Micah: 0:12

I use the standard like public iTunes API, where like pretty much all podcasts are like fetch the podcast showed in the app. I'm guessing a lot of other podcast apps look similar to that The only real difference is that I do some just basic audio analysis to look for ads. The way I do that kind of varies depending on if the ads are dynamic or if they're like kind of static for all regions, like it's a podcast arena ad or is it something that's kind of just like tacked on after the fact? So this is different ways to do it kind of playing in that situation. either way, I'm just essentially sending the user a list of like timings, like, you know, 30 minutes to 13 and a half minutes, there is an ad here and then just recording if they actually skip the ad and charging them for that.

James: 0:58

so it's downloading the full audio from there. Yes. From the initial podcast. Host. But what your tool has done is it's added some times where the way the ads are, you know, essentially. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's nice. So essentially, that means that from a download point of view, it looks as if it's just a normal a normal download, you know, I'm guessing.

Micah: 1:19

Oh, that actually it would be a little different. So I am. I'm downloading the audio and then serving all users the same version of the audio. So that is a difference.

James: 1:28

Oh, so.

Micah: 1:29

If you have users using this app, you would be seeing fewer downloads, you'd be compensated for that. and my hope is that for ad companies, then it's not kind of like it looks like there's all these downloads, but they're not actually, you know, seeing my ads. And that that was another reason for that architecture. I'm not sure the ideal way to do it, but that's how I like the most fair.

James: 1:48

And actually, yeah, that kind of means that there's no fraud going on. There's no ads being played that actually aren't being played. So from that point of view, you can see certainty of your your thought there. Does it work on sponsorship messages as well or is it just purely 32nd ads?

Micah: 2:05

it's kind of a mish mash right now. Yeah, it really comes down to like me listening to, oh, so many ads over the last few years and just being like this really feels like an ad versus like, this doesn't feel like an ad and then training based on that. So it's pretty ad hoc at the moment.

James: 2:21

Oh, that's huge. Yeah. Well, this podcast is sponsored by Buzz Sprout and let's see what happens there.

Micah: 2:27

Yeah. So you catch that?

James: 2:30

Yeah. Well, So I guess there's some text to speech in there or rather speech text in there. Yeah. To work out what the words are as well as maybe some. Does it spot differences in voices or the cast noise or. I guess. Yeah, there's all of these things. You don't want to tell me exactly how to think.

Micah: 2:51

it's not rocket science. It's I would say you could get a lot of the way there with chatbots today. Yeah, And especially as A.I. models mature, I think it'll become easier and easier to do what I'm doing. The only real innovation is I'm doing it cheaply. So if you were trying to do this at scale, which cheap it would cost you a ton of money. Yeah, but I have some kind of relatively clever ways of just bucketing things out and doing it kind of the cheapest possible so that it's not like just costing certain amounts of money to do it

James: 3:22

So you. Yeah, You mentioned that you work out whether the user has scripts and and then charge them. So how does they how does the charging mechanism works?

Micah: 3:32

So you sign up and you get a couple free ad scripts, and then after that you have to subscribe. So just like a standard software as a service subscription, it's for $4 a month, gets you 50 ad skips and then $2 of that. It's kind of set aside for podcasters. That's$2 for 50 ad skips, which comes out to $0.04 an ad skip. And then there's about $0.50 of credit card processing fees in there or apples taking their cut or Google or whoever, you know. And then I'm getting about a dollar 50 of that per user per month is how it works. And yeah, it's really about.

James: 4:10

15%, I think of that, although it's a small, small amount, you're not going to get incredibly rich on this. And unless there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people using it. For sure. Mm hmm. And so you say that you share the money with the podcasters. How do you think that then?

Micah: 4:29

for privacy reasons, I don't track exactly what episode you're skipping or when, but I do track in, like, day bucket. So like on day, you know, you're or lambda, you know, a particular day, what the podcast was, how many credits you used and tally those up. And I just have kind of a running tally per podcast and then through the, the iTunes API or I mean, I can just Google it to I know like what companies behind this podcast. So they give you an example. The three most listened to podcasts by far are the ones that I listen to, which are all from The New York Times. So I just pay The New York Times $20. Right. And I think I owed them a total of $12 in some sense as of today. I what I'm going to do on the website is just have a tally of like here are podcasts that are maybe in total have been owed more than a dollar and how much they've been paid. So there's some pretty transparent way of being like you can see like is your podcast even listened to and if it is like how many scripts have been skipped, how much have you been paid, that sort of thing. Mm hmm. And maybe become more sophisticated with time. But I think at this point, like, I'm going to be paying someone like maybe once every few months. So at a scale. Yeah.

James: 5:42

Yeah. And the money that somebody could theoretically earn through this tool is actually much more, isn't it, than, than they could have earned through the through the advertising model.

Micah: 5:53

I hope so. My basic research. So just Googling it came out around 2 to $0.03 per ad skip like you would know actually if that's an accurate number or not, but that's how I chose for it. That's just like, what's the lowest amount I can charge users that would still be better for the podcast creators? That was kind of my heuristic there. It's not particularly cheap, as you can imagine. Like if you're listening to a lot of podcasts like this. Yeah. And yeah, it's going to be expensive, but there's really no other way to do it.

James: 6:22

I suppose. I mean, this opens all kinds of questions. Mm hmm. I suppose one of the one of the easy questions is how can we in the industry make it easier for you? And I'm not.

Micah: 6:36

Yeah.

James: 6:36

Really easier to get paid more than anything else.

Micah: 6:39

That's a great question. It would be awesome if in the process there is a standard tag and I think there is actually a funding tag. I don't know if anyone uses that right now. I was like, Oh, maybe I can use this and then realize that all my top podcasts are missing this tag. Yeah, think tags exist. That would make it easy. Obviously that apply to take you to a website, so it'd be nice if there was some sort of protocol or something. I think at the end of the day, there's not a great micropayment model for the web, and if there was, then podcasts could use that. But at least I'm not aware of anything like that. maybe someday crypto or whatever would solve that problem, but I think we're far from that reality. So yeah.

James: 7:19

Yeah, I mean, we've been playing around with that in the exciting world of podcasting to point out for a while. Yes, you know, it definitely exists. But the onramp right now for a new user is really hard. that's been the difficulty there of just trying to get that work quite apart from the fact that the US government in particular seems to be pushing more issues in a way. So you know there is that they yeah. So you're so mean by taking essentially you know $4 from a user and then dividing that up, you are, you are essentially achieving the micropayments. Yeah. And the amount of money here is relatively small. So yeah, really actually as a bank, you know, in any way, you know, I guess yeah. And there is the podcast funding tag that that's in the, in the specification and I think you're right, it's used by predominantly independent podcasters. It doesn't appear to be used by the big I hearts and New York Times, but maybe this is something that might, push them to do that if they see benefit out of this. And I suppose that's the question, you know. Yeah, I think we covered it very quietly. We covered Europe very quietly the beginning of this year. you, you, you said that you got hate mail like, oh.

Micah: 8:38

This was actually last year. This would be 2023. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is kind of pre-release and I, I probably heard. Hey, well is fi too strong. I got one email that was rather nasty. I got quite a few folks being like, What is this? Are you trying to screw over the podcasting industry? You know, which is fair, right? And at that point it was very much just like I it was a work in progress. I was building it out. I was the sole, sole user. So I hadn't put a lot of time into marketing. Yeah, yeah.

James: 9:07

Do you do you understand where they're coming from

Micah: 9:09

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think if you're a creator and your livelihood depends on this, and anything that could cut that out is a big deal. I think I'm also like very aware of just like what's happened to journalism and the whole like cat and mouse game of website ad blockers, right? So like, that's a huge deal. Everything you have to have a paywall now or you don't make any money, which is bad for the web, bad for users generally, unless you can pay for a bunch of subscriptions. Yeah, And I honestly think like with air getting cheaper and cheaper, that will eventually be the reality for podcasts as well. So my hope is that this could be a bit of an alternate model where like people who at least are willing to pay can pay in a way that's convenient and that doesn't require like having a $5 subscription to ten different podcasts to listen to occasionally. So that's my hope. do I think this app will survive for years? No, I don't. Why not? I don't know where it'll go, but it's a bit of an adventure right now, and that's fine. It's fun to build something that people want and I've never bought an app before, so it's been a fun experience for me. It's fun to experience.

James: 10:20

So why do you not think it'll it'll be here in a few years?

Micah: 10:24

Oh, I think it's likely that. Well, I guess I is. Media is an area I feel like where people, even if there is a better business model, if it's a new business model, it's a threat, is often how things work. At least they've seen from other companies. And I'm not a I'm not a venture backed startup. I have not only do not have a lawyer and I have no desire to ever pay a lawyer. Right. And so I think if this ever took off and a couple a large company like New York Times or even just smaller companies were like, hey, you know, let me see this, this and I had to do a Saw podcast then that wouldn't provide much value and it wouldn't be worth all of my time trying to make it work. So I think that's one possible future here. And I kind of made my peace with that years ago when I started doing this thing. So yeah, it would also be kind of successful. I'd be like, Well, I got to the point where like people actually like this enough that people actually cared about it. So most apps never made it that far. Never make it that far. You know.

James: 11:29

You're absolutely right. there are some people who would say that what you're doing here is accelerating the death of open RSS. And if you were to, you know, make sure that shows were only available in Spotify or only available in YouTube, then tools like yours can't exist. Um, do you think that's a fair a fair summation? Oh.

Micah: 11:52

Interesting . So the idea being that if you expose your audio publicly instead of in a closed ecosystem, then you're at risk.

James: 12:00

Yeah.

Micah: 12:01

No, I mean, that's a fair critique. I hadn't honestly thought much about that particular particular use case or whatever, I think. Hmm. I mean, I think if you go that route, I don't see what I am. what I'm doing is particularly different than the Spotify or doing it through YouTube or some other provider. Like either way, you have some intermediary that's guaranteeing you revenue and preventing abuse. Right? Obviously I am a tiny fish in that and they could give you much better guarantees about that than I can. Yeah, I don't know. I think we're a long ways away from that. Yeah, I don't know. I think at the end of the day, in media in particular, like you want to have a product that people are willing to pay for. And so a lot of what you need is a service that makes it easy to get paid. And that is almost more important than like restricting your content a ton. I think a lot of the tricky bit is like most podcast apps, like you can put links in there, but there's no real structure to like incentivize users to pay. one thing I was toying with and I think this could be pretty impactful, is I'd love to have that like some sort of like if feature in the App store, I think it'd be huge. I think I listen to a lot of podcasts over the last year or I'm like, Wow, that was awesome. I would I don't really want a new subscription, but like, I want to tip $2, you know, or something like that. And that's still that could be a really big deal. I'd be way more tactful in the fourth sense, you know, step aside. And so I think there be things you could do in here that preserve the kind of openness is just standard RSS. Anyone can get their podcast in without any particular hoops, you know, as long as you go through the standard iTunes submission process and there's still a great revenue share. So I think it could be a win win. obviously I don't expect everyone to see it that way, but I'm happy to chat. If people want to email me, I'm happy to talk to you about it.

James: 14:09

So that's really interesting because what you're basically saying is there are some people that want to pay, there are some people that want to pay for the value that they get. Mm hmm. And actually the open podcasting ecosystem has not made that easy. There is no you know, we were talking earlier about the funding tag not being used by everybody if that funding tag was used by more people and there were direct links to, you know, PayPal or Stripe or whatever it might be, then at least that would be an easier mechanism for getting paid. But at the moment, quite a lot of these shows, it's it's either intrusive advertising that also attracts you or Or it's, you know, having to use something like this sort of tool. So I think that's an it's an interesting way of looking at it and going actually, you know, there are people out there who would like to pay, if only you would make it more easy.

Micah: 15:03

Yeah. And I think the other key there is like the people in my app already have a paid subscription, so like they've already opted in to pay for them. It's just like literally clicking a button they don't have to put in their credit card number again. They don't I mean, like, it's so easy, right, versus like getting taken to some other website, being worried about getting spam. I don't know, like this friction there, even if you have a nice link, is is so much higher. So

James: 15:31

So you say that if people if people want to learn more, then they can contact you. What's the easiest way of doing that.

Micah: 15:37

Yeah. So on the website there's a couple places you can find the email address, but just add podcast at gmail.com. Nothing too fancy. The website is our blog podcast dot com.

James: 15:48

and adblock podcast dot com is where you'll also find the links to Google Play and the Apple App store availability if you check. Yes, yes. They're quite there yet. And the reason for not putting those there yet is just purely because you're still ramping the thing up and you're still making it work. Yeah.

Micah: 16:09

And to be honest, like once this podcast is released or I'll let you know if you do some promotion here, I know I'll probably add to the links before that, right? So my goal was to do a very soft launch of like essentially friends and family and people I know and trust be like, try it out. Let me know if you run into issues before or just like putting this thing on the Internet. Yeah, that was that was my hope. So it was not entirely successful. But, you know, here we are.

James: 16:37

Well, let's see. There you go. Well, but my super interesting, I think From my point of view, you sound like somebody that wants to help. You sound like somebody that doesn't want to rip anybody else. Um, you sound like someone who is trying to do the very best that they can possibly do, given the the issues that we have in the podcast world of not having those direct payment links, you know, forcing advertising on some people that don't want advertising and all of that. And so I think, you know, if if people are concerned about what you're doing, in the very least they could do is contact you and have a chat. So I think that's a good start. A good start. So best of luck with that. Micah, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate

Micah: 17:22

Yeah,

James: 17:22

it.

Micah: 17:22

for sure. Thanks a lot.