The Podcast Promise Of Value For Value

So today, in the midst of everything, I clicked a button and ordered some supplies for my parents via Amazon. One click, done. It'll be at their place tomorrow. I also been having one of those days. So I got myself some lunch from grubhub. One click, bam. And it got here and has been eaten and was enjoyed tremendously. We are in this connected Internet, where money and finance and physical and delivery and all these things are connected. Yet podcasting in its distributed nature, podcasting in its position, doesn't quite have that yet. We're still in a situation right now where if someone wants a podcast, a premium podcast, it might be different on Spotify than it is on Apple. And I know some people are working on that, and we'll chat about that in later episodes, but the fact of the matter is it's a little bit of a mess. And I want to chat about that because there's a promise of value for value that is really interesting that we want to chat about. But first, we need to understand that podcasting is, for lack of a better term, open source. And I'm sure some of the nerds will complain about this term, but the fact of the matter is, Adam Curry, Dave Weiner came up with this concept, came up with this idea, basically gave it to the world. Everybody embraced, and Apple did their part and Spotify did their part, and Overcast did their part, and Libsyn did their part, and Blueberry did their part, and all these people did their parts, and they did the best they could to work together, but it's still kind of distributed. That's still kind of a little bit crazy. And what's interesting is, over the course of the year, with Apple's issues, shall we say, and some of the other things that have happened to the Internet, many podcasters are getting a little frustrated, and they're finding themselves in a position where they're thinking to themselves, maybe we can do better. Maybe we should do something better. Maybe podcasting is owed something better. And enter podcasting 2.0. Kind of the next standard for it. Now, I'm gonna put everything up at podcast report. Thepodcastreport.com value for. For value. Not one of these short number guys. And we'll link to everything I'm chatting about here, including the specifications for 2.0. But basically, Curry and some other folk in the podcasting space are trying to figure out what do we need to do to take podcasting to the next step. And they've got some interesting ideas. I'm going to be looking at some of these things they're thinking about in future episodes and we'll explore it deeper. And I think one of the things that's really exciting is the ability to do it with our client base so that we cannot just kind of do it in the lab, but tested in real life, if you will. So again, thepodcastreport.com value for value, we'll have this episode and things that we extend out as we do. Funny enough, I don't get to tell this story enough in terms of Adam Curry and those of us in the old school podcaster types who really appreciate him for having started podcasting, I appreciate him for an even kind of different level. I grew up in Germany. My folks worked for the US military. I was there in Germany during the Cold War. No MTV Europe to speak of, at least for me. Yet I did have something really funny. I had a Dutch show called Muchmusic with a young VJ called Adam Curry who later moved over to America. But I knew Adam Curry before Adam Curry. It was even Adam Curry. And it has been fun. I wish I had videotape of that because I think it would be fantastic. Should probably look to see if YouTube has it. They probably do. So we have this new thing in podcasting and I'm doing it on the podcast report and gonna be doing it for all of our cl. But the concept is value for value, and the concept is basically this. You get a podcast client. Now, not all the podcast clients support it, but the idea here is that we make this so viable, we make this so valuable that all the podcast clients support it. So none of the ones that you heard have. But right now I'm using a podcast app called PodFriend that supports it. And what it is is you keep a little bit of money in your podcatcher, in this case, podfriend, and you distribute a little bit of money. Cryptocurrency. We'll chat about it. It doesn't need to be as complicated as some people want to make it and just gives a little bit of money, drips a little bit of money to the people that you listen to, you know, and if you think about it, it's not that different from, say, Netflix. You buy your Netflix subscription and you take the money that you put into Netflix over a month, and Netflix kind of distributes some of that money to all the different players inside of, you know, all the different content producers inside of Netflix. Same idea. Inside of podcasting, you listen to 20 episodes of X, 10 episodes of Y, and three episodes of Z. The one that you listen to the 20 episodes of should get more, and it drips. And you've got the idea, if they did something really cool or really fantastic, you've even got the idea of the boost, click a button, send them a bonus. And because it's crypto, and because it's through this thing called the Lightning Network, it's fast, hence the name Lightning, but also kind of independent of everything else. It's not going through the banks, it's not going through these people who seem to want to track everything in life. It's just between you and. And the podcaster, and it's really kind of cool. So this is the podcast report@the podcastreport.com I haven't done an episode in a while. The podcast report has always been a place to test what we're doing, test new tech, play with things. And this episode is definitely, definitely part of that. If you were to pick up the podcast report now on any of the podcasts that support Value for Value, you'd be able to support the show. You would be able to send Boost the show. Now, I'm not asking for that. This is not something I want. As a matter of fact, any boosts that come to the show, we're going to send to other shows and kind of get some of that money circulating around. But the fact of the matter is, it's there. I've set up one of our clients and we'll update this episode again. The podcastreport.com value for value. We'll update this with the clients that we have put in this exchange. The podcast report needs to come back deeper. Some of the mistakes that have happened from Apple this year and some of the mistakes that have happened in the industry this year, and some of the issues in dealing with COVID and whatnot really dictates that I do a little bit more. So there will be more of the podcast coming about. Anyway, let's go back to this Value for Value thing. So what is it? It's paying by crypto automatically. It's using this thing called the Lightning Network. And yeah, there's a lot of content. I'm not going to walk you through how to do this. I'll link to everything on the webpage associated with this. But once you have these coins inside of your podcast app, it drips them automatically to any shows that take it. And if you really get excited, you can click the boost button and send some money right to that show. Percentages of a penny. You can adjust it to be whatever you want. This is, again, a thing that only works in mass. But it's interesting. It starts initially with bitcoin. Now, I know probably statistically speaking, 20% of you really love the Bitcoin. The other 80% of you have no idea what the heck I'm talking about. And you've seen things where, like, give us $200 and we'll give you 10 in Bitcoin. I found the cheapest way to get bitcoin. It's a thing called Cash App. I've got a link to it at the website. If you use my link, they give you five bucks back in Bitcoin. When you put like $5 in there or something like that. It's a way to get five bucks free. I'll link to that. I'll link to podfriend, and I'll link to the articles for setting up your podcast. And you can actually play in that game. So what? It doesn't hurt. It's not that hard. Kridlin over at POD News. Congrats, Kridlin. Good job. Kridlin did an article about how to do it. We got things set up really, really quickly. Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting. Dave tried to do a big zoom call to get others on it, and others were slowly embracing it. But once it gets bigger, once more and more people start using it. You know, there was a time in podcasting, funny enough, I dropped my youngest daughter off to college about three and a half weeks ago at the Ontario airport, home of the first podcast expo, which was, funny enough, so big that when the expo was over, we all met in the lobby of the Ontario Airport Marriott. The airport's got a little bit bigger since then, and podcasting's gotten a little bit bigger since then. But things do start out small. So that's what it is. It's there. Links to it. Everything you need to know is there. So what? Well, it doesn't hurt. It's not that hard. And it's an interesting way to track one potential model. To be honest, most of my clients, most of our clients make their revenue not from little tiny donations, but from the promotion of goods and services that they sell. So I don't see this being something that any of my clients will get that excited about. But we are setting up everybody for it because I think it's important to look at it and track it and go from there. The role of boosts inside this idea is you have the slow drip, but if there's something that really excites them, there's a Way to send a tip right at that moment in the podcast that they know what really gets people exciting. That's an interesting tracking mechanism that will play out. The other thing that's interesting, this value for value exchange, is that it's going to cut out as much of the middlemen as possible. When I started podcasting, I built the first premium podcasting platform. I didn't build it, I paid for it to be built, managed its development, if you will. And all three of my clients, thank you, Dan, were happy with it, but the world wasn't ready for it yet. And right now, as we do premium podcasting in Apple, which they rolled out pathetically, and Spotify, which is just more complicated than it needs to be in some of the other places, it's just still not simple, it's still not elegant. And this value for value exchange, I think has the option to be more simple and elegant than everything else. So it's not the model for everyone, but it is a fascinating model that needs to be examined. So what do you do with this? Thepodcastreport.com value for value? We will keep this episode, all the links, your $5 of free Bitcoin and all that good stuff. And then anybody that we're playing with, any of the articles, and as things grow, if there's enough interest, maybe we'll do a webinar and walk everybody through it. This show is on it. We're setting up our click clients on it. Frank Kern was the first one to do it. All linked there as well. Get yourself some bitcoin and then look into resources, look into this and honestly let me know what you think. Finally, the last thing that I'd suggest simply is thank Adam Curry for this one. And if you haven't thanked Adam Curry for podcasting as a whole, thank you for that. It's been a really fascinating part of my life and that long haired guy who gave me my music videos in Germany when I was a teenage boy, boy has made for a pretty exciting career. So I'll make it possible for you on the website to thank Curry as well. It's been the podcast report, it's been a long time coming. Got more episodes coming for you, but I want to get this done and get this out. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye.