Podcast Distribution: Which Platforms Are Worth It - PCI 338

0:00 You know, the important thing here is there's a lot of places to have your podcast listened to, and, and I've, I'm kind of, the mindset is I don't care why people listen as long as they listen. If they listen on my website, that's great. If they listen in an app, that's fine as well. But one thing's for sure is we definitely continue to support this increase in, uh, app functionality. You're listening to Podcast Insider, a weekly podcast bringing insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow and thrive through podcasting. With the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in. So, Mike, today we're gonna talk about advanced r s s features and a little bit about the podcasting 2.0 project.

0:49 And I think what we should first and foremost talk about is, uh, what, what is r s s and why is it important to podcasting? Yeah, it's, uh, it's one of those things that, you know, back when we started Todd, it was, we were geeks and, uh, we sort of learned how it all worked under the hood. And nowadays, you don't have to, but it's good to know a little bit of history on it. There, there is an official name for rss, but everybody calls it really simple syndication, and it's an open web standard, so it's not necessarily controlled by any one company or any person. Dave Weiner was the guy that came up with it, uh, for the most part, or at least the, uh, RSS 2.0 that we use in podcasting.

1:33 But what's great about it is being an open web standard, it keeps podcasting available to the masses. Meaning, you know, if you've got, you know, a few bucks to spend on hosting a website somewhere and a place to put your files, you can broadcast. And you're right up there with some of the, the big guys, uh, the big podcasters, you know, back when broadcasting was the big thing, you had to get a lot of permission to, to be on broadcast or even cable and podcasting. You can be anywhere. It's awesome. . You know, I think there is some perspective that's important, and we don't wanna go too much into the history, but really if we go back to the, to the beginning when podcasting started, there was really no way to, to be syndicated.

2:22 You could have a website, you could put stuff online, you know, but there was really no syndication of, of content unless you, you know, you signed the contract with one of those big companies, like you said. So there's lots of gatekeepers. And when podcasting came about, blogging was already, uh, really kicking off big, but the podcasting piece to that really opened up the space and allowed people to have syndication of the content. In other words, it could be really anywhere that people could consume the content. And, you know, apple in 2005 when they brought a podcasting to iTunes, at the time, it was quite the watershed moment. And ever since then, the expansion of where podcasts are available today is because of open r s s. And we have the ability to be syndicated where we want and also choose if we don't wanna be syndicated someplace, that's an advantage as well. But, uh, again, it's open. No one controls it, there's no gatekeepers.

3:23 Yep. That can be good or bad, depending on your perspective, I'm sure. But , you know, for, for us that like to podcast as a hobby or as a way to make some money or as a way to get your message out there, you, you're not as easily stopped as if you were doing a YouTube channel. You know, Google can decide if you're doing a YouTube channel, they can decide one day that, uh, we don't want you on here anymore. Poof, you're gone. So RSS allows really you to be in control of your content and own and build your brand. So over the years, podcasting has not really beyond what has been known as the RSS 2.0 spec. Now, apple introduced a number of features, we're gonna call them features because if we get into the weeds here, people's eyes are gonna glaze over. So did Google and a few others, and they, they introduced things that basically the technical term is, say they created their own name space and nothing else really happened this space for many, many, many, many years. And a couple of years ago, one of the pod fathers of podcasting, Adam Curry got connected up with a gentleman by the name of Dave Jones, and they wanted to build a new directory that was going to be basically the master location for really for everything, uh, for all shows. It's an open project.

4:48 And what the beauty of it is, is that directory really expanded into a project to add features to r s s. And many of those features can be seen in the directory, but the directory, again, is the repository of all podcast. There's no longer just Apple controlling the master repository of, of podcasting, and theirs really isn't even a master. Uh, the Apples is a curated list, whereas the directory of podcast@podcastindex.org really is, is everything and even contains shows that have music and have right to of other type of content. Yeah. And it's not just shows that are over there, you know? Right.

5:28 Think of podcasts as shows, but you know, again, you know, they've got bands over there, uh, indie bands that are releasing albums as podcast, meaning each song is an episode of that podcast. And, you know, that's kind of a, a new thing distributing music via that. And of course, video podcasting has been around since the beginning, but it also covers a lot of that. And there's classes that some professors do that aren't necessarily podcasts, but are distributed that way. And that's the beauty of having this directory of basically anything you wanna find in podcasting. And it's available to app developers.

6:10 So if someone wants to build their own podcast app, they can use the catalog at podcasting 2.0 or podcast index.org, and they can populate their app with everything or something they can pick and choose and curate their own list. So we have adopted a bunch of the new features that are coming out of Podcasting 2.0, and there's be a link in the show notes to our introduction page to Podcasting 2.0. And I don't want people to get too wrapped up in the weeds in really the tech, but we just wanna talk about some of the features. And again, these are new features that are coming to a variety of apps that are now starting to show up over@podcastapps.com.

6:57 They're adding some of these new features, and we are on definitely on the leading edge of introducing some of this stuff. Now, one of the features that we introduced last summer was the transcript features the ability to link to a transcript or to have a transcript if you're a blueberry hosting customer, have a transcript created by our partner and it automatically be attached in your r s s speed. And this gave us the ability to allow our player on, uh, individual's websites to show either the transcript tag or if you have a close caption capable file like you do with our partner, you actually get close captions for your show, making your podcast more accessible. And the, and the transcript feature was again, uh, born out of the podcasting 2.0 group that decided we needed to have the ability to link to a transcript, because oftentimes the transcripts are sometimes pasted into show notes, and it just was clunky and it just kinda clean.

8:00 They were stuck in, stuck in the MP3 file in the, in the, uh, in the metadata. And, you know, right. It's not, not a cohesive way of displaying those things. So there's again, a whole host of features, but two of them that I'm excited about that I've been playing around with, um, one of them is called Live Item. Now, not every podcaster is ever gonna wanna do live, and you may, maybe you're on Twitch doing some things, or maybe you wanna do Facebook Live or YouTube live, but if you ever decide that you want to add a live component to your show, you have the ability to announce via your r s s feed that you're going to be going live. And when you do go live, so that apps that support this new live item, and they, they commonly refer to it as Lid, your Lid, your show is a lid.

8:56 It will allow the apps to support this to not only give your content to your listeners on demand like a normal podcasting app does, but flip to this, this live setting so that they can listen and or watch live. Uh, some of the folks that are going live are using an audio stream service like Shoutcast is the type of, uh. Icecast is another. One, Icecast Shoutcast here, the, to the two protocols. And then some folks are doing live video and they're using, and this gets a little technical using maybe a re streaming service with an H l s output. So anyways, again, it's a little more technical and it's not as simple as just flipping on, uh, a Facebook Live with your webcam. Uh, there's a little more involved in that, but at least what happens is you decide to go the extra step and implement the, the technical side of, of going live.

9:51 You have the ability then to keep your listeners right in the same app where they're consuming podcast. And it's, it's been really, really cool. And we've seen a great, uh, reaction to it because they get a notification just like they would with a new episode being posted. And, you know, such and such show is live able to click that, go into the app and actually listen or watch the show live. And, um, the goal of the podcasting 2.0 project is, is multifold. One is they wanna keep the listeners in the app. Now if your goal is to get 'em over on YouTube live or Facebook Live, that's fine, but you also have the ability to keep them in the app supporting the app developer that is adding these features.

10:38 And the second part of this is something called value for Value. And you know, what it does is whenever the value for value function is enabled, the app developer actually gets a percentage of that value for value earnings. Mike, you wanna talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so like Fountain, an outfit, uh, that makes an app that's very good for value, for value, and it's one of the new podcast apps that are found over@podcastapps.com. But Fountain for instance, they have their own wallet system. So you go over there and sign up for a wallet, you know, you as a podcaster will go sign up for the wallet and then you would put that in your settings, in our case in Power Press or in your, uh, blueberry feed settings for value, for value.

11:22 And when somebody's listening on one of those apps, you know, there's a few of them that do streaming satoshi. So you can set, like, you know, to send 10 satoshis per minute and a Satoshi is just a, a small fraction of Bitcoin, but don't let that worry you too much. It's, uh, it's basically a way to transport money around, uh, through the Lightning Network. But what's kind of cool about it is all the app developers put in a one or 2% fee on top of that. And then like us at Blueberry, we take a 3% for developing the infrastructure for it, and you can, you know, do splits and send, you know, send some Satoshis to your guests.

12:02 Or a co-host. You could do a, you could do a split with a co-host. Yep, yep. So, and it's all on a percentage thing. And, and, uh, Dave Jones, uh, the guy that sort of invented a lot of this, uh, or rerouted it anyway, you know, he has, has a hard time explaining that. But basically the podcaster gets, you know, if you send a thousand Satoshi, the podcaster gets a thousand Sato, but there are some fees that are on top of that. So if you send a thousand, you might send you, you know, it might actually end up being say. Nine 70 or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be something like that. And, you know, then it's good for the whole ecosystem because there's money flying around, you know, even if it's, uh, you know, very small amounts of money. I mean, think of thousands Satoshis might be a quarter.

12:46 Yeah, it's like 25 cents. Yeah. Yeah. It's not super big, but it's super motivating. I know I've, I do a show with value for value o on it and, uh, you know, I love it when I get, you know, okay, I, I made 23 cents, but you know what, somebody was listening , I thought that was awesome. You know, what's really cool about it, uh, on top of that is, you know, if you wanna boost somebody, so you're, say you're listening in Fountain or Pod verse or you know, any of the apps that cover that your listener as they're listening to you, whether it's real time and a live feed or if you're just listening to it as a podcast, you can boost something and you, and you can put in a little comment. And a lot of hosts will read those comments after the fact, of course.

13:29 And then in the next show they'll might, you know, thank all their boosters over the time between episodes or whatever. And it's just a really cool way to also get people involved in the show. For me, it's about the engagement. I've never seen engagement as high. You see get, well maybe one email per episode. And there's this whole lingo that is developed with this ecosystem too. So when Mike says Boost, the actual full word is Boosto gram, right? Right. Because it's a boost with a gram, with a, with a message. And the best part about this is, and again, you may not be in favor or like even crypto at all, but with a Sotoshi being a hundred millionth of a Bitcoin, you can use your debit card like Mike said, in, let's say you put $20 in your wallet, $20 worth of Satoshis, which is again, a hundred millionth of a Bitcoin.

14:21 You then have the ability to make micropayments to shows without the high processing fee. So I've had a PayPal link on my website really since the beginning. And if someone tried to send me a dollar via PayPal, well PayPal's gonna take like 45 cents of that in transaction fees. Whereas if you send someone, let's say you send them a dollar's worth of Satoshis, then you're paying like a penny, a penny processing fee to get it, um, to get it sent. So it allows you to make these micropayments and at the same time have this interactivity from the app directly to the podcaster. And again, we're staying in the app. We talked about live, staying in the app, we talked about value for value.

15:06 All this is happening in the app that you're listener is listening to the show Prom. Now, not every app has this enabled, it's being added slowly to different apps. But again, if you go over to uh, podcast apps.com, you'll find the apps that support value for value. It really is, like Mike said, even he got a thousand Satoshi, which is like a quarter, you know, most of us wouldn't get too excited about someone toss us a quarter or you maybe find a quarter on the street, right? But it's the comment that accompanies that quarter or a dollar. And again, it's a value for value, meaning some people are gonna send a quarter, but some people might send a hundred thousands at Satoshi, which would be like 26 or $25, and we see that happening, blueberry or cuz we're taking a percentage, we're starting to see, and at this time it's still very, very early days cuz it takes time to educate an audience.

16:07 You have to enable it in your feed, you have to talk about it on your show. You have to get folks to start using the new podcast apps@atpodcastapps.com. There's an education piece to it, you know, how get it set up. And all that. But even in the short time that we've had this enabled, our podcasters have made more than 600, I think it's around $625 is what I've estimated in these early days. Now we expect that cuz we see the growth rate and audience members moving over my own personal show, um, now is bringing in a couple hundred dollars a month through these types of donations on top of PayPal and on top of advertising.

16:48 So it's additive of money streams. So again, but these are just two, actually three of many features with this new project. We've got transcript, we've got the chapters function, which we haven't talked about, location credit. We've got the ability, again, through these new features to add value to the app credits is basically, it's just like TV credits. You're able to say, okay, here's I'm the host, here's my co-host, here's my guest. And you're able to document that at an episode by episode level. So there's lots of cool things within podcasting 2.0 that are kicking off.

17:30 We'll be adding more features over time and adding to our podcasting 2.0 introduction doc. So stay abreast of that on our website and the blog. Anything further we need to talk about on podcasting 2.01? Yeah, one, one thing cool about credits, uh, remember a few years ago Apple added hosts and guests to Apple Podcasts, but it was by invitation only and it was really only the big shows and they've never really went any further with that. So this, now you can start doing that and that shows up on several directories and several apps, and you can do it both, you know, with the credits you can do it also, you know, by a show level.

18:11 So like with this one, we would have Todd, me and Mackenzie as the co-hosts and you know, we'd have a producer and so on and so on in the credits for the show. But say we have a guest on there, we can actually put that guest also in the credits for that one episode. And that, that, that's pretty cool. And there's other things like something coming hopefully soon we're working on it and Podcast Index is working on it does cross app comments. They, they don't have it quite worked out how that's gonna work. But the, the idea is, is you'll be able to comment on an episode inside the app and everybody that's in those apps that use Cross App comments can see those comments and comment back regardless of what platform that they're, you know, normally chatting on, you know, like Mastodon and Twitter and whatever else.

19:04 And all those comments come home to a base post and it is viewable in the app. That's something that we've never had before. It used to be you'd have to come to Apple to do a review and you'd have to go to Twitter to comment on a post or you go to the person's blog and comment on the post and, and whatever. This will consolidate that in theory. And like I said, that's something that's on the cutting edge right now. But suffice it to say that this whole podcasting 2.0 and adding features to RSS and adding fe you know, basically adding features for podcasters and listeners through this project, it, it has a feeling for me that this thing is like brand new. Again, we were in the beginning of podcasting and every new little thing was just like, oh boy.

19:48 And then Apple came in and it sort of stopped and everybody just said, oh, okay, we'll just go with Apple. That's easier. Now we're starting to push forward on new features and, and things we've always wanted and I love. It. You know, one of the things that as, as a hosting provider we've ran into challenges before is we've had maybe an advertiser come to us and say, Hey, we want to run an ad. And one of the cases was in France, how many French podcasters do you have? Well, when you sign up for service, we don't ask you where you live or what country you're in. And we've had other deals come in where someone said, maybe we, we need somebody in in Kansas. You know, they want to do a geographic type buy.

20:32 So I was really had never had the ability to, unless I sent out an email to all of you saying, Hey, where, where, where do you live? If you live in this location, send me, uh, some info back. So one of the features that is now is the ability to set your location. You set your, your location for your show and you can even do it at the episode level. But not only will it give some geographic reference for the apps to know where content's being created, it's also a great thing for us so that when we're trying to reach someone in Boise, Idaho, we have the ability to go in and say, okay, you know, how many shows list Boise or list Idaho as their origin point. And then we would have the ability then to reach out to you and say, Hey, we've got a, an advertiser that wants to advertise specifically on shows coming out of Idaho.

21:21 We have the ability to reach you in a way that we couldn't reach you before. So even though we are big on privacy, we've been big on privacy for listeners for years, the way we set the system up, we didn't even know where your shows originate. So the location tag is a dual purpose. Again, the ability for me to say, Hey, let's, let's help this podcaster on this particular location. And on the opposite side, the app developers are able to highlight where your shows are from. So this is some of the things that are now possible with some of this podcasting 2.0. It helps keep podcasting it free and open standard for the web and again allows, as Mike said, for innovation in the podcast industry. I'm having.

22:06 I'm as like Mike having a great time with this and I've been doing this now for 18 plus years. Uh, Mike, you've been in this game now 17 years, so you know, collectively when we're both excited, I think that saying something, and it helps with alternative funding for shows and sure we want you to make money through advertising. We wanna make money through listener donations, through PayPal, Patreon, buy me Coffee, all that stuff. But this value for value thing really is, in my opinion, the most exciting part about this because I get engagement, I get hu I get engagement from my audience members like I I've never got before. And the reason it is, it's because right in the app, they can engage you from the app. They don't have to go to email, they don't have to go to Twitter, they don't have to go to Facebook, they just send a boost with that message, um, that says, Hey, I agree with you, or I disagree or Keep it up, or thanks for doing the show or those types of things and I carry the day in motivating you continue to do your podcast.

23:06 So I think that's part of the reason why podcasting two point, it was super important for the podcasting space and for you as a content creator. Yep. And uh, like I said, just keep watching, uh, this podcast on uh, podcast insider.com and uh, other places for new features coming out. And if you find a feature that you don't have that you might want, let somebody know and uh, we can always suggest it to them. Uh, that's the other thing about this project is it's an open project. So, you know, suggestions are, uh, are taken. I think we've about covered it. What do you think, Todd? I think so too. So, uh, again, just go to blueberry.com, search podcasting 2.0, the search bar, and you'll get all the details and how to implement it within your own shows.

23:54 Thanks for joining us. Let's meet up next week. And in the meantime, for more information to subscribe, share or follow, check out the show notes@podcastinsider.com to check out our latest suite of services and help Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the ease.