How to Start a Podcast in 2021 + Buzzsprout's New Import Stats Tool

In this episode, we'll share behind the scenes stories from our latest YouTube video, discuss our thoughts on Vurbl's questionable marketing strategy, breakdown Buzzsprout's global podcast stats for January, and dive into some new features we just rolled out into Buzzsprout.

Share our video "How to Start a Podcast in 2021" on your social media, blog, email newsletter, or podcast for a shoutout in the next episode of Buzzcast.

Just take a screenshot and send it to travis@buzzsprout.com to get a shoutout!

Links from today's episode

• Check out Keith's podcast "The Cordial Catholic"
• Buzzsprout Global Stats for January 2021

Review Buzzcast in Podchaser to let us know what you think of the show.

Transcript

Kevin: 0:00

So now if you import if you let's walk through that scenario, if you come from anchor, you started your show over there, you import it into Buzzsprout. In the confirmation email that you get from Buzzsprout. After all your episodes have been copied into your new account, you can click a link, and we'll show you all your episode names. And we can say, how many downloads Did you have on your first episode? How many do you have in your second? How many do you have in your third? And all you do is punch in the number of downloads that you had? When you were with anchor when you were with competitor, XYZ doesn't matter. And then you hit save. And now when you go to your stats, it says, Hey, you had 300 downloads, even though it's your first day on Buzzsprout, we can display those numbers that you have in your previous host.

Alban: 0:38

How do we stop people from just putting in a massive amount of numbers just to like inflate their stats?

Kevin: 0:44

Oh my gosh, dude, we never thought of that.

Travis: 0:52

Alban, how many miles Do you think that you ran? When we were making the intro for how to start a podcast video, they just came out?

Alban: 0:58

I know for a fact whatever number it was. It was at least like two or three miles longer than I needed to run. john was watching it. He was like, How many times did you film that you looked a little out of breath and one of those takes and I was like, dude, Travis had we do it like 30 times he keeps driving the car. Oh, wait, I'm chasing after the car. I guess Wait, we probably be explained what we've been talking about we we just released our new how to start a podcast video. And in it the first scene is me running behind a car. You don't see the car, but it's filmed from the car. And saying like podcasts are blowing up. They're so versatile. You can listen to a podcast while out for a run. And that's all the scene is. and Travis isn't going fast. How fast are you going? It's slow?

Travis: 1:46

Well, so so here's what's interesting. So when we started filming, I was like, how fast should I be going in Jonathan, who's also on our content team and his new electric Nissan LEAF to like, be fast enough that Alban's actually running, but slow enough that he can still talk like a normal human being and like pick it up on the microphone. And so at first I was doing like 10 miles an hour, which is like a six minute mile. Okay, that's pretty fast. And you kept saying no, no, go faster. So I think at one point, we were doing like 12 1314 miles an hour, at least on the speedometer. And so you were you were like booking it, for sure. And then, you know dodging dump trucks and construction vehicles. Thanks, boy.

Alban: 2:27

It was it. Definitely the breathing and talking part of it was probably the harder bit. There's there's definitely at the end, you put it in an outtake where I'm like running and falling behind very quickly, like yelling my lines at the car.

Travis: 2:42

Yes.

Alban: 2:43

But it was good. I enjoyed it. It was the video we put the most work into yet, right?

Travis: 2:49

Yes, I would certainly say this, the how to start a podcast in 2021 was the most ambitious video that we've made so far, since we started getting serious about our YouTube channel. And and for good reason. You know, a lot of people want to know how to start a podcast. And there's a lot of bad information on the internet, as there is with most things. And so we wanted to we wanted to throw our hat in the ring is, here's a really great 12 minute video that will help you get started in the right direction. So we covered everything from the kind of microphones that you want to buy, like how to record stuff, software recommendations, some basic editing techniques, how to get into directories and apps. And so we really tried to take everything that you would need to know, when you're first getting started and distill it into a 12 minute video. That's actually helpful, but also fun to watch.

Alban: 3:38

And we try to make it like entertaining. One of the things we're learning with YouTube is you need to teach like we have to teach us what our job is. But then we also need to have some entertainment value. So is this saying like, Alright, if we put like four times the work into these videos, and we try to make them more entertaining, will we reach a larger audience? Or in the end? Will we just reach the same amount of audience and we'll just make ourselves look silly. So that remains to be seen. Kevin, if you watched it?

Kevin: 4:07

I did. I did have a question about it. Because it was great video. And it was fun to watch watched it multiple times. My question is in the beginning, you guys talk about podcasts are everywhere. And you give like three examples of where people listen to podcasts while they're working out while they're in their car. And then you went straight for the shower. And I didn't know that shower was like the third most popular place to listen to podcast. Okay,

Alban: 4:31

well Kevin, the reason we say the shower is so famous is because of your co founder, Tom and I were asked Fatima who does the listening conference with quill and she said up she asked us to be part of this like video where we were kind of answering podcasting questions. And one of the questions like where do you listen to a podcast that the only bit of the whole thing? They got selected from Tom's answer. So like 12 questions was where do you listen to five Cast and Tom's like in the shower. And we stopped like Tom, you want to put that others like yeah, listen to podcasts in the shower all the time. And he like sets his phone up to like play in so you can hear it. And he's like, honestly, with CS like, since I haven't listened to podcasts as much when I'm driving because of being at home all the time. Like I found myself taking longer showers to listen to more podcasts. So I was like, Alright, well, we already have this scene of like someone out for a run, then driving home from the run, will continue it and say, you know, you still listen to the same podcast?

Kevin: 5:32

Yeah. And you decided to do it with earbuds.

Alban: 5:36

Yeah, I don't know if you really can see it super well, but I'm wearing air pod burrows in the shower.

Kevin: 5:42

I do have a shower speaker and I tried. I've tried listening to podcasts in there. But there's like too much reverb you can't hear. Everything's super. All the sounds are bouncing around. It's too hard to focus. But maybe I need to acoustically treat my shower. That's a new market, acoustically treated showers.

Travis: 6:01

I'm not sure a pieces of foam in a bathroom that gets shut off is a recipe for success. So yes, anyway, so we had a lot of fun making that video if you want to see Alban trying to keep up with a car in a construction area. And you want to see me tied to a chair. And you want to see what else goes on. Oh, and you want to see our take on the 1960s Batman transition theme, then go to? Yes, yes, then go to our YouTube channel. And I will leave a link to that particular video in the show notes. So

Alban: 6:34

you actually will see in the videos how to start a podcast. That's what the whole video is about. And it shows you editing tips and you know what setups we'd get and how to get your podcasts out to the world. But then you got the other stuff as well. Those are, those are not the draw. I don't think anyone's looking at it. Like I want to see this. What's this with Travis was tied to a chair because what

Travis: 6:53

this is a video we're really proud of. And if you wanted to help us out, kind of get the word out about this new resource for friends that are asking you about your podcast and how to get started or you have a social media presence. If you want to share the link to that YouTube video on your social media platforms or your to your email newsletter or on a blog or anything like that. Just take a screenshot and send it in to me travis@buzzsprout.com. And we'll give you a shout out, we would appreciate that. And we'd love to return the favor by giving you some love here on the show. So I've got an email that was forwarded to us by Keith, Albert little, one of the Buzzsprout podcasters in our Facebook group from a new, apparently world's largest streaming audio platform. So exciting, isn't it, called verbal? and Keith is certainly not the first person to take note that there's this new platform sending emails, you know, a lot of the questions have been is this actually something or is this nothing? or What should I do with this? So let's talk about verbal real quick, just so people kind of know what's going on and why they may be getting an email in their inbox in the near future saying we have your podcast

Alban: 8:02

if you want it ready to the actually saying though the world's largest streaming platform?

Travis: 8:07

Yes, very top of the fold, when you open the email says meet the world's largest streaming audio platform, is it?

Alban: 8:18

The answer is kind of a goofy, marketing speak thing to say. But I don't know how that would be true.

Kevin: 8:24

The verbal team is back at it. I got my first introduction to verbal a couple months ago on Twitter when I was having some sort of conversation with somebody on Twitter. And somebody from who I'd never heard of before jumped into conversation and said something like verbal is going to crush and dominate all these other platforms. Something I don't know. But it was just it was just me having conversation with like a couple other people in the podcast hosting space. And so I had never heard of verbal. So I looked in his bio and went looked at the verbal side. And I said oh like welcome, you know, to the audio space. And that's a very nice way for you to enter. And then he deleted the tweet, and we haven't had any communication since then. So I don't know what's going on with verbal. Evidently they are the world's largest. Let me get this right. World's meet the world's largest streaming and audio platform. I'm not sure

Alban: 9:23

what streaming audio platform Wouldn't it be Spotify world's not the world's largest streaming audio platform.

Kevin: 9:29

Everyone's got their own measuring stick and the one that they're using. You know, I'm just not familiar with yet.

Travis: 9:35

I mean, we're the largest podcast host with light green and the logo that starts with a B so you know like that. Yeah,

Alban: 9:40

you better have that thing better. So those

Kevin: 9:44

so here's the thing is that they've This is a marketing tactic that's been around since podcasting has been around since every podcast has an RSS feed and those feeds are open and available. It's not too hard to find them all like you can scrape Apple podcasts or podcasts index or any other big podcast or You can grab all the feeds, and then you can get all the email addresses that are associated with all those podcasts. And then you can start sending an email. There's a name for that is called spam. It's not a good thing, like it's frowned upon. It's illegal in a lot of places in a lot of countries. And I don't think we should support companies that choose spam as their main form of marketing their main marketing channel. And so I have no idea what verbal is doing or how good they are at it, they might be totally great, but just by the fact that they're going to spam all the podcasters. And that's how they're going to enter into the space. I feel like, yeah, they they should be ignored.

Travis: 10:39

Well, I love how in the email at the bottom, they have frequently asked questions. And this is you probably have some questions. Here are some answers to common questions. Question number one, why are you emailing me? Like, already know, they already know people were like, Who the heck is verbal? And why are you talking to me? How'd you get this email address?

Kevin: 10:58

They know. And here's the thing, I guess I don't know a whole lot about the company, I think that they've kind of had a blunder entry into the audio space, like you don't need to make false claims. You don't need to spam people. There's right ways and wrong ways to enter space. And they might have had some missteps. So hopefully, they'll get this stuff sorted out. And maybe they've got a good product, and maybe they'll add value to the online audio space. But so far, I haven't seen any of that. And so I would say if you get one of these emails, just click your spam button, move on with your life. If it turns into something valuable. We'll let you know.

Alban: 11:32

Yeah, well. And also, I mean, I guess we could should give a shout out to sound I mean, looking at this kind of looks like they're got some of the features of pod chaser and listen notes. And neither of them did this. They've kind of grown organically through the years. So shout out to pod chaser, and listen notes that are kind of trying to do this all the right way. We're gonna highlight stuff we don't think is good. We should also highlight people have done it, you know, kind of just grown by showing up and being part of the podcasting space.

Travis: 12:01

Yeah, for sure. And we'll leave a link to Keith's podcast in the show notes. You can go check that out, give him some support. And thanks for sending that to us, Keith. So we could just kind of set the record straight. And a lot of you guys been asking about verbal and hopefully this gives you some clarity. So now let's shift into the January stats for Buzzsprout. Because now it's February. So January stats are out. Let's talk about some trends. Some things that we're seeing between December stats and January stats. Is there anything that jumps out to you guys, anything that any big shifts or big changes that you noticed? Yeah, I

Alban: 12:34

mean, the big one, is that podcast downloads in January group more than Bitcoin did or something? I don't know. It's like really like 16% a month? Maybe not. 16? Maybe like, yeah, me, it's pretty big.

Kevin: 12:46

Yeah, I mean, December is always a bit of a down month. And that combined with January being a big month, this is always like, the material difference between December and January is always pretty big this year. It's really big, like 10 million plus download difference. Yeah, so that's awesome. There's also What is it? 20,000? Am I doing the math right here? 20,000 more episodes released in January than December. Yeah. So that was exciting. more active podcasts, and the top 50%, like the median number for 50%. What is not percent percentile?

Travis: 13:20

Sorry, yeah, top half of all podcasters, even

Kevin: 13:23

the top 50% of podcasters. On Buzzsprout, you only need 26 downloads in the last seven days of your most recent episode. So it was 27 in December, so the bar has been lowered by one download.

Alban: 13:38

And the main reason for that is that a bunch of people start podcasts in January. So there's lots of podcasts that are just getting started that kind of bring that median number down a little bit. But it just goes to show you like you can you can be in the top 50% just I mean, most of us know 26 people,

Kevin: 13:53

right? Friends, family acquaintances, can we get 26 people each download our episode. And if you can, you're in the top 50% of all Buzzsprout customers, that's a lot of podcasts, 91,200 podcasts that were active in January. So that just tells me that we're not as a group as podcasters we're not doing a great job of marketing our stuff. Because I have a well, he's 13 now but he was 12 when he started this podcast, my son, and he's in the top 50%. And he does movie reviews and television reviews. And these, you know, like the target audience for him or other kids his age. And there's just not a lot of kids that listen to podcasts. But he's doing 2627 downloads per episode. Because what he is good at is telling all of his friends every time he released a new episode, he's like, give me your phone, we got a new podcast episode here. Let me help you show you how to listen to it and make sure he listened. And so but just a little bit of work. You can you can be a marketer and you can promote your show. And people want to listen, they have to know about your show, first of all, and that's the responsibility of all of us creators. We have to tell people about our show. And then we have to remind them that because they have to form habits and habits take a while to form so they might not want Sup podcast app everyday yet, but every time you see him, tell them about new podcast you're listening to tell him about a new episode that you have. Remind them help them form that habit of launching their podcast app every time they get in the car every time they go out for a walk every time they take a shower, right, Alban?

Alban: 15:15

I got the shower guy. I mean, I say the video, I'm just channeling dumb. Yeah, it's true. This was in one of my talks at a conference one, I said, raise your hand if part of your strategy has been getting specific people to download apps onto their phone and show him how to subscribe. Because there's still a fair amount of people that would listen to your show that you know, in real life, that won't listen just because they don't understand podcasting yet. So it tells me at least two things. One, we're still pretty early in the game, if you have to show people how to subscribe, and how to download and do all that. It's still early. And to like, you need that you need that little bit of a bump in the beginning, you need to get to like 100 people that are listening, so that you can get the feedback and your understanding what to improve about your podcast. And then it kind of can snowball, once you've got a little bit of a core audience following you. So in the beginning, yeah, it takes a little bit of work to get your first 20 600,000 listeners. But over time, like that's going to start growing organically without you doing all the day to day work.

Travis: 16:27

Yeah, and just a really simple call to action you can add to the end of your episode is share this episode with one person you think would enjoy listening to it. You know, like it's, it's actually going to move the needle, if even 5% of your listeners take the time to do that. But it's not such a big ass that they're like, man, well, I can't share this with 1000 people. I just have like me and my a couple buddies that are into the same thing. But just saying to share it with one person. That's enough of it asked to make a difference. That's not going to feel like a burden to your listeners. And they'll be excited about partnering with you to get the word out anything else in the global stats, you guys are noticing, I mean, all the apps, essentially, with a few exceptions, showing an increase in the number of downloads for January versus December, Apple podcasts still, number one, Spotify still number two Google podcast continues to entrench itself as the number three most popular podcast app. And that's probably a combination of a couple of things. Then finally, phasing out Google Play Music, which is a dead app. Now. Having Google podcasts be pre installed on the Android devices, certain Android devices is certainly helpful. And so hopefully, that will just continue to to grow the number of Android users that are listening to podcasts, because if you look at the devices breakdown 64% of all the podcast downloads for January came from Apple iPhones, not Apple devices, Apple iPhones. And so the more that Google can kind of start to flex a little bit will help break into that Android Market. And amazon music, I think grew by about 50% from December to January, as far as their downloads. So they're still a new app. They're still gaining traction getting momentum, but certainly one that you want to get listed in if you haven't yet.

Alban: 18:09

Yeah, one of the things I noticed was Apple podcasts and Spotify both grew as a percent like of the entire podcasting pie. They both grew Apple podcasts grew by from 30.3%, to 31.4. So more people are listening on Apple podcasts than they were in December, and then Spotify. So I imagined that was going to come kind of like they did something to maybe steal back a little bit of market share from Spotify. But Spotify grew from 26.4 to 26.8%. So both of them growing a bit. So maybe overall, that means that other ways of listening to podcasts are just not adding listeners as fast as Spotify and Apple are. But our friends are there castbox, they're actually ampac esac, they're both doing really well. So it's good to have lots of, you know, different apps that provide different experiences so that everybody can find one that works best for them. It's just interesting. As we watch those two players, jockey for the number one spot to see that they're actually both growing faster than the industry as a whole, if that makes sense.

Travis: 19:20

This is a bit of a tangent, but semi related to the apps and kind of their rankings here. overcast was the first app, the first third party app that I know of that was incorporating paid podcast ads into the UI. And then over the last 12 months or so a couple of other podcast apps have started to see that as a model to help them generate revenue to cover their expenses. And one of those castbox which you just mentioned is up there towards the top. And I know that we've done some, some advertising spend there for Podcasting Q&A. And for how to start a podcast I will as well if I'm if that's correct, Alban,

Alban: 19:54

I think we just did it for Podcasting Q&A. We didn't do it for any others.

Travis: 19:58

Okay. Well, how How's your experience doing that? Because I know a lot of people will see opportunities to kind of promote their podcast and some of these apps. How did that ROI work out? Were you happy with it? And is that something we would do? Again?

Alban: 20:13

It's definitely it made a difference. I mean, we saw a massive spike from, we were getting somewhere in the order of just about 1200 downloads per episode. And then, in a second, like, when I ran the promotion, we got 10,000 downloads on an episode. But that quickly faded to, you know, to about about 3000. So most of them did not stick around for more than a handful of episodes. And that makes sense, because we were just advertising a podcast that teaches podcasting tips inside of castbox. So it's kind of a general audience. So it's still like the that promotion got us probably about 1000 new listeners, which was, I think I'm happy with just the downside there is, you know, you need to have kind of a podcast that's applicable to everybody. And so I think of somebody like Jordan Harbinger is use this tactic pretty well, that he does ads and other podcasts, but he also has ads inside of apps, his podcast, his interviews with interesting people, and he's just doing deep dives into, you know, their lives. His podcast is probably more of general interest than, you know, Podcasting Q&A. So would I do it again? Yes. And should you consider it? I would say, yes, you should. But definitely, if your podcast is kind of general interest, and then you just need to create some make some creative that makes it very clear who the podcasts is for.

Travis: 21:54

And if somebody wanted to start running ads on castbox, specifically, I know overcast, has a very front facing interface that anybody could buy ads is castbox. Sponsorships? Are they publicly available to anyone? Or do you have to know somebody,

Alban: 22:07

you need to go through a salesperson, so you just want to search for castbox? sales, I think the minimum order though, is like $2,200. So it's not, it's not cheap. But that's, you know, the they get you a lot of subscribers. I mean, I told you, we we did that and got 9000 more downloads on an episode very quickly. So I think it's good, I would just, you know, search that or if we have a contact that I can make sure that they're okay with me just dropping their email, and we can put it into the show notes. But the other ones are player FM has something. And I think radio public has something and you said overcast, which we did a long time ago. There's lots of options. And if paid ads to grow your podcast is part of your strategy. And we just remember, you only have to get a 26 downloads per episode for you to be in the you know, 50th percentile, while you run a $200 campaign with overcast, you're already past that number. So it's a nice way to jumpstart a podcast, especially once you have maybe like 10 episodes in the bag. And yet, you know what, you know, kind of what you're working with?

Kevin: 23:18

Yeah, well, I think that's one of the big differences with the types of ads that are available in overcast versus some of these other apps that have ad marketplaces like castbox. And pocket casts has one also, the the big difference being the price point. So prices and overcast, depending on your category can be pretty low can be around $200. I think I know like pocket casts and castbox start in 1000s of dollars. And it's a different level of exposure. But it doesn't make sense for people who are just promoting a podcast because they're, you know, just want to grow their listener base, but they're not really using it as a marketing channel. They're not using it to promote a business or something like that. And so like a castbox promotion at how much would you say 2000 something dollars might make sense for Buzzsprout. Because we're using our podcast to grow our business. It doesn't necessarily make sense, if your podcast is not at the point yet where you're monetizing it or receiving monetary value to offset that expense. And so in that case, you just want to grow your, your podcast audience, something like overcast might make more sense, again, because those ads, they start at a lower price point. And they're more targeted, not in the sense of you won't be able to specify like demographic information, but it's going to be specific to that podcast category. And some of the categories are just less expensive than others. So interesting place to start. Yeah, these

Alban: 24:40

numbers have actually gone up a lot since back in the day when we did it. I think we spent a couple $100 and had a whole category to ourselves for you know quite a while. 30 days.

Travis: 24:51

It's 30 it's for a 30 day spot. Yeah, I'm

Alban: 24:54

looking at some of them now. And it's pretty incredible. I mean, if you want to be in the business category, why $1,700 and on average, you get 70 to 90 new subscribers. So that's like$21 per new listener. That's, that's pretty high. So you're definitely if you're doing that, you want to make sure you have a podcast that has kind of a monetization strategy behind it, that you'll be able to make money when people are listening to your podcast.

Travis: 25:21

Yeah, either that or if you start using something like popcorn, or you start doing affiliate marketing, you're like, Hey, I got some revenue coming in. I've already got the mic that I want. What else can I do? This could be a good way to kind of funnel some of that back into your podcast to help it grow, and get some more exposure. So fun little tip, fun little bonus tips here in Buzzcast. So what's new in Buzzsprout, Kevin and other we're always working on fun stuff. What, uh, what kind of updates have we rolled out in the last couple weeks?

Kevin: 25:48

Okay, yeah, we've done a couple cool things that have rolled out in the past couple of weeks one, we'll start here is the podcast location tag. This is let me say it this way, it is only applicable to those who are podcasting about a specific location. So it's not a way for you to go in, like Buzzcast. We're all in various places around Jacksonville, Florida right now, we're not going to go in there and put Jacksonville, Florida as a location for Buzzcast. But if you have a podcast that is about Disney World, or is about Spain, or tourism in Florida, then this would be a great use of the location tag. Because what it does is it drops a location with a bunch of geocode and other stuff in it, but it drops it into your RSS feeds. And then podcast player apps like overcast and sit your podcast addict now have the ability to give another way for people to find podcasts. So if you're interested in discoverability, that's what this tag was added for. This is another new tag from the podcast namespace that we're proud and happy to support. And so hopefully, one day in the future, you'll be able to open up your favorite podcast player app and say, Oh, I'm going to Disney in a couple weeks or a couple months. And I want to find podcasts that are just about Disney. So right now, you could just do that just by the key word Disney. But hopefully in the future, like I could just like zoom in on the Orlando, Florida area and say show me all podcasts at around anything in this area, because maybe we're gonna be down at Disney for a week. But I didn't know that. You know, Legoland was only 20 minutes away. And while I'm there, I want to hear about like Outlander, whatever, or great restaurants in the area or anything else. So that's the podcast location tag. If you're interested in adding it, you go into your podcast settings and then under Advanced Settings, and down at the bottom, it says is your podcast about a specific location? By default? It's no but if you change the Yes, and it will let you type in a location, find that spot. And then it will be added to your feed.

Alban: 27:39

That's awesome. So it's really is only for people who are talking about that a specific location and we're not trying to bake it. So everybody connects with all the podcasters in their area, you can find out what shows being made near you. It's really like, Oh, I live in Jacksonville, Florida. Are there any podcasts about the things that are here? And so I pull up sport local sports teams, I pull up? Here's a podcast about local politics. And I could kind of pull all those together. That'd be really nice.

Kevin: 28:10

Yeah. So if you're doing like a podcast about Jacksonville Jaguars, that's not necessarily about the Jacksonville area. But I would still tag it as a Jacksonville podcasts because it's about a sports team that is based out of Jacksonville, Florida. And that way again, we don't know what apps are going to do in the future. But if they do have like a show me podcasts of interest around this area, and they present you with a map or your current location, then you would want your Jacksonville Jaguars podcast to show up there. Same thing if you were talking about the restaurant scene here, or real estate in the area, or you know, things to do in North Florida, whether it be you know, you're talking about the fishing scene or the sports scene or the whatever, club scene whatever the crazy kids are doing these days.

Alban: 28:52

Hopefully they're not going to clubs. Kevin Not right now.

Kevin: 28:55

No, no plumbing, okay.

Travis: 28:56

I mean, it's it's Florida, I wouldn't put it past him. There's a reason that you can type your birthday into Google, followed by Florida man, and you will get a really funny story about someone doing something crazy on a police report.

Alban: 29:07

Okay? You can't talk about Florida man and not get this lecture. So you brought this on yourself, Travis, Florida man is not has nothing to do with the people who live here. Everyone in Florida is just as normal as everywhere else. It's just that the way that Florida makes all police reports public. Everyone else is hiding it. And so when somebody in Florida does something crazy, and that police reports out there in the public domain, then the newspapers find it. They're like, Oh my gosh, what a crazy story. But like the reason there's no Georgia man or Ohio man or New York man, is because all the crazy stuff you guys do in your other states. They just don't publish it. And we're open and everything's up in the open Florida so yeah, no one don't come after Florida last time around on the podcast. This is a beautiful place.

Travis: 30:03

This is the benefits of having a lawyer but not your lawyer on the podcast.

Alban: 30:07

Yeah, I don't know if that was legal advice that was just like me defending my, you know, home state. Well, I

Travis: 30:12

mean, I grew up. I was raised here. So I'm definitely a Florida boy as well. Kevin, I believe you are too, right.

Kevin: 30:18

No, I was born in New York. But sorry

Travis: 30:23

WAMP, well, we'll keep you around.

Kevin: 30:25

All right back on topic location tag. So it is available supported by Buzzsprout can push locations into your RSS feed. And there are two apps that I would like to mention, because they've jumped on board right away and are supporting it one, our friends at podcast addict and amazing podcast listening app for Android devices. And the other is pod friend, which is web based, I believe, yep. Oh, they have an app for Mac also. So they have an app for Windows, not for Mac, and you can listen in your browser. They've got Android and iOS apps coming soon. But pod friends really cool app and they have jumped on board and started supporting all the new podcasts namespace tags as well. So if you add a location, if you have a podcast about a specific location, add it in Buzzsprout, give it about 24 hours, and then go check out your podcast on pod friend and podcast addict and see how they're using that data.

Travis: 31:14

Well, and just real quick, as a review, Kevin, when we're talking about tags, talking about namespaces, this is all part of the podcasting 2.0 working group, right. So just if you just could just give like a two, three minute just oh, I do this every time brief recap

Kevin: 31:29

Listen, to listen to the previous episodes,

Travis: 31:31

I feel like it's helpful. I feel like it's helpful. Kevin, just humor me.

Kevin: 31:35

All right, there's a group of people that are working hard to extend the tags that are available in your RSS feed to make podcasting more accessible and, and continue it to be open and, and not locked in. Like, we don't want certain features only in certain apps, we want them to be available to any app developer that wants to put them in their app. And so the podcast namespace is a way for us to work together as a community. It's not just Buzzsprout. But there's other hosting companies. And there's lots of apps developers, and we're all working together to find out what are the latest and greatest things that we can imagine. And then how can we get them into RSS feeds so that the whole ecosystem can benefit from them? So that's what's happening.

Travis: 32:10

Thank you. Thank you for that quick synopsis. I know that I found it very helpful. And I think our listeners do as well. Can we talk about any of the other namespace tags that were settled in the latest spec doc that we're going to be supporting in the near future?

Kevin: 32:24

Yeah, all this work is happening in phases, phase one closed last year. And phase two just closed at the end of January, January 31 of this year. So the location tag was in phase two. And what else is in phase two, the person tag, and we're working on that. So that's a way to be able to say who the people are, who are responsible for putting this podcast together, like hosts, co hosts and all that other kind of stuff. And we're working on that right now. Hopefully, we in a couple weeks, we'll talk more about that. There is Oh, and then there's also a replacement tag for episode and season number. So right now, the episode and season number stuff only works in Apple podcasts. That was a iTunes namespace tag that came out in 2018. And of course, we jumped in and supported it right away and will continue to support it. But third party app developers don't love the idea of supporting iTunes, Apple podcasts specific namespaces. So the podcast namespaces, that no problem, we can create one that's not Apple specific, you know, so they can feel more secure and safe around developing around it like apple, it's not going to change it. So that's happening as well. But that's going to be completely transparent change. But hopefully, we'll see better support for episodes and seasons and third party apps right now. Like if you look in overcast or pocket casts, or castbox. I don't know how many of them support episode and season numbers. And it puts podcasters in a weird position like should I put my episode number in my title, or should I not? Well, hopefully this helps solve that problem of if we came out with a way to communicate episodes and season numbers that wasn't Apple specific with third party developers be more comfortable supporting it. So good stuff happening all around.

Travis: 34:04

Yeah, and if you want to get an idea of what this person tag could look like, this is something pod chaser does really well. So if you claim your podcast on pod chaser, and you create a profile, it will also link to any other podcasts that you go on as a guest in two specific episodes. So you could literally type Alban Brooke with an E on the end into pod chaser and see all the podcast episodes that Alban has been a part of that they've said that hey, Alban is on the show, but that would be a use case where you could very easily see where someone has been on other people's podcasts. And also for you be able to easily find and link to podcasts that you've been on, as well.

Kevin: 34:46

Yeah, actually, right now in pot chaser. Most of it is all manual. So you have to create your own pod chaser profile. And then every time you appear on somebody else's podcast, you can go and you can tag yourself in that episode. And then whoever's claimed that podcast can like Prove it or say yes, they actually were guest. And pod chaser has their own team of people who are doing verifications. And it's a, it's very labor intensive. The idea here is that if we can put these tools in the hands of the creators, we can get better associations between who was on what podcast when. And then third party app developers could cross link between all that stuff. Now, it is ripe for abuse, of course, because I could say that Joe Rogan was on my last episode. And then hopefully, anybody's interesting. Joe Rogan ends up finding my podcast. So we're making sure there's controls in place where stuff like that doesn't happen. And that's what's taken this tag a little while to take off, like, if you've noticed in Apple podcasts for, it's probably been over a year now on some of the more popular shows like the top 200 shows on Apple podcasts. If you scroll down to the bottom, you can see pictures of who the hosts are of that show. And sometimes they have images of guests. And you can tap that and get more information about those people. That's the same type of functionality that we're trying to replicate in the new podcast namespace. But again, Apple has a team that's doing that. And they're only doing it for a handful of podcasts, when you open it up to the entire world of podcasters. There's a whole bunch of, you know, just abuse possibilities that we have to account for and make sure it's stuff works the way it's supposed to and doesn't get gamed So, but that stuff's all coming soon. Like I said, hopefully, in two weeks, we'll have more to say about that. And then again, the the apps that are first, at implementing this stuff, I would recommend you go ahead and download and download podcast, podcast addict, if you have an Android phone. On iOS, I don't know who's kind of leading the charge there. I know, pod friend is web based. But these apps that are supporting these namespaces, these are really great things. So check them out and see if they're a good app for you. support them, tell your friends to check out these apps as well, because adoption is key. Like it's always chicken and egg, like who's going to implement this tag first, right? The podcast app or the host. And so we're trying to go ahead and lead the charge on the hosting side, get as many of these tags out there in the wild as possible. And then hopefully, that leads to app developers saying, Oh, you know what, there are a significant number of podcasts, RSS feeds that are using these tags. Now, it's worth my while to take the time to develop a UI around it on the user experience.

Alban: 37:08

So do we have time to talk about the one last feature that we just rolled out?

Travis: 37:12

Yeah, I think so. Kevin, you want to talk about this game changer of a feature first ever? And the way that we're framing it in a baseball stats world, right? world's largest

Kevin: 37:26

guest stats import tool? Yeah. So one of the things that stinks right now in podcasting is when you move from one host to another host. So like, if you started on anchor, right, just throwing that as an example, you started on anchor, and you used it for a little while. And then you said, you know that they don't have a certain feature or functionality, or they're not helping me grow my show as much as maybe something like Buzzsprout would. So you move your show from anchor to Buzzsprout. That's an easy process, right? Nothing too difficult about that. But let's say you had a couple 100 downloads on your anchor podcast before you came to Buzzsprout. And now when you're in Buzzsprout, you start at zero downloads. And that's kind of a bummer, because you worked hard those first couple months to get a couple 100 downloads. And now your stats say zero. And so we set out to solve that problem. The challenges, of course, that most podcast hosting companies don't have API's, which is a way for like Buzzsprout, to talk to anchor directly for us to pull those numbers from your old account into your new Buzzsprout account. And so we've kind of got tired of waiting for other hosting companies to make their stats available in a way that we could just pull them directly, just for the record. Buzzsprout does make our stats available. So if you went to like we in our API that you have, as a Buzzsprout customer, you can provide another app with your username and password for your Buzzsprout account. And then they could pull your stats if they wanted to. But nobody else was doing that. And we got tired of waiting for them to do that. And so we decided to create a manual import process where you can just go ahead and Hey, why don't you just tell us how many downloads you had on that previous episode. So now if you import if you let's walk through that scenario, if you come from anchor, you started your show over there, you import it into Buzzsprout. In the confirmation email that you get from Buzzsprout. After all your episodes have been copied into your new account, you can click a link and will show you all your episode names. And we can say how many downloads Did you have on your first episode? How many do you have in your second how much you have in your third? And all you do is punch in the number of downloads that you had. When you were with anchor when you were with competitor XYZ doesn't matter. And then you hit save. And now when you go to your stats, it says hey, you had 300 downloads even though it's your first day on Buzzsprout we can display those numbers that you had from the previous host.

Alban: 39:43

How do we stop people from just putting in a massive amount of numbers just to like inflate their stats?

Kevin: 39:49

Oh my gosh, dude, we never thought of that. I was I was just joking around not caught off guard. We have thought about that. You can change Yes, if you only got 100 downloads for your first episode, and you put in 10,000, then your Buzzsprout stats will absolutely display 10,000. Now there's gonna be a little footer at the bottom of your stats page that says 10,000 stats were manually added by you and therefore are not Buzzsprout and IAB v2 certified. So all of the stats that Buzzsprout collects are ib v2 certified. But anything that you manually put in is going to have that little footnote at the bottom that says these numbers were added by the individual and are not IRB v2 certified. So the idea here is that we're not giving you a way to crank up your numbers just so that you can go out and sell a bunch of ad sponsorships at a really high CPM. If you do that, you will have that footnote at the bottom, what we're doing is we're giving you a way to not have to keep a separate spreadsheet of your numbers when you move from one host to another. So that you look in Buzzsprout and says you have 1000 downloads and then you always have to reference this other spreadsheet that said, Oh, look, I also had 300 from over here. So really, I have 1300 total. Well, now you can just have that 1300 total right in your Buzzsprout account, and you can enter it one time and then throw away that old spreadsheet. You don't need it anymore. So absolutely Alban good questions. First question that I think a lot of people are going to ask is what's stopping somebody from just making huge numbers, you can absolutely do that. At the end of the day, you're really kind of only cheating yourself, like your numbers are your numbers. And whether you have them in a spreadsheet or not. And again, anybody can always do this with like developer tools or something, you can always right click on the number in your Buzzsprout stats and change that number in your browser to whatever you want. And then take a screenshot or print out the page as a PDF. And so if you wanted to cheat your numbers, you could always do that. This is just a nice way for you to be able to keep your numbers, hopefully your real numbers don't know, don't cheat yourself here, just put in your real numbers. And then you'll have a consistent, accurate, updated total, even if you move from another host before you came to Buzzsprout. When you go to your Buzzsprout statistics page.

Travis: 41:52

Yeah, so this feature only applies if you're moving from a different host. If you've always been with Buzzsprout, then all of your stats are right there. So don't worry, we've captured them all for you. Now, when somebody does import the stats, where's it going to show up in their stats dashboard, because we have several different tabs, including listener location, and devices and apps and that kind of stuff. So what parts of the Buzzsprout stats are impacted when they do add these, their old download stats from their previous podcast host?

Kevin: 42:17

Right? Well, your stats that you manually type in yourself, don't have any dates associated with them. So only show up in the charts and graphs and tables that are not date specific. So like when you click on the main stats thing, the first page you land on is how many downloads you had in the last 30 days, these won't be reflected there. But if you change it from 30 days to all time, then you'll see those numbers. And the same thing. If you go to like episode downloads, you'd have to click on all time to be able to see those numbers reflected. And then as you scroll down, you get a list of all your episodes and how many total downloads you have. Those are not date specific. So they'd all show there as well.

Travis: 42:52

Right? And we and because you're manually entering the data, we don't have, you know, podcast player data, like how many of those 300 downloads from your previous episode one, were an apple versus Spotify versus Google. And so we don't we don't populate those charts with that data.

Kevin: 43:08

Which is actually totally fine. Because if you think about it, at the end of the day, what you want is how many downloads you had, it doesn't really matter how many of those plays came in on Android versus apple. Because going forward, we're gonna start collecting that data. And really the only thing that's important with that data is like what's happening right now. Now, it might be interesting. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be to look back at an old episode that you had and see how many of the original downloads for Episode One were downloaded on Android versus apple. And then what am I doing today, but that data is constantly changing. And so even Episode One is still getting downloads, you know, today Now, maybe not that same initial spike that we see when we release a new episode. But since it is constantly getting updated with new downloads, the most important thing when you're talking about apps and devices and locations, is what's happening right now. And so even if we could capture that, historically, it wouldn't be super valuable. And again, we don't have the option to because other podcasts are not making this data available through their API's. So this is the next best thing. And at the end of the day, it's really like 99% of what you need. It's how many downloads you had on an episode level for your entire history of your podcast. And you can always find out apps and devices and locations moving forward. So if you just moved to Buzzsprout, it might take you know, two or three months to be able to get good, accurate information of what types of apps and devices and locations data that you're getting. But within a couple months, you've got a full stats package again, that has captured the entire history of your podcast, even though you might have started somewhere else.

Travis: 44:34

Is there a cutoff point? So like, let's say that somebody migrated their podcast, early 2020, late 2019, or even potentially before that, and they still have that spreadsheet floating around somewhere on their computer. If they did migrate from another host are they able to go in even today and add those episode downloads?

Kevin: 44:51

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely not. You're not gonna get the email that says if you have stats from your old podcast host you can put them here but If you go to your stats section, and you scroll all the way down to the bottom, there's a little footer at the bottom that talks about our IRB certification. And underneath that, if you have a podcast that was imported from another host, there'll be another link. So this is not for everybody. This is only if you imported your podcast, it'll say you can manually add downloads from your, from your imported episodes to keep track of your stats all in one place. And you can click that link, and it will bring you to that page where you can punch in your numbers.

Alban: 45:26

Well, that's awesome. I know, there's, that's actually been a much requested feature. And it's excited to be able to give that to people, I'm sure there's a lot of people in support, who will get a friendly email over the next week and saying, Hey, here's how you do it. And you can go and update your numbers. So you don't have to keep that separate spreadsheet. And there are other checks in place. Like you can't just use these numbers to get yourself a sweet popcorn sponsorship, popcorn will actually see the numbers that you are actually getting and Buzzsprout they're getting the IB certified numbers. So they will know, you know, oh, it says 200,000 on my page, you know, they can see that you imported 200,000. So yeah,

Kevin: 46:09

yeah, that's a good point. Our popcorn integration continues to work, as it always has. Any numbers that you type in will not be sent over to your popcorn account. They'll continue to count the way that they have in the past. And so yeah, just be honest. Yeah, hopefully this is a tool This is the tool for you. So that no that that no, this the numbers that you punch in here are for your benefit. And again, so you don't have to maintain stats in two separate places and you can throw out that old spreadsheet once you punch him in.

Travis: 46:33

Before we go just want to give another special shout out to Keith thanks for forwarding that email regarding verbose. We could talk about it. If you want to get a shout out in the next episode of Buzzcast. All you have to do is share our how to start a podcast step by step guide for 2021 from our YouTube channel, and send a screenshot to me Travis at Buzzsprout calm and we'll give you a shout out. Thanks for sticking around being the best podcast audience on the planet. And we'll catch you in the next one. Keep podcasting