S3E17 Insights from a Master Podcaster - Rob Greenlee

May we start? I want to get your opinion on something.

For the bigger picture.

Now it's time. From Bee Media Production, this is Podcasting Essentials. Hi and welcome to episode 17 of season 3. I'm Nick Schulberger, Managing Director of Bee Media Production. This episode we talk to podcast veteran Rob Greenlee, who's currently VP of Content and partnerships at Libsyn, and few have as much experience in podcasting as Rob. But first, joining me is our own BE producer Nicole Goodman.

Hey Nick, how you going?

I am great and very enthused after a fantastic day at AusPod 2019, the ABC's premier podcast conference, which we both attended.

That's right, that's right. It was fantastic this year. Some really interesting sessions throughout the day, and you know, once again, the ABC have just Nailed it.

Yes, congratulations to the ABC, not just for a fabulous conference they run each year, but also just for continuing to increase the profile of podcasting in Australia.

Yeah, really supporting the industry.

And obviously producing some fabulous shows themselves.

Indeed, indeed.

Now, it was a jam-packed day of sessions, and we're not going to run through them all. We just wanted to pick the eyes out of a few of the most relevant sessions and topics that we'll discuss for our audience to this podcast, which is brands. So right off the top, the opening keynote was from James Quidland. He's done it every year, friend of the show here as well from podnews.net. He runs through the latest audience figures, and also the ABC released their annual survey as well on the same day. So he was the first person to have those stats.

Yeah, that's right. And James actually, he makes data fun. You know, data's never a fun way to kick off anything, but he adds a lot of humor and excitement to numbers and boring things like that.

Yeah, so we'll try and do the same here.

Yeah, absolutely.

He started off by saying, and the overall theme was that, as we know, podcasting listenership is increasing day by day. There are more and more places to listen, more apps, more ways of getting your podcast into the ears of your audience. And he put a big red bold number up on the screen, 741,600.

Which is the number of podcasts on Apple Podcasts.

Yes. And some people have been saying, oh, there's so many podcasts. Does that mean that we're getting flooded? I absolutely loved what Owen Grover from Pocket Casts said a little bit later on in the morning when he referred to the same number and he said, come on, guys, it's 750,000. How many books are there in the world? Has anyone ever said 'Oh no, not another book.' Or when a musician releases a new song, 'Oh no, no, no, we've already got like 10 billion songs. Don't release another song.' Not another song.

It's so true. It's— we hear so much about this, the fear, the big number. There's so too many podcasts. What are we going to do? But hearing it spun that way, it just made so much sense. Of course, of course, that's correct.

He debunked that in a matter of seconds and went on to say, 'Come on, guys.' We are just at the launchpad of the next wave of amazing podcasts.

So much growth to come. Yeah.

James then moved on to podcast awareness figures. The latest figures in Australia, 83% of people are aware, which is great. And a little surprisingly, more than the US, which was at 70%. Normally we're following behind.

Yeah, it was really interesting.

So awareness here is higher. In the US, 22% of people are listening to podcasts weekly, which equates to 62 million people. Slightly behind here in Australia on 15%, but the numbers are not that important. We know that it's growing.

It's growing.

That's all we really need to take away from that. In age brackets, the audiences are getting a little bit skewed, a little bit younger at the moment. I think we've talked before about Spotify is contributing to that, but we're not seeing a drop-off anywhere. I mean, everything's still growing, so that's the—

That's right.

The main thing. Speaking of growing, ad revenue.

Yes.

They're still looking at it tipping out at $1 billion in 2021. Yep.

Now there's a big number. You want to talk big numbers.

That's right. And many think that's conservative too. So that's right.

Yeah.

The majority of podcast listening is still happening on Apple Podcasts. It's sort of between 55% and 60%. Spotify has doubled in the last 12 months, up to 13% and probably growing every day, really gaining traction. It doesn't really matter where people are listening. You need to be in all these places. But it is interesting to see that Spotify has made a huge play in the last 12 months.

And that's really the point for brands too. I mean, when you're thinking about distribution, you've just got to be everywhere on all of these platforms.

Definitely. I was a bit surprised by the stats on listening to podcasts through web browsers because that's increasing.

So interesting. Yes.

Now, the reason it's increasing is because of Google indexing podcasts. They've been doing it for a while, but I think it's taking a while for it to trickle through. James did a search for us, podcasts about elephants, live up on the screen, and straight away you could see 3 individual podcast episodes that had the word elephant either in the title or in the description, which led to another keynote done by Andrew Davies from the ABC, which was all about writing these descriptions and titles for your episodes. And I'm hoping that we'll be able to speak to Andrew on a future episode, but he was basically saying—

He was really talking about the need to consider keywords when you're writing your title and your description, but also to make the description and the title enticing. Now that's quite a bit of work for a podcast or a brand or an agency to consider, but it's valuable, really important. It's one of the key ways people can find or discover podcasts. So it's really worth putting the effort in.

And it's for a few reasons. It's obviously for Google searching, as we just discussed, but it's also for discoverability for people who are just scrolling through podcast apps and looking at different shows. Again, I haven't got the stats in front of me, but Andrew Davies was saying that that description plays a hugely significant role in whether or not someone will listen to that episode. Now speaking of discoverability, podcasters are all trying to find and grow an audience. And there's sort of been some discussion around, well, if you're a rusted-on podcaster addict like both of us, and you've got your 5 to 7 hours of podcasting lined up for the week, that you might find it hard with a new podcast to grab their attention. Well, the stat that James showed was that 26% or 1 in 4 people that are already listening to podcasts listen to a new podcast in the last week. And over a month, it's 66% of people. So not only are the addicts like us listening to new podcasts, you've also got to remember that there's also 55% of the population that aren't regularly listening to podcasts. So the opportunities are still huge.

And it also circles back around to the first point that you made, Nic, which is the big scary number of 750,000 people don't know what to listen to. People are discovering and listening to new podcasts all the time, so the fear is unfounded.

Absolutely. Now let's leave AusPod for the moment and move on to Rob Greenlee. You met him at Podcast Movement, Nicole.

I did. He's a really impressive guy, really no airs or graces. He's always happy for a chat and to offer advice, and he's incredibly knowledgeable about industry. So for those that may not know much about Rob, he's also the co-host of The New Media Show with Todd Cochran from Blueberry. He started in radio, but he's been involved in podcasting since 2004, which, as you and I know, Nick, the infancy. He's worked at Microsoft Xbox, Voxnest, Spreaker, and PodcastOne. And in 2017, he became an inductee into the Academy of Podcasters Hall of Fame.

Wow.

And so we are delighted to have Rob with us. Welcome to Podcasting Essentials, Rob. It's so great to have you on the show.

It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Now, you've been on the conference circuit since the podcast movement in August and kind of haven't stopped really. What's the sense you're getting from the podcasting community as you cross the country? And what role are you taking at these conferences?

Well, I think that there's a lot of enthusiasm in the medium right now. I think there's a perception that the industry is growing fast, whether or not that's entirely true or not. Perception is reality. And I think that's a good thing for the medium. And as far as what I do at these conferences, I just go around and evangelize podcasting and talk to podcasters, existing ones, as well as new ones that are looking to start. And the existing folks, it's all about building deeper connections and relationships with them and solving some of their problems that may be getting in the way of them growing faster as shows, or maybe they want to build and develop a network of shows, which is oftentimes the case, and it's happening more and more these days.

You do a lot of workshops and you do a lot of live panel shows with Todd as well. You spoke at Podcast Movement on a range of different topics. Do you want to give us a little bit of a precis of what that was that you guys were talking about on the panel?

Yeah, the whole purpose of why I pulled that panel together for the New Media Show was to kind of get up a good distribution of voices that could talk about some of the core issues in the medium that are facing us today. And I would say that the number one is on the distribution side. I had a panelist up there from Pandora, and he was talking about— now Pandora is not an international music streaming platform. Primarily in the US, but it is symptomatic of what's happening in the industry where Spotify is getting involved in podcasting more. Because I was fairly skeptical, you know, 4 to 5 years ago that we were going to see a successful entry of the streaming music platforms into podcasting because they seem to not have much of an interest. And they seem to, in all the conversations that I had with them, like 5 or 6 years ago, they didn't seem to understand the medium very well. The goal of that was to kind of talk about that topic and then also talk about monetization and the direction of things like dynamic ad insertion and where the path of monetization was going to go. And then one of the core issues also that kind of goes along with that was talking about the new certification that's coming from the IAB, which rolled out about a year and a half ago. And more and more companies, I think we're up to 9 companies that now support a standard way of counting downloads and being able to build confidence in the advertiser community about audience in the podcasting space.

And Rob, when you say we, are you involved in those high-level discussions, guideline setting as well?

Yeah, I was involved in the IAB working group back in 2014.

Hi Rob, it's Nick Schulberger. We actually spoke to Omnistudio about the IAB Version 2 compliance last episode and its importance, I guess, for brands. Our audience to this podcast are predominantly brands looking to get into podcasting or that are currently podcasting. I guess it'd be interesting to get your take on the discussion around the decrease potentially in download numbers as these compliances are taken up.

Well, I think the big takeaway from that is that it's not really a decrease in audience numbers. It's actually just a more accurate reflection of what the audience has always been. Because a lot of the metrics that we've been seeing have been based on bad ways of counting. We've been counting server requests, bot requests that were not real listeners. So I think where we're going to, and more and more this is the evolution, is we're getting accurate on how big our audiences really are, not living off of what would be considered to be kind of incorrect information.

Yeah, I think that was a very succinct explanation for something that does get quite technical. So thank you for that, Rob. I guess it's a good thing for brands though, isn't it, that they can play in this space with confidence that the numbers are accurate, the money they're spending is getting to the people that they're being reported that they're getting to.

Right. And there's a couple other pieces of this too. It's not that everybody's going to be exactly the same. I like to draw this difference because the counting recommendations that exist with the IAB is open to some interpretations on the platforms that deploy them. So it's not a hard and fast standard. It's a guideline, which I need to emphasize that because there is going to be slight variation between platforms to platforms on the exact number. So it won't be the same if you go host your show over here and then move it over here. The numbers will be different because there's going to be slight differences in those models. So what we've done is we've created basically a guideline standard that gets us very close. And that's an important thing for everybody to understand. It's going to vary probably around maybe 2 to 5%.

Now, Rob, you were a radio guy. You've got a radio background. What drew you to podcasting back in 2004? Was it just something that was a bit shiny and new? And could you see the long-term potential at that point?

Well, you know, when I started doing a show, I started on the radio. So when I got involved in it, I was doing it for other reasons other than anything to do with podcasting. I was doing it to support a consulting business that I was doing at the time, helping companies optimize their presence on search engines. So, you know, to be found and take advantage of this marketing opportunity that the internet and the web was presenting. Because I'm a marketing guy, I have a marketing degree. I've worked on brand marketing for, for years and years and as a sales guy and the whole works. So I was very oriented towards utilizing the World Wide Web and the internet as a marketing tool. And that was the radio show that I did. I did a— the show was called the WebTalk World Radio Show, and I used it as a platform to learn what the trends were in the industry and to take advantage of every little angle I could based on having CEOs and larger company representatives on the show and then leveraging those relationships to grow the show. And to get it out on the XM satellite radio network for 2 years and to get it on about 15 to 18 radio stations around the country. And I took it home and produced it in my bedroom, but I started on the radio doing it live, and that was an educational experience for me. I mean, I was not very good on live radio, but I got better.

And this year, Rob, you've started at Libsyn, which is one of the world's biggest hosting platforms for podcasts, which means you've got a lot of— probably the most data at your disposal. I'm interested in which genres are most popular at the moment, I guess by the download numbers.

I would say that the most popular, at least on Libsyn now, if you look at the genres out there, they're going to vary quite a bit on the hosting platform. So these are the percentages based on what's hosted on Libsyn. And the number one category is comedy. But we have a large percentage of podcasts that are comedy podcasts, and those have tended to be very popular shows. And then it's society, culture, business, news and politics, and even some health thrown in there. Those are the top most listened to. Now that's the key thing. It's not— these are not necessarily the most popular genres around how much content is there, but these are the genres that are listened to the most.

And sticking to the listener side of the equation, Libsyn recently released a report that said that mobile listening has sort of plateaued at around 85%. Why do you think that is and what's sort of going on between the smartphone, in-car, smart speakers? Can you elaborate on some of those current statistics?

Well, I think what you have to do is back up and look at it and those that are listening to podcasts, and I don't believe that we'll ever get much beyond 85 to 90% of the current people that are listening to podcasts. The key growth area is how many people are using their smartphones to actually listen to podcasts. So there's a big upside. So that means that that number tells me It seems to me that there's about 10 to 15% of the population that may never buy a smartphone. So there's always going to be a gap. It's like any kind of market penetration is always capped based on people's willingness to engage in that, whatever that is. So I think that there's still huge upside potential just because we're seeing a large percentage of mobile smartphone users listening to podcasts. There's huge opportunity that's still untapped out there.

And the smart speaker, we talk about them often. This show is called Podcasting Essentials. I still don't think podcasting in its current form is overly relevant for smart speakers. Your stats agree with that. It's under half a percent of listening is done on smart speakers. But there are other opportunities, aren't there, for audio and for brands to use smart speakers?

Yeah, I think the smart speakers is an interesting conundrum when it comes to, I mean, you would think that it would have stronger engagement, but I think I think there's a fundamental issue there and the fundamental issue is that smart speakers tend to be group consumption and podcast listening tends to be individual consumption. So I think you have a little bit of a conflict there around how people like to listen to podcasts and what their personal relationship is with the content. So I do think that the smart speaker platforms will find a higher percentage of market share as you look to the future The Alexa, and I'm sorry, and there's probably people that are using Alexas right now that I just triggered. But those smart speaker platforms will become more important as those smart agent technologies get integrated into the phone and get placed into other types of more personal engagement devices.

We're seeing brands experimenting more and more with audio here in Australia, and the branded podcast category, as we call it, is growing. Have you got some examples of brands that are doing a really good job in this space?

Yeah, there's a bunch of them. I mean, I would say that my favorite one is, and this is kind of a US thing, and it's the Trader Joe's podcast. It's called Trader Joe Insider. And it's a really good example, I think, of what you need to do when you think about a branded podcast is, is you need to get into the trends in the, in the market right now. And that's around storytelling. And And I think the alignment of brand with a brand association with content that's related to your product service, I think is what you need to expose in that program to create engagement. And it's not so much a big commercial for what you're doing. I think you want to avoid as much of that as possible, actually, and just get right into really interesting content about things and areas that are associated with your market and your brand and getting really, really clear with what your brand means in the market and what you want it to represent. And then just make that show representative of your brand and tell stories about how your brand connects with people.

Rob, podcasting has grown rapidly in the last, say, 3 years particularly. What positive effect has that had on the industry, do you think? And is there anything that concerns you?

Yeah, I think that there's always areas where the industry kind of rubs against things that are going on out there. And I do think that there's concerns around advertising, I think is one of the big concerns right now that I have about the long-term opportunity of podcasting is that there's a lot of pressure to drive radio ads into podcast content. And I think it's a little bit of a danger. For the medium from the standpoint of conflicting with the roots of this medium and why this medium even exists. And I think if you go back and you look at the origin story of where podcasting came from and what its culture has been, which has changed, but it started out as a medium that was kind of a stick-it-to-the-man medium. I mean, it was like, we can't be on the radio, but that doesn't mean that we can't produce the content that we want. And that's, that's the attitude. I mean, in the early days, there was no real acceptance of advertising in podcasts. It wasn't something that really anybody did. I mean, I did it, but I think at the time I felt like I was doing something wrong. So it was really a medium of breaking the mold. I mean, if you think about when podcasting started, it came out of the Napster era. And you know what Napster represented was stealing music from big companies, right? So you can kind of see what the internet was doing back then. It was breaking models and creating new opportunities, but at the same time was a cultural transformation. And I don't know, at the time I didn't realize how fundamental the digital transformation was actually going to turn out to be. It was, it's pretty amazing when I think back on it.

And for brands, they can think outside the square. I mean, as with things that are growing quickly, people sort of are quick to copy trends and the way things are being done. And so, you know, podcast ads at the beginning, middle, and end of podcasts, and whether they're host-read or not host-read, it's sort of, there's not a lot of different formulas. But for brands that probably don't want to run ads inside podcasts, there are other opportunities to use the content to give exposure to other parts of their business or, you know, build trust and move customers on a journey that doesn't necessarily mean you have to have a radio ad yelled at you during a podcast.

Yeah, I don't think that— I mean, if you're running a branded podcast, I don't think you want to run any advertising. I think what you want to do is you want to position the content to be content that drives your brand message, that then actually is your commercial message. But it's not taking an overt approach. It's taking a content marketing approach, which is a little bit different. But it can be challenging because you're walking a fine line around maintaining trust and that is not an easy thing to do, but I think you can do it with stories and I think you can do it with showing examples of things that your customers are doing successfully with the products or services that you have at your company and not focus on just the commercial elements of it, but focus on the experience and the benefit of it.

Yeah, the storytelling and creating entertainment, I think, for brands is really important. But on the other side, if brands want to dip their toe in the water and want to get into the advertising side of things, and we will move on from this after this last question, but you did talk in the New Media Show about the difference between host-read or baked-in ads versus radio ads, prerecorded ads. Do you have a sense of what works better, what advertisers should be thinking about?

Well, I think we're moving into a phase where more and more advertising is gonna be utilizing dynamic ad insertion, which it's a complicated subject. There is kind of two sides to this. There's the live read kind of concept, which is done actually live in the middle of the content and it's baked in. And then there's prerecorded host reads, which can utilize dynamic ad insertion, which I think is the direction the industry is going because what we need to do is unlock more ad locations and content across archives as well as current shows. The dynamic ad insertion typically has been done more often in current shows and it hasn't been deployed quite as often in archives. So depending on the kind of show it is, there's opportunity there. And I think the show content can be the same. The host can produce that show. So the brand would give the host of the show kind of an outline of core topics. And then also as part of that relationship, they may be able to be given access to the product or service so they can use it themselves. And so they can have a story that they can tell about their experience with it. And hopefully it's a positive experience. You know, one of the things that isn't talked about much anymore in the early days of the medium, back when we were kind of challenging these commercialization issues, was it was more acceptable back then for a host to bash an advertiser. And so, I mean, it was one of those things, you know, the advertiser would come in and buy ads. And they would send out a product sample to them and they would try it. And unfortunately, the host wouldn't always feel obligated to be extremely positive about the product. And back in those days, you can kind of see how that might be appealing to an audience that was like, podcasting is a rebel with a definite cause. And so there was some friction about that, right? Because as you think about it now, I don't know of too many shows that talk badly about their sponsors. That was something that happened back then.

And we're moving rapidly in the kind of other direction.

Right, exactly. So, you know, when you do that, you're running into issues of trust, right?

Right. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, at what point do we crash against that wall and say, you know, can we really trust any advertising in podcasting anymore? Yeah.

To move on to maybe some quickfire, more rapid questions. You probably get these questions all the time because we absolutely do. Is there a sweet spot for episode length? What are your thoughts on that?

Let me make that simple. No. But that's not to say that there's not some things that you can think about that maybe make sense in that context where the average length of a commute, at least if I'm referring to something in the US, I don't know how common this is outside of the US, is about 25 minutes. So when people are in a car, you can see, you know, they go to work 25 minutes, they go home 25 minutes. Pow, that's 50 minutes. So I would say just generally though, if you're starting a new podcast, I've been hearing this more here in the last couple of years too, this concept of earn your duration with your audience. So maybe it may not be a bad idea to start out shorter, like in the 20, 25 minute range, and then grow to longer as you develop a better show and you're able to sustain a longer show. But I think you can do whatever you want to do. I think it should be based on what the content is and what you're trying to cover, how many segments that you have. Audiences will, if they like this stuff, they'll listen.

Rob, what about when it comes to releasing podcasts? Is there a better day of the week, do you think?

Typically it's early, earlier in the week. So you can push stuff out like Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I wouldn't get much past Wednesday because I mean, you think about podcast consumption is typically a Monday through Friday thing. So getting it out early gives people more days of access to be able to get to your episodes. That's not to say that you can't publish on the weekends. It's just that most of your listening is going to happen on Monday.

What about the time of the day? Does it have an impact?

Time of the day is a tricky thing because you're dealing with so many time zones around the world. So you need to think about, well, where do I think my listeners are going to be? What time zone around the world? So, you know, that may be a hard thing to track. But you can look in your dashboard on your podcast hosting platform and find out where the most of your audience is listening, because a lot of the podcast hosting platforms will tell you what country and city your show is getting listened to the most, and maybe you think about those time zones first.

And if you were thinking about a particular time zone, just to drill down a little further, would early morning be the best time to release for that time zone?

That used to be the case in the early days of the medium when people were using iPods and stuff, where they would synchronize their portable media players to their computers in the morning, and then they would take it in the car and go to work with them. Where now it's like you just open up the app and click play, you know, because most people are connected to the internet now. So it's a little bit of a— it's not really necessary to be concerned about exactly when, but if you want to hit those listeners on Monday, I think it's also more about consistency. So the listener knows when to expect to have your episode available. 'Cause I've had listeners in the past write me and say, you know, your episode didn't come out on Sunday, you know, and I missed it on Monday, that kind of stuff. So there's definitely, I think, a consistency issue you need to think about.

And Rob, what about time of the year, particular months, if you're launching a podcast?

Fall is a good time because people are transitioning. If you look at the overall listening numbers to podcasts, they tend to decline in the summer months. And they go up in the winter months. So that's the pattern. So if you want to start up, I mean, you can start a podcast anytime you want. Nobody's going to slap your hand and say, nope, don't.

It's also not summer at the same time in all parts of the world, which adds an extra complication.

It's all about, like I was talking about before, it's all about time zones, right?

Where is your audience?

Yeah, exactly. If you're targeting Australia and you're in the US, it's a different dynamic, right? You'd be targeting a completely different day. So it gets complicated like that.

So Rob, what's on the horizon for Libsyn? Anything that you can share with us? Anything exciting?

Yeah, well, we're working on a new ad monetization platform to kind of go back to where we somewhat started a little bit with this conversation. It's an important area for the medium. Podcasters need to get paid for the hard work that they do producing this stuff. And it's not getting easier to produce really quality content. It's actually getting more complicated. It's taking larger teams to produce quality content that reaches large audiences. So there needs to be a way to pay people to work on podcasts so we can get the quality up. So ad monetization is a huge focus of ours, and there's going to be some new things rolling out in that area. Plus, Lipson as a company is going to rebrand itself. We're in the middle of doing that already. We've rebranded and rebuilt our website, and we're going to make publishing a lot easier. We're going to create some wizards. We're going to make simple step-by-step processes to set up shows and to publish shows easier than even what they are today. And then we're moving down the path stronger towards, you know, like a mobile app that will give you the ability to control your podcast and get your stats and keep up with what's going on on your show from anywhere you happen to be. So I would say those are the main 3 things that we're working on.

Fantastic. So Rob, as we wrap up, you're back in home in Seattle for a minute. Where are you off to next? Which part of the country? What are you doing?

In about 3 days, I'm heading to Dallas to go to the NAB radio show, which I've spent quite a bit of time over the years going to radio shows, and that's commercial radio type of conferences and events to help that community kind of understand podcasting and And I'm going to have a booth there and going to do some education of some college students that are going to come in. I'm going to do a workshop with them about podcasting. So it should be interesting.

Well, Rob, you're an absolute wealth of information on podcasting. We could talk all day. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been fantastic.

Thanks, Rob. It's been a pleasure having you. Thank you for taking the time. We appreciate it.

Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

And thank you, Nicole, for joining me today.

It's always a pleasure, Nic.

That's all we have time for, for this edition of Podcasting Essentials. For more about us and how we can help you create a podcast or audio strategy for your brand, you can go to be.com.au. From all of us at BE Media Production, thanks so much for listening.