Hello from Podcast Movement – PCI 309

0:11 Everyone welcome to podcast insider. My name is Todd Cochran and I'm joined of course by my cohost, Mr. Mike Dell. Mike, how you doing? Oh, it's doing pretty good. Uh, like I said, I need some of that red bull that you're, uh, you're doling out there. . Yeah, absolutely. I tell you, we've been, uh, putting in the, uh, putting in some long hours here in preparation for really what we're, what we rolled out yesterday and, uh, pretty excited. If you're a blueberry hosting customer, you have the ability now to monetize essentially immediately. Yep. Make some money. That's right. Programmatic advertising has been rolled out and, uh, details are, uh, in the dashboard. You can link to the blog post and really to get started.

0:51 All you gotta do is click to make money link and you see a, a menu item there for programmatic advertising, fire that up. They'll let you know, read the terms of service and, uh, fellow some information for those of either are on a blueberry publisher. In other words, you're publishing on the blueberry dashboard only, um, right then and there, boom, you're set and, uh, ready to go for those of you are on power press. Make sure you have the latest version of power press downloaded. And, um, you'll find a new tab in the setting section of power press. It says, make money, click on that. And that's gonna take you back to the dashboard, but the main difference is you'll still go through the approve, the terms of service. You'll still answer a few questions, but when you get done your show, you'll see a sync button.

1:32 And what that does when you hit sync is it's going to update the links on your post so that they're no longer content that blueberry.com or ins.blueberry.com, but they're gonna be mc.blueberry.com with a whole bunch of other string of information, uh, there. And, um. Yeah. And you know, just make sure you, you sync up and, uh, it'll bring you right back to your WordPress and yep. You're on. And it'll do all your back episodes as well. So that's right. You. Know, all your back episodes will be monetized. So it really turns out the caution is if you're a blueberry pro customer.

2:14 Yeah. Matter of fact, we're gonna flash a warning to you. If you try to enable programmatic, excuse me, and you already have a, uh, active ad campaign with that insertion, those two systems do not, and it will not work. Together. They don't work together yet. I mean, that may be something in the future. But, uh, as of right now, if you're running any ad campaigns manually on our insertion system, you don't wanna do this. No, no. And matter of fact, it won't allow you right to start. You have to deactivate all of the added insertion campaigns in order to allow this to work so you can run one or the other.

2:56 So it's a good option for you. You're a prosing customer. You're not using ad insertion piece. Now you can go ahead and, and enable a programmatic. Yeah, you can do it by show. So if you have more than one show, especially pro customers, you're, you can monetize the whole network or just one or two shows, whatever you want. I've been running this programmatic now for a while, two or three months mm-hmm . And uh, this shows on we've had several others on doing testing and what we want to really put out there is you as a podcaster, if you have an ad that comes across your, uh, show, that is basically thought, mm you know, maybe it's not English. Maybe it's it's in Spanish. That's. Of course shared English podcast. Yeah. If you're an English podcast, let us know, uh, immediately that, or if you can send us to audio file with that add in, because one thing that you should not hear at all, you should hear no companies representing politics, gambling, religion, adult, alcohol, vaping, or cannabis. Now in the future, we may make it available so that you can select from like 30 different categories to the ones you want to include.

4:01 But for now you're in all categories, they try to match up by show type show category, and all those things. They try to do a good match. And geo targeting as well. So yeah, you know, me here in Northern Michigan I'll get ads for Michigan and, uh, somebody in Texas will get ads for Texas possibly. Right, right. Yeah. So you won't, you know, again, and ads can change hour to hour, minute to minute listener to listener. So really your audience will have a, a, the full breath and, and the payment rates vary too from hour to hour, really minute to minute where we're watching some of that reporting come in. It's pretty remarkable. You know, sometimes they're running as high as $15 CPM and then 7, 8, 9, 10, and 1112. And then you see one come in, maybe it's some weird hour at four o'clock in the morning that was on the east coast was, you know, at six or something like that.

4:53 So it's really varies upon time, but people are listening to your show. So it's a big step for all blueberry hosting customers. And really the way I kind of wanted to preface this, and we have a service page for this too, you'll be able to review is that for shows that are smaller, we've worked hard over the years to try to monetize them really in a way that is host endorsed, like, like a lot of the bigger shows are, but those advertisements just don't scale up. They never come. It's long time in between each. So it's pretty discouraging. So this is a good bridge. So if you're a smaller show, or even if you're bigger show, you don't have any inventory, you can turn this on today, run it for two weeks and turn it all. You don't have to run this continuously.

5:38 It can be run for a short period of time. You just really, all you do is enable it sync. If you're a power press, if you're on publisher, that's done. All you do is opt in, opt out, so it can be turned on and off. So once you're in, it's not like you're locked into this at all. And we're also, you know, this is not automatically on all accounts or anything. This is totally opt in. We're not going to throw ads into your show. No, if you didn't ask for them. No. So again, this is something that you can opt into and decide whether you want to try. And we're finding you so far a great experience. Again, we've worked hard with our partner on this and, uh, they are very responsive.

6:18 Mike has a direct line to their top tech person that if something comes across, that is not supposed to be firing, we will get with them immediately and, and they'll kill whatever that may be. But again, uh, we've had very, very big and oftentimes brands are worried about brand safety being on podcast, where we're also highly concerned about podcast, audience, brand safety, too. We wanna make sure your audiences have a great experience with this. Yeah. Um, we wanna hear your feedback too, so you can email me directly onTodd@blueberry.com or if you feel something's not appropriate email Mike and I together, and you can capture that audio file or who the advertiser was. Again, I don't expect it, but we're just, you know, being forthright here, we wanna make sure that, uh, your audience has the, the best experience.

7:05 And this is quite new for us as well. So, you know, we've not experienced a lot of this, so we're, yeah. We're, you know, just feeling it out and I think it'll work out great. Our partners in it seem to be very responsive when anything has gone wrong. Mm-hmm but, uh, you know, like I said, I've been testing it now for probably a week, week and a half. And, uh, haven't heard anything too crazy on my shows. yeah. So, uh, and again, uh, we have a direct line to their top of their tech stack. And if there's a, uh, there's anything that happens, we'll, we'll be, uh, and here's another thing too. You're not gonna hear an ad in every episode, right. This is probably gonna be around 80% fill. You might not hear an ad and your listener might, right.

7:47 So that's just thing too is you're not guaranteed. We, we expect about an 80% fill rate, but volume's gonna grow over the first 60 to 90 days. Right. So we're gonna see how this goes, but, uh, we encourage you to get this turned on and give it a try and get, get the money flowing payments. Uh, first round of payments will happen probably 90 days after you say yes. So here we are, August 18th. So it's September, October, November. So probably in around Thanksgiving timeframe. Yeah. Uh, when you would expect the first check, so just, you know, put some, you know, reality to where, you know, how, and once they start coming, then they'll come every month. So, uh, again, but we do have a minimum, a minimum is $50. Mm-hmm . So when you show earns 50, then we'll issue and it's all via PayPal. So we're not issuing checks.

8:35 This is strictly a PayPal transaction. So you do have to have a PayPal account to get paid. Yep. And also there can be pre-rolls and pro post rolls or one or the other. Right. So we have heard some post rolls, not. Many, not a ton, but, uh, I've heard a. Few to kind of be Frank the audience. I don't think a lot of those post rolls are gonna get listened to, but that's if the, a hazer wanna be in there. So be it. All right. And, uh, make sure you talk to your audience about it too, as you're, as you're rolling this out. All right. So let's go ahead and move here to the regular news. Mike ads may be coming to apple podcast. What is this?

9:16 Yeah, Apple's looking into significantly ramping up its ads business, according to Bloomberg, uh, the guy that's in charge of ads or talking about, they wanna monetize the whole stack, including apple podcast. Now, I don't know what that means, whether it's gonna be display ads in the app, or if it's gonna be injected ads between shows or something like that, but, uh, could be any of it. Hmm. Well, I'm recommending everyone use the fountain app. Yeah, there you listen. The podcast, that's a great podcasting app and you can actually earn money by list using the fountain app. And, and you can boost us. Now. That's right. Latino listener report released by Edison research.

9:58 Yes. So I went through this extensively yesterday. There are some browsers in there mm-hmm yeah. I think watching part of that, between calls . I think for those of you that are doing a podcast, it shows that the Latino community are listening to a lot of English space shows. So it's a demographic that you may not be aware of. And there was some real Wowsers in there in, in audience makeup. And I think that, uh, for any podcaster, it's just a good one to go through the 48 slides take, uh, 10, 15 minutes, if you really read through them and understand the implications of it. Um, I did do an extensive review of this yet.

10:38 And of course there's the Edison actual, uh, on YouTube as well. There, there demos on YouTube. And again, I had commentary with Rob Reley yesterday and a new media show, but yeah, definitely checked this Latino listener report out. So I have no information on this next one. What is step into the podcast bus? It's a, uh, mobile, uh, recording studio. Uh, it's in a, uh, who it was, but yeah, Daniel LDE built a school bus into a mobile recording studio and I mean, it's fully equipped it. Uh, there's not a, a lot of pictures of it, but, uh, it looks like, you know, it's, it's not a school bus. It's, it's like a, uh, you know, commuter bus or something like that, but pretty cool. Uh, kinda reminds me of what Michael Mike Wilkerson did with the podcast bug. I don't know if you've seen that, but it's a VW beetle that he, uh, brings around to different conferences and whatnot. Uh, you can actually rent it for your conference, but, uh, I don't know this, uh, this bus I think is in the, uh, New York area.

11:41 Uh, yeah, it's in the general. Oh, wait a minute. So is it, is it focused on the Jewish community cuz it's this is being reported in the Jewish journal? Yeah, I think the, the, the guy that built it is a, uh, Jewish podcaster. Oh, okay. But you know, it's actually in Los Angeles, I just found. Oh. Awesome. But, uh, it's pretty cool. Uh, read the article and, uh, it'll tell you all about what he did there, but he's got some re twenties and it looks like even a video studio and part of, you know, kind of in the back there, it looks like, uh, it could be good for video, nice, you know, couch and all that. Anyway, kind of cool. And I'll have a link to the podcast bug there too. That's kind of fun to look at. All right. Hey, congratulations, James Freeland, pod news for me named one of the thought leaders in podcasting, according to Frank Rek, I don't know how to pronounce his last name. .

12:27 Yeah. He's in there with about six or seven other people. Most of 'em I haven't heard of, but I saw James in there, so I thought I'd just give him a call out. Cool. Lisson is, went on a drunk buying spree again, they bought German ad company. Juli. Yeah. So, uh, I was, uh, kinda curious, you know, this is like their fifth acquisition in a year. Yeah. Something like that. I can't, you know, most companies are lucky to do one acquisition a year and they've done five. It's gotta be chaos. Yeah. Over there. Hopefully they can pull it together cuz , it's gotta be, you know, trying to mix cultures. Oh my goodness. It's gotta be crazy. So this one's probably won't be as bad because I think that team just is gonna remain as they are so very, very interesting Odyssey.

13:13 A U D C Y has Odyssey. Layoff is uh, touches podcasting business. So what happened there? They started, uh, laying off people. They have, uh, cadence 13 pineapple street to 2,400 sports studios and they're not gonna be exempt of a round of company wide layoffs. So, wow. That's uh, not cool, but they're talking about, uh, 5% of the total workforce or about 250 people. Uh, but Odyssey, uh, you know, is kind of a combination of a bunch of companies. Uh, yeah. I feel, I feel for people, you know, that, that get laid off like that. Luckily knock on wood, uh, you know, our business is pretty strong and that's not universal, you know?

13:55 Yeah. And, and a lot of it just do with ad business yeah. And content creation. So the, you know, a lot of these companies, you know, we keep hearing these stories and this is another one where a company that's com almost completely reliant on ad revenue is laying off people because of the retraction in the advertising market. You know, we saw this in 2008 when the big, big recession hit. Now, we were still at that point, pretty much a service company. And, and we, we weathered the storm very, very well. Yeah. Um, I don't know what's gonna happen with the current economy of the United States, at least, you know, it's looking like maybe a little bit of a recession, maybe not. Well, I think we're technically in one. Yeah. How long it lasts, if it's soft or hard, we don't, no, we know inflations still outta control, but the, the situation with the, when people get nervous, they start cutting ad dollars.

14:44 Doesn't change anything for people that are podcasting, you know, for our customers are largely content creators who are, you know, doing their own thing, building their own businesses. And, uh, advertising is often a plus, but not a requirement. But, uh, and we haven't heard any, you know, talking with the programmatic team they're, they're seeing businesses strong on that side. We'll see. I with the programmatic, I think, uh, a lot of people were spending the, the high dollars on ads may, uh. May shift. May shift down to the programmatic, cuz it's a little bit cheaper and they get pretty good reach with it. That's right. Best practice backups have a backup strategy. Yes. Well.

15:25 I found out this myself here recently. Yeah. I was, uh, thinking about that. Plus I had a customer that had the, had a problem that, uh, they wanted to migrate from their previous host and when they told them that, uh, immediately got shut off and they didn't have backups of their files. Wow. Yeah. So they. Canceled or they. They just shut 'em off said, okay, you wanna leave? Go. Wow. Yeah. Wow. It not cool. But uh, can we say who they, were they paying for that service? No. Oh. So anyway, I'll, uh, I'll tell you about it off. Off. So here's the thing. If you're gonna move and you're getting free hosting, don't tell 'em, you're moving until you've moved.

16:05 Right. Exactly. Wow. But anyway, so as far as a backup strategy, make sure you keep your media files, uh, somewhere, preferably somewhere in two places. Like I said, get a removable hard drive, uh, you know, back 'em up there or a thumb drive, you know, you can get a one terabyte, right. A thumb drive. Now that's what I use and it works great. I put all media files there. I swap it out with another one I have in the safe. Uh, that's good. Or you can back up to the cloud. Uh, you know, I don't know if Google drive or Dropbox, if you wanna pay, you know, for extra storage, you could do it there. Or AWS has a thing called cold storage, which you, which. Yeah. That's pretty geeks. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely a geeky thing. But uh, but definitely try to keep your media files. Like I said, of course, if you're hosting with blueberry, we kind of already have your media files and we're not gonna lose them.

16:55 Hopefully. Yeah. You know, one thing that happened with me is cuz I was one of the Guinea pigs early on when we, uh, started doing hosting and uh, back in 2008, I had some media files that were kinda all over the place. Mm-hmm , you know, and cuz those early days were really kind of difficult as a podcaster. And I discovered four or five of my files never made it over on the migration. And the only reason I figured that out is we were doing some testing on this programmatic and it gave me a report, said these four or five files are Mia. So I went to my backup and I, you know, I've got everything in, basically it's a, it's a network attached storage device plus an external hard drive.

17:35 But I just had to kinda remember, okay, where's that folder. And I had to dig around a little bit, but what on the, I had it. So I was able to pull files those four, four files from, from 2008 and drop 'em on and, and we were good. So, but that was just, you know, one of those fluke things because you know, it's, that's what happens when you're, you know, Mike, you and I kind of become the testers of everything and we test live on our production stuff. So sometimes things can go sideways. Right. But yeah, like I said, it's, it's just real important to at least have your media files. Now I do another thing. I, I back up my, uh, RSS feed as a text file. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. And, and it's not hard to do. You just, you can load it in Chrome and uh, in most cases you just copy all the text, put it in a text file somewhere, do that every so often that way, you know, if something catastrophically goes wrong with your site and you have to start completely from scratch. Yep. You know, but if you're hosting with blueberry and you've got that all set up, you have a blueberry directory, we can actually import your feed back to your website. Once you've recovered it, I've done that all the time. So, you know, with us, we have that backup also for you.

18:43 But it's because we have a directory. So we have a full list of everything that we've pulled from you. Now, there might be a rare occasion where something to stop pulling, but that's pretty rare. Yeah. But uh, you know, just have a strategy, you know, just in case something goes sideways, cuz no matter what platform you're on, what you're using, things can go. Wrong. Yeah. Especially when they shut you off, when you said you're moving. Yeah. That's crazy. So don't tell anybody you're moving off a free platform. Well, you. Can tell us if you're gonna move from. Us. We're cool. We'll keep it a secret. Yeah. we're cool. But, but don't tell your current host. Yeah.

19:25 All right. Some more blueberry news here of Chris, we talked about the program advertising at the top of the show, but we got a blog post out connecting with your local community. This is a blog post that was put together by Merrill one of our writers and uh, great article on how to connect with your podcast community. But next week it's kinda crazy around here. What are we doing? Well. We're heading off to, uh, podcast movement and we're also hopefully releasing a, uh, new thing on Monday, which. That's right. Hopefully knock on wood, everybody drinks their red bull and they're good and we'll have it done. And uh, anyway, Mike me, uh, Todd McKenzie and Cho, uh, will be with us there at, uh, podcast, move us in Dallas.

20:06 So make sure you stop by the booth and say, hi, pick up some swag and we'll be happy to see you. I'm doing a session. I think it's on Wednesday. Yep. So, uh, yeah, it is Wednesday. So make sure you look in your, in your menu, um, doing something on Friday too, doing a live new media show on Friday, Mike, you've got something going on. Yeah, we're gonna do, uh, the show live on the floor. Uh, there's a, a recording booth that I've scheduled for us to do a show. Whether you'll be there or not. I don't know, but I'll grab somebody and we'll, we'll put out a show, uh, probably different format, but uh, all right. We will at least have something for next. Week. Okay, outstanding. Again, if you're at podcast booth and say, hello, come by, get some swag. We got some cool stuff.

20:50 Gonna have a cool video running in this booth. Uh, lots of festivities at podcast move like a big family reunion. Uh, look forward to seeing everyone in Dallas. But uh, we do have a blueberry pro tip from Toby and let's go ahead and fire that. Hi there it's Toby Goodman here being a British male of a certain age. I've always dreamt of living the life of James Bond, knowing who's behind what and trading in international secrets, the kind of secrets, only those with the highest clearance levels can be trusted with. But obviously that never happened, but let's face it. There's a reason. Some things need to be kept well away from the public domain.

21:32 Perhaps you like the idea of having a podcast, but have always felt rather protective of your intellectual property. Maybe there are legal restrictions in your industry or simply you have no desire to cast your pod far and wide now. Sure. For most podcasters, the idea that everyone and anyone could be listening is the ultimate dream. But you are not most podcasters you're you and maybe you just don't want or need to be widely identified. Perhaps you'd rather float inconspicuously like Mr. Bond only connecting classified information with listeners on a need to know basis. That's where private podcasts come in. And the good news is you don't have to be in her majesty secret service to have one, a few days back, I was contacted by a pharmaceutical company who wanted to connect a group of medical professionals. They're part of through a podcast, but they needed a safe place due to strict regulation in the industry.

22:30 They told me how much they knew a well produced podcast would help but needed assurances. We could keep the content safe and private. So the whole idea didn't end up being a doctor. No go. But that's when I told them about private podcasting. You see with a private podcast, you can enjoy all the benefits of podcast tech, but narrow the distribution to those who you choose to give a license to listen. So if you are looking at creating an effective internal way of communicating with your people, perhaps it's time to focus your golden eyes. Last one, I promise on a private podcast, safe in the knowledge you can say this podcast is sorry about this for your ears.

23:18 Only when it comes to keeping those extra special ears listening and engaged, blueberry, private hosting gives you the Fort NOx like levels of security while the pro production team give your listeners the kind of audio experience akin to a luxury holiday. If that sounds good to you head over, come say hi to us. Blueberry pro. Thanks, Toby for the blueberry pro tip on private podcasting. Great piece there let's go ahead and move on to our question of the week. And here's the question it's from Ethan. Our podcast network started with one show.

24:00 These days we have seven shows in network, but we're storing all those shows in the same blueberry folder, not great for content management. Can we reorganize our blueberry catalog of shows into different folders where that affect the URLs of the MP3s will power press show us the new folders. Yeah, it's gonna be a bit of work and, uh, back to our backup best practice. Uh, if you have the files, it's gonna make it a little easier for you, cuz we're not able to move them between folders, besides that we wouldn't know which ones are, which yeah. And yes, it will affect the URL to the file simply because it's gonna be in a different folder. So the URL will be in a different folder. Uh, we have a thing called multi-program mode inside a power press.

24:45 And if you're have multiple shows, you can turn that on. And then when you go to upload you select which show you wanna upload to yep. Keeps the media separate. It keeps the stats separate. Now you could just pull the bandaid off and say, okay, from here on forward, we're gonna do it separately. And all the previous ones stay where they are. Uh, you know, I've had a few customers do that, but uh, it's all doable. Uh, it depends on how much manual labor you want to re-uploading files. Yeah. And, and your stats can't move. Don't move. Yeah. That's the challenge is we can't move the stats from one account to the other. So yeah, multiple shows. The best thing to do is ask Mike for help to make sure that you're essentially what it is, is those files go into their own bucket and it's signed to your keyword and that's really a big piece of it is.

25:32 And that's why your URL will change to your media file. And that's all part of the pro stats processing. So, uh, it has to be in the right folder. I've actually recently I used to upload geekness central audio and video to one folder before. And I've switched that now. And largely because what I'm trying to do is the listens to the audio are higher than the video. And I want my media kit to have a higher, higher number on the average downloads cuz my, the video would draw me down right. In, in the average. So I've started separating mine as well. Yeah. Now, now you're not going back and re-uploading all. The video are you? No, no, no. I'm just, I draw a line, the sand and then moving forward.

26:15 Yeah. That's probably the best, but if you really wanna move them, you know, the, the existing ones slightly change each of the file names when you re-upload them that way it'll the, then forward, it'll go into the stats for that program versus the network. That's right. And of course, don't forget we have subaccounts so you can have a master count and then you can assign the subaccounts to your other host so they can get access to their individual stats. Yeah. That's, that's a big, big thing for pro customers. And for those of you that just have a single show, you can still have up to five. Uh sub-accounts on a single show. So let's finish up here. If you've got a question you'd like us to answer a show, drop an email to Mike blueberry.com, audio, text or video, and we may use it.

26:58 You can also post a question on the blueberry podcasting Facebook. Group, best place for support with any blueberry products or services. Our tickets system tickets give the whole team access rather than direct emails or calls. And of course you can go to blueberry.com/support. We've been coming to you this week from the new media production student co water, Michigan and Mike Dell's world, student traverse city, Michigan produced by the blueberry pro production team. Yep. You can fill out our listener survey and we appreciate it. If you did over at surveys.blueberry.com/podcast insider. You can also schedule one on one with me. Hosting customers, only emailTodd@blueberry.com. You can schedule a tech checkup with me, uh, hosting customers, only email mike@blueberry.com.

27:42 You can always send us your podcast sticker and a self address stamped envelope, and we will send you a blueberry care package. And if you just send us a self address, stamped envelope without a sticker in it, we'll still send you something back. The mailing address is on the blog post for today. Podcast insider.com or you bring. The show Dallas we'll give you we'll hand it to you. Oh yeah. If you're Dallas will give it to you. That's right. And we're gonna have some cool swag there. This this go round. It's been our pleasure bringing the show today. We'll see you next week from Dallas. Everyone. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. Take care.