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Transcript

Buzzsprout Ads Have Arrived! · Buzzcast

• 0:00
  Alban: Kevin, we got another review when I read it, this is from this is from customary three stars.
• 0:08
  Kevin: It's like the more Jordan begs you to not read reviews, the more you want to read them,
• 0:12
  Alban: this is what happened. We had a conversation about reviews. And then people started leaving reviews. And now I want to read them because they're good content. So, Jordan, apologies, we got another three star review. And you gotta read it. Yeah. Another JAM PACKED episode from the Buzzsprout crew, comparing pre mid and post roll ad spots, and the value of reviews and ratings and my review. Ultimately, though, I found it so frustrating listening to the team highlight the value of mid roll ad spots compared to pre and post roll spots. And the show even included three or four mid roll ads for most Pro Services. And yet, what's the one thing we've all been waiting for, since they delivered dynamic content in late 2020. It's the mid rolls.
• 0:50
  Alban: That's right, mid roll dynamic content, fingers crossed. This episode is just a setup for big announcements in the next episode, that mid roll content is finally available.
• 1:03
  Kevin: Just what album mid roll content is finally available.
• 1:14
  Kevin: We've got some big news that we need to we need to share with the world, we've been working on something for a very long time.
• 1:19
  Kevin: And that thing is called Buzz sprout ads. We've been thinking about it, we've been talking about it. And we've been living in this Buzzsprout ads world for probably a couple of years. And just in the past week, we started letting real people in to test this thing out and try it out. So we leaked in the Facebook group, I put a post out there, and I invited some people to log into their Buzzsprout accounts and click on the monetization section. And for those of you who have done it, you would have seen a new feature that we're highlighting, and we're calling it Buzzsprout ads. Buzzsprout ads is like the easiest way for a podcaster to monetize their podcast, hands down. That's where we started that was on Northstars. How do we make it super easy for independent podcasters to monetize. And so we're sourcing all the ads ourselves, you go ahead and opt into the program.
• 2:04
  Kevin: And then you get presented opportunities and the opportunities, you see everything that is included in the ad. So you get to hear the audio, you get to see the cover art, you get to see what will go into the content and links into the show notes. So if people hear an ad, and they want to click through to subscribe to that podcast, you get to preview all of that. And then if you're comfortable with that ad and you'd like it, you think it's a good fit for your podcast, you can accept it. And if you accept it, we automatically start putting into your episodes for you. You don't have to accept that, of course you can decline it. And then if you decline it, you can give us some reasons why you might decline like it's not good fit for your show, or I don't know what the other ones are off top my head. But then we learn more about the ads that you like for your show and will serve you more of those opportunities.
• 2:46
  Alban: Yeah, when you say we've been talking about it for a few years, I'm pretty sure like the very first episodes of Buzz cast, before we ever hit record on this show. I think it just started with a bunch of complaints really on our side, like, hey, there's so many things that are messed up about podcast advertising. And we had lots of things that we thought didn't work. And it was actually part of why for a long time Buzzsprout didn't have its own ads platform. And over the years, I think we just started getting closer and closer to Okay, I think that problem is solvable. And about I don't know what was it like eight months ago, you put together a pitch and said, Hey, I think this is how we can build it. And it's really cool to hit publish. And now it's out there,
• 3:28
  Kevin: it takes it takes a long time, I think we tried to do something different. So back in 2020, we released dynamic content insertion tools, and we started with the pre roll and post roll. Now when you have the technology to do pre and post, you absolutely have the same technology to do the mid the only thing that you're missing to do a mid roll insertion point are the points themselves, like where in the episode Do you want these mid rolls to drop. If you have a short episode, there might just be one mineral point.
• 3:53
  Kevin: But if you have a long episode, there could be three, four, or five, six of them. And that's a tedious process to go through, especially when you talk about doing it for your entire back catalogue. So if you've been podcasting for a while, and you have let's just say 100 episodes in the past, you still get some downloads for those now, maybe not as many as your new episodes, but you get some and you don't want to leave that money on the table. So now are you going to take hours, days weeks and go through all those past episodes and put you know, insertion points or ad breaks in each one of those? Or is there a way that a computer could help you identify the right spots to drop in ADS?
• 4:29
  Alban: The moment this whole became real for me was when we went to Flynn con and we just moved a few shows over the Pat Flynn did and he talked about when he changed services in the past his assistant told us like I spent multiple days going through all these old episodes really listening, figuring out where the outbreak should be picking it and then opening up this like ridiculous tool to fine tune try to find those spots. And to me I went yep, that's The that's the life of being the assistant. I felt that because I was like, Yeah, I would be the person to go and do that stuff. And you had a very different reaction, which was, Well, someone should just fix that. Right?
• 5:14
  Kevin: Well, immediately my thought was like, that makes sense. For somebody operating at that level, you're doing 5000 10,000 20,000 100,000 downloads per episode, does it make sense for me to spend a day going through two or three episodes and identifying the perfect ad break positions?
• 5:32
  Kevin: Well, yeah, because over the next couple of years, that episode that you put those insertion points into, that's going to generate hundreds or 1000s of dollars for you, right.
• 5:41
  Alban: And if you're talking about big shows, like some of Pat's, or maybe something like smartlace, you're not not the biggest shows in the world, but millions of downloads, those old episodes, get tons of downloads to, you know, there's a big difference between evergreen content and stuff that like maybe the daily that probably almost all the downloads are coming from the last two or three episodes, when we're talking about older ones, you absolutely need to be figuring out how to monetize those, because that's probably a bulk of the downloads are those older back catalogue. Yeah.
• 6:12
  Kevin: And some of that exists.
• 6:12
  Kevin: Also, for smaller independent podcasts, obviously, not to the same scale, but none of it is to the same scale, which is the point that I kept coming back to, which is it never makes sense. For somebody who's doing you know, 250 Roughly downloads per episode, it doesn't make sense for them to add two or three or four hours to their workflow. And that's legitimately what it takes. When you sit down and think through, it's not just recording an episode from start to finish.
• 6:35
  Kevin: It's actually kind of like planning in ad breaks and kind of learning how am I going to do ad breaks? And how am I going to enter them? And how am I going to come out of them? And what type of ads am I going to get, and then we got to go out and source those ads. And so when you add all that up, that is the problem of monetizing with advertisements for the independent podcaster. It's just that even if you do all the work, you never generate enough revenue as a result of that work to offset the time and energy that you put into it.
• 7:02
  Alban: Yeah, this is my frustration. Sometimes when people would say like, we'd see this at the conferences all the time. And I would say this, too, you could sell ads for a podcast before you ever launched it.
• 7:11
  Alban: That is possible. The downside there is that you really want to do that. Because if your shows only getting a few 100 downloads, and you're putting in the work to sell the ads, well, maybe now we're in a spot where you did sell the ad. So that was very cool. But in the end, you're looking at something like 48 cents being delivered to you for selling the ad Well, man that time would have been better spent growing the show early on.
• 7:39
  Alban: And I feel like that was another one of these reasons that whenever we start talking about advertisement, again, I'd go if either the ads have to be a much higher CPM, you're making way more money per ad, or we need to figure out how to make this so easy that it makes sense for people to put ads into their shows, you know, without putting in a ton of work, the work and the amount of money you're making have to be comparable in some way.
• 8:08
  Kevin: And so the two big problems here are sourcing ads, high quality ads are a good match for your podcast. And where do we put them in your episode. And so the answer to that for us was to build our own solution. And not just build, like mid roll ad tech, and then partner with somebody who sells ads, but build the entire thing like top down, control the entire stack. So we're selling the ads, we're sourcing the ads.
• 8:32
  Kevin: And we're also fulfilling the ads or giving opportunities to our hosting customers to fulfill those ads. And any of our hosting customers. Right now, the way it's set up is that you manually approve any ad that goes into your podcast episode.
• 8:45
  Kevin: So you know down the road, we want make this faster, easier, more streamlined ways for you to do it, right. But we don't want any ads hitting your podcast episode that you personally are not okay with. And so you get to listen to the ad before it goes into your episodes, you get to see the artwork that's associated with that ad, you get to see the copy that is going to go into the show notes of the episode when that ad is there.
• 9:08
  Kevin: So that dynamic content comes in and out of show notes when ads come in and out. And so that is our solution to the control problem, like having control podcasters should not be getting comments from their listeners, they shouldn't be getting emails, they shouldn't be getting reviews left that says like I love your show, but I can't listen anymore because this ad ran in your show or something like that. If you do, it should be like something that you are aware of, and the programmatic solutions that exist today did not have that capability. And so that's why we built that.
• 9:38
  Alban: So it was this spectrum, that I feel like the two ends of the spectrum were very well defined on one end host grid ads that were manually sourced by good companies and then the host read it and the host dropped it into a spot that was perfect.
• 9:55
  Alban: And they put in something like 20 hours to getting this ad right And it's in the podcast.
• 9:59
  Alban: But it sounds great. And it's, you know, it makes sense. On the other end was the dynamic ad insertion that we really disliked, which was like bought and sold 30 times everyone's data was mixed up in it. And all of a sudden, it gets dropped into a podcast episode.
• 10:19
  Alban: Sometimes it 3x The volume of the podcast episode itself. And there's no control or the controls that were in place, at least were confusing enough, the podcasters weren't using it. And so those two ends of the spectrum people were always saying, Well, how do we pick one or the other? Or how do we make these a little bit better? How do we make the beautiful host read ads that are sourced easier? How do we take those dynamic ad insertion ads, and try to humanize them a little bit? And I feel like the solution we're coming up with is something about in the middle where we're trying to get the simplicity of dynamic ads. And over on the other side, we're trying to keep the humanity of the host read ads.
• 11:03
  Kevin: Yeah, that's a very good point. You know, you mentioned something about the volume, volume is very hard. We spend a lot of time working on volume.
• 11:09
  Kevin: So I'm sure anyone listening to this podcast. If you've listened to other podcasts, you've heard ads that pop in that are that are way too loud. Often, an ad being loud is intentional.
• 11:19
  Kevin: Sometimes you'll hear an ad that's too soft, I guarantee that's not intentional. But what you're doing is you're taking two different recordings, and you're trying to put them together and make them sound like one cohesive recording, that can be difficult. We have a tool this new Buzzsprout adds technology builds upon, which is magic mastering. So if you have magic mastering enabled, what it does is it evens out the volume in your episodes, right. So if you have two different speakers, one's a little bit louder than the other, it makes them both the same volume sets the loudness levels correctly, such the true pre correctly, it does a lot of technical things, so that you don't have to worry about getting everything technically right before he publishes your episode. So if you have magic mastering turned on, and you enable Buzzsprout ads, it's going to be a wonderful sound experience, it's going to sound all level, we are not intentionally making ads louder than your regular content, we're doing our very best to match them all to be exactly the same loudness. We don't want people having to turn the volume down when an ad comes on or turn it up any of those issues. But it helps if you have magic mastering enabled for your account, it makes it easier for us to ensure that we get the loudness right across it. You don't have to use magic mastering but I do strongly suggest it's a really good idea.
• 12:21
  Kevin: And especially now if you're making a little bit of money on your podcast. Yeah, maybe the money you make my cover magic master.
• 12:27
  Alban: Can I tell you actually a interesting tidbit. I don't know if we ever talked about when we were building it for a long time. This was a standard practice for TV to have a TV show. And then the ad was so much louder, like blaringly loud. And the idea was that people often TV in the background, and then that loud ad would catch here attention no matter what. And you'd find out about used cars in your area and people want to go maybe well buy a used car even though it's cranking blasting the speakers on my TV. Well, in 2010, the FCC passed a law early, I guess a regulation of the FCC, saying I think it was called the calm Act, the commercial advertisement, loudness mitigation, calm. And they said it's illegal like you can't have these ads be any louder than the average loudness of the TV show.
• 13:14
  Alban: And I don't know we need to come up with an acronym. I think it needs to be calm again. But podcast as should never be louder than the average of the podcast itself. There are standard loudness, metrics that are well abide at negative 16 or negative 19 LUFS, depending on if it's stereo, or mono. And like, let's stick there, let's make sure the podcast episodes are at the right loudness level.
• 13:41
  Alban: And that's why we like magic mastering. And we will always make sure those podcasts ads are that level. Because we can't have a world where we're just creating the same problem that we got rid of in 2010. For TV,
• 13:54
  Kevin: what can happen, I will say is that if you're uploading a podcast episode, and it's way it's not loud enough, it's way too soft. And you upload that and then we put an ad in the ad might sound louder, because the ads are set to the correct volume. But if you upload a podcast episode that is correct, then the ad will match it. And if you upload one that's too loud or too soft, and you have magic mastering, it'll fix it before it stitches the heads together. So it'll sound perfect. And so that's why I say it's always a good idea to have magic mastering. If you're not exactly sure how to master your episodes yourself, then you don't have to go out and learn it, you can just turn it on. But if you do know how to do it, and you are uploading already at the correct settings, then the ads are going to sound great.
• 14:32
  Alban: So we've talked a ton about problems. You know, we talked about the problem of finding ads and getting good ads. We talked about the problem of controls for ads. We've talked about the mid roll insertion point problem. How are you fixing those? Like we we did a lot of problems with talk. We didn't talk about some solutions.
• 14:49
  Kevin: So the mid roll insertion point, and I think it's easier instead of insertion point. I think an easier way to talk about that. It's just like Where where are the ad breaks? Right?
• 14:57
  Kevin: When are we going to interrupt the episode and dropping an ad?
• 14:59
  Kevin: We've spent this has been a really fun challenge, you know, if you think about what software developers love to do is find hard problems and then solve them. And so we've spent a lot of time analyzing audio files to figure out where is the most appropriate spot to drop in an advertisement. And to do this automatically, like without human intervention, there are opportunities, of course, for us to use markers that come from the podcaster. So like, if you created chapter artwork, or, you know, if you just went in and said, Oh, I think somewhere around here, like those would help. But the challenge that we put in front of ourselves was like, with no help with just computer programming, can we make a tool that's smart enough to analyze the audio and find the appropriate places to put ads, because this is a massive time saver for somebody, you know, we're talking about building a tool that hopefully gets people in the ballpark of making anywhere from, you know,$15 a month and up at $15 a month, it's not worth an extra hour or two hours or three hours of time for me to go through and figure out where these ads should go. And so we have to just make it like one click, we have to make it you turn it on, you start getting paid. You know, and I feel bad even talking about this project, because this wasn't my part of the project, but the programming team and it doesn't just happen on the code side, it also happens on the server side, there is an amazing amount of technology that has been built to analyze audio files and find the appropriate place the best place not just an appropriate place. But the best places to go ahead and put these advertisements. And it doesn't stop there. It also has to include like, well, how many ads? Should this episode have in total? How far apart should they be spaced? How close to the beginning of the episode? Can they be? How close to the end of the episode can they be there's a lot that goes into that. But we're really proud of the solution that we came up with.
• 16:32
  Kevin: And like testing is really hard to do on this. And so this was like where the rubber hit the road last week was when we rolled it out. And obviously we've tested on dozens and dozens of podcasts. But you can only go so far, we only have so many pairs of ears around the office. And we can only listen to so many episodes a day. But when we rolled it out, and we started getting 10, new podcasters 1520 3040 50 New podcasters doing this, and now it's in not dozens of episodes, but it's in hundreds of episodes. I was just like pinging out episode URLs like crazy to all the people in the room like did you hear this one?
• 17:04
  Kevin: Did you hear amazing this was like this person, you know, said this. And then it was you know, they were changing the topic.
• 17:08
  Kevin: And then they had dropped in. It was perfect. It was this. We were like doing backflips. Now obviously, there were some bad ones,
• 17:14
  Alban: we need to be clear. All the ads that everyone's been hearing in broadcast for the past two months are buzz proud ads, right. All of the podcast promos you've heard are using all this technology as it was.
• 17:25
  Alban: And it was incredibly helpful for us to one use our own stuff so that we actually saw the flaws, and what worked, but also a lot of people reached out with really helpful feedback. So can I read one of the painful feedback on the first episode?
• 17:46
  Kevin: I don't know if I want to relive it. But yeah, it was bumpy. In the beginning.
• 17:49
  Alban: Somebody wrote in a love bus cast podcast, listen to every episode, just to give you some feedback. The random podcast promo ads you're inserting are really jarring interrupt the chat mid sentence, rather than being added to the dead spot? Yeah, good. Good feedback. That was the very first time we did it. And we'd been working on getting those insertion points, right. And it just was not there yet. And so you know, at some point, you've got to start using things to make it better. And that was our decision. But yeah, we felt it too.
• 18:22
  Kevin: That was the big jump between using it on these test episodes that we had recorded.
• 18:25
  Kevin: And we're using in the development environment, and then not going to a live episode, but actually recording and editing down the episode and not doing anything to it, just throwing it into the system and letting the system pick and the first ones were a little bit bumpy.
• 18:38
  Alban: And then the next episode, same person reached out, hey, latest episode is great. The ad slots were much more organic in natural pauses in the conversation. And we've been able to get the test episodes looking really good because we're only optimizing on the test episodes. Once we started throwing out real things. Things started getting bumpy again, until we were able to go Okay, now we're able to make the adjustments there so that any audio file that's being thrown at us, we're doing a much, much better job finding the correct insertion points. I mean, I have to give John huge props on this, John, I play golf together sometimes. And we would talk about it and I'm talking about, hey, here's the marketing language I want to use on this.
• 19:19
  Alban: And John's going, here's the problem to actually make this thing happen. And I'm like, Yeah, but we got to say, it's gonna be so cool. And he's like, Yeah, but I've got to build this, we need to figure out how to make it a reality before you start talking about it.
• 19:33
  Kevin: Yeah, and Brian as well, because it really was a marriage of like backend server technology and front end code to make this all come together. And we would see order of magnitude jumps in the quality of the outbreaks. When these two guys were leading their teams and implementing code that just blows my mind. One of the things we do around the office is we do check in sometimes at the end of the day, they're optional, but people do them and it's always fun to see what other people on team are working on. And I just remember over the past couple of weeks specially Brian's working on the same project that I'm working on, and I have no idea what he's explaining everything that he did for the day, I have no idea what he's saying he's running all these new things on the server and scaling all these things up and doing all these amazing things. And our insertion points or ad breaks are getting like monumentally better every day, but I have no idea. I don't understand what he's doing. It's amazing.
• 20:18
  Alban: If at some point, one of them was like talking to a PhD, who had written some stuff about figuring out stuff with audio files, and I was like, I don't know what these words mean. And then my like response under it was like, oh, today, I wrote a blog post. If you ever want to feel inadequate, go post yourself right after the guys talking to PhDs about analyzing audio files. So that's,
• 20:41
  Kevin: that's something that we're super excited about. And we really are just kind of blown away. As we're listening to more and more examples of customers using this stuff, we were very confident that we've gotten the technology to a point where the majority of the vast majority of the ad breaks, like they're good. They felt natural, they felt fine. What I wasn't expecting was that, you know, we're getting 20 to 30% of these ad breaks that just feel incredible. How is it possible that a human did not intervene here did not set that point. And so I'm super excited about it, it should be this is an overused term, but I hope it's game changing for independent podcasters. For podcasters, who are out there who are doing, you know, roughly 1000 downloads a month, and they're thinking, you know, I there's no way for me to make enough money. Because even if I have mid roll tools, it's just not worth the extra time for me to go through and create insertion points, and then figure out how do I get ads in this thing? And even if I sign up for some programmatic solution, they're only gonna pay me $6 For every 1000 I do, it's just not worth that headache. I really think that this could be game changing for you.
• 21:42
  Alban: So where are these ads coming from Kevin.
• 21:45
  Kevin: So we're sourcing all the ads ourselves, which means that we are right now we're just doing it through contacts that we have in the industry. So all of the ads in Buzzsprout ads are ads for other podcasts, it was a market that we are super interested in serving for a couple of reasons. One, because we love podcasters, too, because there's not great ways to promote your show right now, outside of I mean, we talk all the time about different ways to market your show. And one of the best ways is by going on other podcasts or advertising on other podcasts. But there's not a really easy way for podcasters to be able to do that to just jump in to a website in order ads on a bunch of podcasts.
• 22:18
  Kevin: That's something that we're going to talk more about. We haven't released that component to the public yet, but we are using that ourselves. On the back end, we've invited some podcasters that we have relationships with to come in and run their ads through those tools. And when you place an ad using those tools, it then becomes available to Buzzsprout podcasters.
• 22:37
  Alban: Okay, so the moment that this kind of clicked for me was back in 2020. You and Jordan Harbinger who does the Jordan Harbinger show was talking on Twitter about ad tech or something. And I reached out to him and said, Hey, I'd love to just interview you and talk about how you've grown your show, because he's doing something like 8 million downloads a month now. And he's grown primarily through advertisements on other podcasts about his podcast. And that's pretty much the tactic he's been using since he launched this show. And I talked to him, and he kind of figured it out and gotten it down to a science. The only downside was that it was super difficult to source the ads. He was basically going through the normal ad buying channels, and doing dynamic ad insertion where he was recording these podcast promos himself.
• 23:26
  Alban: And if you ever go on Twitter, Ariel who's been on previous episodes organizes the as a lot, but people who are doing promo swaps or feed drops or something, we do them in our Facebook group. Those were always super popular because people wanted to connect with other podcasters. But they had to find people who are similar type shows and about the same size. But you know, some of the problems there that we saw were if I get 20,000 downloads and you get 100,000 downloads, well, it's not really a fair trade.
• 23:53
  Alban: What if I never want advertisements in my show?
• 23:57
  Alban: Because maybe the type of content like Jordans podcast, Jordan Blair on buzz cast, you know, if she's telling stories that some people may be falling asleep to, well, they definitely don't want an ad in the middle.
• 24:10
  Alban: And so for her to monetize with ads, does that make sense? But for her to promote her show with ads does make sense. So the trade has broken down 10s of 1000s of years ago, people used the barter system, and then we invented money. So we decided to adopt the money technology in Buzzsprout. Adds.
• 24:29
  Kevin: Yeah, I was thinking when you were describing how trades work at the beginning of that segment. You were saying?
• 24:34
  Alban: They a little rough. I forgot how trades work, I guess.
• 24:39
  Kevin: Yeah, no, I totally agree. Money is the solution here. It's too hard to find a perfect match podcast for podcast, right? Like someone's always going to have a larger audience. Someone's always going to, you know, maybe do a promo swap a little bit differently.
• 24:50
  Kevin: Well, you forgot to put a link to my podcast in your show notes. And I did that for you.
• 24:56
  Kevin: So I feel like that wasn't a fair deal. Or no, I always get 1000 down Once per episode, I don't know why this one only got 500. Now I've got to run it for you again. And you're making personal relationships, personal connections around things that are just solved so much easier with money, like it's a business transaction, right? Like, how many downloads Do you want to get for your promo, and then we're just going to charge two cents per download. It's super simple. You pay for the number of downloads, we collect the money, the podcasters, run them, we divide up the money, we give it all to the people who ran the promos. And at the end of the day, it's just a much better way. Like it just makes sense.
• 25:31
  Alban: One of the ways that you make podcast promos work is you've got to make sure that the shows are similar. If you have a true crime podcast, and I have a podcast about board games or something, that's not a really great trade, you know, those audiences don't overlap. So what's the solution to that problem?
• 25:48
  Kevin: Well, there are podcasts, obviously, that may appeal to everybody. There are podcasts that don't. But what we know for sure is that if somebody's listening to a true crime podcast, there's a good chance that they will be interested in other True Crime podcasts, right. And if they're listening to a sports podcast, there's a good chance they'll be injured another sports podcast. And one of the beautiful things about how it works is it's on demand.
• 26:04
  Kevin: Now, I'm not saying there's not exceptions, of course, there's live shows and all this other kind of stuff. But it is, for the most part, it's on demand, the capacity for an individual to listen to one true crime podcasts and then decide that they're going to subscribe and follow another one. And they can work that into their schedule is super high. So promoting another podcast in your same category is not necessarily hyper competitive. And you're not going to lose the subscribers because they found somebody else doing the same thing. But they like them better, like the odds of that are super low, which is one of the things we love about the podcasting industry is it's so friendly, because podcasters love other podcasters. And we're always happy to tell you about the favorite show that we're listening to now. And we're not worried that you're necessarily going to not listen to our show anymore, or something like that.
• 26:43
  Kevin: And so with all of that working together, our minds started going in this direction of man, it would be so easy for somebody who is promoting a podcast on other podcasts that they should be promoting it in the same categories. And again, that just starts to make these organic connections happen without a lot of human interaction involved.
• 27:03
  Kevin: Like I don't have to scroll through lists of 1000s of podcasts and start selecting the different shows that I want my ad to run it or be available on.
• 27:09
  Kevin: It's very simple for computers to do this stuff. Oh, so you have this sports podcast that you want to promote. Here are all the podcasts that are hosted on Buzzsprout that are also in the sports category. And you know what, there's not just one category, there's also, you know, the second level category and the third level category. So we have all that data as well.
• 27:26
  Kevin: So it might just be a sports show. But it might be you know, we might get more specific, we might say, high school sports.
• 27:30
  Kevin: And then we might get more specific that and say high school sports, baseball, that's all built into the fields. And so you can go as specific as you want, or broad as you want. But we want the ads to stay in the same category again for now.
• 27:40
  Kevin: Because we want them to reach an audience that we think is relevant and targeted without having to rely on tracking. Like we don't want to track to the individual user level. But we do want the ads to be targeted towards the right type of people who are interested in this type of content.
• 27:58
  Alban: Yeah, a lot of the categories I always noticed when I was setting things up in maybe Facebook ads, Google ads, or maybe another system, a lot of the category tracking and targeting that they would allow reminded me of podcast categories. And so it was like, hey, what about people who are interested in fitness? And I went, well, actually, there's a health and fitness category. In Apple podcasts. There's a lot of important targeting around people who are new parents, there is a parenting category in Apple podcasts. And so I feel like if people are willing to tell you, I'm interested in parenting, well, then it's appropriate to send them advertisements for things around parenting or for other shows that are involved with parenting. What's creepy is when people are not telling you, that's what they want. And then you're kind of like paying somebody who's been snooping on them for a long time. And now they're like, hey, they really want to hear something about parenting right now. Like, that's when stuff starts getting weird. And people think, you know, their phone is listening to them.
• 29:01
  Kevin: And so those triggers are all being said on the advertiser side right now. So on the advertiser side, when you create an ad, the system is identifying the categories that the podcast is in, that you're creating an ad for it is making the suggestions of the categories.
• 29:11
  Kevin: And we're going back and forth, and figuring out like, is there opportunities to expand that.
• 29:16
  Kevin: But ultimately, this is for the the effectiveness of the advertiser. And so we're strongly pushing in that direction. But we already talked about the podcasters podcasters have full control over the ads that run in their shows whether they run or not. And so it is possible that an advertiser has elected to expand their categories beyond just the three categories that their podcast is listed in. And you might get an opportunity that's like, Well, I do this sports podcast, but why am I getting a promo for a cooking podcast? Well, maybe the advertiser has elected to make it available to people who do sports, even though it's not a sports podcast, on the off chance that you think there might be some crossover and they're willing to take that risk on the advertiser side. Now you can still say, You know what, but it's not a good fit for my show. Or you can say, yeah, you actually I do listen to a lot of my fans and we talk about how we barbecue as You're watching sports. So it's a perfect crossover.