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In & Around Podcasting
Ranking Higher: Apple Podcast SEO, Spotify Video Data Plus Alix, Alex & CHD Drama
00:50:02
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- [00:01]
A
We have to get into some tea here, Rob. We must, we must, we must. I think we've talked about this in our old podcast from the beginning, because I was kind of riveted by this story of Call Her Daddy, because we talked about it early on, like in the 2020s when there was a lot of hoopla going on. But I want to kind of walk you through what's been going down and in the gossip channels, in the snark Reddit threads, where folks are just talking about things in those places.
- [00:39]
B
Has she been TMZ'd?
- [00:40]
A
Yes, she has TMZ'd. Absolutely. It is crazy. So. But anyway, let's start it like a little bit of the original. So we're talking about Alex Cooper and Call her daddy. In 2018, Al Alex met her original co host, which was Sophia Franklin, through a mutual connection. And then they launched Call Her Daddy right under Barstool Sports, the show kind of saw unprecedented growth, skyrocketing from 12,000 to 2 million downloads in just two months. That's according to the barstool and according to the Internet lore, largely built on a real toxic and raunchy relationship advice. Because when they first started off, it was really. I think that that was really what blasted them out, is that they were saying things in a way that before hadn't been said by women who were that young and looked like they did. So there was a little like, whoa. And then in spring 2020, it's where that huge, famous split happened. And this was amidst a public fallout over contract negotiations with Barstool and Dave Portnoy.
- [01:53]
B
And don't forget, also, Sophia's boyfriend had a little bit to do with that.
- [01:58]
A
Yes. Well, there was Sophia's boyfriend at that time. Yes. Sophia's boyfriend was involved in a little bit of something. I think it was Sophia's boyfriend.
- [02:07]
B
Yeah, yeah, the negotiation. He was, like, telling her, don't, don't sign it, don't sign it.
- [02:11]
A
There was a little bit pushback from that side. You're right. I totally forgot about that. So, anyway, Cooper secretly accepted a deal.
- [02:20]
B
I was paying attention. Just to let you know when you were talking about this, all this past. Sorry, didn't mean to Overwatch.
- [02:25]
A
So Cooper secretly accepted a deal that granted her full control and the intellectual property of the podcast. Okay. So this ended her friendship and obviously, the business partnership with Franklin. And FYI, Sophia will be releasing her book called Daddy Issues in November of this year, and that is rumored to reveal like, a ton up t. Where I. I don't know. If there was some kind of, you know how people sign contracts that take a while, like for years and for X amount of years, you can't talk about whatever. It just feels like something is like done right where she can talk about it or something like that. But she's been. There's been a lot of like little drops on social and kind of like poking without actually explicitly stating stuff. So anyway, that happened in 2020 then. In 2021 is when Alex was. It's the solo era, right? She had a few co hosts that would come in. Not co hosts, more like guests. And it was the Spotify mega deal. And that's when she signed that historic $60 million exclusive deal with Spotify and completely pivoted the premise of the show from like real raunchy stories to more like highly orchestrated celebrity PR interviews. But that actually did not happen right from the beginning when she first started to go solo in this really focused on mental health, which is when I was really into it because I thought she was having conversations with young ladies and about young women and just young people trying to navigate relationships and sexuality and college life and doing it in a really down to earth well. And she was having like therapists come on and doctors come on. She had her mom come on and they talked through a lot of really powerful stuff like how to deal just with real life scenarios. And I thought, wow, this is powerful. And then she pivoted into the whole celebrity thing. That's when she kind of went all in on there and all of that sort of mental health thing kind of really fell by the wayside. So anyway, in August 2023, she launched the Unwell Network. It was a subsidiary of trending Media, which is a media company she founded with her now husband, entertainment executive Matt Kaplan. Mind you, she started seeing Matt Kaplan, I think he was called in the podcast. He was called Mr. Sexy Zoom Ma'. Am Zoom Man. That's how she called him, Mr. Sexy Zoom Man. She met him right around Covid times and that's when they kind of started dating and they continued seeing each other and they are now married. But he was this executive person, right, that had this, this whole thing. And one of the first marquee signings that they did right at the beginning of the unwell was megastar Alex Earle, whose podcast Hot Mess launched under the network in September 2023. And everybody saw that this was like a big, big, big, big deal because Alex Earle is even bigger now. She's huge. She like catapulted into. She was already one of the top creators that everybody knew. She had amazing influence beyond anything that anybody has had at that time. And this was like a huge get. And then in 2024, her empire started to continue to grow. Right. So in April, Cooper and Matt Kaplan were married in like this fancy highly publicized wedding in Mexico where she had like a full on spread. I don't even know what magazine, I think it was People magazine or something like that. In August, she secured a massive $125 million distribution deal with Sirius XM, which was massive. In October, Cooper interviewed VP Kamala Harris, a move that drew backlash from both sides of the aisle and reportedly featured an expensive fake podcast set constructed in dc.
- [06:21]
B
To be fair to Alex, that was Kamala Harris team's fault. That was not her. I mean she wanted to get the interview and her team blundered. And we talked about that on another podcast. Kamala Harris's social team podcast team. They, well, didn't have a podcast team. If they did, they would've done better. Just dropped the ball in every way, shape or form they could. And even in this case, spending a hundred thousand dollars to create a fake or duplicate set wasn't needed. It would've been easier just to fly her out to do the interview.
- [06:50]
A
Yeah, but that's, I think that that's what she didn't wanna do in the first place. Kamala. She didn't wanna like fly out.
- [06:55]
B
Well, that's a problem. That again, that was the problem with her team giving her bad advice. Her team should have said you do need to fly out and you should Rogan and you should have been on these other podcasts.
- [07:04]
A
So then moving forward from here in February 2025, that's when like the first signs of trouble started to come through. And Alex Earl skipped the Unwell Network super bowl party that they were throwing. She's like their biggest star and she didn't even show up for one of the super bowl parties. That Unwell Network has already been. She, she does these types of parties all over the United States. And shortly after that, her podcast, this is Alex Earls, quietly exited the network with really no formal announcement. Like there was like nothing said. She just sort of petered out and they didn't really talk about it at all. And so people were just gossiping about it. That was February 2025 and there was like no talking about any of this stuff. This has all been like super quiet. This is actually when the conversation around that things weren't going so well in the social spaces were being gossiped about like why did this happen? I think that there's, there's all kinds of, you know, stipulate. People are just like coming up with ideas. Then in April 2026, so like over a year afterwards, the drama begins. So on April 9, the silent tension broke when Alex Earle reposted a TikTok comparing Cooper to an ambulance chaser who swoops in to exploit vulnerable women and their trauma for content. Then on April 13, Alex Cooper fired back with her own TikTok, explicitly calling Earl out. So Cooper told her to stop spreading fake drama to distract from her own life, drop the passive aggressive reposts and just state her problem directly. Since there were no NDAs. And she literally said that, she goes, spill it, spill it. There's no NDAs. And then Alex Earle came into her comments and said, okay, on it with like two exclamation points and posted a video of herself looking delighted by Cooper's response. And then right after that, there was that Bloomberg piece from Ashley Carmen. And so amidst all of this social media stuff that was going on, Bloomberg published a damning report exposing severe behind the scenes chaos at Cooper's company, trending media. Right. So the report detailed high employee turnover, staff threatening to walk off the job. Specifically, it cited formal HR complaints that Cooper's husband, Matt Kaplan had yelled at and berated staff members during the Unwell Winter Games. Because that's a whole, like they have a whole reality show on, I think. I don't, I can't remember if it's Hulu. So they've never been producing now more video, proper video content for streaming services. And Bloomberg suggested that Earl feud is actually a business dispute disguised as a personal betrayal stemming from these internal frictions and underperforming podcasts, because that's the tea out there, is that the podcast itself, all of their podcasts in the network are underperforming, period. And then this just happened. Rob On May 12, Alex Earle plays coy. So she was on the Today show to promote her Sports Illustrated swim cover. And Earl was directly. She was asked by the anchor Craig Melvin about the legitimate conscientiousness with Cooper and Earl. My God, I watched it and she was so. It looked like she had been prepped, PR prepped. All she said when they said, like, so what's going on? Like, what's the beef? And she goes, I just want to keep things positive. And she ended up saying that the beef was a little exaggerated, but. However, the industry insiders highly suspect that Earl is keeping her mouth shut on morning television because she is currently filming a reality series for Netflix where she has a massive financial incentive to air out the actual dirty laundry on a global streaming platform.
- [11:12]
B
Can I just remind people of Walsh's first law of podcasting? Ego equals download squared. And when you have two or three big shows in the network and one of them owns a network and the other one doesn't, and their downloads go up like Earl's, her ego's gonna go up. And big egos tend to clash. I mean, when a network is run by big show and then a bigger show comes along, that we've seen it before, issues.
- [11:40]
A
But you know what, though, with Alex Earle, she's not a podcaster. She's a short form video content creator. She's really good at doing that stuff. And so I think that the show itself, hot mess, didn't really align with what Earl wanted to do. She didn't want to cling to being a hot mess. She's not that girl. And so she felt uncomfortable creating a show that wasn't her. And so she kind of thought, you know what? This doesn't make me feel good. I don't shine in this form. I shine in this form. And it's funny because the talk around town is that these two blonde ladies, they're both Alex's. They both kind of look the same. Nobody knows who's Alex and who's Alex. You know, they're just like, who are these blonde ladies fighting? And so I think in between, it just seems like, I don't know. All in all, there's. People are taking sides. They're like, are you an Alex with an I or an Alex with an E? Like, what team are you on?
- [12:38]
B
Just call me Earl.
- [12:39]
A
Yeah. Anyway, I just thought I'd catch you up on all of that stuff. Rob, I know that this is not something you asked for, but that's really only the beginning. Now let's go ahead and get into it. Hey. Welcome to in and Around Podcasting, the podcast industry show that brings you a range of powerful podcasting perspectives. I'm Elsie Escobar from Captivate, joined by the VP of podcaster relations, Rob Walsh. Breaking down what's up in and around podcasting.
- [13:20]
B
Good generic time of the day. Elsie, how are you doing?
- [13:23]
A
I'm good. I'm happy that we have sunshine and long days.
- [13:27]
B
It has been beautiful weather here too, in Nashville, so it's nice. It's. We're in that sweet spot of the year. Are you gonna.
- [13:33]
A
Yes, absolutely. Although I. I am still wearing sweatshirts and. But that's Okay, I don't mind. I don't mind sweatshirts. They're comfy and cozy.
- [13:42]
B
So when this episode comes out, it'll be a couple days before my son graduates from high school. This is a journey. Cause he is profoundly dyslexic. So this is a journey that has been fraught with a lot over the years, including us moving to Nashville. That's why we're here. And then he has selected a school, War Eagle. He is going to be an Auburn Tiger. This kid fought and fought, and for a kid who was profoundly dyslexic, he wound up getting a 36 on the reading exam. Part of the act. So imagine closing your eyes and having the act read to you. That's what happens for him because it gets read to him and then being able with your eyes closed, to get a 36 on the reading. I'm very proud of him. Porter. Congratulations.
- [14:26]
A
Yay. This is so good. Congratulations. What a long journey. And all the luck in the. Not luck. I mean, it's. He's already. He. I'm sure he's learned so much, so many skills to be able to navigate. I mean, it's hard work. It didn't just happen. So congrats.
- [14:43]
B
Yep. And he knows his roommate already got. His roommate just got assigned to him.
- [14:48]
A
Yay. No, what are you going to be doing? You're going to have to be doing double alarms, like, trying to figure out when everybody's feeling.
- [14:55]
B
Yeah, I know.
- [14:58]
A
All right, well, Tom, captivate stuff. We are going to be talking a lot. You know, there's so many video news happening within the space and whatnot. And I might have talked about this in our last episode when we were talking about the video stuff, but our From Audio to Video Roadmap series, it started off this last week when the show comes out. So you're going to be. There's going to be a link in the show notes for these events. But essentially what I found from the community is they were really asking us, I guess, as an audio podcaster, somebody who starts a podcast with their ears, you know, and they're used to audio. How do you transition into video? What are the realities of actually adding a video component to your podcast? What are some real life scenarios of navigating that? And I've got Greg Willits from Rosary army and Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl in Quick and Dirty Tips, who just both came to join me. And we really broke it down. Everything from workflows to the time investments to also the mindset that you have to really work through when you're moving from one thing to the next. Because I have found with a lot of podcasters, that's the hardest thing, especially if you started with audio. It's the mindset. It's trying to make that switch of, okay, now I gotta do it this way or how do I do it in a way that really adds to what I'm already doing. So check those out. Links are gonna be in the show notes. And also we support video now, Rob. We as in Captivate.
- [16:32]
B
Well, you know, I'm still an audio first guy, but Captivate is there with video support. We rolled that out. If you have any questions, you can contact our support team. We've got lots of good articles on that. Or you can email me as always, Rob walch with a clobal.com and that'll get you to me if you have some questions on that. And then we'll have more video news here in the future. So it's just initially it's the HLS for Apple, but we've got others announcements coming in the near future.
- [17:03]
A
So, Rob, I put this into for us to discuss because I think that there's a lot of conversations out that I've seen a lot of people out there discussing things like, you know, podcast SEO and search results and searchability. And I was working with one of my mentees who was very disappointed and I think that this is the key component that made me want to talk about this again. Because she has been working for so long, almost 10 years, her 10 year anniversary is going to be happening I think in June and she was very sad to see that whenever she goes inside of Apple podcasts, her show isn't showing up for some keywords that she's an expert on. And she has had over 400 episodes of her podcast. It is very high quality content, the conversations she's having in there. And it's a very niche conversation. So you would think that it would help. And in kind of looking at all of the stuff that was going on there, I sent you her RSS feed just so that we could kind of look at it to see if there's anything that she's missing. Because for the majority of the things she was doing okay in digging into it, we just wanted to make sure that there was nothing wrong with her feed itself. And technically everything looked pretty good with that. There were no technical issues with that. It really was the way Apple podcast search appears to work. Right. And I had to sort of reiterate to her how it worked. But also I did a little bit of homework with it, and as did you when looking at some of that stuff. So let's just talk about what really works in terms of. And when I say looking at this is like, if you want to be found for a specific topic or keyword phrase, it really needs to be in these areas within there. So these, we've shared these previously. Apple weighs these keyword phrases in your show title, the author tag, episode titles, and episode author fields. And then the search results are also influenced by total subscribers slash follower counts over time, AKA all time of the life of the podcast, back to when
- [19:27]
B
they were called subscribers. Now they're followers.
- [19:29]
A
But yes, there are really two forces happening at the same time. One is the exact keyword relevance, and then the second is the historical audience size slash authority for the show itself, the entire totality of it. And that's why you can sometimes see very small shows rank surprisingly high if they have an exact match keyword phrase repeated aggressively through a tiny feed. And then one example that we looked at was there was One episode from 2020 that ranks very high for the key word that we were looking at. And it was only one episode in the feed. Like that literally. Was it one episode podcast? It was a podcast with one. One episode.
- [20:17]
B
I know, I love those. Yep.
- [20:19]
A
And the reason seems to be that the exact phrase appears repeatedly in the podcast title, the episode title, the summary slash, tagline, and the metadata fields. Like all of it has that same keyword, even though it's like show and one episode and that's it. Now, this is my working hypothesis, Rob. This is not it. Obviously this is literally a hypothesis, is not something that Apple has even thought about or I don't know, maybe it is happening. It's just something to think about. And you mentioned it actually is that the feed size may indirectly dilute keyword relevance, meaning that if a feed has one episode and the target keyword appears everywhere, Apple may interpret that show as extremely relevant to that topic. Yes, this is totally theory, absolutely theory. Whereas with a large established feed like the show that I was looking at, if only like, let's say around 25 or so of 470 plus episodes explicitly contain the keyword in the episode title as well as the show title in weighted fields, the topical relevance may appear weaker algorithmically, and I don't know, it may or may not happen, even though the topic is more, I guess, expert. But it's the fact that those keywords aren't specifically written in those titles. And then there's the other Side of the equation. Very large shows with massive subscriber slash follower histories can still outrank more topically relevant shows because Apple also appears to weight overall audience authority. So that happened with. There was a Dr. Huberman episode that was in these results. And the key word wasn't in the show title. It wasn't in the episode title or obvious in the metadata. It was only mentioned within a chapter topic segment in the description of the episode. Because the show itself is enormous, it still surfaced kind of prominently in the search. So overall this doesn't look like like there's a feed problem or a quality problem from the show itself. It seems like it's more that Apple rewards exact match keyword density, Apple rewards historical subscriber authority, and large catalog feeds sometimes become more generalized in search relevance unless the targeted keywords are reinforced consistently throughout the archive. Which is why there are some shows out there that really rank when they are very specifically targeted towards that one topic and don't vary, which is like our show. Like shows like this, we cover a lot of different topics within the podcast industry, but if we were focusing on, I don't know, AI and podcasting or
- [23:24]
B
something niche AI slop, let's just say,
- [23:27]
A
yeah, if we had an AI slop podcast about podcasting, we would obviously rank higher because we'd be talking about just that. So the work that I suggested and the thing that we were doing is that we are really optimizing cornerstone episodes first for the keyword that she really wants to rank for and maybe expand that into other keywords leading titles with the actual condition topic people search for. As in like really front loading her episode titles with that first strengthening the author field which I had suggested before and then you reiterated. So we shifted that and gradually tightening keyword clarity across her back catalog because it's 470 episodes, so it's a lot. So thoughts on all of that stuff that we looked at?
- [24:15]
B
Yeah, I mean, what my suggestion to her and anyone is you have to look at this for your show. You should one think about what people are searching for and search in Apple podcasts and see how your show shows up. Right. She did that for her show. She looked at the keywords and she wasn't happy. So that's the first step is people need to do this. Don't just assume your show is going to get found in search results. Do it. Go put yourself cosplay as a listener that doesn't know your show and search on some of the keywords you think someone would be looking for. For your show and see how you show up. And then I always say this. Use Google Trends to see of those phrases which ones people really are searching for in the real world. Don't assume, you know, pick four or five phrases and then look in Google Trends and see how they which ones people really are searching for. And then the one that's the most is probably going to be the one you want to make sure your show is optimized for, because people will be searching for that as well. Just, you know, statistically they're going to be searching for that in Apple podcasts. So that's what I recommend. And then what you just went over are the areas that people have to really focus on to make sure their show is optimized and test. And then one last thing, it's okay to change what you're optimized for as what they search for. Changes over time. What people call different things changes over time. Don't think because you did this experiment five years ago or seven years ago that it's relevant today. Go into Google Trends every so often and search off of those top key trends and see which one is currently trending. I just launched a new episode of Space Business411 that was because space Business trended better than Space Economy. If four years from now Space Economy is trending better than Space Business, the podcast title will be changing. I'm just gonna let you know, I'm not married to the title. The title for me is a way for people to discover the show. The 411 in there I'm married to because before that I'm not. And you just have to look at that as well on your show and change with the times.
- [26:21]
A
Yeah, for sure. And you know, I think that the challenge for some people around these titles, not titles, but being found, especially for podcasts that have a lot of topics that they talk about that are much more, you know, lots of different things are harder to optimize for than those that are really just doing that one thing. But that's something that you gotta like work through and test things out for yourself. Now there is an article that just came out also that is called the Music DNA of Podcast Search why Apple and Spotify still rank like record stores. It's a really interesting read. And there's going to be a link in the show notes. It's@blog podseo.com and they kind of like analyzed roughly 11 million top five podcast and episode rankings on a single day. And they ran it like in May and it was interesting. And I'm just going to kind of give you a couple of the quotes that I saw that were curious in there so you guys can look at that. And I wanted to see how that aligns with what we were saying. Right. So according to the article, it says quote, both platforms overrank fresh episodes around eight to nine times and penalize anything older than two years. Zero to seven days old episodes are seven nine times overrepresented on Apple, nine times on Spotify versus their share of the catalog. The boost to case smoothly through around 90 days and becomes neutral around one to two years then turns into an active penalty. Two year plus episodes show up in the top five at only 0.6 times their catalog share. They're being suppressed relative to baseline. This is the front page of the music app Logic transposed into talk content. It works fine for daily news shows. It punishes a five year old interview that might actually be the best answer to your search, which is a curious way to look at it. I hadn't looked at recency bias, you know, when I was looking at the search results of things that were popping up. I didn't see that when I looked at Apple. But they were looking at top 5 versus searching for a keyword. Right? That's a different type of search. So I'm curious about that. Then they really talked about keyword stuffing and they said quote a short, well chosen tagline after your show name is generally useful and we recommend experimenting with one in both the title and the author field. Like Lex Friedman podcast conversations on AI, science and the human condition. Doing real work for both a human reader and a search engine. The cases above are different in a degree. And they were saying the cases above is that they had like a bunch of other like keyword stuffed examples. And here's one title is untangle your thoughts, trusting God, hear from God, mental health tips, negative thoughts, dot dot dot, a lot more. And that stops describing the show and becomes a keyword list that has two costs. First, ranking and converting are different problems. And a title that wins the search has to survive the half second a real listener spends deciding whether to tap. Second, platforms can change the rules. Apple and Spotify both have precedent for deranking or truncating metadata that gets too obviously gamed. The line we draw is straightforward. Add a tagline, experiment with what's in it, but keep it something a human editor would let through. So that's what we've been saying this whole entire time.
- [30:10]
B
Right? And Captivate's tools will actually tell you looks like there's keyword stuffing don't do that. So Captivate has nice tools to stop people from doing that. So kudos Kieran, for putting that in there.
- [30:22]
A
Yeah, and it's like if it helps, like with the Lex Friedman example there. That's helpful to somebody who's looking for the show versus this other one that had all of it's just a bunch of keyword stuffing. And their summary on the article said this quote what this means for podcasters. Your show name and author field are still your single biggest SEO lover on both platforms, but they're a finite resource. You can't stuff infinity. And the number one rank lifts only flows from one keyword at a time. Pick the one you actually want to win on Apple. Optimize the show on Spotify. Optimize each episode. Apple's episode ranker borrows show signal heavily. Spotify's mostly ignores it. If you're on Spotify, your episode title and description carry weight. Your show metadata won't carry for you. Publish often or fall off. A nine day old episode is already past its peak boost. A two year old episode is being actively penalized versus the catalog distribution. Both engines treat fresh as a category and there's no equivalent of an evergreen ranking signal in this data. Now again, they really only looked at the top five in however it is that they were looking at top five in lists.
- [31:50]
B
We do know from search results in Apple that age has no relevancy. We saw that with the one show that was that one episode in 2020. Right, 2020. And I see search results for podcast episodes that go back to 2010 or earlier. So Apple doesn't have that overall relevancy from the search results. And that's not technical issue. That's my voice going yeah.
- [32:17]
A
And I think that that was something that I was looking at too because they really just analyzed the top five. The top five in a bunch of like millions of whatever happened in the top five updated versus what we were talking about, that there are some people who actually are going to look and listen to a top five podcast, but there's other folks that are going to go in there and going I want to find out about the newest Pokemon release deck. And that's what they want to know. Like they want the coverage of the new release. Moving on to some news. Alitu and the podcast host have a new home, y'. All. My goodness, Colin, congrats to you, sir.
- [32:55]
B
Yes. And he wrote, quote, a couple of months ago, Allitu and the podcast hosts were acquired by Rocketable, a software company backed by Y Combinator. So again, congrats Colin on the sale. Look forward seeing you and talking with you about this.
- [33:09]
A
Yeah and we have a link in the show notes there folks, if you want to check it out. And Alitu was recording and then they ended up getting into podcast hosting towards that latter part. So very curious to see how and what is used from the brand.
- [33:29]
B
I think there was some comments in one of the articles I read on it that looked like they might be getting into some AI content.
- [33:35]
A
Maybe it's the recording part, I don't know. But congrats, Colin is a super, super great dude. And then we have some news.
- [33:44]
B
Well this was breaking when we were recording. We were recording on Wednesday the 13th so it won't be so breaking when you hear it but at the time. According to POD News and an exclusive quote, Amazon Music begins rolling out video podcasts from today. Video podcasts will initially be available for customers in the US on iOS and Android across all subscription tiers. Initially this will just be for video podcasts hosted on Amazon's own Art 19 platform. But later in the summer they will support HLS via the alternate enclosure tag in the RSS feed. No need for a special API integration on this one. More news on this when we are allowed to talk about. And I'll just leave it at that.
- [34:28]
A
Yeah, that would be great. So they're all jumping in there. I think I am a little sad about is the like how are they gonna do all of these platforms are getting also into vertical video. Like that's a big thing that they're getting into and I don't know how I feel about that, you know, especially for. Yeah, I don't know. Podcasts tend to be longer than short form video but alas. Yeah, this seems to be both. But there's a lot of hoopla around short form video all the way around.
- [35:00]
B
There will be some people that will take their Tiktoks and their reels and bring them over and make them available.
- [35:07]
A
Yeah, that's true because you know Spotify has been doing that also where you can have those clips right. Of your shows even within the platform. I just don't know how it works because I don't. I've never really messed around with the Spotify video of it all there. But staying with the Spotify and I guess conversation around video. You dropped here something else right.
- [35:30]
B
So there was article Spotify streams drive 1.5 times more consumption time than YouTube for podcasts. New pod stock data shows and this was a study done by Podstock that found for the same video episodes on Spotify and YouTube. So comparing, you know, episode 2389 from Joe Rogan on YouTube versus 2389 from Joe Rogan on Spotify that Spotify had 1.5 times more consumption or 1.5 times more time spent consuming the same episode by listeners viewers and almost all episodes saw more consumption on Spotify than YouTube. Like 95% of the episodes saw more consumption on Spotify than YouTube, but overall when you average it out it was 1.5 times more. PodStock analyzed thousands of episodes which were released in video on both Spotify and YouTube for an apples to apples comparison. The results were strikingly consistent. In 95% of episodes, Spotify audiences spent more time with content than viewers on YouTube for the same episode. This demonstrates that on average a Spotify stream is a stronger signal of audience engagement than a YouTube view and likely more valuable to advertisers. And then of course the part that I was most interested in the methodology they used and they said for the methodology quote Podsock's findings are based on an anonymized analysis of thousands of full length video podcast episodes published on both Spotify and YouTube within the same release window. The analysis compares Spotify minutes per stream against YouTube minutes per view over the first 30 days after release, limited to episodes that had completed a full 30 day measurement window on both platforms. Unquote. So their reasoning and I read a couple other articles on this where there was some other quotes from him. Their reasoning is him being the CEO of Potsoc. Their reasoning on this was that YouTube has more of a focus on discovery and new viewers will listen less than true followers subscribers and that on Spotify most users know what podcasts they want to listen to. But I think there might be another key factor at play and that is on Spotify, if you close the screen on a video podcast it keeps playing on YouTube. It does not per the default settings on both devices. Spotify will keep playing in the background. YouTube will not. I did reach out to Michael Parzecki, the CEO of Podstock, via email LinkedIn message and also commented in his LinkedIn post. But as of the time of this recording I have not heard anything back on the question and now I want to take this into account. To be fair, that was about two hours before we started recording, which is about three hours ago when I reached out and nope, still didn't reply. So just be fair, we didn't give them enough time because you always hear oh we reached out. But as of time of Recording they hadn't replied. Well, I'm telling you, that was three hours I gave them, so that wasn't a lot. When we do hear back, we will mention it on a future recording of what his reply was, whether or not they took that into account. But personally, I know a bunch of people that consume video podcasts on Spotify, but only listen and do not actually watch. And reality is listeners listen longer to long form content than do viewers viewing long form content. My guess is the biggest factor in the consumption length has more to do with Spotify users closing their screens and listening to the video than just watching it. But we'll find out if that was taken into effect, if they even can take that into effect and mention that on a future episode.
- [39:18]
A
And that to me, kind of speaks to the UI of the, you know, the environment, the behavior of people overall is, you know, whenever you want to really focus on something or you want to try something new or get work done, if you will, a lot of the time moving locations is a good way to do it. If you are in a place that usually you don't get work done or you get bored too much, or you need stimulation and you would go to a cafe to work for a little bit or maybe switch a place in your house to kind of really get focused and do what you need to do. Especially if you're writing like you go into like a log cabin or something, quietly doing that. And it feels like there's an element to that for this where if you're listening to a podcast or you're consuming a show, Spotify is that sort of that focused place that you can do it and it gives you the functionality that you're talking about, Rob, which is being able to tap away from the screen and it still does the job easily. It's kind of built for that. Whereas with YouTube, I actually haven't done this with YouTube.com like YouTube main because I use another app to do this for YouTube main that allows me to consume without ads. And it makes it small too. It makes the little screen super small. So I'm able to do that. And I think Spotify just optimizes for continuous consumption. Even when you swipe out to your point. I think it has to do with both.
- [40:56]
B
Now I got some good news. Michael did actually reply.
- [40:58]
A
How about that?
- [40:59]
B
So here's his reply to my question. So my question to him was this. I'm going to give the exact question I gave him. Hi, Michael, for your study on consumption on YouTube versus Spotify, did you take into account that video podcasts keep playing on Spotify when the screen is closed, but video podcasts on YouTube do not. And he said it's definitely a platform behavior wrinkle, but I don't think it's relevant for the key takeaways which are focused on total time spent with the content, whether in audio or video. Lots of YouTube consumption on mobile where YouTube tab is minimized on screen, unquote. So I'm going to say this based on that answer. He did not factor that in. And I think the biggest reason why there's more consumption on Spotify versus YouTube is that people are closing the screen and they're listening. So I think that people listening is the biggest factor here based on that reply because it wasn't factored out of it. He was thinking it didn't make a big deal. I think it makes a really big deal. I think that to me, yeah, maybe there's something to do with some new people discovering it, but overall I think it has to do more with the fact that you can close your screen on Spotify and keep listening. Or on YouTube, if you close the screen, you're watching Joe Rogan or Theo Vaughn or whatever, you close the screen, it stops playing. And I think that has a lot to do with it. Which then leads us into our next article. So it was good to get the confirmation on that so we don't have to wait till the next episode. And now speaking of the playback of audio is possibly the key reason and in my opinion is the key reason for the higher consumption. I'm not the only one that's thinking this. If you look at YouTube's moves lately, you will see they are starting to embrace an audio first consumption option. Alan Aronas recently posted. Very Good Medium article. We'll have a link to this of course in the show notes and the article's titled Ad tech has mispriced YouTube and audio is why. And he mentioned YouTube's recently announced partnership with SiriusXM to sell audio first inventory on YouTube and that more than 212 million users in the US consume YouTube in audio or audio first mode every month. That includes podcasts, long form conversations, educational content, background listening while working, multitasking sessions, and users minimizing video entirely. Again, that's not the default setting and that's 212 million users in the US consume that. There's more than that that consume video. But anyway, Alan also mentioned that YouTube is now testing audio first playback experiences, background listening enhancements and podcast oriented consumption features. So YouTube is looking at that data podstock head. And they're coming to the same conclusion I came to. It's how people are consuming and that audio consumption tends to cause people to listen longer. Right? You're driving in the car, it's a longer commute. You're walking the dog, you're working out, you're doing yard work. It's a longer spell than people are used to watching video on a small device. Anyway. Wouldn't it not be so ironic that while the podcast industry is tripping over itself to embrace video, a space YouTube clearly won, that YouTube is outflanking us and going after audio right under all our noses. Remember, folks, there is more time in the day to consume audio than any other medium. And it looks like YouTube is starting to go after that extra time in our day.
- [44:30]
A
My goodness, I didn't. I had totally missed that. That's actually cool. I think that part of the behavior that we're moving into, I don't think it's gonna be so binary, as in, like, audio or video. It's both. It's the flow, right? It's the flow of I'm washing dishes and I want to watch the podcast, and then I have other things that I'm doing. I'm going outside to do gardening or whatever, or walk around or go do. Go to my run. And I just take that same episode of that show and move to the next thing that I'm doing, because I'm the one that's moving. The content moves along with me in the way that best serves the environment that I'm living in at that moment. And whoever can, I think, the end user, right? So like either YouTube or Spotify or even other podcast apps, whatever consumption apps can deal with that transition. The best are the ones that are going to end up kind of winning it because they're going to be able to just be in that one place, and we just kind of like, move from one place to the next. All right. And now we are in our part of the show, the flattering ram. The flattering ram. Okay. My flattering ram this time goes to Tropical podcasting. And that is a newsletter, basically, with a corresponding podcast where it is a podcast about podcasting in Spanish from Julio Axel Ponce and Maira Ortiz. And they do industry analysis and they share insights and all of that stuff. So if you are interested in the conversation around podcasting, they are from Puerto Rico, and obviously they center Puerto Rico in a lot of the conversations. But not just that, but it's more about the Spanish speaking market and it's for Spanish speakers. They do sort of like a mixed show where it's like audio and video and newsletter. So there's all kinds of really lovely things that you can check out. They're gonna be a link in the show notes and I was a guest on their show just recently. I think in our latest episode I'll put a link in the show notes for anybody who wants to consume in Spanish. You're welcome to do it. It's a whole Spanish show. But congrats on. They're doing a really great job. It's amazing, it's lighthearted, it is insightful, it is accessible and it's doing really good job, really good work for the industry in the Spanish side of things, for all the Hispanic speaking countries and whatnot.
- [47:19]
B
So my flattering ramp is going to go to Roger Wilmot. Some people who know me know I've mentioned Roger a few times in the past. Most people don't know who Roger is, but a lot of podcasters that are outside the podcasting bubble that are just trying to get started know who Roger is. Roger retired about 20 years ago and his hobby is not putting together puzzles or watching birds. His hobby is in the Apple Podcast Support forums answering questions about how to podcast. He's not selling any service, he's not doing a webinar. There's no mastermind, there's nothing, there's no financial. He's just doing this to help people. And to put this in perspective, Roger has contributed on 47,151 different threads in Apple Podcast support that he's participated in. And some of those are multiple times in those threads. So a lot of posts, he is number one in the Apple Podcast support forums, put things in perspective. I am number two all time in the Apple support forums and I have participated in 1,153. So Roger's 47,151 to my 1,153. And number three is one third of where I'm at. So I just want to put Roger's work into perspective and call Roger out because Roger hadn't posted in 4 weeks and I was getting concerned. So I reached out to Roger and I sent an email and to say, hey, is everything okay? Are you doing okay? And he's like, yeah, no. I had this project I'm working on. He's converting some old time recordings from the early 1900s and even one from 1897 into digital and then he's uploading to a YouTube channel he has. So he gotten on that and he goes. And a lot of the questions that had come up were just more about how to use Apple podcasts rather than how to podcast. But Roger's fine. I was concerned, and that made me think about Roger for my flattering ramp. So I was happy to hear back from Roger last night that, you know, after two weeks of him not posting, I was getting concerned after three, and then it got to about four, and I was like, okay, I gotta send him an email and see if he's all right.
- [49:26]
A
Well, folks, we will be chatting with you very soon here, and thanks so much for hanging with us. And as always, you can email the show at CommunityAPTivate FM if you have any audio feedback, anything to say, anything to talk back at us, anything for any news or information or an insight that you want us to cover, send it over. We are happy to add it to the show. And on that note, thank you so much, everybody. Bye.
- [49:55]
B
Ciao.