Brian Moffitt is with us now from NPR.
And Brian, can you tell us what was announced today on Tuesday and how long it was in the
works?
So, oh boy, I think we have been working on this concept for, I would say, almost two
years now, starting from the earliest iterations internally of how we kind of started to think
about how great it would be if we had listening metrics across all the places our podcasts
were enjoyed.
So, I can kind of take you all the way back there.
So, NPR has an app called NPR One, which you may be familiar with.
And we have a reasonable audience for that, but I think about half a million people every
month use it, monthly active users.
And I think it was around two years ago, we started introducing podcast content into NPR
One.
Previously, it had been a lot of radio shows broken into segments and kind of pieced together
based on listener preference.
You could mark things as interesting or you could take signals from the user as to what
things they listened all the way through, what things they skipped to kind of create
a personalized flow of stories for users.
And we put podcasts in there.
And we realized pretty quickly that because of NPR One being pretty much an always on
platform where you're essentially streaming the content as you're listening to it, we
got very detailed, anonymous information about how people were listening.
How long into an episode did they stay before they had skipped?
Things like that, which things got skipped more than other things.
And we learned that that was tremendously helpful as a publisher when we thought about
what kind of content we're going to create or how we even generate content.
And just to give you a quick example, I think one of the cases that I'm not the expert
in if there's interested in this, we can hook you up with the editorial folks.
But I know when we were launching the NPR Politics podcast a year or so ago, there was
kind of a question of how do you open a podcast to keep listeners interested the most?
Do you sort of just start with some banter around the table and people talking?
Or do you kind of dive right into the issues?
So with NPR One, they were able to test two different versions and see which one actually
resonated.
And there was a very clear winner.
And that was kind of the format we chose for the politics podcast.
So that kind of insight into how people are listening to the content helps us be a better
publisher.
Not getting too technical in the weeds there.
Tell us how this new technology is going to work.
Okay.
So the challenge in the podcasting space over the last decade has been all of us have been
circling around a better definition of a download.
And this is largely because most of the places where people listen are not places that we
control the distribution.
So it's Apple Podcasts is the largest and you've got a bunch of other apps that distribute
our content for free.
And so all we know is that somebody requested the file.
And we know if the bytes were delivered successfully to that user and that's kind of where we are
with the IAB and the common definition known as IAB v2, that we can all speak the same
language about downloads.
That's been great.
It's I think a huge step forward for the industry that we all have that definition.
But we know there's downloads that don't get played.
All you got to do is look at your own behavior.
There's so much good stuff out there that you don't quite get to everything.
We have good research that says people listen to most of what they download and that's been
great.
So what we want to get at is a way to understand from all those places where our podcasts are
played which files that were downloaded actually got listened to.
And I think it's really important to interject here.
We're not worried about who listened to it.
We're just worried that someone listened to it because that's the information we don't
have and that's all we're really looking to get it.
Same things we learned from NPR 1.
What kind of engagement are we getting with this content?
Is it worth the distribution deals we're making with all these different platforms?
Are people listening to what they download?
There's a tremendous cost to NPR and time and energy and money to make a podcast episode
and to distribute it and to deliver those bites to somebody.
We kind of want to know if it was worth it.
So in a quick overview, what we're talking about with remote audio data is actually very,
very simple.
Inside those audio files, which are typically MP3s, although it can be MP4s or other formats,
all we want to do is put a little extra metadata that tells where the important points in the
file are.
Where are the quartile markers?
Where is the halfway point?
For our sponsors, where was the sponsorship starting and ending?
So that we can have the podcast playback platforms, when listening happens at one of those points,
just send us back a little ping that says, listening happened at that point.
That's all we're asking for.
It's hardly any data at all.
We're not asking for any user information or PII.
We're simply, somebody listened at that point in that file and that's the basic metric we're
looking to get back.
So at the end of the day, at some point, will you be able to tell if there's a participating
hosting company like Spreaker or Blueberry or Libsyn, will you be able to tell, okay,
this podcast was listened to after they go through the download number, was listened
to an actual number 58 times or this podcast was listened to for 30 minutes, 23 times.
Is that how deep the numbers are going to get?
That's pretty much it.
And there's different variations of it.
I think the current spec that's out there right now is very, very basic.
It's just a step into this in a way that respects the user privacy so we can at least start
getting something back.
Not like minute by minute or second by second, but just something back.
So that's exactly it.
But it depends on kind of three things happening.
One is publishers will need to encode the rad tags into their episodes before they send
them out into the world.
So that's sort of the basic starting block here.
That requires effort from sort of the second group of people, which are the infrastructure
companies, either the ad servers or the hosting companies who generally are the last touch
of that file.
And particularly if you're going to be doing dynamic ad insertion, which most publishers
do, that changes where everything is in the file.
So you'll need to kind of reinsert the rad tags just to make sure all the data is tight
and this point is where you said it was.
Those are the first two steps.
And then the third step is all the places where podcasts are played will need to look
for that data.
And then when listening happens, securely send that ping directly back to the publisher
so the publisher knows somebody listened to that file in that point.
Gotcha.
Do you think you're going to get all the major publishers or all the publishers to participate?
So the thing that makes me happiest about what we announced today is if you look at
the list of companies that have committed to putting rad on their 2019 roadmap, it's
basically every large major ad server and a lot of the big infrastructure hosting companies.
And I think that's really important because that's kind of like laying the pipes, right?
The plumbing, the infrastructure needed for this to work.
After that, it's actually quite easy for a publisher to put the information in to encode
those rad tags.
And then NPR just announced we're going to deploy rad ping back in our apps.
There are a number of companies that indicated interest that are pretty large podcast playback
platforms.
And I could tell you we're talking to a lot more than were listed in here.
They haven't quite decided which way they're going to go yet.
But I'm optimistic because I think we started in the right place.
We've got a lot of publisher interest.
We've got a lot of publishers ready to commit.
We've got the infrastructure to get the tags in for the delivery systems that exist today.
And now I think it's just a matter of the players looking at the SDKs and realizing
that it's actually not that hard to implement and it totally respects user privacy.
Do podcasters need to do anything?
They'll need to work with a host that supports it or a vendor that supports it, I think is
step one.
And in some cases, that's all you might need to do because I imagine the ads wizards and
tritons and panofleets of the world are going to try to make this as easy as possible for
their customers.
They'll have the encoding solution, the tag insertion, then they'll probably offer capture
the analytics for their customers.
So I think that's probably the easiest thing to do if you're a publisher is keep an eye
on which companies are supporting it.
And then encourage all the places where your audience listens to your podcast to go ahead
and adopt the sending of the data back.
Right now, if you're using a major hosting company, at least to my knowledge, it's somewhat
easy to go to their site and check out your podcast and see how many downloads or listens
you had.
Do you have a vision for how it'll work eventually when there's enough data to read the more
specific data for a podcaster?
Is it going to be the same thing?
You're just going to go back to your hosting company and say, okay, now I know how many
people listen for 30 minutes or how many people fast forwarded past the ad.
Is it going to be the same process or will there have to be a different way of looking
up all that data?
I think you could go either way or maybe even both ways.
I think most of those companies that kind of provide those analytics to you now, be
a PodTrack or your ad server slash distribution company, an ad whether a Triton or a Panoply,
they'll probably deliver a second metric alongside that, that is listen.
You'll be able to look at a show in our case like a Planet Money, see how many downloads
there were with whatever kind of metric definition we use, which for us is the current IABV2
standard.
We'll be able to say, here's how many valid downloads happened.
Then hopefully we get wide enough adoption from the playback platforms.
We'll see and here's how many listens we recorded.
Should podcasters expect to see their numbers go down?
Some really good question.
I think yes is the answer because I think anybody who looks at their own behavior realizes
they probably aren't listening to everything they download.
When we look at our research and our audience panels and you look at the Chervere and the
Edison data, people say they listen to most.
When I look at my own behavior, it's pretty much the same.
But the problem is we just don't know.
There's no way to know because you don't have a holistic way to look at it across all the
different places.
Just to illustrate the problem, for NPR, the biggest podcaster in the world, Apple is the
biggest place people listen to our podcasts.
Just I think a little under 60% of our podcast downloads happen in Apple.
The next biggest chunk is 5% and then 4% and then 3% and then 2% and then 2% and then 1%
and then 1%.
There are so many places where people listen to our podcasts that it needs to be something
that can work everywhere, not just one platform or one app solution to it.
Now is Apple on board for this?
I think we've said in the past, and I'll say again, we've been talking to Apple about this
since day one.
They've been a very interested party in hearing about it.
They're not in the announcement that you said.
They're still kind of thinking it through, but they've been an active participant as
we've developed this over the past two years.
Are you optimistic that they'll be on board at some point?
I'm optimistic that I think everybody will because it just makes sense.
I think one of the biggest issues that we've heard over the past two years as we work with
dozens of companies around this is, will Apple do it?
At the end of the day, I think Apple is going to do what's good for the ecosystem.
I think this is going to be good for the ecosystem and the industry because it's in nobody's
interest to have downloads that aren't played.
That's frankly a waste of resources.
It's a waste of space for users.
It's a waste of bandwidth for publishers.
It's not how most other mediums work.
I think it's kind of inevitable we'll move there.
Will RAD be the solution?
I don't know.
I think we've always taken the position that RAD is the step that we think is possible
because we've tried it and tested it and we've gotten a lot of broad support that it could
be.
If it's something else, that's great.
If it's RAD, that's great.
As a publisher, I kind of need to understand how our content is playing out there.
What do you think this means for advertisers?
We've talked to a lot of them and I think they're very excited about it.
I would argue pretty happy with the definition of the download as outlined by the IAB.
We're all certainly conducting great business around that metric and everyone's kind of
built their ROIs and know that it works.
The repeat endemic sort of direct response advertisers just keep coming back because
it works and we're getting a lot of new brand advertisers in.
I think they're finding success through research and actual performance.
I think at the end of the day, everybody would love to actually have a tighter loop so they
understand not just that the download made it to somebody, but we're talking about people
who heard it and then comparing that to the actions they received.
I think at the end of the day, what you're going to find if we could get there is that
podcasting will be one of the most transparent and effective mediums that you could purchase
as an advertiser.
How long do you think it'll be before we have some usable data and numbers?
Will it be six months or nine months or a year or less than that?
It's going to come in tiny slices.
The NPR One Android app is rolling out RAD support today.
If you're able to encode your files as a publisher and receive the data, you can start seeing
at least from NPR One how listening behavior looks for your content.
I think as more platforms turn on, it's just a nice thing.
The firehose will just get bigger and bigger of the data coming back at you.
My hope, my aspiration is that by the end of next year, 2019, 80% or so of the listening
to our podcast is captured via RAD.
I think that would be great.
I think we would be able to be a much better publisher.
I think the business models will be stronger.
Finally, Ryan, how big a day is today for the podcasting space?
I think that's to be determined.
I mean, me, I'm very happy.
We've been working on this for a very long time.
I think I am grateful that we've had so many companies involved in this, eagerly involved,
pushing it through in different working groups, thinking about all the different problems,
trying to come up with a solution that we think should be able to work for everybody.
I think that's great.
There's been a lot of different ways to attack this, but I think from what I've seen, this
is probably the most holistic and probably the simplest way to attack it.
That excites me.
Again, it's going to depend on how people adopt it from here.
I think the other thing is how many people get involved in the discussion.
Well, we've had 30 companies involved to this point.
We need 300.
If you're a podcast app, if you're a publisher, if you're a platform that hasn't been involved,
go to the URL, get involved.
Let us know what you think.
That's the point.
We need to know what the roadblocks are.
Brian, thanks for your time.
Hey, no problem.