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Insider Insight: RSS Feeds with Buzzsprout's Alban Brooke · Story Scaling

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: We are podcastvideoscom.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Our goal is to educate, enlighten, engage and entertain.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: We believe in the power of love and transformation through storytelling.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Welcome back everybody to Story Scaling with podcastvideoscom.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: I'm Dan Kraft.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: I am the editorial director here at podcastvideoscom and we're bringing in some outside help.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Today we are joined by Alvin Brooke.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: He is the director of marketing at Buzzsprout.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Alvin, welcome back.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Dan, thanks for having me Awesome.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I want to talk a little bit old school to start today off the idea of the RSS feed, real simple syndication.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: This is sort of the seed from which podcasting grew, at least in a distribution sense.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: But do they still matter?
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Yes, rss feeds are the backbone of all of podcasting, and I think we've gotten to a place on the web where it becomes a little bit important to talk about what RSS feeds are and why they're so important.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: You and I both will remember back in the day when the web was really slow and people didn't publish very much, and so you might load up a webpage only to find out ESPN hadn't written a new article that day, and so then you'd load up another page and you'd see that your other website hadn't published anything new.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: There was no endless feed, and so somebody came up with this idea of really simple syndication, where you could subscribe to websites and get notified when they publish new blog posts.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: And then two people they publish new blog posts, and then two people Adam Curry and Dave Weiner took all Dave's work on RSS and applied it to audio, so you could upload an audio file and anybody who subscribed to that RSS feed would get that audio file delivered to them automatically.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: And the next time you uploaded one, they'd get it as soon as it was available as well.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: Exactly so.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: This solves quite a few problems.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: One, you don't have to go searching for that audio, you get it automatically.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Two, it was downloaded in the background.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: It used to take a long time to download things, so it was nice to get it downloaded to your phone or your computer right off the bat.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: But it also made it so that the person who created the content, the content creator, and the audience were not disintermediated by somebody else.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: It was not something in the middle, it was just a direct connection.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: And what ended up happening with the web after 2001, 2004, when podcasting was first started was we got social media.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: We got a lot of sites that aggregated all of the content together.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: So Facebook now is actually between me and all my friends.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: If they post something, facebook checks and goes ah, do they want?
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: I'll see if I think I should share this with Albin or anybody else, and YouTube does the same.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: And there's really only a few places on the web now where, as a creator, you still have a direct connection to your audience.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: And those three places are your own website you can convince people to go to your own website still email, where you can send an email directly to your audience and podcasting, and that is built off of RSS because that's how, when I upload an episode, that it gets delivered directly to my audience, not when the algorithm thinks it's pretty good, not if it kind of hits the right moment.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: It's every single time, a hundred percent of the time.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: Anybody who is checking that RSS feed, they will get the download right away and it really changes the relationship.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: You can just feel so much more comfortable that it takes a while to grow a following on an RSS feed, but once you have them, you have them forever.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: You don't end up like lots of content creators.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: You build a big following on TikTok and then TikTok's algorithm changes and then all of a sudden you see it drops off with podcasting.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: Something isn't going to jump in the middle and shut you down.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: You've always got that connection.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: Right, that RSS feed is stable.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: It may not grow in the leaps and bounds that you'll see an algorithm grab something, but an algorithm can spit you back out just as quickly as it really sweeps you up.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and we I mean, we all saw this with things like Facebook for a long time was telling every business, oh, put your business on Facebook and put this little like button on your physical business.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: And everybody was putting stickers for Facebook, all of the businesses saying like us.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: And the businesses thought it was great because then they could communicate with their customers.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: But then what happened was their customers signed up for Facebook, they started using it and then Facebook said businesses don't really get to talk to their customers anymore.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: Actually, if you pay us, then we'll tell your own customers what you want to know.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: And reach dropped off to near zero for businesses.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: The classic bait and switch yeah, sign up.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, now pay us to use what you just signed up for.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: And with podcasting we don't have that problem because there's not a Facebook or a Tik TOK or a YouTube sitting there in the middle.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: Um, you may use a service like buzzsprout or another podcast host, but you don't have to.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: And even if you use a podcasting host, they're not using some sort of algorithm to decide which content is delivered and which isn't.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: It's all 100% delivered to your audience, Cool.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about the side of your website where you can actually pick and choose the directories that will list a podcast.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: Obviously, there are quite a few out there.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: Apple and Spotify are the big dogs in the industry, but there are probably hundreds of smaller ones out there.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: You guys have, I believe, about 25 available, and some of them I signed up for one.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: You get listed in others.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: Why so many different directories, and is there a pick and choose method to this, or is it simply a good idea for most podcasters to get into as many of them as possible?
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: Well, it started off where directories were, just like, you know, the phone book.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: It was truly a directory of all the great podcasts you could go and listen to, and so it just helped people find podcasts.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: And so just help people find podcasts.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: And then more have sprung up, as more big companies have said hey, this podcasting content is really cool, we want it to be available inside our platform.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: So 2016, spotify says we're going to add all podcasts to our platform.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: So submit, tell us about your podcast and we'll put it in Spotify.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: And then we had Google podcasts do the same.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: And then we had Google Podcasts do the same.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: And then we had Google Podcasts shut down and YouTube do the same.
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: And we had Amazon Music.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: And we had Facebook for a little while, say, they were going to do podcasting.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: And, like you said, there are dozens of smaller podcast hosts or smaller podcasting apps, podcasting apps but I would recommend probably getting into all of them, unless you personally have some reason that you don't like a particular one.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: So one of my shows is not in Spotify and that's because it's about the podcasting industry, and Spotify's goal for podcasting has really been trying to have everything on Spotify move, all listening there, kind of like a YouTube of podcasting Sure.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: And since that didn't align with what we want for the industry, we said, oh, we're not going to be a part of that.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: So unless you have an ideological reason, I'd say get them listed everywhere and help your podcast grow, okay.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Good advice, good advice, good advice.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about you'd mentioned that Spotify is was sort of the YouTube of the audio side of things the growth in YouTube as a platform, the growth of video involvement with the podcast it's no longer strictly an audio-only medium if the creator doesn't want it to be.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: How has that affected your business and your approach to the customer base, given that without YouTube, you're basically nowhere on the web at this point for a lot of algorithm-based matrices?
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: It hasn't affected us too much because we've always focused on audio-only podcasting.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: A lot of what we really identified and love about podcasting is the audio component.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: It's that I can be mowing the lawn or doing the dishes or going for a run and I can listen.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: Podcasting is this one thing that doesn't require full, undivided attention at every moment.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: Reading needs it, video needs it, social media needs every you totally locked in, but audio you can be driving a car and still listening to a podcast, and that's what I really loved about it.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: They're also lightweight and they build much more of an intimate connection between the host and the audience, because when people listen, they often listen for five, 10 times as long, as if they were watching a video.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: So we've always invested in audio.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: That's really been where our focus is.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: There are a lot of podcasts, though, that have found massive success by becoming video podcasts as well.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: So they do the video component and they put the audio out separately.
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: Video component and they put the audio out separately, and I think this is a great marketing strategy, because you've got YouTube to really help boost your numbers, especially in the beginning, and then you have the audience, the audio side, to retain your audience, so that's a really nice combination.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: The downside is, if you are a new creator, it's much more anxiety inducing to be on video than it is on audio.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: The level of technical experience that you need to do a nice camera versus just a microphone it's a bit more.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: It's much heavier editing, and so I often recommend for people to just pick one thing and start with that, unless you have that technical experience, because trying to take everything on at once can be pretty daunting.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: But find the one thing you want it to be, whether it be social media or a newsletter or blog or podcast or videos, whatever it is.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: Pick the one and then gradually grow from there to incorporate other types of media and that's that's basically been our business pitch is the stuff you don't know how to do, the stuff you don't like to do, just we'll handle that yeah, it's.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's so much easier to be partnering with somebody who's got the whole studio set up, who has the editors, who has all of that taken care of, so the you can be the subject matter expert.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: Who is an expert in crocheting, and you don't need to become an expert in camera equipment.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: You can just show up, do your show about crochet and move on with your life rather than trying to figure everything out.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: So if the finances are there for you especially in the experimental stage where you're like I don't know if we're going to do this for years, I think a hundred percent find a partner you know like podcast videos, and figure out is this for you, before you go and invest $20,000 in tons of random equipment and courses and all this time let's just let's figure out, let's do five episodes first and see if this is something you'll stick with Exactly so cool Alvin.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: this has been awesome.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: I hope it's been as good for our listeners slash viewers, given a little bit of insight into how one of the big dogs in the industry works.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: I really appreciate you taking the time out and hopefully we can do this again soon.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: It's been a pleasure.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: Thank you for.