Does an RSS Feed Make a Podcast? – PCI 330

0:10 And welcome to Podcast Insider. I'm Mike Dell, and with me today is Mackenzie Bennett. How are you doing, Mackenzie? I'm doing well, Mike, and a happy belated birthday to. You. Ah, thank you. Yeah, it's weird being as old as old people now. . What a delightful way to think about your birthday. . Well, I went, I went to my 30th high school reunion quite a few years ago, actually. . Mm-hmm. . I was like, why are all these old people here? , just. Looking in a mirror. Just happens. Yeah. Whatever. It's better than the alternative. Yes. So, uh, anyway, today we got some news, uh, some kind of lousy news, but then some better news, and we got our normal, uh, best practice, have a pro tip. We have some blueberry stuff. Of course, we're probably burying the lead. So, uh, let's, let's just wait.

1:03 Let's just get on with our industry news and then, uh, the, the, the leading story will be in the Blueberry News. So the first article that we wanna talk about is, I'm sure, probably not surprising to anyone, but in case you didn't know, Spotify is laying off 6% of their employees according to their chief content and advertising officer Don Ostra. Um, and she's also exiting, so it's about 600 jobs. Yeah, that's, uh, that is lousy. I, I wonder if how much of that is gonna be in the podcasting section of Spotify versus the music, and, you know, all that stuff. But, uh, I guess we don't have any details about who they're laying off.

1:49 It just says that they believe it's the right decision at this time. Many of you will view this as a shift in our culture as we evolve. So we'll see where this goes. But it's been a tough week. Yeah. It's been a tough past six months for people in tech. Yeah. There's a lot of tech layoffs for sure. And of course, the next story's the same type of thing. Vox Media, which is the company behind ESP Nation, pop Sugar, Thrillist, the Verge, uh, New York Magazine and a whole bunch of other stuff are, uh, laying off 7% of their workforce. Although that ends up being about 130 employees. It's still mm-hmm. , you know, it's, it's sad, you know, Twitter laid off what, half their employees and Facebook's laid off people.

2:35 Microsoft's laid off people. Google's laid off people. You know, it's, it's, uh, I, I think what's driving a lot of this is a lot of the venture capital is drying up and these companies have to become profitable or they're not gonna survive. Yeah. Uh, box Media specifically said the decision was based on slower ad sales. Mm-hmm. that too. You know, that's, that's part of it as well. But, you know, they have to be profitable because the f the money, the free money from the, uh, investors is sort of drying up at this point, you know, for now. Anyway, we'll see if it comes back. But it's good that certain companies out there are profitable from the get-go, and some haven't really been mm-hmm. , so mm-hmm. , it amazes me that, uh, there, there's one particular company in the podcasting world that I'm absolutely surprised they're still here, , but.

3:28 I don't think we need to share the name, but I, I am familiar with the company. Yeah. So, uh, but hey, you know, they can do it. It's good. It's a story from James k Cridlin over at Pod News been reported that the number of podcasts in 22, the new podcasts in 2022 has dropped off by about 80% over 2020. There was 1 million or so new launches in 2020, and only 219,000 in all of 2022. And my speculation, and along with his is, uh, part of it is Anchor. Anchor had a good percentage of all the new shows in 2020, but those were.

4:10 They weren't real shows. Yeah. They weren't really shows. They were kind of test shows a lot of the time. Yeah. Uh, somebody called 'em Flash, flash Casts or something like that. Mm-hmm. . And, you know, that happens, you know, people want to dip their toes in it, and Anchor was a good place for that, for, for that purpose anyway, but they were automatically submitting to Apple. And of course that gets better reach because Apple's API is used on a bunch of other apps. And so it kind of gets them out there. And that's where that number comes from, is, you know, apple, between Apple and the Podcast Index. That's how they got that number. And you know, now that Anchor is no longer doing that. Uh, you know, auto, in fact, they don't even give you an RSS feed if you don't, you know, if you don't ask for it or set it up. That's.

4:58 Wild. Yeah. And, you know, that's fine cuz it goes out on Spotify and that's what most people that use Anchor just wanna be on Spotify. That's cool. Mm-hmm. . But that is more the, uh, the drop. I, I, I don't, you know, we're seeing, I wouldn't say growth in number of new shows, but we're, you know, it's steady. I would also say the Pandemic had a significant impact on this. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how, if significant is the correct word, but Yeah. Well, it would. Add more time, my understanding. Yeah. Everybody seemed to have more time, you know, a lot of people were working from home that don't normally work from home. And so they had time, you know, instead of commuting, they could, uh, create podcasts. Well. Well that, but also companies needed to still have some type of contact with their customers and their, you know, their audience. So they were like, okay, this is the easiest way to do it. So.

5:48 So it isn't really all doom and gloom as the headlines looked like, you know, and they said it was an 80% drop in new shows and, you know, well, you dig into it, it, yeah. You know, yeah. And you, it's, it's not as bad as, uh, as the headline makes it out to be. But also, uh, with, with the tech layoffs that we are seeing, I always love to hear people coming out of that situation by creating something of their own that they're able to build up and sustain themselves on and be proud of. And yeah, podcasting is obviously one of those things. So maybe we'll see a slight, slight uptick in podcasts due to that. I don't know. Ironically, the next story, and I call, we're.

6:30 Just going back and forth . Yeah. So Triton, which is a, uh, advertising company that, uh, we have partnered with in the past, uh, says podcast downloads grew by 20% in 2022. So if the number of new shows are down, well more people are downloading the existing ones. I guess , it's all I can figure. Uh, but there's been an increase in new content, increase in number of listeners and the amount of listening. Uh, there was a number in here. Yeah. Each, the average podcast listener Downs downloads 5.6 episodes per week. That's a.

7:10 Lot. Yeah. And then Wednesday is the top day for listening top hours. I mean, they really dig in here. top hours of listening is between 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM So lunch break. And most podcast listeners are younger than the general population. I don't know if that's true, know us. And they skew slightly more male than female. And there's a. Whole No thanks. There's a whole, uh, chart here that, uh, talks about it, but that's, that's cool. It's up 20% according to Triton. Now, Triton only measures certain shows, so, you know, your mileage may vary. Mm-hmm. . Anyway, so Todd and I will be in Vegas in March for the podcast movement evolution. It's the first time I'm going to evolutions. And, uh, they put out their schedule the other day, so if you're interested or you're going now, you can, uh, plan out what things you're gonna go to as all the sessions and the parties and all that stuff, uh, spelled out on their schedule. So that's good.

8:10 That's kind of early. Usually they put that out like the couple weeks before, so. Well, we, I mean, we're only a. Little, we're. A month and a half out, to be completely honest, so, you know. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, I've been to this event before I went last year in Los Angeles and I really enjoyed it just based on the attendees. Uh, this one Evolutions is definitely more industry and professional based, you know, making those connections, uh, between companies less, more hobbyist creator mm-hmm. more, um, more coming from, you know, a network, a media company, something like that. So it'll be interesting to see the move from LA to, to Vegas, you know, cuz a lot of those people were local at the Los Angeles events. Hey, I wonder. Yeah. You know, I wonder how that's gonna bode for, uh, you know, who shows up, but quite a list of, uh, exhibitors there and speakers and whatnot.

9:04 Yeah, I, I took a look at the schedule and I'm pleased to see quite a few, uh, companies that you don't always see on the schedule here for sessions and whatnot. Um, got a lot of great topics. So it, it looks like it's panning out to be a worthwhile event. Yeah. With only two of us going, I don't know how much, uh, time. I'll have to go to sessions, but we'll see. I thought this was fun cuz uh, you see a lot of these websites out there with.fm instead of.com. Yeah. I hate it. I personally hate it. Well, you, you know, FM was, was originally meant for radio stations to use mm-hmm. , but it's actually dominated by podcasting companies.

9:45 I know. And part of the reason I hate it is I think it just leads to more confusion a lot of the time. Like, it brings people in because people know what FM is, but then they like, then it just skews how they think. Like a podcast works a lot of the time. Right. Which is really, it's not important. It's me just being finicky about it and because I get up on a high horse about, um, about.fm.io.net, like all of it. So that's, this is really a me thing. . Right, right. But yeah, a lot, I mean, a whole bunch of it, they list out a bunch of 'em, like, you know, of course Anchors a FM and cash box and, uh, what is it? Uh, there's a bunch of 'em. Fireside transistor, overcast , you know mm-hmm. megaphone.

10:30 So it is interesting though, you would think that the radio stations would, would pick that up, but maybe they're not that interested in the web. I guess not. . So I guess that brings us to our best practice. Kate's gonna talk a little more about this a little bit later, but video podcasting. Uh, did you guys know that video has always been part of podcasting? Uh, delivering video via RSS has always been a thing. Now it's not a very popular thing. at this point. It's not widely available, that's for sure. Yeah. You know, amongst the listening apps, there's, you know, maybe two or three, four that do it. Uh, I know Apple does, and they've always, they always have since they started. And, uh, you know, there's, uh, there's other apps, uh, most of the new podcast apps that, uh, you know, for the podcast 2.0 stuff, they, uh, they handle video, but most people that do video for their podcast might be better off doing a YouTube channel for their podcast, and then they can publish the video to YouTube and publish the audio to the RSS feed. And that gives you, you know, best of two things. You get into the world's second largest search engine.

11:48 A lot of people don't realize that YouTube, when people are looking for things, YouTube is the second place people go after. Google. I mean, if you use your, your SEO and your descriptions and titles and everything wisely, yeah. You're gonna show up in, in the top results immediately. But, um, I agree. Putting thing, putting a video podcast on YouTube and having it not necessarily be a traditional RSS feed podcast does work in the podcaster's favor a lot more than they might think. Oftentimes when we see people saying that they wanna do a video podcast, it is right out the gate and they're like, I'm gonna do video and audio and, you know, we have to do this and we're gonna put it on social too, and they get overwhelmed. Oh yeah. That's, and nothing happens like they, they're, they're not actually building this audience. They're, they're so concerned about just creating this, this video content that they're not actually, you know, building some type of following, which.

12:47 Yeah, I mean, there's nothing at, at all wrong with video via rss. And like I said, it, uh, but it doesn't get as wide a distribution as the audio does. Definitely not because, and I, there's only so much that that's gonna change too. Yeah. You know, and but there was a cooking show that was really popular for a long time as a video podcast, and that was video only. She, you know, she didn't do any audio and delivered at VR r s s and it was quite successful. I I, I'll have to check in and see if it's still going, but, uh, you know, there's some good reasons that you might want to do an RSS video, you know, a regular podcast video versus YouTube or any of those other places.

13:28 You know, Todd says on his, uh, geek News Central show that, uh, about 25% of his audience watch the video version, but he does two separate feeds. Ne never put video down your audio feed that is, that annoys people, that. that will annoy everyone . Right. So if you're gonna do video, uh, you know, our best practice would be to use Power Press, do your audio on one channel and your video on another channel. You can publish both of them using the same post and have the players for both video and audio on your post. And that works like a champ. But again, you know, is it worth all the extra bandwidth and all the extra storage for video podcast when you can get Google to pay for it on YouTube . So, you know, you have to think of that yourself, what you know, what what works best for you and maybe do all three, do a video RSS feed and do a YouTube channel that there's nothing wrong with that either.

14:26 Yeah. Uh, my, like you can do whatever you want and that you feel comfortable with, but I would not recommend winging a whole 30 minute video that you just hope is gonna work out. Yeah. Uh, winging a 62nd TikTok is much different than Wing a 30 minute YouTube. Video. So Yeah. And, and most podcast videos that I've seen, you know, when we go live on this show or go live on any show, it's just talking head video. So it's not super compelling video in most cases. And also remember, if you're doing video, this is another best practice. I gotta put these bullet points in. But remember, most of your audience is still gonna be audio, so don't say, Hey, look at this and not explain it in the audio what, what they're supposed to be looking at. Yeah.

15:14 I would look, I would, I would recommend looking into YouTube shorts as opposed to an entire video podcast. Yeah, you could do that too. And, uh, you do the shorts or you know, TikTok or whatever, uh, what is it on Instagram and Facebook? There's a little short videos as well. Yeah. The. Reels reels and uh, you know, that's not a podcast, but that may help promote your audio podcast. Very cool. Anything else to add before we go on to the Blueberry news? No. . Okay. Yeah, we sort of buried the lead, at least I'm super excited about this.

15:54 I don't know how everybody else feels, but we've added a whole bunch of podcast 2.0 features and the biggest one was the value for value. We, uh, integrated with Albi, which is over@getlb.com if you're interested, what this allows you to do, and we explain it in the blog post we have linked here, but, uh, what that allows you to do is in some of the new podcasting apps, people can send you Satoshi's, you know, that sounds weird. That's like a hundred millionth of a Bitcoin, so it doesn't amount to a lot of money per Satoshi, but they can stream it, you know, so like in Pod verse for instance, when I listen to shows on there that are value for value enabled, I set it to like 10 sets per minute. And, you know, over the course of the show I might send 'em 50 cents or something, but it, it's pretty cool. And then you can do boosts, which are, you know, say you want to send them thousand Satoshis, which is probably about 45 cents right now, and you can send that along with a message that, you know, it just promotes interaction. A lot of the shows I listen to that are, are that way they, they have a whole section where they acknowledge all the people that are supporting them via this value for value thing, but we also added a whole lot of other features as well. Um, all of them are in our publisher system and they will all be out on Monday

17:25 in Power Press. So on Monday be sure to refresh Power Press and up or update it and you'll have all the new toys. Yeah. Suffice to say value for value was quite a bit for me to wrap my head around at first. So the non-technical explanation is that podcasters can enable this new, new feature for their RSS feed that they're able to accept Bitcoin and crypto money that people, that listeners are sending. That's what Mike was saying with the Satoshis and the, uh, you know, the boosts that you can do. It's essentially sending pennies. You know, you're sending this, this very, very minuscule amount of money. Um, you can send as much as you want, but it's just bridging the gap between online currency and your podcast. And it's really, I mean, it's really cool for the, the shows that are, you know, have this audience of people that understand how this is working and it's, it's slow, but I do see that it could, it could pick up because it's a really cool thing to just make available.

18:33 It's part of a, the, the podcasting 2.0 bigger story and capabilities. But this one's, I mean, this one's fun to, to play with and get your feet wet into crypto and Bitcoin, I guess. Yeah. It's, uh, like I said, the cool thing about it is the interaction that it provokes amongst the podcasters. Like I said, listening to some of the shows that have this enabled and are promoting it, it, it's just fun. You know, like new media show Todd's, uh, show with Rob Greenley, you know, I, I'll usually send him a boost to Graham to get a, get my comment read on on the podcast. So and it works cuz Todd has that running in the background.

19:15 You'll hear that, you'll hear something come in and then he'll read the comment and, and it, you know, provokes interaction. Uh, and like I said, a lot of these other, uh, things that podcast 2.0 does, you know, like we, you can put location of where the podcast is. So you're doing a travel show, you could throw your location in there and there are apps out there where it's a map and it shows that that podcast was in this particular place. Some of the other things, the live item tag. So if you're gonna go live, you know, streaming audio or video, you can put that live item in your settings and that lets apps that do it, uh, I think right now, uh, pod verse Fountain and so there's an Android one, uh, what is it? Podcast Addict just added that.

20:00 So what's cool about that is say one of your shows that you are subscribed to goes live, it'll pop up, uh, a notification and you could just play it live right in the app you're in. You don't have to go to Facebook, you don't have to go to, you know, YouTube live or whatever. You could just hit it there and you can listen or I think v view it in some of the apps, but at least listen to the audio live and it kind of brings back that, oh boy, it's Live now. You know, like TV used to be. . Yeah. Suffice to say the podcasting 2.0 things that we are enabling and have already done, you know, it's the, the RSS feed is far and away for a lot of podcasters.

20:45 The most boring part of your podcast and the part that like you don't understand and or don't care about, you just understand that it is a requirement and necessary to get your episodes out there. But all of the new cool things that we basically associate with modern social media and communication platforms online nowadays, all of these new podcast 2.0 tags that we're adding, like all of these features that we're adding are essentially making those things possible in podcasting. It's, it's the ability to go live, it's to be able to get paid this way. It's so that you can have the location cuz you're used to that and all of the other things. We are doing this so that you don't have to worry about it.

21:30 Right. It's, we're we're doing this for your benefit because we think it's a really cool thing to continue doing to help RSS feed, like stay relevant and stay powerful. And it's something that we are happy to do to make it available for you guys, but with, you know, it's like it's happening in the background for you. Yeah. Some of the big companies out there, like Spotify in particular really would love to get rid of the RSS feed. And the reason for that is that gives them more control over what goes on their app, which is understandable. But the, the podcast 2.0 project or podcasting 2.0 i, I keep getting corrected cuz it's not Podcast 2.0, it's podcasting 2.0 ensures that RSS stays relevant and stays op an open standard so that, okay, Spotify can choose not to use it, that's great, but others will choose to use it. So that keeps it open and you know, an open standard, you know, like emails and Open Standard, uh, you know, you can send an email to any email system out there from any other email system out there. We want podcasting to kind of stay that way if possible.

22:39 We don't talk about our YouTube channel all that much and since we were talking about video podcasting . It's kind of been a limbo. I we're, we're we're improving. Yeah. We'll be posting a lot of more stuff in the upcoming weeks and months. Yeah. Yeah. We're, uh, working on some how to videos, especially around some of these new features mm-hmm. on there and you know, of course there is already somehow to videos like how to set up Power press, how to use our publisher system, that kind of thing. Uh, we're also beefing up our documentation at Blueberry, uh, as at the same time, but a lot of those videos will also be on our YouTube channel. So be be sure to check that out. There's a link in the show notes. And of course Todd's not here today because he's probably speaking right now, or real soon , uh, this is, you know, as we're recording it's Thursday noonish and, uh, he was gonna be doing the, uh, keynote one of the keynotes at Pod Fest down in Orlando, and I believe he speaks again tomorrow on Friday.

23:40 So if you're at Pod Fest and happen to listen to this, be sure to check that out. And I think they're doing a live new media show as well. Uh. I believe they are. Yeah, Todd is, Todd is around. We're not doing a booth or anything, but he is there. And we'll be happy to speak to any one of you about podcasting 2.0 stuff or our new partnership with a phonic or Quicklinks. We've released so much new stuff recently and he is out , he, he wants to talk to you about everything. Yes. So go talk to him. Yep. He's not hard to find. All right. Onto the Blueberry Pro tip from Kate this week. Really simple syndication or r s s.

24:22 It's a 23 year old web standard that allows websites and applications to read information and content from your website or podcast. Think of it like a business card for your podcast. It informs places like Apple Podcast, Google, iHeart, Amazon, and all the rest about your podcast. It's title, description, episode title, album art, and most importantly, where listeners and their podcast listening apps can download or stream your episode. Blueberry creates the r s s feed for you as all podcast hosts do, but Blueberry enables you to host that r s s feed on your website using the Power press plugin, allowing you to send your podcast to the pod catchers from your website. So when is a podcast not a podcast?

25:12 Well, a podcast isn't a podcast when it's a video hosted on sites like YouTube. A podcast isn't a podcast when it's just an audio file embedded in a blog post on your website. A podcast isn't a podcast if it's a Twitter or Telegram spaces recording. What's missing in all of these examples, the r s s feed. Now videos can be podcasts. That much is true. However, your reach will be limited to only those platforms that can currently accommodate video. That list is slim at the moment, but it's getting bigger. For example, apple Podcasts can play r s s videos, Spotify will not, unless you're on Spotify's owned platform for the video. There are use cases, but you never want to throttle the reach of your show.

26:00 At Blueberry Pro Production, we make use of all of the tools of blueberry. And one of the best features of the pro hosting platform is the video and audio podcast availability for your show. You can have your video podcast and your audio only podcast in two feeds, both with r s s hosted on your website. The video can be embedded on the website for those who prefer that method of delivery to their audience. While the audio only r s s feed handles the rest of the pod catchers that don't have video r s s availability yet, it's the best of all worlds and it's the only time a video can become a podcast when it's riding the rails of the internet on an r s s feed.

26:43 If you'd like help turning your videos into actual podcasts and hosting those podcasts on your WordPress website, come and talk to us over@blueberrypro.com. This is Kate and I'll talk to you next time. All right, so we have a question of the week. Yeah, I like this one a lot. So the question is, I have another person managing my podcast, but I don't want them to have my login information. Can I have additional users on my blueberry account? And the answer is, of course, yes. We have account sharing, it's not too hard to find. You go into your blueberry dashboard, a blueberry podcaster dashboard once you log in and make sure if you have more than one show to select the particular show you wanna share access to.

27:35 And then you click on show, then manage, and then you'll see another item that says sharing settings. And you can invite people by email and you can give 'em access to your stats or publishing or both. And that's at the show levels. They'll have no access to any other shows on your account or your main account settings. So. This is really convenient for teams, like really convenient, especially for people that have, you know, assistance contractors, anything like, like a virtual assistant, anything like that. It's just you're able to set whether, you know, you want 'em to have access to stats or you want 'em to be able to publish. It's, it's a lot of good opportunities there to still lock things down, but get things done. Yeah.

28:19 A lot of, a lot of podcast, uh, consultants use Blueberry Pro hosting and they have all their clients' shows under that one Blueberry Pro hosting account mm-hmm. . And this way you can give all your podcasters access to their own stats without affecting any of the other shows on your network. So it, uh, it's real handy. It was a feature that we implemented, I think last year mm-hmm. and it was probably the number one most requested feature that we had, you know, since doing the pro hosting. We ab we got bombarded with this question so often and, and rightfully so. , it's . You know, it's, and it's not just pro hosting, it's any hosting, uh, or just stats. If you just have stats with us, uh, you can, you can share that access as well. So pretty, uh, pretty slick.

29:10 What about, uh, wraps it up. If you got a question you want us to answering the show, you can email me, mike blueberry.com and we can use it on the show. We can do audio or video or text or Facebook group or whatever you want to do, but get that question to us and, uh, we may use it on the show. So I think that about covers it this week. We, uh, I think it does. I don't know, I think, I think it's back to you and Todd next week, but, um, we will, will be kind of switching it up in the near future. So. Yeah, watch for that, for that , we're, we're gonna not rebrand completely, but we're gonna update our artwork and, uh, the format of the show is gonna change a little bit. Hopefully it'll be, uh, more useful for you and, uh, all the stuff we normally read at the end of the episode is available in the show notes over@podcastinsider.com. We'll catch you next week.

30:07 Thanks everyone.