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Carly Baker on Running Hubspot's Podcast and YouTube Network · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Really excited today to have Carly Baker from HubSpot.
• 0:14
  She is the media partnerships lead at the HubSpot Media Network and was previously the listener acquisition lead for HubSpot Original Podcast. There's so much to unpack here.
• 0:25
  Carly very graciously fielded all of my podcast and YouTube 101 questions. She's extremely knowledgeable about all of this. I am not.
• 0:33
  And [chuckles] so she gave us kind of a primer on, like, what's going on in the podcast and YouTube worlds right now, and then what are some things that us B2B SaaS folks can take away from that.
• 0:45
  A couple interesting takeaways. One is the audience-first approach. One of the reasons that HubSpot has built a media network is because they want to give a platform to creators.
• 0:54
  Interestingly, creators have become, in many cases, and are continuing to become more powerful than brands, and this is HubSpot's way of kind of participating in that trend. Another is that everything is audience first.
• 1:06
  You know, obviously there are algorithms that, you know, affect the way stuff is distributed and the way that people discover media like YouTube and audio, but there is absolutely no way that someone would watch or listen to the equivalent of an SEO-optimized post, right?
• 1:24
  So, like, there's not this layer, this algorithmic layer that us tech folks are so used to dealing with. They have their own versions, their own issues and challenges, of course, but, but that was a really cool takeaway.
• 1:34
  Carly goes into a bunch of detail about all of this. I learned a ton that we could have spent two hours talking, and that still would not have been enough, so very appreciative of Carly for taking the time to do it.
• 1:43
  I think you guys will really like this episode. Real quick before we jump in, come check out the Superpath Pro 30-day free trial. So when you sign up for the free trial, you get a month of everything we offer.
• 1:54
  We think it's really important that you get the full 30 days. So, one, you get access to the Slack channels. Two, you get access to our monthly one-on-one calls. Three, you get access to our monthly group calls.
• 2:04
  And then, four, you get access to our weekly co-working sessions.
• 2:07
  So there's tons of opportunities to participate, to meet people, to network, and then u- using the co-working session's a great way to get some work done with some other folks in Superpath Pro.
• 2:16
  So you can check all of that out, superpath.co. Get the details, sign up for the trial. I'll get out of the way. I really enjoyed this conversation with Carly Baker, and I hope you do too.
• 2:25
  This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by our friends at Ten Speed. You've been part of this community long enough to know that cranking out blogs doesn't quite do the trick anymore.
• 2:35
  SaaS and PLG companies need sophisticated content that builds authority and performs in the AI era, and that's where Ten Speed comes in. Ten Speed is more than an SEO agency. They're your complete content partner.
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• 3:08
  If you're ready to transform your content, schedule a consultation with the link in the show notes and be sure to mention Superpath for 10% off. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today.
• 3:18
  Very excited to have Carly Baker from HubSpot, legendary content marketing company. We're gonna be talking more about podcasts today, but Carly, would you mind telling us a little bit who you are?
• 3:28
  At the moment, you're the media partnerships lead of the HubSpot Media Network, which is something I actually don't know a ton about.
• 3:34
  And prior to that, you were the listener acquisition lead for HubSpot's original podcast, which I have lots of questions about.
• 3:39
  But could you tell us in your own words, tell us a little bit about who you are and some of the work you're up to at HubSpot. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having me on.
• 3:46
  I was really excited to come on and to share a little bit more about sort of all things podcasting and content that we're doing at HubSpot.
• 3:53
  I have a little bit of a different background, I think, than most people in the creat- or in the corporate world. A lot of people go corporate to creative.
• 4:01
  I went creative to corporate, so I actually, in my former life, was a professional musician, then studied music business and ended up coming into podcasting.
• 4:10
  And I have kind of touched every part of the creator and podcasting life cycle at HubSpot. So I was a talent manager. I've also done talent sourcing and business development for our networks.
• 4:21
  I've worked on our creator content, our licensed content, our owned content, and right now I'm leading media partnerships, so working with other publishers and brands to help grow sort of the big conglomerate now that we have, which is the HubSpot Media Network, which is our sort of digital landscape across the board.
• 4:38
  So our newsletters, our YouTube channels, our podcasts, our blogs, our social accounts, all of those things.
• 4:44
  So sort of taking in, you know, omni-channel partnerships and strategy and while also working with creators at the same time. Dang, that sounds really cool. Can you talk a little bit more about the Media Network?
• 4:56
  I actually didn't realize that it wasn't all HubSpot-owned media. These are, in some cases, independent creators who are part of this network. Is that right? Yes. So yeah, how does that work? How do people join?
• 5:06
  What are like... what's part of it? Like, what's your role in it? Yeah.
• 5:10
  So we have a mix of both, like, content that we work with that's owned by creators, that's licensed, and then we also have our own branded content as well, and the Media Network as a whole contains both programs.
• 5:22
  We started building our Media Network with the acquisition of The Hustle a couple of years ago.
• 5:27
  Of course, that brought over The Hustle newsletter and the My First Million podcast and, you know, sort of the first iteration of the Media Network was just the podcast network. We had My First Million.
• 5:37
  It came with the acquisition. We saw a huge opportunity to start a business network. At the time, there really wasn't a business content network.
• 5:45
  The idea of sort of more individualized and, like, niche podcast networks was just kind of on the rise, and so the first sort of part of the Media Network that we had started was the podcast network, and that was also the first time that we were really working with creators as a brand.
• 6:01
  You know, of course, the more like product side of HubSpot, we've been doing direct response and working with creators through a lot of those paid efforts for many years, but this was the first time where we actually wanted to develop-A creator program and develop a podcast program, and a lot of that was leaning heavily on, you know, doing licensed engagements and being advertisers with creators who were already running their shows and had an audience that was really overlapped with our business audience and sort of who we wanted to become customers.
• 6:30
  So that was kind of the first toe that we put in the water [laughs] in terms of working with creators, and now we have an entire creator program that's sort of launched as a result of that, where, you know, we work with creators on our podcasts, on YouTube, on newsletters.
• 6:46
  They generate a large amount of demand. We do long-term partnerships, so we try to not be an advertiser or brand that's going for volume but is going for depth.
• 6:56
  So we try to do omni-channel with all the creators that we work with and also work with other brands in that way as well.
• 7:03
  So we're kind of are doing a two-pronged approach where we're generating demand for HubSpot as a business and using those audiences and those creators who are speaking to them as another vehicle for us to grow demand.
• 7:16
  Then we're also trying to just have more of a brand presence as a media network with our own content, so act as top of funnel to really be providing education and entertainment for people that, you know, could potentially become customers and also, you know, entertaining and providing additional value to people that are customers as well.
• 7:36
  So we kind of have three different funnels or three different highways that are kind of going on at the same time that are all sort of coming in and out of the media network that we have, including the ways that we work with creators.
• 7:48
  Okay, got it. And then on the back end, is there, like, a shared infrastructure or, like, a shared services among these different partners to streamline production and make things efficient? Yeah.
• 7:59
  So we're a little bit different than most networks. Like, on the podcast side specifically, we don't produce...
• 8:05
  Like, podcasting networks now, there's kind of, like, 100 different ways you can run the business of the network. The HubSpot network is really different because we actually don't do ad deals with other advertisers.
• 8:18
  So traditional podcast networks, they will go and sell ad inventory and sort of broker those deals. We wanna be the exclusive advertiser for these creators.
• 8:27
  We know that they have a, an audience that's a good fit for our software. We don't wanna be working with Dove Soap and Barstool and all these other people and take a cut of that.
• 8:38
  We really believe in the editorial quality and the audience, and so we just wanna put our products in front of them and that's it. So we're not doing ad sales.
• 8:47
  It also benefits the creator because they're getting guaranteed revenue. They're engaging with us in really long-term deals. They n- are comfortable. They know the products that they're endorsing. They know it's HubSpot.
• 8:58
  They're really ambassadors for us in a way that most networks don't treat their creators. It's very transactional, so we try really to stay away from that. We provide, like, programming. We have a community.
• 9:10
  We do individualized support.
• 9:12
  So we try to be really creator first in that way, but we're not producing and, like, editorially directing sort of where their show is going or providing, like, direct support in that way, which some networks do.
• 9:25
  This allows them to maintain ownership of the show and to maintain the IP, and we simply are doing license deals as an advertiser, so they stay in control in that way, which benefits the creator longer term, benefits us as the advertiser as well.
• 9:41
  This is so fascinating. I feel like HubSpot is really tapping into something important here.
• 9:45
  Maybe, gosh, I don't know, five, five-plus years ago, I remember reading this article by a software engineer named, I think his name was Dan Lu, and he wrote this article about how his personal blog was getting way more page views, like, by a factor of 10 than the corporate blog at his company, and he just- [laughs]...
• 10:04
  was sort of, like, saying like, "Why is that?" [laughs] And it's, like, all the reasons you could imagine. It's like the company's risk-averse, there's, like, 10 people working on it, but mostly they're in meetings.
• 10:13
  Like, all these things happen that prevent the stuff from getting published, whereas he can just write an article, post it, it'd get picked up on Hacker News, the next thing you know- [laughs]...
• 10:20
  there's 50,000 people on his website. It's like this trend of creators being more powerful than brands, at least in some cases, has, I feel like, really come to the forefront because the, the tools are better for this.
• 10:31
  The algorithms clearly favor it. Yeah. And I... my guess is if you look at the analytics behind, specifically for podcasts, you would find that, like, you know, like on My First Million, like, how...
• 10:42
  a brand could never create that show. Like, it's way too... It's casual, it's funny, it's provocative. It's all these things, like, a brand I feel like couldn't do on their own, but the people can.
• 10:52
  And then HubSpot, HubSpot can come in and participate in it. I- you know, like, do you see this as kind of a parallel lane to influencer marketing, or is this just, like, a totally new approach to it? Yeah.
• 11:04
  So that's a great question. I do think it's interesting.
• 11:06
  I was actually just talking with someone about this earlier today because people think about, like, branded podcast content in a very certain way, and I think you and I probably know about businesses or companies that start podcasts where it's, like, very thinly ve- Like, the entire purpose of having the podcast is just to sell, and it's very obvious to the listener.
• 11:29
  And it's like they're not really providing that much value. They're constantly mentioning the product. It's like a very specific vehicle that's just been designed for selling.
• 11:38
  And, like, what we've done with our, quote-unquote, "branded content" is gone, like, as far away from that as possible, right? We're, like, barely touching HubSpot with a 10-foot stick.
• 11:49
  But what it means is that, like, we're really trying, especially in the audio side, to stay at, like, the tippity top of the funnel.
• 11:56
  We wanna just be there for whenever whoever's listening, if they decide to have a c- they wanna have a CRM or if they wanna change CRMs, they have a positive association with us.
• 12:07
  But we're not trying to force the HubSpot CRM messaging into My First Million.Right And to like constantly be sort of on that life cycle of making it really closely tied to our brand.
• 12:22
  We're thinking about it in a very audience-first perspective, which I do think is different than a lot of folks that are doing like branded content or doing branded podcasts in that way, where like we're just looking for audiences that's a good fit.
• 12:35
  If and when they're ready to convert, they know about us, and that's kind of it. Right. YouTube has totally changed the game
• 12:45
  in terms of how we think about advertising, how we think about brand association with HubSpot, how we think about our audience, et cetera.
• 12:54
  And so what I shared is very much the lens in which we think about the audio side of podcasting. On the video side, we have a completely different ad and monetization strategy. We don't talk about the product at all.
• 13:06
  We create custom content offers that are branded with My First Million, that are developed with Sam and Sean, that are done out of what our audience asks them to, that maybe have a HubSpot logo on them but are like really heavily pushing My First Million, and that we've seen convert so much better than, you know, spending two minutes of a YouTube video showing you how to build an email newsletter in HubSpot, just because it's not the right fit for the audience, right?
• 13:32
  So we're always trying to make relevant content that fits the channels but is still associated with HubSpot and is still, you know, bringing value, but just maybe not directly through the product. Right.
• 13:46
  You mentioned audience first, and for someone like me who comes from a text content background- Mm-hmm...
• 13:52
  I feel like folks like me are faced right now with taking audience first more seriously than we have in the past maybe. Mm-hmm.
• 14:01
  Like, there was never an era of YouTube or podcasting where there was like this playbook that everybody could exploit, like referring to SEO for us. [laughs] Yeah. You know what I mean?
• 14:09
  [laughs] Like, it had to be audience first. Like, why would anybody listen to a podcast- Mm-hmm... that's optimized for something, you know? Do you think...
• 14:17
  What could the folks like us take away from what you see on successful podcasts and YouTube channels? Like, y- how can we be more audience first, particularly for folks- Mm-hmm...
• 14:28
  who are working as part of a brand and have to speak on behalf of that brand, and maybe don't have the same level of freedom to get creators to just do their thing and be funny and interesting, and then kinda worry about top of funnel as a goal for that?
• 14:43
  Yeah, that's a great question. I think it really depends on the context of where the text or the writing is going. I mean, the other challenge that I see as less...
• 14:54
  well, I guess maybe on the audio side we are seeing with AI, but like everyone that I know that's in the text-based content sphere is freaking out about AI- [laughs] Yeah...
• 15:05
  and about how it's just like there has never been more mediocre or bad, like, text-based content on the internet than there is right now, and it's incredibly difficult to find good content and to find stuff that's written by a real individual.
• 15:21
  I do think that the pendulum will swing and that consumers and audiences will get a lot smarter and be able to detect a lot more of it, although at the same time that means that, like, audiences have to get smarter faster than the technology [laughs]
• 15:36
  Yeah... which is a race, and I think no one really knows who's gonna win that battle. But it is harder to stand out, I think, because of AI and to find that audience.
• 15:47
  I saw this LinkedIn post, and I'm blanking on his name right now. It's this guy that I think he's an account manager at Beehiiv, and he posted on LinkedIn and he was like, "Where are my LinkedIn weirdos?"
• 15:57
  Like, "Where are the people on here that are like making weird content?" And he got like hundreds if not thousands of comments, people suggesting these profiles.
• 16:06
  And so I think, like, part of the challenge with text is SEO search volatility, also never been worse, AI content.
• 16:14
  People are like kind of doing crazy things with paid and keywords and, like, climbing the ranks again in the days of, like, early SEO. People are also not using the internet in the same way.
• 16:27
  Like, I mean, I don't know about you and sort of what your search habits are, but I'm going to LinkedIn before I'm going to Google to, like, learn about business content and to, like, find something. So, like- Oh, wow.
• 16:37
  That's interesting. Yeah. But it could be a generational thing, too. Like, I'm very much a Gen Z, Millennial cusper, and, like, the way that we use the internet is very different than other generations use the internet.
• 16:49
  But I think the principles are the same. When we're thinking about a podcast editorially, when we're thinking about a YouTube video, it's always about, like,
• 16:59
  what's a challenge that they're having, what's something that they wanna learn about, and, like, how are we using our expertise to help them overcome that? Like, it's very simple, right? Almost too simple.
• 17:09
  Are you sure it's not more complicated? [laughs] Yes, it's very simple, I think, actually. But the... but what goes... The content creation part of it I think can be very simple.
• 17:18
  I think the difficult part about it is we have a lot of notions about who we think our audience is, and very few of us actually know who our audience is.
• 17:29
  [laughs] And when you're creating content for who you think they are versus who they actually are, you're never gonna see the results.
• 17:37
  And so having a really strong understanding and creating, honestly, a lane of feedback for your audien- like, with your audience is really important.
• 17:47
  That's changed a lot of how we actually think about our podcast content because of YouTube. When you're pro- producing an audio-only show, you're putting it out on Apple and Spotify, all these other players.
• 17:58
  It's like you're kind of screaming into the void. You don't really know if people are resonating with it unless they send you a DM or they leave you a positive review.
• 18:06
  But platforms that are now, you know, the Substack, the Patreons, the YouTubes of the world that are allowing direct interaction between audience and creator, like, that's a feedback loop that you can very easily use to your advantage to decide what you wanna talk about, how you wanna talk about, and, like, what your audience is actually interested in.So I do think, like, having a open level of communication is really important, and people that like you will always be happy to share feedback or tell you what they wanna learn.
• 18:35
  It's just a matter of asking, and I think a- too many people are afraid to ask. Yeah, that's a great point.
• 18:41
  There's something very cool that's happened, or maybe it has not happened, with podcast, which is that it's not all so reliant on one platform, and it's not all driven by some giant algorithm that everyone in that field is trying to mess with- Mm-hmm...
• 18:55
  or optimize for, I guess. Anil Dash wrote this really cool article, which I'll try to remember to put in the show note. It's called, uh, Wherever You Get Your Podcast Is a Radical Statement.
• 19:05
  [laughs] You know, it's like when people say, like, "Oh, yeah, just get it, like, get content briefly, like, wherever you get your podcasts," like- Mm-hmm...
• 19:10
  that's actually insane because usually it's like, "Follow me on Twitter, check me on LinkedIn, join my Substack, see me on Patre," or whatever. Mm-hmm.
• 19:17
  Uh, I feel like that has to open up some freedom, but one of the things I wanted to follow up on what you just said is there, there's a limitation. Like, there's no interaction.
• 19:26
  I- is that part of the reason why YouTube has become so huge in the podcast world? I think it is. It's definitely a part of the reason that it's become so big.
• 19:34
  I think the other part of the reason is that search and discoverability on Apple and Spotify, which they're not the only two platforms, but they're the biggest two platforms, which is why everyone always talks about them, discoverability and search is really, really terrible.
• 19:49
  Like, you could even search, like, business podcasts and, like, you will not find all of the business podcasts that are on there.
• 19:55
  Like, unless you're searching specifically for the show name, it's gonna be very difficult for you to find what you're looking for or to, like, discover a new show. So the discoverability there is really bad.
• 20:07
  YouTube is completely search-driven, so you could search my name, your name, you know, anyone. You can search for a topic.
• 20:15
  You can search for, like, literally anything, and it's a more powerful search engine than Google, right? And so it's a very content-first...
• 20:24
  YouTube is very, like, content-first in that way, and so I think the audio side of things is r- super, super far behind in terms of discoverability.
• 20:34
  People are trying to overcome that, including us, by doing a lot more, like, cross-platform marketing, like marketing or, you know, sharing their audio, their podcast in their newsletter and on LinkedIn and, like, really direct...
• 20:47
  sending more direct traffic versus just expecting that people are gonna search for how to build an email funnel on Spotify and that their episode about it is gonna come up. [laughs] Yeah.
• 20:59
  [laughs] So that's, I think, one of the biggest reasons why we're seeing YouTube be a big part of it. YouTube, I think, has also just been a platform for creators.
• 21:10
  Like, the term creator and YouTube have had a long-standing relationship. Like, think about the original YouTubers from 15 years ago.
• 21:20
  Like, they were creators before we even used the word creators, and Apple and Spotify just don't have... Like, podcast and creator were not terms that were commonly used together.
• 21:29
  They were very separate for a long time, and so I do think that YouTube is definitely capitalizing on just understanding how to work with creators and creator entrepreneurs and people that are creating content professionally for a living in a way that these other platforms are now kind of scrambling to catch up.
• 21:47
  [laughs] I mean, Spotify is an amazing example of the massive deals that we've seen come and go and all of these things that are constantly in the news about how they're, you know, kind of messing up working with creators- [laughs]...
• 21:59
  and you don't see that with YouTube. They've really nailed down those types of partnerships and have capitalized on that to help them, in return, grow their platform. Right.
• 22:10
  I find it fascinating because, like, I see lots of podcasts in my YouTube feed- Mm-hmm... and it does help with discoverability hugely. Yeah. Stuff I would never find in the podcast app. Yep.
• 22:21
  The Apple one, like, that's the one I use. Um- Yeah... but also, like, they get an insane number of views. I mean, I'm sure, like, what you see is, like, stuff that is... You know, their algorithm has... It's proven out.
• 22:31
  People wanna see this thing, so there's lots of views. But I'm always sort of stunned when I see a podcast that's, like, two hours long with 750,000 views or something, but that seems like it happens all the time.
• 22:43
  It does happen all the time, but when you work at a brand or when you work w- with an advertiser, when you're kind of on the inside of things, you realize, like, so many of those publicly available metrics are just fake.
• 22:55
  You can buy YouTube views. You can buy subscribers in the same way you can buy newsletter subscribers. You can buy podcast downloads. Like, every...
• 23:03
  There's a marketplace for all of those things, and, like, one of the challenging... And I talk a lot about video and a lot about YouTube and podcasting, and people are always asking me, "Should I do it?
• 23:14
  Should I not do it?" And I'm a very middle-of-the-road person, actually, about, you know, YouTube and podcasting. I think it's a winning strategy. It's not the winning strategy.
• 23:24
  There's a lot of ways you can use video to grow your show that's not posting long-form videos on YouTube.
• 23:29
  But, you know, we personally, at HubSpot, we have YouTube channels for all of our, you know, owned branded shows, quote-unquote "branded shows". And
• 23:40
  what people miss about the conversation with audio versus video is we can look in an episode and see that the average listener retention is 85%. Most of our listeners are listening to 85% of our episodes on audio.
• 23:56
  They're hearing all of our ads. They're hearing... They're basically getting almost all of the value that we're providing for them through that episode, right? Right.
• 24:05
  You look at that same 45-minute episode on YouTube and the average view duration is, like, 15 minutes. Like, someone staying around for, like, maybe a third of that episode. They're not hearing all of the ads.
• 24:16
  They're not engaged. They're not taking away all of the value.
• 24:19
  So, like, yes, there's 750,000 views, but how many people-Actually stayed for longer than five seconds after they clicked in 'cause the thumbnail was exciting- Yeah, yeah... and then left.
• 24:31
  Like, there's so much nuance into these numbers, and I think that there's a gap in education, and there's sort of a social proof issue, again, because you can buy all of these stats.
• 24:40
  But I always tell people that audio is the best place to develop a long-standing and a very deep relationship with a person.
• 24:49
  Because if they stick around, they're not gonna stick around the same way that they do on YouTube. Right. And so those are just kind of some of the differences. YouTube is amazing for kinda being a drive-by.
• 25:01
  It's gonna put your content in front of a lot of people. Are those the most qualified people? In most cases, maybe not, but you're getting more eyeballs than what Apple and Spotify are giving you, which is nothing.
• 25:12
  But then you can send the more targeted traffic or qualified listeners directly to your show through, like, other marketing efforts. So you're kind of building...
• 25:22
  and the way that you're sort of using the platforms on both video and audio is different, but you're building two separate audiences.
• 25:30
  I think it's wrong to assume that you're gonna ask people to be more involved by going listening to your audio to... than sitting down in front of their TV or in front of their computer or on their phone and watching.
• 25:42
  I think it's a lot easier to ask people to downgrade and go from watching to listening, right?
• 25:47
  And so you have to think about that f- like, how you're directing traffic, and the fact that you're, like, kind of just building two different audiences at the same time, and that's okay. That all makes so much sense.
• 25:57
  Like, when I watch YouTube videos, I usually hover over the timeline and then just look for the bump. [laughs] Like, you know, like, so you know where- [laughs]... like, the most...
• 26:04
  it says, like, people were interested in this spot, and I listen to that, and then I see if it's good or not. Yeah, you just straight, [laughs] straightforward. [laughs] Yeah.
• 26:11
  You know, before the podcast, you posted on your LinkedIn and said, like, "Hey, if people have questions, post them here," and w- there were some really interesting questions.
• 26:18
  And one person actually asked if, "Is it really a podcast if there's a video component?" Which I thought was kind of a funny question, but- [laughs]... there's something true to that, too.
• 26:26
  Like, is it a podcast, or is it just a show with two different formats? Yes.
• 26:30
  I was laughing at that question more so because it's, like, the hottest topic of them all, and everyone's trying to decide if we wanna use the term, like, vodcast, if we wanna use, like, simulcast, if we still wanna call it a podcast.
• 26:43
  Like, some people are very clearly on, like, podcasts should only be for audio shows and not for video shows. I don't have the answer. I think just because it started as audio-only doesn't mean...
• 26:55
  and that meaning, like, podcast, doesn't mean that the term has to change. I know that there's some people that might be fighting me in the comments, but so be it.
• 27:04
  I think the term podcast is fine, such as which everything in the podcast industry has decided.
• 27:10
  Eventually, sort of five people who are the loudest and, I guess, are, end up being nominated as a decision-maker will decide what the ultimate term is, and the rest of us [laughs] will fall in line.
• 27:20
  But I think for now, the term podcast is fine. People are also... The sort of second part to
• 27:28
  that question or something that question made me think about is that YouTube does not equal video, and video does not equal YouTube. There's...
• 27:36
  or, like, posting long-form podcast content on YouTube and video are not the same things, and we use the term a lot interchangeably.
• 27:44
  There's a lot of ways to utilize video, either on LinkedIn or on other social platforms, that's not posting full-length YouTube videos. That's still using video.
• 27:55
  And so I think those terms are used interchangeably in a lot of ways that they shouldn't be, and, like, there's a very clear distinction there as well. So that's the other thing- Yeah... that I would say. Got it.
• 28:05
  That makes sense. Somebody else had asked, and I love this question, "What kind of data is driving your content decisions?" And I'm curious about that because, like,
• 28:12
  okay, as a non-podcast expert, one of the things I observe is that people who are already famous seem to have the most listeners. So then if you're someone like me, and you want- Mm-hmm...
• 28:24
  to start a podcast about content marketing, like, I'm- Mm-hmm... you're not famous. [laughs] Like- [laughs]... like, should I be using- Not yet, Jimmy. Not yet. Not yet.
• 28:31
  But should I be using data to drive these decisions? Like, 'cause it doesn't seem like these really famous people are. It seems like they're just famous, so people listen, you know?
• 28:38
  So, like, what are the cues that someone like me or other, like, other, you know, creators or brands who are trying to get a podcast going, like, what are you looking at? Yeah.
• 28:47
  A question back for you to start: What makes you think that podcasts that are done by celebrities have the most listeners? I'm genuinely curious. Oh. Well, okay, so SmartLess is top of mind. Okay.
• 29:01
  I have no idea h- how many downloads they get, but, like, I just started listening to the show because someone recommended this episode with Tig Notaro, wh- which was, like, hilarious. It was so funny.
• 29:10
  And I was like, "I wonder what's up with this podcast." I listen- I'm, like, checking it out. I'm like, "Oh, they got a $100 million SiriusXM deal."
• 29:17
  So I assume that means the show's getting an insane amount of downloads. You know, maybe that's just one outlier, or maybe it's not telling the full story, as I think you might be insinuating. Yes.
• 29:29
  It's definitely not telling the full story. There's a couple of things that I'll say to this.
• 29:33
  Number one, this is a very important distinction, and if you take away one thing from this episode, let it be this: Downloads do not equal people. This is a super important distinction. Oh.
• 29:45
  Downloads- I wish I had talked to you about this earlier. [laughs] Yes. People-- [laughs] You could-- It's okay. You could chop this into- [laughs]... the front of the episode. Well, I mean, like, a year ago.
• 29:53
  [laughs] Yes, yes. Oh, we can... Yeah, we could... We'll hash it out right now. It's okay. [laughs] But yeah, downloads don't equal people.
• 30:00
  People, like, individual listeners generate downloads, but someone can generate many downloads for you, and so it's not actually indicative of how big your audience size is. For a long time, the industry-agreed metric of
• 30:17
  what, if your show is successful or not, was downloads. It was a very bad metric. It's the same way where, like, for a long time, and even still now on the YouTube side, people think that, like, views is,
• 30:28
  you know, indicative of how big or how many people are looking at it and consuming your content, and it's just not the case.I'm a really big
• 30:37
  proponent of people actually looking at, you know, unique verified listeners per month. This is data that... And this is also ties into a larger problem [laughs] in the podcast ecosystem as a whole.
• 30:52
  You have to sign in to, like, 10 different dashboards. They all use different terminology for the same thing. No one's explaining what it actually means, but you can find this information.
• 31:02
  But what you want to increase over time is unique verified listeners, so individuals who are generating those downloads of your content. So that's the metric that you should be looking at.
• 31:13
  The other metric you should be looking at is consumption rates, so how long people are sticking around.
• 31:19
  And we can tell, like, editorially, if we have a guest on, like, we'll see 20, 25% less consumption than our other episodes that do really well, and it, you know.
• 31:30
  And I get so in the weeds where I'll look at the charts where you can see where people start dropping off, and I'll, like, go to the episode and go exactly to, like, [laughs] the timestamps just to have an understanding.
• 31:43
  Because if you're losing that much of your audience, then,
• 31:47
  you know, there's a lot that you can take away either about, okay, maybe we don't wanna have a guest that's talking about this particular topic or this framework, or this isn't engaging.
• 31:56
  Like, there's a lot that the consumption rates will tell you about the editorial quality of your show. The other thing that I'll s- I will say, it's funny that you specifically [laughs] called out Sirius XM.
• 32:09
  There's kind of a tale of two cities in the podcast industry where the most- the people that get the most publicity tend to be celebrities.
• 32:17
  I mean, this whole thing with Meghan Markle is going on right now after she's, like, launched another podcast after what happened with her first one.
• 32:24
  We see these gigantic financial deals, and that's really representative of, like, the 1% of people in the industry. Right.
• 32:32
  And, like, 99% of the rest of us, that's, like, so out of touch for anything that we'll ever experience in the industry, and it's very,
• 32:42
  it, it shouldn't be aspirational to most just because it just, the way that it's helping them or contributing to their business, like, it's just a totally different lane of w- and vehicle that they're using podcasting in a way that just doesn't make sense to most people.
• 32:57
  I always try to not look at those and say, "Oh, I wish that was me." I do think it is interesting, I had my first experience [laughs] as a listener, and I'm not gonna say the show.
• 33:10
  There's a true crime show that I'm a very big fan of, and they were independent for a very long time, and they got one of those really big deals with iHeart, and the quality of the show,
• 33:23
  they, which it was one of those one percenter deals. I think they got, like, a $200 million advertising deal with them, licensing deal.
• 33:29
  And in the Reddit for this show, there's, like, hundreds of people commenting saying, "There's t- too many ads," like, "The editorial experience is worse."
• 33:40
  So, like, even with those deals too, there's a lot of sacrifice at the audience. It kind of can ruin their experience in some ways. Now we're hearing a lot of programmatic ads.
• 33:50
  Now there's, in an hour episode, there's 20 minutes of ads. Like, it's good for the creators, but it also comes at a cost to the audience, too.
• 33:59
  And so while making $200 million [laughs] to sell ads on your podcast is amazing, if you're truly an audience first publisher, I think there's pros and cons to those types of deals I'm sure for them as well.
• 34:10
  But I wouldn't know because I haven't received a $200 million- [laughs]... podcast deal yet. [laughs] Yeah.
• 34:16
  Well, it's interesting that it does, it always comes back to audience first, which I feel like in, for podcasts and YouTube is just, like, so much more...
• 34:25
  It, it's not that it's more obvious, it's just, like, there isn't another option.
• 34:29
  Whereas, like, I just keep going back to, like, like us in the text world, we've always had this other option, which is, like, milk page views from organic search, and you can't really do that anymore.
• 34:37
  I mean, you can, but not as much.
• 34:39
  So, you know, shifting gears for a minute 'cause I, we've taken up a lot of your time, and listeners won't know about the technical difficulties that I've eaten up a lot of your time- [laughs]... which I apologize for.
• 34:47
  The... Can you give us, like, like, a quick rundown of, like, what's your day-to-day job? You know, what, like, what are a couple things you're working on?
• 34:53
  And then, like, what are, like, two or three challenges that you're just kinda, like, chewing on, that you're trying to figure out, like, "Where is this going? What am I gonna do about this?" Yeah, absolutely.
• 35:01
  I love this. So I started a new role. I know I shared a little bit about the network at the start of this call.
• 35:07
  We built a podcast network, a YouTube network, a newsletter network, a creator program, and then we realized we have all of these individual channels, but we don't have a brand besides being affiliated with HubSpot, besides being a part of HubSpot.
• 35:23
  And on these channels, we generate a lot of demand, but we're not actually engaging in partnerships that are helping us grow our audiences. So HubSpot,
• 35:33
  we're a really unique business because we're growing an audience and we're growing a customer base at the same time.
• 35:39
  And so last year we decided that we really wanted to develop a media partnerships function on our audience development team that was gonna focus on growing the reach and increasing brand awareness for our owned media properties, our own channels.
• 35:55
  So I've been working leading this initiative for, let's see, about four months now, and this is, like, from the ground up.
• 36:03
  We of course have been generating a lot of demand through partnerships, but we haven't used partnerships to actually grow our audiences.
• 36:10
  And so I've been kind of, like, driving the bus with no wheels on for the last four months [laughs] trying to figure out, okay, we have all these networks. The metrics look very different.
• 36:21
  We have a gigantic sea of people that we could work with. What are, like, sort of the most important things that we wanna address right now?
• 36:29
  Who are the people that we wanna work with first as we're building what these partnerships look like, how they benefit us, what we even have the capability to execute on, et cetera?
• 36:39
  So-I am primarily right now actually working on newsletter partnerships, which newsletters was a totally new world for me.
• 36:48
  I have a ton of experience, as we've been talking about, in podcasts and YouTube, but newsletters was like a black box that felt very scary because it felt like a lot more of a traditional media property than working with creators.
• 37:00
  Yeah, yeah. Um, and, you know, we have three newsletter brands. We have The Hustle, of course, which is a gigantic list and has a lot of brand awareness and power in the market.
• 37:09
  I say I work on The Hustle, people know what it is. It's a lot easier of a... You know, that gets people to open my emails [laughs] to put it plainly. Oh, yeah. Right.
• 37:18
  And then we actually just made our second acquisition. We acquired late last year, uh, an AI newsletter called MindStream that's been growing very rapidly, so we have an AI newsletter. And then we have...
• 37:29
  Actually, going back to some of your text-based questions, we had a newsletter for the marketing blog at HubSpot that we turned into just a full-on marketing newsletter and kind of detached it from just sharing blog content.
• 37:43
  So we're like- Whoa, that's fascinating... rebranding, yeah, and trying to sort of build that and use partnerships to help us sort of identify, like, editorially kind of where we wanna go with that.
• 37:55
  So those are, like, three very different things. The Hustle, we need really big partners to help grow it because our list is so big, right?
• 38:04
  We need people in the news space, people who are speaking to more of, like, those up-market decision-makers. It's very easy for me to get in the room for partners with The Hustle because of it being The Hustle.
• 38:16
  [laughs] Yeah. Then we have this new AI property that just came to HubSpot in December. It was previously founder-led. We're integrating it into our systems.
• 38:25
  So how many AI newsletters do you think there are out there right now? It's like 10,000 different flavors of vanilla, so figuring out how we continue to grow that and work with partners.
• 38:35
  And then we have this marketing newsletter too. So it's like three very different...
• 38:40
  They all have very different challenges and very different things that I'm trying to overcome by working with partners, so it's been a little bit of, like, a song and a dance figuring that out and then also just really understanding what can be reasonably delivered, what are the tiers of partnerships that we have, what's the balance of, like, how many partners do we wanna put in our newsletter, what's the criteria, like, all while actively onboarding and working with partners.
• 39:11
  [laughs] So it's like, as I said, kind of driving the bus without wheels. Yeah, kind of driving the bus without wheels. Even just... I mean, that sounds like a lot of fun.
• 39:20
  It also sounds challenging at, like, well, in a, a couple different ways. One way that it stood out is slightly different audiences. Each platform comes with all its own nuances. Mm-hmm.
• 39:28
  Each medium comes with its own nuances. Like, there's a lot to, I'm sure, just a lot just to, like, absorb so that you can, like, kind of marinate on it, think about it, and then make decisions and go. Yeah.
• 39:40
  It's a lot of...
• 39:41
  You know, and I try to think about, like, we've really sort of created verticals, so and it makes it a lot easier for me to sort of identify partners because I love to do omni-channel stuff as much as I can because we can deliver value, we speak to slightly different audiences on our YouTube, our marketing YouTube, our marketing podcast, our marketing blog, our marketing newsletter.
• 40:02
  But of course, partnerships look different on all those channels, but I really try to think about, like, okay, the marketing vertical is a fit for these types of partners, the sales vertical for these types of partners, entrepreneurship, and try to think about, like, sort of clusters in that way, and that's how we approach growth across the rest of audience development is we have people that oversee each vertical.
• 40:24
  So that helps kind of differentiate who we wanna work with, but it is a very different strategy that I am running for all of the verticals.
• 40:33
  For some right now, I'm working on, like, event partnerships, so doing co-reg for our newsletters to get, like, more subscribers, but also showing up in person. I do link swapping.
• 40:46
  You know, we do, like, traditional podcast cross-promotion.
• 40:48
  Like, it's kind of just a mixed bag, like, of whatever makes sense for the partner we can kind of do, so I always try to lead and understand with a publisher, like, what their challenges are and then kinda, like, craft what I offer to them based on sorta what they're looking for 'cause we can kind of offer most things at this point.
• 41:07
  Yeah. Which is a blessing and a curse. Just means there's too many avenues. It's-- becomes harder to execute, I think, because of that. Wow. Really cool. R-really cool.
• 41:17
  I just wanna give you, like, a huge thank you for your time and also for fielding all of my podcast and YouTube entry-level questions. [laughs] No, you're not entry level. Not at all.
• 41:28
  You're totally- Everyone, everyone has these questions, and not enough people are asking them, so I'm grateful that you asked them. Well, cool. Well, if you're up for it, we'd love to have you back sometime.
• 41:35
  I've been setting reminders for one year from the recording date of each guest and inviting people back. It's just, like- Yeah... fun to kinda, like, see what's happened since then.
• 41:42
  We'll obviously link to the HubSpot Media Network in the show notes. Should we send people to your LinkedIn, a personal website or, or anywhere else? Yeah, you please connect with me on LinkedIn.
• 41:52
  I'm trying more and more to share content. I'll share content from this interview, also other interviews that I do and just general thoughts about media partnerships, podcasting, all that good stuff.
• 42:04
  So yeah, please feel free to send me a connection. Okay, cool. Link will be in the show notes. Carly, thank you so much. Seriously, this was a ton of fun. I learned a lot, and really appreciate it. Good.
• 42:12
  Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a joy. If anyone has any questions, feel free to shoot them over to Jimmy or I, and we'll get them answered for you. Sounds good. Take care, everybody. [upbeat music]