The concept of value for value in the podcasting world explores how listeners who gain value from a show can return that value in the form of time, talent or treasure – or all three, which. would be nice!

David and Leila Medus share their experiences and insights of listener support for their show Fun Fact Friday, and discuss the importance of communicating this model to listeners, encouraging them to contribute in ways that resonate personally, such as sending thoughtful gifts or feedback.

We discuss:

• The value for value ethos.
• What is meant by ‘time, talent and treasure’.
• How to tell your listeners the ways they can help you.

Find podcasting resources, links and extra listening at Creativityfound.co.uk/podcasting

Disclaimer

Things change. Technologies improve. What is discussed in this episode is correct as of end 2024.

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Cover design by The Pink Octopus

Theme music City Vibe from Ketsa

Additional music Nova Search available on Pixabay

If you get value out of the show, return whatever you see fit. And yeah, we can't put a number on that. He also does our transcripts.

For us, that's just work we don't have to do, and that's as valuable to us as, you know, money. The value for value is it's like a circle. You ask for it, they send it, and you thank them and then you ask again.

We love that feedback as a podcaster. It kind of helps us keep going.

Welcome back to Podcasting 2.0 in practice. I'm here today with David and Leila Meadus. Hi, David. Hi, Leila. Hi. Start by telling me your podcast credentials, please.

I was four years old, actually.

It was. Yeah. So I'm 10 years this month. I started a little audio drama show called Meet a Spot. It's rarely produced.

Podcast when I was 10 years old.

Yep. Fun Fact Friday with Leila and David. Yeah, we're over 200 episodes now. We just did 205.

Sounds about right.

Right. And right around that time is when Adam Curry and Dave Jones were starting to work on Podcasting 2.0 and being a nerd. I'm not a nerd, though.

I'm a cool guy. I really like all the back end part of it, the way that the interoperability works with the different apps.

And I was just excited about the chapters and she was excited about chapters because you can get a little bit of art, you can be a little funny with the visuals.

I like the visual aspect of it. I am a very visual learner, so it's cool to have that. As someone who needs a lot of visuals for learning stuff.

Yeah.

And especially with our show, we have facts and people learn from our show and we'll be.

We'll be talking about, you know, a certain mouse in Australia or something, and.

You can't really visualize that.

It's nice to. It's nice to have a picture on the. On there.

Hiya, future Claire here. David and Leila mentioned Adam and Dave and chapters and I'm here to assure you that we're going to be covering those topics in future episodes.

We've always been very into the value for value. We're very anti advertisement for various reasons that we won't go into. But we're just kind of anti advertisement.

So we were like, how are we going to pay for our servers and the dot com and all the little stuff that's associated with it? We don't have a lot of expenses, but we do have some. And we just go with the value for value model, which has really been around forever.

But Adam Curry kind of gave it a name and that's how we've always made money with the show is just asking our listeners, hey, you know, if you get value out of the show, return whatever you see fit. And we can't put a number on that.

What you say on Fun Fact Friday, words to the effect of we are a value for value podcast. This means we put the show up for free.

If you get anything out of it, if it has value to you, consider returning that value in whatever way you see fit. Which makes absolute sense. So it can be. I think a lot of people will think of the monetization side of that and we will talk about that.

But value for value doesn't have to mean I pay you $5 because I like your show. Or does it?

It does not have to mean that at all.

It could be time, talent, or treasure. So, like, we have someone that has chapters for us that is value to us because we don't have to do it and because it's a very nice thing to do.

Pull your mic just a little closer.

Yeah, I'm in a different spot today.

Yeah, she's not in her normal recording spot for this, so things are a little weird. Yeah. So the time part, our chapter, we call our chapter architect, Dreb Scott.

He does our chapters for us and that's probably takes longer than it takes us to record the show and put it out. Thank you, Dreb. Yeah. And he also does our transcripts for us.

And we are eternally grateful for that because that, that's just work we don't have to do. That's fantastic. And that's as valuable to us as, you know, money.

We also have had listeners who will hear us say something and they're like, oh, my gosh. And we had one listener send us a Garfield calendar.

Yes.

From the early 80s. And it was in, like, mint condition. Because I love. I loved Garfield growing up.

You could have sent me a hundred bucks and it would have not meant as much as that calendar. Because he remembered that he had it. He went out and like, instead of, you know, just, hey, look at this cool calendar I've got.

And he actually sent it to me, you know, he had to go to the post office and package it. And, you know, the fact that we're touching people's lives in such a way that they're going to take the time to go do all that. We had another.

Another listener who was going walkabout in the outback, and every place that she stopped, she got us a magnet or.

A sticker for our refrigerator in the refrigerator right there.

Yeah, we've got our refrigerator in the back. So we have six or seven magnets and stickers from Australia. And she could have just sent us the money that those costs.

But that would, you know, it wouldn't have meant. That would have went in an account and we would have spent it on ice cream and it'd be gone. You know, it. It.

Of course it means something to us.

And that is treasure. But, yeah, it doesn't have to be cash money.

Now, we do definitely love the cash money because there, like I said, there are expenses and they're going up. We're negating some of that with other Podcasting 2.0 features. But, yeah, so, yeah, it's not. Not just money, definitely. Time, talent, even.

Just telling other people about the show. Yeah, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. Sharing the love for the show. Telling other people to come and listen to your show.

We are at the early stages of this course, and we're going to be explaining more step by step about, for example, transcripts and chapters. We're going to talk about boosts, of course, we're going to talk about streaming. And.

So you were sitting so still. I thought.

Was I.

Did you think I'd frozen?

You were sitting so perfectly still.

I was. I. Oh, yeah. No, I wasn't. I wasn't frozen. So, yeah, so we're gonna. We're gonna cover all of those listeners. Don't worry about that.

Just grab onto this kind of concept of value for value and what that means. The other thing I wanted to ask you guys is how do you communicate to your audience?

If they're sending you stuff, for example, you must tell them how to send you stuff. As well as saying, this is a value for value show, you must be communicating. How can.

How can our listeners who are podcasters start to communicate to their listener that this is a thing you can do? You can give me back value if you value my show?

Yeah, we have a donations page on our website, and we have our P.O. box, like, right on the page, and we tell people that usually every episode we're like, this is value podcast.

After we're done doing the support segment, like, with Actual money. We talk about where you can find our P.O. box, and if you want to send something, just how to send it to us or where to send it.

And also the funding tag in Podcasting 2.0, you can add the funding tag to your RSS feed and you can point that anywhere.

If you go to funfactfriday.com and click the donations button, which we encourage any listener listening to this show to go do, it actually takes you to our donations on MyMetist Media. So I've kind of got all of my shows and all of my projects under one Metis Media moniker.

And that way I don't have to recreate a donations page for every single thing. But it has the Fun Fact Friday logo on it and the Medus Pod logo.

And it's good to have your own portal or website or something like that that you control and have that linked in your funding tag. Some people will have those link trees or, you know, things like that. Buy me a coffee. You can have it linked to that. Any. Anything that's funding.

Hey there. I'm back again from the future.

You've probably already guessed it, but just in case, to let you know, we will be talking about the funding tag in future episodes, about what it is, why it's good, and how to use it back to David and Leila.

Yeah, and during the show, we just like. Like Leila was saying, we just. We just say these are ways that

you can support us.

We try to remember, but sometimes we forget and we're like, oh, we're a little unorganized. Okay.

We kind of need to get a, like, basic script out.

Yeah, the value for value script. You definitely have to ask and you have to, in my opinion, give your listener as many possible ways to give you money as possible.

And also don't limit how much they can give you, because I know a lot of these services that allow listeners and fans to contribute to creators will put like, you know, $2 a month, $5 a month, or just a flat. Buy me a coffee, send me $4 on buymeacoffee.com or whatever the site is. I don't like that because we've had.

We've had listeners send us $300 at one time. Oh, yeah. And it was like, which is crazy. I thought it was a mistake. I thought they meant to send us $3. But no, no contacted them. And yeah, it was.

It was a huge chunk of change and it really helped us out. So that listener would not have been able to send us that all at once. If we didn't have that option.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that there is nothing stopping your listeners returning their value to you. Even if you have adverts or sponsorships. This is not exclusive, like Fun Fact Friday. You don't want to have adverts, that's absolutely fine.

Somebody might be advertising their own thing. That's what I do at Creativity Found. I advertise my own website and membership and stuff.

But if you had advertisers or sponsorship, your listeners can still give you value as well, can't they?

Absolutely.

And one of the things you can do, like let's say you're, you're getting going and you've got, you know, let's say you do a local podcast and a restaurant is like, hey, you know, you got a lot of local listeners.

Mention our restaurant and we'll give you a free meal or whatever, you know, so you get some ads going and then you can just tell listeners, hey, listen, if you don't like listening to ads, if we start making a significant portion of money with value for value, then we'll drop the ads.

Make that an incentive because I know some podcasts or show, any, any kind of creation will be like, we have the ad version and then the ad free version is over on whatever service Patreon. And they'll, they'll do that also. And that, that's an option if you pitch in.

We'd rather take the money directly from you than sell your ears to the highest bidder. You can say something like that and listeners just, they like hearing it straight.

But one of the things that you have to do, it's a must, is you have to thank the listener. There's the value for value is, it's like a circle. You ask for it, they send it and you thank them and then you ask again.

And you know, you hope you get recurring people who go around the cycle every time, but if you don't ask, they won't give you anything because they won't remember. You want to make it easy for them to send you things. So you want to have links you want to have. Easy to remember.

We have store.fun fact Friday.com that's easy to remember. You know, it's our store, we just sell a couple T shirts, things like that. And then when they send you something, you thank them on the show.

Have you ever been thanked on a show for something or mentioned on a show by somebody that you've been listening to?

You get a little adrenaline rush, you know, it's exciting to hear your name on something you've been listening to a long time, and that's part of the value cycle. You know, you get that. You get that little, little boost, as it were. So it's definitely a whole cycle. And you have to thank the people.

Yeah. And then that comes back to our interactivity as well. You're actually interacting with your listeners.

Yeah.

One of the other things is when you get an email from a listener, like if you're, if you're obviously a podcast listener, if you're listening to this right now, other podcasts that you listen to, pick one of them that you really enjoy, find their email address and send them an email just saying, hey, I enjoy your show. I appreciate you doing it. It will mean so much to them because we're. We're out here, and it's part, it's part of the value for value.

We love that feedback as a podcaster. It kind of helps us keep going.

You feel like you're shouting into the wind sometimes, but when you get just a simple thanks for making your show, or, hey, I really enjoyed this last one, or whatever, it really means something. It really means something, too. So if you're, if you're a listener, not a creator, and if you're, if you're a creator. Am I wrong? Right. Yeah.

You can ask for that too. Just say, hey, shoot us an email. Give us some feedback.

And you got to ask for the feedback because that's time, you know, that's time that you're asking for them from your listeners.

Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much. That's been really brilliant. Thank you for explaining the whole concept behind that and putting it into practical terms.

This is how you, as a listener can help podcasters. This is how podcasters can keep going and keep moving forward. So thank you so much.

Well, you're welcome. Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

You can find David and Leila's podcast Fun Fact Friday on all Podcast Listening apps up episode 210 called the End.

Their new show is called Everything's an Argument and can also be found on Podcast Apps as well as@argentapod.com visit creativityfound.co.uk podcasting to find out more about my guests and access lots of useful podcast resources. If you'd like to get in touch, you can send a boost, but if you haven't got to that lesson yet, feel free to reach out to me on my Instagram account.