Hello there, and welcome to in and around podcasting, the inclusive podcast industry podcast, where we highlight a range of powerful podcasting perspectives. I'm Mark Asquith, co founder of Captivate, and I'm joined by our wonderful co host, Mr. Danny Brown. Danny, you're not wearing any crazy clothing today. What's going on? I'm a little bit disappointed.
I'm not. No, the last time, I believe we got some interesting green screen stuff going on, so I'm not sure about that. Just like a little t shirt today.
Lesson learned. I think that is what that is called. And today we're going to talk about podcasting 2.0. What is going on with it? Is it a fad? Is it the future? Or is it something in between? And we're joined by two amazing guest co hosts for this. First of all, we're joined by the man that provided the inaugural stupid stuff in podcasting on his LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago. It is Joe Casabana. Welcome as a guest co host, my friend.
Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here just for the occasion because I know you all are Star wars fans, and I had my Star wars.
Yes, we are. We are absolute r nerds there. And I appreciate the thought on that. I love that. And we're also joined by another guest co host, someone that needs no introduction, someone that I've known for a long time and a former advisor to captivate before we became part of global. It's the one, the only, Mr. Daniel J. Lewis. Welcome, my friend. How are you?
Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here and excited to talk about some of this stuff.
Good. Well, we're excited for an interesting show. We are going to go podcasting 2.0, but we've also got some shout outs to other podcasts. In our audio only wave file segment, we've got actually the first ever wonderfully whimsical podcasting wishlist coming up. We've got, of course, the flattering ram delivered by the one and only Daniel J. Lewis. And it would be rude not to do some stupid stuff in podcasting. But before
we get to all of that, Joe, give us the skinny. Give us the top level. What is it that you do in podcasting? How do you help people? What is it that you enjoy doing in this industry?
I love helping podcasters do two things, save 12 hours per week producing their podcast. And I like helping them do that so that they can do the most important thing in podcasting, which is storytelling. Those are kind of the two aspects that I help people with, and I love telling stories.
I always have. And automation is kind of my jam. I was in software development for a long time, and I took that knowledge and moved it over to podcasting to help people be as efficient as possible to prevent the dreaded pod fade.
Right.
I want to get people past seven episodes.
And you also have possibly the best name in podcasting as well. I'm extremely jealous of it. I've got the most basic 80s name. I am called Mark. It's disappointing, but Joe Casabono, what a legend. And you can find [email protected] and Daniel J. Lewis, you have been around a little while, my friend. What are you up to these days? You've got a couple of new things ongoing at the moment. What's on your plate right now, mate?
Yeah, the two biggest things I do, helping podcasters engage their audiences and grow their podcasts. I host the Audacity to podcast, a podcast about podcasting for podcasters. Talking about podcasting, it's very, very meta. I also have podgagement, formerly known as my podcast reviews, that helps provide tools for podcasters to engage their audiences and grow
their podcasts. And I love helping podcasters, and that's why I'm in podcasting 2.0 and join podcasting, conversations and conferences and everything.
I love it. You are literally the podcast guy. If I'm the british podcast guy, you've got me as you are, the global version of that. And audacitytopodcast.com. Is that still the best place, mate? Yes, legend. All right, I love that. Now let's get on to podcasting 2.0, the future of podcasting, the future of RSS, but also something that can scare indies a little bit. We've seen it. We see it quite a little bit in support at Captivate, the
idea being that we want to progress podcasting. We love the open ecosystem, and whilst closed ecosystems such as Spotify, YouTube and whatever else may exist, and we can't really do much about those, they have their place. We still want to protect and to move forward with the open podcasting ecosystem. So, Daniel, I'm going to come to you actually on this one because you've just released a new website to help explain this a little
bit more yourself. And James Cridlin, if I'm an indie producer, if I'm an indie podcaster getting into podcasting and someone says to me, what about this podcasting 2.0? Have you done that? Are you quote unquote, doing that? How would you explain it to them. Give us the pitch.
Yeah. Podcasting 2.0 is a whole set of innovations that help improve the podcasting and podcast consumption experience for everyone, for podcasters, for audiences, for developers, even for advertisers. So everyone benefits through the innovations that are being offered in podcasting 2.0 through different features that we're building into RSS feeds and around the ecosystem of how podcasts work and just making it better. That's why the name fits
so well. This is the 2.0 version of podcasts, which have been pretty much the same technologically since the beginning. So podcasting 2.0 brings that in and revolutionises it in many exciting ways.
I love that. And it's very much RSS centric. So RSS being the delivery mechanism for podcasts in general. A hosting platform like captivates generates an RSS feed, sends information in that box, which is the RSS feed, off to the apps that read it and deliver features, deliver content, and so on and so forth, information about that particular show and the episodes within. Todd Cochrane, a friend of everyone's.
His.
Reaction to this a while ago I thought was quite interesting, which is we really want to be selling benefits as opposed to technical features when it comes to podcasting 2.0. So Joe, you work with a lot of people working on the podcast workflows and so on and so forth. How do you see that landscape on the ground for the indie producer? What's the talk of the town when it comes to podcasting 2.0? Are people sort of
afraid of it? Are people embracing it? Where do you see the indies right now?
Yeah, I think it's more like people want the features, right? I'm an evangelist for RSS.com as well, and we do like to promote podcasting 2.0 features, but I usually don't put it like that when I'm talking to folks on that end or my clients. It's almost like saying, hey, you want to get a black and decker hammer? And they're like, I just want to build a house. And so when I'm talking about the podcasting 2.0 features,
they'll say, hey, we got transcripts, right? There's like transcript support. There is the ability to lock your feed. There is the ability to recommend other podcasts and a bunch of other kind of 2.0 features. But I usually won't specifically brand it that way unless I'm talking to other folks in the industry, other people who are part of podcast management platforms.
When I'm talking to people who are shopping. I definitely sell the benefits more than the underlying tech, I guess it's also like in the WordPress space, the sales pages for plugins used to be like we built it with react and JavaScript, and I'm like, no one cares about those things. They want to know what the plugin does. So that's kind of how I view it when I'm talking to the non technical or like non deeply embedded podcast folks.
I think Todd's versioning of that and the way that he articulated that idea know sell the features and the benefits as opposed to the tags, which is know we know the processes goes through GitHub, goes through review. There's a lot of collaborators on there, some more active than others. And the process is that there's a collaborative effort to sign off a round of tag releases, which is an RSS based tag, and they essentially
translate into features for people. So we sign off a transcript tag, eventually hosting companies support it, listening apps, even Apple now supports it. So it's a journey. And Danny, one thing I want to talk to you about very quickly is it's been in the industry for a while. We've all spoken on different podcasts about it. We're all aware of it, this being an industry show about the podcasting industry, but really
trying to help, not just give that view from the top. What's the general feeling in places like captivate support when it comes to things like podcasting 2.0, you lead up that support team, you got any insight on that? How are the day to day people feeling about it?
I think it's a bit of both of what Daniel mentions and Joe, they understand the features when you explain it, but a lot of it is about understanding what benefits it actually does for them as a podcaster and their listeners. And I feel there's a danger of getting lost in the reads or the weeds, whatever
country preference description you use there. But there's a danger of getting lost in that by spewing all the cool stuff they can do without actually breaking it down to really basic for the new podcaster or the indie podcaster that just wants to produce a podcast and doesn't know value for value. What's that? What's the people tag? Why do they need
a person tag? All that stuff. So I think there's definitely excitement about making the show more interactive and accessible for listeners, but it's what that entails, what extra workflow it entails, et cetera.
One of the interesting challenges, I think, is accessibility of podcasting. 2.0 and Daniel, you've done some work with James Cridland on a website to try and mitigate some of that. And one of the biggest aspects of that is translating as we've just gone through this idea of, okay, a tag in an RSS feed is actually something that we'll deal with as a hosting platform that an app will then have to respect and look at
in order to deliver the outcome of that tag. So if it's comments, we have to enable it, they have to enable it, and the outcome will be comments are available and you can do cross platform whatever transcripts, the lock tag, the funding tag, whatever that might be. The biggest single issue that I think that we face, that I'm going to come to you on Daniel, is that there's just very little support on the app side. And
I think Rob Walsh articulated this really well. He just said that actually less than 1% of downloads across the entire industry come from apps that support podcasting 2.0 features in any meaningful way. Pod chat feels, well, there's two sides to this, actually. It's an open ended for you. It feels as if that's true and as if that's sort of, oh my word, look how problematic that is. But yet we're only, what, a year into
podcasting? 2.02 years into it, we've barely even begun in the grand scheme of things. What are your views on that?
Well, a couple of things. I first am grateful that Rob brought up that challenge. Even though it kind of stunned for the industry. I am grateful for it because that is what inspired James and I to launch podcasting two point org. Two, I mix up my british and English sometimes now when I
say that. But podcasting two is the website for podcasting 2.0. And we're trying to make that a site that is both a resource for developers who need to see what are all of the tags, but also especially for the people, the podcasters who need to see. I've heard about this thing. What is it? I have heard about value time split. What in the world is that? Well, we want the website to explain that, so we're grateful that Rob brought
that challenge. I want to challenge Rob's data and maybe Mark, this is a great opportunity for captivate to bring some of your own data. Libson Rob Walsh works for Libson. Libson. Before Apple started supporting the transcripts tag, Libson did not officially support any of the podcasting 2.0
features. Like there was no field to populate any of the features to enter your transcripts yes, you could, in an old version of the Libson dashboard, manually insert XML code in order to add the RSS tags for your podcasting 2.0. And that should sound scary to anyone. You should never have to do that. So for Libson to say in their data, they see that only a certain very tiny percentage of downloads come from podcasting 2.0
supported apps. I think that kind of makes sense because they're not really pushing their own podcasters. They're not enabling their podcasters to support these features, let alone encouraging them to encourage their audiences to use their features. Then compare that to I know you haven't released this data yet, but would be interesting to see data from captivate.
Captivate made the huge splash. What about a year, a year and a half ago with like you just dumped a whole load of new features of podcasting 2.0 support on the industry. And Blueberry and Rss.com and other companies are supporting these features much more heavily too. So I'd love to see how the downloads skew for them. But going back to your point of, even if it is a small number, yes, this is fringe, this is cutting edge.
But the Apple, the number one podcast app now supports one of these features. That's not only going to inspire the other apps to support that one feature, which is transcripts, a very good, very important feature. But I think that's also going to challenge the other apps in the industry as a whole to realise this is a legitimate project. This is not just someone in their basement coding. This is something that now has been embraced
by Apple. Maybe it's time that we also look at embracing this support in our apps, publishing tools, whatever it is. That's what's really exciting that Apple has. I don't like to say this word legitimising it, but that's the way that the industry will look at it, as if Apple's doing it now. That means this is a real thing. So maybe we should too now. And that's got me excited.
Yeah, it's almost a validation, isn't it? Like you said, it was legitimate before because there were other players that did support it. But the validation that, I think the validation that this could scale has been granted a little bit more because Apple have supported that one tag, and it's a very useful tag as well. And Joe, when it comes to, I think, certain other features, let's get into the mindset of features versus tags.
I think for a second, it feels, to Daniel's point about this being bleeding edge, this is fringe this is very early stage, very, very sort of nascent developmental work in RSS and podcasting. On the whole, it feels as if even within podcasting 2.0, there are more bleeding edge things and there are more, okay, safe things. So we've got things like value for value. Let's make money through the blockchain. And then we've got the locked tag,
which is. Let's just make sure. Let's add one more layer to just try and stop people from stealing your podcast. The spectrum is huge there. So when you're talking through workflows and so on, have you got any sort of methodology around. Okay, here's, I don't want to say a partial implementation because I don't think there is a full one yet. But do you work with people insofar as. Okay, do you know what podcasting 2.0 is? This massive
range of things. For now, let's just worry about these one or two things. How does that tend to sit with you and the people that you work with?
Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think to Daniel's point, to the point that you guys are making here, I think it really is kind of up to the industry folks to. It's almost like saying, as a car maker, I don't want to. Oh, well, only less than 1% of people die from car crashes, so I'm not going to put airbags in my car. That's a crazy thing to say.
But I think, again, from the kind of feature standpoint, as I watch the podcasting 2.0 space and some of the features that get implemented and the things that I think are going to be most helpful, that's kind of where I land. So, like, transcripts, I've been bullish on transcripts are necessary for a podcast. My current show, my flagship show, we'll say, launched in 2016. In 2017, it had transcripts because I think that it's an accessibility play, it's a search play. It's a lot of things.
And so it's really cool to see Apple and other people kind of implement this and give native support to it. Things like chapter markers.
Right.
I think that's technically podcasting 2.0. Maybe that's like, support it if you want. It's kind of hard to add. Maybe other apps do it better. But I think about what's going to make the biggest impact based on my clients or students'goals.
Right.
We want to grow the show. Transcripts are necessary for that chapter markers. If you're going to upload it to YouTube now.
Right.
And there is like the medium tag now. So that's pretty cool to see. Maybe we do that. I guess it's all very goals based is the most succinct way for me to put.
Yes. Yeah, I would agree with that one. Danny, I'm going to drop this one on you because we've got to touch on it because on the other far extreme side of this, you know what's coming. Someone has to explain value for value. And I'm going to speak to Sam SETI from true fans about this. He's a good friend of the show, he's a good friend of everyone here, and
he's doing amazing work in that value for value space. Just give us the top level on this because I feel like this is probably the most complex feature, I want to say, of the movement. So good luck. Go for it.
Can you just bleep this section out altogether? Yeah. I mean, from a personal point of view, I see the value, no pun intended, but I still try get my head around, and I see this with our podcasters. I see it online, Reddit, et cetera, where if you're given a listener a choice that's never heard of podcasting 2.0, but you're trying to explain the benefits of why you should use 2.0 apps like Fountain, et cetera. And true fans.
Did Judas nearly say only fans?
I said only fans. Sorry, Sam.
Sound bite, Daniel. Sound bite. Joe, get this on LinkedIn.
Yeah. So true fans. True fans. So if I'm trying to tell my listeners and explain to my listeners, you can support me if you love the show, and I'd love you to support, you can either give me $5 a month for a free buck, buy me a coffee, or you can give me 10,000 sats. Okay, what's sats? Why is it so high? Because I'm equating five versus 10,000,
think of pounds, dollars, et cetera. And I feel it's really hard to, if people aren't technical, to buy into the setup that you have to do with a get albi or a lightning account, et cetera, and then set up all your details to transfer this via a lightning network or however the transfer is happening to get the support and the boosts, et cetera, from one person over to the podcaster. For me, there's a huge education gap and there's
a huge. Just the numbers don't make sense from a simple point of view. 510 thousand. 510 thousand. And I feel that's where a big stop gap is at the moment for value. For value really taking off and getting adopted. Yeah.
The idea you can stream crypto via the blockchain to a podcaster in return for the value that they provide. And not just a podcast, but like a musician, we've seen experiments in that space. It's a lovely idea.
It's a great, great idea. And if someone said, I'll do that and I'll send you $0.05 or $0.01 every time I listen to 30 seconds of your audio, and I think it's worth it, you can sort of see where people would buy into that because they're equating the value that they use at the shop and the store to the thing that they can receive from strangers who enjoy
their show. But I just feel there's that. It's quite an enigmatic challenge because you've got all of these different words Satoshi via the blockchain that I can stream to a creator using value for value. It feels like Daniel does the job you're doing on podcasting two, it feels like Sammy's trying to do with true fans, but it feels like that's got such a long way to go as a concept before people start saying, okay, that's one of my main funding methods. It just feels tech.
Yeah.
There's an aspect where I think the approach to it is going to get easier. That's the nice thing, is the way it is now is not the most complicated it's ever been. It has been more complicated before. It's gotten easier, it will get easier to get into it. And then some of the app developers are also making the understanding of it a little bit easier. Like, I've been using castomatic for a while now, and it's really neat that
it shows me the current conversion rate. So if I'm saying I'm going to send a boostogram, which is amount of satoshis with a message attached to it. So if I say I'm going to send 10,000, it shows me what that's worth in my currency. So that's really neat to see that easy conversion there. So I can know, okay, 10,000 is a really big number, but, oh, that's only about 650 right now. So that's not all that bad. But the other approach is, I like the way that James Cridlin put this, is you
could think of the satoshis as like Internet tokens. Just like you might go to a carnival or a fair and you buy a certain number of tickets and then things cost a certain number of tickets to use, and you forget about the value of the tickets. You start thinking, this is how many tickets I have. So this is how many I can spend. And that's what it is. With satoshis. You might load up a wallet, we would say with a certain number, 10,000, 20,000, whatever it is. And then, you know, this is
how many I have to spend, and I want to send 1000 here, 1000 there. And then you're spending those tokens, and it's going to become more familiar to people as time goes on, and especially as bitcoin gets more adoption, that people will understand this conversion better. So I'm excited about how easy it will get in the future.
I think that's the key takeaway as well from this portion of the show,
is that podcasting 2.0 is not pointless. It's a developmental future of podcasting that is in such a young stage that it requires us all to give it space to contribute where we can and to allow people to understand exactly what the opportunities are when they are, without making it seem some big scary thing that if you don't adopt it, if you're not shouting from the rooftops about it because you're an indie podcaster from your
bedroom, that's all right as well. There are layers to this and there are levels to this, and I think that's a big important thing, but it's a valuable movement, and there are people doing fantastic work in that space. Thank you to everyone that is pioneering that, and to people like Daniel and to Joe and to everyone else, and to James Quidland and to Adam and Dave and everyone, all the hosting platforms that are doing great work in that space. Now it is time to just switch gears.
The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod news weekly review with James Criblin and Sam Sethi.
I'm James Cridlin, the editor of Pod News, the daily podcast newsletter.
And I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of Podfans.
Every week, the Pod news Weekly review is the last word in podcasting news, with a look back at the most important news in podcasting and interviews with the people that matter.
This is Rachel King. I'm the CEO and co founder of Pod People.
Hey, this is Mark Asgris, the co founder here at Captivate.
Hey, James, it's Kathy Doyle.
Hi. This is Brendan Mulligan, founder of Podpage.
I'm Anna Sean. I lead the marketing team that is focused on Spotify for podcasters. Hi, I'm Christiana Kromer descripts community manager.
Hi, I'm Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout. Hi.
This is Todd Cochrane, CEO and co founder of Blueberry.
I'm Melissa Kishi and I'm a senior vice president at Edison Research.
Hear from Sam, me and everyone else in this industry every week the Pod news Weekly review with Buzzsprout podcast hosting.
Made easy from your daily newsletter the Pod news weekly review.
Danny, you wanted this one. I'm going to let you jump in with the wonderful, whimsical podcasting wishlist. What have you got? What's the dream?
This actually came up this morning after I received the Daily Pod news. I get James's newsletter every day and there's news in there that I'm not always interested in and there's maybe podcasters. I never want to hear the name or like any news about podcasters. And so it'd be really cool if I could stick in an AI browser, tool extension, whatever, that I can let AI know. I never want to hear this topic, this name, this
podcaster, nothing at all. And it looks at my newsletters and looks at the content coming in, strips that out from the email, but leaves the email intact and replaces it goes searching off the web for content I've read before, content I've listened to, and takes the latest news from that piece of content and sticks it into my email or my browser, where I've got the email version of the web version of the newsletter open. I'd love a tool like that. That's where I would love AI.
Joe thumbs up, thumbs down, or ambivalence.
I like it. One of the reasons I'm still on the social network, formerly known as Twitter, is because I have spent years I've been on that platform since seven. I've spent years curating and blocking and muting words aggressively and just moving all of that technical debt to another platform seems very
upsetting to me. So I would love an app. There was a chrome browser like this or a chrome extension a few years ago like this that I heavily utilised when the Avengers movies came out because my daughter had just been born and I wanted to avoid spoilers at all costs before I could go and see it in the theatres. And so heavy thumbs up on that. I'm all for not seeing things I don't want to see on the Internet.
I relate to that. Most of my mute words are Star wars focused. We do not like spoilers at all. Daniel, you have brought to the table one of our other interesting segments today. So I'm going to throw over to you for the flat. This is positivity. This is where we're spreading goodness and highlighting people doing great work in the podcasting space. And we can flatter absolutely anything that we want at all. There are no
boundaries or limits. So, Daniel, thank you for bringing this. What do we have?
I've got a podcast for you that's really fun. It's completely independent. For some reason, they don't have advertisers yet, but it is knack news. So that's knickknack is spelled with k's on the beginning of both of those words. So Knickknacknews.com, this is a podcast from two friends who talk about recent random news bits. They have dinosaur news, they have hamburger news, they have space news. They talk about tardigrades,
they talk about science. They talk about all kinds of interesting things, and they just have fun with it. And I met these two friends at a podcast movement a couple of years ago. Their podcast sounded interesting. I checked it out and it's really good. It's not highly produced. It doesn't have all the NPR style journalistic stuff, but it's two friends who know how to have an entertaining conversation, which is something that I would say
that a lot of comedy podcasters out there don't know how to do. That's one of my pet peeves, is two comedy podcasters getting together and not being funny. But Alex and Anthony in Knickknack news are great together. It's great to hear one of them bring a crazy news story and the other just burst out laughing at it. It's a really fun podcast that I think should really get more attention because it's so good and so fun, and yet it is very simple, too. And yet it's that good.
I love that sounds fascinating. I love the irreverence of just bringing random use together like that. And it's one of those shows that, it feels like one of those shows where you're just in the car, you're not quite sure what you want to listen to. That just feels like it fits absolutely perfectly into that gap. So fascinating. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. We'll dig it out and we'll stick a link in there because I think that's a really good shout. Daniel, thank
you. Pod chat. That is the flattering ram. Always interested to see what comes up in the flattering ram, because goodness is good to spread and we are going to wrap up because we've got two people that know about this. We've got Joe, we've got Daniel and Danny brought to us this week. I feel like this might become a trend, mate, actually, that you bring this because it feels like you are on the ball with it. Danny did bring
this week's stupid stuff in podcasting. All right, what's grinding your gears, mate? Yeah.
And this is something you see a lot. It's the good old, and I'm glad Daniel's on here. And obviously job, it's a good old. Get loads and loads of Apple reviews because that will throw you up the charts and it'll get you any search and it'll help you get more downloads and it's just great.
So get these reviews.
So, yeah, it's just. I'll leave it to the experts on this.
Oh, yeah, it's been around for a while, hasn't it? Review swaps early on, on the launch to get into new and worthy and all that was part of the launch plan for a lot of people. Joe, is this something that you still see? Are people doing this when they're launching shows?
Yeah, and interestingly, I was talking to a few people who launched podcasts earlier this year that said, oh, we're only launching on Apple podcasts because we want to get reviews there. And I'm like, that's so weird. That's not how it works. Reviews are great. They are social proof and they make you feel good most of the time. Unless somebody says that you have too many ads in your show, it's a real bad review I got on my show. But yeah,
I get why people would think that, but Apple does these quarterly. What's new in podcasting sort of things. And everyone, they're like, we're not going to tell you what affects the charts, but we will tell you it has to do with subscribers, listener or followers, listeners consumption, some combination of that. And they're like, reviews don't help, but it's just this thing that has permeated the hive mind, I guess, of like, oh, reviews obviously means better ranking.
And it came as well, like I said, part of the launch phase for a lot of the gurus and so on. I think the challenge was it was attributed to rankings, which I thought was interesting, as opposed to just, it might get someone to click and have a look at your podcast. So someone's written a review about it that's positive. Like, we get that aspect of it, but maybe we sat with the foremost expert on this. If only someone had a system
that would cheque my podcast reviews. Luckily, such a thing exists. Come on, give us a skinny Daniel, you know all about this. What do reviews do?
Yeah, I created the service called my podcast reviews. It's now called podgagement. And while I would love it if getting more ratings and reviews did make your podcast rank better, because that'd certainly be better
for my software, that's just not the case. I have tracked this for years and I can see that in the charts, especially you look at the top podcasts, and if you actually click through and see the number of ratings and reviews that they have, you'll see that it does not coincide with their position in the chart. I've seen sometimes a podcast will shoot to number one and it has a dozen ratings, and maybe one of those has a review
on it, and then maybe the number ten has a couple of thousand. There is no correlation there. But I love what Joe said. It is really about how you use your ratings and reviews. It's engagement, it's social proof. It gives you opportunities to learn things about your show, learn things that you can improve. It gives you special stuff that you can use in
your marketing material. You could use it to figure out what you need to focus on with your podcast, but it's not going to help you rank better. It might help someone who has already clicked into your podcast to decide, oh yeah, this looks interesting enough to cheque it out. So it might help someone convince, but it's not going to attract them. But it's still really fun to have. And that's what I think we should focus on with reviews is
to engage your audience with them, not to try to rank better. That comes as a reward of engaging your audience.
Better engagement is huge, and it should be the thing that we all focus on. I totally agree, and I think obviously your pivot to pog engagement is testament to that as well. There's a huge space there that can be worked within to help shows grow in almost, I don't want to say an easy win, but what I would suggest is that probably most shows aren't really doing that much to engage fans, even though they think they're doing a
lot to engage their fans. So I think this is a fascinating space to be in. And yeah, applaud you for pivoting that and sort of not necessarily pivoting, but adding to my podcast reviews and building on top of it. Danny, I once got a review that just said, thanks for that, mate. Why did you do it? No, I did. I got one. You guys who do email marketing will get this as well. You do the email marketing, whatever, you send an email out, whatever new episode. I also got on saying f off just to
reply to that. But then the hilarity is they didn't what. All right, but what I'm getting at there is I do think that a lot of new podcasters, Joe, you probably see this a chunk, is that they can take the bad reviews to heart a heck of a lot, which can be quite a challenge. It can put people off. Especially one of your core missions is stopping people,
podfading, helping them get past that milestone 7th episode. The last thing you want is a negative review within those first few episodes, derailing you, kicking you off the car, and you actually do podfed, do you ever speak to the people that you work with about this and just say, look, here's how we're going to handle this. Do you have anything in place for that?
Yeah, I think it's mostly, I mean, like, I've been, you know, I've been making websites, or I had been making websites for 20 plus years. I've been on the Internet a long time. There are people who are just trolls. There's a guy who threatened me via email because I blocked him on my YouTube channel. And I'm like, these are just empty words. There's no consequence for being mean on the Internet. And this is what I try
to tell people, right? There's like the scene from how I met your mother where Ted gets like dozens of glowing reviews from his students and then gets like one bad one and it ruins his day. And I try to tell people, look, you're not going to be for everybody. And there are just some people who are having a bad day and they're taking it out on you. Focus on the positives, because those are the people that you're helping, that
you're making their day better. Forget about the myopic people who are just trying to be mean. You're going to get those and it's going to be fine if they provide real feedback, by all means. When someone was like, hey, you take too long to get to the actual meat of the episode, I started doing a cold open and telling people the top takeaways in the first three minutes. Right? When someone was like, you have too many ads.
I was like, okay, I had four ads in a 40 minutes span. That feels, I mean, if you listen to certain podcast shows, you'll know that it's not a lot anymore. But it felt like a lot of the time. I'm going to dial back and I'm going to have a metric of one ad per 15 minutes of content. So real feedback definitely take to heart. But if someone's just like rubbish or f off or whatever, they've got hurt people hurt people, right?
They've got something else going on and they're taking it out on you.
I love that. Very sensible and I think very inspirational for people that have not quite been through that process as well. So thank you very much. We are going to stick a pin in it. Thank you for joining us on the second episode here of in and around podcasting. Mr. Daniel J. Lewis. Thank you for joining us, my friend.
You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. And I've enjoyed the conversation. I enjoy listening and journeying with you around and in. Got that mixed up in and around podcasting.
I love it.
No, we will welcome you back soon as well, sir. I'm sure we will. And Joe, always a pleasure and thank you once again for inspiring that first episode last week. It's great to have you on as the co host, and I'm sure we'll get you back as well.
My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. This is a great show and a great format you guys have here. I love it.
Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Danny. Thank you so much. And the stupid stuff was a good one this week, sir. I applaud thee.
Thank you. I'm off to send an apology to Sam Seti.
There was nothing butchered. Don't you worry. You did it justice. I assure you. I've been Mark askquith. Thank you so much for joining us. Grab us at in and aroundpodcasting.com at Inaround podcast over on the old X or the Twitter, whatever we're calling it these days. We'll be on YouTube because we're a very modern set of people. And of course you can get it inaroundpodcasting.com slash listen. Until the next time, look after yourself. We'll see you soon. You.