The Australian Podcast Ranker

Tommy: The Daily Talk Show. It's The Daily Talk Show, episode 591.

Josh: What's happening, guys? What's going on? Happy Tuesday. We're back after a long weekend.

Tommy: The, uh, the tennis is on at the moment in Melbourne.

Josh: I mean, the tennis is keeping people up at night. Uh, Julian Haig said to me he's had about 7 hours sleep in the last 5 days because he's been going, and he said he snuck into one game.

Tommy: And anyway, what does he mean? What do you mean you snuck in?

Josh: Hey, snuck in. You can sneak, you can, you can do naughty stuff at the tennis. But then hopefully you can find a seat.

Tommy: Do you remember the pest? Talking about naughty stuff at the tennis, there was the guy who came onto the court and was— He did the same thing at the Grand Prix.

Josh: And they called him the pest.

Tommy: Yeah, he was the pest.

Josh: Appropriate name.

Tommy: If you type in—

Josh: Was his nickname the pest?

Tommy: It was like public— If you type in like public disturbance, Australian Open, Grand Prix.

Josh: Well, I get it if he's doing it for a YouTube channel.

Tommy: No, it scared me. He was sort of— He was—

Josh: It was before YouTube.

Tommy: Crossing the road.

Josh: Road scares you, bro.

Tommy: If you're jaywalking, yeah. I actually had a lady, I was jaywalking this morning and sort of did the thing where you go halfway across the road. Yeah. It's, you know, traffic going both ways. You can see it's safe, the side closer to you. So, you sort of go into the middle and wait for the other car. And this lady wouldn't have it. Like, she stopped right where I was going across.

Josh: Might have been American. Americans stop for you if you walk on the road.

Tommy: No, but she stopped just after me, so I would have walked into a car. Passive.

Josh: Yeah, real passive. I mean, this— the— so that's keeping people up. What's been keeping you up, Josh?

Tommy: Yeah, so I spent, uh, I was telling you before, 9 and a half hours of screen time yesterday. On—

Josh: and I spoke to you, so did you— were you— was that the one time that you weren't on your phone, like, looking at it, but you were speaking to somebody on it?

Tommy: No, I reckon— yeah, I mean, that would add up to the, um— I just heard a little bang, and that does remind me on, uh, Saturday night at the, um, in the city with that Lunar New Year. Oh yeah, there's firecrackers going off.

Josh: Oh yeah, Jordan Markelidis was there.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: And so you could hear them from your joint?

Tommy: It's full on. It sounded like some form of, you know, thing you don't want to hear. Yeah, explosions and shit. Like a little bit scary.

Josh: They are little crackers though.

Tommy: But yeah, no, so I used my phone for 9 and a half hours. Got to the point because I've got a lot of screen time. Which phone have I got, Sebbs? 11 Pro Max. Yeah, 11 Pro Max, meant to be the biggest battery. Managed to get the battery to run out of juice by like 7 PM.

Mason: That's solid though.

Tommy: That's, that's great, dude.

Josh: And so did you make an exception to say, I didn't give a shit how much time? Yeah, I'm just using it and I'm using it.

Tommy: Well, so, uh, the reason I was on the phone was because I wrote an article on our, uh, the Daily Talk Show website.

Josh: You did?

Tommy: I love it.

Josh: You sent the text through as a Slack message for me to read. I was reading that. Then you sent me the text message of the article posted.

Mason: Yeah.

Josh: So it wasn't really like, hey, can you just—

Mason: There wasn't confirmation.

Josh: He was doing his due diligence. Yeah. Mate, I should have been quicker. I should have been quicker.

Tommy: I got Bree to cheque over it. And the thing is, Bree's a good filter because she, if she doesn't understand, she'll be, it's very annoying, but she'll say, I don't understand.

Josh: Yeah.

Tommy: It's like some of the most annoying feedback you can get. But she was like, oh yeah, no, I understand. It's great. So we spoke to Jordan Michaelides from Uncommon Podcast on Saturday, and we're talking about this issue with the Australian Podcast Ranker, which is the Commercial Radio Australia, uh, I don't even know, governing body?

Josh: What are they like?

Tommy: They're, they, they represent all commercial radio networks.

Josh: So you've got the AFL Players Association, which represents all of the players. And so is it of a similar vein? They're, they're taking a fee and they're sort of the, the governing body or something like that?

Tommy: I don't know if the governing body is the, the right word, but basically CRA represents all the, the radio networks. And they came out last year in 2019 with this Australian Podcast Ranker where they said, hey, we've created charts. So if you want to see the top 100, uh, podcasts just come over here to the Australian Podcast Ranker. Sounds very official.

Josh: Does.

Tommy: And then you click through and you see, ah, the only podcasts— there seems to be a lot of radio shows. And then you discover that at the moment, at the time that they released it, they were only doing their sort of member shows. So all of the podcast, all the indies, all the even Shameless, Mamma Mia, some of the biggest podcasts in Australia weren't even on the charts.

Josh: So that's when you get your nose up, you start smelling something. Yeah. What is that? Can you smell that? I can smell that.

Tommy: But the thing is that we had a bunch of people come out to us at the time and say, this is bullshit. What's going on?

Josh: Yeah.

Tommy: And we were sort of like, ah, we'll just sort of like let it, you know, die out because it eventually will. But then something happened that started to annoy me. So I subscribed to a lot of radio shows and their podcast feeds, and then, you know, subscribe to them. And what I was noticing is, uh, all these shows weren't just releasing their full episode. They weren't doing like an hour-long episode. They were now doing the hour-long episode and they were doing all of these bonus bits. So I'd click refresh and sometimes my whole page on my phone was filled with extra bits. So, 6 or 7 bits from the day.

Josh: Amazing that you had 3 different shows doing, does pineapple belong on pizza? It's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, it needs to be answered, but it's, you know.

Tommy: On that, did you see that there's a Kiwi pizza now? Like a Kiwi fruit?

Josh: Kiwi fruit? Yeah. Eugh.

Tommy: We've done exactly what we criticised. But yeah, I heard a radio person talking about the Kiwi pizza and they brought up the pineapple pizza. But anyway.

Josh: It's a tried and tested phoner.

Tommy: I don't blame her. And so.

Josh: When it's a bit low, just throw it out.

Tommy: And so the reason this is happening is because the way, uh, the Podcast Ranker works is it takes Monday to Sunday on a week and it says— and it has your total weekly downloads based over a 4-week period over the month. Now, if you want to increase the amount of downloads, all you do is, um, you could do it the organic way of trying to get more people to actually download and listen, or you could just have more content that they're downloading.

Josh: So subscribers get pushed more of your own content, so your feed That's why it's full of stuff that you didn't really want. You just wanted the show, but now it pushes you all the other little bits.

Tommy: And so the, I mean, the funny thing is that Hamish and Andy only does like 40 episodes a year and they appeared on the top of the ranker, which shows the power of how big they are because you had people who are, or shows that are releasing 5 days a week and are saying, oh, you know, we're getting close to, you know, on the charts or whatever to Hamish and Andy. The consideration is, yeah, you do 5 shows a week, you should be way higher because your download should be 5 times that of a podcast that does 1 a week. And so anyway, I finally decided to write this article.

Josh: What kind of mood were you in when you wrote it?

Tommy: You know, like, just curious. So I'd had a coffee.

Josh: Oh yeah.

Tommy: Okay. And so I, yeah, no. So I went to Pavlov's Duck. Yeah. On— Sure.

Josh: You should be saying locations of your situation.

Tommy: You have to. Yeah. I'm in witness protection. No. So you went to Pavlov's Duck, got a coffee. It was actually funny because it was public holiday. I decided to get a cappuccino instead of a flat white.

Josh: Oh, that thing would have cost you $10. Yeah, because it was surcharge on the public.

Tommy: And also like it really rattled them because they're like, oh yeah, just one large flat white. I'm like, oh no, can you actually make that a cappuccino?

Josh: So you're living on the edge because you wanted a bit of shock.

Tommy: Shock and awe.

Josh: Yeah.

Mason: Okay.

Tommy: And so then I got out my—

Josh: It's Monday, but I don't want to be too naughty.

Mason: So it was great.

Josh: It wasn't a Monday.

Tommy: Mocha. Anyway, let's not get bogged down in what I was drinking. But so I got my phone. I use an app which I love and I stand by. So I've been using Notion, but I would— I didn't— I don't use Notion when it comes to writing. I'm using Drafts.

Josh: Okay.

Tommy: And so Drafts is an app that works very well on iPhone and Mac and it sort of syncs up.

Josh: So where did you write this? On your phone?

Tommy: So I started writing it on the phone. Okay. And so I started grabbing all bits on the phone and I'm like, okay, sort of the different arguments or the different elements. And then I went home and went onto the laptop and actually had to make the bed because I wanted to lay on the bed and it wasn't made. So I had to do that. And so I wrote that.

Josh: White sheets, by the way, white doona cover, white sheets.

Tommy: Yeah. All white.

Josh: Nightmare for some, nightmare for kids.

Tommy: Or if you eat chocolate in the bed, which I don't do anymore.

Josh: Which, yeah, actually good incentive not to eat chocolate in the bed.

Tommy: Exactly. So you're shovelling it, you know, just to—

Josh: It's always yourself. I got it in there.

Tommy: But, and so, you know, I wrote the rest and did my due diligence in reading up all of the Commercial Radio Australia stuff around what they'd said.

Josh: And so you've gone down a full rabbit hole. It's the 7-Eleven exposé. It's the O-Bike takedown. It's now the— what do you call this one? The Podcast Ranker is dumb.

Tommy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you think of the title?

Josh: I loved it. It's just so, so straightforward.

Tommy: Well, I want CRA to come out and say Dumb means you can't talk, you know, like in school if you called someone dumb, they would call you out.

Josh: Yeah, fuck, I probably—

Tommy: so it doesn't translate that well, but I think it was good. So I did it and then I sent it. I just did a big send to all these different media people and started getting emails back.

Josh: This is exactly what Mason and I did for the 7-Eleven coffee one. And it's tried and tested method.

Tommy: And so then it's very addictive. It's the perfect—

Josh: we were riding a high that day, wasn't it? Friday.

Mason: Yeah.

Tommy: But do you know, were you calling out 7-Eleven? I mean, we were saying, yeah, the O-Bike one, definitely. You're calling out.

Josh: I mean, I did go on to The Project, so we put that video out, and then on a Friday night I went on The Project to talk about 7-Eleven coffee, and Mr. 97 and I went down to make sure, like you did your due diligence by looking at CRA's website in the back, you know, backstories. Mason and I went down and I filmed doing the test again. And then I, and then I like a little bitch sent that footage to the project.

Tommy: You gotta just give them a little bit.

Josh: They said to me, they said the question which I knew was going to be asked is like, oh, um, it was something like, uh, so, so tell me how it happens. Like, are you sure it just wasn't the one time? And then I was like, nah, went today. And they pulled up the footage as I said it. So they were in on it. Yeah, I love how they're in on it. Yeah.

Tommy: And just And then did you actually say cut to the footage?

Josh: No, I didn't.

Tommy: But they should have.

Josh: Mate, they're running a tight ship there. They just put it up.

Tommy: Yeah. I mean, the other thing I did, because I had the idea before Monday on Saturday night when Bri and I were going out to dinner, I just was like, I wonder. So one of the things that I hate about this whole Ranker is they're calling it such a generic name. I know it's a bit rich coming from the Daily Talk Show, but we are the Daily Talk Show. But Australian podcast Ranker. Implies that they are the king of rank. Like they're the Australian podcast ranker. If you hear that 97, what do you assume? You hear Australian podcast ranker.

Mason: Yeah, real official.

Tommy: Yeah.

Mason: Like the Australian.

Tommy: It represents all of Australia.

Mason: It's like the government set it up.

Tommy: Yeah, it's like this, but it's got as much sort of official, officialness. That's not a word.

Josh: As certification.

Tommy: Yeah. As the the bakeries that say that they do the best snot blocks, you know, the vanilla slice.

Mason: Grace just said Josh's club should have been called the Call Out Club.

Tommy: I would have loved to be there. Anyway, so I ended up getting the domain name australianpodcastranker.com.

Josh: Just hang on, just let that, let that sit.

Tommy: Yeah, we love a good domain name.

Josh: We love just taking the time to appreciate when a good domain has been purchased, and we need a song, we need a some kind of sound effect. Maybe we could get some sort of like cha-ching. No, no, no. Venture IP's dinosaur could make some noise and we use that as the— Oh yeah, I like that. You just bought a great domain or I don't know, something like that.

Tommy: And so they— So initially when I got that, I was like, I'm going to create our own ranker and sort of— But then what I thought is that we could easily just be disregarded as just being a couple of clowns.. And so I went down a little bit more of a serious option and just used the domain name to redirect to the article.

Josh: I like you said, make it easier for everyone. Yeah. Here's how you can read the article.

Tommy: It goes.

Josh: And so anyway, can you just answer why didn't they have a, why didn't they buy that domain? Well, it looks like that's clearly the name of what they're trying to do.

Tommy: Well, I think that Australian businesses, they're, they're, what they think is, oh, we just need the .au. Oh, John, John, if we just get the .au, we're in Australia.

Josh: Which in defense, if you're trying to SEO something, it helps.

Tommy: Well, yeah. So if you're trying to optimise and you are Australian, and so I would never get the .au because there is all these laws around, like you've got an ABN, you need an Australian Business Number to have it.

Josh: And so they've done that.

Tommy: I'm not, I'm not sure, but the .au wasn't available. I wouldn't have gotten the .au anyway, but I, so I got the, the .com. But yeah, so I spent the good portion of the day not only seeding it out, but I was getting all of these messages from people who were in the industry who were saying, for one, they were like, finally, I've been talking to my boss about this. And they said, you just got to play the game. But the other one that was interesting was a few independent podcasters who are bigger than us in regards to downloads and success. They came to me and said, hey, absolutely love the article. Also, Commercial Radio Australia wants to charge between $150 and $200 a month for any independent creator to be in the charts.

Josh: Just to be on it.

Mason: Yeah.

Tommy: So think about this. We should create a chart if we can get 1,000. How many podcasts are there in Australia?

Josh: I reckon we know about 50. Podcasters.

Tommy: Yeah. What do you, what do you reckon, Seb? Can you find that number? I know there's like, you know, over 700,000 podcasts on the, um, uh, you know, Apple Podcasts. But just imagine if you were able to get 1,000 podcasts in Australia to pay $200 to be on a rank up, we could make $200 grand a month.

Josh: That's a good business model.

Tommy: Yeah. And so anyway, It's, it's one of those things. I've done this a few times.

Josh: That's not to say that they're making that money now through the radio stations or no, the radio stations are already paying them a fee for being partners or whatever members.

Tommy: Yeah. Okay. And so it's, but the thing is, and a few people have asked, I've actually had one person who was sort of defending it and they're like, what is your solution?

Josh: Is it what's in it for you or your solution to their approach? Yeah.

Tommy: What's this? If you're saying no to this, what do you think the solution is? And I don't know what the—

Josh: which is the classic one when you say it to your missus.

Tommy: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, what do you want to eat for dinner then? Yeah, yeah. If you don't want fucking Thai, if you don't want pizza, if you don't want burgers, yeah, yeah, you, you tell me.

Josh: Yeah, I'll have whatever. Yeah, and you make it.

Tommy: You don't want carbs, but you also don't feel like meat. You know what, let's just not eat tonight. That's a bit what it feels like. But, um, and so anyway, I think that the It's complex. And I think that going down the rabbit hole of trying to design something potentially falls into the trap of playing the finite game that is trying to rank everyone against each other, which I don't necessarily— I think that there needs to be more context.

Josh: And you didn't also put your hand up in relation to creating something, creating a ranking system.

Tommy: I'm just saying the current one is flawed and it's not only flawed from an independent creator point of view, but it's bad for the radio industry because every radio show is being pressured. And so I— this was, this was purely my assumption, right? Based on being a listener, I was like, oh, they're being told that they need to upload this thing. And I sort of said there, I was sort of matter of fact about it. This is what's happening. But now that I've published it, people have actually come out and said, uh, our representative within the business are saying that we need to do this. We need to be posting more content to our feed to increase our ranking.

Josh: So that was the directive, which is—

Tommy: which I think is bad for the radio industry. So I think that—

Josh: well, I think it's good for short-term gain with commercialization of podcasting and being relevant as an audio business that then has— so if someone said radio people aren't listening anymore this all about podcasting? He's like, no, they're actually also listening to podcasts and also listening to radio. Is that the— is that what they— No.

Tommy: Well, I think that the thing is that what the people who support the, the Australian Podcast Ranker would say is that there is no single solution right now for any podcaster to go to advertisers, whether that's through agencies or direct to client. And to give a good state of the industry and say, this is where we fit. And so the thing is that, yeah, you're right, we don't play the CPM game. We've had some great successes recently that prove to us that you don't have to just play the CPM game, which is the amount of money an advertiser pays you per 1,000 downloads, which then in that case you could— let's just do more episodes.

Josh: Fudge numbers also. You can pay for downloads. Yeah, you could push that number through.

Tommy: And the thing is, there's so many different elements that you can— or ways you can look at it, which I was pretty specific because you could easily say, okay, well, this is IAB 2.0 data, which is the standard that was created globally around how we measure, um, downloads.

Josh: And so in layman's terms, when Facebook were just counting anything, anyone just swiping past the video as as a view before they changed that. It was the similar nature of podcasting before it went to what you just said.

Tommy: Yeah. And so I don't know, I mean, the fun thing was this morning I said we got a few publications, media people reach out to us and said, hey, we want to write storeys and they're asking for photos. So we did obviously prioritise during our whip meeting, we went out and did a little photo shoot.

Josh: It needed to be done. Sometimes pressure just needs to be applied to get the photo shoot to happen. And I needed to do it for a long time.

Tommy: The most controversial bit was whether I could wear my headphones or not. We decided that wearing headphones— Plugged into what? Yeah, yeah, I was gonna put it into my troll. I think it would have been just to sort of COVID sort of my neck, right? It would have just defined my neck just around my—

Mason: No, you look great in the photo.

Tommy: Thank you.

Josh: With any kind of outwardly facing comms that can call out— you call— you could— we could call it—

Tommy: I called them out. Yeah, I cancelled them though.

Josh: No, well, you don't cancel them. Yeah, some people cancel things. No one decides to cancel.

Tommy: Should I also mention I did send it to Seth Godin? I said, what do you think of this? He said, and he did say revolutions are messy.

Josh: I mean, you took his advice of make a ruckus.

Tommy: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. What are people saying?

Josh: I just want to say when you do do any kind of call out or whatever you've done, whatever you want to call it, like I did with 7-Eleven, expect some death threats. Well, people who just don't really appreciate it for some reason, for some kind of bias that they may have. I got threats from 7-Eleven workers that were saying, 'Do you remember that, Sev?' Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tommy: I was like, 'Shut up, shut up.' And so, but I think that there will be, like, if you imagine how many people, you've got to expect that there's at least 100 people that have somewhat sold, been sold in on this idea. Which I actually push back on because I'm sure there's a bunch of shows that are on there that don't want to be on there. But let's just say there are a few people who need this to work in regards to keeping their jobs or all that sort of thing. Yeah. And so I wouldn't be surprised if we look at the articles and we don't have comments on ours, but I could imagine in the broader media landscape we will see people calling out the fact of— I think the biggest criticism will be like, these guys don't make fucking money. Like, we're just trying to like make this industry work, and I think that they've gone about it the wrong way. What do you think, Sevs?

Mason: Scooter Derek says Josh Assange.

Tommy: Yep, I'll take that. Do you reckon I would be happy? Yeah, I'd be happy.

Josh: A wee little guy that lives in Russia.

Tommy: Which embassy should I move to?

Mason: Not the Ecuador one.

Tommy: No, no, because they'll kick you out. But what about, um, uh, the US Embassy has a nice little cafe area out the front.

Mason: Does it?

Tommy: But I think it's not— Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mason: But I don't know if you can live in there.

Tommy: The embassy?

Josh: You can't.

Tommy: Okay. Anything else?

Josh: Anyone else?

Mason: Yeah. Ash says, buddy won the first set for those playing along at home.

Josh: Oh, yeah. The buddy party.

Mason: The Fashion Avenue Podcast says, what? That's criminal in relation to the charging to be on the—

Tommy: Outrageous.

Josh: I mean, this is— we need confirmation. I want to know if radio stations or the people that were in that first 100 paid and what their fucking money was for. Yeah, you didn't build a website.

Tommy: Yeah, well, administrative costs. So for what?

Josh: Just an email?

Tommy: So the thing is, no. So if you think about the, uh, Triton Digital, uh, is working with, uh, Commercial Radio Australia, and so they had this— there would be annoying admin associated with getting someone's numbers and then making sure that they work. But the thing is that if you're going to take this on, you can't absorb that cost, I don't think, at the independent creator stage. If you want to be the industry standard, you just need to make it work because, yeah, I just, I think it's criminal otherwise. What else are people saying?

Mason: Peter Finn said, morning boys.

Tommy: Morning Peter.

Mason: Shannon says, fuck it, you're not looking for a job in commercial radio, right?

Tommy: Yes, absolutely right.

Mason: It's a shakedown, baby.

Tommy: Yeah, Shakedown. What did you say? Take Down Tuesday.

Mason: Take Down Tuesday. Yeah, that's what I coined it.

Tommy: And look, I've taken down a few. I mean, I haven't fully taken them down. Yellow Pages.

Josh: What did you do there?

Tommy: When I had a blog called Melbourne Geek, Yellow Pages basically were trying to— and Census was the bigger overarching organization. They were using really dodgy tactics to try and get small businesses to sign up. And, um, I spoke to them on the phone and they were basically saying we can guarantee organic, um, search engine optimization. They're basically saying that they would be able to get me onto number one on Google and that they had a special partnership with Google that allowed them to do it, which was completely false.

Josh: And so, and they were promoting that, and so they were—

Tommy: the, the person on the phone was actively saying, hey, we can get you on the top page. And I'm like, what do you mean, through ads? And they're like, no, organically. And, and then they brought up their relationship with Google. And so it turned out to be complete bullshit. And so I wrote a complete article about it. Census ended up having to— I remember the guy's name, Damian Glass. I wonder if he still works at Census, but he had to put together this. I loved it because I was like this 21-year-old, this is fucking in his PJs in Berwick writing articles. And they had to come out with an official statement.

Josh: And what was the statement?

Tommy: Saying that it's, uh, yeah, we don't officially— like, that's— we don't have this relationship, uh, that allows for the organic stuff. And interestingly, and this is the thing with the CRA stuff, we are very good with search engine optimization, like, as a business.

Josh: One of the best.

Tommy: Yeah. And, uh, and so when the thing with the Yellow Pages thing is I ranked number 1 for Yellow Pages scam, and so I had, um hundreds of comments from people saying the same thing happened and they were— and it was great. Small businesses were using the article that I'd written to help get them out of contract.

Josh: I didn't know this. Yeah, you hadn't told me this.

Tommy: Oh really? It's a fun story.

Josh: Wow. And, and so what do you, what do you want?

Tommy: So why?

Josh: What do you want CRA to, to do? What do you want them to write in response or what do you want them to share in response to what you've written?

Tommy: So I think that they need to create— I think they need to rebrand the— because you got the domain. No, but they need to— they can't—

Josh: how much you selling it for, bro?

Tommy: No, I'm not. Someone asked that. They said you're holding it to ransom. I'm not selling them the domain. You just said I fucking own it. This is just a domain I've got. The thing is that don't call it the Australian Podcast Ranker if it is not a representation of the Australian podcast industry. So that's the first thing. So call it the radio shows that have podcast ranker.

Josh: It doesn't—

Tommy: yeah, it doesn't have such— what do you— what are you looking like that?

Mason: No, I was about to say just call it the, what, Commercial Radio Australia podcast ranker.

Tommy: Yeah, the Commercial Radio Australia very specific podcast ranker for only a small number of shows.

Josh: I mean, as soon as I read it, as much as we are an independent media brand and I've We are a big media company as well. Yes, we are. That's our name.

Mason: Yeah.

Josh: Big Media Company Pty Ltd.

Tommy: Send your CC to Syd.

Josh: I did feel it gave me a visceral response when I saw it and I just, I didn't quite understand it. I'm sure that's what all these people that have contacted you have actually, they felt that too when they saw it. They're like, does this make sense? Like your podcast app has the top shows in it. Is that like—

Tommy: And so the thing is, what do we, what do we hate? It's like the Instagram, we hate the manipulation of our feeds, right? And so this is an indirect manipulation of our feeds because it is promoting radio shows or anyone that's on the podcast ranker to upload more. And so it's like, we can, we can actually draw a line. We can, we can connect the dots between when the Australian podcast ranker started and when radio shows started releasing more than one thing a day on the feeds.

Josh: And so big accusations. Yeah.

Tommy: And so I think I think that we need to, um, yeah, so they obviously need to do, to do the rebrand thing. They can't call it the Australian Podcast Ranker. I think it's just, it's too confusing, too confusing for advertisers. Um, I think that they need to relook at how the Ranker is working in regards to should you be ranking a show that does 5 days a week with one that does 1 day a week. And, um, if you need to do that, how are you going to communicate that to advertisers? And I think that the biggest issue is that this is a philosophical issue around, um, the way downloads are seen. And so what they're saying is downloads right now are seen by advertisers as like just the number. And so the higher the download number, the more they pay.

Josh: Yeah.

Tommy: And what we're saying is that all downloads aren't made equal. There is, um, Simplecast have something called Unique Listeners, which, um, which is more nuanced and tries to reflect or show you a, a user rather than how many people rather than downloads.

Josh: How many people, which, which in 100,000 downloads, exactly, it could be only 3,000 people that are going through your catalog.

Tommy: And so the thing is like that, that's all nuanced, and I think there's a way to go before we get to the Unique Listeners business stuff. But I just think that the current way that it's done with looking at downloads without the context of even like demographics, like there's no reflection of where people are located. Are these, uh, Australian audiences? Are they based mainly in Melbourne? Are they like, um, when we're working with advertisers, we believe that demographics, psychographics, all these other things outside of just the core number Yeah, community engagement, like how many people are actually interacting with you.

Josh: I mean, I've had a friend, one of my best mates worked as a salesperson in the radio industry and he said, I'm fucking selling air. He didn't give it like the, the what he would tell the person to get the sale.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: I mean, he's not in the industry anymore, but he said that that was pretty common, common practice.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: And so Seth Godin talks about, Gary Vee talks about people buying TV advertising and what and why people, why even big companies are still buying it. It's a legacy purchase. It's the old executive who needs to be seen to be buying TV spots. And so there is a flow-on and a change that needs to be made when numbers and digital, the digital era is so transparent. It can't, it should be the real one. How many people listen to radio? You answer that. Honestly, you don't know. You can't know. You don't take a study of 2,000 people and say that there's 100, you know, 250,000 people in this suburb listening. It doesn't work like that these days. It cannot work like that these days.

Tommy: Yeah. And I think that the other thing too is what's disappointing is it feels like, for one, Commercial Radio Australia have known about podcasting for what, 15 years, right? 2004, podcasting started. It has taken them 15 years to slow, like, do some sort of response. This is their response. And what's frustrating is that response is based on them trying to keep the power that they already have. And as Seth Godin says, revolutions are messy. So on that, anything else?

Mason: No. Jasna says, how do I score one of your jumpers? I'm hooked on the podcast.

Tommy: Thanks, Jasna. We've, uh, we haven't, uh, Uh, we haven't got any, any hoodies left. We did a big, uh, sort of run of those, uh, last year, and I think we will come into the colder months.

Josh: We'll do t-shirts though.

Tommy: Yeah, so I think, um, yeah, we should do some, uh, t-shirts. Yeah, I love it. Maybe— no, we won't do any sort of podcast. We could though, just to charge the list. Rankers are for wankers or something. It's a good— anything else? Did you have a good, good weekend anyway?

Josh: Uh, yeah, I mean, we worked, we had episodes recorded that went out, but we had a nice time in Geelong. That was a lovely time, had a little family outing. Mr. 97 just, um, creating, you know, moisture in the— on the earth. That sounded horrible.

Tommy: He's into the water, he was, um, swimming with old mate.

Josh: Is your— how's your chest? Can you show me his chest? Can you pull up your top?

Mason: Yeah.

Tommy: It's all scrunchies.

Josh: Oh, because Bodhi had his little— my son had his little floaties on and you were throwing him up and when you came out, you were like cut up.

Mason: Yeah, yeah. Just from his floaties, all the plastic bits.

Tommy: Eastern Beach, Geelong. The burger at the Beach House is ridiculous.

Josh: Yes. If you're in Geelong, the Beach House, go. It's the prime—

Tommy: If you say the Daily Talk Show sent you, you'll—

Josh: They'll ask you, what are you talking about?

Tommy: It's still worth it either way. Anything else? Service before we go.

Mason: Uh, Fashion Avenue Podcast said, goodbye, Rankers Are For Wankers.

Tommy: Yeah, right, perfect. Well, maybe, dude, digital printing.

Josh: If I did the O'Bike fishing t-shirts and I got them up within a night, can you just do it outside of business hours?

Tommy: Because we get a bit of these Rankers For Wankers— Rankers ranking— what did I say? Rankers, Rankers Are For Wankers. Yeah, okay, all right. It's a daily talk show. Uh, if you have any feedback, uh, you can send an email to me personally as well, josh@thedailytalkshow.com.

Josh: And this is especially if you are CRA. Yeah, because I don't need that in my life. I want my sleep.

Tommy: Yeah, I wonder. Yeah, it'd be interesting, like, if we got it wrong.

Josh: My brother's mate is on the board of CRA.

Tommy: Perfect. Get around it. Anyway, hopefully they're having a meeting about it right now and they can fix it. All right, see you tomorrow, guys. Have a good one.

Josh: See you guys.