Podcasting 2.0 with Dave Jones + Video Buzzcast Update

In this episode, the crew discusses why we're hitting pause on uploading Buzzcast to YouTube, Dave Jones joins the show to talk about Podcasting 2.0, and we open up the mailbag to answer your podcasting questions.

Links from this episode:

• Check out Podcast Index
• Zapier for automated social media posts
• How to Rebrand Your Podcast

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

Chapters

• 0:00 For two of us...
• 0:30 Video Buzzcast
• 17:15 Dave Jones
• 27:41 Listener Q&A

Transcript

Alban: 0:00

It is so stinking nice to like, show up and record this show. And Travis has already put together an outline. Kevin's got suggestions, I throw my thoughts into the mix. And then Travis goes and does all the work from there, too. It's out into the wild. And I don't see anything. That's an absolute joy for at least two thirds of the team. Yeah, I mean, exactly.

Kevin: 0:30

You guys remember, like two months ago, when you were like, We're going all in on video Buzzcast. I was like, that's, I mean, I will agree and commit and disagree, disagree and commit, I'll do something. But I don't want to do this.

Alban: 0:42

I never said that. The only reason we ever did video was because of you.

Kevin: 0:50

That is true. I will take that. Because when we first got locked down, and we weren't allowed to see anybody in person, I was like, well, it would be nice to be able to see you guys when we record. And if we're going to be doing video chats Anyway, why don't we go ahead and publish those. So I do take the full blame for moving us to video in the first place. But how's that working out for us?

Alban: 1:11

Not good. The first one we did was like a year ago, we did that live stream to our YouTube channel. And that just kind of grew into then we wanted to play around with Riverside, which was doing video remote video recording, and then squad cast launched video, remote video recording. And I think, you know, we've you kind of had the tools, the tools were there. So we started playing with the tools and experimenting. And now the experiment is coming to an end, at least for now, at least for now. So do we want to give like the whole story of it, kind of walk through why we made each decision along the way? And let's give the sparknotes what we learned the highlights sparknotes? Yeah, start at the beginning. Kevin, why did you want to start doing some video Buzzcast.

Kevin: 2:01

When we first started recording Buzzcast, we would do it together in the office in our little studio space. And we could play off of each other's energy, right? I think, Listen, I'll speak for myself, I'm not a super high energy person. So it helps for me to be sitting across the table for somebody or to see somebody else's reactions to what I'm saying or when they're speaking themselves to be able to keep myself amped up and engaged in the conversation when we went audio only and there was no video component, it was hard for me to continue to keep my energy high. And to stay engaged. I've also got a little bit of add that I'm I'm fighting and dealing with at the same time. So that part was was necessary in order to be able to just produce good content. What I was interested in is that since we're doing this video component Anyway, why don't we record this, we've always said that YouTube is an interesting opportunity for people to promote their podcasts because they do have the algorithm, they do have the recommendation engine. But you shouldn't just publish your audio only there. Because that doesn't feed into the strengths of the algorithm. So you're not even getting the benefit. And you're taking all this extra time to do that. In fact, you could be you know, putting yourself at a disadvantage if you do that, because then you get a bad reputation with the algorithm. So anyway, we were doing video, why not go ahead. And while we edit the podcast, the audio version, why not edit the video version and just stick it on YouTube and see if we get a bump from it. That is where you guys come in on the analytical side and say, Is this working is this not I will say that the constraints from just somebody who's on the podcast are much higher than I anticipated. It's one thing when you're out of the office, or if you're traveling or you can't be here there to be able to quickly grab a USB mic, throw it in your bag go with you. And you can record audio from anywhere in the world, it's not too hard to find a quiet space, most hotel rooms are pretty quiet. Or if you're staying on Airbnb or something that you can find a closet, you can find a quiet space to record audio, being able to travel with a decent camera setup. Or if you don't have a decent camera setup, then you're using whatever on your laptop, you're constantly worried about your background, like all this stuff is going on. It's just a different level of commitment and what's required in terms of being able to put a show out every week or every other week. So that has been added an extra level of commitment to the show, which again, not something that we weren't willing to do, but something that was a little bit unexpected. Didn't know going into it. And then from an analytical side, like how helpful was it actually, for us growing the show? That's what you guys have dug into. Right?

Alban: 4:24

Yeah, I mean, we can talk a bit about the analytics buzz cast itself was getting more attention, let's call it attention than it ever had before. We were getting between the downloads that continued to grow on the RSS side. And on the YouTube channel being added to that it was huge. And then we started doing clips of Buzzcast episodes. And those were doing really well. And so if you wanted to add all that up, it was like wow, this show is doubled in sighs This is great. But we on the other side, were kind of frustrated with the growth of the YouTube channel. We grew a ton the first year. And we just kind of seen a lot of slowing down of our growth. We didn't know exactly why. And we kept kind of digging into the data. And I think it might have been Jonathan first, or maybe it was Travis, who said, I just clicked through all of the last videos. And I noticed most of the Buzzcast ones lose subscribers. And I was like, That's not true. And then I click through and went, Oh, that's definitely true. I was very skeptical by nature. And so and then we started digging in deeper. And I took, I think it was like six different stats that we use to kind of quantify how valuable each individual video is. And I just went back and looked at, like the last 90 days, all the videos that were created during that 90 day period, I think we had 22 videos, or 26 videos, all of the Buzzcast ones were in the worst category, they were they represented, like the very bottom five episodes, or videos. And, you know, we, I think Travis, you had some good ideas of why the Buzzcast ones were performing near the bottom. But in the end, we were kind of doing the thing that we've always criticized, we've always criticized people who were putting a static image on a YouTube video on a YouTube video, just having audio, you know, we said that can crush an existing valuable YouTube channel. And we were crushing our existing value bowl YouTube channel, by adding this, you know, some of this, basically podcast content in video format.

Kevin: 6:59

To clarify, we weren't crushing it because we weren't putting the static image when we were putting real video up. But we weren't playing in line with the the rules of YouTube or to use the algorithm in the smartest and best way we were confusing the algorithm. We were publishing different lengths of content, different formats of content. And so we ended up is a very important and valuable channel for us for marketing our software and telling the world about what Buzzsprout can do for you as a podcaster. We were hurting that marketing channel for us, right?

Alban: 7:27

Yeah, I guess what I was saying is, we were not being hypocritical in the way that we created the video, the content, because we weren't publishing the static image with the audio. But the reason we say we recommend everybody else not to do that, is because what it's doing is it's showing YouTube that your content is low quality, and it's a specific type of content. It's audio plus an image. Well, when we were looking at it, YouTube was used to a much higher production quality, a very different type of content for our channel. And so I think people were constantly confused. They're running into videos that they thought were going to be Travis or Sarah jalon, doing an in depth tutorial. And they were clicking, and they were finding me pontificating about Facebook podcasts for 20 minutes. So Travis, give us some more insight, what's what are the differentiators between our day to day content are the bread and butter that we do very well, and what Buzzcast was doing on our channel?

Travis: 8:31

One thing to keep in mind is when we create content for Podcasting, Q&A, when we create tutorials, things like that, we have a very specific aim for those videos. Right? So we're trying to answer questions really well, we're trying to take all the knowledge and best practices for how to be a podcaster. And consolidating that into a form factor. That is something you could easily watch in just a few minutes and get all the information that you need. And because we're able to put that level of focus on it, like Alan mentioned, the production quality is better. We have custom animations, and B roll, which is just a fancy way of saying we cut away to different videos of models doing things that match what we're talking about on screen. And so we're able to create a type of content that works really well in a YouTube ecosystem. And so if your whole channel is that kind of content, then YouTube starts knowing Okay, if someone we've kind of identified them as a potential podcaster, and they're asking a podcast related question, Buzzsprout is going to be the channel we recommend because we know they have this kind of content. The reason that we split off Buzzcast the full episodes into a separate channel a couple of months ago, is because we noticed that those videos were not performing at all at the same level as the Podcasting, Q&A and other tutorial videos were doing. And that was a common practice we'd seen with other youtubers That created video podcasts, they would create new channels for them. And then if they had clips, that would be a third channel. So they would actually have three channels, they'd have their main YouTube channel, a full podcast channel and a clips channel, in order to make sure that they were kind of playing by the rules, the best practice of YouTube. So these were all things that we, you know, as we were experimenting, we weren't sure like, how far are we really going to carry this book? Like, how invested Are we going to get into video Buzzcast. And so it didn't make sense to spin up a whole YouTube channel, we're just going to do a couple episodes and then retire it right. So we tested in our on our main channel first and said, Okay, that's working. So then what if we took the next step, and we made it consistent? And then what if we took the next step and made a separate, and so it's kind of like evolved over time. And now to Kevin's point, it's at the place where we just wanted to make sure, if we keep going on this trajectory, it's going to serve you guys, it's gonna make Buzzcast better for you. And it's also going to make sense in the grand scheme of the other things that we're doing to produce and create content. And so we're now at this nexus point where if we're going to be able to go back and record in the studio, you know, that has a level of production that even exceeds what we're currently what we were doing before. And, and so at this point in time, it makes more sense for us to pause it, knowing we can always turn it back on later. But just to double down and refocus our efforts on the audio only version of Buzzcast.

Alban: 11:27

So if I can kind of tie this together with what are the best practices we have learned for YouTube, and podcasting, in particular, because podcasting is really growing on YouTube, one out of five people now who say they listened to podcasts, they listened to most of their podcasts on YouTube, one out of five, that's pretty remarkably high numbers. That comes from Edison research. I actually interviewed Tom Webster this morning, and he told me that so it's definitely working there. But it takes a lot to make it work. And it was not stuff that was going to make sense for us to do. So. I think to do podcasts, well on YouTube, you probably need to be recording a person so that you have that live engaging element. Because I don't know how to say this exactly. But like, the level of engagement you want to see between the hosts during a audio and a video medium is very different. Right now, like I can see Kevin and Travis and like Kevin looks kind of disinterested. That doesn't bother anybody who's just listening to this because they go, Oh, Kevin's probably listening attentively. But you know what? But if we're on video, I'd be the first comment we ever got on one of our Buzzcast episodes was why does albot look so mad. And I was like, Oh, that's just my face looks. That's just me. Like, that's just me not smiling. And so that works perfectly fine. When you're recording long distance recordings. When it's on video, it starts to look a little weird. And you can either kind of over fake enthusiasm, or you can get together in an audio studio get together in a studio in person. So like, get together in person, I think is a very high recommendation, they should try to get that number, you know, if at all possible, then you've also got to have like multiple shots to be able to keep it interesting. So that's probably a camera on each host. Maybe an additional wide angle camera, you can see that we've experimented this in some of our Podcasting Q&A videos is rolling, I think three different cameras now all at once, and then we flipped between them. For us to do the three of us in the studio would require us probably to be shooting like four or five cameras at a time. And then the, you know, that really ramps up the amount of video editing that we're doing. Okay, so we're buying a bunch of cameras. We're buying, we're doing more in video editing. We're getting us all together in the studio in the most dangerous, dangerous COVID hotspot United States right now. So three negatives, and all for the benefit of starting a new YouTube channel that isn't exactly in alignment with what we want. So that's to kind of wrap it up quickly. What how we're thinking about this. Maybe we come back, maybe not. But until next time, listen to us on our RSS backed podcast.

Travis: 14:35

Yes, we are definitely not going anywhere. You'll just need to listen to us anywhere except for Spotify will be.

Alban: 14:42

This is basically Apple podcasts and indie apps exclusive now. Yeah, I would say so. I would say so.

Kevin: 14:48

Yeah. I think it's an interesting point that you talked about when you talk about your interview with Tom Webster and he's saying that one in five podcasts are roughly 20% of people listening the podcast in YouTube, and I can't help it think that that is it just don't think that there's a stat that we should just take without some additional thought, right? Like listening to a podcast and YouTube is a different experience than what a lot of us who produce podcasts are in the podcasting space probably think about when we think about podcasting, like the benefits in the beauty of podcasting is it's it's passive, it's something that you can do not only on demand, but at your convenience while you're doing other things while you're doing housework while you're exercising, while you're at work while you're driving a car, you the YouTube experience is different than that. And so while the YouTube ecosystem is huge, and it might be a lot more mainstream in terms of the number of people who engage in that space, and then at some point, click on something that is calling itself a podcast, it's, it might just be an exposure thing, it might just be the size of the ecosystem thing, it might not necessarily be what we would consider a podcast and all the great benefits that go along with podcasting. And I don't want to get into the details of is it does it really have an RSS feed and all that stuff, that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm just kind of talking about the size of the medium and the number of people who at some point during their normal day, flip open YouTube, and might click on something that is calling itself a podcast. So that being said, YouTube is a fine place for you to distribute content and being creator. But hopefully, there's some takeaways from what we've experienced over the past year, pressing into the YouTube Space a little bit in terms of putting a podcast onto YouTube, there's a lot more that goes into it than just recording a zoom call, and then throwing it up there. If you really want to succeed, you have to understand the algorithm, you have to understand how the medium works, you have to understand what type of content works there is, this is a larger level of commitment. And you might find a huge audience and huge following there. But it's probably not going to be it's not an overnight success. It is a lot of work. And it is very different than audio only podcasting. So as we continue to unpack, and learn things about how to use YouTube, or other channels to grow your main podcast, your audio only podcast, it's distributed through RSS, we will continue to share those learnings with you and hopefully make you a better podcaster. But this is where we are today. And the decisions we've made. So this podcast will not be on YouTube, and not in video form. And as we learn more and grow more, we'll share all our learnings with

Travis: 17:15

so if you've been a Buzzcast listener for any length of time, you know, we're big fans of the podcast index and podcasting 2.0, that entire group, that entire working group of people dedicating themselves to improving the open podcast ecosystem, and creating really fun new features that allow you as a creator, to make awesome content and help your listeners really engage with your show in some really unique ways. Kevin and Tom had an opportunity to sit down with Dave Jones, who is working on the podcast index and podcasting 2.0 to talk about a new feature that Buzzsprout is now supporting, and also tease out some fun new things that they have coming down the pipeline. So here's that conversation between Kevin Tom and Dave Jones.

Tom: 17:59

This is Tom Rossi, technical co founder of Buzzsprout. And I am glad to be joined by Dave Jones, one of the two guys running the podcast index, Dave Jones and Adam curry have been doing amazing work with the podcast index. Dave, welcome to the show. Thanks for all that you're doing. Tell us a little bit about the podcast index and what you guys are doing over there.

Dave: 18:21

Let's see, what are we doing at the podcast? And what are we not doing at podcast?

Kevin: 18:25

So Dave, the podcasting to auto project is like it incorporates the podcast index and the podcasting namespace right and a whole bunch of things. Can you tell us like what's the difference? What are the two functions that those those two things sort of where they come together? How does it all work?

Dave: 18:39

Yeah, we get this question a lot. What the heck are y'all doing with all these various projects? And then what did they even mean? And so podcasting 2.0 is the name of our podcast, but it's also the name of the broader movement of trying to preserve, protect and extend the open RSS ecosystem,

Kevin: 18:57

right. When we say this, this is a little bit different than what like fireside chat introduced it podcast movement, is podcasting to Dotto, right. Yeah,

Dave: 19:04

I gotta hope it is completely different. Yeah, but podcasting. 2.0 is just an open source, volunteer movement of people coming up with ideas and launching projects to help preserve the open RSS ecosystem of podcasting, and podcasting inside the app. So pod inside podcasting 2.0. But that would be the podcast namespace where all these new features and tags are coming from. Also within podcasting, 2.0 would be something like pod ping, which allows hosts to rapidly notified apps and aggregators of new episodes, things like that. That's all in the podcasting 2.0 side of things. The podcast index is the thing that we created at the very beginning in order to facilitate all these other things. So the podcast index is the largest directory of podcasts on the internet. It's were like 4.1 million podcasts right now feeds. We are a directory and also an API for podcast app. to hook in to get their podcast data from, basically, they just start coding an app, they plug into us and they get all their data in, it saves them a world of hurt on that side of things. So those, the podcasts index is the APN directory, but geisen 2.0 is all the features and community movement.

Kevin: 20:19

Right, and then huge opportunity with the index is that we're not tied in or reliant on Apple anymore. So like over the past two or three months, Apple's directory has been having a ton of problems. Not to mention even before that, when it was working, well, it would take you probably a minimum of two or three days up to a couple weeks to even get in Apple podcast directory, then when you publish a new episode, it might be 24 hours or more before that new episode gets released in search showing up on any of the apps that rely on that directory. And the index solves all that along with other technologies that you're developing as well like the pod paying and everything else. Right.

Dave: 20:50

Yeah, we started this whole project with with the directory and the API with the idea that we wanted to take Apple Apple's directory away from being the center of the podcasting universe, which has been for, you know, 15 years at least. And the idea there was that, you know, no, no knock on Apple, I mean, they've been good stewards of podcasting, it's just that it doesn't make a lot of sense for an open specification, like podcasting, an open system that anybody can participate in, it does not make a lot of sense for that. To be controlled by a single humongous entity like apple, I mean, they're literally the biggest company in the world. And so it's sort of like you have this weird spectrum where you got podcasting, which is completely open, I can hand write an RSS feed today, and get into the inbox and create a podcast. And I can do it from my computer in five minutes. But then you have the directory where all the podcasts are found, his career is controlled by this huge corporation. So it really just didn't didn't make a lot of sense, the goal there was create a directory that is completely open, anybody can join it, anybody can add to it, anybody can put their podcast into it in 15 seconds. And then the next step, which is the which is the part that has to happen, make it available for free, and everybody can download it, you can download it our entire database right now from our From the homepage of our website, and do whatever you want with it, you can go create your own directory or your own API or your own apps. So if it's not free, then it doesn't solve any of the problem. And if you have to have us, it still doesn't solve the problem. You need to be we need to redistribute it. And so that's what we that was the Gulf in the beginning.

Tom: 22:38

One of the features that I'm most excited about out of podcasting 2.0 is pod ping, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dave: 22:44

Yeah, sure. podcasting suffers from the same thing that all RSS based infrastructure does it, what you have is a system where you publish an episode of whatever this is, or a blog post or anything, any bit of information, you publish that to an RSS feed, think of it like a WordPress blog. So then the RSS feed, which is just a file on a web server somewhere, it gets updated. How does the rest of the world know that you've just put a blog post up on your website, they have to be notified, or they have to go and check in there's, there's the only two ways to get that information. So just think of it like, you know, clicking on a website refresh button over and over and over just to see if something new pops up. That's essentially what all of these infrastructures have to do, whether it's podcasting or blogosphere, or any of these things. It's just what you resort to is just checking the website over and over and over.

Tom: 23:38

And this is this is one of the things that we see all the time, right, where we have podcasters, who will publish an episode. And then they're wondering, Well, where is it? I published it an hour ago? Why don't I see it anywhere? Why don't I see it on Apple? Why don't I see it on Spotify? And I think what what's exciting about pod pain is this is a solution to that problem, which is if you subscribe to a feed with with pod pain, you'll know whenever it gets updated. You'll know about it immediately.

Dave: 24:05

Yeah, and that's a just a reversal of that whole thing of instead of checking over and over and over for new content. We tell you, you know, the publisher tells you when there's content,

Tom: 24:15

pod ping solves two problems. One is the polling with RSS feeds. And then you also have the problem of much of the web sub pub pub is built on Google, which isn't reliable. So pod ping does it in a reliable way. And so as I've talked to people about pod paying, and they said, Well, don't we already have a solution for this? Well, we don't have a reliable solution for this. And so that's why a lot of people just continue to pull RSS feeds. So really excited about the work that you did with with pod Ping. One of the features of the podcast namespace that we've just implemented at Buzzsprout. That I'm sure everyone would love to hear why we did it. Is the gu ID, or the gu ID. How do you say Dave gwit? Yeah, let's Duguid. Goo it sounds gross. Let's do good. There's no way around it that it's He's gonna sound gross. So but tell us what, what's the grid? And why do you want podcasting companies like Buzzsprout and podcasters. to include this in their RSS feed,

Dave: 25:10

a grid is a globally unique identifier, geo ID. It is a long number that uniquely identifies a thing and object globally in the world. It's this thing is this number. And so that is a thing that Apple's directory has always had. Everybody's podcast has an iTunes ID, or an apple podcast ID. And if you go and look for your podcast on Apple's podcast directory, you can see at the end of the little URL in the address bar up there, you can see your Apple ID, because Apple has been the center of the podcasting universe for so long, that iTunes ID has become the way that many apps identify a podcast in there's problems with that. We solve those problems earlier this year, when Apple's API stopped returning the location of where podcast live at. So they stopped returning in their API for many, many feeds, they stopped returning the actual URL, which is would be like, you know, buzzsprout.com slash such and such. That's a huge problem because it broke tons of apps. And we were on the front lines of that, because a lot of people started using our API when that happened, because it broke and broke their app.

Kevin: 26:28

Is this stuff going to help us move in the direction of like global comments, global ratings and reviews? Are you guys working on infrastructure to be able to allow podcasters to leave a five star rating in one app that then translates over to another app or a comment over here on pod friend that could get posted in pod chaser?

Dave: 26:48

Yeah, I hope so. I mean, that's the idea. That's, that's absolutely the goal with this.

Tom: 26:53

Just a quick note for our Buzzsprout listeners, don't you don't have to write into the port and ask us to put a grid on your RSS feed, they're already there. So all these features whenever we can we want to implement them without having to require, you know, any, any kind of, you know, technical knowledge on our podcasters. And so, yes, the goods are already there. And we continue to follow all the work that Dave and Adam are doing, and we will implement those features as they come up. Dave, thank you for being on the show. Thank you for all the work that you're doing to help make podcasting. Awesome. We appreciate it. And thanks for being here.

Kevin: 27:26

Yeah, thanks, guys. Appreciate it. listeners, please check out podcast index.org click on apps, download a new podcast app, recommend it to your listening audience. And yeah, support the movement. It's really good stuff for podcasting.

Travis: 27:41

So we asked the good people of the internet, namely on our YouTube community chats if you subscribe to the YouTube, the main Buzzsprout YouTube channel, you may have seen this in your subscriber feed. Alban asked on Twitter, we also posted in the Facebook group, the Buzzsprout podcast, Facebook group, just your questions. So we're going to run through a lightning round, have a bunch of questions and hopefully will give you some okay answers. Alright, so the first question, Alban, I want to see this off to you first, because you're going to be the best person to answer this question. This is from Arielle, she asks, Why is Alban the coolest? No,

Alban: 28:16

no, no. Why is Alban the coolest? My response to that because that was to my asking people questions was please delete this. So yeah, no answer to that. plead the fifth. Hmm. Next question.

Travis: 28:31

Kevin, do you have a rebuttal response?

Kevin: 28:33

I agree. It's puzzling. He is the coolest. Nobody really can explain why but she's right. Ariel, one of our good friends. Just start a podcast movement works with squad cast. Awesome software. Awesome People. So check them out. Thanks for the question. Ariel. Sorry, we don't have a better answer for you.

Travis: 28:47

He just is. It's just the sky is blue. Alban is cool. And podcasts are awesome. Next question comes from Julio. And Julio wants to know about automatic social promotion. Is there an automatic way to post to social media accounts automatically from your RSS feed? Okay,

Alban: 29:08

so yes, there is a way to do it. I think the way that I've seen most people do it is through Zapier or Zapier, depending on how you want to pronounce that name, it's, you know, you pretty much have it, check the podcast feed once an hour or something if there's new episode, then kick off these tweets and these social posts. So there's a way to do it. I would advise Julio not to do it, though. This is one of the marketing things that like everybody really wants an automated solution for we're like, wouldn't it be cool if I didn't have to write all my tweets, instead, I just did the thing I'm already doing and then some software. Sometimes people say AI, even if it's not AI, that some thing will go and do all the work for me. And that would be cool. It'd be very cool. What It ends up happening is, you end up tweeting the exact same tweet, once a week, or four times a week with just different links. And the only people I know who I've seen do this, it's like, those don't get any engagement. No one's liking them. Because the algorithm can see and like your followers can see, like, just a link to some random website plus your boilerplate text. Much, much better would be for you, if you think there's a quotable element of your podcast to go create a audio gram or a soundbite and share that. If you're overwhelmed by all the promotion, like I've got five different social channels and only one person to do all the work. Well, then the right answer, I think, is pick one social channel and write one tweet, one Instagram post one story, whatever it may be, for each episode, and get that out there. And you will I think, do better just by doing one manual action than trying to set up this automated solution that will pretty quickly fade into the background noise of Twitter and the rest of the social platform. So my recommendation is probably don't do it.

Kevin: 31:19

Alright, good advice. And if you decide not to take Alban's advice that SAP yours EAP i e r dot get answered. Next question came in from we don't know who anonymous question is, should we auto distribute to YouTube? timely question, we

Travis: 31:37

just this is a similar question. So I would say, go back to the first part of this episode, where we talked about why we're pausing video Buzzcast. It is the rare exception. Where a podcast can auto publish a video of a still image with an audio file playing in the background and have any level of success and we're talking, I can count on like one hand, the number of podcasts that I know, do this, and they have they do you get some traction. I'm thinking Tim Ferriss, I'm thinking of all but like not very many beyond that. And that's simply because it's not what YouTube is built for people don't go to YouTube to not watch something, they go to YouTube to watch videos. So any kind of automated YouTube distribution is going to strip the video element out. And that kind of defeats the purpose of putting it on YouTube,

Alban: 32:28

start with the video, and then take the audio to put on your podcast. The other way around is not as valuable. Sorry to interrupt your question traps.

Travis: 32:36

No, that was a perfectly fine way to sum it up.

Kevin: 32:38

Good advice. Next question came in from Rick, how long should your podcast title be?

Travis: 32:43

Here's the good news. There are no rules that I'm aware of other than, you know, there's a certain maximum number of characters Kevin, do you know off the top of your head? What the max number of characters is for?

Kevin: 32:54

It's got to be it's got to be big?

Alban: 32:56

It's something like 255, right? Yeah,

Travis: 32:58

it's quite long. So if it fits in a tweet, you can make it an episode title. So the strategy becomes how do you create an episode title that gets your listeners to say, I am going to listen to another episode this week. Or if you're using some kind of podcast SEO strategy, where you're trying to get those episodes to show up inside of podcast apps, then you'd want to make sure that the title captured those those keywords. There's no rhyme or reason to how long the title should be. There are some podcasts that have quite long titles, again, thinking about the Tim Ferriss show where he has like the whole summary of the episode in the title. And depending on the app that someone's listening to it in, you'll see more or less of it. And then you'll see the little ellipses at the end, if it's runs over the kind of like a lot of space there. But in general, just hit the high point, what's the main thing people can expect to get out of the episode, make it really clear up front, and however long it needs to be is how long it needs to be.

Kevin: 33:57

Yeah, and I'll throw in my little tip because I listened so much in the car. And I use Apple CarPlay to do that. And whatever app you're using everything in the Apple CarPlay interfaces is blown up huge. And so you really don't see very many characters at all. So I would say regardless of how long your episode titles are, I don't know that that's super important. But please put the most important information at the front like we'll use the Tim Ferriss example, because you already brought it up. But like I already know it's Tim Ferriss show, so don't say Tim Ferriss show podcast episode number yet, like that's gonna be the same for every single episode put, like the guest name first, like Tell me who's on there. So regardless of the app that I'm using, or how much they decide to show, I'm seeing the relevant information at the beginning, not the same thing over and over for every episode. Indeed,

Travis: 34:39

wise words. Kevin, I want to queue this one up to you as our technical expert here. This is from dog tail storytime, podcast can turntables free features help you grow your audience because there is a free chargeable and then you can pay for some other stuff,

Kevin: 34:56

right? So here's what I would say about charitable I'm not exactly up to date on what they give you in their free plan versus the different paid tiers. And one of the reasons that I'm not is because of the way that charitable, like implements their technology, they to use most of the powerful features of charitable you, they're gonna want you to put in a URL prefix on your RSS feed. So that's something that you can totally do as a Buzzsprout podcaster, we don't limit you or not let you do that, you can absolutely do that. But what I'm not familiar with enough, because we've just never looked into doing it ourselves is, we as soon as you do that, you turn over all your privacy, like all all the information, your IP addresses of all of your audience to chargeable. And I know that they do some attribution. So they then have code that different businesses can put on their websites to look for overlapping IP addresses between the people who are downloading podcast episodes and the people who are landing on websites. And then what they're doing on those websites like, are they buying certain products? Are they checking out, they use some of that technology to retarget them. So if they show up, they listen to this episode, and they land on this website, they might want to show them an ad for something similar from another podcast or something. All of that stuff kind of goes against things that I'm into things that I get excited about. it rubs me it rubs my privacy button the wrong way. Like I don't love tracking, I love. I love targeting, like the idea that saying, hey, this podcast is intended for this type of audience. So if you're a podcast sponsor, then that's something that you should look at, because this is content that's geared towards people who are into motorcycles, and who are the types of people that are into motorcycles? Well, it's mostly these types of people. But we can't identify any individual motorcycle owner and say that they also have this level of education or could be this gender, or might be this level of household income. Like that's, that's where the line crosses for me. And charitable is kind of more into the other stuff. And so I don't know a whole lot about it. But I would tell you that if you're interested in exploring charitable, please read their terms of service, please make sure that you're comfortable as a podcaster, that as soon as you start hooking up their, your, their tools to your podcast, you're going to expose some level of your listeners, your privacy to them, and I don't know what they do with it. So please do some research before you get into that. Not saying it's not the smart move for you. But just educate yourself before you do it.

Travis: 37:15

Next question is from Stephen. And he has some premium content that it seems like he already has on Patreon. And so his question is about adding that premium content to Spotify and Apple podcasts. So in addition to Patreon, should he offer subscriptions directly on Spotify, or Apple?

Alban: 37:36

So the answer to Stephen will be a little different than for everybody else. Steven is actually the podcast host and producer, Apple Insider. So he does a lot of pretty produced podcast episodes. It's very tempting to say, Oh, of course, do it. Why not put your podcast episode everywhere? Because that's what I would want to do is make it easy for people who are on Spotify to subscribe, make it easy for people on Apple to subscribe, make it easy for anybody, anywhere else to subscribe via Patreon. Why not? Well, the why not is the amount of work that that could take. So there's quite a few. There's just an article I read about I believe was NPR was NPR hiring two different people. And their primary responsibilities was uploading all of the podcasting content to all these different platforms. And double checking to make sure they did the ads free version there. This one got that bonus content. This one, we gave it the right title, blah, blah, blah, being put everywhere on the web, if you're an indie podcaster. And you're just saying, hey, I want to experiment and see if I can make a little money. Well, man, this is really not a exciting proposition, to add multiple hours to your workflow to make sure that your podcast episode is put up all over the place. But if you are a larger team, and you have the resources of something like Apple insider behind you, like Stephen does, that may well be worth the, you know, the time and effort to make sure it's as easy as possible. The only slight caveat, I guess I'd give it the end is for Steve in particular, the podcast is Apple and cider is for people who are really into Apple products. If they're really into Apple products, they're probably using Apple podcasts or one of the other dominant iOS apps. I just be surprised if they got a huge following over on Spotify as paid platforms. But it'd be interesting to see that but yeah, so that's maybe how I would think about that question. Yeah,

Kevin: 39:42

let me jump in here quick. This is a bit of a tangent off of the paid subscription workflow in the amount of work that you put into it. Something to keep in mind, you might hear oftentimes, people say, make sure you have a large enough following before you start going into premium content. And the reason that like we've given that recommendation and other people As well as because it's the same amount of work whether you end up with one subscriber or 10,000 subscribers Exactly. And so you're making a commitment to the people who decide to give you money for your premium content that you're going to do as extra work every week, you're going to do the bonus episodes, you're going to do the ad free version, whatever it is that you're promising, you're going to do that whether one person decides to pay you $5 a month, or 50,000 do. And so make what we say make sure you have a large enough following before you take this commitment. It's because when we when you launch, we want you to have enough income coming in from your premium offerings to justify the effort that goes into it. And it can be a large amount of effort. So just think that through before you jump into any subscription or premium offering,

Travis: 40:36

the next question comes from Al Pete's, hey, longtime listener, first time caller, how important friend, how important is it to have a team behind you with your podcast?

Alban: 40:48

Okay, well, to quote Marilyn Monroe, maybe I'll save this for later. I'm not I'm not lucky locked in on you've got to have a team. I mean, the Marilyn Monroe quote, it's better to be unhappy, alone and unhappy with someone else. So I think this is the way I've approached it. Maybe I'm in a dark place of my life.

Kevin: 41:09

But there's another quote that says misery loves company, like those conflict.

Alban: 41:14

Yeah, misery loves company means like, if other people are miserable, then they're going to want to like make you miserable, too, right. And Marilyn, and rose saying, like, I'm already having a rough go of it. I don't need another person who's having a rough go of it. Also kind of venting their stuff on to me, too.

Kevin: 41:30

You think they're complimentary. Okay,

Alban: 41:32

I use if you're on a good team, and it is a joy to work with other people. It really is like, it is so stinking nice to like, show up and record this show. And Travis has already put together an outline, Kevin's got suggestions, I throw my thoughts into the mix. And then Travis goes and does all the work from there to it's out into the wild. And I don't see anything. That's an absolute joy for at least two thirds of the team. Yeah, I mean, exactly. But if you're on a team, where let's say you're the one making the outline, and you're the one kind of carrying the conversation, and you're splitting the money three ways, you know, let's say you're actually making some money off the show, it can get old, and it can get really old, if like, people are also changing the recording time, or they're supposed to create the social media posts, but they don't. But you're still editing the post editing it. And we really appreciate Travis, but I think there's a lot of editors and podcast producers, who don't get a lot of credit for the amount of work and thought that goes in to that part of the show. The the face, the voice of the show, often is the one getting all the credit. And so I would boil that all down to sometimes it's really great to be on a team, sometimes it can be tough. And I am constantly impressed by very small teams that what they're able to get done. The You know, my first job ever was working for the government, when I was 17, working in a library. And like you just saw how slow everything moved. And now working on a really, really small team that builds Buzzsprout. It's a lot of fun to see how quickly we can get things done. So I think in some future life where I'm a, you know, I think anything, I would not want to be on a smaller team, not a bigger team. And there's people in the podcasting space who have teams of two or three. And I bet that they're loving it that way. So certain things can only happen if you're really big. But if you're small, I think it's a good thing to enjoy it and maybe don't grow unless there really is a good reason to do so.

Kevin: 43:50

Yeah, let me tackle the same question from a different angle. Because you could also look at it as like, what do you have more of time or money if you love doing your podcast, and it's successful for you. And whether you're doing it alone or interviewing somebody necessarily great, but you don't have all the time to put into the promotion, or you're not giving it as much love as Mark, you're not giving as much marketing love as you would like to or you don't have time to edit it to the level of quality that you want to then those are things that money might be able to solve for you. So you might be able to maybe team isn't the best word maybe it's it's think about it in terms of help, like, how important is it to have help? Well, if you have resources on the money side moreso than on the time side, then I think that's fantastic. Well, a lot of us have more time than money. And so in which case you can learn to do this stuff yourself. And there's great resources on YouTube and everything else. So I think just kind of figure out where you are and what works for you. I wouldn't be afraid of using a team. But I wouldn't necessarily say you have to use a team either. So whatever works for you, so thanks for the question. All right, next question came from DJ s cube. DJ s KOB.

Alban: 44:53

What ej S wave? DJ skewb dj skewb Okay,

Kevin: 44:58

what's the best way to rebrand and retain your audience.

Travis: 45:01

Oh, well, this one, lucky for you, DJ Scoob is relatively easy. We actually have a video on our YouTube channel that I'll link in the show notes, where we talk about rebranding, what used to be five minute Mondays to what is now Podcasting, Q&A. The biggest things you want to think through is make sure that your audience knows what's happening before it happens. So it doesn't happen by surprise. They're not looking for, you know, five minute Mondays in their podcast library, and they go and it's not there, and they don't know where it is or why it's missing. And they didn't scroll down to see Oh, there's this new podcast called Podcasting Q&A, that I'm happy to be subscribed to make sure they know what's happening ahead of time. And then when you actually do the rebrand, make sure that you're still serving the same kind of person. So if you start off as like a Star Wars fan podcast, and then you want to jump into home gardening, it doesn't make sense to rebrand that because it's built to serve a different kind of person, someone who's looking for something different. And so if you're rebranding it, like changing the name to be, you know, more dialed in or you want to take your name out of it and change something like, that's totally fine. Just make sure you're serving the same kind of person. Otherwise, you're gonna have better success, just creating a new podcast from scratch. Alban, we talked about Facebook podcasts a couple times here on the show, and we have lots of thoughts on it. History breeze podcast wants to know, is there any update on Facebook podcasts?

Alban: 46:23

Do you actually know who history briefs is?

Travis: 46:25

I do not.

Alban: 46:26

That's a our friend Brad shrieve wonderful Ostuni show. So if you want to hear short stories about history, check it out. Okay, so what's happening with Facebook podcasts? Well, I still am very bullish on it. I think Facebook could open the door to millions of new listeners, if they ever decide to really launch Facebook podcasts, they announced a ton very quickly. And then they had a date to their was launching. And it was only going out to like 1% of podcasts, and only 1% of Facebook iOS users in the United States. So we're talking like a super, super limited quantity of people we're seeing it. And it really hasn't launched much more than that. The only update I have is, you know, we had one of our shows how to start a podcast in there. And that was cool. And I we played around with a little bit. And then I saw Buzzcast got added. And that was cool. But I went back in recently, because I got an email that said your podcast has been added to your Facebook page. And I went in and there are like 80 podcasts associated with the Buzzsprout Facebook page. Okay, well, why is that because some of you know Buzzsprout hosts over 100,000 active podcasts. And a bunch of you are doing great shows that Facebook has found and said, Ah, these would be great on Facebook podcasts, we are going to automatically connect it to their Facebook page. And they have incorrectly identified that Buzzsprout is the owner of that podcast. And I have to imagine the same thing is happening over for all the other podcast hosts. We didn't publish any of those shows, obviously, because those aren't ours to publish. And, you know, if it was associated the Buzzsprout page, it wouldn't help you grow your podcast on Facebook anyway. So I guess I'm just saying, I still think this could be good. I'm looking forward to learning more, they've got to get a nice way to submit shows via RSS, or to at least manually Connect shows that they find to Facebook pages. Because this totally automated solution is definitely not working now. But we saw growing pains. In the beginning of Spotify, we saw Growing Pains like this, the beginning of Amazon, to a much lesser extent. And some even with beginning of Google podcasts. It's reasonable that we have them. Now with Facebook. I'm sure it'll get cleared out. But once this launches, and once it there's an easy solution. Brad, you'll be one of the first people that to know, because I think it could be really big in the grand scheme of things for podcasts. It's gonna be huge, huge. Facebook was very big for our former president. So

Kevin: 49:21

that's the next big thing is when was that platform that got canceled?

Alban: 49:24

parlor?

Kevin: 49:27

parlor podcasts coming?

Alban: 49:29

We had them for a hot minute. Do you not work? Okay, so there are two parlour apps.

Kevin: 49:35

There was doesn't have enough editing work to do already. Now we're gonna go into the parlor.

Alban: 49:39

This is a segment This is the second podcast. All right,

Kevin: 49:43

let me fire off another question for you. What is the least complicated platform for recording? I'm assuming we're talking about recording multiple people remote, so let's steer it in that direction.

Travis: 49:53

All right, multiple people remotes and we're gonna set up a basic bar of a Audio needs to be at least average, right? There's lots of solutions for, you know, capturing phone calls and things like that, but not really the level of quality you'd want in a podcast, if you just want super simple and very intuitive zoom, surprisingly, can give you some good audio if you have all the settings tuned correctly. So you'll want to record separate audio files for each participant, you'll want to turn original audio on. So that zoom isn't compressing the audio file as it's being streamed back and forth. And you'll want to save it both locally to your computer and to the cloud. At the same time, if you have all those settings turned on, and the other person has the zoom app download to the computer, it's pretty intuitive. But if you want something that is going to give you that extra level of quality, and the software that we've used for Buzzcast that we recommend for podcasting is Riverside, and squad cast, both of those will give you completely lossless audio. So whatever the microphone is recording, that's what you're going to get. And it's built right into a web app. So you're going to send someone a link, they click it, and you can start recording your podcast. Fantastic. Alright, one more.

Kevin: 51:11

Let's do one more. And this is a tricky one. Luckily, we have an expert on the panel today. Can you use small snippets of movie audio? Or waves when discussing a film or a show?

Alban: 51:23

Can you?

Travis: 51:24

Alban, you're the expert. You tell us?

Alban: 51:27

All right. Yeah, I guess Kevin wants me to give my non real this is like a fake thing. But I am a lawyer. I'm not your lawyer. I wasn't even a good lawyer, even when I was a lawyer. So I take all that into account.

Kevin: 51:41

Why Why do people do that? album? sidebar? legal term? Why? Why every time a lawyer gives an answer on a podcast or or TV show or somebody that why do they say that? What do they say I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Why is that?

Alban: 51:54

Okay? So there's actually a lot of law around whether or not a client or attorney client relationship is formed. And so sometimes people will like show up in your office and be like, blah, blah, blah, talk to you about their case, and then be like, cool, you're my lawyer. And then you're like, No, no, you're not my No, no, I'm not your lawyer yet. And they're like, Oh, yeah, you are. And you can actually kind of get roped into doing some legal work, especially if you're already like going to trial, even if they're not paying your bills. all that to say, you got to make sure that people know when there's a attorney client relationship formed. And I think that it's gone a little bit too far when people are like, I'm a lawyer, but not your lawyer, like no one in their right mind is thinking like this random anime avatar lawyer on Twitter, like re tweeting back at you is actually their attorney. No one thinks that there's a relationship there.

Kevin: 52:51

So just to be clear, Alban, you are my attorney, but you're not the listeners. Attorney. Right? I actually. Okay, so can I use a clip from a movie or a TV show? Can I put it in my podcast? And if I do that, am I gonna get in trouble?

Alban: 53:05

Alright, so the what they're kind of hinting towards is copyright law, and specifically fair use. So if something is copyrighted, you can't use it in your podcast? Well, you can, but then you will get sued. And then people are most people are savvy enough. They're like, but sometimes I know that stuff is in in things. And there's this thing called fair use. Yeah, there is there is a legal defense to a copyright suit called fair use. And that's when you're using me it would be like if your Do you there's different ways you could say we're using it for educational purposes. I'm only using this in a satirical way I'm using it. In a way I think that modifies the original I forget the legal term for that. It's been a long time since I didn't do well on copyright law. But all that to say, yeah, you can use stuff, but then you get sued for it. And then you try to prove to the judge that it was an acceptable fair use. That's not the situation you want to find yourself in for your movie podcast. What is much better is to just talk about the podcast, or to actually get to license whatever, you know, whatever license you need to get to actually share those clips. This is definitely not the end. Another thing to think about is a lot of different platforms are scanning to find content that is, you know, violating copyright, because of DMCA. So. YouTube has bots that are checking every video going, Hey, is there any Miley Cyrus music in here, and if it is like, turn it off, turn off this video and let Miley Cyrus give you a strike on your account. So that's going on in the background for all a lot of these channels. Spotify, YouTube in particular, I'm sure Apple has some as well, if you're on any of those platforms, even if you have the copyright, it can get a little dicey because the bot picks you up says, Oh, that's copyrighted music, turn it off. And then you've got to actually work with that platform to be like, no YouTube, I actually have rights to this. I mean, there's so many kind of funny examples of people uploading their own music to YouTube, and YouTube goes, Oh, this is copyrighted. And they're like, yeah, by me, I gotta turn this off for a bit. So all that to say, don't, it's not worth the hassle. I have heard of people who do shows that involve a lot of music, or movie trailers or stuff that is copyrighted on Patreon. And they put all of it behind the paywall, and my only thinking is the only people who see it are paying subscribers. And there is no algorithm running around checking for copyrighted material that is a copyright violation that is just unlikely to be caught. So wouldn't recommend it. But um, yeah, don't use it. Be good. Don't do bad things.

Kevin: 56:07

Alright, challenged to that answer. I listened to podcasts like Seth Rogen does the akimbo podcast, and people do it on talk radio all the time, they play these little clips, like whatever, you know, a little sound from the Seinfeld show, or a famous one liner from friends episode or something like that, just as like little transitions where they make a joke, and they get, you know, they're like, you know, for whatever reason, new moon or something like that, like comes in, like, how do they get away with that? And can I do something like, to that extent on my podcast without trouble,

Alban: 56:37

I need to go pull it up, Kev, I mean, you're, you're still in your landing into Fair Use space again. And so you could still end up like, I think all of those radio stations like some, you know, whoever owns the rights to Seinfeld. Now, Fox could be like, Alright, let's go after him for that. It's just a big difference if like your radio station, or you're a pretty big company that actually has a lawyer on staff that can be like, Oh, I can respond to the threatening letter. I can respond to YouTube when they're trying to get this taken down. Versus I'm an individual. And all of a sudden, I'm dealing with this massive issue, at least in your mind. I mean, you get one cease and desist letter. Most lawyers, like when we get cease and desist letters are like, yeah, these get sent out all the time. And a lot of times, there's no suit even coming after, after them. But if you're an individual, and you get a cease and desist letter, you're like, Oh, my gosh, I can't go spend 10 grand and hire an attorney. I can't fight this. We're talking about a podcast with 80 listeners. Well, as soon as that happens, now, you're going back in and re editing all your episodes to take out these segments, you're taking down episodes. It just throws a huge wrench into your life is like did that ever improve the podcast anyway? I don't think so. So that's my take on why I would probably leave it out. Well, Albert, I

Travis: 58:02

think that's fantastic. Official lawyer Lee advice. Kevin, are you gonna say?

Kevin: 58:07

Well, every now and then this does happen. And some of our customers get cease and desist letters and they get sued and they say like, what can you do to help me and we can only have like one response, which is, I know a lot of people want to send water. Just send your cash. Alright, wrap us up.

Travis: 58:24

If you want us to do more of these a lightning round Question and Answer segments, make sure that you tell Alban on Twitter. that'll probably be the fastest way to get to one of us and let us know that you really liked that. We did this. That's it for today. We'll get to the next one. Keep podcasting