Buzzcast

Cracks In The IAB Armor + Buzzsprout 2019 Recap

December 20, 2019 Buzzsprout Episode 15
Buzzcast
Cracks In The IAB Armor + Buzzsprout 2019 Recap
Buzzcast Supporter
Become a supporter of the show!
Starting at $3/month
Support
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

This week we offered our take on the latest IAB stats hiccup and recap a monster year with a rundown of all the new features we released for Buzzsprout in 2019.

Check out our unreleased (but quite hilarious) PodMic vs ATR2100 YouTube thumbnail.

Wanna see our newest Top Secret project? Watch the "Podcast Editing Tips" video on YouTube to spot the new feature coming in 2020.

Here's a list of all the new features we mentioned in this episode


Have an idea for something we should talk about? Submit a topic in our Listener Suggestions form or post it in the Buzzsprout Podcast Community on Facebook.

Support the show

Contact Buzzcast


Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!

Travis:   0:00
buzz cast is the tuxedo T shirt of the podcast world.

Alban:   0:04
We'll take it seriously, but were laid back. I don't think you understand what a tuxedo T shirt tuxedo T shirt is a T shirt that looks like a tuxedo, but he say it's laid back. But professional is not prevention.

Travis:   0:23
Welcome back to bust cast, guys. The last episode of 2019 Crazy this year just flew by. So many awesome things happened in podcasting here, a bus sprout. And so, uh, since it's the last episode of 2019 we wanted to kind of do, Ah, a recap, a reflection of that and all that from features we rolled out on all the things they're gonna help you be more successful into the future. But before we jump into that album has ah, really interesting news article that you wanted to talk about, so I wanted to jump into that helping.

Alban:   0:53
Well, it's not just the last upset of the year, it's a the whole decade. This is closing out a decade of buzz cast episodes. The big announcement that I'm super excited about is hot. Hollywood is the number five podcast in the world.

Kevin:   1:09
Interesting. I never heard of hot Hollywood.

Alban:   1:11
Have you heard of it either? Um, what is it? Go ahead. Yeah, Hollywood is us weeklies. Um, I think it's maybe like a gossip podcast. So James Cridland wrote this article. He's like, you know, came out on these lists and it was right at the top. And it's number five, and I never heard of it. And if anyone doesn't listen to pod news, his podcast, um, the James does or read his newsletter. He is like the most plugged into the podcasting industry of anyone. So he should know about it. And so he started doing some digging and he wrote this article where he's looking at chargeable data and he's saying, Well, huh, They're not really ranking for anything. And then he's looking over at, um, I think it was Last box. Cast box tells you how many will subscribe in their app,

Travis:   2:01
right? And it's public,

Alban:   2:02
and it's like 150 were subscribe to this podcast.

Kevin:   2:06
Yeah, cast boxes like the number four I think AP, like one of the most, is like number two on Android and number four overall podcast traps.

Alban:   2:13
And so I was like Okay, maybe it's new. Well, it's not new. It's a been around for a long time ago. Okay, how the heck is this possible? And so he ends up doing more digging and basically on their home page because they have so many people that go to their website. They were actually in the browser loading the episode, and they had just, you know, a little bit of a glitch with the player they're using. And it was loading the episode and was triggering it to look like a play. And so, um, pa track was then looking at it going Oh, my gosh, They're getting so many places. This is one of the top podcasts of all time.

Travis:   2:52
Wow! And and And this was because rarely when you when you look at your podcast statistics ah, small percentage of those are gonna come from like an embedded player on a website. Most of this is gonna be in an app like an apple podcast after a spot of fire directory. So even if you look at the data and cell like 99.5% of their plays were coming from a website, that would be yeah, eyebrow raising is

Alban:   3:14
well, we will see it. We would filter these out. But if ever we're looking at the people making requests off so he starts seeing a request that looks like just aton on a browser and they're not making through your stats. We know that those it's a it's bought activity. Um, say, let's see

Kevin:   3:32
there bought or something like a pre load or something And that was in this case we're talking about. It was a bunch of pre ludes.

Alban:   3:37
Sometimes it's not malicious like this wasn't malicious, but, um, you know, it kind of fits into this larger theme where we've also seen people gaming iTunes, stats or excuse me, Apple podcast stats and rankings. And now we have, you know, this. Um so it's kind of kicked off this whole conversation, this larger conversation about, um, the validity of some of the industry statistics because, you know, Pa Track is the company that a lot of advertisers look do say Okay, someone's telling me they get this many plays. Um, I know they've got a podcast to us as well. I want you guys to really validate that for us and Eve. And they were able to be fooled by it now it was again. I'm not saying it was. It's obviously not delicious, but it kind of feeds into this larger kind of thought process we've been having that, um you know, maybe what we have right now for validating these stats is really not good enough.

Travis:   4:46
Yeah, especially if you're gonna take it. As gospel is like, this is the definitive number. Take it to the bank, right? Because because from an advertiser's perspective, like, let's say that you sponsored this show and Pa Jack said that Oh, you've got 200,000 downloads on this episode and you're paying them in a CPM rates to reflect that. In reality, it was 500 people that listen to it then that becomes a huge problem. And so so also an over reliance on statistics that aren't that can be gamed or fooled in this way is not not great for the podcasting industry, right?

Kevin:   5:20
So this happens often, like any podcast host is susceptible to have weird traffic show up in their stats, and we all try our best to filter that out to identify it, filtered out, make sure we're giving accurate numbers. So the question is, is why is this such a big news story? Why is James Cridlin the pod news dot net? Reporting on this and the biggest issue that he saw was that there were two companies involved. They both played a part pod track was the one reporting the data, and they were using a UL prefix in the player that was being used was a simple cast player, one of their older players that was doing the pre loading. And both of these companies are I'd be certified, so I A. B is the interactive advertising bureau. They came out with a guideline for how we should track and measure podcast plays, Basically saying what counts is a play and what doesn't? What should we filter out in what should be, you know, allow through the count is a play. Both these companies have gone through the certification process. They've spent a lot of money to get certified. And if you're certified, you should be catching stuff like this, right? But now we have two companies involved. They're both certified. It got through both of their systems and registered as a top five podcast. What is going on, I should never happen. And for us, we this we took this to heart because this has been we've pushed back a lot against the I'd be guidelines. We've said it's not a real speck, and, um, the guidelines can be bent too. The technologies available to the company. So, like PA Track, for example, is not a podcast host, so they don't have access to server logs. Server logs provide our best. It's our best source of information of what actually happened. What triggered that download? Where did it come from? Does it look suspicious or doesn't want Riel? Since Patrick doesn't have access to that data, all they have is the initial request. They can't tell how much of the file was downloaded. Um, and so they've again. We don't know exactly how they're doing it, but somehow they came up with their own proprietary solution to not having access to server logs to still get certified. And my concern is men, if you're gonna certify people who don't have enough data to really verify a download than what's the point of the certification? Um and so we've been resistant to going through the certification process because we don't believe that the guideline is a good guideline. We think that there's too many holes in it, and this just shows that there are massive holes. And so why is this bad for independent podcasters? Independent podcasting community? Exactly what Travis said. If you're trying to monetize your CPM, um, and advertisers pay, you say they drop $10,000 advertising your podcast because you're a top five podcast. We'll really you're only getting three or 4000 plays. You're not getting these hundreds of thousands of plays that they think you're getting because those are the numbers that you're reporting from your certified podcast host. And their return is way less than $10,000 because that ad only got listen to buy 3000 people, not hundreds of thousands of people. So they're not gonna advertise with you again. They're not gonna believe in podcast advertising there. I don't think it's work. It works. They're not gonna think it's effective. And if they do come back and wanna advertise again, it's gonna be in a much lower rate. They're gonna say no, we're gonna pay you like $5 CPM not 40 because you know you only drove this much business for us. Your 200,000 listeners on Lee turned into $5000 in sales for us. We can't continue to pay those rates. So this is terrible. This is This is not Yeah, I don't know. It's It's super frustrating that I feel like the old guard and podcasting has really rallied behind this. I'd be, ah, guideline again, not a speck, just a guideline. But they rallied behind and they said, This is everything that we need and everyone should do it and everyone should pay the money to get certified. But the numbers aren't good. There's holes in the system. It's not reproducible data. Anybody can implement it different ways. And so we've been thinking a lot about it. We're trying to solve the problem we're trying to work with. Other hosts were working in a work group with James Kirkland and some other people in the industry to come for the better solution. But if you if you have been in some Facebook groups, we've heard talk about the A B, or if you've been to a conference, where there you have, I'd be sessions and getting certified and you've wondered. Hey, why isn't Bus brought? I'd be certified. This is exactly why we haven't taken the steps to get certified because we don't Well, you don't want to back something that we think is dangerous. And we like independent podcasters. We think there's a massive value in podcasting and the relationship between host and listeners. We think CPM rates should be as high as possible. And when you have systems like this with holes in in them like this, there's the potential for it to completely devalue the the entire podcasting space and advertisers confidence and a bit in their ability to get a return on their investment of investing in this space.

Alban:   10:14
This is why I mean, this is part of the messiness of having an open source or not his source and open, you know, ecosystem, where lots of different people are doing things different ways. And there's a lot of things we love about open podcasting. Um, but this is if you're on YouTube like YouTube sees a bott, and then they just block that baht and everybody on YouTube has affected the same way. And that would be something YouTube. But pushes like to see how great you know being on a platform is only one person making his decisions, whereas in podcasting it's dozens of people trying to make the decision. So this is some of the messiness that we are work, you know, working through, Um, But what's really important is that we get it right, because as we get it, if we get it wrong, we make it loose enough so that different types of companies can all get in. We end up leaving up and the ability to be, I mean, embarrassed with, you know, gov podcast No. One sort of being raped number five

Kevin:   11:14
right When we get this right in the industry, from the host perspective again, this is a little bit of inside baseball, so feel free to skip over it. If you're not super interested,

Travis:   11:23
we do use chapter markers, you get to the other stuff.

Kevin:   11:25
It's super interested in the headaches of being a podcast host, but ideally, you should be able to host on bus route and then move the show to another host. And your numbers shouldn't change wildly. Yeah, I mean, maybe, ah, five or 10% you know, you know, difference is acceptable, but that you shouldn't move from Bud Sprout to seduce Soundcloud or something, because that's a notoriously bad. But if you did that, if you move from bus brought to Soundcloud, your numbers were probably going through the roof and you'd be super excited. But it's only because they don't do any, you know, bought blocking or anything like that. Um, and then and then again you could move to another host. What's happening right now is you can move from one. I'II be certified host to another, and you get wildly different numbers. That doesn't make any sense to me. If we're using the same set of rules and Thio account a play, what is the play and what isn't then the numbers shouldn't be wildly different, so we need a better speck, and all this energy and hoopla that's going behind I'd be is the way to go This stuff like this. This is not the first time stuff like this has happened. Daniel Day Lewis did something earlier in the year where he created his own bought to kind of test. The stats packages a different host, and he found discrepancies. Big discrepancies between different I be host? Um, there's just too many holes in it. And so yeah, if you really want to get into it, you can go toe. I'd be Web site and download their speck in C. Um, but anyway, we'll talk a little bit later because we've been thinking a lot about stats.

Travis:   12:48
Yeah, I mean, just to kind of put a bow on this, we can move on to fund more fun things. I think, um, I think the problem is not that I be came out with a set of guidelines. That said, Here are some things you can consider to potentially make your data more accurate in this particular way, my issue has always been It's been marketed as the Silver Bullet that will fix podcasting once and for all that once everybody one becomes Ivy, certified, all of our problems go away. And since it has kind of come out with the IIB podcasting guidelines and more, more podcast would come on to that. We haven't seen that. We've seen the opposite and many respects so color of skeptical at this point. But we're hoping that 2020 can be a good year for podcast, so says we continue pushing these different ideas in different ways of tackling this problem that are gonna be beneficial not just to advertisers and sponsors, but really to support independent podcasters as well.

Kevin:   13:45
Yep. Well said we're gonna figure it out in 2020. You heard it here. All right, so I have compiled a list of all the different work cycles again, if you've listened to show, you know, that we work in work cycle, six week work cycle. So I've gotten I have a list of all the work cycles that we went through in 2019 and some of the highlights of each of those work cycles. So I thought I'd be fun to run through all the new things that have, uh, that we've done for bus route in 2019. Awesome. I hope into it. Yeah. So in january, try 19. We had the first work cycle. Quebec. Our cycles kind of go follow. What is that called? The NATO Alfa frenetic alphabet. That sounds correct. It's like Quebec. Romeo Sierra. Let's go with that. Okay, so we kicked off Quebec work cycle in January, and the first thing that have there is that we launched an A p I for Buster Brown. That has been a really cool project we kicked up. I'm gonna have to refresh my memory some of these things, But I think our too first immigration partners were Allah to, um, I saying that correctly, Ala too. Yeah. And was he murdered the other one and Hindenburg, right? Yep. So if you edit either one of those fantastic products your podcast in either one of those you can publish, assuming you're done with that, you can just push the bus route. One that pushes straight in the bus brought so you don't go down with the violin, then come over the bus brought upload.

Travis:   15:10
Yeah, And if you're listening to this meal like what? The hex and a p I it's just it's It's a way for different pieces of software to communicate with each other toe make the process of using different pieces of software easier. Yep. Right. So it just streamlined the process of If you're editing in Hindenburg, you don't have to go through a bunch of extra steps toe like close out your Hindenburg work and then start your bus route work. It just flows right into the one foot into the other.

Kevin:   15:32
Yep, was to software to talk to each other. The next thing that we did in there was we gave people the ability to export their stats a couple different reasons that that was really exciting for us. One. People wanna look at stats different ways and so being able to download those in a format that you can open up in a spreadsheet program like XLR, Gruebel sheets or something. And then there's run different your own reports on it or manipulated different ways is is fun and interesting for some people. The other thing is that if you move podcast host, if you move from bus brought to somebody else's stats, don't go with you. And so being able to just create another opportunity for people to not feel like they're locked into a host. We hope you love bus route and you'll stay here forever. But if the day comes when you feel like you, you'd be happier somewhere else. We want to make sure that you're free to go, and so exporting stats is another way to make sure that if you move, it's it's not disruptive and you have all your data. Ah, And then the last thing for Quebec that we pushed out that was big was something called achievement e mails, Really. Everyone listening has received at least one achievement email so far, because the 1st 1 I think we send is that you published your first episode. Hopefully everyone has gotten at least one, but they're different milestones along the way to keep encouraging podcasters. We know that podcasting can be tough, especially if you are doing like a solo show, or you don't have a community of podcasters around you. You're doing yourself and it can feel isolating and lonely sometimes. And so we wanted to give you some encouragement just to be able to, um, you know, they're not alone in this, that, uh, all along the way, whether you're getting tons of listeners or you're not. There's other things to celebrate. And so we tried to create achievements that were around more things than just, um, how many listeners were homey downloads that you're getting? Um, so we help. Those have been exciting and they've been shared a lot. And it's been fun for us to follow along as our customers reach different milestones and different levels of success.

Alban:   17:19
Yeah, I always love seeing when somebody like one of the first ones ever saw someone was like, Oh, just published my 2/100 episode. It was like, Holy cow, like you put these out and you don't really know that people are gonna be hitting these mouse turds right away. And it was like that day swims like, Yeah, the 2/100 episode. I just got my, you know, achievement. And I'm like, Man, I'm so glad we got about tabulate guys. 200. Pepe said,

Kevin:   17:40
Yeah, And for people who don't podcast Oh, my gosh, 200 episodes And just that. So much work.

Alban:   17:46
That is such a huge achievement. That's four years. Yeah, every week for four years. 11 thing that's not going to show up on their you know what? Ah, beginning of the year Last year was the first episode of bus cast trailer came out in December, and I think it was very beginning of the year. Knows when we had, like, a different format to the show, right? But ah, yes. Oh, that was a year ago. We might be getting an achievement email saying

Travis:   18:14
Yes. Buzz cast was was born beginning of end of 2018 beginning 2019 and then burst several other podcasts and yeah, yeah, that was a big, big, big thing for us to

Kevin:   18:26
all right, So after Quebec, we moved into Romeo. And that is when we started our podcast gear review videos during the way. So we started pushing into YouTube and Travis and Alban of dung tunnel work on our YouTube channel. And, uh, yeah, so we started. I think one of the first things we are doing it was the first video was like the 18 21 100 verse pod. Mike?

Travis:   18:47
Yes. We had a pod. My case here. 2100 battle video. They didn't They didn't actually fight each other. But you know,

Alban:   18:54
the sound epic nobody else got. Nobody got to see this, but Travis took a photo of him holding like the to Michael hands, and then our video guy edit it to look like there's like lasers coming out of your hands and like electricity. Like it was Emperor Palpatine and Star Wars. And we're like, trust. What is this? You're, like a be tested way. Can't put this on the Internet. He's like, This is this is what you do, What's tell you? Tell you what I'll

Travis:   19:22
do. I'll upload it toe like Dropbox or Google Drive, and I'll put a link in the show notes. So if you want to see what that alternate thumbnail was, you could go and check it out like we're doing. I thought it was epic, but, uh, ultimately,

Alban:   19:33
if you want boring, it wasn't on Brand wear the killjoys,

Kevin:   19:39
All right, The next thing we did was one since we started creating these new videos. When you go to bus route dot com and you're logged in, you skipped right over the marketing site. We think that's a better experience for people.

Travis:   19:49
Marketing sites is just the home page that you get to. If you've never been the best route before,

Kevin:   19:53
right or if you hit, log out, then you land there. Um, but we didn't want people to have to log out to see these new videos and the awesome block post that we're creating every week. And so we created a resource is section inside of buzz about which brings in that block content in the videos. And so, um and and some deals. Coupon codes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots from

Alban:   20:14
the people who did the A p I the

Kevin:   20:15
first Hindenburg. And now we have five or six others. Yeah, there's

Travis:   20:19
a line on designs in their hover if you want to get domains. Um,

Kevin:   20:24
we're trying to give you enough discounts so that your buster out subscription is practically free.

Travis:   20:30
It's a worthy goal. I think people appreciate whenever you can help them save money, you know?

Kevin:   20:34
And then we also did in Romeo Podcast website three designs. So the public face on the podcast website that you get with your bus up Bud Sprout subscription. If you use that, that got a face lift in the Romeo cycle.

Travis:   20:47
Yeah, I loved I was a huge proponent of that, Um, because when you're just getting starting it in podcasting there's so many things you have to learn. You don't want to add on Web developer to your list of skills And so us being able to, uh, create what is, you know, it's still in my mind the best looking podcast website. Um and you can map your own domain to it. You can send people to that link, no matter what device there on, it just made it a lot easier to promote your podcast episodes without having to, you know, filter out. Well, which device are you listening to it on. And, Oh, you're on an android phone. And I have an iPhone. Let me see if I can find a Google podcast. Link it. It was just a whole right. A lot of people

Kevin:   21:27
ask that question. Of what length should you share when you're sharing your podcast? And we wanted to try to answer that question with the redesign. And so it was important to include all the links like Travis is is talking about apple called podcast podcast. Modifies that you're all the players. Um, so that is a great interest question. If you're wondering what link to share share your bus route like,

Alban:   21:52
yeah, it clicks this you, like, click subscribe. And it pops up like all 30 APs that we confined. You're listening for you and say, grab him anywhere. Go for it.

Kevin:   22:02
All right. That brings us to Sierra Sierra. Works like old. First thing I have is the visual soundbite enhancements, visual sound bites or a little 30 seconds. 62nd video clips that you can upload to Instagram and YouTube and Facebook, all your social media sites And they, you know, Ty's highlights from your episodes to get people click through and subscribe to your podcast or listen to full episode. And originally they were just very playing one style. And so we did these enhancements so that you could change the colors and customize and make him look a little bit more like what you want. Um, so that was a big updating Sierra.

Travis:   22:32
And you can also change the aspect ratio, too. Yeah, so that was a big thing that people loved was You could do square videos. You could d'oh Ah, four by five vertical videos. You could do 16 by nine videos. So depending on which platform you're using or promoting your episodes on, you could tailor the, uh, visual soundbite for that platform

Alban:   22:51
customized the color so they match your brand. He used to just be we had kind of this sum

Travis:   22:56
like a rainbow. Yeah, this is like will hit all of the brand

Alban:   22:59
was like Mario Rainbow Road, kind of like style. And I know you've got a Now you can match it to whatever your podcast looks like. Makes no more sense.

Kevin:   23:09
And then the last thing in Sierra was that we redesigned the episode sidebar on your detail page. So as we're getting more sidebar on the detail page, is that not make sense?

Alban:   23:20
I feel like this is this is pretty deep. This is cut. Let me tell you about what I'm talking about. When you log in the bus

Kevin:   23:28
route and you're on the episode. Beijing you click on the tail of an episode, the next page you go to, we call the detail page. It's all the details of your episode, and the sidebar was starting to get messy because we're adding a whole bunch of things, like the new visual sound bite in transcriptions and chapter markers and all that stuff. So we designed it or redesigned it to make it more clear and, you know, break things into sections. And, um, again, that's just a usability, making it easier to use but sprouting less intimidating when you're first coming in. So the learning curve is less steep.

Travis:   23:55
Yeah, and that made it easier to like find specific links was like Okay, I want to share the oil for this episode. I want to share it to Facebook or I wanna, you know, copy of the U. R L and paste it into my newsletter. I wanna embedded on my website. Like that redesign really helped us make everything a lot easier to find. I think it definitely helped cut down our support cases to with people saying, How do I do this? Because they're like, Oh, well, I just go to the episode and I could see my title. My description and my episode are working. Oh, right there on the right. But the sidebar is exactly what I'm looking for,

Kevin:   24:25
so that's a good point. Good customer service starts with AP design, and then we moved on to tango on the first thing we didn't tango was we added a share toe linked in button. So why was that important?

Travis:   24:39
Because that made it so. We didn't have to wear suits to work anymore because we we fulfilled our

Alban:   24:43
professional obligations. I mean, I think there's it's funny, like I would never think of using LinkedIn for my podcasts, and it's not wouldn't be super applicable to me, but ah, there's some people like they way they market. Their show is on LinkedIn. And so he started hearing more from people who have a bit more of a professional than to their podcast. Um, and I think, like I think, Kwame am I have been one of the people who was interested in it and his podcast negotiate anything and like for him negotiations. It's very professional. He's reaching a lot of professionals. He's gonna want to be on LinkedIn.

Kevin:   25:23
Okay, And then in tango, we jumped into Wave Player, gets directory links, and so we launched a New Way player earlier in the year. I didn't touch on that earlier because I'm touching out now. And one of the enhancements that we did is that you can click a subscribe button on the impeccable wave player that we have. And now we're not just showing like Apple Podcast and Spotify, but we're showing all the different app so they can. Anybody can scroll down and find the pod catcher of their choice,

Travis:   25:46
right? So if you're taking your embed player and putting on your blawg post or a website or something like that, anyone can then directly subscribe to the podcast app that they use. So it makes it again a lot easier to get people to subscribe. So they listen. We're episodes and you can grow your audience. Right?

Kevin:   26:03
And then we did better handling for people with multiple podcast. So in bus brought, you can. You don't just have to have one podcast. You can have two or three or 10 or 100. And when you started to have, like, more than three or four, it was a little bit not not the greatest You I in terms of switching between them people would get confused. And so we want to make that a better experience. And so anybody listening if you have multiple podcast on bus brought, hopefully appreciated that tango update. All right, so that wrapped tango, and then we moved into uniform. And so just if you're following along in the timeline now we're into September. Beginning of September was the Uniform Cycle kickoff. And that is when we you guys started the how to start a podcast video. Siri's boom, which are now rolling out.

Travis:   26:44
Yes, they are house in a long time. Our movie star in the making. Yeah,

Kevin:   26:49
three month investment. So far. We're only on video. Five just dropped video. Five yesterday, right?

Alban:   26:53
Yeah, it That's not That's not full time work on it, but it is a good amount of time. I mean, each of the scripts took me two days, and then the second video guy commented, Hey, man, for the next video, you should write a script, and I'm like, I'm reading this off a teleprompter.

Kevin:   27:12
So if anyone out there is wondering you like the difference between podcasting and creating videos. We've been three months in the making of these how to start a podcast video series. And I think you guys did the original how to start a podcast podcast course. And just like a week, we can have all of them, right?

Travis:   27:29
We recorded all of them in a week, and then I think I edit them the next week. Yeah, so pretty quick.

Alban:   27:34
Three week scrims filming. Yeah, that was so much easier

Travis:   27:39
here. Yeah, yeah, love podcasting. Kind of it.

Kevin:   27:43
Also in uniform. We did the affiliate marketplace launch ching. Yeah, and we talked a lot about that at the time. That is, anybody interested in getting started affiliate marketing? We want to make it really easy to find your first affiliates for you to partner with. So we launched with five of them. You can go click on Resource is Fleet Marketplace and see everything that's there. And Albert, have you looked up? How many brand mentions we've had since we launched that?

Alban:   28:08
Yeah, we just looked it up. It was like, 590. So a lot of people are getting affiliates mentioning him and episodes, hopefully getting some cash. We don't see all the cash because we don't take a cut of it.

Kevin:   28:22
No, we stay out of it so we don't know how those affiliate deals are working out for you guys. So if you want to drop us an email supported bus brought that calm and let us know how it's working out for you. How we could make it better. We are super interested in providing the best way to get started in the Fleet marketing. Ah, and then, Hey, here's a big one. Team members team members was part of the uniform cycle, So not just one log in for your bus brought account anymore. Now you can add as many people to your account as you want and you can Adam in different roles.

Alban:   28:49
Yeah, I mean, that purpose for this is a lot of people were starting to see. It was more common for multiple people to be working on the same show. Some people, one person's, the editor wants the owner, and I don't know what it is with podcasters. Maybe we're a little more cantankerous, but sometimes we, you know, but into each other. And we say you did something wrong at the podcast, but, well, one log in. So this way you can see what's going on. Who's doing what you could maybe stump you loved from for permissions. And it's a clear there's one person who owns the podcast,

Travis:   29:21
right? Well, in a few hire an outside podcast editor than they can upload your episodes for you. They can schedule him out in that kind of stuff, but they can't like, delete stuff. They can't cancel your account. And so you're able to start outsourcing more things if you want to write

Kevin:   29:36
and then, ah, what is this? Oh, creator program. We launch the creator program. So we announced it. Put a page on our website, invited people thio apply to our creator program. And can we announce our first creators that we've accepted? Let's do it. Okay, so in no particular order, the first creator that we've except into the bus right creator program is Kwame a Christian. And he is. His podcast is called Negotiate Anything and there's another podcast on his network. Ask with the confidence with confidence. And so we are super excited. We've no call me for a long time. And he does great stuff and has been a fan of bus route for years and years. So exciting to make that relationship official, and the next one is crystal profit. If anybody is in the Facebook bus brought Facebook Community Group, you might know Crystal because she is in there and helping people all the time. She's awesome. She's a podcast. Coach helps people launch podcast our podcast instead of their podcast questions. She's been super helpful to us, and we want, oh, really partner with her and help her take her show and in all of her goals, to the next level in 2020. And then the third is Carrie and read Brown, who has been a guest on buzz cast previously, right after podcast movement. Yeah, and so look for great things from those three people in 2020 is We walk through and and figure out and stumbled together about what the bus brought trade program does and how it looks. Um, yeah, we're, like, really excited about that, and that brings us to the last work cycle of the year, which we just wrap this week. Victor was the name of the work cycle and a couple things that we rolling out as part of Victor One is better in bed code, so the embed code is just code the copy and paste on your website to get your podcast players on your own website. And depending on the technology that your website was using, there were a few edge cases where the player wouldn't display properly. And so we enhanced the embed code to make that easier and more compatible with all different websites. Whether you're on square space or wicks or homebuilder word, presser, whatever. Ah, and then we add a character counts to description field, so it's not something that a lot of people run into. But every now and then you have podcasters and They have very long descriptions of the episodes. They, some people just drop a lot of show notes. Some people, you know, take quotes and all this other comes up. But in their descriptions, totally fine. But there is a limit to the number of characters that you can have in a description. And that's per apple Apple podcast specs can't have more than 4000 characters. And if you do things like affiliate mentions or stuff, then we have to reserve some of that space for disclaimers and stuff. So we wanted to add a live character counsel as your typing. You see how much room you have left,

Travis:   32:22
and there's one more projects that was actually most of the work that hasn't hasn't rolled out yet. Um, top secret, but we're very excited about it. If, as a ah informed insider you are subscribe to the YouTube channel, you can go and watch our latest video, which was how to edit a podcast, and there's a little Easter egg in there for you give you a little sneak peek of what's coming in 2020. We're gonna They're

Kevin:   32:47
a very short section showing a screen cast of buzz sprout and being a bus brought user yourself. I'm sure you will recognize that. Hey, that's not a screen I've seen before. So if you want to see what's coming in early January could take a look.

Travis:   33:02
So awesome. Great. Year 2019 was a huge year for bus proud. Uh, I think we had a lot of fun putting these features together for you guys. It was really great getting all the feedback from you and how you're using them and how it's helping. You were excited in 2020 to continue moving that ball forward and continuing to empower and equipped you to reach your goals and just keep podcasting. So, uh, from all of us here at bus route want to say a happy holidays, Happy New Year and we'll see you in 2020

Tuxedo T-shirts
How "Hot Hollywood" fooled IAB
Export Stats
Achievement Emails
Resources Section
Visual Soundbite Enhancements and Customization
New sidebar on Episode Detail page
Share to LinkedIn
Wave player gets directory links
Better UI for people with multiple podcasts
Multiple Team Members
Better embed code for episode players
Character count in episode description field

Podcasts we love