NAB Podcasting Adventures - 4/20/2016

Now, here's the rest of the schedule for today. We're going to go into podcasting, FM translators for the AM stations. We'll talk about car radios, digital sales. We'll hear from NextRadio, HD Radio, and iHeart all around lunchtime, what's going on in their platforms. And then in there, in the middle, we'll have a really exciting keynote speech. We're looking forward to hearing from John Ellis formerly from Ford, now a consultant, great speaker. I think you'll enjoy that, so hopefully you can stick around for lunch. We will serve a box lunch here while that's happening. And we'll keep moving at a rapid pace all day long here. We'll talk about video on the radio. Oops, sorry. And we will— where was I there? We'll also look at— I'm not sure why that happened, but we'll look at a number of other elements about particularly to this year the social media in the political year, in the election year. Talk more about measurement, as we heard from Brad earlier. Nielsen will be back to give us an update there. And then we'll finish up with what's always a fun session, kind of a Shark Tank approach. We'll have a panel of startups up here talking about their new ideas on what they think is a pitch that makes sense to radio, that radio stations should be interested in. And one of those is actually, I'm one of the charter members of the pilot project that I was talking about earlier. So you'll see, hear from all of them at the end of the day. And then we'll take a tour for those who are interested of a few selected spots on the show floor. So that's what we got coming up. Let's get right back into it then with our first session on podcasting. Let me call that panel up. Come on up, guys. And then we'll turn things over to the moderator of that session, who is Rob McCracken. He's the director of digital solutions group at the E.W. Scripps Company, and he'll introduce the rest of his panelists.

Rob?

Well, good morning. I mentioned John Ellis earlier, talking— he's going to be coming in to talk about the connected car. I highly advise you all to stay stay for that. One of the slides actually I have here today is one of his, so stay for it, he's good. I'm going to let you guys introduce yourself because I want you to talk a little bit about, to give a little bit of context about what is Rob Greenlee, what is Spreaker, and then Rob Walsh, what is Lipson, so you guys understand.

Yeah, good morning. Spreaker is a podcast hosting platform that also does live streaming, so we can kind of combine the world of on-demand audio with live streaming in a kind of a consolidated and one kind of platform experience. So when you do a live show, it publishes up to the cloud and then it drops down into our set speed. You can still do some post-production on it if you want to, but it's a platform that has creation recording tools that are free as well as a listening platform that has a bunch of apps for Android and iOS that you can listen to podcasts on those as well. Do you want me to talk about my background?

Just a little bit. Okay.

Yeah, I used to run the podcasting platform for Microsoft, the Zoom and Xbox team for about 6 years. And then I left there to go to work for PodcastOne as the executive VP of technology for the company for about a year or so, and then left there to go to work for Spreaker as the head of content. So I've been involved in the podcasting space since about 2004. I had a podcast that was a syndicated radio show that I started back in 1999, and then I started podcasting in 2004. So I've been working professionally in the podcasting space for about 12 years now. So it's changed a lot. In some ways it hasn't changed, and I'm sure we'll talk a lot about that.

I'm Rob Walsh. I'm with Libsyn. Most people don't know who Libsyn is. The best way to explain it is we're kind of like the Akamai of podcasting. We're the company behind most of the podcasts that you listen to. About 25% of the media files hosted in iTunes are hosted with us. About 35% of the top 200 shows in iTunes of— you listen to Joe Rogan, Marc Maron, Dave Ramsey, Joyce Meyer, they're all being served from our servers. So we help you get into iTunes and now Google Play Music and Spotify and many of the other places. Myself personally, I have a podcast called called Today in iOS, and before that I had one called Podcast 101, which I started back in 2004. And on that podcast, I would interview other podcasters, kind of like Inside the Actors Studio for podcasting, and I kept promoting the service I used, Libsyn. And in 2007, they came to me and said, you say such nice things about us, why don't you come work for us? And I've been working with Libsyn since 2004. Or 2007, excuse me.

Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Rob. Is it a requirement to be named Rob to get into podcasting?

No, it's not.

I just want to make sure. Yeah, it's not. But there are a lot of Robs in the podcasting space.

So more time is being spent with digital audio content than ever, and a lot of the growth is in on-demand. People want what they want when they want it. And the difference is today they can have it. For on-demand spoken word, that usually means podcasts. The latest Infinite Dial report from Edison Research shows nearly 100 million Americans have listened to a podcast. The podcast Serial recently surpassed 100 million downloads. Mark Maron just did an interview, first podcast interview ever with a sitting president. And podcasts saw a 24% increase in the last year. Have podcasts made the jump to mainstream? Is it time to put the mainstream term, is it time to put that to bed?

Yeah, I think so.

I joke, when Family Guy, when he did his podcast on hats, that's when we hit mainstream.

So, just because so many of the people in the room here are radio broadcasters, why don't you talk a little bit about, I want you each to talk about it. What's the difference between broadcasting, streaming, and podcasting?

Well, I look at the difference between broadcasting and streaming, especially broadcasting, where you're going out to many. Podcasting is more niche. Every podcast, there's podcasts on professional chameleon raising, there's podcasts on Professional tree climbing associations or tree climbing associations, I don't know if it's professional, but there are podcasts on every niche you can think about. Then there's a lot of podcasts that are repurposed radio content. Dave Ramsey, who hosts with us, gets 8 million downloads a month on top of what he gets out there on all the radio stations. Probably some of you in the audience have him on your station, but he's getting another 8 million downloads because people want it on demand. I think that's the biggest difference. Earlier we saw a slide, what today's schedule was. Well, maybe you have a meeting at one of those times. You can't meet one of those things. That's the beauty of podcasting versus when it's happening live. The end user's in control of the medium. They can pause it when they have to do something, come right back to where they left off. They have the control, and that makes it more intimate.

Yeah, and I think also one other kind of dovetail to that would be that There's really an opportunity, I think, for the radio kind of broadly to take advantage of this because as you've seen with television and other media, movies and stuff like that, it's really moved towards on-demand. And I think that that's what the younger generation is looking for. And so as you think about your radio station and the shows that you create, I think the opportunity really is to make more of what you do on-demand. And because of that, podcasting has a beginning— let me back up. A show that's a podcast usually has a beginning and an end. So you have to think about the content that you produce that basically fits in that. So maybe as you produce stuff, you think about making it digital first, and then think about the distribution across digital and on-air, and try and walk that line, trying to produce the content that will fit. The actual distribution. So I think there isn't really a big difference between streaming, podcasting, and broadcast in my view. I mean, I come from radio. I did radio for many years myself. And it's just how you produce the content and how you distribute it is really what the difference is. So I think the opportunity of blending this together, I think, is a fantastic opportunity for all of you.

You've both been podcasting, each of you, for over a decade. Recently, we've heard a lot, read a lot about the podcast renaissance. I feel like I heard about a podcast renaissance in 2012. What's different this time?

You can go back. There's an article from February 14th, 2007 that talks about the podcasting resurgence or renaissance. And so if you Google it, you will actually see there's been a podcast resurgence every year. I think what's really happened was there was a media resurgence, and that's really because of Serial. Serial's psychographic was newspaper reporters. And newspaper reporters said, "Hey, there's this thing called podcasting and I like it, and I haven't written about this, so it must be back, or I haven't written about it in 5 years, so it must be back." So it was really a little bit of a media resurgence because there was a popular podcast that hit the right psychographic.

Thus, that drove more adoption of the medium too. They kind of spun on each other. I mean, as you can see in the numbers, we saw a significant jump. And if you look over the last few years, it's been pretty flat. And that just means that there hasn't been as much media attention to the medium of podcasting until the last couple years.

And we saw steady growth every year. If you go back, we had 3.3 billion downloads last year on our network. We had 2.6 the year before, 1.9 before that, 1.6 before that. So we were seeing growth before this growth resurgence hit.

Does a stronger ad business or better storytelling have anything to do with that?

Yeah, I think it's gotten better. I think that the advertising business has definitely woken up more now. It's been steadily growing for many years. All this additional attention, the success of Serial, the success of public radio just in general and podcasting has driven a lot of new media buyers to come in and really seriously look at the space and say, well, how can we tap into this? These guys will tell you too that advertising in podcasts works. But you have to do it a certain way that fits with what the audience is looking for and what the advertiser's looking for, and it's a little different than radio.

So, let's see, I'm gonna miss a slide here. According to Ellipson stats, 72% of all podcast downloads in February 2016 were direct to mobile devices, with a 5-to-1 ratio iOS to Android. How will a new native Android app from Google affect podcasting? And isn't Apple's lock on podcasting slipping a little bit thanks to Spotify, TuneIn, and Stitcher?

Let's put this in perspective. Last year across the network, we saw 68% of our downloads went to iTunes and the podcast app from Apple. Obviously, number one, over 50%. Number 2 was Stitcher at 2.5%. That's a big gap from 1 to 2. So, yes, Apple's gap, we've seen it recently now down to about 64% in February. Yes, it's slipping a little bit. It's actually the number isn't going down, it's just that we've seen some Androids coming up, some Android apps called Shifty Jelly Pocket Casts and Podcast Addict have really come up and raised and helped raise Android. Now, we're hoping Google Play Music will do the same. Where I really think it will help is finally there's a native app on Android that supports podcasting. So, when you send an email blast out to your subscribers, say, "Hey, go listen to this podcast." Before, all you could send was like a link to iTunes or your RSS feed. If you sent them an RSS feed, most people on Android didn't have a podcatcher. They'd have to go find a third-party app, maybe buy it, then figure out how to subscribe to it. It was difficult for Android users. Now, as of today, as of Monday, you can send a link in your email, one for iTunes, one for Android users. And iTunes one will cover everybody but the Android users, pretty much.

Yeah, I think that there's a huge opportunity with Google offering a first-party service. And I think that that's only going to grow. Now granted, the Google Play Music platform is not a hugely consumed kind of media platform. But it's also, I think, it's one more piece of content that people can connect with. And there's certainly a lot of Android devices out there. So I think that there's a big opportunity to start to grow this. And maybe, I think it's a good thing to erode the iOS domination of this medium and spread it out across more players. I think it's better overall for the industry. And we're going to reach more listeners with this, which we desperately need to keep growing.

Speaking of the industry, let's talk about the radio industry specifically. Is podcasting more additive or subtractive to radio?

Well, we see most consumption happens on Wednesday, then the next group of consumption is Tuesday, Thursday, and then it's Monday, Friday, and then after that it drops on the weekend drastically. So that's telling you people are listening usually commuting to and from work and some people at work. So is it taking away from radio? Well, if they're listening in the car, yeah, it is. So if you're not making your content available on demand, if they're not listening to your stuff after the fact, they're going to listen to somebody else's stuff. So it's not a matter of, well, if we don't put out a podcast, they just have to listen to our radio station. No, they don't. They can choose what they want to listen to. So if you have content worth listening to later, make it available for them to listen to later.

Yeah, I think more and more users, especially the younger generation, want to be in control of their media experience. They want to control the playlists that they listen to, the shows that they listen to, the music that they listen to. And as you think about CarPlay and the Android Auto deployments that you're starting to see roll out now, you're starting to see TV commercials talking about those platforms in cars that are available this year and next year and into the future. And it's only going to grow. It's really going to make it a challenge for radio, I think, to keep the dominance of getting in the car and the radio starts playing. So, I think the on-demand piece, I think, is key. And so, if you can kind of incorporate the on-demand piece, and that may be a good way of thinking about this, and podcasting is just kind of part of that, because then there's streaming and then there's downloading. We haven't talked about that yet.

That's a good segue. Oh, I'm out of order here. Radio has really owned the in-car experience for the last 50 years, but in the next 4 years, 90% of cars in the United States will have internet connection. What happens to radio when my car recognizes my phone and projects my curated preferences, playlists onto the screen? And if you've ever used Apple CarPlay, go test drive a brand new Corvette, you can check it out, plug your phone in. It completely takes over the radio. So what happens to radio when that is everywhere.

It becomes more competitive for radio to compete against these streaming services. I think it's going to give more choices too. It's going to empower that user to take control of their medium. It's not going to be as much of a lean-back experience. Though I think people like Spotify are creating playlist experiences which will simulate kind of a lean-back experience. I think people are still going to want to create the— kind of like what people do with music today. They create a playlist and they listen to it. I think that's going to come to podcasting too. So I think that's the challenge is, you know, how do you get your content in front of the listeners on these new kind of car listening experiences? And I think that's the challenge before all of us. And podcasting, as you can see in the slide, is right there, one of the key buttons.

One of the myths I hear people, and I've seen people misstate this too, is they think shorter podcasts are better or more popular. It's actually not the case. When we looked at the shows that were getting 100,000 downloads or more across our network, over 65% of them were 50 minutes or longer. One of the most popular podcasts out there is called Hardcore History with Dan Carlin. He gets over 4 million downloads an episode. His shows are over 4 hours long sometimes. People like to hit play and listen. What will happen with the smartphone, because it's mobile, people will hit play as they're leaving their apartment or their house with their earbuds in. Now they walk into their connected car. Now it goes to the speakers. They listen on the drive to work or to the gym in the morning. Now they get into the gym and it stays right with them as they get out of the car, back onto the earbuds. They work out, they come out of the workout, back into the car, now it's on the speakers, they get to work, and now they can listen as they walk up to work, and if they have a job where they can do it, they can listen at work. The smartphone really becomes your hub, and the connected car becomes, in some cases, I know there's an argument, but in some cases it becomes a glorified Bluetooth speaker for your smartphone. At minimum, it becomes a control panel to your smartphone.

Do you have a different view?

Rob Greenlee.

Well, I think that the actual in-dash experience is going to have its own data connection. I mean, it's not going to be 100% reliant on your mobile phone. I think what we're going to see in the future may not happen like in the next year or something like that, but I think that your preferences and your playlists are going to live in the cloud and they're going to float down to your car. Because these car manufacturers are going to be using that data connection for more than just media delivery. They're going to do it for augmenting the driver experience, kind of keeping the car updated with patches and updates. I mean, really your car is going to turn into a rolling iPad. I think is kind of where this is all going. So that car is going to be a digital experience through and through. So that car is going to need to have an internet connection. I just think that the data that flows down to the car into the dash You're going to have a much better kind of experience, user experience, with the speed that could be applied to a faster processor in the car. The navigation could be a little faster. You're not having to pick up your phone. The whole voice recognition thing, or the voice controls, is the other big piece that we haven't talked about yet either, but it's going to transition how we discover content in the car as well.

Thanks. Let's talk about monetization a little bit. If I'm an independent podcaster or if I'm a radio station, how do I make money with podcasting?

There's, I mean, there's two primary ways people make money today. One is advertising and the other one is through a premium subscription to certain content. So many podcasters will do it both ways. They'll make back catalog and special episodes available just for premium subscribers, and then they'll put advertising in the latest episodes. As a radio station, you're already creating great content. Even if you're a radio station that's doing music, if you have a morning DJ, which most of you do, will have a morning DJ, and he's interviewing a band, take those interviews and make them available as a podcast. Why let them go off into the ether? And not only that, those interviews, now that they're out there, other people in the music Or the comedians, you know, you're gonna have people come to town that wanna promote something. They're gonna wanna get on the air. Get that available and then friends of those musicians or comedians that hear them, friends on your show, are more likely to call in and be on the show. So it makes, it's just a self-feeding frenzy. But you don't hear an interview once it goes up on the radio and it's gone. If you're not there at that time. And that's the beauty of podcasting. It's there forever.

I mean, I think take the content that you're producing right now and figure out how you can repurpose it as a podcast. I think that's a great place to start. And then I think start thinking about the talent that you have in your station right now. Are they enthusiastic about something that's more niche? Are they wanting to maybe create a podcast that is only available as a podcast that's associated with your radio station? And maybe that's something they do on the side or something. And I know that creates some probably challenges around labor and maybe additional cost or something like that. But as you think about this, not all on-air radio content, because it tends to be local, right? And podcasting today is predominantly a national medium. Though I think as we get more listeners in local markets, the opportunity for radio to do local podcasting is going to grow. But it's still early for that. Currently today, podcasting is a national and global medium. So as you think about that, think about what content that you're producing on your station that could be repurposed that would have an appeal on a national or global basis.

We have some radio networks, Bonneville hosts with us, and we have some of the radio networks that we have ad stitching tools, and they'll sell ad stitching to different geo-targeted areas. So you can do that. So they're making the content available. They're getting a good number of downloads. And their sales force now has this other tool in their tool bag to offer up to advertisers.

And if you have a morning show that wants to do a podcast and you have a producer that can curate it once a week or even daily, an hour long, you may have an advertiser who is a local advertiser who is loyal to that morning show who might pay a little extra or a lot extra depending on how much you promoted on air to get that podcast off the ground. Because the cost per— the CPM model does not equate to the local cost per point model.

And if you have someone at the radio station that's not on air but wants to be on air, the podcast can be your AAA. Try them out, see how they do. Maybe they can work their way up. Especially if they're bugging you to get on the air and you don't want to let them on the air yet.

Speaking of promoting podcasts, I want to go down the rabbit hole hole a little bit controversial. In a memo a few weeks ago, National Public Radio forbade its staff from promoting NPR podcasts or its own on-demand mobile app, NPR One, on air. Is NPR best serving the public and its listeners by doing this?

Definitely not best serving the public and their listeners. Maybe they're serving their— definitely not. I mean, how are they best serving their public by restricting access to content? You know, they've kind of had a little pullback on that.

They're not really restricting access, they're just not promoting it on the air, right? So they're just not going to be pushing their digital platforms to their radio listeners in the sensitivity of the local affiliates that want to keep that revenue coming in getting in the door on the radio side. Because I think they felt some pressure on siphoning off that audience over to podcasting, basically going around the local affiliates. And I think that's a challenge. NPR has been facing that since they launched the podcast platform many years ago. It's just, I guess, it's reached a critical point now where they were feeling a lot of pressure from the NPR affiliates.

But these are the same people that we agree want What they want when they want it.

Yeah.

Yep.

That's the public.

They want it when they want it. They want to be in control. That's right.

What drives you crazy? This will be a good one, particularly for this guy. What drives you crazy in podcasting today?

Yeah, one of the things is when I hear— Yeah, no. There's many things, but I think one of the key ones is when you hear people talk about the metrics and they say, oh, well, the podcasting metrics aren't as good, they're so much better than what are on radio. Radio's based on surveys and this. With podcasting, you can get actual IP addresses, you know how many people actually downloaded the files. So there is a much better metric on it. You know where those downloads came from geographically, you know the user agents, you know if those downloads were completed. So we have really good information and it's not a survey, it's not, you know, Arbitron, no offense to the Arbitron folks, I know they're here, but it's not a guesstimate of what the actual numbers were. I've heard stories from radio people about where a white male who started dating Hispanic women started driving to work, 'cause then he had the little box with him, and all of a sudden, in that market, white males between 25 and 35 started listening to Latino music, according to the surveys, because one person started dating a Latino woman and listening to that on the way to work every day. Podcasting's not like that. It's real numbers, and you can get those numbers. It's not as great as what you get on digital side, but it's a lot better than on radio.

Yeah, I think my more recent pet peeve is all the attention that the public radio folks are getting in the podcasting space when they have such a small piece of the actual podcasting market. Though it's been good for podcasting, there's just a lot more things going on outside of public radio in podcasting. I mean, a lot of the radio stuff that's going on in the podcasting space today is really, really interesting, and the media should be covering that. So it's a little bit frustrating to see so much of the East Coast media coverage covering public radio as it relates to podcasting when they're not really the dominant force in podcasting, though it looks like it because they're in the top rankings of iTunes. But that's also kind of a misperception too. Just because you're in the top rankings of iTunes doesn't mean that you have the biggest and most popular podcast.

Yeah, just to put it in perspective, public radio, all of those combined are less than 1% of the podcasts out there. There's about 300,000 podcasts on iTunes, maybe 200,000 of them are active, and about 1% of the— less than 1% of those are the public radio podcasts.

Can you repeat that? How many?

There's about 200,000 active podcasts out there. Now, let's put that in perspective. There's about 400 million active blogs. That's a 2,000:1 ratio of blogs to podcasts. So if anybody in this room is blogging and not podcasting, you're really missing out. And if you want to take it to another level, female podcasters make up about 15% of podcasters versus 52% of bloggers. So it's a 7,500:1 ratio of female bloggers to female podcasters. So any females in here who blog and don't podcast, you're really missing out on standing out from the crowd.

I agree 100%. There's a real huge growth right now in women women getting into podcasting. They do a fantastic job of podcasting. And some of the most popular podcasts that we're seeing here over the last 6 months are being hosted by women. I mean, if you look at Serial, Serial is hosted by a woman. So there's a huge opportunity for women to get in this space and to build big shows. They, women just, they rock when it comes to podcasting. I just want to see more women getting involved.

These guys both host very informative and often funny podcasts on the business of podcasting. I encourage you all to subscribe to. Why don't you tell them each about what your podcasts are so they can get more information?

Yeah, I do 3 podcasts a week right now. One is called the Spreaker Live Show, which is basically a live streaming show that's also a podcast. And I talk about podcasting, you know, very meta. And then I also do another show called The New Media Show, which is actually a live video as well as audio podcast that's done through a platform called Blab.im. And we just take that video and the audio and then we publish it out as a podcast. And then the more recent one that I got involved in is the Radio Ink podcast, which I'm going to be co-hosting starting this Friday. So I'm staying busy podcasting, which is what I love to do.

I co-host a podcast with Elsie Escobar. She actually does the production work on it. And that podcast is called The Feed, and we talk about podcasting. And you can just search for The Feed or Lipson in iTunes to find that, or go to thefeed.lipson.com. And then my own personal podcast is Today in iOS, where I talk about all things iOS with a little snarky humor. And if you're an Android person, don't listen to it.

Don't listen, you won't like it.

And just be respectful of people. We'll open for Q&A outside the room. So if anyone wants to come up and talk to us afterwards, we'll be outside the room for as long as you would like to ask us questions or get cards or that. So we'd like to free it up for the next group to be able to spend all their time because I think we're out of time for questions.

Thank you.

Thanks, guys. Thank you.

Thanks, guys. Interesting conversation about