It used to be that podcast downloads were the main data point podcasters would use to track their growth. The thinking was, get X amount of downloads per month and sponsors will jump at you with wallets full of cash. While that may have been the way back in the day, today's success metrics looks a lot different when it comes to podcast success.

In this special live recording of In & Around Podcasting from PodSummit YYC 2024 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Danny is joined by Kattie Laur and Tim Truax to talk about how you can take advantage of them, and reframe your thinking and discussion around monetization and sponsorship.

Takeaways:

• The podcasting industry is evolving, and metrics should extend beyond just downloads.
• Engaged listeners are more valuable than sheer download numbers when seeking sponsorships.
• Indie podcasters should focus on local sponsorships to create meaningful monetization opportunities.
• Understanding your audience's engagement can help shape your content and sponsorship strategies.
• Value for value models allow listeners to support creators without traditional sponsorships.
• Experimenting with different ad formats can improve listener retention and engagement rates.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Bumper
• Captivate
• Apple
• Spotify
• Acast
• Douglas
• AG1
• Buy Me a Coffee
• North Bay Echo
• Canadaland

Our guest co-hosts this week:

Kattie Laur

Kattie Laur is an award-winning, freelance podcast producer and writer based in Brantford, Ontario. She has a life-long love of public radio, and has been clinging to the podcasting space since 2013. As both a professional and independent podcast creator, Kattie’s insights have her keenly focused on making the Canadian podcasting ecosystem sustainable, equitable and world-renowned. Kattie writes the biweekly newsletter for the Canadian podcasting ecosystem, Pod the North. Pod the North’s regular readers include many media excutives from the likes of CBC Podcasts, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. She is currently also working on her debut podcast, Canardian, in association with her newsletter coming Spring 2024.

Kattie's Website

@podthenorth on Instagram

@PodKatt on X

Kattie on YouTube

Links to interesting things from this episode

• PodSummit: Canada's Podcast Event
• Funding Opportunities - ISO-BEA
• SCOOP: A look at the Canadian podcast sponsorship economy.
• Are hyperlocal podcast networks replacing local media?

In & Around Podcasting is a podcast industry podcast brought to you by Mark Asquith and Danny Brown.

If you enjoy the show, we'd love for you to leave us a rating or review on your favourite podcast app! You can also drop us a tip at https://www.inandaroundpodcasting.com/support, too!

If you're an independent creator who would like to co-host with us, please let us know via Twitter and we'll get you booked!

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OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Danny Brown: 00:00:01

It's not just for the geeks and OGs, this show's for those in and around podcasting. Hello and welcome to another episode of In and Around Podcasting, the industry show that shares powerful podcasting perspectives.

I'm your host, Danny Brown, and I'm running solo today.

Mark, my regular co host is not here, and there's a really good reason for this because we're coming live from PodSummit YYC in downtown Calgary, beautiful Alberta, Canada. So good morning, Calgary. But I do have two awesome guest co hosts today. We have our returning co host, Kattie, you were on. We were talking about AI.

Kattie Laur: 00:00:42

Yeah, we were talking about AI.

Danny Brown: 00:00:44

Yeah, ethics and AI with Deidre from Capsho a few months back. So we know, Kattie, but we obviously will get to know you again. And I'm excited to have Tim Truax on as a guest co host today as well.

Tim Truax: 00:00:56

I'm a big fan. I've listened to this podcast, every single episode in your repertoire, so I'm pumped to be here.

Danny Brown: 00:01:01

And you'll notice we've taken a little break because we've been prepping for this, etcetera, so this will probably be one of the first episodes back after the break, so that'd be kind of exciting, too.

But today we're going to talk about something I know, Tim, you mentioned prior to the conference, or one of the big questions is downloads and monetization, and we've heard a lot about that over the last couple of days.

So we are trying to reframe that conversation and move away from concentrating on just the downloads and what it actually means to grow an audience and grow it effectively and serve that audience effectively. But before we do that, we are going to introduce our guests and I used the Royal we there. I'm not sure why I did that. I have to stop doing that.

Kattie Laur: 00:01:39

You're used to your second co host. You are, the two of you?

Danny Brown: 00:01:42

I am Mark today, but I've not got his Yorkshire accent, eh, lad? No. So I don't have that accent, unfortunately.

But, Kattie, as I mentioned, you've been on before, but for the listeners that didn't hear your episode, and for the listeners listening to this episode, who are you and what do you do?

Kattie Laur: 00:01:55

Yeah, I've got a little bit of a mouthful of an introduction, but I'm Kattie Laur. I write a newsletter called Pod the North, which is a podcast. It's a newsletter for the Canadian podcasting ecosystem.

I was a freelancer, a podcast producer for a long time, and now I'm working full time at a data driven podcast growth company called Bumper. And I'm a podcast growth specialist.

Danny Brown: 00:02:16

And I know Bumper well. We had Dan on the show a couple of episodes back.

Kattie Laur: 00:02:20

Actually, Dan is my boss. Lovely, lovely human Dan Meisner.

Danny Brown: 00:02:23

Awesome. And he's very smart individual. And speaking of smart individuals, rolling across nicely, Tim Truax. Who is Tim and what are you doing?

Tim Truax: 00:02:31

You gotta let me into that. Am I smart?

Danny Brown: 00:02:32

Smart?

Tim Truax: 00:02:33

I don't know. I don't know. We'll see here.

Kattie Laur: 00:02:34

We're about to find out, Tim.

Tim Truax: 00:02:35

We'll see. Tim Truax. I would say in the podcasting space at least I came into it as a hobby. Podcaster, podcasting and pop culture.

Star Wars, Marvel, that was my bread and butter. That's actually also what led me to you guys, Mark being a Star wars podcaster. And so I listened to his stuff, too.

And that was something that kind of led to this passion of community building and sharing and expressing my views inside of that space with like minded individuals. And that led to where we are kind of today. You know, I have a day job. Podcasting has always been something that has been my creative outlet.

are right now. PodSummit YYC: 2024

And it's something that we structure around the idea of community that was rooted in my first podcast, and it's something that we're amped about. We're halfway through day two here.

It's been an incredible experience, and I'm just so thrilled that we've been able to set this tone for the future of Canadian podcasting and be hopefully this catalyst for a bit of change, a bit of disruption, but also this larger community building across the entire country.

Danny Brown: 00:03:48

And that's one of the things. I mean, I've loved seeing it in the last couple of days. We've spoken before, I know a lot of people in the room.

I've spoken before about the Canadian scene not getting quite as much recognition as maybe the American podcasting scene. And I know the Acast folks were talking about that earlier, it's maybe 10%, but I feel it is larger than that.

We're just not very vocal enough about that. So hopefully events like this will start to push that narrative. And I know, Kattie, you do an awesome job at that with Pod the North.

Kattie Laur: 00:04:12

Thank you.

Tim Truax: 00:04:12

Yes, big time.

Danny Brown: 00:04:13

And like I said, what we're going to talk about today. And Tim, I know you've spoken about this when we were brainstorming an idea for this episode.

This live recording is generally like, I'm Head of podcaster support and experience at Captivate, which is a hosting, analytics and monetization platform.

And one of the first questions any of our team member gets from a new podcaster or a podcaster that maybe moved from another host to that is, how do I monetize? How do I make money? What tools have you got to make money?

And while yes, obviously you can make money, and it's a great goal to make money with your podcast, it's not as simple as just having ten thousand downloads, thirty thousand downloads. Bob mentioned yesterday, you're thinking at scale, and it's the harsh truth.

If you want to make money from advertisements, you need scale, you need the large download numbers. And that's just the way it goes. Unfortunately, it's the same with tv, it's the same with YouTube.

If you've got millions of views, you'll get a lot more AdSense clicks for the indie podcast, the serious indie podcaster, like everybody here is, it's a different story. So that's where we're kind of going to try reframe it. But I guess the first question is, why is it we're still.

Bob, you made a great point yesterday about podcasting is in the teenage years now we're twenty years old, basically.

So we're in the teenage years, but we're still essentially using the baby steps of downloads, where back in the day, a download was a really valuable metric, and it's still a valuable metric today. But it was the metric twenty years ago because you physically had to download a file to your listening platform and play back.

So it made sense that if you download a file, you're going to play that back. Now it's changed. You've got auto downloads and Apple Podcasts. You've got save for later. You've got bots, you've got scripted.

So why are people, do you think, Tim, I'm going to start with you. You've been in the industry for a bit, but you've got a bit of history there.

Why do you think that we're still talking about downloads towards monetization?

Tim Truax: 00:06:00

I think it's just the narrative never changed away from downloads. It's always been the metric, and it's a very loosely defined word to what is a download, what is a listen.

I know you guys have talked about this on the podcast before about what those metrics mean. But I think it's just a legacy thing.

I don't think that there's been anything presented tangibly that is measurable at scale because we're going across.

You have to log into Spotify, you have to log into Apple, you have to go to YouTube, and then you're real and you're trying to add up all this engagement and there's not like a single thing. You look at YouTube, their metrics, it's like there's a number there, it's public, it's there. You can see what people are doing.

And I just don't think podcasting has had, that leap's been made because it's so kind of fractured as what is being measured. And I also think that the, the idea of measurement, as you mentioned, it's changed through time. What is a download.

And it seemed, at least to me, my perception of it is that, that word, it leads, I think to podfade. It leads to disappointment. When you look at those numbers, you're like, oh, what is this?

But what you don't realize on the other side is maybe you are engaging, as we've talked about over the last couple of days, a niche audience. twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, one hundred people. That's a good audience. And.

But it's seen as something through the download eyes as being, we're not being successful, we're not this, we're not huge. Then it leads to disappointment. And I think, but honestly, I think it's just a legacy metric and nothing has been put in front of us.

I think there's been attempts made where there is attempts being made through like Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify, where you can see things like listener engagement. These are the type of metrics I like. How long into an episode are people listening?

And these are all metrics that YouTube have, but it's those listener metrics, those engagement metrics that I think need to be pushed a little more. But we're still all stuck on this download thing and that might be because of an advertiser thing. That's what you're asked for. What is your number?

Danny Brown: 00:07:52

And Kattie, I'm going to come to you in a very quick sec, but just briefly, how many podcasters here went to publish an episode? Go back in five minutes later, refresh and see what downloads they've hit. So we're just the only ones. You're either fibbing or you're not doing it.

That's good to see, actually. It looks like people are moving away from the downloads only as a metric. But Kattie, you work at Bumper, and I know you've got the Bumper dashboard.

And Tim, you spoke about fractured metrics having to log in in multiple areas. That's one of the things that you're trying to do at Bumper with the Bumper dashboard.

So how are you approaching the argument of moving away from downloads only as the valuable metric into the real data about engagement and across platforms?

Kattie Laur: 00:08:32

Yeah, I want to be careful about speaking for Bumper too much because I am their newest employee. But, yeah, one of the best things that my boss, Dan Misener, says is downloads are just a metric of how many phones your podcast is on.

We have no idea how many people actually listen to that. We don't know how long they listen to the episodes for. We don't know who they are that listen to it.

And I think that's why we want to start moving away from that metric of measuring downloads.

And something that Bumper just released, as you mentioned, was the Bumper dashboard, where we're aggregating metrics from Apple and Spotify all into one place where we can see things like retention rate and consumption rates. So how long somebody is actually listening to an episode for? And you can also see unique listeners.

So how many actual people clicked play on that podcast episode?

And that's done through just new metrics that we have available now, because I think in the early days of podcasting, downloads was the only thing that we could capture. But now, because of Apple and Spotify kind of opening up what they have access to now, we have way more metrics to look at.

So if you want to measure the success of your show, maybe you want to look at the consumption rate. If somebody is on your episodes about fifty percent of the way through, that's a great indicator of, you know, I should probably change things up a little bit.

Why aren't people listening halfway through, like, the other half of my episodes? Are they too long? Is there a segment at the end that just isn't interesting enough? Is the whole podcast episode just not interesting enough?

So what we like to measure now is unique listeners and comparing that to consumption rates rather than downloads, because that can really inform how you develop a show and grow an audience around it, because audiences, at the end of the day, love great content.

Tim Truax: 00:10:23

Well, it's interesting you point that out there, Kattie, about adapting to those metrics, because that's not something you can do with downloads. You're just getting a bulk volume. Right. It's like how many people listen.

You're not getting the data or the understanding, oh, fifty percent of the episode through, and everyone drops off. What am I doing halfway through? Well, it's an hour long podcast and I've, you know, people dropping off at the half hour mark, you can adapt to that.

So that's an interesting take that I really like, because it's giving you feedback into your podcast that you're able to integrate into your story, building your execution and how you're delivering these episodes to the audience, which downloads doesn't give you.

Kattie Laur: 00:10:57

Yeah. And when you can see the consumption rate of your variety of episodes sort of listed in front of you, you can also deal with.

You can experiment a little bit too, and see how much your audience would actually like a more long form interview. And you can compare that around all of your episodes and you can experiment a little bit more with these new metrics that we have, which is nice.

Danny Brown: 00:11:19

And how are you finding. So obviously you work with clients with the Bumper dashboard and you pull in YouTube, Apple and Spotify, if I recall.

Kattie Laur: 00:11:24

Yeah.

Danny Brown: 00:11:25

How are you educating? Because obviously there are very different metrics.

YouTube's kindly, you know, views and there are listens, but it's through YouTube Music or maybe in the background YouTube. And then Spotify's got their own metric and Apple's got their own version of that metric.

And then obviously you've got hosting companies that have their metrics around downloads, unique listeners, etcetera. How are you educating to, to move away from like, just looking at the downloads and what that data is telling you?

What kind of stuff are you telling a bumper class or what are you telling people you're speaking to podcasters, for example?

Kattie Laur: 00:11:54

Yeah, I was. It's everything I just said, I think, which is focus on your consumption rate and focus on your unique listeners.

And then also, I like to add, when I'm just talking to podcasters out in the wild, not from a Bumper perspective, but think about how engaged your audience is. And there's a number of ways, a number of ways to do that, especially if you're thinking about advertisers. Advertisers love an engaged audience.

And you can think about how many people are sending you DM's on Instagram or on TikTok.

You can think about how many emails you've been receiving of people who actually just genuinely want to talk to you and tell you how great that show is. I would never look at reviews as a metric of engagement because people only like to leave bad reviews.

I don't know if anybody is a Google Maps fan like I am, but typically when you're going and looking at things, mostly it's bad reviews.

So, yeah, I think when we're talking to clients, they're often asking us about downloads, and that's when we kind of tell them more about these other metrics that exist out there and why they're important. Everything I just mentioned about understanding how great your show is and making shifts based off of listen time and, and.

Tim Truax: 00:13:06

Unique listeners, that's one thing I want to put a PSA out there for. What you just said there.

It's so true that people will only leave, like when they're frustrated or mad is when they go and say, I'm going to make a comment. So I want to challenge everyone here. Go leave a positive comment on one of your favorite podcasts.

Whether it's on YouTube, you're leaving it there, or Apple or Spotify, those things matter. And one comment can make a huge difference in a person's day.

Give them that encouragement, maybe when they're feeling very isolated inside of this space, you know that that little bit of outreach and engagement from the audience to the podcaster can be incredibly motivating and valuable. So that's a challenge I want to throw out to everyone.

Kattie Laur: 00:13:45

I'll just add to that note, because on Pod the North, I recently did an interview with, I'm blanking on his name, but with Sleep Tight Stories, which is a kid's bedtime podcast. And it's so funny because kids are so, so willing to leave positive reviews.

If you look at the sleep tight stories feed on Apple Podcasts, they've got a couple of other companion shows, sleep tight science. Their reviews are just filled with emojis, with kids being like, please write a story about this.

So I think on your note, Tim, I think we can all harken back to a little bit of our childhood selves and just be willing to put some good stuff, good energy out there, put a good vibe out, just make people feel, feel good.

Danny Brown: 00:14:27

You mentioned about the additional data. So I know obviously when you're having a podcast, you're looking at the metrics that you can tell that's right in front of you.

So downloads, listens, listeners consumption, drop off, et cetera. But there's also a larger audience there that people often don't. That's what we're going to talk about.

People often don't include when you're talking about looking for sponsors. No matter what your audience size is on your podcast, you may have an additional audience on social or your newsletter.

You may have a community, a Facebook group, a discord group, et cetera. And I feel oftentimes I know I've been guilt of it when working with sponsors or looking for sponsors is not including all the data.

I think that's a key way to get. Tim, you mentioned about the engaged listeners.

One thing I do want to mention is if you're like most indie podcasters will never get the high multiple thousands of downloads each month for listeners each month. That's just a given.

It's not, you know, it's not bad news because you can still work with a really highly engaged audience to work with sponsors and a way to frame that.

If you've got a podcast that's got a thousand downloads per month and a hundred unique listeners, you mentioned listeners Kattie, so that's ten percent of your audience are engaged and they're listening to the audience, but you sort of halve that a bit and you say, okay, I've only got five hundred downloads per month, but I've still got a hundred engaged listeners. Now you've got twenty percent of an engaged audience, which makes you a lot more attractive to sponsors.

And if you take it down even further, I've only got two hundred downloads per month, but I've got a hundred engaged listeners, that's fifty percent of your audience that are now going to hopefully support what you do. Take action. If you have a call to action, that becomes really valuable at a smaller scale.

And I know we're going to talk about this, Tim, about micro scale, micro ordinances. So we just want to frame it, get you thinking about that, and frame it that way, where that's why it's not.

Yes, downloads are important if you're looking for advertisement and big scale advertisement and CPM rates.

But I think when it comes to sponsors and sort of your local, you know, hyper local sponsorships, there's a different story and a different approach that you can take, which makes you a lot more valuable to sponsors. So I think I just wanted to talk about that a little bit where I know, Tim, you'd mentioned monetization was a very interesting question.

It came up a lot planning PodSummit. So I mentioned hyperlocal sponsorship. What's your take on where we move for sponsorships for indie podcasters?

Tim Truax: 00:16:46

Yeah, I think the hyperlocal thing is an interesting question, because it's come up quite a bit too in discussions with a lot of people as we built out PodSummit.

And I think that's where the divergence away from this download piece is, because I think that people set this bar very, very high, and a hundred isn't a lot like, I don't know where that measurement came from.

But if you imagine a hundred people that you are engaged with each and every day or once a week, and you have to remember, too, like, this isn't a three second scroll on Instagram. This is an hour, forty five minutes, thirty minutes, whatever it is, of engaged listening. This is a very, very valuable piece of podcasting.

It's like we were talking about in the panel before or a couple before, is it's an intimate form of entertainment and engagement. You're in someone's head. And how rare is it? Look around. There's very few things that you do longer than thirty seconds.

Now you sit up to park, watch a movie at Netflix or on Netflix, and you're on your phone, you're this. But I'm going to engage for thirty minutes on a podcast, an hour, sometimes somewhere like three hours long, people are engaging with.

And so that audience of a hundred people or fifty highly engaged people, extrapolate that out to how many hours of people's time are being consumed by listening to you and your message.

And that's where I think narrowing the focus down, stepping away from this idea of being Joe Rogan or the big, you know, let's look at the value you're adding to those hundred people. And then those hundred people are minted as you're probably your best advertisers for growth, is that they are telling their friends.

They are telling, like, for me in the Star wars and Marvel space, you know, people say, oh, I told my buddy about this. Now he's a listener. Like, you can put out a million Instagram ads for your podcast.

It's still not going to be as good as one person telling another, like giving a recommendation, that means a lot. Someone tells me to watch something, I'm probably going to go watch it or listen to it.

Kattie Laur: 00:18:37

I'm so glad to hear that. The amount of movies that my partner has recommended to friends, and they still don't watch those things, it keeps them up at night.

It's truly disappointing.

Tim Truax: 00:18:47

Also, you want to talk about it, too. It's like, oh, this was an awesome thing. Talk about it.

So, like, those two people are using your, your podcast as a way to communicate, and community builds on their own, and that's how these things grow. And so focusing on that, whether it's a hyper local community online, because I think there's, there's two different pieces of that, right?

Like hyper local online, where you have a disparate audience that is spread across North America or Europe or wherever, or hyper local in the sense that you are focusing just purely, say, on Calgary and engaging Calgarians on the day to day, giving them the information maybe they aren't getting elsewhere. And so I think there's like a huge value in pivoting that mindset from the desire or need to reach a global audience.

And me, as a hobby podcaster from my basement, I don't need to reach a global audience, right? I need to reach a good set of people that are engaged and are willing to community build, and then they become the best promoters for your product.

Kattie Laur: 00:19:44

I would love to speak on this, because hyperlocal podcasting, hyperlocal advertising is actually something that you and I first talked about.

And you were the one, Danny, that sparked my curiosity around this, because, yeah, I think when we're thinking about getting sponsorships on an indie show, and you want to think about all the classic brands that you've heard, like AG One and me, Andies and Douglas and all these things, a lot of those ones have been in the podcasting space for a long time, but you still sometimes even need to educate a lot of these advertisers. Luckily, when you have folks like Bob Kane over there, he is doing the job for you of educating sponsors about the values of podcasts.

So, luckily, a lot of indie podcasters don't have to do this anymore.

But still, people, this idea of moving away from downloads is a pretty new idea over the last couple of years, and it's a lot harder to sell yourself to a big corporation, a big brand, and educate them about downloads and how engaged your audience is. And then they have to go bring it to the subcommittee and talk to the higher ups and all of that stuff.

So I really love the idea of now working with local sponsors and thinking about the community that you exist in and tapping into the brands and the companies and the restaurants that you really, really love. And this is something that I've been working on for my podcast, Canardian. Every episode, we gossip about a Canadian hometown.

So something I've been working on is tapping into local sponsors from those hometowns that I talk about to just do a fun mid roll ad in the middle. It also ties so well into my show because I can just use it as content.

And I'm thinking about those sponsorships, not in like an ongoing forever kind of way. I'm thinking of it as a, do you want to give me $250 to pay me for my time? And that's good enough for me.

I can put it in my wedding fund for next year. So I'm more than happy to take that. And I was able to actually lock in a sponsor. Recently, I've been working on just calling them.

The thing about local sponsors is you have to call them on the phone. They don't answer emails.

But I just actually locked in a local dispute dispensary based in Six nations, because my first podcast episode is going to be about Brantford Six Nations. I emailed this guy, and he was stoked. He was like, oh, my God, I love podcasts. Like, I never even thought about advertising on a podcast.

And he was like, yeah, let's do it. And then this is something that you actually told me about, I think, Danny.

But we came up with a little thing where if somebody comes into his shop and mentions the name of my podcast, he'll give them, like, fifteen percent off, or I. Something like that. Or maybe no taxes.

I don't know what it is, but, yeah, so that's something I'm really excited about, because now I'm connecting to the communities that I'm talking about, and they might even promote my show because they're like, hey, we were on this little local podcast. We all know this drama about my hometown. So I'm stoked about local podcast advertising. I think it's super, super exciting.

And North Bay Echo is another really wonderful example of a local podcast network that's tapping into the community and not really worried about expanding out. They can support themselves through local sponsorships and focus on local content, which I think is super, super cool.

Tim Truax: 00:22:58

Yeah, I love that. Just whole piece of it, because it puts something into perspective here.

And something that I think everyone should think about with this hyperlocal idea and concept is that there's a tendency to look at the downloads and be like, okay, if I can get to here, then I'll get a brand, and it'll be a six year deal or a three year deal, and I'll mint myself and go. But it's like, this is two hundred and fifty dollars of my favorite podcasters.

Kattie Laur: 00:23:24

There's nothing to sneeze at.

Tim Truax: 00:23:25

No. And, like, it's awesome, because one of my favorite podcasters, Matt Kerner, he says, crumbs make crumb cake. Right? You need to build that.

And then you have this, like, hyper engaged, very local piece that's promoting and amplifying, and then you have someone else coming to be, oh, I heard this. Can you do an episode on my town? And it's the same thing.

It's like, I think the same thing with downloads, with monetization and the dollars and cents of it all. And I guess there's scales of economy with all this. But you have to start somewhere, and it's not going to be the $300 million Joe Rogan deal.

You got to start with something that you're also providing this really awesome opportunity for local businesses to advertise outside of putting on a park bench or something like that. Right? Like this is a new form of advertising that maybe is going to require, at the local scale and hyperlocal scale, some education.

But once you engage that, that starts.

Kattie Laur: 00:24:18

To go, yeah, sorry to keep talking, harping on this, but my last thought on this is that podcast advertising is a very modern way of advertising as well. And we know that a lot of canadian listeners are young, affluent, well educated. They're listening to a ton of podcasts.

So I think that's if marketers are wanting to tap into people with a little bit of money to spend, especially with young people.

I mean, the world is looking pretty bleak, and we know that a lot of folks now, young people are spending a lot of money on travel and things like things that are in that immediate, satisfying vicinity because they don't think they can afford a house. So this is the sad reality, is that a lot of young people are actually just willing to spend money on things that will make them happy right now.

And that's something that podcasts can tap into.

Danny Brown: 00:25:08

Well, I like the point you made about there's also the local advertising. And I always remember, I don't know if it's still the case now because I'm older than you guys. I think I'm older than you, Tim. Yeah, more than you.

I don't think so. But I remember going to the shops and you'll see, and maybe like community centers and local swimming pools by the Y, etc.

And there'd be a whole bunch of business cards up stuck together, and they're all random, you know, just maybe pick a business card. But it doesn't really do anything for the shop owner or the business owner.

It's just business cards that thankfully, the business owner is helping out local businesses, but now taking it back to local sponsorship.

You're driving value back to that business for having you there because you're now sending your listeners there, say, hey, go to Joe's emporium for your local aquatic fish. I don't know if fish would be anything well, I don't know if fish would be anything but aquatic, but you're sending people there.

So that's great from a hyperlocal point of view. But also, you mentioned, Tim, about the hyperlocal online, which is going to be a different approach.

So what would be an approach for a podcast that's thinking, okay, I don't really have a show that's tapped into the local business or a local business near me, but I do want to sort of do. I do want to work up with a sponsor. That's obviously key for my audience. How do I find, like a hyper local approach online?

Tim Truax: 00:26:20

You feel that's definitely a tougher one at the end of the day, because you have an audience that isn't concentrated in one spot. And for us, what we done, we have a really great niche space.

And one of the things we chose is, from a monetization perspective, is to ignore it on the hyper local scale or hyper local online scale, and said, what we're trying to do is just build a community around this and use that as a stepping stone to elevate in other pieces.

And so we have to kind of establish a platform and a place where we are expressing some level of, I don't like the word authority inside of the space because I feel that is too overarching and like gatekeeping. But it's something where we can establish ourselves with this community to be people, like a voice that's prominent in it.

And I think that's maybe where, maybe the sponsorship stuff isn't as attainable, but you're creating a platform where you're not only gaining the confidence, but you're also creating something where you're getting amplified across areas, and then you can use that as a stepping stone to do different things. And to be honest with you, that was the stepping stone to get here, right?

I used the communities that were built and the confidence and the things that I got out of my day to day podcasting to create something completely different.

It's not necessarily, I don't even think on a looking at a pure monetization scale when you're looking on that online community, because like a lot of people that are present here today, I met online, and I consider that an online podcast community that has unfolded from podcasting, but not directly my podcast. The words the day to day that I do inside of the pop culture space.

And so it's harder to tether to that, to like, say, okay, this is going to lead, this online community is going to lead directly to some monetization or sponsorship, but you're also getting feedback from those people. You're creating engagement scores, you're understanding the brands better and all that.

And I think that in itself, for me, it's another metric, it's another way to gauge the level of interest in what you're doing, and maybe you take those ideas and you execute them more locally.

I also got a roundabout away of saying that it's really hard, but that's like kind of how my brain thinks with regards to the online communities, because it's.

If you have someone, if you look at your scatter plot on where people are downloading from, it's, you know, some like stuff in Japan and, you know, Europe and Asia and like all over the place, and it's like, how do you do that? Well, maybe there's a different way to look at that metric and use it as a tool to refine things and then you scale towards something different.

Danny Brown: 00:28:54

And I think that's that that moves into the stickiness of podcast audiences.

I know you'd mentioned about engaged listeners, and it's not just about downloads, it's about what's your audience actually doing and what value does that bring to potential sponsors and back to your own audience? Because obviously you can cross promote back to your audience. Again, from a stickiness point of view, what kind of metrics should you mentioned?

Consumption percentage, carry and drop offs. What kind of data?

Whether it's with Spotify for Podcasters on their dashboard, or Apple Podcasts Connect with their dashboard, or even Bumper or the hosting companies, what data should people be looking at to show sponsors the value of the show when it comes to stickiness of their audience and they're actually coming back and listening to episodes and you're. Sorry. Maybe it's empirical at first.

We are looking in your growth from listeners because people have recommended it from week one and now you're seeing week four. You've got. I've got two extra listeners, you know, in that same area, if you like.

What kind of data should podcasters were looking at when it comes to stickiness?

Kattie Laur: 00:29:53

I mean, definitely the unique listeners metric, I think, is the most important one there.

If you're comparing your unique listeners day over day, month over month, week over week, if your unique listeners is sort of staying stagnant, then you know that your show definitely doesn't suck and that people are coming back to listen to it over time. But if you're seeing those metrics go up, then that's really exciting news. I wouldn't look at the downloads for sure.

Something we've noticed at bumper is a lot of clients are seeing their downloads go down, but their unique listeners go up. There's been a lot of nerdy things to talk about about why downloads are going down.

It's worth a Google and worth maybe an afternoon to try and parse it through your brain. Because ISO seven is one of the main reasons why downloads have been going down.

The Apple Podcast app, the Spotify podcast app, they're always kind of changing their algorithms a little bit and trying to figure out how to make it the most, the best app that somebody could possibly use to listen to podcasts.

And that means that sometimes it messes around your analytics a little bit, specifically in terms of downloads, but something that they're always tracking is your unique listener who actually clicked play on your show. So I would always pay attention to that metric for sure.

But then when it comes to, like, sponsorships and advertisers too, like, sometimes the metrics that you're looking at aren't necessarily metrics, but they're sort of anecdotal evidence that people are engaging with your show. And some things that you can do are obviously show.

You can create a press kit that shows an email that somebody sent to you talking about how much they love their show, your show. You can start to take advantage of a lot of, like I mentioned, these apps are kind of changing themselves all the time.

So Pocket Casts and Spotify for Podcasters have both launched the opportunity for people to comment on episodes and put out polls.

So if you can show that people are engaged with those things, then, you know, people are definitely listening to that show, because no random person's gonna fill out a poll usually. So you can kind of show evidence too, in a press kit if you wanted to reach out to a sponsor that way.

Tim Truax: 00:32:01

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's interesting because as we're talking through this, I'm thinking of economies to scale this, because there's a talk later today that's going to be talking about connecting to a brand at a much larger scale.

And I feel like we're talking to a degree, to the independent podcasters and all this, and trying to encourage some of those looking at metrics maybe just a little differently, stepping back a little bit from the downloads, looking at the actual data that you have. And I really like the listen through rate that you see.

I always like that on YouTube, and I like it here because it tells you a lot about what's happening. You can look and have however many views, but they're all within the first 2 seconds, which means it's a clicking off.

This is giving you a ton of data, but I think you can use it as a self reflection too. Like we talked about, it's a piece of data that isn't necessarily like a hard number that you can promote, Ed.

Well, it is, I guess, but it's also something you can internalize and adapt.

And that's, for the first time where you're getting, like, without tangible feedback, someone actually getting to the board and saying, oh, I love this part, or I didn't like this, or providing you some real feedback, that is a metric that you can use to adapt and evolve. And I think that's really cool that we have that available to us now. Maybe you don't need to be producing an hour and a half long episode.

Maybe four to five minutes is a sweet spot. That's the question that's asked all the time. Like, what is the sweet spot? Should it be ten minutes? Should it be 3 hours?

I don't know if there is one, but that metric will tell you what your audience is listening to, and then you can adapt around that. So I think that's my favorite one right now, is the listen through rate.

Kattie Laur: 00:33:29

Yeah, there's a balance to play, too, I'll add, between making data informed editorial decisions and just doing what feels right. To be honest, once you start making decisions only informed by data, it can get not so fun anymore.

And sponsors love people who are in love with their own podcast, people who genuinely just like making it.

So if you start to lose that feel, then you might not just have so much luck because they might just click on the video and be like, honestly, this guy's just not.

Tim Truax: 00:34:02

It feels like AI feels like some robot that is. It's a great caveat to that, is that. And I think it's the fundamentals, like, you gotta enjoy what you're talking about.

You gotta love what you're talking about, because that comes across too, like, absolutely perfect caveat to that.

Kattie Laur: 00:34:16

Thank you, Tim.

Danny Brown: 00:34:17

Well, one of the things, you made a great point about the listener data, the listen through data, and an example, one of my shows, one of my older shows, I used to have a pre roll. I was looking at my analytics, and so the sponsor paid for a pre roll for like six episodes or something like that.

But you could see people were skipping through the first 15 to 20 seconds, thought, okay, that's not good because they know there's an ad there, so they're just going to skip through. So basically, I changed the format around that and made it a cold intro.

So the guest would be, there'd be a snippet from the guest speaking for ten, fifteen seconds instead, or twenty seconds maximum. Like that. Just a really punchy part of the episode. I'd throw at the start of the code intro and the pre roll became a mid roll.

So the engagement went up because people started, they continued listening to the once they realized, oh, it's actually part of the episode now. They continue to listen to that, and then they would actually listen to the mid row. So it does lead to both your points.

It's really good to look at the data regularly and see what's working, what's not working. Do any short an episode, don't you change things up?

But to your point, yeah, don't become a robot and just do everything based on data and leave it to AI because you're done on a different slope altogether.

Kattie Laur: 00:35:22

You can also use data to measure the success of an ad, too, because with consumption rates on both Apple Podcasts and Spotify, you can see sort of a dip when people have skipped past it. And so you can start to test out how you approach ads.

Yesterday, Camille was on a panel, and she mentioned her show of show that she loves to listen to. We're here to help. I'm also a big fan of this show, and it's so funny. They do their ad reads so well. Jake Johnson, and I forget the name of his host.

Danny Brown: 00:35:53

This.

Kattie Laur: 00:35:54

This is so bad.

But anyway, one of their sponsors is Squarespace, and they've incorporated their ad read into the show where they have Patreon members and all these people, because it is a show where they give free advice, they incorporate squarespace in where it's like, I need to fool my boss that I'm not going to a sex show. I'm actually supposed to be going to a dining party.

They actually built a website and had their Patreon members build this website for this person and had, like, a follow up episode where they were like, and this was part of the mid roll ad, too, where it's like, how did it go? What did. Was she convinced by the website? She was fully convinced by the website. So you can start to have fun with it.

And I am willing to bet if you were to look through the consumption rate of that, those episodes, like, I bet you nobody dipped off. Like, I think they were just having so much fun listening to how this sponsor worked out for them.

So I think you can have a lot of fun, too, and see how you can keep people around.

And that kind of metric is super valuable for a sponsorship, and they would love to see evidence of how well it's performing and that people aren't skipping.

Danny Brown: 00:37:08

Through it when speaking of fun, because I think one of the things that sometimes happen around monetization people get scared about how do I monetize? Do I find sponsors? Do I try to find advertisers? What should I charge? What should I not charge? Am I good enough to actually attract sponsors?

And there's a lot of ways, obviously you can monetize now. You've got the v for v model, you have sponsorship, you've got Patreon, you've got memberships, you've got tips, you've got a whole bunch of stuff.

And Tim, I know your big mantra is moving away.

You mentioned it just now, moving away from the macro scale of Joe Rogan with the exclusive Spotify deals and a million dollars, etcetera, to microscale and how you can monetize at a micro scale level. So what are some of the ways that you feel indie podcasters can really use the data that they're looking at?

We've been speaking about and really a have fun, monetize and grow on the show? And what are some fun ways that they can actually do that?

Tim Truax: 00:38:03

Just to build on what Kattie was saying, it's finding brand alignment to a degree.

At that local scale is, you know, a lot of the things that you look at, you, you have to be willing to use whatever product or whatever thing that you're talking about. I think people can hear through, we said you can hear through the bullshit a bit, right?

Like if you're talking about something you don't really believe in or you don't actively use, it's people want to hear recommendations and get excited about, like they're there to hear you and your content and the things that you're recommending. If they don't align with you and your brand and what you're talking about, it's going to feel weird for them.

They're going to feel like, oh, Tim, they just brought in whatever and they're talking about it. It doesn't feel real. And so I think it has to start with and it's being talked about later today. You have to start with that brand alignment first.

And at that scale, you know, you're talking about like, for me it'd be like talking about, I don't know, some Star wars toy or something like that. And like that's brand alignment for me. Me talking about, I don't know, DoorDash or something.

Maybe that's not brand alignment for me because that doesn't make sense for listeners. So I think it kind of starts there. At the local scale.

When you're looking at those metrics, you have the engaged listeners, you know the listener type because you have a very specific content and kind of building that profile and then leveraging that into maybe going out and talking to, like, for me, it'd be talking to someone like, big bad toy store, an online toy store. I have this engaged audience that is actively buying action figures and all this.

And how about we work somewhere where there's some code or something like that? And I can push because, oh, I shopped today at Big Bad toy store and bought my Star wars action figures or whatever, you know what I mean?

So you have to find that alignment and that maybe goes to a little bit more.

Some of the online stuff, specifically inside of your brand, is that, is there somewhere you can funnel people towards that makes sense and doesn't feel divergent from your brand, but also doesn't feel unorganic inside of the conversation that's for me, at least from a local scale or that kind of hyperlocal or focusing down to the indie side is what I'd be sussing out. And sometimes that takes a look internally, is like, what is my brand? What do I think it is?

And Liz Hames talked about this yesterday about audience growth, is like constructing your ideal listener.

Like, who is the person that is listening to your podcasts that you are then trying to maybe eventually sell something to or push something to, or push them towards a brand.

Like, if you don't understand that person, who your listener is, it's hard to understand, like what sort of alignment you can get with something that could potentially lead to monetization.

Kattie Laur: 00:40:33

I would add that it's always worth, if you can, and you've locked in a sponsor or a sponsor has showed interest, have as many conversations with you with them as you can to really make sure that you can genuinely have fun with these ad reads, because a lot of them might want to listen to it before you put it out. Some might not.

But you want to make sure that you can have the most fun you possibly can, and some are brand new to the space and want you to just read a script or a CTA. But yeah, you want to make sure that they're aligned.

Something that I have had the pleasure of doing is I've written a ton of ads for podcasts that I was working on at Canadaland. One of them was super aligned. It was for Douglas mattresses. And that show was wag the dug, a show about Doug Ford.

So we were able to have a ton of fun with that, even though it was just mattresses. The alignment between the dougs, you can't go wrong there.

But a show that's just been produced or just been released recently is a show called the Worst Podcast. And it's hosted by a curmudgeon, a 72 year old man who kind of hates everything, but he's working on it.

And Canadaland locked in ag one, there was no way this man was going to read these ads. He hates everything and definitely doesn't believe in green juice. So I had to navigate. How are we going to do this? Because this is different.

This is a network where they've had locked in the sponsor, and this is what keeps everybody paid. So what we ended up doing was really, he wanted to talk about poop so bad on this show.

And luckily, ag one is great for gut health, so that's kind of what we focused on. And basically every ad read that we did, we were like, how's your bloat doing today? And we were able to just have fun with it.

So I think a part of being a podcaster is being a creative and thinking about how you can work with the opportunities that you get and make the most of them. Luckily, ag one was happy for us to talk about how bloated we were, but that's where you have to really have those conversations.

And that's what we did. We had a conversation being like, are you okay if we do this? Like, heads up, this host hates everything.

Like, you don't know how you're gonna feel about this.

So we had to have those conversations and have an onboarding meeting with the host there to make sure that he was actually gonna read their CTA's exactly the way they wanted to, and just be creative with it. So it's possible with big brands, too. You just have to be creative.

Danny Brown: 00:42:59

You'd mentioned about the audience knowing your audience, and I think that's key. I don't think that gets spoken about enough.

When it comes to analytics and sponsorships and growing your podcast, you need to know what your audience is or who your audience is before start. Well, have an idea of who your audience is going to be, your ideal audience. So build a Persona.

For example, who's your ideal lister, what's their demographic, what's their breakdown, what's their makeup, etcetera. But that can also change over time, and I think you've got to look at that.

So how do you sort of adapt if you've got your idea of audience from day one, but six months down the line, you've now got, my show's changed a little bit, format's changed based on data and I want to work with these kind of sponsors versus these kind of sponsors I had earlier. How do you adapt your audience Persona from that moving forward?

Kattie Laur: 00:43:45

I mean, I can definitely speak on this. This is sort of a case study that's been happening recently.

One of the show that I produce independently with my friend Aaron Hines, it's a responsible travel show called Curious Tourism.

We launched it in twenty nineteen, thinking like, this is just going to be a podcast for the travel space to help people who are curious about travel be better travelers and leave, like no trace, like, figure out how the industry works. And it's definitely evolved over time to be more of a critical look at the travel industry.

And then recently my host actually went on a trip for six months. We took a break for about a year.

And in that time, I looked at our consumption rates and our unique listeners and discovered I was able to kind of compare unique listeners to consumption rate and see like, kind of what are the episodes that people click on based off, off of the headline and what are the ones that they stick around to listen to the most?

And I guess because our show's been around for about five years, I discovered that it looked like a lot of our audience was actually people who are really interested in long term travel from the perspective of a content creator. And so it wasn't actually just like regular schmegular travelers that we were going to be. That our audience was engaged.

Our engaged audience was, they were looking to Erin as the host to see from her perspective as a travel blogger and a travel influencer, how is she telling stories about travel? How is she approaching travel in a responsible way? And it almost kind of like to be completely blatant.

It seemed like people were listening to see how they could become travel bloggers themselves without getting canceled because travel is such a critical thing to look at right now. Right? Like, we, we know that airplanes have such a wild impact on our planet. So this has been massive for us.

So we just, we've shifted the way that we produce the show now and are focusing more on, like, doing some critical, some reviews about travel news and focusing on, like, what is it that travel content creators or people that just, like, want to travel more would be mainly focused on? So something that we want to talk about this upcoming season is press trips and things like that.

So yeah, now that's going to shift how we think about sponsorships as well. But I'll be totally real, too.

As indie podcasters, we burnt ourselves out like crazy last year, so we've actively decided we're going to wait to see, wait for sponsors to come to us. Rather than trying so hard to just monetize the podcast, that also meant just taking a step back and only releasing the podcast once a month.

That means we get to have more fun. We feel less stressed.

So now we're going to be focusing on sponsorships that make sense for what a travel creator or a content creator would be interested in.

Tim Truax: 00:46:38

Yeah, just from our perspective, quickly, we've sat in this pop culture space for almost ten years, and it changes every single year. Ten years ago, everyone, we almost went purely into the Star wars content.

We adapted to what's going on externally, too, we were using, because at that time, it was download metrics and all that. But we're looking now at how broad do you go with some of this stuff? Pop culture is a big, broad stroke. It's very, very difficult.

We spend a lot of time using the data to niche down a little bit more and just see which episodes are people listening to. Is it the marvel ones? Is it the Star wars ones? Is it the general talk? Is it self narrative?

So we reusing all of that to try to better understand our audience and then curtail a little bit of the episodes while still doing the experimentation, but also leaning less into the broad strokes and more into, okay, this comes to the Persona. The person coming to my show are big Marvel fans. Okay, we're gonna produce more Marvel content, and then they're going to pass that on.

And so it's like adapting a little bit. And we've gone from recovering every single thing in pop culture to niching right down to basically two franchises now.

And so that you have to adapt to with what you're covering as well. Like, especially with us, it's related to an external thing, like the film industry or comic books and all that stuff.

And so as that adapts, we can't just say, okay, we have a format. We have an idea of this exact person, because that's changed over time.

The people that started listening to us ten years ago are ten years older as well, the people that have stuck around. And so the whole industry has changed, like, from what we cover in those last ten years.

And so you have to be adaptive in the moment sometimes, too, and be willing to shed off maybe some of the things that worked early on that maybe don't work now, or maybe people have gotten over and gotten past, and.

Kattie Laur: 00:48:28

I'll add, too now for you, from a sponsorship perspective, now your show is the go to show for Star Wars content from a Canadian perspective. That's very, very unique and a very specific audience that sponsors can find.

Tim Truax: 00:48:44

Yeah, that's it as you niche down. And yeah, you put that caveat in the Canadian space, right? Because the Canadian experience is different. And that's really what pods on.

Kattie Laur: 00:48:53

There are plenty of Star Wars podcasts out there.

Tim Truax: 00:48:56

Where is the uniqueness of it, right? Like how do you get away from being a Star Wars podcast? Like what is the niche down from there? Inside of Canada, inside of Calgary?

You know what I mean? We focus on this very specific thing.

And so, yeah, it's all about the, I think you have to be open to the evolution and in some degree there's external factors and there's also the internal factors, like the data, like the metrics, like the listener experience that you're looking at.

Danny Brown: 00:49:22

Last JedEh. There you go, new podcast, the Last Jedeh. Jedi. That's a terrible pun, terrible joke. Last Jedi is a movie in the Star wars universe.

If you don't know it, that's what.

Tim Truax: 00:49:33

Caused the literal downfall of Star wars podcasting.

Danny Brown: 00:49:35

Yeah, exactly. We are going to change things up shortly and go into our segments. But there's one thing I did want to talk about quickly.

You mentioned adapting and how the industry's changed over the last ten years. And we've been talking about advertising, sponsors and using data to find sponsors, etcetera. But it's not always about finding sponsors.

There are other ways to monetize your podcast, and obviously you have your patreon, your tips, buy me your coffees, etcetera. But one of the ones is value for value. And a lot of the times people think of value for value.

And we had two episodes on the show, actually, Mark and I did a value for value streaming SATs podcast for bitcoin. And then we had David Medus.

Come on, who's talking about more community based value for value, which I think is really interesting and talks about the whole mantra of this weekend is the community, you know, aspect of podcasting. David Medus has a show in the US, it's called Fun Fact Friday with Leila and David, David and his fourteen year old daughter.

Every Friday, as the name suggests, they get some facts that they found on the Internet and discuss them and leave the link so their audience can then go discuss them and, you know, email them, leave voice messages, etcetera. But they're very much a value for value driven show. So the value that they offer as creators, the audience can pay back in value.

That can be by streaming sites in bitcoin, it can be by coffee. Buy me a coffee. It can be big tips.

One of the things I liked about David's example was he mentioned on his show that their Chromebooks were dying of deaf. Like, both Leila and David used Chromebooks and they were dying of deaf, and it was making creating the podcast a little bit longer.

So one of the listeners sent them to two chromebooks. They weren't brand new, but they were pretty new ish. That's free, four hundred dollars right there.

It's not sponsorship, it's not advertisement, it's not tips, etcetera. But it's value is monetization.

So I feel that's another way that podcasters can look, you know, if they're maybe scared off of with sponsorship to start with, how can you offer and get value back from the community you're serving?

Tim Truax: 00:51:28

Yeah, absolutely.

Like, I think the value for value that you were at, to a degree, always providing some level of value, as in the content we create and leveraging that in other forms. Like, we often think of this kind of this idea of a podcast matrix.

Myself and Jeff Humphries talked about this a lot, about how you're doing something now that may lead to something down the road. It doesn't necessarily have to be dollars and cents of it all. My podcast eventually led to us sitting up here on the stage.

In a weird way, there's a start, there's a point where we pivot, and then it leads us here. And so that value maybe isn't always something that is tangible or always something that is obvious in the moment.

And sometimes that value that you're providing, you're never going to know either. You're never going to know if your voice provided someone just that little bit of uplift that they needed when they're having a shitty day.

And so, yeah, that value for value, I'm not super familiar with.

I know I've listened to podcasts that you guys talked a lot about that on, but the concept of value coming and delivering to an audience, and that value may be showing up somewhere down the road, I think, is something that's not really perceived super well. We often look at it as an exchange where it's like, I provide value here, you provide something in exchange for it, and it's immediate.

Sometimes those things are drawn way long, and you don't realize the value of your invested time and all that until way down the road when something else pops up, you make a connection with a person, and then all of a sudden that leads to x, y, and z. And so I think thinking of value that way is quite important.

Kattie Laur: 00:53:04

I'll just add really quickly, at the end of the day, as a podcaster, most podcasters are putting out free content. There's value there already, especially if you understand your listener promise.

So it's worth it to just put out your patreon to just allow people to give you money. And there's the value for value exchange right there.

Danny Brown: 00:53:25

Exactly. And I think that's a great point on to end this topic, but we are going to briefly have a quick segment.

I know we're looking at the time here, we're going to have one of our quick segments, which is one of my favorite parts of the episode. And that is Stupid Stuff in Podcasting.

Yeah, I know you like this one, but basically stupid stuff in podcasting we are essentially looking at, and I'm doing we again because Mark's not here, but this is where we see something online that we're not sort of putting the person or the idea down. It's the topic and maybe the advice given. So I saw something in a Facebook group where someone was asking about buy me a coffee.

Is it worth using for monetization? And one of the commenters of the first commenter, I think, actually said, no, don't use it.

It makes you look like a beggar and you're going to look really bad to your audience. It's not professional. Don't use it. So I'm curious. Buy me a coffee. We're all aware of it. What's your take on that advice?

Kattie Laur: 00:54:24

I think that's stupid. Yeah. Like I just said, allow people to buy you a coffee. Why not? People want to.

And I think also buy me a coffee is a great way to make your ask for people to support you feel very small. It's not an ongoing thing.

It's a very small ask where somebody can just give you $5.01 month and then if they want to give you five dollars again, six months from then, they can. And they don't have to lock into like a steady stream. It's a, I think it's like a really nice, accessible way for people to support your show.

Tim Truax: 00:54:58

Yeah, I don't like the begging comments.

It's interesting because it's like, I think begging requires you be consistently asking for something where you're maybe not providing the value in exchange. Right. Like Kattie says, I think just opening it up and giving people an avenue to take and providing that opening. Some people would take it.

Kattie Laur: 00:55:16

Yeah. I mean, people who are low income still want to support the content that they're creating.

And it can be really daunting to see something like I have to support this like on a monthly basis. I just can't do that. My funds just aren't there. But if you allow them to give you just a dollar, like that's meaningful for sure.

Danny Brown: 00:55:33

And I know Dave Campbell over up here, Dave Campbell waving there. He definitely disagrees with that advice. Dave uses Buy Me a Coffee really well.

So if you want to know about Buy Me a Coffee and how to use it, Dave's your man up there. So we're going to shift up to another segment because that's obviously a little bit negativity. We don't want to finish on a negative side of things.

So this is a part of the show where I ask you, Tim and KaTtie, to give someone or something in podcasting a shout out. Someone that's doing a great stuff, you know, an event like this, maybe so who? KatTie, I'm going to go with you first.

Who or what is your flattering ram and who do you want to shout out?

Kattie Laur: 00:56:14

Yeah, we've been talking about monetization and something I've been looking to into a lot is grants as well for canadian podcasters. I want to give my shout out to the ISO, the indigenous Screen Office.

They launched a podcasting program I think earlier this year, maybe last year, and it's been supporting about twelve indigenous podcasts and they all look so amazing. So clearly I think it's been a really great success and I'm excited to see what they're doing in the future.

So pay attention to the cool stuff coming out of the ISO.

Tim Truax: 00:56:44

I'm going to shamelessly self promote on this one. As we're sitting in this, I want to shout out to all the attendees, speakers, everyone that's been a part of PodSummit.

This has been an incredible journey for me to go on, both personally and professionally, and just the groundswell of support around all of this and the people's willingness to fly all the way to Calgary to have a chat about podcasting and buy into this idea of what we're trying to build around community has been just absolutely amazing.

And I'll be forever grateful for these moments because we had a vision and seeing that come to life through the eyes and the execution of the attendees, the speakers, all our sponsors and all that, it's been incredible. So like I said, shameless self promotion, but big shout out to everyone on this.

Kattie Laur: 00:57:31

Everyone is sort of promoted in that promotion right now.

Danny Brown: 00:57:36

I was going to give a show, but I'm just going to piggyback off yours because I think that's awesome.

I think we should, you know, give a shout out to what you and your team's achieved and, you know, all the expert speakers and panels and sponsors and attendees, obviously. So I'm going to piggyback off that one as well. So again, Tim, KatTie, thanks for appearing on In and Around Podcasting today.

Kattie Laur: 00:57:54

Thank you for having me.

Tim Truax: 00:57:55

Thank you.

Kattie Laur: 00:57:56

Always a blast.

Danny Brown: 00:57:58

Thanks for listening to In and Around podcasting. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow on your preferred podcast app or you can even watch some videos. We have got some videos up on YouTube.

We'll be putting a back catalog up there pretty soon. And if you know a podcaster that would enjoy the podcast, we'd love for you to refer them to the show, too. So again, thanks for listening.

And whatever you're doing in podcasting, keep doing it because it is important.