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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
Steven Bartlett Chose Creative Control Over $100M
What would you do if someone offered you $100 million for your podcast?
In this episode, we dive into Steven Bartlett’s recent disclosure that he turned down not one, but two massive podcasting deals — including a $100M offer. Why? Because they came with strings attached: platform exclusivity, ad overload, and a loss of creative control.
We discuss why prioritizing your listeners, values, and long-term vision might be worth more than the biggest paycheck. Plus, we hear the drawbacks of video podcasting through perspectives of reluctant celebrity podcasters.
Mentioned in this episode:
- The Only Men Allowed to Podcast Are Tween Boys
- The Diary of a CEO Turned Down $100M Podcast Deal
- Smartless: Maria Shriver
- Office Ladies: Webisodes: The Podcast & The Office Ladies Podcast Pilot
- The Compassion of Sound
Sound-off question: What is the strangest podcast growth tip that actually works?
Contact Buzzcast
- Send us a text message
- Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods
Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!
Do you guys want to hear about my Uber ride this morning? Got in the car, very nice gentleman driving me home from the auto repair shop. He was listening to what sounded like talk radio, but I noticed it was coming through Apple CarPlay. So I of course asked what are you listening to? And it was a sports program that I'd never heard of before. And I said, oh, is that a podcast? And he said no, I don't know anything about podcasts. And I said, oh well, what are you listening on? And he said TikTok live. What TikTok live every morning? And I said, oh, is this like a regular show that you listen to on TikTok live? Yeah, and he said, yeah, every morning these guys come on and they do their show live on TikTok. So I just go on TikTok, I follow them. It pops up and I just listen to it as I drive around.
Kevin:And so we talked a little bit about what podcasts are and that he doesn't have to tune in at the same time every day. He could listen whenever he wants. And again, I can't remember the name of the show, but I asked him if these guys had a podcast. So we loaded up Apple Podcasts on his phone. We searched for them. We found their show and so now he can listen any time of the day and he was very thankful, wow. So I was thinking like maybe a lot of people are listening to things on YouTube and TikTok and stuff, but podcasts might be a better solution for them. That's what it got me thinking, at least for this gentleman. He seemed appreciative. He might've just been being polite, but he was like no, this is great. So like now, if I'm driving in the afternoons and my morning show is not on, I can still listen to the morning show. I was like, yeah, that's exactly, it's like on demand.
Jordan:He's like this is great. This is exactly what a podcast is.
Kevin:So I changed a life for the better today with podcasting.
Alban:Wow, that's great. Kevin Finn podcast evangelist yeah.
Jordan:You know, that reminds me of that story that I saw I think it was a couple of weeks ago, maybe last week, and it was those tween boys that have that podcast that they're basically streaming on like TikTok and YouTube.
Jordan:It's like a bunch of like food reviewers, but they have no experience in like tasting foods, so they talk about like school lunches and stuff, and I was really surprised to see that they didn't have their show on podcast apps. It's literally just like YouTube and Twitter, and so I wonder if there's just some weird sub-genre of people who are podcasting by streaming on these platforms. But I didn't realize that they could do that on TikTok.
Kevin:Yeah, I didn't know that either. What also was interesting is the conversation took a weird twist when I said do they have any ads? Do they do any ads in their show? And he said, no, they just get paid by TikTok. And so I was like, well, why would TikTok pay them? And he's like, because TikTok has a lot of money.
Alban:So they just no somewhere. Tiktok has to be making money. A lot of the live streams I remember for a while were making money because people would like donate to the live stream.
Kevin:He did say that. He said there is a way that you can just give them money. He said, like you can give them coins or hats. I was like hats, what do you mean? You give them a hat. He's like I don't know, there's a little hat button. I can click it and then the hat goes on their head if you're watching it. But it costs you money to put a hat on their head.
Alban:And he's like I think they get the hat button and then that solved it all. The value for value stuff. No, it wasn't that, it wasn't patreon, it wasn't exclusive content.
Kevin:It was, and I feel like we were close a couple months ago when I switched my profile image to the cowboy hat image. Yeah, like we were just teetering around the idea we just missed, missed it. But like how, as a listener to this show, how much would you pay to be able to put hats on us?
Alban:Well, I can tell you someone very famous, kevin, a podcaster who always wears a hat, is Tim pool, that's right.
Jordan:What a segue I?
Kevin:saw the news article. I saw the headline that a buzzsprout podcaster has made it into the white house press pool.
Jordan:Oh boy.
Kevin:A former Buzzsprout podcaster, former.
Alban:Buzzsprout. Right yeah, so that's the second former Buzzsprout podcaster who has been in the White House, the first being former President Joe Biden and now frequent hat wearer Tim.
Kevin:Pool Is a beanie. A hat? Yeah, I guess it is a hat. It's a genre of hat, but nobody calls it a hat?
Jordan:Is it a hat or a sock?
Alban:Head sock. Yeah Well, we're still waiting for our Press Pool briefing badge.
Kevin:Yeah so we talked about that on this show that the White House opened up a new media seat and one of the types of people that they were looking for were podcasters. They brought in a podcaster last week. It was Tim Pool, who is a controversial figure in the new media space. We're not saying anything good or bad, we're just saying he is a podcaster and we can also say that he started I think he launched his first podcast on Buzzsprout since moved to. I don't know a different network.
Kevin:He moved to Megaphone shortly after For ad deals and stuff like that.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:So no longer a Buzzsprouter, but got to ask Caroline Levitt a question. I think it was not a question that has anything to do with podcasting, so we won't cover it.
Kevin:But he got in there.
Alban:I just want to know what's the best way to start a podcast. After that follow-up, what's the best way to keep podcasting? I've got to know like, oh, what a great question, you just got to go to buzzsproutcom.
Jordan:Welcome back to buzzcast podcast about all things podcasting for the people at buzzsprout. So we're going to start off with an attention grabbing headline. People at Buzzsprout. So we're going to start off with an attention-grabbing headline. Bartlett turned down massive 100 million podcast deal. And that's Stephen Bartlett from Diary of CEO, and he recently disclosed that he had turned down two pretty big podcasting deals, one worth about $100 million and the other I'm not entirely sure, but I'm guessing it's a lot. Did you guys get a chance to read this article?
Alban:Yeah, I did. It's interesting to see his rationale for turning down $100 million First off. That's just so much money and even when it's totally against your principles, it's really impressive to see people turn it down. I mean, that's not life-changing money. That's like forever never work again and also your kids and their grandchildren never work again. Money if you want it to be, but very cool to see him kind of make this decision and talk about it publicly. Do we know where those deals came from, by the way?
Jordan:He did not disclose that. I'm assuming one of them was probably Spotify, because there was a little bit of a mention about how this was during the time when there were these big acquisitions, and he did mention that one of the reasons why he turned down this huge deal was because they were wanting him to be platform exclusive, and I believe that Spotify was one of the only platforms that was doing the platform exclusive deals.
Alban:Yeah, I actually just heard there was a little clip from the Netflix where Netflix was doing the platform exclusive deals. Yeah, I actually just heard there was a little clip from the Netflix where Netflix was doing their earnings call and they asked about podcasting and their CEO had a response about video podcasters starting to get more and more similar to talk shows.
Kevin:Yeah.
Alban:And so you could see us bringing those kind of talk shows onto our platform, and so it made me wonder if maybe the more recent of the deals might come from Netflix, because his diary of CEO is available everywhere on podcast listening apps, but it's predominantly on YouTube, and so I wondered if maybe they were trying to pull them on there.
Jordan:Another reason why he turned down this deal was because he said that it would be a 300% increase in ad sales on his episodes, which is ridiculous. So he would have to go platform exclusive and then have three times the amount of ads on his podcast than he wants. He wouldn't have creative control over the podcast. Looking at it, it's like yeah, that's a life-changing amount of money. And then you look at it and it's like that could also tank your podcast and he would be beholden to the platform that he's on.
Alban:So there was this other little bit that he mentioned, and it's funny. We're trying to pull apart multiple deals that we haven't been able to see. But $100 million is like you know, your eyes pop. And then it's multi-year payout tied to performance targets.
Jordan:Yeah.
Alban:And then you're like Ooh, and then it's three times the adverts, ooh, and less creative control. And then you realize that he's already making a massive amount of money with the podcast. Now, if you have to hit these performance targets over a five-year period, then it's really looking like 20 million a year for five years if you continue to grow and you pump massive amounts of ads into your show.
Kevin:You know it reminds me of and I don't want to take anything away from the fact that he turned down a generational wealth amount of money, as Alban said earlier. I'm not saying that's easy, but I am reminded of. There's a tech person who I follow and they are 100 millionaires. They have made it way beyond big. And he talked one time about the different stages of wealth that he's been able to go through in his life and he was like there's a really big jump. That kind of happens for him.
Kevin:Anyway, his experience between going from being pretty wealthy at making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to being a multimillionaire he was like that was pretty life-changing. I used to live in a nice house and drive a nice car, but now I could take multiple vacations a year, I could have multiple cars, I could have a bigger house or multiple houses, and that happened between, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and a couple million dollars a year, and he said that was the biggest life change from there forward to like accumulating $50 million and a hundred million dollars. He's like you know, yeah, I can do all these things. I could have a private jet, I could have a helicopter, I could probably buy an Island or stuff, but those weren't things that were really desirable for him and he was, like it, just kind of felt I don't know gluttonous, like too much or whatever.
Kevin:I don't know that you'd have that perspective before you got there. I certainly don't have that perspective now, like it would be hard to turn down a hundred million dollars, but at least for somebody who'd been through it it was interesting to hear them talk about it from that perspective. Anyway, it makes me think, like Stephen Bartlett, the entire CEO, it sounds like he's already made the huge life-changing thing where he has more money than he will ever possibly need and anything that he wants to do or anything that you can get with money. He can probably already get the next level jump. Maybe he had enough foresight to see that what he'd be giving up in the quality of life and the joy and the creative expression and the control of a show like that's not worth it just to be able to I don't know have a private jet that you can call on.
Alban:It is important to remember. You know you can turn things into money sometimes, but is that what you want to do? Do you want to spend day in, day out working for whatever company he'd be working for and doing shows that they want to do and pumping ads in and not being able to control it, when maybe you do get four or five times as much money as you would have otherwise? But the lifestyle may not change drastically in a positive way, and if you can see your work life actually getting a bit more annoying now you're in meetings about whether or not you're allowed to interview somebody you want to interview, or okay, people are mad that there's all these weird ads in my show now and I can't make the decision. That could be much more of a cost than the additional money might've been worth.
Jordan:His vision for his podcast was really to diversify where his income streams are coming from, and he saw way more value in that than just getting this huge brand deal. It seems like it's up front, but it's not up front. So he talked about equity deals where he would get shares in a company in exchange for doing ads or being sponsored by them. He talked about these long-term partnerships where you actually integrate the brand into the podcast and so it seems a little bit more like natural and fluid in your. Your audience can get familiar with that brand and there's just all these different things with, like, merch or listener subscriptions. So there's all these different ways that you can make money, and he chose to just bet on that as opposed to getting this like upfront cash and then and then maybe it'll work out.
Kevin:Right, you talked on equity deals and I think that Tim Ferriss made a lot of his worth out of doing equity deals and just being able to create relationships. So he was an author and a podcaster for many years and through the relationships on his podcast he got opportunities to invest in companies at some very early stages. I think he also was introduced to some new products and companies and would like them himself and said listen, I want to be like an ambassador for this product, so don't pay me to do the ad. I'm going to talk about it when it feels natural. I'm going to help build it, but in exchange for whatever a small percent of equity in the company 2% or 5% or something like that and that has worked out for him really well.
Jordan:He's crushing the wealth side of life anyway, yeah, and I think that's something that seeing these huge, massive deals and thinking like podcasters can really take away from this how important it is to be loyal to your listeners and be intentional with your podcast and long-term, that will build up the success of your podcast way more than selling out for these like programmatic ads that are just going to alienate listeners. It's going to annoy them, they might drop off, and so I think it's really important to keep that in mind, that, no matter how big your podcast is, it's just important to be thinking about your listeners first and foremost.
Alban:The thing I took away from it was you need to remember and keep in mind am I doing the thing that I want to do, even if there's a big bunch of money coming with the thing you don't want to do, then pay attention. Well, if it's not the thing, I want, to be spending the next five years of my life who knows where Steven will be in five years? And if it's not what he wants to do, then awesome, great decision. Yeah, I don't want to do it. And the other piece was man, this deal sounds insane when it's 100 million, but then you're like oh, it's over five years, there's earnouts, there's actually a bunch of ads, there's platform exclusivity, and then you add all that up and you're like okay, it starts feeling like the present day value of this deal is way, way smaller and the lost revenue from the show being exclusive and him not getting all the ads anymore, probably it wasn't as big of a turndown, I guess, as we imagine.
Jordan:Yeah, I think that's so true because it is. It's just this headline where it's like turn down $100 million and you're like whoa, what, that's crazy. And then you look at it and you're like actually, yeah, that was the right choice.
Kevin:So the takeaway here would be when those $100 million offers start flowing in for your podcast show.
Jordan:Which it will.
Kevin:Don't sign too fast. Think it through, read all the details, and maybe there's a lesson that Stephen Bartlett has to share with you.
Jordan:All right.
Alban:So I know that a couple episodes ago we promised, we swore that we would not rant about video podcasting again, but I found a loophole. What's our loophole, Jordan?
Jordan:Our loophole is our wonderful listeners, who sent us clips of celebrity podcasts talking about video podcasting, and also some friends in the industry talking about it too. So we're going to discuss that and it's it's not us, it's them.
Kevin:All right.
Jordan:I'm going to play a couple of clips here. So the first was sent to us from David John Clark of late bloomer Actor. So there's an episode of Smart List from the month of April and they had Maria Shriver on.
Kevin:The Maria Shriver.
Jordan:The beautiful Maria Shriver.
Smartless:We can talk to you about anything though, is what I love about you you can tackle any issue. Yes, that's why I can't wait to talk about 10,000 things.
Smartless:But you said to me I said what I'm so excited about is the only show I've ever gone on where I haven't prepared at all, because you told me not to prepare at all. Correct so I didn't brush my hair. I had no makeup.
Smartless:Yeah, because we're not Anything Right? We're not filming this, it's just audio, it's a podcast. You know, Don't explain to her what a podcast is Thank you. Will.
Smartless:Thank you. I mean, my God, this is a bridge too far, yeah, really.
Jordan:Oh my God, I could listen to Will Arnett talk all day. I love his voice, batman, yeah.
Kevin:I love it. Hey, I will play the part of Maria Shriver today. This is exactly why I love audio podcasting. I don't have to do my hair, which is like an impossible task for me. I don't have to. It doesn't matter what I'm wearing, I don't even have to read the outline, I just show up and chime in with stupidity aplenty, and that's a podcast.
Jordan:All right, and so this next clip that we have is from Remy Roy, host of the Driven Introvert. Let's know that the office ladies also had a rant about video podcasting when a listener asked them to make a video version of the show.
Office Ladies:We have discussed many times the idea of adding a video element of the podcast, and it boils down to this.
Office Ladies:I don't want to yeah, I mean, it's a podcast. Aren't podcasts just by definition something you listen to? Why do we have to watch everything? Why does?
Office Ladies:everything have a video. I like the idea of something that I just listen to and I think once a camera's there, it changes how you share. It's not as intimate. I feel like I would be aware of the camera in some way. The camera would be like this extra person in the room that I would clock in to the camera. I just like that. There's not this third thing in the room, it's just me and you having a conversation.
Office Ladies:Well, listen, we tried it very early on. Back in the Earwolf studios, Josh and Lee came in with two cameras and they set up lights for us and we tried to record the podcast while we were being videotaped. And it was horrible. We didn't even put that podcast out, we stopped in the middle and we were like shut off cameras. I was so self-conscious, I was so like I don't know, I didn't like it. Also, sometimes I don't want to brush my hair before we record and I want to wear my sweatpants and I want to be in my cozies and I just don't want to feel like I'm on display.
Office Ladies:Oh, I know.
Kevin:It's another good clip.
Jordan:Okay, so this is two actresses who have built a career on being in front of a camera and they're saying no, absolutely not, Turn it off. We're not doing this.
Kevin:Yeah, and I'm picking up on a theme here.
Jordan:Yeah, women don't like to get ready.
Kevin:Hair and podcasting do not mix. I feel like maybe this is why so many video podcasters are bald men Do we think?
Jordan:I think you're onto something.
Alban:Is Stephen Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. Does he have hair? What's the hair situation?
Jordan:We were talking about Tim Pool. He wears that beanie all the time.
Alban:That's the video podcasting hack. Is the eventual beanie? Yeah, all right, stephen Bartlett does have hair, but it is pretty closely cropped, so maybe he doesn't have to do too much work.
Kevin:Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. You're making a really good point about these being professional actresses who are, like I was, assumingly very comfortable on camera and yet they still did not like the camera for their podcast.
Kevin:Yeah.
Alban:I feel that too. I mean, how many times have you been somewhere and you're just having friends? You're hanging out with friends, you're having a good time, you're at a wedding and people are dancing and then you realize somebody's pulled their phone out and you're like oh, everything changed as soon as there's video and it's being recorded. Then you're watching yourself and you're going okay, is this cool? What am I doing? Is it fun? Are people going to like it when they watch it back? And that running in your head changes all of the feel, all the feelings that you have about whatever you're doing.
Alban:Yeah, and I feel that with podcasting, for some reason, with audio, I don't feel as much of that self-conscious kind of checking oh, what are we saying, how are we performing, how do we show up? Instead, you're just a little bit more authentic, and maybe that's to our detriment sometimes, but I think often you just end up being a little bit more casual. It's another reason why I like podcasts more than live audio, because you can say something and go oh, that was kind of dumb or I didn't. I don't really agree with that. I don't know why I said it that way. Let me cut it. And it kind of takes two of the inhibitors of being authentic and sharing off the cuff. I'm not being recorded video and I had the chance to go back and re-say something if I get it wrong.
Jordan:It makes it so you can be much more real. Yeah, I actually cut that clip a little bit short because it was a longer clip, but they went on to talk about how they also don't like how judgy people are when they do video. They get so sick of people making comments like when did her chin start looking like that? Or getting distracted instead of like oh, brutal. Chin reviews, but I mean, you know how people on the internet are.
Jordan:they get like snarky and they have comments about everything they have to like judge how someone looks or how someone has aged, and what that reminded me of so much was that blog that you actually shared with us, kevin. The compassion of audio from Hindenburg.
Kevin:Yes.
Jordan:And in that Nick actually mentioned that. That's kind of the beautiful thing about audio is we turn off our judgment for a hot second. You know what I mean? There's just something built into us that when we see someone on video we're judging and that could be a good judgment or a bad judgment, but it just it sort of like having those visual cues of what someone's wearing, how someone looks, kind of takes us out of it for a second. We get distracted by the way that someone like blinks, or the way that someone is dressing or fidgeting with something while they're speaking, and in audio you don't have that.
Kevin:Yeah, that's profound. I don't know that. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that until you just raised it, but for sure I would agree with if I'm watching someone, I can see what they look like. I don't think it's conscious, but I think subconsciously I'm probably making assessments of whether they are like me or not based on how they look, based on how they dress, based on cues I pick up on just by their appearance, and then I probably value or devalue some of the things that they're saying based on how similar I perceive them to be to me.
Kevin:And with audio you don't have that as much. You might have a little bit of the oh by the voice. I'm sort of envisioning what this person might look like, but it's definitely not right in your face. And so I do find myself oftentimes listening to audio and I hope, hope, I feel like this is true, being more open minded to ideas that I might not have myself, or being in a position where I could be convinced that you're right even though initially I didn't love the idea of this that you're expressing this viewpoint and I'm like, oh, I'm really against that. I see that different way.
Kevin:But then, after listening to them for 20 or 30 minutes I might come around to at least to their perspective. Like I still might not agree with it, but at least I understand where you're coming from now because I'm really engaging in the idea more than I am the person, somebody who I've perceived to come from a totally different walk of life. So we're never going to see eye to eye immediately. It's like I don't know what walk of life you come from, I don't know your story, so I'm just hearing your perspective. I'm just kind of judging you based on the argument you're presenting and trying to qualify the idea and the thinking without all this other noise and distraction around it. And noise and distraction in this scenario just being video, like just being what somebody looks like, which is terrible, like we don't want to do that, like I said, and ideally you wouldn't, but I think it does happen subconsciously.
Alban:Yeah, I was pretty surprised once when I saw a video of Nina Totenberg. She's like the Supreme court correspondence for NPR and she's been covering the Supreme court for years and so I think if you'd asked me how old is she, I would have probably said she's got to be at least in her sixties. But I really had not ever thought of her age. And then I saw a video and she's in her eighties.
Alban:Oh, wow but that had never clicked for me, because all I'd ever listened to was she has a great voice and she knows a ton about the Supreme Court, and that was like my only experience. And I did wonder if I'd seen video from the beginning of having listened to her for years and kind of put her in a box of oh, she's like my grandmother's age almost, and she's similar to my grandmother. Then would I have like approached the ideas differently? And I think it's an uncomfortable question, because when I'm surprised that people look different than I imagined, that this is, I guess, rude to podcasters, but people are always more attractive in my mind.
Alban:I was thinking the same thing and I think this it's because when people are on TV, we select pretty heavily for beautiful people, like even normal roles in TV. You think like they're the normal person in the TV show and yet if you knew them in real life, like they're pretty attractive. That's just like the way TV works. It's even the way like YouTube works and I think there's a pretty heavy bias towards people who are attractive, you think are smarter, and I think that podcasting I noticed that must be true for me, because it happens the opposite way, that I hear people and I go, wow, they sound smart, they must be beautiful, they. And then you see them and you're like, whoa, this guy is wearing like some wild outfit. I can't deal with watching this video but I'm like, oh, but I'm going back to the podcast and it's great.
Jordan:Yeah, I was. It's so funny you brought that up, because I don't know like sometimes podcasters sound very like hot with their voices, like they just have hot voices, you know what I mean, and I'm like they're probably like super cute. And then I see them and I'm always surprised if the voice matches the face, cause usually it does not.
Alban:But another reason why we don't do video podcasting Kevin, are there any podcasters you listen to that you think are hot?
Kevin:I don't think I process it in the same way, but it might be a good explanation of why we don't do live events, like we don't want to disappoint our fans. That's true, the few that we have.
Alban:We had somebody once come to the booth and they met us in person. They're like all right, so who's Kevin, who's Alban? It was like that's very surprising to me that it wasn't obvious off the bat. But why would it be obvious?
Kevin:Right, but then as a joke, you said something kind of grumpy. You're like well, let me just tell you, I don't really like anything about you know videos. And then she was like oh you're Kevin. You totally fooled her.
Jordan:Okay, let's get into our sound off segment. So first off, we have a fan mail message from wits and weights. Hey guys, long time listener and host of wits and weights on buzzsprout, of course love the effort behind the no sugar challenge. That said, I tend to cringe a little when restrictive dieting is promoted, especially when it dismisses tools like artificial sweeteners, which can actually help people manage calorie intake. On On our show, we focus on flexible dieting and sustainable habits that don't villainize any specific foods, including sugar. Well, my initial thought when reading this is that I don't think we were promoting it at all, because clearly I couldn't stick to any sort of sugar diet.
Kevin:So defensive Jordan, you were clearly promoting this.
Jordan:I don't think I was. I think I was saying it wasn't possible.
Alban:It's funny because to me, every diet has been so much more effective if it's completely restrictive. I must have some like legalistic streak in me that when I'm like absolutely no chips, then the chip cravings go away. But as soon as I'm like I don't vilify any food, I have a little bit, I go off the rails, or at least it's just. It's much easier when I'm like I don't drink. It's so much easier.
Jordan:It's like when you did that thing where it was just like no drinking, like you're doing whatever diet and then you're exercising twice a day One of them must be outside and then you have to read a nonfiction book every night.
Alban:I'm just like wow, so much easier than if you were like eat 40% less chips. I'd be like, oh, that's going to be a lot harder. But I know I may not be typical, because my wife is much more similar to what Wits and Weights is talking about, where she can do anything in moderation and as soon as there's like a rule in place, she's like oh, now I want to break the rule.
Kevin:I agree I don't like restrictive dieting and I'm in the camp of it. It's never worked well for me either. I will say this, though my daughter has this trick that she's been doing that I really find fun, and that is anytime somebody asks her if she wants something, she says no, thanks, I'm full. Like regardless of if she's full or not, she says that first to like take their offering her or pushing something, and so she's like I'm gonna eat when I'm hungry or if I want something, I'm gonna evaluate that. But if I'm not even thinking about food and then someone's like oh, I'm going to get a bag of chips, do you want some? No, comes out immediately and she's like I'm going to make my food choices, I'm not going to have other people put food choices on me, and I'm like that was pretty clever. I don't know where she got it from, but she was just home for the weekend, for Easter weekend, and anytime somebody said something like oh, do you want dessert or do you want? I'm grabbing this, do you want some?
Alban:No thanks, I'm full. She's like I wasn the family histories podcast. I was air punching during Alban's video podcast monologue rant. Loved it Nice. I got to say some of these are my favorite messages. I don't know why the people getting excited if I rant. Yeah, now I'm going to be more prone to ranting in the future.
Kevin:I like the air punching I used to. You know I'm a little old school. I would call. Would call that uh, who is? It was at arsenio hall. He used to do the. Uh, the dog pound the.
Jordan:Remember that I was picturing the breakfast club like n scene, you know the beauty of podcasting.
Kevin:we all can create our own visuals. Dave jackson from school podcasting wrote in and said I added the funding info, but I don't see it in pocket casts. I refreshed is this a feature that is here or a feature that is coming? Okay, dave, I had this problem too. It is a feature that is here. I looked for it in podcast. I couldn't find it. So then I went like to the app store, like trying to force an update, and I noticed an update was available. So then I hit the update, whatever button, and then I went back into Pocket Cast and I still wasn't seeing it. So then of course, I go to my podcasting expert, jordan, and I said, jordan, I can't find this thing, have you seen it? And she sent me a screenshot. So I knew it was there something I was doing wrong. So what I had to do was force quit the app on my phone and then I relaunched it and then I saw it.
Jordan:So if like quit that app in a while, it might not pop in until you do that, well, they have that like lovely minimalist interface going on. So you have to like actually click the title of the podcast and then the options will show up, which I didn't know because I'm not familiar with Pocket Cast. It's not my daily driver. You guys probably knew that.
Kevin:Yeah, it's not as front and center as I would like it to be, but I'm not going to criticize anybody who's making any positive moves. So great job. Pocket Cast. If you want to make it more apparent in the future, I would love that as well. But no criticism, all love. Thank you for putting it in there.
Jordan:Our last question for our sound off was what feature would you like to have in your podcast listening app? First up, we had someone from Metacast reach out and said you want bookmarking of transcripts and podcast apps. We've got it in Metacastapp. You just swipe the segment and it saves the bookmark. Check it out. Very cool.
Alban:So did all three of us download Metacast, or just Kevin and I? Yeah, I have it.
Jordan:I got it.
Alban:I was able to bookmark stuff. It was good. I listened to some podcasts and was able to do it, but unfortunately only the first five minutes of the transcript were available. So that's the. The paywall or Metacast app is, if you want to be able to see the full transcript, that you have to upgrade. So it's good, but you would need to pay for the full thing.
Kevin:Yeah, and let me, let let me just say I checked out a couple of different podcasts. One that I know does not have transcripts provided by the podcaster, so the app is creating the transcript on the fly, which I like. That, if the podcaster is not doing, I love that the app is doing it. And to put those behind a paywall, no problem with that. I get that. I don't like the fact that, like for when we looked up Buzzcast on there, we provide full transcripts through our RSS feeds and only the first five minutes are available in the app and you still have to pay for the upgrade to see the full transcript. I don't love that.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:I mean, I feel like us, as the creators, are creating a transcript, we're editing it, we're making sure the names are correct. Like you know, most automated transcriptions get Alban's name wrong they call them Alban and stuff like that so we make those adjustments, we publish it. I would like the Metacast app to just display what we're publishing. We're putting it out for free. I don't like that. You're taking our stuff and putting it behind your paywall. But that's just my opinion. The rest of the functionality I really love and I think that there's probably some other great opportunities to paywall some of that functionality. That's not paywalling the content from the creators specifically. Yeah, so not to be super critical. Thanks for listening to the show, thanks for writing in, but I would like to see that change.
Alban:Chris from Podtastic Audio reached out with a app request. He said I don't know if many apps have this feature, but could we create an about section of the show with photos and bios? Look more like a website than just some text. There's been some work in this space. I know that some of the podcasting 2.0 stuff has talked about having photos of the hosts, but after our talk about the compassion of audio and apparently like extreme attractiveness bias that we all seem to have, I'm of the opinion maybe we need to keep this section out. I don't really know if I want people to go and see all these photos of Kevin and I.
Kevin:Yeah, but I do like the idea of being able to bring more of the podcast website into the apps. There's a lot of stuff, like on the websites that we provide for all of Buzzsprout customers. There's a lot of things you can do in there, from contributions to, if they provide subscription content to a little bit more about the show. Other like we have this tag that we call the pod roll tag, so you could bring in other shows that this podcast recommends. So there's a lot more content that could be brought into podcasting apps. It might be nice if the apps just did something as simple as there is a link to a podcast website in every rss feed, if you could just tap that and make sure they had a nice mobile browsing experience within the app. That could be a simple way to execute on it. But I do like the idea. I think there's some good stuff there.
Jordan:yeah, I was gonna say we have the person tag that's usually associated with the host photo and you can have a bio and all that stuff. So it's really just a matter of the podcast apps adopting that and implementing it. Apple podcast has something very similar. When you go to a podcast, you can scroll down and they do have the photos of the host there and if you click the photo it'll actually show the podcast episodes that they are on. Guests are on, things like that. So that's nice, but yeah, it would be nice if it was a little bit more widely adopted.
Kevin:Yeah, all right. Damien the DM wrote in and said I use podcast addict and one thing I'd love to see is a native way to take a podcast, clip, a section, and generate an mp3 that I can send to people, share on social media or use for creating audiograms. I love this, and there are a couple of podcasting apps that I'm aware of that do this really well. One, but if you're a podcast addict, I'm assuming you're an Android user. I don't know any offhand. Oh, pocket Cast is available on Android, and Pocket Cast has a great clip sharing feature, and the other one I was going to mention is Overcast, who sort of kind of pioneered this in the podcast app space, but they're iOS only, so you might check out Pocket Cast.
Alban:I really enjoy those because you can create a little clip and it's a video clip that just shows, like, the progress going across, but it's got the artwork, it's got the episode title, all of that information. So when you send it to somebody they can listen to it anywhere, but then they can also see all this other information about the podcast, in case they want to go listen to the whole thing.
Kevin:Yeah, a little nuance. It's not that these apps don't generate MP3s, so maybe not super easy to use as an audiogram, but they are movie files like Albanston.
Jordan:Yeah, what I've been doing lately, whenever I want to share a clip, is I don't know if Android has this they probably do but iOS, they just have a built in screen recording tool.
Kevin:Yes, that's on Android.
Jordan:I'll line it up and I'll do the screen recording and then I have to go into my photos and like crop it so you don't see how low my battery is, Cause it's really embarrassing how low it is all the time. So I'm I'm in the camp of that. Would be cool to have a native way to have like a little screen grab.
Kevin:Yeah, Isn't that funny. Why is? Why is low battery an embarrassing thing?
Alban:Because people call it out. I don't know, but also cracked screen, oh yeah. I always if someone's got like, it's not like a big crack, it's mostly like oh, I'm going to wait to upgrade it, but it's like the small cracks. I'm like what's going on? You're dropping this phone a lot, but you don't get a case. What's going?
Kevin:on here. Yeah, I get all the little chips around the edges. Feel like it's just like a metaphor for your life, like everything's just kind of chipped and rolling around.
Jordan:I once accidentally dropped my iPhone off of a patio and it fell on the concrete and of course, the screen shattered but it was still functional because iPhones are amazing and I took packing tape and put it over the top and I kept that phone for like another nine months or something like that and my boss at the time he finally bought me a new phone because I was embarrassing him at work meetings. Like I just looked insane with this like cracked screen with tape on it.
Alban:I did have a friend once who broke her phone and then was like I'm going to show you. And then said I'm going to take a screenshot to show you how it broke. Like that's not going to work. It's on a photo of the screen.
Jordan:All right. So Steph Geopats podcast. I want to be able to order my downloaded episodes. Can't do that in Podcast Addict. Do any apps do this? Yeah, Apple podcast does this. They have a queue. Spotify also has a queue where you can like rearrange the episodes that you want to play next. Do you guys know of any other ones that you can do this?
Kevin:Yeah, pocket cast has a I think they call it now, like up next, I think is what they call it, and you can drag anything up and down and around in there.
Alban:Yeah, it's pretty much just setting up the queue so that your episodes you want to listen to next are up there and then when that finishes, it goes into the next one. D Sparkling, life Coach, reached out, said I'm with Jordan and Albert. I'd love to see an option for social like commenting and liking and bookmarking episodes, similar to what YouTube and GoodPods have. My favorite app is Apple Podcasts, but I've been listening more on GoodPods for that option. Yeah, I mean D, I agree with you, agreeing with us. It would be nice to have one place, you know, where you could just drop comments and chat with people kind of asynchronously about an episode. That is one of the things that I really love about YouTube is, you know you can go onto a video that's five years old and it's got all of the you know, these interesting comments and people sharing things, and so you can learn more about whatever the topic is about.
Jordan:I actually heard from Megan, who does our Buzzsprout Weekly podcast and she does the Buzzsprout newsletter. She had pulled a story that Deezer has implemented an algorithm where listeners can either like or downvote podcast episodes and it's sort of like a Reddit style recommendation algorithm that they have, but it's personal to that podcast listener and I really like that. I would love that so much more than having like rating and reviewing systems, like if we could have that and more podcast apps where I could just say like, yeah, I like this or no, I didn't really enjoy this and they go great. We'll quit serving up more of this stuff to you.
Kevin:Yeah, as far as what they're recommending.
Jordan:Yeah.
Kevin:Yeah, I do like that. That's reminiscent of early Netflix work. Yes, you remember when you used to have to log into Netflix. You'd watch something and they'd ask you to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Then they moved to like a star rating. But it was all for the benefit of them trying to get an understanding of the type of movies and TV shows you'd like, so they could suggest other things that you might also like.
Jordan:And then you start figuring out like the weird niches that you're into, like cerebral, like clown stuff, I don't know, know like it was always they always have really weird categories, cerebral cruck at some point.
Kevin:I'm imagining they got sophisticated enough where they're like. We don't have to ask them anymore. We can just tell by how much of the stuff that they're watching that we can figure out what you like and don't like. They're probably still trying to figure me out, since I watch all my movies at 2X no you don't?
Jordan:Yes, he does, please don't.
Kevin:Yes, he does.
Kevin:Yeah, but that's good. But what's more exciting to me about that is Deezer is alive. That's fantastic. I thought Deezer got shut down at one point. I hadn't heard anything about them in a long time. All right, well, good for them. Deezer should also check out the you know the pod roll tag that you could find out if I'm listening to a show, that podcaster may be recommending other shows. That might have some influence on your algorithm as well.
Kevin:Yeah.
Alban:So for sound off next week I was in the buzzsprout Reddit group, where now we're up to, I think, 900 people in the group, so we'd love for people to come and join us. But I was in there and chatting with somebody and they're talking about all these growth tips that they've done. They're like, oh, we've tried everything that's like off the wall. And they named all these kind of random ideas. But one of them was they made any music that they made for the episode they put on like SoundCloud and then link back to the podcast. And then they made Pinterest posts about the podcast and they were sharing all these kind of like off the wall ideas. And they said and now we can see a third of our new listeners come from all these weird backlinks that we created over the years.
Jordan:Oh, interesting.
Alban:And so my question for you is like what's the strangest podcast growth tip that you've tried that's worked? I'd love to hear you know we came up with unique podcast growth tips a few months ago for people but I'd like to hear from our listeners Are there any that you've tried that are unique, that we maybe haven't heard of?
Jordan:Yeah, let's get into the weird stuff. Man, let's go.
Alban:I'd think weird, as in like very few people are trying this, and if it's working, then we want to get it out there, so everybody knows. Oh yeah, I wouldn't have thought you would get any listeners by taking the music you made for your show and putting it on SoundCloud, but apparently somebody did make that work.
Jordan:All right. So to have your response featured on our next episode, go ahead and tap the Texas Show link in our show notes. That's the easiest way for me to grab all those. So when you send us messages via email, DMs, Twitter, it's a little bit harder for me to remember and I might miss them on the next episode. So be sure to tap that Texas show link. Thank you all for listening and keep podcasting.
Kevin:Did you guys notice a new feature in Buzzsprout? No, I did not. What did we launch? There is a hidden. It's pretty hidden.
Jordan:Okay.
Kevin:But Buzzsprout has been a longtime supporter of transcripts. You both know that we've been doing a lot of work to be able to generate high quality transcripts ourselves without using a third party.
Kevin:The bar is pretty high for us because we've been using some really great third party tools, so it's not like we can just roll out kind of average transcripts. We need to roll out good transcripts if we're going to replace any offerings that we have currently. And that work is now been published, and the really nice thing about it is that, since we're it's brand new and we're testing it out right now, any podcast episode that's uploaded to Buzzsprout you can create a transcript for free using the new Buzzsprout transcripts tool. Okay, how does this work? Okay, so any episode you upload, if you don't have, if you have co-host turned on, you automatically get a transcript for free. That already happens. You can edit it, all the things you'd expect.
Kevin:If you don't have co-host, then you can click into your episode and on the right hand side there's a little section that says do you know you have a transcript for this episode or do you want to create one? Add a transcript here. You tap into that and then you're brought to a page which gives you different options. One like if you already have a written transcript, you want to upload that or paste that in. You can just do that If you don't have a transcript. There's some options below that to create a transcript.
Kevin:And now there's a new option there and it's basically let Buzzsprout create a transcript for you for free for a limited time, and we're just calling it Buzzsprout transcripts. It's in in beta, but it is open and available to anybody who's on any paid plan within buzzsprout very cool. So I think we're probably gonna let them roll for free for, you know, four to six weeks, roughly like that's a work cycle in our plate and like how we run things. We're gonna let it roll for a little while while people give us some feedback on the quality of the transcripts they're getting and the editing experience. After that we'll probably roll it into like an add-on package, like we do with magic, mastering and co-host and everything else.
Kevin:These transcripts are not free for us to create, so there's some cost involved. So we need to make sure we're covering our bases there. But I'm really excited because, uh, we do it. We did it for a couple reasons. One, we believe in the power of transcripts for helping all the accessibility benefits that come along with that opening the podcast listening experience to more and more people, regardless of whatever conditions they may have that may limit their ability to hear clearly so you can always read along. It also helps with some discoverability, so more and more podcast apps are pulling in transcripts and then you could search through episodes, like we just talked about in our SoundOff segment today.
Kevin:More apps are doing great things, like Metacast being able to swipe and create notes from transcripts. More apps are just supporting transcripts in general. Like we talked about this year, apple Podcast Apps has a really great transcript integration feature. Pocket Cast is adding it. We'll probably see more and more of that coming to more and more podcast apps. So I just feel like 2025 and beyond is just going to be like transcripts are just going to become table stakes for podcasting. If you publish a podcast, it's going to sort of be expected that there's a transcript available with it, and so we decided to make the big investment to make sure that everybody who hosts on Buzzsprout has a really easy way to get high quality transcripts.
Alban:I really love it because I mostly am not reading podcasts, Though sometimes I'll listen to a podcast and later on go back and read and kind of pull notes. But lately I found myself much more often pulling up old Buzzcast episodes and I'm like I think we talked about this. I want to remember what we covered and what we didn't and you could just go back and search. It's so nice to be able to search old episodes. Kevin sent an article, I don't know, maybe a week ago, and you're like, oh, this is interesting. And I was like, yeah, I think we talked about it on Buzzcast. And I went back and I was like, oh, we kind of talked about it, but it was a little bit different than I'd remembered. But I wasn't going to go through the process of listening to hours of content trying to find that bit again. But it was super easy when there's a couple keywords and you just start searching and you go, okay, yeah, it's not there.
Smartless:Yeah, yeah.
Kevin:There's. There's some really fun things you can do when the majority or all of your podcast episodes have transcripts associated with them. With AI tools that are available today, you can train your AI. So, for example, I've got a chat GPT subscription and I and it's now it has memory so you can teach it things and so you can say this is my podcast, here's the RSS feed and you can see at line whatever.
Kevin:73, there is a link to a transcript file. There is a pattern there. Can you see the pattern between this episode and all the other episodes? Yes, so now you know how to pull down transcripts. Can you please pull down the transcripts from my last 10 episodes and tell me like give me ideas for what a good next episode would be, and like you can start interacting with AI agents in this way. Does that work? It does work. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of experimenting with that, but I think they're going to get better at being able to discover transcripts on their own, but right now, you have to teach it the pattern of how to find your transcript and then, once it finds that pattern, then it can follow that pattern and it can pull in transcripts automatically. It can read them, parse them, get that knowledge and then you can ask it questions about your stuff.
Jordan:That would have been so nice to have when we had our hundredth episode. Oh yeah, and I pulled those clips that were like the best of moments of buzzcast in the past hundred episodes that took so much time for me to go through, find it, figure out what timestamp it was on, and then, like, go and listen through all these things and be like, oh yeah, that was a good moment or this was really compelling or funny and I that would have saved me hours probably.
Kevin:Yeah, Do you guys remember a couple of weeks ago when I was in the company chat, I was saying you know, like I'm teaching chat GPT how to do things, and I said I taught it how to find the transcript for a buzzcast episode and I said I was wondering if it knew, since I taught it from basically my instance of chat GPT, if your instance would then figure it out. I remember you asking about this yes.
Kevin:Yeah, instance of ChatGPT, if your instance would then figure it out. I remember you asking about this, yes, yeah, and so I think like one of our programmers chimed in and said I asked ChatGPT to find a Buzzsprout transcript and it could not find it. So my experiment was failing. It wasn't going outside of my box, but I can still go into my ChatGPT and say, hey, can you find the latest transcript for the latest Buzzcast episode, and then I can ask it questions about that, and it can do that. I don't have to retrain it every time. That's pretty impressive, yeah.
Kevin:So anyway, enough with the AI stuff. But yeah, if you don't do transcripts, please hop in there. We would love as many people as possible to try out the new Buzzsprout transcripts feature and edit your transcript. Once it's processed and you have one, jump into the editor, see what you think about that. You can assign speakers, you can correct any typos. You don't have to do extensive like get every single word perfect, but just polish up the glaring errors and then publish it. They appear on your Buzzsprout website.
Kevin:And, as I mentioned before, are appearing in more and more podcast apps.
Kevin:So it's a good thing, we're excited to bring it to you, but it's still early days, so we need testers and feedback and all that stuff.
