 160, did you forget to categorize your podcast? I hope not. I hope you brought some extra categories that we can maybe decide to change out. Do you know you can change your categories? What am I even talking about? We'll find out. Podcast categories, I am Ray Artega. I never introduced myself. That's a verbal glitch there. I introduced the round table. Although Dave, you know what? I guess we have a name cards here. Lower thirds on the video version, youtube.com slash podcasters round table, if you're ever curious about that. And it says my name, I never say my own name. So if you are, if you've been here for 159 rounds and just learning who I am, welcome. Welcome, my name is Ray. That's Dave Jackson. If I can get Dave, my co-host at GiggleOnce, we're good and I am worth a part to do. Yeah, well, don't say that. I had that happen this last weekend. Somebody said, you're one of the best speakers and my head like exploded. And then they said, because everybody else sucked. And I was like, well, that's not much of a compliment then. The bar's pretty low at that point. Yeah, it's like, wow, thank you for the backwards compliment. Yeah, I'm Dave Jackson from the schoolofpodcasting.com. Awesome. And new round tableer, JJ, welcome. Thank you. Excited to be here. What is your show? My show is Business Beat. It has a wonderful array of episodes that have not been added to in a while. So I am the face of pod fading and working on a new show as we move into a little bit different thing. But when you do this as a hobby, life sometimes gets in the way, but here I am. Dave, is that how we deal with pod fading? You just go on to a new show. I could say that I'm kind of guilty that or sometimes because you go on to a new show, the other one gets left in the dust a little bit. I don't know, guilty, Dave? Yes, oh, very guilty, yeah. I always think I'm coming back and then six years later, you're like, wow, I haven't recorded an episode since, Obama was in office, so. Time flies. Well, with this show, it was part of a whole other thing with kind of being a business consultant and then I've just kind of moved on to something different there and technology's my stuff and so the new show's gonna be more along the lines of what I wanna talk about. Whatever you have to tell yourself to feel better about ditching that audience. I really, it's just an excuse to buy equipment so that my wife thinks I'm buying stuff for her. I understand that, I understand that. All right, returning round-table James, welcome back. Greetings, it's wonderful to be back, yes. Yes, I do two podcasts. I do the Pod News podcast, which is every day and I do, and this is a new and really unique idea. It's two people, two men, talking about podcast industry. It's called Pod Land and I do it every single week. So, yeah, new idea. If you've never heard that kind of podcast before, you should go and hunt it out. There we go. Fantastic. All right, well let's jump into some stories and I will not bury the lead and tell you what I'm babbling about when I'm talking about podcast categories. This was an article by Dan Meisner, specific content to we have had a lot of good articles from. He likes to really dig into data and pull out things he's saying a lot of times with Apple. But this one, again, involves Apple and it's titled The Value of Assigning Multiple Podcast Categories and this is in Apple. So, if you are aware, if you have a podcast in Apple and if we've joked before, if you don't, do you really have a podcast? Certainly get your podcast in Apple if you don't have it unless maybe you have a moral objection, I don't know. Then that's gonna be a hard road to ho, but go for it. Apple actually says you can choose up to two categories or subcategories. I thought it was three, hold on. It used to be. Oh, okay, all right, let me keep going then. You can choose up to two categories or subcategories that best reflect the content of your show. The primary category is used to display your show in each category page, top charts and personalized recommendations and listen now. I don't use the app, someone wrote that is. The secondary category also helps your show appear in select category pages in editorially curated collections and in search. And then he looked at true crime and he said 75% of true crime shows in Apple podcast lists true crime as their only category. So he saw a surprising number of podcasts that only listed one category and it seems like it probably depends on your host or how you create your feed, how obvious it is that you can do this, right? Dave, you work at Libsyn, pretty obvious when you're making your feed but it doesn't mean everyone's, even if it's obvious, it doesn't mean everyone's gonna select another category. Maybe people think there's no reason to or that their show doesn't even fit into another category. But he points out if you're looking at, for a careers podcast related to a specific industry, the careers category in Apple podcast is so broad that it borders on unhelpful. So imagine you're looking for a career and you're an entrepreneur, right? Having that careers plus entrepreneurship tag can it be a very helpful versus like careers in education? But he said most notably Apple podcast and a lot of other apps as well only display the show's primary category. So his takeaways here where your podcast categories are important part of your show's product packaging, right? Because, well, for apps that display it, it could be helpful I guess in that case. But if you've only specified a single primary category for your show, you should consider adding a secondary category. Even though they're not prominently displayed in the case of Apple, Apple says that secondary categories are used within the app. So used for search, which I'm not sure we've said before. So do you guys find, Dave, do you deal with this? James, do you find that to be the case? Well, I find that people like to obsess over it because it doesn't, you'll find that I do a show and it's not this and it's not this, it's kind of this. So what do I do? And which point I hand them a coin and go pick one and you mentioned it earlier, you know, try, like I just went over, I was like, what are my categories? The school of podcasting is listed as business marketing and technology. And I was like, so if I wanted to, I could go over there. I'm assuming there's one for education and I could try that and then do it for three months and go, did my numbers go up? Oh, no, they went down. Well, let's try switching it to something else and realize, I guess the big question is how many people go into Apple podcasts and go, let's see what's going on. Cause I think they only show like the top 20 depending on where you're at. And so they're probably not gonna see your show anyway. If you haven't gotten the hint here, it's like, yes, put in a category, but please don't spend like eight hours, you know, with, you go into their like bedroom and they've got all sorts of yellow sticky notes and strings and like notes. I don't know that it's that important. It seems like search is the important thing here, right? James, would you say that search is kind of at play when you're, and that's kind of what he pointed out is that Apple's saying that they may not display it, but they're using it on some level. I mean, I think there's, yeah, I mean, I think that there's two things here. There's, you know, your primary category is obviously the thing that you will appear in, in the charts, in the Apple podcast charts, which remember are not charts. So that's one thing, but obviously a podcast which is true crime and comedy is gonna be a very different podcast than true crime and news commentary. You kind of understand a bit more about what that podcast might be. And so one of the things Dan was saying is make sure that, you know, it's a plea for podcast apps and for podcast directories to show those secondary categories as well. So I took my orders from Mr. Meisner and within a half an hour had shown all of the secondary categories when you go and search for a podcast inside pod news. And that's relatively handy. So I can certainly see where he's coming from. And I think if you are looking for a funny true crime podcast, then being able to see that secondary category is really, really helpful. Yeah. And I think the other thing, and this is, I don't have anything besides me thinking, I think that's what's happening here because it's Apple and you don't always know what happens. But let's say I put my show in business, but I also put an education, but really my main thing is business. And when you search for yourself, you come up as education. I think it's because you're ranking better in that category. I think that's how they, whatever category you're ranking the best in is what you're gonna show up in because I've seen people obsess over that. They're like, wait, I wanna be shown in business though. And I'm like, you are in business. And they're like, nope, when I search it says education, I'm like, I think that's because you're ranking better in education. So that's another kind of weird thing that I go, I think that's how that works. You say back, you wanna be found is what you actually want. Yeah, that's the good thing. Yes, when you search for your show, it actually shows up. That's you're in front of so many people at this point. JJ, do you know if you've categorized more than one? I think I've done, I did all three. My background's in web development. So SEO is a big thing for me. And I understand that that was just, discoverability is one of the largest things that podcasts deal with. And so I try to make sure to cross all the T's and dot all the I's and have you in everywhere. I mean, I just saw the other day someone asked, should I have a domain name? It's like, yes, what are you doing? You should be everywhere. You should have your account name in every Instagram, everything. And it just comes back to like, if there's a category you can put yourself into, fill them all out. Because the more they know about you, the more they will be able to get you out there and you'll get discovered. Yeah, when it comes to search, the last time I, that's the other thing. And it takes all of two seconds to pick one. I think the last time I heard somebody talk about this, Apple uses the title of your show, the title of the episode in the author field. And what always kills me is when I see somebody spell out the word episode. So it's like episode 28. And then they'll use three words to describe the actual episode. So it'll be like, you know, James Cridlin. And then it'll say the name of the show. And I was like, well, the name of the show was already in that field called, you know, the name of show. I don't know that anybody is Googling episode 28. And maybe if you said some great takeaway instead, you would get more downloads. And I understand some people are really obsessive over the episode number. And to me, I don't put them in. I always say, if you do put them in, I would put them in at the end. But this person I saw today actually spelled out the word episode. And one single tear just slowly dripped from my left eye as I saw that. I was like, oh. Did they have podcasts at the end of their show name too? Probably. Because, yeah. Yeah. I tell you one thing about having podcasts at the end of your show, it makes it almost impossible to find your podcast in Spotify. Because Spotify ends up using the word podcast just the same as it uses every other word. And so therefore you are automatically competing with every other podcast, which has the word podcast in it. I've got lots of automated searches going on in Spotify. And it's pretty well a dead sir. But if you've added the word podcast in, you've just made it 20 times harder to find your show in Spotify. So yeah, so that's a bad thing. JJ, you are in management and you're in business. There we go. Business makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Yes. So yeah, that's good. I also think having the word the in your name is another one. I think you end up ranking against everybody else who has the word the. And so one of my shows is called the podcast rodeo show. So I have show and podcast in the name. And you can never find that you have to search for Dave Jackson for that to show up. So maybe you should have taken, I don't know, a few more minutes to come up with a better name, but that's the one that stuck at the moment. Yeah. And I think that people really, just like you said, with the title naming and all that, taking it from an SEO type standpoint and making sure that your titles are correct. I do interviews on my show. So people sometimes search for the person that I'm interviewing. So I make sure their name's in the title and then whatever we talked about. So if I talk to an accountant, it's about accounting. And it's in the title, quick, easy. I do put the episode numbers in it just because it's more or less so I can remember where I'm at and I did this once somewhere. But yeah, I mean, you have to utilize all these tools to make sure you're filling them out because computers don't know unless you tell them. And you got to tell them. I've always been like the episode number thing is it's been an evolution, right? We used to put, we used to start with, we had acronym for the show PR 160 colon title of the episode. Some people used to put the show name, then the number. I've paired that down. Fortunately, you know, in Apple's case, they solved it, right? They put in the episode number because there's a field for that now. And so that works. But for podcast directories that don't list the episode number, the problem is there's so many directories and you don't know where someone's gonna find you. So my only issue with that is when you want to reference episode 56, you're on episode 327. How the heck does someone find that, right? If the app themselves doesn't list the number, how are you gonna tell it? Well, if someone go to a date, I guess you could look through dates if the app lists the dates. So like, Apple did this very well. They fixed it, which was great. But sometimes I will still for apps that don't display it because I want to say, hey, on round 59, we talked about this thing. Check it out. There are two, sorry, I was just gonna jump in. There are two titles for each episode and the most podcast hosts will allow you to do. So put the episode number, if that's really important to you, in the normal title and then in the iTunes title, you can avoid doing that. And Mark Steadman and I did a ton of research a few months ago around what individual podcast apps and podcast directories are actually searching for and Apple Podcast literally only searches within your podcast name and your episode title and your author tag. That's it. They don't search through any show descriptions, any of that. And so yeah, it's just really important to get as much useful information into your podcast name, obviously, and also your episode title. I mean, if you're gonna do a podcast, reviewing different shows, don't call it after a sport involving horses. That's probably a good plan. Yes. I wonder why we have a discoverability issue. That's all Apple's doing. Well, and apparently to bring it full circle, the category comes into play a little bit, maybe in some way. I don't know. Fill out it. If they give you the moral stories if you have the field in your podcast, fill it out, right? It's there for a reason, right? Lipson has all those fields there for a reason. Fill them out, even if some of them are deprecated and the field is still there, but just fill it in. Take the extra minute or two to be thorough about it. I think the only, I don't think Buzzsprout does. I know Captivate does. I don't think Spreaker does. I know in Captivate, they make it an option if you want to have a different title, you click a button and it comes up. So it's there. Make sure you do this. Make sure you do this and then spend the rest of the time going and making a TikTok video because then you'll get way more listeners based on that time you spent on that video than doing these small little tweaks. That's right. Now spend four hours finding the perfect clip of your audio to put in a headliner video. Oh, I think we have a story that ties into that. I'm not sure. I think we do. Let's do another one. Oh, I just like that. That's perfect. JJ, that's a nice transition. So it was kind of going along. Ray wanted to talk about YouTube getting really into podcasts, but headliner now has an auto post to YouTube option. So kind of the idea of should YouTube content be curated a little better? Or are we all just throwing our podcast up on YouTube with a headliner video and calling it a day? And should that be the approach? You know what I thought about when I saw this is I was like, wait a minute, headliner hosts audio? I mean, like podcast headliners for clips. Like, right? Dave is what you're just joking about making like an audio waveform. They're sending clips to YouTube or the whole thing? Are they a podcast host all of a sudden? I think they can do the whole thing though, but they're not a podcast host. You send them a headliner. Yeah, and you do your chocolatey goodness on it of making things blink and flash or whatever. I was gonna say that was, yeah, what's the motivation there? I could just upload it to YouTube, but I guess it's because it's like a Canva for audio. It'll be somewhat prettier than just an image, just slightly more. But you know, it's one of those things, like I'm a big believer in create the content for the platform you're putting it on. Joe Rogan, which we're gonna go back to him, most of his YouTube views were the short little clips that they would put out there, not the full seven and a half hour show that he does or whatever he does, whatever link that is. And so they found their niche in that and that we're going to create and know that these small clips. So you either do a YouTube show or you take your 10 minutes plus that YouTube likes in their algorithm and you create your show, or you create small little clips of your podcast, but then just throwing audio up there. I mean, I don't know how many people just use YouTube as an audio player nowadays. Used to work, you know, back in the day it was, and it's like, there's so many other options of getting content and getting audio content that's easier to listen to. We're gonna get back to that because I threw a late story into the Google doc about YouTube getting into podcasting. So we'll approach that, let's not finish here. What else? Well, as I look at my numbers because I created a separate channel for my, you know, audio on YouTube kind of thing and I'm getting three is my lowest number up to 118 with some guy named Adam Curry. Right. That I interviewed. But, you know, those are views. I have not gone in to see how far. That's the big question. But, but, but, if that hundred, you know, viewed video, meant you got a hundred subscribers, it doesn't. I'm just saying. It changes very dramatically when you think of it as subscribers versus views because if 10 people found out that Dave has a podcast, that's useful. A view on YouTube, I think last time I checked was five seconds. Sure. But I mean awareness. Like you could be on YouTube for a completely different reason, have no idea that Dave even has a podcast or, you know, in this case, a subject, right? Like, there is a podcast about podcasting. Didn't know that. I was here to watch Pat Flynn's video about how to start a podcast. Turns out there's a whole, you know what I mean? So that discovery element is something that can't be, I don't think overlooked because we always, when I joked earlier about if you have a podcast and you're not Apple, do you really have a podcast? Because you're, you know, if people are doing, if they're doing, you know, if they're blogging about finance, the finances, they could be doing a podcast about finance. They're not in Apple. If they don't have a podcast, there's a whole search engine of people looking for financial content that they're missing out on. So in theory, the same thing could apply to YouTube, right? You're not there. You can't be found. Whoever's in your niche who was on YouTube is kind of taking those views from you. Well, it is definitely two separate audiences because I've had, I think probably three or four people now that have joined the school of podcasting and they've said, oh, you do audio stuff too? And I was like, really? Seriously? Wow. Okay. So it is a, I mean, they bow to the ground of, who's the king of YouTube these days? It's not PewDiePie or Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast, so they bow to Mr. Beast and this other group is all Mark Maron and Conan and- Well, I mean, the round table, and I've given that example too many times, but the round table was mixed into my regular channel and so many people discovered the round table because of my YouTube channel. And it was this, it was talking head. It wasn't, you know, talking head is, this is not what people generally consume. Although I am finding in my, I did tweet about it yesterday, at podcast helper, you should follow that, about how I think, you know, this is a debate we've had for a long time with those of us who've been in the space for quite a while. Should you be on YouTube, you know, direct audio to YouTube is not a video. We talked about this for years and there's plenty to say about it. But what I'm seeing is new generation of podcasters who come into the space and they're on YouTube almost as default. These are kids who didn't have TV. They grew up on YouTube. They start a podcast and they don't think, they don't go through the debate. Should I be on YouTube? No, no. We're on, it's just on YouTube. Like why the heck would I not be there? Like that's ridiculous. So there's sort of, I feel like I'm seeing a shift and then again, we'll talk about the other story that I have on here. But James, do you have, what do you think about the audio to YouTube? I mean, I think from my point of view, YouTube is just another platform. It's just another place to get your stuff. And so I put pod news there automatically every single day. I've written a script that automatically uploads it and it gets, sometimes it gets 200 listens. Sometimes it gets 20, but they might be 20 to Dave's point. They might be 20 people who don't use any podcast app. They don't, you know, they certainly don't subscribe to the pod news newsletter and so therefore very good by the way pod news.net. And so therefore, you know, these are new people from my point of view. So if you can, I think, you know, I'm very lucky in the iCode and, you know, I make my stuff available, you know, as much as I can in as many different platforms as I can. And if I can manage to get another 20 listeners for no additional work whatsoever because I've just added it onto the script that I run, then great. I think if you are spending time editing something into video and, you know, and spending lots of money on lights and things, which clearly I haven't done very well and all that kind of stuff, then I think it's a different conversation. And I think it just depends in terms of how much time and effort you want to put into in my case gaining, you know, 30 listeners, perhaps, you know, an episode. I think that the real winners, if you want to call them that on the podcast and YouTube is the podcast that has the bandwidth, ability, budget to go full-on. Like I saw a new podcast that other day that actually prompted my tweet. Man, beautiful set. They're sitting there and, you know, just that left an impression because you don't see that. You see what we're doing, right? You see talking head. You see audio with no video. So it, you could be, this is all these things that when you do them early, you have that sort of advantage, right? In the beginning, if you had a podcast 15 years ago, you had the advantage of being first. Like there wasn't much to find. Holy cow, there's a podcast. Dave probably built a large part of his audience by being the first guy who's doing a podcast about podcasting, right? So like there's all kinds of levels to it, but, you know, that discovery I think can be important. So it's something to consider for sure. Going back to what James was saying, Sting was on the Tonight Show once and talked about a story where the police, back before they were, you know, the huge group or whatever, they played a theater in New York to three people, three whole people. And so they would just stop and like, hey, is there a song you want to hear? And they totally customized the concert to the three people. The guys had a blast and then it turns out that one of those guys was a DJ who then started playing their music on the radio. And as they say, the rest is history. So you never know who's listening and you never know who might discover you on YouTube. And like James said, there are a lot of services now that'll automate this for you. And so it doesn't cost you anything. Why not? And I... I think the only way would hurt it is if you had, for lack of a better phrase, a real YouTube channel that you're trying to grow. Don't mix. And yeah, don't mix. Which you specified that you had a separate channel for it and that there is a reason for that. Yeah. That's why this podcast got moved to its own channel. Because if you're gonna subscribe to something, you wanna know what you're subscribing to, right? So in this case, you're only subscribed to the roundtable. Yeah, and there's also a ton of other people who say that fake videos as Daniel J. Lewis calls them are gonna be bad for your channel and bad for the algorithm and everything else. I just find it weird that I get alerts from YouTube when I publish a new pod news because it thinks that I might be interested in it. That's pretty good. But apparently that's not actually happening. So for most people, it clearly is recognized that I like the content on the pod news YouTube channel. I can't think why that might be. So yeah, so I would certainly keep it as a separate thing and just be careful of the YouTube terms of service. So what I would also do is highly recommend you put it on a different Gmail account, different Google account. Because if YouTube wants to, they can completely close your Google account which might mean that you lose all of your email and you lose your family photographs and everything else. So warning, I wouldn't do that. Google would shut something down? I know, who would have thought it? Hey, Feedburner still works, all right. And I just checked my stats on YouTube. Many of them, the percentage watched is 5% or less. There are a couple that are 28, 30%, 60% is on but that's a really short show. So, but again, it's free, doesn't cost you anything. If you put it on its own channel, why not? Well, we talked about, yeah, exactly, not a place to go, it's not a place to be found. It's a walled garden, so if you're not there, you're not found. I found it interesting, the Edison Research recently asked people kind of generically where you're finding podcasts and I think the number one answer was YouTube, right? People don't, they don't necessarily, the general public's not, they don't know the difference between a podcast directory and YouTube. They just know that when they want to find a podcast to go to YouTube, so, you know, and that part of the herding algorithm thing, like that's hard to measure, but it can be harmful. That's the reason this show is not on my channel which is just slash rare take up because as much as it helped this show, it hurt that channel because I would see as many, people would sub for this that the people who were already on the channel which was like camera reviews, microphone reviews, they were out of there, I don't want this. And every other week, every week you're showing me this and this feed, I'm out, it's not what I signed up for. So be specific, right? It's just like categories, like put yourself into a niche. Related to that, I do have another story here which is a little older, I think this was a month ago. And is this on, let's see, this was from the Verge, this is Ashley, is it Carmen? She took over the hot pod. YouTube gets serious about podcasting and so my takeaway really is what does YouTube have up its sleeve for podcasting? So we talk about this, yes, I agree that audio with just the thumbnail to YouTube is, it's lame. I click on it and nothing moves, this is lame. Okay, I now know that Ray has a podcast but this isn't what I want, right? So I might get someone to follow me from YouTube. Most will not, most are just annoyed, which is fine. Again, you've been discovered. But Kai Chuck apparently has been hired at YouTube. He's been there for 10 years, I believe, said and hired to manage the large volume of existing podcast and relationships across the YouTube platform. So YouTube realizing, yeah, this is a thing. This is happening quite a bit, whether it's just audio that's being uploaded, it's happening, right? And Google said that 15% of people listening to music on the platform. So you know, this is very common that just music, I think probably kids of the last five years is probably the primary place they get their music is YouTube, it's free, right? So that's why they get music there. But 15% of people listening to music on the platform did so with it in the background. So if you have the premium YouTube, you can do background. I guess in Canada, they have or are going to release the ability to listen in the background of music for free. So that'll be interesting that should go up music listening. So really no one knows what they're doing, but they're recognizing it and something is maybe coming, right? So will they switch off? I don't even know how you handle this, right? Is it a separate tab for podcasts so that you know you're getting audio only and you can listen in the background? Like I'm trying to figure out, James, you're a coder, maybe you know that if they recognize it's audio only, they can allow background play on the free app. I don't know. Yeah, I think there's two things here. I think one of the things is we are talking about this with our definition of a podcast, which is an RSS enclosure, an MP3 enclosure in an RSS feed. That's not what YouTube is talking about, I think here. I think what YouTube is talking about is Joe Rogan's show, which of course used to be in video on YouTube in full and many of yours and all of that sort of thing. That is what YouTube considered to be a podcast. It has a video component and my suspicion is that Kai Chuck has been hired to basically ensure that YouTube doesn't lose its position in terms of those large video podcasters who might wish to go over to Patreon. They've just announced that they'll be doing streaming video, may wish to be going over to other places as well. Spotify is obviously jumping into the video podcasting space as well, but again, not as we know it. So I think it's a little bit more around what YouTube considers to be a podcast. There's a lot of talk about whether YouTube is going to move or Google as a whole, is going to move podcasts out of the Google Podcasts app, which nobody seems to be working on into the Google, into YouTube. And so you'll find what we all call podcasts in the YouTube app. I don't really see how that fits with anything. So other than this background, though, this background play, this is the thing a lot of people do, whether they pay for it or they just ignore the video and listen in the background. Yeah, and absolutely. But there again, there are people doing those sorts of things anyway on YouTube as well. And we shouldn't also forget that YouTube has a very successful music service as well, YouTube music, which is a separate thing, which is just like Spotify. And so YouTube has all of that content in there as well. In fact, I canceled my Spotify this week because we're all using YouTube more. So I might as well, you know... I was gonna ask, is it successful? Is YouTube music successful? Do we know that because, I don't know? It seems to be doing... Because YouTube... It seems to be growing incredibly quickly. It's nowhere near as large as Apple Music or Spotify yet, but it does seem to be growing incredibly fast. As I mentioned, that a lot of people go to YouTube for music, whether you get a video there or you just get uploaded music. And YouTube found a way to monetize that, right? They grab it and they pay the person who... They pay the copyright holder. Right. And if you go to YouTube and you click on the little hamburger menu, you'll see a link right there for YouTube music, which takes you to kind of a completely different looking site. And I can see them doing the same thing for podcasts. Yeah. And will YouTube destroy the host by giving free hosting, right? That's always... I mean, they free host video. Like, why not? Why didn't they do it for audio? Dave... Yeah, maybe. Dave, you're gonna need a new job. I was gonna say, I just tightened up just a little bit when you said that. You can just... You can port your skills to Google. In fact, I think the workplace is probably even a little nicer. You can move out to California with me, but... The one thing just to bear in mind is that Google is... Google is run by a large company called Alphabet in the same way that Facebook is run by a large company called Meta. YouTube is also run by that large company called Alphabet. And they are separate companies. Google Podcasts right now is run by Google Search. It's run by the Search Division. And my understanding is one of the reasons why Google Podcasts doesn't seem to have an awful lot of work on it is that they share the engineering resource with their search folk. And Google Search obviously is the foundation of the business and makes the money. Whereas Google Podcasts is a fun thing to have, which, I mean, it is the number three podcast app out there now. It is doing pretty well, but it's a distant number three. That's a backhanded compliment. Yeah, in podcasting. Yeah, it's very, very distant. Zoom is four. Yeah. So, yeah, so it's... A cast box seems to be doing incredibly well, but weirdly. Not that I'm going off on a tangent, but cast box seems to be like a really big podcast host in many different countries, judging by some of the data I've seen. So, yeah. But anyway, so I'm not necessarily sure that with Google being the political company that I know it is internally, I'm not sure that Google Search would give up all of their... All of their goods to give over to a, not just a separate division of Google, but a separate company. That to me seems a little bit strange. Yeah, you know, someday, someday, maybe Google will figure out where podcasts live in the ecosystem. I mean, they've been trying forever. They just went away for a bunch of years, said, forget it. Yeah, yeah. And it became popular. And it became popular on their own platform, YouTube. So, it should be interesting. Exactly, indeed. I know, JJ, are you suede? You wanna stick your audio up there with a picture of maybe my face? Cause that would help. Well, if it's something that, it's just like an automatic thing, sure. Go at it. Just don't spend a ton of time doing it. Unless you're gonna get over that line. And then like you said, I mean, it, you know, I've been told, you know, you definitely have to have certain production values or people just not gonna watch it. And so, yeah. Oh wait, I got it. If you're gonna get to that point, do it. Yeah, or not. Yeah. I'm switching cams and then real time for the audio listener, this is production. There you go. I'm keeping it dynamic here. We're interested. Now we're interested. Yeah, no, agree, totally. Put it out there. Put its own channel. And it also depends on, you know, it depends on the type of podcast. Like we talk about podcasting too. Like we really are almost getting to the point where we've gotta almost start using different words. And like this type of thing is a live stream. We call it a podcast, but then you have produced audio that is, you know, cereal or, you know, these types of things that may not work on a YouTube type channel. So, you know, it's just really like based on who you are and what you are, you know, it would be, it needs to be a different, you know, do what is good for your show. And this goes two directions because if you're on YouTube, if you're a show on YouTube, if you do something like what we're doing on YouTube, and you even might even call yourself a podcast. But that implies one thing to people who at least, there are a lot of people who listen to podcasts now. They get it. They know what a podcast is. They're probably gonna look for you in their podcast directory. To be honest with you, I watch a show. It's a financial type show here on YouTube. It's how I discovered on Instagram, came to YouTube, and then that person said they had a podcast. So I was able to go and get them in a podcast. So if you're on YouTube, you have a show, especially if you call it a podcast, get yourself in a podcast directory. Make sure you're in a feed that goes to podcast directories because you don't want that audience to then go somewhere else and be like, you're not, you're not a podcast. Like I can't find you. The key is can I find you? So I mean, it really does go both ways. You see, we saw a mass sort of migration maybe a year or two ago. Like time has no meaning anymore. Of YouTubers going to podcasting, every big YouTuber added a podcast. Why? Because they were doing what we're doing here. You're not in that platform. You can't be found in a podcast directory. We can't be found on YouTube. They couldn't be found on podcasting. So that was interesting as well. Right. We used to do RVing, traveling full-time and keep your daydream people on YouTube. They had a podcast that was totally separate from their produced YouTube show that showed them doing their thing. They sat down at a table with a mic and talked, which was different from their YouTube content. And you couldn't find their podcast on YouTube, but they had a YouTube show. So you would find their show, then you'd find their podcast. When you guys are just like, oh, I want to hear the behind the scenes. And that's what the podcast was. Will Smith is doing that. He just launched a YouTube TV show. It sounds weird, a YouTube show I guess called something about my best shape ever. He's trying to get back in shape after gaining a bunch of weight. And in the video show, you see him read his book to his kids. So he's reading to his kids about what he said in the book about his kids to his kids, which then makes you want to then go like listen to the whole book. So it's this whole cross promotion thing. And yet the book, probably by the time it gets to it, we'll start talking about the video stuff. But it's this interesting cross promotion of the YouTube channel drives you to the book and the book will probably drive you back to the YouTube channel. So yeah. Right, which is, it kind of goes back to the who are we as content creators? You know, someone says I want to start a podcast. It's no, you need to start a brand, start your brand and then create the elements that you want. If that means you're good in front of a camera, then that can be a YouTube. If you're good, you know, you have a really bright personality, a TikTok channel. Maybe you're a good photographer and you can really do well with some things on Instagram. And have your brand and your podcast is just part of that and build the brand itself. You're going to be much more easier to monetize. You're going to be much more easier to do that. But take the approach of that, not just, you know, these people are like, oh, I want to start a podcast. I have no idea what I need to talk about. Well, you need to start your brand. And then the podcast will just kind of come with that. That's what I did with Business Beat is I wanted to start a brand of, I need to be a business consultant. And one of the ways I can do that is by creating a podcast to kind of talk about these things and to get information from, you know, other thought leaders in the industries that I was working in. And so the podcast is just a natural formation of that. And so we really just look at it as not just as podcasters, but really we are content creators. And how are we going to create that? And a lot of it is just based on your personality. What is best, you know, there's tons of different kinds of social media out there. What's the best way you kind of get applied to that? So, yeah. Bad bloggers podcast, bad podcasters blog. There is still a space for bloggers. You know, I love a good blog article with somebody who can actually write something. Medium, sub-stack, I mean, we're podcasters. A lot of people consume hot pod, pod news. Come on, there's a lot of written, right? Goes together. I did have a new idea though for a podcast. It's going to be interesting people talking about interesting stories. You know, I think I'll just call it like the interesting podcast because nobody's doing that. Yeah, I mean, how about making sure that that conversation is raw and unfiltered? That's right, raw and unfiltered. Including, you'll get to hear us plan the podcast as we do it. Oh yeah, that's good. That's always, because it's real. All joking aside, I'm now getting an awful lot of pitches for new shows, new podcasts, which they send me and they say, you know, this is strictly embargoed until November the eighth or whatever it is. And so I sit on it until November the eighth. And then I'm there going, okay, well, I'll stick it in now. And I have a search for it on Apple podcasts and they're not there. And I'm there going, you know, it's November the eighth. I can't mention you because I can't link to you. What's the point in launching a podcast? November the eighth, if you're not actually there as a podcast yet. But they did, they launched on November eighth. They just did it on November eighth, so they can't be found because Apple has an index. Well, that brings up a great point. You should probably say, I haven't gotten the email myself, but I've heard that December 13th, if you're gonna be launching a show in January of 2022, you better get it into Apple. And this is every year. Yeah, every year they go on vacation. And I heard the best advice is do it before Thanksgiving, which is like in a couple of weeks. I don't know when it is, it's some Thursday. And I also heard the, but I heard somebody say, yeah, if you really like the last date ever would be like December 13th. I have yet to, I don't get email from Apple. I have gone in and double checked podcast connect and everything else. And I always have to find somebody who actually got the email, but they usually send it out. I boringly, I report on them every single time that they send them out because, you know, it's an email from Apple. Right. Dave, where does my phone go on vacation? The big Apple. I just wrote that right now. You're welcome. I was gonna put that into the bonus. Yeah. That's in the premium feed. That's right. That's the content you get. We don't have a premium feed. Maybe we should. Do we have a story about premium feeds? You know, we ran into, I was gonna give James, you actually, James was last minute. So thank you, James, for jumping in here last minute. But you added stories, although we ran into another story. Let me see. Let me see. That makes more sense. Who had the one about transcripts? Yeah. That's from Pod News. Speaking of doing your planning as you do. Yeah, exactly. As you do it. This is the sausage being made. This is the good stuff. This is premium content. I already told you. We're in the premium content section, Dave. Exactly. Behind the scenes. My best use of a transcript in the last week was, I knew Adam Curry had said on podcasting 2.0, how many dollar amounts and how many satoshis had been gone through the system in a day. And I was like, ah, I looked at it as like an hour and a half podcast. I'm like, I know it's in there somewhere. And I transcribed it through it into Otter, went in it and said, just typed in per day in it. Like it came right up. And I was like, this is the best money ever spent on transcription ever. Yeah. It saved me a lot of time. It's really useful. Although that particular podcast already has a transcript already available. So you need to have taken it into Otter, but yeah. I should have gone to newpodcastapps.com and got one of those good apps. Exactly. Exactly right. And you're sort of referencing, I did have a story here. I put podcast transcripts, why and when. That's not the title of it on Pod News. James, but that is what the permalink says and I liked it better. I went with that. I think this was really about automation versus having someone get it right when it comes to transcripts. But the transcripts, we hear common reasons for doing them. And we've talked about it a lot on this show, but for hearing impaired, great reason. For SEO, you hear all the time, maybe multilingual, I've found that they have in different languages or someone else can translate into their language, can be helpful. But so Naomi Fowler from TaxCast had a good quote in here and said, they might reference my podcast in their own work and having everything written down helps them do that more easily. So Dave, you gave another great reason too, just finding something. But this is a problem of, the automation is done typically because we don't have a budget. Like this is still not accessible to all podcasters it doesn't feel like, right? And we kind of feel like we're waiting for Google to solve it. They do a really good job. Like if Google transcribed it, you could at least go through it and see if it was accurate, but it's not gonna be, that's a massive drain to have to go through an hour long podcast like this and get it right. So transcripts are still a large barrier. You probably should have them agreed 100%, especially for accessibility, but it's still not accessible. Yeah, there's a couple of things here. So this article is actually around about a year or so old, but it came up again because Amazon have just added transcripts into their app, but they are automated transcripts only and they're automated transcripts for the podcast that Amazon likes. And you as a podcaster, even if you get a transcript made, are unable to give it to Amazon and say, here's my transcript for your app, it's all completely automatic, which is weird because if you think about it, you could say something on a podcast like Boris Johnson hates, hates fraud, you know, hates criminals. Boris Johnson hates criminals, right? You could say that on a podcast and your automatic transcript might end up coming up on the thing saying Boris Johnson rates criminals. And all of a sudden, you have said something bad, you've libeled the Prime Minister of the UK at this exact moment. And you know, and so who's at fault there? Is it you because that's been published next to your podcast? Well, it's not you because you haven't even done the transcript. So there's all this kind of stuff going on. The one thing, by the way, there's kind of, yes, there's the hearing impaired thing, but there's also the doing what Dave was doing, you know, going through a show and finding out what was actually mentioned in a particular part of the show. If you want live captions for everything on your phone, then go out and buy an Android phone, go out and buy a Google Pixel phone because that's something that it offers. There's a tool on there that will automatically caption every single piece of audio which is going out on your phone, which is really cool. You can also do that in Chrome as well. If you use Chrome on your desktop, then you can automatically caption that as well. So captions are great, but captions aren't necessarily what a lot of people are using transcripts for. And the new podcast namespace has, you know, transcripts as part of that, which more and more people are supporting. So yeah, so it'd be good to see loads of people supporting that. And frankly, it is part of American law, the ADA. It is part of law in many other countries in the world. We should really be working as hard as we can to both at least have an automated transcript there in the first instance and then be able to go in and polish that and change any errors. Where do you think it's most likely that that's going to happen? Is Apple going to do something? You know, like, wait, Google does, right? So is this on the directories, on the podcast hosts or the podcaster? I think if it's on the podcaster, you know, especially automated, it's just not going to happen the way we want it to. You need someone big like, because Google's doing it for YouTube. And honestly, they do it pretty well at this point. It's not perfect, like you said, but... Yeah, I mean, I think to be honest, I think it's not an either or it's an and. So you can automatically shove loads of, you know, there are loads of open source tools that will do a relatively good job of podcast transcripts, at least in American English, they do. If you start talking about other languages, much, much harder. So there's tools to do that. That's a good first step that every podcast should have. And then it would be nice if you were to, you know, if you've got the time, if you've got the, you know, if you've got the person powered to end up doing that, it would be great for you to be able to go in and tidy up those transcripts and make them better. But I think every single show, having a transcript would be a great start. And so, you know, and I believe that there is a wide variety of podcast hosts which automatically make those available and they make those available in the standard podcasting 2.0 namespace as well. But I think, you know, that should be a standard that it doesn't cost that much money. It should be a standard that every podcast host does. And then making it more beautiful is a separate conversation, I think, yeah. Yeah, I agree. I don't have a lot of faith in that happening just because, you know, I think this is why Google does it. I mean, I think it's why almost someone like Apple has to do it. I mean, look at the mess that is Anchor and how many podcasts are coming out a day. It's just so many podcasts that the producers. It's a tremendous amount of podcasts, but what we don't wanna do is we don't wanna leave it to, I mean, there are two things. We don't wanna leave it to Amazon to do their own thing in their own app which is not helping the podcast ecosystem as a whole. And we also, as creators, it's our stuff and we should be in control of this. And if I want to make a transcript which is my transcript for my show, then I don't want Amazon producing their own version which will inevitably be worse. Well, in that case, the choice is the key there, right? Because it's fine, Amazon can do it. And if I choose, it's like, great, I have a transcript that is somewhat accurate. I can override that and I can make sure that that goes into every single platform. To me, that makes an awful lot more sense. And I'm kind of, you know, it's a frustration seeing Amazon doing their own transcripts. There's a new podcast app called Clever which does their own transcripts. Fountain does their own transcripts. And then you've got the automated transcripts that are being produced in parts of Google as well. In fact, Apple are also doing automated transcripts as well. They're just hidden away and you can't actually see them but they do use them to search. So, you know, so there's a bunch of this stuff going on. It seems that there's quite a lot of reinventing wheels going on here and it would be really nice to be able to give the creators at least the control of their own stuff to actually say, no, this is my transcript, this is how I want it to appear. Thank you very much. Yeah, definitely two different things going on there is like, I have one need to be able to give it to you versus I just need one created, right? I think the hosts where you host your podcast or audio doing automated that you could then clean up or submit would be even more key then. And you said there's some hosts doing it. So I think that's a value add. Like hosts are gonna have to probably step up. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I was trying to figure out where does Amazon use audio and text together? And you only think I could think of was on Kindle. You can have that weird whisper sync thing where if you buy the book and the Kindle version, you can basically read up to chapter three on a book, pick up your audio phone, go to Audible and it'll pick up in chapter three where you left off in the Kindle book. But that doesn't make any sense because, cause I was like, well, maybe they're gonna put podcasts on a Kindle from the transcripts but that would be a horrible idea because those are free and books are not. So. You can get free stuff on a Kindle. Can you? Yeah, I think if the author decides and wants to make it free, I don't know. They probably have to pay. Yeah, that's true. I have no idea. No, there is that. There's that whole beautiful piece of software called Calibra, which is, which looks as if it's a piece of software from the 1980s because I think it is. But nevertheless, it allows you to transfer anything onto your Kindle. Interesting. All right, let's see. JJ, you had another story here, right? I Heart, our friends at I Heart. Being in Nashville, I actually saw the I Heart building this morning. It, they have a big presence here. I Heart, number one at being number one. Yeah, exactly. They love to be number one. Well, they just came out and said they reported 64 million in podcast revenue. And I thought it was very interesting. We monetization is always something that comes up. I didn't worry too much about it because it takes a little bit of time to get there. But there seems to be a lot of money being thrown around and I'm wondering where that's coming from. And is it because I Heart has the ad executives to be able to sell these advertisements basically like radio? And should we take a little bit different standpoints and have more ad networks pop up and things like that? I don't know. It just seemed interesting that there seems to be a lot of money from these networks and people are buying ads for them. Can the independence learn from that? In that article, they definitely talk about them being the biggest, right? And I think it's about podcast publisher, right? They're a big company. So like if they say we'll publish your podcast, it's funny because they talk about being picky, that they get to be picky about who is on the platform or who, and I think there's difference, right? There's your directory, which you have iHeart, which I think they used to claim to be the biggest like podcast directory, the biggest place to find podcasts where they had the most podcasts or something, which I think was baloney. I think it was partly due because of PodTrack and who participates in the PodTrack survey. I'm not sure about that. But then there's how many podcasts come out of this organization with the stamp, essentially that they're underwriting, right? Whatever that means, right? And so also with 64 million, like it does add even help. Are they still behind? For a big company like that, they might be behind depending on what they invested in the space. So yeah, iHeart and their big podcast directory. Well, I mean, yes. I mean, they're number one for podcasting if you look at PodTrack and PodTrack only lists certain publishers, but anybody can go in there. Acast turned around and said, well, if we were in PodTrack, then we would be number two. And you're there going, well, why aren't you in PodTrack then? That's the obvious answer. Why aren't you in PodTrack? And what's weirder still is that iHeart own Triton. Triton put together another podcast ranker, number one in Triton's podcast ranker is Stitcher because iHeart is not measured by iHeart's own podcast ranker. So what is that saying? 64.1 million for the quarter, which almost doubled year on year. So it went up by 184%. It is only 6.8% of the entire company's revenue though in terms of money coming in. So it's interesting seeing, you know, that actually it's not that big for them. Acast themselves also released their financial results, 30.8 million. So they're doing quite well. Odyssey made 16 million, which is just 4% of the company's income. Odyssey used to be called Enticom, so it is essentially iHeart's competitor in this space. So there's money there. Quite a lot of people have said that quite a lot of these podcasts divisions are losing money. I think that's probably right. And the reason why you're seeing obviously a tremendous amount of revenue increases, I think Acast was up 89% year on year. The reason why you're seeing all of these beautiful increases is of course, last year we were in the middle of a pandemic and we didn't know what was gonna happen. So nobody was buying advertising. So everybody's gonna be up. That's fine. But I think it's, you know, it's interesting seeing where these companies are going. And iHeart being number one for podcasts is something that really riles certain people, but it was always interesting to actually see. So what's the draw for some of these networks like SiriusXM and things for these podcasts? Is it just cheap content for them or what is it that they're wanting? Couple of things, right? Spotify, if you're pressing play on a podcast they're not paying for it, right? Or they have to pay a musician. They don't have to pay a podcaster. So it's a cheap time, right? Yep, cheap content. If you think about it, I mean, this show is gonna be an hour long. That would be, you know, how many songs that they would have to pay for. But I don't know. I'm not sure how much. Because you gotta remember. Yeah, Spotify doesn't pay per song. It pays a percentage of their revenue. And what I understand happened is when Spotify started doing their podcasts, they were there rubbing their hands and going, okay. So if we can show the record companies that only 80% of the time in the app is spent listening to songs and 20% of the time is spent listening to podcasts, we can pay them 20% less. And the record company said, no, no, no, no, that's not how our contract works. And so Spotify is still paying exactly the same amount as they always did to the record companies. But the reason why Spotify is getting into this is both there's more inventory there that they can sell advertising around. If you don't pay for Spotify is the number one thing. But also I suspect with quite a lot of these companies who are spending an awful lot of cash in terms of buying podcasts and buying podcast companies, they are seeing the benefit of the IP. They're looking at Wondery. They're seeing the benefit of the IP in the podcasts and going, okay, so Wondery took this podcast called Dr. Death, they turned it into a podcast that was number one in the Apple Podcasts chart, which isn't a chart across many different countries in the world because they translated it into lots of different languages. And then they made a show on Peacock and they've earned loads and loads of money out of that. That's something that we can get behind is this whole IP train of you find a new podcast that really works, you can turn that into a TV show that really works, you can turn that into a movie that really works. I suspect that that's why they're jumping onto the bandwagon there. But obviously for iHeart, it's just a case of, they already have tens of thousands of salespeople already out there selling audio ads to businesses anyway. So they may as well sell them a little bit more. Which is why in five years we'll have, call her daddy, the movie, it'd be great. You call her daddy the movie. We're the minor leagues. All right, step up to the plate. It's FOMO. It's just FOMO. Podcast radio show, yes. The podcast radio radio show. James, you've said that sometimes that iHeart being number one really gets sort of into certain people's wheelhouse and they go on about it. But twice, twice you've said Apple is not charts. You have to, for the listener who's made it this far, you have to tell us what the heck you're talking about. Oh, because the Apple podcast charts are not charts. They're not a list of the top downloaded shows. People live and die by the Apple podcast charts. Yeah, and they really shouldn't. They really shouldn't. The way that the Apple podcast charts calculated actually changed last year. And it wasn't very obvious and not very many people talked about it, but the way that they were calculated used to be just in terms of the amount of people that pressed that, the subscribe button or the follow button as it is now. And it used to be that based on how recently they ended up doing it. So if lots of people pressed the subscribe button on one day, then you would go really high in the Apple podcasts charts that are charts. The way that it works now is new follows are included in that algorithm. Also playback activity, i.e. whether anybody's actually playing the thing is included in the algorithm. And completion rate is also included. So if you only listen to the first two minutes and you think this is a rubbish show, I'm not gonna have a listen to this, then that will do you down in terms of the Apple podcast charts, which is really good ratings and reviews, there's nothing to do with it. Obviously that might get more people having a listen to your show, but those aren't part of the way that the charts work. So new follows, playback activity and completion rate is how that works together. So it's not just a download. So why isn't that a chart? It sounds like they're done a good job at measuring the most successful podcasts. Oh yeah, but it's not a chart in terms of everybody's looking for the billboard chart, everybody's looking for the most popular podcast in the US or the most popular podcast in the business section in the US and all this kind of stuff. I'm saying it's because it's literally not showing that. It doesn't measure outside of Apple, because otherwise it sounds like a chart for Apple podcasts. What's best in Apple podcasts today? It's a trending chart, yes. So it will show those shows which are hot right now, but it doesn't show the full, when you look at that chart, it is not related purely to downloads. And if you are, I've been subscribed to the New York Times daily for three years, that has no effect on today's Apple podcast charts because the Apple podcast charts are specifically around trending. Which, well, in the past, when you said it was only based on subscribers, it did factor in length of subscription though. No, well, it factored in the last couple of weeks. Rob Walsh wrote a very good thing about this many years ago. I'm getting that from him. I thought length of subscription. Yeah, but it was only how long, it was only for the last couple of weeks. I mean, I thought it was all time. Dave, isn't it all time? It used to be all time because it would really make people upset because they'd start a WordPress podcast. They could never. And they could never get past the guy that was above them, even though they hadn't put out an episode in like five years because that guy had his podcast when there weren't any of the WordPress podcasts, got a gazillion followers and eventually they would get more than the dead podcast. And still theoretically picking them up, like just because you're not making episodes doesn't mean not getting subscribers. So that may not be the case anymore then, which would actually be a good thing because that was really annoying people. Yeah, who's the blame here? Does Apple call them charts, podcasters or media? Or do we all call them charts? Well, I mean, I occasionally get press releases from companies who've said, after just three days, we're number one in the Apple podcast charts in Albania or something. And it's, well, of course you are because that's how they work. They're deliberately built to trend things. Quite a frustrating thing, but yeah, and the other thing of course is that, of course the Apple podcast charts only measures, listens in Apple podcasts or all of those things in Apple podcasts. And for most countries in the world Spotify is larger. For some countries, Apple is still larger, but you're looking at a small window and you're looking at an algorithm. You're not looking at total downloads, which is what most people are expecting. Do we have a chart? Do you track that at Pod News? In terms of total downloads across the world. Yeah, I mean, if we actually wanted a podcast chart, does it exist? No. There are two ways of doing that. One way is things like pod track, but pod track only lists participating publishers, but everybody can be in pod track if you want to be. But they're not. So is there anyone proactively going out and grabbing the space and saying, here's what's going on? So that's one thing. The other way that companies are doing this is Edison Research is asking a ton of people every quarter what podcasts are you listening to? And that's a quite unacceptable way of doing things. And so the number one is Joe Rogan, of course, as you would expect. But, you know, and that's fine, but that will only give you realistically the top sort of 30 or so shows. And you will never know where, I will never know where my podcast is in that list. So right now, unless there is a really magical piece of work done by somebody, there is no way of having a global download chart. That's just a thing. Well, I mean, hold on, hold on, hold on. You'd have to somehow opt into it or... No, no, no, hold on, hold on. There, right there. We're number one. I got it. Number one podcast space. Right, congrats, Dave. Thank you. Grats to both of you. James, JJ, you did this. You made it happen. Thanks, everyone. The listeners, you're the most important here. Number one podcast who mentions the word table and round. Yeah. That's it. We're number one in. Hashtag iHeart. Charts have never been charts. I've worked in music along. There you go. That's good. I ran a top 20 CCM show in the early 2000s. And the way that it was charted was, did I like the songs? So about the only thing we had back then, I mean, they still, it's sound scan. Cause it was a literal like, what were the sales being reported from the stores? We can get hard data. You just can't get that with the podcast. Cause it's like, unless we build some sort of tracker that everyone, but again, potrack's probably the best thing you can do because people participate in it. They can, you know, they do their little magic on your feed and actually view exactly what's going on. But we've, you know, the individual podcast has to expose that. James, any insight from your days in radio? Then, you know, on that side of the pond. Oh, I used to do, I used to do a chart, West Yorkshire's new official countdown. And it was a chart where I would pretend to be Rick D's for two hours. And yeah, and the way that that chart was compiled was I would look at the new chart which was coming out the day after that we were sent up on the printer the previous night. This is how long ago it was. And I would then randomize some of those, probably keep the same number one most of the time, randomize the rest of it a little bit just so that it wasn't the same. And that was West Yorkshire's new official countdown. And that was how that worked for three years. You said Rick D's. So we definitely know how old they were. That's gonna say, there's a name I've not heard on a long time. The weekly top 40. That's my American voice. This is Casey Casey. Yeah. So yes, so yeah, that was completely made up. But you know, there is an awful lot of good stuff out there. I mean, you know, the pod track data, the equivalent from Triton, what Triton do is they actually go and they look at your log files. So you have to share your entire log files with Triton stroke I heart and they will then go through those log files. So they are being compiled in a very, very consistent way and a consistent way that he's actually to do with downloads. It's a better way of doing it than the pod track or blueberry way which is just as a redirect. So the Triton way is actually the right way. There are privacy issues in that because obviously you're handing over an entire server logs to a different company. But, you know, they do that in a very good way. And they're running, there's a pod track, there's a podcast ranker that Triton run here in Australia. There's one in New Zealand, there's one in Belgium, the US, Latin America and so on. And that's probably the most robust chart out there. But obviously it only includes those people that are in this case paying to be in it because it costs money to go through all of those log files. So yeah. Dave, let's wrap up on, you have a story here and I'm only interested because of your main takeaway. What is your story? And, you know, usually, thanks Dave for adding a story. Dave usually adds stories and then we just chop them because Dave's stories are emergency stories. If we don't get through, we always get through. So Dave. Well, it's a guy that put an article on Jamesite. So go over to podnews.net. And he's talking about different ways to grow your audience. And he said that the one phrase I saw, he said, we don't advertise. He says it's one of the most damaging viral trends in the podcasting industry, which I thought was interesting because Evo Terra just did a thing where he had somebody that said, I can grow your podcast by X amount of percentage or X amount of, he had this whole system and I know how to do it in Facebook ads and Evo lit $350 on fire and got pretty much nothing for it. So, but the thing I liked about the article was just if you look at it, he kind of throws out a ton of what he calls advertising. I just call promotion. And so like the one that always makes me scratch my head when I don't see it is put a link in your email signature. When I see somebody in their email signature is Dave and that's it, I'm like, okay, low hanging fruit. This is gonna be an easy one. So, but if you look at that article, he's got like just a giant list and you'll notice that in every single item, there is a verb, whether it's run, network, post, they're all verbs and you don't have to do them all, but if you go to that list and pick one and then do it and then the next day do another one and the next day do another one, they're all items. Nothing on there was, you know, mind boggling. I go, my gosh, wait, I should try to be on other podcasts. I've never thought of such a thing. So, some of them are fairly obvious but they were yet exactly. So, it's an interesting article and it might, it's one of the things that, again, it's not like, you know, Moses coming down with a tablet and here are the things that will grow your audience but if nothing else, it might trigger something in your brain, you go, oh, you know what? I should probably try that or, oh, what if we did this instead kind of thing? So, it's one of the things that I love getting is someone who has tried all of this stuff and knows what works rather than just opinions because opinions are great but opinions are like other things, we've all got them. Yes. So, this is Sean Howard from Fabric and Folly which is a Fable and Folly, sorry, which is a Canadian fiction podcaster and yeah, and it's a three part series this in terms of how he advertises it. So, I think part one is, you know, get on to other people's podcasts. Part two is where he starts diving into Twitter and Facebook and spending money on those things and he says what works and what doesn't and all of that and quite a lot of that is down to the copy that you end up using and everything else. And, you know, and I love seeing all of this stuff and, you know, anybody that wants to share case studies, I'm always up for that because case studies are where we can really learn. You know, opinions are one thing but actually somebody who's gone out and spent some money and seen what works, what doesn't and how much it was, you know, that's always really, really useful. So, yeah, so it's a good article from Sean. Since I was a business podcast mind, I did some lead magnets and gave away some content I purchased somewhere from a white label thing and got a probably good 200 people signed up to my email list, which I was then able to send out, hey, I got a podcast episode. So it was just a real easy way. I think I spent 20 bucks on Facebook ads to get people, people love free things and it was like just give me your email address. That was the exchange, got them onto an email list and then I can promote that way. And so, yeah, there's a lot of cheap ways of doing some of these things that just follow, they're just marketing. I mean, it's, you could just ask the same question. How do I get somebody to my Shopify store? Here is a list, I mean, it's the exact same thing. So one way I grew a list once and I was surprised that I, because, you know, you always get notified if you want, you know, somebody sign up for your newsletter is I just said, hey, if you're on a treadmill or if you're in the car right now or you're walking the dog and you always say to yourself, oh, I wanted to go check that out in the description. I wanted to see the show notes and you forget. I said, just remember this. And then I gave my address, it was something slash newsletter, you can sign up and I will send the show notes to you. So there was no lead magnet. It was just like, hey, if you're always forgetting to go to the show notes and you want to, but you forgot about it, I'll send the show notes to you. And I had people sign up and I was like, I need to do that more often. There was no PDF, nothing. It was just like, hey, this can come to you. Yeah, email is one of, you know, I've been on the internet longer than I should. Email is and will always be that main thing that we always overlook, but it's still the ultimate tool. And as they say, it's $1 per month per email subscriber should be the revenue that you're getting from it. And that has proven very much something in every business I've ever worked in. So. Yeah, and this I think with your quote there, the we don't advertise is one of the most damaging viral trends in podcast industry is he's saying that we don't advertise is either a badge of honor or a four letter word to say advertise. And I think they're very different. I joke about all the time, we don't advertise. People, I do affiliate links on my YouTube channel. People take it as a extra amount of credibility if they say no one gave me this product I bought it myself, right? There is something there, but, and this is a big long list of ways to market your podcast. Clearly he's been listening to our shows for the last 10 years because this is all the stuff we've said. This stuff doesn't change. These are good tips for promoting your podcast. And I think the difference is when someone says we don't advertise, it means we don't take money from someone else. The big difference like Dave, you said you considered as promotion, like it's marketing. There's a difference between me telling you go to podcasherroundtable.com slash newsletter versus, hey, thanks to, you know, Track Nine for giving us these beers today. They're, mm, they're yummy, right? Very different type of things when we're talking about advertising. Yeah, did I read that wrong then? No, no, not at all. I just think that that's what he's, he's, there's a, I'm making the differentiation between the word advertise that some people perceive it as, as a, I can't promote myself or some people perceive it as taking money. Like there's a very different type of, as podcasters, you should be promoting yourself. Like if you don't, what do you hear at every YouTube video? Like, subscribe, smash the like button. If you don't say it, people don't do it. If you don't tell people to subscribe to your show, they just don't think about it. Or like you're saying with show notes, Dave, they forget to go. That's not advertising. The way that someone who says we don't advertise, they're thinking we don't take dirty money. We're not, we're not pushed by any corporation. We don't spend dirty money. Yeah, we don't spend dirty money. Yeah. And I think, you know, there are, you know, there are a couple of tropes that you hear in the podcasting, in the podcasting world. One of them is we never advertise our show elsewhere. The other one is we never edit our show. Yeah, that's the one. And, and, you know, and all of those sort of, you know, come up and it's kind of, you know, aren't we clever? Well, actually, if you're doing really well and you're not marketing or advertising your show at all, then of course you're really clever, but that's not something to copy. Don't get copying that. You know, if your show is good enough that you don't need to edit it before you stick it out, then that's great. But that's not something that other people should be copying. And I think that's what the difference is there, yeah. Yeah, they're not peeling back the curtain. It's like, yeah, we don't edit our podcast because we spent time planning before we hit record is really what they're saying there, but they don't say that. So, yes, it drives me nuts. Exactly. Jared easily also wrote an article for Pod News not so long ago about calls to action of, you know, reminding you how to ask your listeners to do something. And, you know, again, from my old radio years, just ask them to do one thing. Don't ask them to do 10. Ask them to do one thing and make that the focus of your ask that week. And it will always work better. So, yeah. I completely agree. So thanks for joining us. Go out to the website, go to the YouTube channel, subscribe, leave us a review. Leave us a review. Well, that's it. I had somebody that contacted me and they were doing a podcast as kind of a marketing thing and they weren't really getting the results they wanted. And I said, okay, well, I saw some things on your website. There's some things you can do to grow. And I said, why don't you give me an episode to listen to? You know, just pick one. And he's like, oh, I'm good with content. I'm good with content. And I hear this a lot. I'm good with content. No, no, no. I know what I'm doing when it comes to content. And I got to the end of an episode and I'm not making this up. He had eight calls to action. And I go, I think I've discovered why you're not getting people, because I do really think by the time you get to call to action three that, you know, they've remembered call to action one. It's like, and by the time you get to eight, they're just like, A, they fast forwarded. They hit stop, but yeah. By the way, there is, there is one new thing. I know that, I know that Ray, you were saying that, you know, none of this is new. And we've been doing this for a long, long time. There is one new thing that I think podcasters could be playing around with a little bit more. And that's the humble QR code. Because two years ago, no one was using QR codes. And you would see these fancy things on the side of, you know, posters. And nobody was using them now. Everyone knows how to use them because you can't get into, certainly in this country, you can't get into a bar or a shop without them. And as soon as the iPhone integrated into the camera, that's the key is because people didn't use QR codes because they didn't know how. Now you just point your camera. Now everybody knows because everybody has had to use them. And QR codes are really handy. You can easily put some code at the end of that QR code, which opens, if you're on Apple, opens Apple Podcasts, if you're on Android, opens Google Podcasts, which everyone has installed automatically. Google Podcasts, the player is installed in every single Android phone, even if the app itself might not be. So you can actually get a beautiful QR code, which you can put on your leaflets or put on your posters or put on your business card, which just automatically opens the default podcast app to your podcast. Dead easy. And that's something that, I don't see too many podcasters doing, even when you're walking around, podcast conferences and stuff. And that seems to me to be such low-hanging fruit. Oh, that sounds good. Click right on Subscribes. Well, so easy. Another great use of that is if you're at an event, you will see people in the audience, somebody who put up a slide and it's got three bullet points and everybody pulls up their camera and takes a picture of it. And then another one, and at the very end, I did this. And I had my logo and it said any questions and then just a giant QR code. And when they did that, it took them to Daniel's page from my podcast reviews so they could subscribe and follow. And I watched, people actually did that. So I was like, ah. Here's what I'm gonna do. Here's what I'm gonna do. If you're a guest on any future round table, you must show up with one thing, right? That this is your QR code printed out onto a sheet of paper taped to a popsicle stick, which we will hold over our faces at the end of every round. Well, some of us have, like, yes. So, like, we can actually do an overlay. Oh, I'm, oh, there you go. Don't even bother, Jay. I'm working on an augmented reality overlay that's real taped to our face. This is actually a video one. You'll see it, like, it moves. There you go. Oh. It moves. Look at that. This is my after effects past career that I'm gonna be doing. We've been doing that the whole time. We could have better retention rates, J.J., and just say, That's true. We get all the information. Awesome. Well, let's head out, because this has been awesome, and we've extended our time. Doing a good job here. It's becoming a hour-plus show. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it usually means we've had a good conversation. So, I'm gonna thank everyone. Let us know what your podcast is. If you have a QR code, please hold it up. PS audio listeners, no one's holding up a QR code, but it wouldn't be, it would not be the worst thing you could do, James, just saying. You might wanna tape one to your wall, something, it would work, right? So. There's another use. There's another use. All right. So, J.J., thanks for joining us for your first roundtable. Thank you. This was fun. It doesn't have to be the last. We'll welcome you back. Anytime I get invited to talk, I will do that. That's right. Where do we find your podcast? You can find it on Instagram, at Business Beat Podcast, or just businessbeat.cc. So. Very cool. I'm fascinated by the. I'll take you to all the places. The domain extensions these days. Like, .com's not always, you know, you can't always get .com, and there's a lot of interesting ones out there, and it's always fun to see what people choose. Yeah, I bought my first .cc about 11 years ago, and then it's a pretty. I mean, it sticks. Like, you know, they get weird. They can get long, but, you know, CC, you can hear it, and it works, so. Cool. Occasionally, it gets caught in validators. Cause people don't realize it's an actual domain name, better than that. Awesome. Businessbeat.cc. See? Okay, I lied to the audio audience. There's a QR code being held up by James. So, hey, point your camera. I assume. The scary part is where that takes us. We don't know. It worked. Here we go. Oh, he's got it. There you go. And open in Safari. James, thanks for joining us. Literally last minute from the other side. Open this page in podcasts. There it goes. There it goes. All right, it works. So, yeah, so you can get pod news in your podcast app, but the podcast's good, but the newsletter is better, so you can subscribe for free at podnews.net. The second person we've had to produce as a newsletter. There we go. Say it's better. Subscribed. There you go. Nice. Two things. James is disappointed you weren't already subscribed, but that's okay. That's all right. Second thing. I'm probably on Spotify. Yeah, there you go. Let's be, let's add extra value here. James, how the heck does Mo, how does the average person just go and create a QR code for their podcast? If you wanna do this. The really easy way of doing that is to come to podnews.net, search for your website, sorry, search for your podcast, and there will be a QR code in there. So if you're looking at it on the desktop version, and that is one of those fancy QR codes that will, if you're on a phone, open the right podcast app, and if you're on desktop, it will open a player. And yeah, so that's the easy way. And if you want the slightly harder way, then at the bottom of your podcast page on podnews, there is a link to all of the codes that you need to copy and host on your own websites, because don't rely on my website because who knows? So yeah, so there's hopefully ways that will help you there. Awesome. Very cool. Co-hosting, you're busy. You're very busy trying to get your QR code. I'm trying to get the QR code and I'm on James' site. I was like, oh, hold on. I usually just go to Chrome. If you go to anything in Chrome and put your click in the URL at the top, there's a little button you can click on. But yeah, you can just find me over at schoolofpodcasting.com and James had mentioned case studies. I know of a place where you can get case studies about monetizing your show and that's at profitfromyourpodcast.com I've already done two call to action. That's right, you have six more to go, Dave. So it's okay. And for those of you watching on video, there is Dave's show. Oh, look at that. There's Dave's show. Cross promotion. All right. Well, thanks everyone. PodcastsRoundTable.com slash guest. If you want to be, or you want to appear on the round table along with Dave and I and various other guests, sign up, fill out the little form. So I know a little bit about who you are and where your podcast is. I use it to see if you're still podcasting, to be honestly. Cause it takes a while to get on. So I admit sometimes it can take a while to get on. It was a year. It was a year. Look, see, do you hear that? Wow. Yeah, it's pretty random. But I will check if your podcast is still. Oh, JJ, I thought you had released something. I swear it's timestamped, not too old. Last month or something, two months ago. Yeah, it was January. I actually interviewed one of the Gronkowski brothers. So I ended in a good thing. All right. Okay, well, my system is flawed. So that is good for you. And it's good for everyone who signs up at podcastroundtable.com slash guest. That's it. Wave goodbye. We'll see you next time. See you.