134 Inside the Podverse: Exploring Podcast Media Hosting with Danny Brown of Captivate.fm

[00:00:00] So what do you think makes a really good podcast media host?

[00:00:04] What features would you want to have if you were designing that podcast media host?

[00:00:08] You know, and better yet, what do you think makes a really good podcast?

[00:00:12] These questions and more on today's episode. Let's get started.

[00:00:21] Sound matters. Be heard.

[00:00:25] Welcome to the podcast where you get, you can podcast or vodcast or do whatever you want to do. It's all your show. with millions of downloads, millions of followers. Big shows have been deep platformed off of YouTube before,

[00:03:04] just because you're so massive does not mean you're immune to getting deep platform. There's Pandora if they're still around. Anyways, there's a bunch of other places that your actual content can be physically consumed by the podcast listener, which in my opinion is one great advantage to having a standard, I like to call it like podcast classic, which would be like your standard RSS feed distributed

[00:04:22] through a podcast media host to all the just standard podcast hosting. They also do a bunch of other things. I was just perusing their website. I'm like, wow, you guys offer this. You guys offer that. And I'm like, that is good stuff because I'm not a lot of other podcast media

[00:05:40] hosts even offer these things. And it's all wrapped

[00:05:43] up in a nice, wonderful package. I think what makes a

[00:05:46] really good podcast media host is for somebody who is captivate.fm? Is that what it is? It is, yeah. It's the old FM radio station domain, if you like. Don't tell Mark, I said that Mark's a co-founder would take that. Danny, when did you first get involved with podcasting? When did you first start doing that kind of stuff? So I obviously, unofficially, this is how bad it was. It was just me talking into my MacBook speaker with no headphones or anything, sitting in an office with bare walls and bare floors, etc. It was in glass, lots of glass. So you can imagine how quality driven that show was.

[00:08:20] But it was basically, it was me, the whole, not knowing what was doing, rambling. So what software did you use to record it on your MacBook at that time? I think it was Gaddish band probably. Default Gaddish band, it came with a Mac. But you can still do some editing within GarageBand, I believe, even then. You didn't even think to figure that out at that point?

[00:09:40] No, I was one of these people that thought,

[00:09:42] I don't need to edit.

[00:09:43] People are going to enjoy this anyway.

[00:09:45] It's natural, it's raw, it's what you want.

[00:10:44] his guests to just write Ramlin and talking about anything the one and he obviously gets millions of very successful. But the problem was he was already successful as a comedian,

[00:10:50] as a host, a sports analyst, etc. Or a sports commentator. So he already had success and

[00:10:55] had an audience who were more forgiven and who were ready for that kind of approach.

[00:11:00] But I think a lot of podcasters are shows, I run these circles and I always review some movie or whatever, and I was thinking that like, you're not the only show reviewing that movie. So you kind of have to do it in a way that's better than everybody else. And one way you can really stand out is having better production than the two Zoom chat guys,

[00:12:20] drinking beers and getting, by the time of episodes finished,

[00:12:24] they're sloshed and they don't even know what day it is.

[00:13:26] And I heard somewhere that the retention rate on YouTube is like less than 50% per video.

[00:13:31] Oh, yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I look at my stats for YouTube. I don't really have a big YouTube channel. I've only recently started doing proper video, if you like. And I look

[00:13:37] about attention stats. And it's horrible. Yeah, it's definitely there's some videos get good

[00:13:41] retention. And I do tend to find that's obviously they can. They said they go in the Apple podcast connect and they go Spotify things like that. They can see kind of the same retention levels and things like that. And I've heard it's soul crushing. If you find out, oh, they break drops out in the first three minutes. What's up with that? You know, but the funny thing is, is that you see your stats and it looks like, well,

[00:15:02] I've got all these downloads, but maybe they accidentally clicked on it for a minute or

[00:15:06] whatever.

[00:15:07] And then they, and to listen, retention time, et cetera, that's a key number as you want to be looking at. Yeah, one of the factors I look into is actual feedback from physical listeners that either email me, message me,

[00:16:20] they write to me on social media or emails,

[00:16:23] things like that.

[00:16:24] And that's kind of like,

[00:16:25] oh, well, you know, same with Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. At least that allows you to look at your content and tweak it. If people are constantly skipping your pre-roll, then maybe take away your pre-roll and stick that in mid-roll, for example. And if people are dropping off before the end, pull any call to actually you've got the end and drop that in three quarters way through, etc. So, it's, I mean, like you

[00:17:41] mentioned, you can talk all day about podcasts and I could talk all day about podcasting

[00:17:44] and data and analytics. It's just, it's team and work very closely with the marketing and the dev team about making the whole experience of the podcaster as good as it can be, whether that's the UX of the dashboard, the UI of the dashboard, the features that podcasters can use,

[00:19:01] how they can connect with their listeners,

[00:19:02] how they can monetize, et cetera.

[00:19:05] Really just making every touch point with captivate,

[00:19:07] whether that's using the platform Probably about a dozen dedicated and then a little bit more when you take on other ones that now have hosting as an option. Yeah, so when it comes to hosting, what do you say to the guy that says, yeah, I have a podcast. Oh, you're always hosted at YouTube. What do you tell that guy? Well, I mean, yeah, if they want to call the podcast, prove it argue.

[00:20:21] I saw about obviously you get feedback from your listeners. on their servers, what if YouTube did the same thing? Like what if YouTube decided to charge for hosting, for videos on their platform? I think the world would just explode, everybody would just go nuts, everybody would just start crying, and I know the big shows wouldn't care, like whatever, what do we care? But I think that the smaller, like, you know, people that are doing this totally for funsy hobby,

[00:21:42] you know, no money invested kind of thing

[00:21:44] would probably lose their minds.

[00:21:46] I don't think we do. somewhere. Where are your servers located and where I mean, where are YouTube servers located and how big are they? Yeah, so you pretty much find that most companies use global servers. So you might have some servers in the US, some in the UK, some in Europe, some in Asia, for example, I know captivate, we've got multiple servers in different places in case one goes down or one has

[00:23:01] issues. So if AWS has issues, for example,

[00:23:04] we can switch over to another server, which is a backup to AWS and so forth.

[00:24:03] that go into, okay, what's the upload speed like for this person when they're giving us files? Should we bump them to that server, the server, etc, to ensure that you've got the most

[00:24:07] optimized speed up? Well, does it make a difference for say, like, I'm here in San Diego, and I've

[00:24:12] uploaded to the closest server to me. What's this say, it's LA for some reason, just because it's close.

[00:24:16] And somebody was in South Africa, and downloaded my file, would it make a difference for them,

[00:24:21] or how does it work? It shouldn't really make too much of streaming and bringing it in, why don't we just use a term, plays versus downloads? You can probably do that. A lot of times when people come to us and ask, what's the difference between download and a listen, we'll say the pretty much the same thing. The listener is where the difference comes in. So you've got a listener and then a download.

[00:25:42] Okay.

[00:25:43] So yeah, I mean, different platforms, It really starts to, the difference is come in when you really start to dig in and see, okay, do I have to pay extra for more improved analytics, for example? Do I have to pay extra for upload amounts, some podcast hosts charged by the amount of hours you have each month to upload episodes?

[00:27:01] Some might charge you for using the custom domain

[00:27:03] on a free website or extra team members

[00:27:06] if you've got like a client show UK, Europe, or the US, those three currency models. But the base plan is the personal plan, which is either, let's stick with the US because I'm in Canada, you're in the US, so let's stick with dollars, it's easier. So it's 19 bucks per month or 204 bucks per year, which is the equivalent of 17 bucks per month.

[00:28:20] So you save a little bit if you pay annually.

[00:28:24] Basically, every feature comes to all podcasters that's going to start adding up obviously. But the average podcast episode that's got maybe an hour long, 30 minutes to an hour, one person or two people, a little bit music or whatever, the average podcast media file doesn't take went in general. Oh. So yeah, I don't have that open or anything. Sorry, Chris. But yeah, we could find out how many's got that, you know, how many's got the over who's on the personal, who's on the premium,

[00:31:00] sorry, who's on professional plan, who's on the business plan.

[00:31:02] So if you go over the 30,000, you get kicked into the professional plan?

[00:31:06] No, so we'll give you a couple of months, feel that if you're single podcast or if you're podcasted getting beyond 30,000 downloads each month, you should be doing some form of monetization by them, either direct sponsorships or advertising or dynamic ads or anything like that. There should be some monetization in there because we do offer a lot of features for that. So that should cover the basic jump

[00:32:21] from the personal plan up to the professional plan. It can host client, limited client podcasts. And then the network to offer a network feature, if you want to have a network for your shows, if you've got multiple podcasts, on personal, you can free podcast the network on professional six and then on business unlimited. But apart from these tiny little changes there, all the other features are available.

[00:33:41] Yeah.

[00:33:41] Now, will you say three or four or six different podcasts?

[00:33:44] Are they six or three different RSS feeds

[00:33:46] or are they the same thing too, but I see they do it, especially with, I seen a show of like years ago they were on, they were on anchor back in the day. And of course the anchors all free. So why not just dump all of our, but they had to get like seven or 10 shows on one anchor feed. And because I was explaining to me on Tuesdays, we do this show on Wednesdays, you do that show on three, like what I am so

[00:35:02] I want to go check out our show. And I just assumed they did that on anchor at the time for sure. Oh, I gotcha. Nice. Nice. So what is the... So it's $49 a top tier plan. You have something bigger than that. Yeah, there's the business plan, which is for the, as it mentions, it generates for agencies and producers or whatever that want to host client shows.

[00:36:24] So you would have a podcast production company or a podcast from each other? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And each client would only have access to their own show. So it's actually be like you have an office and you've got 10 little offices within that main building and every client's got their own office and their own key to that office. But they can't go and teach others office. They can only go into their own office, but you can go into every office and make sure

[00:37:40] everybody's okay.

[00:37:41] Yeah, that's very important.

[00:37:43] Well, on that note though, if I always say that's a client student or new clients that

[00:37:48] want to come in, I always tell them like, mean, I'll get access to upload the files for them. Sure. I won't make sure they have full control of that because it's literally, it's there. I feel like it's their property. It's their stuff. It's their show. If, for example, they got big and started making some money. Like, if I want to be a shady person, I can say, well, I'm going to take that money because it's, you know, because I deserve it now or whatever.

[00:39:01] I just don't want any of that kind of stuff to get in the way of that. So they tied you as the producer or whatever permission to want to give you on the show and you log in when you're on password etc and just take care of the production side of it. That's fantastic man. I think that's a great way to do it because I mean I mean I don't want to like take full ownership of somebody else's you know stuff. Yeah. You know it's it's not my

[00:40:21] house. I'm just I'm just kind of

[00:40:23] cleaning it for you. I guess that it's

[00:40:25] been the living here. You live here

[00:40:26] you know. So that's like one of those

[00:40:28] deals but it's still a tiny part of the actual Spotify experience.

[00:41:43] So YouTube does it really well.

[00:41:44] So in the podcast, as we have on Captivy

[00:41:46] that offers both video and audio, have the right environment, you have to have the right production value, the right sound, the right look, the right enter, you know missions if you like with the transitions between the person speaking and then whatever's coming up as a special slide or whatever There's so much just to go into that. So it's also it's a huge part and it's a lot of people now

[00:43:01] Do use YouTube as the background to audio podcasts?

[00:44:01] that are out there. You gotta compete with those guys.

[00:44:02] And those guys are also,

[00:44:04] their stuff is force fed right in front of you on the screen,

[00:44:08] saying, hey, look at me,

[00:44:09] look over here instead,

[00:44:10] don't watch this thing,

[00:44:11] look at this thing.

[00:44:12] And so you have to keep them on your content

[00:44:15] without getting distracted

[00:44:16] by the other cute, colorful videos to the other side.

[00:44:20] Not to mention,

[00:44:20] oh, I'm gonna go to the movies tonight.

[00:44:22] Oh, not to mention the news is on.

[00:44:23] Not to mention,

[00:44:24] oh, the Netflix show came out.

[00:44:25] I wanna check that out.

[00:44:26] Not to mention all that other stuff. on YouTube, an hour talking head podcast, unless, unless they're physically showing other things happening on the screen at the same time. I think it's where a lot of these, I guess quote unquote, video podcasters kind of fail is where they don't physically like show other B roll elements. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, for sure. And I mean, that's what I definitely don't have the expertise to have

[00:45:43] a lot of things going on. Like the videos I put up now, it's very different approach and very different medium. I think that's where the two mediums are definitely separate from each other. Yeah, I think with audio, you really feel like you're part of the conversation. You feel like you're connected with a host directly. I think there's more of a definite connection more with an audio podcast than a video show, I think. But

[00:47:03] some people might argue with me on that because the host. I mean, you can have the greatest equipment. You can have your room treated really well. You can have great editing skills. You can have great production values. That's all secondary for me. It's

[00:48:21] the interest of the host that's doing the podcast. Do they really want to do that? Do

[00:48:25] they believe in what they're talking about the basement, the guys getting drunk

[00:49:44] and just starting a podcast and then talking don't know what I'm talking about here, Chris,

[00:51:00] but do it stuff like that.

[00:51:01] I can listen to the most boring topic if you like.

[00:51:02] As long as the podcast host has got that passion

[00:51:06] and that interest and really work with the previous episode, etc.

[00:52:20] That's where an audience goes and pays money to go listen to a comedian

[00:52:27] or go watch a comedian. have a fantastic and stay warm up there in Canada. Rest your day, man. Thank you very much and enjoy your T-shirt while in San Diego. I want to teach you right now, speaking of which. There you go. Hey, thank you once again for listening to this episode today. You know, I really, really appreciate it. That makes me smile so much. But you know what will make me very happy is if you gave me a honest

[00:53:42] review on your favorite podcast play with its Apple Spotify, Joe Blo's