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School of Podcasting: Expert Tips for Launching and Growing Your Podcast
The Pros and Cons of Going Video: Let’s Talk
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Apple just announced that they will be adding HLS video. What is that? I'll explain that in a second. And I just got back from speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters event where I was talking about the pros and cons of YouTube. So today we're going to talk about video. And should you or should you not be doing video? Well, as always, that answer is depends on. So I'm going to give you the pros and the cons. Hit it, ladies. The school of podcasting with Dave Jackson. Podcasting since 2005, I am your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson. Thanking you so much for tuning in. If you are new to the show, this is where I help you plan, launch and grow your podcast. And today I think would definitely be in kind of a planning stage. I want you to go in with your eyes open when we talk about video because there are definitely some pros and there are some cons. So we're gonna just jump right into that. If you wanna check this out, my website is schoolofpodcasting.com and today is episode number 1024. So just go to schoolofpodcasting.com/1024 to get into the show notes. And so why are we talking about YouTube? Well, it seems like we can't escape it or video in general. Well, Starting back in 2024, TikTok started to beat YouTube and advertising revenue. And so I've told this story before, this little make kind of makeup story, but somebody said, hey, we got to get people talking about YouTube. And somebody said, I know podcasting is hot. We'll just call them all podcasters. And that's exactly what they did. You need an RSS feed to be a podcast. So first things first, YouTube is not a podcast. It's a show. We're not going to spend a lot of time on that. It does really mess up our stats moving forward when we call YouTube a podcast, because they're going to call it a video podcast. And well, it's, it's not, it's a show, but let's not spend a lot of time on that. And so I have some, some good news and bad news on this, but we have to know what we're talking about. And so back on March 31, 2025, YouTube announced that they were going to change the way they counted shorts. And that change meant that from like this point forward, the moment a video starts to play or replay with no minimum watch time, meaning the watch time could be, I don't know, 001 seconds. Yep, that counts. And so they announced that on March 26, 2025, and then they came out shortly thereafter and they said, hey, YouTube shorts are attracting more than 200 billion daily views. Well, it's easy to get to 200 billion when it only has to be, you know, 0.00, whatever. It can be, anything can be counted as a view. So again, just letting you know when you hear these things about bazillions of views. Well, hold on, that could be like, here, I'm just going to tap my microphone. Yeah, that could be counted as a view. Now, my buddy, Dr. Colin Gray over at the podcast host, he did a survey of podcasters. If I remember right, I want to say it was 1500, it was a lot of podcasters. And he said 69% of them were doing video. But that's where again, we got to throw in the asterisk. Is that real video or, or static image video? And it turns out that only 42% of the 69%, which I believe is 29% when you do the math, we're doing actual video. Now why do I say that? Because everybody's like, hey, if you're not doing video. And this goes back to Steve Goldstein and the other guy, I believe from Triton Digital, or I forget the other people that done the survey and realized Steve hangs out at a college in New York City. He is surrounded by 20 year old people. And so he saw these people calling YouTube a podcast and was like, hey, if you want to be a podcast, you better be on YouTube. I get that point, totally understand it. I am somewhat perplexed as to why we didn't go to the college people, you know, the students, because they're there to learn and explain to them, that's not a podcast, that's a YouTube channel. But it's too late now, in a way. I will continue to say YouTube is not a podcast, it's a show. One of the co creators of Podcasting one Adam Curry, who I got to hang out with ever so shortly at the show, he said, look, not every book needs to be a movie. All right, good point. But then if you think about it, Sean Menendez, Soulja Boy, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Arnold, Arnell Pineda, Justin Bieber, Kate Upton, Megan Thee Stallion have one thing in common. They were all discovered, you guessed it, on YouTube. Okay, that's a definite plus for YouTube. Now you also have to remember how many creators are on YouTube. It's a lot. We'll talk about that in a second. And of course, we have to bring up our good buddy Joe Rogan, to which I always like to. Again, let's. Let's get the whole story. Joe started back in 1988. Not 2008, 1988, where he was a comedian. He was on the TV show News Radio. He was on the TV show the Man Show. He was on Fear Factor, Right? So he's been understanding and learning how to entertain an audience for many, many moons. And then, of course, we all look at Jimmy Donaldson Meadow, known as Mr. Beast. He has something like 464 million followers on YouTube. But again, you got to remember, he started back in 2012 as a very young, you know, teenage boy where he would almost, frame by frame, study YouTube. So that's what we're up against. And I was studying Jimmy, and he had a really great line. He was being interviewed by the New York Times, and Mr. Beast said, humanity spends 2% of their time on YouTube. Not New York, not California. Humanity spends 2% of their time on YouTube. So there's definitely some traffic over there. And if we look at if you actually had a video podcast now, if you hear someone say, Apple is finally adding video to podcasting, that person doesn't know what they're talking about. Apple has supported video since day one via rss. Hooray. Now, not every app will play video, but Apple Podcast, Podcast, Addict, Podcast, Republic, Pocket Cast, Podbean, Dog Catcher Audios, Radio. I've never even heard of that one. Downcast, HiCast, Podcruncher, Podest, Podurama. That one's just fun to say. Podu Rama and primecast, these are just some of the apps that play video. If you're doing a true video podcast delivered via rss. If you're doing what I will call in very gigantic apostrophes here, a YouTube video podcast, it will go to YouTube and YouTube Music. Oh, that's not one of our top answers, and it sounds like I'm exaggerating. I don't know a single person that uses YouTube Music. I'm a YouTube Premium subscriber, and I don't use YouTube Music, and I get it for free. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's look at the price of doing audio. Right now, if you're doing a solo show, you could start with a Samson Q2U microphone. That's about 80 bucks. If you're going to have a co host in the room with you, you could get the PodTrack P4 next. That's about $180. So you're looking at 260 bucks. To get started. And then if you want to do remote recording, so it's you maybe just yourself, you want to do interviews, you're looking at either Descript or Riverside and both of those are not entirely always reliable. But you're looking at around $30 a month, maybe 35. And then hosting for the audio is 19 bucks a month. And I recommend Captivate is my top one. I love their business model. If you want somebody else, check out buzzsprout. There's RSS.com, there's a bunch, there's Blubrry. But Captivate and Buzzsprout are my favorite too. So you're looking at 260 bucks to get started with audio. Now if you're doing video, because you have this thing probably in your pocket called your phone, you've got a thousand dollar camera right in your pocket, so you don't have to buy a camera. Now this isn't going to be the world's best audio, but you could get a set of Rode Wireless Micro. It's a little lavalier that you pin on your shirt. That's 99 bucks. And then you can get a dual lighting kit for about 200 bucks. And I know you might think I'm going to spend more money on lighting, that the most important thing in video is the audio. And so again, you're looking at a microphone, it's 99 bucks, lighting, 200 bucks. So you're looking at $300 and somewhere around 30 to $36 a month if you're gonna do remote recording of interviews and such. And you don't have to pay for hosting because YouTube's free, so not a ton of money. It used to be if you're doing video, you had to get a camera and you had to get this and you had to get that. You can get started for about the same price as an audio podcast. Now, you're not going to get that wide distribution if you're just doing video. And we'll talk about doing both here in a bit. Now, if you wanted to up your game on the audio side, I'm talking into the rode podmic USB, it's $200, roughly. You can get the Shure MV6, that's their gaming mic, that's 150. And then if you want to look like Joe Rogan, you can get the Shure SM7B microphone for $400. So that's a bit of a jump. Now if you wanted to get an upgrade from your phone, you could get something like an Elgato Facecam Pro. I think those are $400. But if you really wanted. And really, in my opinion, that's not any better than your phone. Not that it's bad. I use one, but keep that in mind. But if you want to upgrade to an actual DSLR camera, I would recommend the Sony ZV E10 2. It's about $1,000, and that comes with the ability to change the lens. I went to the national broadcast, national religious broadcasters with my buddy Daniel J. Lewis. He just bought this camera and I believe he got a lens slightly used for around $500. For the lens. When you look at lenses, it gets like cray cray in terms of money. In fact, I was. I'll talk about Think Media here in a bit, but they were doing a video and they said, oh, if you want to get the lens that we're using, it's only $2,448 for just the lens that doesn't include the camera. So things can get very expensive on the video side. They can get really expensive on the audio side, too. You can spend thousands of dollars on a microphone, but that would be ridiculous if you want a microphone that's not in the shot. I never understand this, where people are like, oh, I'm a podcaster, but I don't want my video to have a microphone in it. To me, that's like saying, yeah, I want to be a horse jockey, but any pictures of me, I don't want the horse in it. It's like you're kind of expected to be around a horse and podcasters are kind of expected to be around a microphone. But you can get this microphone. They call it a shotgun microphone. And it is where normally like this microphone is about three fingers from my mouth, a shotgun microphone would be maybe a foot and a half. It's going to be out of the shot. And I'm here to tell you, I've played with a lot of shotgun microphones. You almost always have to do some sort of post production to remove some of the room noise. So in terms of gear, again, you can start easy for 300 bucks, but when you upgrade for an audio show, you're looking at maybe 150 to $200. When you're looking at upgrading video and taking it to the next level, you're looking at a thousand dollars, maybe 1500, maybe 2000, depending on how crazy you want to get. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now let's take a look at competition. Competition. At least back in March of last year, there was a study that came out and they said there were 202 million people in the U.S. listening to podcasts. And at the time, there were 4,478,000 podcasts. And that's where people go, holy cow, that's a lot of competition. But I look at. According to podcastindex.org, there were 358,000 podcasts that had put out an episode at least once a month. And in my book, if you're not doing a show at least once a month, you're not really podcasting. Come on, now. So that's the number I used. Now, if we look at video competition, and remember, we're talking about all those people getting discovered on YouTube. There are 65 million YouTubers. Wow. There were 358,000 audio creators. 65 million YouTube creators. Now, what's the audience size on YouTube as of last March 2025? 2,490,000,000 viewers. That is a whole lot of eyeballs on YouTube. And this is where we get to do fun with math. Yes. So there were 202 million listeners for 358,000 audio creators. And when you do that and you do the math, so you divide 358,000 into 202 million, that means you have two rooms. One on the left are listeners, and one on the right are people that like video. The room on the left, when you open it up for Your podcast, has 564 listeners ready for your show. The room on the right, people waiting for your video has 38. And you're like, wait, but it's YouTube. Yeah, there's a ton of. There are trillions of people over there. There are also millions of creators. And when you do the math on that 564 listener divided by 38 viewers, that means that audio has a 15x times the size of audience. There's more audience on the audio side. Now, the other thing that makes audio a great choice is you have more opportunity to listen. On the way down to NRB, I listened to probably 10 to 15 episodes. I did not watch a single one because my eyes were busy. More opportunity to listen. And I know people like. But Dave, the algorithm. The algorithm. I know. We'll get to it. When I worked at Libsyn and I got this story from Rob Walch, who, if you haven't heard, is now working for Captivate. I'll put a link to an article on if you want to move your show from Libsyn to Captivate, which I would recommend. Rob is now, along with Elsie, by the way, Escobar, she is also working at Captivate. And they will be the new hosts of the in and around podcasting show. But Rob told this story when Bill Maher, comedian, he's on hbo, he decided to launch a video podcast. Now, by that we mean a YouTube channel. It wasn't really a video podcast, but it was on YouTube and Bill didn't want to do audio. And we're like, bill, you should do audio. And he's like, ah, audio shmadio. And we finally talked him into doing the audio. Bill hired a PR agency that only promoted the video. Again, Bill wasn't really into the audio, promoted the pr, you know, got their team to go out, only promote the video. And again, audio outperformed the video 15 to 1. His audience was 15 times bigger on audio than on video. Why? Because there's more opportunities to listen than to watch. And if you've ever seen Club Random, it's two people talking. It's not like they're wood whittling or painting or something that really needs to be watched. Now let's talk about completion percentage. And the One thing that YouTube has that podcasting doesn't is amazing stats. YouTube knows what your audience ate last Tuesday for breakfast. It's crazy the amount of information you get. But I compared, I looked at a completion percentage. Now again, let's not be silly here. This is a survey of one. It's me. This is my data from the show Ask the podcast coach. And I do a 90 minute show. Don't ask me why. I pick 90 minutes every Saturday. If you want to come get your podcast questions answered, go to askthepodcastcoach.com live and myself and my co host, Jim Collison, and the world's greatest chat room answer your questions. And so when I looked at my audio, my worst completion percentage was 73%. So people would listen to 73% and then they would bail. That's the worst. And I looked at six different episodes and the best I got was 86%. So I was pretty happy with that. On YouTube, my best completion percentage was 34%. So my worst was 74 on audio. My best on video was 34% with the exact same content. So for me, I look at that as YouTube is a mile wide and an inch deep and audio is an inch wide and a mile deep. And I know you're saying, but Dave, what about the algorithm? I know the algorithm. And I asked, they said, well, what is the algorithm? And they said, it's this thing because it's Google. It kind of knows you. In fact, it's almost creepy how much it knows you and it recommends things to you. And people go, yeah, audio doesn't have an algorithm. To which I mildly push back, because when I think of that definition, I go, I have one of those. His name is Doug. He's my older brother. And I'm here to tell you when my brother Doug or my best friend Scott send me a text message that says, you gotta watch this, my brother told me you would love Landman because it's dark humor and if you don't mind a lot of swearing on that show and some sexual content. It's an adult show, but it's pretty funny at times. And so my brother was dead on. My buddy Scott, he and I talk music all the time. And when either one of those guys send me a text message with a link, I click on it every single time. So I do have things that recommend them, and you do too. They're called your audience. For a while when I lived in my apartment, if you see old videos of me, you'll see just pictures behind me. And at first I just thought my audience consisted of just middle aged white dudes with beards because that's all that was there. But then the ladies started to show up and I have all these pictures of my audience behind me. And that's your algorithm. You just have to make remarkable content. And remarkable is not easy. You're probably really good at making good and very good, but making something remarkable is an art form and it takes lots of practice. Now, if we looked at hosting an actual RSS based video show, you're looking at $150 a month on Libsyn, $100 a month on Blueberry, or $29 a month on Podbean. Now, Podbean does a thing where it sounds cheap. They're also going to stamp Podbean all over your videos, because a video file is 46 times, at least 46 times the size of an MP3 file. That's why people like YouTube, because they don't want to pay 100 to $150 a month for media hosting of a video file. So keep that in mind. I just did that. I just exported a video minute long, 46 megs, exported a audio file, the stereo 128. So I can actually make it half that if I wanted to. So video files are ginormous when you compare them to video files, which is why most people host it on YouTube. We'll talk about the Apple thing in a bit. Now, when it comes to monetization, I currently, as of, like, two weeks ago, had 3,500 subscribers on YouTube. Now that sounds like a lot in podcast land. It's not. That is a baby baby, like, very tiny show on YouTube. And I looked at my money for the year, so basically January and part of February, and I earned $106.90. However, there's a big asterisk here. My birthday was in February. And Ralph from the content creators podcast.com was nice enough while I was doing a live stream to give me $100 for my birthday. Thank you, Ralph. And that means if we take that aside, really, I only made $4.02 in actual YouTube money. And so when we do the math on that $4 and 2 cents divided by. Oh, did I say I have 3,500 subscribers? Well, they're not all looking at my YouTube. In this case, only 795 were. And again, fun with math. You take your followers or your viewers in this case, and you divide that into the money you made. So 795 into 402 is $5.06 per 1,000 views. So when I say most of the programmatic ads are somewhere between three and seven dollars, probably more likely five, it's because of that math right there. When I did my CPM, minus the birthday wishes, it was $5, because I don't know about you. Thank goodness my birthday isn't every month. So the other thing you might look at is now, again, YouTube. We just said video files are huge. That's why people put them on YouTube. But they basically take 45%, because all this time, while you've been growing your audience, they've been paying for your videos. And now that you have an audience that's actually making money, when you make money, they're taking 45% to catch up with the amount of money that they've been paying. Now I'm using Patreon for crowdfunding because it's easy. They they're 10% is how much they take. I actually like Supercast a little more than Patreon. But if we take that full $106.90, if that had been given to me on Patreon, I would have made $96.20. But that came in over YouTube, and I got to keep not 9620, but I got to keep 5880. And that's when you're like, oh, so, yeah, they're gonna take some of that money back because they've been paying for Your hosting. And I've said this example a couple of times. The best way to make money is to sell your own stuff. And so if you buy my book, Profit from youm podcast, available at profitfromyourpodcast.com, you buy that from me, not through Amazon, which I think right now I'm sold out if I think about it. But anyway, I would make $12. Okay, now at $5 CPM, right? Cost per thousand downloads, that would be 2,400 downloads. So this is where I asked the question, what's easier getting 2,400 downloads or selling one book? Another thing that's you gotta know about YouTube is yes, you can earn money on YouTube, but if you do something wrong, that money can also go away. I'll have a link to this video in the show notes. But here's what they talk about at the beginning of the video.
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YouTube is currently conducting one of the largest scale demonetization enforcement initiatives that I've ever seen. Channel earning $30,000 a month in YouTube ad revenue. Totally demonetized. Another one that was earning $7,000. Demonetized. We actually got some insider information from YouTube how to protect yourself. A big theme of this is AI, but all channels need to be aware of this information.
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So yeah, that's kind of scary. And they talk. In that video, there was a faceless, meaning the person wasn't on camera, a faceless Bible. Channel had 588,000 subscribers and about $30,000 a month in ad revenue. And they didn't lose their channel, they were just demonetized. So YouTube just went, hey, you know how you're making 30,000amonth? Not anymore. And one of the reasons was inauthentic and mass produced content. So they're using AI to try to find and demonetize AI. Except in this case it wasn't AI, which is what? Remarkable, right? I heard this, I was like, oh, I got to tell people about this. And so, yeah, that YouTube channel, you can find them@thinkmedia.com I'll have a link to this in the show notes. But now realize I'm not talking about partners. My buddy ray over@aroundthelayout.com we've talked to him about his model railroad empire that he's building over there. Got a free trip to Australia that doesn't stink. But he is building partnerships. That's not the $5 CPM. This is where you get paid per show. If you need help with that, I always recommend Justin Moore's book Sponsor Magnet. It's a great book. But just keep in mind, and Sean over@thinkmedia.com made a great point. He goes, when you're making the budget, don't put the grocery budget. Be like, don't tie that to the YouTube budget because it might go away. Because on one hand, yes, there is the algorithm that can help promote you, but also it can become your overlord. Here's a clip from Jordan Harbinger talking to Rob Greenlee on the New Media show.
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I know a lot of big YouTubers that don't. Not podcaster people. This is a different thing. I know a lot of podcaster folks too. They go, I can't take a week off and go home and visit my family for Thanksgiving because the YouTube algorithm will punish me, right? They won't be featured as much. Even my own YouTube team is like, we gotta release two or three things a week. We just gotta. If you do one and it's a massive hit, maybe we'll wait a few extra days. If you do one and it's a stinker, I gotta release another one. If that's a stinker, I gotta release another one, right? You want to keep the algorithm happy and fed.
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And even if you do that now with AI, there's a guy that I watch called the professor of Rock and. And he said this in a recent episode.
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The. The AI takeover of said platform is in full effect. I'm telling you, I lost 70%. It's getting worse by the day. Every week it seems like it falls even more. It's tough to build something for six years and to see totally out of your control. And it just kind of just goes,
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goes, goes like this.
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But there are AIs that are actually copying my shows and they get more views in my shows and they actually take my information. I mean, some of it's word for word. It's crazy. I have to give you an example. I worked my fingers to the bone the last, especially the last six months, trying to do everything I can. I can honestly say, guys, I've given everything I've got. Enough is enough. Between the stress and high blood pressure, the kidney stones, all the things that I deal with, something's got to give. And guys, I'm an optimist. I am. I always try to remain positive. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, though. It sucks. It sucks, sucks right now.
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Now it's not all gloom and doom. My Buddy Ralph Estepp Jr. Has a channel. He has many channels. But the one truth unveiled with Ralph, he's got 270,000 subscribers and it's growing. So it's just one of those things. Again, I'm not trying to Poo Poo YouTube. Just like, like I said, use it for the distribution, use it for the eyeballs, because you're not going to grow your audio by starting video. And I'll give you a great example of why not. You see a great movie, maybe you saw the movie Jaws. Great. It's based on a book. Did you go read the book? Now, some of you might say, yeah, actually I did. But most of the time when I see a good movie, I rarely if ever have gone back and. And read the book. Why? Because I like movies. And in the same way, someone may love to watch your stuff, but they have no interest in listening to it. So it's not all gloom and doom. Again, my goal here is to make sure you know both sides of that story. And so one other thing, speaking of things that YouTube does better is, is community. This is again the good news and bad news is the only place you can watch YouTube is on YouTube. Now you can listen to this show on Apple, on Spotify, I love Pocket Cast Overcast, take your pick, cast. But there's no way to leave a comment in any of those apps yet and have it show up every place else. It's something that some really lovely nerds are working on. But right now it's super simple to go to YouTube and leave a comment and everyone will see that. So you can build community there. So keep that in mind. That is one thing that either A, having your own community or B, just using YouTube. But just realize you could lose that anytime if you're thinking of getting into video. Descript and Riverside are two video recorders editors, but unfortunately neither one of them is what I would call a hundred percent reliable. I see a lot of people complaining one time about descript and then next time about Riverside and you kind of go, isn't there one somewhere that works? And the answer is not all the time. No. They all tend to tweak things and they're all trying to do everything and consequently they're not doing any of them super duper confidently. So keep that in mind. And also if you're going to go into YouTube, you have to feed, as Jordan said, the algorithm. And so you better understand titles and you better understand thumbnails. An example, Mr. Beast had a thumbnail with a picture of himself and apparently his ex and they are chained together. Why? Because the title is Survive 30 days chained to your ex and win $250,000. Now do you have an ex. I have two. Add more than that. If you count all the girls in high school. Maybe it's an ex job, an ex boss. We all have exes. And we can understand, we can all identify with being chained to them for 30 days. And then you go, I wouldn't do that. And then you go for $250,000. And that creates that. Wait, I want to see how this turns out. Why? Because a great title, it's relatable. And then a decent looking thumbnail. Now, if we compare audio to video, both have chapters, both have transcripts, both have sharing, both have comments. Yeah, you can have comments on audio on your website. You can do that. Most people don't anymore. It's nice to have them centralized. Both have blogs. You can write a blog on YouTube if you wanted to. And both have ads, so keep that in mind. So as I was doing some research again, my buddy Dr. Colin Gray over at the podcast host had a thing where he interviewed some people that tried YouTube. And so one of them was Darren Lake. He does a show called one percent Better Runner. But here's the thing. How do you know if you should do YouTube? Well, in Darren's case, they said, hey, can you put this on YouTube? That's a pretty big clue that you should put it on YouTube. And in the 18 months when he put it on YouTube, he outpaced his audio audience of six years. However, what did he do? He shortened his episode and made it more explainer kind of formatting. So he changed his show and it worked better on YouTube. If he had kept his old show, maybe it wouldn't have. But that's a person that liked YouTube. There's a person named D. Cary. Now here's the thing. She loves seeing the comments on video and she enjoys interviews more. Oh, and there's another one. Her fiance edits the video. I feel that's important. I'll put a link to the article over at the podcast host Matty Lansdowne does a show called how to Not Get Sick and Die. And he was somewhat overwhelmed after 200 videos because he had 800 subscribers. He did 200 videos and got 800 subscribers and, and was averaging five to 7,000 views a month. So if we look at that $5 CPM, well, that's seven of those. So five times seven is $35 for the month. So he's kind of underwhelmed. If we look at Joe Casabono, really nice guy, he does the streamline solopreneur podcast. And in this study. He'd been doing video for six months and saw no significant growth. But it did increase his editor's invoice by 30%. And then last one, in this example, where Colin had gone out and interviewed some people that had tried video. John from the Disruptor podcast. He thought it would be easier to monetize. And I don't care what platform you're on, monetization is not easy. And in this case, he thought it would be easier. He spent about $300 per one hour episode and published eight episodes before he said, yeah, that's enough of that. So if you are doing something that is highly visual, obviously be on YouTube. It's free. It needs to be on YouTube. Because if this was a show instructing you how to play the guitar and it was audio only, it's not going to make much sense when I go, oh, put your ring finger on the third fret, you know, or heaven forbid, if I go, oh, finger number two on the G string on the second fret. That's not going to work. It needs to be visual. And so keep in mind, like I do the live show I do is Zoom on Steroids. I use ECAMM Live. It's myself and Jim Collison. And there's really not much to look at there. It's really an audio first show. So when my video only holds people 40% of the time, maybe because there's not much to watch there. But keep in mind that some people love to read. That's why you need to write blogs. You not AI let AI kind of fancy it up a bit. But some people like to read, some people like to listen, and some people do like to watch. And so if you're not doing anything on YouTube, there are people that would probably watch it. But again, they're not going to come back and listen to your audio. They might. I heard Tom Webster from Sounds Profitable said there was a study came out that some people do actually discover things on YouTube so they can then go listen to it. But I don't think it was a huge percentage. But the thing I want to say again, I'm not anti YouTube. I just hate it when somebody says, I want to do a podcast. And I go, well, what is it? And they tell me this idea. And I go, this sounds amazing. And they're like, yeah, I don't want to be a slave to the algorithm. I don't want to do a video. And I'll say, you don't have to do video. And they go, no. Everybody says I have to do video. And I go, everybody has a name. Its name is YouTube, and of course they want you to. And I'm not even going to mention Spotify. Spotify. I put three months of video on Spotify and got less than 20 downloads. And most of those were me. And so just Spotify can just take their video and go home. Go back to doing what you do best. So realize you don't have to do video now. If you want to do video and your show might work better in video, you know, like the one guy did, he changed his format and it worked great, then by all means, do video. I just hate hearing people say, oh, I was going to do a podcast, but I don't want to because I don't want to do video. You don't have to do video. And now, you know, the pros, People do get discovered. There's trillions of people watching over there, you know. But in the end, you can get discovered. Is it worth the time? Because it takes a lot more time. If you think about it, when you're doing video, you have to take a shower. You have to care about what you look like. You will obsess over your background. There's no way around that. You will obsess over your background. And in the same way that upgrading your microphone probably isn't going to grow your audience, upgrading your video probably isn't going to change your audience over there, unless it looks really, really bad. But just in a second, we're going to talk about the new announcement from Apple. Dave, what do you think? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? What is the thing? We're going to talk about that right after this. Look, I get it. Starting a podcast can be daunting. You feel overwhelmed, you have this fear of failure, and you're uncertain about where to begin, and you start to doubt your abilities, and all that stuff just hold you back. But what if you had a guide? Well, that's where I come in. The school of Podcasting. It's here to help you launch and grow and monetize your podcast with confidence. With over 20 years of experience and tons of successful podcast launch, I'll walk you through every step, from planning to promotion. You are never, ever alone. Learn at your own pace with video courses and join an absolutely supportive community and get unlimited coaching with me. Say goodbye to fear and hello to success. Start your podcasting journey today with the School of podcasting. Go to schoolofpodcasting.com to get started. No fear, just success. You've been podcasting for a while and you're having fun. But you wouldn't mind earning a little bit of income from your podcast. Well, you check out my book Profit from youm podcast@profitfromyourpodcast.com it'll help you turn your listeners into a livelihood. Check it out again. Profitfromyourpodcast.com the School of podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Apple is going to add HLS video to Apple Podcasts. And there's one thing that I think we skipped. Who wants this? Do you as a viewer? Like, oh, I wish I could watch more video on Apple because you've been able to do that since 2005. It's just really expensive for the creator, the podcaster, to do an actual RSS feed based video show. So is this HLS thing on Apple going to make it less expensive? No, from what I understand, it might make it more expensive. So again, who's asking for this? Is the audience, is it the creator? Doesn't sound like it. So why are we doing this? My guess is it's for the advertiser because this means you're going to be able to to have videos with dynamic content, many time ads. And here's the part I like about this, because Apple is going to make money when they display your ads from your media host. And you'll notice that right now there's only four different media hosts that you can host your video on and they're all ad agencies. Again, I don't think that's a coinky dink. So we're doing this for advertisers. And for that reason I don't like the idea, but I do like the fact that Apple, and this is not known yet, they're going to charge you a small amount every time your ad is shown. Now why do I like that? Because that charge is going to end up going against the podcaster. It'll probably go to the media host and then they will distribute the charges to the podcasters. Because right now I don't think podcasters think more than a half a second about adding more ads to their show. At the nrb, I was talking with some people in the advertising field and they were talking about shows getting close to 40%, 40% ads. And I'm like, well, if charging people to put ads in their show slows that down, I'm all for it. Because you're going to make sure that not only do you have ads in your show, but they'll be good ads because you need them to work. So I don't like the fact that we got to pay for them. I do like the fact that we kind of got to pay for them. So I'm not super excited about that. There is a lot that we don't know. This was just announced. It's probably not even going to start rolling out till late spring. So I'm thinking somewhere around August. But if they built technology and nobody uses it, what was the point? We'll see. So I'm really interested to see how this rolls out. I expect other types of hosts like Libsyn. I was really surprised, but kind of not that Libsyn wasn't included because they do have advertise, well, what used to be advertised cast. Now it's Libsyn ads and they have hosting. So that to me was a big head scratcher. But Rob Walsh, who is the world's biggest Apple fanboy, isn't there anymore. They let him go. And maybe that relationship with Apple went with Rob. Again, I do not understand. Well, I have an idea because I've been paying attention to what does Lipson. We're going to take a tangent. Is that okay? Toe, for crying out loud, here comes another ten second tangent. Ten seconds indeed. Such absolute rubbish. Now, it's been two years since I worked for Libsync. I still know people over there and I started paying attention to what are they promoting and a lot of their PR kind of, hey, look at what we're doing over at Libsyn are about getting ad deals with fairly big shows. And I just wonder if that's going to be the future of Libsyn where they find ads for bigger shows. And it's not that they don't care about independent podcasters, but they're really interested, it appears to be because they're not making new features for a very long time. I haven't heard any at least. And so I just wonder, are they going to be kind of like a megaphone where in the early days of Megaphone it seemed like the only people on megaphone were people that were like fairly big shows that had advertising. Maybe that's going to be the future of Libsyn. I don't know. I don't understand what's going on over there. When I was there, when I joined, you know, I was there eight years, we were the number one media host. And over the eight years I just saw that dwindle, which is why I now work for PodPage. So if you need a website for your podcast, check out podpage.com. ugh. Finally, back to the show. So there's going to be four media hosts as of right now. Again, there's a lot here that we need more information on. I think it's odd that right now it doesn't sound like this is going to be on Apple tv, but we've got a ways before this actually launches. The one thing I'm confused on is, is there's this geeky feature of podcasting 2.0 where we just try to make podcasting better. There is technology called the alternate enclosure where you could say, hey, here's my audio. And if you want to watch the video, it's over here and you point them at the video file and they're not using this HLS to point at. Like you could somehow use that alternate enclosure to point at the HLS video. That's kind of a bummer because in this example, when you upload the video file to, let's say, Acast or Arc 19, there were a couple others there that's only going to go to Apple. And so you will upload a video to Spotify if you want your video on Spotify, because Spotify only only shows the video to Spotify if you use their feed only the audio goes out via Spotify. So boo to that. And then now, if you want the video on Apple podcasts, again, we don't know what the price of that's going to be on these media hosts. But Apple's not hosting the media, they're just hosting the playlist. For lack of a metaphrase, that shows this video cut up into something like 10 seconds and that's going to enable dynamic ads to be tracked. Again, this is a feature for advertisers and if it's great and people make money, yay. But my knee jerk reaction is, meh. I would have rather had Pod roll or the funding tag so that every app had a button where you could click and it would go to your PayPal or your buy me a coffee or something like that. So I am at this point, in terms of the Apple thing, not really like, yay. I'm going, who wanted this? Because when Apple moves, it changes the industry. And I know people have said, you know, we need to figure out advertising or podcasting is going to go away. And I'm like, no, no, no. If we don't figure out advertising, the advertising people will go away. And I love me some Tom Webster and Brian Barletta and everybody else, Dan Granger. I just think we need to find a better way to do advertising and maybe this is it. We'll see. But I just know I'm not super excited about it. And the other thing I want here is 100% transparency. I want Apple to come out and say, we're going to charge you a dollar for every 1,000 impressions. I would love to see that. So that way, if I get charged $2 per impression of the ad because the media host tacked on another buck, I want to know that. So anytime I'm getting charged and it's not going to me, that gives media host the ability to tack on additional charges. And again, on one hand, you better make sure your ad works if you got to pay for them to appear. But on the other hand, I don't want people to get gouged. So there's a lot more to come on this particular issue. Just realize if somebody says, hey, Apple's adding video. No, Apple has had video. If you want to see video, you can do it. There are video podcasts right now. It's just, instead of serving it in chunks, it's. It's one MP4 file. So if you kind of scroll to the right to fast forward through a video, now you have to wait for the whole video to download behind the scenes. And with this hls, you could scroll to the right and it would just pick up wherever you left your finger. So it's a big announcement because it's Apple, but we'll see what the impact is later on this year. So, again, if you don't want to do video, don't. Don't do video. If you want to do video, throw it on YouTube. I would ignore Spotify at this point. And you better go in with your eyes open once this Apple thing rolls out, because they are going to charge you a small fee every time your ads appear. So it should be interesting to see. But I just want to make sure that is clear. I know I've said it in the past. You don't have to do video. I know YouTube's going to say, you got to do video, and Spotify is going to say, you got to do video because they want to put ads against your stuff. But you don't have to do video if you don't want to do video. If you need help with your show again, schoolofpodcasting.com is the website. Use the coupon code listener when you sign up. And until next week, I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters. It's what I do. 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. My 90 minute video was 5.6 not Megs gigs. Yeah. So if we take, you know, 5,600,000, I'm doing, doing the math here live, which is always fun. 5600000. There we go. And if you divide that by 90, that is in theory, numbers that I can't understand. 62,062 megs. That's not right. And my question is, which is easier? Getting 2,400 downloads or $12 pro or. Yeah, don't do math in your show. Yeah.