Dan Misener: The Art & Science of Podcasting

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:12  
If you've worked in and around podcasting, you likely know the name Dan Misener. You might have seen him speak at a podcast conference, or perhaps someone shared one of his written pieces related to podcast audience growth. With you. When I first met him, he was in charge of audience development at Pacific content. Yes, that Pacific content that was sold to Rogers in 2019 and yes, that Pacific content that was going to be mothballed by Rogers until the UK company lower street purchased them just a few weeks ago, I'll save you the time now and tell you that I did not ask Dan about his thoughts on that. Today we're here for the audience growth hacks. Dan now heads up Bumper, along with Jonas wouss, they've already put out a few free tools, including podcast X ray just a few months ago, Dan and Jonas are currently tackling the question of why podcast metrics from hosting providers like Apple podcasts Spotify and now YouTube aren't so easily found all in one place, a question that gets asked daily on Facebook groups and on our sound off media company Slack channel. Right now, the Bumper team are in the midst of launching a dashboard that's gonna do just that. You know, for years we've been talking about podcast success in terms of downloads, and maybe we shouldn't think about it. Would you rather someone download your show or listen to your show, see where this is going? And now, Dan mesner joins me from beautiful Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. You're in Lunenburg today, but you got your start at campus radio, ckdu in Halifax. Back in my day, it was at 97.5 and had 33 watts. But I believe in your day, it found its way to 88.1 What did you do at CKDU?

Dan Misener  1:58  
I was there and straddled both of those frequencies, and at the time, it was the mighty 50 watt CKDU. And CKDU was a place that I wandered into one day, not knowing anything about radio or broadcasting or how to cut tape or mix pieces. And there was just this incredible community of people who showed me, who taught me, who said, we're interested in this stuff too. Come on in. And I would say that my time at CKDU was incredibly instructive and hugely formative, and has informed, I think, quite a lot of how I think about podcasting 20 years later, because the spirit of DIY media, the spirit of having a place for stuff that might not otherwise fit in conventional broadcast footprints, that's just stayed with me, the idea of you don't hear something that you want on the radio, so go Make it yourself.

Matt Cundill  3:01  
I love that that's in my bones. Did RS Smooth? Have a show on there with Smooth Grooves at the time? 

Dan Misener  3:08  
Yeah I hosted the countdown show. So there was a show called radionumerica, which was the weekly chart show. And so I had my turn in that host chair, and a fantastic person, Francis Willick taught me how to do sort of audio editing, and taught me how to do spoken word audio editing. And at the time, I had just started listening to This American Life, real audio streams over the internet, and I was just so enamored with that kind of storytelling, sort of narrative, documentary storytelling. And so I also did a show at ckdu called Dickey drive, which was named after a street near where I grew up. And it was very much my earliest attempts at trying to do spoken word storytelling, sort of documentary style programming. So I got to do at CKDU, some music stuff and some spoken word stuff. And I think very, very fondly back

Matt Cundill  4:05  
on those times, was there a subsequent radio story after that for you? What's at CBC? Was that next? Yeah,

Dan Misener  4:13  
and in fact, the work that I did at ckdu turned into work at CBC in the early 2000s which is when I was at ckdu, the CBC employed recruiters. I know that sounds kind of unbelievable. Now, 25 years later, there were two recruiters on staff at CBC Radio, and one summer, they went from campus community radio station to campus community radio station to campus community radio station to talk to the program directors, to meet the volunteers. They were looking for people for their talent pipeline. They wanted to find people who could apply to an internship, or might get summer work or could backfill somebody else. Job, and that is how I actually got work, coming out of volunteer programming at a campus community radio station. It was because the CBC sent people across the country to look for folks to hire, and so really, really nice transition from doing that kind of volunteer programming work into something that felt like, oh, this might actually be a career.

Matt Cundill  5:23  
At the age of 24 my I want to say my gateway CBC drug was, it was probably brave new waves, actually, but I think it was Nora young and dnto where I really got into the spoken word aspect of of CBC. And I'm 24 and I'm actually in commercial radio. I'm at a station called the bear, and we are doing whip them out Wednesday, and other, you know, crazy stunts. But I found this radio to be really good. You got to work with Nora on Spark, and I think you also did some dnto work as well, right? I did. I did

Dan Misener  5:55  
a little bit of work freelancing for dnto. Those were the days when Sook in Lee was the host of dnto, and I got to work with her and a producer named Nick Purdon on a couple of different pieces, which was a ton of fun. And yeah, Nora is one of the most influential people in my life, certainly in my career, and I owe an enormous amount to her, because when she came up with the idea for the radio program, that became Spark, which just wrapped up its 17th season this year, when she came up with that idea, she reached out to me and said, Hey, I've got this concept for a show. We've got a pilot, and the CBC has commissioned the first run of episodes. Do you want to come join us? And I immediately jumped on the chance to work with Nora, because I was a fan of hers from her documentary work on ideas. She did a bunch of really interesting series. One of my favorites was the seven Heavenly Virtues and the seven deadly sins. I was, of course, familiar with her work from dnto was just a big fan of Nora, so jumped at the chance, and I spent many years working with Nora and the team at spark to make that show. And it's remarkable now that this year 2024 looking back, it ran for 17 years, which I think is a huge track record, and

Matt Cundill  7:18  
I think a lot of people today might just recognize that as just a podcast, because CBC podcasts, a lot of people just don't know when it's on, or they don't know that it's on the radio, or it's got an international audience, and they can't listen to it

Dan Misener  7:30  
absolutely. And one of the things that I really loved about working with Nora and spark this was a show that was about sort of the intersection of technology and society, and especially early on, in the mid 2000s when we began, it was that first wave of early social media. And so the whole conceit of the show was, what would a radio program sound like if it sounded like the internet, whatever that was supposed to mean. And so we really tried to embrace podcasting, which was starting to get traction with listeners, and so we did some things with Spark early on that I still feel really, really proud of. Yeah, we put out an hour long weekly radio show, and that was available on demand as a podcast, but throughout the week, as we were recording interviews, as we were putting together pieces, we had an entirely separate secondary podcast feed that included raw interviews that hadn't been edited. You know, maybe we'd record for 45 minutes, but the resulting piece on the radio was seven minutes. We put that all out, and we put it out in advance of the program airing right and so we were able to build this feedback loop into the show where we could release something on a Monday, have listeners spend time with it, respond to it, write in or engage on social, and then that got built into the eventual broadcast product at the end of the week. So it was really fun to experiment with, how can a traditional radio program and a place like the CBC, which was very heavy into CBC Radio at the time, not CBC podcasting so much, how can we sort of play with the workflows and the production schedules to take the best of both worlds, the sort of immediacy of what you can get online, and the sort of hopefully thoughtfully edited stuff that was on a weekly cadence, yeah.

Matt Cundill  9:29  
So you could basically reverse this. So a traditional essay a newspaper write an article or an op ed, and then people will write the letters to respond to it, and then the editor prints it. This is kind of the reverse, and then you can sort of include that content in so yeah, you saw the future.

Dan Misener  9:44  
That was the idea. And we were experimenting. We just saw the promise, and were excited by the promise of breaking away from once a week, one hour on the radio. What could we do all the other days of the week? Like

Matt Cundill  10:00  
and this is not heavily touted, or at least you've never mentioned it to me about how much you teach beyond just writing the blogs, because you've been teaching at Ryerson for quite a while, and you were teaching the audio side of how to create great audio. Have you always been a giver, giving back, showing, teaching, leading.

Dan Misener  10:19  
I love working with new and emerging podcasters, and I've done some of that at Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly known as Ryerson. More recently, I've been teaching at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, working with mid career, mostly public health professionals who have little or no podcast experience but a ton of domain expertise. And I'll tell you, as somebody who is concerned about healthcare in our country, I want the people covering healthcare in our country to know what they are talking about. And so there's this wonderful program there, run by a guy named Rob Steiner who set it up, and it's like, let's take mid career professionals, turn them into beat reporters, and a lot of those have been in the healthcare space. I love to teach in part because it keeps me in touch with people whose lived experiences are very outside of my own, whose professional paths are very different from my own. And I just get to see how people who are newer to this medium, both on the consumption side and the production side, are approaching it right, and my notions about what podcasting is are challenged and pushed every single time I work with, usually younger people than me, but not always younger people than me, in a very selfish way, I get a ton out of teaching just by staying connected to people who are not people like

Matt Cundill  11:47  
me who have been in this for decades. How did you become curious about audience development? Because you could have just produced great audio for the rest of your life and been in a sound room and just written stories made it better and better, but it was audience development that made you go, pow.

Dan Misener  12:06  
I had to learn how this stuff worked. I was working with my friend Steve at a company called Pacific content, and when I first started working at Pacific content, I was hired on as a producer to produce stories and write scripts and cut tape and do all of the producer things. And one of the things that we learned fairly early on at Pacific content, where all of our work was with brands, right we were working with Dell Technologies and Ford Motor Company and slack and Shopify these really incredible brands. What we learned was that just because our clients were good at marketing their own products and services, just because they knew how to sell technology products or vehicles or software as a service, didn't necessarily mean that our clients knew how to market a media product. They didn't necessarily know how to market an audio product. And we realized that making really high quality stuff, which I think we did a lot of at Pacific content, making really high quality stuff is only part of the equation, getting it in front of exactly the right people and getting it in front of them in the right way, at the right time, with the right message. That was hugely important. And I think we naively expected that our clients were gonna know how to market this stuff. And once we realized that they didn't necessarily have that audio or media marketing expertise, we said, we gotta get good at this. So I was sort of, I forced myself to learn, is

Matt Cundill  13:46  
it a case with all these companies that they can't read the label inside the pickle jar?

Dan Misener  13:51  
Say what you mean by that? I

Matt Cundill  13:53  
don't. I've never heard that before. Yeah. So I mean, you're inside a big company, and you make this podcast and you don't really know who it's for, because you're so into it, and it takes outsiders such as yourself to do a little bit of research, or you go to a company like Signal Hill, for instance, like Jeff fiddler, and they're able to say, this is where it should be for you. Yeah,

Dan Misener  14:15  
I think there's a couple of dimensions to what you're talking about here, and one of them may be the biggest challenge that I've seen is in that kind of work for hire branded podcast production world a conflation of why is it good for the brand with why is it good for any real world listener, and so often brands natural inclination is to focus more on, why is it good for us? Why is it good for our CEO's reputation? Why is it good for our business? How many widgets can we sell as a result, the what's in it for us by producing a show and not nearly enough time is spent on what's in it for the listener, you. World With so many options for how I could possibly spend my time, why would I choose a show from a brand over anything else that I could choose to spend my time with? And so a huge part of sort of my way of thinking about this, and when I came to learn in Pacific content, was that the trick of it is finding the Win Win or the ideally, the win, win, win between something that a brand wants to say or wants to be part of a conversation alongside, and what do real people in the real world actually want to listen to? And that's an incredibly tough balance to strike, and it requires not just marketing chops. It requires show development chops and it requires incredible execution every single episode, every single time, we've just been trying to strike that balance over and over and over again, and it's so easy to get it lopsided.

Matt Cundill  15:54  
Did you have a favorite podcast of Pacific content, or did you love all your children equally well? Not

Dan Misener  16:00  
all of them were my children, because I got to work with an incredibly talented team of people. I have a soft spot for the work that I did with Slack. We got to work with slack when it was a much smaller company, before they were acquired. This would have been in the mid 2010s really, as slack was coming up as almost an underdog piece of software, and we got to make a couple of shows with Slack. One was called slack variety pack, and the one that I hosted was a show called work in progress, and that was a show all about how people find meaning and identity in their work. And you could define work as somebody's professional career. You could also define it as volunteerism. You could define it as really, as broad as you'd like. And I got to work on that show. I got to host that show. And one of the most incredible parts of it was the timeline and the budget that we got to work with. We had budgets comparable to the highest of high end documentary style narrative shows, and I think the quality of the work really stands up. I'm so pleased with many of the stories that we put out, work in progress and the slack variety pack.

Matt Cundill  17:16  
Tell me why you wanted to start doing some deep dives on some of the workflows and the work processes for podcasters, and you really helped out a lot of people with your blogs. When you would write things like, well, let's talk about show descriptions for a second. And why do we write them so poorly? And maybe you should be writing them better, and maybe the first 200 words should maybe show up. And I mean, a lot of it's obvious, but yet, there's a lot of people who wouldn't really sort of heed that advice. Like, we know we should do it, but we don't do it. And so, you know, tell me how you got to the point where let's explore descriptions and show notes and the importance of those things.

Dan Misener  17:52  
What you're talking about is what I would describe as product packaging for podcasts, Episode descriptions, episode titles, Series titles, series descriptions, all of that textual metadata, right? I think this also applies to the visual identity of a show, and that can happen at the show level, the network level, the episode level, the chapter level. I mean, I'm really, really interested in product packaging as kind of a discipline within podcasting, in part because it is so discounted, and it's the place where often there is so much room for easy wins and so much low hanging fruit. And I tend to think about podcasting as an eyes first year second kind of medium, long before anybody ever hits play on an episode, they're forming some kind of impression of it based on a number of different signals or clues or cues, right? Is there episodic artwork? What is the title? Where does the title get cut off? How repetitive is the text description of the episode as it appears in Apple versus Spotify versus some other podcast app, all of these different things. And I think I had been pretty frustrated with what I will call folk wisdom around best practices. You must do this. You must not do this. This this has to be a certain number of characters. Don't go longer than this number of characters, all that kind of stuff. I saw a tremendous amount of folk wisdom without a whole lot of, let's back this up, or let's measure it, or let's prove some of this stuff. And so I would say my my interest in product packaging is largely because there's a lot of easy wins there to just tweak and adjust and improve the experience for listeners and hopefully improve the result for creators and podcasters, but also because there was a lack of anything rigorous around what tends to work and what tends not to work, it's the art and the science, and I'm. Interested in kind of marrying those two?

Matt Cundill  20:02  
Yeah, I mean art and science. That's the fundamental to any great broadcaster. And now podcaster and anything media is finding that spot between the two. And you mentioned about the packaging, and I think that's so important, because Fleetwood Mac, we know the cover of what that rumors album looks like. And I think podcast art is, I mean, it's that's special unto itself. To make a great piece of art, a lot of people mess that up by putting a microphone into the artwork, or it's bland, or there's too much writing, or they don't have it at all, or they put the episode artwork up at the wrong size, and it doesn't make it into Apple CarPlay, which I've seen happen a number of times, they'll just put up the wrong size, and Apple's just not gonna carry that artwork forward. So I guess packaging, more than ever,

Dan Misener  20:50  
I've really been struck by the emphasis that Apple especially, but other podcast apps, just in the last year or so have put on episodic artwork. I really do think it is such a easy win if you've got a show with any significant volume of episodes. I think it's especially important for regularly producing regularly in market shows, daily shows. For instance, I follow a lot of shows and popping in that up next section of Apple podcasts, where episodic artwork really is featured very prominently. A nice piece of episodic artwork might be the thing that gets me to tap your daily show versus somebody else's daily show when I wake up in the morning,

Matt Cundill  21:37  
another real Oh, wow moment came when I think you wrote a blog about podcast neighborhoods, and you took the categories, then we broke the categories out, and then, you know, in radio, for me, it's always been about, let's go to blue ocean space. So where are we going to put the radio station that's sort of just far away from our competitors that we can sort of own this piece of territory? But then what you wrote was, Oh, it doesn't really work that way. In podcasting, your neighbor is kind of your best friend, and the rising tide will lift all boats. Is that still true today? We've built

Dan Misener  22:11  
this tool, this sort of podcast, neighborhood map generation tool, which we use in nearly everything that we do, from show development to paid marketing to earned opportunities through swaps or guesting or trades or other kinds of Contra the podcast neighborhood tool really informs just about everything that we do at bumper. And the central idea is that podcast listeners can be grouped together through affinity. Listeners of Matt's show also listen to Dan's show. Maybe Matt and Dan should talk about a guest appearance, about a cross promo, about some kind of CO marketing, whatever. And we have access to this data right in both Apple and Spotify and a handful of other platforms. You can go and scroll to the bottom of nearly any series in one of those podcast apps, and you will get a list of you might also like, or used to be called, listeners also subscribed to that's the platforms telling you listeners of your show also listen to these other shows, and that's based on the platforms understanding their bird's eye view of what everybody is following and what everybody is listening to, Apple and Spotify, and those other platforms are really the only ones who could make a list like that, because they see the whole picture and they know what everybody is listening to, and All of that listening behavior is tied back to individual device IDs or Spotify user accounts. And so the central idea behind the podcast neighborhoods was, let's use that audience affinity data that's kind of buried in the bottom of a whole bunch of preview pages, and let's use that and apply some network graph analysis techniques to really build out these cohorts. And they allow you to take a big, wooly broad category like business or technology or society and culture, maybe the granddaddy of all big broad categories, and they let you break that up into smaller, more manageable pieces. And so if we look at the technology category, for instance, instead of talking about technology podcasts as this one monolithic thing, or a technology podcast listener as one broad persona, we can break that up into the different affinity groups within that. Here are the people who are interested in software development, here are the people who are interested in crypto. Here are the people who are interested in security, here are the people who are interested in accessibility, right? All of these different facets, and sometimes it's sort of sub topic based you. And other times it's storytelling style or a common host or a common network. And so we're able to generate these maps that help us understand the kind of homophily of podcast listeners, listeners who think together, flock together, something like that. And we can then do things like targeted outreach for cross promos, or we can offer to buy ads on somebody else's show, or we can propose a swap, all of those kinds of things. And to your point, around you know, what's the white space? Where's the blue ocean for new show development? It can be really instructive if you're thinking about making a technology podcast to look at a neighborhood map of the top 250 technology podcasts in Canada or in America or in the UK right now, and say what's not here, what's not on this map, what is the kind of show that we could create that stands apart from what's already out there? Because the world doesn't need your pale comparison of an existing show.

Matt Cundill  26:00  
You mentioned bumper, but I mean, anybody who does follow along in the podcast world knows that your time at Pacific content ended when it was sold to Rogers, and then you started bumper. Tell me how bumper came together.

Dan Misener  26:13  
My co founder, Jonas woost and I both worked at Pacific content, and we were both Men of a Certain Age at a certain point in our lives, in our careers, and for independent reasons, both decided around the same time that we were going to leave specific content to do something else, and once we learned that the other was leaving, we started talking. And the more we talked, the more we realized that we weren't interested in building another podcast production agency, no shade to any podcast production agency or work for hire shop. We'd seen just how many great ones were out there, and we didn't want to compete with all of the other work for hire production companies. And frankly, we had done quite a lot of that work through Pacific content. And so we said, like, what else is out there in terms of needs? What are people having trouble with? And we kept coming back to this idea of podcast growth. And growth can mean lots of different things to lots of different people. Sometimes it's a revenue thing, sometimes it's an audience size thing, sometimes it's an impact thing. Lots of different ways to measure growth, but nearly every conversation that I had at Pacific content was we would like our show to be bigger, by some measure, right? More people, more money, more whatever the person wants. And so we looked around and we realized there were not a lot of places that exclusively focused on podcast growth. There were lots of really great production companies that had an audience development team or a podcast growth team, but no agency specifically focused on not making stuff but helping creators, helping podcasters, and in our case, helping enterprise podcasters grow existing shows or build new shows designed to grow over time. And so the more we talked, the more we got interested in this idea. And it was just about two years ago now that we announced we were gonna start this company bumper. And two years on, so far so good transcription

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Matt Cundill  28:45  
So if you're into podcast measurement and growing audiences, you're kind of married a little bit to the download, which is a metric that it's universal. We've been using it for a long time. Seems to work. There's a little bit of a standard to it, but there's so much more that can be measured beyond the download. So is it time spent listening, or is there something else

Dan Misener  29:07  
I am not the world's biggest fan of the download as a measure of reach. I really don't like downloads as a measure of people, and the reason I don't like them is because download numbers seem to be falling farther and farther out of step with measuring people, and I can point to a couple of examples of how they've been falling out of step. One, we can look at Apple and automatic downloads and how changes to the automatic download scheme in iOS 17, very significantly changed the game for a number of publishers just over the last year or so with iOS 17. I think about the IAB and how the IAB defines a download, and every once in a while, they publish a new guideline, not standard guideline, and that guideline makes. To the download ever more conservative, right? Because it's always filtering out, filtering out, filtering out, right? So the I B's definition of a download changes over time. And I would also point to Ashley Carmen's reporting on a number of unscrupulous marketers schemes for artificially increasing download counts in app games, yeah, and so I have fallen out of love with the download as a measure, partly because it's so gameable, it's so Duke able, and for creators, it's not especially controllable. What are you or I gonna do as creators to influence Apple's decision to rejig their automatic download mechanism, like it's just not something I can control. And so I'm not saying ignore downloads, because impressions and impressions inserted into downloads are the coin of the realm in terms of a lot of podcast monetization, but they're not the only number we should be looking at. And so in addition to downloads, we really, really recommend looking at what we would call verified listeners. So those are the numbers that come straight out of the apple podcasts connect dashboard, the Spotify for podcasters dashboard, the YouTube studio dashboard, where you can get unique viewers. These are de duplicated proxies for people, right? It's my apple podcasts device ID. It's your Spotify user account, right, which ties back more or less one to one to a person. And we can get this on a daily, on a weekly, on a monthly basis, and that is a far better measure of the size of one's audience than a download figure. And so we would recommend, yes, look at downloads. Also look at verified listeners from the apps that actually have the vantage point to tell you how many people hit play on your show. I wouldn't look to my podcast hosting provider for a listener number, because what they list in their dashboards called listener is really better described as a downloader, and is not a measure of any kind of consumption. But we really like measuring consumption, and a verified listener is somebody who we know hit play on a given day in a given week in a given month. We would also look at what we call listen time, or what YouTube calls watch time, time spent listening. I think it's a pretty common term in much of broadcast measurement, and that's a measure that we care a lot about, because it's just so much harder to fake or bake or juke than a download number. Nobody needs to listen to your show. Nobody is forced to listen to your show. Nobody is compelled to listen to your show. And so looking at the time spent, either on a per episode basis, as an average, we're going to put out an hour long episode, and on average, people spend 4550 55 minutes with it. Or in aggregate, we published an episode last Tuesday, and it has achieved 10,000 hours of people's time across Apple, across Spotify, across YouTube. You can't make that app short of hiring a fleet of teenagers to go to Apple stores and hit play on a whole bunch of iPhones there. And so we really like measuring people and time, and we tend not to focus on downloads, unless the conversation is about revenue, where downloads and impressions inserted into downloads still tend to reign supreme.

Matt Cundill  33:33  
And bumper is in the throes of unveiling a new tool that's really going to help solve a problem for a lot of podcasters. I don't know anything about it, which is why you're gonna tell me about it, but I see it all the time. Oh, how do I add my YouTube video stats into my podcast stats? And how does it all aggregate?

Dan Misener  33:52  
I think that one of the biggest pain points for podcasters who want to understand the health of their show is the fact that there is no single source to go to. We get a different piece of the puzzle from each and every dashboard. So we work with a lot of podcasters who, if they wanted to stay on top of the performance of the show, would need to regularly log into a number of dashboards. I'll name just a couple of them. Apple podcast, connect, Spotify, for podcasters, YouTube studio, which is an increasingly big piece of people's worlds, your hosting provider, any third party analytics service so that might be chartable, or pod scribe or op three pod track Potter, right? That's maybe four or five, six different dashboards, each telling you a different piece of the story, but none of them on their own, giving you the big picture, the bird's eye view YouTube can tell you what's going. On on YouTube, Spotify can tell you what's going on on Spotify Apple can tell you what's going on Apple, but YouTube's never gonna tell you how your show is doing on Apple podcasts. And so we felt this pain. And so really, at the beginning of bumper's existence, we said, Let's build some tools just for ourselves to aggregate this information, to pull it all into one place and to generate reports, some of which you couldn't generate through any of the individual dashboards on their own, because they require that bird's eye view. They require you to, as you say, add numbers across different platforms and have the understanding of what is responsible and fair to add together and what really shouldn't be summed up, right? Those kinds of things.

Matt Cundill  35:49  
Yeah, you can add downloads to downloads, but you can't add, like, a YouTube view to downloads, and

Dan Misener  35:54  
because they're different things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Matt Cundill  35:58  
It's like having a million rubles and saying you're a millionaire, and this,

Dan Misener  36:02  
just to go back to what we were talking about a moment ago, is why we are such big fans of people and time. Because 10,000 hours on apple plus 10,000 hours on Spotify, plus 10,000 hours on YouTube, I'm going to call that 30,000 hours of time spent with my episode gets a little funnier when we talk about people, because conceivably, I could watch on YouTube and listen in Apple, but the tighter the time range you're dealing with, if you're looking at a single day, I think the likelihood of somebody listening to the same episode in Apple and watching it on YouTube within a single calendar day, that feels like it goes down a little bit. But this is why we like people and time. It's because time for sure, you can add all that together, you can sum that, and I have no beefs whatsoever with people summing time together. And so what we found was that in order to get the bird's eye view that we wanted, we had to build custom software for ourselves for our own internal use. And then we kept seeing our clients doing the same thing, but they were manually creating spreadsheets once a month or once a quarter, somebody on the team would log into all of these dashboards and export CSVs, and they would bring them into Excel or Google Sheets or Tableau or some other kind of data crunching tool, and it was just slow and painful, and it didn't allow for that kind of real time feedback loop where you publish an episode on Monday, kind of want to know how that did by Tuesday or Wednesday. It was just too slow, too manual, error prone, and people without the domain expertise were maybe adding things together that shouldn't be added together. And so what we built for ourselves was a dashboard, an internal dashboard that lets us see information from all of these different platforms all in one place, not a replacement for any of those dashboards. We're not going to re implement YouTube studio. We're not going to rebuild the megaphone dashboard or any other podcast hosting providers dashboard, but as a much better first place to check that's what we built for ourselves. And so the development is this summer, we are unveiling something that we call the bumper dashboard, which is really just an internal tool that we've had in house for a couple of years, and we're making that available to more people, because we've found it really, really helpful. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  38:25  
I think one of the first things that I ever really wanted from my metrics was to have something that could come out, like a sales report, just to say whether it was a campaign or whether it was to talk about the performance of a show. Can you just give me the one shoe that gives me the full story, and even when it comes to, I mean, a metric we haven't even discussed, but we've kind of discussed, is consumption, which is available in Apple and available in Spotify. But I'd love to sort of put that together. And for all the teeth gnashing that goes out about those two apps getting like a low lion share of the use they're offering this stuff, and consumption is really the cornerstone to any successful podcast. The same way time spent listening is on a radio station, because if people aren't getting through your show, it's your show's not that interesting. Yeah,

Dan Misener  39:12  
and layering those together, we talk about time spent. I'm a huge fan of the Minute by Minute, second by second. Retention charts that come from Apple, they come from Spotify, they come from YouTube. Couple of others offer it as well, and we see incredibly different patterns depending on which platform you're looking at. The exact same episode published to Apple, Spotify and YouTube, the apple and the Spotify performance, minute by minute, second by second, where are we holding people? Where are we losing their attention? Those tend to look pretty similar on the audio first apps like Apple and Spotify, but the minute you put YouTube into the mix, it looks a whole lot different. And strategically, I think that can be really important to. Know, because if you're putting the same piece of content, if you're dropping the same episode down three different major distribution endpoints and expecting them all to perform equally well, it's worth actually measuring how that episode that didn't include any original video content, how did that really do on YouTube, and is it worth our time and attention to focus on that platform versus another, and so these are the kinds of insights that we're trying to be able to pull out. Is what does well and to not have to check five, six different dashboards to get to that answer. Are

Matt Cundill  40:34  
you going to get some pushback from people who have short shows, or is there a way maybe that we can balance out the numbers so that, like, a short show that's like five minutes long or 10 minutes long, you know that an advertiser or somebody wants to engage with that podcast doesn't look and go numbers too small. I'm out.

Dan Misener  40:52  
I think, of course, if you're releasing five minute episodes or 10 minute episodes, you are never going to have the kind of total time spent listening that an hour long episode or a five hour long episode. Of course, you're not where you would have to get an awful lot more listeners to make up that multiple This is why, in addition to total time spent listening or some of the other ways of looking at listen time, we also recommend looking at it as a percentage. And in fact, short episodes, in our experience, the five minute, the 15 minute, you know, in that range, tend to have higher average listen time than longer episodes, right? If the name of the game is, keep your retention curve as flat as possible. Short episodes tend to do a better job of that, because they are more consumable within a single sitting or a single listening session, and there's just less of them to skip past or bail out of, right? And so in addition to total number of hours spent, which, of course, is going to be different depending on how long your episodes are, we would also recommend looking at that through the lens of a percentage where 100% is the goal. 100% means every single person who hit play on your episode made it all the way through to the end. 100% would be amazing, and we see that much more frequently on short shows rather than longer shows. But no can a five minute episode compete with an hour long episode on total listen time. I doubt it in the same way that a five minute YouTube video can't compete with an hour long YouTube video on watch time.

Matt Cundill  42:28  
So nice. We listened twice would be the best help.

Dan Misener  42:31  
And we see that we've worked on a couple of really interesting kids shows. We worked on one show with the team at Sesame Street, and it was a show called Good night world, headspace and Sesame Street, beloved children's characters helping kids have a smoother bedtime routine. Breathing exercises you want to hear Elmo help you have a better nighttime routine. The thing sells itself to parents, right? We started looking at the performance of that show, and we saw an incredible amount of evidence of repeat listening, right? How do you get higher than 100% average listen time, listen twice? To your point? Why did you build podcast X ray? We built it for ourselves, and we used it internally for a couple of years, and we found it very, very helpful. And so when we brought our colleague Stephen onto the team, he helped us get it to a place where it could not just be an internal tool, but could be available to everybody. Podcast, X ray is a tool that we use to sort of see some of the more difficult or hidden details of a show that podcast marketers like ourselves tend to need to know. What is the hosting provider for a given show? It's not hidden information, but it's not something that would show up in most podcast apps. I want to know, is this show hosted with megaphone? Is it hosted with Spotify for podcasters. Is it hosted with art 19? Is it hosted with Simplecast? Where's the thing hosted? Might also want to know, are there analytics prefixes, op three or chartable, or any of the others? Do those appear also things like historic release cadence? Are they putting out episodes every Monday, every Tuesday, sometimes Monday, sometimes Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday. How consistent is the release schedule? That's a hard thing to visualize inside a regular podcast app, and also things like episode duration, right? If I were to go look at the sound off podcast in podcast X ray, I'm going to see roughly how long your episodes tend to be when they get published. And that can give me an idea of what am I getting into, if I pitch myself as a guest on your show, or if I propose a swap or propose a trade, that kind of thing. So we built it because we wanted it, we needed it, and we didn't have anything out there that had our exact list of requirements. So we built it for ourselves, and then we said, hey, other people might want this. And so. We

Matt Cundill  45:00  
we open it up. Yeah, it's cool. I mean, I think, do they take the summers off? Have you? Because this comes up all the time, and I think the answer is, there is no real answer to this, because people are, well, what's the best day of the week to release an episode? But I figure I'll just ask you, because you've got this data that sort of sits in front and maybe from that, you can determine what would be the best day? I have my answers to this, but I just want to see if it's even close to yours.

Dan Misener  45:26  
I think there is such a desire to find the magic day of the week, the magic time of the day. There are absolutely trends that we see when it comes to calendar day and time of day, and it's so dependent on what you're trying to do. What is the goal? What's the best time of day to release an episode, to maximize downloads? Well, that's a separate question from what's the best time of the day for a language learning show focused on ESL with a global audience, where the goal isn't necessarily maximizing downloads, it's maximizing the number of people who will hit Play given all of the time zones in the world, right? Those are different questions, so I sort of, I bristle a little bit at the what's the best time, because it's what's the best time for your show, and what's the best time for your audience, and what's the best time for your goal. And I think we talked earlier about the distinction between delivery, right? Was a file downloaded and consumption? Did anybody play it and so often, if your lens, if your primary lens is your podcast hosting providers, dashboard, you're only looking at when the files were delivered. You're not looking at when the files were actually consumed. If they were consumed at all. And so are we optimizing for revenue and downloads? Are we optimizing for people to actually hit play on an episode? I could tell you a short story about this. We were working with a client on a daily show. They published Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, every single calendar day of the week or weekday, and they wanted to know, given their international audience, should they make their episodes publish earlier in the day, later in the day? And the beautiful thing about this is you can run a little experiment. You can change the release time of your show. Do it for a week, do it for two weeks and see what happens. Back it up an hour, push it forward an hour. And what they did is they ran a couple of different experiments. And so one week they moved it up an hour, and then the next week, they moved it up two hours, and then the next week, so they changed the sort of release time. It was all sort of still kind of in the middle of the night eastern time here in North America, but they changed the release time of day on an otherwise Daily Show, and the download numbers didn't change at all over that time. Downloads were downloads were downloads, incredibly consistent. However, when they looked at how many people hit play on those episodes, dramatically different depending on when the episode was released. Daily Show you're trying to appear at or near the top of somebody's feed in terms of recently released episodes. Well, how do you do that? You don't want to be too early. You don't want to be too late. It's kind of a Goldilocks problem, right? Where's the sweet spot where I am close to the top of somebody's queue, but I'm not so close to the top of their queue that they might have left for work already in the morning, or whatever else might be going on in their day. And so this focus on, let's look at consumption, and let's look at people who have hit play rather than let's look at downloads and whether or not an mp three file was transferred that could have knock on effects for really tactical things, like, should we release it 3am 4am 5am or 6am and again, to your question, well, it depends. What do you want the most downloads kind of doesn't matter. Do you want the most people listening? It matters a lot because rush hour, because commutes, because of habits. Yeah, I

Matt Cundill  49:01  
totally get that. I thought the answer was 2:37am but it's true. Like people wake up in the morning and they get a notification, and is your podcast released the first notification that they're going to see, and where does it land in your particular app with your particular queue? I did get some data back on this show, by the way, European company who asked me, they said, why is it that in the US, the downloads seem to happen immediately, but in Canada, it's later, and I could only surmise and tie it to unlimited data, where people who might subscribe in the states don't really care. There's lots of unlimited data plans. The show will come pouring in right away. And in Canada, it was taking place the next morning when people were waking up.

Dan Misener  49:46  
Yeah, I very regularly look at hosting provider dashboards, and we've got clients who use most of the major providers, and I'm always struck by how many of those hosting provider dashboards. Words, give you a day of week and time of day breakdown of downloads, as though that's supposed to tell you something other than when was the file delivered. I want the well, when did somebody hit play? And I think we get that at a daily resolution for most of the big platforms, Apple and Spotify certainly give us that daily data. I would love to have that hourly data right what time of the day did somebody hit play on my episode? I care so much more about that than when did their phone notice there was a new episode and automatically download it while they were asleep? Who cares? I don't care

Matt Cundill  50:37  
for podcasts. Is the video the podcast, or is the video a marketing tool for the podcast?

Dan Misener  50:44  
Any all? Both? Yes, of course. I very broadly think about video podcasting and the sort of media assets that are produced, because I'm a consultant falling onto kind of a two by two grid, right. There are videos you can sort of divide the world of podcast video up into sort of four main pieces. There's like, did it use video cameras in its production? Yes or No, right? So right now, I think we're making a video podcast, and we both have cameras, and we both have lights, and I'm wearing tons of makeup, and, hey, we've produced a video asset that actually contains video

Matt Cundill  51:21  
and only one of us shaved for the event. I

Dan Misener  51:25  
think the other side of that is podcast video that doesn't actually contain any real video content. It's a static image, or it's an animated wave form, or it's, you know, it's something like that. So when I think about podcast video, it's, were there video cameras involved or not? That's one major dividing line. And then the other major dividing line is, is it the whole episode? Is it the entire duration of the interview, the panel, the conversation, the story, or is it some subset of that? Is it an excerpt? Is it a clip? Right? And so if you think about those as the two big questions, video cameras, yes, no. And the whole episode versus a piece of the episode. Most podcast video fits somewhere into one of those four quadrants. And I think, depending on what you're trying to do, use the, you know, the video asset, as kind of marketing collateral for your podcast or a social clip whose goal is engagement on social, and that's about it, not expecting that it's going to drive tons of new listeners to your audio podcast feed. I think there's a space for all four of those quadrants. And I think my advice when working with clients is always just to be intentional about what do you need this piece of video to do for you. What is its job? I got no problem with a short clip that includes video made by video cameras that is meant to live on social, that is meant primarily to drive engagement on social or prompt conversation on social or create awareness on social, with no expectation that somebody's gonna leave Instagram or Tiktok or anywhere else and jump over into a podcast app, because we've just not seen that happen. I get no problem with that, but I do have a problem with people thinking, Oh, these short social assets, these sort of the marketing collateral for my episode, we're gonna put them on this social platform and expect that that's gonna do wonders for us over here in Spotify, or over here in Apple or over here on some other podcast app. And so it's about what's the job to be done for a piece of podcast video content?

Matt Cundill  53:29  
Do you have any other wish lists for the podcast industry, aside from the metrics piece, I think is large. But is there something beyond that?

Dan Misener  53:38  
I am lucky enough to have seen a lot of what I'd hoped come to pass actually come to pass. I am somebody who came up in radio, came up in campus, community radio, and then Public Radio. And my big dream, if you had asked me this question 10 years ago, it would be, I want the podcast ecosystem to evolve beyond the vestiges of radio formats. So much of what was popular and seemed to gain traction in the early days of podcasting was heavily influenced by broadcast formats, and I was just so hungry for stuff that just didn't sound like radio, or didn't sound like commercial radio or didn't sound like Public Radio. I think I am so pleased by the stuff that I'm listening to now in 2024 because the shackles of broadcast and broadcast formats and broadcast clocks, those feel broken in a wonderful way. I love that I can hit play on episodes that sound nothing at all like what I might hear if I were to turn on the radio. So that's like, a wonderful thing that I've seen just in the last couple of decades, is that evolution, my sincere hope and my big wish for podcasters, for creators, for the podcast ecosystem that we haven't seen come to pass yet. You. Is a deeper understanding of what success looks like and a more varied understanding of what success looks like. I still feel that we are in a world where people are comparing themselves to other shows, to other networks, to other creators. They look at what they're doing, and then they look at what somebody who is farther along or more famous or seems to be doing more in terms of revenue or ad sales, they compare themselves to somebody else, and they are comparing themselves to people who have entirely different reasons for making a podcast. I think success is relative to your individual goals, just like there's no wrong reason to be playing tennis and there's no wrong reason to write a book and there's no wrong reason to pick up a musical instrument and create something there are very few wrong ways to use podcasting, but I really do worry when people who make a show to get together with friends, to have an excuse to talk about a subject that they care a lot about, pursue something that they're curious about, when those are really the goals and then they compare themselves to large, commercially successful podcasts, and somehow feel like they're not doing good enough. I want a more varied, a broader and a more diverse understanding of what success can be and how we measure success and again, not derail on downloads too much. But you talk about how they are a standard, or how they are sort of universal, I actually think that works against us in many ways, because not everybody's goal should be downloads, and downloads are just a very thin, juicable measure of one facet of success, but they are not the yardstick by which every show should be measured. And so I want people to be open to the idea that there's more than one way to be successful in podcasting, and in fact, there are many, many, many ways to be successful in podcasting, and stop comparing yourself to people who have different goals

Matt Cundill  57:00  
than you. Dan, thanks so much for doing this and being a

Dan Misener  57:03  
part of the show. Thanks for having me. This is fun.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  57:06  
The sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan Surminski, edited by Taylor MacLean, social media by Aidan Glassey, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.