On this episode I talk with Todd from Blubrry about new products that they have released including Vid2Pod and Blubrry PAI.
Welcome to podcast answers, the show where I help people start and grow their podcast,
Speaker:answering any questions along the way. Guys, if you've not checked out the last episode
Speaker:I talked about, "Podgagement" with Daniel Lewis. This week I have another guest from
Speaker:another podcasting service. I have Todd from Bluebrry on with me talking about some of
Speaker:the things that they're doing in the podcasting space and it's talking about their new AI product
Speaker:and some other podcasting 2.0 things. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get into this
Speaker:episode right now. With me today, I have Todd Cochran from Blubrry. Todd, welcome to the show.
Speaker:Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. So you guys have been doing all sorts of things at
Speaker:Blubrry for podcasting 2.0. I talked to you several episodes ago about the podcast
Speaker:mirror service that you guys have had implemented and created and allowed non-podcasting 2.0 hosts.
Speaker:There are hosts, non-compliant hosts to add tags and things, but you've done so, so much more
Speaker:recently. Can you tell me a little bit about... Let's start with VidDepot. That's a pretty
Speaker:exciting service and then tell me what it is. Yeah, and actually, my stats report came up today
Speaker:and we were actually blown away by the number of customers that signed up for. It was about five
Speaker:times what we thought it was going to be, but VidDepot is kind of as it sounds and it really
Speaker:was an idea that was generated from talking with YouTubers at PodFest who said, "I don't have time
Speaker:for a podcast." And they were kind of like, "I'm busy building my channel." And then we came back
Speaker:home and we talked about that and my CFO, Barry Kant, said, "Hey, you can't beat them. Join them.
Speaker:Why don't we make it easy for a YouTuber to have a podcast?" So that's what we really did. We did
Speaker:integration where a person signs up, they link to their YouTube channel, they pick a playlist,
Speaker:and if they want, we'll pull in all their old episodes or we'll just start at a certain date.
Speaker:And what we do is we pull down those media files and then we convert them to audio
Speaker:and we auto-publish. We utilize their title and their metadata from their description
Speaker:to pre-populate those two fields in their episode and basically it's a set and forget it.
Speaker:So it basically reduces the amount of time. Number one, the first people that took off on
Speaker:this was people that were already doing double work. Sure. Yeah. People that were posting on
Speaker:YouTube then coming over and now we're getting from the list that I'm looking at,
Speaker:we're getting peer YouTubers are coming over and basically now they've got an audio podcast
Speaker:that's available via the normal distribution channels with an RSS feed. So that was the goal
Speaker:here was to make it easy for YouTubers to have a true technical podcast.
Speaker:That's awesome because I think, I've heard you guys talk about it before and we both agree
Speaker:a YouTube video is not a podcast, but you've said it before yourself. When you talk to people,
Speaker:they're surprised when you say, "Show me an Apple podcast where your podcast is at."
Speaker:And they don't even know. They don't even know. So this really allows them to be able to
Speaker:take their YouTube video and automatically create a MP3 out of it and host it with you and create
Speaker:a true podcast. That's definitely a really cool thing. Have you had much feedback about it?
Speaker:People love it. They love it and what they're starting to realize is, "Oh, look what we've been
Speaker:missing." Because then you open them up to the ecosystem of everything that we've been doing
Speaker:with podcasting 2.0 and this whole new audience. Because what we're really the sales messaging
Speaker:on this is, "We want to grow your audience. We don't want to hurt your YouTube audience.
Speaker:But let's let that continue to thrive over there and you do the YouTube strategy."
Speaker:And then on the podcast side, you can have a podcast strategy to be able to market to people
Speaker:to a new hope, brand new audience. And there's only one really restriction in using the service
Speaker:and something we go through pretty heavily when they sign up is they can't bring
Speaker:any YouTube content that has any YouTube license music. So if you have any music in your show that
Speaker:you've gotten from YouTube, it's not legal to cross that over. And just because that's where
Speaker:people are going to get in trouble. So it basically said, "Hey, if you have your own license music,
Speaker:that you've gotten other places. Number one, you need to check to make sure it covers podcasting.
Speaker:And number two, if you're using YouTube music, then it's a non-starter to begin with."
Speaker:Gotcha. Yeah. So then they would just have to find some of their licensed music,
Speaker:replace what they're using in the YouTube from YouTube, but bring in their own licensed music.
Speaker:That's cool. So yeah. And then you've also been doing podcast AI or Blubrry Pi,
Speaker:which I love your name by the way. It's great. It's great. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Speaker:Yeah. Blubrry Pi was actually, we were trying to figure out what we're going to call this thing.
Speaker:And it's podcast artificial intelligence assistant. And Dave, one of our support guys said, "Why don't
Speaker:we just call this thing Blubrry Pi?" And we're like, "Oh, a star is born." But what we did is
Speaker:it's a real targeted product. And we've really thought hard about this over six months. And it
Speaker:was me and several other team members that were using chatGPT, using Claude. We're using just
Speaker:about every product we could test. And it really has broken down into three components. One is
Speaker:planning. Basically, give me some ideas for a show on basket weaving or whatever the topic may be.
Speaker:And if I'm going to have a guest, let's preload the guest information, their bio,
Speaker:and link to their LinkedIn page or wherever they have information about themselves. And then
Speaker:what we've done then is it generates really a couple of things.
Speaker:10 potential questions. We allow them to add 10, excuse me, 10 topics for a specific show plan.
Speaker:And they can add their own if they want within that. Number two, we come up with questions for
Speaker:their guest. If they're going to have a guest, allow them to add more as well. And then finally,
Speaker:the planning project just spits out a kind of a show flow. And what we've told people is,
Speaker:you know, with any product, this thing does not alleviate common sense. You need to read
Speaker:true and make sure everything is valid. But the tool that's getting the most used is the production
Speaker:tool. Basically, you've already done your editing. You've uploaded your audio to the platform
Speaker:you can go in and select that audio. We create a transcript that's contextual. You say it's Todd
Speaker:and Rob or whoever's on the show, you'd be able to pick the speakers. And then it will suggest
Speaker:10 titles for the episode. It will go through and figure out, you also have to in the production
Speaker:planning have to say, kind of, here's what the main topic was. Or maybe this is what I want you
Speaker:to lead with. So kind of you give it a little bit of a lead. And what I found is it gets about on
Speaker:the titles of the episode that gets me about 50 to 75% there. So I'll see a title, say, okay,
Speaker:I like that, but I'm only going to use three quarters of it. So I'll edit it and select it,
Speaker:or I'll add my own. Maybe I've already got a title in my mind. But the next section,
Speaker:we do an absolute fabulous summary, give them a second section of bullet points of topics that
Speaker:recover. We create some episode art. And finally, we ought to create chapters. And so for me, when
Speaker:I'm doing my tech show, I know I talk about 30 topics. I said, I think there's going to be like
Speaker:32, 33 topics. And it goes through and it's really, really good at basically finding those breaks
Speaker:where you change topics. And for like the podcast insider show, we only talk about three or four
Speaker:things. And it usually comes up with about five chapters, which is about right. Nice. Yeah.
Speaker:And you can edit them, add your art, add links. So for those that are publishing on the dashboard
Speaker:at Blubrry and not using the WordPress, PowerPress combination, what happens is every
Speaker:edit you make, then changes a draft episode that we basically get ready. So you're on the dashboard.
Speaker:Once you're done with that production flow, you just go into the episode area and you'll see a
Speaker:draft there. You go episode draft, the titles in there, the summaries in there, the chapters
Speaker:files link, the transcript is linked, the media file is linked. All you have to do then is go
Speaker:in and do any small edits, any art links that you want, any hyperlinks within the summary,
Speaker:do your editing and bam, hit publish. And what we're hearing from the customers is,
Speaker:when I was, well, I knew personally, when I was using chat, GBT and Anthropik and all these other
Speaker:tools, I was spending like an extra hour doing my show because I was using multiple tools for
Speaker:multiple things. And now I'm back out the door just as fast as I was in my old process with a
Speaker:book, Richard made a data set. The folks, and even though I have to, because I'm on blueberries,
Speaker:I'm using the PowerPress plugin with my WordPress site, we don't have a direct integration there
Speaker:yet. It's coming where I basically have to copy and paste, copy the title, copy the
Speaker:summary, copy over the chapters file. So I have to do a little bit of extra work, but in the near
Speaker:future, what will happen is, as a PowerPress user, using the AI, you say, I'm finished.
Speaker:And that will invoke a reaction that will send the data to your site, long as you've linked it,
Speaker:and will pre-populate an episode or a post with as much data as we can.
Speaker:That's definitely cool. I know for me, the chaptering thing, I want to make rich chapters,
Speaker:but it's so hard because you've got to go back and listen to the whole thing and try to figure out,
Speaker:if you have an hour show, where you have to go back, you know where you talked about topics at,
Speaker:and you can skip through, but it still takes that time to go ahead and listen to your show,
Speaker:try to figure that out and get that. So that's the super handy feature. And like you said,
Speaker:it does a pretty good job at detecting when you're switching topics and work,
Speaker:should put chapters and stuff. That's a great thing.
Speaker:And you know, it's one of those situations too, where I have a Kirk who's my
Speaker:basically executive director. He basically pre-produces all the topics. I mean,
Speaker:he goes in a couple of days later, and after he's listened to the show and written down,
Speaker:you know, all the hash points, and he goes up and makes sure everything is matched up in the
Speaker:chapter file, so that from a longevity standpoint, everything is exactly where it should be. And
Speaker:he says it's about 90% correct. And he actually says it saves him time, because sometimes he
Speaker:doesn't have time to listen to the show, but he'll jump to the topic area. And then he'll say,
Speaker:"Yeah, that's the marker. Let me put in the link." And he backbills. So that's the beauty too. And if
Speaker:you're a Blubrry customer, you can assign someone that will be able to come in and edit the
Speaker:chapters separately. You don't have to do it. If you've got a fan of the show that does it,
Speaker:like many do. Oh, nice. Yeah. And then the same thing in wordpress, really,
Speaker:all you have to do is give someone an account and give them the right privileges, and they can get
Speaker:in there and do the editing. And we mirror it. So in other words, if you make a change in
Speaker:powerpress where you edit the chapter, it gets put back into the chapter JSON file that
Speaker:Blubrry's hosting. So it's a married situation. So you can edit on either side,
Speaker:and it works out well. And then the third piece is really kind of a social promotion piece.
Speaker:That's where you create clips, text clips only for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all those
Speaker:locations. And we also have the ability to create an email that you would send out to your audience
Speaker:about the episode. And here's the crazy thing that I really attest to. That's what's really
Speaker:happening with my personal show. Is I used to just copy what I had in my post from WordPress.
Speaker:And I used to paste that into an email and send it off. Well, you know,
Speaker:people probably deleted 90% of those. And what I found now is because it's kind of,
Speaker:I worked the hardest on this email because this thing kept running home to mama and wanting
Speaker:to be like flamboyant and making, you know, it was really, I was not happy with the output.
Speaker:And it was like a battle. I think I probably did 150 prompt changes to get it right. So now it's
Speaker:got a good mix. And we've hopefully trained the model to make it understand that people have
Speaker:subscribed to the newsletter, know who I am or know who you are. And a little bit of the flavor
Speaker:of the show. And then ultimately it creates this pretty good email. And it's, it's almost,
Speaker:I wouldn't say a comedian, but it feels like sometimes when I'm reading what is come up with,
Speaker:I kind of laugh. I still have to edit it. Because sometimes you get something like, no,
Speaker:I didn't say that it run home to mama and assume it like I was talking about an interview with the
Speaker:I'm a show last night about the, an interview with the CEO of discord. And I didn't do the
Speaker:interview. It was done on another podcast. Yeah. It, it, it falsely assumed it was me and I had
Speaker:to change that out, but probably in the whole platform, the weakest piece of it is the image
Speaker:creation. Because we often tell it, you know, don't put any, any text in the image. And you know,
Speaker:about 25% of the time it still does it, still runs home to mama. But again, you know, I think we,
Speaker:you know, we've used enough disclaimers to the site to say, Hey, this is still early days.
Speaker:And the beauty of this is we build it internally and did the pay calls. It's not that hard.
Speaker:People just assume it is. It's really about the, it's really truly about the,
Speaker:the, you know, the scripts, but the prompts. And, but we got some stuff coming. We got some ideas.
Speaker:And, but who knows, you know, that's, this is fun stuff. And, and as we, I've heard several times
Speaker:before, you know, this is the early days of, of, of artificial intelligence, but it's only going
Speaker:to get better. Right. I mean, we're using this stupidest AI or language model we're using right
Speaker:now. Right. Weird things. I mean, it sometimes puts multiple hands on people, but it's only
Speaker:going to get better. And, and I, it's not ever going to be a replacement for, for human, you know,
Speaker:to do their whole job. Like I think that's not going to work. But the way that you're using it
Speaker:and, and to be able to assist with the production of your show, that's a great thing. Cause I know
Speaker:that like the more stuff that you do for your show, the longer it takes, you know, if you, if you just
Speaker:purely record an audio file and send it up to your, to your media host, you can be done quickly.
Speaker:But if you're going to do all of the things like create show are and do the transcripts and all
Speaker:of that stuff, which helps your show look better. It ends up taking a lot longer and you know, your
Speaker:production ends up, you know, like you said, doubling because you're doing all of the, all of
Speaker:this extra stuff besides just the show. So that, that's really cool. Now going back to your, your
Speaker:first thing that you included with the pie, you talked about it being able to suggest kind of a
Speaker:show flow and questions for your guests. Now, can you, are you able to tell who your guest is so
Speaker:that it has some, it has some knowledge of that. Okay, cool. Yeah. It's in the planning tool.
Speaker:Basically, we, we have a profile. So like Robin, I show, it's always like Todd and Robert here.
Speaker:And then what the topic that we have a guest, what the, what the topic that we're going to cover,
Speaker:then I put a, have the ability to put in either paste a bio in or link to a LinkedIn page and
Speaker:put information about the guest so that when we process the questions that for the potential
Speaker:guest, I go out at LinkedIn, you use the topics and come up with stuff. And I'll say that from that
Speaker:standpoint, again, maybe 60, 70% solution, some of the questions it comes up with is like, okay,
Speaker:that's, that's dumb. I'm not going to use that. So you're able to select and then we actually
Speaker:allow you to regenerate to come up with more questions if you don't find enough. And that's
Speaker:seemed to be pretty successful. Awesome. But ultimately in the planning document, what we
Speaker:want to do is everyone does a show flow different. And we want to be able to have a templating system
Speaker:where you say, okay, I do an introduction. I talk about my guests. We get into, you know,
Speaker:we want to be able to have people be able to set up a template so that they're show because we're
Speaker:giving them our show flow now. And I, you know, people are saying, I gotta, you know, I gotta edit
Speaker:this thing. And I'm like, well, it's okay. It's there for you to use it. And it's again, it's,
Speaker:it is a tool to assist you. Right. And, and some people say, well, it got me over writer's block,
Speaker:which was podcasters block, you know, I said, oh, you know, came up with a whole bunch of new ideas.
Speaker:And to be honest with you can go to chat GPT and say, I'm going to have a guest on a podcast that
Speaker:is going to be blah, blah, blah, blah with this as a topic. You know, give me 20 questions and it'll
Speaker:do that for you. But what I found and talking about time, I don't have time and I hate wasting
Speaker:time. I don't edit my show and I know that was against the grain for many people. But I wanted
Speaker:to, as soon as I hit stop, I want to be walking out the door in 45 minutes. And when I was doing
Speaker:all this manually, it was like 90 minutes. But now I'm back to actually I'm saving time. I'm
Speaker:actually getting the show out quicker with much richer metadata. And going back to that email,
Speaker:we send my listeners who, you know, I got this huge mailing list 16, 17, 18 years worth of mailing
Speaker:lists. Yeah. And they're saying, Hey, we're reading your emails now. And what I've actually seen is
Speaker:audience members come back and new members coming in because the show notes are richer. Even though
Speaker:I was preaching, Hey, I have two, three paragraphs of rich show notes. I always, that was lazy like
Speaker:everyone else. I didn't always do that. Right. So now I have this big chunk of metadata that
Speaker:that Google can just slurp up. And so it's, it's, I'm seeing increases in audience numbers that I
Speaker:have not seen in many, many years. And maybe it's audience members purely coming back from the email
Speaker:sure. But regardless, I mean, Hey, we're going to take it, right? If they're coming back or if
Speaker:they're new, you take any growth you can get. Right. Well, and you know, to be honest, like this is
Speaker:the reason that we get into podcasting is because we like the actual audio and actually talking and
Speaker:things like that. It's not the actual post production work that looks like doing, right? You
Speaker:know, I'm of the same way. I like to hit stop and be done. And so this, yeah, this brings back
Speaker:the joy to podcasting because it allows you to do that extra stuff without having to
Speaker:do the extra stuff or do as much. And when I get a 10, 10 paragraph summary of the show,
Speaker:and I drop it into my template that I have for my episode already, and I read it through. And
Speaker:again, it's, it's really just, okay, that wasn't right. That was right. Let's, let's change this
Speaker:word and tie that in with Grammarly. Oh, it's a beautiful product. Yeah. And some stuff has to
Speaker:be changed. There's always one or two things that it didn't get quite right. But again, it's
Speaker:trying to take contextual what's in the transcript and say, based upon here's the show topic. This
Speaker:is, you know, it's so again, we're using the dumbest, large, and I don't like to call it AI yet.
Speaker:Really, no, we don't podcast AI system because it's truly just a language model at this point.
Speaker:And we're nowhere near, well, we'll see how long it takes to get the AGI, but
Speaker:time will tell. But for me, this is fun stuff that makes podcasts, you know, I've been in this
Speaker:almost 20 years. So, you know, it's like the podcasting 2.0 stuff. Oh my God, I'm excited.
Speaker:You know, and some of the stuff that's been talked about recently is exciting for us because
Speaker:we're really trying to think about how do we get, keep this engagement going. Because in the end,
Speaker:if you have listeners engaged and whatever they're doing, if they're sending a boost,
Speaker:or if they're sending a cross-app comments post or if they're emailing the show,
Speaker:those little itty-bitty tiny things keeps a podcast, or even me,
Speaker:motivated to keep doing your show. If you're someone saying, oh my God, the takeaway from your
Speaker:show is, you know, I got X, Y, and Z out of this. Thank you. That, that, that drives you for another
Speaker:three months. You know, it really does, you know. So, it's so small things that were,
Speaker:you know, and I think if you're listening, if you're a podcaster listening to this, you know,
Speaker:we, we have to really work, work really hard and making sure we're coming up with solutions
Speaker:to get our audiences engaged. Sure. Do you have any future plans for the podcast,
Speaker:the Blubrry pie that you are working on currently that you can talk about now?
Speaker:Yeah. The clip creator, we publicly talked about that. It's actually, starts beta testing next
Speaker:week. I've got some other stuff coming. I don't really want to go too deep in it. And here's
Speaker:the thing. You look, I had one idea that I came up with and we had a meeting about it and about
Speaker:20 minutes in, I said, well, you know, big X mark through because it, it really wasn't viable.
Speaker:I'll just say this. We want to really, our goal over the past couple of years is,
Speaker:how do I grow my show? And because that's the question I get asked 100% of the time when I'm
Speaker:doing one on the ones with podcasters is how do I grow my show? Yeah. And, you know, usually I can
Speaker:go to their website and say, okay, here's 10 changes to make on your website to get you started.
Speaker:But in the end, I think we have to go much further beyond just updating your.com to make
Speaker:you more viable and findable on Google. We need to have this ability to give podcasters
Speaker:actionable things that they can do to change their show. One of the stats we added was tracking.
Speaker:Basically doing ABCDE comparison of different episodes. So let's say I talked about,
Speaker:you know, water bottles on one and I talked about Mountain Dew on the other.
Speaker:How did those track with the audience? How did they grow? What was the topic that more resonated?
Speaker:So is that, that kind of stuff? Now it's not AI. That's just pure stats. Right. You know.
Speaker:And so we're really looking at, I guess for a better word is where do I have holes? Starting
Speaker:A to Z. You know, I'm doing this, this, this and this to help a podcaster now. But where's the
Speaker:hole? Where's a hole where I'm missing something that will help a podcaster? So I'm, you know,
Speaker:if that gives you any clue, I'm looking at those holes to see where I can fill stuff. And number two,
Speaker:and this is probably going to make some people that compete with us with auxiliary products.
Speaker:If you're spending a lot of money on a third party product that's basically
Speaker:helping your podcast, I'm going to try to fill that hole as part of a basic hosting plan.
Speaker:Awesome. So, so the, the Blubrry pie, is that part of the basic hosting plan? Or is that in
Speaker:addition? Or how does that work for you? It's part of Thrive. And it's a whole host. The Thrive
Speaker:package is 10 bucks additional a month, but it's a whole host of additional items. I think we're
Speaker:up to seven or eight. So we keep throwing stuff into Thrive to make Thrive more, more valuable.
Speaker:And at some point, I'm going to say, when am I going to stop and stuff to that? Because, you know,
Speaker:I'm looking at the cost because this AI stuff is, you know, what, what really costs the most is the
Speaker:image generation. That is, that is the most expensive part of the whole query. But,
Speaker:but yeah, we're looking at anything where I'm, and hopefully the most of the stuff that I'm able
Speaker:to add will be part of the baseline price. If I do an integration with the, let's say Adobe,
Speaker:I'm probably going to have to charge for that. But unless I can get such a great deal through a
Speaker:third party that that integration, I can, I can make that those numbers work. Sure. In the end,
Speaker:really our biggest challenge to getting most of these brand new podcasters episode one, because
Speaker:we still have people signed up for service and we're watching, you know, we're watching a report
Speaker:and you get 10, 15, 20 days. We're like, Hey, do you need a hand? Do you need an assist? And it goes,
Speaker:goes dark and at 30 days they cancel it because maybe they figured out, okay, this is too hard
Speaker:or I wasn't ready. So our goal is really to help that podcaster get to episode one.
Speaker:And I think that's in the form of hosting. I think if you talk to any hosting provider,
Speaker:that probably is where the highest churn rate is. Once they start,
Speaker:you get to maybe episode six or seven, I can almost guarantee that. Yeah.
Speaker:Podcast is going to be around for a while. Yeah, they'll keep doing their show.
Speaker:Yeah. But you don't get to that number. Yeah, they're, they're, you know, 90 days they're done.
Speaker:Yeah. And if you're, so ultimately, people are, people are at a point today where
Speaker:they just want instant gratification. And then, you know, I think there's a lot of people out there
Speaker:selling strategies that says, we'll get you to X number of listeners and, you know,
Speaker:some amount of time and give me $5,000 to do it. And, you know, and people are, frankly,
Speaker:there's probably not a good strategy from a month, from a money standpoint. So
Speaker:we want to make sure we're having tools in there that they're not going to have to go out,
Speaker:spend that money to have a third party help them with a whole variety of things. Sure. Now,
Speaker:moving on to other podcasting, two point related things. You know, you guys went gangbusters and
Speaker:added a bunch of stuff before we talked a little bit about that last time you were on,
Speaker:and we talked about the podcast mirror service. But is there any, anything that you're adding
Speaker:new either recently or going to be adding here in the future?
Speaker:Well, as soon as they formalize the next round, we'll look at all that and figure out where we're
Speaker:going to drop. We'll add stuff as they add it. I tell you what I'm really excited about is this,
Speaker:what do they call it? Satoshi backs or something. I don't know if there's an official name, but yes,
Speaker:where you can, yeah, send it back to the listener, like from an advertiser or whatever. Yeah. To me,
Speaker:that makes sense because I'm thinking to myself, okay, what I've been doing now has been telling
Speaker:any of my listeners, you go on Fountain and get the Fountain app and send me your Fountain address.
Speaker:I'll send you sats to prime the pump. I'll send you a sats. You don't have to put your credit card
Speaker:down or nothing. You can use that to give that to any show that you want, just as an education
Speaker:standpoint to try to get people moving. But it makes it a lot easier if I can say, okay, you
Speaker:listen to, you know, Podcast Insider, you listen to the new media show, you listen to Geek and
Speaker:Essential and you listen for that 60 minutes, you're going to earn 4,000 or 5,000 sats. I think
Speaker:people would say, oh, you know, over time, that's real money and they can use that whatever way
Speaker:they want. But to be honest with you, I think Adam kind of hit upon it a little bit in a recent show
Speaker:is I just want people to be able to put a fiat amount somewhere, put $20 on account. And then
Speaker:this magically happens and then they can magically get their money out. We have to figure out a way
Speaker:because there's still crypto stigmatism. There is. Yeah. I think, you know, I think Sam,
Speaker:Truefans has started doing that as far as buying the sats. You're able to do like Apple Pay or
Speaker:Google Pay and do that. And I think that when you're essentially saying, I'm going to buy,
Speaker:you know, what we're calling like the fairground tokens where it's not, you're not actually looking
Speaker:at it as crypto crypto. Yeah, I call it tokens too. Yeah. Right. If you associate that where you
Speaker:put your amount of, you know, USD or whatever, wherever you're at in and you get these tokens
Speaker:that you can pass out however you want, then it takes this whole like, it takes that away and
Speaker:it makes it a lot easier to do as opposed to having to go over to another one app and then show a QR
Speaker:code to the other app. And it's fine for geeks like you and I, but for everyday listeners,
Speaker:it doesn't work real well. And it's kind of like the Dave and Buster saying you're going in, you
Speaker:know, you power up your Dave and Buster's card or whatever. I don't even know if they're still in
Speaker:business, but in the end, and the same thing is, is if we do this sat backs thing where I can say,
Speaker:okay, you listen to the show and we're going to send you so many sats a minute and I'll give you
Speaker:a bonus sats if you listen to that, I have in my show. And I promote that back to an advertiser.
Speaker:That's beautiful. And but the key is we got to be able to get whatever sats we send to a listener
Speaker:to baby easily extract them into their PayPal account or into whatever mechanism we use to get
Speaker:their cash back. You know, we want to get them that cash back. Well, and I think too that if we
Speaker:end up doing that, you're going to be able to prove better to the advertiser, you know, this
Speaker:amount of people listen to your ad spot as opposed to now where we're just kind of guessing and hoping,
Speaker:you know, we can say we have this many downloads, but again, that doesn't equate to a listener
Speaker:necessarily. So yeah, I think that that would be a good, a good thing is we can then make their
Speaker:advertising dollars worth it and go further. But also don't, don't disregard what advertisers do.
Speaker:You know, they'll say, okay, we're going to give you whatever that sum is like for GoDaddy. They
Speaker:give me a sum each month. I have a base, but you better bring us X number of new customers. They
Speaker:back that out into a cost for acquisition. So I get an email from GoDaddy say, hey, you hit your
Speaker:quota. Here's, you know, here's your, here's your performance for the month. And here's, you know,
Speaker:this is what you earn. Whereas if I'm under quota, they're going to say, hey, you know, we were under.
Speaker:So, you know, you're going to, you know, I get my base, but I get no bonus and you know, you know,
Speaker:get busy next month. But if I can, it opens up a whole realm of opportunity. They're still going
Speaker:to look at performance on money spent, but we'll have a better, better ability to say, did that
Speaker:person hit that 30 second advance button? Or because I'm sure some of my audience has been in the
Speaker:show for years. So as I hit the advertises, they go bang, bang, they hit the 30 second ahead twice.
Speaker:If it's available, I'm sure. But again, if I pay them to listen and talk about a new offer,
Speaker:then maybe they share that with a friend that, so it changes their dynamic a lot,
Speaker:especially I know I'm okay, I'm going to get a dollar or 50 cents or whatever for listening to
Speaker:this 60 second spot. So I think Adam's dead on and Sam on this setback thing, I think it's a
Speaker:great idea. So we'll see, we'll see where it goes. Does it make it into this generation of the next
Speaker:release? Probably not. But I think it's good times because people are starting out to pay attention
Speaker:at podcast moment evolutions. There were some Apple folks there and I'm saying, hey,
Speaker:you know, I think we got these things and maybe this feature would be something that would be
Speaker:awesome for us. And you know, and I you can't tell Apple what to do, but you can say, hey,
Speaker:this might be helpful, right? And they'll go, oh, yeah, that's interesting. And that's about
Speaker:as far as they say, then two years later, you get the feature if you're lucky, you know.
Speaker:And it was the same thing with transcripts. And, you know, I think it's probably publicly known
Speaker:that Ted was the one that really pushed it over there. But they did transcripts really,
Speaker:really, really well. And I would actually, they are scoring. So they're scoring the transcript
Speaker:I provide. And if it doesn't score high enough, my understanding is that they may not surface it
Speaker:if it doesn't score high enough. So we have to really work on making sure we have really good
Speaker:quality transcripts if we're submitting them to Apple. Yeah. So don't go cheap on the engine that
Speaker:you use to create a transcript. And if you're in doubt, then just let them run theirs. Yeah.
Speaker:A simple fact. Well, and I mean, they do a great job. They're transcription from what I've seen
Speaker:has done a great job. You know, I'm always providing my own my own SRT file for my transcripts. But at
Speaker:the same time, the ones that I have seen that that I didn't do like is doing a great job.
Speaker:It's it actually ignores I'm running pre-roll on the new media show. And it doesn't start the
Speaker:transcript until that ad is done. Wow. And I was that's what blew me away. I'm like, wow,
Speaker:they ignored the ad. How did you guys do that? Yeah, for real. Because because that's a big
Speaker:complaint is syncing is off. And they basically that doesn't matter how that ad changes.
Speaker:For every person, they know when I say welcome to geeking the center or whatever my intro is,
Speaker:that's when the transcript syncs up and moves on. They know now I haven't checked to see if they
Speaker:ignore the GoDaddy spot midroll. But I'm assuming they probably do. But to me, that that is brilliant.
Speaker:I'm like, how did you guys do that? And Ted said, well, I was 10 years of tech. And I'm like, I believe
Speaker:it. Yeah, no, no kidding. No kidding. You know, anything else that you want to promote here?
Speaker:Well, before we before we get off the call. Yeah, I, you know, I just think it's a great time to be
Speaker:a podcaster and people say that's pretty cliche. But if you look at the active number of shows,
Speaker:I think the last time I looked last week was 350,000 shows have upvaded in last 30 days.
Speaker:There's four million shows in the inventory. But again, 350,000 active shows. I truly believe
Speaker:that someone that's sitting on the fence right now about creating a podcast needs to rethink that
Speaker:strategy immediately because it is the best time ever. And boy, at 19 years, I hate it again,
Speaker:it sounds cliche. This is the best time ever to become a podcaster if you're not podcasting already.
Speaker:We're seeing overall just natural growth in shows that are, you know, that really haven't seen a lot
Speaker:of growth. And the reason why is very, very simple. The listeners to podcasts have not
Speaker:went away. That audience is still there. It's still same amount. They may be listened to a
Speaker:tighter number of shows, but they're also digging deeper and they're going deeper down the stack
Speaker:to find content that maybe was never discovered before. So great show titles, great metadata
Speaker:will all drive discovery, even if it's not an Apple podcast or Spoutin or Spotify or wherever
Speaker:people are listening. That's stuff of surface. And I just think that it's a great time. And a lot
Speaker:of people are worried and we are too. The economy's flat or the space is flat. So we just have to keep
Speaker:that in value to the platform and doing what we can to the best of our ability to grow shows. And
Speaker:if podcasters grow and get feedback, they're going to keep on podcasting and not say that,
Speaker:but that's going to keep us in business. Yeah, absolutely. Where can people find you at?
Speaker:Easy. Todd at Blubrry.com, Blubrry without the ease because they couldn't spell. We couldn't
Speaker:afford to ease. And I think they're right now that Blubrry.com is like 2 million B.
Speaker:B L U B R R Y.com. So Todd at Blubrry.com. They may want to buy that domain for us too. We
Speaker:gladly take that as a gift recipient for that purchase. But yeah, Todd at Blubrry.com.
Speaker:Well, thanks, Todd, for being on this show. Really appreciated hearing all about the stuff
Speaker:that you're doing with Blubrry pie and the other features that you guys are implementing here at
Speaker:Blubrry. Guys, if you've not checked out Blubrry, like he said, it's Blubrry.com without the ease
Speaker:B L U B R R Y. They are a hosting company and they do a good job at what they do. And they're out
Speaker:there leading the way and being innovative with some of the stuff that they're doing and implementing.
Speaker:And so go check it out, guys. Have a great week and keep podcasting.
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