Myths Debunked: Addressing Common Podcast Channel Misconceptions

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works today. Get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everybody, Tom hazard here from FeedYourBrand podcast and Politize.com I am flying solo today, at least for a while. Tracy has something that she has to do, unavoidable. So you're getting me alone today. And what I thought I would go over with you is some common misconceptions about your podcast and especially some of the podcast distribution channels. Your episodes, when they're actually published, when are they actually available on different platforms? Because we're getting a lot of questions lately, not only from some new people, but from some existing longtime customers, even about some expectations, I guess, that they had for episodes and when they would be public and some things that also come back and impact their statistics of their show.

So first misconception is about publication of your podcast episodes. I want to make it very clear that when you publish an episode and actually, let's talk about when you launch a show first because some of you are new. Now this, this is gonna have something for those of you that are seasoned podcasters as well as something for those of you that are new. But let's actually start at the new. People often say, hey, I want to go live with my podcast next Friday. There's a specific date. They want to make sure their podcast is live to the world on that date. And that can be done. But you got to plan ahead, because while some podcast platforms that are out there, when register your show there you can be live literally in 30 minutes. And in their system, most often that's not the case. Most often you need to register your show, which means we submit for you your RSS feed to them and then they get all the information on your show and put it in their system available for people to find through their app and use. And that happens within 24 to 48 hours usually. But unfortunately, the number one podcast destination or platform or distribution channel. There are many ways people describe these things. The number one is Apple Podcasts, which that's the new name for it. Everybody commonly refers to it as itunes. In reality, itunes still exists as a program, but it's only for certain things. And Apple sort of split up all the different things that used to be into itunes, into their different little individual apps like music and podcasts used to be in itunes. Now there's Apple music and Apple podcasts. If you have an older computer, you can still have an itunes app, but it's 10 different. It's not what it used to be. So I may interchangeably use the words itunes and apple podcasts, but essentially we're talking about Apple. Apple, of course, invented podcasts because they weren't even called that till the ipod exists. They created the ecosystem, but now there's an awful lot more players in it. But still, today, Apple will still, for Most podcasters, be 50 to 60% of where your listeners are, and your podcast plays, or downloads, as they may be referred to, are coming from. And ironically, Apple, who's the very first, pioneered this technology. They are the slowest to putting a new show in their system and making it available on Apple, on Apple podcasts. So they have invented and created these, I would call them. Well, their guidelines, their policies, their requirements, really. So they still vet new shows? Okay? They absolutely still vet new shows for making sure they're in compliance with their requirements. And they have real people that do it. It's not automated. It is not just this automatic process where you submit it and it goes through some computer stuff and then gets put out there. So they have real people and employees that have to do it. Over the years, we've found that the amount of time it takes for. For a podcast to become live in Apple's system can vary tremendously. At certain times of the year, when demand is not as high and people are not away on vacations at Apple and things like that, this can happen in a few days. Two to three days maybe is the shortest I've experienced, but the longest we've experienced is over two weeks. And I know that's a little alarming, especially for any of you newbies who are trying to plan around a marketing push or social media push around a launch of your podcast. That's a hard thing to deal with. But often we find it's usually seven days or less. Usually at most times of the year you can count on if you plan a week ahead, you're going to be good. And in fact, even very recently, we had a couple of shows because we're launching shows every week. We had a couple of shows literally take three days, and they were live on itunes. Unfortunately, it's just unpredictable. Apple owns this space, really. And they're going to do what they do, and there's no way to make them do it any different way. So when you're planning a launch, you've got to plan around the potential that it's going to take you, I would say, up to seven days and be ready for that, or as little as three days. And so you have to be ready for that as well. If the show comes out before you want it to, it's going to be available for the world to download. And that's just the way it is. There is the option with Apple to hide the podcast. Like if it goes live and it's earlier than you want it to be, we can hide it from being visible and then make it visible on the exact day you want to launch. So if you have a real marketing push and you want everything to be timed precisely, you can do that. However, we also have been experiencing and understand there's some algorithmic consequences for that within Apple's platform. And you would may not be well served for your show being ranked and your show rising in the charts and certainly in the new podcast section as high as it would have if the day it launched, whatever day that was, you just go with it, promote it and drive as much people to it as possible. You will do better. And we don't recommend doing that in every situation. So you got to be prepared. A podcast launch could be kind of a little bit of a fluid thing and takes place over a period of days, maybe not on one particular day. So I want to make sure everybody's aware of that. It's also a common misconception that especially newbies who want to go and publish an episode and they publish it at 10 in the morning. Maybe they published it two hours ago today on Wednesday and then they keep looking in their app. Well, I published it. I don't see it on Apple. I don't see it there. Well, yes, that's true. There's another common misconception about your podcast is just because you would like to publish something live, it's quite a bit different than going live on Facebook. Like I am with this presentation right now, I am live on Facebook and as soon as I went live, it's live, it's out there. Now it's in a private group. I've limited who can see it, but it's out there and it's live. That's either going live on Facebook or YouTube or Instagram TV or something like that. It's really the only way you're going to be completely live on demand when you want to be. The podcast ecosystem just doesn't work that way. When you publish an episode, it's live to your podcast feed. And that's sort of the mechanism of distribution of podcasts. If you didn't know that it's an RSS feed, which stands for real simple syndication, basically, that makes it available for the world to find. And any of you that have a website with a player app that is checking your feed, then it will be live in pretty much real time on your website. If you've got a website app that's pulling the latest episode, when anybody loads that page of the website, that app goes and checks the RSS feed for a new episode and pulls it in and people can play it right there. Any of you working with us that you have a WordPress website, we put the fuse box player on your site and there's an option to have what they call the sticky player, the bottom of every page of your website. And that means no matter what page of your website someone's on, at the very bottom is a track player of your latest episode. And people can play it right there without being on the podcast page, without being in a blog post for it, without going into any other app, they can play it right there on your site. That's the most live experience anybody's ever going to have with your podcast. Real time experience is going to be on your website.

In the podcast ecosystem and distribution system, all of these apps, every single one of them, Apple, Iheart, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Tunein, Spotify, and there's a whole bunch more. I think we're up to like 14 or so. We're putting everybody on all these apps, they check your RSS feed usually only once a day, and some of them don't even do it every single day. It's a little bit unpredictable with some of them, and that's very unfortunate. So the closest you can predict as to when an episode is going to be published is the next day or the next morning, if you will, after you publish it to your RSS feed. So if you want your shows to go live on Fridays, and we're handling this for you, we're going to schedule that episode to publish usually Friday morning at somewhere between just after midnight. So like 12:05am And 3:00am Somewhere in there. So that's when we're gonna do it. And because most of the podcast distribution channels are checking your feed once a day for new content, new episodes published in the wee hours, the early morning hours, usually before, people would be driving to work, walking to work, commuting to work, however they're getting there. The idea being subscribers want a podcast as soon as they can get it and they're going to make it live. They're going to go look for it and pull it in and make it available for you to listen to as soon as they can on that day, they've checked the feed. But if you publish an episode after they check for the feed, let's say that Apple checks at 4am it varies because there's so many feeds. I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there. Folks, even as powerful as Apple is, it takes them time, a period of hours at least to be able to check all the feeds for new content. So you publish an episode in the early way, early hours in the morning, and then by the time somebody drives to work, it's available on their device. They can listen to it as they're commuting. But if you wait and publish an episode till after that time, they've checked it. And again, it's random. You have no way of knowing exactly when all these channels are going to check it. So anytime, probably 7 in the morning, 8 in the morning, 9 in the morning, 10 in the morning. If you publish your own episode at a time like that, it won't be available until the next morning. That's the way it works. And in the vast majority of platforms that's going to be the case. There's one minor exception that you can refresh a feed and force an app to publish something right away, but it still takes an hour or two and it's a little bit unpredictable. But for the most part, you really got to plan on it and have an expectation. You got a plan ahead and you want it available on Monday, it's going to need to be published somewhere between midnight and 3am Monday morning, or you may miss it and it won't be available till Tuesday. I hope that's clear. I know that can get a little confusing, but that's just the way the podcast ecosystem works. It's not a absolutely live, real time situation the way Facebook Live is, or YouTube Live or Instagram TV or anything like that. So that's for new podcasters and publishing episodes in general. So other misconceptions are you actually know how many subscribers you have. It's another newbie thing. I think those of you in podcasters know this already, but you'll never know how many actual subscribers you have. You can estimate it and you can get a pretty good idea, but you're probably never going to know exactly how many subscribers you have on Apple, on Spotify, on Google Play, or at all in general, across all of them. Because the ecosystem just isn't built for that. It doesn't tell you how many subscribers you have. You'll know how many downloads each episode has gotten, and that is a pretty good approximation of how many people have listened to it. If you want an idea of how many subscribers you have, it's probably the number of people that have listened to an episode within the first 24 hours. Some people say 12 hours. I think it depends a little bit. But how many downloads you get somewhere in that first 12 to 24 hours are usually the number of subscribers you have. Because they get it first. It's not random that they're finding it. They're going to get it right away that day it publishes. So that's the way you can estimate that. Also, podcast platforms, you might think that we have this happen a lot, and this is with existing podcasters, too. So this is sort of getting out of newbie territory. I mean, it's valuable for all of you. But we have people say, hey, I want you to publish that episode on this date. And they go. And as soon as on that date, they go and check every different platform, every single one, they check it to find out, hey, is it available? Where is it available? And unfortunately, the reality is that we don't have control over every platform and everywhere that it's made available. And while most of them check once a day, they're not required to. They do it on their time. They make up their own rules, they set up their own algorithms, and we have no control over that. Each of these different apps and channels is their own company, their own software, and their own rules. We don't control it, and we are unable to predict it and control it. So we've had some people say, hey, my latest three episodes are not on Stitcher. Stitcher's been really weird in recent months, I got to tell you. It was the standard for listening to podcasts on an Android phone platform, really. Google Podcasts is starting to take that over, and they want to take it over. Stitcher still exists, and it's worth being on Stitcher. But I'll tell you, an awful lot of people are finding that their episodes are not publishing there consistently. And we reach out to Stitcher, we try to work with them to see what's going on. The reality is we don't really know what's going on. They're a little unpredictable. So just want you to be aware. Some people think Even if they're DIY hosters with us, they're not even people we're doing production for, but we're syndicating their stuff. They publish their own episodes on Potitize and it pushes out everywhere. Unfortunately, this is something you don't have control of. And DIYers will sometimes say, what is wrong with your hosting? My show isn't appearing on Stitcher, and it really has nothing to do with our hosting. The episode's published because it's on Apple, it's on Spotify, it's everywhere, but it's just not on that one platform. So we deal with those issues on a case by case basis and try to provide support and get them out there. But just beware. It's a little bit of a misconception that it's always completely predictable and that it always happens when it's supposed to. I mean, there are glitches. It doesn't happen often, but it can happen.

And then here's another one, somewhat related, and it's important. If you publish an episode and then you realize, I've had this happen, somebody gets threatened by someone, they call up and make a threat. You publish this. You're talking about my company. Take down that podcast now. Or I've had people have a guest that the guest was unhappy with their performance and they demand they take it down. And hopefully all of you are getting permission from your guests that they're going to be recorded and published and you have the right to publish it. But in the rare exception where you want to unpublish an episode, just beware. Because we unpublish it, it doesn't erase it from the Internet immediately. And there are some places it won't erase from at all for quite some time, because once you put it out there, it's out there. Anybody who subscribes to your podcast will have had it downloaded already to their device. So they've got it. And you can't unring that bell. But there are certain platforms like Spotify that cache your episodes, meaning they put it in their system and serve it to their people from them. So they don't check your feed as often. Usually they might check it a few times a week, maybe not every day. And it can take a while before they'll take an episode down that was published there. So we've had that happen with people that decide, hey, they want to unpublish something, or we've had people decide to launch their podcast, and then the morning it goes live, they say, no, I want to push back my launch date a week. You can't really do that very well and very effectively. And that wreaked all kinds of havoc with the algorithms on Apple for the charts and all that too. So be aware of that if you're new. And then Stats Just a few misconceptions on stats. Some people think, hey, you're always going to know exactly how many plays or downloads you have on every little individual platform and most podcast hosting platforms. In fact, I think all of them. In fact, I don't think there's any way you can absolutely identify exactly how many you've got on Castbox or how many you've got on Stitcher versus other platforms, even Apple. The ecosystem is just not really built that way to give you that level of stats. Although Tracy came up with a very cool concept that I'm not going to share with you the details of, because we think we may turn this into some cool new software, but we think we have a method we think we can implement this year. At some point it's going to take us a little time where we'll actually be able on Poditize, if you're hosted with us, to give you that kind of detailed information. So anyway, more to come on that. So really that will wrap up my portion of what I was sharing with you today about misconceptions about your podcast and publication especially, and a little bit about stats.

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