Buzzcast
Buzzcast is a roundtable discussion about podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. We'll cover current events and news, podcast strategy, tools we are using, and dip into the Customer Support mailbag to test our podcasting knowledge. If you want to stay up-to-date on what's working in podcasting, Buzzcast is the show for you.
Buzzcast
Acquired’s Unconventional Approach To Podcasting
This episode covers a load of topics, so buckle up. We're back to tell your what that short podcast was in our feed last week and with more information for putting your podcast on YouTube. Then we delve into how "Acquired" podcast achieved success despite their unconventional approach of delivering lengthy episodes on an irregular schedule and maintaining a minimalist presence on social media. And finally, Alban reveals his research into the ultimate sock to own.
View the discussion thread on Twitter/X!
📣 Sound-Off Question: Do you prefer your podcasts to be extra long or broken up into smaller episodes? To have your response featured on our next episode, send us a text at 855-951-4230!
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Wendy's Proposes Surge Pricing
- How to Upload a Podcast to YouTube
- How the Acquired Podcast Became a Sensation
- Darn Tough Sock Style 1039
Contact Buzzcast
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- Email us at support@buzzsprout.com
Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!
I have not been feeling good because I have had fast food every single day for like the last like week and a half and I feel horrible, like I feel so sick.
Alban:Sherlock Holmes is on the case. Yeah, Jordan. What fast food are we talking about?
Jordan:Well, I'm trying to mix it up. My kids wanted McDonald's like every single day.
Alban:So I'm sorry. You just said that like I'm trying to get a balanced diet, I'm trying so hard I'm trying.
Jordan:So here's. The thing is like, I started that stupid play and so, like, as soon as I leave work, I go straight to the play and I'm there until like 8 30 at night, right, and I'm starving by that time. Yesterday I had a slice of banana bread and that was it the entire day.
Alban:Until.
Jordan:Until 8 30, when I went to Panda Express with my daughter because she's also starving, oh my gosh. But yeah, I've been trying to mix it up. So I've had like Popeyes and Panda Express and Freddy's and McDonald's and Burger King. Oh, I had Del Taco the other day. I am telling you like I'm trying to balance it out, but I feel, balance it out, what are you talking about?
Kevin:I don't know that. There's a big difference between, you know, burger King and McDonald's, wendy's Del Taco it's the same thing.
Jordan:No, you know what. The difference is what? I will never go to Popeyes again because I bought three meals and it was seventy four dollars.
Kevin:Whoa yes, yeah, I know, Popeyes got so expensive.
Jordan:It's like twenty bucks for like a chicken basket. That's crazy. It's like five chicken tenders.
Kevin:I think something happened that Popeyes is not that expensive. They had to have messed it up.
Alban:Yes, it is.
Kevin:You accidentally did a pay it for yeah, you pay.
Alban:Did you pay for the people behind you?
Jordan:I did not, I swear. Actually there was a kid's meal in there too, so I take that back. It was technically four meals.
Alban:Seventy four dollars.
Jordan:Yeah, seventy four dollars, I'm not even joking. Did you do it? No, I didn't, I drove, is that crazy?
Alban:It's unbelievable, but not in the sense of while I'm shocked, like actually, and I do not believe that this story could be true, yeah, so this is so wild, I don't know if this is like Popeyes in Idaho just has like a really bad surge pricing or what.
Jordan:It was crazy.
Alban:Surge pricing. Wait, did you guys hear Wendy's CEO said that they were thinking about doing actual surge pricing? What, Not a joke? I don't know how, if you didn't know that that you're job with the current events, I don't think that's a bad idea. But yeah, he said that they were going to look into surge pricing at Wendy's. I was like, first off from my analysis of the Wendy's situation from driving by, there's never going to be hitting surge pricing, least in Jacksonville.
Kevin:No, but maybe it's not based on how busy they are, maybe it's just based on certain times of the day, which wouldn't be a bad idea. So if you pull into Wendy's at three in the afternoon, you should be able to get cheaper food.
Alban:They just see you pull up and they're like this guy looks really hungry. Just double the price. Seventy four dollars for three meals it's not a bad idea.
Jordan:That can't be true, Alban. That sounds to me like Onion article, like someone. It's satirical, there's no way Do you know what they should do.
Kevin:They should discount the food. You know they pre cook a bunch of stuff and put it under those heat lamps. They should discount it before they throw it out. So do you want a fresh burger or do you want our old burger? They're half off.
Alban:Jordan, from CNN Business. Wendy's will soon begin surge pricing. The price of a Wendy's Frosty could fluctuate throughout the day as the chain looks to introduce uber like surge pricing on its menu Based on how clean the milkshake machine is, and we just cleaned them, so they're expensive right now. They're going to use AI enabled menu changes and suggestive selling, and also like quality was never that good to begin with, so I don't I'm not looking forward to this future.
Jordan:Welcome back to Buzzcast, a podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. I'm Jordan, and joining me today are my cohost, Alban and Kevin. Hey guys, hey Jordan.
Alban:Jordan, thanks for having us.
Jordan:Kevin, what do you think of our quick cast that we posted last week?
Kevin:I was going to ask you about the quick cast, Quick cast. I was surprised by it. Yeah, I was.
Jordan:Was it a good surprise? Or like oh my God, were they doing surprise? It was good.
Kevin:I mean, I didn't recognize it as a quick cast right away, because the you know quick cast title wasn't there originally, and so I saw it pop into my podcast player app and I was like what is this? Did we record another episode or am I off the show? And then I tapped into it and I saw it was only you know a minute and a half, and then I realized, oh, this is a, this is that quick cast idea that we've been talking about.
Alban:Kevin's been talking about the idea of quick casts for like a year and the idea is something like they're really short episodes, you don't do a lot of editing, you just jump into it and it's a way to like connect to your audience during the off weeks, but then they probably aren't the long term episodes that stick around.
Kevin:Yeah, or off days, Like if you publish weekly, then your show only pops into everyone's podcast app once a week and it would be nice to be able to have your show pop in you know more than once a week, because they're only seeing your podcast artwork. They're only being reminded of your podcast once a week, but usually during the time in between full episodes you're planning the next episode. It's you know. You're like, if for our show, we're putting outlines together as we're seeing stories there, we're dropping them in. If you're doing a more produced podcast, you might, you know, give teasers or saying this is where we are, we just recorded, we're going to be editing Whatever works for your show, but there's opportunities to maybe engage your audience more in between full episodes with some idea like Quickcast. Another idea, another name, could be Fastcast. Is Fastcast better than Quickcast? I kind of like Quickcast.
Jordan:It reminds me of like Fastpass.
Kevin:Yeah, and that's not a pleasant memory.
Alban:Fastpasses are gone, aren't they? They've now upgraded it to something new, so you know, quickly we get off topic.
Jordan:Yeah, I know.
Kevin:Okay, so Quickcast or Fastcast or something. So yeah, they would be just really short. I mean, they don't have to be really short, but I would say they have to be like three to five minutes.
Jordan:Under five minutes.
Kevin:Yeah, and it's kind of a preview or a teaser or some way to connect with your audience in between. Full episodes. Not highly polished, not highly edited, you know should still sound good, of course, and be interesting. It shouldn't just be fluff, Like you want. If people are going to listen to it, it should be good content, but it's not a full episode. And then there's another idea that Albin was throwing. I think you threw out this idea of should they go away?
Alban:And I think about a lot of times where I've started a podcast that has been around for years. I found some new show this week had 250 episodes or something, and most of the recent ones were like Q&A. But I don't really want to jump into Q&A content for a show that's supposed to be a bit more in depth, and so I kept trying to go back and find like full episodes and they weren't labeled. And with Quickcasts we wouldn't want, like you, to have. One of every ten episodes is a real episode and the other nine are just quick little hey guys just jumping in it's me and Jordan and we wanted to give you a little update.
Alban:That would not be a great first impression, and so my thinking was what if you just had the main episodes but the Quickcast jumped in and maybe they disappear once you release a new episode? So most you only ever have one Quickcast, but often you have zero and the idea is you got to connect to your audience. You had a little bit more of an opportunity for them to feel connected to the show. You can have a little bit more engagement. But besides that, you're not kind of like polluting the feed with this years and years of like little drop-ins.
Jordan:You know, I have a, I have a name proposal for this.
Alban:Okay.
Jordan:Snapcast.
Alban:Snapcast.
Jordan:So it's like Snapchat, like how the like stories disappear.
Kevin:We understand this name. Yeah, that should be a contender. That's not a bad name.
Jordan:Thank you, snapcast. Thank you.
Kevin:And then like. For people who are familiar with Snapchat, then they probably immediately get the connection that it's going to go away Because way to snap, and so is that going to happen. When this episode drops on Friday, are you going to delete the what is now a Quickcast but might in the future be a Snapcast? I think so.
Jordan:I don't know if we should, because we are talking about it right now. Like it might be kind of weird for somebody if they're like, what the heck are they talking about?
Kevin:Yeah, well, subscribe and get the next one, maybe just this one.
Jordan:We'll leave it.
Alban:Yeah, if you want to learn about Snapcasts, slash, quickcast, fastcasts, you're going to want to stay subscribed to this feed. Stay locked in, because they're only here for a short time. It's going to, a new one will probably come up next Friday and then it's going to be gone.
Kevin:I wonder should you only be able to have one Snapcast at a time, or can you have multiple? But as long as you identify them as Snapcasts, then they would stay around until your next full episode and then all of them go away.
Jordan:Yeah, that's the thing is like. Do you want to trigger it by episode, like by the next episode publishing? What if you publish a bonus episode and your Snapcast is supposed to be for two episodes down? Yeah, I don't know.
Alban:Well, these are all questions that we can answer by kind of playing around with the format and seeing if people even like it. I mean, we could get the answer, which would be numbers across the board start dropping and everybody hates it. People write in saying please stop doing these little Snapchat casts, I don't like these. And then we go OK, problem solved. But if they end up catching on, hopefully users will let us know what you feel about it. And is it connecting? Is it not? Because part of us doing this show is experimenting with different things and podcasting? You know we're playing around with the texting stuff. Now we're playing around with this idea of Snapchat casts or playing around with all sorts of stuff, and our hope is sometimes we figure out that it works. Sometimes we find out that we don't get a ton of people who are sending them in and no big deal. We'll just keep iterating and trying to figure out what works.
Jordan:I actually just looked and Gene Bean said, I'm confused by this little preview like episode. I saw it in my list of things. I hadn't heard yet and was surprised when I realized it wasn't a normal show. Hopefully you'll elaborate during the next episode.
Kevin:Here, we are there we go.
Jordan:We also have some follow ups for YouTube podcasts. It's been kind of interesting how many questions we've been getting about YouTube podcasts. It seems to be a little bit more confusing than we initially anticipated. So we're probably going to have to be talking about this for a while, even if we don't want to.
Alban:Well, yeah, let's dive in the first one from Ali Murphy Tasker. I'm making videos of my podcast to put on YouTube, as well as uploading via the RSS feed or their pros and cons to this? My best guess is that there's some cons to this. Then you're going to end up having videos that are competing with the audio only version. You could just consolidate these into a single item, which would be the videos. If you have some episodes that are just the audio and some episodes that are just video, you can put all of those into one playlist and just designate that playlist as a podcast so that it shows up inside of YouTube music. Little bit confusing. But overall, you mostly just want to have one item on YouTube for each of these pieces of content and if it can be video, that's better than just the static image on a video. So that would be my pick. Yeah.
Kevin:The thing that confused me about this for a while was, I didn't know, the YouTube music app also played video, but it does, and so you can set up your if you do a video podcast and you push that into YouTube. You can take those videos and put them together in a playlist and then you can mark that playlist as a podcast and as soon as you check the box that says this is a podcast, that's what triggers YouTube to also syndicate that content over in YouTube music and then anybody who goes over and YouTube music and taps on it, it will play the video if they have their screen open and the phone unlocked. But if they lock their phone it probably switches over to the audio only I don't know, or some audio like bandwidth saving version of that, but it continues to play just like a regular podcast player would. So if you're already doing video content, do not link up your RSS feed and duplicate it all. I don't think there's any benefit to that. There's probably just some downsides, like Alban said.
Alban:And I think you can have like mixed content together. So if you did have a playlist that was designated as a podcast with all the like audio videos in there, and then you ended up going, oh, episode three, I actually want to make a video for it, you go back and you make a video. You can upload that and just take the audio only one. Now say that one's going private or unpublished and just publish the video there, because if it's still in that playlist, it will still be designated as part of the podcast.
Kevin:Yeah, that YouTube studio stuff is pretty hard to manage, yeah.
Alban:I mean, it's one of these things like the more and more powerful something gets, the harder and harder it is to make it accessible for people who are brand new, yeah, and so I think they've kind of leaned on the we're going to make it. So there's tons of options, but it does make it confusing.
Jordan:Yeah, and then we also had a question from Katie Azavito. Is there any downside to uploading recorded podcast videos to a YouTube channel that already has a strong presence 16,000 subs and lots of regular non-podcast videos? Is there a risk of confusing my audience by adding in podcast videos?
Kevin:We did this for a while. We've recorded video podcasts, we've recorded Riverside, and so we just took the video and put it on YouTube and we were trying to grow our channel in a different way and most of the videos that we put out there were like 10 minutes or less and they were more short form video first content and then we started throwing out these hour long, 45 minute long buzzcast episodes that were just talking heads and that did not help our channel. In fact, I don't know that we can definitively say it was hurting our channel. Maybe, albin, would you say it definitively hurt it.
Alban:I definitely think it hurt it. At one point I talked to a YouTube consultant and he saw it. He was like what are you doing with all this stuff? You've got all this different types of content. Like you've got to focus on one thing so YouTube and your audience know what you're doing. So that was kind of the beginning of the end.
Kevin:And I think the recommendation was if you want to do this, then create another channel, like a sister channel to that one, and put them there so they're separate, and then you can kind of cross promote those channels, but don't do it on the same channel because it's going to hurt it, you know. And for buzzcast, we just decided that wasn't worth the effort for us because we didn't feel like the video first content was that good, we wasn't that engaging, it was really just talking heads, and so we doubled down on creating the best audio experience we could. And for our YouTube channel, in order to make that as good as possible, we focused on video first content and, like I said, most of it was very different from what we're doing on this podcast.
Jordan:So and then Matthew Crickler says best practices for YouTube shorts for podcasters.
Alban:I think it's the same as for TikTok, it's the same for Instagram videos all these short form video and the idea is you want to have a self-contained piece of content, something that's interesting on its own. So even if people don't know who you are, who your guest is or what the whole podcast is about, you still want something that's 30 to 60 seconds. That's very interesting. You want a really strong hook in like the first two seconds, or you're going to lose people and then at the end, I would recommend, say, listen to the full podcast and then have like icons of all the podcasting apps that people can use to listen and maybe you include links out to those, because you want to hook people with something. They think this is interesting and immediately know the name of the podcast and where they can go to listen to it.
Jordan:Yeah, I think YouTube if they have not already, they will be very soon removing the ability to post links in YouTube shorts. So you were able to post links in YouTube short descriptions, but now you can't. So I think that end card saying like where you can find the podcast and that it is a podcast and having those icons and stuff is pretty important at this point. And then we have another question from Elizabeth Cheney Stader Best apps for taking your long form YouTube videos and shortening the clips.
Alban:I don't have a good recommendation here. You can hire somebody to cut them up. I know there's lots of apps that say they do it really well and my experience has been most of them aren't the best. I do know Riverside has a nice little feature here. So if you record video in Riverside for your podcast, then you can also use that to cut up. You know, say, oh, this little segment is a good clip, and then it can format it a bit and export it. My recommendation would just be in the beginning, find something that's very easy for you to use and if you start seeing success with these YouTube videos and then little clips, if you see success there, then you can kind of invest in going full. Okay, let's find the very best software for us. But first I want to run the experiment. See if you actually are getting, you know, viewers from it.
Jordan:Yeah, I know there are some podcasters that have done so using a headliner as well headlinerapp. Also, canva is surprisingly good for making little shorts. You know there's stock footage and imagery that you can use to create your videos. Just select a segment of your podcast that you think would be good for the short and then you can put stock footage and, you know, put your logo over it and everything like that. So that's probably a good place to start as well.
Kevin:All right. So your media solutions said it might be good to discuss how bonus content shows up on YouTube now that we can connect via Buzzsprout. Yes, so bonus content, if it shows up in your RSS feed, it's going to get pulled in if you're using the RSS ingestion tool for YouTube, just like any other episode would. And I think one thing that's important to decide when you set that up is whether you want your episodes to automatically go live once they YouTube sees them in your feed, or if you are going to log into the YouTube studio yourself and make them live. And so if you have them set to automatically go live, then bonus content will go live just like any other episode, automatically. But if you don't want that to happen, then you might not want to choose the option where it says don't make them automatically live, just ingest them and have them ready for me, and then you log in whenever you want and you choose the episodes that you want to go live. So then you would just not publish your bonus episodes if you don't want them to go live, and then they also go on and say also, instead of deleting duplicate episodes that existed prior to ingestion, you could simply make old versions unlisted. Yeah, and that's a great option too.
Kevin:So again, you'd probably want to choose the option to don't make everything live. Let it finish that ingestion process and, again, depending on how many episodes you have, it might take a few days. We've seen it stop after you know it can do like 20 or 30 episodes and it might stop for a day or two and then come back and finish them. We don't know why it stops or at what points, but we've heard lots of reports of it not doing it all at once, and so it might just take a few days and then, when you're done, you can decide which ones you want to go live, and then I think you could probably change that setting after that If you say, okay, now, going forward, I want everything to go live automatically. You could just change that then.
Alban:Yeah, there's even another setting that you can not import old episodes. So you can hook up your feed and say only import going forward, don't import the back catalog. So if for some reason you've been doing this manually or you've been using another tool, you could add those old videos into the playlist so they show up as a podcast and say RSS going forward, pull stuff in. Anybody who feels confused by this discussion I see you, I hear you. This makes sense that you're a bit confused, because I sure am as well. Another question from David John Clark hey team, another great episode. Question regarding the YouTube directory listing. On Buzzsprout One uploads directly to YouTube to show interview video. We can link this to our Buzzsprout YouTube icon for our directory pages.
Kevin:I must have missed a word, can we? That's why it's a question.
Alban:There we go. Can we link this to our Buzzsprout YouTube icon for our directory pages? Love your work, david. Thank you, david, yes, you can. The way to do this would be to take all the videos that you have and you take those and you put them in a playlist you designated as a podcast and then grab the URL for that playlist that has been designated as the podcast and give that to us. That's where we will send people whenever they click that YouTube link. That will still work. The David has a follow-up question.
Alban:I think it needs to be hammered down with podcasters that the adding of your podcast to YouTube is only RSS ingestion Once off process and it will not be included in your RSS stats. Many people don't realize that. This is another confusing nuance to the way that YouTube's doing this, because they're just ingesting the podcast, they're just copying it into YouTube. Any plays that you get on YouTube won't show up in your Buzzsprout stats. This will almost be like it's totally separate. If you look and you say, oh great, I've got 1,000 downloads, you will go to YouTube and you'll see, oh, on YouTube, I have 300 downloads. Those would be 1,300. It's not going to show up many stats for any Google properties inside of your Buzzsprout account going forward. If you do happen to see a few stats for something like Google podcasts or YouTube music, those are legit. They're just coming through a totally different avenue, but most will never make their way back to Buzzsprout.
Jordan:Funny enough. So we've been talking about, you know, listing your podcast on YouTube. And then we went ahead and listed our podcast on YouTube to like test things out and make sure that we were running the steps correctly, and then we ultimately decided to take our podcast off of YouTube. And, oh boy, that was a bit of a process.
Kevin:Well, let me ask you this, Jordan when you went to take all the BuzzCast episodes off of YouTube, were you able to just go into the playlist and say, like, select all videos and delete?
Jordan:Uh, not really, because what is really interesting with the YouTube podcast is that when you import all the episodes in the RSS, you know, into your podcast playlist, there is an option, like in your studio, to say whether the playlist is public, private, unlisted. And so I was like, okay, well, we're not going to do this anymore, so I'm going to list it as private. And then I noticed that all the podcast episodes were still showing up on our channel, and so I go in and you have to go into the individual videos themselves and then click each individual video and make them private. And I was like, all right, the playlist is private, the videos are private, like no one's going to see it, and we can deal with this on another day.
Jordan:And then, lo and behold, our next episode that we published imported into YouTube and it was public. And it was like what is this? And so I go into the settings on our playlist and there's a setting to make the playlist public or private. And then you go down a little bit and there's a setting for future episodes that are ingested into this playlist and the. So you're dealing with like three different settings and so we disabled the RSS feed for this playlist and then I deleted the playlist and, of course, because it's YouTube, deleting the podcast does not delete the individual videos. So then I had to go in and hand delete like hundreds of podcast episodes one by one, and then you have to like check a box that says yes, I do want to delete this permanently, and it took up a good chunk of my morning.
Kevin:It took forever. Was that just a misstep, like now that you know that if we still had the playlist could you have selected all the videos in the playlist more easily and deleted them straight from there?
Jordan:I don't know.
Alban:There might be a way to do that, to say, all 50 of the episodes that they show me inside this playlist select, all, delete. I think there are mass deletion features. I've used them from other times.
Kevin:But if you kill the playlist first without killing the videos before you delete the list, then they're unorganized and they're scattered throughout all your content.
Jordan:Yeah, I tried finding it within the thing, but I'm not super familiar with YouTube. Youtube is not like my main domain, so I very well could have missed a very simple solution to this problem.
Alban:I mean, I think the simplest solution of all was to never put our shows into YouTube. We ended up pulling them out. I made the call some point last week. I was like you know, after listening to BuzzCast and hearing us go through it, I'm like this just doesn't feel good. It's not podcasting, we're putting it into another place. Everything's not connected. If we make updates, they're sometimes going to make their way over there.
Alban:We've had multiple issues with some episodes being live and then some accidentally being deleted or some not showing up, and it felt also like it was a pretty big drag on the channel as a whole. It's a channel that we use to grow Buzzsprout, to teach people how to podcast. It's not a channel that we use to broadcast our BuzzCast episodes. So it never felt like a great fit. It doesn't feel like it's something that a lot of people are going to want to do Listen to BuzzCast and audio form on YouTube or on YouTube music. So between everything that we didn't love about it, I went this is you know, if we're not in Spotify, I feel like this is probably worse than all the reasons why we're not in Spotify. So made the call let's just pull it out, and I feel a lot better about it. I mean we should be more excited about all the new podcasting apps coming out. We should be more excited about Apple podcasts moving stuff forward and all these indie apps and what we really enjoy about podcasting.
Alban:I think that YouTube is very attractive for the reasons that Spotify has been attractive More people listening to my content but I think if you want to be successful on YouTube, you really should be playing the YouTube game, not the podcast game, and the YouTube game is make really good videos that are really captivating.
Alban:Go get celebrities on your show and film them. Film something that feels really intimate, where you can see the hosts and they're having fun, and make video part of the show. If you're going to do all of that, which is a big commitment, then I think being on YouTube makes a ton of sense. I think that the way we're doing it right now just doesn't feel like a great solution and it comes with a lot of downsides. So I think for us, the answer is let's not be in YouTube. Instead, maybe let's educate people. If they do want to listen to Buzzcast inside of YouTube music, there is a way for them to add the RSS feed manually, and so if users want to listen to us there, they can still do it, which is a nice thing that YouTube added.
Jordan:So I have a real-time update. I went to my personal podcast that is still listed on YouTube as a podcast. I went to the playlist and even if I click on the videos that are only in the playlist, there's not an option to select all and remove them. So it's still a tedious process.
Alban:Jordan, your podcast feels to me like the type of content that would do the best on YouTube. As far as podcasts, you know, it's stories. It's very calming, help people fall asleep the kind of stuff people would put up on YouTube. As they fell asleep they could listen to it. So we're thinking that it probably is the right type of content for YouTube. Can you give us an idea of how many people are actually watching you on YouTube now, versus your podcast itself?
Jordan:Yes, I had the test videos that I had created. It was like 10 of them and it really didn't get that much interaction. But now that I've had my podcast up for oh, let's see here I think it was about maybe 25 days or something like that I've had my podcast up and running. My watch time and hours for the podcast is at 79.5 hours. There's only 561 views, so it's better than the videos we're actually performing, which is kind of funny.
Alban:So we're looking at 561 views over that same period. How many plays do you think you had on the podcast?
Jordan:Oh, the actual RSV was probably 150,000.
Alban:So quite a bit bigger.
Jordan:Well, yeah, I actually don't know, I haven't looked, but yeah, I mean it's quite a bit bigger, substantially bigger.
Alban:Well, it'd be interesting, if it at some point changes, to kind of keep an eye on it and see if at some point it does take off. I feel like yours would be one of the podcasts that would do really well on YouTube, so it'd be interesting to see if it ever does catch the algorithm and take off. But until then, it doesn't feel like it's somewhere you have to be and I think if people are looking at it going, this sounds like more headache than it's worth or it doesn't feel right to me. I think you can trust your gut. It's not somewhere you have to be right now and for this show in particular, I think it's somewhere we do not want to be.
Jordan:So, albin, you actually posted a blog post from Cal Newport about how the acquired podcast became a sensation, and this is pretty interesting because it comes from the perspective of you know. They became a sensation based on just really doing like deep, focused work as opposed to just generating a bunch of content. Can you tell us a little bit about this?
Alban:Yeah, I've been a big fan of Cal Newport for a long time. As a company, we all read his book Deep Work at some point. It's like a company book club, and so he had sent out a blog post about the acquired podcast. Have either of you listened to the acquired podcast?
Kevin:I haven't. Yes, yeah, I have.
Alban:Yeah, it's really, really in depth. So it started out as a podcast about acquisitions and I think all of them were mostly tech acquisitions. First episode, I think, was about Pixar and there's only like 45 minutes long. But they were not just like let's talk about like the Wikipedia page on this acquisition. They're in depth.
Alban:I remember the first one I listened to is probably about Google Maps. It was some one of the maps I think it was Google Maps and they talked about like the history of MapQuest and the people who figured out mapping and like all the work that goes into cataloging maps. Like they went so in depth and you feel like whoa, there's so much interesting information here, adds a ton to the story. But it was the type of content that you don't find. Let's say that if you asked chat GPT hey, what happened in this acquisition? So super in depth.
Alban:And Cal Newport, I think, found something they posted about here's how we've grown over time and they showed how many downloads on average they got per episode. And if you look at the chart it looks like a hockey stick. You know, it looks like exponential growth. It starts out slow for a long time. It's speeding up, it's speeding up and now it's speeding up faster than it ever was speeding up before, and since the beginning they've started just focusing on larger and larger companies because I think they've hit all the big acquisitions and so there's just deep dives. But rather than like the human side of it that you might get from how I built this, these are really, really in depth about the business and the founding and a lot of information you just wouldn't find somewhere else, and so there are just a few interesting things from the blog post about the lessons you could take from acquired and maybe apply to your own podcast.
Jordan:The topic reminds me of Land of the Giants, right, which is a great, great podcast, but it's almost like they took the entire season. You know, based on how long these episodes are, they took what would have been an entire season of, like Land of the Giants and can put it into one extra long episode, which kind of goes completely against any conventional wisdom that podcasters have. You know, there's like all these people are talking about how you have to have, like you know, 45 minutes is like the ideal episode length and you have to be posting on a regular schedule. And this is what makes podcasts successful. And they're not doing any of that. They're completely ignoring that and just focusing on creating the content. And it doesn't matter. You know they have this like a regular schedule that might be like a few months before they post the next one.
Jordan:And I was trying to think of other podcasts that are kind of exercising the same publishing schedule or like length of podcast episode, and some that came to my mind were Dark Net Diaries, which is hugely successful. He will put out an episode when he puts it out and, frankly, his stuff is so good that it doesn't matter, it's just like an extra treat when he puts it out. Reply All was this way, especially towards the end of the podcast run. I mean, sometimes it would be a few months before you'd get an episode. And then Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. There are like crazy long episodes and he posts them when he posts them.
Alban:I think Dan Carlin's Hardcore History has a lot of these same principles, so maybe I should be explicit about what the principles are.
Jordan:Yeah.
Alban:One wait until there's something you have that's really really good. And this is hard because for a lot of creators we say you've got to get past and got to get over the anxiety of, like, your own perfectionism and you just need to start publishing and you need to get in the groove of creating something. But once you're I think, 100 episodes in you really are in a groove. You know you're going to release stuff. You've built a little bit of an audience. You know this show is a type of show that could be good. You know they initially started out doing like five to 10 hours of research on each episode and they say now they've grown that to about 100 hours of research per episode. So it's gone up a ton.
Jordan:Wow.
Alban:If you talk to Jack Reisider, he would say the same thing. He had a full-time job when he started the podcast and then now he's full-time on the podcast, but it's still fewer and farther between the episodes because so much more research is going into the stories.
Kevin:Yeah, it makes me wonder. Would these podcasters be interested in the Snapcast concept?
Alban:Ooh, I think these are the types of shows it would work for.
Kevin:Yeah, I know they probably don't want to commit to a publishing schedule, like they probably don't want to say it's going to be a month or it's going to drop on the state. But being able to just connect with their audience and say this is what we're working on and this is, you know, what's happened in this last week, and just so like a little two or three minute update to keep the audience engaged and let them know that something is in progress and you're teasing them all along the way. So then it becomes even more exciting when that episode finally does drop.
Jordan:I love that.
Kevin:Sorry to interrupt you, Alban Continue.
Alban:No, I mean, I think that this is who Snapcasts would be for Somebody who wants to put in, you know, 100 hours of research and not release, but maybe once a month, if even that. But they're putting together something so special that if you want to have the ongoing relationship with the audience piece, maybe there's something else that could step in for that aspect. But also maybe that stuff fades away because long term it's these really big, really in depth episodes and I just love how much it's changed. I mean, the first episode I heard I want to say was 45 minutes. They were doing a lot of 45 minute to an hour long episodes and now they're doing four hour episodes like Dan Carlin style.
Alban:So they did just did an episode on Hermes, they did one on Visa, they've done NVIDIA and those are just these massive episodes. But if you're doing 100 hours of research and you're getting tons of really interesting stories and you're learning about how companies were built and you want to give people really in depth knowledge, like these are like little audio books and they're amazing case studies of how businesses are run and were built. So if that's something you're interested in, there's really not much better than a podcast like acquired so super interesting article. We'll link to it in the show notes and definitely worth checking out and seeing how you can apply some of these principles to your podcast.
Kevin:Yeah, I know a lot of people have gone back and forth. They asked the question oftentimes in our Facebook group and to our support team, sometimes about I have a really long episode, should I split it into multiple episodes or just publish one really long one? And I mean I don't know what the research says about this or who has done research or what the data might point to. But you know, I know as a listener I get I really enjoy, like Land of the Giants, but it breaks really bad oftentimes in the different podcast apps and so that is like Jordan said. It's a very long story. It's usually one story and a typical season might be like seven to nine episodes where they kind of tell parts of the story and I think they do list it correctly, meaning that it would be a serial podcast. And so the idea is that if you flip into season six, for example, and let's just say it was the Amazon story, and you should start with episode one and then go to three, four, five, six, seven, so even not based on publish date.
Kevin:Again, thinking about podcasting, usually what you're wanting to do is listen to the most recent, but for serial podcasts you want to listen to them in order.
Kevin:So setting that flag for your podcast reverses the order, but it's kind of inconsistent, it's pretty flaky and it doesn't work as you would expect in every app. And so I like it conceptually that this tag exists and this is the type of show that I have and it should work nicely in all the podcasting apps. But oftentimes I find it just so much easier, because one thing that does kind of work consistently is most podcast apps remember where you left off, and so if I'm listening to Hardcore History and it's a, you know, a really, really long episode, or even like Joe Rogan, episodes are too long for me to listen in one sitting, and so it's fine. Like I know, after I've had 45 minutes of Joe, I'm like kind of done for today. I might come back and listen to the rest of this episode tomorrow, but I'm going to switch to something else and my podcast app always remembers where I left off, and so it might just be easier. And again, traditional, like what is it Common knowledge or what are we saying about conventional?
Alban:wisdom.
Kevin:Yeah, that's the word I'm looking for. The conventional wisdom would say podcast episodes perform best when they're on that 45 minute mark, like Jordan said. So break it up. You know, have us a part one and part two. Hey, if you're only doing part one and part two, maybe that's fine, but if you got to do a part three and a four and a five, it might just be easier just to publish the whole thing all together.
Alban:I sometimes wonder if the land of the giants eight part series. There's some benefits there for syndication. They help you get sponsors for the season. You can put out content over two months. Maybe you can build a buzz because people are like, oh my gosh, this is such an amazing story. You've got to start at binge the first four and then catch up. But it does add a bit of like flakiness into the app. You sometimes like get dropped into the wrong episode. You can get some weird behaviors where I mean, have you ever seen this? Like dateline? Like even inside of a date line episode They'll be like coming up after the break will tell you what's going to happen and then when you come back from the break they're like here's what already happened and you're like there's only like 20 minutes of total content the whole hour because they keep recapping and pre capping what's going to happen. Pre viewing is the word I was looking for there.
Jordan:I like pre capping, that's good.
Alban:And so there is something nice about you know. If I listened to the Hermes episode of acquired, I know they're not going to do a bunch of hey, we'll preview what's coming up later or let's recap what happened. It's just we know that you can kind of keep your attention span together. We trust you to remember what we talked about. Here's the four hours that you'd want to know about this company, and I think that's awesome. I don't know, maybe the future could look like you release episode one, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and then at some point you go OK, the season is done, let's just combine those all into one now, so that going forward there's just one episode for Hermes rather than eight 30 minute episodes. Yeah, I don't know, we could probably think about it more, but it doesn't feel like there needs to be totally separate episodes. If at some point they're all there, you don't need the serialized content anymore.
Kevin:Yeah, I think it's a totally different.
Kevin:It's a totally different ballgame when you're doing sponsorships and ad reads and you need to get a pre roll and you need to get some mid rolls in there, you need to get a post roll, and that works really nice when your episodes chunk into 45 minutes or an hour, as opposed to four minutes.
Kevin:But, again, there are podcasts that do it just fine, and so we've given you some examples. But, yeah, I think the takeaway here is figure out what works for you as a podcaster, as a creator, and figure out what works for your show, and don't feel like there's a formula you have to follow to be successful, because there's plenty of people who do completely their own thing, a totally different way, and still manage to find success, and the thing that they all have in common, though, is that the content is excellent, and so, start there, start with excellent content, and then figure out what podcast wisdom applies to you, or what do you like, what do you want to try to work into your show, take what you want, leave what you don't, and just keep podcasting and have fun.
Jordan:It's time for sound off the segment where you send in your responses to our podcasting questions. We have some boostograms to get started with. The first is from Jean Bean Great summation of how Spotify sees open podcasting. That's in response to our Spotify's new podcast strategy, Episode Last.
Kevin:Episode Last.
Jordan:Episode Last we forgot the title of it. No, it was the title of it, but I said it our last episode. I said OK, I was speaking like Yoda. That's what happened.
Alban:Our last episode.
Jordan:Our last episode Spotify's new podcast strategy.
Kevin:Yeah, hey, it looks like Priscilla wrote in. I'm assuming this is the Priscilla from our team, our head of support. Priscilla Wrote in and said hey, Albin, it's Taylor's version, not Taylor's edition.
Alban:Oh, because I said something like the Super Bowl Taylor's edition, not Taylor's version.
Jordan:Yeah.
Alban:Thank you for the Taylor Swift joke correction.
Kevin:OK, adam Curry has sent us a boost. Hey, adam, thanks for writing in. He sent us 10,000 sats. Thank you so much. He said Spotify makes you sign a licensing deal to be on their platform, which is a non-starter. Yeah, so like I don't know, adam, if you're referring to larger podcasts that have to do jump through additional hoops, but every podcast has to agree to Spotify's terms and conditions, which a lot of podcasters don't like and find objectionable for one reason or another. Interestingly enough, I mean all the other platforms as well, like Apple podcasts have their own terms and conditions and Amazon Music has their own terms and conditions.
Kevin:I imagine Google would. I haven't read them all. James over at Pod News has done a good job of having like a strange terms and conditions section of the website. So a quick way to find out if there's any terms and conditions that you should be aware of, without reading them all top to bottom. That would be a place that I would point people to. But yeah, if there's something in that Spotify licensing deal that doesn't sit right with you, man, I agree it's a non-starter.
Jordan:And then we had an email come in, Alban, that's directed at you, from Marcos says hey, Alban, you can't tease us with your sock testing process and then not tell us what sock won. What sock should we get? I think that's a little bit of my fault. We had a very extensive conversation about the socks and I cut it short just for the sake of brevity.
Alban:I think that you just jumped on and were like complaining something about socks, and I was like, oh, let me tell you my sock philosophy. But Kevin goes, this is terrible content. And apparently not so Jordan concluded it.
Jordan:Yeah.
Alban:But now you're in for it. All right, marcos, thank you for the question. All right, here's the philosophy of socks. The worst thing about socks is the pairing. When you're doing laundry, oh this sock goes with this sock and you have to match them and you match them. But then when you put them on, you find out they're not actually the same sock, they just look similar. So I came up with this idea. I was going to simplify into one to two types of sock, and so the standard sock that I almost wear all the time is now a white sock that's like ankle high and it's mostly athletic use. And then I researched what should the sock be made of. I got four contenders. I ordered them all, I used them all and I came up with the winner. So I won't go into all of the criteria, but the winner was the darn tough, ultra light cushion sock, style 1039. It beat out a different darn tough sock. It beat out the smart wool targeted cushion sock. These are all available on Amazon.
Jordan:We're gonna have to do an affiliate link for that. Alban, You're selling the hell out of these socks.
Alban:You can buy them with the link affiliate link. But what you want to do is you want to get a good sock with Merino wool and nylon, and so I did the research into this. Merino wool is soft and breathable, it regulates temperature and it wicks moisture way better than cotton, which is very important in Florida. And nylon is for the durability, the elasticity, the wear and tear and when you start getting up, when you're buying socks one pair at a time, you know they're expensive. So you got to get the nylon in there. And they've also got some lycra spandex, Kevin.
Jordan:I don't know nearly as much about socks as you do, and this is why we cut this part off.
Kevin:Here's what I know. I know that Marcos cut the podcast off about four minutes ago.
Alban:No way If you write in saying tell us about it.
Kevin:He wants to know the winner. He doesn't want to do the research, so he doesn't want to hear you recount all the research. He's like skip the research, give me the answer. And it took you six minutes to get there.
Alban:This is skipping the research. The research was hours and hours. I'm the acquired podcast for socks. Kevin, I'm going to do it a hundred hours of research.
Kevin:He had already accepted you.
Alban:And if you can't?
Kevin:stick through the six minute episode. I mean what?
Alban:Come on.
Kevin:Welcome back to sockcast. Give your host out, you're going to get it.
Alban:I'm boiling down hours of sock research into. I'm talking five minutes, kevin, five minutes max. Is this episode over? Yet You're going to learn about Marina Wolk.
Kevin:This isn't just normal wool, but we've got to contact all our sponsors and let them know that our listening audience just got cut in half because we did the whole episode on socks.
Alban:Darn tough socks of Vermont is calling. Oh, what the heck is happening. The impressions are crashing through the floor.
Jordan:Oh my gosh. All right, so darn tough socks. That's the winner.
Alban:Style 1039.
Jordan:We'll put your affiliate link in the show notes.
Alban:This could be a recurring segment, kevin. This is how I buy things in almost every area of my life, so if you want my olive oil research, if you want, I've got it for lots of different spaces, so I'm ready.
Jordan:Oh man, that sounds like a new Snapcast.
Kevin:Yeah, and forgive my memory if we forget to bring this back up Never, never, we got a tweet from QR code ART about subscriptions.
Jordan:If you have 80% of your listeners on Apple Podcasts, then you should use Apple Subscriptions, shouldn't you? Yes or no, depending on what you want. Apple Podcast Subscriptions you have to pay a $20 yearly fee to enroll in Apple Podcast Subscriptions. Also, when you are in Apple Podcast Subscriptions, your listeners can only listen to your bonus content on Apple Podcasts, so your other listeners that might be on Fountain, spotify, anything like that, will not be able to access your bonus content. So you have to weigh the pros and cons of that. Also, the $20 upfront fee if you're not wanting to put money in upfront, then I recommend going with a subscriptions platform that doesn't charge upfront and instead charges when you get paid. That might work a little bit better and then that way it can be used across platforms.
Alban:All right. Last episode I asked what are the keys to success for your podcast this year? And Sarah Rossett wrote in keys to success for my podcast consistency in releasing episodes and releasing monthly supporter episodes. Basically, keep podcasting.
Jordan:Hey.
Alban:There you go, Sarah. Thank you so much for writing in. That's great.
Kevin:Corey wrote in via our texting solution and said A please let me turn off my stats. Even being able to walk myself out for a week would be helpful. My dopamine lottery is real. It's addictive and distracting. Yeah Well, we're thinking about Corey, so maybe that'll happen. Point B my keys to success are staying on track with my release schedule and my podcast narrative, so continuing to pick up skills that make me better at it, like interviewing, writing for audio story formatting and editing. And C this texting thing is awesome and Sarah's feedback. Yeah, texting's cool. It's nice that you can string multiple messages together. I don't know if that was one long one or multiple texts, but yeah, once you get the number in your phone, then you can just text the show whenever you want.
Jordan:All right, and our question for the next episode. I think it's my turn. My question is I'm curious to know what you think about the Long Form podcast content. Do you prefer podcasts that are broken up into seasons and shorter episodes, or do you prefer if they just drop the episode and even if it's three or four hours long, that you can listen to once every two months? So to let us know, send us a text at 855-951-4230. And, as always, thanks for listening and keep podcasting. So, albin, I heard that this weekend you went to a film binge fest called Gorge of the Rings, in which you sat through 13 hours of Lord of the Rings movies in one day. Is this true?
Kevin:Oh man, that's a great name. That's a great name Gorge of the Rings.
Alban:Well, there's more to it than just this. As a longtime listeners of the show would know, I am the oldest of five kids and the youngest is nine years younger than me, as a huge Lord of the Rings fan, all five of us. As kids, our dad used to read Lord of the Rings to us, and so when the movies came out, I do remember going to see them. I think I saw them all on opening night, but I have not seen any of the Lord of the Rings since then. And the youngest brother texted all of us and said hey, this theater in town is going to do back to back to back Lord of the Rings movies. And you know, trying to be the older supportive brother, I go great, let's go. And he goes oh, it's even better. They're going to do Lord of the Rings style food. So it's gorge of the rings because you're gorging yourself on food. So there's like nine little meals throughout the movie.
Kevin:What's Lord of the Rings? Food like giant turkey legs and stuff. Yeah.
Alban:It's like like Shepherd's pie, seed bread that you know in the movie they they eat lamb to spread, which is like the Elf's bread, and so you get some like bread and then you get there's a lot of breads Actually.
Alban:And then they have like in the breadmaking, I guess a little breakfast which was like pancakes, and then they had some sausage and then did you have second breakfast? Yeah, you had breakfast and second breakfast and leavensies and tea and mold wine, and I had a pork tenderloin at the end, but it's all served to you while you're watching these movies.
Jordan:Oh.
Alban:So it's all in the dark. So it's like you just have to trust them, because somebody comes in and like a plate's in front of you and definitely you can see shapes, but that's it. And then you're just saying I hope I'm not allergic to anything I eat here.
Jordan:Was it like Rocky Horror Picture Show where you're like you throw the bread in the theater?
Alban:I did not throw anything the whole time. I don't think everyone was throwing stuff, but we ended up going. We got all five, all four of my siblings and I went to it. One spouse came, the youngest brother's wife. I was cannot believe, you know. My wife said I married sickness and health, poor, rich, whatever. But I did not marry you for Lord of the Rings marathon movies. So she did, she did not come, I won't leave you, but I will not be joining you.
Alban:I initially did not appreciate that the Lord of the Rings movies were so long because I hadn't seen them since they came out and there's extended editions which are longer. So it was like legit when, when Jordan says 13 hours, it was 13 hours from the time that we sat down till the time we got up. Now there were a couple very short breaks, but these are four hour movies and it was just a very long period. Now the movies were better than I remembered, or at least the experience was better than I expected, but we didn't dress up.
Kevin:Now, did you? Did you? Do you know when you sit for 13 hours you have to be concerned about blood clots? So did you do any research on compression socks that you could talk about for a while?
Alban:Luckily, kevin, I was wearing the darn tough socks 1092s or whatever I was talking about and they performed admirably in the theater. I can tell you, I felt so bad after a day of sitting and I was like and eating you know a bunch of bad food mostly breads and drinking mold wine. The next day I went and ran I think it was nine and a half miles. It's just like maybe I can flush my system of some of this. But I will remember it and it's a fun memory and we got all the kids there.
Kevin:And so did your hobbit feet hurt. After the nine and a half mile run. Did you run barefoot?
Alban:My hobbit feet did not hurt. They felt great. I was singing. You know the soundtrack in my head as I'm running. You know imagining I'm one of the characters.
Jordan:Oh man, I hate going to the theater. I can't even picture sitting in one for 13 hours. The last few times I've gone to a movie I have hated every minute of it. It's just like I hate being in theaters with people. I can't sit for that long either.
Kevin:I just did a nine and a half hour car trip by myself that we talked about. I was coming back during the Super Bowl and I realized that I am now of the age of which, like the four hour sitting is the limit and you always hear older people talk about their butt hurts after sitting too long and as a younger person, you're like that's so weird. Well, I am now of the age where my butt hurts and I understand. Like I was thinking about stopping at one of these truck stops and buying one of those donut pillows or a beaded car seat that taxi drive users.
Jordan:I'm starting to have fantasies about what sort of you know, car seat cover.
Kevin:I can have to make this work. I imagine the movie theater seats are a little better, but so that's a long time to sit, yeah it was.
Alban:I mean the benefit was that we that all of us have don't get to see each other time, and definitely as a whole group, and we got. Everyone, including my brother from Atlanta Was in town, so he came with us, and so it's pretty much was 13 hours of now, adults leaning back and forth to each other, making like the stupid jokes that we all would have made when we were, you know, 17 to eight years old.
Jordan:Oh, you were those people in the theater You're the talkers. Oh yeah, I'm sure that it's a little bit spaced out.
Alban:You know a lot of people are they're digging into their turkey legs or whatever. So we got away with it. But we were just talking about it. We were just it was a good time to do with family and I'm sure for years from now we'll be like do you remember when we were 13 hours? And then we'll be there. It wasn't 13. It was 12 hours. It wasn't even that bad.
Kevin:So is this happening nationwide? Is this like a gorge of the rings and find it in a city near you, or it's only in Jacksonville?
Alban:It was only in Jacksonville at Sunray theaters and I think they did it one time.
Kevin:I wonder why it seemed like it was the sixth best so many people are listening right now that are just terribly disappointed that they can't attend it in their own city.
Alban:I can only imagine the amount of sadness that our listeners are feeling. Reach out to us on the text line if you need anybody to commiserate with.
Jordan:Give you my better help code.
Kevin:Maybe go take the idea and pitch it to your local theater. I'll be all over it.
