The Jeff Payne Show

Send us Fan Mail On October 22, Amazon renamed Kindle Unlimited to Kindle+ and put audiobooks inside the subscription. The headline was the rebrand. The real change is the default: an AI-narrated version of any enrolled ebook now goes onto the shelf automatically, with no decision and no studio. Meanwhile the industry's own numbers say US audiobook sales hit $2.43 billion last year, 58% of American adults have listened, and only 16% of listeners have ever tried an AI-voiced book, with willing...

Send us Fan Mail Two years ago, Instagram told businesses to keep video under three minutes. This week it announced a test of videos up to ninety minutes, in the main feed, with a path to your television. Same company, same customers, opposite instruction. In this episode, Jeff walks through the two reversals, why the stated reason has shifted from how people behave to where people are, and what it means when a platform asks businesses for their most expensive asset, long-form video, in excha...

Send us Fan Mail On October 22, Amazon renamed Kindle Unlimited to Kindle+ and put audiobooks inside the subscription. The headline was the rebrand. The real change is the default: an AI-narrated version of any enrolled ebook now goes onto the shelf automatically, with no decision and no studio. Meanwhile, the industry’s own numbers say US audiobook sales hit $2.43 billion last year, 58% of American adults have listened, and only 16% of listeners have ever tried an AI-voiced book, with willin...

Send us Fan Mail For about a decade, your website and Google had a deal: describe your business in a machine-readable format, and Google decorates your listing—stars, question boxes, extra height on the page. Since 2023, Google has been taking those decorations back, one at a time, and nobody got penalized. The reward just stopped showing up, and the line item didn’t. In this episode, Jeff answers the question, "Why are we still doing this?" and how it is the wrong question. The audience for ...

Send us Fan Mail Most AI visibility work chases citations. This episode shows why that is only half the answer. New research compared the same questions to ChatGPT with search on and off, then looked at brands that were actually on the pages the AI cited. The model named brands it rarely mentioned from memory only about 11% of the time, even when cited. It named brands it already knew 99% of the time. Same pages, same citations. The difference was what the model believed before it searc...