, you're talking- Well, just the fact that if this was me and I understand that my audience isn't gonna know what the heck I'm talking about, I would have said in my PowerPoint, I would have said, here's how you set it up. Here's what it does. Here's some example of the stats and here's how you can use it instead of like, hey, we got this thing and we're gonna protect your privacy. It's like, they're talking about the technology, not the benefits. They're not talking about the sizzle. Like, if I go back to my days as a copier technician, nobody cares about micro toner. But if I go look, it makes your images super crisp and clear. And it's same thing with Google Podcasts. We're gonna double the number of downloads and then they give me a half-baked app. I'm like, why isn't anyone getting their product ready to go before they go, here it is. And I'm like, to me, this whole thing, it's like, we're all sitting here going, well, if it does this and maybe if it does that. And I'm like, how about if somebody actually would create a great presentation and deliver this so that we're all excited and go, yay, as opposed to, yeah, this is what we wanted to do. Hopefully people will accept it. I don't know. I guess to me, that's just frustrating that a lot of this is, I don't know, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Over, rant, over, thank you. Even with the data, again, it didn't work. I was like, who wants to, I don't know. I guess that's just Dave's thing. Dave has a chip on his virtual shoulder. It's about something. So we just don't know what's going on anywhere. Apps, Dave, we can't figure it out. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. Isn't that the way that the app world works? We toss out an app and see if it does any good and then iterate as we go. Maybe that's John's department. You're the tech guy. But isn't there the, what is it, the minimum product, something? It's some sort of- Minimum viable product. Yes. MVP, yep. Yeah, isn't there- Minimum viable products? They work. Yeah. They've done the minimum. I don't know. I mean, we talked about Google Podcast. I think you were listening, maybe you were listening. Yeah. Well, what do you think about the central? Do you yay or nay Google Podcast? Is it going to be around two years from now? I think there will be. Yeah. I mean, okay. Do they need to be doing something? Is it on them or us? And obviously it's both, but where do you think? Why aren't we seeing more pickup and who do you think is more responsible for- Well, the only thing I'll add to the fantastic discussion you guys already had about this is James Cridlin was doing some experimenting of equally promoting both the Apple Podcast and the Google Podcast link. And he said that he's seen almost a 50-50 split between- Promoting now. How is he doing it? Linking to them, I believe. And as well as any emails that he sends out promoting subscriptions to his podcast or anywhere he tells people to subscribe, he always has those two links together. So you're saying it's half the time he links to Apple Podcast and half the time he links to Google, half the time he clicks through to Apple Podcast and half the time he clicks through to Google? That's science. Not half the time, all the time he links to both. Right. Yeah. And he's seeing that because of that, and this is what Blueberry has been saying with their subscribe on android.com tool, is that when you promote the Android subscription option, you're not stealing from your Apple Podcast side. You are making your podcast available to a whole new audience. And so you're going to see a bigger spread of where your subscriptions are when you support whatever it is that your audience wants to use. Do you, Daniel, do you promote specific apps and platforms when you have a call to action for subscribe? Not for subscribing, no. Right. Like when I bring them back to my site. Most people are not subscribed. Most people are not seeing links. Like we know people don't go to our website in general for the most part, right? Like they're not, like that's not the biggest place people are consuming our podcast. You're not seeing an app, you're already in an app. So where is this subscription? Where is this app? You know what I mean? Like where's the responsibility? I think Paul's maybe getting some bites of meat. No, no, no, no, just getting some batteries so that I can last the rest of this conversation. They sound like very tasty batteries. Well, I'm going through my bag. So you know what I mean? The only thing that doesn't make sense to me is it's always like, promote, promote, promote and make sure you have subscribed on Android and that's on your website. Like is that where we're seeing most of our conversions happening? Like where people are going to see an actual option for one or the other? I think so. Well, unless they have found your podcast in their podcast app already, found either intentionally or by referral or whatever method that was. It's like for my audience, which is podcasters, I don't need to tell them how to subscribe. They're telling their own audiences how to subscribe. Sometimes I help them try to refine that language but they, my audience doesn't need to be taught how to subscribe to my podcast. I don't think they even have to ask, be asked to subscribe to my podcast because they're podcasters in general. Most of them are podcasters or interested in podcasting. So if they want to subscribe, they'll subscribe. I think for the people who have the more general interest shows, like John's show, the Wired Homeschool, that's a more general interest. Not, I mean, yeah, it's for technology or people who want to be savvy with technology, with their homeschooling, but that doesn't mean they know how to subscribe to a podcast. So for his audience, it benefits them a lot more for him to maybe remind them to subscribe or how to subscribe. But what do you think, John, about that with your audience? That is something that I have been doing and usually what I do is I say, okay, lady in my phone, and I record a video subscribing to my podcast. So hopefully they're watching this on their computer and they have their phone next to their computer and they're listening without headphones on and then the lady on the phone will actually subscribe them to my podcast. Echo, I know this is a big, I got a big scathing email about this. So we always come up with not saying her name and we say other things for, but it's actually called an Echo. And when you say that, it does not do anything. Like, well, what it's called, I say it's a brand. No, no, no, because there's three different platforms that I do this for. So I do this for an Echo, I do it for my wonderful Google Pixel that I use and I also do it for iOS. And iOS, and I do know with the Google Pixel especially, it will trigger, it triggers from TV commercials, it triggers when I say, hey, Lulu, which is my bird's name, which you see there, it just did. So it does work for other platforms. It may not work for the Echo, but it does work with other platforms. It's funny that we never refer to the devices by their actual name, which doesn't actually make them do anything. So it's pretty funny. Yeah, Amazon needs to add an addressing word. A what? Yes. A hey, so you say, hey, ladies name instead of just ladies name. And then that way, that's why you don't hear of Google or Siri being activated as much, because there is that addressing word in front of it. You say, hey, whatever. Or in the case of my Once Upon a Time podcast, one time I was talking about Hades and that activated Siri on my phone. Yeah, it's a sort of pretty much simple solution, but anyways, I will say that Daniel did invite Adam Curry to be on the round table and he quickly responded. It was no, but they basically, Adam was almost here. That's all I'm gonna say. Adam almost on the round table. So someday, I muted you, Paul, because you were eating batteries, so you have to unmute yourself. There you go. Am I in now? Yeah, you're good. So I think the real question is, is it our responsibility that Cortana has not been getting us a lot of podcast subscribers? You know, I think if we would promote Cortana better and yeah. Is that possible? It's going away. Can I use a Windows phone? I don't even understand what name that means. Is Cortana- Well, that's because you're not promoting it. I know. Exactly. No, no, that's your fault. Like, you should be researching it. Oh, I don't care. Like, I don't care to subscribe to this show. I want you to go to YouTube. Forget podcast. YouTube.com slash podcast is around people. There we go. That's where I make real money, people. YouTube. If you're watching right now, YouTube audience, I love you. Just stay tuned and enjoy that little pre-roll. I'm amazed how well those work. Anyways, different subjects all together. No, I'm kidding. Subscribe to the audio. We obviously get more listens on the audio podcast than we do via views on YouTube. But you should check us out. YouTube.com slash podcast around table. Cause you get to see these amazing faces. Not at all. Yeah, exactly. Paul's making, see, you're, you're welcome. Audio only listeners. You missed it. Yeah. It's our gift to you. All right. Anyways, well, I think we successfully got through two stories or topics. It's funny because I say we don't do topics anymore, but we don't really do news either. We'd sort of do articles. So podcastersroundtable.com slash guest, if you want to be on the round table, what happens is I invite you usually like 10 minutes before you're live. And if you're not doing anything, you say yes. And then most people say no. Cause they're busy. Ray, no, it's a self. Anyways, John, thanks for being last minute. And then Paul, you're a stand-in guy. Paul is pitch hitting today. So yep, out of the park. But anyways, sign up there. You'll be on the round table. And I asked you to pick a couple of stories, but we never get to barely any of them. So you could really put anything down. We probably won't get to it. But it's a lot of fun. I've had fun. Do we want to tackle anything else here quickly? One thing quickly, I'll share is that data heavy blog post that I published on the I'd ask you to podcas.com under the headline, what new data suggests about podcast hosting customers. I think the big takeaway that I see from it is, there's somewhat of a chicken and the egg to this. So I'll word it this way is that it seems like the kind of people who invest in their podcast, invest financially in their podcast, seem to also be the kind of people who podcast longer and more successfully. Because they're invested. Well, see, that's what I don't know. I waxed philosophical on this in a podcaster society webinar. But because is it by investing, does that make you more committed or are you committed and that's why you invest? Yes, I would say that one. I mean, because what's more likely the reason you're sticking around because you're committed, not because you're invested. And I think there's a little bit of both. There are plenty of people who buy lots of gear and never get out of first episode. We don't know about those people because their episodes aren't out there. I mean, Dave does because he sold them a bunch of affiliate gear they'd never used. But no, I mean, I think it has to be because the driver of consistency and being here for six months or six years is that you just really wanna do this thing. And people who really wanna do this thing often have an interest in investing in it. They want to get the right stuff. And we know that the right stuff doesn't mean spending a lot of money, but it doesn't mean it's not fun to go and get the gear. And that's one fun part, it can be if you're really into it. So I think it has to be the commitment that's driving that. I don't think, I think that's an easier chicken and egg one. But it's sort of related to that is I did have an article here about ratings and reviews. And it was, what was the title of the article? What do podcast ratings actually tell us? This was came out of Panoply, I believe. And basically I was asking do reviews matter. We talked about this. I was actually round like 108 or something. It wasn't that long ago. And they had some interesting takeaways. What he's saying, he said, the more ratings a show has, the less useful they are. So when you say ratings, we're talking about the one through five stars, right? So he says the higher the number of ratings, the more likely a show is to get close to a five star average. That's because these tend to be super fans. It's like who is choosing to rate a show. It's not, still not easy to do that. And what interesting he said out of all the podcasts and iTunes, roughly 80% have no ratings listed. That means fewer than five because of the way iTunes does things. He said 90% of podcasts have 10 or fewer ratings. He said podcasts are free. So there's no refund to demand for listeners who don't like it. They just don't listen, right? So why is it that we don't see a lot of really bad ratings on a podcast that does really well, it gets a lot of ratings. Again, it's who is rating. And oftentimes people just, they don't listen. They don't, they don't bother. You've already wasted my time. Why am I going to go out and also try to figure out how to rate your show as well? But he said that there is, seems to be some value in the medium sized podcast, which I think is most of this audience, most of us here who do shows was somewhere between, he said those medium sized podcasts was somewhere between 100 and a few thousand ratings. He says whatever they were looking at seems to make you think that those are more of your real audience giving real feedback. So his advice to podcasters was to focus on that first hundred ratings and reviews you get to sort of pay attention to what those are more so than how many you get. So I don't know, it was kind of an interesting article you guys can read more into it. Can we, can we yield the floor to Mr. Colligan who got somebody way up the charts on new and noteworthy with one episode? And I don't think they had any reviews or a couple, right? Didn't you have somebody like that, Paul? Yeah, we've taken a couple dozen people to number one with no reviews. Right, and so remember that there's nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I'm not correlating number of ratings with how well your show does. Although the article does start off inappropriately saying that it does correlate, which it doesn't. No, well, there is the 0.1% of shows that have like 12,000 plus ratings, right? Like the big shows that we all know of, those tend to have a massive amount of ratings. Now, I do. And if your show is about selling on Amazon, you also have tens of thousands of reviews that tend to all sound the same and follow a pattern. Interesting, they're all about tusking milk for some reason. Yes. Yeah, and who mentions that too? So it's an interesting article and I mean, it could open up a lot more conversation. Daniel, you're the ratings and reviews guys, so certainly you want more ratings and reviews. Well, yeah, it's not about the number really. It's about what you do with those ratings and reviews that you have. And I think the reviews are far more valuable because, and this is what I tell people who are interested in my podcast reviews. So disclosure, I run my podcast reviews, big update coming soon. And what I tell people is it's not really about trying to be better or not even necessarily about trying to build that social proof number that people see or you've got this many ratings and reviews. But this can help you engage with your audience. Like if you've got a review from Bangladesh and you mentioned that in your podcast and you say, thanks Billy Bob 72 from Bangladesh for your review, you mentioned such and such in this. And now Billy Bob from Bangladesh is a celebrity in his mind and he wants to tell other people, hey, I didn't think these guys even knew how to pronounce Bangladesh and look, they mentioned me on their podcast. They read my review. So you turn your fans into super fans and there's so much more you can do with your reviews than them simply sitting there passively in your podcast app, which the podcasters for Paniply are, I hate making a global sweeping generalization but I'm going to. I would say that generally they're probably not the type of podcasters who engage much with their audience. So they just merely look at their ratings and reviews numbers and maybe not actually read them or care what they say. Daniel made me feel like I was about to get a spanking from my dad. Look, I don't want to do this, but I'm going for it. I love you. Yeah. And you'll thank me for this someday. Yeah. I stopped asking for ratings and reviews years ago. Like I said, when I looked at my stats and realized that most people were listening in a browser, then it was pointless for me to go out and ask for ratings and reviews because they're not going to stop listening in the browser and then go open iTunes and find my podcast or click on the iTunes link and maybe they've got iTunes installed. Maybe they don't. So I just stopped asking. And if somebody, and I don't think anyone has rated or reviewed my podcast, well, I know no one has reviewed my podcast in probably almost two years. You know that. Two or three years. My podcast reviews, obviously. That's exactly right. Daniel's promotion for you. And do you check in all 132 countries? No, but... You don't have to. He uses my podcast. I knew. My podcast is, what is that, Romain again? Four. He checks it for me. All 132 countries? All 155 countries. It's just turning into an affiliate situation. Really is getting kicked back for this. No, hey. So this seems to still be the most pervasive myth that goes around. Big shows, they still, it helps us out a lot. Ratings and reviews. This is the one I hear. I mean, like I have been a part of some really big shows and they still do it. And why does it persist? What do people think they're getting? I think they're getting moved up the charts, right? Because that's the way it does work in other places. Like on Amazon, yes. Ratings and reviews. There we go. Yeah. And I think also because there've been, for years, we podcasters thought that helped. And so we would say that. And people who came behind us, who listened to our podcasts, heard us say that. So they thought they had to do it. And then there's all these courses out there from 2010 on YouTube that say, oh, by the way, make sure you tell people to ask for ratings and reviews on your podcast. And so. So being a black box and not telling us that, hey, that's right, you ain't got people to the Apple's fault. So they don't care. My favorite is when somebody says, if you like the show, subscribe. That has never inspired me to subscribe to a show. Like if I'm listening to a brand new show and they go, hey, subscribe to the show. I'm like, oh, I forgot I could do that. You know what's interesting though? Because it seems that, and I always draw the parallel, which there's very huge differences between YouTube and podcast. You do have to tell. Paul, I'm pretty sure I see it in your quotes that you tweet automatically all the time. That if you do not tell people what to do, right? They just don't do it. You have to tell people. Right, Paul? Yeah. What's the quote? He doesn't know. It's too old. There's a lot of them. There's a lot of quotes. So I mean, Dave, I get it. Like, I don't do anything. The problem is, is Dave is speaking as the podcaster. And those of us listening to the show, we're the podcaster. And we view podcasts a certain way. Our future is in people who don't think of podcasts a certain way. The old, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A lot of people don't know that you can subscribe. A lot of people don't know that when you do, these things come automatically, spam free. And these types of things. And we just have to go to, and especially those of us, we can all raise our hands. Well, not all of us, but most of us in this group, raise our hands very guilty. We do podcast about podcasting. And so we're viewing it through that lens. That's true. But the group who doesn't know that you can subscribe, the game changes. And it's funny, I helped to launch. And when I say helped, we're gonna go like this because the amount that they listened to was pretty minimal. But what was funny was a ton of time and money and effort was spent on getting reviews, sharing where you could win an iPad or ear pods or that kind of thing. And all that effort produced a small percentage of what's sitting in email that said subscribed it. And there were a lot of people, I mean, if you look at the numbers, there were more people sharing the show than there were listening to it. You know, and because you could win an iPod, who doesn't like that? You know, who doesn't want the new iPhone? Like, I'll share, you know. So it's, we gotta remember the audience who doesn't listen to the podcasters round table. That's the audience that we need to think about. That's a good point. You know, although we love you and the audience who listens to the podcasters round table. Thank you. We love you. You know, you know, yeah. Yeah, I know. Don't leave all these habits for a toilet bowl, right? Paul, so. I am. Hey, can we- A little back check here on the article that said roughly 80% have no ratings listed. Right. One through five stars, sorry. Yeah, and you can leave a rating without leaving a review. Yes. But every review must have a rating attached to it. So a podcast will usually have many more ratings than it does reviews. But I'm looking at- Is that true for all 155 countries? Yes. Okay. And I'm looking at the data that I've recently been pulling from Apple Podcasts and of the now 618 plus thousand podcasts in Apple Podcasts, 73% do not have reviews. So that number is smaller than the 80% they said. And keeping in mind that more podcasts will have ratings than have reviews or have more ratings than they do reviews. It's very likely that number is actually smaller. I would estimate, I'm sorry, I don't have this data yet processed, but I would estimate it's more like 60% of the podcast, maybe even smaller than that. Don't have any ratings. Maybe they were looking at reviews and rounded up significantly, but I'm seeing 73% with reviews. So that number- Or maybe they heard it somewhere and they're just repeating it because that's easier than doing research. Yeah, or maybe they're looking at only their own podcasts or top 400 or something like that. The Cuminator in chat says they podcast about podcasters that talk about podcasting, which is awesome because that means clearly I've been an episode. Daniel has, Dave has, anyway, so I feel like a celebrity right now. You know, at work, I had the ability in our new website redesign to have a subscribe button and when you click it, it has a lot of options to subscribe for. But do you know what that button says? You know what I put there? Subscribe for free. I mean, I'm still telling people it's free because that term in a science circle often implies that you're subscribing to our journal that costs money. So we're still at that point. I mean, there's still have, you know- Okay, new episode on that. We're gonna be here for another hour if we wanna talk about that. Well, I mean, what do you mean? What do you get a crack open there? You can hint at the episode, we won't go there. It's a worthwhile discussion what the verb is that we use and Apple has been pushing. Post a subscribe. Yeah. What else would you say? Listen is what Apple is saying that I know that doesn't account for video podcasts but most of the podcasts out there are audio. Because it does imply you could just do it. You know, that's not a paid, generally paid option. Well, yeah, but I have a cable subscription. I have a Netflix subscription. I have a Hulu subscription. Get the, you know, so I can see where people might think subscribe to my podcast. You know, I've got a, you know, school of podcasting or whatever I have a podcasters round table subscription. I wonder how much that's gonna run me. That's what I'm saying. Subscribe implies to a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we should say the word steal. We said sign up. We have pirate, podcasters round table, Google podcast. And pirate podcast round table wherever you get podcasts. Or we could be developer friendly and say clone. Spend up a new instance of download and insert some ads into podcasters round table. Today. Now. Perpetual use. Free. All right. This is the point where we have gone too far and it's a good wrap up. There's always a, there's always a ping of when we should wrap up and it's going off right now. But people are just done. They're done. Our rad data is hitting the server right now. We'll know that because we are rad implemented here. Cross checked with IAB and everywhere you listen. XYZ. All right. We'll promote Google podcast while you're doing it. Google podcast. Google podcast. Spotify. Not on Spotify. Cortana. I'm doing. Don't. Find us on anchor. No, we had to show an anchor. I did three episodes and I quit. So that's anchor in a nutshell. Oh, they're not listening either. Okay. Anyways, we're out of here. Daniel, where would you like us to go? Go over to the audacity to podcast.com. Check out my data heavy article and also I'll have some more data pretty soon on the genres over there at the audacity to podcast.com and the Daniel Lewis on social. Very cool. John, thanks for joining us for your second round. Thank you very much. You can head over to thewiredhomeschool.com. Dave Jackson. You can find me at schoolofpodcasting.com. Somebody asked me how many plays I had from Pandora on my last episode and that would be zero. But you're still bragging because you're on Pandora. I'm on Pandora. Still. But as I look at my stats, the answer is none. That's because you don't open your show with a guitar. So change your intro, adjust for the time on Dave and you'll skyrocket to the top. Oh, wait, I take that back. Oh, I was looking in the wrong place. Six. Ooh, you're now the number one podcast. That's it. I had six downloads. So I didn't look at my destinations area. So there you go. There's your answer. All right. Seems to be trending about as well as Spotify for Dave. So congrats. Paul, call again. Thank you for jumping in from your hotel room in an undisclosed location. There we go. Yeah, no, yes. Thank you for having me on. As always, I think this is the shirt episode if I'm not mistaken. I think you see me in the shirt now, right? Yeah. The pitch hitting doesn't count. Sorry. I'm trying. OK, all right. The podcast report, episode 150 will be coming soon. The next season is back. And what I really recommend that you do is that you subscribe for free to the podcast report wherever you listen to audio online. Does that season have a title? If people are going to do seasons, I want titles. Bigger, better. Now in 4K. You can't listen to it. Season six, stop screwing around. All right, well, there's no dragons in that. But maybe I'll check it out. All right, I don't watch a dragon show. Podcasts are roundtable.com. Slash guest, sign up. We'll see you for the next one, which I believe is 1, 2, 3. I like that number. And wave goodbye. We're out of here. See you.