The Transcript

Why Copyblogger Media is Betting Big on Podcasting

Robert Bruce: I guess we should start with the fact that we re in new digs here. We re in a new home. Rainmaker.FM has been around for a while, but this is the first episode that we re doing this. What do you think of this new place?

Brian Clark: I think it s kind of crowded. It used to be just us and those guys on The Lede.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: There s how many shows?

Robert Bruce: There are 10 shows, eleven if you count the Master Feed, which is all of the shows in one feed. You re convinced that not many people are going to use that Master Feed, but we ll see.

Brian Clark: Yeah, who knows? I don t know. I just think it s ironic that we re announcing our podcast network, and I have a cold and I kind of sound like Barry White, baby.

Robert Bruce: Do you have a fireplace going, and some scotch next to you?

Brian Clark: Oh yeah. Smoking jacket on.

Robert Bruce: What are your plans for the evening, Brian Barry?

Brian Clark: I think I m going to stop doing that before I embarrass myself further.

Robert Bruce: So here we are, Rainmaker.FM. If you re listening to this through iTunes, you should go check out quietly. We re not announcing this actually until next week. When this goes up it will be Thursday morning, but we re not actually publicly announcing this till next Monday, but check out Rainmaker.FM. Tell us what you think. It s the first live episode that we re doing here.

Brian Clark: Don t forget to give us a rating and a review on iTunes because all of these upstarts are coming along, and we need to increase our lead, so to speak.

Robert Bruce: Yes. You listening to this right now are among the first who have seen it, so thank you. Brian, there is a little interesting news item this week, and a bummer. We re starting this brand new media property, Rainmaker.FM, the same week that a major player is going down, and that s GigaOm, the news of GigaOm.com.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it s shocking to me and sad. It s been around as long as Copyblogger actually. It was about the same time that Om transformed it from a personal blog into a true media property. It just caught me by surprise because I think Om left a year ago to go join True Ventures as a venture capitalist, and there was an infusion of $8 million at the time. Now, on one hand, they either spent $8 million amazingly fast, and are completely broke, but I think probably that was a buyout of Om.

Maybe the cash didn t stay completely in the company or at all, and they had changed to a content marketing focus, in that they were primarily looking to sell research to make money. I think it just brings up one of these eternal questions. It s obviously not that content marketing doesn t work. If you re not in sync with your product or service matched up to your audience, you can still fail even if your content is fantastic like Gigaom. Yeah, It s a bit sad.

Robert Bruce: Fantastic.

Brian Clark: But it s also kind of a lesson at the same time.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, really good content, but also major property, major audience, major numbers going on over there for a long, long time. It is a bummer.

Brian Clark: The whole point of having an audience is listening to what they want to buy, not deciding what you want to sell, and that s been the Copyblogger story all along. Here we are launching a major new authority site based on audio, which is a way to reach a different audience than the core Copyblogger audience. Yet what we re selling — the very platform that it s built on — we know people want it, because from the launch in September, we are now into seven figures easily and growing every day.

The trick for us is not that we have to figure out what people want to buy. We ve done that from listening over the years. Now, it s how do you reach more of the type of people that are going to go for Rainmaker as opposed to self-hosted WordPress or something like that.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Okay, we ve broken this down into three parts, today s episode. We re going to talk about that. We re going to talk about audio content in general and specifically what we ve been doing in the past for part one, what we re doing right now in the present with Rainmaker.FM, and then also what some ideas about what the future may hold.

We re going to stick to that little format. Some of the parts of the story is just going to be me interviewing you, or before I knew you, actually, then moving to the present and the future.

Let s go back to 2005. You launched Copyblogger in 2006, January of 2006. But I know you d been thinking for a long time about what you wanted to do, what type of content, what format, what type of topics you wanted to do.

But there s one thing in particular before you came up with the idea of Copyblogger. You had another idea. Tell us what that idea was and what this thing might have been.

More on Why I Didn t Start a Podcast in 2005

Brian Clark: In 2005, I exited the two real estate companies that I started, sold those to my partners which was a disaster, and ultimately left me with not much of anything. Just to keep it clear that I was not flushed with cash at that point. I had to hustle doing a few online projects in the fall of 2005 just to survive. Looking around at the time, you ve got blogging, which is growing up into pro blogging or commercial blogging.

The other interesting thing that happened and was going on was early, early, early podcasts. Remember they were named after the iPod? I don t know if that s lost on people at this point given that the iPod has been discontinued, and it s really the iPhone and various other technologies that have really caused podcasting to finally explode 10 years later, 9 years later. I was just so fascinated with the concept even though I d never done any form of audio recording outside of You know those little push button tape recorders we had when we had to record songs off the radio.

Robert Bruce: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Brian Clark: And try to catch it before the DJ started talking or get that instance of the song. That must sound so insane to younger people. Then we d have to carry around a boom box on our shoulder, and we thought the Walkman, which was the size of a small attaché case, and yellow.

Robert Bruce: Okay, we can reminiscence all we want later.

A Short History of Copyblogger Audio Content

Brian Clark: Yeah, I was fascinated. I wanted to start a podcast even though I was completely unqualified to do it, yet I was qualified to write. Smartly, I would say, I started Copyblogger instead. I played to my strengths and that was fortuitous in lots of ways. Number one, I probably would have been terrible. Number two, podcasting crashed and burned. The big VC funded network, I can t remember what it was called, but Scoble was involved and some other technology people tied to blogging and RSS, and it crashed and burned.

Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ was known as the pod father and he was a big podcasting advocate. He was very persuasive about how powerful podcasting was, and his venture completely failed. I m not even sure what he s doing anymore. But he was the man. Everyone listened. Well, everyone being us nerds. We all listened to that show. Did you ever listen to Curry?

Robert Bruce: Oh, I was only aware of him from MTV. I was not aware of podcasting in general till about 2006, but no. No, I missed him in that format all together.

Brian Clark: Yeah. So I think we met in 2006, and you have always had this fascination with audio.

Robert Bruce: Yup. What s interesting to me about this is the crash and burn, the first crash and burn of audio online largely because it was expensive. A lot of the tools that we have now weren t around, so if you wanted to both produce it but also consume it, it was a lot more expensive and difficult to do all the way around. It s still not easy to do well. We ve been doing this now for a number of years — and we re starting this podcast network — and there s still bumps and bruises along the way. It s difficult to get really good audio quality all the time.

Brian Clark: Especially when you re managing a lot of people, and kudos to you for that. You and I, for four years we talked about it, 2006 and 2010, wasn t it 2010 that we launched the first?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Bring Clark: You wrote me an email. I was lying in some gutter somewhere, and you wrote me an email and said, Hey, you want to come work with us, with Sonia and I and everybody? One of the first conversations that you and I had was about starting a podcast, and that s exactly what we did.

It was in November of 2010, and it went really well. I mean it was mostly you and I, and Sonia would come on a lot, and then you or I would interview people, basic format, but it was a hardcore teaching format mostly, like everything else we do. And it went really well.

Why We re Betting Big on Audio, and You Should Too

Brian Clark: Yeah. It s interesting, because that show had rabid fans, yet here it was our perception — because we were killing it with text content. Part of the evolution here is it was hard, and the web from a search and sharing standpoint was just so text focused, yet a lot of people don t read. It s not necessarily something you can do while you re doing something else, like driving a car, one would hope. Although I do see that occasionally on the freeway, and I m like, What are you doing?

It s portable. It s on demand. It s all this perfect stuff for the modern world, yet it took a long time to shift. We never took that podcast too seriously. It seemed like just a novelty for some people because we had an audience full of readers, and you write a post that goes viral, you do a podcast and you re like, Hello?

Robert Bruce: Yeah. One interesting aspect of that that we realized quickly was that this was tapping into a whole new audience that we ve never talked about. Obviously there were some overlap from Copyblogger, of course, but there was a whole new audience of these audio people who we had never had the opportunity to talk to before.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and I think that s incredibly true today because there s a big portion of the web that doesn t read 1500-word articles, but they ll easily consume an hour of podcast at the gym, on the run, in the car, whatever the case may be — in the background while they re getting work done. It s radio, except it s on demand and portable.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, 2005, you re thinking about starting a podcast network. You veer into text, which was a smart decision at that time. Five years later, we start a single podcast, and then four years later, actually, let s finish that part. We abruptly ended Internet Marketing for Smart People — you just stopped doing it.

Brian Clark: It actually morphed into The Lede, and then we handed that over.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. There was a period of downtime, and then Jerod came on and Demian, and they started it up again as The Lede. It was pretty abrupt, and we just kind of stopped doing it. I mean we got busy like everybody else, building the company.

Brian Clark: Yeah, as key products and services.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. It s interesting to think about, ultimately, at some level, that we never would have probably articulated this, it was like this is something that can be left behind. If anything has to be, this is probably the thing. That wasn t a conscious decision, but of course it s the decision we made nonetheless.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it was a thing that if you don t have enough time in the day, then that was a thing, that we didn t see the return that everything s brought to us.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and that s 2010. Now fast forward another four years, and we are launching the Rainmaker Platform, which from a product standpoint is really the future for us.

Brian Clark: That s the reason Copyblogger Media was formed in 2010 when we merged the individual businesses together.

Robert Bruce: But here s the thing, you came to me and said — we started talking about audio, and we d been talking about audio constantly throughout this whole time — but you said, I think I want to launch the product, specifically with a podcast. I said, A brand new podcast or what are you talking about because we don t have any traction. Of course, again, Copyblogger will back that up, but you wanted to start a brand new podcast leading up to the launch of the Rainmaker Platform, and that was going to be the way that we were going to launch this. Let s talk about that a little bit.

Brian Clark: We launched the pilot program.

Robert Bruce: Right. Correct, be specific.

Brian Clark: It was crucial because the pilot program got motivated people into the service, and we were able to take their feedback and evolve it from 1.0 to 2.0 before we ever mentioned it on Copyblogger. We did launch a product without ever mentioning it in text or at least on Copyblogger. We did do it with audio. There were three webinars there at the end, to try to boil down into some very intensive education, the concepts that were behind this media not marketing approach, which is a better way of explaining content marketing. A lot of light bulbs went off there.

It was almost unbelievable. I think it was Mike Stelzner who told me that he was listening to — we did the actual announcement of the Rainmaker pilot program was by audio. He was like, I couldn t stop listening. It was fascinating. I was like, Well, thank you, but I was just hoping I wasn t losing people because it was a completely different medium for me compared to writing the announcement post.

Robert Bruce: I got to give it to you because I was worried — and we talked about it but I ve really got to give it to you for that because it worked. I was wondering if it would or how it would work, but it really did.

Brian Clark: I hear that all the time in this company. Everyone keeps waiting me for to make a crazy decision that fails, not to say that all my decisions aren t crazy.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. Let s be clear here.

Brian Clark: There s usually a method behind my madness.

In 2013 as we re coming into the New Year, it s almost like you feel like coming, and what a year 2014 was for podcasting. Now I can t claim to be prescient enough to say, Yeah. I saw a serial coming.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

Brian Clark: It s intuition. It s just an overall awareness that this is gaining momentum,...