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School of Podcasting: Expert Tips for Launching and Growing Your Podcast
Inside Flight Cast: The Video-First Hosting Platform Behind Diary of a CEO
00:38:19
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- [00:00]
Dave Jackson
If you've been thinking about YouTube and video, boy, do I have a show for you. Today we're interviewing the co creator of Flightcast, Mr. Rocks Codes, who along with Steven Bartlett from diary of a CEO have created FlightCast. And we're going to talk about what makes FlightCast FlightCast because it's doing some things that nobody else is doing. We talk a lot about stats today and I found a free tool that enables you to see all of your stats in one place. And yep, Dave has yet another reason to strongly disagree with Spotify. Hit it ladies.
- [00:39]
Dave Jackson (show intro/outro voice)
The school of podcasting with Dave Jackson.
- [00:45]
Dave Jackson
Podcasting since 2005. I'm your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson. Thanking you so much for tuning in. If you're new to the show, this is where I help you plan, launch and grow your podcast. And today we're giving you insights into a somewhat new media host that came out of the gate video first. It's called flightcast and we are interviewing one of the co founders, Rocks Codes. And the other co founder is Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. In fact, that's kind of how this whole thing came into play because if you're new to diary of a CEO, they like the details and FlightCast has it. This show is brought to you by the schoolofpodcasting.com and podpage.com if you're looking to have a great looking website. I'll be talking about that later, but right now we are going to talk to Rocks Codes who if you go to his website I'll have a link to that in the show notes. He has created and sold different companies, many of them around YouTube, thumbnails and social media. And he's an amazing guy. And when I first heard about flightcast I was like I would love to see a demo of this. So I really thank him so much for coming on the show. The one, the only Rocks Codes.
- [02:11]
Rocks Codes
Happy to join the one and only Dave Jackson.
- [02:13]
Dave Jackson
And so I wanted to get into kind of just like if you're new to media hosting, what is flightcast?
- [02:19]
Rocks Codes
Flightcast is a video first podcast hosting platform. The idea was very simple.1 upload one dashboard. So it should be as trivial as I upload one episode to Flightcast and it goes everywhere. So that's video to YouTube, video to Spotify, video to Apple, video to RSS now and audio everywhere else and then get all my analytics back into one dashboard.
- [02:40]
Dave Jackson
Which is amazing and it sounds kind of complicated, but it turns out their goal is actually fairly easy.
- [02:47]
Rocks Codes
Flycast is A video first podcast hosting platform. The idea was very simple. One upload, one dashboard. So it should be as trivial as I upload one episode to Flightcast and it goes everywhere. So that's video to YouTube, video to Spotify, video to Apple, video to RSS now, and audio everywhere else. And then get all my analytics back into one dashboard. So you just drop your video in, drop in a thumbnail, drop in a cover art, drop in a date for whenever you want to schedule it, and then title, description, chapters, metadata, so all the extra season numbers and everything, and then you just hit save schedule and it goes live to YouTube, Spotify, wherever you want it to, wherever you don't want it to. And if this seems very simple, it's because you've actually hidden every ounce of customization behind these little customize buttons. So if you want to do a custom audio edit that is a different mastered version of the audio, you can do that. Just click custom audio and then drop in an MP3 file. If you want the episode to go out at a different time on each platform. A lot of people have it go live at 8am on YouTube, but 6am on Spotify and audio, because they want people in their car to be able to listen to it on their commute that morning, but not necessarily on YouTube. And same for titles. You can do a title for the video versus a title for the audio rss. You can even do different descriptions if you want to for each different platform. For, like the audio versus the video, it'll generate descriptions for you based on your previous descriptions. It can generate titles for you based on your gener, your previous titles, so it'll always sound like you. It can generate chapters for you based on your previous chapters. It'll put the chapters into your description. We got this little placeholder guy, so you can just move this around and that'll make sure that the chapters get put in the correct format for each platform. So, like for YouTube, they want no parentheses. For Spotify, you have to have parentheses around them. That all just gets magicked away. It just gets handled. And then you can customize each platform on the right here by just saying, oh, on Spotify, like, I actually only want it to be audio as opposed to video or on YouTube, I want to go to various different playlists. But that is the. The most fundamental feature of FlightCast is get it everywhere on a screen that looks very simple but has hidden beneath it all the ability to customize everything however you would want and, and do all the different versions of it. You can even Upload different versions of the file to YouTube and Spotify. So if you want to say the word subscribe in one edit and the word follow in another edit, you can drop different versions of the video in. But if you don't want to do any of that, you can just drop episode thumbnail cover art. Pick a day, generate, generate, generate, hit publish and it'll just go.
- [05:21]
Dave Jackson
Which I thought was pretty cool. It can be as simple or with their customize button you can go in and I'm here to tell you, change anything you want. But the thing that kind of blew everyone away was the fact that you had stats from all these platforms in one location.
- [05:38]
Rocks Codes
We've got streams from Spotify, views from YouTube, listens from RSS, aka downloads, and I add those all up into plays because I didn't know what else to call it. And then we've got all of those stats day by day. We've got new versus returning followers gained total uniques across every platform, whether or not it's your new stuff or your old stuff getting you views each different episode that popped off. We've got a giant spreadsheet because everybody kept making spreadsheets. So I made you a spreadsheet that you can just export. We got breakdown by platform, we got breakdown by country, breakdown by state, city and percentages or direct amounts, kind of whatever you want there. Breakdown of every website all the way down to some more advanced stuff like audience overlaps. This will show you like how many people that listen to episode A also listened to episode B. So you can start to see if you, your returning audience is truly like the same people. Or if you talk about business and then you talk about health, are the same guys showing up or do you have sub audiences within your main audience? And if that kind of stuff sounds interesting to you, well, you can dig in even farther into that with our AI chat that we have where you can just say, I don't know, rank all my episodes on YouTube in the past six months based on views in the first 24 hours. And it's basically just an open box for you to ask any questions. Very good. If you have like non technical people on your team or you're on a call with a sponsor and they ask you for some really obscure number like hey, what's your hundred day episode average? Or something else that nobody in their right mind would ever know offhand. And no dashboard's going to make easy enough, so we put that in there for you.
- [07:10]
Dave Jackson
So there's all sorts of stats that I was just like, wait, what? But if you're a person that's been running ads, it covers a lot of the things that your media host probably does now.
- [07:21]
Rocks Codes
It handles, you know, geo targeting and programmatic and your dynamic and different kinds of ad slots and everything that you would ever want out of, out of an ad system.
- [07:32]
Dave Jackson
And an easy way to look at
- [07:33]
Rocks Codes
that is it's good enough for the Diary of a CEO. That's. That's usually what I say.
- [07:37]
Dave Jackson
There you go. So retention data, anything you're getting now, you definitely get, plus all these extra things. And one of the things I thought was interesting is it basically creates a bunch of clips and tests them before you then make them public. Is that something like every creator would then set up their own test account to blast these two, or is that something that you guys are doing?
- [08:04]
Rocks Codes
So they create the test account. When you set up, it takes all of 30 seconds to make a blank YouTube channel. So. So we have you make it. We give you a little bit of guidance on how to make it. There's like a 10 second onboarding for that. Once it's made, we generally recommend you start with one clip a day to kind of like warm up the channel. And then eventually, like after a week or two, you can bump it to two. After a week or two, you bump it to three. After a week or two, you bump it to four. I wouldn't go past four. Four's a lot. Then it's just this sort of always on experimentation in the background.
- [08:31]
Dave Jackson
And I always say your podcast is a recipe, not a statue. And I love the fact that they're always experimenting to learn. And so after looking at all those stats, I asked Rox if he had a favorite stat.
- [08:45]
Rocks Codes
Yeah. Which of my kids is my favorite? Oh, that's such a good question. Yeah. Such a reasonable question. The real answer is it's always views, no matter what, the truest. Which, like, sounds like a cop out because it is by many considered to be like the lagging indicator. Right? It's like, oh, yeah, well, I got the views because of the other stats. Surely and kind of yes, but kind of no. At the end of the day, the episode that got the most views is the episode that's most successful. And views is the biggest metric of success. And I guess views as opposed to downloads. I'm looking at YouTube views.
- [09:14]
Dave Jackson
And then we got into a best one of 10 discussion. And in case you've never heard that expression, here's what it is.
- [09:23]
Rocks Codes
So YouTube basically will rank your relative performance of an episode. So so it's like, hey, your episode's been out for two days. Usually after two days you get like a thousand views. Right now you're at 1200 views. So this is like your third best episode recently within a two day period. Like in your first two days. This is a pretty good episode. It's not the best performance you've had in two days, but it's like the third best performance you've had in two days relative to your last 10 uploads or so. Anything outside of your last 10 is considered kind of. And so we take that and we do it per platform. So usually this is actually very interesting because this ended up being backwards, but this outperformed on Spotify for these guys. This episode performed pretty good on YouTube. It was a seven out of 20. We do it out of 20. I like a little bit of a longer reference point and then a 5 out of 20 on Apple. So it's been very interesting how differently things will perform on different platforms. But usually you will see YouTube is like a 5 or a 3, but Apple and Spotify will still be like a 10 because they don't really go viral. Right. So at the end of the day I'm focusing on all the YouTube stats. Click through rate is great to look at, but it is a subset of many different things. Average view iteration is a great thing to look at because it's telling you if people are actually watching through. But really, like I would analyze this retention graph, I would spend most of my time here because this is not one single number. This is like, hey, what happened here? Did I have an ad here? Why is there this giant drop off? Like why did I lose 5% of people now? They skipped, clearly. So there's probably some ad there. But then okay, whatever this chapter title was, I should write that down because people skipped to this chapter, right? Because why is this at 23 but right before it's at 18? That means people skipped over here. So that's usually the thing that I'm analyzing the most to try and improve.
- [11:13]
Dave Jackson
And I like that point because I'm always been a big fan of chapters but have never thought of them as a way to maybe get people to click again. Not just your title, but the title of your chapters could get people to click.
- [11:26]
Rocks Codes
I also really like 30 second retention. I consider that like intro success. So at 30 seconds how many people were still there? And if you're going up in that percentage over time in general, like if your episodes slowly get a higher 30 second retention, the whole of your YouTube journey will improve massively if you get really good at making intros. So I've kind of like benchmarked that for myself as like a intro quality metric that I measure.
- [11:52]
Dave Jackson
And so you have all these amazing stats and they don't just want to be a media host. Once you have all this data, flightcast can become a consultant.
- [12:03]
Rocks Codes
I started chatting with a lot of our like more strategic or very like deep creator customers on what those questions are that they're asking often and then pre baking those into the analytics page as just graphs or like analyze this episode type UI or whatever else we can think of to try and make that a better flow. Because we have all the data, we have everything from everywhere, forever. So now it's just a question of what do we do with it, how do we want to analyze it, what is the best opportunity for growth. So to some extent FlightCast is kind of meant to be a consultant, like a YouTube consultant in my head or just like a growth consultant in general. So this is the start of that. The clips is the start of that a little bit. But ideally there's so much data you shouldn't have to know how to analyze it. It should just kind of do it for you.
- [12:46]
Dave Jackson
And of course as we recorded this, more and more places were adding video. And if you're wondering, well, which one should you prioritize, end of the day
- [12:56]
Rocks Codes
I focus on YouTube because YouTube is the top of the funnel and it is the middle of the funnel. Spotify and Apple come a little bit later. But if you can get people to Spotify and Apple, that becomes a very, very valuable audience member because they will keep coming back.
- [13:08]
Dave Jackson
And you've probably heard me say, hey, if you're doing video, it's going to get expensive. So how much is this at FlightCast
- [13:16]
Rocks Codes
starts at 50 bucks a month for everything except for clips. And then if you want clips, it goes up to 100 or 250amonth, depending on how many clips you want and how many downloads you want. Other than clips and downloads, pretty much everything's in every plan. So the basic plan gets you up to 50,000 downloads a month. You get full 4K video, you get Apple HLS video, you get everything. There's no bandwidth charges, there's nothing really complicated. You'll be able to tell in your dashboard real quick where you said it's like three terabytes of storage, which is insane, nobody's ever used it. It's a great limit. So feel free to not compress your files. It's fine. We'll do it. And just give us your, your original versions.
- [13:55]
Dave Jackson
Which brings up the subject of format. Should we do in 4K? Are we allowed at 1080, 720?
- [14:02]
Rocks Codes
My recommendation is after 1080p, it's not necessary, but it's nice to have. But at least hit 1087. 20 to 1080 is a massive jump. 1080 to 4k is nice. It's not needed. You know, I think Mr. B still doesn't do 4k. Or at least for a long time did not. Because he was like, well, I don't think most people watch it that way. And I think it's almost like uncanny sometimes. But a lot of people do do 4K, Flycast will ship it out. So I just did it as a way to kind of respect the customer where I was like, if you're gonna put all the effort to do 4K, I'm gonna make sure that that 4K gets to where it's supposed to go. You know, I'm not gonna like downgrade that. So even for Apple video, we do 4K, I believe we're the only ones doing that. But most phones aren't gonna load it right. Most people are not on Internet connection fast enough. But if you're sitting there at your house with really fast Internet and you wanna see it and eventually I'm sure they'll put it on TVs and stuff. And for that day I wanted to just be ready. So yeah, just do at least 1080p and you're, you're okay. But if you can pull 4K, might as well like iPhones can do 4K, you know, so sometimes, sometimes it's nice to watch people laugh in HD.
- [15:02]
Dave Jackson
So we've heard a lot about FlightCast. So I wanted to know like what is the target audience of flightcast?
- [15:09]
Rocks Codes
So yeah, it's for a very particular kind of like serious video Podcaster is generally how I word it, or at least like intermediate plus. But it's powerful. It's powerful. It is a jackhammer, but you don't always need a jackhammer.
- [15:19]
Dave Jackson
I also asked him about his thoughts when it comes to talking head videos. And okay, maybe you're not an advanced YouTuber, so what resources would you use to become one? And we're going to hear those along with some new features that are coming right after this.
- [15:36]
Dave Jackson (show intro/outro voice)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [15:38]
Dave Jackson
Did you know that award winning actor slash director Ron Howard never releases a movie? Even though always won close to 20 different awards, he never releases a movie without sitting in an audience and watching it. With them. Why? Because he knows when they're supposed to laugh and when they're supposed to cry. Well, we've taken that idea at the school of Podcasting that when you sign up, you can now request to have your podcast reviewed. Now, how do we do it? Just like Ron Howard. You get together, you give me an episode. We, we listen together and you get to watch us listen to your show because you know when we're supposed to laugh or when we're supposed to cry. And you can see the reactions. And if you need to make changes later, this is just one of the great features at the school of Podcasting. You can sign up today. Go to schoolofpodcasting.com start use the coupon code listener and I can't wait to see you on on the inside. When you look at the pieces of a podcast, your media host is the engine, but your website is the home. It's where your audience learns who you are, explores your episodes, and design decides to follow your show. At PodPage, we build podcast websites that are fast, reliable, and designed to convert visitors into listeners. Every episode is automatically published, SEO optimized and structured for growth so you can focus on creating your podcast, not managing your website. If your media host powers your podcast, PodPage gives it a place to live and a place to grow.
- [17:30]
Rocks Codes
Grow.
- [17:31]
Dave Jackson
Give your podcast the home it deserves. Start building your podcast website today by going to podpage.com preview and enjoy a 14 day free trial. Podpage.com preview
- [17:51]
Dave Jackson (show intro/outro voice)
the School of Podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [17:55]
Dave Jackson
As I know, you might be a person that's not doing any video and you're thinking about going from audio to video. So if that's the case, what do we need to know in this? Answer almost put me out of my chair.
- [18:10]
Rocks Codes
And I think this is a thing that the industry at large kind of doesn't frame well, which has always been kind of interesting to me coming from, like, the YouTube side. Video isn't a file format, it is an algorithm. YouTube has an algorithm. Discovery and publishing were never two different things on YouTube. Discovery and publishing are never two different things on TikTok, on Instagram, Reels on YouTube shorts. They're all the same. And what's been crazy to me is realizing how much marketing exists in podcasting and how much of, like, how to grow your show. It's like there's no how to grow your YouTube channel that has any guidance other than making better videos people want to watch. Get good at thumbnails. Get good at titles. That's foundational to the content, right. The answer to how to grow on YouTube is get good. You know, like, that's it. That's the whole of the advice. And I think the main thing when you go from audio to video is you learn how to live in an algorithm world. And that's a completely different world to what you're used to. But. But you'll also find infinite opportunity on the other side of it. In equal terms, you will find as much frustration and struggle because you can't just publish. You have to get good at it. If you get good at thumbnails, you have to get good at titles. You have to be a student of the game, because there is a game to learn now, whereas with audio, there almost isn't that much of a game. Everybody's kind of drawing at smaller straws of like, ah, do these ads. There's some SEO optimization you can kind of do and this and that. And everything is, you know, 10%, 20% gains or advertising within other podcast apps. And it's a lot of paid media and everything. Every YouTube advice is make a better thumbnail, make a better title, have a better video idea, make a better intro. You have about four things you control. Maybe five. Edit the thing better, but that's the fifth, right? And if each of those take up equal amount of time, you're only spending 20% of your time on the edit and 80% of your time on everything else.
- [20:04]
Dave Jackson
I want to jump in here just to make sure we caught that point. He said it over and over and over throughout this interview. Get good at your first 30 seconds, your title and your thumbnail.
- [20:15]
Rocks Codes
That will be jarring, that will suck. You will realize how much time it actually takes to go into being good at YouTube. It's a lot of time. It is hundreds, it is thousands of hours. But what do you want? What's, you know, to define success, we must define the goal is the goal, growth is the goal, more people is the goal, the right people. But generally, I find that most people putting out content into this world would really enjoy if people heard it and if people saw it. So in terms of that video is, in my opinion, without a question, the absolute best place to be and the absolute most infinite opportunity. Because it's hard to be a podcaster, but it's possible to be a YouTuber.
- [21:00]
Dave Jackson
We've spent our hundreds and thousands of hours working on our thumbnails, working on our titles, but in the end, what if we're just talking heads?
- [21:10]
Rocks Codes
Talking heads are not bad content. Joe Rogan's Talking Heads you know, Diary of CEO is talking heads, right? The visual of it all doesn't have to be four K8 cameras, you know, 1080p and two cameras and three cameras. Or, you know, a couple of iPhones is nearly as good. Or one iPhone and it's fine. You know, if you're interviewing somebody interesting and you have some good takes and they can make some good clips, think about the content. Like, the production quality is still 80% of the importance is just the audio of it all. The video doesn't have to be gorgeously made. That doesn't really matter. The thumbnail does, the title does. The first 30 seconds has to be edited well, but it doesn't have to be so crazy interesting.
- [21:55]
Dave Jackson
So again, in case you missed it, the audio is the most important thing in video. A lot of people skip that.
- [22:05]
Rocks Codes
But would I go out of my way to make a trailer? If you have the time, yeah. Would I go out of my way to, like, pick good moments for clips? Yeah, that's why I built a whole fricking feature about it, you know? But no, you don't have to be putting in B roll and doing all these other things. Most of the successful podcasts in the world don't.
- [22:19]
Dave Jackson
But what if we're new to this whole thing? I gotta learn thumbnails. I gotta learn all this other stuff. Do you have any resources to figure out how to do this?
- [22:29]
Rocks Codes
Yes, I will give three recommendations. The number one is a YouTuber called Aprilyn Alter. She just sort her channel by popular and watch, like, the top 10. Every single video she makes is like months of research distilled down into like 30 minutes of a framework. She's also kind of built for intermediate plus. But you will realize how much you don't know very quickly. And then if you need additional info, you'll find it out. But if you're, like, a bit familiar with how thumbnails and titles and stuff work, she'll quickly go from like, here's the foundation of it to here's how to do this at the next level. Like, here's how to grow. Here's the. You know, it's not just colors, it's curiosity, right? And then she has another video that's like, give me eight minutes, I'll make your titles 80% better or something. So I'd watch her thumbnail video, her intro video, her title video, and her ideation video. At a minimum. I think ideation as a concept is something everybody could get a lot better at. I'd recommend looking at Patty Galloway Patty Galloway is. He is advanced, but his content is mostly breaking down. How YouTubers got successful and what it is about their content. And I think generally think like a YouTuber is a really good mindset for most podcasters, because think like a podcaster doesn't get you as far in terms of growth, because there isn't much growth to be had. Thinking like a podcaster. That's mostly more about the quality of the episode and the quality of the interview, which is great and awesome. But for YouTube, 60 or 70% of it is just the first 30 seconds, the picture and the title. So you should be spending a lot of that time on that. And then my final recommendation would be there is a newsletter called Creator Hooks by Jake Thomas, and I would recommend that he's very, very, very good at breaking down titles. And I would take those three things and I would study them like it's a religion, and I would truly just consume all of it. Because you ever wondered how Mr. Beast got big, everyone? How Ryan Trahan got bigger, how anybody else got big? They all studied. They tried and they studied and they learned and they improved. And there is infinite information out there. But those are some of my favorites.
- [24:25]
Dave Jackson
And I'll have links to those in the show notes. Just go to schoolofpodcasting.com 1040 and he mentioned April Lynn Alter. I'm gonna play a quick clip from her video on making thumbnails. She's amazing, but listen to the dedication that she's talking about.
- [24:44]
Aprilyn Alter
Best YouTubers in the world view thumbnails as a priority, not as an afterthought. And while most of us don't even start thinking about thumbnails until right before hitting publish, top youtubers take the time to finalize their thumbnails first before they even start working on the video itself. So don't be afraid to spend days or even weeks perfecting your thumbnail. It's worth taking the time to get it right.
- [25:06]
Dave Jackson
So that jumped out at me. Days or even weeks working on a thumbnail, if you want to get it right. And of course, anytime you talk to somebody who's building software, you always ask them what's coming in the future, which, you know, has got to be really frustrating. I just gave you a giant list of all these features, and I'm like, great. What else you got?
- [25:28]
Rocks Codes
I think there's a lot that can be done on audio analytics that has yet to be done. So I'm going to be pursuing a lot of that and just generally speaking, a lot more of that analytics A lot more of that growth, a lot more of that experimentation. Kind of like the second bastion of flightcast after having completed all places video could ever go.
- [25:44]
Dave Jackson
So this was the very first expert talk that we had out at the School of Podcasting. Keep in mind, there is a free version of the School of Podcasting and that would get you access to these kinds of talks. So thanks to Rocks, and again, I'll have a link out to FlightCast. I should say up front that the link in the show notes is. Is an affiliate link, but that's not why I brought Roxanne. I brought him on because I'd actually heard him on another show called Pod Biz and I was like, man, I want to know more about this stuff. And then when I saw it, I was like, holy cow, this is amazing.
- [26:23]
Dave Jackson (show intro/outro voice)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [26:26]
Rocks Codes
Ooh, now that's a good question.
- [26:29]
Dave Jackson
This might be the one that I get no responses for, because when I ask people this question, they kind of freeze. And that is how do you measure success for your podcast beyond download numbers? And I'm not even going to say what that is. I'm going to leave it open because I don't want to lead the witness. I need your answer by June 26, 2026. Don't forget to say a little bit about your show, including your website address so I can link to it in the show notes. Just go to schoolofpodcasting.com? again by June 26th. Oh, where am I going to be August 21st through the 23rd? Charlotte, North Carolina. Empowered podcasting. 3. I went last year and the minute it was over, I'm like, I'm going back to this one.
- [27:28]
Rocks Codes
One.
- [27:28]
Dave Jackson
You gotta check out this one. Especially designed for independent podcasters with the maximum capacity of 250 people. I love that because I get to meet everyone.
- [27:39]
Rocks Codes
Check it out.
- [27:40]
Dave Jackson
Empowered podcasting dot com.
- [27:44]
Dave Jackson (show intro/outro voice)
The school of podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [27:48]
Dave Jackson
So I realize you might be thinking, you know, it'd be cool to have all those stats together, but I really don't want to do video. Well, check this out. Right now There's a website, podanalyst.com and they're in beta and you can get their pro plan, which is normally 50 bucks for free during their beta. So you can get this information, but just know somewhere in the future they're gonna pull the rug out from us. But this is a really interesting site in that you can go in and yes, it tracks kind of keywords, which is things like pod SEO does, but it really can go in and it will look at your episode and kind of grade it at the 25% mark, the 50% mark, the 75, etc. And so you can easily see, hey, how long are people listening? And for me, that is the metric, because people go, well, I wish I knew if people thought my show was any good. Well, if they only made it 25% through, I don't think that's a good sign. And so I'll put a link to that because I realize not everybody wants to do video, but they would like these kinds of stats. You can track 10 keywords. So again, that's a little bit like Pod SEO. You can actually share stats with team members. And on the free plan, they give you email support. And you can also export your data, which is kind of cool because they've collected it all in one spot. So I'll put a link to again. Schoolofpodcasting.com 1014 yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [29:33]
Dave Jackson (show intro/outro voice)
The school of podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [29:37]
Dave Jackson
I'm always afraid I come across as anti video, and I'm not. I just want you to go in with realistic expectations. I will give the example. In my 20s, 30s, 40s, and part of my 50s, I played in different bands. And I was in one band that was really successful here in Ohio. For a local Ohio band, we played big outdoor festivals and things like that, but we knew we were never moving to Nashville. We were never going to, you know, make it as a. An original band. We were a good, fun party band. And so I say this because we knew that and we set our expectations to do what we could do to be the best band in Akron, Ohio. And I think we achieved that. And so when I say, and I play a clip from someone that says you should spend a couple days, if not a week, on your thumbnail, you might be going, well, I can't do that, and that's fine. And I will say this till I'm blue in the face. If you want to do YouTube, do YouTube. Just realize there are people that are spending days on their thumbnail. And we heard over and over and over, it's your title, it's your thumbnail, and it's your first 30 seconds. So if you don't have time to spend on your thumbnail, your title, and your first 30 seconds, your mileage may vary. And I'm just here to let you know ahead of time, hey, here's what other people are doing so that you don't quit. My biggest worry is that people are going to add video to their Already full plate of audio podcasting. And when video doesn't work or just burns them out, that they're going to not stop doing video, they're going to stop doing podcasting. That's my biggest fear. But if you want to do YouTube, by all means, go right ahead. Just go in with realistic expectations. You may not be the next Joe Rogan.
- [31:51]
Rocks Codes
Dave has another reason to hate Spotify,
- [31:55]
Dave Jackson
by All right, so if you care what's going on or if you care about advertising, Spotify has adopted the alliance for Podcast Measurement definition. Their definition of a play. It used to be the iab. Now, that's the one where everyone got together. Tv, even, and media hosts and all sorts of people got together and decided what a podcast was. These people met in secret meetings. One of them was Spotify, and one of the other two were DraftKings and BetterHelp. So a bunch of advertisers and they came out and said, hey, now, on Spotify, if you listen to 30 seconds, that now counts as a play. So it used to be a minute. So congratulations, everyone on Spotify, you just got twice as many plays, if not more. I need to read a little more into the specific. And so now we need to see if Apple's gonna follow suit or YouTube. It's funny, we really do not have an official clarification of what a play is on YouTube. There are a lot of people that think that it's 30 seconds, but YouTube, you know, because their YouTube never really said. But the thing that's gonna be weird now is I'm a podcaster. You pay me, and I'm just gonna make this up $5 per 1000 impressions, or shall we say plays. And now because we've cut what a play is in half, I now get 2,000. That means I get $10, because it's $5 per thousand and you just doubled my income. Well, if you think that's what advertisers wanted, hey, can we come up with a way where I pay more money? No, that just means they will cut the price of advertising in half. I think it's silly. I think it's stupid. And if you don't believe me, you know, I will tell you that in the past, I have a show that gets programmatic ads, and it was somewhere between three and five dollars per 1,000 downloads. I came out and said, hey, guys, if supply and demand is still in play, I think we're gonna see the price of programmatic ads. So those are those automatic ones for Geico and everything else. And then we're gonna see those go down. And people literally said, oh, he's just clickbaity. Don't listen to that guy. He's crazy. Yeah. I just got my notification. I made a dollar. A dollar CPM for that show that I'm using for CPMs. So I know your mileage may vary. I'm just here to say if the plan is I'm going to start a podcast and get ads and quit my day job. Hmm. Now, if you want to do partnership like my buddy Ray over at around the Layout, that's different story post red ads. But I'm talking about the you can make money from day one stuff. This is just silly by coming and cutting down what a play is for 30 seconds. And I think the reason they do that is, well, what's your average pre roll ad? It's 30 seconds. Yeah. If you want to rid yourself of all this really boring talk, start yourself a supercast, start yourself a Patreon. Sell something that your audience would want. Ads are just not my favorite way to monetize. If you're a person like me that like, oh, I don't know if I have time to learn about how to make thumbnails. There are some resources. One is called Pixels. I tried this one and it has some really great features. I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted it to do. Another one is called one of 10, which kind of goes in with the conversation we were having today. Both those are between 40 and $50 a month. And then I forgot about Vidiq. This is a tool. It's a YouTube kind of coaching service that researches your competitor and what they're working on. And it gives you all sorts of stats and such. Vidiq is 20 bucks a month and that is a subscription I have and sadly am not using. That's one of those that I probably need to cancel and come back later when I have a little more time. But if you're kind of like this thumbnail thing, there are tools that'll do it for you. And this is where again, I say you're either gonna pay in time or money. Use the one you have the most of. But I'll have links to those again out in the show. Notes. Go to schoolofpodcasting.com 1040.
- [36:29]
Dave Jackson (show intro/outro voice)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [36:30]
Dave Jackson
I will have links to everything out@schoolofpodcasting.com 1040. Thanks so much for hanging in and checking out this episode. I know video isn't for everyone, but you're still here and I just want to let you know I do appreciate you. And if you want to get your podcast going and this kind of news that I bring up here, I'm doing this almost daily in the school of podcasting, going, hey, if you're going to use, for example, if you're going to use that tool I mentioned, Pod Analyst, I have a video that shows you, hey, if you're using Captivate, don't forget or Buzzsprout, for that record, don't forget to unhide your email because my goal is to help you avoid those little potholes that come along in the world of podcasting. Again, the website schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code LISTNR that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. And if you need a website for your podcast, check out podpage.com/preview will get you over there to start a 14 day trial. And you don't even need a credit card. I'm Dave Jackson. I've been helping podcasters for over 20 years. I can't wait to see what we're going to do together. And until next week, take care. God bless. Class is dismissed. If you like the show, please share it with a friend. If you like the show, pretty, pretty please share it with a friend right now.
- [37:55]
Rocks Codes
Now.
- [38:04]
Dave Jackson (show intro/outro voice)
Yeah.