Podcasting 2.0 June 19th 2026 Episode 264 - "Podcast Plebicide"

  The week podcasting argued about what a "play" even is — and whether better measurement fixes the money.
  Board meeting: AMP's 30-second play (and its quiet walkback), the spam / AI-slop flood, and podping going weeks at 100%.
  <b>We are the only boardroom that will never sign a memorandum of understanding</b>
  <b>I'm Adam Curry in the Heart of the Texas Hill Country</b>
  <b>And in Alabama, the man who always guve you 5 nines of uptime — <i>Say hello to my Friend on the other End — Dave Jones!</i></b>
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ShowNotes
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  Justin Jackson's post: We Have A Communication Problem
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  00 - PODPING.ALPHA STABLE + INDEX / PV-ALPHA HYGIENE
    <b>Milestone:</b> Dave — "I think we can safely say that podping.alpha is stable now. It's been many weeks of 100% uptime." Lead the boardroom with the win.
    <b>PV-alpha 500s:</b> @mitch + Dave debugging the "get a list of feeds that have updates over the last X" endpoint throwing 500s; @mitch adding a delay between paginated requests in case it's a too-many-requests block.
    <b>Feed de-listing puzzle:</b> Dave to @ChadF — a feed marked dead with no spam flag; aggregators de-listing it for some other reason. Open question.
    <b>Iroh 1.0</b> — Dave flagged it: "Dialing keys instead of IP addresses." p2p networking, boardroom catnip — worth a riff with Dave.
    Discussion: also surface your own snags — Sovereignfeeds webhook "Unknown Error sending to Server" and ladder.podcastindex.org appearing down (to @StevenB / Dave).
    Iroh 1.0 Release
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  01 - SPAM + AI-SLOP — TOWARD A "SPAM-COP SCORE"
    <b>Your spam API got the PNWR shoutout:</b> both James Cridland and Sam Sethi credited Dave Jones / the Podcast Index spam API on this week's show — TrueFans auto-removes reported feeds via it. Take the lap.
    <b>Spotify under fire:</b> Senator Maggie Hassan's investigation (follow-up to CNN's drug-dealing-podcasts story) — Spotify removed 3,500 accounts in 2025, reported ZERO to law enforcement, doesn't track link clicks; some shows up 4 years. Also iHeart, Amazon Music, Acast/Podchaser — NOT Apple. Pointed at JellyPod (AI tool).
    <b>James' pitch (your lane):</b> industry-funded "spam-cop score" — like a spam-cop score for email — that FLAGS obvious spam, leaving each directory to decide. The Index is already best-placed to do it.
    <b>Fastcast vs Inception Point:</b> Fastcast floods directories with hundreds of AI-voiced local "[City] News Now" shows but LABELS them AI; Inception Point AI decided sub-3-min shows won't disclose AI at all ("Siri doesn't say it's AI"). Apple requires disclosure but doesn't enforce.
    <b>Namespace hook:</b> they noted there's still NO approved AI tag — it's just a use of <podcast:txt>. Boardroom question: should there be?
    Capwing: ~60% of TikTok videos served to new accounts are AI slop — James calls it a "siren call" for podcasting.
    PNWR (Jun 19) — measurement, spam and money
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  02 - MEASUREMENT: AMP'S 30-SECOND "PLAY," ROUND TWO
    AMP defined a "play" as 30 seconds; Spotify immediately adopted it. You and Dave already called 30s "bullshit" last week — push total listen time + percent-completed as the real metrics.
    <b>The walkback:</b> AMP's original press release said "30 seconds of content played… once per user per session" — and quietly DELETED "once per user per session," leaving a woolier definition. James flagged it on-page with the HTML5 del tag.
    <b>YouTube is in AMP:</b> Google confirmed YouTube "has been participating in the AMP-led conversations" — implies YouTube uses a 30s play. Apple's stance still unknown.
    RSS.com test (Alberto): moving the DOWNLOAD threshold 60s to 30s changed totals by ~1% — negligible. So 30s for both plays and downloads is just simpler.
    <b>The HLS gotcha:</b> playing 10s of an HLS video podcast still downloads ~60-72s, so server logs can't tell real play — only player-side instrumentation (Spotify, future Apple) can. James: it's all too "cloak and dagger."
    <b>Watch July:</b> AMP's implementation doc is due July and the group is light on technical people — needs to be real technical work, "not a sales press release."
    Understanding podcast stats (PodNews)
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  03 - BEYOND CPM — INDIE + MISSION-DRIVEN ECONOMICS
    <b>Losh Moodaley ("Beyond CPM"):</b> the indie middle class (5k-25k downloads = only ~1-1.5% of all podcasts) can't survive on CPMs. Roadmap: audience-as-economy, sell exclusivity not inventory, scale outcomes not audiences, "owners of trust, not renters of attention."
    Pure V4V-adjacent framing — Sam Sethi tied it straight to TrueFans activity-based value (a share or comment is value, not just dollars) and "creator portals." Easy on-ramp to your worldview.
    <b>Vox Topica (Richard Fall):</b> full-stack agency for nonprofits/mission-driven orgs — speaks engagement/reach/"depth of message," not downloads. Nonprofits resist AI voices (authenticity) but use AI for scripts/cleanup/show notes; now recommends video to ALL clients.
    Beyond CPM: Surviving the New Measurement Era (PodNews Daily)
    Vox Topica
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  04 - NUMBERS + MONEY MOVES
    <b>812 million podcast hours / week</b> (Edison/SSRS, +5%, and +386% over 10 years). James wants THIS to be the headline figure instead of weekly-listener count — because listener count will plateau soon. Pairs with the move to listen-time + plays.
    <b>Fox buys Roku for $22B</b> (Lachlan Murdoch). Fox already owns Tubi, Red Seat Ventures and Supercast; Roku now entering Australia. Expect more Fox One / Tubi on the box — and more video-podcast deals.
    <b>Canada:</b> podcast reach up to 46%/month (49% English) — biggest single-year jump (Signal Hill / Triton). YouTube most-used; Apple the #1 RSS app (49% of new-episode downloads).
    YouGov dumping podcast research (UK/US genre data). @js's adoption datapoint for the namespace talk: only 0.529% of new May episodes carried an alternateEnclosure.
    @js Livewire / OP3 data
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  05 - AI BUBBLE / EDGE COMPUTE — DATACENTER WATER
    <b>Dave's thread:</b> Amazon used 2.5B gallons of water for datacenters in 2025, claims "75% of the way" to water-positive by 2030 — set against EPA's 9B gallons/day for US landscape irrigation (3.3T/year). The scale-of-the-bet tell.
    Carries the EP263 thesis forward: the AI capex boom and the podcast-measurement mess are the same disease — inflated numbers nobody wants corrected; real metrics (and local/edge compute) threaten both.
    Light touch this week unless you want to re-run Jensen / local-inference — no fresh clips queued.
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  06 - CROSS-STORY: COMMODORE FLIP-PHONE
    Commodore (retro-computing brand relaunch) is shipping a Commodore-branded flip phone. Cross-routed to PC20 + NA + WGTDT. PC20 angle: brand revival, dumbphone-as-product, the indie/maker ecosystem you and Dave love.
    (Heads-up: the page 403s a plain fetch — confirm content browser-side before air.)
    Commodore flip-phone
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  07 - QUIPS / TRANSITIONS
    @js: only 0.529% of new May episodes had an alternateEnclosure — "adoption" in one number.
    @js, on AI eating news: USA Today now builds "automated shell files" for breaking stories within ~4 hours to beat AI Overviews.
    Heads-up from @csb: you forgot to read last week's Bitcoin Gram — he says he's withholding today's donation until you read it. (Boardroom karma.)
    Dave's teased topic: "focused attention" — why in-person beats online (off @mijustin). Possible cold open.
    PNWR's new segment is literally "Spam of the Week." Even the spam has a slot now.
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