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03:12 and Spotify and Google podcasts

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47:10 always google podcasts

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58:30 with Google podcasts. Both of 44:17 on this. Google podcasts is pre 44:31 Google podcasts is still only at

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31:32 and Google podcasts for each

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27:19 Google podcasts get listed

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05:16 listen on Google podcasts. And

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27:41 Google podcasts, Spotify, and

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48:56 Google podcasts. It's reasonable

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47:55 Google podcasts. And so your 48:00 Google podcasts, people can play

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08:37 Google podcasts, but didn't seem

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06:05 Apple podcasts, Google podcasts

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17:27 Google podcasts be pre installed

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20:16 to Google podcasts, 2.4, then 16:38 Google podcasts is doing. So we

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37:17 Google has Google podcasts, and

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29:29 Google podcasts on this list. 30:04 Google podcasts and all the 30:06 will make Google podcasts more

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30:40 trying to get Google podcasts.

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07:47 The show notes is the section of your podcast episode that allows you to engage your listeners provides some next steps for those that are ready to take action on what they just listened to. And also persuade someone new to listen To the episode, the number one best practice is to use formatting. Alright, a majority of podcast players like Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, overcast, they support HTML formatting. That means you could put paragraph breaks bullet points, embed links, all the stuff that you need to do to make your show notes look nice, because when your show notes are properly formatted, when it's easy to navigate within your episode description, it makes it easier for your listeners to find what they're looking for. Right, instead of combing through several paragraphs of information, they can just zip down to the list of links that you mentioned, and click on the one that they're looking for. Because remember, when someone goes to your shownotes, your episode description, they're going for a number of reasons. First reason they heard you mentioned something in the podcast and they want to find the link. They want to learn more. They want to buy that product that you recommended. They are looking for a particular piece of information, and they're gonna take action on that. The other reason somebody goes to shownotes your episode description is they're not sure that they want to devote the 30 minutes, 40 minutes hour to listening to the full episode. And so they see the title is interesting. They're curious, they want to learn more, and they go to your show notes to to see some amplifying information to see, is this something that I really want to listen to?

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11:06 And Google is the other kind of looming giant that could do something, which is kind of where I would put Amazon and Google almost in the same category, simply because Google, they launched Google podcasts. There's talk that they're eventually gonna fade these out Google Play Music, because they're going to combine the music elements with YouTube Music, and then put the podcast stuff in Google podcasts. If you log into your Google podcast manager, by the way, there is now a new banner at the top that directs you to migrate your Google pod, your Google Play Music podcasts into Google podcasts. So they are at least in their own apps and interfaces trying to shift people in that direction. They could do something but to this point, you know, Google podcasts is an important directory to be in for Internet search purposes, but it's still not a heavy hitter as far as listen volume, but they could they have the resources, they have the capabilities to jump in there and kind of be that that third heavyweight, in addition to Sirius and Spotify, which have just really shown the focus to say we want to be intentional about shaping the future of podcasting and, and how we can grow that as an industry. 12:13 Well, also you think it's not just that in the Google Play Music and Google podcasts world that they've had stuff to do with podcasts, Feedburner, which, you know, people probably don't think about a ton now, which still has a ton of podcasts are using Feedburner. That's a Google product that they've had for years. You could see them doing some cool things there where they turn Feedburner into something similar to like a charitable or a pod track, where they're actually giving you, you know, stats that you're, you know, if your host maybe doesn't give great stats, you could get better stats from Feedburner. This is not something they've ever shown an interest in, but you could imagine, they could give charts that would be truly universal, because they could be charts that every podcast had access to. there's just lots of interest. Things you could see them doing. And they have a core competency in infrastructure, hosting reliability, and in AD tech. So a lot of the things that everybody is kind of figuring out in the podcasting space and talking about are things that in the past Google has shown to be exceptionally good at, you know, and discoverability really the discoverability and the ad tech or the do greatest things they've ever figured out.

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11:11 right. And it has to be so good that people are willing to leave the convenient option, which is typically Apple podcasts or Google podcasts or Spotify, the thing they already installed, and like go out of their way to learn a new app and a new way of listening and stuff like that, even though I would probably bet money in that pod here. His app is considerably better than two of the three options. Yeah, maybe. But But you have to convince people that don't even necessarily know that there's more than three podcast playing apps that it's worth trying to find and do that. 17:56 What do we want to say about that? One of the positives is You don't want to have just one giant in the room. And for a long time podcasting was all Apple space. And for a long time, I kind of was like, Apple's gonna do something here and just totally own the space. And they always like it probably Apple had bigger fish to fry with like launching the iPhone and like making billions of dollars. So they weren't really super focused on podcasting. Then Spotify kind of took a very strong interest in podcasting and started getting stuff moving. And I think it is a good thing for the industry. There's an argument he made, it's a good thing that it's we're getting, maybe we're getting Amazon, we're definitely getting XM Google podcasts has made quite a bit of moves. There's rumors of Apple doing their own branded content. All of that combined kind of makes me think, well, at least there will be one giant in the room, there'll be six and that'll at least make it less than likely that one is able to totally consolidate the entire market. And, you know, kind of squeeze all of the value out of it. That'll if as long as it stays open and diffuse, there's a lot more power that's still in the hands of independent creators.

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25:22 one of the things that I think first struck me about Buzzsprout is that when you are on the internet, and you're asking the question, you know, you're asking Google, how do you make a podcast Buzzsprout shows up in a way that a lot of other platforms don't Buzzsprout not only offers the specific services that are required of podcast hosting, you know, you host the podcast, you distribute it to Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, you know, it does those basic things, but Buzzsprout also provides The level of support for podcasters that I think a lot of podcasters really truly need where they help you. Well, I shouldn't say they where you help podcasters go from the question of how do I make a podcast through actually creating that podcast? And I think in a lot of ways philosophically, the script tries to do the same thing, where it's how do I edit? How do I create a professional quality audio file? And we try to walk creators through that process in a way that's intuitive in a way that's genuinely helpful. And as we continue to grow as a company, it's something that we're trying to do more and more of, and I think the partnership with Buzzsprout allows us to do that in a way that's really informed and coming from a point of view of in real life for real life. podcasters. Who are they working with? What are they trying to do? How are they trying to achieve the goal of Launching a successful podcast and maintaining a successful podcast. And I mean, from my point of view, I don't think anybody does it better than you guys. 40:15 Yeah, like Apple has a couple years ago, they split off the apple podcast app to its own app. They broke it out of iTunes. And now there's a music app and a podcast app completely separate. And Apple TV and Apple TV, right. And we see something similar happening in the Google world. Google wants to sort of silo these different types of content across different apps, Spotify going the other direction, Spotify, saying, Hey, we already have our app installed on hundreds of millions of phones. We just want to push more content into that one app. And a lot of it might have to do with the fact that Apple and Google can basically push whatever apps to hundreds of millions of phones at any given time that they want. So the podcast app is default app in iOS now. So is Apple Music. So is Apple TV. Google has the same leverage and power with on the Android platform. So if they want to give everybody Google podcasts they can if they want to give everybody youtube music they can. Spotify doesn't have that power. Amazon doesn't have that power. Amazon made a play at one point they had like fire phone and all this other stuff, but it never caught on fire. Right? And so there, they don't have the same advantage that Apple and Google do. So I almost feel like if they could, they would, because it probably is a better experience to be able to say, hey, my music lives here and my podcast live here. My TV shows live here, it's you know, you don't have a huge screen on mobile devices. So being able to dedicate the controls and the user interface for this specific type of content is probably a better experience. But you see Spotify saying we don't have the power on the option. So we got to push it all in. And it's one of the the criticisms that we have as podcasters is the podcasting listening experience. And Spotify is not great. It's not as good as dedicated podcast apps. So that's a bit of a disadvantage, but it's the only play that they have, and it's Seems like Amazon is following suit. So Amazon has a music app that's pretty popular. And they're thinking that by I'm assuming now now I'm projecting but I'm guessing they're saying, hey, let's put podcasts in there. That's just another reason for somebody to launch our app.

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38:49 Alright, so there's been a lot of news. It's kind of gotten overshadowed a little bit by the Joe Rogan stuff but podcast addict has for the third time in the last six Months been kicked out of the Google Play Store for linking to podcasts. And, you know, there's been a ton of people talking about this. So give a little bit of context of what happened. All the podcast apps generally link out to the websites for the podcast, they list. They don't host these shows. They're just listing them so that people can find them. When the Coronavirus pandemic hit, Google really cranked up their algorithms to check for content that was talking about like fake cures or was just preying on people or were scammy, which apparently have just been a ton. And in doing that, they have started catching apps and saying, hey, you were linking to the scammy website because some podcasts are scammy. And so they kicked a bunch of podcasts out but this is Concerning because podcasts addict is the number one rated and most downloaded podcast player on all of Android. Well, coincidentally not. I mean, maybe not coincidentally, who knows? At the same time, Google has been doing so much more with their own player. The Google podcast player has been gaining a ton of listeners has been doing really well. It's been well received. They've launched Google podcasts manager. They've been doing quite a bit. And so while it may not be nefarious, at the same time that Google is pushing more into the space podcast addict has found themselves kicked out of the Google Play store multiple times for a week plus. So that's laying a little bit of the, you know, groundwork. What have you guys been reading about this? We've been thinking. 12:44 Well, there's some parallels right like Howard Stern, moving to XM. What does it Sirius Sirius when used to be XM, right, XM Sirius or Sirius XM Satellite Radio, whenever the kids call it and I imagine I don't have any research on this would be interesting to look up. But I imagine his, his audience dropped dramatically. But it was still a win for him because he got his truckloads of money. And it's still a win for Sirius because they were drawing in enough people of his fan base. Again, it might have been a small percentage of his fan base, but enough to justify what they were paying him in new subscriptions. So I'm sure everyone at Spotify and the Joe Rogan team are smart enough to have worked all these numbers through and it's going to be a win for them. What I think that we need to think about as independent podcasters is what does this mean for independent podcasters? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? As Spotify gets more clout and more exclusive content or dominance in the podcasting space, they also start to have a lot of control and power. One thing that independent podcasters don't see that much that we do see as a host is the number of like Showtime takedowns that we get from Spotify every single week. And so right now, if you produce a podcast, use a host like Buzzsprout. To put it out, there are dozens and dozens of great podcast apps that you can distribute your content to. If you get booted or banned from any one of those, like the smaller third party independent ones, it's not that big of a hit, because your content is still widely available in these lots of other places. Obviously, it's a big hit right now, if you were to get booted or bumped from Apple podcasts because they were the dominant podcast, distribution app and consumption app. But Apple podcasts does not do take downs like Spotify has been doing takedowns Spotify has been much more aggressive in curating the content that they'll allow on their platform. Apple has been very passive. And the same with like Google podcasts and stuff very passive, not very aggressive. Spotify seems to have shown early on that they are going to be heavy handed in how they curate and manage the podcasts and the content that are distributed on their platform, which is a scary combination with how quickly they are becoming a very powerful player in the podcasting industry. So they're buying a lot of content, and pushing a lot of people into podcast content for the reasons that you guys mentioned earlier. Like the, the licensing fees on it are much lower. So they make a lot more money, the more time people spend on their platform, listening to podcast content versus music. And they're just investing a ton of money and growing the podcasting side of their business and now moving into the video side as well. But it becomes scary, right? Because if they don't like what you're talking about, they can kick you off your platform. So if you build your whole audience around what Spotify is doing, there's a huge risk there, right like that you could get I mean, and in the YouTube world, they call it like D monetized, but Spotify is not really monetizing anybody yet. They just will boot you and so that's That's concerning.

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26:53 Yeah, Google podcasts manager. It's very similar. If you've used Spotify as if you've logged in and claimed your podcast on Spotify, very similar to that. They don't give all the data that Spotify does. Spotify gives some demographic data. And they differentiate between plays and streams things that the I think is listens in streams, listens and streams. I can never remember the terminology they use. So they differentiate their Google podcast doesn't seem to be as sophisticated yet the Google podcast manager, but it's awesome that it's something I mean, Google has, up to this point, been doing their own thing their own way. And this is like, kind of falling in line with what others have been doing, just kind of like unexpected of Google in a good way. The claiming process is super simple. I loved it. I did a really short video showing how you can claim your show there. It also sounds like it has the side benefit of Google has never given us a way to submit shows directly to Google podcasts before. We've had To put up a website that met some very technical specifications to set yourself up to be discovered by Google podcasts seems like they've kind of piggyback submission on top of this Google podcast manager feature. So if your podcast hasn't been picked up in Google podcasts yet, you can still drop the feed in. they'll recognize it possibly as a show. We haven't tested this, but it's been reported by James Cridland to pod news that he had a podcast that wasn't in Google podcasts. It was brand new, he dropped the feed and they recognize it as a new show and let him index it right there. So it's very cool. I don't I'm not overly impressed with the data yet. But I don't need to be because it's something that I didn't have before. Right. Like it's it's how can you be picky? Like you got something you didn't have before, but you're saying it's not good enough? Well, it's better than nothing. It's better than what we had two days ago. And so I don't want to like naysay it. I mean, it's pretty cool. I have if anybody is watching on the livestream, I'll show you. I've got the Buzzcast podcast loaded up in Google podcasts manager show. I'll show you that screen. It has Like number of plays across the top number of minutes played, again, not super exciting, the data seems to only go back to April 6. So it seems like that's when they started collecting this pool of data that they were going to make accessible to people who access Google podcast manager. So it starts at April 6, then it goes forward. So we see some plays, which is showing 65 plays for Buzzcast from April 6. One of the things I want to do is compare that to what Buzzsprout is reporting. So if I go over to Buzzcast, we don't. We don't let you like lock in a date range when you're looking specifically for apps and devices. So the filters that we get for apps and devices are by episode, you can look at your last episode last five last 10 or all episodes. So I figured the closest thing to 30 days that we have is about the last five episodes. five episodes for Buzzcast actually spans two and a half months, not just a month, but I don't have you know, 30 days on here. But if I scroll down and look at Google podcasting where that shows up, we were showing 152 plays on Google podcasts over the past roughly two and a half months. They're showing 65 plays for the past 30 days. So I mean, those numbers are, you know, they're in the same ballpark. It's interesting. I like seeing the little bumps when we release episodes. You can see here, here's what you get from services like this that you don't get from your podcast host. And this is where the value is, when you log into Apple podcasts Connect when you log into Spotify podcaster dashboard. Now when you log into Google podcast manager, even if you don't get a lot of plays on Stitcher, but stitcher has a dashboard that you can log into as well. The most valuable thing is that you can see they know that we don't is how much of your episodes are being played. Because they're the app they know more than we do. We just know if somebody downloaded the file or not. They know how much of that file was actually played on the person's device. So that is that's why we love this stuff. When Apple came out with their podcast analytics when Spotify did theirs, now Google podcast is done. There's, these are the three biggest players in the podcasting space. And now for all three of them, you can log in and not just see how many downloads you're getting. But you can actually see how much of your episode is being listened to hugely valuable. And it's great that they're providing data that podcast hosts can't. So we're doing the best job that we can and providing all the helpful data that we can like total number of downloads, and where in the world people are listening from and the types of apps that they're using and stuff like that. But how much of your episode is being listened to is not a data point that we have access to? Until the apps provide API's that we can actually pull that data that they provide it to us, which I don't think Apple's ever going to do. I don't know that Google is ever going to do that. So it's really nice that they don't want to share that data with with partners, which I understand why they wouldn't because there's like it's a huge trust relationship. There's some liability there, right. And so they want to anonymize it. They want to control it. I totally get But make it available to the public. And now we have the third major podcast host or listening platform, making that data available to podcasters. Huge when, again, there's I have my critiques, but I'm not gonna say any of them. Because I'm so excited to be doing this. I think this is a fantastic tool for podcasters. 25:56 Yeah, and I know for me personally, I'm getting kind of Tired of the, we know that we are living in uncertain times. And we are here for you rah rah commercials that are everywhere now. What I really want is for people just to make my life better. And so if you can be that for someone else, they that will stick out, they will remember that. And then like Alban said, in the long run, that'll pay huge dividends for whatever it is that you're creating. And if you want to hear the full interview of Alban just crushing it on the Smart Passive Income podcast, I will leave a link to that episode in the show notes. So you can click over, check it out, and then leave a review saying that Buzzcast sent you. So Google, who makes lots of different software products, including Google podcasts, just released their first podcast analytics feature software platform? I don't know what would you call it, Kevin? 32:17 Right. And this is just their, this is almost like a beta product, like they just rolled it out. Of course, there's gonna be bugs, but like you said, it's better than what we had before. And even if you don't have a ton of Google podcast plays, which would not be uncommon, it still gives you an insight into how people are consuming your podcast on different platforms. So like, you can see, is there a consensus in the consumption charts across these different apps? Or are my Spotify listeners not listening as long as my apple podcast listeners and what does that tell me and it just gives you more information that you can kind of pull inferences from and make educated assessments about what's working, what's not working in your show to make it better for your future episodes. That's Really the power of these things. And so it's just one more data point to help you be more accurate with those assessments. So if you want to watch the full video, Kevin walks through how to get set up with Google podcast manager. I'll leave a link to the YouTube video in the show notes for this episode, and you'll get all set up with that. And if you're not yet in Google podcasts, then it seems like that would be the fastest way to get listed as well. So great bonus there. So if you have tried to purchase podcast equipment, in the last several weeks, you may have run into a brick wall of no one having anything to sell you. This is not uncommon with Amazon where a lot of the microphones that we recommend a lot of even the boom arm that we recommend the road PSA one is out of stock on Amazon out of stock in bnh, at least at the time of recording this video. But there are some places that you can check if you're wanting to upgrade your equipment or you wanting to purchase something and Amazon doesn't have it. That's not only will potentially be able to get you in waiting lists, you're notified when they get back in stock. But we'll also give you more information than Amazon does. So Kevin, why don't you kind of share the places that we go to to try and find things when they're not available? They're not easily available.