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Charting Success in Podcasting Without Obsessing Over Stats · Buzzcast

0:00
Kevin: Well, no one told me that.
0:01
Jordan: It's in the outline the outline, did you guys?
0:03
Kevin: you told me not to read the outlines.
0:05
Kevin: What I don't think?
0:06
Jordan: that that is the opposite of what we said.
0:09
Jordan: We said we need to read outlines before we start recording.
0:13
Kevin: I thought, yeah, except for Kevin.
0:14
Kevin: No, why would we say don't read the outline?
0:16
Kevin: Yeah, that's what Alban's always said.
0:18
Kevin: I can't be the only one that heard that.
0:20
Kevin: I don't know.
0:21
Alban: I mean I could see an argument for it.
0:23
Alban: So the argument is you have somebody who's prepped and ready to lead the discussion.
0:28
Alban: Nobody who's prepped is a subject matter expert and someone who's kind of just ripping off hot takes.
0:32
Alban: But that means that you'd be the ripping off hot takes guy.
0:35
Kevin: I've been clear that I don't really read the outlines and you guys have been totally fine with that.
0:40
Kevin: You find that so much more funny than me.
0:45
Jordan: It's so funny to me Sorry.
0:48
Alban: I find it funny, but I also find it to be, like, possibly true as well.
0:52
Alban: So that's why I'm a little concerned.
0:54
Jordan: It's a thousand percent true.
0:56
Jordan: A hundred percent true.
0:57
Alban: Yeah, wait, did.
0:58
Alban: We did tell Kevin not to read an outline.
1:00
Kevin: No.
1:01
Jordan: No, wait, what are you talking about?
1:03
Jordan: I'm saying it's a hundred percent true that you don't read the outline.
1:06
Alban: Jordan's a thousand percent sure we never told Kevin that.
1:09
Alban: That's indisputed.
1:11
Alban: Kevin is a hundred percent sure we did tell him that and I am thinking I'm pretty sure it's been in writing somewhere.
1:17
Alban: It's a hundred percent sure that we said at some point we should all be reading the outline and doing more prep.
1:23
Alban: I also think there's at least a 50 percent chance that at some point we said and maybe we, it's just me, Kevin you just show up and let her rip and just react.
1:34
Jordan: It's probably like a conversation that you had while playing pickleball that you just don't remember.
1:40
Alban: That's highly possible as well.
1:42
Alban: Of those 50 percent that this existed and this happened that have that, 25 percent of the chance is that it was during a pickleball match.
1:49
Alban: The other 25 percent chance is that it's in writing in base camp right next to hey, Kevin, why don't you do some more prep?
1:55
Alban: And he said I don't want to do prep.
1:57
Alban: I went yeah, don't do prep, just show up and let her rip.
1:59
Alban: That's also a chance.
2:01
Alban: And so I'm just in humility saying this all sounds highly like that.
2:06
Alban: Yeah, I like that.
2:07
Alban: Here we go.
2:13
Jordan: Welcome back to Buzzcast, a podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzs rout Jordan, and joining me, as always, are Alban and Kevin.
2:21
Jordan: Next week we are heading to PodFest in Orlando, Alban.
2:26
Jordan: Do you have more information about that?
2:28
Alban: PodFest is a podcasting community where everybody's going to get together and we're going to attend talks and we're going to learn about podcasting and there'll be other podcasters there and a bunch of the Buzzsprout team are going.
2:39
Alban: So I think at this point we probably have something between all of us, like nine or 10 people will go different days, but most everybody will be there for all day.
2:48
Alban: Friday and Saturday.
2:50
Alban: Friday night we're going to have a Buzzsprout meetup for everybody that we're bringing or people that are hosted on Buzzsprout.
2:57
Alban: It'll be Friday, january 26th, from 6.30 to 8.30.
3:01
Alban: And we're planning on having finger food, heavy hors d'oeuvres.
3:05
Alban: It's not like a full meal, but I think most people who come that's probably going to be their full meal.
3:11
Alban: Drinks non-alcoholic, but also beer, wine.
3:15
Alban: We might have some extra drinks, I'm not sure and we're going to have some exclusive swag Some first edition stuff.
3:23
Jordan: Only the cool kids are going to have this.
3:25
Alban: So you'll want to come and it's all going to happen in the Jasmine and Magnolia rooms of the floral ballroom Very fancy.
3:33
Jordan: At the conference center.
3:34
Alban: At the conference center.
3:35
Alban: Yeah, you always have to trade off between do we want to go off site unless people will come, that it will probably be cheaper or do we want to stay on site, where the conference center kind of sticks it to you a bit.
3:47
Alban: But it's so much easier for everybody and I feel like the whole point of a conference is that everything's kind of nearby so you just have a lot more fun if you can keep it on site.
3:58
Alban: So we were able to keep it on site this year.
4:00
Alban: Yeah 6.30 to 8.30.
4:02
Alban: Jasmine and Magnolia rooms of the floral ballroom.
4:05
Jordan: And if they want to come to the meetup for like a little bit, but they also want to score the swag, what time do you think they should drop by like?
4:12
Alban: I think swag will probably be in the middle, like 7.30.
4:15
Alban: But just come when you can come.
4:18
Alban: It's not a big deal if you're right on time.
4:21
Alban: That's not embarrassing If you're 20 minutes late, also not embarrassing If you leave early to go do stuff with people.
4:27
Alban: That's the whole point of going to a conference is that you're making friends, and if something's boring, just bounce and don't worry about it.
4:34
Alban: And so we understand that and we hope you're able to come by and have some fun with us.
4:40
Jordan: Do we have like a phone number or something where people can kind of get like in a group message setting?
4:45
Jordan: Are we doing that for this conference?
4:47
Alban: Yeah, if you registered your ticket through Buzzsprout, if we bought your ticket.
4:50
Alban: Part of it was that I got everybody on a text line and I said hey, give us your cell phone and I will add everybody into this texting tool that we use called slick text, and we'll just send out reminders like hey, we're all meeting up here, come on over.
5:05
Alban: It's really nice because people can text us questions and we can also remind people when events are happening.
5:11
Alban: So we will be sending a handful of texts, but not much, just a few.
5:16
Alban: Hey, here's a reminder, we're at the Buzzsprout booth, come on over, we'd love to hang out.
5:23
Jordan: YouTube's RSS feed delivery is out of beta and it's now available in 98 countries.
5:28
Jordan: They published a handy blog and video on how to submit your RSS feed to YouTube.
5:33
Jordan: However, I don't recommend that you watch the video.
5:36
Jordan: If you were like me and have an aversion to mouth sounds, did you guys watch this video that YouTube released?
5:41
Kevin: No, I did not.
5:42
Kevin: It was very smacky.
5:43
Kevin: Oh my gosh, it's so brutal.
5:50
Jordan: I watched it and all I can think of was YouTube.
5:52
Jordan: You were a huge company.
5:54
Jordan: Surely you have a massive production budget.
5:56
Jordan: Like, can you just run a de-clicker over this audio?
5:59
Jordan: It is rough.
6:00
Jordan: One of my podcast friends actually texted me about it, that's how bad it is.
6:05
Jordan: So if you don't like mouth sounds, I recommend avoiding the video, but the blog post is really great.
6:11
Jordan: I followed it and submitted my own podcast to YouTube.
6:15
Jordan: I found it was pretty simple, but all new things there could be like hangups or uncertainty, and unfortunately they don't have a comprehensive FAQ page at the moment to answer these questions.
6:25
Jordan: So I did run into a couple of things that were a little puzzling.
6:29
Jordan: One of them was that if you have a lot of podcast episodes that you need to ingest through the RSS feed I had over 100.
6:37
Jordan: And for some reason the upload just like stopped and said it was going to resume the next day, and I couldn't find any way to like force it to continue uploading.
6:46
Jordan: And it actually like uploaded two days later.
6:49
Kevin: I wonder what the reason is.
6:50
Jordan: It was very strange.
6:51
Jordan: So I think there's still working out a couple of things like that.
6:54
Alban: So is your podcast live on YouTube music right now.
6:58
Jordan: Yeah, it is.
6:58
Alban: And what have you seen?
7:01
Jordan: Have people started listening to it?
7:02
Jordan: No, I think I had like one view in the last few days, but I was excited because there were a few videos that I had uploaded a while ago.
7:10
Jordan: It was like 10.
7:11
Jordan: It was just like an experiment.
7:12
Jordan: I uploaded them and then just like never open my YouTube studio again to look at it.
7:17
Jordan: And when I opened it to submit my audio first podcast through the RSS feed, I had a little achievement badge for 500 hours of consumption.
7:25
Alban: There you go.
7:25
Jordan: On my little videos.
7:26
Jordan: So I was really excited about that, yeah, so that was kind of cool.
7:30
Jordan: So hopefully the audio first ones catch on too.
7:33
Jordan: We'll see.
7:34
Alban: Well, if you do have a group of people that are listening to your podcast through Google podcast, this is something you'll want to do sooner rather than later.
7:41
Alban: I got an email just about an hour ago from Google podcast saying hey, alvin, we've announced Google podcast is going away this year and it's going to be going away at the end of March, and at the end of March.
7:52
Alban: As a listener somebody who uses Google podcast to listen you will not be able to migrate all of your shows over after, I think, june.
8:02
Alban: So they're trying to push users to go ahead, move over to YouTube music to listen to shows.
8:08
Alban: Google podcast is going away.
8:10
Alban: So if you have a substantial audience there, it's probably a good time to get yourself on YouTube music and start nudging your listeners to move over as well.
8:21
Jordan: All right.
8:22
Jordan: So during our sound off segment last episode we missed a comment from David at the late bloomer actor, but it actually worked out because it ties into our next story.
8:29
Jordan: So David says I agree on listener stats.
8:32
Jordan: I'd like to see a system that gives you a listener reading based on how much a listener listened to my episodes.
8:37
Jordan: A download count of one tells me nothing, but knowing if listeners only listened to 10% on average bad news or 90% on average great news would be more worthwhile.
8:47
Jordan: So what David is referring to is called listen time listen duration, consumption or audience retention, and really the only places to see information like that is by logging into the platforms that track the metric, like Apple podcasts or Spotify or YouTube.
9:05
Jordan: But unfortunately those stats only apply to those platforms.
9:09
Jordan: So the open podcast prefix project, or OP3, has released a new metric called listen time, and what's really cool about this data is that it comes from innovations like streaming stats.
9:21
Jordan: So the way that OP3 is getting this information is they're looking at platforms that allow users to stream stats while they're listening, like true fans or fountain or pod verse, and they can figure out at what point a listener drops off during the episode.
9:37
Jordan: It's really cool.
9:38
Kevin: Yeah, I heard them talking about this on the podcasting 2.0 show a couple of weeks ago it's probably been more than a couple of weeks at this point and then John Spurlock from OP3 went ahead and implemented his version of some of their ideas.
9:48
Kevin: I do think it's novel.
9:50
Kevin: It's pretty neat.
9:52
Kevin: The challenge, of course, is that we could get this data before, like, from Apple, but it would only apply to people who were listening in Apple podcasts.
9:59
Kevin: Well, it's kind of the same thing here.
10:02
Kevin: It's like this is done in an open way, so it does actually gather data from all different types of apps, but those apps are pretty small in terms of like market share.
10:12
Kevin: So even if you combine all the apps that do streaming stats right now so, like you said, pod, verse and fountain and custommatic and true fans you put them all together they still only represent even a smaller subset than like what Apple represents.
10:23
Kevin: So Apple represents, conservatively, 40% or so of the total podcast listening market and these apps combined are like way less than 10.
10:31
Kevin: And then what you have from that 10% is it's only people who are actually streaming stats while they're listening.
10:36
Kevin: So, of the 10% now let's take a look at that pool and say, oh well, like 1% or 2% of the people who actually listen to fountain actually stream stats while they listen.
10:45
Kevin: Again, I don't want to knock on that stuff because any innovation in this space is pretty cool, but it is a it's just a subset, a very, very small subset of your listening audience.
10:55
Kevin: So, like for us on Buzzcast, we do.
10:58
Kevin: Where are our numbers?
10:59
Kevin: A couple thousand downloads per episode, roughly in 30 days or so.
11:02
Kevin: Yeah, two to four depending on the episode, and I think Jordan, if you log in and you look at how many people are streaming stats on a typical episode, there's like 10.
11:10
Jordan: Yeah, right, and now that I think about it, I think it's like two.
11:14
Kevin: I'm going to use 10, because I'm not great at math.
11:16
Kevin: So if it's 10 in 2000 downloads, that's 0.05%, right, or is there another zero in there?
11:22
Jordan: Whatever, Don't ask me.
11:24
Kevin: Yeah, it's really small.
11:25
Kevin: It's really small, but if we look at the number of people who listen on Apple podcasts, for example, it's probably closer to 50 or 60% listening to the show using Apple podcasts.
11:33
Kevin: So if we're looking at trying to get consumption data that's representative of the audience overall Apple is a much better place to go for that.
11:41
Kevin: Still Now, that might not be that way forever.
11:44
Kevin: We hope it's not.
11:44
Kevin: We hope that these apps become more and more popular and people stream micro payments to podcasters listening to them.
11:50
Kevin: We love that idea.
11:51
Kevin: We hope that continues to grow.
11:52
Kevin: And so this is very cool because it's early and it's innovative and it's open.
11:57
Kevin: These are all good things, but if you're actually looking at it as, oh, this is a new way to get great new data from my podcast, no, it's probably not yet.
12:04
Kevin: Maybe one day.
12:05
Alban: What I really like about it is, yeah, it's a much smaller group of people, but it's a much stronger signal.
12:10
Alban: You know, these aren't just people who downloaded, these aren't just people who played it for a little bit, they're not just people who listened.
12:17
Alban: There are people who said I'm doing all of those things and I find this to be such a good podcast that I'm willing to actually send you a little bit of money, and so it's a really strong signal.
12:27
Alban: You know, even if we only have 10 people that do it, that's a pretty, you know, impressive.
12:32
Alban: That's our core group of 10 people who are willing to say I'm actually totally cool with sending you a little bit of money for what you're doing.
12:38
Alban: And if we can see all 10 of those people listen to the whole episode, that feels great.
12:44
Alban: If we saw one week our 10 most engaged fans all bailed, then it would be a pretty strong signal like, okay, we're missing something here.
12:53
Alban: So I hope it continues to grow.
12:55
Alban: I mean, I hope that everything with value for value continues to get more adoption.
12:59
Alban: It can only start small, but it can go somewhere really big and it's continuing to gain momentum, and so I hope it continues to grow and I love that people like John are investing so much in trying to make OP3 be able to pull all sorts of interesting data like this, so this is really interesting and I hope it gets more traction.
13:19
Jordan: Yeah, I think I prefer the average consumption, or like the listener time, to total downloads by far when measuring how successful a podcast is or how well your podcast is doing or, you know, keeping listener attention and things like that.
13:34
Jordan: It's just such a better metric.
13:37
Jordan: And I think that it's also a better metric to show potential advertisers or sponsors.
13:43
Jordan: It's a lot stronger than just saying like, oh yeah, my podcast has you know 10,000 downloads, but how many of those 10,000 downloads are actually listening through to?
13:52
Jordan: You know the end of your podcast, or even like 60% of your podcast.
13:55
Jordan: So I think it's a lot bigger of a bargaining chip to go to sponsors and say like, hey, look at all the listeners that I have that are hanging around for you know 90 something percent of my podcast.
14:05
Jordan: And I think that that's a lot stronger when you're trying to haggle with these advertisers.
14:12
Alban: One of the reasons I love looking at the consumption data is because, for the data that we do have, podcasts stack up really really well against YouTube and blogs and other types of content.
14:22
Alban: Oh yeah, where a blog post that we write might get four minutes feels really good Average time reading the blog post.
14:29
Alban: Youtube video, we're looking at like two and a half minutes of watching it on average, just because a lot of people drop off both of those pretty quickly.
14:36
Alban: But people who download and click play, which is a subset, but download and click play on Apple podcasts we get something like 80% play through and so that's people who are listening for like 35, 40 minutes on average.
14:49
Alban: That's a really long time.
14:50
Alban: So, yeah, the numbers are lower.
14:52
Alban: Less people are playing podcasts than are downloading it and less people are playing them than are watching YouTube video or clicking on a blog post.
14:59
Alban: But the people who do are much more engaged and I think that's why I love podcasting is because it's deeper engagement, even if it is a smaller audience.
15:09
Jordan: Do you guys know how someone can enable the OP3 tag on their podcast so that they could take part in this if they wanted to?
15:16
Kevin: You mean take part in getting this extra like consumption data for their podcast.
15:20
Kevin: Yeah, so you'd have to do two things.
15:22
Kevin: The first thing you'd have to do is you'd have to enable value for values SAT streaming on your podcast.
15:27
Kevin: So the easiest way to do that is to go to the podcastindexorg and search for your podcast, find that little lightning bolt icon under your podcast and then set up a value block.
15:36
Kevin: And then, once you have that value block, if you're on Buzzsprout, you can email that value block to our sport team.
15:40
Kevin: We'll add it to your podcast for you and then your podcast will be value for value streaming, micro payments enabled.
15:46
Kevin: And then step two would be to set up OP3.
15:48
Kevin: So that is another email to our sport team.
15:52
Kevin: Just say I had like OP3 turned on for my podcast.
15:53
Kevin: You don't actually have to go get the prefix.
15:56
Kevin: We know what the prefix is.
15:57
Kevin: It's the same for everybody.
15:57
Kevin: So you can just say can you please set up OP3 for my podcast?
16:00
Kevin: We can put the podcast prefix in there on your episodes and then you'll get both.
16:04
Kevin: So then you have value for value streaming set up and you have OP3 set up and then when you go to your OP3 page to see your statistics over.
16:12
Kevin: You know it takes like a week or so for them to start coming in.
16:14
Kevin: Then that data will be there and then, as soon as people are, if anyone's listening and streaming stats while they listen, then those statistics also will show up in your report.
16:27
Jordan: Once you get your OP3 listen time metric enabled, you can ignore it for three months by participating in the NoStats 90 challenge.
16:34
Jordan: What's?
16:36
Alban: NoStats 90?
16:37
Jordan: Oh man I saw this in Pod News today Mark Steadman from Morning Creative challenges podcasters to go 90 days without checking their downloads.
16:45
Jordan: The reasoning for this is that he feels like focusing on stats distracts from focusing on the content and the connections you make with your audience.
16:54
Jordan: So he's telling people hey, like, join this challenge, go 90 days without looking at your stats and he has a way to get, like the audience involved in supporting the creators, not focusing on their stats.
17:07
Jordan: Yeah, I like this idea.
17:08
Alban: It's an interesting idea.
17:10
Alban: I think it's probably healthy for a lot of creators.
17:13
Alban: I don't know if I could do it.
17:14
Alban: It is something so encouraging about even just a few listens that if I was launching a new podcast, I'd want to see them going up.
17:21
Alban: Though, when something's a bit established I mean like this show I quoted earlier I think we get between two and four thousand downloads an episode.
17:29
Alban: And then I went and looked, that's true, but a lot of them are closer to that two thousand side.
17:34
Alban: We've had some that have kind of gotten close to four thousand, but not in a while, but I didn't really know it because I'm not checking our stats all that often.
17:41
Alban: So, while I think it's healthy and I actually encourage more people to go and sign up at no stats 90.com or use the hashtag no stats 90.
17:50
Alban: Yeah, I know that I would be the person to say this is a good idea, and yet for a new podcast, I'd be very probably would not make the challenge.
17:57
Alban: Yeah All right.
17:59
Kevin: So you guys could probably guess like I think this is fantastic, I think this is the best thing, and if it were up to me, I would like have statistics disabled on all new Buzzsprout accounts for the first 90 days at least of a podcast journey, because I don't think there's any good that really comes from it, especially when you're early.
18:16
Kevin: I know that people are drawn to it.
18:19
Kevin: Like you create something, you put it out in the world.
18:22
Kevin: You want to see how many people are listening to it.
18:23
Kevin: But almost always, unless you have some sort of following already, unless you have some sort of celebrity, those numbers are discouragingly low and they can rob you of the pursuit of whatever got you to record that first episode in the first place.
18:39
Kevin: It's almost like everyone's hoping and thinking maybe I'm the exception, maybe I'm the one.
18:44
Kevin: I'm going to record a podcast and I don't have a following and I've never done this before.
18:47
Kevin: But I'm going to put out an episode and somehow my episode.
18:51
Kevin: Who knows how this is going to happen, but somehow it's going to get a thousand downloads, my first try ever.
18:56
Kevin: No, it's not.
18:56
Kevin: It's like you have a better chance, going out and buying a lot of ticket, most likely of winning something on that lot of ticket than you do probably doing a thousand plus downloads in your first episode with no following.
19:06
Kevin: And so why do we want to do this to ourselves?
19:10
Kevin: And I think we probably don't.
19:12
Kevin: It's probably just the fact that these platforms have stats that drive us to look at the numbers.
19:17
Kevin: Like back in the early days of podcasting, statistics weren't a thing.
19:20
Kevin: You would publish an episode and this is a long, long time ago.
19:23
Kevin: But in the very early days, like before Libsyn, Libsyn was like the first mainstream podcast hosting solution, but people were self-hosting before that and it was very hard for them, almost impossible for them to figure out how many downloads they were getting, how far their podcast was going, what their reach was.
19:39
Kevin: But they weren't doing it because of that.
19:41
Kevin: They were doing it because they enjoyed it and they had something to say and they wanted to put it on the world.
19:45
Kevin: And it was very much like the same reason.
19:47
Kevin: Like people would blog and if you remember from 20, 25 years ago, like a lot of blogs have little hit counters on the bottom, like that was about as accurate as you could get, and those were not accurate at all.
19:57
Alban: You just hit refresh and all of a sudden that hit counter went up by one.
20:01
Kevin: Yeah.
20:02
Kevin: Yeah, some people knew they weren't accurate, but it was almost better when we didn't have the statistics to drive Like.
20:10
Kevin: You could record an episode, you could put it out in the world and you could feel good about that.
20:13
Kevin: And that still happens today.
20:15
Kevin: People feel good about it.
20:15
Kevin: I did it.
20:16
Kevin: I recorded an episode.
20:18
Kevin: Yeah, I know I flubbed the word here or there and I used too many filler words, but I'm still proud of it overall.
20:23
Kevin: I put it out in the world and then you come back a week later and you look at your statistics and you see that only six people have downloaded it and then, all of a sudden, all the joy that you had has been robbed, and I think that's more.
20:31
Kevin: Statistics generally do more of robbing joy than they do bringing joy, and so I really am not a huge fan of them.
20:38
Kevin: I know we have to provide them because it's table stakes for podcast hosting, but I do wish we could do something where it's like hey, listen to us, trust us, this is in your best interest.
20:48
Kevin: We're not going to show you your stats for the first six months of podcasting.
20:52
Kevin: Just go out there and create the best content you can and don't worry about what these dumb numbers say See how far you can get in six months, and then we'll show you Like that would be better.
21:01
Alban: All right, let me propose this, kevin what if the first time you went to the Buzzsprout stats page, it just said you probably should have a lot of stats?
21:07
Alban: You said you probably shouldn't look at this.
21:09
Alban: And it's just like it's that argument, okay.
21:12
Alban: And we say, click here to view your stats.
21:16
Alban: But here's the art.
21:16
Alban: You know, we don't think you should.
21:17
Alban: We think there's a button that says I'm podcasting for the love of it.
21:20
Alban: And the other one is just let me see my stats.
21:23
Alban: And we say, as long as you're podcasting for the love of it, we will cover $2 of your payment or something.
21:30
Alban: We will cover something.
21:30
Alban: We will do something extra for you.
21:32
Alban: It's a little bit cheaper.
21:33
Alban: Just don't do it for six months.
21:36
Alban: We're just encouraging you.
21:36
Alban: Don't do it.
21:37
Alban: And then, if you want, imagine, like I think about how much of getting better at things is really just being comfortable at being bad in the beginning.
21:46
Alban: Everybody is bad at things in the beginning and I think it's why so many people that are great artists or great athletes or great at anything started early, like as children, because being a child is when we're all okay with being bad at something.
21:59
Alban: But if, like you, didn't dance as a kid and then you become an adult and you're you know you're dancing is embarrassing.
22:05
Alban: You can just go to a class and become a good dancer pretty quickly, but no one does because we're like gosh, that'd be embarrassing.
22:11
Alban: It'd be embarrassing to go learn to sing right now, as an adult man, that would be embarrassing.
22:17
Alban: And so we just don't do it because we are not comfortable with looking bad even for a really short amount of time and like, if you're going to be checking your stats, all you're doing is it's like you're learning to dance and you're looking around and checking the room like hey, who thinks I'm good yet?
22:31
Alban: Yeah, you're probably not yet and probably the first few episodes it's going to be really hard to get new listeners.
22:36
Alban: Even if you're really good at podcasting, it's going to be hard to get new listeners.
22:38
Alban: That's just the game.
22:40
Alban: So would it be cool if we could convince people we're with you, we're proud of you, you're doing a great job?
22:46
Alban: Give it a few months and you can click this page off and we'll never come back.
22:50
Alban: But one time, just a little bit of a nudge, like we don't think you should look at this.
22:54
Kevin: Yeah, I think the idea is worth toying with.
22:56
Kevin: Like you know, we wear these fitness trackers and Albin and I wear this one called the whoop and I've been wearing it for a while now a couple of years and I started taking it off before I would do.
23:08
Kevin: I would have a day where I was going to do something.
23:10
Kevin: So let's say I signed up for a 5k race and I would not wear the whoop a day or two before the race, because once one of the things that you do you get in the habit of waking up every morning and seeing where your recovery is and that is like how well rested you are and it's a good metric for how well you'll be able to perform that day.
23:25
Kevin: Well, on race day it's like always bad news.
23:28
Kevin: You never get like a 95 or a 96% recovery on race day.
23:32
Kevin: It's just because you've been training hard up to that event and you've rested for a couple of days before.
23:36
Kevin: But you're probably going to be like the best you can hope for is whatever in the 80s or something.
23:39
Kevin: But then you're like, oh, I'm only 80% recovered and I've got this big race.
23:42
Kevin: I've been training, so I just take it off Like I don't need the noise in my head Like I just want to go out there, I want to feel good about myself and do the best I can, and so whoop came up with a feature that is just like hide my stats, Really.
23:52
Kevin: Yeah, there's a toggle now in there where you can say I'm going to, I've got a race day on this day or whatever, so don't show me my stats on that morning, Like when I wake up it is what it is, Nothing I can do about it at this point.
24:02
Kevin: So don't even show me until after the race.
24:04
Kevin: And I think it's a great feature.
24:06
Jordan: What if we did something like that?
24:07
Jordan: And instead of like, when you toggle it off, instead of showing stats whenever you go to the stats page, we just have like a meme or a GIF, like cheering on, like the Kris Jenner, like you're doing great sweetie.
24:19
Kevin: It's just a motivational thing, yeah.
24:22
Jordan: Yeah, it's just a motivational thing or something funny.
24:24
Kevin: Well, like, here's what I think.
24:25
Kevin: I think, like, as a podcaster, you're constantly putting yourself out there and so, like, let's say, you're you have this idea that I'm going to invite a high profile guest on my show.
24:34
Kevin: Well, like, just looking at your statistics, help you take that bold move and ask that person to be on your show.
24:39
Kevin: Or does it probably not?
24:41
Kevin: In most cases, it's probably not.
24:42
Kevin: It's like, who am I to approach?
24:44
Kevin: You know podcast, whoever this, this amazing person podcasting, or this amazing guest that I want on my show, I only get, you know, 50 downloads per episode.
24:52
Kevin: I can't ask them.
24:53
Kevin: I can't ask them.
24:54
Kevin: Well, wouldn't it be better?
24:55
Kevin: What if you didn't know?
24:56
Kevin: Maybe you didn't know how many downloads, but you're proud of your content.
24:59
Kevin: I do a great show.
25:00
Kevin: I ask good questions.
25:01
Kevin: I'm a good interviewer.
25:02
Kevin: I'm getting better.
25:03
Jordan: I've had other guests or getting good feedback from people.
25:05
Kevin: Yeah, I'm getting good feedback from people.
25:07
Jordan: Yeah.
25:08
Kevin: I started with interviewing somebody in my family, and then I moved up to a neighbor and then a local shop owner, and the quality of my guests keep going up and up and up, and so now I think it's time for me to take that step.
25:17
Kevin: But then you look at your stats and you're like, well, I'm still only getting 65 downloads, though in episode.
25:20
Kevin: I can't ask them yet.
25:21
Kevin: Like, these things are not helpful.
25:23
Kevin: And so I know that at a certain point, if you want to monetize through sponsorships that's impression based advertising sponsors need to know numbers.
25:31
Kevin: That's how that side of the game works.
25:33
Kevin: But, like at a podcast conference, we're going to be just talking about podcast.
25:37
Kevin: We're going to be there in a week, one of the things that most buzz sprout people.
25:41
Kevin: You might notice if you ever come up to a booth and talk to us about your show, like, we're not going to ask you your download numbers.
25:46
Kevin: We're going to ask you about your show because a couple of things.
25:49
Kevin: We know that most of the shows are not getting huge numbers.
25:52
Kevin: The only time we'll probably ask you about numbers if you come up to the booth and you say, hey, I want to advertise, I want to get advertisers on my show.
25:58
Kevin: I want to monetize through advertising and we're going to say, okay, well, now we have to talk about numbers and the reality is that most people are not doing the number of downloads that you need to be able to monetize effectively through that.
26:08
Kevin: Is it possible that you could qualify for Buzzsprout ads and make a few dollars a month?
26:11
Kevin: It's possible, yeah, but it's not life changing money, it's not even side gig money.
26:16
Kevin: It's just like it's the same thing with YouTube.
26:18
Kevin: Like can you qualify for YouTube monetization?
26:20
Kevin: At a certain point you can, and will you start getting five or $10 a month, maybe, and maybe that's all you want and maybe that feels good and I'm not downplaying it, but I'm just saying these are not, they're not life changing.
26:32
Kevin: Anyway, this is a tangent.
26:33
Kevin: I'm saying we don't need to talk about numbers unless you're going to monetize through sponsorships.
26:37
Kevin: Everything else that you want to do in podcasting can be about like are you getting better?
26:41
Kevin: It's self-improvement right.
26:43
Kevin: Are you asking better questions if you're doing an interview show?
26:47
Kevin: Are you getting more interesting guests?
26:49
Kevin: Are you meeting the types of people that you thought that maybe if I start doing a podcast, I might be able to get in circles with these people and meet these people.
26:55
Kevin: You might be promoting a business or you might be trying to land a new job in a certain field, so you want to talk about that field or interview people who are working in that field.
27:04
Kevin: How do I get a job in this field?
27:06
Kevin: All these different goals that people have when they start podcasting.
27:09
Kevin: None of them are tied to statistics Like none of them.
27:14
Kevin: And again, it would be one thing if podcasting was this super viral place where almost anybody, regardless of how long they've been doing or the quality of content, was getting thousands of downloads because there was a shortage of content but a massive number of like listeners out there just searching for anything.
27:31
Kevin: Just give me something to listen to.
27:32
Kevin: But that's not the landscape that we're operating in.
27:34
Kevin: It's not the opposite of that.
27:35
Kevin: But it's a pretty healthy balance.
27:37
Kevin: Like there's a good number of good shows and there's a good number of people who are interested in listening to those shows, and so it's pretty balanced.
27:43
Kevin: But to get up to the point where you're doing the numbers, where you could probably monetize based on downloads, it's going to take a while.
27:49
Kevin: It's going to be a long haul.
27:50
Kevin: It's going to be work.
27:51
Jordan: Well, in talking about the viral nature of other things, it feels like download numbers are kind of like an empty fulfillment, similar to likes and followers, things like that.
28:03
Jordan: When I first started my podcast I thought, oh man, I would be pumped if I got like 5,000 downloads in my first year.
28:11
Jordan: And then you reach that and then it's like, oh well, man, if I got 10,000, that'd be crazy.
28:17
Jordan: And then you reach that and then it's like 25.
28:19
Jordan: And no matter what, in the beginning I was like man, if I got 5,000 downloads, that'd be insane.
28:24
Jordan: And then once you reach like a million downloads, now it's like if I don't get a million downloads in a year, I'm bummed out and I'm worried.
28:34
Jordan: I'm stressed that I'm going to lose advertisers, things like that, and it's just bonkers to me because those should be really exciting fulfilling numbers.
28:43
Jordan: But the problem is is when you raise the bar and you continue raising the bar, those download numbers, the higher you get, the less they mean.
28:50
Jordan: So once you get into the tens of thousands or the millions of downloads in a day, you can lose like 20,000 downloads in a single day and it doesn't actually mean that much, which is crazy because a lot of podcasters like that would be an insane amount, but it doesn't mean anything once you get high enough, and so I think it is kind of like an unhealthy mentality to be in and it feels really empty the more downloads you get, if that makes sense.
29:19
Alban: Yeah, I think this applies for any number based achievements.
29:23
Alban: If it's, how much weight can you lift when you're working out?
29:27
Alban: If it's, how much money did you make this year?
29:29
Alban: If it's, how many downloads did you get?
29:31
Alban: I mean, for work.
29:33
Alban: For a long time, kevin and I used to have goals for this is how many people we want to sign up for Buzzsprout in a month?
29:39
Alban: And they felt like very lofty goals.
29:41
Alban: And there have been points where we did two or three times as many signups in a day as our loftiest goal when we first started working together, because everything just changes and the game changes, and so what becomes easy was what maybe used to be hard.
29:57
Alban: The trick is to not just ride the numbers and always be like what if it could get bigger?
30:03
Alban: What if it could get bigger?
30:04
Alban: What if it could get bigger?
30:05
Alban: The better way to do it is just to say I'm just going to enjoy the thing.
30:10
Alban: I'm going to enjoy my job and, yeah, if my job ends up paying me more or paying me less, I'm going to try to enjoy the process of this job so that it's fulfilling, no matter what.
30:21
Alban: And the same goes for all these other numbers.
30:24
Alban: I'm enjoying going to the gym, even if my bench press numbers don't accelerate as fast as I hope you know, at some point they will peek out probably.
30:31
Alban: I'm just going to try to enjoy the process.
30:33
Alban: And with podcasting, mostly you're sharing something that's important to you.
30:37
Alban: You're probably not in it to make, to get the listeners and to get massive numbers.
30:42
Alban: You're probably in it knowing like, yeah, the chances I become the next podcast MrBeast are not probably very high, so it probably is healthy to.
30:52
Alban: These numbers are useful.
30:53
Alban: I guess they're useful, and yet when we look, watch them, it becomes like that's the metric, that's the point.
30:59
Alban: But it wasn't the point.
31:00
Alban: It's not why you start, and so I think whenever we have these number based metrics, it's easy just to say success is 200% of what I have right now, it's 2x, it's 2x.
31:10
Alban: So I love these ideas of hey, let's just take a break for 90 days and then see what happens.
31:16
Kevin: Yeah, there's some parallels here between, like, some of the most unhealthy behaviors and side effects that we see of social media are tied to the numbers involved in social media.
31:25
Kevin: So you think about, like the teenage world today.
31:28
Kevin: A big thing that plays into status for teenagers even some adults, for sure I shouldn't just sing about teenagers here is like the number of followers that you have in your social media accounts and then when you post something, like the amount of engagement that that gets, whether it be likes or comments or something.
31:45
Kevin: We've all heard stories about people to post something and it didn't like it didn't reach the bar.
31:49
Kevin: For them it only got 100 likes in the first two or three hours and for them that felt embarrassing.
31:54
Kevin: So they felt like they had to take the post down, or the post was a failure or I've got to quickly post something else that will try to perform better.
31:59
Kevin: That is certainly an unhealthy place to be.
32:03
Kevin: We think about, like the early days of the internet and it was just fun to post something on your MySpace page.
32:09
Kevin: Right, it'd be fun to make when Facebook just came out, fun to post something on your Facebook page, but that very quickly started getting wrapped up in the well, how many friends do you have on Facebook?
32:18
Kevin: You've got 100, I've got 200.
32:19
Kevin: Oh, look at so-and-so, they've got 500.
32:21
Kevin: How do I have 500 friends?
32:22
Kevin: They're so popular.
32:23
Kevin: Oh, this person has a thousand friends.
32:24
Kevin: Zuckerberg notoriously had whatever 6 million friends or something, because he was friends with everybody.
32:29
Kevin: He was your first friend.
32:30
Kevin: And who was the guy who did MySpace?
32:31
Kevin: No, that's Tom from MySpace, kevin.
32:33
Jordan: Tom yeah, he was the popular guy, tom from MySpace.
32:35
Kevin: Tom from MySpace.
32:36
Kevin: Yeah, I'm getting a little confused, and so I think, when I think about like OP3, sort of brings back the podcast and when I think about OP3, one of the ways that we could think about taking away some of the power from these numbers that they have over you is by making them public.
32:48
Kevin: Like, I'm just, I don't care anymore, I don't care who knows my numbers, I'm putting them out there in the world.
32:52
Kevin: I'm going to put OP3 on my podcast and now they're public and everyone can see them and there's no false pretence anymore.
32:58
Kevin: They are what they are and anybody can look.
33:00
Kevin: We do that for Buzzcast.
33:01
Kevin: Our numbers are out there.
33:02
Kevin: But at the same time, I don't necessarily know that that really solves the problem of taking the power away from the numbers Like just because they're out there in their public.
33:09
Kevin: Well, your Instagram likes and everything are public and your Facebook friends are public, and TikTok likes and shares and comments that's all public.
33:15
Kevin: But there's still this pressure around performing and always performing better.
33:19
Kevin: The next post has to do better than the previous post, and so I know that the platforms need these numbers.
33:25
Kevin: They need to measure engagement so they can figure out how to feed their algorithms.
33:28
Kevin: What do we serve up next?
33:29
Kevin: But I almost feel like the whole at least social media side of the world would be more healthy if, yeah, there's a like button and there's a comment button and there's a, but you don't need to show the numbers, you don't need to aggregate it.
33:40
Kevin: Keep the numbers on your side so you know what to serve up in the algorithm, but don't show them publicly.
33:44
Kevin: It would certainly be better for, like, teenager mental health that you just post something and people are liking it, but they're not showing you how many people are liking it.
33:52
Kevin: You know fine who cares.
33:54
Kevin: I'm going to feel better about myself and I'll go maybe post something different, maybe the same thing, but I don't care.
33:58
Kevin: But, like, my self worth shouldn't be determined about how many of my friends you know in air quotes here actually think that the photo that I took on the beach was good or not, or heart worthy or not.
34:08
Kevin: That doesn't determine your value as a person and it certainly doesn't determine your value as a podcaster, how many downloads you get, because downloads are hard to get.
34:16
Kevin: It's a very long game, so I don't know.
34:18
Kevin: Stats in general, I think, are not important For the most part, don't make us feel better about ourselves, don't help us continue to pursue our passion or get better at our craft and any goals that you actually achieve, usually in the statistics world, just quickly move.
34:31
Kevin: The bar just keeps moving.
34:32
Kevin: You're always chasing it, so I think there's healthier things to chase than stats.
34:36
Kevin: So I'm a supporter of whatever this tag is, no stats 90.
34:39
Kevin: And I think maybe we'll just keep thinking about if there's some fun ways for us to work this opinion into the Buzzsprout software going forward.
34:46
Alban: Yeah, another way that this creeps in, kevin, is kind of audience capture.
34:50
Alban: Have you ever seen this where your creator or somebody tweets, or somebody you follow becomes more and more locked in on a single viewpoint and that could be a political viewpoint, but it could also just be they used to review lots of tech and now they only really review Apple tech.
35:05
Alban: Or they used to do all sorts of different stuff and now they kind of honed in on one specific thing and they're doing that thing over and over and over.
35:15
Alban: And there's things about that that are great, where people are fully self actualized and just like oh, I'm just doing the thing I love, but sometimes it's I did 10 things and only one of them did well.
35:26
Alban: So I did that 10 more times and a subset of those did well.
35:30
Alban: And now I'm doing the same thing over and over, because that's what gets views, that's what gets clicks, that's what gets likes, and it doesn't feel good to be a person and for only a very small sliver of who you are, to be quote, unquote, shareable.
35:44
Alban: It's.
35:45
Alban: The only thing I ever talk about is that I'm this person who loves to review I don't know iPhone charging cables or something like.
35:52
Alban: You might be much more than just the iPhone charging cable guy, and so if you aren't looking at your stats, you're much more free to just engage in who you are.
36:01
Alban: It's when you're staring at the stats the whole time that you're constantly weighing which of these photos of me, or which of these tweets, or which of these videos or which of these podcast episodes is the exact one that does numbers, because I'm going to do more of that and less of anything else.
36:16
Jordan: Yeah.
36:16
Jordan: So if you want to sign up for the no stats 90 challenge, you can go to no stats 90.com.
36:23
Jordan: Sign up for the challenge.
36:25
Jordan: Pick a charity to support.
36:26
Jordan: Ask your friends to sponsor you to abstain from checking your stats.
36:30
Jordan: Check your progress on a wall calendar and every time you take a peek at your stats, restart your streak from zero.
36:36
Jordan: So might want to get one of those whiteboards that says like zero days since checking my stats.
36:43
Kevin: Yeah, so we send you stats on a weekly basis.
36:45
Kevin: We send it to your email.
36:46
Kevin: So either filter out that email or turn it off.
36:49
Kevin: Yeah, you can go in the bus, sprout under your my Profile and turn off that weekly email for the next 90 days.
36:57
Jordan: It's time for sound off the segment where you chime in with your thoughts and opinions.
37:00
Jordan: Last episode, kevin asked what was the best podcast episode you listened to in 2023?
37:07
Jordan: .
37:07
Jordan: I thought maybe we could give our answers to Albin.
37:10
Jordan: Do you want to start us off with the best podcast episode you listened to in 2023?
37:14
Alban: I think my favorite episode was an episode of invest like the best.
37:20
Alban: Patrick O'Shaughnessy does this podcast called invest like the best, but not really about investing, and he interviewed Patrick and John Collison, who are the co-founders of Stripe, the payment processing company, and it's just an interview.
37:34
Alban: But I think what I loved about it the most was, first, they're both really really smart like intimidatingly smart, but there's something about it that they're really smart and yet they treat each other like their brothers, like you hear it, and if you have siblings, you hear the sibling type of connection there too, very easy, but also kind of giving each other little jabs and it's just they're enjoying it.
37:55
Alban: And then Patrick O'Shaughnessy does this amazing job of interviewing them, because you can tell he prepped this interview in a particular way and it starts going in a different direction and he's totally comfortable with it and he follows the conversation where it's interesting and you end up with these whole segments that were really illuminating and not something I would have expected for them to talk about.
38:18
Alban: I really enjoyed it.
38:19
Alban: When I listened to it, I tweeted about it.
38:21
Alban: I probably will go back and re-listen to it again, but that stuck out to me because it's not a podcast I listen to regularly and it was a really, really good interview.
38:30
Jordan: Kevin, do you have a favorite podcast?
38:32
Kevin: I do.
38:33
Kevin: I've got one ready to go.
38:34
Kevin: It's the Tim Ferriss show, episode 678, which is Jake Muse of Maui, New Venison.
38:41
Jordan: Oh.
38:42
Kevin: So I've sent this to a few people.
38:44
Kevin: One of the people I sent it to was Alvin.
38:46
Kevin: He listened and bought a giant box of Maui New Venison for the office we could have Venison treats around the office.
38:51
Kevin: But a really compelling interview of how Jake started up this business saw a problem, thought he could solve it and not just solve it for the betterment of all the people who live in Maui, but also make a business of it and feed the world a healthy snack, and so it's a very interesting story of all the hoops he had to jump through to make that business work.
39:11
Kevin: Of course, tim Ferriss is a fantastic interviewer and takes it all different directions gets into his personal life and parenting tips and everything else in between.
39:19
Kevin: But yeah, tim Ferriss show episode 678.
39:22
Kevin: Check it out.
39:23
Jordan: I have one as well.
39:24
Jordan: I think my favorite podcast of 2023 was the first episode of Ghost Story in 2023.
39:32
Jordan: It's this guy who lived in a house and had some weird stuff happen and then he married a woman whose family had ties to the next adjacent house.
39:44
Jordan: I think it was in London or something like that.
39:46
Jordan: But I can't give away too much.
39:48
Jordan: But the first episode I had to pause a couple of times to just breathe through because there was just too much coincidence and I at one point ran downstairs and told my husband like I was just like oh my gosh you're not going to believe this.
40:03
Jordan: This is crazy because it's somewhere between a ghost story and a murder story, like a true crime kind of thing, but also like a family history and it's just like, oh, it's so good.
40:17
Jordan: So that's definitely my pick for 2023 is ghost story.
40:21
Jordan: That sounds great.
40:22
Alban: I'm now realizing how much this question is pulling out.
40:24
Alban: Like tell us something about your personality.
40:26
Alban: You know, kevin's is like, oh, this is so cool.
40:29
Alban: It's a combination of, like, sustainable hunting but also taking care of the environment and also great storytelling.
40:36
Alban: And I'm like, oh, I'm interested in payment processing.
40:38
Alban: And Jordan's like Jordan, personally, you think your house is haunted, don't?
40:43
Jordan: you?
40:43
Jordan: Oh, 1000%.
40:44
Jordan: My house is haunted.
40:45
Jordan: Are you kidding me?
40:45
Jordan: It was a boarding house in the 1920s.
40:48
Jordan: Surely some bad stuff went down here.
40:52
Alban: So you're here.
40:53
Alban: I guarantee you ran down to your husband because you're like this is us and of course he doesn't believe in any of it.
41:00
Jordan: So much to my dismay, he doesn't believe me when I hear someone pacing in a room or something like that, but it's happening.
41:07
Jordan: I promise it's real.
41:10
Alban: So if you hear any background noises in this podcast, it's not a lack of sound treatment, it's Jordan's ghost.
41:17
Jordan: In my cats, my ghost cats, all right, so we had some responses from listeners.
41:25
Jordan: Osbert wrote in and said hi, you asked for a favorite podcast episode from 2023.
41:30
Jordan: Here's mine Working for Progress with Inessa Rezanova.
41:34
Jordan: And Working for Progress is actually a bus route podcast, which is cool.
41:38
Jordan: It's a podcast from a co-working space in Edinburgh, scotland, that I try to work from once a week.
41:43
Jordan: Each episode is an interview with one of the members exploring their values, motivations and story.
41:48
Jordan: I chose this interview because of Inessa's fascinating story and her stories both as a refugee from Ukraine and as a TV producer turned computer game writer.
41:57
Jordan: Well, I was Bert Landkaster.
41:58
Jordan: Host leadership for sustainability.
42:00
Jordan: That sounds really cool.
42:01
Alban: All right, that sounds great.
42:02
Alban: Barnabas wrote in the best episode I listened to in 2023 was probably number eight, the headless hero from the show the Hollow.
42:10
Alban: It has an amazing tear jerking twist at the end.
42:13
Alban: I never saw coming and love.
42:14
Alban: And, yes, washing dishes is one of my chores.
42:17
Alban: Barnabas from the Kids Code podcast.
42:19
Kevin: That's awesome.
42:19
Kevin: Thanks, Barnabas.
42:20
Jordan: I thought this looked kind of interesting and I looked up the Hollow and it's from Gen Z Media.
42:25
Jordan: The podcast description for this is when three sixth graders at Sleepy Hollow Middle School stumble upon a real life ghost story.
42:32
Jordan: They find themselves on the trail of the headless horseman himself.
42:35
Jordan: Is he truly a terrifying ghoul, or is he even misunderstood for all these years?
42:38
Jordan: That sounds like something my kids would love.
42:41
Alban: Sounds like something you would love, Jordan.
42:43
Jordan: I'm in, 100% I am in, and my children are also going to listen to it.
42:47
Kevin: I like it.
42:47
Kevin: I like when they take the bad person or whatever character and they say maybe they're not bad, maybe they're just misunderstood.
42:53
Kevin: I mean it's the whole.
42:53
Kevin: What is it?
42:54
Kevin: Wicked, the musical Wicked, yeah yeah, so it's great.
42:57
Jordan: And we also had a boost of ground from Pocket Parley.
43:00
Jordan: The Cleveland kidnapping on TimeSuck just stands out to me as one of the best episodes in 2023.
43:06
Jordan: I looked up this episode.
43:08
Jordan: It is three hours, so I'm going to have to take your word for it.
43:11
Jordan: That's really good, cause I don't know if I can fit it in.
43:14
Kevin: Well, the great thing about podcasting is that you don't have to listen all at once.
43:17
Kevin: What is it about Jordan?
43:19
Jordan: That's true.
43:19
Jordan: That's true.
43:20
Jordan: So yeah, it's from the TimeSuck podcast, the Cleveland kidnappings, trimont's House of Horrors, so I'm sure it's really grew some true crime episode, but it sounds really good.
43:30
Jordan: It's just like three hours of it, man, I don't know.
43:34
Kevin: That's three good one hour listening sessions.
43:36
Jordan: That's true.
43:38
Alban: I can read this.
43:38
Alban: I feel like this synopsis could convince you to listen.
43:41
Alban: On the evening of May 6th 2013, in the Trimont neighborhood of Cleveland, ohio, three enduring mysteries were suddenly shot, suddenly shot.
43:49
Alban: I can't read.
43:50
Alban: Today, shockingly solved.
43:51
Alban: Three missing Cleveland women, who all were presumed dead, were found to have been held captive by the same madman.
43:57
Alban: Is this the woman who escaped a house and, like, ran up to some guy and was like hey, there's two other women that have been kidnapped and are in the house still.
44:06
Jordan: I was thinking about that.
44:08
Alban: And he went viral because he was on the news and his like reaction was so funny but yet at the same time was like it's such a horrific story.
44:16
Alban: Do you remember this?
44:17
Jordan: I do remember and actually that was what I was thinking in my head too was like is it this story?
44:22
Jordan: Cause that's pretty crazy too.
44:23
Alban: Amanda Berry yeah, so it is.
44:25
Alban: It's the same.
44:25
Alban: Uh is the same story, so, uh, we're adding this to the list as well.
44:29
Alban: Yeah, thank you for sending it in.
44:31
Kevin: All right.
44:32
Kevin: Cutting over to a question from listener, nathan Gathwright says audio claimed that their ad skipping ad skipping feature doesn't result in less revenue for the podcasters.
44:39
Kevin: I was curious how bus brought ads plans to handle apps like this, presuming audio as an identifiable user agent.
44:44
Kevin: Charging the advertiser for those downloads Sounds like ad fraud to me.
44:47
Kevin: If the feature was default off, at least you'd have plausible deniability, not knowing either way.
44:53
Kevin: But if podcasters wanted you to refuse to serve their shows to that user agent, would you do it?
44:58
Kevin: Uh, yeah, probably.
45:00
Kevin: I mean, here's the thing Nathan.
45:02
Kevin: Uh audio has like.
45:03
Kevin: Have we ever even seen a play from audio?
45:06
Alban: Yeah, we might be rounding up to zero.
45:11
Kevin: Um, and, and they were all, I think.
45:13
Kevin: In their original press release they said they were only doing it for like the top 200 podcasts or something.
45:17
Kevin: So it was.
45:18
Kevin: It was pretty small and I can't imagine they're going to get very far, but on the off chance that they do, would we improve our ad tech to be able to handle this scenario?
45:26
Kevin: Absolutely we would.
45:27
Kevin: Um, yeah, we're not interested in charging people to run ads in podcast players that skip those ads and then still charge them for it.
45:34
Kevin: I don't know.
45:35
Kevin: Uh, it's ad fraud or not, I don't know.
45:37
Kevin: Either way, what I can tell you is that would be bad business for us to engage in and we would never do it.
45:41
Kevin: So, if it ever gets to the point where this stuff is popular.
45:44
Kevin: Yes, we would absolutely adjust our ad tech.
45:46
Kevin: So thanks for the question.
45:47
Alban: And the way this plays out often is that if somebody ran an ad with Buzzsprout and they got zero conversions out of it, they'd go oh, buzzsprout ads must not work.
45:55
Alban: It's in our favor to make sure we catch everybody who does anything like this, because if we don't catch them, then people won't get actual conversions and actual people taking whatever action they want.
46:06
Alban: If they're not getting that, then they're never going to come back, and so we already have plenty of safeguards.
46:12
Alban: Now where we're trying to catch people engaged in ad fraud and people are saying, hey, our whole business model is pretty much engaging in as fraud, as I at least that was my argument Then, yeah, let's go ahead and pull it out of anybody's Buzzsprout ads All right.
46:26
Kevin: One more question from Alejandro says Hi, how do you add the Buzzsprout supporter bar to the Buzzsprout webpage?
46:32
Kevin: Thank you, alex.
46:33
Kevin: So the way you do that is you click on the login to your Buzzsprout account, click on the monetization tab and then that is the result of turning on subscriptions.
46:41
Kevin: So there's a couple of different options that you'll see when you turn on subscriptions.
46:44
Kevin: One of them is just listener support and the other is you can do like premium podcasts so you can charge for specific episodes if you want.
46:51
Kevin: But, like if you're asking about how we got on on Buzzcast, buzzcast just has the listener support stuff enabled.
46:57
Kevin: So that gives anybody who listens the opportunity just to support us on a monthly ongoing basis no additional benefit besides just returning value for then for what you're hearing.
47:07
Kevin: But you'll see there's different options with that.
47:08
Kevin: If you want to say hey, we'll give you a shout out on the show.
47:10
Kevin: If you support us, you'll see all those options in there.
47:13
Alban: And one final possible submission to this on Twitter.
47:16
Alban: Jb Wogan wrote a little late to the game, but I enjoyed this episode of Buzzcast about pod role to help with podcast discovery.
47:23
Alban: I don't know if JB is saying this is one of the best episodes of the year, but we got this notification right as we asked the question.
47:30
Alban: So I'm going to go ahead and assume that this was one of JB's top episodes of the year and, as promised, I'm putting all of these into a thread or at least all into one feed.
47:42
Alban: Listen notes allows you to make a custom playlist with all of the episodes from different podcasts, so you could subscribe to this one feed and download all of these highly recommended episodes in all at once.
47:55
Alban: So check them out and see if you find a good new show.
47:59
Jordan: Cool.
47:59
Jordan: All right, so it's my turn for our next sound off question.
48:02
Jordan: So for next episode, I want to know what do you use to measure your podcast success?
48:08
Jordan: That does not have anything to do with stats.
48:13
Alban: We have a lot of ways to reach out to the show, but I've made another.
48:16
Jordan: Oh no.
48:17
Alban: Remember the last week Kevin was saying I want to just solve this and I'm like I think the answer is a cell phone number in the show notes.
48:25
Alban: Then anybody who's listening on their phone just clicks it and texts that number.
48:30
Alban: And so I set up a number that receives texts for the show.
48:35
Alban: How much does?
48:35
Kevin: that cost.
48:36
Alban: It costs nothing because we're already paying for this service to send everybody texts for PodFest.
48:41
Kevin: How much would it cost for somebody?
48:43
Alban: who didn't have the service.
48:43
Alban: The plan that we're using is $29 a month.
48:47
Alban: Now I think you could probably set up like a Google Voice number.
48:50
Alban: There's probably a way to do this for free or almost for free, but I just want to try it.
48:54
Alban: Do people reach out more?
48:55
Alban: And I think the answer will probably be yes.
48:59
Kevin: I hope you would think that's the answer.
49:00
Kevin: You wouldn't have wasted your time doing it.
49:02
Alban: Wasted my.
49:02
Alban: I'm experimenting.
49:04
Kevin: Kevin, if you have something, no, but I mean, if your hypothesis is no, then you don't really want to test the hypothesis.
49:10
Kevin: You'd come up with something where you come up with another idea, where you'd guess the hypothesis would be yes, you're right, I'm testing the one.
49:16
Alban: I expect to win.
49:16
Alban: I thought we could ask people to send us a letter to a PO box and I went ah, probably not going to work, so I didn't pitch that one.
49:23
Alban: The one I'm proposing is the one I think will work, which is just text us right from your phone and we will actually get these texts.
49:31
Alban: You don't have to download a new app, you don't have to do anything else.
49:33
Alban: You just click the button in the show notes and then you text us.
49:37
Kevin: Yeah, but there's no button, it's a phone number.
49:39
Kevin: You're literally putting a phone number and they have to tap that no how texts work and the phone number is 855-951-4230.
49:47
Alban: That number again, 855-951-4230.
49:51
Alban: And text us.
49:52
Alban: Anything you want us to hear, text us.
49:55
Kevin: I bet Albin's right, I'll be interested to see if you put the phone number in the show notes how they display in different podcast apps.
50:03
Kevin: Yeah, Like, will they be a link?
50:05
Kevin: Can it be something I tap where?
50:06
Kevin: Then my phone then asks me do you want to call or text this number?
50:09
Jordan: Yeah, so we'll.
50:09
Jordan: We can put that in the show notes for this episode.
50:12
Alban: Yeah, Yep, and so reach out to us and let us know I mean one, if you reach out at all, we'll know.
50:18
Alban: Hey, people actually use this.
50:20
Alban: But answer Jordan's question Tell us what's something valuable you got from your podcast.
50:24
Alban: How are you measuring success?
50:25
Alban: That has nothing to do with stats.
50:27
Alban: If your stats page never existed, how would you know your show was actually successful?
50:32
Jordan: Ooh Albin, coming in with a better question.
50:35
Alban: There it is.
50:35
Alban: Well, it's the same question.
50:36
Alban: You're reworded.
50:37
Jordan: It's the same question, no it's reworded better, it's just like.
50:39
Jordan: It's so much of like.
50:40
Jordan: If the stats page never existed, how would you know your podcast was successful?
50:44
Jordan: Oh, poetry.
50:46
Alban: And let us know by texting us at 855-951-4230.
50:50
Alban: It's in the show notes.
50:52
Jordan: I don't even have to like list out the fan listcom slash buzz route.
50:55
Jordan: None of that matters, just text us.
50:57
Jordan: That is it.
50:58
Alban: We'll try this and let's just see, of all the ways the email, the fan lists, the true fans, the boost of grams of all of it, where people most likely to reach out, and let's try to get them connected.
51:09
Alban: Perfect, yeah, I hope it works.
51:11
Jordan: And with that, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.
51:13
Jordan: All right, Can I get?
51:15
Jordan: Can I read you?
51:16
Alban: something from Twitter.
51:17
Alban: Yes, this was shared on the Reddit for podcasting.
51:20
Alban: My podcast has been canceled.
51:23
Alban: There was an altercation during yesterday's podcast session.
51:27
Alban: Nobody got hurt, but the equipment was destroyed, so I can no longer podcast.
51:31
Alban: The final episode will only be up until the 13th, after which the entire podcast will be removed from Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
51:38
Alban: This was retweeted by at podcast delivery.
51:42
Alban: Who's making the podcast about what went on?
51:46
Alban: What went down on this podcast?
51:48
Alban: You find the most confusing things to talk about on the show.
51:52
Kevin: What in the world?
51:52
Kevin: So there's a tweet that somebody said there's some sort of altercation while they were recording their podcast, but we're still putting it live, but now, as a result of this, the entire show is going offline in a couple weeks.
52:04
Kevin: I do feel like you have to be on the podcast.
52:08
Alban: I do feel like you have to be on the internet long enough.
52:11
Alban: Somebody went to Reddit and was like just letting everybody else know my podcast is canceled and the only thing they give it give us is there's an altercation, nobody got hurt, equipment was destroyed.
52:24
Alban: Final episode will be up.
52:26
Alban: And then we were removing it from both Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
52:31
Jordan: Okay, so I found this original pose.
52:34
Alban: Okay, so what is there more?
52:35
Jordan: context.
52:36
Jordan: There's more context, yes, there's more.
52:37
Jordan: And as if the original pose like the vague, weird underlying story, here it's okay.
52:47
Jordan: It gets weirder if you can believe that.
52:48
Jordan: So the original poster mentions that they had a secret YouTube channel for 10 years that their parents didn't know about.
52:59
Jordan: They revealed some information and I think it was the dad that destroyed the equipment during the recording.
53:06
Kevin: Okay, so some kids are doing a podcast.
53:08
Kevin: I don't see in my mind this becomes less weird.
53:11
Jordan: It doesn't sound like it's a kid.
53:12
Jordan: I think it's an adult.
53:13
Jordan: I think it's someone that, like lives with their parents.
53:15
Alban: Wait, wait.
53:15
Alban: So this person is at minimum what like 23.
53:18
Alban: Maybe they start a secret channel.
53:21
Kevin: Why is your?
53:22
Kevin: Worldwide is the minimum.
53:23
Kevin: I don't think someone started their 23.
53:25
Kevin: That's the minimum age.
53:26
Alban: Well, I'm trying to think they've had a secret YouTube channel for 10 years In your world, everyone over 23 still lives with their parents.
53:33
Kevin: They're living with their parents.
53:34
Alban: They've had a channel for 10 years.
53:36
Alban: What's the youngest that I believe?
53:38
Alban: Somebody started a YouTube channel and kept it going hidden from their parents for 10 years.
53:43
Kevin: So they're at least 23.
53:44
Kevin: Do you feel like a nine year old is pulling that off?
53:46
Kevin: Yeah, okay, I don't get any of this action.
53:48
Kevin: That's what I'm saying.
53:50
Alban: What's going on in this family?
53:51
Alban: And is the podcast?
53:52
Alban: Have the dad on it?
53:53
Alban: Is that what we're?
53:53
Alban: Is that how this connects?
53:55
Jordan: Yeah, I mean it sounds like okay.
53:56
Jordan: So the original poster said my parents are super uptight about the internet.
54:00
Kevin: Yeah.
54:00
Jordan: Okay, here's what makes me think that it's an adult.
54:02
Jordan: They say I was allowed to do pretty much nothing as a kid, so they must be an adult now, right?
54:07
Alban: I mean, if they're living with their parents and podcasting with their parents, their dad's, smashing their equipment?
54:11
Alban: Maybe not?
54:13
Alban: I'll be honest, none of this makes sense.
54:16
Alban: This is actually becoming less believable.
54:18
Jordan: Yeah, okay.
54:18
Jordan: So here we go, it says.
54:21
Jordan: I've been uploading YouTube daily for over 10 years, entirely in secret.
54:23
Jordan: I thought it would be fun for my mom to have a podcast, and I'm not really sure she knows what's going on or that it goes online.
54:30
Kevin: Age is irrelevant at this point, okay.
54:32
Jordan: So I'm starting to see more how we're like heading into this altercation of like this being destroyed, you know, like if the parents aren't in favor of like the internet or things being like public, and then the OP is like secretly somehow recording them and then posting it online, which they hate.
54:50
Jordan: I can see how this is happening.
54:53
Alban: Jordan, are you just slow rolling the answer to this?
54:55
Alban: I feel like there's more.
54:57
Alban: You kind of stop Like is there more on this page that you found?
55:00
Alban: I found it, you found it.
55:01
Jordan: I found it.
55:02
Alban: Is it there?
55:02
Alban: Do you have the answer?
55:04
Jordan: Yeah, okay.
55:05
Jordan: So here is the inciting incident that has led to the altercation, they say.
55:13
Jordan: A week ago a door fell off a plane mid-flight.
55:15
Jordan: If you guys have heard of this, it's the Alaska Airlines.
55:18
Kevin: Yes, yep, yeah, I remember that.
55:22
Jordan: My dad is recently retired from a company involved in the matter and inspected the parts.
55:24
Jordan: He told me inside information and I shared it on Twitter.
55:27
Jordan: So he found out during our podcast that I had shared what he told me and overreacted.
55:34
Kevin: Maybe not overreacted.
55:35
Kevin: Yeah, honestly, maybe reacted appropriately.
55:38
Alban: That sounds like an appropriate reaction.
55:39
Kevin: It doesn't sound like he overreacted.
55:41
Alban: Can I just try to recap this story that now is just not believable at all.
55:44
Alban: Yes, dad works for what Like Spirit Airways or whatever the group that put it, it was Alaska.
55:49
Alban: No, no, no, the people who made the fuselage.
55:53
Alban: I'm just guessing.
55:54
Alban: This is me putting it together.
55:55
Alban: Okay, this is getting ridiculous.
55:57
Kevin: Just keep going.
55:57
Kevin: You put together what he works for.
55:59
Alban: He somehow messed up.
56:00
Alban: He retired, he's always hated the Internet and now his somewhere in their teens son or 20 son, says.
56:08
Alban: By the way, I've been doing a secret daily YouTube channel for over 10 years and I'm doing a secret, clandestine recording of podcast interviews with my mom, which I think would be nice for her.
56:18
Alban: And then, as a side, I posted on Twitter that my dad was involved in the Boeing incident, and then he got mad and he smashed my podcast recording equipment and then it's canceled.
56:32
Alban: This just doesn't seem believable at all.
56:34
Jordan: Yeah, there's just like a little bit too much here.
56:37
Alban: Also not enough yeah.
56:40
Jordan: Yeah, I mean honestly, looking through these like comments and stuff, this seems to be the consensus is that the original poster is just trying to kind of gain attention for their podcast, which I could totally see Like.
56:53
Jordan: If you had like a crazy story that went viral and people were wanting to listen to an altercation and the episode just like suddenly ends like, you probably would get a lot of downloads, right.
57:03
Alban: That's true, but now, with that being a consensus, I would say let's not give them any more attention.
57:09
Jordan: Yeah.
57:11
Kevin: What's the most embarrassing thing that you've ever put online that you've had to take down.
57:16
Alban: Multiple blog posts that I wrote when Facebook originally had blog posts.
57:20
Kevin: That's it.
57:21
Kevin: That's the most embarrassing thing you put online.
57:23
Alban: Oh yeah, I mean, there's some emotional Albin as a teenager, college kid moments that I just was like the best way to process this is to write it out in a blog post.
57:33
Alban: And eventually Facebook got big enough that I was like man, there's a lot of stuff online that.
57:38
Kevin: That is embarrassing.
57:38
Kevin: So you wrote blog posts where you were like like bearing your soul or something.
57:42
Kevin: Oh yeah, oh.
57:44
Alban: I mean I got to really make sure those things are nuked.
57:46
Alban: Yeah, it's like what's the worst thing you ever did?
57:50
Kevin: I was going to the Wayback machine this afternoon.
57:53
Alban: I was checking the way back right now.
57:55
Kevin: What about you, Jordan?
57:56
Kevin: You ever put anything up that you had to take down.
58:01
Jordan: You know, I don't think so.
58:02
Jordan: I think that it's mainly been other people tagging me in like unflattering images where maybe I have like a double chin and I'm laughing in a stupid way, or something like that.
58:13
Kevin: Oh, so that you're wanting them to take it down?
58:15
Kevin: It's not you.
58:16
Jordan: I'll just untag myself.
58:17
Jordan: I don't make them take it down.
58:18
Jordan: Honestly, it's hard for me to Just tag somebody else.
58:20
Jordan: Yeah, it's hard for me to be like embarrassed so I don't think I have anything embarrassing.
58:24
Jordan: I'm sure other people could look through my social media and be like, well, that would be embarrassing if I posted that.
58:29
Jordan: But I just, I don't know, maybe I just don't get embarrassed very easily.
58:33
Kevin: Like in life in general or just online stuff.
58:35
Jordan: Life in general.
58:36
Jordan: I don't know if something happens and like I could, I could be walking on ice and Biffet in the video, like it could be caught on like a ring doorbell and go viral and I still won't be embarrassed, like I just don't care.
58:48
Jordan: I don't care what people think.
58:50
Alban: Kev.
58:50
Alban: What's your answer?
58:52
Kevin: There may have been more, but the immediate one that comes to mind just happened like a couple of months ago.
58:56
Kevin: We were, we were out of town and my mom had ordered some something from Amazon.
59:01
Kevin: I'll tell you what she ordered she ordered Mott's applesauce.
59:04
Kevin: She likes Mott's applesauce.
59:05
Jordan: She ordered it from Amazon.
59:06
Jordan: She ordered it from.
59:06
Kevin: Amazon.
59:07
Kevin: She ordered it from Amazon.
59:08
Kevin: Yeah, she gets it from Amazon, I don't know, but it was delivered on the front door and it was delivered in a Mott's box, not just like an Amazon box.
59:15
Kevin: She didn't know it was inside, she didn't know the actual, everyone could tell what that was and I don't know.
59:21
Kevin: Two hours or so after it was delivered, somebody pulled up into our driveway, got out of their car, grabbed the Mott's applesauce, put it in their car and drove off.
59:31
Kevin: And I saw it on the camera and I thought that is so weird.
59:35
Kevin: Who took Mott's applesauce?
59:37
Kevin: So I took the video from the doorbell cam and I put it on the next door site and I said somebody grab our Mott's applesauce because my mom's really needs that applesauce.
59:49
Kevin: Just like snarky, hilarious, whatever.
59:54
Kevin: I was just goofing around.
59:55
Kevin: And yeah, and my sister, I don't know texted me like 15, 20 minutes later.
1:00:01
Kevin: She's like take that video down.
1:00:02
Kevin: I knew you guys were out of town so I asked my friend to stop and grab the package.
1:00:05
Kevin: Oh no, she's my sister's friend.
1:00:07
Kevin: The other one's on the lookout for the applesauce thief.
1:00:15
Kevin: But it was not a thief, it was just a friend trying to help out.
1:00:18
Jordan: It's really funny.