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Explaining the Apple-compatible lookup endpoint, Dave says the goal is to keep Podcast Index's mission pure and give developers a non-Apple alternative when they need one. It's meant as a failover, not a replacement; they can't afford to replace Apple's API.
I'm trying to keep the mission pure on the index, and in give developers a non Apple alternative to things when they need it.
Dynamic-insertion CPMs had risen recently (reportedly about half of host-read rates), getting people excited. Dave warns that when advertising suffers in a downturn, dynamic inventory takes a hit immediately.
But in a, in a downturn where advertising suffers, the dynamic stuff is going to take a hit immediately.
Talking with Chris Fisher, Dave praises shows like his and ATP for well-done, reasonable host-read ads, and calls Leo Laporte the master of the host read. The problem on those shows is length: reads go so long they lose the audience.
But that the problem with those shows, though, is they the reads are so long, I mean, you feel like you're just it loses your you loses you it loses the audience,
Faced with a big entity trying to control podcasting with proprietary systems, Dave says the best defense is to get the index into more places and make it even freer and more open.
the answer to proprietary Enos is always more open. And so if we can get the index, even even better, even freer, even more open, that is the way to do it.
Podcasting 2.0 started with zero market share and in under two years hundreds of thousands of feeds used the namespace. Dave says critical mass and domination only matter if your goal is money. If your goal is improvement, make it better and people will adopt it.
if your object and your goal is to make something better, then you just make it better. People will see that it's better, and they will adopt
Agreeing with Buzzsprout's Tom Rossi, Dave ties the grow-at-all-costs startup phenomenon to monetary expansion. Since around the dot-com boom, money got so cheap that investors happily lost money on 99 companies hoping one pays off big.
And then we've just been money got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And there was more money and like money was so cheap, people just trying to find a way to give it away.
Dave builds on the Microsoft example. A company innovates only enough to dominate, then flattens out. BlackBerry went from market domination to near-bankruptcy within a few years of the iPhone. At a certain scale, the plan stops being a niche and becomes just 'dominate'.
think about Blackberry, and Blackberry get there get get, they went from a market domination standpoint, to virtually bankrupt within just two or three years after the iPhone came out.
Every hosting company uses Linux and RSS, but Dave says most companies don't understand participating in open source or what its culture is like. Having open source software in your stack is different from being an open source company.
I don't think a lot of companies understand the participation within open source. They don't understand what the open source culture is like,
Responding to an article about a 'standards innovation paradox', Dave says the author makes decent points but he rejects the premise that standards constrain innovation. The real tension is between following a standard and making lots of money.
I just disagree with the fundamental premise premise that standards constrain you and prevent innovation.
On how value-for-value apps should charge, Dave says programmable money capable of microtransactions has only existed for a couple of years. Nobody could know what this market should look like, so you stumble through until you find what works.
you have no idea what what to charge how to charge any of this stuff like you just have to stumble through until you find the thing that works.
Explaining why app-fee splits come out of the boost total rather than being added on top, Dave says the original reason was to avoid surprising listeners. If they chose 1,000 sats, more than that shouldn't leave their wallet.
that was purely for the reason of that you don't surprise the listener when they chose Okay, I'm gonna send 1000 SATs and then more than that came out of their wallet.
The repeated claim that YouTube is the number one podcast app always bothered Dave, even before he could explain why. So he pulled Edison's top-50 data to check. Some numbers lack real-world credibility; Todd Cochran had the same reaction, saying it doesn't match what Blubrry sees.
you look at a thing and you hear some numbers, you're like, I just can't believe that, that it lacks a certain what do you call it? Not the one I was thinking, Oh, no. It lacks a, a real world credibility
People assume Podcast Index wants as many API users as possible. Dave says every new free user adds load and costs money. Anchor faces the same math: the more popular a free platform, the more it costs to run.
Because every time a free, you know, somebody else free starts using the API, it's more load on us, it costs us money.
Asked at what fee percentage an app becomes a scam, Dave says it isn't about what he thinks. It's about whether people perceive it as one, and everyone has their own tolerance. Some businesses, like Pocket Casts during its money-losing years, may truly need higher fees to cover costs.
It's not about whether I think it's a scam. It's about whether or not they say that it's a perceived as one. And I can't say when that is because everybody has their own tolerance for those sorts of things.
In a long debate with Adam over value-for-value app fees, Dave's position: apps decide their own fee, but they must be transparent about it. Visibility and public disapproval keep fees in check. An app that charges far more than the rest won't survive, so the problem corrects itself.
there's gonna be a fee, the apps gonna take a fee, they can they can decide what that fee is. The critical part is they have to, they just have to be transparent about it.
Asked what he's most grateful for in Podcasting 2.0, Dave says it's what he's grateful for in anything: the relationships. Especially working relationships where you learn you can build something new together and learn about each other and yourself. More than the work itself, it's the shared work.
I think the thing I'm always most grateful for no matter what you get involved in, it's just the relationships that you end up building with people.
Gently disagreeing that live isn't for every show, Dave says you can still post-produce and release a polished version. Hearing it live, mistakes and all, builds a quirky bond with your most committed listeners.
you can still post produce, and put out the polished one. But there's an there's a, there's a unique, like, even if you're going to Maven, or for messing up a bunch of starting and stopping and that kind of thing. That's still valuable to hear it live because you build a sort of like quirkiness with your audience who's committed to your thing.
Responding to Spotify calling RSS outdated, Dave says RSS being the format is just an accident of history: when the enclosure idea came along, another format would have been fine too. RSS's job is to describe episode data to apps, and it does that perfectly well. It was never the only piece of the open podcast stack.
it's just an as a sort of accident of history. That that RSS was the thing that was that was the syndication format of choice.
Answering claims that Podcasting 2.0 is just copying, Dave says some of its work is new. Much of it, though, takes things tried before (like Blubrry's RawVoice namespace, or features shared only between Buzzsprout and one app) and pushes them to a finish line as a general standard. That needed an independent voice so nobody would be scared off.
But some of the stuff we've done have also just been taking things that were tried before and making them and pushing them into some over some sort of milestone or finish line.
After Spotify's investor day claimed 4 million podcasts (most on Anchor), Dave says you can find garbage feeds in 30 seconds, like a keyboard-mash title with a single one-second episode. His conclusion: Anchor exists to make Spotify's number huge. Podcast Index counts only about 1.8 million feeds that meet its quality criteria.
And the thing that makes sense to me now is that anchor as a podcast platform exists only to increase Spotify as in a huge number.
Proposing a legal expert as a guest, Dave says he listens to many Bitcoin podcasts and Bitcoiners almost never talk about real-world legal issues, even in private. Hearing someone say what's okay and what to watch out for is valuable.
people in Bitcoin Bitcoiners and people involved in Bitcoin things do not talk about the real world aspects of the legal side of things. They never they hardly ever talk about it.
Talking with Podfriend's Nic Ivanov, Dave sees a side effect of 2.0 tooling: it blurs the lines between host and listener app. Tools like Sovereign Feeds can live outside the traditional client-server split.
it's sort of blurring the lines between host and listen, and because especially to take Vaizey for instance. If you have that tool, the tool, you know, the tools can live outside of the traditional client server split or host listen split.
After wiring Sovereign Feeds webhooks to Podping, Dave pitches hosting companies a vision. A podcaster opens the dashboard, switches status to live, Podpings go out and a stream starts. It's fully decentralized, with no YouTube needed.
imagine your UI where your podcaster customer goes into their dashboard. And instead of publishing a new episode that they've already recorded, there's maybe a little drop down there that says go live or something like that.
On bringing indie music platforms into Podcasting 2.0, Dave says to treat them like podcast hosting companies. They're already onboarding people, and you have to tap an existing pipeline to get content in.
Because they're onboarding people already. They have the pipeline. And you have to sort of tap into an existing pipeline in order to get people in order to get the content in there.
Agreeing with Adam that 2.0 needs something like physical merch, Dave notes that people (especially young people) grab the bottle that needs an opener first, because the ceremony is part of the experience. He thinks the deeper reason is limits: humans don't do well when there are none, and podcasting can create that in digital form too.
You have to go through the experience and go through the ceremony to to then be able to get the content.
On moderating the index (including FOSTA compliance), Dave says a podcast about the F-150 never raises the question. A show tied to an escort service is different: beyond the law, you have a moral responsibility to try to figure out what it is, for example whether it's commentary or an actual service listing a phone number.
when it comes to a podcast about the F 150. You don't? You never had there's not even a question. You don't even have to figure it out. When it comes to a podcast or an escort service. You you have a moral responsibility to try to figure it out.
Dave sees open RSS podcasting and advertising-based podcasting as two separate industries. They overlap only a little, where the big non-exclusive shows live, and you can hear which world someone comes from by how they talk. It's not a slam, just how it is.
I think there's two industries, pretending to be two pretending to be one industry. Yes, there's open podcasting, open RSS, podcasting. And then there's advertising based podcasting.
Dave says Podcasting 2.0 has never been hostile to advertising in the sense that ads must fail for value for value to succeed. Brand safety isn't inherently bad either: if he bought ads, there'd be content he wouldn't want them next to. The real question is whether brand safety leads to healthy outcomes for content.
podcasting 2.0 has never been ad advertising hostile in the sense that that advertising has to fail in order for podcasting 2.0 or value for value to succeed.
Dave maps the unspoken logic behind 'removing barriers to podcast advertising'. More ad spend needs volume, and there aren't enough big shows, so it means selling small shows. The only way to do that is programmatic, and programmatic inherently brings brand-safety concerns.
advertising means it needs increase, it means increased ad spending. This is how you get this is how you remove barriers in your you increase ad spending to bring more money into podcasting, that requires volume, because there's not enough big shows to do it on their own. Yep, that means selling to more small shows. The only way to do that is with programmatic.
Discussing an ad-research figure who got into podcasting because he heard things there that mainstream media wouldn't air, Dave says that's what brings many people in. You hear people as they really are, with views that mainstream media would sanitize or curate away.
you feel like you're getting a chance to hear people as they really are, or maybe views about things that you didn't get did or more sanitized and curated on mainstream media. For a lot of people. That's a big draw.
Arguing for opening some Podcast Index endpoints without API keys, Dave notes that signed per-request metadata makes every call look unique to caching proxies like Cloudflare, so nothing can be cached. Keyless endpoints are cacheable and simpler for app developers.
if you have to have an API key, you're changing the request metadata,
Sketching a value-share tag for curators, Dave suggests a type attribute. When modifying a spec, you design for the idea you have, but leave room for other ways people might do something similar later.
when you're when you're modifying the spec, you want to future proof it enough to say, Okay, well, would this is the one thing we came up with, where would this one idea where people could do this thing. But there's potentially other ways that somebody could also do something similar.
On why big platforms back away from podcasting, Dave argues that Facebook has moated itself by employing thousands of content moderators worldwide, so it can always say it's doing plenty of moderation.
they have moated themselves with their content moderation mode, by employing you know 1000s of people around the world to do the content moderation
Dave thanks Fountain for sending its podcaster-wallet data back to the index. It could have built the service in-house in a silo and it would have worked inside Fountain. Sharing back means every other 2.0 app benefits.
you could have easily built this service in house in a silo, and it would have worked, you know, within fountain, but you took the extra step to, you know, send that information back out to the world to the index.
Picking up Oscar Merry's point, Dave says likes and follows have always been a social currency that people understand has value. Podcasting 2.0 attaches real money underneath that number, which changes the game.
Now we've just attached actual, you go underneath it, detach the social, you know, achiness and swath, attach real real real money, value, your real money, and now you've kind of changed the game.
As streaming companies tighten spending, Dave predicts the end of the era when podcasters with good IP could roll it over to Netflix or Amazon as a film or series property; the money won't be there.
I think the time has come to an end where you're going to have like these podcasters that where you have a have a good set of IP and you just roll it over there to Netflix or Amazon and turn it into like a like a video book film property.
Discussing how video and TikTok-style editing hold attention through images rather than content, Dave says that isn't what most podcasters are trying to do. Traditional podcasters want to communicate content through a personal connection with an audience. For him, the show is an outlet for what he thinks about during the week.
most podcasters are trying to communicate content in personalized connection with an audience most, most podcasters I'm a traditional podcasters are not burn, they're not going for just the quick, you low hanging money fruit approach.
During a debate over rebranding Podcasting 2.0, Dave falls back on his old adage: once people start arguing about things, it's time to stop talking and go build something. He's also lukewarm on the rebrand after seeing John Chidgey proudly display a 'Podcasting 2.0 certified' badge.
this goes back to the old to sort of my old adage, when people start arguing about thing about things. It's time to stop talking and just go build something.
Explaining why the medium tag matters for music, Dave says it works like a filter on top of the feed. With medium set to music, 'episode' becomes 'track', 'person' becomes musician, and episode art becomes album art, without renaming every tag.
when you bring in the medium tag, what you're doing is you're applying sort of a logical layer on top of the feed that changes things about the feed. So you can imagine it as like a is like a filter.
After a Podcast Index search-result change (from a pull request) drew criticism, Dave explains the old debate: should search show the most popular result or the exact title match? Either way someone is unhappy, so it's almost absurd to hold people accountable for decisions like this.
I think, a very good illustration of why it is so difficult to make some of these decisions like to why it's almost absurd to expect to expect people to be held accountable for some of these things that are almost impossible.