Yesterday I Learned...

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  0:02  
Welcome to the podcast. Super Friends, five podcast producers from across North America get together to discuss podcasting.

Jon Gay  0:13  
Welcome to this month's edition of the podcast, Super Friends. I'm John Gay from jagged, Detroit podcast here outside Detroit, Michigan today, we're talking about not t, I L, but Y, I L, yesterday I learned we're going to start by going around the horn, introducing everybody. Normally, we go north of the border to Canada, but today we're going to go across the ocean to start over to Spain. And Matt Cundill,

Matt Cundill  0:35  
Matt Cundill, from the sound off media company, where this month and next month, we are going to be residing in Malaga, Spain, the

Jon Gay  0:45  
the remote office will head next to my hometown of Boston.

David Yas  0:50  
Yeah, Boston, the Spain of the West, right? Anyway, uh. David Yaz, pod 617, com, the Boston podcast

Jon Gay  0:59  
now and next to my former home of Louisiana and Baton Rouge, who just muted herself,

Johnny Podcasts  1:07  
and now we can't hear her. Luckily, you have four producers on the line with

Jon Gay  1:12  
this stuff always happens. All right, we'll head to the home of Podcast Movement 2025 and that will be Texas.

Johnny Podcasts  1:17  
Glad to be back. I missed last month because my wife and I had a baby, so we have a third little head in the household. And speaking of going on mute, if that does happen, it is because there's a screaming one month old in the background. And what's your name? I'm Johnny podcasts, and I also I never knew what til meant, so t i L, I learned, or T i l

til ah. Zoom, very always read it online

and go, I don't. I just would scan. I just would skip over it mentally, whatever T i l said, and read the rest of the post and never knew or had the gumption to look it up. So glad we learned something today, you

Jon Gay  1:55  
know, and it's something that I'm sure, as the three of you do, I always tell clients, which is, you know, there's always a tech hiccup, whether it's a client I've been working with for six with for six weeks or a client I've been working with for six months or six years. And that's why sometimes clients will hire me to hop on just the beginning, first five minutes of a call, make sure everybody's audio and video is dialed in. Because if COVID taught us anything, it's there's always a gremlin in the system somewhere. I always

Johnny Podcasts  2:16  
push it on my clients. I always say, like, I have to join before every recording. And they go, Oh, I think we've got it locked in, Johnny like I think you can skip this one. And I go, I thank you for that, but I for just the way things are. This will be the one where everything goes wrong just because I didn't fix one little thing beforehand. So

Jon Gay  2:35  
easier to fix it in pre than post, exactly.

Catherine O'Brien  2:39  
Catherine, are you with us? Dare I try once again? Yay. I'm great. I touched, I'm wearing the headphones that I didn't want to wear, and I touched the wire and it went out. So we'll just, we'll see how we do for this whole thing. Hey, it's Catherine O'Brien. I'm from formerly a Spanish colony Baton Rouge. We we fell Louisiana, purchase all those good things we once were Spain. So that's my claim to fame for the Spain theme of the day. And

Jon Gay  3:09  
you've got Entergy there, the power company, I think they've got a problem, or that's in New Orleans, in Baton Rouge too, causing an electrical issue for you with your cords. I think. No, yeah, not the best infrastructure down there. Okay, all right, so we're going to talk about some stuff that we've all learned recently in the podcasting industry. And I think I want to start with Dave, because Dave sent us a great email about some stuff he picked up recently from a webinar he was on. So let's start in with my cousin from Boston.

David Yas  3:36  
From Boston, yep. So pod match came up with a report which is not only revealing, but also really good news for independent podcasters, a lot of us who produce podcasts, a lot of us who host podcasts, there's a natural tendency for people to compare you to like Joe Rogan or someone who's got a zillion followers, and Part of the result of this survey is that even if you make it past, let's see, you make it to 10 episodes, you've already you're already in the top 50% of all podcasts. If you make it to 100 episodes, you're in the top 5% 95% of podcasters quit before reaching that point, though. So it's, it's crazy. And the the other kind of big thing that jumped out is only 6% of all independent podcasters are considered actively established, which I'm not sure exactly what that means, but they account for 95% of the total podcast listenership. So this is what I'm kind of point I'm trying to beating around the bush here, but the this medium is not dominated by entertainment companies, as you might think. It's dominated by you. It's dominated by independent podcasters, and so that is really the beating heart of the podcast industry. Are people who either do it themselves or do with independent producers like us. And I think that's great. And the last thing I'll mention is and then, and then I'll take questions from the floor. The last thing I've mentioned is, if your podcast gets 100 downloads in the first seven days a given episode, you're in the top 25% of all podcasts. So that's so it's if you're struggling, and you're only, like, 100 you know, downloads per episode. It's okay. First of all, it does take, you know, as many as 100 episodes to find that audience. But if you make it, if you're getting up to, let's say, the numbers for 460 downloads, that's the top 10% so if you're in the hundreds, you're in the ballpark. So it's just, just know that and and, of course, know how valuable is being an independent podcaster. You're probably reaching a niche audience that most medium, most media cannot reach. Two

Jon Gay  5:50  
points on that. Dave, so one, I think it's not fair to compare podcast downloads to social media, likes, comments, shares, things like that, because it's not apples to apples. I would take 20 podcast listeners over 500 Facebook likes. Liking a Facebook post doesn't take any effort at all, but if you're talking about someone who is going to take the time and interact with your content and give you the attention for a podcast, what would it be worth to a client to be in a conference room with while you were addressing 50 people? They'd probably pay big bucks for that. So I'm so glad you mentioned that that download metric, you mentioned active podcasts from what I remember from Rob Walters usual annual presentation of Podcast Movement, their their criteria for that was reach 10 episodes and put something out in the last 90 days. So if they're using the same metrics, I think that's what they would consider active Yeah.

David Yas  6:39  
And the the big number there is, there are, according to pod match, 2.7 million podcasts. But only 390,000 of those are active, so that's 14% so it's, you know, we preach consistency and have a plan and don't pod fade after like three episodes. If you stick with it, you're already kind of an elite company, so it's such an approachable, reachable, touchable goals that are right there for you.

Johnny Podcasts  7:09  
I think it's the easiest way to not pod fade David is to not concern yourself so much with the downloads. Like the downloads are the downloads. What do you and I guess I would pose this to the rest of the panel too. What do you guys tell clients, especially new ones, where you that you're just you're not taking on a show, where you're taking over production, but you're helping launch a new podcast. You always get the question, Well, okay, we've released the first couple episodes. Here's our download numbers. Is this normal? What? What should these numbers be looking like? And normally, what I tell them is, before we've even launched the show, we've established the goal that is outside of what our download numbers are. Our goal is to achieve x with this podcast, whether it's to grow our own personal brand, create some social media content for your Twitter or for your LinkedIn, or to help bring brand awareness to your company or drive new clients to your business. It's not so much the fact that we've got 100 downloads or we've got 200 downloads. It's more of fact as who those 100 people are. So what do you what do you guys normally, because you've all gotten this question over the years, what do you normally tell

David Yas  8:16  
them? You've said it already, John, it's you can't compare it to other big numbers. You can't compare it to like, you know, a Facebook will tell you, if you pay for this ad, you're going to reach 10,000 people. Isn't that 10,000 is much better than 100 right? Well, it's not, not even close to apples to apples. Podcasting is the most intimate delivery of information, of content that there is out there. We know this. We've seen numbers that when people click on a podcast, they are, you know, like something like 80 to 90% are likely to listen to most or all of this, of the whole episode. So it is, it is that kind of, you know, intimacy that you get from if you were holding a breakfast series and there were three dozen people showing up every Friday morning, you'd think that was fantastic. You're connecting people with people, and probably the right people, people that came specifically to hear your content. It is much more akin to that. So I'm with you. I mean, it's, it's nice to look at the download numbers. We all love it when we get big download download numbers. But you got to put in perspective, you can't compare it to any any other kind of metric, social social media especially,

Jon Gay  9:27  
I'll echo that Dave. You know, people get intimidated when they see that number, that there are roughly 3 million podcasts out there. Well, you're not competing against 3 million, as you can see on the screen for watching the video version of this, you're competing against 390,000 or if you to compare that to the number of blogs out there, it's not even close. So your competition is not as stiff as you might think. Another thing I do, to Johnny's point about pod fading, or both of you have mentioned this already. When I sign a client on, I sign them up for a finite number of episodes, and we call it a season. Could be five episodes, it could be 10 episodes, and you. Excuse me, the idea there is the idea there is, you don't take on this project, that it's every week from now until eternity, and it becomes one more burdensome thing in your to do list. The idea is, we do five, we do 10, we map out the content. It's an achievable goal. And at the end of the five or the 10, they say, Hey, Jack, we love doing this. We're gonna keep doing what season two or hey, you know what? I enjoyed this, but this isn't for me. My attention is elsewhere, and no problem, and you're on your way and you don't have this acts of Damocles hanging over your head, of oh my gosh, I've got to do another podcast this week.

Catherine O'Brien  10:33  
Yeah, I think managed expectations from the very beginning are important. I think that we've long preached on the podcast super friends that you have to be looking for engagement. One of my clients, I use this example a lot, she gets an email every single week. First of all, we give the listeners a way to reach out to her through the show notes, and she actually does get emails from listeners saying what they appreciated, what they liked, all those kinds of things, so that engagement is she might not have otherwise heard from anybody in the in what she's doing, but she's hearing from the listeners, because we ask them, and we give them away to do it, and we that's a really great way to see some sort of return on the on the podcast. I'm

Jon Gay  11:15  
so glad you mentioned email Catherine, because as we see increasingly wonky things going on with social media on all sides email is the database that you control. You're not relying on Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to decide if they're going to show your content to folks. You are ending up in people's email boxes, and it's a way to communicate with them directly without any third party involvement. Which leads me to Matt's yesterday I learned, oh,

Matt Cundill  11:41  
I wasn't ready to go there yet. Okay, I wanted to talk very quickly just about the 390,000 active podcasts that are out there. And, you know, for those who are rushing into YouTube, would you prefer to maybe I hate the word compete, but to market against the podcasts that are out there, rather than the millions of videos that are going up every day. I mean, it's, it just seems like it's just so obvious that you want to be in podcasting and have audio and have an RSS feed and maybe not rush into YouTube, because that's, that's a much bigger ball game. I want to qualify that

Jon Gay  12:19  
point, Matt, because you said, you said, you know, not rushing into YouTube. Do you mean not rushing into video? Because I think there's value in having your audio podcast populate to YouTube for SEO. I

Matt Cundill  12:27  
mean putting video first, okay?

David Yas  12:31  
I think, I think that's fair. Yeah, the the and you're right, Matt, it's, it's silly, like, if you got into podcasting for a reason, because, because this was the way you wanted to build your content through these, you know, sometimes long form interviews and things that you don't get in a 62nd tick tock video, for sure. So I know you're skeptical about going all in on video. I kind of am, too, but I'm at a point now where the people I help, we do the video. It's, it's not meant to be like a slickly edited like, you know, TV news show or something, but it's up there and, you know, so I'm kind of one foot in, one foot out, I guess. But being on YouTube, it, it helps. It's, it seems like it's a little easier to get clicks on YouTube than it is downloads. But I'm with you. Let's not forget, you know, what? What, how this meeting was born, and, like, what? What the true spirit of it is, it's conversations, you know?

Matt Cundill  13:30  
Yeah, I actually had something I did learn this week. There was a fault with my pod page. It's since been fixed, but what happened was they started, all the videos started to auto play from YouTube. And I'm like, that's just gonna run the numbers up on videos. Yeah. And because, you know, an IAB certified download is not supposed to auto play by any stretch. So I called them on it, and it was apparently a bug, and they fixed it. But it's just one of the things that's sort of talks about the imbalance between video and audio. And

Jon Gay  14:00  
Matt, you've seen the numbers too. I believe that consumption tends to be a lot better on the audio side, on Apple and Spotify, etc, than on YouTube, correct? Yeah,

Matt Cundill  14:09  
it's just so much easier to move on to something else on YouTube, which is great because you can, you know, just find that search bar and find something else quickly. But, you know, consumption is just much better on in the audio space.

Johnny Podcasts  14:22  
I have a yesterday I learned a y i l yield, okay, so we've all been hearing like over the last couple years. We the whole term, oh, ai, ai is coming for podcasting. AI is here. And then then there's a new term that comes out, which I'm sure you guys have seen online, which is AI agents. We've got agents deployed in our SaaS company. If you sign up for our business, you'll get your own personalized AI agent. I was like, What the hell is an AI agent? So I asked my wife, and she's just like, yeah, it's just a fancy word for just a chat GPT bot that you've built. It's just a prompt that is given to a large language model that. Spits it out, but it's fancy to call it an agent, like, Oh, I've got an agent working for me. So all that to say in your podcasting process, whether you're a producer, whether you're a host who's running their own show, if you're touching any part of your podcast outside of just recording the spoken word, you can build an AI agent for a ton of the back ends, but back end work that needs to be done for your podcast, and we just built one yesterday for one of my clients. So I get a text from a client's assistant, he says, or she says to me, Hey, can you send us some social media options for promoting this episode? And I said back to them. I was like, Oh, I don't I'm not gonna. Maybe I didn't say this to them. And in my brain, I go, I don't want to write out this stuff for this episode for you to just post on LinkedIn and Twitter. So I sent back. I said, I'm not responsible for creating the written social content, but what I'm happy to do is to create a prompt for you to put into chat GPT that will just give you the social content. So what I did is I go over into chat GPT and I create a new agent that is the agent creator. And I said, You are now my agent creator. I will tell you to create a chat GPT agent for x, and you will assist me in creating a prompt that can be fed into chat GPT. In order to create this agent, you should be asking lots of questions to help us get as much information as possible, so that would create the most detailed prompt possible for the creation of these agents. Always be thinking about how we can make the prompt better, more detailed and overall smarter for the prompt. They said, Great, let's get started. What I did is basically said you are going to pull information from this podcast, which can be found here on YouTube, here on Spotify, and to create social content for these two social media accounts, one on x1, on LinkedIn, and basically it created an entire prompt that is going to give them multiple post options for for LinkedIn, for x, in different tones, different calls to actions, different different parts of an episode, takeaways, things like that. It's going to give them about six options each. And all that the person, all that the human, has to do is just put in the transcript and say the words, create social content, and it'll spit it all out. So rather than just creating one time, or, you know, social content for one episode one time, they now have the opportunity to do it every single time just by plugging in the transcript. So if you just set a little side, little time aside. Now you save so much time in the long run by creating one of these chat GPT bots, or agents, as we're calling them now, but you can do that for a ton of different aspects of the post production, side of podcasting and and get your message out farther, wider, faster. I

Jon Gay  17:39  
don't want to get too far into the weeds here, Johnny, but I do have a follow up question. Up question for you. So if, when you are originally setting up your agent Shaken, not stirred, or however this agent works, is, are you giving it the links to where the podcast is? And do those links include transcripts? Because you've got to feed it some sort of text, right? So

Johnny Podcasts  17:58  
we're taking a a so I'm putting the episode into descript, which is transcribing it, or I have my team doing the actual transcription, like the really fully cleaned up one that is being attached into the text box with the prompts generate social content, and the agent knows, based on the prompt. It says, your inputs from the human will be you are pulling everything from the transcript. So I went in and asked, I said, are you able to actually read or pull any data from the Spotify or the YouTube link? And they go, No, we can't actually do that yet. So I'm sure that's in the works, but they can't yet. So you have to give them something you can't just say, like, do it for my latest episode. Maybe in a year, we'll be able to do that. But for now, you need to give them the full transcript, and so far, they do a really, really good job of doing

Jon Gay  18:46  
it. It's just like Google can search, you know, text as opposed to video or content. Yeah.

Johnny Podcasts  18:52  
So I have, I have chat GP chat GPT agents that are doing time codes. I have them that are doing titles for episodes. I have them that are doing episode descriptions. And it's more than just so. And so is the CEO of this company, and they've worked here for 10 years. It is. Welcome back to this show. Today. I'm sitting down with blah, blah, blah, blah. Here are 10 bullet points of everything we talked about. Here are the links to everything that was mentioned. And it's all just like that. But you have to know how to create that kind of stuff, and you just take some time and, you know, utilize chat GBT, or any of these large language models to say, Help me get this going. And it's going to take a few hours and a few tries, but once you do it and get it right, then you're set. Well, the the

David Yas  19:31  
client, your your person you're working with, still has to go back and find if they're going to make, make a video clip, I take it, they still have to find the part in the video that corresponds to the part in the transcript that chat GPT has identified, right?

Johnny Podcasts  19:43  
Yes, or the way that we built it was not necessary that it would be paired with an image or a video. It's strictly text based content. So normally, so if one of the posts, for instance, is just an overall post promoting the episode, then we can combine it with either for LinkedIn. LinkedIn only allows the first 15 minutes of an episode. We'll put, we'll attach the first 15 minutes of an episode and then add something into the post saying, like, here's the first 15 minutes. If you want to watch the rest, go to YouTube, more for x or Twitter. You can post the whole episode and still have all of that, but you but what they're looking for is just the written content they don't want. No one wants to sit down and actually think about it and write it out, and we want to just give it to us. Yeah, I've

David Yas  20:22  
had good success using the AI tool in descript, which we talk about all the time. We're fans of descript, and it's great for writing show notes. It's great for if it generates a blog post from the transcript. And if you've never used this people, you should try it. It's It's pretty amazing. You don't want to rely on it. You want to check that text to make sure the robot hasn't done anything stupid, but it descript also has tools to create clips using a video. Excuse me, but I haven't had success doing that seamlessly yet. I don't know if any you have, but maybe we're two in the weeds now. But you know, and

Jon Gay  20:58  
Riverside also offers similar processes as descript does. I've played with both, and I think they're kind of in this arms race where they're leapfrogging each other in terms of which is better, but they're fairly similar products. One caveat I'll throw out to this using AI for generating content, I'm working with a marketing firm who just said that Google is now getting smarter at detecting what's been written by AI. So one way to do it is, like Johnny said, to make really, really specific prompts. But I would strongly urge anybody who's creating written content with AI to go through and do some light editing to make it sound less robotic and more human, or less agent like and more human, because Google is starting to Down, Down rank in search results exclusively written AI content and prioritize has been written by actual people. Catherine, that's right. That's

Catherine O'Brien  21:47  
totally that's absolutely correct. And I also just kind of want to give a shout out to some of the other tools that we're fans of, just to for Johnny's point about using, using these prompts, a lot of the tools that we're using already have built in these agents to make the social contact for it. So I want to just give a shout out to headliner that we're all fans of. Headliner for doing audiograms, their their tools for AI for coming up with social content I think are getting really good. And then to your point, jag, I just wanted to say that somebody who I follow, Neil Patel about SEO, he says that one of the things to keep in mind is it's ai plus human. So everything that's being generated by an AI tool, it really if you just use that human touch, that human screening, that's going to get you a lot further than just using the straight up. AI, yeah,

Jon Gay  22:38  
that's Jonathan my rule for anything AI, even AI audio editing, things like descript and Riverside and Adobe enhance and things like that. You can run it, run poor quality audio through it'll do a pretty good job, but you have to make tweaks, because sometimes it'll lop off an S or an F at the end of a word, and now your host, your guest, sounds like they have a lisp that they don't typically have, or or other things. So anything that, anything you run through AI, has to be completely hand checked by a human eye and or ear.

Catherine O'Brien  23:06  
And I think that I get some of from the people that Johnny's interacting with on Twitter or x, that some I see some of the things I've been noticing. A lot of the people who are focusing on AI are really breaking down which AI tool is best for which platform? So AI tools are, they have different skill sets, so they're better in some arenas than others. So it's been kind of interesting to see like, Oh, don't use grok for this. Use grok for that. Use Claude for a blog post. Don't use Claude for a research whatever, whatever it happens to be that. It's kind of interesting to see who's being enhanced in different ways. What their what their skill sets are.

Jon Gay  23:46  
Matt, are you ready for your yesterday, I learned, yes,

Matt Cundill  23:48  
I am. Go for it. I think X is kind of done in my world. And it's just, I've just watched the metrics go and I listen, I'm big fan. Have been there for a long time, and you know, in the end, it's not really me who left, it's my audiences left. I can't tag anybody anymore, and these are media people, and they're gone. And if they're gone, what am I doing here? Even though we're on X right now, by the way, we are streaming live to x. And yep, they're fine. They're fine with it, but, you know, they're really asking for me to upload video to it again, my audience isn't there for, you know, the sound off podcast and a number of other ones. I can't remember the last time I was sort of offered an opportunity to listen to a podcast on there. They don't really want me leaving. They want me engaging, and mostly it's politics. So I kind of really, really wondering what I'm being fed and what the purpose is of of this platform. It's just doesn't seem to be cohesive with the people I'm trying to attract to listen to the podcasts that we put out. That's it. I love you. Twitter. Love jacks, but time to break up.

Jon Gay  24:58  
I think there's, there is a bit. An opportunity for podcasting here in this increasing political divide we've seen on social media, where we've seen, I'm generalizing here, there are exceptions. I know we've seen Twitter X shift a little bit to the right. We saw the responses from blue sky and threads shift left. And I think because these platforms are becoming more and more polarizing, and I don't want that one of scrolling social I want dog videos and podcasts. So So I so there's definitely an opportunity for podcasting to fill a void I believe there.

Matt Cundill  25:31  
I think Instagram might be the big winner out of all this.

Jon Gay  25:37  
You don't mean threads, you mean Instagram

Matt Cundill  25:39  
either or, I don't know that there's enough people on threads. I don't matter, but, but I think Instagram has become a very simple way to promote your podcast. How a real, very easy, like a real tick tock is, you know, as well, for that matter. But you know, here's the real it's there's a one click method that can get somebody to Spotify very, very quickly, just in stories. You guys know it, because I promote this show by doing it that way, you just click it once, and people go there. It's anytime. You can reduce it to one click to get to where you need to go to be listening is a good thing,

Johnny Podcasts  26:18  
yeah. And that's the big problem with x and a lot of the text based social media platforms is they de rank you if you post a link into a post LinkedIn. Does this? X does this, I'm sure threads does this. They don't want you leaving the app ever. And no social app wants that. But those ones really, they just will nail you, and they try to offset it with, oh, well, you can upload the whole episode here, but, yeah, but like, eventually, in five seconds, I'm gonna want to keep scrolling my timeline, or I'm gonna want to switch out of the app and go do something else. And unless I have the paid version of x, I can't do that. And it's, yeah, I hear where you're coming from, Matt, for sure. I don't

Catherine O'Brien  26:57  
know you guys. I enjoy feeling like I'm shouting into the void every single day I'm on Twitter, it could not be that people aren't appreciating my dazzling sense of humor. Come on

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  27:17  
the podcast. Super Friends support podcasting 2.0 so feel free to send us a boost if you're listening on a newer podcast app, find the full list at new podcast apps.com

Jon Gay  27:29  
I think, you know, we talked about that one click. And I think Tom Webster sent that in an email or in a sounds profitable. And I think that probably segues into his recent webinar. Was it Catherine that you wanted to

Catherine O'Brien  27:40  
talk about that? Yeah, and it's actually a little bit of a shout out back to some of the topics we've already covered today. So I went to the sounds profitable. First of all, happy webinar season. It seems like back into webinar season. Matt is going to be busy, busy every 1pm Thursday, we're going to be all booked.

Matt Cundill  27:58  
And Wednesdays now they seem to want to Wednesdays as well.

Catherine O'Brien  28:03  
Yeah, so for all who celebrate webinar season, that's me. We wish you a happy webinar season. So I got the pleasure of attending the sounds profitable, branded podcast webinar. It was great. They had a couple of people the host of Amazon's, this is small business. She was there talking, and then we had Liz harns, also from jar audio. And this is a deep cut, but I'm a big fan of Jar audio because they've got some great information about branded podcasting. And Liz harns gave us a great new metric to pay attention to, kind of a shout out back to what we were just talking about, about the idea of engagement with your podcast. She said that when they're talking to clients brands, specifically about launching podcasts, is that they say, they say, because of the high consumption level of the podcast, consider this minutes spent with brand. So just like we were just talking about a minute ago with social media, that's ephemeral, social media is passing by, you know, moment to moment to moment, you're liking, you're moving on, you're scrolling there. People are not staying with you. So for all of the expense and the thought that goes into having a really cool social media post, people are passing it by just in a moment's notice. They see it and they move on to the next whereas with your podcast, as they're consuming more and more of it, consider that to be minutes spent with your brand. Then she took it one step further and said, Okay, so now whatever cost you put into producing this podcast, you can say that you can calculate that as minutes spent of attention. And I thought, and she says that when they break it down that way for clients, the all the marketing people, their ears perk up like they get really interested because they're saying, okay, so this is the dollar per minute spent on the attention that this person is having with our brand. And I thought, Okay, this is a this is a really nice way of sort of tweaking it. So instead of just celebrating like, oh, you know, yes, people could. Assume more of the of the podcast. This is an you're actually this is the you're paying for the attention of the listener that you're paying for the attention of this potential client or customer. And I thought, Okay, that's a great way to just sort of tweak a little bit more, get a little bit deeper into our engagement numbers there. It's

Jon Gay  30:17  
a great metric. And

Catherine O'Brien  30:21  
again, for sharing that it's a

Johnny Podcasts  30:23  
classic, beautiful corporate jargon term that they've come up with. I could see marketing people just salivating over that. Well, yeah, when you're like, they loved it. They loved hearing time spent with brand. Ooh, that's so fancy. Excuse

Catherine O'Brien  30:34  
me, you were talking about AI agents and SaaS. You one more jargon word.

Johnny Podcasts  30:40  
We all have our spectrum of the buzz words that we like to

Catherine O'Brien  30:43  
Yeah, okay, well, I this is what I'm embracing,

Matt Cundill  30:49  
but that's another time spent I've left everybody speechless, great. Another time spent listening request, which is really, I think, where we're moving to in this not, not always, very helpful when you have a podcast, say, like the one Jack does five six minutes long. We're not going to get some very good metrics out of that Jack's going to would probably prefer to have downloads and audience and unique size, but time spent with your podcast is really a big deal.

Jon Gay  31:14  
Restart my podcast, which I need to do because I pod faded my own podcast and not follow do as I do, not as I say,

Johnny Podcasts  31:21  
likely pod faders are podcast producers who don't have time to shoemakers.

Catherine O'Brien  31:25  
Kid goes shoemakers. Kid goes barefoot. It's that's how it goes.

Jon Gay  31:31  
All right, who wants to go next? I

Johnny Podcasts  31:33  
have another small one that's very recent, and it touched on what David said was that the legacy, kind of like old guard media doesn't own podcasting. You, like the average Joe owns podcasting. What we've seen over the last month, just from the launch of two podcasts, should be so encouraging to the everyday person, or the everyday business person that wants to, like, get into podcasting, whether it's to market themselves or market their business. We saw Gavin Newsom and Michelle Obama both launch podcasts in the last month for two reasons that should be really encouraging. One, it means, oh, wow, this is a big deal we've gotten. You know, the governor of California and the and the former First Lady are getting into podcasting that gives some even further validation to the medium, but two, they're both terrible at it,

like Michelle Obama is getting clowned all over at least x and on YouTube for her show. And I, honestly, I tried to listen to the first episode and just give it some grace and go in with an open mind. It's awful. It's not for me. It's for somebody else, but it's not for me, and clearly it's not for anybody else, either, based on the people that are commenting on it, all that to say

the big celebrity podcast dream that thing's dead. It's not a thing. It's not this medium is not for those type of people. It is for someone who has something very unique to say and can find an audience in who to say it to, whether that is for marketing your business, whether that is for just doing something extremely, extremely niche, but these really broad conversation based podcasts like that, they're doing it just isn't it just isn't working in podcasting. And I find that to be very encouraging for the everyday person, that you guys should not be discouraged, that you can never be successful in this, because, oh, well, I'll never be Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama is trying it, and she freaking sucks at it, so that should not stop you from starting this or trying it. Can I

Matt Cundill  33:33  
let me give us? Go ahead, Matt, yeah, I just want to push back a little bit here, because I know that these podcasts, while popular, are getting a lot of attention for negative, you know, as being negative experiences. But you know, even if you're Joe Rogan, you have a 14% share. If you're a Top radio station in a city, it's a it's a six or a seven share. That means like, 94% of the people are not listening to you. And now, if you're a celebrity in this day and age, you know, if you get, like, a share number of that, of that range, we now have the rest of the audience who want to target that politician or celebrity, and we'll go and make reels about how bad it is. And I give you Megan Markle as the latest example of just somebody who, by the way, same thing like failed, completely failed podcast at Spotify, but is now on whatever with Netflix, whatever it is that she's doing now, and just, you know, just people are just bombing her for it, but it's like, Johnny, it's like you just said, though it's not for you, right? But people are actually going online and saying, This is not for me,

Johnny Podcasts  34:38  
yeah. So is it like all attention is good attention type of thing. It is. It's just

Matt Cundill  34:44  
that we have this new dynamic now of people who are who are being vocal about the things they dislike and using the opportunity of celebrity to propel their own social media platforms.

Johnny Podcasts  34:54  
No, you're right. That is the correct take. My mind is more just from the sort of a different lens of. Just like, it should be encouraging to somebody who may have been apprehensive beforehand to be like, oh, you know, yeah, and I can do this, and I can succeed in doing and let's make no mistake, those two podcasts are dull. Yes, yeah. It's just, well, their problem, what they're those are really good case study. Well, maybe not so much gavid newsomes, but Michelle's is a really good case study in the failure of the broad mass appeal podcast. It's really hard in this day and age to do the sort of just general conversation. Oh, we're just going to kind of shoot the shit and just hang out and chat, because we're just so entertaining and so smart. No, you have to have a niche. You have to have a message. You have to be telling me something because I'm giving you my time that I'm interested in hearing about, and it has to be done. Well,

Jon Gay  35:43  
two points there. So we'll go ahead. Catherine, you go first. No, no, you go first. All right. So, so one, I think these big name celebrity podcasts, they're going to see a lot of downloads out of the gate because they've got a built in following, and people are going to sample and try it. But to Johnny and Matt's point, if the quality isn't there, those those download numbers are just going to fall off a cliff because you can't keep them there. But I think the other encouraging thing here to what we're talking about with these celebrity podcasts, some folks, when they get into podcasting, have this idea, it's got to be perfect. It's got to be great right out of the gate. Now, the more prep you can put into it, the better quality you can you can make it great. But the hardest part about a podcast, about starting a podcast, is actually doing it. Your your podcast is not going to set the world on fire in episode one. I don't have a single client's gotten 10 episodes that likes how episode one sounds. The hardest part is doing it's a work in progress. It doesn't have to be Pulitzer Prize winning or Emmy Emmy winning out of the gate. Start it and work on it and improve and take feedback and listen to it back and figure out what you can do differently. You don't have to be Joe Rogan or pod save America right out of the gate, or the daily from the New York Times. Start it. Once you get going, you'll build some momentum and continuously improve. Katherine, I

Catherine O'Brien  37:00  
was gonna say new conspiracy theory has just dropped here live on the podcast Super Friends, is that we all know that that negative things spread farther and wider in social media than positive things. So I wonder if there's like, a little bit of a hate listen element to all of these things where it's like Netflix is getting all kind. You know, here we are. We're burning up time talking about the Markle mess. People on social media are, you know, putting out, oh, this is so terrible. There's, you know, comments that are going on YouTube. All of this is just furthering, you know, that sort of what Johnny was just saying, that all attention is good attention or bad attention is, you know, there's no such thing as bad press. There's no such bad thing as a bad click. So maybe I'm wondering if there's a little bit of a in the same way that we love to read terrible or hear a terrible movie review of just trashing a movie. I wonder if there's something to be said for this too, or it's there's something fun about seeing, you know, having somebody say, Oh, this is just a total disaster. This is a mess, and let's tell everybody about it. They

Johnny Podcasts  38:02  
ultimately have to spin it into something good, though, because if, if the only thing people are hearing is that this podcast sucks, this podcast sucks, this podcast sucks, then you know your brother's uncle's neighbor's dog is gonna go, Hey, did you hear about the Michelle Obama? She She launched a podcast like, Yeah, I heard it sucked. And then I move on with now that their brand is now stained forever as something negative,

Catherine O'Brien  38:22  
loving counterpoint. They Spotify. Gave them so much money, the Markle and Prince Harry gave them a, you know, a wheelbarrow full of money to do a podcast. It was considered poor this Netflix show is after that. They're still, they're still breaking in projects. I mean, it's, it's nuts. I frankly, if I was, if I was a wealthy, wealthy woman, I would fund a investigative reporter to get to the bottom on how they keep getting these contracts. I really would like to know.

Jon Gay  38:55  
Well, honestly, Catherine, I think part of it is their celebrity status is they're going to start off with a built in audience that any of the five of us are not going to start out with, and they're trying to get a piece of that, but it's all smoke and mirrors. What if the quality isn't there to back it

David Yas  39:11  
up, I have another Spotify note. If the chair will entertain, it entertained.

Jon Gay  39:17  
Okay, speaking of which, yes, yeah,

David Yas  39:21  
Spotify. Come over here, sit down. Let's have a little talk. Spotify, like other platforms, is can be concerned about the copyrighted material being illegally published on their site. If you publish a podcast that has some copyrighted material, it might get flagged. Now, I do have a law degree. I don't want to go legal on every anyone here, but if you're wondering what the law is, according to the fair use exception to the cop, the Federal Copyright Act, if you are using material for the purposes of commentary, criticism, parity, news, report. Thing, then it is okay to do. So now if you're just playing entire songs on your show, or you've chosen Pearl Jam song to be your theme song to your podcast, just because you like it, you didn't ask their permission, then, yeah, you got yourself a copyright violation. If you're using small bits of things and clips of things, like I do occasionally, then where they may get well, it's funny, you ask Cath and I do have this music podcast called past tense,

Jingle  40:31  
a top 10 time machine, and

David Yas  40:34  
we do comments. The whole purpose of the podcast is to comment on music. So long story, a little shorter Spotify would occasionally send me missives that said we flagged some copyrighted material. Please choose one of the following. It's like, I'll take it down. I own it. It's not copyrighted by anybody else. Or three, I am not using this improperly. I don't know if it uses that double negative, but in other words, I'm permitted to use this in the way that I am using it, and typically I would check that box and send it back to them, and usually the issue solved. But recently, they've been cracking down on this, and they're getting pressure from the record companies who are going to Spotify and demanding that they take down certain podcasts and and channels and size songs or whatever. So recently, I get an email that says that your Spotify account has been suspended. All right, so they bar me. They bar me now, Spotify, we got off such a good start. I'm one of your Spotify for creator, creators, I've got, I've published probably three dozen podcasts on your site, giving out, you know, making this content available to all of your listeners. I never asked for any money or anything like that, or even thank you, and you cancel me now. So when this happened, I was horrified. So I thought all the podcasts I produced are not going to be on Spotify anymore. That's not the case. This. The podcasts are still there. I just had to open an entire new account, and now I got to figure a way to if I want to monitor this or look at the the analytics for any of the my pods on Spotify, but clearly this, they've taken this, you know, barbaric approach Spotify do better. What I imagine is happening is there is no human dealing with this issue at all. I think it's a robot that has flagged it, a robot that has said

Jon Gay  42:19  
an agent, Dave, an AI agent, yeah, yeah. People, an

David Yas  42:24  
evil secret agent. And, you know, I think after you get a certain amount of these emails saying you're violated, they automatically terminate the account. So we get it together. Spotify, yeah, and I tweeted, I tweeted them on Spotify cares, and heard nothing back, which begs the question, if it's Spotify, and do they really

Johnny Podcasts  42:44  
Spotify really well, it's between you and the Island Def Jam executive who came kicking in the door going, there's this podcast called past tense.

Matt Cundill  42:56  
All right, I have a theory, yes, and I think that it's Spotify is constantly trying to renegotiate their deal with the record labels. I think the record labels are saying, Okay, we'll do something with you, but you got to clean this up, namely, top 10 Time Machine. You've got to go and get rid of that and then clean

David Yas  43:19  
up all the stuff clear past tense is still on Spotify. It's just, it's, it's host got his account, yeah.

Matt Cundill  43:26  
So I, you know, I like to lurk in the Facebook groups when and somebody said My show is no longer on Spotify. And I went and found out what show it was, and then I listened to two or three episodes, and I took the songs, and I didn't know the song. So I use my Shazam to find out what the songs were. And I said, you've got this song, this song, and this song, and using this as a theme song, you've literally been booted from Spotify because of this.

David Yas  43:52  
Yeah, I mean, I understand. They got to police it somehow, and that's there are certain things that you can't do, but it's just the it's frustrating for someone like me doing a music podcast, which if our fans, what are our fans going to do? If they enjoy the show? They're going to listen to more music. They're going to listen to Spotify more. They're going to listen to artists in the in the typical way. They don't come to our show to listen to songs. They want to hear what we have to say, but I guess they want to hear, yeah,

Johnny Podcasts  44:21  
there's another line. Cast never reaches out to you about this. It's only Spotify Correct.

David Yas  44:25  
Knock on wood.

Matt Cundill  44:26  
Yeah. I mean, YouTube is worse, isn't it? Yeah, YouTube

David Yas  44:31  
is similarly cruel, yes and, and unyielding and, but

Johnny Podcasts  44:37  
well, and what YouTube will do is YouTube will contact the Creator directly and let them know that their content is being copyrighted. So if, like, on one of the podcasts I manage occasionally, you know, a guest on the show will say, like, Hey, can we have a copy of the episode so that we can post it on our YouTube channel? And of course, they clear it with us, like, yeah, of course, you can do it. So we'll post it. I will give. Them the full video, they will upload it. I will get a notification on YouTube from my host channel saying, like, hey, this, this other channel is copywriting your content. Potentially, you should check it out. And I will look on there, and it'll say, using 100% of your content, and it'll show the video, but I'll see that it's the the episode that we shared with them. And it all depends on whether people are really, you know, crazy about monetization, and whether they feel like they're being stolen from but again, the Fair Use thing should have cleared all that up where it's like, if we're using this to comment on it and and we're playing little bits and pieces, pausing it and then talking about it that, you know, that totally falls under fair use. And this just, yeah, it's just that it really does

Catherine O'Brien  45:45  
seem that they've put the burden on the Creator. When it comes to fair use issues. They're very unsympathetic, and they make it so it's upon you the podcaster, to jump through all the hoots to make sure it's, it's, gets through, it's, and if you watch any YouTube at all, you know that the YouTube creators have had this problem for a very long time. Yeah.

Jon Gay  46:05  
So it's really trying to, you know, kind of, please both sides. I know, for example, YouTube, I have a subscription service where I download, you know, music to use intro outro for podcast. Not, you know, not Welcome to the jungle, from Guns and Roses, but, but, you know, compositions that have been created for this surface, this purpose, and when these podcasts go on YouTube, I have to make sure I download a copy of the YouTube license when I download the audio file, because when the podcast launches, invariably, the trailer episodes one and two, they will send that notification to the creator of said music and say, you have a claim against this. Do you want to appeal it? And I appeal it, and I copy paste the license that I got from the music provider, and then it's fine within 24 hours. So I applaud them for trying to, you know, protect the creators, but I don't want them to hurt us as creators, either. It's a really fine line.

Catherine O'Brien  46:58  
Well, Spotify, please look away when the new account set up by David Daz gets

David Yas  47:04  
Oh, it's already there no connection. Welcome back

Johnny Podcasts  47:07  
to our new podcast, hot tub, Time Machine.

David Yas  47:12  
Fine. It's just me. I'm public number one. But yeah, I did just open another Spotify account. I'm not gonna. Don't admit that

Catherine O'Brien  47:19  
as you're my attorney, don't

Johnny Podcasts  47:23  
incriminate yourself. The post production episode of this, can we put like the Mel Gibson,

Jon Gay  47:29  
take my freedom. Yeah, whatever

Johnny Podcasts  47:31  
song that was over. David spiel, welcome to his

Jon Gay  47:35  
new podcast past nines, very quickly, since we're on the topic of podcast hosts, yesterday, I learned that you'd no longer need an Apple account to create, to put an app, put a spot, a podcast in Apple podcasts. I'm still kind of old. Years later, I know it says the apple hater in our group, but

Johnny Podcasts  48:00  
the 11th version of the iPad Air to fix this,

Jon Gay  48:03  
and the 10th software update this week. I, you know, I have mixed emotions about this, because I'm kind of old school. I like having everything tied to an Apple account, whether it's the client's podcast or it's my central account that I use to to submit everything to Apple, so I have it all in one place, and I can look at everything all at once. You can claim the podcast without an apple podcast Apple ID, rather, to me, all you need for an Apple ID is name, email address and a credit card they do not charge to be on Apple podcasts. So I'm still gonna use the apple podcast login way to do it. But if you really don't want to give the folks in Cupertino too much information and don't want the Apple ID, then you can actually claim the podcast and submit it without having an Apple ID. So that was what I learned.

Johnny Podcasts  48:50  
Yes, you tried doing that, or, like, have you done, like, a, like a high level walk through of that process? Because I just, we just launched a podcast, and I still went through the deal of how we've normally been doing it, we have to manually hit publish in podcast, connect on it. I

Jon Gay  49:07  
haven't. I haven't. I actually did a zoom screen share with a client who asked me about this new piece of it, and we went through and looked at for her podcast. But she'd already could, you know, created it through her own Apple ID, and she was good, but it was, it was a real learning experience for me, for anybody who's starting out that doesn't have an Apple ID.

Matt Cundill  49:25  
So I have a question, is this going to make it easier for us to share Apple data with, say, clients?

Jon Gay  49:32  
That's a great question, potentially. Or is it going to be or is it going to be claimed by only one, you know, one user? So that's that probably remains to be seen. I would think,

Matt Cundill  49:42  
yeah, so I'll get back to everybody on this, and I'll report back in a month when we do our next episode.

Jon Gay  49:51  
Does we are almost that time. We've got a couple minutes left. Anybody have any points they want to hit before we close things up?

Matt Cundill  49:56  
We'll talk about pocket cash shortly. They've got a web version that says. I think that's a good thing. You know, what happens if you want to watch a podcast or listen to a podcast on the web? What options are really out there? Well, podcasts has come up with one. This has sort of given me a little bit of incentive to add the Pocket Cast banner to some of our websites. So I'm going to see how this sort of develops over the next month. I think it's a good thing.

Jon Gay  50:22  
Do creators need to submit to Pocket Cast, or does it pull from another feed, like apples

Matt Cundill  50:27  
from the Apple API?

Johnny Podcasts  50:30  
But ultimately, Pocket Cast is trying to make a play for taking away some listeners from Spotify and Apple by having a web player.

Matt Cundill  50:37  
I think, I think they're, they're realizing that this is, there's a hole in the market for this.

Jon Gay  50:44  
This is to listen on the web, Matt, you said, as opposed to on an app,

Matt Cundill  50:47  
yeah, exactly. You go to, it goes to, takes you to a web page. Every one of our podcasts now has a Pocket Cast page that is dedicated so, you know, makes it easy. Anything you can do to connect the listener to your show in an easy way is great fish, where the fish are, yeah,

Johnny Podcasts  51:04  
that's a pushback on the YouTube thing. If you don't want to be have your podcast on YouTube, then what's the difference between, you know, fish, where the fish are. Because if all, the majority the big fish are on YouTube, the the minnows are on Pocket Casts. So why wouldn't you be on

Matt Cundill  51:17  
both? Well, if minute you're on Apple, you're on Pocket Cast, whether you like it or not,

Johnny Podcasts  51:23  
yeah, but wouldn't you want to be on

Matt Cundill  51:26  
YouTube then, well, I want to have that conversation, because

Jon Gay  51:29  
I'll have it. We are out of time.

Catherine O'Brien  51:34  
I have one point on podcasts. I've actually heard from podcasters, independent podcasters, that because Pocket Cast actually offers a feature where you can advertise your podcast and have it sponsored to listeners, people who are already listening to podcasts that that's sort of been an un fully shouted out method of promoting your podcast is that people really saw a nice when they would have their podcast be sponsored to other podcast listeners, they would get a nice bump in their downloads. So that would be something I'd be interested in seeing a

Johnny Podcasts  52:06  
little bit more of. That's different from overcast, yep.

Catherine O'Brien  52:08  
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have one more yield. Yesterday I learned. So yesterday I learned. And we all know the email we've already talked about email in this particular episode, too. A lot of podcasts have email newsletters that go along with their with their topics, or if you're working with companies, they've got newsletters for for the public to use. And I just learned that beehive has a automatic sponsorship option so that you can get your you can turn your newsletter into a way to monitor a revenue stream by having sponsors for your newsletter through beehive. Now, Matt, I think you use, do you use beehive? Yeah, I do. Has anybody heard of this or experiment with this at all? What was specifically with,

Johnny Podcasts  52:53  
like, the sponsor specific feature? But everything that I'm being fed about beehive online, it is that it is the newsletter platform. It is the they seem to really get a stack over WordPress. It is the place to be. Wow.

Catherine O'Brien  53:07  
Okay, I would be interested in because I think that, I think that having as many options as connecting or, you know, even if they're just multiple streams of income, even if they're rivulets of income. These are going to be important things for for podcasters to know about. So I would love to hear a little bit more about podcasters that are using beehive and using this automatic sponsorship option to get some revenue flowing with their newsletters.

Jon Gay  53:36  
That is a wonderful place to leave it. I was trying to make a bee transition, but I couldn't come up once. So let's run around the room. And since her mic has been working for the last hour, let's start with Katherine.

Catherine O'Brien  53:47  
Yes, let's not tempt fate anymore. I can finally move my head. This is Katherine O'Brien from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the red stick, and it's been my pleasure talking with you. You can listen to me shouting into the void on Twitter. Hello, Catherine. Oh,

Jon Gay  54:02  
to Canada. Now Spain, I should say,

Matt Cundill  54:05  
yeah, exactly. We're in Malaga, Spain for right through until Easter. Matt Cundill, you can find me on x while I'm still there at Matt Cundill,

Jon Gay  54:19  
Texas, I'm Fort Worth Hello. Hello.

Johnny Podcasts  54:23  
I'm Johnny podcast. You can follow me on x at Johnny podcast, and soon you'll be able to find me at Johnny podcast.com.

Jon Gay  54:32  
Look forward to that nice tease, Boston. Hello, Boston.

David Yas  54:35  
Dude, yes. Pod 617, dot com, Boston Podcast Network, baseball season, go socks. Come on, come on. Jack, go

Jon Gay  54:44  
socks. Go socks. All right. Alex Bregman, John Gay Jagan, Detroit podcasts, you can find me at jag indetroit.com I'm focusing on internal comms, podcasts and podcasts or financial advisors. So if either one of those means anything to you, you can find me on my website. On social at jag in Detroit. Thanks so much for checking out this month's podcast, Super Friends for Johnny, Matt, Catherine, David and myself, we will see you next month.

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  55:09  
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Super Friends, for a transcript of the show, or to connect with the Super Friends, go to the show notes of this episode, or go to sound off dot network,

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  55:20  
produced and distributed by the sound off media company in.