Support the funding tag

Learn more about the funding tag here: https://fundingtag.link

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to Matt Has a Podcast About Podcasting. Big week for me this week, as I mentioned in the last episode, that I'm heading to Podcast Movement down in New York in about a day and a half. Today is Tuesday. I head down on the train on Thursday. If you're going to be there and you're watching this, let's connect. Hope that we can meet. If you're part of the Buzz Sprout After Party, I think that's what it might be called. I think I'm going to that as well. And I might also stop off at the Open Standards Project meeting, which is available for everyone. Just look for me if you can find me. I don't know how many people are going to be there. Maybe there's enough, or maybe there's not that many where we can find each other. Or just contact me right on X or LinkedIn at Matmadeers. So support the funding tag. That's the title of today's episode. I'm going to go a little bit deeper in that because I've built a marketing site. If you don't know, if you've haven't followed my work before, podcasting 2.0 is my equivalent in my day job world of the WordPress community or WordPress itself. It's an open source project that people contribute time, effort, uh, and code to. And a lot of people rally around that piece of technology. Initiative does the same thing, except they do it for the stable old piece of technology that helps deliver podcasts to any place that will accept an RSS feed. And one of the many uh advancements that they've made, including chapters which Apple has adopted into their own uh system, is the funding tag. Now the funding tag is a very special tag, uh I think, uh at least it is to me, and I think it is for many creators, uh, but there's an imbalance of how it's supported uh throughout the and a funding tag is no more than me handing you a link. It is a simple link that is placed inside of the RSS feed that is deemed to load a payment link, a e-commerce link, you're selling a t-shirt link, you have a nonprofit donation link, you have a tip jar if you're down with that terminology, you have a membership sign up, you have a Patreon link. It doesn't matter. The concept is you've got a payment link or something in some way to support your show, you put it in the funding tag at your podcast hosting company, and any podcast app that supports the funding tag will show a button that says support this podcaster. And even better is if you have the right podcast host, uh that podcast host will also let you change what that little call to action is. So you could change it to buy my t-shirt, sign up for my membership, support the show, give me a tip, donate to my cause. The biggest challenge, of course, with many of these things is just awareness, understanding uh a bit of a collaboration across hosts and apps. And the biggest podcast apps uh will never support it because the biggest podcast apps are Apple, Spotify, and YouTube combined. And uh they're going to want you to have payments through through their own system, right? They I mean they don't support it yet, except for YouTube does in some kind of way. Uh Apple and Spotify don't, as far as I know, uh not yet anyway, but they would never support the funding tag, though I guess never say never, because Apple has supported podcasting 2.0 stuff. Chances are they're gonna want that money to run through through their own system. They could adopt the funding tag, of course, and use it as a standard, uh, but they might just hard code their own payment gateway in there, which would be fine for me as a podcaster. Hey, I get it. You know, you're gonna tax me on your platform. Makes sense to me, just enable it. You know, because we're talking about a link here. And once you have that link set up, as I mentioned, the podcast apps have to support it. My daily driver is Pocket Casts uh by Automatic. And uh they have the funding button that will appear in the podcast as you're looking at the podcast in the player, though I wish they would enhance that a little bit more. It's kind of a weird, obscure icon. It's I think it has a dollar sign. It doesn't really stand out because it's in a row of all a bunch of other icons. And I would really prefer um the app to have the funding button appear in the actual player of the episode, uh, because that's where most people are when they're listening to an episode. And the great thing with this funding tag, uh, or with any you know, support my show, is if you're actively using that as a call to action, like I might say something like uh the wpminute.com slash support, which would go to my signup page for my membership. As I'm verbally saying that, I could have that as my funding tag. And when somebody looks at the phone, they don't even have to go to the URL, they'll see the button right there, click the button, and we'll take them to that call to action that I'm using across my podcast. So we need app developers to also support the funding tag. Once again, I can't iterate this enough. It's a link. It's a link that you design as a button and you give it priority in your user interface. And I know that one of the biggest holdouts is Marco Armin with Overcast, uh, which has the probably the most popular podcast app second to Apple podcasts uh in the iOS ecosystem. And I believe he's you know squarely against it. You know, for one fairly good reason is people are going to confuse that payment button with his own entity as an organization and maybe ask him support questions. I've seen workarounds like this when you click a button and there's a message that comes up that says, hey, you're going to a third party. This is an external service. This has nothing to do with my website or my app. Uh, and I know only 10% of people read, but we're really holding back an opportunity for podcasters who are trying to get their podcast off the ground and get funding in ways of donations, sponsorships, and tips, even though we don't love the tips word. We're really holding back that ability for folks to easily earn an income that isn't just in an ad network where uh you must have a zillion downloads to make five dollars. Uh, this is something that I think the funding tag anyway is paramount to the to the podcaster, especially the the up and coming and and young amateur podcaster who's just trying to earn a little bit of cash through their through their podcast. I'm gonna show you a website that I've made ahead of podcast movement that I hope will be as a a sort of funding tag. Uh there's a lot of podcasting 2.0 awareness pages and knowledge bases and and websites and and videos and stuff like that. I am just squarely focused on the funding tag because I do think it is the easiest and most valuable way for a podcaster to get paid.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Let's dive into showing you this website uh and you let me know what you think in the comments.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

All right, the website that I put up is.link because it's really just a link that we're putting in for our funding tag. Join 91,136 podcasters getting listener support with the funding tag. If you're just listening to this, um I do apologize. You might want to check out the video component of the podcast, uh, which you can find on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify. Uh the 91,136 podcasters getting listener support from the funding tag is actually from the podcastindex.org. Uh, they release a set of data for various supported tags in the RSS feeds that they index, which is somewhere north of four million total podcasts that they track, and 91,000 of them uh or more have the funding tag. So on this landing page, it's really just uh an awareness page. If you're if you understand the funding tag uh and you're good with it, you're not gonna really learn anything here. But if you're want to share that and get other people to adopt the funding tag, please share fundingtag.link. I have a little video that uh is about two and a half, three minutes long. It explains everything I've already explained at the top half of this uh podcast. As I scroll down the site, I just have informative sections that help people understand it's technically a three-step process to get the funding tag up and running for your podcast. Uh, number one is you just have to make sure that your podcast host supports the funding tag, uh, of which there's a list of hosts that we do or that the funding tag does support uh on this landing page further down. Two, you need to have a payment link. Uh, you know, you'd you have to have either like a Stripe landing page, which they just uh that they just released. I think they're called Stripe profiles. Uh PayPal has had payment pages that you could send somebody for quite some time. Fenmo, you could set up a WooCommerce store if you're a uh a WordPress user. You could use a Gravity Forms if you're a WordPress user. Shopify link, remember it doesn't matter. It's just a link. So make sure your podcast host supports it. Then grab your payment link and put it in. And then you have to just promote it with your audience, right? You have to ask for the value to get paid, uh, whatever your call to action might be. But then you also have to encourage them to either, well, simply use your link that you've created and you're I've at least encourage you halfway there to get people to pay you, uh, but then tell them that it's really the best way to experience it is using TrueFans to listen to your podcast, Pocket Casts, uh, and all of the other supported um podcast apps. So it's about that awareness for you as the podcaster to raise awareness for your audience. And that kind of that rising tide uh hopefully lifts all boats. Show a little code snippet as we scroll down just so people can understand what it looks like technically, where you can find these apps to sign up for those payment links. Does your host support the funding? A little search box. Again, this is data that I've pulled from the podcastindex.org, uh just putting it here on this landing page so people can see it. Uh, so we first look at the 29 podcast hosts that support it, and then we look at the 25 either podcast apps or platforms uh that do support the funding tag in various ways. And you can see pocketcasts right here, which is the one that I use for my Daily Driver Podcast Attic, uh, et cetera. If you want to ask your host, your podcast host to support it, I have a little fun copy paste. It's a you know, pre-made call to actions to get people to start using it. And then some common questions like Do Apple Podcasts and Spotify show the support button? They don't, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it because you can still have your podcast running on Apple Podcasts. You just want to make sure that your podcast host has the funding tag enabled because other podcast apps can pull it in. This is not the same thing as the air quotes crypto boosts that we saw with the value for value tag uh and streaming Satoshis and all of that stuff. It's not the same technology made by podcasting 2.0, but not the same technology. Uh will the turning this on break my show? Absolutely not, because it's just a link, people. I don't know how many times we have to say that. Uh will apps show my custom label? Again, depends on the app. Hopefully they do respect the the spec of the funding tag in the RSS feed. Uh but either way, as long as they got a button in there and you're getting paid. Uh that's what we really mean. That's what we really care about. I already put Patreon in the show notes. Why bother? So if you have any of your like your Patreon, your support links in the show notes, that's great too. You definitely want to do that as great practice to grow your revenue of your podcast. But also the funding tag, the idea of it, it's front and center. It's a priority in the user interface of the podcast app. And hopefully somebody sees that before they start reading your show notes. How do I know it's working? It'll just appear. It'll start appearing or wherever it supports it. And uh, I don't have a payment link yet. Sign up. You can sign up for a Stripe account, PayPal account, at least in the US, or you can start hosting your own. You can have a Shopify store, WooCommerce store, uh, Sky's the Limit. Remember, it's just a link. I have to keep emphasizing that because we should all just support this in our apps and our podcast hosts. Um, I would also push my friends at podcast hosting companies to have the funding tag uh UI in the embeddable web player of the of your podcast uh hosting player because somebody might be using your podcast website that's built into your podcast hosting, or they might be embedding it on a WordPress website, a ghost website like I do, and I want that funding tag there. So thumbs up to that. Support the funding tag, funding tag dot link. That's what I have for you in today's episode of Matt Has a Podcast about podcasting. I'll see you in New York City. That's a nomenclature that gets old, right? That New York City. What was that, like a barbecue sauce? That's how old I am. Uh I'll see you in New York City at Podcast Movement. Hopefully I bump into you. Send me a message at MattMede on X, at Matt Medeiros on LinkedIn. You can find me there. I'll see you at Podcast Movement. I'll see you in the next episode.