What Are You Going To Do When Google Wants A Different Feed Than Apple? - An Interview With Rob Walch - The Podcast Report

What are you going to do when Google wants a different feed than itunes? It's the Podcast report, episode 121. Show notes, links, conversation and more@the podcastreport.com 1, 2, 1. This episode, brought to you by how to podcast training@howtopodcasttraining.com who else wants to learn how to podcast? The Podcast Partnership Way more details again@howtopodcasttraining.com this episode is a solid interview with Rob Walsh from Libsyn. Now, those of you who have followed me over the years, you know that there have been other hosts, there have been other players, there have been other options, but Libsyn has been in an interesting place and a Their steadfastness, their longevity, their willingness to be in this since day one is fascinating and I appreciate that. And the model they've had for you don't pay for the bandwidth, you pay for the hosting. So you know how to budget. I've also appreciated that. But more importantly and something that I really want to focus on on this episode and in this interview with Rob is, is that Libsyn has a plan. Libsyn has a strategy. Libsyn has an understanding of podcasting that is bigger than podcasting is right now. So, yes, they're the oldest one in the game. Yes, they've been around forever. Yes, they don't have any of that new fancy, flashy, shiny stuff that some of the others have. But as you'll see in this interview, they have a take and a view on podcast hosting that I just simply can't find anywhere else. Now, is this a commercial for Libsyn? No, this is an interview with Rob. And this is an examination of ideas such as destinations. This is an examination of ideas such as forking the feeds. This is an idea to what happens when somebody actually legitimately goes against itunes for podcast directory and podcast hosting. Yes, we've had some people dip their toe in the water, and who knows if itunes will ever give any market share to anyone else, but Google's trying and stitching doing things. And who knows, one day Microsoft might pull something off Amazon. What are they going to do? We don't know. You got to have a strategy for that. And what's neat about Libsyn is inside of what they've done, they have a strategy for that. Their concept of destinations makes it possible for you to publish different things at different places with the same podcasting. And I just thought it would be something really important to point out to you, the podcaster. So I go along with Rob not as long as the last couple of interviews, but It's a good 45 minutes. It's a good, solid, complete look at what you're going to want from a hosting platform. It's a good, solid, complete look at what you want to think of when you're thinking of long term with your podcast. If you're going to do real business with your podcast, this requires that you have the tools, the ability to do real business. And this is more than the ability to redirect a feed if things go south, although that's important. This is an understanding of the industry, where it's going, how to plan for it, how to respond to it. And I think that's what they've done over there. So we're going to go with Rob. Let me give you a couple of things if you want to comment on this episode. ThePodcastReport.com 121 if you want to do the social thing. ThePodcastReport.com Twitter ThePodcastReport.com Facebook if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do so. It's subscription that makes podcasting so powerful. ThePodcastReport.com iTunes ThePodcastReport.com Stitcher LePodcastReport.com Google love to have the interaction with you, love to have you as a subscriber. But more importantly, I would love to and I'm going to introduce you to, to accompany a thought process and approach to podcasting that is about the real business of podcasting that I think is a little bigger than some of the things you've heard before. So without further ado, let's get to Rob. It is Rob Walsh from Libsyn. How are you doing, Rob?

I am doing excellent, Paul. Thank you for having me on the show.

Rob, how long have been with LibSync?

It'll be 10 years in August.

Exactly. That's the first point. Libsyn has been around for a long time. I remember the first time I heard of Libsyn and it was funny because Libsyn came with this concept to podcasting at the very, very beginning that if your podcast got huge and back then everybody had dreams of getting huge. They still have dreams, but back then we were a bit more ignorant. At least the idea was that if you got huge, you wouldn't be discounted for it, you wouldn't be charged for it, you wouldn't be surprised by it. Your bill at Libsyn was going to be exactly the same regardless of the traffic and the bandwidth. You did now, in the beginning, that caused some. Some issues and some times, and there were people certainly taking advantage of that. But Libson survived, you know, and robbed nearly a decade, but they've been going longer than that. I remember when Rob joined Ipson.

Yeah, I mean, I joined Libsyn almost 10 years ago, and I was podcasting with Libsyn for two and a half years at that point that I joined.

Bingo.

So Libsyn's been around over 12 years now. They were the first podcast host before there was an Odeo, before there was an itunes, before there was any of the other stuff, there was any other companies in podcasting. There was Libsyn before there was an article in USA Today about podcasting. It was 2004, there was a Libsyn.

There we go. So I was at Gnome Decks, which is a big nerd show, and I.

Can'T remember where I met you.

Yeah, exactly.

2005.

Okay, that's what I thought it was. 2005. It was gnome decks. It was right before 4th of July weekend. Adam Curry. Now, I'd gotten Todd Cochran's book, which was absolutely hilarious because Todd's book never mentioned itunes. Now, my first book never mentioned the iPhones. So we all have these things. And it wasn't that Todd didn't write a chapter about itunes. It was just that at that point, it wasn't the option. Now, that wasn't how we got our podcasts. So Todd's handing out his book, Adam Curry is doing his 200th episode or something like that. And there's this company called feedburner, which is for all sakes and purposes dead. But, but feedburner handled feeds. And right before we all went home, Apple made an announcement. Apple needed some new things. Apple needed some, had some requirements for their RSS feed. And the beautiful thing was because feedburner was handing my feed. I can't remember the guy's name. Maybe you do. VP of feedburner was sitting.

Rick.

Rick. Yes, Rick. Rick sitting next to me. And I look at Rick and I go, you got a busy weekend, don't you, Rick? And Rick looks at me, goes, yep, I gotta call everybody into the office. And he did. They had to handle the feed. And I looked around the room at all these podcasters that were coding their own feed or using these third party feed programmers or that type of thing. And I just said, oh my goodness, somebody else handling my feed is the greatest thing in the world. So Rob goes, I'm sorry. Rick goes home and has a lousy fourth of July weekend, I go home and have a fantastic Fourth of July weekend. Enter Libsyn. As Libsyn continues to grow, continues to get big, one of the great things is Libsyn handles the feed. It's part of what they do. And I've always been the proponent of, you got to let the computers do the things that the computers do. Nobody writes in postscript for their printer. They write in Microsoft Word or Notepad or something like that. They'd let the computer handle it. Coding your own feed is absolutely ridiculous. And so Libsyn handles the feed, and there were others who handled the feed. Things got interesting. I do the first copy of how to Podcast, and the book goes well. And at that point, I wasn't maybe as tired and as bitter as I am today, I guess, but. But what had happened was I had put all the hosts in the first version of the book. I was trying to be a good netizen, trying to give all the options, trying to be the good journalist. But what happened was I would get email after email. I'd get call after call. I'd get Facebook post after Facebook. Why did you recommend X? It's a mess. Why did you do this? This is a mess. Why did you do this? This is a mess. And it was really interesting because they had something very not in common with each other. None of them were about Libsyn. They were about all the other hosts. Nobody complained about Libsyn. Now, there were a couple who said things like, you know, is there a cheaper ops on Libsyn than the $5 account? You know, those types of things, whatever. But nobody complained about Libsyn. And then Rob and I had a conversation that really rocked my world. And it was something that really helped me understand what the difference is between Libsyn and everybody else. Now, Rob is. And this isn't going to be about this. On this episode, Rob. Rob is one of the biggest proponents in the world of if you call it anything other than a podcast, you're a moron. And Rob is. Will die with a tombstone that says Podcast, not Netcasts. I mean, he is a massive proponent of this industry as an evangelist, hall of Famer, whole nine yards. Thank you for your service, my friend, but go ahead.

I don't think I would waste the space with the word Netcast. I'll just say it's a podcast. Stupid.

There we go. But things started to happen. The app industry started to happen. The websites started to happen. Social started to happen. And Libsyn came up with this realization that we could Send our podcasts to multiple destinations. We could send them to Twitter, we could send them to Facebook, we could send them to itunes. We might send them somewhere else. We could send them to an app. And there was this option inside of Libsyn, and nobody else was doing this, at least that I know of, where you could go in and go, okay, this goes to the feed, but this doesn't. You know, maybe my app will enable a special download of a PDF that you get only for the app. And that could be either a reason to get people to download the app, that could be a reason to get people to pay for the app. I mean, when you first launched your app, just by doing bonuses, you had some crazy conversion. What was it?

Well, my conversion rate was well over 20% early on, and I've seen some people. Marc Maron, at one point in time, his audience for his app was 50% of his downloads.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely fantastic. So he came with this idea of destinations, and that was fun in the app versus podcast world. But then things started to pop up. Google comes up and says, hey, we're going to play the podcast game. Now, we've done other episodes on Google's podcast game, and whether it's even worth an episode is another conversation. But Google is Google. They're tremendous. And at one point they might go, hey, we want things different than you do at itunes. Spotify is in the game. Spreaker's in the game. Iheartradio is in the game. Who else is in the game?

Well, soon to be Alexa, Amazon. So you're going to have that in the game. Tunein, as you mentioned, you've got YouTube as a destination. So we have a lot of different destinations. And Tumblr and Blogger and Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, these are all different destinations that we have available. So there's a lot of different places you can push content out. But Spotify, Google, Play Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Stitcher, iTunes, Itunes obviously, is the big dog, bigger than everybody else combined. There are a lot of different places that you can send content out to.

These days, and that becomes interesting because you can have strategies for this multiple distribution place. If you only have one feed, then either everybody gets it or nobody gets it. If you have multiple feeds, you can do different things. You can do, hey, the show notes in PDF on the app. You just have to either download my app for free and help me in the charts, or maybe pay for the app and help with the monetization of the podcast. You can do. Was it the nerdist that was doing things early or what?

Yeah, the Nerdist, when Spotify launched, Libsyn was the only podcast hosting partner at the launch, but there was some other podcast networks that were part of that, and Nerdist was one of them. And what they did with Spotify is they made an agreement. They would release content early to Spotify, a few hours early to Spotify before they released it anywhere else. And that got them prime promotion from Spotify at the launch event and in Spotify app itself. So that's one of the things you can do, and that's one of the things I tell people. One of the advantages of having multiple destinations is you can do special content for different destinations and work out an arrangement to get promoted. The other thing is you can have different artwork. It's great that your show was a top 100 podcast in iTunes. You don't want to flash that on your artwork that's in Spotify. And someone did that. Someone uploaded their artwork that had the banner that said itunes 2015 pic. And the guys at Spotify are like, can you get them to change that artwork? I'm like, oh, yeah, Why'd you upload this artwork? Upload your other. So they uploaded their old artwork in there without mentioning itunes, and Spotify was happy. So that's one of the key reasons. And then you mentioned the other reason to have multiple destinations, and the one I always tell people between itunes and Google is why would you put the same feed in Google that you put in itunes? Eventually, you know, Google and itunes are going to disagree, and then you have to pick which parent is getting a divorce. When they get a divorce, which parent you got to go with. And so eventually you're going to need two feeds for Google anyway. It's just a matter of if, not when.

Well, and it becomes fascinating because, you know, before you and I started this recording, you know, we talked about, you know, Everybody who loves WordPress, but the deeper they get in, the more programmers they have on staff. Now, someone can certainly have the ability to give Google something different and give Spotify something different and give, you know, iheartradio something different. But then it requires, you know, a feed nerd on staff and maybe different feed nerds with different capabilities and understandings and relationships with some of the other places. You know, you guys have been the first to launch for a lot of these, and it's been because you've handled it. And I've had this pleasure to just, oh, look, new destination. Click you. Yes, I'll have that destination. And then you ask for three or four pieces of information that that destination wants. Certainly fair to me. I prefer to speak for myself, not you. I fill out the form and bam, I've got myself a destination. This is huge. This is bigger than this idea that I make a feed and I spray that feed at the world. Are you seeing this used? Are you seeing this embraced? What are you seeing @lipsync?

First, let me say this. The RSS feed is the most important thing. I mean, that is where the majority of your downloads are going to come from, your RSS feed. But that doesn't mean you have to have the same RSS feed for everybody. You can have a destination where we have customized feeds. We've got the one that's for itunes, we've got one for Google Play Music, one for iHeartRadio, one for Spotify. We publish out to SoundCloud. There's a bunch of different places we push out to. Some of them are actually pushing the contents like SoundCloud and YouTube and Facebook. The content's getting pushed out out there. Others are pulling from the feed like Spotify and iHeartRadio. And iHeartRadio doesn't even rehost it. So they actually just pulling from the feed and just populating their directory like itunes does and now Stitcher does. And then you have Google Play Music and Spotify that actually pull one copy and then re encode and redistribute. But the point is they all have different requirements. If you look at our iHeartradio destination and you go in there to that destination, go set it up. There is personal information about you, the host. You can have up to 10 different hosts, all their Facebook and Instagram and other links for each of the hosts, plus images for the host, plus show information and show Instagram and Facebook, all this stuff that you wouldn't want to throw that in your regular RSS feed. But iHeart is asking for it so that they can populate iHeart to look how iHeart wants iHeart to look at. Just like iTunes had special tags, iHeart has special requirements. Spotify has special requirements. So we try to customize and make it easy and where possible, like with iHeart. And if you get chosen for Spotify, you don't even have to go to them to submit. You just go into Libsyn and you fill in the information, you click accept the terms and service and your show gets sent in and submitted to them. Now, Spotify is still curating, so it's still where they have to first accept you before we can turn on your destination, but iHeart, if you're been with Libsyn for two months, the iHeart destination is already available for you and just go in, fill it out, click Accept Terms and boom, within two weeks, your show is an iHeart. You don't have to do. You don't have to go anywhere else and submit it. So it makes it easy. The Alexa one, when we announced that fully, there's a little bit of stuff that has to be done there on Alexa that if you weren't going through us, you'd have to figure out how to write a skill. You still have to get your own Amazon account. They want you to get an account, but we're going to help you on that and then we're going to write the skill for you and then automatically publish it into your Alexa account. So we're going to make it what would otherwise be a really, really complicated process. Trust me, we got the first five set up. If you have an Alexa echo right now, just say alexa Enable the Tim Ferriss show or Alexa Enable Hardcore History and you can see examples of the scale. And that's a first gen skill. We'll have additional features, but it was fun getting those written. I tell you, most podcasters that couldn't tell you the difference between RSS and css, they don't want to deal with the skill. They don't want to deal with WordPress. Most podcasters, I think one of the most annoying myths out there is that you need a WordPress site to podcast. I hate that most people don't want to deal with that and pay $250 an hour to have someone manage the WordPress site. And the one thing you never hear anyone talk about, less than 5% of your audience comes from your website anyway. And the bigger the show, the lower that percentage is.

So there are two types listening to this point, the podcast, some are going, yeah, this is Libsyn. I get this, Rob. Nothing new here. And for those of you, we'll talk to some insight later. There are others. You're going, paul, I don't get the big deal. And this is important because I want to take you to the big deal. The majority of the hosting platforms, alternatives out there, if they provide feeds, they provide one. And yes, Google will take that one feed right now. And yes, Google slurps it in and makes it work, but that could change. I don't know the particulars of the other sites, but I know Stitcher will take the feed, I know Tunein will take the feedback. So the majority of them, the quote unquote big guys right now are there and you can sort of hack and slash your way into this. But a specific strategy to distribute all these things automatically and the means by which to do it and to track is really, really interesting. Most of, well, this show, the first place it's released is by Twitter and it's done with a destination inside of Libsyn. And I will get four or five dozen downloads of that thing from my Twitter audience before I even have placed the blog posting that has the show notes on a very annoying WordPress blog. Like Rob said. But that's different. And so I have this tool set with Libsyn that simply isn't available anywhere else. And it's a toolset I can use to minor advantages now. I mean, one dumb stat. Everybody knows I do a lot of stuff with YouTube. I auto publish my audio podcast to YouTube directly through LibSync. And one of the funny things Rob talked about album art. I give them a special album art that looks good on itunes because nothing looks sillier on itunes than a square piece of album art. Go ahead.

Yeah, I used to manually for YouTube, I used to manually convert my audio to video. And at 3 in the morning, now I'm at 3:45 in the morning by the time I'm all done.

Yeah, exactly.

And when you're getting five hours of sleep or four hours of sleep a night, you getting an extra 45 minutes percentage wise is a pretty good deal.

Exactly. And what's great is I now go into the stats. Now are masses of people flocking to YouTube to consume my podcast? No, but when it was a button I set up once back when Rob and I had this conversation. It's a bunch of fun listens. Here's the funny thing. I go in and I look at the stats and YouTube stats will tell you how long people consume the video. And even though, yes, it's only audio with the picture, it's still technically a video. And what's Funny is a 30 minute episode of the podcast report will be consumed longer at YouTube than similar 30 minute videos. So I've got another distribution plan. I don't know, Maybe it's their YouTube Red Guys, I don't know where it is. What do you think, Rob?

YouTube Red is one of the things whenever I see people talking about. Oh, people don't listen to podcasts, they don't want to listen in YouTube. YouTube Red is the one thing people don't seem to understand what it is and the importance of YouTube Red. And that is it allows you to play audio in the background. YouTube, people don't realize, is the second platform for audio listening. It's the second largest platform for audio listening in the world. More and more people listen to music on YouTube than almost any other platform out there. So people are used to consuming the audio side of things. And, and I'll put it this way. Would you spend five minutes one time to potentially pick up 10 listeners every episode going forward?

There we go.

Would you spend 45 minutes every episode to maybe pick up five listeners and probably not. But if you only had to spend five minutes one time setting it up and possibly pick up at least five to 10 every episode, you'd do it. I mean, no matter what size the audience, because you never know who the five or ten are. And I had one of my episodes go viral on YouTube When I interviewed Aaron Menke for Podcast 411, I had thousands of listens on YouTube, which I never would have expected. Now because Aaron, people were searching for Aaron Menke and they were coming across my interview with him from podcast 411 and they were coming across it on YouTube. That's where they were searching. That's where they were. And I think the best way to put our philosophy with destinations is we want to help everyone, not just the big shows, but everyone, big and small, be everywhere except Pandora, because Pandora doesn't get it. But everywhere but Pandora, if you listen to audio somewhere, whoever that person is, your podcast should be available to them. And that is what our philosophy is, has been, and will continue to be. We want it for everybody. And then if you leave Libsync, we have the tools in place so that you can redirect. Nobody's ever been locked in or lost their audience or lost control of their show that hosted with Libsyn. Not in 12 plus years. There's FUD out there. Some people try to say that, oh, you got to control your feed. Controlling your feed is having it in a place that if you do leave, has the tools in place for you to put the redirects and or them to put in a permanent redirect. And Lipson has that lips. And again, we're not about locking anyone in ever. We're not potomatic.

Well, no, no, no. And to be fair here, the there are a number of listening who are now saying, oh, Paul, this is why you asked me to move over to Libsyn. And I want to be clear that you're departure strategy, or capacity I guess is the better term, is Not a checkbox somewhere on the website. That means people will go first to the original place and then out to you. It's working in the confines of RSS to truly move things alongside so that, you know, eventually Libsyn just isn't part of the story anymore if somebody decides to leave and then of course, if somebody decides to come back. So it's not a trick, it's not a hack. It's a feature that a number of the other platforms have not provided for. Pick whatever reason you want, but have not provided. Is that pretty accurate?

There's four levels, four things that you can do with regards to the feed and redirect and moving audience. And we have all four. First one is we have the ability for the producer to go in at any time and add a redirect. You know, 302 redirect. They can just go in and put the new URL at any point in redirect. We have the ability at any point for producer to go in and add the itunes new feed tag. That's the second item. We have the ability beyond that. Before those, you can bring in a custom URL. So when you sign up for an account, you don't have to be tii.libsyn.com it can be acstartup411.com RSS so you can bring in your own custom URL from day one. And then finally, if you do decide to leave, you can ask us to put in a permanent one time redirect for your account and we'll just basically we mothball your account. We put a permanent redirect in for a one time $25 fee and that's it. And forever, for as long as the life of your show, that redirect will be in there. So we give all four of those options and I think between all of them combined, there is. You don't have to ever worry about losing your audience.

So $2 more a month on the standard account. I can have the feed be my name, dot com RSS and then, you know, I could leave tomorrow, not even tell you. But because I control the domain name, I'm good to go all the way through to the insert of the Tag to the $25. What's the redirect number?

$25. One time you hit up support and say, okay, I'm leaving you guys and please put in a permanent redirect to this new URL.

And that's really for people who have a feed listed in a book of feeds somewhere, that type of thing. Because an existing audience, you do the feed redirect or you do the tag, they'll come with. This is for really archaic stuff. Right.

And it's just one time. That's it. Yeah. And again, we hope you stay with us, but we're not going to force you to stay with us. You know, you stay. We want it to be a relationship you want to be in, not that you're forced to be in.

So feed management. Libsyn does it. Libsyn has the headaches that our buddy Rick had. The opportunities and the options out there. No, nothing right now screaming that you have to have two different feeds, but the opportunity of putting special things at a special time or at a special date or sending a PDF to the app or that type of thing. Fascinating right now, but projecting ahead to what's coming in the future destination is really huge. Another thing played at. And I can't remember if they were at Gnome decks. I know some of the players were, but podcast ad insertion, stitching of new content. We had our friends. Do they still exist as a legal entity?

Kiptronic.

That was the one I was thinking of. I'm thinking the one that Gohagen was involved with. Pot.

Oh, yeah. They were second, but yeah, they were going to do some. I forgot what the name of this was, but yeah. People, one of the things that is funny, you want to see bad writing and people that don't do research is just find any article that talks about ad insertion being something new.

You'll see.

They'll talk about Art 19 and their ad insertion and it's some new technology and. No, I mean kiptronics did it 12 years ago. Libsyn's been doing it for 10 years. There's nothing new about ad insertion. I agree to some degrees with what Dan mentioned about the downside of ad insertion.

You're speaking to Dan Benjamin. Last week's interview or. Or interview 118. I can't remember what order this one's going in, but the Dan Benjamin interview.

Right, right. He mentioned that for advertising, ad insertion isn't always the best. I would agree. In many cases that's true, especially if it's programmatic and you don't have any say in what's going in. I can tell you this. Advertisers that have come along and bought ad inserted campaigns, 10% return. Advertisers that come along and buy campaigns, whether it's host red, 90% return. And that's because the host red ads are so much better. But there are places where ad insertion makes sense. And it's not just about advertising, it's more about promotion. Insertion.

Yes, yes. Dave Ramsey, let's chat really quick. For those. There are the nerds in the audience who are going, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are those who don't know what this means so can speak to it really quickly. We can Dynamically update an MP3 to put more content into the MP3. You can do at the beginning, you could do it at the end. You could even do it if you have a specific time slot in there where you want to do that. So you could take content that is five years old, give it a new commercial. You could take content, you know what you said about the promotions, absolutely huge. You could take a podcast that still has, for some reason listing in different directories and people still go to it, let people know, hey, although this podcast is five years old, you can head on over here. Anyway, you're about to say Dave Ramsey, let's talk about Dave. What's Dave.

Dave Ramsey, Joyce Meyer. What they have done with the ad insertion is they have live events in different places around the country. And what they'll do is they will put a special pre roll or post roll ad for Chicago saying, hey, events coming up in Chicago. Or they'll put it for the DMA in Kansas City saying, hey, there's gonna be an entree leadership day in Leawood. Come to this event. And they'll only put it in the areas where the event's going to be so they're not annoying all their audience. And they're saying, you know, they're getting more focused, hey, Kansas City ins, come see us. We're going to be live in your event. When you hear that, hey, Kansas City ins, you are more likely to listen to the fact that they just customize it to you than saying, hey, we're going to be in going to have events in the next six weeks. We're going to have events in Kansas City, Denver, Chicago and Atlanta. And you might just tune out soon as they start hearing that you might miss your city. But when they say Kansas City ins right at the beginning, boom, you hit it. You understand it, you know, it's your market and no one else hears that other than you. And I was at the entree leadership event when I was here in Kansas City and I was asking everyone, I'm like, hey, how did you hear about this event? Because I was just curious. Everyone to a T said they heard about it through the podcast. Everybody I asked at the event, not one person said, I heard it on Dave's radio show, which is nationally syndicated and broadcast locally. All of them said they heard about it on the podcast. So you have a local event. Ad insertion is great for the geotarget part of. Doesn't have to be about just people think it's advertising.

No, no.

That's the worst part of ad insertion.

Yeah, agreed, agreed. And you do this as a company and you do this under the Libsyn Pro line, which is not the unlimited bandwidth. There's just some plain. As you dynamically create MP3s on the fly. There's just some. Some. Yeah, some power associated with that. And you've got to charge for it and bandwidth. And I want to chat to a bit of a hack on the bandwidth side of things, because people miss this. You charge a certain amount per month. Rob, how do people get ahold of you if they wanted to do Libsyn Pro?

Very simple. Email me Rob. Rob as in robert.com so robson.com and I can give you the information. We have two services. We have libsyn.com, which is more for the indie podcasters, nonprofits, churches, that kind of thing. And then we have Libsyn Pro, which is meant for the more serious media companies. That's where the HBOs of the world host their podcasts. And Consumer Reports, even Amazon hosts their podcasts with us rather than on Amazon. S3. I always love people like, why should we use you over S3? Well, even Amazon doesn't eat their own dog food.

They host with us the cobbler shoes. Yes, that service. And I appreciate what you said. Yeah, ads are not the opportunity, it's the updates. It's the timely stuff. You know, I mean, imagine if you were listening to a podcast from four years ago and it started with, hey, before you go into this Valentine's Day, you know, that type of thing is interesting stuff. I'm moving a client over that right now. And the plans we have are fantastic. And I know the reach is going to be beautiful. And what's wonderful is the CEO, the coo, the guy who runs the numbers on this, you know, he called me with the classic, well, what is this going to cost me thing. You know, right now we're only paying X, you know. You know, the price is going to go up, Paul, and it's going to be based on bandwidth. Well, the beautiful thing was the COO who actually runs numbers. Once we got it down to a per stream cost, per download cost, he just laughed because this guy is used to paying for stamps. This is a guy, he's used to paying for feeding people coffee at an event. You know, when it gets to a per download piece, it gets funny, which speaks to the production of your MP3 file because you charge for the service and then you also charge for the bandwidth because of the service it has to go through. So the smaller the file that you make in a dynamically inserted product, the less it's going to cost you. Could you speak to that?

Well, yeah. I mean, one of the mistakes I think people make is they think that if your file is encoded at some high bit rate, that's going to somehow improve the your show. It's spoken word audio that people are listening through earbuds. No one's going to tell the difference of a spoken word audio file that's encoded at 64 or 96kbps versus 1 that's at 320kbps. So if you look at the big shows, you'll see the big shows, for many reasons are encoding the files down at 64 and 96. 96 is the highest. If you're an audiophile, you're really anal about your audio quality. 96. Anything above 96, you. You are kidding yourself and thinking there's any advantage to it. You're just costing your end user money for their bandwidth, for their data plan, because everybody's listening on mobile devices and you're hurting yourself if you're on Libsyn Pro because of the bandwidth costs. So, yeah, just get your files down and then the ad insertion part of it, we have a little fee that we charge for the ad insertion. It's not much on the Libsyn Pro side. That's more just to keep everybody from doing it all the time. But whether you're doing it for promos or you're doing it for advertising, it's a minimal fee.

It works. It works. Where are you on the. Now, some of you, the nerds are going on 96k. Interesting. 64k. Interesting. Some of you are saying, I don't know what this means. For those of you who doesn't know what it means, here's the deal. If your guy does it right, if your gal does it right, it's going to cost you less when you step it into this Future. Rob says 6496, where are you on the mono or stereo question? Might as well get that out there.

Mono. I'm a believer in mono. There's no reason to be stereo. You could do joint stereo, but even there, there's some issues with some players I found if you go 64kbps mono 44.1khz sample rate that works fine mp3 and don't do 48k. I can always tell when someone comes in from the video world or old time professional audio guy and they do 48khz for the sample rate. That causes the chipmunking on a lot of players out there and some of the Android devices definitely didn't like it. So go with 44.1khz mono 64 for spoken word if you want to go 96 go 90 if you're really anal 96 but really 64. And the nice thing is 64 it's easy to remember. It's half a meg a minute. It's that simple.

There we go. That makes sense. So who else is doing this.

Ad insertion? Yeah, like I said, there's a bunch of new people that have come along that are doing the ad insertion art 19 audioboom acast but I don't know if you have access to the tools and what you can do with those guys and how much of the control some of them they have the ad insertion but only if they get to put their ads in your content and you don't really in most of those cases you don't have much say in those cpm. And this is where me and Dan would agree. Ad inserted ads that are coming in. From a programmatic point of view, the CPM rates crap and getting crappier every day and the ads are horrible. And now you have people that are basically putting bad ads in that are getting bad return which causes lower cpm, which causes even worse ads and causes less shows to take them that are even worse with their audience. That causes the CPMs to go further and further. Ultimately you're going to get CPMs down in the $1 and $2 range for the ad insertion and you're going to have people that are doing host red ads up in the $40 and $50 ranges because the ones that can do host read will continue to do host red because that's where the money is. It's the live reads where the money is. The mid roll. What we do at Libsyn, what Podtrack does, what Blubrry does. RobVoice it's the host red ads that where the real money is.

Well and let's take the real money statement that Rob just made is true. The episode I did about why I'm doing ads now is definitely part of that but let's take the logistics of it. We've all been to a website that wants you to take it seriously. It could be a news site on whatever political leaning you happen to have. It could be a local news site, it could be whatever. When you're at a website and you're trying to take the content seriously and there's some jiggly animated gif with the four things you can do to cut belly fat today and you're not on a health website or you're not anything that has anything to do with that, you just kind of laugh. Or it has the secret that Obama wants you to know about your home mortgage. When the ads are ridiculous and obviously bargain basement scraping, you begin to question the website that you're on. You begin to question the source of the content that these ads surround. And I think the same is true for podcasting.

Oh, absolutely. I've heard some really, really bad misplaced ads that have been stitched in on some shows out there and just cringe. And you know the person's and worst part about it is you're causing your audience to die because they're reaching for their phone to try to fast forward 30 seconds to get away from that horrible ad that you had inserted in and they're crashing their cars and they're dying. So your bad ads aren't just bad in causing CPM rates, they're killing off podcast audience.

That should be the Libsyn T shirt at all the events this year. Friends don't let friends do crappy ad insertion.

Ad insertion.

So you've got you control the feed because you believe that someone smart should do that and not the content producer. You produce multiple feeds because there's some use of it right now, but it's only going to go that way. You could do dynamic editing of the content and serving on the content. Not just based on hey, take this episode and run this ad before it. But hey, take this episode and and all the Kansas City ins run this ad before it. You've got apps, you've got connections with the larger organization. So you can come and you can go to pick company X here and say, hey, these guys are doing 150,000 downloads. These guys are doing 200,000 downloads. You might want to give a second look and a second consideration. Now, you do this with a company that has a starting podcast rate of $5 a month. How do you afford this, my friend?

Well, as Dan said, most shows don't get a lot of downloads. Our average, most of the users that host with us are in the 15 or $20 accounts. Most go to 20 or above to get the advanced stats because people want the stats. But many people that just have started having a pod fade or for a while ago on hiatus, they'll drop their accounts down to $5. They're not really caring about stats anymore. And there's others that will start out at 5 dol and never move up from there. That's all they want. Sometimes they'll add $2 to go to stats for 7. But it comes down to that. We have a lot of. We talk about the numbers on the feed. The median number is about 200. Half the episodes that release get more than 200 downloads, half get less than 200. So we have the whole aggregate. Yeah, we have some really big shows. We have shows like Dan Carlin, it's on Libson.com and Tim Ferriss, it's on Libson.Com, that are getting hundreds, thousands, millions of downloads per episode. And they're big, big shows. But they also work with us for advertising and we have ad network and we work with the really big shows to help bring advertising to their shows. If they don't want to work with us and they want to sign an exclusive, we have Libsyn Pro. That's another reason to move to Libsyn Pro is if you know you are someone that's a huge show like the Nerdist Network and you want to sign an exclusive ad deal with Midroll, then we have Libs and Pro for you because in that case you're making a lot of money and you can work with us to share on that cost on the bandwidth and we have a really good rate on the bandwidth anyway.

Are you fiscal? I mean, are you profitable?

Oh yeah, we've been profitable for years. Yeah, we're profitable. Making money, cash. I mean we are none. I mean we are the anti Internet company. We actually believe in making money and being fiscally responsible and our numbers are out there. We're publicly traded. You can go and look at our 10 Qs out there and you can see our numbers and you can see that we are a profitable company. That's why we're here still to this day and why we've been around. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we've been so reliable. We haven't had downtime. People like hosting with us because they don't have any issues. And I think that's one of the most important things you look for Podcast host is we did over 25% of all the downloads that went through itunes last year with no downtime. That I think right there speaks volumes. People talk about the ability, oh, yeah, I'm going to have the ability to scale when we get bigger. And da, da, da. We scaled. We're already there. We can tell you that. It's not hypothetical if we can scale. We've scaled, we've done that, and we continue to grow. And, you know, we talk billions of downloads when we do presentations. I talk billions. Other people may talk millions. We talk billions.

So I want to be careful not to make this an ad for Libsyn. This is not an. A continuation of the why Paul's taking ads. This is not advertorial. This is an important issue in the space because I have a number of clients stuck with a certain host movement. They keep waiting for Apple to fix the change your feed thing so that it's real, or they hope that the host will grow up and one day give them the means to leave. Or they just believe some bad press and find themselves maybe functional, maybe serving, maybe still building an audience, but a little bit terrified behind the scenes because what happens if it does explode? And maybe the explosion is their bandwidth, their audience, their reputation. Maybe the explosion is the company that they're hosting with. What's interesting about Libsyn is decade plus model plus forward thinking, a pro division that does the ad insertion and this whole concept of destinations which serves podcasting here Q1 2017, but also serves podcasting in the Qs to come. I think this is really, really important. If you're stuck with an existing host. Sometimes there are some ways to get out. There are some ways to get out. Creatively, I would not say necessarily go to Libsyn, but I'd say go to someone who's going to treat you like Libs.

I'd say, if you're not going to host with Libsyn, host someplace that they have an exit strategy you can get out. That's what I would say. Make sure wherever you go, they're not going to lock you in. They have the tools. Ask them from day one. Okay, if I decide to leave, how do I leave? People email me and ask me that question all the time and I'll send them. I have canned response. Here you go. Here's how you can leave. But check that with any place you host. And there are other places to host other than Libsyn and. And obviously. But make sure wherever it is that you host, they're actually really a podcast hosting company. It's not just part of their business. That's their business, that's their core business. Because that way they don't put your RSS feed in maintenance for three days while they do some updates, as one company did last year. That's unheard of. The RSS feed is so important. And make sure sure that the company you host with understands the importance of the RSS feed. We see it becoming more and more important. 80 something percent of your downloads come from that. Now one of the kicks that we have gotten over the years has been how the websites that you get with us and we just rolled out new websites so you can see the new podcast page with Libsyn and that's a much nicer design. It's truly mobile, completely mobile friendly with widgets on the side and, and all the different things you would want in a basic webpage. So you do get that with Libsyn. I eat my own dog food. I have my sites up on Libsyn for all my shows. That's all I use. I don't use WordPress. I used WordPress a long time ago. My WordPress site got hacked. I hate WordPress point blank. I hate WordPress because it's just a nightmare to manage. That said, we also do support publishing into WordPress because we know a lot of people do use WordPress. So we're not going to stop you from using WordPress. But if you're not currently using WordPress, you don't need to podcast, you don't need to do anything else. You can just sign up with Libsyn if you've never even had a website and it could be your complete one stop shop. And that's what our whole philosophy is about. Making it possible for anybody to podcast and be on a completely level playing field with Marc Maron and Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss. If you host Libsyn, whatever size your show is, you are on the same playing field as those guys.

Thank you, Rob. Rob, podcast 411 today in I.O.S. any other shows? The feed.

The feed that's the one about podcasting that I update on a regular basis. 411 is on again and off again and Then today on iOS is my. Is my most regular show. That's every. Supposed to be every week. I'd say it's every five to ten days on average.

We'll get links to that in the show. Notes I don't have in front of me what episode number this is. So once I let Rob go, I will come back and tell you what episode number this is. But we'll get links to all of Rob and what Rob's doing. Dan offered a coupon code. I happen to have a coupon code at Libsyn. So if you use the coupon code, Paul, that gets you your first month entirely for free. And it's really hard to remember, Paul.

And part of it gets you the rest of the current month free and all of next month free. So whatever the current month is. So you get the rest of the current month free and all of the following month.

So are you saying that if somebody signs up on, say, March 3rd, they would get all of March and all of April for free?

Yep.

There we go. You heard it from Rob. I have not been. I've told many of you that, but I haven't necessarily marketed it. But now that it came from Libsyn, I will. I will certainly let them say that. Rob, I'm gonna give you the last word before we close out here, buddy. What should those looking to do real business with their podcast know and think.

And do start their podcast? I think that's the biggest thing. Don't be saying, oh, I'm gonna get it started once I get 10 episodes done. Get your first episode, get it out. Don't be one of those, oh, I gotta wait till I have 10 to launch or three to launch. Get one and go. And I think, Paul, you've proven that with shows more than anybody else out there. It just takes one to move up the charts.

Amazing, huh? Isn't it great to hear forward thinking thought? And isn't it great to see leadership in terms of where podcasting is going and what the market is bringing and what to do about what we have in front of us right now. This idea of forcing your way, your view, your opinion into someone else's podcasting strategy doesn't let you do, quote, unquote, my favorite phrase, real business with your podcast. But what Libsyn has done is definitely fascinating and interesting. Are they perfect? No. Do they have faults? Yes. But they have thought through some things that the others haven't. They have put into place some things that the others haven't. And I don't care where you host, but I want you to have an answer for what happens when Google wants something different. What do you do if you've got a Spotify plan that requires a different publishing schedule? What are you going to think about? Where are you going to go? If you look at ad insertion, these elements are not necessarily every step of every podcast in the future, but you want to think about them. You want to consider them. You want to know they're there. And that's why I have this interview with Rob. So thanks again. If you haven't subscribed to the show, please do. Got another great episode for you next week. We will chat soon. Thank you, Rob, for coming on the interview. Bye.