Shownotes
In this episode:
— What Skip Ahead does, and why "you could always skip" doesn't hold up — Why "we're not affecting ad delivery" is technically true and completely dishonest — James Cridland on the terms and conditions nobody read — The membership pitch that got flagged as skippable — Why your intro is on the list too — The one thing a machine can never skip Clip from Podnews Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi, used with thanks. Subscribe at weekly.podnews.net — he does the reporting, I just have opinions about it.Podmastery goodies you can grab:
- Treat yourself to a PodmasteryPodcast Audit
- Founding member doors for thePodmasteryPodcast Communityopen soon
- Everything else:podmastery.co
Transcripts
So there's this button.
Speaker:It shows up on the Spotify playback screen, and it's bigger than everything
Speaker:else in there, and it appears the second Spotify decides you've
Speaker:reached a bit of the podcast that isn't worth your time listening to.
Speaker:Tap it once, just once, and you're straight past the whole damn lot.
Speaker:Not 15 seconds of it, everything.
Speaker:And the bits it's decided aren't worth your time include ad breaks,
Speaker:sponsor messages, and even intros where you might have shared some
Speaker:interesting insight that Spotify's AI
Speaker:Just decided sounded a little bit salesy.
Speaker:Intros.
Speaker:Your intro.
Speaker:Dead.
Speaker:Never heard.
Speaker:Even though you spent the time and thought crafting it
Speaker:This is Podmastery Podcasting Opinions, our special spinoff
Speaker:version of Podcasting Insights.
Speaker:I'm Neal Veglio, the podmaster, 25-odd years in radio and audio, and I'm
Speaker:building the Podmastery community,
Speaker:including this podcast's mothership, so I can help creators like you
Speaker:get more from their own podcast.
Speaker:So this is a weekend bonus extra because this topic is not gonna keep until Monday
Speaker:I'm gonna be quite rude about Spotify, which is really
Speaker:easy to be honest.
Speaker:But then I'm gonna be quite rude about you, which is a little harder, but
Speaker:it is the more important point Right, James Cridland broke this on Podnews,
Speaker:podnews.net, and then went through it properly with Sam Sefi on the Podnews
Speaker:Weekly Review, weekly.podnews.net.
Speaker:And if you want the full forensic version, go listen to that because he's
Speaker:done the actual legwork on this one.
Speaker:Here's the shape of it.
Speaker:Spotify are testing a thing called Skip Ahead.
Speaker:They haven't announced it.
Speaker:It's just in the app at this stage
Speaker:So here's how it works.
Speaker:An ad break starts, you hear the sting, you know the one, like that little A cast
Speaker:noise, the little chime that's basically Pavlov's bell for here comes a mattress
Speaker:sale, and instantly this enormous button appears on screen and it says skip ahead,
Speaker:and just one tap of that takes you to the end of the entire commercial break.
Speaker:Now, and people have already started doing the, "Well, you've always been
Speaker:able to skip line." And no, stop it.
Speaker:Skipping 15 seconds at a time is nine taps and a bit of overshoot.
Speaker:Now hang on, is he still going?
Speaker:And that is friction to hitting the button.
Speaker:Friction is the only reason ad reads survive at all.
Speaker:What Spotify have built removes that friction entirely, and then,
Speaker:and this is the really important bit, tells you when to press it.
Speaker:That's not a skip function.
Speaker:That's a recommendation.
Speaker:And here's my favorite part, for want of a better word.
Speaker:It's happening on ads that Spotify themselves have sold.
Speaker:So one half of the building is on the phone to advertisers going, "Yeah, we
Speaker:could put your messages in front of 300 million paying subscribers, and that'll
Speaker:be a lot of money to do that, please."
Speaker:And then the other half of the building is going, "Oh, no, no,
Speaker:no, no, don't listen to them.
Speaker:Here's a big button- And apparently, according to James' own analysis on
Speaker:this, he put that to them, and Spotify's line was that they're not affecting ad
Speaker:delivery, which is technically true.
Speaker:Genuinely technically true if you've decided that delivery means the file
Speaker:arrives on the handset, on the device
Speaker:But nobody's ever bought an advert in the hope that it
Speaker:lands safely in someone's phone.
Speaker:They bought it hoping it reaches a person's ears or eyes.
Speaker:Everyone involved knows that that's the entire transaction at play here, and
Speaker:answering, "Are the ads being heard?" with, "Well, yeah, the bytes got there,"
Speaker:is the media equivalent of your teenager insisting they've tidied their room
Speaker:because everything's now out of sight, even if it is just tucked under the bed.
Speaker:Now, I want you to hear this next bit from James rather than from me, partly because
Speaker:he's the one who put the questions to Spotify and got the answers back, so it's
Speaker:his to tell, But mostly because there's a detail in here that I don't think people
Speaker:have properly wrapped their thinky meat around yet, and I'd rather you heard him
Speaker:say it than have me paraphrase it to you.
Speaker:Listen out for the part about the terms and conditions.
Speaker:Here's James with Sam Sethi on this week's latest episode
Speaker:of the Podnews Weekly Review
Speaker:But in terms of when the advertisers will notice, I mean, the advertisers
Speaker:will notice when the ads don't work as well as they used to.
Speaker:And at the end of the day, if the ads stop working, then the advertisers
Speaker:will walk away, and we will have no opportunity to bring them back because,
Speaker:you know, they will say, "Well, we tried podcasting and, and it, it just
Speaker:doesn't work for us anymore, and so we're gonna go off and try something else.
Speaker:We're gonna try YouTube or something."
Speaker:So going back into their financials, they're the one line they had.
Speaker:The platform also credited favorable podcast impacts with helping push its
Speaker:profit margin to an all-time high.
Speaker:So yes.
Speaker:I find it, uh, uh, uh, quite depressing and quite sad that Spotify would do
Speaker:this sort of thing, would knowingly do this sort of thing against the creators
Speaker:that have built up that company.
Speaker:But, you know, as I say, it part-- it's par for the course for Spotify.
Speaker:They don't seem to care too much about creators.
Speaker:And there is nothing to stop them from automatically skipping all of
Speaker:the ads, whether you're a Premium user or whether you're a free user,
Speaker:because you-- the terms and conditions that we all signed actually allow
Speaker:them to do that if they want to.
Speaker:And that should be a real concern for all of us.
Speaker:Record margins off the back of podcasting while they secretly build a button
Speaker:that helps people not listen to it.
Speaker:Yeah, well played Spotify.
Speaker:#nonotes.
Speaker:And that last point of James's is the one I keep coming back to.
Speaker:There's nothing stopping them doing it automatically because the terms we all
Speaker:clicked accept on already allow it.
Speaker:Let those words enter your cerebral cortex and plant seeds.
Speaker:It means the button isn't really the end of the story here.
Speaker:The button is a test.
Speaker:The terms and conditions are the wider plan
Speaker:So let's go back to James's point there.
Speaker:And that should be a real concern for all of us.
Speaker:Right, except that you listening to the sound of my voice
Speaker:You may well not have any ads You may never have run a spot in your life.
Speaker:So there's a very tempting exit here, which is to go, "Dreadful business.
Speaker:Glad I'm not involved. Now back to my show." And before I take that
Speaker:away from you, it's really valid
Speaker:I'm gonna give you a declaration of interest here because this show
Speaker:doesn't get to bang on about integrity and then silently skip the awkward
Speaker:bit, much like that bloody button does I've got some skin in this game.
Speaker:The ICN, the Indie Creators Network, the network that I run through
Speaker:my brand Podknows Podcasting, it's an ad-supported model.
Speaker:Now, in the interests of full honesty, we haven't sold that many ads yet,
Speaker:so I'm either beautifully impartial here or I'm the bloke complaining
Speaker:about a burglary at a house I haven't even finished building yet.
Speaker:So you can take your pick on that one.
Speaker:And on the Podknows side in particular, our top-tier clients tend to source
Speaker:the odd sponsor themselves rather than running programmatic, which if I'm
Speaker:being smug about it means that I'm mostly insulated from this, except
Speaker:I'm not, and neither are you, because skip ahead doesn't only skip ads
Speaker:Now James mentions in the full episode a show called Search Engine by PJ Vogt.
Speaker:It's very good.
Speaker:Go and listen to it.
Speaker:They've got a paid membership called Incognito Mode, and PJ's read about
Speaker:his own membership on his own show and then got flagged as skippable.
Speaker:And that's not an advert.
Speaker:Nobody sold that.
Speaker:Nobody bought that as inventory.
Speaker:That is a bloke telling his own listeners how to support the thing that they're
Speaker:currently enjoying and have subscribed to.
Speaker:They have chosen to hear it, and a third party has decided on their
Speaker:behalf they'd probably rather not.
Speaker:So have a think about where that leaves your Patreon, your Buy Me a Coffee,
Speaker:your 30 seconds about the community you've spent 18 months building,
Speaker:and then have a think about the other item on that list, the intros.
Speaker:The show's open, the intro sting, the name of the thing, all of that flagged
Speaker:And that could be the entire setup, which doesn't work without
Speaker:it So we're not really talking about advertising anymore here.
Speaker:We're talking about a platform applying editorial judgment to your own production,
Speaker:not the ads that someone else stitched in, the bit that you made, the bit
Speaker:you spent a Sunday afternoon probably writing, the thing you're really proud
Speaker:of for getting out into the world.
Speaker:And as for the, "Well, YouTube does it too," comparison that some of
Speaker:the tech bros are shouting out here,
Speaker:well
Speaker:well that falls apart the second you poke at it because YouTube pays its creators.
Speaker:There's a check involved.
Speaker:There's a relationship.
Speaker:However grubby that is, Spotify pays you precisely nothing for
Speaker:the privilege of carrying your RSS feed, and they're now editing it
Speaker:James made that point in his analysis of what Spotify are doing.
Speaker:In some markets, they're over three-quarters of all podcast downloads.
Speaker:So just leave Spotify then isn't the answer either
Speaker:And I've got a whole episode on why that particular fantasy has never
Speaker:once worked coming out on Monday.
Speaker:And to be honest, I only did the research on this because I considered that myself.
Speaker:Do we get together as an industry and boycott Spotify?
Speaker:There are reasons why that's probably not a good idea.
Speaker:Again, big reveal on Monday
Speaker:Right, so that's the easy bit done.
Speaker:Being cross about a big company is the LinkedIn influencer special
Speaker:there, and it costs me nothing really.
Speaker:I've got no stake in that.
Speaker:Here's the harder bit, and this is where I stop being on your side because Spotify's
Speaker:actual defense, their real one, not the delivery to the device excuse nonsense.
Speaker:It's that the button only appears where listeners were already skipping, so
Speaker:it's just surfacing existing behavior.
Speaker:Now James, it sounds like, isn't sold on that, and neither am I particularly.
Speaker:It's a very convenient thing to be able to say, but I'd be a coward
Speaker:if I didn't at least try it on my own show before slagging it off.
Speaker:So when did you last sit and listen to your own intro?
Speaker:Not check it, not glance at the waveform, listen in the car
Speaker:as a stranger would.
Speaker:Because if you did, you might hear stuff that makes you decide it's
Speaker:not a particularly lovely afternoon.
Speaker:You might hear 40 seconds of music.
Speaker:You might hear a voice that isn't yours saying the name of the podcast
Speaker:to a person who's just tapped on the podcast and therefore knows the name
Speaker:of the podcast, and then you saying the name again, then a bit of throat
Speaker:clearing about what's coming up, which is a promise about a thing rather
Speaker:than the delivery of the thing itself.
Speaker:And that's a pattern that a lot of podcasters fall into.
Speaker:Same words week after week in a slightly brighter voice than the one
Speaker:you actually talk in, and the regular listener has heard that 40 times now.
Speaker:They could even recite it along with you.
Speaker:They were already thumbing past it before Spotify offered to help them.
Speaker:So yeah, you built that skip button.
Speaker:Spotify has just given it a UX graphic and made it slightly bigger.
Speaker:Now, we're not gonna leave you hanging there because that's the guru move,
Speaker:and I'd rather not be the guru.
Speaker:Here's what's actually going on underneath all this, and I'm hoping
Speaker:you're gonna find it a little bit helpful.
Speaker:A machine can only skip a block.
Speaker:That's all this technology does.
Speaker:It finds a chunk with clean edges, different audio, different energy, same
Speaker:words every week, a music sting either side, and it draws a box around it.
Speaker:So anything in your show that behaves like a detachable module is now
Speaker:permanently at the risk of a big company's algorithm, and anything
Speaker:genuinely woven into the episode isn't, because a machine can't find that seam.
Speaker:Doesn't have the human ears to do so And that is the whole answer.
Speaker:So before I give you the one thing to actually go and do about this
Speaker:I'm gonna play you a podcast trailer from one of our Podmastery community
Speaker:members, which Spotify would absolutely skip And they certainly skipped this
Speaker:bit where I talk about how we're opening the doors to the public soon.
Speaker:So if you'd like to join the founding members,
Speaker:Go to podmastery.co/waitlist
Speaker:so that I can add you to that founding members waiting list
Speaker:Right, so here it is.
Speaker:Here's the one thing that I'm gonna ask you to do.
Speaker:Play the first 60 seconds of your most recent episode
Speaker:Find the exact second where you actually start saying something,
Speaker:not promising something, saying it.
Speaker:Whatever sits in front of that second
Speaker:is your skippable block,
Speaker:and that's where the button would probably appear.
Speaker:On the next episode you publish, consider how to make sure that button can't appear.
Speaker:That's your job.
Speaker:Not a rebrand, not a new strategy, Just think about how you can seamlessly get
Speaker:from that bit into the next bit, because the only genuinely reliable defense
Speaker:against someone else deciding which parts of your show are worth hearing
Speaker:and which parts are worth skipping is not having any parts that they can skip
Speaker:So on Monday I'm gonna talk about why the idea of podcasters all just leaving
Speaker:Spotify is a lovely idea that has never once worked, and what actually has
Speaker:leverage with us as podcasters instead.
Speaker:So come along back for that.
Speaker:And if you wanna work through what your show should actually sound like
Speaker:with an actual human about your actual show, deliberating that, head to
Speaker:podmastery.co and click the button to get your podcasting challenge solved.
Speaker:I'm Neal Veglio, the podmaster.
Speaker:Until Monday,
Speaker:Good luck with your continuing journey towards pod mastery
