Latest / Buzzcast / Earn Passive Income With Buzzsprout Subscriptions! with Cameron Moll

Transcript

Earn Passive Income With Buzzsprout Subscriptions! with Cameron Moll · Buzzcast

• 0:00
  Jordan: Oh yeah, you have your cast on.
• 0:04
  Alban: Do you see I've got my first signature?
• 0:06
  Jordan: Who is it from? Emerson?
• 0:07
  Alban: Emerson, it's very hard to read because they don't make cast the way I mean, this isn't a plaster cast. It's like fiberglass cast. And the old plaster casts I think we're a little bit easier to write on.
• 0:18
  Kevin: Did you get mad at her?
• 0:18
  Kevin: Because she messed it up.
• 0:21
  Alban: Terrible parenting tip number one: get mad at your six year old when they sign your cast.
• 0:28
  Jordan: Are you still gonna have people at Podfest sign it? Have you thought about that?
• 0:31
  Alban: I was not planning on having anybody sign it. I think it was my mother in law who was like, oh, hass Emerson signed your cast yet? And Emerson's like Oh, that's a thing? I go, great. All right, well, one signature that's all.
• 0:45
  Jordan: We should do like a challenge where people have to like try to secretly sign your cast while you're there.
• 0:54
  Alban: That's exactly that where it goes down the hill. And he started having all these drawings on it and all sorts of stuff.
• 0:59
  Jordan: There's gonna be people like sneaking up on you, Sharpies in their hand.
• 1:04
  Kevin: People to come write their podcast name on your cast.
• 1:08
  Kevin: Or draw their podcast artwork on your cast. Oh my
• 1:08
  Jordan: Pod-cast! gosh, it's just, I didn't even get it. It just clicked with me.
• 1:18
  Alban: Promote your podcast on Alban's wrist cast.
• 1:30
  Jordan: Joining us for this first segment is one of the newest members of the Buzzsprout team, Cameron Moll. Welcome to Buzzcast.
• 1:38
  Cameron: Hi, everyone. So I'm the VP of Design for Buzzsprout.
• 1:41
  Cameron: And I joined back in October, and it's been absolutely great.
• 1:46
  Cameron: You know, I've had questions about what does design mean? And in general terms, you know, it's to raise the level of design quality, the user experience that we offer to people. And that's what my team does. We've got a great team that works on all things design at Buzzsprout.
• 2:02
  Alban: I think you first connected with Kevin like 10 years ago, right?
• 2:05
  Cameron: Yeah, so I don't know.
• 2:05
  Cameron: It's like 2008 2009, something like that, Kevin?
• 2:08
  Kevin: Yeah, that sounds right.
• 2:09
  Cameron: Yeah, some freelance work back in the day. I've been building for the web since 1999.
• 2:12
  Cameron: Ish. So you know, coming up on 25 years next year, which is crazy. My career has been just a number of things, including freelance as well as some time at Facebook, Meta as a head of design in some other roles, but I've probably managed people, as long as I've managed, or as long as I've designed that is, and for me, bringing together those two things, you know, working with other people, and then to take that and create some manifestation of design and user experience. That's been my entire career. And it's been great in the few short months that I've been now with Buzzsprout to be able to apply that same approach, but in our unique way, right. We're much smaller teams and other teams I've worked with in the last five years. And I think that offers some unique advantages that you just don't have when you're at bigger corporations and bigger teams.
• 3:03
  Alban: And we've got some projects today that were some of the first things you started working on when you joined us.
• 3:08
  Alban: And so we're excited to have you on to talk about them. The first one is Buzzsprout backtracks.
• 3:13
  Cameron: Yes. So this is really building on something we've done in the past. Before I got here, right? There are these annual emails that we send out, just recapping how your year went as a host. And we wanted to going back to what I said about design, we wanted to amp up the level of design this year to really leverage design to make these an even more compelling experience for our users. I was a little bit terrified going into it, because this would be the first, you know, public display of what I'm bringing to Buzzsprout. So you're always concerned. If this doesn't land?
• 3:44
  Cameron: Well, well, how does that reflect on me, but thankfully, I think it's it's landed really well.
• 3:51
  Jordan: Yeah, this was such an exciting project, because before the emails were just basically like a year in review of your podcast, and it was exciting, but it wasn't super, like shareable. And this year, it was kind of a different approach to it in a couple different ways, because it led to a web page for the backtracks.
• 4:11
  Cameron: Yeah. And that was partly, maybe heavily, actually a technical limitation, I won't get into the nuts and bolts, but suffice it to say, whenever you're rendering something in an email client, it does not render as consistently as it does in the browser, when you think of like Outlook and Gmail and all the clients that people use out there. So what you can actually display and show in an email is quite restricted compared to what you can do on the web. You can even show like, for example, gifts and a lot of email clients. So we knew early on that to make this more compelling both in terms of design as well as the experience, we were going to have to get this outside of people's inboxes and move this to something else and that's something else became a standalone page. And as soon as we did that, it freed us up to really leverage you know, tap into the full display. We have tools that we have when creating experiences in the browser. And to take that and create a much more dynamic, vibrant design.
• 5:09
  Cameron: One where we had a lot more flexibility, one that would display across a variety of, you know, viewports, what we call in terms of screen sizes. And it just really freed us up creatively to turn this into something that is, I think, multiple steps above anything that we've sent in the past. And while we were kind of doing that experimentation, we started looking at things like the name, could we give this a unique name, and we came up with the Backtrack name and, and now we're calling these things Backtracks. And that seems to be working well. So I think moving outside of that did a number of things. One of the things I didn't mention is you can share that URL with other people. If you choose something, again, you can't really do in an email unless you take a screenshot, or you forward the email to all of your folks or redo that. So it just makes it a whole lot easier to share to have something more visually compelling. And I think that really took off a lot of the limitations that we've faced in the past to free us up to do something great this year.
• 6:05
  Kevin: Yeah, massive change in the shareability, like a lot of people just grabbed screenshots of certain sections. And you guys made it really easy to share the summary at the bottom, straight to Twitter, or Facebook or wherever they wanted. But I was surprised with the number of people who decided to tweet and share their entire backtrack. So like all their stats. And so that was the thing that I found most enjoyable, is going through the hashtag on Twitter and people just sharing their entire page, and you can click there and you can see all their stats, I was really surprised at how many people were completely free and open. And legitimately excited, like regardless of whether they were doing hundreds of 1000s of downloads or 10s of downloads, I'd love the fact that we gave them something to be proud of and to share. And to continue to be excited about in podcasting. Like oftentimes podcasters are so insecure about their numbers. But you guys did a great job of finding a really fun way of getting people excited, regardless of where they are along their journey.
• 6:58
  Cameron: Yeah, that's the risk we knew we would run by making
• 6:58
  Alban: My absolute favorite one, Kevin was in the Buzzsprout podcast community, woman shared her stats, I'll just tell you, it very easy, and even encouraging people to share she wrote, I just started on November 14 2022. I'm so proud their numbers. And that is the risk of comparison that you see of my 2022 stats, definitely motivated to keep going. And someone else's numbers and you're like, Well, I'm not gonna then she shares three episodes was listened to in two share my numbers, because they don't look nearly as impressive.
• 7:17
  Alban: countries, 104 downloads, and she was proud and motivated. And But we've seen it run the full spectrum, which has been a that is where you should be when you're at three episodes. That's really pleasant surprise, as you mentioned that people are very actually a good number for three episodes. But that is the kind of stats that I don't see get shared almost anywhere else.
• 7:29
  Alban: excited to share these numbers no matter what they were. And, Because everyone goes, Aren't I supposed to have like This you know, to your point around some of the feedback that we've American Life numbers? And if I'm not competing with Joe Rogan, what am I even doing? And this kind of tapped in to like, seen coming in, it's just been so great to read a lot of the Hey, this is exciting, like you did something actually really, stuff that's come in, I'll share just a couple examples in a really cool. You tried to launch something, and you did. And it's actually getting some plays. And now it's you know that she was moment. But let me step back and say, you know, I come from a sharing this and it's being played in France, like someone in France founder show, and is enjoying her content.
• 7:53
  Alban: space over the last five years prior to joining Buzzsprout, where it was all about data and research, we really didn't make a lot of product decisions or launches without relying heavily on data and research. And we didn't really do that intentionally. With this effort.
• 8:11
  Alban: We knew we wanted to create something that we were proud of something that would, yes, leverage the experience that we have before doing this, but really try to take it in a new direction, that might be a little surprising. And when you do that, you don't know how it's going to land. You don't know how people will react. But we've just been really pleased with how people have reacted. And the fact that they have been so open with not only the numbers, but even like how this impacts them emotionally. We had someone post theirs and saying, Well, I was having a low day. And then I got my Buzzsprout email, smiley face, you know, posting their stats. Someone else said, I'm just quoting here, It was a rough year personally dealing with my daughter's accident. And there were times I nearly quit podcasting. So glad I didn't.
• 9:17
  Alban: And they post the numbers. And so it's been so encouraging to see people get excited about these numbers no matter what they are, and perhaps to not get lost in the game of comparing your numbers to someone else's numbers.
• 9:34
  Jordan: That's exactly it. Yeah, that's exactly it because it's all relative. And something that's a victory for one person might not mean a lot to another, but they have something else that is such a victory for them.
• 9:43
  Jordan: It was so fun to see, you know what the important stats were for people. You know, for some of them it was the percentage of growth was astounding. I mean, even though their podcast is small, their growth was astronomical and that It was such a cool stat to see. Then you have other people where they're labeled a globetrotter because their little podcast is being listened to everywhere.
• 10:07
  Jordan: And that's just like amazing.
• 10:07
  Jordan: And it's such a cool feat for somebody who's just sitting down and creating something and it's just being shared all over the world. And so you can tell what people value by what screenshots they were choosing to share. It was just such a great celebration of Buzzsprout podcasts.
• 10:25
  Kevin: Yeah, I was just listening to a podcast over the weekend. It was the Rework podcast, and David Heinemeier Hansson, Jason Freed from Basecamp, 37 Signals company, they do this Rework podcast. And the whole episode was about finding your voice, they were mostly talking about writing, they do a lot of blogging. And they've been doing this for 20 years. More recently, they've just started experimenting more with YouTube and Tiktok, Instagram, like trying to figure out if any of these marketing channels will work for them. And what they're seeing is how discouraging it is. Because all these platforms are built around stats nowadays, like you don't just post something, now you post it, and then you go back to it 10 minutes later, and you're like, has anybody seen it yet?
• 11:02
  Kevin: And you go back a day later, and how many more people have seen it. And a week later, they were contrasting that with when they started writing for the web 20 years ago, there was no stats, it's like, they would just write and put it out there. And they'd go back the next day, and they'd write again, yeah, there might have been some like basic hit counters on your website, or something like that. But it wasn't just this pressure that now exists on almost every platform around stats, and they were going back and forth about like, it doesn't feel good.
• 11:25
  Kevin: What's the solution, the solution that they landed on, and their latest product was like, we're not going to show stats, they did this email product, and they did this hay world thing where you could kind of blog and they're like, we're not going to make it about numbers, because we don't want to discourage people. And that's a fine solution for them. I really excited about the direction that we're moving at Buzzsprout, which is, we're not going to hide numbers. But we're going to take the time to find ways to make them encouraging and exciting. Because it's not just about having the biggest number. It's about motivation and excitement, and continuing to feel empowered to do something that we hope you love doing. And so I think it is hard, it's harder than ever to put yourself out there and you feel like it's not getting the reach that you'd want it to or the reach here some other people might be getting. But this is like an individual sport, right?
• 12:08
  Kevin: Like you need to be comparing yourself to yourself and getting better and having more fun and improving, not measuring up against, you know, Olympic athletes or professional podcasters.
• 12:17
  Alban: We've talked about this tons of times on the podcast, but the social platforms always just see it's like there's a leveling, and like everything is exactly the same. It's like a view as a view as an impression.
• 12:26
  Alban: And they just say like, Hey, this has got so many views. And they're all like equivalent, but they're all removing the element of depth and impact. And I couldn't care less if we got an extra 1000 plays on this podcast. But when I see this one that said, I'm so proud of my stats, that just made me so happy. And so it's funny seeing all the social platforms, like try to display basically, what's the biggest number we could show you. And they show that really big number so that you're thinking like, that's a ton of people, I need to keep going.
• 13:02
  Alban: But in the end, like I'd rather just have three or four people who talk to us like that means so much more than the individual stats. So when you're comparing your podcast plays versus your tweets, how what reach they got, or whether or not your LinkedIn, you know, reactions, I would say like, Are people reaching out and telling you like, this really mattered to me, because that really is a super important stat that may not be showing up in your statistics package.
• 13:30
  Cameron: And one of the first stats I mean, the first stat we show in Backtracks is the number of episodes published. And again, that's a very relative number. I'm looking at one right now that's 11 episodes for the year. I mean, you should be proud anybody should be proud of 11 episodes over the course of a year. For some people that may not be achievable, right? Maybe it's six, maybe it's some other number, maybe it's I don't know, 42. But what it means to you, what is the meaningful number here, right? What is not the actual, you know, net or gross number, but what's the meaningful number and I think that's where people really have appreciated seeing these metrics, because they connect it to what they can feasibly do what they're proud of, and draw that back to to themselves. Like you said, Kevin, a moment ago, they compare themselves to themselves. And that's the best comparison that we need to make.
• 14:14
  Cameron: Sometimes rather than looking at all those numbers and, and getting lost in the, you know, the cult of comparing. I should call out too, now, Jordan is a prolific podcaster and marketer, but she's also a very good designer. And Jordan had quite a bit of say in the early concepts and actually throughout the project, to help backtrack become what it became. So if we are proud at all of what visually backtrack became, we have to give a lot of credit to Jordan for her creative ideas.
• 14:43
  Cameron: Even like the powder background, right, Jordan, I remember you early on. It's like, why don't we try this and I'm like, Okay, let's go try that and we did and it stuck. It worked really well.
• 14:51
  Cameron: And so, I just want to make sure I call out you know, all three of you, but especially Jordan for her role, and making sure that this became something beautiful and compelling and enjoyable for people to have in their inboxes and on their phones and, and I couldn't be prouder of how it turned out.
• 15:06
  Kevin: Yeah.
• 15:07
  Jordan: Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun to work on, because I was like, here's my crazy idea. And you're like, Yeah, let's do it. It was a blast.
• 15:16
  Kevin: It came out really well.
• 15:16
  Kevin: I mean, oftentimes, when you're designing something that is going to feature, I mean, who knows what podcast artwork is going to look like? Right? It could be everything from a grayscale image to something with wild colors that are like, you know, Technicolor, neon, anything in between? How do you come up with a design solution that really looks good, and all of those things, and oftentimes, what designers go back to is something a little bit safer, kind of like a monochrome color palette, or something a little bit toned back. And this was the opposite direction, it was like, we don't know what colors the artwork is going to have in it.
• 15:44
  Kevin: So we'll just use every color.
• 15:49
  Cameron: One of the things that I think I've I've managed to do well, in my career, I've done a lot of things not well, but one of the things I've done well is to create environments where people can bring their own self, their own design their own brand, to that environment. And to give you an example of this, I lead design for the events platform at Facebook. And we knew that people would just take that system and do all kinds of stuff with it, they'd upload a cover image for their event, they'd, you know, have a long description or a short description, and you just had you know, we've we had 600 million people using the product at the time of the 2.7 billion people. And so it was a massive audience, how do you design something that people can call their own, when you have an audience that large? Well, the principles don't change a whole lot, whether it's 100,000 people or 100 million, you try to create an environment where they can express themselves as creatively as possible. And we wanted to do that here. But we still did, you know, want to have something that was a bit of our own spin on it as well. So trying to balance that you bring your artwork you bring, you know, whatever the long city name is, we had to we had to make sure, very long city names would just not totally break this layout. I mean, there's a ton of things we had to do to make sure that it would accommodate any possible city name or cover artwork or, or what have you. And I think we did that. But we did want to make sure that we put a beautiful wraparound around that that would make you even prouder of those, what those numbers represented, what those cities represented. And I don't know, I think it turned out okay.
• 17:22
  Kevin: Yeah, I think so.
• 17:23
  Alban: I think it turned out a lot better than okay. I think it was a huge hit. And I like Kevin enjoyed having very little work to do in this project, nearly nothing. And then getting to be the one who went through and liked all the things on Twitter and Facebook and just getting to checkout everybody sharing their stats. So hats off to everybody who worked on this project. It was awesome.
• 17:43
  Kevin: Yeah. And I will say, Jordan, who runs the Facebook group with an awesome group of moderators, you guys had some work to do, because Facebook group got overwhelmed. It was flooded for like a week.
• 17:55
  Jordan: Yeah, it was a Old Testament level of flooding going on in our in our Facebook group. But it was a really great opportunity for us as moderators to do the whole "see?" thing with the group members because they're always wanting to share, you know, promotions or their podcasts or who they are and stuff like that. And we don't really allow that. And this is why because when everybody is posting their promos, the no one sees it and it doesn't matter.
• 18:21
  Jordan: So it's more important to have it just dedicated to growing as a podcaster not growing your podcast as Jonathan or moderator says. So I think it was a great learning lesson for us as moderators about how to handle the backtracks. Next year, we'll probably just have a dedicated thread instead of just willy nilly posting. And then it was also a great learning experience for our group members as to why we are so strict on some of our rules.
• 18:50
  Cameron: I thought you did a very good job, Jordan. Basically posting in a tactful way the party's over.
• 18:57
  Jordan: Yeah, I felt like the mean person coming in and breaking up the party. But when you party for three days straight, it's time to stop.
• 19:02
  Jordan: Right? Well, to see more Cacktracks from the community search hashtag BuzzsproutBacktracks on Twitter and Instagram to check them out.
• 19:12
  Jordan: They're everywhere.
• 19:16
  Alban: So Jordan, I saw it all the bleeped out stuff about Tom posts about subscriptions in the Facebook group.
• 19:24
  Jordan: How'd you like that?
• 19:25
  Alban: It's a good intro.
• 19:29
  Jordan: So I saw that Tom --- in----- that ---- ----.
• 19:34
  Alban: What?
• 19:37
  Kevin: Oh my god, it sounded like he went on a tirade or something.
• 19:40
  Alban: It did it sounded like Tom when it was just like cursing up a storm or something.
• 19:45
  Kevin: Like firing everyone.
• 19:46
  Jordan: I have to be honest with you, editing that cold open with It was all appropriate language.
• 19:46
  Jordan: But it was not appropriate for like the unnecessary censorship.
• 19:49
  Jordan: I had to be really careful about us to start telling you about Buzzsprout Subscriptions that the way in which I bleeped it because if I left a certain letter in what I was talking about, it sounded like a really when this episode launches is live inside of your account, bad had word was being bleeped.
• 20:00
  Jordan: So I had to very carefully craft the censorship. So that didn't sound too bad. But I think it still came out very funny.
• 20:20
  Jordan: Kevin, what is Buzzsprout Subscriptions?
• 20:22
  Kevin: Well, it's big, and it's a lot of stuff. Let's just start there, there's a lot to say about Buzzsprout Subscriptions.
• 20:27
  Kevin: The way that I think we want people to think about it is it is a clear path to move your podcast into like a listener supported production. We all know that the concept of subscriptions exists in the podcasting space, for the majority of people is a bit of a heavy lift to go from, I have no subscribers to I am now going to start creating additional processes in my workflow to do something that I think is beneficial enough for somebody start paying for it, which is like think about like bonus episodes, or if you run advertisements in your podcast, maybe you need to edit that down and create an ad free version,
• 21:03
  Alban: Setting up a totally separate feed with Patreon or glow or something.
• 21:07
  Kevin: Right. Going and finding an external service that offers some of these benefits and setting that all up. So now you've got your Buzzsprout for your main podcast, and you got something else outside of it to manage your subscription content. Well, we thought that there's an opportunity for Buzzsprout to come in and provide like a pathway, regardless of where you are in your podcasting journey, whether you're just starting out or you've been doing it for years, some type of subscription can start working for you immediately. And we wanted to create a system where you could jump in regardless of where you are. So that's what Buzzsprout Subscriptions is.
• 21:35
  Alban: And a lot of this, we kind of pulled the ideas and some of the way actually works from value for value. Value for value is this idea that it was started by Adam Curry. Adam says we're creating this podcast for you, I don't know if you'd like it or not, if you get a lot of value from it, I'd love it if you'd repay that with some money. So we can keep doing this. If you don't get value from it, no worries, but you set the price, you decide what you'd want to give us. And that kind of unlocked this idea for us of how we can start with a subscription product for podcasters. That starts to work at any level.
• 22:11
  Kevin: Right. And so one of the other things that I'm talks about all the time is that if you just ask people for, I don't know, $2, they're gonna give you$2, if they've received value from what you're giving them, if you say give me 10, and some people will give you 10. But if you just say if you receive value from what I'm giving you, then I would appreciate if you return that value, whatever it's worth to you sent back to me, then you're gonna have a lot of people to give you two or $3, you're gonna have some people give you 10, you're gonna have some people who give you 100.
• 22:32
  Kevin: And you're gonna have very few people to give you even more than that. But there are people who are going to receive different levels of value from what you're doing. And your system shouldn't limit their ability to easily give that value back in whatever way they want. And so some of that thinking, not all of it, but some of that thinking definitely inspired how we set up our subscription offering to work is that we didn't think it was necessary to go in there and say, oh, I want to set up a donation system like Patreon, and I want to you have this price option and this price option this no, like, you're just gonna say, are you ready to have a subscription podcast?
• 23:05
  Kevin: Yes. What do you want to do? Do you want to accept listener support? Or do you want to offer something additional. And if you offer something additional, then you can set a minimum price on that. But there's always the ability for them to give above and beyond that if they want.
• 23:17
  Alban: The first time I encountered this was as a kid going to like Christian concerts, they'd always have the CDs, and you could buy a CD and CDs were like 16 bucks back then. And I'm like 14 or 15 years old. And that was like way out of my price range. And then they would say, Hey, we're putting them out here, whatever you think is a fair amount to pay. If you can't afford it, no worries, just grab a CD. And I remember them saying back then we found that when we offer people to be able to buy it for whatever is appropriate for them, we almost always get the exact same amount of money anyway. And I was like, how is that true, because back then I was giving two bucks, I'd grabbed a CD. And then I realized later on in life, like two bucks back then was a lot of money to me. And it was me saying, Hey, this is valuable.
• 24:03
  Alban: And there are other people who said, I got a ton from this concert, and I'm gonna crap the CD, but I also want to support them. And here's 100 bucks. And those ended up, you know, evening out in the end. So I love that we've added this in to Buzzsprout Subscriptions where you can just accept, you know, a gift, somebody just says, Here's some money that I'm going to give you because I got so much value from this podcast, and I want to appreciate it. But you can also start saying on provided incentive as well like bonus episodes, or some subscriber only content to incentivize people to at least meet that minimum threshold.
• 24:38
  Jordan: For me, the big thing about the Buzzsprout Subscriptions, especially if you're offering premium content is that the episodes that you upload that are the premium content if you do like behind the scenes, extended cut something like that, it goes into your main feed and it shows up to your listeners as like this is a subscriber only episode so Oh, I've gotten to test it out as it was worked on.
• 25:03
  Jordan: And I was so excited because the first time I uploaded a bonus episode, within like three days, I got like nine new subscribers.
• 25:11
  Jordan: Well, it's amazing. And I guarantee that it is because the episode was just like the dangling carrot right in front of my listeners faces and they were just like, Oh, what is this. So that's really exciting.
• 25:22
  Jordan: And then also, you know, with like Patreon and things like that, you don't have your bonus episodes sync to your primary feed. It's not together, it's this disjointed thing. So when you get subscribers, they're going to have to have two separate podcasts that they listened to. So now, it's really exciting for my subscribers, because they get all of the content together. It's just this one cohesive podcast that they get. And it has my regular episodes, and it has my bonus episodes, just all synced in the same feed. And it's beautiful.
• 25:57
  Alban: The big difference that I kind of knew would come with Cameron and Dave and Kevin kind of leading like how this workflow would function is a really simple setup and maintenance, like the workflow is not gonna get any more complicated now that you're running a listener supported podcast. So contrast this with these things that are really well done. And they're really feature rich like Patreon, or glow, or maybe supercast.
• 26:22
  Alban: There's a lot of options out there for running a premium podcast. But the difference with Buzzcast subscriptions is you just turn it on. And once you turn it on, you don't have no more maintenance, you don't have to go set up another account.
• 26:36
  Alban: You don't have to upload episodes to multiple places, you don't have to tell your subscribers, hey, if you're going to go to premium unsubscribe to this podcast, go subscribe to a new podcast and make sure you only download the episodes that you've already haven't listened to. Like there's so many extra pieces that go into it when you have to manage multiple accounts. And so with Buzzsprout subscriptions you turn it on. And now there's this constant reminder in the feed like, oh, there's a premium episode in there I could be listening to if I subscribed and paid for this podcast. So it's really, really simple setup. And then the workflow going forward is completely seamless.
• 27:17
  Jordan: Like you're saying that's a simple setup, but it is like so slick. I mean, when I went to go set it up for my vodcast you guys already had some things like pre populated, like suggestions. And I was just like, Yeah, that sounds great.
• 27:30
  Jordan: And you know, I was just able to like, set my price, what I wanted to call it and my little blurb. And it was just booked done. And it took me under a couple minutes, I think it took me like maybe one minute, it's very fast.
• 27:42
  Kevin: To really understand how much work goes into making something simple, I don't think you'd really get it unless you've set up subscriptions on other platforms. And like Jordan, you have done that. So I think you've you really see the contrast here, between setting up a subscription on one of the existing platforms versus what we're just rolling out here with Buzzsprout subscriptions, we hope it's night and day for anybody who's done the other side. And it's as simple as you click on monetization, there's a subscription section in there now. And like Jordan said, you're gonna click a button that says, Yeah, I want to try out subscriptions, you're gonna give a title, you're gonna choose one of the options, which is just recurring support, or premium content. And then you can write a little bit of additional information about it, it's as simple as that as soon as you hit save, your subscriptions are now enabled for your podcast, there's nothing else to go set up, you don't even have to start telling your listeners and your audience about it, like they will start discovering on your own. Now, I'm not saying that that's the best plan, you should probably start telling them about it and promoting it a little bit. But even without that Buzzsprout is gonna go start doing some work on your behalf in the background, we are going to put some notes in your episode descriptions to encourage people to subscribe or support your show, we're going to update the public website that you get with Buzzsprout.
• 28:48
  Kevin: And if you do any premium episodes, we're going to drop them in your feed. And anybody who hasn't subscribed to that premium content yet, is going to hear an audio message that says this is a premium episode. And you need to subscribe to listen.
• 28:59
  Kevin: And there's a link in the show notes to do that if you'd like to. And so in literally a minute all of these systems start going into place and going into action and start promoting your either recurring support or premium content on behalf of you. We've been really doing nothing.
• 29:13
  Jordan: Yeah, the great thing about it too, is you know, if you do choose like I'm not ready to do bonus content, or it doesn't make sense for my podcast to do bonus content at all, then yeah, if you just do the support only where listeners just like pledge $1 amount to you, then it's so easy to offer something in return that is not extra work on your part, you you have their name and you have their email and there's a couple different things you can do. You can give them a shout out in your podcast for supporting your show. Or you can also send them a thank you email. Like if you just copy and paste a template and send it to them. You can totally do that too and give it like a personalized touch to thank them for supporting the show. So you don't have to put in all this extra work of creating premium content if you don't have the time. aim or don't want to. So there's, there's lots of great things you can do.
• 30:04
  Alban: Yeah, this is why Kevin said, it's a clear path to a listener supported podcast, when you're launching a podcast, you're trying to get as much exposure as possible. And when you're growing, you're trying to get as much exposure as possible. And then when you monetize, you know, often people say I'm creating some bonus content, that will not get exposure. For me, it's not helping me grow. But it will convince the people already listening to pay me some money.
• 30:29
  Alban: The downside to that is if your shows small, you know, let's say you're only getting a few 100 plays per episode, but you want to start monetizing, like monetizing is important to you are you going to start doubling your output, or doing an extra two episodes a month, and say, Hey, come over and pay for it, and maybe you get a few people paying, that's a ton of work to be producing extra episodes that you might think are fantastic.
• 30:56
  Alban: And yet, they're only being listened to by five people who are paying you a few dollars each. Yeah, that's a pretty tough thing to start with Buzzsprout subscriptions, you can start that process before you ever create the bonus episodes. So you can start receiving recurring donations, you know, recurring revenue, you're building up a passive income stream. And just since we've turned it on, we've actually here up to four subscribers for Buzzcast. So we can eagle eyed subscribers, or eagle eyed subscribers, right?
• 31:27
  Alban: Shout out all of them minute, we didn't promise them anything to come and subscribe. I think we said we would give them a shout out. But we didn't say we will be producing twice as many episodes. And now you'll get so much more. So come and pay us.
• 31:42
  Alban: But there might be a point where we say, okay, you know, we've got a few 100 people here, we're making some money on it. Why don't we start doing some bonus episodes just for subscribers.
• 31:52
  Alban: And you can like start to ease into that over time before you ever make a clean decision saying like, I'm going to commit to doubling my output. You know, that's just not feasible for a lot of people who are probably podcasting as a hobby, it's not your full time job,
• 32:07
  Kevin: right. And it is a commitment. Because once you get one person who says, Oh, I'll pay you $5 a month for that bonus content, then that bonus content better show up every month, or they're gonna stop paying. And so if you only have one person who's doing that, is it worth $5 a month to create the bonus content? Probably not.
• 32:22
  Kevin: And so this pathway allows you to gauge the engagement of your audience and their willingness, like they start to tell you how much value they're receiving, and how much value they're willing to return. And so at some point, you might see, hey, I have $100, and people who are just supporting the show are receiving value for it, if I give them a little more, they'll get more value from it, they'll return more value from it. So I'm starting to feel like doing premium content, doing some sort of premium offering, it's the right time to do it. Now. And this isn't for everybody. This is just the system that we've designed, you might start out I think, Jordan, you were very much like this, when you launched your podcast, you knew from the beginning that premium content was going to be part of your model. And so you launched it very early, and you went all in and it worked out for you.
• 33:03
  Kevin: But that's not everybody's path.
• 33:03
  Kevin: But regardless of how you want to start and how you want to if you want to go all in right from the beginning, you can do that.
• 33:09
  Kevin: If you want to test the waters with some recurring support options, you can do that. And if you're not ready to monetize it all now, you don't have to do it either. We're not turning it on by default for everybody.
• 33:18
  Alban: So some of the more boring details, but are important for you to pay attention to and you're setting up a listener supported podcast.
• 33:23
  Alban: Buzzsprout manages all the subscribers support for you. So when people are deciding if they want to be on a plan, or they want to cancel Buzzsprout takes care of it. Self Service subscription management, where we make it really easy for your subscribers to cancel or change plans. And all these links are sent to them automatically, you will get access to all of your subscribers names and emails, it didn't feel right to us at Buzzsprout. To hide all of that information for two reasons.
• 33:52
  Alban: One, we want you to actually be able to create a connection with your listeners. And so part of that is now making it a two way connection. They are sending money, giving you their name and email. So now you can actually reach out to your subscribers.
• 34:05
  Alban: But also, if you ever one day decide to leave Buzzsprout, you should still be able to have that connection go into the future. So if you decided you wanted to go to some other product that you thought was a better fit for you. Well, now there is a path for you to migrate them over to the new spot. So you have full access.
• 34:25
  Alban: Kevin, what else do we need to note fees? How much does this cost?
• 34:29
  Kevin: We're charging 15% flat fee on all recurring support, whether it be premium content, or just a support or option.
• 34:36
  Kevin: Obviously, we looked at what was happening in space. And then we also look at what is it costing us to run the service for all of our customers. And we landed on a 15% flat fee because it's simple. It's simple to understand a lot of what you see when you go to these platforms is oh, you can look into 8% plus credit card fees or, I don't know 5% 12% PLUS credit card fees and all this other kind of stuff. We didn't want people to have to think about like what our credit card fees and how do I factor them in oftentimes the Math is a little bit, it's not tricky. But if you're not in it, you might miss some of the details that make a huge difference. For example, a credit card fee is 2.9%. So if you look at patriots offering, I think one of their standard offerings around 8%, plus credit card fees, so plus 2.9. So that lands you around 11%. And you're like, Oh, that's a little bit less than Buzzsprout. But what you're missing in the credit card transaction is it's also it's 2.9 cents per transaction plus a 30 cent transaction fee.
• 35:25
  Kevin: Well, 30 cents on a $3 transaction is a pretty large percentage. So it actually works out to about like, we were going back and forth between like $3 and $5. Well, that's the difference between 17 and 22%.
• 35:33
  Kevin: But it doesn't feel like seven, they don't market it that way.
• 35:37
  Kevin: And so we're like, we knew by saying a 15% flat fee, we know that that's not the best marketing message to put out there. But we also know that it's the most transparent. And so that's where we landed, we are going to be completely transparent in our pricing with you. And it's super simple. If you do a Buzzsprout subscription, regardless of how you do it, anybody pays you anything, there's going to be 15% taken off the top for us to run and provide the service for you. Nothing else, there's no credit card transaction fees on top of that. And here's the other thing is that credit card transaction fees can change all the time. Some of these services allow you to set up your own credit card merchant account with like Stripe or something like that. And then stripe will charge various fees depending on the type of credit card that's used, or the country that it was used from. Or they can even adjust your rate based on like the number of chargebacks that you get, those rates can go up and down. And so it's not that that's a bad deal. It's just that it's complicated. And so we wanted to err on the side of simplicity. And so we're taking all that burden and all that risk, we're running it all through the Buzzsprout system.
• 36:35
  Kevin: And then we're just passing on one flat 15% fee, it's as simple as can be as transparent as can be. And if you actually do the math correctly, and you get all the details in there, it's actually really competitive with all the other options that you have.
• 36:47
  Jordan: I really love the model where you don't pay until you get paid. And that's what you guys went with, which I just love. Because sometimes it's scary for podcasters, especially if they're just starting out to say like, do I want to get this new feature? Do I want to subscribe to this platform and risk like not getting paid for it? And so yeah, you guys taking that on is amazing. And it's going to be so helpful for new podcasters that might be a little scared or hesitant to start accepting listener support. But if there's no risk to them, then it's great.
• 37:19
  Kevin: Yeah, I really feel like this is one of those features where there's not a lot of reasons for almost everybody to not go in and turn this on. I know Yeah, right. If you choose the recurring support option, there's a drop down where you can choose some different things that you might want to offer people who support your show, one of them is just become a supporter of the show. Like, that's it, thank you for becoming a supporter show, that's all there is to it. So you're not returning, you're not committing to give a shout out your episode, you're not saying I'm gonna send you these emails, I'm gonna send you stickers or T shirts or whatever. Of course, you can do all of that stuff, but you don't have to do any of it. And so if you're just saying, Hey, I just launched my podcast, I don't, I'm not ready to start sending stickers out to people or to commit five minutes on my show to thank all my supporters, I'm not ready for that. I don't know which direction it's gonna go. Just turn it on and say thanks for becoming a supporter of the show. Other options you have is like help us continue making great content for listeners everywhere. That's something that you can feel good about.
• 38:09
  Kevin: But it's not anything that I've got to do as a podcaster above and beyond to like, return even more value to you. Like, you're just saying, Thanks for doing your show, I want to compensate you in some way. Or you can write your own message. So whatever, if you have a podcast that specific about something and you can craft, like a message that speaks directly to your audience, you can write that yourself. So I hope that a good chunk of all Buzzsprout podcasters turn this on. And I think there's at least a good chunk of them who will be pleasantly surprised that even regardless of your audience size, whether it's big or large, that there's people who listen, who enjoy it, who've received value from your show, and they want to give back and they want to support you.
• 38:44
  Alban: Yeah, as somebody who supported shows for a long time, I think I have three that I've supported that have never given or at least when I started, they didn't offer any sort of listener bonus. You know, if I'm spending a few hours a week, paying attention to what somebody says they're creating content for me. I can't give a little bit back a few dollars for that. You know, it didn't feel right that I was willing to give up so much my time and so much my attention. I was thinking I was getting a ton of value. And then they had to run ads for Audible and BetterHelp constantly because they were like, Yeah, we really need to make a little bit of money. And I was like, oh, yeah, I mean, I'm getting more than $5 of value from this. I'd love to support this show. And even if you don't listen to every single episode, you feel good knowing I'm supporting the things that I care about, rather than, you know, letting it die. You know, there's nothing worse than getting into a TV show and finding out that it gets canceled because not enough people were supporting it or paying attention to it. You know, you're kind of get to vote with your money here. And yeah, I want to vote for the podcast that I love. So Kevin, you got the dev team to launch our Buzzsprout subscription like right weeks ago, right?
• 40:01
  Kevin: I don't know if it's been three, it's been at least two by the time this episode drops for sure it's released 20 days. So yeah, that was fun. I was in the office that afternoon, and I was getting a walk through the system. And it looked really good. Like it looked like 85% of the way done. And I was like, I know that there's still this little lingering issue. And you know, there's a typo over there.
• 40:19
  Kevin: And that could be written better. But can we just launch it? And they were like, are you crazy? And I'm like, Yeah, I am a little crazy and published. It just went live. We didn't talk about it. Tom posted. You heard the beginning of last week's episode. That's how the bleeping is you posted some screenshots of it in the Facebook community group, which was good. You know, obviously, we didn't want to talk about it yet. But um, that's one of the benefits of being involved in that group is sometimes you get to see stuff a little bit before everyone else.
• 40:48
  Kevin: And yeah, since then, people, one of them on our team, which is very nice. But three other people who are not employed by Buzzsprout have decided that they want to support the show.
• 40:58
  Kevin: Yeah, I
• 41:00
  Alban: was so impressed by the amount of people that found it and supported us before we ever talked about it. So the first one was David ditches. Dave was actually Kevin's college roommate, and one of the designers at Buzzsprout.
• 41:15
  Alban: Employed. He worked on this project, and then supported the show. So Dave, we appreciate it.
• 41:19
  Alban: I am a little bit nervous that that is going to get canceled before the second time.
• 41:26
  Jordan: I think so I think this is just a test subscription.
• 41:29
  Jordan: We'll
• 41:29
  Alban: find out
• 41:30
  Kevin: it may or may not be. I think if it's if it's the company card, he'll probably let it ride. He might cancel
• 41:38
  Alban: it. This is the company card that Dave used that. I don't know if he gets a shout out. I think it's shout out to hire pixels. The first person who found Buzzsprout subscriptions and decided to support the show without ever hearing about it was Pacific Northwest haunts and homicides, Jordan, you know who they are?
• 42:00
  Jordan: Yeah, so Pacific Northwest is p n w Honson homicides. It's a podcast, I actually really enjoy especially being in the Pacific Northwest.
• 42:06
  Jordan: We're very like spooky people.
• 42:09
  Jordan: So it's a Caitlin and Cassie, and they talk about ghost stories around this area, or like myths and legends and things like that. So I was actually very surprised that they found our subscription page so quickly because they subscribe, like ASAP after we published that. So thanks, guys.
• 42:28
  Kevin: All right. The next support we have is the A level biologists podcast. And they subscribed 14 days ago, which was awesome. Yeah, and one of the other fun things that you can do when you decide to support a show that's running through Buzzsprout subscriptions is all of your supporters will get to choose a little emoji that kind of represents them.
• 42:46
  Kevin: The level headed biologist podcast chose a maple leaf and Pacific Northwest haunts and homicides is like a unicorn. So cool, you get a little bit of insight into like, at least what emojis the people who are supporting you like personalities, personalities.
• 42:58
  Kevin: Yeah. And we'll be doing more and more and more. This is fun and exciting. We think everyone on Buzzsprout should go turn it on today, at least at the very basic level. And at some point, you might want to offer premium content. And then we'll give you a full run through how the premium stuff works also in the upcoming episode.
• 43:20
  Jordan: Spotify now supports chapters, but only they're added into the episode description in parentheses. And this is similar to what you see on YouTube with the timestamps in the video description. And people seem to be a little bit torn about whether or not this is a good thing.
• 43:37
  Alban: I mean, it's a good thing because there's support for chapters. It's a bad thing because this implementation is not great. It is kind of hostile towards the actual standard Now that it's out there. So we can we talk about the positive is chapter markers are good. Yeah, it might be about where my positives end.
• 44:01
  Kevin: Alban's always so positive. Thanks, man. That's really great. Yeah, I don't think it's a good thing. I'll tell you why can YouTube do stuff like this? Absolutely.
• 44:10
  Kevin: Why? Because they are the monopoly in the online video space. They can do whatever they want. They control the world in the video space. Podcasting is not like that Spotify is coming to open ecosystem. And my hope is that you would come when you come to a large gathering of people who are doing a bunch of stuff. It's kind of like Be friendly get along with people figure out what the norms are.
• 44:26
  Kevin: What are the social norms? How are we moving? What's what's the direction the community what's best for everybody? Can we all agree on some certain rules?
• 44:33
  Kevin: Like should we dip like double dip is double dipping, okay, here at the chip table, or is it not? And Spotify is just like, hey, we're big and bad. And if we want double, double double dip, and some people are like, no, they stick their hand in the salsa salsa, right? It's just it's just not good. And so there's some technical parts of this aspect that are bad data side I just I really feel like it's just like them kind of pushing their way for their reason. And honestly, because it is not as good of a technical solution, I almost feel like they're doing it like just to spite the direction that independents are moving. So it's like if they had a better technical solution be nice if you'd bring the better technical solution to the group, let us talk about let us discuss it give us opportunities to implement and then roll it out.
• 45:22
  Kevin: But even if you didn't do that, if it was just better, I think everybody in the community would just be like, hey, it's not the way that we agreed to do things.
• 45:26
  Kevin: But look, it does have all these benefits. So let's just change our spec and move this direction. But it's not it's not either of those things. It's the worst technical implementation, which leads me to believe that they're just doing it just to exert their authority upon whoever I don't know. It's just, it's garbage.
• 45:42
  Alban: So things that it's missing. There's no chapter image support, which is a bummer, because that's in the chapter marker spec right now that tons of podcasts are using, and it doesn't support dynamic content, or ads. So if there's anything that's inserted into an episode, will all those chapters break because the way Spotify is doing it is you write it into your description, that makes perfect sense on YouTube, where YouTube is the one inserting all of the content, all the ads, so YouTube is able to do that math.
• 46:13
  Alban: But when Spotify is pulling these files from any number of podcast hosts, those chapter markers are very, very often going to be wrong. So even if the podcaster goes through the work of saying, well, here's where the segments start, Spotify is going to go cool. At one hour, this segment starts.
• 46:32
  Alban: And then when a user clicks it, Spotify won't on the fly, do the math and go oh, but there was a 42nd ad added in, well, no, they're just going to go jump to an hour. And now all of a sudden, the person's in the wrong spot. And they think this whole segment was off. So there's just real downsides. And I can't help but be reminded of July, we did an episode, where Michael Manado, who founded anchor was talking about I don't like all the open specs because it moves. So slowly. There's so many things we want to be able to do, like chapter markers was in the article of the big criticisms that the open ecosystem couldn't move fast enough to implement this. And their implementation was a crude copy of YouTube's implementation. That doesn't work for podcasting. But they could have just supported the thing the open ecosystem has already done now. So the open ecosystem did move faster. And then Spotify just kind of went in a different direction with the only benefit here is to Spotify. And it's frustrating, because, you know, they're hoping that kind of by backdooring this in by making it have to be in the descriptions that other players will have to support it. But it's really just the bad implementation that is going to be a negative really for everybody.
• 47:49
  Jordan: Well, let me hear your opinion on this. So James Cridland wrote a blog article titled chapters on Spotify, to Cluj or not to Cluj, and I had to look up Cluj because it's spelled K L UdG. And I thought was clutch and I never heard that word before. Yeah, so thank you to James for expanding my vocabulary. But he goes through
• 48:11
  Alban: what's a Cluj, you have to define Cluj. Now for everybody?
• 48:16
  Jordan: Oh, sorry. For other people, I just assume that everyone else is smarter than me. So a Cluj is when you kind of like hobble something together. So he's saying like, should we hobble this together.
• 48:24
  Jordan: And he goes through the different kinds of like chapter marker implementations. And he proposes one possible fix. And I want to hear your opinions on this, to identify Spotify in the RSS crawler, and give them a slightly different RSS so that other users don't see the chapter markers. I think that this is a complicated fix to something where people can just put the chapter markers at the bottom of their descriptions, no biggie. But that's my viewpoint on it. So what are your opinions on this?
• 48:56
  Kevin: Yeah, I understand where he's coming from. It's, and I think James has been around long enough to understand, remember, the browser wars of the early 90s, when Microsoft Internet Explorer was moving in their own direction with their own set of HTML standards that was very different than what the W three C was proposing as open web standards. And so what happened was developers, people who were building websites for creating multiple versions of websites so that they worked on all different browsers. And the way that that started impacting everybody who just wanted a website was website started costing a lot more money, because we didn't just build one website anymore that we're working on the browser, you had to build a version of the website that worked in your Explorer version of the website that worked in Firefox, maybe a version that worked in Netscape.
• 49:35
  Kevin: And I think Chrome wasn't even on the scene yet in the beginning of the browser wars, but Safari was, and so you had to test in all these different browsers, and make sure that your website worked in all the different browsers. And so oftentimes, people who remember the era, you'd go to a website and who knows Safari, and it would say, Oh, you want to check out now you're done just browsing product to check out you actually have to use Internet Explorer or you've got to switch browsers And it was a terrible experience. And this was impacting web developers were like hating their jobs. I hate developing five different versions of this website, they're having to charge their clients like 2x 3x, the price of a website, because we got to basically build two or three different versions of the site.
• 50:14
  Kevin: And it was terrible for people who were just trying to experience the web. Like I got it, I can do this site on this browser, but I gotta switch browsers to be this site. This is not good. This is the type of world you start building when you start doing what James is suggesting. So I understand where he's coming from, is that could we build technology that solves this problem and serves up different versions of this code to different podcast aggregator apps? Yes, we could.
• 50:37
  Kevin: Is that free? No, it's not free, it comes at a cost. And the cost is, we do our best to keep costs low for all of our customers. So as many people can experience all the great benefits of hosting on a premium platform like Buzzsprout as possible. But if we have to add more developers and contents and start generating specific feeds, for specific podcast listening apps, we're gonna have to hire more developers, we'll have to do more testing, we're gonna have to hire more customer support people, like the cost will come, we're gonna have to raise our prices, that means less people are going to be able to podcast, there are massive benefits to open standards and being able to build once and it works in lots of different podcasts, listening apps everywhere. But Spotify is pushing against that hard. Why?
• 51:09
  Kevin: Because they want to own it.
• 51:13
  Kevin: They want to own the space, they want to be YouTube, they want when you think podcast, you think Spotify, when you want to go listen to a podcast, you listen in Spotify, and so they're not interested in playing with an open set of rules that you can listen anywhere and get the same experience. They only want the best experience to happen in Spotify. And that's why I feel like it's so harmful. But I saw on our show notes, somebody is saying, Can you please list Buzzcast and Spotify? These are the reasons why we can't. It's a principle decision. I know there's a lot of people listen to Spotify, a lot of people enjoy it, I get it. But on a principled level, what they're doing is not good for the podcasting ecosystem overall.
• 51:44
  Kevin: And I absolutely refuse to support it.
• 51:48
  Jordan: Sorry, David, that's a listener that tweeted at us
• 51:52
  Alban: with the way the implementation works. But it's not going to make build anything special to support it. But if you will listener want to go through the work of identifying these chapter markers and putting them in your description. They will work inside of Spotify for people who are using it work in the sense that if you use their format, people could click it and jump to a section. So that is usable, but it will make your apple podcasts descriptions look weird. It will make the descriptions on every app not really look great.
• 52:23
  Jordan: I am curious with these chapter markers, do they have to be in one cluster, like in order to work? Or is it just the parentheses and timestamp that activates that? Because what I'm thinking is if you want to do this, you could in your show notes when you link to your different topics, or you have like show notes on the different topics that you cover the different segments, if you were to just put the parentheses and timestamp before the segment title, and then put your show notes below that and then do the next one parentheses, timestamp, and then your title and then your little notes on that. I wonder if that would work in the Spotify app. And then that way, it's more integrated in your show notes and not as like just a little clump of timestamps,
• 53:08
  Alban: hmm. You might be able to do that. But you still are going to run into the downside of if you ever use dynamic content. If you ever update the audio file, if you ever turn on Buzzsprout Oh, yeah, if you ever run subscriber content, where there's multiple versions of file, or if you ever turn on ads inside of Spotify in some way, all of those would break these timestamps. And there's plenty of times where we have to make this decision in Buzzsprout, where if something works 90% of the time, we say you can't launch that because 10% of the time, you're throwing people into a tailspin because now they expect it to work. And all of a sudden, they're like, why is this not working? Well, I think it's fair to say like a good amount of people are going to put time into making these timestamps, and then they will be wrong. And so if that's the world that we're living in, where they're constantly going to be, you know, mistaken, go to the wrong spot and the episode, what value is that for your listeners? If they go, Oh, I'd love to listen to that segment, they click and you're in the middle of a conversation or something else, and they go, what an idiot, why do you get the timestamp wrong? So with that, like, I would not be putting the effort into making these, though I understand.
• 54:15
  Alban: Maybe for some people who know they will never change the audio file and none of those things will ever apply to them. I imagine there's some people who will implement this, and it will be a benefit. But generally, I think it's pretty risky.
• 54:30
  Kevin: So like to get into the technical details a little bit.
• 54:32
  Kevin: I don't I'm not sure how much our audience is interested in that. But the podcast namespace implementation runs chapters as a separate file that's linked from your RSS feed. And ideally, the way this is implemented through listening apps is that when they download the audio file for the episode, they then at the same time, if they display chapters in their app would grab the chapter file that is available at the same time.
• 54:56
  Kevin: So think about if you're if you have your podcast app set up to only down loaded once I click listen to an episode, then it's going to grab the file. Once you click play, it grabs the audio file and it grabs chapter file.
• 55:05
  Kevin: If you have it set up to automatically download in the background, it should grab the audio file at whatever midnight when you're not using your phone. So it's ready for you to listen the next day, while at the same time it grabbed the audio file, it should grab the chapter file, that way, we can always make sure the audio file that you're getting is synced up with the chapters, the chapters may change as Alvin said, as dynamic ads or dynamic content comes in and out of your podcast. But that chapter file as long as you grab it the same time you grab the audio file will always be synced up with that version, we have a pretty sophisticated back end system at Buzzsprout, as we call it to the transformation system, that as the audio file changes as dynamic content comes in and out of audio. The timestamps for the chapters that are user created gets shifted appropriately. So if you have a 32nd dynamic pre roll that gets put in all the chapters that you create manually will all get shifted back 30 seconds because we're playing 30 seconds of audio before that. And so it works it stays in sync. It's it's a sophisticated system to build wasn't a light undertaking, but it works and it exists. Now we're gonna be talking about this in a couple of weeks. But we are going to start getting customers who write in and say that want to do this, can we make it easier? I'm telling you, if we go down that route, everything's gonna get more expensive, there's a price to pay. Another reason why Kevin doesn't like Spotify.
• 56:15
  Alban: So a month ago, we started down the to buzz booster not buzz boost section. One of the things we got was from Scott at not just an editor on Twitter, and he said it was one of his least favorite segments, but he pointed out is probably because he really disliked the sound effects. And so he put out a call for people to submit their own buzz boost stingers and we got one from Scott. So Jordan, can we play that and kick off this buzz boost feedback section? Yeah. Here's your
• 56:48
  Jordan: buzz boost. So cute. So his daughter is a fan of his podcast talk with history and that was so sweet. Tell her we said Hi and thank you for the buzz boosts. Stinger
• 57:01
  Alban: Thank you Scott. So if anybody else wants to submit stingers, we are open for new stingers so we will swap them out as we get new ones.
• 57:09
  Jordan: Sam Sethi at Sam talks tech on Twitter. This week's Buzzcast podcast Jordan says listener supported content is in for 2023 and sponsored podcasts are out fully agree micropayments will go mainstream and true podcast fans will begin to pay. Yes, I agree. Thank you, Sam for agreeing with me to.
• 57:30
  Kevin: Yeah, I think he's right.
• 57:30
  Kevin: We're kind of putting a lot of eggs in that basket to with the subscription content. We really think that that is a great healthy future. Like I'm not saying that podcast ads are gonna go totally away. Podcasts will probably always have ads.
• 57:41
  Kevin: But this is a viable alternative for people who ads don't work or they don't want them or anything else.
• 57:47
  Alban: Farmer Fred reached out to us if you show up on time and are honest with your listeners and sober you might just be a good podcaster or a good bartender. At least bartenders have tip jars that he shared his Buzzsprout backtrack
• 58:03
  Jordan: podcasters have tip jars to
• 58:06
  Alban: Little did farmer Fred know we were going to be launching Buzzsprout subscriptions
• 58:11
  Kevin: at Buzzcast podcast. Hey guys love the show. sad to hear the buzz boosts things are gone.
• 58:14
  Kevin: I love them. Maybe I'm biased as a sting jingle creator. But I've always enjoyed the musical interlude. JAMES Well, James, they're not gone. They're just the ones we were using have now been retired, we're looking for new ones. So as a sting and jingle creator, we call upon you to submit new ones for us. So do your best send them our way.
• 58:35
  Kevin: We'll work them into the shows as they come in.
• 58:38
  Jordan: We got a boost from more it's from Alby have 5000 sets, thumbs up for listener supported content as a trending topic for this year. How can we get there?
• 58:44
  Jordan: Well, easy with Buzzsprout subscriptions.
• 58:50
  Kevin: That's right, but for us as Christians is a great way to start. And also, if you want to do the value for value, like lightning enabled payments, you can do that too, with Buzzsprout. So just drop an email to our support team and say, Hey, I'd like to get set up with value for value they're gonna tell you to go to I think it's podcasters wallet.com or whatever and generate code. Once you get that code, you send it to them. We'll put it in your feed for you. That's the same thing we've done with Buzzcast and we've done it for lots of different podcasts on Buzzsprout. So yeah, streaming sets absolutely possible and working for a lot of shows on Buzzsprout. And if that's a little bit too technical for you then the Buzzsprout subscriptions is the easiest way to get started.
• 59:24
  Alban: We got a boost from Kieran at mere mortals podcast one of our top supporters with 2222 SATs. He said I wouldn't discount the small amount of SAT somebody could potentially pass on from fountain felt like I only minorly contributed to you guys this year, but it's still totaled 15 to $20, which is kind of wild considered I already have two shows on Buzzsprout. So I'm already paying a fair chunk of change. I could think of any other company I'd voluntarily pay extra to but you have a great podcast and get why value for values important for independent shows, I believe value for value Trumps advertising in every way. I agree in every way. A with one exception those were 15 to 20.
• 1:00:00
  Alban: Australian dollars. And I don't know what that counts for in like real us freedom dollars. So
• 1:00:13
  Kevin: Good chance it's worth a lot more.
• 1:00:15
  Alban: Yeah, I don't know the conversion rates. I know the SATs, I can t hink it's that.
• 1:00:23
  Kevin: So I will say what we're talking about SATs and all that stuff, Fountain had a really big update. So if you're interested in trying an app and you want to support podcasts with streaming sites and boosting all that kind of stuff, check out Fountain they just did a major overhaul.
• 1:00:35
  Kevin: And evidently, it is a lot easier now, to be able to put a little bit of money into a podcast or wallet, I think you can just use a credit card now straight from within the app to load it up so that you can lose people. Oh, no more transferring SATs around and stuff like that complexity, I think is gone now.
• 1:00:49
  Kevin: And the new fountain update.
• 1:00:51
  Jordan: That's fantastic.
• 1:00:53
  Alban: Something I found in the fountain photos. Do you guys see this? When they're sharing all the UI UX updates in the actual product image? You know what podcast showed up? Is it Buzzcast Buzzcast? Baby? No, there yeah, we're in their pin tweet. So thank you so much to fountain it's really important that we have lots of experiments going on at the same time. You know, people are trying out ads other people are trying out value for value with lightning specifically, some people are trying out Buzzsprout subscription, some are going and using, you know an apple podcast subscription like there's lots of different ways to monetize the show. And it's important that we have people who are working on all these efforts so that every podcaster can figure out what works for them so Fountain has really been pushing forward especially on the listening side value for value in a huge way so I'm excited with all the improvements that they've made with this update.
• 1:01:47
  Jordan: Thanks for listening and keep podcasting
• 1:01:53
  Alban: what is our post show?
• 1:01:54
  Kevin: I mean we don't ever talk about sports on the show but how can we not? We're a Jacksonville based podcast, two thirds anyway are Jacksonville based. And, is Jordan gone? Like she's she's shriveling. She shrunk. She's gone.
• 1:02:06
  Jordan: I'm out.
• 1:02:07
  Kevin: But come on. Jordan, you if you didn't watch the game, you heard about the game.
• 1:02:11
  Jordan: Because you guys posted your photos in the group chat.
• 1:02:14
  Jordan: Like I literally have no idea about what's going on in sports world at all. Like, I mean, is it your favorite basketball team? Or?
• 1:02:25
  Alban: You're just trolling us now?
• 1:02:27
  Kevin: She's totally trolling us. So I mean, I'm sure we all have stories. Maybe not Jordan.
• 1:02:30
  Kevin: But this game was unbelievable.
• 1:02:34
  Kevin: Unbelievable. I mean that down 27.
• 1:02:36
  Jordan: So explain to me why.
• 1:02:37
  Kevin: Because they were down 27-0 through what four or five picks in the first half of the game is that right Alban?
• 1:02:44
  Alban: Okay, so the Jaguars have been the worst team in the NFL for two years in a row. Not the second worst, the absolute worst. It's like shocking levels of dysfunction that you have to have to be the worst team two years in a row. Because when you're the worst team, you also get all these really good picks, and we still were the worst. And then this year, we got a new coach. Trevor lar starts looking good. All our players start doing well. And we went on a five game win streak at the end of the year. To at the very last game, get into the playoffs.
• 1:03:21
  Jordan: Why it's okay. That's really cool. Yeah, it's really
• 1:03:25
  Alban: cool. And we were in the playoffs. Trevor Lawrence, our quarterback was incredible in high school and in college. And so it was always like a joke he'd never lost on a Saturday.
• 1:03:37
  Alban: Well, the NFL never plays on Saturdays. So that will look like a streak that he would have his entire life. And then they put a Jags game on a Saturday.
• 1:03:44
  Alban: And we won. And then they put another one in the playoff on a Saturday and I took my daughter with me. We're in a section of all like grown men and me and a six year old girl. And it's like 30 degrees. And the Jags have a epic meltdown, epic level meltdown, we're down 27 to zero in just the first 24 minutes.
• 1:04:13
  Kevin: And like one of the things that Trevor Lawrence is known for is not throwing interceptions. Yeah, he doesn't throw interceptions. He's not like the most amazing like strongest arm in the NFL or anything like that. He doesn't throw everything on a laser, but he doesn't turn the ball over.
• 1:04:26
  Kevin: That's like his thing. I
• 1:04:27
  Alban: think he had eight interceptions all year. So in 17 games, eight interceptions, and then four in half of a game. And then we had like somebody I've never seen happen in a game where a ball was punted and bounced off a guy's head for a turnover. It was just the worst thing that could have happened to the state of Jacksonville since the great fire in the early 1900's
• 1:04:49
  Kevin: Jacksonville's a city
• 1:04:51
  Jordan: It's a state of mind.
• 1:04:53
  Alban: I know you know a geography major Kevin.
• 1:04:56
  Kevin: State of mind. I got you.
• 1:04:58
  Alban: And then thanks started to turn around. Jags score at the end of the half. And there must have been some sort of epic speech given in the locker room because they came back out and just kept chipping away at this lead to the point that the Jags win in the final second by one point. And when I say by the the final second it really wasn't the final second because it was the ball was kicked in the final second. And during as it goes to zeros across the board, the ball is in the air. It field goal is made Jags win 31 to 30 it was I think the biggest comeback in Jaguars history. So since 1995, we've never come back from that big of a deficit. It was the third largest in NFL postseason history. And the stadium and the city went nuts.
• 1:05:56
  Kevin: Yeah, and it wasn't like a perfect field goal. Like I don't know what you could tell Alban was out the game. I don't know if you could tell it from the game. But on TV, it was like did that just go through? Like we didn't know for sure if it went through or not? It was insane. And I made a terrible mistake of I'm not I'm not a Jaguars fan. I grew up in Tampa area. So I'm still a Bucs fan.
• 1:06:16
  Kevin: Primarily jaguars, like my number two team. So everyone, I was on a guys weekend with my son who was just turning 13 and a bunch of his friends and another dad. And all the kids had bet, you know, we took bets like hey, and pretty much like they all picked their what they thought the score was going to be. And the loser had to go out in the 30 degree weather and jump in the pool after the game.
• 1:06:40
  Kevin: And I'm the only one who was like, sorry, guys, but I think the charge was going to win this. And so I lost big time. I had to go jump in the pool for a little. And for the first half of that game, actually all the way until like the last two minutes of the game. I was like, I'm not jumping in the pool. The
• 1:06:57
  Alban: jacks didn't lead the game, like during the full hour of football. 60 minutes. They never had a lead. The lead only came in the final play where it happens like technically after the 60 minutes are up, right.
• 1:07:10
  Alban: They never leave. It was interesting. Yeah, I mean, I've never been to I mean, it was one of the most fun football games I ever went to. My daughter was hiding her face at the end going. I don't want to see this scoreboard say chargers win. I don't want to read it dad. It's like, it's okay. If everything like Jags are gonna lose tons of games in your life. I was like, but if they win, this could be one of the greatest football games you will go to in your entire life. It would be the BIGGEST COMEBACK I'd ever seen in my life. And she's like, I mean, I'm only a kid. Like I know you're if you watch football for another 50 years, you may not get a lot of life ahead.
• 1:07:53
  Kevin: From here. Well, it's like
• 1:07:56
  Alban: you know, I've got 27 years of watching a bunch of Jaguars football and all the pain that has been associated with that. And like this is if this happened you this will be pretty close to the top and as a huge win and we got to celebrate the Jacksonville Jaguars from our home city for Buzzsprout Home City, Jacksonville, Florida.
• 1:08:19
  Kevin: I will say that I mentioned earlier that I'm a Bucs fan. So the Bucs played last night. And in the first half of that game, the Bucs were down 24 Zero and I was very much like oh, this can be like a Jaguars thing. It's fine.
• 1:08:29
  Kevin: They're going to totally come back and win this game. I was thinking the whole time. The Jaguars gave me false hope the Bucs did not pull it off. We wait. They disappointed me.
• 1:08:37
  Jordan: Oh my gosh. I'm just realizing this. So Florida has two?
• 1:08:40
  Kevin: Nope, keep going.
• 1:08:42
  Alban: Florida has three NFL teams.
• 1:08:44
  Jordan: You have three professional football teams.
• 1:08:48
  Alban: Yeah.
• 1:08:48
  Jordan: What?
• 1:08:48
  Kevin: Yeah.
• 1:08:50
  Jordan: We don't even have one.
• 1:08:50
  Jordan: We don't have a professional anything in Idaho. Did you know that?
• 1:08:55
  Kevin: You have a professional podcaster. I'm looking at her.
• 1:08:58
  Kevin: Well,
• 1:08:58
  Jordan: Thank you. Yeah. We have a hockey I'm the only one. I think we have a hockey team. No, I don't think they're like, No, I don't think we have anything over really lame here.
• 1:09:12
  Alban: I mean, to be fair, Florida has a lot more people than Idaho. So I think Florida has something in like 22 million people. And Idaho has less than 2 million. So it's a lot bigger state. And we also are in the south where people play football constantly because it's pretty warm year round. Yeah. So there's a lot of football down here in the south.
• 1:09:36
  Kevin: So it's it's been a heck of a year for sports. I mean, we had an amazing world cup. We're having an amazing NFL season.
• 1:09:42
  Kevin: Baseball.
• 1:09:42
  Alban: My dogs won the national championship.
• 1:09:45
  Kevin: The dogs won the national championship sports are great.
• 1:09:46
  Jordan: Oh, Welcome to Wrexham with Ryan Reynolds came out.
• 1:09:50
  Jordan: That's my extent of sports this year.
• 1:09:53
  Alban: What what is that? What is it what Welcome to Wrexham
• 1:09:56
  Jordan: Stop it
• 1:09:57
  Kevin: Uh oh. I don't know it either.
• 1:10:00
  Jordan: You don't know what I'm talking about, Oh, I'm so disappointed in you.
• 1:10:05
  Alban: It's just gonna be so Ryan Reynolds bought like a minor league soccer team.
• 1:10:09
  Jordan: No, no, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. They bought a Welsh football team like, Yeah,
• 1:10:16
  Kevin: This is like real life Ted Lasso.
• 1:10:18
  Jordan: It is real life Ted Lasso.
• 1:10:20
  Alban: I'd imagine it's funnier if Ryan Reynolds is doing it.
• 1:10:23
  Jordan: It's super funny. But it also is a celebration of like Welsh culture, like this little town in Wales and stuff. It's really beautiful show but it's also like, really cool, because it is like an underdog story about a football team. And just them trying to get into the league. And it's really incredible. So I'm really surprised that you guys don't watch that actually. But that's been the highlight of my year for sports.
• 1:10:50
  Kevin: Yeah, it actually sounds like something I want to watch.
• 1:10:52
  Kevin: And somebody mentioned it to me and I forgot about it. So I'll put it back on my to do list.
• 1:10:56
  Jordan: Yeah, that's gonna go right to the top of your to do list. Oh, you're gonna get so many tweets.
• 1:11:02
  Alban: Go Jags!