Proven Strategies for Podcast Growth: Insights from Buzzsprout’s Alban Brooke

Harry Duran 0:00 - 0:04

 

So since it's round two, we can just start a conversation and we don't have to worry about, like, the formal intros.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 0:05 - 0:10

 

Okay, well, you are the expert, so I will follow your lead.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 0:10 - 0:26

 

So if anyone who is not familiar with you to get the full origin story, I had the episode number handy, but it's June 2021, episode 264, June 2021 to get the full story of Albin. But thank you for coming back for round two on the podcast junkies.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 0:27 - 0:32

 

Yeah, Harry, thank you so much for having me. I'm really pleased to be back on the show.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 0:33 - 0:58

 

It's a bummer that we don't get to hang out at the conferences and sometimes I haven't been to. The last one I was at was Denver for podcast movement, which was last year, and then, so I haven't been making it to the evolutions. And there's, like, a lot going on in my world with, like, we're now relocated to Minnesota. So last time in 2021, I was in Minneapolis, but I wasn't where we're at now. And it looks like you're in a different location as well.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 0:58 - 1:03

 

My location is quite a bit closer. I used to be in the bedroom. That's one that way.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:04 - 1:05

 

Yeah, yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:05 - 1:15

 

So I've moved a whole room in our house, but I. Yeah, located over here because the lighting's better and I can look outside and there's trees and birds rather than just a wall.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:15 - 1:17

 

Remind me where a home again is for you.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:18 - 1:19

 

Jacksonville Beach, Florida.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:19 - 1:23

 

Okay. And what's the weather been like there lately?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:24 - 1:40

 

I went and ran this morning at 645, and it was enough that, like, you're just pouring in sweat. So it's hot, it's humid. It's only going to get more. So we'll hit the hundreds in June, July, August, so it'll be nice and toasty.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:41 - 2:22

 

We're just now getting into sixties and seventies, and I think for anyone who's been following a couple of the posts I've been making on socials, there's been a bit of a change here because we're now into kind of like, homesteading vibe. And we're about 30 minutes outside Minneapolis, so there's about an acre of land, and we're looking to, like, we've got crops, not crops, but just like, veggies. We're planting, like, garden beds. We're roping off an area because we want to keep the deer away, because there's deer and rabbits and squirrels and all sorts of critters and turkeys that come on this property. We're in the process today of building a chicken coop because we've got five chicks in the house and a brooder. So it's a lot happening.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 2:23 - 2:27

 

That's awesome. You were, for a long time, you were the vertical farming guy in my brain.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 2:27 - 2:28

 

Yes.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 2:28 - 2:32

 

And now I'm going to think of you as the homesteader Harry Duran. Many different shapes.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 2:33 - 3:12

 

Well, it's so funny because the vertical farming podcast is still going strong, 120 plus episodes. And that I went to a vertical farming conference earlier this year in Vegas. And then I go, there's another one in Chicago. So it's interesting how it's just kind of like taken on a life of its own. And we've merged with a newsletter called Igro News. And so it's like another second or third business to run at this point. So I kind of lose track of all the stuff that I've. It's all within the realm of podcasting and because of podcasting, but it's been interesting to kind of keep my ear because of podcast junkies, which is ten years in April of this year was the ten year anniversary for the show, so it's been crazy to think about the fact that I've been doing it.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 3:12 - 3:17

 

That is wild. Ten years of podcasting for me will be this December.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 3:17 - 3:18

 

Oh, nice.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 3:18 - 3:30

 

That's when I quit my job as a lawyer to go work for three other guys. Tiny little room. And I was like, I love podcasting. And they're like, yeah, we have a podcasting product. Come over here, work on it.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 3:30 - 3:30

 

That's nice.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 3:31 - 3:34

 

And it ended up working out really, really well for us.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 3:35 - 3:45

 

So I keep on top of what's happening because of, mainly because of Sam and James with pod news. And I know you guys are supporting them as well with the Daily show and the weekly show as well.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke3:45 - 3:50

 

Yeah, we love the show. I was actually just listening to it this morning. Did you listen to the new one?

 

 

 

Harry Duran 3:50 - 3:52

 

Not the new one yet, no.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 3:52 - 4:32

 

So a few episodes ago, probably, we talked about. I was on there to talk about our iOS app, and we finally launched a iOS app for Buzzsprout. For years, people had told us, we'd love for you to have an iOS app. And we were kind of like, that doesn't really make a ton of sense to us. And over the years, we get convinced that we hear all these use cases and we start thinking of some ourselves. And so we launched an iOS app, and today we are launching something else we're calling fan mail. And it's one of these, like, for us, really exciting features that make so much more sense when we already have an iOS app.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 4:32 - 4:33

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 4:33 - 4:47

 

So it's going to be a ton of fun now seeing kind of the synergy between having this app on our phones and having fan mail, which is the best way for listeners to contact the host of their favorite podcasts.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 4:47 - 5:29

 

Oh, wow. So let's start with the iOS app, because I think for folks that maybe missed that conversation, or if you didn't go in depth, as you kind of would have liked to, I think about, you know, obviously think about Buzzsprout as a podcast host, and you think about the functionality that you need as a podcast host for what you do on a daily basis. Get your show uploaded. And I'm thinking, like, before you get into it, like, the reasons I would get value from an iOS app, and it's obviously stats access to changes on the fly. So I'm curious, when you guys were thinking about coming up with that, is it users requesting it or is just a combination of some research and development on your end?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 5:30 - 6:47

 

It's all of it. We go to conferences, we have people mention what they'd like, people like you that would say those two stats and changes on the fly. And one of the most important things to us is we do buzzcast. It's a show about the industry, specifically for people on Buzzsprout or people who are independent podcasters. And by doing that show now for six, seven years, we've, you know, using our own product day in, day out, and we would feel these moments where you'd want to log in on your phone. And we had invested a lot in our mobile experience. So if you went to the mobile website, but it's nice to stay logged in and make sure that when you click the app that you're logged in right away. You don't have to go into the browser. It's really nice if you want to check your stats to have a really clean stats view that's made for your phone. Or like you said, the changes on the fly. One, I had a, we published an episode and I didn't title it. And when I saw the title went live, I was like, I don't like that title at all. I want to change it. Well, now I've got a, you know, I'm listening in the car. So now I need to wait till I get into the office to go on my computer to change it.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 6:47 - 6:47

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 6:47 - 7:05

 

And you just hit those little roadblocks and you go, you know, be really nice. Is you, you just pull out your phone and you make a change right there. You click save and your podcast has been updated. So if you ever make a typo or you've missed a link or somebody else titled it and you didn't love it, you just make that change right away.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 7:06 - 7:11

 

Is that, are those the cases where you see folks using it more? And is there an Android app as well?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 7:11 - 7:23

 

Android's on the way, so it's pretty close right now. We're testing it. It works, but we want to make sure it's really polished the same way that we did with the iOS version.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 7:23 - 8:20

 

So when you look at stats, right, and you know, I've tried a lot of different hosting companies as well and over the years, and I think one of the things we hear a lot from podcasters is the metrics to see the trends are good. And I think the question is always like, what should podcasters be looking at in terms of actionable trends? Like when you look at a site and it's probably something that's near and dear to me because when I was in my previous corporate life, I used to manage a customer service reporting team. So it was like nine people. And all they did was like prepare reports just for the customer service department. So we would slice and dice info so many different ways. And I would tell them we would prepare like reports for vps, right? So I would say to the team, hey, I know you spent like 2 hours on this report, looks really beautiful and polished, but they're going to look at it for 30 seconds and they're going to say like, what do I need to be worried about? Or what do they need to be concerned about here? So I'm curious if there's any guidance you provide, like your audience, your client or your customers in terms of like how to look at the metrics in a way that's actionable.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 8:21 - 10:29

 

That's actually the question that we were asking ourselves when we redid our stats, and I want to say we redid those in 2014. So almost ten years ago is when we did the big revamp. And we said we started with, what can you actually learn from podcast stats that matters that's actionable? Because I don't know if you've had this experience, you go into Google Analytics or you go into maybe some Facebook analytics and there's just so much, it's overwhelming and there's people that they enjoy. You know, it's fun to like make cool graphs and look at all these visualizations, but at the end of the day, we need to have a question that gets an answer from that data and then that informs future decisions. So a few of the things that we want looked at, we were like, okay, you want to see trends? Are my episodes now getting more or less downloads than they were a few episodes ago? And so we have these seven day views, the 30 day views where you can see all your episodes and how they're tracking. So you can see, okay, they're going up, so something's positive. We have daily views where you can go in and see kind of these charts with these spikes on individual days. And you go, okay, I see the spike on that Tuesday. Well, that's when I sent this big email blast out with the link to my episode. Good. The email blast is working. Like, you need to get that feedback. You can just, over time, see the cumulative view. You go, oh, it's still continuing to grow, and the growth is accelerating, which means I now have more people listening. Pull in all the podcasting apps. Well, what if you see, hey, Apple podcast isn't showing up anymore. Maybe you notice your podcast was dropped by Apple Podcast. Maybe you learned you never submitted to one of the top directories. So we try to really be focused on, there's so many stats we could make up. You know, it's, you can slice the same data 400 ways, but every stats page in buzzsprout should be answering particular questions.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 10:30 - 11:36

 

Yeah, I like to think about in a way, like, in terms of actionable data or even trends or aberrations from trends. So if your podcast typically is, you're getting 150 downloads per episode, you know, over the past six months, if one episode, you're getting the 500. So it's like, if you think about your month over month increase, it's always steady. You're one or 2%, or you look back, or a three month rolling average, I think that's sometimes a good measure. So if you're about 150 over the past three months, or even a twelve month rolling average, right. And then you see a spike or a drop, like now is at 50 or it's now at 600, it could be like an interesting way to deep dive into the metrics. And I wonder how much handholding you guys provide in terms of seeing something to point to. Because I think as podcasters, sometimes we're like, you see all the country metrics, you see all the browser versus iOS versus desktop metrics. And I think sometimes it's a bit overwhelming for folks to kind of figure out what is moving the needle, because. Right. That's the ultimate question, right? Like, what can I change about my show to like to put those metrics to move those metrics in the positive direction.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 11:36 - 12:12

 

Yeah. As far as handholding, I mean, this is Tom's most popular talk he ever gives at movement or podfest. What are your stats telling you? What can you do about it? What are the actionable metrics and what matters? We respond to tons of these in support, but we've also made videos about, like, all right, let's go look. And if you see this, let's talk through what that would mean. Yeah, locations are fun, but, you know, it's cool to see, oh, this country's doing better than that country. But what's really interesting, one of my friends, he does a podcast about comic books and the whole comic book scene.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 12:12 - 12:12

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 12:13 - 13:24

 

And so when they were traveling around Europe, they would stop by comic book stores and meet the owner and talk to him and say, hey, do you mind if we leave some business cards here that talk about the podcast? And so they left a bunch in Berlin, and then they leave a bunch in. They go around all these different places and they said to this day, they pull open their stats and there's little pockets in all of those cities. And this was 510 years ago that they were actually starting the show. But, you know, the little seeds that they put out there, they got a few listeners from that one marketing tactic and it worked and it got validated for them. That's really useful information, because now they know if we can ever create those relationships, let's do it. But if we were to look over for buzzcast, my location stats say people in big cities, New York, La, listen, and a lot of people in Jacksonville, Florida, well, that's where we're located, so make sense. But I wouldn't get a ton of other information out of that. Maybe if we were doing a live recording, I would go, oh, we should probably do the live recording here in Jacksonville or in New York, but besides that, it's not going to be as actionable for us.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 13:24 - 13:43

 

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The other feature that I've heard used on the show is the dynamic ad insertion. So can you talk a little bit about that and what the thought is beyond there? And if there's, and if you're also looking to improve or add features to that as well, because obviously everyone's doing it a little bit differently now.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 13:44 - 15:12

 

So dynamic content is a way for you to add any type of content into your show as a pre roll, as a post role, or we're using AI to figure out the best spot inside of the show to insert content. So we're finding all those mid rolls for you. So you can be done as a mid roll, and that content can be ads, and it can be ads that work through buzzsprout ads. So maybe we source the ad for you and then we'll drop it in. But what's more powerful is if it's an ad that you sourced yourself. So, for vertical farming, I remember going to your talk and you said, you know, selling those ad spots and getting full sponsorships for the show is so much more valuable than the $0.02 an episode that you would have gotten with a CPM ad. And so dynamic content is focused on not the very biggest shows that will just do mass amounts of ads. We're more excited about when you find the perfect fit that you can add that into all your episodes. But it doesn't just have to be ads. It doesn't have to be sponsorships. It could also be, hey, I'm going to be at podcast movement in a few months. I'd love to see you all there. Well, that'd be great to add into all of your episodes. And you can do that with dynamic content. You upload it, and it gets added to all the episodes at once. So you're not going back and editing.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 15:12 - 15:20

 

Them one at a time so you can add it. If you choose the dynamic option, the AI will pick where to place it.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 15:20 - 15:59

 

Yes. So what it will do is it will find kind of an appropriate topic change. That's what we really would like to find. We're talking about one thing changes to something else. The speakers change. There's a natural pause, and then we have a human voice come in and say, all right, let's take a quick break. And we got nice music rolling in, and then we have the content that you dropped in yourself. And then now back to the episode, and we go back into it. And that was just. We're podcast listening fans, you know, we've experienced the really bad ad that just cuts in mid word, non relevant.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 15:59 - 16:00

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 16:01 - 16:05

 

Or the really bad ad that's three times as loud as the episode.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 16:05 - 16:06

 

Yes.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 16:07 - 16:31

 

So we wanted to make something that at least would work for us, that when we heard it, we wouldn't cringe. We'd go, okay, I know it's an ad. Sometimes you don't want the ad, or maybe, but now it can be a piece of content that maybe you really, really would like to hear. Like, hey, Harriet's gonna be giving a talk at podcast movement. I'm gonna be there. And the fact that I listen to podcast junkies let me know about it.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 16:31 - 16:37

 

Could you also do dynamic ad that's placed in at a certain timestamp.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 16:38 - 16:42

 

With the. You're saying with dynamic content in the mid roll sections?

 

 

 

Harry Duran 16:42 - 16:44

 

Yeah. Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 16:45 - 16:52

 

So I think all those right now are going to be picked by AI. We don't have a selecting tool for you to go in and pick those.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 16:52 - 16:53

 

Okay.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 16:53 - 17:45

 

Our thinking for that is a pretty cumbersome process. So if you know exactly where you want it, then it's easy. But what's really not easy is I create an episode, I edit it, I put it live, and now I go, oh, I've got to pick my ad spots. And now what do I do? I listen to all of the episode. Or if I'm now going to add dynamic content into 50 or 200 back episodes, I'm going to listen to all of those and find a spot. Our hope is that's. I guess our thinking is that's something computers are really good at. That's something people are not good at. And if it requires you to do 200 hours of relistening to your old episodes and cringing and finding the right spots, then you're probably not going to do it. So that's why we made it to be an automated solution.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 17:45 - 17:59

 

Yeah, we've been testing some stuff here where we say, or we have clients say, before we get into this uninterrupted conversation with Alvin, here's a few words from our sponsors. So then that becomes a marker. And that's like a consistent place where you put it every time.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 17:59 - 18:14

 

Yeah, that's a wonderful way to do it. You can't upload that language to us so that it makes it real clear what you know so you can be the one to say, all right, let's take a quick break, and then it can jump into the dynamic content so.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 18:14 - 18:19

 

You can actually record the lead in to your ad as well as the ad itself.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 18:19 - 18:29

 

Exactly. It's nicer if it's you because then it feels more natural. The ones that are, you know, are not as good as when it's just a random person.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 18:29 - 18:46

 

It feels like the AI is getting more and more powerful. It's pretty wild because we've been testing out a couple of tools. I know you've been. You had initially started with podium. Are you still working with them? Are you doing something in house or for AI? Just AI related support for co host.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 18:46 - 19:51

 

AI, we are still using podium. That's still our partner. But for anyone who's listening, co host, what it does is you upload your episode, we transcribe the whole thing. And then we use that to write suggested titles, descriptions, chapter markers, social posts, blog posts, a bunch of other things. And again, this just comes from personal experience. After you've done the episode and then you've edited the episode, I never think while I'm editing or while I'm recording what's a good title for this? And then you get to the end and you're uploading it to buzzsprout and you go, oh, I need a title. I need all this stuff. I need to transcribe. And that becomes the chance for like my laziness to kick in. And I'm like, we're just calling it episode 86. We're moving on, but co host could jump in. It gives me five suggestions. Two of them are going to be good. And I go, oh, but now I know, I remember exactly what this is like and I'm going to pick a title that's a variation of one of them.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 19:51 - 19:51

 

Yes.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 19:51 - 20:11

 

And the description reminds me of all the main points and I might tweak it. And then the chapter markers, I'm like, oh, you found the right spots, but I think I want to name them slightly differently. And now I become the editor, not the person who has to relisten to the entire 1 hour conversation to try to come up with that information.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 20:12 - 20:28

 

And so you're placing it, if you think about the UX, like the UI of the Azure uploading an episode. So azure up in the place in buzzsprout where you're uploading or have to type in the content, like that's where co host appears and allows you to populate it right there in real time.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 20:28 - 21:48

 

Exactly. So it's going to, now it's going to take us a little while to come up with all that. You upload it to us, we make sure it's the right file type, we make sure the loudness settings are correct. If you're using magic, mastering, we're going to master the episode for you. We'll do all that, and then we have to transcribe and then we have to come up with that information. So yeah, it can take a little bit of time, but then you come back and you've got all those options for title. You click one and now it's in that box to edit. If you want to edit it further, the description is already pulled into the description box, so you can tweak it if you'd like, or you can just publish it, that is. And since we mentioned the iOS app in the beginning, this was to me one of the big drivers of why we need to have an app. Because we were sending all these emails that were like, cohost is ready and people don't get emails immediately. Most people don't at least. But now I have an app on my phone that lets me know ten minutes after I upload, hey, co host is ready. And I go, oh, I pull it up, I make a couple tweaks, I click publish and I'm done. I don't have to have been sitting at my computer refreshing the page, kind of maniacally going, okay, when is this going to be ready? I can just get the notification and take that action right away.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 21:49 - 22:19

 

That's nice. That's very convenient. Where else are you seeing opportunities for podcasters to leverage everything that's happening with AI? Because it's so overwhelming sometimes when you see everything that's being done and people throw in updates to like chat GPT Claude and I got my hands full just with chat GPT and everything, the cool things that you can do there. But it's interesting, and I'm wondering if you've gotten any feedback from the community or requests from the community about like other ways AI could start to like make a podcaster's life a little easier.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 22:20 - 24:45

 

I am paying a lot of attention to it because I'm excited with the tools that we've built. I'm excited to see all the, you know, these are like the two of the worlds that I'm most excited about, AI and podcasting. Yeah, there are some things I'm seeing now that I'm, you know, I pull away from pretty viscerally. So one of the examples is a lot of these synthetic voices where people are creating a fake voice and they don't sound exactly right yet. They're, they're getting better, they're close, but they're not there all the way. And so I see podcasters kind of asking like, oh, could I kind of use this to make my voice? And then I don't have to actually record. You can. But I think the future is going to be a world where AI is creating tons and tons of content and it kind of like floods the Internet with all sorts of text, all sorts of social content, all sorts of video and audio. But there's going to be little pockets where they're still going to be primarily people making content. And I really hope the way that podcasting kind of dodged the algorithm wave of social media by being platform agnostic and allowing people to move around between hosts and people connect directly to their audience, I hope that podcasting also is able to dodge a bit of the AI stuff, and I specifically mean that around you creating your own content, having an authentic conversation with somebody, using your own voice, and then just publishing that out to the world when we, I think those are the areas that people want the human to be there. And the other things like picking the right chapter marker and helping you write the description, that doesn't feel like the integral human component. That feels kind of like any person that you hired. You could ask them, hey, today, could you do this for me? They go, sure, yeah, I could fill in. And that doesn't feel like that's the creativity. But if you were all of a sudden pulling some AI voice, cloning in to do the whole episode for you, I'm like, well, why am I listening to podcast junkies if Harry's not even doing these interviews?

 

 

 

Harry Duran

 

24:46 - 25:57

 

It's interesting because I've been testing Wondercraft as a tool that does something similar, but you can create a whole podcast episode, but we're using, we're testing it for like, a secondary podcast on the vertical farming side. That's just news. It's just reading the news. It's almost like Pod news Weekly recap. And I think James tried it out, too, and he was a bit, like, impressed, slightly disturbed, slightly worried that he's like, this actually is pretty good, and it's getting there. And if it's just someone, like, tuning in for the news and not so, like, dialed into the personality, I could see how somehow, like, some of that might be helpful because it's pretty wild. And we tested out a couple of instances of it, and you just drop in like a summary blog post, and it'll, like, reinterpret it and, like, add commentary in a different voice. And there's one called Scarlet. It sounds like Scarlett Johansson, and you can add a british accent, and you can have her be, like, calm or excited. And so in initial tests, it's interesting because all this stuff is just going to keep getting better and better. So it feels like there's unique, very narrow use cases where it could be used. But I agree with you. Anything that takes away from what people come to podcasts for, if you've dialed in and you're hearing this personality that you've built a relationship over the years, I'm sure you don't want AI getting in the middle of that.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke

 

25:57 - 26:08

 

Yeah. I think the best way, at least the defining line for me about what's appropriate, what's not, is, would I be comfortable saying, here's what I'm doing.

 

 

 

Harry Duran

 

26:08 - 26:08

 

Yes.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke

 

26:09 - 27:24

 

And right now, like I do, if this tool existed that I could type up a hundred ideas for YouTube videos, and then a bunch of them would be generated and created about podcasting and post it for me, like, I'd be tempted to do that, but then I would go, I would feel like such a fraud if I did, and I would never want to tell people I did it. Well, that's probably a good indication that it's not a good idea, but I'm perfectly happy I'm using it as a marketing pitch. Hey, come to buzzsprout, because we'll transcribe it for you. You don't have to transcribe it yourself. That doesn't feel wrong. Feels right. We'll come up with the chapter markers for you. That feels right. And I think that the news is probably on the that feels right side. No, Harry Duran didn't read this whole episode. To you, it might have been a voice that sounded like it, but as long as you feel comfortable telling your audience, hey, the news happens every day, some of you want to listen to this before I've even read these stories. So I've automated it. I think that's totally appropriate. The people who are you kind of palming it off as their own work, then that's where it starts feeling a bit gross to me.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 27:24 - 27:52

 

I think everyone's going to have to probably create an AI version of themselves. So, like, AI Albin, and just have that, like, as AI Harry. And it's like, or I see some people, like, saying, hey, this is Harry bot. For some of these automated chat tools or something like that, they're actually, like, admitting, like, hey, this is Harry bot subbing in for Harry to start this conversation. But if you need to speak to him at some point, so I'm sure they're finding creative ways into your point. As long as they're being open with it, that makes a lot of sense. So let's talk about the fan mail.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 27:52 - 29:08

 

Yeah, so we're talking a little bit about AI and how machines get in the way, but the big thing we're all excited about is how do we connect people, specifically connecting podcasters with their audience. Now, podcasters reach their audience in a pretty obvious way. They create the podcast, and then they send it out. Yeah, but for anyone who's podcasting for a long time, you can often just feel like, I don't even know if these numbers are real. I record every week. I put it out there. It goes out to the world, and the numbers go up, and then nothing. And then you do it again and again. You get one review on Apple Podcast and you go, okay, so somebody listened, but there's still not a ton happening. And for our show, we tested everything. We tried boostagrams, we tried fan list, and we tried true fans, and we tried voicemails, and we tried email, we tried Twitter, then X, and then discord. Like, we tried so many solutions and we were like, just talk to us about the show. And we would get interactions, but it was a lot of work and it just didn't feel like it was easy.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 29:09 - 29:09

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 29:09 - 29:15

 

And the beginning of this year, Kevin on our show goes, 2024. My resolution is we're going to figure this out.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 29:17 - 29:20

 

And when we say figure is out, he meant grow the show.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 29:20 - 30:11

 

No. He goes, we've got to figure out how our listeners will contact us. How will we get them to contact us in a easy way. It's easy enough for them that they're excited to do it. And I go, we just got to have one way. It's got to be one. It's got to be like, just send us an email. Or like, put Kevin's phone number in there and just say, text Kevin. And then the next episode, I come on, I'm like, hey, so I have this texting solution that I signed up for. It's pretty expensive, but let's try it out. And you hear us. And all of a sudden we start getting tons of texts that number. And quietly on the bus route side, we get really excited because we've tried every solution out there. And then we tried this solution that everybody has used their whole lives, SMS. And as soon as we tried it, the numbers went way, way up.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 30:11 - 30:12

 

Really?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 30:12 - 30:38

 

So, okay, just for as an example, we recorded a week ago and we said, hey, this features out there. Everybody just click the link, it opens up your texting app, you send something, and that will come through to us. Since then, it's been a week. Gotten 17 texts, and these are encouragements. These are feedback about the show. It's what they like, what they don't like.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 30:38 - 30:38

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 30:38 - 30:51

 

And that's the feedback. We were, like, dying for 17 people, some of them texting multiple times. That's huge. If I was getting five of those, I'd be excited. And we're just getting tons.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 30:51 - 31:03

 

So that's happening. So how does that work, like, app wise? So talk to me about the user experience. If they're on the app, is it still. So fan mail is now using this SMS service or it's kind of like, evolved into this.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 31:04 - 31:07

 

So what fan mail is, is the buzzsprout version.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 31:07 - 31:08

 

Okay?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 31:08 - 31:29

 

You go into buzzsprout and you turn on fan mail. You can do that on the iOS app, or you could do that on desktop. And when you turn on fan mail, we will add a link to all of your show notes that say, text the show. Now, on the listener side, they're just listening to a podcast. And Harry goes, hey, why don't you shoot me a text? Click the link in the show notes.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 31:29 - 31:30

 

Okay?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 31:30 - 31:40

 

They go, they click it and it opens up their podcast or their texting app, okay. With sending it to a number. And it's got a code in there so we know it's podcast junkies.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 31:41 - 31:41

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 31:41 - 32:16

 

And they text whatever they want. And you will then get a notification on your iOS app. Then you will get an email that says you got fan mail, and you'll log into your account. And when you log in, you've got this inbox of all the people who've reached out. We're threading them together so you can kind of tell, like, okay, this is all the same person. We don't give the full phone number because we want to keep them. We don't want to expose all this information that people didn't mean to expose. And you can block if anybody sends you something you don't like. Or maybe you're getting political texts all.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 32:16 - 32:31

 

Of a sudden, but you're acting as the intermediary. So if, like, those texts are coming to my personal number, if I hit like, I can hit stop to stop the trick. Because normally with those messages, you can hit like, stop if you want them to stop the messages or, yeah, these.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 32:31 - 32:37

 

Will never, you as the podcaster will not ever get any texts.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 32:37 - 32:38

 

Okay. It's all through the app.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 32:38 - 32:46

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would text and to bus brought and so it show up inside of bus brow on desktop or bus brown in iOS.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 32:46 - 32:47

 

That's great.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 32:47 - 33:05

 

So you'd be able to go through and read those. And the best way for you to respond, obviously, is then when you record the show now you can go in and you can read them off and say, oh, man, I got five really great pieces of fan mail this week. Let me thank the people who wrote in and read what your feedback was.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 33:05 - 33:24

 

I can always have these, like, marketing ideas when I hear cool stuff like this. So it's like, you could build it into the app. Like, once it comes in, if you like, oh, I want to share this on social right away. It could be like a one button click to, like, post this on my Twitter or post this on my Facebook page or something like that at some point in the future. That'd be cool. You can create a likes graphic around it.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 33:24 - 33:27

 

I may or may not have already pitched this internally.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 33:28 - 33:29

 

Great minds think alike.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 33:30 - 33:49

 

I love it because with the app, this was so funny to me. What's the bet? People look at their stats, they look at their achievements that we give them, and we often would see people share them. But then when we release the app, one of the main things we want to do is make it easy to share to social, and it's so much more natural.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 33:49 - 34:11

 

That's what everyone's looking to do. And solo podcasters are looking for so much help because they wear so many hats. So anything you can do that's like one button away or just like, have this kind of like, dashboard in your hands of like, control panel of like, all the things I need to do. And it's just one button and just continuously gets the word out. And I think just pushing out these, like, people that are loving the show on socials, I think is really nice social proof.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 34:11 - 34:34

 

Yeah. So you can, right now you can screenshot stuff, click all these share buttons, go directly and to the social apps and send them out. But I love that idea that when you get these messages in that are, you know, really excited about the show, they're expressing what they like that you could one tap say, I want to share this and put it up on social. I think that's a wonderful idea.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 34:35 - 34:49

 

And obviously, because it's coming from the podcast host, it's app Agnostic. So whether you're listening in Spotify or Apple or overcast, I'm assuming you can listen in the podcast and your buzzsprout app as well. Obviously it's the same experience, right?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 34:49 - 35:01

 

Yeah. The buzzsprout app that we built on iOS, that is just for the podcaster to do their own podcasting work. So you're managing your podcast, you're sharing things from there.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 35:01 - 35:04

 

Some more for the host, it's for the podcast host. Okay.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 35:04 - 35:31

 

But all listening apps are going to be able to have people click links. And if they can click a link, then we can load up a message inside of their texting app. And now they're able to shoot a text. And I think, honestly, the reason that this is so much more popular than if you have to open up a random web page and record a voice message or open up a crypto wallet and try to send some bitcoin along with the message.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 35:31 - 35:31

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 35:32 - 36:26

 

Is because, like, we all know what texting is. And there's a lot of, you know, muscle memory built into texting. We know it shouldn't be too long. We know how to keep it in. It's informal. We don't have to overthink the message. But if you tell me, call in and do a 32nd voicemail for the show, I want to write it out. I want to think about it. I want to get my voice warmed up. I have so much to do. And then I go, I've got a lot going on in my life and I don't send anything. But if you say, shoot us a text and let us know what you think, it can be as short as, man, I really love the show. Thank you so much for doing it, Alvin. And that takes 3 seconds of my day. And for the podcaster who may have never gotten a message in their life about the show, that could be a really, really big, exciting thing because of the technology.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 36:26 - 36:45

 

And I guess maybe Apple obviously treats it differently. Imessage is different than SMS and stuff like that because I know people leave voice messages on text as well. And there could be a point in the future where you could use that same mechanism to capture the voice messages as well and as the technology approves or something allows you to do that.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 36:46 - 36:50

 

I'm sorry, Harry, you cut out a little bit there. Could you say that again for me?

 

 

 

Harry Duran 36:50 - 37:07

 

Yeah. No, just thinking how sometimes you can actually leave voice messages on text as well. Right. Depending on the device, if it's Apple to Apple, you could record a quick message and it'll just show up as the audio file. And I wonder if at some point in the future, the technology will allow you to leverage what you're doing with fan mail, but also like to leave a quick voice message as well.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 37:07 - 38:38

 

The way we're doing it now is all just text based. That's what has really wide adoption across the entire world. You know, people can send texts when you get into audio messages. I know there's different things between the way Android will handle it or apple. So these are all things for us to work out. One of the things we're trying to work on right now is if you text internationally, you know, that can cost a few cents. And it pretty quickly is, you know, I'll send a message, but if it's a dime, there's a little bit of friction there versus somebody who has unlimited free texting in the US. So. So we're looking for solutions for that. But what's actually a little bit ironic is that because texting costs money, it actually is such a better medium for people to communicate because the scammers and people who just send spam out all over the web, they'll just do it because it's totally free. They send a million messages, it costs them $2, and they go, no big deal. But as soon as you apply, like, this might cost you a penny, it might cost you two cent. Then the spam drops off significantly because they're like, oh, that's a real amount of money. I don't want to just send out all the spam. So it's been a really nice thing that's come along with texting. We're not seeing spam come in. We're seeing, it's pretty much all listeners of the podcast who are excited to connect finally with the host and say something kind about what they're doing.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 38:39 - 39:11

 

So obviously, this idea of feedback to the host, supporting the host, is something that's near and dear to every podcaster's heart. You did mention the sending crypto, so I'd be remiss if I didn't ask what the latest update is. Or I know a topic that's near and dear to Sam Sethi's heart is podcasting 2.0 and all the tags. And so I'm curious, like how you've been approaching that, because a lot has changed since we last spoke and there's a lot of movement happening. And you did mention true fans as well. So I'm curious where buzzsprout is in terms of supporting that and what's been the experience with your users who have tried to use it.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 39:12 - 40:38

 

We probably, I wish I knew off the top of my head exactly how many tags, probably like twelve of the new podcasting 2.0 tags. It's quite a few, but some of them, like transcripts, just made so much sense and now have been adopted by Apple. Some of them like the person tag, which will let people know, hey, this is the person who is on the show, the host and the co host location tags. So if your podcast is about a particular location, we will grab that information, at least the way I think about it, and I think I speak for the whole buzzsprout team, is we don't want to add a ton of extra work for the podcaster until we see where that value will be for the podcaster. Yeah, so just blanket adding hundreds of tags into buzzsprout as a whole would just add a bunch of extra weight for people to think about. But when we know you're already telling us the host name, well, let's add that into the tag so it's readily accessible by a podcast listening app. Then, you know, we know that you're going to tell us about the location if that's the subject of the podcast. Well, we already collect that information, so let's display that. And that's the way we're thinking through it. One that is a little bit different that I really love, though, is pod roll. Have you looked at pod roll yet?

 

 

 

Harry Duran 40:38 - 40:43

 

It's similar to blog roll, right? Where you list, like the shows that you recommend.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 40:43 - 42:24

 

Yeah. So back in the good days of blogging, you'd go to a blog, you'd read something and you'd go, oh, this person's really smart. I love what they're doing. What do they read? You know, what do they like? And they'd have four or five things on the side. They're like, oh, here's where I'm getting my news. Here's some newsletters I like. Here's some blogs I like. That's the blog role. And we said, what if, you know, we all are trying to break this like, podcast discovery problem and all the solutions that are out there are algorithmically driven and they all lead towards the platformization of podcasting, where podcasting is on one platform and it's kind of destroyed the independent nature of podcasting. It becomes more like a social media. So we didn't want that to happen. But we're like, how do we recommend shows? Still word of mouth, but pod roll would allow any podcaster to say, hey, if you like my show, here's three or four other shows that I would recommend to you. You already trust me for the 45 minutes that I talk to you once a week. Here's some others if you're into it. And it's really exciting to kind of see shows pop up on one pod roll and then they show up on another. Or shows will kind of cross promote. And so if you just pick these shows, they will show up in your pod roll, they'll show up on your podcast website. And over time, we hope that more podcast listening apps will pick these up so that if you're listening inside of your favorite podcasting app, at the bottom, you run out of episodes. It goes, hey, the podcast host is recommending these other shows. Why don't you check one of these out?

 

 

 

Harry Duran 42:25 - 42:54

 

Is that what the user, I always think about what the user experience is like. So in apps that recommend shows, I mean, is Apple, I guess I don't really look at, stare at what's happening because sometimes I got my earbuds on, and my phone's in my pocket. So I don't really see what's happening from the screen perspective. But when the episode is done, is it, I mean, is it Spotify or Apple that would, like, use the blog role tag to recommend apps? Or how's that working?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 42:55 - 44:29

 

Here's how. In my ideal world, this would work. So other people working on podcasting 2.0 would probably have different opinions. But in my ideal world, I want information to get very quickly from the podcast host, the person creating the show, to the listener. And one of those pieces of information is, here are some recommendations. And so, using this tag, let's say you're listening to a podcast and it ends, and you go, okay, I've listened to all of my shows, and you open up your podcasting app, and it said, hey, looking for new shows. Three of the podcasts that you regularly listen to recommend podcast junkies. Why don't you go and check it out? It was recommended by Alvin at Buzzcast. It was recommended by, this show is recommended by this show. And it's like, you know, the same experience that you might get on Goodreads. I finish a book, I go in and I say, I just finished that book, and it says, you might like this book. And I click it and it says, like, four of my friends have given it five star ratings. I'm like, oh, I don't really want to know. What's the best book? The New York Times bestseller isn't always the right one for me, but if I see that, like, my best friend from college and my dad and buddy else I know from the podcasting industry, like, they all liked the same book, was probably pretty good, you know, those personal recommendations mean so much to me. And so that's how I hope pod roll helps people find more shows that they'd be interested in, that makes a lot of sense.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 44:31 - 45:25

 

So I could talk to you about somebody geek out on so much podcasting stuff, I'm trying to think about things that'd be relatable and helpful for our audience, the one that really comes to mind. And I think this is obviously with everything that's happening with the gamification of download numbers and people using these gaming apps now to get a lot of download numbers. And then what's happening with, is it op three or OPm three or the new, like, download metric that op three? So I'm curious, like, where what strides have been made from buzzprout side in terms of, like, showing metrics that are, or download numbers and how you're thinking about those, you know, people are like, shying away from, like, even IAB because people saying, hey, look, what are we paying these annual fees to IAB for? And then the numbers are being gamified. Anyway, so I'm curious what as you, you know, being a podcast host and reporting numbers is a big part of what you do, I'm curious what's where you guys lie with that.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 45:26 - 48:22

 

This has been a problem we've had since 2008. You have people, or you have bots that try to download episodes, and it's okay, if you want to download the episode, go for it. But when we see 500 episodes all get downloaded by the exact same person within 2 seconds, and they're on different shows, we go, okay, we know what this is about. We see a new podcast, all of a sudden get 700 downloads, but 698 of them are all on iTunes. Yeah, we know that doesn't make sense. No one's using itunes for podcasts anymore. And because we have over 120,000 active podcasts, we can look across all of them and say, we know what real downloads look like, and we can spot abnormalities. We can spot, like, aberrations in the statistics and go, okay, let's pinpoint what's happening here. So it has been a, you know, back and forth for 17 years, or really 16 and a half since we launched Bus Brow, trying to find what kind of things are people doing to gain their numbers and then shutting it down for everybody on buzzprout. And so there were many years that people would move a show to buzz browut and they'd say, oh, no, something bad happened. My stats went down and we'd say, it's honestly, it might even be worse. Because what we're really telling you is these are real stats. These are why these are legitimate. It's not that we don't see the old downloads that you used to get, it's just we've identified them as bots. So we often end up on the more aggressive side because sadly, as Tom, one of our co founders, says, stats will always go down as they get more accurate. You know, we never have accidentally filtered out real people who are like a download of the episode. We're often trying to battle the bots that are downloading things. I still think there is value and things like IAB, at least in the guideline that they've created. So what the IAB does is they say, here are some rubric. Here's what should count as a download. And to me, they're kind of the minimum viable. You've got to at least be doing the stuff that IB has for you. It's not everything, but it's at least a good minimum. And so we always have met those standards. We're planning to be recertified this year and to continue, but we often go well beyond that, as we see, especially when money gets attached to it. You see it find all sorts of new scams when people are like, oh, they're running ads on their show and you see something weird happen. Helps us identify all the different ways that people are promoting, whether it be in a gaming app, like you said, or just buying downloads from people who've got 700 different devices to play episodes.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 48:23 - 48:32

 

What are you playing with the op three numbers or. Cause I know people have been saying that's like, a really reliable metric in terms of, like, showing true activity for a show.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 48:33 - 48:49

 

Yeah, I think op three is a really good check. So John Spurlock has doing the op three. You can look at it for buzzcast. All of our stats are public on op three, and they line up very well with bus route numbers.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 48:49 - 48:49

 

Okay.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 48:49 - 49:37

 

If you were anywhere else, you're on another podcast host. I'd recommend you just add op three as a prefix, which then you've now got two sources that are telling you, here's what we think the stats for your show are. And op three, I believe, follows all IB guidelines. But John's being pretty smart about filtering out bots, so you might find out, hey, good. The stats, I always thought were legit, they're legit. But you also might find, oh, it's actually about 3% lower because op three was a little bit better at finding some bots that were out there. But it's a really nice thing to set up. He's got lots of nice visualizations for all the stats nerds like us. You can dive in a little bit more and try to learn more about your show.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 49:37 - 49:46

 

Where do you go to see your op three stats? And if you're listening on the audio version of this episode, this is the part where we're looking stuff up online now.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 49:48 - 49:55

 

I don't have the URL. I mean, you to set op three up. You go to op three dot de v. Okay.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 49:55 - 50:10

 

And I'm wondering if you like, as if you put the feed into your, into your podcast host. I'm curious where you would see those numbers. We can look it up later if you want to send it to me later, I'll put it in the show notes. I don't want to like. Sure.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 50:10 - 50:14

 

So if you want, if you're asking for the shows for bus route.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 50:14 - 50:27

 

Well, yeah, I'm just saying, in general, if I did put that as a prefix, where would I see those numbers captured? Like in chartable? Like if you put a charitable prefix in, you can go to charitable and you can see what the activity is there.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 50:27 - 51:02

 

Yeah, it's op three dev, and that's where you go to get the prefix. You'd send that to buzzsprout, we add it to your show, and then all these numbers start populating in op three, dot de v dot. But if you do what we did for Buzzcast, you can also make those numbers public so that everybody could see how your show performs. I really like this for advertisers. I don't think it's uncommon that an advertiser says, hey, I want to advertise on the show. How many downloads do you get? And those numbers are a bit more ambitious than they are accurate.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 51:02 - 51:02

 

Yes.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 51:03 - 51:08

 

You know, that's what they would hope the show would get. But if you have publicly.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 51:08 - 51:43

 

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the dirty little secret of advertising. Like they're gaming the numbers so they can show the sponsors that they have these big downloads, and then the spot, the advertisers are not getting, like the results from the campaign, but they're spending all this money. But they're saying, like, look, I'll show you my, you know, IB certified numbers that show you I'm delivering these downloads. But if they're, the majority are coming them from like, apps or just other ways that they're getting, you know, getting those 8 seconds of play or whatever, the actual metric number, it's an interesting thing, and I think it might be get to the point where advertisers start specifically requesting like, op three, like numbers.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 51:43 - 53:02

 

You know, well, you know, if you look, if you think about this from the advertiser's perspective or from the podcaster's perspective, downloads are just a stand in. They're not the real thing. Advertisers want to know, I spend a $100 on advertising with your show, I'm going to get like $300 back in sales. And when I look at my margins, that means I make more money than I spend. So they're happy to do it. And all that's happened is they try to guess, you know, they try to figure out a little bit of marketing magic. Okay, 5000 downloads, probably this percent will actually do something. Oh, the audience looks like this, and they're trying to figure out all that math. But at the end of the day, they want to know, will I make money? And so it's why all those, you know, codes for me undies work. Meundies in the end is like, we spent $1,000 to this show, and then we got $1,500 of purchases using that me undies code. Great. We're happy with it. And for the podcaster, I think this is what we're doing with fan mail. You care that there's 2000 downloads, like, that's really, really good, or you even care if there's 50 downloads. But you know what's way cooler than 50 downloads? The one person who tells you I listen to the show.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 53:02 - 53:03

 

Absolutely.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 53:03 - 53:16

 

Absolutely. Because a download's not a listen. You know, people could download it and not listen, and they can listen and not pay attention. They can pay attention and not like it. But if they go all the way to texting you, they liked it.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 53:16 - 53:17

 

That's your true fans.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 53:17 - 53:37

 

And they listened to it and they paid attention to it. And that's what I'm in podcasting for. So, yeah, it's trying to get a little bit away from the stat that's not, you know, the most critical downloads are not the most critical listens aren't. It's people, it's engagements, it relationships.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 53:37 - 53:37

 

Yes.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 53:38 - 54:23

 

And if I get that, if I get ten texts that say I enjoy this show, well, then it's great. That's enough for me. I'm so thankful for my ten listeners who like the show. Now, the other thousand that download the show, and I didn't hear from, like, that's a bonus. But the real people who texted, I know for a fact those are real, and I love it. And so that's what I want to get with fan mail. I want to have thousands and thousands of buzzprout podcasters every week getting encouragement from their listeners. I love your show. I love what you're doing. Keep it up. It means something to me because those are real relationships that are formed. They mean so much more than stats ever could.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 54:23 - 54:53

 

Yeah, I'm glad you said that, and I'm glad you're providing that. It's going to be so interesting, and you'll probably be doing reporting on that metric, like a thousand text messages received by our listeners. The other page that I am always looking for, what's the buzzsprout link that shows you if your show is doing x number of downloads, doing like the one percentage or I always refer to that and I was like, cause podcasts get so discouraged. Like, I'm only getting 150 downloads. I'm like, well, if you listen to buzzsprout and you'll know you're actually doing pretty well. But I always forget what that URL is.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 54:54 - 54:57

 

Yeah, it's buzzsprout.com stats.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 54:57 - 55:01

 

Okay, well, that's obvious. That's an easy one. Okay.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 55:01 - 56:47

 

It only feels obvious in retrospect. What's nice about this is we're aggregating stats from 124,000 active podcasts, over 100 and almost 170,000 episodes released last month. Over 100 million downloads. And we're telling you, what are the top podcasting apps? One that popped up this week that last month that was really interesting was Spotify has now passed Apple podcasts, and our data is being the top podcasting app. I think this is because Apple got much more strict about auto downloading episodes. So when they made that change, Spotify moved up. What you were referencing is down here at the bottom. So I had the same experience. We would go to conferences, and somebody would say, I think I'm going to quit. I'm like, oh, why? I mean, this one's real. Lady said, I'm going to quit. And I said, why? She goes, I'm only getting, like, 15,000 downloads an episode. I was like, 15,000. She goes, yeah. I mean, I've been podcasting for over a month, and that's the most I'm getting on an episode. I was like, whoa, what did you do? What? And she's like, she's thinking she's failed. And I'm is blowing my mind, and I'm like, I don't think you understand. You're in the top, probably 0.1% of podcasters, at least at your stage. And so we had to put these numbers public. So what we do is if you release an episode, figure out how many downloads it gets in the first seven days. That's a good idea of how many subscribers there are to your podcast.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 56:47 - 56:48

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 56:48 - 56:59

 

If you're getting 30 downloads in the first seven days, you're in the top half of podcasters. And we're talking out of the 124,000 on Buzz Brow that are active.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 56:59 - 57:01

 

It's crazy to think about.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 57:01 - 57:49

 

Yeah, you're up there in the top 62,000 already, and if you get 115 downloads, you're in the top quarter. If you're getting 470, you're in the top 10%. And these numbers start feeling so much more doable. If you think, I have to grow a show to 470 downloads and now I'm in the top 10%, that feels so much more doable. Than when you pull up these top shows on Spotify and you see millions of listeners, and then you flip over to your podcast and s 200, and you go, I'm a failure. You're not a failure. You're in the top quarter. You're crushing it. But you're just comparing yourself to somebody who's done it for 15 years and was a celebrity before they ever started, of course.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 57:49 - 58:05

 

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you published those. They're very inspiring to podcasts to just get started. And it's something I constantly reference and I share with our clients when we launch shows for them. I'm like, slow and steady wins the race. And, you know, just the key is really to get into that 30, then to that 115, and then to that 470 as well.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 58:05 - 59:23

 

Yeah, it's really, really powerful, especially when you remember, you know, these are people. I gave a talk once at a meetup, and I think back then, the number was 29 was the median, and everyone's talking about, whoa, 29. And I looked around, I counted, and I went, just for reference, there's 29 people in this room. And everyone goes, oh, like, 29 steals so tiny when it's a number, but when you look around a room and it's standing room only now because the room is packed out, even though it had, like, the tiered seating in it, it was still. It felt packed. It was 29. I was like, if every week someone invited me to come give a talk here, but I had to spend 45 minutes to prepare the talk, I would do it every week because it would feel like, this is really valuable. 29 people showed up. That's as many as are in an average college classroom. But when it's a podcast, we see a lot of people go, nah, I think I'm just shutting it down. No one really cares. So hopefully, this fan mail feature is what really helps a few of those people in the 29 to reach out to their shows and say, you're doing a great job. Keep it up. Here's something you taught me.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 59:24 - 59:49

 

Yes, I'm eager to see what the feedback on that's going to be. One last topic I can't have to cover is YouTube. So just real quick, just as we wrap up, like, what's. What's your take on? They had the big announcement about, like, submitting your RSS feed, and I'm sure there's probably a lot of confusion. I'm sure a lot of buzzprout clients had questions after that webinar, but what's been the take on what they're doing? Buzzsprout's perspective on YouTube, entering or trying to make podcasts more visible.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 59:50 - 1:02:45

 

Well, I love Google, one of the greatest products of all time. I love YouTube. I watch an ungodly amount of YouTube. There's so much valuable information. I'm trying to replace a water filter on my fridge, and I type it in and there's a YouTube video on it. Like, it's amazing. And you go on there and you see all of these, you know, quote unquote, podcasts that are blowing up. You know, they're interview style shows, some of them with celebrities, some of them with sports, you know, some athletes. And it's a blast to watch. And so I think in the podcasting space, we all got very excited. Lots of podcasters were like, well, shoot, what if I just did video as well? I could get way, way bigger. And I think what a lot of people missed is how difficult video can be. You know, it's really, really hard to do video well. Lighting is like a whole science. It's a job on movies for a reason. Like, it's a big deal. Getting the audio right, getting the videos right, getting the camera angles, recording multiple things, editing that, it's just, it's almost an order of magnitude more difficult. So what you see is a lot of people say, I want to be on YouTube, but I don't want to do video. And so the Google podcast team moved over to YouTube music, and now they have podcasts on YouTube. And what they're doing is they're taking all that audio content and they're kind of shoving it into YouTube. Yeah, but on YouTube, nobody wants to watch a static image and listen to a podcast. They want to do that on their podcasting app. Now, it's nice to have another place that people might listen to your podcast, but I've not seen great numbers from any of this audio content that's showing up on YouTube as really moving any of the numbers. So we support it. You know, technically, we support it. I think I recommend to anybody who's thinking about podcasting or thinking about doing videos on YouTube, I say, let's pick one thing to do. If you are passionate about blogging or video or podcasting or social media, those are all good things, but, like, probably pick one. I personally love podcasting the most, and I will advocate for that one because it's personal. It's very low barrier to entry. It feels very authentic. It's the human voice. There's very high engagement. But if you're teaching me how to change the filter on my refrigerator, the water filter, it's just so much better done on YouTube. And if you're sharing inspirational quotes, it's better over there on Twitter for you to do that.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:02:45 - 1:02:45

 

Yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:02:45 - 1:04:11

 

So find the one that aligns with what you're doing. And don't overburden yourself by doing all of it. There's a really wonderful article put out by the podcast host about how YouTube was killing more podcasts than anything ever has. And their logic was, a lot of people who would start a podcast go, I'm gonna start a podcast. And then they're told, great, but you need to make it a video podcast on YouTube then, okay, so I've got to now learn how to do that. And then somebody else shows up and goes, and you've got to put out shorts because shorts are how it grows. Then you got to get those on TikTok and on Instagram, on YouTube shorts and on Facebook, and they go, oh. And now it's gotten bigger and bigger. And one weekend they burn out and they go, I've got a full time job, and I have another full time job for this podcast that hasn't even started, started yet. And they shut it down. I'd more excited about start with making one YouTube video or five tweets or one podcast episode and let it just grow organically and see does it, you know, feed your soul and does it do something good for you? And if it does, keep running with it. But don't imagine from day one I have to have this digital marketing plan that's going to, you know, turn me into some celebrity. It probably is just your personal thing, and so let it be that, and let it be okay. Being that in the beginning, that's great advice.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:04:11 - 1:04:52

 

Probably a great way to put a bow on this conversation. We've covered so much. I think that's been helpful for podcasters, and I think for folks to get a deeper insight into what's happening at bus prod. You guys are so I feel like you're not necessarily, you're not bleeding edge, but you're definitely cutting edge in terms of, like, implementing and testing out, like, features and functionality that really, you know, it speaks to the podcast, the heart of the podcasting community. Like, I really feel like anytime I hear what you're working on, that you always have the genuine indie podcaster at heart. And so I just really applaud all the work you guys are doing, and you're such a valuable resource and spokesperson for the community as well. So I just, like, really want to applaud and support everything you do to support the community.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:04:52 - 1:05:04

 

Well, that means a ton coming from you, Harry. I remember the first time we met because I knew who you were for years and years before we ever met personally. We were both in a Starbucks at one of these conferences and I was like, hey.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:05:04 - 1:05:04

 

Oh, yeah, yeah.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:05:05 - 1:05:13

 

Are you Harry Duran from podcast junkies? And you're like, how do you know who I am? So I really appreciate it coming from you.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:05:13 - 1:05:16

 

Yeah. So where's the next conference you're going to be at?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:05:16 - 1:05:30

 

I will be at DC for podcast movement and we are also going to be doing a series of podcast meetups with podcast movement. They're going to do one in New York, one in DC, and one in Philadelphia.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:05:31 - 1:05:31

 

That's nice.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:05:31 - 1:06:03

 

Really cool thing for anyone who wants to go to podcast movement, but maybe it's cost prohibitive if you go to any of those meetups, we've sponsored tickets. And so if you go and you've never been to podcast movement, you'll get a free podcast movement ticket to the big DC event. And that's, you know, $400 or something. So you're in one of those areas, come out to a meetup. I'll be at all three of those and everybody can hang out, have a good time, talk podcasting and then go see each other in DC.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:06:04 - 1:06:07

 

You got to talk to the team to add one more stop in Minneapolis.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:06:09 - 1:06:15

 

The New York, Philadelphia, DC to Minneapolis train. It fits right in.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:06:15 - 1:06:49

 

Yeah, right across. Well, thanks again for your time, Alban. I always appreciate catching up with you because I know sometimes it's hard at the conferences. We see each other for a couple of minutes and then we're like, oh, we'll catch up at the party and then we're like, there's like the music is blasting and it's just like, I just love this opportunity of having this virtual stage where I can bring my friends in and we can just have a proper chat for a nice decent amount of time just to get the lowdown on what's happening. So I appreciate you making the time again. I know we trying to make the schedules work, but it's always very interesting to hear your feedback on what's happening in the community. So where's the best place you want to point people to learn more about you and buzzsprout?

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:06:49 - 1:07:18

 

You can go to buzzsprout.com. If you want to learn more about Buzzsprout, you go to any of the links we talked about. If you want to see the stats or you want to see some of these features that we've launched. And if you have any feedback for me, specifically, reach out on Twitter albinbrook. Or if you go to Buzzcast, my podcast, you can click the link in the show notes and send us some fan mail and let us know what you think of that feature. Let us know what you think about anything that Harry and I talked about on this episode. I'd love to hear it.

 

 

 

Harry Duran 1:07:18 - 1:07:24

 

Very cool. I have to check that out and send you some feedback. All right, thanks again, my friend. I really appreciate it.

 

 

 

Alban Brooke 1:07:24 - 1:07:25

 

Take care.