What’s Ahead for 2023?

0:10 Welcome to Podcast Insider. My name is Mackenzie Bennett, and I'm joined by my co-host, Mike Dell. How are you? I am doing good. Happy New Year. It's the first episode of 2023. You know, I think all weeks back from the new year. Should be a four day , should be four days. . Yeah, that's true. Well, you know, we did all right this, this year. We got, uh, Monday off and yeah. And then, uh, it's been busy as all get out for the last couple of days, and, uh, not so much this morning. I, it was actually kind of nice, a little reprieve. All right, Mike, don't ruin it. . I said this morning, I think I'm maxed out with meetings this afternoon, but it's all right. So we got, uh, our normal list of stuff today. We got some news articles, so mostly, uh, predictions and whatnot for 2023. So, and, uh, Mackenzie, and I'll add ours at the end of that section.

1:05 We got our best practice. We got some blueberry stuff and a blueberry pro tip, and a question of the week, so we got all the normal stuff this time. Yeah. Let's start out with our first news article. It is great podcasting market correction, and this is from Bloomberg, and it is a little doom and gloom. Yeah. Um, for my taste, I, I see a lot of, um, valid points in here, but I don't know, I don't know if it's gonna be as accurate, uh, or, you know, as a downturn from the previous years as people are really expecting it to be.

1:48 No, I, you know, the thing is, is, you know, when we had that recession, whatever the great recession in, uh, 2008 around there, you know, podcasting just held its own. It wasn't, you know, it didn't fall off a cliff like some other industries. And, and I don't suspect it will this time as well, if indeed we go into a, a bad, you know, worse economy than we've got now. They talked to Spotify and they talked to, uh, SiriusXM mm-hmm. , and those two companies are, you know, this last year laid off a bunch of people, cut back on stuff, and, you know, so th those two companies weren't having a very good time. But I don't know if that holds true for the rest of the industry. You know, I look at, you know, our little corner of the business and, you know, we're holding our own just fine. I think, you know, we're, we're gaining users and, you know, of course we're losing some, just like always, you know, there's always a little bit of churn, you know, people lose interest and whatnot. But, uh, I, I don't see it as doom and gloom.

2:47 I, I see maybe the advertising part of it might be a little doom and gloom, but again, you know, reading the article and, and some of the other ones we've got, they're, they're talking about the podcasting grew by 28 point something percent in revenue last year. Mm-hmm. mm-hmm. . And that's bad. I thought that was good. , , you know, you know, I don't know if it's gonna be 4 billion by the end of, uh, 2024 that some people were predicting a couple years ago, but we're, I, you know, even the advertising market seems to be holding its own, you know, a lot of companies do cut back though. I don't understand that, but. I kind of do like the, um, the, the phrase correction in this title of the article that we're reading, um, because to me, a lot of what they're scaling back and saying of, of actual spending, you know, how you were mentioning like Sirius and Spotify and Amazon and whatnot, um, their, their budget cuts, their layoffs are a lot of the time, in my opinion, especially with podcasting, is correcting a misuse of funds in the first place. Yeah.

3:58 Oh. Course they're putting exorbitant unnecessary amounts of money into new networks and acquiring exclusive shows, and, you know, putting everything into a production team. I really do think that the past couple years we've seen everything turn into, you know, um, every podcaster has to have their own like, professional network. And, um, every company has to be able to provide that and has their own exclusive versions of it. And I don't, I think these companies made it a little too complicated and spend a little too much money, and that the overall podcasting creator side for more so the hobbyist or the people that are just getting started is fine. Mm-hmm.

4:49 , you know, people, people aren't gonna turn down money. You know, creators are never gonna turn down money, um, was something that they feel comfortable with. And I don't blame 'em, I wouldn't either. The idea that, you know, the industry overall is having problems is something I would not agree with. The, the way that some of the larger companies are conducting themselves is what I, I see the problem with. Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. They big companies, you know, Spotify comes to mind, you know, a few years ago they were spending money, like it was going outta style, you know, buying companies and whatnot. And then those, all their acquisitions are where some of the cuts were coming from Gimlet, few others that they bought. And, you know, I think it might be because of the venture capital, and I think that's dried up.

5:38 You know, I don't think you're gonna get these giant venture capital backed companies anymore. You know, they're gonna have to show profitability, and that might be just part of it right there. They just, you know, they, they need to cut back a little bit because they're spending crazy amounts of money. That is more rare than people think. . Yeah. Yeah. You look at a company like ours, you know, it, it was pretty much bootstrapped, you know, we've never had big investors or anything like that, and, you know, we're holding our own. And. I mean, I, I wouldn't, I would never try to co like, compare ours to something like that, but in the, you know, the overall sense, like, yeah, it's, it's too much they had to scale back. Yeah. You know? Yeah. We're totally different. It's a lot on the content side, that's, that's having the pain, you know, content and advertising, you know, especially, you know, net big networks, uh, Adam Curry's famous for saying you can't monetize the network, and that's true.

6:32 You're, you're gonna have some big hits, but those big hits are gonna cover for all the duds that you got as well, . So, you know, how, how, how is that gonna work out long term? Because you can't have, you know, a whole bunch of exclusive shows that you've paid a lot of money for, and they're not performing when you got a couple that are performing, so you can cut back on 'em. That makes sense. I, you know, I, I don't, you know, I like the word correction as well. I think it is gonna correct a little bit because the venture capital's going away and, you know, they're gonna have to show some profitability. One of the things, you know, we have another article here that has predictions, or not necessarily predictions, but, you know, um, quotes from people in the podcast industry.

7:13 And one of them was saying that they, so much of what people are doing now for the podcast is, you know, if they have a YouTube video, if they have the video show along with it, like if they're putting all of this on social media, like of the recording, that type of stuff, they're like, that's not the actual podcast. That is just the marketing for the podcast. Mm-hmm. . And I feel like people are somewhat distracted by that type of stuff right now. Oh, yeah, for sure. And, you know, the video podcasting has been a thing since the beginning. And YouTube videos of YouTube channel is not a video podcast. It is a video of a podcast. Mm-hmm. , if that makes any sense. You know, most people that do a YouTube video in association like we do with this one, sometimes we go live on Facebook Live and other places.

8:08 That's not the primary show. That's a video of us making the podcast, if that makes sense. But the actual podcast is still the audio, but could be video, you know, video podcasting is a thing, but whether that's gonna be the big thing or not, who knows. But yeah, I just, yeah, a lot of these articles, we, we'll have all of 'em, of course, in the, uh, show notes, but suffice it to say there's a little bit of doom and gloom, and there's some, there's some interesting predictions in the Pacific content. Uh, if you read through that, I, we're not gonna read through all that stuff for you, but, uh, you know, read through it. There's some interesting stuff, uh, from some people that, uh, should know what's going on in the industry a lot on the production side, but still, uh, you know, could be applicable to us indies.

8:55 So I would like to include one, I I don't have a prediction for 2023. I just have a want Uhhuh, my own personal want is, I feel like when I go in to scroll, uh, like through the Apple Podcast directory for a new show or something, or, you know, like when I hear about new releases, um, uh, it kind of, a lot of the time feels like it just matches. Like when I stream through Hulu or Netflix or H B O, it's like, okay, this actor now has a podcast. This person is a guest here. I, I am just kind of craving more. Yeah. You want more discoverability. I wanna.

9:36 Yeah. I think I want more discoverability for organic ideas. Mm-hmm. , like all of these celebrity or, you know, fun chatty shows, like I'm over them. I do not care. I got in that early with Mark Maron and, you know, burnt out of it. I can't tell you the last time I listened to just like a chat podcast between two friends. I like, it's been years. Mm-hmm. , it has to have a topic. It can't just be, tell me about your life . Like, I, I'm done . Yeah. You know, and, and, but you know, you kind of, uh, go back and forth between different things. You know, I find that, you know, with me and music, you know, some days I'm mm-hmm. , I'm into, you know, instrumental jazz and just have it playing in the background.

10:18 And then other days I wanna rock out, you know, , I just, yeah, you, you cha you know, it depends on your mood, uh, as far as that goes. But yeah, I see what you mean. And, and what would be nice and, and maybe it's search is probably the key, uh, is being able to search more than just the titles, you know, like an Apple in particular, but other apps are similar that you can only search for titles in the app. What about topics and tags and stuff in the show notes and, you know, I, I think a better search engine would make what you're talking about easier. Yeah. I, I feel like it's just, uh, whenever I've gone in, in the past couple months or, you know, reflecting on, did I listen to new shows this year? And I'm like, well, I listened to a couple new shows, but I feel like I didn't really find something new that, you know, like took over a big amount of my time.

11:10 I think I'm just craving some creativity. Yep. Yep. And that's, and that's the beauty of podcasting. What is there now? 4 million podcasts, something like that. Uh, last I heard 200 and some thousand active podcasts, but still a lot. A lot of that is like limited series type stuff. So. Yeah. But, uh, you know, there's a, you know, I, I've been on a history kick lately and, you know, it's just been kind of fun to, to listen to weird history stuff that I didn't know mm-hmm. , you know, and I do that on YouTube as well. And YouTube's a completely different experience as they were talking about in those articles. I've, I've been watching a, a Gallup in the up of Michigan talk about copper mining back in the 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds.

11:56 . That's cool. It sounds completely boring, but she makes it fun. And she goes and, you know, visits these mines and smelters and all kinds of stuff like that. You know, like I said, it's, I'm going off topic here, but just stupid little things like that make it interesting and, and having better search within an app would probably make stuff like that easier to find. Yeah. I especially like it because, uh, I frequently will, you know, look up, I just, I look up the topic and then I find the episode about said topic mm-hmm. , I'm not gonna listen to that show ever again. Yep. And if you're doing it right, the blueberry way, your, uh, episodes get indexed in Google, so you can use your Google search to find that stuff. So yeah, I don't have a, a ton of predictions this year. I, I, I'm gonna repeat a prediction that I did last year as I think Joe Rogan is going to, uh, end his Spotify exclusivity and go back to being a regular podcast.

12:58 You know, I know he gets a lot of ink , a lot of. You know, I'm, I'm sitting here thinking I don't wanna spend another minute talking about that, man. But. You know, regardless of what you think of his show, he is a, a prominent podcaster, or well now currently doing a show on Spotify, but technically he's, you know, a podcaster and Yeah. And you know, what happens with him kind of foretells what's gonna happen with a lot of these exclusive shows. And I, I really doubt that I, I, what I think's gonna happen is Spotify is gonna not be able to afford him, and that's, that's gonna be my guess. They're not gonna want to spend the money to keep him.

13:39 He made a lot of waves in 2022 and put a lot of pressure, you know, just Spotify was in the news a lot and not necessarily in a good way. And I, that is another want of mine of, I don't, you know, regardless of his show content, I don't think he was doing anything positive in the podcast industry by creating all of this drama. Oh. So I would like to see less drama like that, especially led by one man having done in 2023. . Sure, sure. But, uh, you know, like I say, it's, he is a prominent podcaster and you know, what, what happens with them, you know, with him? And Spotify seems to make the news all the time, you know, I kinda wish it would go the other way and let the hindis, uh, take back podcasting. But, uh, yeah.

14:27 That's, that's my main thing. I'm just like, my God, podcasting is so much more than this one conversation . Yeah. Yeah. You know, you know, and, and I go back to the same thing about advertising. You'll notice in these articles, they're, a lot of 'em are talking about revenue and advertising and all that. People that I deal with that, yeah, there's some business people that, uh, do it for money, but most of 'em are business people doing it to promote their own stuff or, you know, or, or the, you know, as I always say, the guy next to the water heater in the basement, you know, the indie just does everything themselves. And, you know, it may not be a mass market thing, but it's a hobby. You know, you get two, 200 downloads and you're happy and you do your thing. And it's, there's nothing wrong with that. And yeah, we don't talk about that kind of thing as much as we talk about all these big things and advertising and, and revenue and all that, you know, and that gets a little boring at times, to be honest with you. It.

15:25 It absolutely does. And I mean, we, we released programmatic advertising for, you know, automated ads. Mm-hmm. for people to make a bit of money if they would like, a couple months ago in the fall or the summer. And that, I think that's a good way for us to go about it because, you know, it's, it's not part of a deal. It's not, yeah. There's no exclusivity, there's nothing like that. There's. Nothing hanging on it. Yeah. It's just, this is a nice way to, you know, maybe earn a couple bucks to like, get your hosting fees taken care of, essentially. Right. Like, that's all. Yeah. So go check out that program. Programmatic, it's in the make money section of your dashboard. Okay.

16:06 I gotta put on the radio voice for that. But yeah, that's my one prediction. Is Rogan's gonna leave Spotify. Uh, you know, and, and as the rest of these people, you know, sort of said, you know, as far as revenue goes, yeah, it might be flat line, but I don't think it's gonna drop. I don't, you know, I, I think podcasting is, you know, traditionally since it started, has always had slow, pretty steady growth with little spurts here and there. And, you know, the pandemic was kind of a uptick because everybody was at home, had time to do stuff. Now everything's sort of coming back to normal. They don't have as much time to, uh, do a podcast. So, you know, as far as growth of podcasts, that's probably flatlined a little bit.

16:47 And same thing with revenue from advertisers, you know, with, with the economy coming down and, you know, some advertisers just can't put the money into it. They used. To. Yeah. I, I mean, it's just, I think it's gonna have to be more responsible spending in a, I think that's the doom and gloom. . Yeah. That's it. I. Think the economy is the doom and gloom. That's what it is. . Yeah. And then hopefully we'll pull it out sometime this year and it'll start going the other way. Again. That's, that's what we all hope. For. I think this is larger than the podcast industry. I think this is just a Yeah. worldwide. Situation for sure. Well, hey, all that doom and gloom, let's, uh, go onto the best practice.

17:28 One of the things that, uh, you know, we don't have guests on here very often, but when we do, we definitely send them the link to the published episode after it's been, you know, released. So we encourage you to encourage your guests to share your episode when it's published. And a lot of the time, guests don't wanna do this. They're either, I feel like it's a lot of the time. They're either too eager and they're asking for it, but like before it's been released and like, trying to get involved in the whole publishing process, or they record it and then like, forget about it, and then they're like, oh yeah, I guess I can like tweet that out. So , well, um, essentially it's just like my recommendation, and I've had some pretty good success with this over the years, on and off of, you know, when I've been doing it more regularly. Um, if you kinda like stick to an email template or you know, like a 1, 2, 3, like in this whole conversation that I'm gonna have when we're figuring out scheduling and topics and, you know, release dates and everything like that, one of the last things that you should be doing is sending them the links, sending them a thank you, including all of your handles saying, this is what we've got scheduled on our social, we're gonna put it in our newsletter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, it's on our website here. We're in all of these directories. They like, don't make them do the work. Yeah. Do the work for.

18:40 Them. Yeah. Make it easy for 'em to promote their episode and therefore your show make sense. Uh, it's so many times when you, uh, when you interview somebody, uh, or like, I've, on the opposite end, you know, when I've been interviewed on other people's podcast, a lot of times they won't even tell me when the episode came out. That's kind of a bummer. And I'm like, okay, when has that been out ? Yeah. And, you know, and I'll, I'll definitely promote it, but they don't ask for it. They don't, you know, they just say, Hey, thanks for the interview, and they ghost me. So don't do that to people cuz they, they wanna promote themselves. Why would they be on your podcast otherwise? Yeah. Don't ghost your, uh, don't ghost your guest. . Yeah, we got a title.

19:21 . Yeah, there we go. All right. So we got some blueberry news. Nothing, uh, nothing too crazy. Uh, Todd of course is out this week. He's at Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. And, uh, they're providing, uh, live coverage, uh, all four days, starting in about a half an hour, I guess as we're recording this. So around noontime, uh, Eastern, you can go over to TPN tv, that's tech podcast network in case you didn't know. And, uh, go over there and, uh, check out the, uh, live stream that they're gonna be doing. They usually, they, they try to interview a new guest every 10 minutes. .

20:07 It's, ah. It's a TruD, it's a trudge. I, I've been out there for that a couple times and, uh. Oh my god, the introvert and me would , oh, I would have a hard time . I don't care enough to talk to people that much. When, when I was out there, Todd's mom, Sherry was the cat herder and she would have all the guests kind of in a little green room , she would get 'em on, you know, cuz as we'd switch, you know, every 10 minutes for a different interview. And it was, yeah, like I said, it was a s slug, you know, it was a slog. You know, we'd get, have breakfast at six in the morning and we didn't get back to the hotel till 10 at night for four days straight. It was crazy. It is not for the week. No. But, uh, the coverage is, is really good.

20:50 And then afterwards you'll see a lot of these videos on various, uh, podcasters website and their special media feeds. So a lot of the floor interviews are, are there cuz they also send out camera crews to visit booths and all that. So it's, it's quite the thing, . So go check that. Out. We wish them the best. Have fun and please enjoy that beautiful weather that I am sure. Wait, are they getting that storm that California's getting? I think so. . Oh no. Okay, well, pretend I never said anything. . Okay, moving. On. Yeah, I don't know how Vegas is doing for weather-wise, but, uh, it might be warmer than us, so, you know, that's probably true. All right. And, uh, let's see. Looking to start off the month of January with a podcaster of the month. You, uh, you want to, uh, have somebody step up for that?

21:37 Yeah, tell me like, I mean, I can find someone, but it's more fun if you're like, excited about it too and like, you know, tell me why you think you should be podcaster of the month. So. Yeah, and we, and we want to get you on to interview you if you get selected too, so, uh, keep that in mind. Yeah, yeah. We, we always do like a, um, we'll do a blog post where we send you some questions and we, we get answers there, but also it's super fun to have you guys, you know, be a guest on this show as well. So Yeah. We we wanna have more guests. . Yeah, yeah. You know, we're try, we're gonna try to do that more. I think so. So the next thing, uh, we got some integrations and some announcements and releases all coming soon.

22:18 We held off a bunch of stuff for the holidays cuz if we would've released before the holidays, we wouldn't have got any, uh, any juice out of the announcement. So yeah, we're being a little strategic here, so . Yeah. You. Know, so probably the next few weeks you're gonna see more new stuff from us and, and some of it I'm pretty excited about for sure. So stay tuned. All right, well let's, uh, see what Toby has to save for the tip of the week. Hi, it's Toby Goodman here. What are programmatic podcast ads? Now if the hosting platform you upload your podcast episodes, two for distribution offers programmatic podcast ads.

23:04 It means you can immediately make money from your show after going through a few screens of check boxes and the like, the doors to add space in your podcast will open up to a marketplace of companies looking to invest in podcast ads. The sponsors will pay using CPM as a metric that's cost per 1000 impressions. And in our case, that's gonna be listened. So don't expect to earn too much early on. The downside of this is that you are selling the most valuable real estate to someone else. The upside is that you can make money from a podcast like immediately. So do you want to use money from ads to grow an income for your podcast or do you want to keep that space for your own purposes?

23:52 You may know my profitable pod method course and best selling book, narrow Podcasting, and basically all my consulting work is about the latter. But programmatic is still fantastic for so many podcasters. So while programmatic ads are not for everyone, it's a huge part of how the podcast industry is growing. To get more context and hear a discussion with Podcast Tech Pioneer and c e o of Blueberry Todd Cochrane, check out my interview on my podcast Moving Conversations that can be found under the podcasts tab over@narrowpodcasting.com. If you like the sound of having programmatic ads in your podcast, then Blueberry can help contact the team@blueberry.com.

24:36 Or if you'd like pro production and programmatic ads, come and say hi to us over@blueberrypro.com. And thanks for that, Toby. Uh, yeah, we were just talking about ads and, and that and , we do that. So. yes, we do, we do offer programmatic advertisement. All right, well the last thing we got here is the, uh, question of the week. We've had a flurry of support tickets this week. Uh, don't you read the question and I'll do the answer. What people have been asking is, what are the podcast landing page URL and the podcast meet podcast mere feed URL fields for a power press?

25:22 Like why do those fields exist? What are people supposed to be putting in there? Okay, well by, you know, if you're using Power Press, if you don't put anything in the podcast landing page box, it'll just go to your homepage, you know, your main website, uh, if you put something else in there, apps like Apple Podcasts and, and there are others that will say, uh, podcasts website and, you know, there's a link there right in the app. And if you hit that, it'll open the browser and go to whatever page you put in that box. If you don't put anything in the box, it'll go to the homepage of your, your website. If you're using Power Press, and if you're not using Power press it usually go to your hosts page for your show. You know, our case Blueberry's, uh, directory listing for your show. But, uh, and even in our publisher, there is a podcast homepage setting that you can change.

26:15 So it's kind of cool that way. Uh, podcast Mirror Feed url, we have a service called Podcast Mirror, and if you're familiar with FeedBurner, it's kind of a, a updated better replacement for that. It's a feed caching service and what that does is makes your feed really fast, but you have to tell everybody that that's where your feed is instead of on your WordPress site. So you put your podcast Mirror feed URL in that box, and that lets, uh, everybody know that, uh, if they subscribe, they subscribe through Podcast Mirror instead of directly to your feed on your website. And as a, uh, you know, as they talk about in the pharmaceutical business, an off-label use , you can also use that to do a 3 0 1 redirect for your feed if you are moving away from Power Press to generate your feed.

27:02 So we've had people that want to get off a power press and they wanna, they want to, you know, instead of having a WordPress site, they wanna go to Wicks or some other thing. So they wanna host their feed on blueberry.com instead of on their website, which we don't recommend, but they can. So what we have them do is put their blueberry feed in that box in their WordPress site. You gotta leave that there for a couple of weeks. And then after that, you can kill the WordPress site and everybody's moved to the new feed. But basically podcast Mirror feed URLs, you, you use that if you're using our podcast Mirror Service. If you have any questions about that, of course, get a hold of us at support. And of course, if you've got a question you'd like us to answer on the show, drop us an email or drop me an email, mike blueberry.com and we may use it on the show.

27:50 You can send us a video that you can send us a text, email, whatever, uh, or you can put a question in the Facebook group and we'll probably answer it there, but we may use that on the show as well. So that's gonna be about it for this episode. Uh, we're gonna have all the normal stuff we have in the show notes, in the show notes over@podcastinsider.com. Did we, did we do Okay, Mackenzie . You know, I think we did for January 5th. I think we did exceptional. Yes. We're, uh, changing up the format a little bit here. And as you guys all know at the end of the show, we always go through the same script and we just decided we'll just leave that in a show note. So if you, if you, if you really wanna hear any of that stuff, go over there.

28:30 We trust you. Yes. So, uh, everybody have a good week. Any, uh, parting comments. If you guys have any strong feelings about stuff you would like to see different in our, in our podcast in general, format wise, released whatever. Yeah, anything. Uh, let us know. Because we're in the process of, uh, re-looking at all the, uh, things we're doing in this podcast and, uh, you know, we wanna grow this show as well. So, uh, lead by example maybe. All right. Well have a, uh, good week, uh, next week. I believe Todd will be back. And, uh, I suppose I'll be here too. So, uh, we'll see you. Then. Thanks everyone.