Splitting Up With Your Podcast Co-Host: Make Sure To Secure These Things

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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, everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy, and today we are talking about splitting up with your podcast co host. Make sure to secure these three things. So I've never had this experience, but I know we have clients that have. I've never split up with a co host. Cause honestly, Tracy, you're my co host. You know, nine times out of 10, I mean, there's one show I'm on that you're not on. Maybe there will be others, but he.

Might want to split up with you one day.

He might.

You never know because there are so many reasons for it. It has nothing to do with bad feelings. It might be business strategy. It could be just time commitments.

Yeah. One person doesn't have time for it anymore.

Shift of focus. Like, it's not, you know, it's not the best use of your time and your time is valuable. So. So thinking about that. So I have done this before with the show, but I knew I was going to do it from the beginning. We planned it in. So that's something to consider as well. That if you're thinking about setting up your show and you're thinking about having a co host, you might want to plan these things from the very beginning because it's likely to happen.

Boy, I think it's really very good advice, Tracy, and I want to put a little emphasis on it. I wish I could put the two exclamation points like we have in messenger on our iPhone. Like, hey, that's a good point. And it's really true. Any of us that are listening or participating in this recording that have been in business or are in business, know the time to have a contract that defines the end of the business or the end of the relationship between a couple of parties that are in the business corners, whatever is in the beginning when you're happy, not at the end when you're mad at each other. Because it's near impossible to agree on anything at that point. Similar thing here with co host. Wouldn't you agree, Tracy?

Yeah. So we're talking about co host Prenups, something like that.

That would have been a catchy title, too.

Co host Prenups a little bit different because that's preplanning. This is what happens when you. When you're ready to make that switch. And the reality is, is that it's this time of year. So we're recording this at the beginning of a year. And at the beginning of a year, this is when people make decisions, they make changes, they reflect on things and they say, you know, I really don't want to spend my time focusing on recording this podcast anymore. I need to shake this off, I need to move on to something else. This just isn't right for me. So this is likely a time of year that this is going to happen. That's why we're talking about it right now. But it's also likely a time of year where you might want to shift some things in your show and you might want to bring in a co host or do some different things or bring in some guest hosts. Like there might be some different things that you want to do and how you handle it and what you're going to secure for yourself really matters. And that's what we're really going to talk about today. Because at the end of the day, a podcast has value, right? It's intellectual property, copyrighted value, and someone has to own that. And it really has to be clear from the beginning of that. Now, there are some hidden things that I'm going to want you to talk about, Tom, because you're sort of the expert in how to extricate yourself from it or what really controlling factors are, right? And so when we really look at a show, there are a few things that are indicators of control, whether that's your agreement or not, right? You might have an agreement that you are co sharing this show, but you actually aren't executed in that way. And some of those things are how your show is set up and syndicated out to Apple, Spotify, all of those places out there, how they're leaving your RSS feed and going out there is an indicator of who's in control. We come across this a lot with people who find out that they don't actually control their show, whoever their radio station or their network were on that they are in control of it. And you may find out that one partner of the two hosts control it as well, and not both. And that is a mistake in your setup and how you set this up, because you didn't plan for that from the beginning. But it also, you know, is just really Common. So let's see if we can address those things and maybe you can fix them now while you're still in a good situation, in case things might go wrong in the future.

Now, Tracy, you have really three key things you have in mind to share with everybody in this episode today, Right?

Right. The first thing is the control of the show itself, like the physical control of the RSS feed, which is a control of your copyright, whether you think it or not, whether that's what you believe, or that's the arrangement that you have the physical control of who owns that show, according to Apple and Spotify. And the RSS feed is the control of the copyright.

Well, in fact, you're correct, Tracy. But in fact, it's even more than that. If there's only whatever person, and even if you both have login credentials to the hosting account where the RSS feed is generated, there is an email address that's associated with that account and with pretty much every hosting provider out there. The person who's in control of that email is ultimately in control of that hosting account, and the person in control of that hosting account has the keys to the Castle and can take it, do whatever they want, can change the email, could change the username and password. Ultimately, in the world of podcasting, in the podcast ecosystem, whoever has control of that hosting account, that RSS feed can do whatever they want legally, whether you have agreed that they have the right to do it or not, you have control over that. You own the show, you can do whatever you want. So be aware of that.

Which means it's kind of like controlling a bank account. They can lock you out, or it's.

Like controlling a company. I remember one of the earliest lessons I learned in business when I had even my first company, Tracy, before we had our first company together in the mid-90s, early mid-90s, you have two people in a corporation that has stock, S Corp, whatever. If you don't both own 50% of the stock or equal amounts, one person owns 51, the other owns 49. Guess what? The person that owns 49 ultimately has no control over that business whatsoever. You could be fired from the company. You know, there are things you can.

Lose access to the bank accounts. Right? Like, so all of that matters. So that email address is the key, and that email address is the most important thing. When I set up one of my shows, and this one in particular, we're going to just talk straight out about it, New Trust Economy, its email address was a joint email address we created together. So my co Host is Monica Profit. More My co host was Monica Profit because it's now all hosted solely by Monica Profitt. And so Monica and I started the show. We did it as a purposeful start together. It's a show on Cryptocurrency and Blockchain. And we did it because I had experience writing and she wrote the book on Blockchain. So, like, you know, we just had this kind of. I had a column, she had a book. It made a lot of sense. Plus profit and Hazard sounds really cool together. And so, you know, it seemed like the right thing to do to start the show, but we intended eventually it would be its own thing and she would likely take it over and I would stop doing it. At some point, like we had planned for that. We didn't know when that was going to happen. Along the way, it might wait till 100 episodes, we might get to 50. We didn't really know when, but we knew that was likely to happen. So we planned it so that it had its own email address that wasn't single, wasn't one of ours. It was one created for the show. So you might do myshowmail.com or whatever that is, but you have a controlling one. And we both had access to that. And now that's the case, someone can go in and be very difficult about it and change that email address and lock you out of it. So you do have to be careful and cautious with that. But that is something that we did was we created a special email address that was required to help us to syndicate our show. And so it was not one of our individual emails.

Yeah, you had planned this at some point and while one of you could have covertly gone in and had the ability to change everything, despite whatever kind of verbal or written agreement you had, you know, once someone decides to go in and change those things, they could seize control of the show and then you have to kind of fight them for it later. So you just need to be aware of what the situation is. I mean, it's always for whoever you are, one of the co hosts. If you want to be in control, you need to try to set it up that way. Obviously, you have to agree between the co hosts. And actually we have a few shows that have three and four hosts. Every show makes it even more complicated.

And those in those cases, I recommend more of a company approach. Right, you're going to take a company approach and you're going to have a written agreement between all of you. You really should at that point. So. So with Monica And I, we were taking a little more casually. We weren't expecting to make a ton of money off the show. It wasn't a plan for advertising or any of those things. We just. We were doing it from an experiential situation and using our joint authority to build a better, faster show. Like that was really its point. So we just had a different purpose to it. So what we tried to do was create as much equality in the copyright as possible. So in our authorship, it had both of our names under. In our syndicated feed and on our website. So we always had both of our names for every episode that we created together. Occasionally we would do a single episode separate. So where I would interview someone or where she would separately interview someone. And in those cases, only our single name went on there, whoever was hosting that interview. And so we did that purposefully so that there would be this both variety over our website and our blog post of where it would say Monica and Tracy. And other times where it would be just straight Monica or straight Tracy. And those would be the single articles or the single blogs within that that were our copyrights alone. But the entire website was also marked with joint copyright. So we did that purposefully to kind of create that situation where we were creating a joint statement of these copyrights belong to both of us.

I've seen other co hosts do things differently where they each have their own website and the podcast is available on both, although the blog post posts are only available on one website because you can't have duplicate content. There are other issues to consider. But you plan this out and I want to just.

And we planned it out with a separate website. So I do want to say that newtrusteconomy.com is its own website and we did that purposefully so that it would have its home be separated from the two of us, because we knew one of us was going to take it over separate eventually. Right.

And Tracy, I just want to also let our audience understand that the reason that you. You planned that you would exit this show at some point is cause you and I have this thing where at least one of us, if not each of us, starts a new podcast every year so that we're experiencing what's working today and not just what worked years ago, launching a show. And so you knew you were gonna move on and do some other show here, right?

I know in a year I was gonna do another show. Yeah.

This is not a show that you intended to do long term. Like maybe the binge factor that you've done for a lot of years and you're intending to continue to do or this show feed your brand that we're continu to do. So there are reasons why you planned it. Now, not everybody plans it. Everybody gets into a podcast. Yeah, let's do this together. It's going to be so much fun. You have this vision, you're both going to do it for the foreseeable future. Most of us been around a while, know that everything's temporary, Right?

Right, exactly. So thinking about this from the RSS control standpoint, because I want to go back to that. So RSS control and IP ownership, those are the two major things. The third thing we'll talk about in a minute, which is website and email list control. So those are the three parts that I'm going to be talking about, about the different things that you must secure. Right. Or you must have an understanding about or a written agreement about. These are the things that you really must understand, impact your ability to control your show and the value from that show. So those are the three most important things. IP ownership, RSS control, and your website or email list control. Because those things are go hand in hand. Think of it like you don't have access to your subscribers, but you do have access to the people who gave you their emails or who came through your website. Right. So you have access and control of those as well. So those are the places that we want to make sure that we're clear on. And sometimes in that website, email list control might be your social media controls too. So there are different choices that we make up front when we are looking at all of these control issues to saying, do we want to have the same separated from one of our businesses and into its own entity. It makes it easier. And that's why this particular case, we had its own Facebook page, its own Twitter feed. We didn't do LinkedIn. I think we made a LinkedIn page for it, but we didn't do more beyond that. And each of us were admins of all of those things in the process that there were always two admins in control. And we did that purposefully. Same thing with our rss. Obviously we hosted on potatoes because like, that makes complete sense. And so in potitize, we. Monica had her own login and I had my own login. And we would still see exactly everything in the feed. We'd see everything that was related to our show. Either one of us could make adjustments or changes or make, you know, keep it up to date, do what we needed, publish episodes and do all of that but at the end of the day, we had an agreement that neither one of us was going to mess with the email address, right? Because that's the understanding of the controlling point. And we had this understanding, a handshake between us, not a written agreement. But it's also because the show had zero value at the beginning, right? So keep that in mind. It's like you may not really realize like this is going to become an issue for you to. You're a few hundred episodes in and now your show has sponsors and value that's being created and one of you wants out and the other wants to keep honoring the relationships with your sponsors. So now you have money tied into there and that copyright issue becomes like even more value and control. It's like, what if I say I want to separate from the show and you cannot use my name, my likeness, or any episode where my voice is anymore? And I try to take that away from you. That takes your 300 episode balance down to, you know, 100 or something like that. And it hurts your show. So when you start to get to the level of kind of controlling up and seeing that there's going to be value created from this, that might be a time where you step in and say, hey, let's have an IP ownership discussion. And then if one of us leads the show, like right now we might be 5050 sharing, but if one of us leaves the show, the other has the right to use everything previously published, has the right to use likeness and name for a period of time, at minimum, a transition period you might want to plan in. And if you leave the show and you're no longer contributing, you, your share goes from 50% to 20%. You know, I just made that number up. But like you could come up with whatever that contribution level is. And you know, there's a lot of very unequal co host partnerships out there. I'm just gonna be really clear about this where you, you know, you might wanna say you're not even 5050 to begin with in terms of IP ownership, a creation of episodes because one of you shows up, you know, three out of every four times. And so your participation is like 75% to 25%. So also be really careful in just granting a 50 50. You could make it clearly based on the number of episodes published and participation in those episodes. So you could make it tied to an actual participation level.

Regardless of what you decide to do. The good idea is to have an exit plan, try to lay some ground rules ahead of time, because then the show is going to get or just.

An ownership plan, even if it's not an exit one. Right. If you're clearly defining that ownership level and it's based on participation or whatever, then if somebody wants to drop out, the exit's already clear because the participation drops to zero.

That makes a lot of sense, actually. I think participation is a huge indicator of maybe a way to decide value, benefit, return on time invested, all that sort of stuff. But the show itself, and we'll talk about this more going on this year, Tracy, with other episodes, is your show will gain value. You mentioned, could we have advertisers, could have sponsors, could have website, could have traffic, email list. The show itself will have a value. So it's good to try to define these things and you'll have an easier time moving forward.

Right. And that's why I'm say to secure these three things, because if you secure or identify what's going to happen when value is created, your IP ownership, your intellectual property ownership, or your copyright split, you know, the value created there, like, what does that involve? If you're in control of your RSS feed, that means you control the future of everything. So you definitely want that. And if you're controlling the website, email list and or social media sites, or web pages, whatever you want to call social media pages, whatever it is that you've got, the accounts there, those are controlling your access to the community. So at the end of the day, having a podcast is of no value if you cannot then access your community outside of the podcast itself. Right. You want all three parts to be working for you. If you're going to retain the ownership and you're going to move it to the next level, taking any piece of those, you know, despite, you know, rev shares or revenue share or any kind of royalty give back or, you know, kind of monetary split, that's something for, you know, a side discussion. But the access to all three of those things, any one of them actually encumbers the ability for your show to grow in the future. If any one of those things is not available to you, to you, you really need a new show at that point. You're creating that show, is creating that show where someone else is achieving at least a third of the value.

Okay, so, Tracy, so you have the copyright that was number one.

Yep. The copyright, the ownership of, you know, of that relationship of all the past episodes and everything about them, owning everything.

Of value within the podcast ecosystem, let's just say.

Exactly.

I mean, the copyright is a big part of that, but it really is Control of the show.

Audio files themselves. Right, exactly. It's the control of what was said there. Yeah.

And what's been syndicated. And to have control to continue to do that the way you want to. Okay, so number two, revisit again, is the RSS control.

Well, actually, that one was number one. Our IP was number two.

So, yeah, we reversed it. Okay. Number one. I'm sorry, that.

Yep.

The IP number two. And then what's the third?

The third is that email, website, and social media control. Right. Because you want community access, so it's your community control.

Okay, makes sense. So just to make sure everybody. Cause I know a lot of things are talked about and they're overlapping. Yeah, yeah. And they do overlap, but those are the real key value points, I guess, tangible aspects of your podcast.

Right. So let's say we've agreed to split up. Right. And that's happening. And the show is, you know, and I'm going to separate from it. I mentioned before a transition period, and I highly recommend a transition period for any shows that are over 50 episodes, less than 50 episodes. I think you could be kind of, you know, if somebody just really wanted to make a hard split, I think you're fine with that. But. And by transition period, it doesn't mean that somebody has to stay involved and record more episodes. You can make an agreement that we're going to record one more goodbye together. That could be it. Or you're allowed to do a goodbye where you say that they're leaving. Right. You want to get an agreement to say that because, you know, they might not want to tell people why. Right. They may not want to announce that yet. So you need to come to an agreement about what that transition episode itself is going to be. But you also might want a transition period where you agree with your co host that's leaving that you have six months to remove their name and likeness from the entire show catalog. Or you have an agreement, they don't have to do it. Like, I agreed with Monica that she can do it when she wants, but if she doesn't want to make any changes, she doesn't need to, because Profit and hazard sounds really cool. The COVID art looks awesome. And I am in the show. I'm just not in the show past 100 episodes. Right. So it's not a lie. But so she can decide when, at what point she wants to make that change. And I gave her unlimited time period to do it. I just did that because it doesn't matter to me personally. I don't need those blogs I don't need any of that. I turned it all back. I turned it all over to her to do what she wants.

You're right. As I look at it right now, Tracy, your name's still on the COVID art and you're still credited as an author in right now.

Any current blogs that are posting or any current episodes, they don't have my name in them in the episode arts or anything like that. And that's of perfectly normal. Right. Because that's how we used to do it back then anyway. Was whoever was recording the episode name was all over everything. So she can take her time to do that. She can never do it if she wants because there's residual value to my name. When you Google my name and you see the articles I wrote in Ink magazine on Blockchain, that adds credibility and authority to her show. She may not want to get rid of me and you may not want to do the same thing. So you could come in some long residual agreement and say, I'm going to pay you 10% on anything I earn on the show for continued use of your name and likeness. And also never have to spend the cost to change all of those graphics and all of those things and take the time to scrub someone and remove it. So either get yourself a transition period that you all agree is a certain time period. Six months is my minimum that I would recommend. But a year might be a good time period as well. And then from there go forward and just make a determination. Are they owed something for that? Do you feel like that's necessary? Do they demand that and make sure that you make that right during that time period? And then a single transition episode, I believe, is required. And so the reason I say that that's required is because it's confusing to people. And people who binge listen to a show will start jumping around if they see that looking for that transition point when the person left. And they will be looking for closure. If you don't give it to them, it surprises them. The next thing that I say that you do is once you've now recorded a bunch of new episodes and you get kind of far enough in that that episode disappears off the main list. So once you do at least 25 episodes, that transition episode will start to disappear off of most of the short lists that you would see in any episode.

It will still be there. What she means is it's not obvious.

It's not as visible. Yeah, people have to go down farther and look for it harder to find that. At that point. I Recommend. You might think about changing your trailer. Like having a trailer or a teaser episode or something like that, and having that change where it says, hey, you're going to hear some episodes that are with this co host and just like, but I've taken over the show and here's the new changes to it. And so you're just making it in that teaser obvious. That clears it up and it makes closure immediately and it builds immediate trust into the fact that this is still a good show.

You know, Tracy, this last point you made really comes under in my mind the heading of address the elephant in the room with your audience. You know, podcast audiences want you to be real with them. I think they're willing to accept a lot of things that may change in your show, but you need to just be upfront with them and let them know. They don't want you to try to pull a wool over their eyes. They don't want you to pretend something isn't what it is. They don't want you to be, you know, contrived about anything. It's just address it, deal with it. They'll respect you for it and be like, okay, that's the way it is now. Move on.

Absolutely. I agree that authenticity into what you're doing and it just creates better trust with your audience and they're going to stick around because of that. So if you've decided that you're going to switch your show and you're going to make the stylistic changes and you're going to scrub your host from everything or whatever you're going to do in that process, here's what I recommend that you do. The first thing is to make sure to adjust your intro outro so that it is clearly only you from that point forward. So this doesn't always require you to have it re recorded. You could just have an edit where you're cutting out. So, like that's possible right now. You might have to have it re recorded and it might be a great time to do it anyway and revamp it.

You might just need to have it remixed.

Exactly. That's what I was saying. By re edited. By having things kept but remixed. Right. So those are possibilities as well, especially if you have to change the website that it goes to for any reason. You definitely need to make sure that you're doing a new outro. Right. We record that. So that's the first thing that I say you do. And don't go back and put it through all your episodes. Just go and start that from forward on at least at this point, you can eventually go back and do that, but from that point forward, address that just moving forward. Do that first. The second thing then is change the COVID art. And the COVID art is the icon for your show. It's the main icon that's shown. When you make a change there, it changes across the entire ecosystem. Within about 24, 48 hours, it'll be everywhere. It'll be shifted and changed and you just remove their name from the COVID art. Don't make a significant change to the COVID art unless you really are going to make a big change to the show. And then the third thing that you do is record that transition episode, whether it's you doing the closure or had that last episode with your co host, just record that transition period and give that for yourself. So those are the immediate things to do long term. You might want to change your episode art, you might want to change some of your episode titles. If the co host name is in there, you might want to change the authorship on the website, on the podcast itself. Now, the one thing to consider, and the one is if you do not have to remove their name from the authorship section and during that transition period that you agree to, I would leave it there. And the only reason I say that is because if someone's searching for me, Tracy Hazard and Monica's show is going to show up because my name is still in her authorship section. So it says Monica Profitt and Tracy Hazard and has both of our names there. And so someone's searching for me, they're going to see her show. So actually my name showing up gives her the ability to tap into my audience, my community. So it gives her value leaving me there for a period of time. And for her, I've given her authorization to do it as long as she wants. Right. But you might want that for a period of time because maybe your co host was more name recognition, more well known than you were, had higher authority. But it's a search engine thing that if someone's searching for that person and they find you too, they're just going to go check out the show. Right. And then they'll know about the new changes, they'll get your new teaser, they'll get all those new things we talked about, and now they're becoming loyal to you. And it didn't matter how they went in and searched for you, but they found you.

Yeah, you just want to cast a wider net for your show to be found really by having both names there. So for the person that stays, probably is benefit at Least for a period of time.

Now, this is the other thing is like I just want to mention. So that was transitioning about like how you transition intro, outro, cover art, then go episode authorship, like those kind of levels to things that you might want to do. And there might be some episodes you want to scrub and delete completely. That's okay too, because maybe they were just too edgy for a topic, for how you feel you want your show to be perceived. Remember now, it's your show. That's the ability to own the IP means you could also remove it, right? You could take something off air. And so that's your choices to do that. Let's just talk briefly before we go on the value created from a show. So, so when you're trying to decide if you're going to offer your co host some money because you have sponsors, because you're making ad dollars, because you have affiliates or whatever it is that you're earning income on the show for, it is unfair to your co host. And any good co host or anyone who understands podcasting would balk at you telling them, I'm cutting you out of the show, you're not doing any more work. And because you're not doing any work, you don't deserve any value. About 60% of your listens come from your back catalog at any given time. So there is actually residual value that the episodes that they may have created with you and for you are delivering value from an advertising perspective, from an earnings potential, and they may be some of your top episodes in terms of listenership as well, especially some of those first 10 episodes. So to cut them out completely on that is kind of unfair. And so what you may want to do is, may want to do an actual study of how is my back catalog earning or a listenership based on that. And as that changes over time, you maybe make a monthly adjustment or a quarterly adjustment to that and offer them a declining value of percentage. So you might come out and offer them 20% for the first quarter and then 15, 10 as time goes on, and your catalog becomes bigger over time as well. So that's just something to consider because if you want to do the right thing, the fair thing, but also if they balk at it, and you need to kind of come up with a method, understanding where your numbers lie and what's happening on your stat side of things and how much of that is coming from back catalog is extremely important in assessing its overall value.

You know, Tracy, I think this episode could be a slippery slope to a lot of other episode topics that are kind of related or, you know, spin off of this one tangent to this one. I'm also, as we're, you know, wrapping this episode up, I can hear, boy, a lot of people who haven't launched the show with a co host saying, yeah, I'm going to reconsider that co host thing. I don't know if I want to do that. And maybe others that have already are out there with their podcast and have one armor a co host thing.

Uh oh, we haven't talked about this.

I'm prepared for what's going to happen down the road and I hope it doesn't happen. But anyway, it's like it can all be worked out.

Can all be worked out for sure. It's just a matter of understanding what the, you know, what the real issues are. I think a lot of podcasters get into this and they don't know what they don't know.

They really don't know. I mean, if there's anything that I hope we made you aware of is that participation and valuing participation is really what it's all about here, you know, because that's value creation and you don't create a podcast if you don't show up. Right. So if your co host isn't doing the work, then you need to get rid of them. Right. It's just not, it's putting a burden on you and it's also burdening your future potential of opportunity. You're going to start seeing this as less valuable as not and you're going.

To quit anchor holding you back.

Right, Exactly. So, you know, sometimes this co host shift, it may be a painful six month period, but when it's done, you're free to change things in your show that you didn't know. You know, you didn't really even consider consider before you're free to seek sponsorships that you weren't even eager to do before because it just felt like they were going to object and it was going to be too much work. So it might be the most freeing, absolute biggest opportunity for your show than you can imagine. So think of it and look at it that way. It could be the best thing that ever happens to you.

All right, Tracy, Well, I think let's end on that high note or high wish for all of you listening who may be co hosts or considering being one out there. And you know, I hope this has provided you some value today. We'll be back next time with another great episode. This has been Tom and Tracie Hazard.

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