The Business of Podcasting – Small Business Show Episode 129

The Small business show, episode 129 for Wednesday, July 26, 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business Show. You got it. The show that's by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in San Francisco Bay Area, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man?

I'm good. Busy. Yeah. Crazy. This time of year is weird because you got, like, vacation, like, I. I can't stay in a rhythm. Not that I feel. I. I mean, I think if I think about other times of the year, maybe I. Maybe I'm never in a real rhythm, but I don't know.

Yeah, I. You know, what's funny is I often, sometimes think, wouldn't it be great to have a rhythm?

Yeah.

And. And then once I get into a rhythm, I'm like, wow, this is kind of boring.

What else can I do? Y.

What sort of. What kind of bomb can I throw in this to change things up?

Right. I do find when I have a lot of travel, I mean, if I'm going to be away for like a week or something, that's different. But when it's just two or three days here and then I'm back in the office for a little while and then two or three days there, which seems to be my schedule recently, I actually find that helpful. I mean, it's busy, but I am forced to prioritize the things that absolutely need to get done and do those and think about, you know, I become much more intentional with time, and that's always a good thing. We've talked about that before, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, it's is. It is interesting how that forces you to start to do that stuff.

Yeah. You know, I found that, like, you know, in the days when we built these businesses, Mac observer and Backbeat Media, I feel like I was more productive then than I am now in terms of these businesses. But if I remember correctly, which I'm pretty sure I do, if memory is. Is what it is, I was also running my consulting business at the same time. And so, you know, it was like, all right, well, I've got it. Like, I've got to go see my clients. And so that's happening during these hours. I only have this time to, you know, do all the things, like now all the things that my employees do. Everything right. Yeah, that's right. So you. I don't know. Time deadlines are awesome motivators.

Yes, yes. And I think that, you know, and we've talked about this on the show, Too. But transitioning to, you have to kind of realize your productivity is going to change dramatically.

Right.

It's not how many clients you talk to, how many people you visit, how many things you fix. It may just be, you know, you touched base with your team and, you know, walked around your building and, you know, helped someone solve a problem they were having.

Yeah.

And I think that can be, and I know it was for me, a difficult transition because I'm a real, you know, rate my day. That's how good I feel driving home kind of thing, what I got done.

Right.

And, and I think as you, as you become a different kind, as you become a business owner moving from being self employed, it gets, you know, squishy and a little less easy to kind of rank or whatever, put numbers next to it maybe. Yeah, you can't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a little tougher. So, you know, that's, it's crazy.

But it does mean that I have time. And this can be both good and bad, but it does mean that I have time to think about, you know, bigger picture stuff which, which really is my job, you know, to make sure that the business is not that it's running properly today. Although if it's not, then absolutely, that's my job. But yeah, for sure. You know, but it's all, even if I have to worry about something today, I also need to be worried about something a month from now, six months from now, and you know, a year from now. Right, yeah.

Or longer. And I think that.

Right. Yeah.

And coming up with new things to do either for your business or for yourself is a really important thing to focus on and to recognize the value of it. You know, you may have a day where, you know, at the end of the day, whenever your day ends at night or whenever, you know, you meet, like, wow, you know, I didn't get, you know, I didn't have this checklist that I just nailed these things. But, you know, you focused on some part of your business or maybe it's your personal brand or something.

Something. Right.

You're moving and you're moving it forward. For me, I always try to. Did I achieve something today that moved things forward?

Oh, I like that.

Yeah. Did I? And that may be solving specific problems, but it also may be, hey, I, I, you know, did whatever I, I, you know, I got somebody going, I motivated someone, I walked and talk to everybody, you know, you know, had lunch with, you know, somebody on my, my team here that really needed to talk with me. All those things move your, your Business forward, so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but.

But talking about planning and I know you wanted to. To. To discuss this today. Yeah, you know, for new things, you know, when I started having some time, extra time a couple years ago and, you know, looking to fill that up on what I would want. What I wanted to do, one was I. I really enjoyed working previous company, and I wanted to do that again. But the other thing is I wanted to find a vehicle to talk about small business and to give back to the small business community that has, you know, been so great to me. And we wound up. We wound up doing the. The Small Business Show. We started as dba.

Right.

Doing business as.

Yeah, that's right.

And we thought that was a little dated, so we, you know, we updated to small business show and. But this as a business or in podcasting as a. As a business is kind of a. I certainly don't have the detailed background that you do, but I would love to talk about it today.

Yeah. Right. So there's been a thing happening, and I'm going to get very specific to start this because this thought process of mine about the business of podcasting was triggered and is a very reactionary thing, but it has me thinking about the future and being very intentional about where we go as a. As an industry.

Sure.

Because so much of my world is tied up in this right now. And, you know, five years from now, that may or may not be the case still, and that's okay. But, you know, with this show, we have yet to take on a sponsor in any traditional sense. Right. That may still happen, but with my. Right, with my other shows, we definitely do that. And of course, Backbeat Media represents a bunch of podcasts for which we sell sponsorships and all these things.

Yeah. And would you say that it is a factor of, you know, our niche being pretty narrow and, you know, getting, you know, subscribers enough and getting enough downloads and things like that to where it makes a sponsor, you know, want to come on. Is that the.

Yeah, we kind of. For a while, up until maybe six months, maybe a little more than that, maybe eight months ago, we sort of intentionally kept the show off of the sell list. Sure. We've been putting it on now and actually starting to get some interest and things like that. But we kept it off the sell list because we didn't want to sell it with listener numbers that were going to then change dramatically in the future and wind up having this underpriced thing.

Makes sense. Sure.

But there's been a change in the podcast sponsorship world for Years. I've been podcasting over 12 years now. We've been selling ads on podcasts for over 12 years now. And one of the huge benefits to this medium is that no one is currently listening to this episode accidentally. Right. Ah, right.

So they have to be intentional listeners.

Intentional listeners. Like, it's not even that they downloaded it and it wound up playing. Right. I mean, you got to go and like, say, yep, I downloaded the small. I want to subscribe to that show. I have subscribed. I've now downloaded a new episode, and I've now pressed play on that episode. Right. So these people want to listen to us, crazy as that might seem, right? No, that's right. Yeah. But no one listens accidentally. If you don't like this show, then you just won't listen again. And that's okay. But. But that the relationship that we have with you is the very thing that. That we can leverage with a sponsorship. Now, obviously, you know, with great power comes great responsibility, but that's the huge benefit. And podcast sponsorships are one of the most effective sponsorship mediums that I've ever worked with. And it's because of this relationship. Right. And.

But so let me interrupt you right there.

Yeah, sure.

From. I can talk to the other side of this because I have been a podcaster, podcast advertiser as well.

Sure. Right, right.

And so what. And the thing that's interesting on your comments is that I found that the broader the podcast, the actual. The less effective the advertising was.

Yes.

And so, you know, yeah, they have all these. These big numbers, but just like anything else, it's like, well, you know, they may or may not be interested in your service or product or whatever it is. So, you know, it's kind of this catch 22. The sponsors want to see these big numbers, but that may actually not be where the value lies.

Right. Well. And, you know, generally when you sell podcast sponsorships, you might do it. We sell all of ours as sort of a flat rate. But that flat rate isn't just, you know, defined from thin air.

Sure.

It's by looking at how many subscribers a show has and then multiplying that by a cost per thousand. And that cost per thousand number can be anywhere. Generally, it doesn't dip much below 15 bucks for podcasts. This is 15 bucks on the very low end, and then kind of on the high end might be 40 to 50. Generally somewhere in between 30 is probably a realistic target to work with. Right, sure. But, yeah, you're right. The shows that are too. The size of the audience isn't so much the problem, it's the subject matter. Right. If it's too broad, then yeah, it's.

Like every other ad.

Right.

Because you have to, you know, you're kind of pushing all this out there. You're thinking, well, maybe somebody wants to buy a mattress or somebody wants to needs their computer fixed. In the case of, you know, when we were doing tech restore ads.

Yeah, exactly.

But you know, certainly like on a show like this, the feedback we get is, you know, very passionate, very like, you know, oh, I use this information all the time. It's really practical and you're definitely getting to someone that is going through the things, situations, discussing.

Yeah, right. So it needs to be topical or you know, in the case. Because we've done ads for like Casper Mattresses and Harry's Razors and stuff on, on Mac Geek Gab. But I always really work to tailor that spot to our listeners. Like things like, let me find a way that. And obviously I'm going to tell our listeners it's a, it's a sponsorship and you know, we, I don't want to breach that trust. Right. Like, to me that's the most important thing. Right. But you know, trying find a way to fit this and if we can't fit it, we will reject the ad. And we have. And one thing that the industry over the last 10 years has been, you know, we said many, many times is, gosh, you know, look at all the money that's being spent on TV or all the money that's spent on radio. If, if people realized, you know, that how valuable this medium podcasting is and even moved, you know, single digit percentages of their budgets over here, it would triple this industry overnight. Right?

Yes.

Okay.

For sure.

So that's starting to happen. In fact, I can point to one advertising agency in particular that has brought this company called Ad Results. And they've brought, they're a traditionally a radio agency and they've started, you know, in the last like year 18 months, they've really started pushing into podcasting. I think they did a little bit before that, but they really, you know, they sought the future. They decided, yep, we can, we can make a run at this. We have all these relationships on the radio side. We have some people here that understand podcasting. Let's marry it together and expand our business. Great. Okay, great. But, you know, and so everybody's happy about this on the surface, but the problem is, you know, the radio world doesn't work like the podcasting world does. And in order for those dollars to be comfortable here, some changes are being made in terms of how the, how the sponsorships are delivered, how they are monitored.

Yeah, monitoring, I would think.

Yeah. And, and so what's happened really in the last six months is every agency, not just this one, but, but, you know, they, so this company's actually been, you know, like stealing. Not stealing is the wrong word because they're not stealing anything. Gathering clients from other agencies and bringing them to them. It's, you know, that's how competition works.

It's fine. Of course.

So the people that are losing clients are saying, okay, why are people going over there? We need to change our business so that we don't lose people. We can provide that same service. And one of the things that, that's now becoming industry wide amongst agency purchased ads. So I'm not talking about like if you purchased an ad directly from, you know, from us or whatever.

Okay.

But agencies are putting a huge value on qa where they now have people, and this is new in the last year, they now have people that their job, and it might be their only job, is to go and listen to just the ads on every show and go through with a checklist and say, okay, did the host. Because they're all host red ads. Right? Because, you know, because we know that that's where the value is. Right? You don't want to just play a canned spot. And we want to have this host rate ad. So we're leveraging the relationship that the host has with their audience. Great, everybody's good. Okay. But now we've got these people going through and checking off. Okay, did they say this thing in the talking points? Did they say this thing? Did they do it this way? And when that doesn't happen, you get an email from the person that's checking. It rarely is it anyone else. Like, it never goes outside of that realm. It never goes back to the person that purchased the ads. It's just this person that's listening probably to 50 podcast spots or more a day. Right.

You know, interesting.

Checking this list and saying, okay, you missed this item. You have to redo the ad for free, you know, in order to get paid.

Yeah, okay.

And I get that on the surface that sounds, yeah, okay, that sounds reasonable. But the problem is, you know, we're talking about the value of leveraging the relationship that the podcaster has with his or her audience. And the person that's doing the QA has no idea about that relationship and also isn't a listener to that show. I mean, how could they possibly be sure? I mean, these people probably don't want to listen to another podcast again in their lives if they could help it. Right. Because that's all they do all day.

That's your job.

Yeah, but they're not listening to the entire episode. They're just listening to the, whatever 1 to 4 minute ad spot that happens for this particular thing. And did it have all these elements? If not, okay, big red X, you know, reject it. I'll give you an example. We had one. It wasn't on one of my shows, but it was one of the shows we manage. We had one company that in the original set of talking points, there's several companies out there that are doing these meal deliveries at home or whatever, right? Oh, yes, and it's a cool service. And actually they're all cool services and we've had several of them through various different agencies or even directly sponsor various different shows that we have.

Okay.

This one company initially put in their talking points and we have a dietitian on staff. So it's like, okay, so our, you know, dutiful podcasters tells his listeners. Yep. And you know, you should order this food, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They even have a dietitian on staff to, to, you know, make sure that the meal is balanced, etc. Etc. And then, you know, three months in, so they're doing one ad a month, let's say, I don't know exactly what the schedule was, but let's say they were on a once a month ad schedule. And then three months in, we get updated talking points. Now these talking points aren't just like four items. It's usually two to three pages worth of someone trying to describe this. You're not going to read two to three pages in four minutes. That's right. So you go through and you pick the things that you know. And a lot of times when they're updated, you don't really know what they've been updated with. So podcaster gets the update, looks maybe there's like different meals to read or something. Okay, great, got it. Goes through, reads the spot, knows because he's done it before, they've got a dietitian on staff. So he says, yeah, they've got these great meals and you know, they're all balanced out because this company's got a dietitian on staff and now that's rejected because, oh, the talking points were updated to say we have two dietitians on staff. Okay, well, it sounds like it's ridiculous.

Yeah, you're not Going to be able to. It sounds like if they want that level of control, you, maybe you can't do the sponsor type ad. Maybe it actually has to be an ad that's pre recorded. Pre recorded and created and you know, played during the podcast and. Oh, hey, right, real quick. We're gonna have a message from one of our sponsors.

Boom.

And then it's interjected in. Do you think we headed in that direction?

Well, if we are, I won't have any ads of those type on our podcast because I know they're not valuable. Yeah, like my listeners are valuable to me. You folks that listen to this show are. Even though we have yet to have any sponsorships here, I mean, you, there's many reasons that an audience is valuable. You know, selling sponsorships is really only one of them. Like this, right. You talk about, right. It might be the smallest one. And for this show, obviously it's not at the top of our priority list because we haven't pulled any sponsors in. We could, we just haven't. And so it's, you know, about building our personal brands, like you say, and all of that.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So. So we had that and then we had another instance, this company Eero, that, that makes the wireless mesh products. Right. I talk about them all the time. In fact, you and I were just joking before this show that MacGeek, if I wasn't careful, could become Mesh Geek Gab. Right.

I have a euro at my house.

Right. I have it here too, in the most recent spot. And so we talk about it. Whether or not they are a sponsor of that particular episode. We wind up talking about it routinely in and amongst the content, because it's content. And we also talk about the Linksys Velop and the Netgear Orbi. I mean, we don't limit it to just sponsors. And there's a trust relationship. My audience trusts me that when they hear me talking about something that's not part of a sponsor spot, that I am not being paid to talk about it. And I'm talking about it because of the reasons that I say. And I just have to know that my audience trusts me on that.

And you've taken years to develop that trust. Exactly. And you really do have to be careful what you, you know, allow, even from an advertising perspective.

Right.

Because if it's just full of a bunch of junk, you know, it's just one more reason. I mean, it's tough enough to go through the steps, you know, log in the subscribe, download, you know, set it all up. Once you Set it up. It's automatic downloads.

Great.

But you still, like, you have to intentionally, intentionally do it. And you have to intentionally do it each week.

So it's week, right?

Yeah. So. Or. Or each episode, some people, you know.

Right. Daily or whatever.

Single day. So if, if there's a bunch of junk or garbage that, you know, is on the show, people aren't going to listen. I mean, I would argue that in addition to, you know, the numbers of, you know, downloads, there's a, you know, significant amount get downloaded and never listened to.

Never listened. Right.

Oh, that guy. I mean, it's just normal, right?

That's just normal, right? Yeah. So we did the most recent EERO spot and they had some new hardware come out. You know, they. They released version two of their product. And so again, one to four minutes. Like, they're only guaranteed 60 seconds, but I usually wind up going about two, maybe two and a half minutes. And we did the spot and we get a rejection notice for it. Dave didn't talk about his personal experience with this.

Oh, come on.

And that's. It's like, okay, I got it. Yeah, wait a minute. You know, our listeners. Part of the reason I didn't talk about my personal experience is because I didn't want the ad to seem repetitive. And in the past two episodes, you've.

Been talking about it.

Correct. Over and over. And here's the thing. If the people at Eero found out about this, and I, you know, I'm not. I mean, here. I am talking about it here, but this is, you know, yeah, this is a little bit of dirty laundry, but it's, it's an example of what's happening to the industry. I. If the people at Eero found out about that, they would be horrified to know that their relationship with me is being impacted potentially. And it's not like I know everybody's just doing their job. It doesn't, it doesn't really faze me. But, but it worries me. Like in a, In a. In the bigger picture, they would be horrified to learn, like, oh, my God, you're screwing. Like, this guy talks about our stuff all the time. He's one of the industry experts on this subject. And you're gonna mess with him over this tiny little thing like the ad.

Agency is messing with him, Right?

Yes, right, Exactly. And my guess is even the people higher up at the ad agency would be unhappy to learn that this happened. And I, And I've talked to the CEO at the. Not the ad agency I mentioned, but a different one about this Guy that I've known for, like 11 years, we started doing a lot of this stuff together. He started his agency in the podcast world kind of when we started this, and I reached out to him and I said, hey, man, so there's a change I've been seeing, you know.

Sure, sure.

And I'm worried about, like, I don't care. I'm gonna redo the ERO spot. Even if you tell me, don't worry about it. Like, that is not why I'm bringing this up, you know, but hey, like, this worries me because if a year from now everything is so homogenized, we've now taken out the one valuable thing that's unique to this medium. And.

Well, it's. Yeah. And it sounds like is. Is there, you know, like, back in the day when we were buying banner ad spots and there was.

Yes.

There was agreed upon standards of, you know, what ad size, how it played, how many times, all this kind of stuff.

Yeah.

In. And I just don't know the answer to this. Is there a podcast ad standard? And if there's not, why don't you make one?

You know, there is. I mean, it. And it's, it's been. Yeah, it's been developed. But the, the problem is, you know, it's like I'm trying to think how to relate this to banners, and I don't know that there is a way, because banners lack this very specific relationship to leverage. Right.

Yeah.

So it's. I, I mean, really what it comes down to is you need to pay me, the podcaster, or, you know, my representative, whatever. But in the end, what's happening is the sponsor needs to pay the podcaster and trust that the podcaster is going to deliver their message in the way that his or her audience is going to best receive it.

Yes.

And. And that's really where that line needs to end. And, and, you know, it doesn't mean that you have to renew. Right.

Yeah.

Right.

If you're not happy with the results, certainly.

But don't come back. Right.

Yeah, but kind of denigrating the entire, you know, power of the, of the podcaster.

Right. Yes.

Connection with a, you know, albeit narrowly narrow, casted niche. But, you know, there. That's. That's the power of it. And when you start trying to, you know, quantify that so you can check off these little things on your checklist.

Yes.

That. That's probably not going to work to your best advantage, you know, and it, It's, It's a tough one. And I, And I understand where they're coming from, they want to have something to tell their cut, their customers. The ad agency wants to say, oh yeah, they played the ad X number of times and look, they, they covered all these little things. Check, check, check, check, check. And then they're, you know, they, they're off the hook or whatever.

And that's the problem is the, the ad agencies, I feel like, and again, it's, the introduction of radio into this space is absolutely, at least I know correlation is not causation. So.

Sure.

You know, but the timing of that is exactly the same. Right. We were doing great. And then when these radio dollars really started to move in, that's when all this changed. So, and I'm, and it's more than that. Right. Like, like I said, I can, I can see the path of where this came from. Sure. And you're totally right. The ad agencies are self defining their value in what I call low hanging fruit, which is we've, you know, here's something we can put on a spreadsheet that shows, you know, all of these spots were done with all of your boxes checked.

Yes.

And that's their value. That's not actually valuable. It's, it's like Google AdSense tricking every AdWords.

Yes.

Tricking everyone into the click. Right click, the click. It's a really easy thing to measure. So I mean, of course, and this has been the age old problem, you can't measure the success of an ad all the way through. Like you can't measure 100% of the success of any advertising. It's just, it's impossible because we don't have chips in people's brains.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Like that's the thing. Like, okay, yeah, we checked all these boxes, but does that mean that, that Timmy and a thousand other Timmy's bought your product?

No, that's right. Well, you know, it would be, it would be interesting, you know, small business owners out there that are listening to this, you know, tell us what, how you think the, you know, your message would go across on a podcast or you know, and what, what's your thoughts on it to the value of it. Because that's what we're kind of talking about here.

Right? Yeah.

And you know, send us an email feedbackusshow co, share your story. Or maybe you're using, you know, podcasting in some other way that, that we're not talking about here to promote your business. You know, different ways you may have your, you know, if it's a technical thing you're talking about this, or given tips for carpet cleaning or why you should buy a $10 ice cream cone, all that kind of stuff. So it is interesting story, I think.

And I think there's, there's a couple lessons to be learned here. Right. Because number one is be careful of low hanging fruit when you're defining your own value. Because in this case, really where the value is in the agencies is picking the right podcasts right now that's a much harder thing to quantify on a spreadsheet. I get that. Right.

That's right.

But you got to be aware of the low hanging fruit. And then the, and the flip side to that is, you know, we've been having conversations internally at Backbeat about it and I told the guys, I'm like, be prepared, you know, back to the beginning of our conversation here about looking toward the future. I said be prepared that a year from now we will be accepting no ads from ad agencies. Like, I don't know that we'll get there.

Sure. But if they're gonna be like that where, you know, if they can't educate their customers, that to me that seems to be what it is that they're not thinking, okay, we've gotta go forward and explain to them, hey, here's the real value. We're gonna connect with this person who has this very loyal following that trusts them to talk about X and we're going to let them. And maybe you need to do some, hey, let's do some sample run throughs of how we would do this.

Sure.

You know, we'll, we'll do a couple of them for you on the show. If you like something like this, then go for it.

Let's go.

Yeah, Trying to, to, you know, kind of back to what we first started talking about. Valuing your day by little thing.

Oh.

You can check off your list is probably not the best use of your time as a business owner. But as you, you know, the same thing on here, you know, they're not going to be able to just quantify everything and put it in a neat little box and push it out to an accounting department that's going to say, great, there's some value right there.

No, that's totally it. Yeah. And like I said, I've been talking with the founder of one of these agencies and he's like, you were totally right. He's like, we've been thinking about this too, you know, and so we've got a conversation that we're going to have and, and, and it'll, you know, I'm sure. It'll happen over, over many, many weeks or maybe even months because, you know, they've got to, they've got to serve their clients in the way that their clients think they want to be served while they're teaching them to be served in the way that they actually are going to get some value out of it. But yeah, I mean, so now on to us, right? Because what I said to my team was, I said, look, you know, we've got a lot of sponsors that are direct, like, you know, like you.

Sure.

I mean, I don't, I think you bought some podcast ads from us, but whatever.

We did some.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but companies, you know, that are just buying directly with us, those in general, that's fine because we can, you know, we can, we, we see all aspects of the relationship. Right. And so, sure, we have the conversation and it's total transparency.

And you can educate.

That we can educate, correct? Right. Yeah, yeah, but I said, look, you know, if it, if it comes that we like, a podcast can't make enough money, you know, if it's somebody who's a full time podcaster or, you know, even a part time podcaster, if they're not making enough money just from the sponsorships, that's okay. Like to me, with macgeekab, you know, we make whatever it is, X amount per month from macgeekab. If the sponsorships drop off to where that's half of X and I still need to make X. Well, I'm not going to take the, you know, the, the eventual prerecorded reads from the ad agencies just to make my, my monthly numbers what I, my audience is too valuable to me and I know that over time you'll lose them. I will lose them. Right. So what that means is I need to do something else to earn money from that podcast. And maybe what that is is I create extra content, you know, like a, like a book or little web snippets or a daily newsletter or something. And then instead of marketing Eero or Harry's Razors or, you know, whatever, I market my stuff to my audience.

Yeah. Thousand true fans, man.

That's it.

You know, we've talked about that before.

Exactly.

And you have a little subscription model, perhaps?

Yep. Which we do. Yeah, we do. Yep. Yeah.

And I think that's great. And again, you're even fine tuning the, the niche that you have even further from the folks that are interested in that. But then now you've got a subset of them that are actually willing to pay for it, right?

It doesn't need to be all of them. No, no, it doesn't even need to be most of them.

Yeah, like I said, thousand people, ten bucks a month, you know, I mean, those are, those are real numbers that, that impact your life and allow you to focus on keeping that trust that you're talking about. The reason why you're successful is because people, they can sniff it out. They know that you're not always selling. And, you know, and you can't. It doesn't work because the more you push and push and push, you know, it's like that 80, 20 rule of social media, you know, 80% of what you put out there needs to be useful. And then, and then that 20%, you know, hey, by the way, if you're going to spend this money anyway on this product or service, we'd love to have that money.

Yes.

You know, so if you, you know, and you have to protect that, it's extremely valuable. And this is what you're talking about. In an ad agency that doesn't know your listenership, that probably, I mean, on the surface, they care, right? Oh, yeah. We need to find listeners for lawyer podcasts or attorney podcasts, legal, whatever, you know, but they're just trying to slot things in. You're the one that has to protect and nurture that audience, you know, and keep protecting it.

Totally. No, that's it. That's it. And I think I scared the crap out of my team when I said, yeah, we're just going to tell ad agency to pound sand, but, like, we have to do otherwise, you know, we can take the short term money, but it's, it's going, it's going to dry up.

It's going to happen to you anyway. So you might as well be proactive about it and do it on your own terms and explain why, because maybe you'll get somewhere where you'll get a. Maybe a more enlightened ad agency would say, oh, well, that's, that's an interesting take on it. Let's, let's talk more about that.

Let's work together on this. Yeah. Which is all I want. Yeah, right.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, that's it. Yeah.

That's fascinating.

So it's crazy, man.

Yeah, it is. I mean, and we would love to talk to someone or, you know, multiple people if, if your main business is podcasting and you're generating revenue and living on that, come on the show, come talk with us, you know, message us a feedbackusinessshow co. Jump over to our Facebook small business support group at BusinessShow Co Facebook and reach out. We'd love to hear from you, have you on the show and talk to us and tell us how you're doing.

Yeah, fun stuff, man. Really, really good. Thanks for. Thanks for letting me, I don't know, rant, I guess.

Yeah, it's okay.

It's good.

It's good. It impacts your business and so it's. It's interesting and stuff that not everyone thinks about all the time, so.

Right, right.

I'm happy to learn about it.

Yeah, it's fun. It's. Yeah, it's good. All right, folks, like Shannon said, we'll see you at. What is it? BusinessShow co. Right?/ Facebook. Yes, sir.

Got some music.

Yeah. Something's weird. I must have changed the setting. Live that charmed life, folks. We'll see you next week.

Take it easy.