What does the future of podcast monetization look like?
And in particular, what does the future look like for the independent creator?
It's something that a lot of podcasters concern themselves with, especially in the
world of minimum revenue guarantees and minimum download thresholds for
advertisements and big words being thrown around like programmatic advertising.
The good news is that as an indie, maybe we don't need to worry about any of that
so much.
That is what we're going to dive into today here on the podcast accelerator.
I'm your host, Mark Asquith, and I'm joined by a great friend and a wonderful
industry thinker and an actual industry doer, of which I believe there should be
more.
But we'll talk about that on another session.
We are going to talk all things value for value.
We're going to talk all things monetization.
We're going to talk all things the future for the indie creator.
And we're going to talk about the brand new platform called
hot fans.
Welcome to the show, Mr.
Sam Sethi How are you my friend?
Wow, I need to have one of you just lead in me, go in front of me in rooms and just
introduce me.
That'll be amazing.
Toastmaster.
like a David Brent thing.
We'll get a nice boom box on my shoulder.
We'll play a little bit of Tina Turner.
You're the best.
We'll just any room you need, my friend, I'm there.
I'm ready.
That's it.
We're done.
Right.
Hello.
I don't like doing this because I know that everyone really should know you like
I know you because I know the fantastic work that you do in the industry.
But I want to get to some of the cool stuff that you're up to with, with the
product that you've got and some of the thinking that you do, which I think is
vital, but I'm going to do the thing that everyone else does at the end.
I'm going to say, Sam, tell us what you do.
And importantly, give us your bloody website, mate.
Okay, what I do, I co-host Pod News Weekly with James Cridland.
We've been doing that for about three years.
And so that's great fun.
It allows me to interview cool people and talk with James about what's going on in
the industry on a weekly basis.
And it's so, so hectic every week.
Beginning of the week, I think, Oh God, what we're going to talk about this week.
And by the end of the week, it's like, Jesus, cut that we haven't got enough
time.
And invariably, the Pod News Weekly
We tried to make it a half hour podcast at the beginning.
It's invariably 90 minutes on average.
It's ridiculously long.
So apologies to everyone about that.
And then on the side, just to keep myself busy, I've got a new podcasting platform
called podvans.fm.
I love it.
I want to dig into that in just a second.
And before we do that, though, I do, I want to set the scene.
I think that pod news weekly 30 minute aspiration is actually a really good place
to start because that has been the situation in podcasting.
I mean, I want to say at least for the last five or six years, it was felt a
little different before that.
It was there was a lot going on, but it didn't.
It wasn't I don't want to say mainstream, but it wasn't as close to mainstream as it
is now, which then incurred the fact that, you know,
wasn't as much money coming through it because of that there was much less
interest and then there was this startup boom there was this money boom there was
this boom of acquisitions and everything just seemed to go crazy 2017 2018 ish and
things started to change so as someone that's really at the forefront of the news
and the response to the news every single week it's easy for me to sit here and say
things have changed things are slowing down and for other people to comment and
say things are slowing down but like is it
Is that true?
It doesn't feel like what you're saying matches with some of the narrative that we
see online.
It seems as busy as ever.
I think what we're seeing is that people are still actively involved in podcasting.
Yeah, there is a slowdown.
I mean, we all know that COVID resulted in people sat at home bit bored, got a mic
out, started a podcast anchor gave it away for free.
We got a influx of podcasts that you know, let's be honest, some were not very good
and some were okay.
But but it wasn't
professionalizing it.
Now what we've seen post COVID, of course, is a lot of that's gone away, people have
gone back to work.
And that's fine.
We've seen also companies now the stock markets are beginning to say to companies
like a cast and others look, oh, you, you've got some money.
Now we want to see some profit.
Yeah, great that you are still revenue generating.
But Spotify, a cast, podimo, all these others, let's see the money.
And so there's been some downsizing of people and cuts.
I think the exclusives that were out there, it was a good idea to start off
with.
Let's get, you know, big high profile names, see if we can generate some numbers
around it in terms of people and that will lead to more revenue and profitability.
Hopefully didn't quite work.
But I think again, looking at global, there have been some amazing alternatives
where there's actually been a very clever strategy.
So the news agents been brilliant.
I mean, the numbers you guys are hitting are knocking it out of the park, but also,
you know, look at.
The rest is, you know, Goldhanger Productions podcast.
They've got, the rest is politics, the rest is football, and they're doing really
well with all of their titles.
And I think crowd networks, there's a lot of good solid companies who are producing
good solid podcasts that are generating real income and real revenue.
Now, what does that mean going down the long tail?
Yeah, it's still hard work.
I mean, you know, most people are, you know, if they're getting above 1000
listeners, they're still in the top quartile, right.
So podcasting is not quite yet, you know, the 10s of 1000s for everybody.
But it is, I think an industry that's gone, I liken it to remember web one.io
when everyone had crazy valuations, and there was a pop and everyone went, Oh,
well, that's the internet over and done with in law, let's all go home.
And then suddenly web two came and it stabilized and real business models
occurred and real revenue occurred.
And we are where we are today.
And I think that's exactly what podcasting is.
It's, it's seen its early days.
It's seen its massive pop rise with crazy money coming into the industry.
And now there's been a downturn and then slowly, I think 23, 24, the end of 23,
early 24, we're beginning to see proper businesses and proper podcasting models.
different revenue models, but proper models.
And so, yeah, I think we're a good industry.
It's okay.
Yeah, I hear that.
And I love the comparison to web one and web 2.0.
And we're going to talk about web 3.0.
And I'm always amazed how it's taking so many hosting companies in podcasting to
get rid of their web 2.0 interfaces.
And some of them still got them.
You know, we all like stuff that looks nostalgic, but time for an upgrade,
people.
Let's just move ahead with that one.
And I think that's representative of where the industry was, though.
There was no real need to shift.
And you know, all sort of flippancy aside with that one, it was a genuine, that was
a genuine issue.
There was no honest reason to shift because, you know, you think about the
creator economy and you think about the way that that's always worked and that's
always generated revenue.
And suddenly you get something.
And I don't want to be the guy that invokes cereal, but I've got to do it.
You know, you get something like cereal that puts podcasting on the map for the
consumerism in a much bigger way.
And.
you know, the boom can be directly attributed to that kind of feeling where
everyone started to look at podcasting as a media, as an industry.
And I completely agree with it now that we've come out of the end of what appears
to be that talent boom, which, you know, a lot of people say that was a silly move,
you know, let's why, why acquire Joe Rogan's the best example, if you're not
going to be profitable.
I do think there was a lot of strategy in that around just acquiring users.
And I don't think there was necessarily a need for profit.
I think it was a loss leader in many ways.
Um, and it's.
I think to a lot of people in the industry, it hurt their feelings a little
bit that podcasting was like the loss leader for a platform.
And again, I understand that because we're close to the industry.
But what interests me about the way that you think and the way that you do things,
and I think we think pretty similarly on a lot of these issues, is that podcasting is
sort of bundled in now.
Everything that is on-demand audio is sort of called podcasting now.
And it's not, you know, if I go and watch
a Marvel movie, whether that's on Disney or whether that's in a movie theater,
that's not bundled together with a home video or something necessarily on YouTube.
And I feel like podcasting has got that yet to come where, you know, crowd,
global, wondering, whoever's producing top tier multifaceted IP that happens to be
delivered via a podcast to start with, eventually starts to sort of not become
podcasts because
we feel that the creator economy is where podcast is.
And we saw that last week or it was last week, wasn't it?
With the new Batman original from Spotify that just doesn't have the word.
It's an audio original, audio drama, whatever the wording was, it just not got
the word podcast.
So do you think there's a challenge there?
And well, I want to bring this back to the independence in a bit because I think this
is where pod fans work so well.
But do you think that is, is that pie in the sky thinking or is there something in
that logic around why are we bundling everything now under podcast?
Well, it's become the Hoover of the words, right?
So when you say I'm going to go and Hoover the lounge, you're not talking about
getting the brand Hoover.
It could be Dyson, right?
It's the generic word.
Google, we don't say search, we say we're just gonna Google it, right?
I mean, so I think podcasting has taken that generic mantle of anything that's
audio video that I can consume digitally online.
And the
pragmatist, and I'll put myself in that camp, you know, would say, well, it's not
really because it hasn't got RSS.
But look, 99% of people who are what we call the normies are not bothered whether
it has RSS attached to it, right?
They open up Spotify, they open up YouTube, they consume it.
And to them, it's a podcast.
So therefore it is.
And we just have to get over ourselves.
I think where we will evolve possibly is new words will come out.
maybe as you said, we talk about films, then we talk about DVDs, and we talk about
on demand, and we talk about streaming in the video homeworld, you know, Netflix.
But equally, I just said, I'm going to watch a film on Netflix.
And it doesn't really have to have that connotation of a cinema attached.
So I think language is loose and flexible.
And I don't think we should get too hung up on it.
But I think as podcasters go, yeah, I mean, I think
think it's I'm I was against YouTube was against audible in many ways, you know,
calling them podcasts.
I've sort of flipped I've gone like, you know what, let it be because if we get a
secondary glow from the word podcast have been picked up by some 18 year old or 25
year old who's just getting into it.
And then they go, Oh, what other podcasts can I use or listen to or watch?
I'm happy.
They will they will eventually
get their education curve to where we want them to be, but they have to start
somewhere.
Yeah, I felt that way about Anker back in the day.
You know, you get a lot of the incumbents having a real good cry about Anker.
You know, well, Anker's coming along and it's free.
And if you're free, you know, if it's free, then you're the product, which is
ironic, given, you know, that many of the hosting platforms have freemium, which is
wild.
And I'd sort of treated that.
That's how I treated Anker as a, in my mind was it's just a freemium product that
doesn't have a premium tier and guess who was the premium tier?
You know, here we are at Captivate.
My logic was always the same that if someone, I would rather someone start a
podcast using anchor and it was free and then realized, oh, do you know what?
Okay, I enjoy this.
Now it's time for something different and Captivate was an option for them.
Not even saying that we were the only one.
I would just rather we were in that mix rather than them just say, oh no, I've got
to pay money for this thing that I might not enjoy doing.
And yeah, it's a...
I feel exactly the same way about that.
So I'm with you on that.
I think that the evolution and the halo that we all feel with regards to the word
podcasting, taking on various different meanings.
I'm all right with that.
I think that's OK.
And there's merit to there's merit to open in that market, because then to bring it
back to the revenue stuff, which I really want to dig into, you can.
You can't bring more money in if you are not making more people aware of what
podcasting is.
And if this is the way that it really goes mainstream, then we can't.
I don't think we can be that sad about it.
So let's, let's switch up to the creators then.
So let's talk about pod fans.
You know, even, even now, a lot of people still think that monetizing a podcast as
an indie with.
You know, a hundred downloads, a hundred listeners.
is super tough.
You know, they think it's difficult to get sponsorships regardless of whether they go
direct and they've got a super niche audience or not.
And many people are put off by that.
There are other ways.
All right.
So we know about that.
You've been a big pioneer of value for value.
And pod fans is there, this new product that you're launching this week into the
public domain properly is right at the bleeding edge of that.
So can you spend a second or two just educating the audience on, okay, what is
this whole value for value thing?
What is pod fans?
How does it work?
And actually, why should we be interested in this?
Yeah, before I do, sorry, before I do, let me take a quick step back because it looks
blame why value for value is important.
So when I was at Netscape, I was the product manager, we created the browser
HTTP was the way that people learned about the language.
And I remember going out and saying to people, oh, by the way, Mark, it's called
a browser.
It's called a URL has starts with HTTP and people were going never catch on.
don't understand what you're talking about, first of all, and secondly, you'll
never catch on.
It did, as we all know.
So new vocabulary is always hard to get into the lexicon of people's minds.
The second part of that was Mark Andreessen, my boss never created a micro
payment system.
So in the absence of it, we got hearts, likes, thumbs up as sentiment analysis.
So people wanting to tell the creator that they like what they've done, that was all
they could give them.
There was no form of payment.
Then the creators went, well, I need money.
I can't keep doing this for free.
So that they ended up creating advertising around the content.
And that's where we got to today.
Now fast forward, and we have something called Bitcoin.
Now, most people rolled their eyes the minute you say Bitcoin.
And if I say it's a digital wallet, and it's called a micro payment, and they call
Satoshi's.
Again, these are all new words, people look at you going that'll never catch on.
It's all Swahili.
I don't know what you're talking about, Sam.
Well, as I said, people didn't understand what HTTP was either.
So there are about 50 million people using digital wallets today.
So it's not, you know, small chump change, there are a good number of people out
there.
And it's slowly catching on.
We're seeing the numbers, you know, through various wallets increasing.
So what is a micro payment?
What is value for value?
So a micro payment is 100 millionth of the Bitcoin, it has to be that small.
And why do you need it at all when you've got PayPal and Stripe and Visa and
MasterCard and Apple Pay?
Well, because all of those take payment gateway fees.
And because they take those fees, if I just wanted to give you Mark 50 P or a
pound for this show, I couldn't do it because actually most of that money would
go to the payment gateway provider, even if they accepted that payment, because
most won't even accept those small payments.
So
This micro payment model came about and that's the first part of it.
Now value for value is just a simple new economic model.
It doesn't have to include micro payments and Bitcoin.
Value for value is simply you mark set a value for the content you're creating and
means the listener can agree with the value you set or disagree and if I agree,
I just pay it and if I disagree, I can make it higher.
I could say Mark you're stupid.
boy, this is the best show ever.
I'm doubling or tripling the amount I want to pay you or I'm sorry, Mark, I'm a
newbie.
I haven't got quite into your show.
So I don't want to pay you.
I'm going to pay you nothing now.
I'm going to listen for free.
But when I become a fan, I will trip over into paying you.
So value for value is a very simple model.
We have it in real world.
You know, if somebody walks into a shop, they see a sale ticket price, that's the
offer price, they can legally go to the counter and offer a different price, but
we just too British, and we don't do it.
But bartering is that way.
It's a value for value is a very simple real time model.
Now, what's nice about it with podcasting is because you get a digital wallet and
you get these micro payments in them, think of them as tokens, then, you know,
it's a direct payment between you, the listener and the creator.
There is no third party.
There's no middleman.
There is no I'm going to do, you know, go up here and I'm going to hold your money
until I'm comfortable.
There's no none of that.
So direct payments.
which is the root of what Web Wando 1.0 was.
You know, if you remember Linewire, Napster, Skype, it was a peer-to-peer
system.
It was Web2 that made it client server again.
And yes, you mentioned it earlier, Mark.
So I'll say it again.
Web3 is very much about decentralization and peer-to-peer monetization.
And so we're going back to the roots of the web and value for value is a new
economic model that really will benefit podcasters
And sorry, Mark, this is the last part.
So the average CPM rate for an advert is about $25.
If you're a creator with less than a couple of you know, 100 users, you're not
going to get that $25 CPM rate, you're just not.
So what can you do, you can go and get a sponsor if you're lucky, maybe you might
get a few of your mates listening.
Great.
And who might want to pay you buy your coffee or whatever it may be.
But again,
Kevin Kelly's seminal blog post was a thousand true fans and all he said was
look, stop chasing millions of people.
None of us are Joe Rogan.
So if you've got a couple of hundred people willing to pay you 50p an episode,
a pound an episode, that covers your hosting costs and gives you a little bit
of money.
Now scale that up to the likes of a news agent at global with 10 million users and
you know, then the revenue numbers outweigh anything you'll get through
advertising.
But we're just in the early days.
And so when this
crosses over and it will, then people will probably not want to be interrupted by
advertising and they will willingly pay to listen to content that they're a fan of.
We're starting to see that shift as well.
We're starting to see the trend of people saying that podcasts have too many adverts
because that is the only way when you have a large audience and the only extra thing
that you can do outside of listener support, so through subscriptions,
memberships, or whether it's taking tips as you alluded to earlier, the only way is
to simply insert one more ad slot, and then again and again and again and again.
So you do start to see now that people are starting to just say...
Hmm.
This is becoming a bit of an issue.
And then, you know, conversely, what you then get is the model that you hear
throughout, you know, everywhere.
Every major production company is doing this where listen, add free.
If you give us money per month and what I like about the way this works.
And I'm always a I'm massively into new tech.
I'm always looking and playing and tinkering right in the earliest stages of
new tech.
And then as someone that runs a hosting company, I'm always thinking, actually,
When do you bring this to the masses?
And when are the people that aren't in to tech going to be ready for this?
And I agree, you know, I think eventually people will get on board with this
thinking.
Because what I see as a major issue that this begins to solve is that if I am an
indie creator, let's assume that I've devoted my entire creator experience to
the Kevin Kelly logic, which I totally agree with.
I've got my thousand true fans.
How long has it taken me to get those fans to become true fans enough that they want
to pay me?
Like that entire, if you think about it in marketing terms, as we always do, people
like you and I, that conversion period, that sales period is long.
They listen to X amount of podcasts, a number of episodes, and then they've got
to discover that they like you, and then they've got to really like you, and then
they've got to be willing to give you something.
and then give you something regularly every single month.
Like that sales process is tough.
Does this go some way to solving that problem because it is such a.
I don't want to say transient, because I think that oversimplifies it and
diminishes it a little bit, but it's very fleeting.
The decision, if that makes any sense.
So, so what we currently have today is what I call the Chinese buffet mode.
So let's talk about Spotify or, or subscriptions on Apple, right?
Pay me in advance for something I've not consumed.
And if I don't drop a new episode, still keep paying me because I want you to
because that's all that a subscription can do.
Whereas with a value for value model, it's a per minute payment basis.
So let's say
you start listening to a podcast and you only listen to 20 minutes of an hour's
show, that's all you pay 20 minutes worth.
If you're listening to a book, exactly the same thing model applies for value for
value.
I've listened to two chapters.
I don't know how many books I've gotten audible that I've got a third of the way
through and never listened to all of it.
The same works of video.
And most excitingly, this model is also now working for music as well.
And that's one of the new things that's come out.
So you might only listen to 10 tracks instead of listening to 50 tracks, but why
pay for the 500 tracks in advance that you never listened to?
problem with that is if anyone listens to Meat Loaf, each song's going to cost them
45 quid.
Oh, if anyone listens to Meatloaf, you just shoot them.
I'm going to tell that to the karaoke group at the local pub because on Friday
night, they get wild up there, mate, for a little bit of meat.
But no, I like that.
I like that.
I'm interested in the way that technology thinkers like yourself will take what can
be very abstract concepts like value for value, like, you know, Bitcoin, like the
Satoshi element of Bitcoin and do what all the good people really have been doing
since day one, which is putting technology
that doesn't feel scary in between us and that what appears to be the backend
technology.
So tell us a bit about Podfans because that's exactly what this does.
It's a well thought out product from good thinkers to simplify something that can be
complex for the creator.
So tell us all about it.
Tell us what Podfans does.
And really what was the idea behind it?
Where did it come from?
Sure.
So, complexity is fail simplicity is one of my favorite sayings.
And that's a guy called Edward De Bono came up with that.
When we started pod fans, there was no point in trying to replicate Apple and
Spotify, right?
Just a subscription based model.
We would fail.
And when I started pod fans, probably a year to 18 months ago, Bitcoin was just
forming the Lightning Network, which is this fast real time payment system was
just forming.
So these were new ideas.
Core part of it is I firmly believe that people's time and attention has value.
And that value is I will only pay for what I consume and I'll only pay for the time I
listen rather than pay it all in advance.
So when we found that this micro payments existed and it was possible to do a per
minute payment system for digital content of any sort, that was the embryo for
starting pod fans.
So RSS, as we all know, is an open ecosystem.
You can consume anyone's RSS unless they've blocked it or made it exclusive.
And on that basis, we decided that we wouldn't have advertising as the
monetization model for creators, but we would have this peer-to-peer direct
payment system from fan to creator.
So to build that, we had to fundamentally start with creating the database, then we
had to create.
wallets and we have to create the mechanism for measuring in real time
across everyone who's listening.
So we do we do a per second analysis over the API.
And we make and then we aggregate that bundle per minute and then we pay it.
And it works.
It just works, right?
We spent a year building this and it works.
And that's the cool thing.
So now
when you're a new user to podfans, it's very simple, you join and in the
onboarding process, you either have an existing wallet, or you don't.
If you do, we just verify against your wallet, off you go.
The learning curve is great because you already understand what a payment system
is, with micro payment and what a wallet is.
So now you're just understanding how my platform works.
And you know, the intricacies of my platform compared to other platforms.
If you haven't got a wallet, and that's, you know, again, we have to reach those
people who don't understand this.
then we've got to educate you on the onboarding as to how do you get a wallet?
And we do that.
And then we put in 10,000 sats into your wallet as a part of the process and we
reward you and we're trying to teach you as well we call learn and earn.
So we're trying to say to you look, you've got your wallet you've joined here's some
tokens here's some sats in your wallet.
Now give us your email address or pick your first five favorite podcasts or
listen to your first show.
and we will reward you for completing tasks that add up to 10,000 sats.
So when you get into the system and you click play, it works.
You don't have to go, Oh God, do I have to get a credit card out now?
Oh, I don't want to do that.
I don't know these people.
We also, as I said, we reward time and attention so you can earn by being an
active user.
So let's say it was a fan of your podcast, Mark.
I could be sharing it.
I could be boosting it, which is a comment with a payment.
I could be clipping in a piece and putting that out to my social network.
Each one of those is a verb, boost, clip, share.
And we've put a gamification engine inside of pod fans.
So we know there's 30 verbs.
We know what exactly you do when you're in the platform and we can allocate points to
that.
So yes, you pay if you choose to listen to a podcast, you don't have to, but you also
can earn by being an active fan of a podcast.
So we think that two way value for value model.
is what we've built and that's pod fans.
the element of rewarding the attention of a listener as well.
I think that's really, really useful.
Even the gamification element of anything is always so powerful.
And I do think that podcasting is yet to really capitalize on that.
We see words like engagement banded about so much, but no one really does anything
with it.
So I really like this idea that you've embraced that.
And a lot of people are going to start to say things like, okay, well, actually
I listen to most of my podcasts on the go.
I listen to most of my shows when I'm doing something else.
And it's usually on a smart device, usually on a phone or whatever.
So how do you handle that?
Are you available mobile?
Can people listen using mobile and using pod fans?
Yeah, the good news is we've created what's called a progressive web app PWA.
And all that means is browser based.
It's not in the iOS store or the Google Store.
We don't pay Apple a 30% tax for any transaction, which is why we did it.
And it means it works across iPad, laptop and mobile in the same way.
And we just size the screen down to based on the size of screen.
So that's really cool.
The one thing I was going to slightly change one thing there was a report this
week Mark just bear with me.
Ashley Carmen from Bloomberg put out a report saying that podcasters now
beginning to fake their numbers in terms of downloads.
And why are they doing that?
Well, fake until you make it is an expression that you hear many
entrepreneurs being told to say but
reason they're doing that is because they want to get that $25 CPM.
Oh, how many how many people download your book?
Oh, yeah, a couple of 1000 people.
All right, well, we'll sign you up.
There you go.
You can have some advertising.
And then they find out it's a couple of hundred people.
So that is something that is quite common, I'm afraid in the in the community.
And also, we all know if you use something like an Apple podcast, it auto downloads,
that doesn't mean you auto listen.
So you could have a back catalog of hundreds of podcasts you've never listened
to.
But that gets reported back as a download and therefore the advertiser thinks, oh, I
should be paying for that.
The last part of that mark is also we don't know how far along in a podcast the
person's listened to.
So let's say there's three adverts, the one at the beginning, middle and end.
We all know the one at the end generally doesn't get listened to.
We know the one in the middle probably gets skipped.
If it doesn't get skipped, it will get listened to.
But we can't 100% know for certain.
Now with pod fans, we know for certain, because we know exactly how many minutes
you've listened to, at what point you dropped off.
So we've got three metrics that we've worked with a company in Canada who have a
similar thinking called Bumper.
And it's time listened, percent completed and value paid.
And you bring those three metrics together and you can roll that up to a creator so
they know exactly how long each listener listened, but also in aggregate how...
where people dropped off in your episode.
You also know how much value was paid for it.
And those three, when you go back to an advertiser, if you still want to put
advertising into your own podcast, you can.
And then the advertiser is going to be confident that yeah, actually, you know
what, Mark?
80% of your listeners listen to that advert.
Great, I'm going to continue paying it.
So again, we've got this old download model.
We've got this fake it until you make it and use a number model.
And again, that's all changing as well.
So...
The way that we're doing micro payments, it'll be not just good for creators
linking to their fans, but it also be good for advertisers trying to be 100% certain
that their adverts are even being listened to.
It's such a challenge that because I think this is responsible for a lot of the
downside of the boom that we saw.
So where we are now basically in the industry, you know, the renewals of big
brands looking at partnerships and looking at even programmatic and so on where
they're doing big ad buys across various networks or different types of show.
You often find renewals are so much more challenging than the original sale because
you're absolutely right.
We can report on downloads, but that.
That was only sexy when podcasting was really, really new and it was the only
metric.
But now those same people are walking into the meetings and saying, actually, all
right, downloads are fine, but what did we get?
And you can't you can't constantly just use brand positioning as the answer to
that.
And we know that's happening.
We see that at the highest levels of podcasting.
We see that at the highest levels of ad sales.
And we see it reported very, very often, which, as you said, leads to what we saw
reported.
today through Ashley.
So yeah, I get it.
I think it's fascinating.
Now I think the thing that I would say is the indie producer, so the person that's
really, really busy, the person that is, you know, getting the 50 or the 100
download, you know, good loyal audience, but actually, they've not got that much
time.
What's this going to do for them?
Is this a challenge from a timing perspective?
Do they need to put piles of time into working with something like pod fans?
Or how does this accommodate those?
Really simple.
So we we've ingested probably about 500,000 podcasts and we'll increase that
over the next few months.
Obviously, all 4 million aren't what we want.
We talked about anchor earlier.
So but we'll get all the best podcasts we think they're out there.
If yours is one of those podcasts, all you have to do is then claim it.
And when you claim it, you get access to a backend dashboard for pod fans.
Now
A pod fan sets a default value for every podcast out there at 100 sats per minute.
So an hour show is six thousand sats.
What's that in real money?
About 50p.
Right.
So it's not a big problem.
So once you've got a value for every episode, you as the creator, once you've
claimed your show, can go and change that value.
You can say, oh, OK, I want my show to be 10 sats per minute or a thousand sats per
minute or zero.
You can pick what you want.
In the value for value model that will just change at the front end and the
listener will go Oh, that's the new value that's set by the creator.
But in the value for value model, I as the listener have that final say I can still
change that value as well.
So as a creator, no, you don't need to do much you go in and check that the podcast
that you that's yours is there you claim it and verify it and it has to be verified
and we'll
And then once you've done that, you set your own values and then you market that
out to your listeners that this is what we do and your listeners then have choices,
pay it or not pay it right.
But there isn't much more you have to do.
There's no, Oh my God, do I need to know how to do a tag in the middle at minute
one with a DAI link here and something else and do I need to rub my head and
scratch my tummy to do this?
No, it's fairly self-explanatory because you've got to, you get given a wallet when
you joined.
So it, you know,
It's the same for creators as it is for listeners.
You just need a wallet to be receiving your sats into.
That's what I like about this concept is that, well, like we said earlier,
simplifying the complexity of all of these mechanisms and moving parts that are
required to benefit from blockchain payments and so on and so forth.
I think that's the real strength behind the scenes of this is that I can set it
up.
And I know the word wallet, I know that works, but I don't generally have to worry
about it.
So I commend you on that, my friend.
I think that's fantastic work.
What's the timeline for pod fans then?
So this is, we're here, we're at 28th of September.
2023, what's the status of pod fans now?
What's the next six months look like to wrap this up?
So earlier this week, we took off the wrapper.
It's now a beta product.
It was an alpha.
And so it's mobile, it's desktop, it's in all those screens in between.
That's great.
And yeah, please go and use it.
We've also built a really, I mean, talking about paying SATS, Mark, we've built a
feedback model where if you give us a bug report, we pay you in SATS as a thank you.
So we give you some SATS for reporting bugs.
If you give us a brand new feature suggestion,
give you some slats as well for that.
So again, there's ways of getting earning it.
But fundamentally, yeah, you can go in there.
You can use it.
Now what we are doing is increasing the servers.
We're building this.
We talked about it very tangently.
We're building a new music element to it as well.
So lots of independent music artists are now being said, I don't really like
putting my music on Apple and Spotify.
I don't really make any money, but they're beginning to create RSS feeds for their
music.
and uploading those to the index and then we can download those and using a payment
model value for value, they can get paid directly by their fans and Ashley Ainsley
Costello, sorry, an artist on who's done this said on Twitter or X that she made 20
or dollars when she did it across 60 streaming platforms and she made $400 in
one day doing the same thing using SATs.
artists are beginning to understand and artists more than podcasters have a deeper
connection to their fans.
I mean, we all love to think our fans love us, but realistically they are a little
bit flirty.
If we went away, they'd go away.
Right.
They wouldn't chase us down and find us.
But if a music artist goes, you're like, Oh my God, I love you.
Where have you gone?
Right.
And, and their commitment to music is much higher.
So
The value for value model works really, really well with music.
So we're adding a music element very shortly to it as well.
fascinating work as someone that builds software, my friend, I know how difficult
this is to pull off.
And yeah, come on, commend you on the work, but also just the way that you lead
in the thinking as well.
So yeah, absolutely commendable workers always.
And I think everyone should just give that give this a whirl, even if I'm always a
fan of trying things anyway, I think even if you don't stick with it, I'm not saying
that would be the case with pod fans, but please, anyone listening, just go over
there and try this and you can find that at podfans.fm.
So I heartily recommend that you do that.
Well, Sam, it's always a pleasure.
I know you've held an event this week with James, which I'm sure was absolutely
fantastic.
I was out of the country for it.
So I'm sorry I couldn't be there, but if it's anything like the Manchester one, I
know it would have been a roaring success.
And yeah, look forward to seeing you in person soon, my friend.
Indeed, indeed.
And we're going to a Liverpool game together.
So that'll be even more fun.
That sounds good.
Speaking of that, I appreciate that.
I cannot wait for that.
I'm looking forward to that.
If you would like to send Sam and I some beer money for that, you can do that at
mark.live slash support.
It's like we planned that, Sam.
It's like this smooth segue into sending
Thanks for watching!
Any industry events outside of your own?
No, no, I mean, I think we're coming to the end of those.
So we did our own one and I also went to the British Podcast Awards this week and
gave out an award.
The next big event, Mark, for me, and maybe you might be there, is the one in
the LA podcast movement.
I will be there.
It'll be the first time back on the West Coast since COVID because of the family
and travel.
So I'm excited for that.
We actually booked the hotel.
We booked the flights.
We are there.
So I'm excited for that.
And for you listening out there, if you are interested, go to podfans.fm.
And if you've got any questions, just get in touch with us on the usual channels.
The Twitter's all, I'm not gonna call it X, the Twitter's the best way to do that.
And I'm at MrAsquith and Sam.
You're over on Twitter as well, aren't you?
at Sam Sethi or at JoinPodFans.
Just come and ping me and I'm more than happy to give you an answer to whatever
question you have.
Amazing stuff and for you listening, enjoy yourself.
Thank you for tuning in.
It's always a pleasure until the next time.
Keep on doing what you do.
Keep sharing your voice, your thoughts with the world and look after yourself.
Bye bye for now.