More potential for ad slots?

Daniel, future of podcasting episode 48,

future of ad slots. What do you mean by

that? Do we have sponsors now? Oh, I wish we did.

Noah, You listening right now, you are

our sponsor. Send us to Instagram. Some streaming satoshis,

PayPal, whatever, pizza. But I was thinking more

this is inspired by a recent episode of Pod News Weekly Review, which we'll have

the link in the notes for this episode, where they interviewed

Micah who created this app, Adblock Podcast,

which the first time you heard

about this idea, Dave, of you could get an

app that using AI or some kind of algorithm would allow

you as a listener to skip the ads in podcast that you

listen to. What were your immediate reactions? My first

reaction was, oh, this ought to be good. Okay. Can't wait to

see the details of this one. That was my first reaction. Can't wait to hear

what the judge says about that. Right? Yeah. I was

the same way. I thought, oh, this is horrible. This person doesn't understand

podcasting. The podcasting industry doesn't respect podcasters or advertisers

or audiences. Well, obviously, it respects audiences. I would

say I was wrong about several of those things.

And hearing the interview in Pod News Weekly Review

with James Cridland who conducted that interview, it got the

wheels in my head turning since I looked at that loony old

man. And it made me

think of better potential because I I

heard more details about what Micah

was originally intending, or maybe not even originally, but what he's

building now, and it's different from what I originally

expected. I thought it was originally you get this app

for free or maybe you pay to use this app, and it skips all the

ads for you, and the app developer pockets all the money by providing

the service to you of skipping the ads. Yeah. That

reeks of fraud. Right. Let's just be upfront with it.

That is bad. Do not do that. Anyone who's thinking of

building an app or a service to do something like that, don't do that. That

could get you in big legal trouble. But that's not what Adblock

podcast actually does. It's got a couple things going

on. I know I just pulled it up. In fact, let me

see if it's still doing its thing. It is still doing its thing. It'd be

interesting to see because that's been going on close to 20 minutes. I'm downloading

the Jordan Harbinger show, and it is processing

the audio. It does say there's one ad detected, So that's interesting.

But if I wanted to stick with this app, there is a I don't know

how much the pay a $4 something like this. I don't know what you pay

per month for the listener. So there's that. And then it pays

the podcaster 4¢

per ad skipped. And according to their website, an ad can be anywhere from

10 seconds to 40 seconds. And so when I just downloaded the

app, it gave me 25 ad skips for free. So the

goal here is to get me hooked on ad free podcasting. So I then fish

out the 4 bucks. So that sounds like, okay. I paid for a

service. I want ad free podcast, and I'm getting that

service. The podcaster is getting paid. So that's something that

hopefully then it's a little less frothy. But the one that gets

me is, wait a minute. What about the advertiser? The

advertiser paid the podcaster money to get his message or her

message into the ears of that audience, and that no longer is

happening. But the podcaster still got paid by the advertiser. And I went,

oh, that's very frothy in my book. If you're saying, oh,

yeah. I'll deliver that message to my audience. And it's weird because in

a way, they did, but this app is now blocking

their intent. And so that's where it's kinda icky.

Totally. If it worked exactly as you described, yes.

I would say, yeah, that's fraud to completely block the ads where the

downloads are being counted, the podcaster is being paid, but the ad

is never being heard. Now, of course, there is the reality of

ad skipping. We all probably skip ads

at some point in our lives, in podcasts, in shows

we watch. We use ad blockers in our browsers and all of this stuff.

We as a society do not like ads and we like to

skip ads if we can and if it's convenient to do so. And

that kind of thing is not always trackable. And I

hope we'll never actually be trackable by the advertisers

or by the podcasters. They don't need to know that information, but it happens.

So if I'm listening in, let's say, Overcast. If I'm listening in

Overcast and I double tap on my Apple AirPods

Pro to skip forward 30 seconds and I've skipped the ad, the

download was still counted, but I never heard the ad.

Usually, I hear enough of the ad to know

what it was about because I've heard the ad enough times or I

can just tell from how they're starting anything like that.

So the product is still in my mind. But, generally, I'm

skipping the ads. Sometimes I completely miss whatever they're talking about, and

the podcaster is still getting paid and the advertiser is still paying even

though I didn't hear the ad at all. And that was simply because

I, the listener, manually skipped over the

ad. So that's going to happen. No matter what technology is

created, that kind of thing is going to happen. And I don't

want this conversation I didn't bring this up to really focus on this one

specific app, but it's the springboard for a bigger conversation that we'll get to in

a moment. But the way that Micah has designed Adblock Podcast,

or whatever it's called by the time you're listening to this, is

to download the media file onto his

server so it shows up as one download inside

of your analytics. Then his system uses

artificial intelligence to discover those ads and skip over

them. It makes a little sound kind of like you hear in Cast O Matic,

I think, does this where if you set Cast O Matic to automatically

skip the first 60 seconds or whatever of an episode, you

hear a kind of bling sound with it. Well,

Adblock Podcast does that too. So you know that an ad was just

skipped. And when it does that, it's pretty

nicely seamless how it does that. It doesn't find every

ad. And you can see once you've followed a

podcast inside of the app, it will start processing all of the episodes

as it's downloading them to his servers looking for the ads and

then skipping over those. You'll start to see how many ads were detected.

It doesn't detect all of them. There have been several podcasts I've tried already

where I know those podcasts have at least 3 ads,

separate ad breaks in them, and none of them are detected. So there

is some tweaking to do. But that aside, if he had

a 1,000 people using his app, then that's only

still one download. So the sponsor,

if an ad was served, the sponsor is paying for

one download. And there is even something

he could do to work around that where some sponsors

will only pay for downloads within certain markets, like only in

the United States or Canada or North America or something like that. And

so if you get a download from Abu Dhabi, you're not going to

be paid for it anyway. And some of these dynamic or programmatic

ad insertion techniques also don't insert ads into those things. That can start to

get tricky to try and auto detect that. Yeah. But if he's downloading

it one time, then it's not exactly ad fraud.

It's ad fraud in the sense of one download, and it's a

bot. That bot probably wouldn't even show up in your analytics

anyway. But let's say and I'll just keep using Jordan Harbinger because

I like his show and he has ads. But what if a bunch of Jordan's

audience starts to use this app? Then instead of having

we'll just keep the math easy. A 1,000 downloads. He has one. He

lost 999 downloads. I guess we'd have to do

the math because 4¢ is basically what? A

$40 CPM? Right. Yeah. And host

rides are not getting $40 CPM Okay. As far as I know. So

on one end, he might be getting paid more

Exactly. Per person. So that's interesting.

Yeah. This has got me thinking. Alright. Yeah. See, that's what I'm saying. It it

gets you thinking about it. And think of it from the listener side

too, where there are all of these podcasts now

that their approach to value for value

is that they they have to take ads for their podcast. Maybe they don't

want to run a business. Maybe they're not able to run a business. Maybe they

can't take the risk because going purely value for

value is a big risk for podcasters because you might

not get enough people, people might not give enough. Anything like that could

happen. It is a big risk. Yes. Life is full of risks. So I'm not

negating that. I'm not saying that that's bad. It's just something to be

aware of. But for some people, advertising might be

the best way for them to monetize with their goals for

their podcast. And some of them then offer an

ad free version for $10 a month, $20 a

month, $5 a month, whatever. And for 1

podcast, that doesn't sound too bad. I think, yeah, I really enjoy

this podcast. Yeah. It's definitely worth $10 a month to be able to

enjoy it without ads. Well, then multiply that times how many

podcasts you have that you listen to that have ads in it. It

starts getting really expensive if you're having to pay $10 a

month for 1 podcast to get that podcast

without ads. Yeah. And maybe that's only a weekly podcast. So

you're only talking about it could be only a dozen ad slots

per month, and you're paying $10 for that. But then think about it

from this perspective of what Micah is doing with

Adblock podcast where you as the listener

are paying $2 toward the podcaster

and, also, then $2 goes toward him or at least that's the pricing right now.

But let's assume that that pricing amount stays. Maybe it's

just multiplied or bigger packages in the future. But let's assume then you

are paying about 8¢ per

ad to skip it. That is totally doable.

Like, for anyone who's struggling with cash flow, and and I'm one of those people

that I have to watch my cash flow very carefully and budget very tightly right

now. I cannot do $5 for every podcast I

listen to in order to get it ad free. But 8¢ per

ad to not hear that ad, I could probably do

that. That might be a total of 5 to $10

per month for all of those podcasts for me.

Right. And I know there's that thought of, well, for the

podcaster then, they're only getting that tiny amount

instead of $10 per person. But here's the

other way to look at it. You're getting a tiny amount that you wouldn't

have gotten from someone otherwise. That was one of the things that I was

like, oh, that's not well thought out is he he mentioned that, like,

how do I pay the first, I think you have to get $50. That's the

threshold to get paid. And when he gets to that, he's gonna Google your

show. And I was like, yeah, that needs that needs a little propping

up a little bit. The only other thing I could think of

that I go, is what if somebody's

right on the edge? You know, you need whatever 10,000 downloads

to have your ad, and so they they get somebody because they have 10,000.

And then for whatever reason, his their audience. So there's a lot of, like, it

just so happens then that that Friday, everybody jumped on this app. Well,

now they don't get the 10,000 downloads. So, yes, they

got maybe paid more, but now they're like, well, we paid for

10,000 downloads. You said you had 10,000, and we only had 8,000.

Well, because 2,000 people are using this. That's once

then again, we're we're not nitpicking. But I was like, that would be one situation

where it'd be like, okay. The good news is you got paid more than you

were than if it was a host. Right? The bad news is this app kinda

puts you under the threshold, and they're not gonna renew because you don't have enough

downloads. Yeah. Or you have to do make goods with the sponsor or

something about or renegotiate. That's I'm just trying to think of, like, what what could

happen here that would be bad? So I thought, well, that might be one if

you're right on the edge. What I would love to see happen with

this is this be turned into more of a

framework where Sam gets to say pretty much to

everything. Oh, yeah. We've already implemented that with Podfans

or True Fans. Sorry, Sam. I beg your forgiveness with True Fans.

Well, what I realized that I kind of get to say frequently

is, oh, yeah. I proposed an idea for that.

So maybe that's my thing as I get to say that all the time, but

I did propose something. It didn't go all that far a while back,

but some kind of open protocol that would allow

podcasters to offer this kind of functionality in

any podcasting 2.0 app. And we are

almost there with the whole streaming satoshis

thing. We are almost there. Now I know the streaming

satoshi stuff is all up in the air kind of right now, and we've talked

about that. Other podcasters have talked about that at the same time that we did.

So, yes, there is some stuff there that's still questionable how exactly

we'll work that out. But it it's looking like we're still gonna be able to

make it work. Think of it like this. What if inside of a podcast

app and in your RSS feed, you could do something where

you indicate your ad spots in the

chapters or some information inside of the RSS

feed. And if someone streams a

certain amount of Satoshis, like a minimum threshold, then they get

to skip the ads. And the podcast app takes care of

then seeing where those ads are, ensuring that the person is

streaming those satoshis and then skips those ads appropriately. I think

that kind of thing I know that when people say, well, if we expose the

data of when the ads are, then people will build systems that will

automatically skip the ads. Yes. Exactly. That's what we

want them to do. But the point is to do it conveniently.

Let's jump back in the not completely early days of the Internet, but

the early days of when the Internet started really getting cool. Back

when Napster was around and BitTorrent was really big and all of this

stuff, and I will admit I was a BitTorrenter. The

reason wasn't because I didn't want to pay. The reason

I and many other people use BitTorrent and stuff, and I did it primarily for

TV shows, which would have been free to watch anyway. But for me, it was

an issue of convenience. I wanted to be able to

watch the TV show on my computer. I didn't have a

TV. For many years. I didn't have a TV at all. I didn't want to

pay for cable Internet. I didn't wanna set up an antenna or anything like

that. I just wanted to watch the show. I didn't care if it had ads

in it. I was fine with that if I could watch it for free. I

just wanted to watch it when I wanted to watch it on my

compute. You can see why I love podcasts so much because of the on

demand idea. The time shifted. Yep. And Apple was not the first

ones to do this, but they made it the easiest. When Itunes came around

and started allowing you to buy a song where you could buy an album for

usually about $10 for an album or a single

track from any album for only 99¢, That made

it really convenient to do, and that

exploded because people wanted the convenience. They did not

necessarily want it free. Yeah. Sure. There were plenty of

people out there who wanted everything for free. Those are the extreme cases,

I think. But there are people out there who just want it

convenient. So if the Podcasting

2.0 apps could build this into their system where, yes,

they read where the ads are. And they totally have the ability to

skip the ads for the people using the app, but

only if the people who are using that app

pay a certain amount of streaming satoshis. And and we're

not talking a whole lot either. You think of just a 100

sats per ad spot? Like, a 100.

That's nothing. Well Yeah. In actual dollars right

now, a 100 sats would be since a 1,000

sats is the cost of Bitcoin in pennies, the cost of Bitcoin, if

we say it's 65,000 right now, if just throwing that number

out there. If it's 65,000, then a 100 sats

would be 6.5¢. 1,000 sats would be

65¢. So a 100 6.5¢. So that is

already 3 times what the podcaster could earn

through a standard $25 CPM where then the ad agency

takes $5 of that at least, if not more.

Yeah. So you've already tripled your profit, and you've made it

more convenient for the audience. But then you could maybe

even put in the app, you could build it in where it

says something like, you can listen to this with the ads completely

free or stream this many satoshis or

unlock it ad free for a 1000 satoshis, listen ad

free. And it's a button you press right at the beginning. It sends the

satoshis right away, unlocks it, and skips all the ads automatically

without having to worry about how many ad slots are there. You could do something

like that where you say, listen to this episode ad free for only this tiny

amount. And you could set that to whatever. And, of course, the ad develop

app developers could make it so the listener could set

whatever amount they want to put in there, like, they decide, no. I wanna give

you 10,000 sats to be able to listen to this ad free.

You build it convenient like that, and I think people will like it.

It reminds me of, which I couldn't believe it. I knew it was coming, but

when it happened, you're like, oh, they're they weren't kidding. Have you

watched any movies on Amazon Prime recently? Because

I went to watch I forget what it was. It might have been

If the, imaginary friends or whatever.

But it was like, your movie will start after these

two advertisements. 1 was for Amazon, which I always find weird. I'm

like, I'm on Amazon already. You don't really need to. You know, but they're

trying to sell me Prime, and I'm like, I'm already on you know? So there

was that, and then it was an ad for T Mobile. And the thing that

drove me nuts is every time I pause the movie, if I went back or,

like, the next day or something like that to watch it oh, it was, the

one about the bomb, Oppenheimer. Okay. Because it took me, like, 4 days to watch

that movie. And every time I went to watch it, it'd be like, you can

watch this ad free. And I'm like, no. I've already paid my dues. I've already

seen the ad, and it was always the same T Mobile ad. So I would

love it if it said, hey. You can watch this ad free by just

clicking this button, and we won't show you the ads. I love that idea.

I expected to see ads, really, and so it surprised me that I have not

seen ads yet. And I'm not upgrading because, like you just said,

I'm already paying for Amazon Prime. A lot. I'm of this

type, and this is why I never subscribe to TV service,

to cable Internet or cable TV. Yeah. Because

my perspective as a senior millennial

is I don't want to pay and still get ads.

Yeah. And then the the option was, well, if you don't like it,

we'll just cancel your prime. And you're like, yeah, but I like free shipping.

And I like in theory, next day delivery or whatever

promising, which I'm noticing more and more. It's like, oops. I know we said we

get it to you tomorrow, but we were just kidding. You'll get it on

Tuesday. You're like, wait. What? You know? So Or you can't even watch the show

then. I remember, like, the early days of Hulu, the

very, very early days. I jumped on Hulu. I don't know how quickly

after it came out, but it was around that same time. And I

started to stop torrenting because Hulu made it convenient.

And then Hulu had this really cool thing where I don't know if they still

do it, but maybe some places still offer this kind of thing where they say

you can either watch this with normal ad breaks or watch

this extended ad upfront and then

have no ads or fewer ads later. And

there's some interesting psychology here, and it comes to play also

in mobile games too. And I heard someone put this really well,

is there are kind of 2 approaches that you can take to

mobile games and advertising in mobile games. And this is relevant to podcasting as

you'll see in a moment. One approach that you can take is,

hey. You're playing this game for free. Now watch this ad. That's a

disruptive thing. It's interrupting my flow. I get

annoyed by the ad. I get annoyed by the game because I'm forced

to sit through this ad that I don't wanna watch because the game

was free, which, yeah, I'm getting a free game, but here I have to have

this ad that I cannot skip. But then the other approach, I love

it when games do this, is they will then say,

would you like to watch an ad and get

500 gold tokens or get a free upgrade or, you know,

speed up your build process or anything like that. So it's like,

oh, you mean there's some value to me

in the game? You enhance the experience for me

if I watch your ad. Now the psychology flips around to the other

side where now I see there's something in it for me too.

So, yeah, I have no problem playing the ad

because I know I'm gonna get some gold tokens from this that I can use

to make the game more fun. So it's rewarding me for the

ads. And I know at this moment, probably Sam Sethi is saying, hey. We do

that with true fans. And, yes, I wanna bring that in because Sam has done

something interesting with true fans where he is offering

the podcaster the opportunity to do a reverse

stream back to the audience. If you

listen to this ad, we'll give you not a

100 or a 1000 satoshis. I think that would be unreasonable depending on how much

you're getting paid for that ad. But maybe it is, like, 10 satoshis. Hey.

We'll give you 10 satoshis. Go ahead. Keep listening to this ad. We'll give you

10 satoshis to listen to this ad. Or this

could be like a little option. We give you 10 satoshis to listen

or pay us a 100 or a 1000 or whatever it is. A 100

satoshis, we'll say. Or pay us a 100 satoshis, and you can skip the ad.

Or something like, let's play this episode. We'll pay you a 100

sat to listen to this episode as it is with the ads or

prepay a 1,000 sats, and you get to hear it with no ads

or whatever amount that you want to enter to pay for this above

a threshold if you want. Yeah. And did you get

Sam's email about his new 2 click fill your wallet thing?

That is looking great because I love Sam's approach with this

that it's making the process easier. Yep. And that is so much

what we need. And that's why when we did that episode that I kept trying

to say, let's not get doom and gloom about this because the challenge

arose, and people are rising to the challenge and discovering

ways to innovate around this. Yeah. I'm waiting to hear

Friday's podcasting 2.0 because I know Oscar at

Fountain has been working on something, and it sounds like I listened to the

episode that they did from some Bitcoin conference. And they

made a great point. They're like, I think for this to really work, instead

of having one place, like get Albi, and then they

end up having so much money go through their system that it might grab the

attention of somebody that if there are multiple people offering

wallets, which is basically what Sam is doing now, you can get a wallet through

true fans that still some monetize into Alby. And I'm like,

okay. Don't understand how you're doing that, but okay. But it

makes Albie not nervous, so I'll you know, yay. Yay, Sam.

Keep on doing what you're doing. But if there are multiple people offering wallets,

then it might not be quite such a a lightning rod of, hey.

What's going on over there kind of thing? So I was glad to hear it.

I haven't played with it yet. I've I've filled up my wallet all the time

because I can just use a good old credit card, and it's $10. And it

literally is, like, 2 clicks. It's like, oh, here it is. And Stripe

remembers my credit card. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad

thing, but it does. And I click a button, and the next thing you know,

I only got $10 worth of Satoshis in my wallet. So it's awesome. And

I really don't mind each app

requiring a different wallet for the audience. I think that makes total

sense, even to the point where that podcast

app is the wallet for the audience member.

So if I'm listening in Podcast Guru,

I give Podcast Guru $5, and then I get

$5 worth of Sats at that time, whatever that's worth, whatever that

conversion rate is. And that gets loaded into my Podcast Guru

wallet that then I can distribute out to whatever apps are out there.

Or maybe I subscribe, so $10 a month to Podcast

Guru and then $9 of that or maybe the full $10 or

whatever automatically gets converted at whatever the current rate is, and I get

those satoshis to then stream out and do all of this cool stuff with it.

I think that's cool. On the podcaster side, I

don't want podcasters to have to mess with multiple wallets because an

audience No. Will generally probably use only 1 or

2 apps. Like, when you think of about the the fringe

audience on the fringe that is who wants to

support through streaming satoshis, they'll probably use

one app for that and then their preferred

their favorite podcast app for all their other listening

unless the podcasting 2.0 app gets so good that it

replaces their normal app, and some of them are getting very close to that. I

know another person that does, and I'm I'm moving this way. When Overcast

came out with a new version, I was like, oh, I wonder what's new. And

I kinda went over there, and I was like, oh, I I forgot how much

I like this app. And I'm very close to having my

non satoshi streaming stuff in overcast

and everything else, no agenda, you know, podcasting 2 point

o, SoundOff podcasts are a couple that I listen to that are doing value for

value. And I was like, maybe I'll just keep those in cast o matic. And

when I feel like it, I'll use that app. And and and then it's really

a matter of, like, how much do you miss that show if you haven't listened

to it for a while because it's not automatically coming up in your playlist. You're

like, oh, wait a minute. I haven't heard from whatever show. And then I go,

that's because it's in the other app. So that's the the weird part of it,

but I I'm very close to doing that. And on the podcaster

side, we do not need multiple wallets. I I want us to

have just one wallet for each podcaster or per podcast.

And I really think the logical place for that to

happen is the podcast hosting providers who

might already have the necessary

protocols in place to be custodians

of money for you, think of Patreon. You know, people

pay Patreon, and then Patreon distributes that money to

you. And that's because

they're not wallets that you can use in other places. I think

that's part of the problem that we're running soon. I know we're kind of

shifting subjects completely here, but it's all connected. I

promise. That's part of the problem that we're running into is that

in thinking along the lines of cryptocurrency, there is the

idea of it's in your wallet. If it's not in your

wallet, if you don't have the keys, Elon Musk said this one time. He

said something like, not your keys, not your wallet. If you

don't have the private key to your wallet, then it's not really your

crypto. I can understand that. I think if we get

out of the mindset of wallets and instead just think

about it as you've accrued this and you get paid once

a month. That happens everywhere, and people do that without trouble.

I do that with my own affiliates. Like for Podgageman, I pay them

at the beginning of each month. They have accrued a certain

amount, and then they get paid that amount the next

month. And that's not a wallet issue. That that

kind of thing works with all kinds of affiliates and systems out there,

and there's no huge legal trouble there. It's

when I, as a service provider, am managing your

wallet for you, that's where things start to get

trickier. We can still use cryptocurrency for this

kind of stuff. But maybe it's something like as soon as it

comes or once a month when it comes into your podcast

hosting provider, into their system, then they send it

out to your specific lightning wallet,

whatever that is. And more and more places now are

starting to offer that you can receive Bitcoin through the

Lightning Network, like Coinbase, for example. I can

transfer Bitcoin over the Lightning Network to my

Coinbase account. I cannot use that Coinbase

address as my Podcasting 2.0 value block

wallet. Lots of lingo there. It doesn't work for

that. But it does work for just receiving a straight transfer.

And that's the kind of thing that podcast hosting providers could do. Or

maybe even the apps do something like that instead of

the providers. But then the apps start having to manage all of these

inboxes and outboxes for all of these podcasts, and that starts to get

become a mess. I think it totally makes sense for the hosting providers to

offer that. And then the apps doing these different

methods could integrate then even with that. I mean,

think of it like that where it comes to this whole ad

blocking thing coming up, bringing it back. See, I promised we'd be there

relevant again. Bringing it back to the ad blocking concept. If

the ads are dynamically inserted, then

there's either something to skip or not something to skip. And

if it's downloaded every time, it could be a different ad, which might

potentially be a different length. But what if the app

could trigger to the podcast hosting provider? This

podcaster has paid to listen to this ad free.

So do not do any dynamic content insertion

of ads. And there need to be the ability for then the

providers to indicate what's an ad and what's an announcement. And the podcast

would have to be honest about that kind of thing too. Like, you use

DCI, dynamic content insertion, with Skoll podcasting, and they're

not all sponsored spots. No. They're all well, there's I'm the sponsor. That's the

fun part. But you do, like, your question of the month? No. Question of the

month. Yeah. That's not that where am I gonna be is not an ad. So,

yeah, it doesn't always have to be an ad. And then I think,

on ask the podcast coach, I'm now using some dynamic stuff. I'm playing with

Buzzsprout. And, my one little it's like 10 seconds.

It's like, hey. Not listening to this live? Go to ask the podcast

coach.com/voice mail and leave us a message, and we'll, you know, we'll answer your

question, you know, when we're live or whatever. So it doesn't always have to

be an ad. It can be and that's just me playing, basically. But it's like,

hey. What would I say to these people? I'm like, well, we need for the

show. So I just had it, and it does. It does that weird little

noise and then Do do do do do do. Yeah. It's like, okay.

Yeah. And imagine, again, for the audience, what

if they have the ability to just pay and skip any of those that are

not announcements? And that's where it does come into what are you

inserting and Yeah. Is there a way that you can

ethically indicate that it should not be skipped?

That starts to get complicated, I know. But there's

great potential here, and that's what I like seeing

where and, you know, we started with this as, oh, no. This

is gonna get someone in legal trouble Right. Into

here's a whole new way of building a value for value

ecosystem that can solve many of these technical problems

that we might be facing with stuff like Alby or other things like that

and helps the podcaster, helps the

audiences, helps the developers because, yes, anytime value is

exchanged through a podcast app, I think it's okay for the podcast

app to take a cut of that. I think that should be

disclosed maybe. I'm not so sure it's necessary to disclose that

to the audience, but definitely disclose that to the

podcaster. Because, like, right now, when you're paying with a credit

card at Chick Fil A, do you know how much they're

paying in merchant fees? Yeah. They don't disclose that to you. It it

doesn't really matter. You just know I'm paying way too much for a chicken

sandwich nowadays. So I don't think

the audience needs to know. As long as the podcaster

knows what the amount was that was given, just like we see that with

PayPal or Stripe payments. We see, oh, yeah. Someone paid $10.

I'm getting $9.50 of that or whatever it works out to

be. I think that's fine. It'll be interesting to see because there's a lot

We're sending things back to the media host and yeah. I mean, if you think

about it, there are newer services that don't have the tech debt

that some of the older hosts do. And so Pod Home

could, you know, maybe try something like that. Because when you're talking about going back

and forth to a media host and as someone who previously worked

at a a media hosting company, I don't know if I wanna deal with support

where it's like, hey, man. I'm down 12 and a half satoshis.

You guys are taking my money. You know? I'm like, do we really wanna

ingest that into support? That could be a nightmare, but it'd be it'd be fun

to try. And and somebody like Podholme could could give it a shot. You never

know. When that's where while this stuff is still a bit

complicated and your grandmother or your aunt or whoever, your mom,

can't do this stuff yet. Yes. There's a hidden your mom joke in

there. That's right. Good old aunt Cheryl. I think that

also means that it's the potential to

not have those people complaining about the 12 and a half satoshis

because they know this is cutting edge, this is

bleeding edge technology stuff. I'm taking a risk doing some

of this stuff. I'm okay kind of experimenting and trying some of this while

it's in beta. There's one other point we should probably talk about when it

comes to advertising. Quit making boring ads.

Yeah. If you don't want people to skip your ads, don't make them so boring.

Tom Webster made that point. It's like, if people are skipping your ads, it's because

they're boring. You know what I mean? And a lot of times it is just

the same old bullet points and things like that. So I'm like, yeah. If you

think about all the, all the ads that we talk about, remember that one, the

Alka Seltzer one and the where's the beef lady? Like, those are all kind of

funny and entertaining versus just like, yeah. Here's the

facts. You know? Life is hard. Better help. You know? Okay. We

get it. It's like so so put some creativity

in there. So And that is the one party

that stands to lose with a value exchange like this, with some kind of

value for value where you get to pay to skip the ads and you're paying

a very small amount but more than the ad itself was actually worth.

Yes. The advertiser, they're losing opportunity. They're

not losing money. They're losing opportunity. But the thing is,

though, do the advertisers actually

want to pay to put their product out there?

And, I mean, I know the basic answer is yes. But what I'm getting at

here is if they're not paying for it,

they're not losing. So, yes, it means let

let's just take an example. Since you mentioned Jordan Harbinger, a very popular podcaster,

if advertisers are now

paying less because they're getting to a smaller

portion of his audience because some of his audience, let's say, 10% of his

audience moves over. So the advertiser is getting 10%

fewer impressions. So they're paying 10% less.

Are they really losing? Not really. They're they're paying less.

They're getting fewer impressions. Yes. Right. But

fewer impressions that they're not paying for. Poor.

So it's not like they're being ripped off. They're not gaining from the

system, but they're also not losing.

They're just not reaching as many people, but they

might not be reaching those people anyway because those people

are skipping ads probably. Yeah. It it depends

for me if I'm riding my bike or something where

my hands are tied driving. I will not skip ads if I'm driving because

I don't wanna have to reach up on the dashboard or something like that. But

if it's just me walking or I'm sitting here at my desk and the phone

is right there, oh, yeah. We're we're as soon as then especially

depending on some of those people go for, you know, 5, 10 minutes of

ads, and you're like, yeah. Skip, skip, skip, skip, skip. Nope.

Skip. One more. Skip. Skip. Skip. Skip.

And skip. Okay. Yes. Okay. And we're back, and then it's them going, hey. Thanks

so much for listening. That's the end of the show. And you're like, jeez, Louise.

Yeah. And it's probably also not exactly that the advertisers are

thinking, oh, we have got to get Casper mattresses

on Jordan Harbinger. So it's a perfect fit. His

audience is the perfect audience of all of the podcasts out there.

We have to advertise our mattresses to his audience.

They're not really thinking like that. They're just thinking many of these

big advertisers on the big podcast are very general

needs sort of thing. Like, everybody needs a mattress. Everybody

needs help. Everybody you know, all of this stuff is very general.

Yes. There are some of the cases where it is a more niche advertiser

wants to advertise, and you've probably had this on your podcast day if I've had

some advertisers come after me month after month after month

begging to support and sponsor my some of my

podcasts, and I just don't like having ads. But and there there are

cases for that, and certainly, we can find ways to work around

that, I think. But in general, that's not happening a whole lot.

It's usually these general purpose

advertisers going after general audiences but

engaged audiences. But they're not thinking we have

to get that podcast for our very general product. It's

only Jordan's audience that sleeps. Right. We we

need to get it on his show. Nobody else needs pillows and

mattresses. Well, the reason I bring up Jordan too, if you want a good example

of somebody who has, like, 3 ad breaks a show, but, a, he

always makes them somewhat lighthearted, even his teas before he

goes in. A lot of his ad reads, he'll work in a story about his

kid or his wife. So it's not just here are the 5

facts about this pillow. They make you wanna buy it. No. It's they're a

little more entertaining. And he gets to them. It's he hits it,

quits it, next one. And then because there's

value because I listen a lot to, feedback Friday.

I'm willing to sit through ads because I know there's another

outrageous story on the other side of this ad, and there's always 2. He doesn't

do more than 2. That's you start doing 3. I'm like, okay. Now I

gotta find the skip button. But 2, I'm like, oh, I'll hang with that

with Jordan. Not everybody else, but Jordan, I'll hang for 2. And I love that

you brought that up because that's another point that was on my mind is that

this whole idea of potentially being able to pay to skip ads,

it is also relative to the podcast because some podcasts, you want

to hear the ads. Yeah. Some podcasts, you

so desperately do not want to hear

ads interrupted because maybe it is a super gripping

story. We're just like, why is going to happen? And

now do you need psychological help?

Yes. Because you're interrupting my story. Or, you

know, some of these dynamic things might insert the

ad in such a horrible place.

Maybe I don't know if any of them do this, but it could be, like,

maybe it's interrupting the music or interrupting the line of dialogue in a

story or interrupting the scene instead of being between scenes in the

story. Or maybe there are some of those fall asleep kind of

podcasts where you want to drift to sleep with a

nice, peaceful, melatonin,

melodramatic, monotone, all of that,

just calm. And then Friday, Friday, Friday.

And, you know 15:15 minutes will save you 15% because

Who do I have to pay to never hear this ad again while I'm trying

to fall asleep? That's where it might become far

more valuable to an audience to for this

particular podcast, I'll I'll pay 10,000 satoshis to not

hear an ad at all while I'm listening to this podcast

because I don't want my listening to be interrupted at

all. I even make my family pay to interrupt me if I'm listening to the

podcast. It could be to that point. And that's where

the idea of value for value is what is it worth to you?

You set that value, put that value in numbers and

give that back. So what is it worth to you

to not hear an ad? What can you give? What do

you want to give? Like, for me, I can't

give what it's worth to me at times.

But I would love the ability to give something

to not hear the ads, certainly more than the ad is worth to the podcaster.

I'd love to give a podcaster 4¢ to skip

an ad they're being paid only 2¢ for. I'd love to do

that, and I could totally afford that. And then someday, if I'm

able to do more, then I could say, hey. I'll give you a dollar to

not hear an ad. I'd skip that for a dollar.

Exactly. We did get one boostagram

from, Brian to relax mail. He gave us a

row of ducks, 2222. Says, I I guess, we had said

something about we didn't get any boostigrams. And he says, well, we can't have y'all

feeling unloved. So thank you, Brian. We appreciate that.

And, if you'd like to send us a boost, just go to those

one of those awesome new podcast apps. We also have buttons, I believe, out

on our website if you wanna send it that way. Of course, you can always

check out Podgagement. You can check out the School of Podcasting. That's another way to

support the show. But that's gonna do it for episode 48,

and I wanna check here. It's been going now,

45 minutes. It's still kinda doing the little circle

thingy on the app. So I'm looking at this what is the

Adblock podcast? And I download Jordan shows. It says one ad

detected, and it's just spinning. So I don't know if that's

a good thing or a bad thing, but it's it seems like it's still processing.

You know, a funny thing about that is Jordan actually reached out to me

recently and asked, hey. I figured if everyone you might know of a

way to do this. Is there a way to easily figure out how many

hours of content that I've put out in my podcast? I

thought, well, yeah, there probably is. So I threw together really quickly a

script because he uses the Itunes colon duration tag

in his podcast that has the duration for each episode. It was really easy to

make a script that went through his entire RSS feed, pulled that all

together, and the number was something like, I think,

around 1200 hours of content. Yeah. I think it was

11 00:43:51

57, 1157

11 00:43:55

hours point 3 or something like that of content.

11 00:43:59

So inside of Adblock podcast, since you put Jordan

11 00:44:02

Harbinger's show in there, I think it's still processing

11 00:44:06

a 1000 hours of content because it seems to go through the

11 00:44:10

entire RSS feed looking for ads

11 00:44:14

to be able to skip and and to mark as

11 00:44:17

ads. So, certainly, there's some opportunity for some optimization there

11 00:44:21

and some opportunity, maybe even some crowdsourcing. Yeah. This is

11 00:44:25

episode 1024. So he has a few to to go through

11 00:44:29

then. That would make sense. Excellent. But, thanks again for

11 00:44:32

listening. Thanks for those who are, streaming. And, that's gonna do it for

11 00:44:36

episode 48 of the future of podcasting. Keep boosting and keep

11 00:44:40

podcasting.