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A Broken Podcast Feed Forced Me to Rethink Success · Your Mic

• 0:00
  Over a thousand ghost episodes.
• 0:03
  Same shows published over and over and over and over again, all summer long.
• 0:08
  One minute files, you press play and hear nothing.
• 0:12
  Silence dressed up as content.
• 0:15
  My own daughter saw the notifications stacking up on her Spotify app and asked me what was going on.
• 0:21
  Even the platform's founder told me he'd never seen anything like it.
• 0:27
  It wrecked my analytics for this very podcast you're listening to.
• 0:30
  It wrecked my analytics for months.
• 0:33
  Maybe even my YouTube channel.
• 0:35
  And I still had to decide what any of it actually meant.
• 0:45
  Welcome back to your mic.
• 0:47
  My name is Freddy Cruz, founder of Speak Podcasting.
• 0:50
  And if hosting a show is something you've been wanting to explore, hit me up, freddy, at speakpodcasting.com.
• 0:57
  So let's go back to this past summer.
• 0:59
  Apple, as you know, earlier this year, rolled out HLS video support for podcasts, right?
• 1:04
  Well, that new standard lets people watch video episodes.
• 1:08
  In case you don't know, now you do.
• 1:10
  It lets people watch video episodes right inside the podcast app.
• 1:15
  I didn't jump on it right away.
• 1:17
  I sat with it, thought it through, and decided to make the move at the end of May.
• 1:23
  And that's when things went sideways.
• 1:26
  Not a little sideways, but...
• 1:29
  completely off the rails.
• 1:32
  I was migrating podcast hosts about eight months before, and what followed this past summer was something I can only describe as a hot mess.
• 1:43
  I was in direct contact with the founder of that hosting company.
• 1:46
  He told me personally he'd never seen anything like it.
• 1:49
  And, well, that was certainly not reassuring.
• 1:54
  Here's what anything like it looked like, though.
• 1:58
  Episodes I had already published started getting republished, not once, but over and over.
• 2:04
  Some days, I thought it'd be fixed.
• 2:07
  Then the next morning, dozens more of these duplicate episodes would dump into my feed overnight.
• 2:12
  By the time it was done, we were talking about more than a thousand ghost episodes over the span of an entire season, and they were called ghost episodes for a reason—
• 2:23
  The file length would show up as one minute, okay?
• 2:27
  You hit play and there was nothing there.
• 2:29
  No audio, nothing.
• 2:32
  Just a phantom file sitting in my feed pretending to be content.
• 2:36
  My own 21-year-old daughter is the one who flagged it for me.
• 2:40
  She saw a wall of notifications hitting her phone on her Spotify app and all these new episodes supposedly dropping from my show.
• 2:47
  She asked me what was going on.
• 2:50
  I didn't really have an answer and I still don't have a complete one.
• 3:06
  Let's not pretty this up though.
• 3:07
  The mess destroyed my analytics for three months.
• 3:12
  I'm just now, this past month, starting to see the numbers stabilize.
• 3:17
  My YouTube channel took the worst of it.
• 3:20
  I think it's fair to say it got wrecked, or as the kids would say, cooked.
• 3:24
  I still have the channel.
• 3:25
  I just haven't decided if or when I'll go back to publishing video on that platform.
• 3:30
  So for now, video is off.
• 3:32
  Audio only.
• 3:33
  When I'm ready to figure out video again, I will.
• 3:36
  That's just me being completely forthright with you.
• 3:40
  Okay?
• 3:41
  I love YouTube.
• 3:42
  I'm bullish on it.
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  We have clients who are really successful on YouTube.
• 3:46
  Can I do it for myself?
• 3:48
  No.
• 3:50
  Now, did it damage my credibility, that whole thing with the ghost episodes?
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  Did it damage my credibility with the audience, with my clients?
• 3:57
  Honestly, I don't even know.
• 3:58
  I can't confirm or deny it.
• 4:01
  But that uncertainty is its own kind of uncomfortable.
• 4:05
  And I'm not going to pretend I've made peace with it just because I'm talking about it on a podcast about podcasting.
• 4:13
  And here's what this forced me to sit with.
• 4:16
  Downloads and views are not the end-all be-all of this business they never were.
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  What they actually show you is a trend line.
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  Are you moving up and to the right?
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  Or aren't you?
• 4:28
  But when a technical disaster can erase that trend line completely overnight through no fault of your own content or your own effort, you start asking a much bigger, broader question.
• 4:39
  Right?
• 4:40
  If the number can get destroyed by a bug in somebody else's system, what was that number actually measuring in the first damn place?
• 4:49
  Now...
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  Being embarrassed by a vanity metric is a real thing.
• 4:54
  I felt it.
• 4:54
  I still feel it.
• 4:56
  Not just with the podcast, but on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn as well.
• 5:00
  Watching my own feed fill up with garbage, watching these notifications pile up, knowing my daughter and probably half my audience could see it happening in real time.
• 5:11
  That's a specific public kind of humiliation, and it's different from having just a slow month.
• 5:20
  Here's the harder question I'm still wrestling with.
• 5:25
  What is the actual impact you're having on the people who do consume your show?
• 5:30
  Not the ones counted by a download number that a glitch can inflate or a migration can erase.
• 5:36
  I'm talking about the ones who heard something, used something, and told somebody else about it.
• 5:49
  That number doesn't show up on any dashboard.
• 5:53
  And maybe that's the number that should have mattered more to me all along.
• 5:57
  Now I wanna talk about a lady named Alison Ellsworth, the woman behind Poppy, you know, the health soda that you see at the grocery store.
• 6:06
  Alison said something on an episode of My First Million that has been living rent-free in my head for the past few weeks.
• 6:15
  She said embarrassment is the most underexplored emotion when it comes to success.
• 6:20
  She said that success first starts with embarrassment, then refinement, then clarity, and then
• 6:28
  confidence.
• 6:29
  And I believe that because I've lived versions of that with three books and a business built from absolutely nothing.
• 6:38
  But this past summer's embarrassment with the podcast did not feel like the productive kind.
• 6:45
  It felt like getting mugged by a system I trusted in front of an
• 6:51
  I don't have the refinement or the clarity yet.
• 6:55
  I'm still somewhere in the embarrassment part.
• 6:58
  I just am.
• 6:59
  And I think that's worth saying out loud on a podcast about podcasting.
• 7:04
  Not every setback resolves into a tiny, tidy takeaway by the time you hit publish.
• 7:11
  And for you, this is what I want you to do, okay?
• 7:14
  Stop staring at your download count for five minutes and go find one piece of real evidence that your show reached somebody.
• 7:24
  Of course, we want you to reach a lot of somebodies, but real evidence that your show actually reached one person.
• 7:33
  It could be a message, a comment that actually says something meaningful, a person who told you they tried the thing you talked about.
• 7:41
  Find one, that's it, one.
• 7:45
  Write it down.
• 7:47
  The number is not on your analytics dashboard, it's never going to be, but it might be the only number that survives the next platform meltdown.
• 7:57
  But let's say for instance that you don't have a show and you wanna build one that can survive its own version of a thousand ghost episodes.
• 8:05
  The roadmap is waiting for you.
• 8:08
  Get it right now.
• 8:08
  Speakpodcasting.com.
• 8:11
  S-P-E-K-E podcasting.com slash free resources.