← Ahead of the Curve with Coco Mocoe
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Coco Moco
Last Wednesday I was at my version of a Met gala. It was the Spotify now playing event where they invited a bunch of big podcasters to do panels and talk about the new video feature that they were launching on the platform. It was niche podcast Heaven. Emma Chamberlain was there. Colin and Samir Jay Shetty, the good children. So many big podcasters in one room. I was inspired and I told myself that maybe next year I will be a panelist at a Spotify now playing event and maybe one day one of you guys will be there with me too. That is what inspired today's episode of Ahead of the Curve with Coco Moco. Thank you to everyone leaving reviews on Spotify and Apple podcast. And for those of you becoming paying members of the now one of the best selling substacks. Thank you guys. So today we're going to be talking about why you should start your podcast. This is your sign. Or if you have a podcast right now, why it is time to go even more aggressively. There was a gold rush of podcasting the last 10 years, but now I think that we are about to have a renaissance. The past five years have been amazing in the content space. With short form and platforms like TikTok taking off and we did have a bunch of growth with new podcasts. I do think that we have entered somewhat of a dark age of content, more so with a creativity crisis and just how repetitive everything has become. Again, I don't even necessarily blame the creators. I think it is just the way the algorithms work. Now, the biggest creator in the world who is Mr. Beast, we are now seeing the downside of someone who's constantly trying to go bigger and more extreme. And also we're seeing the downside of so many other YouTubers who make long form videos just copying the Mr. Beast formula. I called it like the industrialization of YouTube. The content space and even some of the big podcasts have become just repetition farms. And what I mean by that is that they go viral by just repeating whatever topics are already popular on TikTok. They're just rehashing things that have happened two weeks ago on TikTok, and most of the time they're not adding any new information or adding any new perspectives. There'll be times where I'll click on a commentary YouTube and I'm like, all right, this is going to be interesting. And then they're just repeating everything that's already been said and then giving the reaction that they think is like the most popular opinion about the topic. So because of that, I'm calling it a creativity crisis. We are even seeing it in Hollywood where so many of the new movies coming out are set simply just new sequels or franchises that already exist. That is why I love and made part of the podcast a few weeks ago about the new movie Anora. Because it's a completely new concept, a new storyline. It's not based in anything that already exists. Everything is just so repetitive. For me, specifically trying to find a new podcast that I'm excited about feels like the dark ages. I always laugh at how much I end up loving astrology podcasts because yes, it's woo woo, but at least those girls are creative, okay? They're original. I hate when I find a new entertainment or commentary podcast and I'm like, heck yeah, this is going to be something new and exciting. But then it ends up just them being rehashing information that TikTok already went over for weeks. So this episode of Ahead of the Curve with Coco Moco is my plea to you guys, the brilliant coconuts of the world. Please make more podcasts, I'm begging you. I need something good to binge every week and I don't have that right now. And anytime I meet you guys in person or I talk to you over DMs or comments, you're all so brilliant and you all have such fascinating insights about what you do and the perspectives that you bring to the Internet. I know so many of you have mastered TikTok Instagram in short form. So now it is time that the coconuts take over the podcast and long form space. Now the renaissance of long form begins as we move out of the dark ages of repetitive short form content. In today's episode, I'm going to start out by telling you about the new feature that Spotify just launched and why it's important to lean into it. And then I will tell you about the logistics of starting a podcast. What tools to get, what websites to use, the nitty gritty that I wish someone told me when I started, which actually did, I had a friend, Kaylin, who sat down with me one day in an apartment and like told me how to get an RSS feed. And for that I'll always be grateful. Thank you, Kaylin. So I'm going to tell you guys about that stuff because if you're like, I want to start a podcast, I just don't know how or I have a full time job, I don't have time to figure it out. I hope that this episode will give you the resources that you need at the end of the podcast I'm going to go into my tips for how you can find a unique angle that will make you stand out and help you climb the charts. And I'll even give you some examples of podcasts that I think have done this. So if you want to listen to that very end of the episode, then you can become a paying member of the substack@kokomoco.substack.com Again, thank you guys for making my substack a best seller on their platform. I'm actually getting lunch with one of the founders on Monday, probably when you're listening to this episode, and it's because of you guys that I'm so lucky and I get those opportunities. So the extended episode, I'll give you guys some more creative tips on how to find your why, how to find your angle, and then examples of podcasts that have climbed the charts recently that have done just that. One of the best pieces of advice that I ever learned while working at buzzfeed was that whenever a platform comes out with a new feature that might take a while for others to adopt because maybe it feels out of place, that is always the best time to start using that said feature. Platforms will begin pushing those using the new features aggressively in the feed to convince other users to adopt the new behavior. They want to show their bosses at the platform that this new feature they came up with is such a big success, and so they're going to hand push those videos in the algorithm to boost views and metrics as proof of its success. So when Spotify at this convention announced, or I guess it was like a event, not a convention, they announced this new feature, I knew that it was going to be something to adopt early. They've already been pushing video podcasts on the feed for a couple months now, but they created a new website for this to make it easier for users to post videos. And it seems that not only do they want it to be video podcasts, but now you can upload clips of episodes that look similar to like a TikTok feed, which will push your show in the algorithm. This website, I'll link it below. It's called creators.Spotify.com and basically this conference was a way for Spotify to convince the top creators there to not just upload their podcast episodes, but also upload videos. I almost think they're trying to compete with like a YouTube. They even announces what I was most excited about as a user, not even just a creator, but they even announced a new monetization model. They noted that they've noticed the amount of ad reads per podcast episode is increasing. Now the average monetized podcast will have 11% of that runtime be an ad that is over one minute per. Every nine minutes is an ad read. That is like so crazy. It's a lot. I know for me, I have never, ever, ever run an ad on this podcast ahead of the curve of Coco Moco. I. I've never run an ad on it and I don't want to say that I won't ever, because I think if I ever find a brand that I actually align with and I'm excited to promote and it makes sense, then I will. But right now, I have never run an ad on this because I personally as a user find it so jarring when I'm watching like either a YouTuber that I love and I really respect the their opinion, or I feel like they're really smart the way they navigate the Internet. And for me, they kind of lose credibility when they then are kind of peddling this like, VPN that doesn't even actually make sense or matter. Or they start peddling like a mental health website that's like unlicensed professionals. I've turned down deals with said platforms where I'm like, that just one doesn't exist in the Coco Moco world. And I think my audience is smarter than that. I don't think that they would use or would necessarily care for like a vpn, for example. So I steered away from ads on my own platforms. However, thank God again, like for Substack, because for you guys, making my substack a bestseller, it has helped me monetize my podcast without running any ads. So like, if I upload an episode and it's only 28 minutes, there's no ad in that 28 minutes. Whereas if you see a YouTuber and they upload like a 30 minute video, you're like, heck yeah. But then you have to watch ads on top of that and they already have baked in ads that are five minutes each. That 28 minute video is really just only 17 minutes of video. So for me, I haven't run ads because I'm on substack and it allows for me to monetize anyways. But what Spotify is announcing is a monetization model based on premium subscriptions. But what that means is if you're uploading videos as a creator and you're monetized, you will start to get paid based on how many views your videos get. So they gave a very hypothetical example of a top performing podcast and they said that if this top performing podcast get 1.25 million views on their videos in 30 days, then they could make up to $45,000 that month. And some of my TikTok comments brought up really good at points where they were like, well, you know, the music artists don't get that same streaming model. They don't get that many, you know, dollars per song stream. And I agree, 100, 100. I think the difference here, and this is why I always say like long form media matters, the longer your video, the more the rpm, the more money you're going to make per per view or per listen. So for me on TikTok, that's why like only videos that are over a minute long get monetized, whereas videos that are 10 seconds, I know they're not going to get monetized, they're just for exposure. Now this model of payment is not going to last forever. I don't think this is my opinion. I think it's going to be similar to what happened last year with the TikTok beta program where they were giving away thousands of dollars to every creator every single month who were uploading videos over a minute long so that they could really win over the loyalty of creators and they could get market share on American creators. But then once TikTok knew that they kind of had a lot of that market share and creators were loyal to the TikTok platform over all of the other platforms, they stopped paying as much money. And if you talk to anyone who makes money on TikTok, a lot of them will tell you that they started making less money per view when TikTok switched from the beta program to just the creator reward program. I think something similar is probably going to happen with Spotify, where maybe in 2025 and 2026 they'll be paying out these really big dollar amounts, but then the moment they get more of the market share, they're going to pull back a ton. So that is something to keep in mind. But if you're a new creator, if you're uploading videos anyways, you don't have a licensing deal with a podcast studio already or platform, you might as well start uploading your videos to Spotify as well. It is so worth it anyways because in the long run, podcasting is where the influence and money is. As a creator, if you've listened to my advice for a while, you know that I always say the longer the media, the longer the object permanence. You can have a TikTok get 10 million views. But people will forget about it once they scroll to the next three videos. But with a podcast or a long video on YouTube, people are going to remember it. People are going to remember you. I say this in every episode. Can you repeat to me the last 10 TikToks that you watched in order? Probably not. What was the name of the creators? What was the title of the videos? What was the subject matter? Probably not. But can you tell me the last podcast you clicked on and listened to? Or the last long form YouTube video or last long form TV show that you watched? What was the name of it? What was the subject matter? Why did you click on it? What did you learn? You could probably tell me all of that and then some is because long form media has longer object permanence, which means more influence. I talked about this in the last episode about Kamala Harris's campaign, but we're seeing the power of podcasts in their influence come up in the recent election. I did that deep dive episode and I'll link it below. But there are entire segments now on national television like CNN and MSNBC and Fox about how podcasts influence the outcome of the recent election. So for example, Kamala Harris went on Call Her Daddy and the episode that she filmed with Alex Cooper was about seven minutes long. Not only that, Alex Cooper had to fly to Harris's location and recreate the set there. That video didn't even crack 700,000 views on YouTube. The week before the election, however, Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan. So did J.D. vance. Both of their episodes were three hours long or more and Trump's got 45 million views. Before the election, J.D. vance got 17 million views. And that's just one of the long form podcasts that they went on. The short sound bite strategy of the Kamala Harris campaign going super viral on TikTok Kamala HQ. While yes, it was viral and it was interesting and it was great marketing, what we talked about in that last episode was it was empty marketing. It didn't move the needle. But going on a long form podcast where you talk for three plus hours, that moved the needle for Trump. So podcasting has always been huge. But I really do feel like the podcasts the last few years that have broke through are the ones that lean into video as well. Mostly because they're able to pull clips from those videos and then post it to like TikTok and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and drive traffic. I know a lot of new podcasts that I find organically. It's because I Watched it on my TikTok feed. So now that Spotify is promoting video podcasts over audio podcasts, it is so important to lean into video. And I'm going to give you the tools for how you can create video podcasts. We'll call them Vidcasts in this episode. Again, the website to upload to Spotify. If you're already doing YouTube videos, you might as well be uploading to a podcast. It's creators.Spotify.com Here it is. What you're going to want to do is you can either start by filming on your iPhone. Some of the biggest YouTubers that took off the last couple years, they didn't even film on an actual camera. They just set up their iPhone. That is okay. IPhones, Google Pixels, Samsung, a lot of them have pretty good cameras now. So you can film on your iPhone if it comes down to that. But if you want a better video quality, what I personally use is the Sony ZV1 for video. And then I have this like mini tripod that came with it from Best Buy that I when I film in my car, I'll just put it on my dashboard. Or like right now I'm filming at my desk, I just put it on my desk. It's a little mini tripod. It's perfect. And the Sony ZV1 is really great for video. I have a different Canon A camera, the Canon G7X for photos because it has a flash. So if you want to be fancy and get one for camera, for photos and then one for video, Those are the two options. But I specifically love the Sony ZV1 for video. The audio is sometimes more important than even the video. So if you can't afford to buy like a brand new microphone yet, what you can do and if you're watching the video on substack, what I'm using is literally just the old iPhone head jacks like the before the AirPods, you know how they have like the white string and if you where you adjust the volume, there's a microphone in there so you talk into that. That actually acts as a really good microphone. And I know so many creators that have multi millions of followers and they still use this as a microphone when they're filming viral TikToks. I have different microphones, but I do love this one because you don't have to remember to charge it. And I got the one that is the USB C so it plugs into my new iPhone 15 and I can record audio on my voice memo and then I just sync it to the video. So if you don't want to spend more than $20 on a microphone, and you don't want to get a new camera, iPhone, or like Samsung, Google Pixel, whatever you have, and instead spend your money on the old Apple headphone jack for a microphone. Now, if you want to go a little fancier, what you can use is the Hollyland microphones. I have these linked out all in my Amazon storefront, and I'll link that below as well. And. And if you guys use my Amazon storefront, I get a portion of the proceeds. So I always try to be transparent about money. So thank you, guys. If you do that. If not, you can just like search them. But Hollyland, they have these microphones where if you're sitting further away from the camera and you need to record audio, they are so perfect. I would get the one that comes with two. So that way if one of them is dying, you have another one you can use. And then it's also if you're filming with two people, if you want to do street interviews, if you want to have a podcast where you sit on a couch, you interview your friend or whatever, or you're just sitting far from the camera. The Hollyland microphones are so amazing and they come in different colors. So I'll have that linked below as well. The new Hollyland microphones, they also come with a USB C cord, so if you don't want to plug them into a camera, you can plug it into your iPhone or whatever and do a voice memo so it still works. So all of these devices, and again, there's cheap versions, you can just do your phone in a headphone jack or you can get a Sony, you can get the Hollyland camera, and those all work. And then because it's getting darker earlier in the day, because it's getting to winter time, if you want to film and maybe you work during the day, you have to film at night. I'll link out this one light that I use that is. I hate those, like, ring lights that people clip to their phone because they're such cheap quality and they die. They don't work. They only work for like a month. But I use this one light that is so good, it's like $80, but it's so worth it. You can make it warm, you can make it cooler lighting, you can make it brighter, less. And again, it uses a USB C to charge. So I'll link out that below as well if you have to film at night. So those are the specific devices. Now, one of the reasons that if you're going to start a YouTube show or you want to start like a podcast show as well, you might as well also upload it to podcasts. I was actually at a college recently doing a talk and one of the students that came up to me after to ask for advice, she was like, yeah, I, I film YouTube videos about like college advice and stuff and, you know, how do I like get more momentum there? And I was like, if you're already posting 20, 30 minute YouTube videos, just turn it into a podcast. Because if you're uploading that to podcasting, the beauty of podcasting is that there's ghost metrics. No one can see how many views or listens or downloads you're getting except you. And it gives the illusion of like your show being more important than it might be. And that sounds bad, but it is kind of nice as a creator to not have to be, you know, so exposed all the time. So when I was doing my Ahead of the curve when I first started it like over a year ago, maybe two years now, I loved it because when I first started uploading, I would only get like 200 listens an episode and people would come up to me and they're like, congrats on your podcast blowing up. And I'm like, what? Like in my head I'm like, it's not blowing up, but thank you. Thanks for thinking that. Like in my head I'm just like, okay, cool, thank you. So there really is this world where like, if people can't see the metrics, they feel like it's more important than it is. So even if you're uploading your podcast, if you're already gonna do a long form YouTube channel, you might as well upload it to Spotify as well because no one can see the metrics except you. I also think we could maybe see the comeback of like vlogs and lifestyle content. One, I think it's naturally going to happen on YouTube, but maybe that's also going to happen as well on Spotify now that they're hungry for more video platforms. In terms of editing your podcast, I've used so many different platforms in my career. I've been trained on Adobe Premiere Pro. I've used Final Cut Pro, I have used Imovie when I started out like the free Mac editing. But the number one that I love more than all of them is Cap Cut. It's so easy for beginners. And not the one on your phone, the one on your phone is chaotic. But go on your desktop, on your laptop and get Cap Cut for your desktop. And then I pay like $10 a month for it. It is what I've edited all of my YouTube videos on all of my viral TikToks, like with captioning on them and stuff. I up, I edit them on Cap Cut. Cap Cut is really intuitive for beginner users. And I think Adobe Premiere plus or Pro, whatever it's called, is great if you're like a careered editor, but it is not intuitive. It's so hard to learn. I used it for three years at buzzfeed and I still didn't know Joe from Schmo on that platform. I love CapCut. I recommend Cap Cut to everyone. And if you want to upload multiple episodes a month, your storage on your laptop and phone is going to get really full, really quick. So I personally use hard drives. I use this like orange looking hard drive from Amazon. I'll link that out as well. That helps you not fill up your storage as much. It makes editing quicker. And the number one pain is a crater when you're doing long form content. Not just TikTok is storage space, as I'm sure you guys know. So if you really want to take editing and long form video seriously and launching a show, hard drives are going to be important. So I'll have all of those linked out in my Amazon storefront. And then if you want to like, not just film in your bedroom or your car, on your iPhone, but you're ready for the next step, you want a more fancy podcast studio. This is a secret that no creators tell each other, but I'm like seeing it from the rooftops. If you're in a major city, use this one website, peerspace.com. i'm not getting a kickback from this. Like, I'm not working with them. I'm not affiliated. I just. That's how I found the podcast studios that I film at. It's essentially like Airbnb for creators and so on. Peerspace, you go on, you put in the city that you're in and then you can find podcast studios to film in. And for me, like I found a podcast studio that I would film in. It was only $175 an hour. They had three separate cameras, multiple microphones, and they have a producer in the room with you. They send you all the footage. That's the same studio that now that I film at Spotify, they come and film with me at Spotify because they're just so great to work with. And building that relationship was really nice. So that is so worth it if you're already monetized. Like, for me, if I have a TikTok go viral and it gets like a million or more views on TikTok, I'll probably make a thousand dollars from that. So if I'm filming for an hour in a podcast studio, all I need is one of those 10 clips to go viral. And I'm already 10xing the return the amount that I spent. So if you're already a monetized creator and you're in a major city, look into peer space 100. It's what I use. No one tells you how, like, where to post your podcast if you don't know how to do that yet. This is what my friend Kaylin helped me with years ago, and I'm so grateful to her, is that it's called an RSS feed. I remember when I was listening to the fallout of Call Her Daddy when, like, Alex Cooper and Sophia Franklin had that fallout and they were posting about it in 2020 and, like, videos and stuff. And Alex Cooper kept saying how she did all of the work and she was the one who launched the RSS feed. And I had no idea what any of that meant. I was like, what is an RSS feed? What are they talking about? So an RSS feed, you can get it from different websites and you could do it on, like, a substack, a creators.Spotify.com. there's a website called megaphone.com and it's where you go on and you create an account, you put in your email, whatever, and you say, like, you want to start a new show. It's usually free on all these platforms. And you put in your title of your show, the. The thumbnail of what you want it to look like. And then they'll give you an RSS feed. This is basically a URL. And then they'll give you instructions on how to take that URL and to publish it to Apple and to publish it to YouTube, podcasts, Google podcasts. I think Google Podcast isn't a thing anymore. But to go onto iHeartRadio all of those through this link called an RSS feed. So look at websites like megaphone, substack, creators.Spotify.com. find which one you like better, and you can use that to launch your podcast. And if you use it on one of those platforms and you don't like the platform, you don't like the way the analytics are, whatever you can like, you can always take your RSS feed and transfer it to another platform. So that is how you get your RSS feedback. Again, no one tells you how to do that. It is so confusing. When I started Ahead of the Curve, this podcast, I started on this thing called Anchor and then Anchor got bought by Spotify. So then it was Spotify for podcasters dot com. Now that turned into Creators Spotify dot com. But because I have a partnership with Substack, I'm now on Substack. So again I move my RSS feed over. So that's how you get an RSS feed. I hope that helps you guys. And then if you're also going to be recording interviews, but they're virtual, maybe you want to interview people and it's going to be in like that person's in Virginia or that person's in Canada. It's not going to be like everyone's in the city that you're in. What you can do is also there's this platform called Riverside. It's about $10 a month and it's like a fancier Zoom or Google Hangout. And you go and you do the interview like normal. But it, it downloads and records both of your videos in high quality in the audio and then it takes a few hours after the interview ends, it downloads that in high quality and then it emails you those files. So it's not glitchy like if you were just screen recording a Google Meets or a Zoom. So there's something to do as well. There's so much to learn when starting a podcast and there's never a good time to that you're ever going to feel ready, but you just have to do it. You have to just start it and learn as you go. I promise you, the world right now, AKA me, needs new creative podcasts to listen to. Everything right now is so repetitive. There's a creativity crisis. Everything rehashes the same information or drama or stories that already played out on TikTok. Nothing is interesting anymore in the podcast world. Now is the best time. So please start your podcast and if you're able to record a video version, even if it's just on your iPhone or on Google Hangouts and you upload it to Spotify, that gives you a bigger chance of being pushed in the algorithm, getting more views, getting more momentum and being able to turn that into your full time career. So please, please, please, you guys, I'm begging you, start a new podcast now. If you are like, I want to do a new show, but I don't know what my angle will be, that is what the next portion of this podcast is going to be about. It's going to be about different ways to find your why to find your unique perspective. What I think is the viral formula for viral podcasts and that is going to be in the paid portion of this. So if you're not a paying coconut you can become one. @cocomoco.substack.com you'll get access to all of the on the all of the locked extended episodes if you want to binge the content. And then you can also get access to every single trend report that comes out every single Friday. So that is for paying members of the substack. But if not, if you just listen to this free and you just enjoyed it and you're inspired, thank you so much. I hope this helped if this helped you at all. If you made it this far. If you can go leave a review on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts that helps me as well grow in the charts and find more of you guys that want to listen. So thank you so much and paying coconut, I will see you on.