Stranger Than Podcaster Fanfiction

In this episode, the hosts discuss "The Standards Innovation Paradox", weigh the pros and cons of multiple Facebook profiles, wonder at fanfiction about podcast hosts, and the truth is revealed about which one is an internet creep.

ACAST & PODCHASER
🎉 Congrats to both!
https://podnews.net/press-release/acast-podchaser

• Deal totals $34 million ($27.2 million initial & $6.8 million earn-out clause). 
• Podchaser will operate as a separate brand and independent business. 
• Will give Acast's advertisers better data to target ads. 

THE PODCAST QUIZ
https://podcastfont.com/Quiz.html

PODDLE
https://poddle.podchaser.com/

HEARDLE
https://www.spotify.com/heardle/

THE STANDARDS INNOVATION PARADOX
https://mignano.medium.com/the-standards-innovation-paradox-e14cab521391
The Standards Innovation Paradox is a blog post written by Michael Mignano about the trade-off of finding an audience quickly vs innovative development.

FACEBOOK TESTING MULTIPLE PROFILES
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/14/23219030/facebook-multiple-profiles-meta-active-users
Facebook will allow some users to have multiple profiles as part of a test. 

• Up to five profiles per account
• Can use fake names for the extra profiles
• If any one profile violates Facebook's policies, that profile or all tied to the account can be affected.
• Interaction-based (i.e. work profile, hobby profile, family profile, etc.)

PODCAST FANFICTION
https://audioboom.com/posts/8103609-podcast-famous-with-brian-park
Audio Boom's Normal Gossip had an episode air on June 21st that detailed the story of three women who became a fans of a podcast that had a fan group on Reddit.
The women in the story found out that there was a fan-fiction group for this podcast, and thought it was hilarious, so they started taking part in writing fan fiction about the hosts.
It is definitely worth a listen!

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:59 Acast to acquire Podchaser
• 4:20 LIT Live Item Tag
• 11:30 Podcast games
• 15:30 The Standards Innovation Paradox
• 27:44 Multiple Facebook profiles
• 36:36 Podcast Famous: podcaster fanfiction
• 45:56 BUZZBOOSTS!
• 51:27 Post Show

Transcript

Kevin: 0:00

Yeah, you don't have to fit. I'm gonna show it to you. You don't have to fake enthusiasm for it if you don't want to. Oh, no.

Jordan: 0:07

I mean, it's just like, I think it's too cheesy.

Kevin: 0:09

You think it's too cheesy to do something like that?

Jordan: 0:11

I do. Dang,

Kevin: 0:13

I thought it'd be fun.

Jordan: 0:14

I really, really, really appreciate you being like, you know, Jordans. Right. But this, isn't it.

Kevin: 0:21

You don't want to do something like goofy. Yeah,

Jordan: 0:23

I don't think Goofy is it? Well, it's cool. But

Kevin: 0:26

Well, it's not cool. Don't lie to me.

Alban: 0:29

Jordan's, like, I don't like it. Pretty cool, though.

Kevin: 0:35

You have two options, Jordan, you can be honest, or you can be nice, but you can't be both

Alban: 0:40

Jordan's way of giving harsh feedback is to say the harsh feedback and then the opposite just so that like, if you were really hurt, you could like let yourself down. This is terrible. But it looks good though.

Kevin: 1:00

So the news broke yesterday that our friends at Podchaser were acquired by Acast. And we've gotten to know the folks at Podchaser over the past couple years great group of people super excited for them, I just imagining they're thrilled to the moon, they've done a great job building a very cool product over the past couple of years. So congratulations to all of our friends at Podchaser have no idea what this means going forward. But it seems like they're happy. And a cast is super happy. They both did separate announcements. And that's all a couple tweets on Twitter about it. So congratulations to Cole and Bradley and the rest of the team at Podchaser.

Alban: 1:33

Yeah, a lot of times when we see acquisitions, especially in the podcasting space, which we know pretty well, you kind of see where the benefit is coming from, you know, they're good companies, but with their powers combined, like to become something even better. AD. So I think the argument here is the pod chaser will help a cast sell better advertisements, though. And I don't mean this as the negative for pod chaser at all. But purchase was a cool company, and they're doing cool stuff. I'm not seeing $34 million is making a ton of sense for a cast in particular, you know, a cast isn't this massive company, that$34 million isn't a big deal. That's a really big deal. And for them to be acquiring a company mainly for, hey, we're going to get some delta on selling better, more targeted advertisements. If that's the play, I don't see how it's working. So like, I'll be interested to see it. And I'm obviously very excited for the guys that we know at pod chaser, Bradley and Cole, specifically, because they've been working in this space for a long time. They're really good people. And I hope they stick with the a Cast team and maybe take some of that positive good energy that they have. And maybe they apply it to some of the email marketing cast spot.

Jordan: 2:51

I mean, that's the thing that keeps getting brought up by podcasters, or those who are in the podcasting industry is wow, that's a really great way to get emails is to buy a company that has a lot of emails.

Kevin: 3:06

Yeah, it's definitely a brand lift for a cast. Right, pod chaser has a strong brand. They're liked by everybody in the industry. Everybody from that company from pod chaser who's ever attended podcasts conferences always gets along with everybody always tries to do right by the community, a cast not so much they've got opportunity to lift their brand. And by aligning themselves with POD chaser, I think it was a good move there. They're not gonna spend $34 million to do that. So obviously, there's a lot more to the deal than just the brand lift. But it is a good move. Like, I don't think anybody's ever said anything negative about pod chaser, there might have been a few times in their history where there's been some concern about the level of data that pod chaser was acquiring and pot chasers always handled it really well. We know some of the team there. They're fantastic people. And so I imagine they vetted this deal fully, they probably had some concerns getting acquired by a company that has had a few stains reputationally over the past couple of months, specifically around email marketing, but they wouldn't have done the deal if they felt like these were not good people who were trying to move in a more positive direction. I just want to say congratulations, call you guys and Bradley, everyone who works at pod chaser, good job, I think this was part of the plan originally built something big enough that you could then be a part or acquired by a larger company, and you could do more things. And I'm sure they're excited about that. So we're excited for them.

Alban: 4:19

We were talking the other day about like some of our favorite podcasts that we know are really, really big, that just leave everything in. I mean, when I listen to his 538 politics, podcast, and like there's tons of stuff out there. I'm like, I know this is a very big show with a producer like you've got a team and there's just like knocking them like, falling over. It's still in there. Phone's ringing in the background. Oh, like let's get it on.

Kevin: 4:45

Well, it's interesting that you bring this up because I've been thinking about Dave Jones was here last week. He drove in town was visiting us in Jacksonville. Dave Jones works with podcasts index and Adam curry and all the podcasts namespace new tags and everything. One of the new tags because that has just been finalized is called Live item tag or lit for short, which is lit. They say this podcast is lit. And that means you you're live. So your podcasting live, it's really great name, every once in a while they had a great name for a tag. And this was a great one. So the live item tag, you know, I'm like back and forth on live podcasting for non professionals, non people who have done it for a long time, because doing a live show is really hard to give good content. But the tag is now like finalized and enables people who want to be live. Like we can do that through RSS. So it's pretty interesting. I was thinking about it, even if you did a show live, and then you don't publish that as your final episode, you replace it with a final edited episode. Like I don't know, I'm just I'm thinking about how we might utilize that as at Buzzsprout.

Alban: 5:48

Is it like an alternative enclosure that you can have an edited version, but a lit version as well? Or is that like, Hey, here's a URL. And if you see it soon enough, you can jump into the live stream.

Kevin: 5:59

Yeah, it piggybacks on pod ping. So, you know, with POD ping, you don't have to wait for updates. As soon as you publish a new episode in your feed, it notifies the pod pink service than any podcast app that uses pod ping as well gets an immediate notification that there's new episode here. And it displays that if you use Apple podcasts, it can be up to 24 hours before you realize that a new episode is dropped. The latest version is a little faster, like two to six hours is what they say. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But any app that uses pop paying, it's really it's like within minutes. And so they develop this live item tag to build on top of pod ping. So if you're using pod pinning, which Buzzsprout uses pod ping, and you publish an episode and you say, Hey, we're live right now, then you can jump in and you can listen to the stream as it's happening. And then that live item tag would update when you're done recording. And it could live there until you replace the audio. So let's say we were lit right now we would say hey, it's it's 130. On Tuesday Buzzcast is recording live. So anybody who wants to listen to this gibberish can log in for two hours and just listen to a stream live. And then when it's done, that could be in our feed until Friday when you publish the final edited version. Or you could take it out. Or you could say hey, the live event is over. I don't want to end my feed until we officially published on Friday. You can do whatever you want. And I'm just trying to figure out like if we implemented the live item tag at Buzzsprout. What do we think the best use case for that is?

Alban: 7:17

What if it was it stayed live forever as like an alternative enclosure. So you would say this one episode has two versions, one version is edited prefer,

Kevin: 7:28

that's really not how the alternate enclosure is designed to work. So alternate enclosure is four different versions of the same audio so encoded at different bit rates, or a video version and an audio version. But it's always supposed to be the same audio. So you really wouldn't have an unedited and an edited version, because that's not the same audio. That'd be two different versions of the audio.

Alban: 7:45

Well, this is why we need to talk to Davy Jones because this is what I'm proposing. I guess index like I get the alternative culture has a different purpose. But I'm trying to think of like we already have situations where people are like, I kind of want to do a video podcast. And we've always talked about why that's not the best idea. But what if there was alternative versions of the same episode? So you say, Hey, we have the edited version. But if you're, you know, a super fan, and you want to hear the sausage getting made and a whole process, you can listen to that that was live. And now it's in here as the alternative lit version. And if you're also somebody who wants to watch video, no, I don't know, I don't even think I can get on board with putting the video into the RSS. But maybe it's like a link to a YouTube video.

Kevin: 8:30

Podcasts can be video, sure, they can be audio, sure, but it doesn't mean that every service has to be everything. And I still think if you're going to do video right now, you should be on YouTube. So if we ever did a video plan on Buzzsprout, I think that video plan would have to publish to YouTube, which is like, why don't you just publish to YouTube now? Like why do we have to build all that

Jordan: 8:49

out? Yeah, well, I think it's just like people wanting the streamline simplicity of AI upload to one place is distributed everywhere. So I think that's why people are groaning about that is because they don't want to do all the extra stuff.

Alban: 9:05

I understand that desire, like you want to be able to say hey, I upload my video to Buzzsprout. And then Buzzsprout sends it to YouTube also creates the audio version from it, and then the audio goes out everywhere else. I can understand at least a pitch for that. I'm not sure it's something we would build but at least the pitch. The thing that everyone still talks about though, is like I want a video file in my RSS feed. And that doesn't make any sense to me because video is so heavy. I mean, these are big files. And the idea that I'm subscribed to a bunch of different shows like all the YouTube channels that I'm subscribed to are automatically downloading to my phone every time there's a new video put up. Now I've just got gigs and gigs and gigs of video content on my phone in a lot of it. I'm not gonna watch it. I'm probably going to listen to it

Jordan: 9:54

you know, now that I'm thinking about it. I kind of feel like the whole like video podcasting thing. It's it's getting revved by Spotify trying to get people to use anchor, right? They're wanting to do like that sort of like integration. I kind of feel like they're like throwing gasoline on the fire and stuff. But I'm curious if there's any statistics on how many people actually watch the videos on Spotify. Like I kind of feel like maybe this is like a really, really solid marketing campaign by them to be like, video podcasting is happening. And it's so popular and all these people are watching it. And you have to get on Anchor because all these people want video podcasts. And I'm wondering if there's any statistics to like, back that up? Like how many people are actually watching videos on Spotify?

Alban: 10:35

There's some at least for YouTube. Well, yeah, but I think the YouTube case is there's no, I'm just saying there's stats for you to that. It's actually a significant amount of people want to see video, if they're watching using YouTube. And there was some large amount that actually we're just putting the video on as an audio only experience. But I think like the sale that are what people are like excited when they hear video podcasting, what you're excited about is the reach. And that's a YouTube thing is not really a Spotify thing, and it's not really a video in your RSS feed thing. And so when I hear it, like proposed, unlike that's cool, but the cool thing about it is that YouTube has a ton of reach, and they can get you a lot of reach. And that means put it up on YouTube, maybe chop it into clips, and then redirect people back to the podcast. So you have ultimate control in the end.

Jordan: 11:31

Did you guys see in pod news, there was a link for the podcast quiz know what's a podcast quiz. So podcast. font.com has a daily quiz and they say a new quiz every day. You know everything about podcasting. But can you recognize these five logos. So I went to it. I haven't taken the quiz yet. It looks like every single day they have five logos and you have to select what podcast company it applies to.

Kevin: 11:57

Well, the first one is super easy, because the logo says the name of the company it says good pods, so I'm gonna choose good pods.

Alban: 12:05

Okay, the third one is wrong. This is weird. Like the option isn't there?

Kevin: 12:09

Hang on a second. That's the second one. The second one is a lightning bolt. Alright, whatever.

Alban: 12:13

I got five out of five. Boom.

Kevin: 12:16

I'm gonna choose lightning labs.

Alban: 12:18

We don't don't say it Kevin just just click the things no, we're I'm just doing it live.

Jordan: 12:23

I put this diagram because I don't know. It's not

Alban: 12:27

know you kids. No one's locked in on this screen.

Jordan: 12:30

I am locked in. I'm logged in on Instagram. I did it wrong.

Kevin: 12:33

Yeah, and the last one is just the letter CH and like a scripty font. That's chargeable. Yeah, no, that one that has

Jordan: 12:38

to be charted will get results. How did I do? Oh, I got four out of five. I scored

Kevin: 12:43

five out of five. Yeah, he both got four or five. Now I got five out of five because I changed it after Alban told me the answer, which is what any good cheater student would do. Alright, so this is my new Wordle just replace Wordle

Jordan: 12:54

for me. Well, have you played Paudel yet?

Kevin: 12:56

I have puddles. Yeah, it's kind of boring puddles hard.

Jordan: 13:01

The they based off of the pod chaser top charts, which are different from like normal top charts.

Kevin: 13:07

I'm just gonna keep playing the podcast quiz until I see the Buzzsprout logo show

Jordan: 13:11

up. Well, Spotify purchased hurdle just this week. What's up? It is a daily quiz. But you get the first I want to say couple seconds of a song and you have to guess what the song is? That's cool. Yeah, like multiple choice. I don't know. I haven't done it. I'm gonna let her know. hurdle hurdle. Like a herd of cats like h e a rd? Hearing Yeah, like heard heard in my ear? Yep. Listen to the intro then find the correct artist and title in the list. Skipped or incorrect attempts unlock more of the Oh, unlock more of the intro? Answer in as few tries as possible. Okay. Oh, that's easy. It's list of mania.

Kevin: 13:52

Yeah, I don't even know what that song is. List of mania. That's the name of a song.

Jordan: 13:56

Yeah, there's things that I think it's a was it Wolfgang Amadeus or whatever.

Alban: 14:01

Yeah. Do you guys know what list of mania was? It was the it was like a composer something list. And like women went nuts for it. Yeah, Hungarian composer Franz lists during his performance frenzy first occurred, actually looking at this etching of him. Kind of makes sense. See a bad I mean, according to the etching. If you're doing it at jig of somebody who's not that attractive, and that women have been like going nuts at their classical music concerts, like you kind of have to embellish a little bit.

Kevin: 14:38

All right, we should really do a podcast show. So when you're looking at I just went from the podcast quiz. And I just went to the podcast font homepage and I typed in Buzzsprout they have so the Buzzsprout logo is in their font package.

Jordan: 14:51

Oh, these are the tags. Yeah. Oh, if you download

Kevin: 14:54

the podcast font then you can get the Buzzsprout logo is one of the glyphs so

Jordan: 14:58

here's the thing is you can actually study this fight to win the quiz every day. It sounds worthwhile. I'm really I'm really serious about trivia. They must have made them. That's interesting. They do have tag icons. What are the tag icons? You're seeing? I am seeing alternate enclosure tag.

Kevin: 15:15

I gotcha. Use the search tag. Yep. Chapters funding good.

Jordan: 15:19

Yeah, this is actually pretty cool. So that was smart of them to make a quiz so that people go visit the site. Are we going to talk about this Michael Mike nano theory, his write up, I don't know what to call it blog post. For anyone who doesn't know the standards innovation paradox is the blog post that Michael wrote about the trade off of finding an audience quickly versus difficulty developing innovations.

Alban: 15:48

Basically, in lots of areas, there are standards, we have standard for podcasting that's built on RSS, you've got SMTP, for email, Latos, if you've listened to this podcast is what I've always called protocols. And the benefit of standards. And Michael's argument is that you quickly can get adoption. And you can start building something cool on a standard. But over time, you start realizing, there's so many stakeholders who are building on the standard because it's open, like SMS, there's carriers, and then there's people who use the phones. And then there's also people create phones, that you can't really move the standard forward. And so the problem is that you don't really innovate, he does. But on the other hand, you just have things like iMessage, where Apple just says, Hey, we're just going to build a cool messaging app. And we're just going to totally disregard anything that came before. And then we because we control everything, we can just make decisions and move forward. So you have this paradox. When you start, do you want to get a lot of adoption, and quickly start with something? Or do you want to go slow and steady and then go up to infinity as you get to build your own thing, and iterate on it, and he kind of does little graph. And at the end, then he starts talking about a few times where people do have a standard. And then later on kind of like move off of the standard. So the iMessage is an example of that. They use SMS and eventually say, those are those green bubbles. But we'll layer on top of that iMessage, we've talked about this a lot. This is what Spotify is goal was they used the standard of RSS for a long time, and then now have gradually shifted towards locking up podcasting, having lock in on the Spotify platform and at anchor by saying, hey, RSS really isn't going to do it for us, we've got to do something new.

Kevin: 17:49

There is a difference here that he doesn't point out that there's a difference between protocols and publishing formats. And so he uses like HTTP as an example of a standard. That's a standard protocol. And it actually stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, that's HTTP. What RSS is is not a transfer protocol. It's a publishing format. So the correct analogy here would be HTML versus RSS, which is hypertext markup language versus really simple syndication, those are two publishing formats, you can take code and write it in a specific way. And that code is saved as a txt file. And it can be either an HTML file, or it can be an RSS file to publishing formats. And so I don't really think he has a deep tech understanding to be fair, and like neither do I like I wouldn't try to make this argument, at least not without talking to some really technical people and making sure that my analogies hold up. But just on the surface level of the technology in the way that I understand. I feel like his analogies are just like all over the place and falling apart. So I'll start with that. The next thing is that he's making an argument that innovation is not happening in RSS. And that's ridiculous. We know that we've been talking for two plus years about what's happening with podcast to project and the podcast namespace specifically. So all the new tags that are being developed, we're trying to standardize them like movers and shakers in the industry, people who are building hosting products, people who are building apps are trying to come together and create new tags for podcasters to be able to do new things, whether it be publishing video, or alternate file enclosures, or commenting or deciding which directories that you want to be like handling all of that within your RSS feed is all possible. And it's moving quickly. He's saying that this innovation can't happen quickly when you're using standards, but it absolutely can't happen quickly. What's not happening is Spotify is not participating in it. When questioned about it on pod land, he said, I really didn't have much of an awareness of that, like, I don't know really what's going on. They're like, well, that's not an excuse. That's like, You got pulled over for speeding and you know, it's going 60 and 40. And you say, Well, I thought this I didn't know the speed limit was doesn't matter, you're still gonna get ticket. Ignorance is not a defense. And so that positioning is ridiculous. And the whole thing seems like a lot to do about nothing. And it feels to me like somebody who's just trying to defend a position. He's trying to control the narrative while they continue to move in their own direction because As you know, until they get to the point where they don't need independent podcasters, publishing their content into Spotify, so that they can monetize it, then like it's after it's falling apart too quickly, before they can realize their end game, then the whole thing, the whole thing breaks. And really podcasting and content that they don't have to pay royalties on every time it's downloaded or streamed is the future of Spotify. Spotify is going to make it and this has to work. Because their their business model around music is not working, it hasn't worked. And I don't know that it will ever work. And so it's really hard for a company that size to have a business model that works in music, they're starting to pivot towards all things audio, and if the opinion of the world start shifting and being like, hey, like podcasters, like we see what happened with musicians and how you screwed them and how they're not making any money. And if you're going to just try to do the same thing to podcasters, then we're really not interested. So I think it's a narrative control piece. I think it fell flat. I think anybody knows anything about podcasting, argued back about it and didn't buy it.

Jordan: 20:52

I mean, it's pretty bonkers. Because he like, even when people are saying, No, here's why it's not true. He's still sticking to his guns and just doing that whole like, Well, did you read the whole thing? Did you read the whole thing? And it's like, Yes, we did read the whole thing. And I mean, he even mentions in there. Like he says, if we were to enable a comment section for podcast episodes, and have these comments be available within a shows RSS feed. He's saying like, unless you get hundreds of people like it will never work. And then podcast index and pod verse come at him. And they're like, actually, that's like, already in the works here that's already being done. He used all these like hypotheticals that are actually real. And it just further disproved what he was trying to say. But yeah, like that's the thing is like, he was just like completely sticking to his guns. I thought his graph was very funny, his little hand drawn graph to illustrate his point, and I get that it's to illustrate his point. But like, to me, it just seems silly.

Kevin: 21:51

You know, it really help some of these tags catch on in a big way, would be for a big player like Spotify to get on board with one of them. Just one. Like there's there's dozens, pick one like you're he's all hot to trot about cross out commenting, or just commenting in general he doesn't he doesn't want cross app. He only wants Spotify comments. Well do it in such a way that any other podcast app that's playing an app, if somebody leaves, comments, Spotify, I can also see it in overcast or I can also see it in pod verse or I can also see in Felton do it that way the standard exists. It's called the Social interact tag, it's all documented, you can implement it today, if you don't like the way that it's implemented. It's all open source. So you can fork it, you can do your own version of it. If the community gets on board, great. If not, at least you attempted to participate in what's going on in the open pockets ecosystem. And you're trying to work with developers. But this is not that, like, that's the ruse that's happening here is they are not interested in playing nice with ever the other people, they're only interested in what's best for Spotify.

Jordan: 22:42

Well, that's what James Cridland said to he just basically was like, Okay, well, Apple is doing it. So why can't you?

Alban: 22:48

So yeah, I think there's actually a clear answer, why can Apple do it, and Spotify can't do it, because Apple makes its money by selling iPhones, and they make their money by selling services for the iPhone. And Spotify is struggling to make money off of a music platform, because it's very, very difficult with the types of tracks that you have in the music industry to make money. And so they said, Okay, we'll try to do it with this podcasting thing, where there's not all of this power in the hands of the labels, because there are no labels. So then they tried to do the podcast thing, their business model of making Spotify work, is to become the home of podcasting on the internet, to be the place that everybody goes to be the platform for podcasting. So when I read the article, there's actually a few points that I think are well made, but they're not well made to the audience that he's speaking to. This is not an article that is written for us. If you're listening to this podcast, it probably wasn't written for you. It's not really written for anybody who's in podcasting. He's writing to other people who are going to build apps, and are saying, How am I going to make my business succeed? And he's saying, Hey, do you want to plug in to an existing platform? Or do you want to build something totally your own? So think of the guy that is slack? You know, do you want to plug into email? Or do you want to build your totally new things? Let me give you a couple quotes. Like I think this makes the point pretty easy. Standards for RSS for podcasts have enabled emerging technologies to spread far and wide in the information age by making it easy for them to plug into existing ecosystems. So what's plugging into the existing ecosystem? Spotify is Spotify saying like, yeah, we're not going to try to build the whole podcasting thing ourselves. We're just going to plug in to whatever is there. And he talks about what are the downsides. And multiple times it's like, there's so many different podcasting apps. Why is that a bad thing? Lots of people tried different web browsers that are dead. Lots of people have tried different email clients that are dead. That's not a problem. The problem is for somebody who's trying to build a business in this space, we have to be the sole winner. We have to be the Google Chrome we have to be the gmail you know, you've got to be big enough to make money. See, that is a real problem. And I think if you're trying to do that, if you're trying to be the platform, plugging into an existing standard is dangerous. And that chart he drew, I think actually makes a lot of sense. But it's not an innovation isn't the y axis, its stock price. And I don't mean that is like a rip like it's true, you can get an initial bump, but it's not going to go up forever. The line doesn't just keep going up, because it's going to plateau. Once you say we brought all the podcasts on board, or trying to do cool stuff, everyone goes sweet. It looks like your stock should go up. But then they go, Yeah, but you're not really going to ever own this thing. You've actually, in a way propped up the existing standard. And he's going but see, we'll never we'll never be able to go to the moon. And you're like, Yeah, you won't, because what you did was you didn't try to build it yourself. You try to plug into an existing standard. And now you're trying to say, I think I'd like to be the owner of this whole thing. And so the shots at RSS, I really feel our shots not at the standard, their shots at the decision to plug into RSS for Spotify.

Kevin: 26:12

I asked myself, Why is he writing this because he doesn't even work for Spotify anymore. So he was I can't remember exactly what his title was, but like head of talk or something. So he was one of the cofounders of anchor anchor got acquired by Spotify. As part of that deal. He went and worked for Spotify, and was head of talk, which was the new title that they gave him. But basically in charge of podcasting and things related to talk radio, that was where they were going to be appearing within Spotify platform. And he did that for two and a half, three years, I don't know, some amount of time since the acquisition until just recently, but I think he announced at the podcast show in London, he was done with Spotify, he's leaving, he was just on pod land last week and said that, you know, whatever the future holds for him. He's just like doing investing and stuff. He's not announcing anything new in the podcasting space. So post departure of Spotify, he writes this article and puts it out and people are interested in it because he was, you know, an executive at Spotify. So when executive Spotify talked about podcasting, people are gonna listen, but he's not executive Spotify anymore. And so why, like, why now, after you left? Are you interested in explaining the problem between following standards versus going our own route? And all the challenges and complications behind that? And so I don't know what to think other than man, do you still have a lot of Spotify stock? Are you still interested, and making sure that people don't get super like podcasters don't get super frustrated at the direction that Spotify is going. And so you feel the need to kind of explain it a little bit more to make sure that Spotify stock doesn't completely tank and all your wealth goes away. That's what it feels like. I don't know if that's what's happening. But that's what it seems like.

Jordan: 27:45

Facebook is testing multiple profiles for single users. So they have selected certain people to have up to five profiles under one account. And this is really interesting, because currently, it's a violation of their standards to have a name that is not your given name. And then also maintain multiple accounts as a single user. So this is kind of moving away from that process. For them, it's a little bit better for people that want to have their life compartmentalized. And I'm actually one of those people where I like to have things compartmentalized. I mean, you know, I don't use my full like real name in podcasting space. But I'm constantly getting friend requests from listeners or other people in the podcasting community. But I want to keep my personal life separate from that. So I'm actually really, really looking forward to this. And I'm hoping that since this is from meta, that it also is going to carry over to Instagram, I have my accounts linked up between Instagram and Facebook. And so I'm hoping that there's going to be the ability to have multiple profiles under one account in Instagram, that are able to link up to the different profiles in Facebook.

Alban: 29:10

It's surprising to me that this has taken Facebook so long to kind of make this shift. So famously, Mark Zuckerberg said, like you only really have one profile, you only have one thing to share with the world. And that's your whole self. And it always seemed naive, like, we are not the same person at work as we are with close friends, who we are is a public persona. And I think people see this all the time when a celebrity acts in a way that doesn't seem like their normal self. It's like the probably actually is their normal self. And the character they've been playing for you is you know, more of a character. Everybody has this, you know, multitudes of personalities that present differently. And so what Facebook always said was like no, but only one profile. Well, what that originally opened the door to was LinkedIn people wanted to have a personal life, and they wanted a professional life. And so LinkedIn said, hey, we'll be a separate place for your professional life. And I'd imagine that Facebook later on when they tried to launch more work features was kind of regretting like, oh, we let professional life get away from us and go somewhere else. And then with Snapchat, it was like, Hey, this is really social media for only your closest friends. And it's the stupid stuff, you say to your close friends, and it's so stupid, we'll just make it disappear. And then Facebook, I think when ah, we kind of missed out on some of these, like, personal dumb interactions. And I think over time, we've just seen more apps, the place that they've gotten a little leverage has always been in the, hey, Facebook isn't serving this purpose, because there is a part of your personality and a segment of your social graph that you have a certain type of communication with, that isn't great for Facebook. But with up to five profiles, what you're gonna be able to do is you can have your work persona on Facebook, and it's the one that you accept friend requests from your work people. And then you can segment off your closest friends, and you can segment off other groups, it's probably a little too late for a lot of people, like most people have moved away, I think, from our generation of core Facebook users. But it makes sense. And, you know, now people will probably feel a little bit more comfortable sharing controversial political opinions on their one profile and keeping that separate from like, work friends, or from you know,

Jordan: 31:29

other people. Yeah, I mean, the only reason I even have Facebook still is because of the Buzzsprout podcasting community group on Facebook. That is the only thing keeping me there. And I think that the reason for that is, is that I don't have a separation between, you know, Jordan as a podcaster. And Jordan, as a mom, Jordan, as a friend, you know, things like that I don't have that separation, I think I'm going to be more comfortable with my presence on Facebook, and like allowing people in as long as I can keep them in their little box. So for anyone that doesn't have a business page and their podcast, I imagine, that's going to function similarly to if you have your profile, and then you also have a page, Facebook has in the menu, there's your profile photo, and if you click that, you can actually switch between the page and your personal profile. So I'm wondering if it's going to be that same like toggling effect, where you can click on it, and then select which profile you want to enter. Um, something else I'm really interested in seeing is that they indicated you can have a profile for a hobby such as like if you have an interest in anime or something like that. And so I'm wondering if you have one profile that like reflects certain interests, if you're going to have more like targeted advertising for that certain thing, or I don't know how it's going to work, like if that's going to change, what kind of things are directed at you, or what kind of things the algorithm puts in front of you, as far as people you're friends with posting and stuff like that? I don't know.

Alban: 33:04

I think Facebook is realized more and more people have all these interests. And they started feeling like, oh, I don't really love it when my uncle sees my and my posts, whatever it might be. And it's like, it's happened to all of us were you become friends with somebody on a social platform, and then you start seeing some part of their personality you've never seen before. They're like, weird, I didn't know they're into that. Or they have those opinions. And I think Facebook saying, Hey, it's okay, you can segment it off, not everybody needs to see everything about everyone they know, that's a good thing. And then the other huge benefit from Facebook's perspective, is they said, If you violate community guidelines on one profile, you violated it on all of them. And I know they've had to play like a whack a mole game with terrible content with people, and where people have maintained many different profiles. And then they might post some really despicable stuff on one. But then when that gets banned, they just jump over to a different one. I think they've now said, Hey, do you want to just link all these profiles up? And a lot of people will take them up in the opportunity. And then they'll say, Okay, we just got to ban all five at the same time. Because, yeah, this guy shouldn't be posting this stuff on anything. We'll just take away all of these personas.

Kevin: 34:20

Yeah, I can totally relate to the scenarios that you guys were putting out there. Like it. I used Facebook for a little while, and it was all personal stuff. And then as Buzzsprout started to grow, and we launched the community, you run into these weird issues of, there's all these people in our Facebook community now and they want to be friends, but giving them access to my profile gives them access to my family and what my kids did this weekend and stuff. And that just feels a little weird. Not that like you know, they're probably all perfectly fine people, people I bump into a podcast conferences and stuff, but you know, I just had an interaction with you for 10 minutes, or I just liked a comment that you gave. And now I don't know that I want to give you access to all of my personal history on Facebook. And so I totally get the deal that I would be able to give people more access. If I could come Part mentalize a little bit, but then I'm also kind of like, I'm kind of like exhausted with social stuff in general online, like, Oh, you want me to go into Facebook and set something else up and tell you a little bit more about how I want to compartmentalize my life, I'm like, way over that. And like, it might be a little bit too little too late for me in Facebook, I don't see myself doing that. What I've been doing more is like pulling back from Facebook, like I want them to have less information, not more. I love participating in that community group. But we've had multiple talks over the years and will probably continue to until at some point, we move our community out of Facebook in general, because I think there's more negative than positive. It's happening in Facebook. And so like, even though there's this massive benefit of having this Facebook community for Buzzsprout, podcasters, can we have that same thing somewhere else without all the baggage of Facebook? And so I'm more interested in exploring those ideas than I am and like, oh, well, Facebook might be giving us more tools to segment that stuff off. Like, well, here's a great tool to segment it off, like just go to completely private community outside of Facebook. But yeah, I think I think it's a real neat, I just don't know if I have the energy to deal with

Jordan: 36:01

them. Yeah, it would be really nice to move away from the Facebook group and move it to something else, like a discord or, or a slack. Or it would be nice to do that. And it's so funny, because pretty much everyone I talked to has the same sentiment of like, yeah, if it wasn't for the Buzzsprout community, I probably would never be on here. So I wonder if that's just what's like the glue that's holding us all together. Right?

Kevin: 36:28

That's not a good feeling that we're the anchor locking a lot of people into Facebook like Oh, gosh.

Alban: 36:38

Alright, Jordan, you've got something in here that what's going on with this fanfiction and podcast, groupies?

Jordan: 36:44

Oh, my goodness. So I listened to this episode of normal gossip that had aired back in June. The episode is called podcast famous. And I was like, that's interesting. And is the story about these three girls who became fans of a podcast, they figured out that there was like a subreddit of other fans of this podcast. And then things got a little weird because what happened is this fandom grew like a little bit more aggressive about things and got really into the podcast hosts and apparently the podcast hosts are like attractive guys or something like that. So they start kind of posting things are like a little bit more thirsty in the subreddit about these hosts, and someone reaches out to them as like, hey, we actually have a fanfiction thread specifically for these hosts. And so the girls think it's hilarious. They go check out this fanfiction site and there's a private fanfiction group where the listeners of this podcast write fanfiction about the podcast hosts. And it's things like damsel in distress and like the podcast hosts are like the ones rescue them. And it's very sexy kind of stuff. But it just basically like these listeners fantasizing about these podcast hosts. And it's the most bonkers story I've ever heard. Because like, it's not some actors that got together and decided to make a podcast like these are not people who are celebrities at first. It's like they had this obscure podcast and the fandom just kind of like grew into this crazy thing.

Alban: 38:21

Do we know what the podcast is? No. So

Jordan: 38:23

that's the thing is normal gossip, make sure that everything is completely like anonymous. So they make up what the podcast topic is they make up the podcaster names. They make up the podcast name completely. They make up the names of the people telling the story. So everything is purely anonymous. I have to admit my curiosity was piqued. I wanted to know what it was about these podcasters that made people so ravenous for their affection. I Deepto for like an hour, and I think I might have figured out who the podcast is, but I'm not super sure. But it led me down a very dark rabbit rabbit hole and I found a podcast that maybe could fit the bill. And then I went into like their Instagram accounts and I just found that there was an Instagram picture that match something that they had mentioned about the certain host, that was a fan favorite. So I went down a very dark place and I don't know what this episode did to me.

Alban: 39:25

I just want to be clear, you're stalking the stalkers?

Jordan: 39:27

I'm not stalking I mean, it's all readily available online, but

Alban: 39:31

stalkers say, oh, it's in the phone. I'm going to go into a public street.

Kevin: 39:38

There's a very fine line between stalking and research. And it's like you're you're you're falling on both sides.

Jordan: 39:46

But I might know what podcast it is after my investigation after my sleuthing, but I'm not super sure so so without

Alban: 39:55

like revealing the name, since that's not totally needed for the story. What's the podcast about is it Buzzcast? I just want to know.

Jordan: 40:03

Alright guys, it's our podcast, it was us whole time.

Alban: 40:08

Yeah. It is funny to me though, how you know, this is the thing we always say is like, Hey, you can build such a relationship with your listeners. This is the time where it's like, oh, maybe a little too much.

Jordan: 40:21

I mean, that's kind of like the funny thing is, as podcasting gets a little bit more popular, mainstream, yeah, like mainstream, people are starting to develop pod crushes. And I kind of feel like that already happens with YouTube stars and stuff like that. There's people who subscribe to youtube channels, because they think the host of the YouTube channels cute or funny or something like that. And they actually become a fan of this person, because they feel like they know them on a certain level. And I think that that is starting to happen a little bit more with podcasts. I mean, there's podcasts that I've listened to, where I'm like, Oh, this host has a really nice voice. And then I go find their social media profile or something like that. And like, Oh, they're actually really cute. And then I go to like their Facebook group for the podcast. And it's just like, tons of fans like constantly posting about the person. Like I've seen it happen before.

Alban: 41:15

And then like I just went, did some research and started to do some fanfiction. And it's like, all of a sudden,

Kevin: 41:20

I seen it happen through your own eyes is what you're describing.

Jordan: 41:27

I'm very thorough when I do my research about things. Okay. I'm very,

Kevin: 41:33

like for a friend, this is you. You're doing No,

Jordan: 41:36

I'm just a naturally curious person. And I like to see things with my own eyes.

Kevin: 41:42

It's an interesting story, like, are we talking about it? Because you feel like this is like a viable marketing strategy for podcasters to be hot, or to be hot. And then if you happen to be hot, then to recruit fans to write fanfiction for

Jordan: 41:56

you? I don't know. I mean, there's only one way to find out. We have to do some tests. I'll get back to you on that.

Kevin: 42:04

I'm gonna have to do some research because I gotta be honest with you. I've never read any fanfiction of anything. And I know it exists. But I have no idea what it's like.

Jordan: 42:13

I think that more often than not, fanfiction is viewed as smutty. But it's not necessarily always that there's actually some fan fictions that are very good, where they suss out backstories that aren't necessarily canon in a fandom. For example, the Harry Potter fandom, you know, the founders of the Hogwarts houses have very, very interesting stories that are not like necessarily touched on in the series. And so there are fans of Harry Potter that have like, taken it upon themselves to say like, okay, in the canon of what we know in this universe right now, what makes sense to happen for them to get to this point, and so they will make their own version of it. And sometimes it's so good that they can make like really good money off of that. I mean, 50 Shades of Grey that started out as a Twilight fanfiction,

Alban: 43:08

it feels like you've made a good point that it's not always like sexual. And then your final point was 50 Shades of Grey is a great thing. Like I think he just took it back to my initial misconceptions might have been correct conceptions, you're

Jordan: 43:22

right that I did start out saying like, okay, it's not all sexual. And then I ended with this very sexual example. But I kind of shifted my point from like, it's not all trash to like, it actually can be very popular and you can like actually monetize your fanfiction is what I was trying to make the point of, but most of it is like sexual fantasy kind of stuff. But not all of it. Some of it is actually just very good.

Kevin: 43:49

In my mind, there's there's a different when you're talking about here's the story about these characters in Harry Potter World. And now I'm going to write my own story about the same characters having a different adventure. Versus there are these real life podcasters who were talking about who knows what sports or something and they happen to be attractive and now fans of that show are going to make up personal lives around these people. Were going to write fiction for these real life people like that seems yeah,

Alban: 44:16

there's some there's a different level of weirdness when you're talking about like, what if, like, a loss actually was my boyfriend? Versus like, Oh, what if this person who's a real person in real life did this thing? Yeah.

Kevin: 44:29

What if Joe Rogan came over and was my personal trainer and we were all sweating in the garage and yada yada yada? Like, that's you're talking about Joe Rogan? That's really weird. I'll be honest,

Alban: 44:38

I would not listen to

Kevin: 44:41

Kevin sweaty workouts. Just to be clear, that's fiction. That didn't happen only in my mind.

Jordan: 44:50

So in normal gossip, the host said it was like a podcast about movies. But what I suspect is it may be a podcast that's Like a little bit on the nerdier side, where they would have the type of fan base that live for fanfiction and that's just their MO is to create fanfiction about things that they're obsessed with. And so I suspect that's the type of fan base. I don't actually know and I'm not placing any judgment, but I don't suspect that our fan base are the type of people that would write fanfiction as a hobby.

Alban: 45:26

Yeah, speaking for myself, I'm not the thirst trap that is going to get anyone to start writing fanfiction. So on that front,

Jordan: 45:34

this episode I listened to was very, very good. So I will leave a link in the show notes so that you can listen to it and there's a crazy twist at the end. So there's little tantalizing detail.

Kevin: 45:46

I want someone to write fanfiction for our podcast

Jordan: 45:48

actually have someone doing it?

Kevin: 45:49

Are you serious? All right, so there's some debate about whether we're going to read booster grams on this episode or not. Jordan and Alban are saying we should I'm saying we shouldn't. And here's the reality is that we only have one buzz boost. It's from Dave Jones, who I love. I want to read your buzz boosts day, but I also feel like it's I'd love the fact that you're boosting us. But we need more people boosting us this can be a real segment of the show when we should have at least you know, 234 or five that like originally when we started doing it, we were getting five and six boosts per episode, genre is the quality of content. Is it that we're not talking about boost enough? I don't know what's happening. But I will say this. Dave's boost from this week on last week's episode is it wasn't last week or the week before? I don't know. Yeah, a couple episodes ago. This shows the value of this stuff. So let me just read his boost. And then I'll tell you why this is valuable. So he boosted us 1900 sets from Dave Jones podcasts index podcasting to Dotto Show if you're not listening to it, you should because you're listening to this that you love podcasts and why don't you listen to that show as well. It's awesome. And they're talking about what's going on in the podcast namespace in the podcast index. He says, I'd love to attend a buzzer Palooza Sign me up. Awesome. We can give an update on BUZZA Palooza in a second. But let me tell you why these histograms are so valuable, because that just tells me right there that was a topic that we described in the post show. So after 45 minutes of podcasting content, then we played a little outro and then like there's this post show discussion. I know that they listened to all the way to the very end. And then I know he heard us talking about doing a conference for Buzzsprout podcasters that's amazing. If you're not you're utilizing some form of booster grams and your podcasts that's crazy, like you should do it whether people boost you or not and whether you want to use a show content that can be debated but I appreciate the fact that they've listened to our episode all the way to the end heard that bit at the end and then boosted us and you know nine counter sat and said that he would be coming to our conference if we do it which means like we already have one attendee now so it's obviously gonna happen.

Jordan: 47:45

I want to say we have five attendees now. This idea is really taking shape. I think we're going to sell out

Alban: 47:52

what would sell out what, seven tickets if we had six

Jordan: 47:56

tickets available? Well, so here's the thing is like, you guys took buzzer Palooza and then we just kind of like brainstormed a bit and then we came up with an even better idea. Because a cruiser so we're going to rent a cruise ship and it's going to be a buzzer cruise. Um,

Kevin: 48:17

yeah. For the

Alban: 48:18

people who've been around podcasting a long time this it actually not be the first podcast or cruise. There was the I think it was John Lee Dumas. podcasters paradise. Yes,

Kevin: 48:29

with John Lee Dumas.

Alban: 48:30

Yeah, John Lee Dumas his group did a cruise. I don't know. 2015 2016 Maybe Yeah, it was back in the day. And it was not an insignificant amount. I think there are at least like 50 people that went on the podcast or cruise. I don't think it was like a whole cruise ship. But I think they bought a bunch of tickets at the cruise and they all hung out. So this would be the second we could be the second podcast crews conference.

Jordan: 48:57

Yeah, no cruise like a buzz cruise. I want to get to this.

Kevin: 49:02

I don't know that podcasters paradise was hugely successful, because that they only did one they never did again. So I That kind of tells you something that we should do it. We should do that, but I saw pictures of it. I saw pictures and the 50 people that attended looked like they were having a lot of fun.

Jordan: 49:18

Oh yeah. And then the 200 people that attend ours are going to have even more fun 200 Well, how many people does a cruise ship hold? What like Oh 1000s now? Yeah, so 1000s of podcasters are going to get on our cruise ship and we're just gonna like set sail.

Kevin: 49:35

There could be some fanfiction written about that though. Lots of fanfiction.

Alban: 49:39

Our hope here is that more people are going to come on the podcast, your cruise with Buzzsprout that go to podcast podcast who puts all work together for like 10 years to put on an amazing conference and we're like, year one 2000 People getting on the bus group just

Kevin: 49:55

I personally enjoy cruising. But I think there's a large section of the world does not enjoy cruising at all. Yeah, people

Alban: 50:02

with like health concerns and like wanting to eat healthy and

Kevin: 50:06

people who get motion sick. Yeah. And so I feel like you're taking an event that is already going to struggle to get enough people to attend. And you're saying like, now we're doing it in an environment where 50% of you already will not come no matter how great it is

Jordan: 50:20

already struggling to get attendance. So are you not feeling as confident anymore? That dance

Kevin: 50:27

did show a large lack of confidence. I'm sorry about that there

Alban: 50:29

is still like COVID stuff like we want to be like that. It'd be a real bummer to have like a podcast cruise where like, half the people end up with COVID.

Kevin: 50:38

So yeah, now in the COVID era, I don't know that we should schedule our first conference to take place on a boat.

Jordan: 50:43

So silver lining, I mean, we could just pivot the concept to like an incubator program where everyone just kind of like works on their podcasts when they're stuck in there. So we're

Alban: 50:56

going from like a disease incubator to a podcast idea incubator.

Jordan: 51:08

This idea is falling apart really fast.

Alban: 51:13

If you have ideas for how to make this podcast conference work, we'd love to hear it in a buzz boost. Or you can tweet at us if you haven't set up your boosted grams.

Jordan: 51:23

alright with that, thank you for listening and keep podcasting.

Alban: 51:29

Alright, so I have a really good pitch that came in. Hey, Alban, your podcast was recommended to me. So a few episodes of small business marketing, the Then and Now queued up. I'm excited. So first off, you know, little mistake there. Are you open to a guest slot interview on your podcast? If so, I'd love to come on and do an episode aimed at surviving and growing gyms slash studios during times of recession? What do you think? Guys?

Kevin: 51:57

In the show? Please sign this person.

Alban: 52:02

I, here's why. Here's the gig. We got to start saying yes.

Jordan: 52:07

No. Don't do anything. And I don't think this is the place to start.

Alban: 52:15

This is the exact place to start. What better place get someone on to start talking about, you know, I can spam and GDPR laws. What? I don't know, there's just like these all these spam.

Jordan: 52:34

Okay, so you got a guest pitch into your Buzzsprout email? Yeah,

Alban: 52:40

well, this show about how to survive during her session by growing your gym. I understand what you guys are missing here.

Jordan: 52:50

I think it was just like, it's so out there that I was like a little thrown off. I mean, I get like the pitch emails where it's like, Hey, I love your podcast, I would love to do this and that and this and that. Or I would love to represent you for the data. And it's like, okay, well, you didn't like say anything? Because they don't even say like, Hey, Jordan, it's like, hey, at this podcast. I love your show.

Alban: 53:17

I don't know, is it just that we get so many of them that we're immune? Or are there? Or is it like apparent to everybody, these things are just spam. Like, there's some people that are reading these and going, Oh, sweet. He loves my podcast, I'd love to have him on. To me.

Jordan: 53:35

It's just kind of like, you know, there's always people that kind of fall for spam mail and spam emails and spam phone calls and stuff. And so I think it's just, it's no different with like, podcasters like they're falling for the same kind of tricks. People complimenting them or making them feel valued and important. And just to get something from them.

Alban: 53:57

We need to like combine a few of these. I am a Nigerian prince, I would love to your podcast and talking about everything that terrible that's happened. My uncle is trying to overthrow why princedom Will you help me? Did

Jordan: 54:12

you hear I'm sure you saw it. There was a guy, I feel like it was like a YouTuber or something. He got one of those Nigerian prince emails, something to that effect. And he actually, like got in contact with the guy and ended up getting to know him more personally and then like, sent a camera to him, like mailed a camera to this guy and had them take photos and send them back. And he actually like wound up helping him because he was actually doing those spams, like trying to get money, I believe to build a well for his village or something like that. And so what the guy like went there, and it was legit. i It

Kevin: 54:51

doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe but if you just sent a spam email to a million people and just said I'm just trying to get money to build a wall in my village. Don't you think you'd have more success? debunked

Alban: 55:07

Kevin would be like the worst employee at Snopes. I read this forwarded email and it's, it's false for sure. It felt weird.

Jordan: 55:17

debunked. My opinion. Is this debunked.

Alban: 55:22

Did I ever tell you that I once got a spam call about like viruses on your laptop. And so I just played along with it for a while. And then the guy like got really angry. It was like, I know you're just teasing me because it's like, whatever day you're, you're screwing with me. And I'm like, You're the one screw with me. You're the spammer. And then we be we like talked for like two hours. dame's Natasha and he lives in somewhere in India, and like we talked for, like, we on and off have talked multiple times since then. It's like, funny to like, become friends with him. And he's actually like a nice person who regrets the work he's doing. It was just interesting.