How can I get the stuff around the audio to help me get discovered by other people? And that's what Podcasting 2.0 does. It provides those extra features that allow you to get discovered by keywords, titles, person tags. All those things are really important for discovery.
I get comments and I get that interactivity that gives me that affirmation that somebody out there is actually heard what I said, but not only just heard it, but has taken the time, energy, and effort to come back to me with some positively, hopefully, opinion. And now you as a user can actually give real value back to the podcast that you're listening to.
If you want to listen to this show, learn about podcasting 2.0 and you will understand very clearly how this all works, but also more clearly how you can support your favorite podcaster. Welcome Back to podcasting 2.0. In practice, before we get into the features or tags of podcasting 2.0, basically the things that you can do, I want to focus on why you might want them, how they can help you without going into the details of what they are yet. I'm here with Sam Sethi. Hi, Sam, how are you?
Hey, Claire. Hello. I'm very well, thank you. Yes. Good. Sam has been helping me a lot in devising this show. Before we get into what we're going to talk about today, start by telling me about yourself and your podcasting credentials. Oh, well, I've been in the podcasting industry probably now half a decade or more. Not quite a full decade yet. I started off in radio and then moved into podcasting.
And podcasting was really because I wanted to interview some really interesting people outside of my radio sphere because that's very geographic. And when I started getting to podcasting, I had the same problems that everyone had. What mic do I get? How long should the show be? What title? Who's my host? How do I edit this thing? Right. All the same questions that we all have as beginners when we start podcasting. But slowly and steadily, I got my learning curve up.
And it is easy once you just dive into it. As I say, go ugly early. Get in, just do it right now. Once I'd got going, Covid hit and I thought I'd really like to do an online podcast festival. And never having done an online podcast festival, I thought, that'll be great.
And instead of inviting a few people that I knew that would be nice and safe and easy to do, no, I went and invited Kara Swisher and James Cridland and George the poet and Dan Snow, and I didn't expect any one of them to say, yes, I'll do that. And everyone said, love to Sam. And I went, oh my God, I've now what have I created? So the podcast festival was born. And from that festival I fundamentally learned a lot more about how you could do live podcasting and how podcasting works.
And we had an audience and it was great and it was good. And we did two of those. And on the back of that, I pinged James Cridland back and I said, james, hey, I know you do a three minute daily how about a half hour podcast with me and you. And I again, didn't expect him to say yes, but he did. And so what was born was Pod News Weekly. And James and I have been working for probably the last three years doing a weekly show about all things podcasting and podcasting 2.0. Brilliant.
Yeah. And it's one of the shows that introduced me to the phrase podcasting 2.0 and had me like thinking, I'll do a little bit more exploration of that. So it's interesting that you started knowing nothing, as I did myself, and I had a good content idea and just wanted to get it out there. And you and I have spoken in the past about the kind of problems that any podcaster starting out experiences, and we've also talked about the features of podcasting 2.0 that might help those.
But for now, what do you conceive those main problems for podcasters to be? Well, apart from the ones I said earlier, which is what, Mike? What editing tool? And those are things that you learn quickly. But once you've got your podcast edited and recorded and published, you then go, well, how does anyone find my podcast? Big problem, right? There's 4 million podcasts in the index. Pick or choose a couple of hundred thousand, depending on whether you're Apple, Spotify or Podcast Index.
So you're just one of many. Hi listeners, it's future Claire here. Sam mentioned the Podcast Index. Now, this is an open database of podcasts that was established in 2020 with the purpose of preserving, protecting and extending the open, independent podcasting ecosystem. If you're a podcaster, your distribution host will probably have given you the option to distribute your show to the Podcast Index. And there are other podcast apps that use the Podcast Index to find their content.
We will be talking about this in more detail in a future episode. So you can either retain that information, park it, or just forget about it altogether until further along in the course. Back to Sam. Well, of course you're going to tell every one of your friends, you're going to tell anyone else you can get in your social media link and you're going to hope that they listen to it and spread the word. Word of mouth is still one of the most effective methods of getting your podcast discovered.
But if that's the only way of discovery and you don't have a multimillion pound marketing budget, then you're probably only going to end up with half a dozen people listening to your podcast. And the big problem is people get what I call the Joe Rogan effect. Oh, my God, I'm going to start my podcast and everyone's going to listen and a million people are going to be listening to me, and then I'm going to get advertisers, and then I'm going to make millions of money and retire to my beach.
And sadly, that is not the way it works. So for the majority of us, you know, we do get half a dozen friends. I say to people, if I stuck you in a room with 12 people or 20 people just listening to you, you'd be very happy on a weekly basis. So don't dismiss the numbers that you as, oh, there's only a couple of people listening. Well, they're interested, and if they're repeat listening, they really are interested. So that's good. That's the step one.
You are not going to be Joe Rogan, so don't try. But step two, Discovery is about how can I, for want of a better word, podcast SEO? How can I get my titles right? How can I get the things that go into describing my podcast? The show notes, the descriptions, maybe as we talk about later, in the future, things about chapters and transcripts, but how can I get the stuff around the audio to help me get discovered by other people? So that's step one, and that's what podcasting 2.0 does.
It provides those extra features which we call tags, that allow you to get discovered by keywords, titles, person tags, who's the host, who's the guest. So all those things are really important for Discovery. Yes, discovery. Of course it is. Half of the work is actually making the show, and the rest of the half of the work is trying to find people who want to listen to the show and tell people, look, my show is brilliant. Come and listen to it.
Another thing we've talked about is, and I have heard this from other podcasters that I know is the interactivity. Like, it's difficult to actually get a relationship with your listener. Now, hopefully the listener has a relationship with you as the Host. But as the host, how do you know who it is that's listening and what they like and don't like about the show? Can that be helped along the way with any of the podcasting 2.0 features?
We've all listened to radio, and as I said, I started off in radio, and one of the things with radio was you're talking into the abyss. You're in a studio with a mic and you're just broadcasting out, and you have no idea who listens. And then one day, suddenly, someone phones into your show or they write in just as excited as the person is. Did they just mention me on the radio? Oh, my God, that's brilliant.
The host, actually, I promise you, gets just as excited when they hear that someone's actually listening to their radio show. And that is the same feeling that podcasters have. We go into whatever room that we have our podcast set up and we record and we go. I don't know if anyone's listening to this, but here we go. And then suddenly, now you're beginning to get feedback loops, which means that I get comments or I get.
Which we will learn later are called boosts, but I get comments and I get that interactivity that gives me that affirmation that somebody out there has actually heard what I said, but not only just heard it, but has taken the time, energy, and effort to come back to me with some positively, hopefully, opinion. Now, we all have the Apple and Spotify ratings and reviews. They're great as well. That's another form of interactivity.
But comments is a great way to also give that feedback loop to you as a host. And again, that's part of podcasting 2.0. Yeah, brilliant. And the other thing, and I'm not going to go into a great detail of this, but monetization is something that you've already mentioned. Don't expect to retire to the seaside. A challenge, or perhaps something that people expect to achieve when they start a show through things like, I'm assuming, sponsorships and adverts and stuff, which is all very valid.
But I believe that there are some elements of podcasting 2.0 that can give you a different aspect of a kind of monetization model. Yeah, let's. Let's break this down. So monetization in today's podcasting, as you said, Claire, is sponsor driven. Host read. Advertising driven. Right. And if you. If you are lucky enough to get a sponsor, well done, you. Right. Congratulations. Because that's still hard to do.
Host red ads are effective because they are based On a trust model, the listener trusts the host. That's generally why they're listening to their podcast. So the host then reading out an advert, hopefully, is not just endorsing something that they, you know, just do for money. But there is some authenticity to reading out that ad. Now, given all of that, again, the chances of you getting a host read ad given to you is very low as well, because most people want big numbers.
They want thousands of people listening to your podcast. And that's the trouble with most podcasting monetization. Now, it's a numbers game. And unless you've got thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, even most advertisers aren't coming to you either. How do you make Money? So podcasting 2.0 has come up with pay what you want or pay as you go. And that model really is for fans, let's say, to begin with, now, today, and maybe in the future it'll change.
But today it's really for your hardcore fans who, who want to support you to stop you pod fading. You've done episode five, you're excited still, episode 10's come out and now you're going, I wonder if anyone's listening. I wonder if this is worth me spending an hour a day recording or whatever time, and then an hour editing, and you're suddenly going, I give up, I just give up. And actually, you have got an audience, but they haven't got a way to give you any monetization.
Now, if we step back very quickly. When I first started in technology, I worked for a company called Microsoft and then Netscape. But at Netscape, the original browser company, we didn't create a monetization for the web. So you have PayPal, you have credit cards, but there was no web system for making money. And so in the absence of that, Facebook, Twitter, and the Web 2.0, companies created hearts likes, thumbs up, which are great. They're an affirmation of feedback from your listener.
In the case, it was more blogs and posts. But again, the same idea is there. I really like what Claire wrote. I really love what Sam said there. Thumbs up. Well, that's lovely, but take that to the bank and see what your bank manager says. Right? I've got a million thumbs up. Well, visit the door fast.
So the reality was, if you then wanted to get a credit card out and pay 50p or a pound or some micro payment, the credit card company or the PayPal Gateway company would take 30% or some percentage. So suddenly that 50p is 20p. That 20p is 10p. It's just a waste of time. Let's not bother. So fast forward to today and the podcasting 2.0 community have come up with a mechanism for you to get a wallet, get some funny money tokens, and we'll talk about them probably in later episodes.
They call SATs. But Claire, you can explain them later. And I can make micro payments so I can leave a comment with a small micro payment so I can leave a comment saying, claire, love your podcast. Here's Tempe. Claire, loved what you did there. Here's another Tempe. Or I'm going to listen to your podcast and stream payments to you as I listen. So pay as you listen and I'm going to pay you. I don't know, the equivalent of a penny a minute. Right.
And that micro payment capability is what podcasting 2.0 has done. And now you as a user can actually give real value back to the podcast that you're listening to if you want to. It's not a. I have to do this to listen. Now. There's a lot of hurdles in there. Terminology is the biggest, biggest hurdle. I talked about Netscape. Now cast your mind back to when you first came to the web. You had to learn what an HTTP was. You had to learn what a URL was. Why did it start www. What is a browser?
Right. All of those things were terminology that you overcame. And once you overcame those hurdles, the web's pretty basic to everybody now. Then fast forward to today and when I tell you it's called a wallet and they're micro payments called sats, and you do peer to peer payments. You're looking at me. What are you talking about?
But I promise, you listen to this show, learn about Podcasting 2.0, and you will understand very clearly how this all works, but also more clearly how you can support your favorite podcaster. Well, that's the perfect ending sound bite. Support your favorite podcaster. I have planned this course for that very reason, like I'm partly learning it. I have been in the position of knowing nothing about it.
So we are going to take those elements, those things that we've talked about there, and we're going to explain things, things very slowly. So we're going to back up what we've talked about here. I'm going to relate that to what we talk about in the future. So listener, you're going to understand it and we're going to take it really slowly and step by step.
Thank you so much, Sam, for explaining that and giving us a really good introduction as to why podcasters and listeners should continue listening to this show and be aware of what this modern technology can do. So thank you so much, Sam. Pleasure, Claire. I look forward to the rest of the episodes. Thank you. Visit creativityfound.co.uk podcasting to find out more about my guests and access lots of useful podcast resources.
If you'd like to get in touch, you can send a boost, but if you haven't got to that lesson yet, feel free to reach out to me on my Instagram accountcasting 2.0. In practice.