Fact or Fiction: The Realities Behind Popular Podcast Advice

We're investigating six more common myths, including whether you need to be on YouTube, if ratings and reviews actually boost your ranking, and whether great content alone is enough to grow your show.

Myths we're covering:
• YouTube is the largest podcast platform, so you need to have video
• Ratings and reviews help your podcast grow
• If you build it, they will come
• You can use any song as long as it's under 10 seconds
• We can fix it in post
• You need a big following to make money in podcasting


Fan Mail Requests:

Send us your favorite bits from past shows for our 200th. Also, if you’ve cracked Apple charts or earned a feature on their app, tell us your story!

Contact Buzzcast

• Send us a text message
• Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods

Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!

Chapters

• 0:00 200 Already?!
• 3:42 Myth: YouTube Is The Largest Podcast Platform, So You Need Video
• 16:52 Myth: Ratings And Reviews Help Your Podcast Rank Higher
• 25:58 Myth: If You Build It, They Will Come
• 34:30 Myth: You Can Use Any Song If It's Under 10 Seconds
• 40:47 Myth: We Can Fix It In Post
• 45:15 Myth: You Need A Big Audience To Make Money Podcasting
• 54:02 Fan Mail

Transcript

Kevin: 0:00

Is the outline right? This is episode 199. Yeah. What in the world happened? Oh, wait. I think I I think I know the answer to my question. Because it seems like just it wasn't that long ago that we were like, we just did a hundred episodes. And now all of a sudden.

Jordan: 0:13

Yeah, I remember putting the hundred episodes together.

Kevin: 0:15

Yeah. And now we're already at 200.

Jordan: 0:17

It feels like it came a lot quicker because it took us so long to get to 100 episodes. And then the 200 just like snuck up, but that's also because we kind of doubled our publishing frequency.

Alban: 0:28

That's my theory, is that it went twice as fast as soon as we started doing twice as many episodes.

Jordan: 0:33

I guess that's true.

Alban: 0:34

There's also we're recording this one. We're following our own advice right now. We are planning ahead for when we're all going to be not able to record. And so we're recording this early. So for us, this is episode 198, and we're going to 199, we're planning it ahead. The next one you listen to will likely be the 200th episode, and we're going to have to do something special for it.

Jordan: 0:56

I know.

Alban: 0:57

I don't know if we're going to get any takers on this, but we talked about doing an episode where you go back and you pick out like old bits or things from the podcast that you liked over the years. If you've been listening to the show for a while and there's episodes you remember, there's bits you remember, the things that you thought were funny, send them in to us and we'll try to bring those back. I'm not committing us to doing a recap episode because I don't know if I always love recap episodes, but if there's something from, you know, a few years ago that you still remember, send it into us. We'd love to hear what it is.

Jordan: 1:30

Here we go. Welcome back to Buzzcast, the podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. Our last myth episode got a bunch of feedback. We got some fan mail messages. It was uh listeners like really appreciating that we covered things like publishing frequency and niching down. Like your podcast doesn't have to be that big to be successful. It's been really awesome.

Alban: 1:58

Well, the best ones, the ones I liked the most, was somebody who was like, I'm doing a regional podcast about my county, uh, a small county in Georgia. Yeah. And they're like, my out of state friend said, Well, why would anybody around the world listen to it? Like, yeah, that's the point. Nishing down, niching down is because you're out of state, you're not going to listen to the podcast about Fayette County, Georgia. Yeah. I actually thought that was a misspelling of Fayetteville when I first saw it. And then I went, no, Fayetteville is in Fayette County. Even I'm learning stuff about Georgia because of this podcast. So the best part of the about the myths is when we quote unquote bust them, when they are encounter you encounter them in your life, you don't have to feel like, oh, I have to listen to it. You can go, I think I feel comfortable with my initial decision to niche down or to pre-record episodes or just follow what felt like the right advice to you. And it's great when that aligned with at least our feelings about some of these myths.

Jordan: 2:56

Yeah, I'm I'm super looking forward to our next round. We've got six more for you. So let's go with round two. So, how this is going to work is I'm going to present a myth. I'm going to talk about what it means, maybe the story behind it, and then we'll do some supporting arguments. We'll do some uh dismissive arguments, and then we will determine if it is. I'm trying to remember what these were from the last episode. Uh, myth, fact, or possibly true, or maybe true with like a caveat or some nuance. I think I asked this last time and it just didn't stick. I don't remember.

Alban: 3:31

There's lots of things you can do, but mostly we're going for myth or fact or confirmed or something like that.

Jordan: 3:36

Yeah.

Kevin: 3:37

It's confirmed, it's busted, or it's plausible. Those are the main three.

Jordan: 3:41

Okay. Let's kick it off with our first podcasting myth. This one was suggested by Matt at Girl Dad Nation. YouTube is the largest podcast platform, so you need to have video. YouTube is where everyone listens to podcasts now. So if you're not making video episodes, you're already behind. So, what are our supporting arguments for YouTube? It's the largest podcast platform, so you need to have video. Why are people constantly saying this on the internet?

Alban: 4:09

Well, I keep seeing all this data that says YouTube is the number one podcasting platform. Let's table that for a second. And for people who are really big podcasters, many of them seem to be doing video. So it kind of feels like if I want to have a really big and successful podcast, I should be doing video as well. You know, video is not just a way for people to engage your content, but the fact that it's on YouTube means that you're going to get the benefits. I'm putting this in scare quotes, the benefits of an algorithmically driven platform. So you're going to get lots of exposure, possibly, to totally new listeners. And so the idea is you have a chance of getting in front of a lot of people who wouldn't have seen your show and they could become uh subscribers. So I think that's the argument for why you need to have video.

Kevin: 4:59

Yeah. I mean, I you can't see me because we don't do video, but I winced when Alban said, you know, the algorithm could expose your show to a lot of new people or a big audience. Well, sure, it's a possibility, but it's also a lottery. Like quite literally, a lottery where the odds are very much against you. And so I do think that a lot of people struggle with the whole marketing aspect of podcasting. In order to grow a show in a traditional like audio podcast space, you have to market it. You have to spread the word. You've got to tell people. And what often happens in the YouTube world is people just rely on YouTube to do the marketing for them and they hope that they stumble upon something that the algorithm likes. Or the better strategy is that you create content that favors whatever the algorithm likes today.

Jordan: 5:47

Yeah, I think that Joe Rogan kind of set the bar for this because he was publishing so many clips. It was short videos, and that's really what went viral for Joe. And I think that a lot of podcasters, if you have time, if you have time for it, it can be beneficial to have like those like talking head videos or, you know, make something where you can like convert it into shorts because that's going to be a little bit more engaging than an audiogram. Obviously, if you're on something like Instagram or YouTube, it does make sense that video would be more engaging than like a still image. And so I think that's kind of where this comes from.

Alban: 6:26

Yeah. Let me give one more argument for this before we go into full um dispelling mode. The last is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are consuming ungodly amounts of YouTube. And if you know anyone under the age of 15, that's like their primary type of entertainment is YouTube. And they want to watch YouTube, they love YouTube, and they find creators. And if that's where the Gen Z and Gen Alpha are going, then that's going to be your way to grow a podcast long term. That more of the culture is going to be uh YouTube centric. So we see all the stats, we see the celebrities seem to be proof points that they're doing well on YouTube. It feels like it could be mark uh help with marketing, and younger listenerslash viewers are consuming a lot of YouTube. Maybe you need to be on YouTube. Now I think we can uh like jump in and start pulling this part.

Jordan: 7:27

Okay, we'll start dismantling this. One of the first things that I thought of is how YouTube was randomly assigning playlists as podcasts because that's how YouTube categorizes podcasts, is like there's um basically a tagging system where you can create a playlist and tag it as a podcast. And there was like, I don't know if it's still going on, but they have been tagging music and just regular YouTube videos as podcasts. And so, like, even in like the YouTube music app, there will be like songs tagged as podcasts. And so I think that the numbers are super inflated just from that alone.

Kevin: 8:08

100%. It's very fuzzy math over there at YouTube. Mostly because you have like the people who are collecting the data are the ones reporting the data, and they're the ones who are determining what is what. Let me try to make sense of that a little bit of what I'm trying to get at. Is like YouTube, um, they have public view counts on all the videos that are on the platform, but they don't really tell us what counts as a view. Now, I understand that they want that to be a little bit of a black box because they don't want the they have to battle bots like we battle bots and we're counting downloads. And the more transparent they are, then the more people can get around that. I I get all that kind of stuff, but we don't really know what a view is. Is a view 10 seconds of video watching? Is it one second of video watching? Is it a minute of video watching? We don't really know, and they don't want to tell anybody. That's fine, it's their platform. But what we do know is that it doesn't seem to be equal to what is in the podcast world. I think that YouTube used to, Alban, you might know this better than I do, but do they stop most video play counts at 500 while they do like a deeper stats analysis and then they start counting again?

Alban: 9:17

I've definitely seen videos that seem to stall, and I think that it's their way of making sure that the traffic's legit. Right. So I don't know how much that still happens, but I remember seeing that when we would be driving a lot of the traffic ourselves.

Kevin: 9:30

Yeah. This is what I'm referencing is that one of the things YouTube used to do is I think they just used to pretty much count everything for the first 500. They're like, this video is small, it's not getting a ton of traction. So anything that is, you know, click and play on this video, we're just gonna count that as a view. As soon as it hit 500, then like their level two system kicked in, and they're like, oh, this video seems to be getting a little bit of traction. We actually want to put it into our like level two stats package and do a little bit more analysis before we start serving it up to everybody. The good thing about that ecosystem is that the motivations are in alignment. Like they don't want to get scammed by bots, and then their platform thinks something is good content, so they start promoting it to a bunch of other people. Turns out it's not good content and ends up driving people off the platform. That's not good for YouTube, it's not good for the content. And so the nice thing is there is that alignment there. Like they are incented to make sure that views are actually views. They are keeping people on the platform. The bad news is that like we don't know how they're doing it, we don't know what they're counting. And so if you try to compare these like Apple to apples with podcast downloads, you're never going to get anywhere because while the while podcasting stats are public and there is a standard and a certification process that we all try to follow as much as possible. That doesn't exist. It doesn't have to exist on the YouTube side because they yeah, like it's what they say it is. Ads are purchased through their platform, their the data is reported through their platform and collected through their platform. It's pretty much what they say goes in their world.

Alban: 10:53

They control the whole world. Yeah. It's a bit ironic. Like the podcast stats get so much more scrutiny because people can move between hosts and set up all these redirects and all these different ways of measuring the stats. And they go, Oh, I'm seeing like a slight variation between two hosts or between, you know, OP3 and my host, which those are really healthy checks. But YouTube's, I mean, is the equivalent of asking someone to grade their own homework. Yes. That we want to believe that they're doing their best. And we know that the algorithm is really important to them to make sure they're getting that number really good. But from other Google properties, we have indication like these numbers are not absolute. So the views that you could get if you're running ads in Google ads towards a YouTube video, those aren't gonna be one-to-one. Well, they feel like they should be. If you're using Google Search Console and also Google Analytics for your website, those numbers are never gonna be a hundred percent match. So there's lots of areas where it's like Google is grading the same piece of homework slightly differently at different times. And that makes me feel like these are useful numbers, but we've got to put some pretty healthy error bars around it. And we also have to know they're just totally different types of numbers than what we're getting elsewhere. There's a another point I really want to make here. When we talk about YouTube being the number one platform, one of the things I see a lot is this question that uh people answer in surveys, and it's which of the following podcast apps do you use to listen to podcasts or watch podcasts? Check all that apply. Okay. If I asked the two of you to do that, both of you would probably check YouTube.

Jordan: 12:41

Yeah.

Alban: 12:42

Unless you were making a really like precise, maybe pedantic point, no, YouTube's not podcasts. But like most people are checking YouTube because they're going, well, mostly I I watch some podcasts and they pop up every once in a while. So yeah, I check it. Right. But then you don't go check Spotify and Apple and Overcast and Pocketcasts because you only use one of those really to listen to podcasts. So what happens, I think, is everyone has a primary podcast player and it's Apple, and you check Apple. And then you scroll down the list and you go, Well, I used Apple Music, so Spotify's not involved. I don't use a third-party player. Oh, I also sometimes YouTube, because I look at videos on there, I also see podcasts check as well. And what happens is then YouTube is the most dominant because the most people say, Sometimes I use YouTube to watch podcasts. Yep. So it shows up on all these reports as being number one just because everyone is watching a little bit of podcasts on there. But it doesn't mean that that's the primary consumption platform.

Jordan: 13:43

Yeah. And I would say that weekly, I listen to, I want to say, like 15 to 20 podcasts each week. And there are two technically podcasts that I will watch on YouTube. And they are both, when I look at them, they are both by filmmakers who it's gorgeous cinematography. They have visual aids and it's document, every episode is like a documentary. Right. And so that is why I watch those because it is so engaging visually. And I know for a fact that a lot of the podcasts that I listen to probably have some video version of the podcast, but I don't want that because they're literally just sitting on a couch and talking. Why would I watch two people sit on a couch and talk? I don't need that. So those are the ones I'm gonna listen to while I'm driving or walking or doing dishes.

Alban: 14:35

So we've talked about one of the supporting points is well, when I look at the most popular podcasts in the world, they're all on YouTube. Yeah. First, that's just not true. They're not all on YouTube. But even the ones that are there, there's a very heavy uh survivorship bias that the podcasters who launch and don't stick with podcasting, who they launch on YouTube and they don't stick with it and they just go back to doing whatever they're doing and they quit creating content. We don't see them. But the ones who had a team, had everything lined up, they launched on YouTube, they hit the algorithm and they stick around, that makes sense that they get near the top. But we're discounting all of the 95% who go, this was too much work. And then they kind of just churn and they quit. Yeah. They pod fade. And it's really important to remember like, if you're getting into this so that you can help tell the stories of Fayette County, Georgia, well, you're probably not going to make it to number one. And are you still doing what you want to do if you do it as audio? And I think the answer is yes. So don't try to add video day one and overwhelm yourself and end up in the 95% plus that are, you know, pod fading pretty quickly.

Kevin: 15:48

Yeah, I like to think about YouTube as in terms of how an indie podcaster should approach the question of is YouTube right for me or not. I like to think about it in terms of it's a for sure, a high investment marketing channel with a potentially high return. Yes. But the return is not guaranteed. That's definitely risky. What is guaranteed is the investment. It is a high investment. And so if you get to a place where you say, I need a new marketing channel, I want a new marketing channel, and I've got a lot to give, then YouTube might be a marketing channel which you can make that high level of investment in and potentially get a high return. But you might also not get a return, or you might get a very low return. And so that's how I think about it. And I hope that's helpful. I don't think it is in terms of like the myth, being YouTube is the largest podcast platform. So I have to be on there and I have to be video. I don't think that's right. I think YouTube could be a really great marketing channel for a podcast. And if you have the resources to put yourself in there in a high quality way, there's a chance that it could pay off in a good way for you. But yeah, it's risky.

Jordan: 16:52

All right. Our next myth. This one was suggested by Dave Jackson. Ratings and reviews help your podcast grow. The math is simple. More podcast reviews equals higher rankings equals more listeners. I just heard this one. I was listening to On Fire with Jeff Probst, and he said in a call to action, hey, make sure to leave a rating and review because that helps us grow. And I was like, ooh, Jeff, no.

Kevin: 17:20

So you're coming right out of the gate and you're saying, no.

Alban: 17:22

No, one of you has to make the uh supporting arguments.

Kevin: 17:25

Yeah, I mean, one of the ways that we could say that this is true is that there is social proof that goes along with it. So it depends on what you do with your ratings and reviews. You could just rely on the platforms themselves, like Apple Podcasts, to promote your ratings and reviews that you get. And that might do something, but you could also take them and you know repurpose them. You could tweet them out. I just got a new rating and review, and it was really flattering. And so I'm going to tweet that and I'm going to put it on threads and I'm going to put it on Blue Sky and all the social channels that I'm on. I'm going to throw it on LinkedIn and everything else. I'm going to put them on my website.

Jordan: 17:55

Yeah.

Kevin: 17:56

I'm going to incorporate them into my show. I don't know. All the different things that you could do. There is some social proof that could be a way that does help your show grow. Maybe Jeff's onto something there with that. Maybe that's what he's thinking.

Jordan: 18:09

Yeah.

Alban: 18:09

Often the way I hear this portrayed is people not saying the social proof. They're actually saying, like, no, ratings and reviews are part of the search engine algorithm. And we know that to be 100% false. So three years ago, Apple published this blog post about how search works on Apple Podcasts. And here's a quote Like charts, um, search and charts both work this way. While ratings, reviews, and shares help indicate a podcast's newness, popularity, and quality, they are not factored into search results. So we know it's not part of the algorithm. We actually anecdotally know this from another way, which is when all the scammers were trying to do podcast promotion and Apple Podcasts, they would do two things. They would subscribe to the show, because it was back when subscribes were the main thing, and they would listen to one episode. And they would just listen to a half a second. They'd subscribe, listen, subscribe, listen, and that's all they would do. They weren't leaving ratings and reviews, they weren't doing any of that stuff. So it's not something that factors into the search results. But like Kevin said, a great marketing strategy around your podcast could incorporate ratings and reviews. So when we used to ask for them and read them on the show, we got more of them. We could screenshot them and post them online. We could put them on our website and we could say, man, this is awesome. You should listen to the show. This person loves it. That's all really good marketing work to do, but it does not influence the algorithm.

Kevin: 19:40

Now, I do think that a lot of the stuff, like if we're talking about Apple Podcasts specifically, a lot of the podcasts that they highlight in different areas of their app are editorial selections. And so I am, I would imagine like Apple has never come out, as far as I know, and said that we don't look at the number of rating or reviews that you have when we're selecting podcasts to be featured in whatever. Like Halloween is coming up here in the States. And so they might put together whatever the spooky podcasts, you know, playlists or whatever. And they're looking for podcasts to highlight in that. So if you do some true crime or spooky stories podcast or something like that, you might be on the threshold of what they would consider something, like something that they would consider in terms of engagement. So how many downloads are you getting, you know, per episode and like what's the amount of listen time? They're probably looking at all that data. And then they might also look at, oh, it has like 200, you know, five-star reviews. So that could bump it up. As far as I know, they've never said that they don't look at that stuff specifically when they're selecting podcasts for editorial features.

Alban: 20:39

Yeah. New and noteworthy. They're very clear. It's editorial. You submit and say, Hey, will you include me? And they ask you questions like, are you going to launch on the day that we would put you in new and noteworthy? We kind of want you to line up with our schedule. They say, Are you going to go out of your way to promote Apple Podcasts? So there's just, are we on the same team here? They seem to want to highlight podcasts that have a subscription, like bonus content inside of Apple Podcasts. They're very clear, like this is editorial, and there's a bit of, we want to make sure it's valuable for not just uh listeners, but also Apple Podcasts as a whole. And they've got to be looking to see are we getting real ratings and reviews from people who say this is a great show? I'd be surprised if they said that wasn't the case. So there's there's still value here. It's just the myth that it seems to influence search results or it influences the charts, the two other ways to get visibility in Apple Podcasts, that is not accurate. That's uh got to be busted.

Jordan: 21:44

Yeah. And I went and checked on Spotify's uh to see if Spotify, because we're talking mainly about Apple Podcasts, but Spotify is another big player, and their algorithm also ratings do not affect that at all. I know they added ratings like a couple of years ago or something like that, but yeah, even ratings on Spotify, not included. So yep, busted.

Kevin: 22:04

I know you guys want to throw out busted. I just I want to put it in the plausible category. Oh, because I do, I do think it can help your show. And the way that at least the way that it's written in the outline, it says ratings and reviews help your podcast grow. I think it's plausible. It's plausible, but it is not a one-for-one. It is not a if you get more ratings and reviews, you're going to your podcast is going to surface higher in the list of search results or chart rankings or anything. No, like let's bust that. But I feel like we kind of have to have some nuance here. We have to break these out as two separate myths. The fact that we'll get your podcast to search like rank higher in search results, busted for sure. That it could potentially help it make it grow? Yeah. Plausible.

Alban: 22:43

I think it's possible. Yeah, I'm reading the uh more podcast reviews equals higher ranking equals more listeners. And I'm saying that's that's busted. That's not true. That's busted. But are is getting social proof for your podcast gonna help it grow? Absolutely. Are people saying this is a great podcast help gonna help you grow? Absolutely. Should you do it? Yes, 100%. In a great marketing strategy, should you be highlighting the people who say you do a good job? Yes. Um, there's about a thousand studies done on marketing going, oh, it turns out if you just have random people say, I like this peanut butter, other people will buy it. Even if they don't even know that person and they're not a celebrity at all, they're just like, oh, I heard from somebody at the store peanut butter. This peanut butter is good, so I bought it. So 100%.

Jordan: 23:32

Yeah.

Alban: 23:33

Is it good to get a five-star review? Yeah. Yes. But it the path doesn't go through the the rankings, it goes through the psychology of someone thinking about listening to a podcast. And nobody wants to listen to a podcast where that has zero ratings and reviews. You kind of want to look there and go, oh, there's like five people who love the show at least. Great. I'm in. I'm gonna give it a try.

Jordan: 23:56

When you find a new podcast, do you go to the reviews to read them before you listen? No. I don't either. I don't either. Yeah. But I will notice like if a podcast looks interesting to me and it has like a hundred and something reviews and it's like an average of two stars, then I will go to the ratings and be like, okay, why are people? Why are people reading this so low? And like nine times out of ten, they're like, there's too many ads.

Kevin: 24:21

Yeah. Oftentimes ratings end up being an indicator of something being low quality more than high quality.

Jordan: 24:27

Yeah.

Kevin: 24:28

That's kind of true of ratings across the board. I expect most of the things that I'm looking for on Amazon to have a high number of stars generally. But once in a while, I'll stumble upon something that I'm about to check out on and I'll notice that it's like averaging three stars. I'm like, that's that's pretty low for an Amazon product.

Alban: 24:43

What's going on? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. In a five-star rating system, you really want the five star to be reserved for like, wow, this is incredible. You know, you go out of your way to recommend it to somebody. But what really happens is from Uber to Amazon to everywhere, it's like five stars is basically like we were adequate. And then anything below that is like there was a serious problem. And so everything is like 4.8 stars. And you're like, okay, so it's about average.

Jordan: 25:14

That shouldn't be average.

Kevin: 25:16

Uber Uber has gotten really bad with this. If somebody accepts your Uber ride and they've got less than like 4.5, me personally, I'm canceling that Uber. Something bad happened in this vehicle, I'm not getting in it. Yeah. Yeah. Which it shouldn't be. Like you would think it would be like most drivers would land somewhere between three and five, which means three is very average and five is exceptional. And if as long as you're between three and five, I should be accepting the ride, but it's not. Like every Uber driver, for the most part, has like high fours, 4.8, 4.9, 4 something. It's very rare that I see anybody with a five. But if you're in the low fours or below, I'm done. Cancel, like, no way.

Jordan: 25:52

It's because people are so polite when they're leaving those ratings while they're in the car with them. You know what I mean? All right. Our third myth of this episode: if you build it, they will come. All you have to do to have your podcast grow in listenership is just make great content, publish it, and the audience will find you. Right?

Alban: 26:12

Yeah. So yeah, this is the uh the field of dreams. Argument for it. Quality is what keeps people coming back. Marketing is what gets people to see it the first time. So if a podcast has really incredible marketing, it doesn't matter if somebody's listened to the show and went, This really stinks, and they don't come back. If you have millions of dollars to spend on podcast ads, but the show's not any good, no one sticks around and you aren't able to continue to grow. So quality is really important. Lots of shows are growing because they're highly recommendable. And people are telling their friends and family, I really enjoyed this episode. You would too. You like this kind of stuff, check it out. I guess there's an argument sometimes that people would make that the quote unquote algorithms will surface your content. Um, that's not going to happen in the podcast apps, but that may happen on YouTube if you're doing video. It may happen on social media if people are recommending you there, um, if people are creating clips. But there's a bit of just like virality that happens in real life if one person starts recommending a podcast. I mean, kind of like what we had with serial in 2014, that it just started getting recommended everywhere to the point that you you really started seeing it everywhere you went.

Jordan: 27:31

Yeah, I think we saw something similar to that happen with the telepathy tapes this year. That podcast just like blew up and everyone was talking about it. And then she's and then after it blew up, she started like guesting on another podcast and talking about her podcast. And some I think we've seen that where someone just like makes something and I didn't see any like advertising form. It just was like a word of mouth sort of thing. Everyone's talking about it. But I think there's also some podcasts that I've listened to that I thought were spectacular quality. And then I look and they only have like 20 reviews and I'm shocked and I don't understand it. And I imagine that that's probably because they aren't marketing it. They're not like, there's no call to action in the podcast saying, hey, if you like the show, please share it with somebody. So I think there's something to say before that too.

Kevin: 28:22

Yeah. I got so many thoughts on this. I don't know where to begin. Not every podcaster wants like the main reason of them doing the show or entering into podcasting in the first place, one of their goals is not to get to a million podcast downloads. And so the reason that you start a podcast is just I want to connect with my co-host and we want to get together and we want to record these things and we put it out and it's fun, and that's enough. Then the idea that if I build it, they will come. We might find our 10 listeners out there in the world, and that's enough. Then I think you could lean into this and you can say, we do no marketing for our podcast, and we're completely fine with that. I think that's a completely legitimate position to have. You don't have to have a massive audience to be successful on the terms that you defined. And that is I get to get on the uh, you know, a microphone with one of my best friends every week and we chat for an hour, and that is a blast. And yeah, 10 people listen, but we don't do it for the 10 people. We do it because that in and of itself is fun and rewarding for us. That's wonderful. But I don't think that's what this myth is saying. I think what this myth is saying is that just creating good content in and of itself is a marketing channel, and I think that's where this starts to crumble. Because how are people going to find it? Like, I just don't know how to say it any simpler than that. Like, I end up scratching my head a lot at podcast conferences when we talk to people who say that they've been doing, you know, it's podcasting for a year or two, and the show's just not getting as much traction. They're not getting the audience that they really set out to find, to discover, to create this content for, and they're disappointed by it. And so, of course, the question is well, how are you marketing it? Like, what are you doing to promote your show, to tell the world that this show. Exists and find the right people. And they're not doing anything. Well, that is it's a different skill set. You know, being able to put an outline together or come up with interesting topics or be an expert on a topic that you can talk at length about is one skill set, and obviously the number one skill set for a podcaster. Another skill set is now making sure that whoever this podcast is created for and intended the intended audience is for that. Like, how do you let them know that it exists and how do you get them to try it? And then once they try it, hopefully now your great content takes over and they become a regular listener and they maybe start to spread the word. But you got to do that first step. And so we've talked about that before. Like, how do we get those first hundred listeners? We've got some tips. We did a great episode on like 25 unconventional marketing tips and all this other kind of stuff. But if having a moderate to large size audience is part of what you would consider success for your podcast, you have to put on the marketing hat at some point and you've got to do some marketing work.

Alban: 30:57

Again, the quality of the content is retention. And it's really, really important. Once you feel comfortable, like, hey, I'm really proud of the content we're doing. People who do listen, who maybe we've told about in real life or communities we're involved in that we've told about the podcast, they're listening and they're enjoying it and they're writing us and they're telling us they like it. Then that's the good indicator it's time to do some marketing. Trying to get your podcast in front of the ideal audience. But long term, like the content has to be there. So these are two sides of the same coin. You have to have both great marketing without a great product. That's called a scam or snake oil. A great product without great marketing, a great podcast without great marketing is mostly just like a hidden gem. And you do run across them. Like you find products sometimes, and you're like, this is such a great product. How do people not know about this? Or you find a great podcast, you go, how do people not know about it? Probably because there hasn't been any marketing around it. And you do need to have both pieces.

Kevin: 31:57

I'm reminded of two things. But first, I'll start with a quick one, which is TV Guide. You remember TV Guide used to exist? Yeah.

Jordan: 32:03

Yeah.

Kevin: 32:03

I don't know if it still does, but like when shows would come up for renewal, I don't know what time of year that would be generally, but they would always put out a TV guide episode that would be like the best TV shows that you're not watching. And it would basically go through a couple of shows that are like, hey, the networks are going to cancel these because the ratings are so low, but they're really good shows. And so it would be like TV Guide and the people who work there doing marketing on behalf of these shows because they didn't want them to go away. Right. And and you might find a few fans of your podcast that are like, hey, every time we listen to this episode, the hosts are saying, Yo, we're asking for feedback and nobody's writing in. And like, well, why are we doing this? Should we keep doing it? But you really love the show. You don't want it to go away. And so, like, you, as a fan, as a listener, might try to like market the show for them or help grow the show. It reminds me of what TV guys. But somebody needs to do the marketing, right? Yeah. If you're listening to a show and you love it and nobody's talking about it, nobody's listening, then we need the street team out there to help grow the show. Somebody has to do it. The other thing, Alban was saying, great marketing without a great product is he calls it snake oil. It reminds me of my favorite quote about marketing in general, which is the fastest way to kill a bad product is with good marketing. Yes. So I think that that means you have to ask yourself a tough question sometimes. If you're marketing your show, if you're promoting all of your episodes on all of your socials and you've set up a blog or whatever, and you're targeting certain keywords and you're getting search results, if you're doing marketing type stuff, but your audience still isn't growing, then you have to ask yourself, like, is it a product problem? Yeah. And podcasters often don't. That's a tough question to ask. You have to be really honest with yourself. You have to find some people in your life who will be honest with you. If you say, Did you listen to my last episode? No, why not? Would you listen to my next episode and give me some harsh constructive feedback? Because I really want to do have a I really want to have a good product and I'm investing. I'm putting time, effort, and energy into marketing this thing, but I'm not seeing any results. And it's probably it could be that the marketing you're doing is not good. That could be the problem. Or it could be no, the marketing is fine. It the problem is with the product, and you have to have a high quality product.

Jordan: 34:08

All right. If you build it, they will come busted.

Kevin: 34:11

I say busted.

Jordan: 34:12

But there are some lightning in a bottle cases.

Kevin: 34:14

Yeah, because to entertain the myth itself at all, you have to say that whoever is interested in figuring out if this is true or not is interested in growing their audience. If you're interested in growing your audience, you have to do more than just putting out a great product. You have to tell the world about it. And so I think busted.

Jordan: 34:30

Next up, we have the internet's favorite rule. You can use any song as long as it's under 10 seconds because it falls under fair use, right? Yeah. This is one I added so quickly because I see it all the time. All the time. They're like, hey, I want to play a song, and like I got to make sure it's under 10 seconds. And everyone's just like, ah, I don't know.

Kevin: 34:53

Let me just pile on another myth on top of this myth.

Jordan: 34:55

Okay.

Kevin: 34:56

Is that using a cool, catchy, popular hit song in your podcast intro will make your podcast good or help make your podcast grow. It will not. Nobody cares about the intro music that you're using. Bust it. Right. And if I wanted to go listen to some great music, I'm not searching podcasts to find it.

Jordan: 35:16

No. Yeah.

Kevin: 35:17

So anytime somebody comes into podcasting and they're like, oh, I need an intro, I want to use my favorite song. Bad idea. Bad idea in terms of you know liability and lawsuits and everything else. Any amount of time that you're using copyrighted music is going to get you in trouble potentially, unless you're completely flying under the radar, which means it's just a ticking time bomb. At some point, you're hoping that your show gets popular enough that somebody is going to recognize that you're using this music that you shouldn't. But here's the other thing it's not going to help. Nobody cares. Nobody's like, oh, that's my favorite song, too. I'm going to listen to this podcast. No.

Alban: 35:53

What's really important. So a lot of times people say, Well, yeah, you can because of fair use. And what's happened is they heard this phrase fair use once, and then they go, Yeah, that's like perfectly legit. Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement, which means you get sued for copyright infringement, and then you go, no, no, no, it's okay because it's fair use. And fair use, we have four pieces to it. Okay. The third one is going to be how much of the copyrighted material did you use? So that's where that 10 seconds comes from. People are like, hey, if you're using less, you're less likely to get busted. Unfortunately, for those people, there are three others. One is the purpose and the character of the use. So is it commercial? Well, for a podcast, yeah. If you're ever gonna run ads in it, you know, it's a commercial use. It's not a parody. Um, you can get away with parody more because you're trying to say you're trying to riff off of the original. The nature of the copyrighted work, it's a copyrighted song that was made for selling CDs or albums or streams. The purpose was not for this to get ripped off. So that's gonna cut against you. And then the fourth one, effect on market value, kind of ties to what Kevin was saying. No one's really listening to your intro because they're like, oh, cool, I'm gonna replace the original song. But it's still like the the point of the song is to get licensed in movies and in commercials and possibly in podcasts. So nobody wants you to steal it. And if you get big enough, then you're going to get some cease and desist, or you're going to get copyright takedowns, or you're gonna run into some negative legal issues. So either go ahead and get the license or just don't use copyrighted music. There's tons of good music that now that you can get licenses for all over the web. There's tons that are free. And now there's all this new AI-generated music, which isn't always great, but you can make up a quick jingle that you could use and not have to worry about copyright infringement. So there's lots of options out there for you. Don't go pick your favorite ACDC song and hope to get away with it.

Jordan: 38:04

Yeah, there's a lot of podcasters. Like, um, I've seen the uh example of someone saying, I want to do a podcast where I analyze like hit songs from the 80s and 90s. And I'm going to play clips of them and then I'm gonna talk about them and dissect like why it became a hit, and we're gonna talk about the music theory behind it. And even doing that, like chopping it up and using it as like a reference of analysis is going to get you in hot water. And the Spotify takedowns. So, I mean, I've talked about this before. I have licensed music, not by popular artists. This is like just music from Epidemic Sound or Artlist. And Spotify has been so aggressive in taking down all of my episodes. I feel like I am constantly battling Spotify. And there is a gorgeously composed fiction podcast that's kind of like a comfort podcast for me in the autumn. It's like every autumn I go back and listen to this podcast. And it's just a short series. And this guy is a beautiful composer. I went back to it and he had a new episode, and it said, attention for Spotify listeners. And Spotify had taken down like two-thirds of his entire podcast. Like it was like all of season one, all of season two, half of season three. And he's just basically like this was months ago. He's like, they're not helping me resolve this. I can't resolve this issue. This is music that he himself created. Yeah. So if he's having issues and it's music that clearly the bots couldn't have flagged as licensed music, they just took it down. Then, I mean, if you have something as popular, it's gone immediately.

Alban: 39:49

Yeah, you're making a good point. Even if you have a good defense for fair use, the way this actually plays out across the podcast apps, especially ones like Spotify or YouTube, that they are very much in a strong relationship with the music rights holders, they're going to take it down and they're going to err strongly on the side of the labels who have the rights to this music. And they're going to go, hey, by default, we trust you, label who sent us this takedown notice. We'll let the podcaster, YouTuber, whatever, prove they have the license, and it's going to be painful for them. So just don't do it. It's not worth the upside. The upside value is almost none. You get some music that might sound good, but the downside risk is now you're inviting legal and a bunch of just headaches. So it's definitely a myth and it's not worth it.

Jordan: 40:47

Okay. Next up, we have we can fix it in post. You don't have to worry about mistakes because editing will save everything.

Alban: 40:55

This one was sent in by Jordan.

Kevin: 40:58

I'm like, wait, why are you saying it like that? I think this one's true. Come in there, like confirmed, moving on. Right.

Jordan: 41:06

Yeah. And I mean, the truth is editors who have a lot of experience and expensive tools can absolutely clean up a lot. You can clean up background noise, pauses. Maybe if your co-host is clicking their AirPods case, you can scrub it out of the audio if you're really talented.

Alban: 41:24

Fishing for compliments here.

Jordan: 41:27

But not everything can be cleaned up in post. Audio is data. And when you have corrupted data, there's no data there to save, right?

Kevin: 41:36

Yeah. I mean, there's there's definitely a line. Like the clearest line is if on your recording there's some clipping. That is something that even like with the best tools, you can't create something that's not there. And clipping is when you're recording and your levels are set so high, somebody is so loud in the microphone that it's actually not able to be captured in the recording.

Jordan: 41:55

Yeah.

Kevin: 41:55

And so it's when your meters on your little microphone meter level go red. That means that there's so much noise coming into the microphone at this point that we can't record it all. We can't capture it all. So there's no saving. It's a little bit like in photography. The photography, the kiss of death, is the overexposure. There's too much light. And now on the film or on the camera sensor itself, it's just gone white. And you can't pull back any detail from something that's white. Like every pixel has been completely blown out. I don't know if there was, you know, a bird in the sky or not, because now the sky is just all white. And that's the same thing that can happen in recording. So there are mistakes that are so egregious that they can't be saved.

Jordan: 42:30

Yeah.

Kevin: 42:30

For the most part, a flubbed word or re-recording a line, like, yeah, with a good editor, with a nice editor, with a gracious editor, they can make you sound wonderful, even if you're not that great. But there are extremes.

Jordan: 42:42

Yeah. And I mean, there are like AI tools now that even if you, like you said, flub a word, you can actually like highlight the word and then type in what you meant to say, and then AI will make it sound like you actually said the correct thing in your voice, which is really cool. But like you said, there's just some stuff that can't be fixed. Um, one of my really good friends, she's an editor and she has a bunch of clients. And one of her favorite things is when they send her a recording where the internet like dropped and there's literally like half of a word missing or half of a sentence missing, and they say, Hey, can you fix this? And she's like, There's nothing there. There's there's no audio to fix, but people expect her to fix it.

Alban: 43:26

Yeah, it's there's a lot of these things that have stepped in to try to fill this gap. Magic mastering is one of them. We go, you have audio, but it's not very good. Let's try to clean it up. The filler word deletion that lots of tools have. That's just you said um a bunch of times. I think we could take that out. That will help. The script has that thing where you can like correct a word, the overdub, and now that word is fixed. But what it can't do is it can't fix the fact that you never wrote an outline to begin with, and so none of the points really made sense. You and your co-host were just not connecting for an episode, and so there's just a lot of like awkward back and forths. You can't really fix that. You just mispronounce this, you know, phrase multiple times. So things that you can do, you know, if someone mispronounces a word and it's important for you to fix it, just say, hey, let's pause for a second. Can we say that again and get it right? Or if you flub a word, you just go back to the beginning of that sentence and you say it again. And those are like things that now it's you can fix it in post. You know, when we flub the word, now Jordan can just delete the flubbed sentence and keep the good sentence. But the fix in post isn't we can create it in post. There has to be something to fix for you to actually fix it.

Jordan: 44:45

Yeah. There are some things, obviously, that can be fixed in post, but it's really just a band-aid for lazy recording. Um, and it's going to cost whoever is editing a lot more time and effort. And there's always a situation where if you record in like a bad environment or you know, something's not working, you have tech issues, it just can't be fixed in post. It can't be busted.

Kevin: 45:09

You so strongly want to make sure that's busted.

Jordan: 45:12

Yeah, that's got a big old busted stamp right on it. Finally, you need a big following to make money in podcasting. The carrot at the end of the stick for a lot of podcasters is to earn income from thousands and thousands of listeners. But unless you have thousands and thousands of listeners, you can't make any money in podcasting. There's no money in podcasting. Like, don't even try.

Alban: 45:35

Confirmed.

Jordan: 45:36

I disagree.

Kevin: 45:38

I think about it two ways. I think that it's possible to earn some money from podcasting, even if you have a small audience. I also think that I wouldn't say the inverse is true. Like if you have a large audience, the chances that there's no way to make money off of your podcast, I think that's crazy. If you have a large audience, even if your show is, you know, all the traditional ways like not monetizable, because let's just say it's offensive and it's crude, like no brands are going to want to align with you. And well, we've seen that work. I mean, we've seen with one of the largest podcasters in podcasting, Joe Rogan, he has found brands that he can do ad reads for where he's dropping, you know, curse words every other word. There are brands that are like, no, we're fine with that. As long as Joe's talking about us, we don't care if he's like, this is the best beep beep beep, you know, friggin' product on the market. They're fine with it. Yeah. And so I would say, like, if you have a large audience, there's definitely a way for you to monetize. So the qu the question for us becomes hey, if I have a small audience, is there any way for me to make some money? And I think we're gonna say yes. I think we can point people in that direction, the yes. It's not gonna be big money though. Like, I do think the potential for income from a podcast specifically does scale, not necessarily like on a straight line, but it does scale. So the larger your audience, the more potential for income you have.

Jordan: 46:59

Yeah.

Kevin: 46:59

But even with a small audience, you can monetize. You guys would agree with that, right?

Alban: 47:03

Yeah, I 100% agree. I mean, it's a multiplication problem where it's the amount of people who listen to the show, that number, multiplied by what to what degree are they willing to pay for the content. And that's a function of do, you know, is this an audience that has money and is your content exceptionally valuable to them? You want all these numbers to be big. You know, you'd like the number of listeners to be big, you'd like it to be extremely valuable for them, and you'd like your audience ideally to be an audience that has enough money so that they can spend the money to pay for your premium content or that their advertisers really want and get in front of them. So, can the raw number of downloads be low and it be monetizable? Yeah. We had an example of a BuzzBrow podcaster who had like 150 downloads per episode and was ranting and raving about how valuable it was. And we asked him, and he goes, Oh, well, what I do is I set up call centers for big companies. And so I started doing this podcast about call centers. But pretty much everyone who's listening is one of the CEOs of a company I would work with. They're the decision makers, they're people searching in this very small space. And so they listen to the show. I don't run ads, but I monetize because these are leads that I would be paying thousands of dollars per lead. So when they come and they say, I've listened to the podcast for six months, we sit at the call center, it's a huge win. That's a monetized podcast with a very small audience, but it's because the value of each of those listeners is so incredibly high, especially for the guy who's making that show.

Jordan: 48:38

Yeah. I think where this idea really takes hold is when podcasters start a podcast with the blinders on that they need to get like 10,000 listeners, and then that way they can slap some programmatic ads in it and it's going to be easy money. And I think that there's a big issue here because when you have these podcasters that have 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 listeners, yeah, you can negotiate higher CPM rates, which results in like bigger sponsorships. It's bigger ad deals. You know, one ad can bring in like a thousand bucks on an episode or more. But the thing is, is there's a little bit of a trade-off because yeah, you can slap some ads in there and, you know, make a quick $2,000, but you're also putting in a ton of work with the marketing. You're putting in a ton of work and ad spending for your own podcast. You're, you're trying to get other podcasts to promote your show. You're doing a ton of work. You have a whole team on that kind of stuff. So I think there is a trade-off. And really, I talked about this in my talk in the podcast movement. I think that there's kind of like a skewed value with advertising versus like listener support. Because with advertising, if you have a CPM that is $15, which is pretty average, if you're doing like programmatic ads, you're looking at four, seven dollars, something like that per thousand downloads. And if it's sponsorships, you're looking at like, I don't know, $10 to $20 per thousand downloads. So let's say that you get $15 for a thousand downloads on an episode versus if you have a listener subscription and you get three subscribers on your subscription, just three, you make that $15. So that's three versus like a thousand. It's a huge difference. You do not need a massive audience to make money. You just need a few dedicated listeners. And honestly, I was talking to one of our podcasters about this. He's, I forget his name right now, but um he's the guy that has like millions of followers on social media. And we were talking about how volatile the sponsorship and ad landscape is because you go through seasons and it's like when it rains, it pours, and you get all these sponsorships. And it's super easy to make these brand deals and you know, you get a bunch of money coming in. And then you have six months where there's just nothing. It is a wasteland. However, our subscribers, the people who are supporting the show, the people who are subscribed, that's not wavering from month to month. That's staying consistent, whereas like the ad dollars are just all over the place. So yeah, I'm gonna call this one busted.

Alban: 51:24

I think I want to put it in the plausible. If I'm I know that it's not a hundred percent true, you have to have a big audience.

Jordan: 51:30

Okay.

Alban: 51:31

But boy, does it help. Like you definitely want.

Jordan: 51:35

It does.

Alban: 51:36

And I don't love the idea of going into podcasting thinking I'm going to make money on it and I'm gonna do a kind of niche show that hopefully I'll be able to figure out how to also run, you know, all the this Patreon and this BuzzProud subscription and a newsletter and all these other things so I can monetize the audience. I think I'm just holding all of those hopes and dreams with like a kind of a loose hand, loose grip in the beginning. And over time, then I'm going to, you know, if it, if that's the direction it goes, then that's going to be beautiful, but it may not go that direction.

Kevin: 52:12

I'm with you, Alban. I I have to say that I'm leaning more in the direction of I just want to simplify it in people's minds. I do think there is a way to make money off a podcast if you have a small audience. I think it's it's challenging and it's not a lot of money. I think it's true that if you do have a large audience, there are lots of ways to make money. And I think that kind of becomes easier when you have a large audience. But it's much in the same way as like, here's a weird analogy that I'll draw. If I just had a million dollars, I could take that million dollars and I can invest it in an SP index fund and I'll make 10% a year, 10% a year on a million dollars, 10 at $100,000, right? I would be making $100,000 a year for doing nothing. So all I got to do is get a million dollars. It's so easy.

Jordan: 52:54

Yeah.

Kevin: 52:55

Right. And I think as crazy as that sounds in money, like everyone's like, yeah, no, getting the million dollars is the hard part. That's the same problem we have in podcasts. Exactly. Podcasters start and then as soon as I get to $50,000 downloads per episode, I'm gonna turn on programmatic ads and I'm making $5,000 a month. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. How are you gonna get the $50,000 downloads per episode? Yeah.

Alban: 53:17

On the same vein, Kevin, there's people who are going, no, no, no, all you need is $10,000 and just to pick the perfect investment, and then you're gonna make all this money. And that's I think what the small podcaster is saying like, all I have to do is get the perfect audience, perfect everything, and then I'm gonna sell them this incredible content and they'll all pay for it. They're just both of those strategies are viable, and yet uh you're missing the really difficult piece. Right.

Kevin: 53:42

Yep. All right. So busted, plausible, new. This is a nuanced. Yeah. This is the bigger the audience, the more options you're gonna have to monetize. But there are some options at the lower end of the scale. So you don't need a big audience, but it sure does help.

Jordan: 54:01

Let's get into fan mail. We have a response to our podcasting through the holidays episode. And this is from John Corey. And he says, I'm listening to the holiday episode in discussion about Jeremy's survey and Alban's deeper dive into data from over 100,000 podcasts, which is much broader and more inclusive data set. Alban mentioned holiday road trips mostly tied to US traditions like Thanksgiving and Christmas. But what about audiences outside of those assumptions? So in Australia, Christmas means summer on the beach. Um, Muslim friends don't celebrate it, and Jewish friends in NYC spend the day at a Chinese restaurant in a movie. And Canada's Thanksgiving is in October. Scotland celebrates New Year's more, and in China, holiday travel often means trains, not cars. So are there insights in the Buzzsprout data about non-American audiences or holidays beyond the US lens? Alban, wow us if there's anything hidden in there.

Alban: 54:57

Um, well, no, this is primarily uh US data. So across all of Buzzsprout, um, it's something like 45% of all listeners are going to be in the US. And then that's followed by Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, but it pretty quickly we're down into like 5% and below. Yeah. So Buzzsprout podcasters dominated by English speaking and in English speaking countries. You know, so yeah, that data is primarily US, but it still plays out. So what a lot of podcasters who are listening to this and listening to Buzzprout shows are talking about the holidays. They mean Thanksgiving, New Year's in the US, and Christmas in the US. And even if you're not celebrating the birth of Christ, Christmas is still happening in the US and there's still a lot of cultural things happening around it. We all are mostly taking the day off, you know, for that period. So yeah, it has that lens to it, but I still think it's all good advice. Um, this is an opportunity to reach people who are traveling around the holidays, those being the US holidays. So if you can put out an episode, you have an opportunity to be recommended during that period.

Kevin: 56:12

Yeah. I mean, in in the US, is it the day before Thanksgiving is the number one travel day in the US? Yeah. And I don't know what it is worldwide, but that would be interesting, especially if your podcast has a more international appeal and audience. Like what are the big travel days worldwide? You could apply some of the same tactics and strategies that we talked about, maybe potentially other dates or other times of the year, if you have more of an international audience.

Jordan: 56:36

All right. So for our next episode, we are going to be talking about Apple podcast charts, rankings, doing noteworthy.

Alban: 56:45

And if you have information about all of this, we have a lot that's publicly available. But if you have a case study or an anecdote or something that's worked for your podcast, tell us because your stories are often the best way to share that data. So we may have kind of what Apple has told us, but the stories uh make it so much more interesting. So let us know if you have something you'd like to add.

Jordan: 57:07

Yeah. All right. I'm excited about that one. Okay. So until next time, thank you for listening and keep podcasting.