Hey, everyone. I'm Dave Clements, customer relations and
media specialist here at Blueberry.
And I'm Mike Dell, the VP of customer
relations.
And today, we're gonna
be diving into the biggest podcast platforms like
Apple and Spotify
and some non podcast platforms like YouTube.
I know that's funny, but that's how it
is. What they're doing right and where they
might be missing the mark.
Because podcasting
is always changing, and there's always something new,
whether it's monetization,
analytics,
discovery,
and all of these platforms that we're gonna
talk about. They're actually shaping how creators are
reaching their audiences.
Exactly.
Understanding the pros and cons will help you
choose where to focus your energy
and what tools to trust and what not
to worry about.
You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike
Dell, Dave Clements, and Mackenzie Bennett from the
Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and
insider tips and tricks to help you start,
grow, and thrive through podcasting with all the
support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting.
Welcome. Let's dive in.
As the podcasting
landscape evolves, creators are navigating
all the changed things. There's not a whole
lot of new platforms, but but there are
the different softwares and everything. And I like
to break it down this way. There's
podcast apps, which their
main focus is podcasting,
and then there's apps that do other things
that added podcasting
for whatever reason.
You know, Spotify,
even though it's a fairly large
platform for podcast listening, is a music service.
So it isn't really a
podcast
app in the traditional sense,
but, again, we include it because it is
important just like any of the other ones.
Quick breakdown.
I'll take Apple here. Apple Podcasts is a
classic
podcast app
Well, it's a directory
and has a very wide listener base. Apple
only. Actually, not so much now. They do
PWA, but that's too geeky.
The analytics that they collect
are kinda limited
only to people that use Apple Podcasts, so
it doesn't show you anything that happens anywhere
else like Blueberry does. And their subscription model
is handy, but it it benefits Apple more
than every podcaster. Now there's some that are
making some good money there.
And if we talk about Spotify, Mike mentioned
it's a good place for discovery,
but it's primarily
a music app. So it's
it's closed in what you would call a
walled garden.
And Spotify has a great algorithm. So if
you're listening to music, you might get suggested
podcasts
that you may be interested in listening to.
If you're listening to podcasts, you're gonna get
recommended other podcasts. That's one thing Spotify has
done
very well is their personalized recommendations,
and they even have tools that they're developing
wrapped and things like
that. Plus, they're also expanding some things. So
they're doing, like, polls and q and a
features within their services. If you were a
Spotify podcaster,
maybe there are some things you could use
there. But the downside
is that
when it comes
to their stats, it's actually pretty
limited.
Apple,
they're only measuring what is on their platform,
and I'll be honest, a lot of it's
inflated.
So can you trust it? Maybe not. And
some podcasters, when they are exclusive
to Spotify,
they will have their episodes locked
behind
Spotify only access. So
if you're listening on Apple or another podcast
app and one of your favorite creators
drops an exclusive episode for Spotify, it's time
for you to go over to Spotify and
either use their free app with ads or
pay their premium subscription.
Yeah. And the thing about that also is
they do host some podcasts. They bought Anchor
platform, and that was pretty big for a
while, not so much anymore. But they do
that.
The problem is that
by default,
there's no open RSS feed from
Spotify for creators is what their new name
for it is,
and that limits your distribution to just Spotify.
Yeah. I remember a few years ago, Marvel,
because I'm big into comic books and superheroes
and that kind of stuff. Marvel had a
partnership or a deal with them where
they had a limited run series that was
only on Spotify. And I was like,
I don't use Spotify enough to download the
app or even visit the website. I have
my listening planned for the day through primarily
one app. I missed out on that until,
I think,
six to eight months later, you could find
it in your actual podcast apps because it
was distributed with RSS.
That's the whole thing is you wanna have
that RSS feed because that gives you the
most control over your podcast.
Let's talk about YouTube.
YouTube is great for video. That's what they
do. They're a video platform.
There's nothing wrong
with having a video of your
podcast
there.
You don't originate a podcast on YouTube. Now
you could
have a YouTube channel and call it a
podcast, and that's fine. The listeners don't care.
The viewers don't care. Call it a podcast.
We don't care.
But it's not going anywhere.
It's gonna be on YouTube. But YouTube is
they got a massive reach. There's nothing at
all wrong with having a YouTube channel. It's
just
in the traditional podcasting
realm, that's not what they're doing. They do
have YouTube Music, which a lot of users
use to listen to music. They also have
a podcast section, and
it's pretty good.
To be honest with you, it's as good
as Spotify. But,
you know, the main purpose of that to
most hardcore podcast listeners is, hey. I discovered
a podcast when I was listening to some
music.
I'm gonna go over to my podcast app
and
subscribe to it. I'm not gonna continue listening
to it here, but not everybody's the same.
That's and that's the thing.
We don't care where you listen as long
as you listen. Again, I'm torn because I
really
think that there's a distinction
between things that are delivered via RSS
and things that are not. And there's not
anything wrong with also distributing
non
RSS, like on YouTube or
television, radio.
All of those are different delivery methods of
and it could be the same content.
Your podcast can be a YouTube channel.
Your YouTube channel can be a podcast, and
there's no problem with doing both.
Yeah. I think it just comes down to
when you're looking at Spotify and YouTube,
there's there are some limitations
there. Like,
one thing that we haven't talked about is
the fact that if you are an audio
only show, you can
use your RSS feed
and put that audio show onto YouTube. That's
another method.
But,
you know, there are pros and cons to
at least these last two. Like, Apple's pretty
open because they're using
RSS, which is an open
I don't wanna say platform. It's just an
Standard. Open standard. Yeah. An open delivery method.
And it's not to say that there's
that Spotify or YouTube are bad.
I think, like, Mike and I over the
years, we've we've
put shows on to Spotify. We've taken shows
off of Spotify. Just is it doing well?
Or how do we feel about Spotify that
week? You and I spent an awful lot
of time being Spotify support.
That's true.
So, yeah, just kinda keep that in mind
as you're I think, personally, I think it's
good to be everywhere you can be,
but
don't overextend yourself. If it's easy to get
your RSS feed on Spotify, do that. If
it's easy to do it on YouTube, do
that. And it is.
But don't have the video component unless you
have the time.
Yeah. You know? Video is huge as far
as amount of time extra
you're gonna spend
doing that. Boy, do I know that.
Yeah. Dave Dave's kind of our YouTube guy.
So Yeah. Yeah. The cool thing, though, with
all of these
is that Blueberry hosting integrates
seamlessly
with all of them. We give you instructions
in Apple and Spotify's cases. You can
submit your show directly from the Blueberry dashboard,
and you're still in control of the feed.
So if you ever wanna take it off
of a place, you can do that. Super
simple.
Yeah. And now, you know, let's make a
little bit of a distinction between video and
audio podcasting.
A video podcasting, and I'm talking about delivering
video via RSS feed,
will never get to YouTube.
Or I shouldn't say never. As of currently,
YouTube will not take video via RSS feed
and neither will Spotify.
So if you want to do a video
RSS podcast,
then, you know, Blueberry has all the tools
to make that happen if you want,
That will be of limited distribution.
A lot of the podcasting two point o
apps through podcast index
show video,
and a lot of and Apple itself shows
video, and a lot of the apps that
also use Apple as a directory do, but
they're all the minor apps. None of the
really big ones are gonna take video
other than Apple.
But and there's nothing wrong with that. Just
know that if you want full distribution on
video, you do the RSS.
You do
direct upload to Spotify and direct upload to
YouTube.
You got it all covered. And there's nothing
wrong with that. I'm not against any of
that.
It's just know how much extra
work that's gonna be. Yeah. And like Mike
said, Spotify
allows
video
if you're using their service directly. Same thing
with YouTube.
But who knows? We could record this episode,
and three months later, they're like, hey. Surprise.
Here's a video for everybody. Yeah. And we'd
be all for it. Yeah. So just
this is why we're here, to keep you
up to date on things like this. So
make sure you're always paying attention.
Last I checked,
I I did some a little bit of
research to see
just how many places out there are there
for people to listen to podcasts.
And I'm not counting the web. I'm just
counting apps and
device directories, that kind of thing. It was
about a 125
different places
that people could find your audio podcast.
And, yeah, it's amazing. Some of them I've
never even heard of. But
the thing is
and there's the strategy I say. When you
first start podcasting or or if you've been
podcasting forever, make sure you're in three places.
Apple Podcasts,
podcast index,
which is not super well known, but it
powers a lot of apps,
and
Spotify, unfortunately,
because they are the third
most used platform out there for podcast listening.
But if you're in those three, you're gonna
get about 95%
of the potential
audience.
And in the Blueberry dashboard in our destinations,
there's some that don't use either of those.
IHeart and Pandora
and Deezer and
some of the Middle East and and India
apps. Those don't use those directories, so you
gotta go to them directly. But there's nothing
wrong with being in any of those. In
fact, we encourage you to be in in
any of those. But let me make one
caveat there. If you're doing a video
on YouTube, so you have a full blown
video channel for your podcast on YouTube,
don't submit your RSS feed to YouTube
because what'll happen
and I'm talking about your audio RSS feed.
What'll happen is each of your videos is
gonna have a video version, and then right
next to it will be an audio version
with just a static image.
That just makes your channel look funny.
All you have to do is make sure
you put all your podcast episodes that you
upload as video on YouTube
in a playlist,
and make sure that playlist is designated a
podcast.
That way it'll show up in YouTube music
as audio.
Kind of a neat way of getting around
it. So you get both best of both
worlds that way. And, anyway so that's just
my little soapbox about YouTube and, you know,
certain things. We have a service called Vidapod,
which is currently having issues, but it should
be back sometime, where it's for video first
creators.
And then we create a audio version and
put it out in an RSS feed automatically.
That's all great, but then they see in
destinations, YouTube. So then they submit that RSS
feed to YouTube, and it causes a giant
loop.
Yep. Yeah. It's like a bad
feedback loop, and we've run it a few
times. So if you're using VidtoPod, don't submit
your Blueberry feed to YouTube.
Yeah. You're already there. Mess. Right. You're already
there.
What are they doing right? Talking about the
platforms we're talking about. But putting podcasting
into new audiences, I get that. Adding video
options and interactive tools. Yeah. Some of them
have video options as we discussed
and making listening easier across devices.
Yeah. That is nice. Like, especially if you
are using YouTube or Spotify as your primary,
quote, unquote, podcast app. Right. They make it
for every device. So you can download the
app, log in to your account, and you're
good to go. I know, like, I love
Overcast, which is exclusively iOS.
And
so then not that I'm ever not on
an Apple device, but there have been moments
where I'm just like, man,
I I wish I had all of my
podcasts here. Yeah. I think at some point,
you're just gonna be able to grab anything
everywhere
all the time.
Yeah. Overcast is my daily driver too, but
I I find it,
yeah, it's probably not quite as user friendly
as Spotify or Apple,
but it's powerful in the way you can
organize your listening and all that. But again
and then
Marco, that that does Overcast,
uses both Podcast Index and Apple's directory. So
if you're in either one of those,
you're on Overcast.
Yeah.
And and I guess we can talk about
what they're doing wrong. Like, we can't be
positive all the time. Right?
So, like, we mentioned earlier, like, sometimes their
stats
are confusing.
You might call them inconsistent,
especially if you're already using Blueberry stats because
you can see one number in Blueberry, and
then you go over to your Apple or
Spotify, and you're like, wait a minute. Something
seems off. And I typically get this
more from
people who have Spotify accounts,
and they're checking their Spotify stats. And they're
like, Spotify says I have so many more
downloads. And I'm like,
yeah. They're
they're inflated, and they can do that. We're
Blueberry is regulated. We've got rules to follow
to make sure that we're cutting out bots
and things like that. So that's a What
happens with Spotify
is they
say you
listen to my show. You listen to an
episode. You're let's say you're listening to this
on Spotify. By the way, we are back
on Spotify.
We were off for a while on purpose,
and we're back. But, anyway,
if you're listening to this on Spotify and
you hit pause and you go do something
and you come back and you hit resume,
Spotify will count that as a second download.
And that's how it gets inflated
or you know, and I don't know this
for sure. They don't give us their thing,
but that's what I suspect is happening.
Apple does the same thing sometimes. I think
they're a little better about it, but
what they what Apple shows you for what
your downloads in Apple are and versus what
we show you,
it's probably gonna be more on Apple.
That doesn't mean they're wrong or right. That
just means by our standards, this is what
constitutes a download.
Yep. Yep. And they're pretty strict rules that
we're following to a point where we're constantly
checking up on them. Of course.
Some other things that they may not be
doing. We mentioned this concept of walled gardens,
so they're
sticking you inside their box. Blueberry podcasters don't
have to worry about this too much because
you are operating with an RSS feed. But
podcasters that are using Spotify
directly,
they have no way to get outside of
the Spotify box,
and that's rough. It is optional if you're
using Spotify for creators. You can optionally
have an open RSS feed, but it's optional.
So a lot of people don't do that.
I mean, if you're
I wouldn't use their platform myself, but if
that's what you need to do,
make sure you turn that RSS
option on and then submit to all these
places, because you you want the most
distribution
as you can get. Yeah. And I would
say YouTube is probably even more
walled in in the fact that if you
are video first,
you're just kind of stuck
because
there are not a lot of
podcast companies that are doing something similar to
what we're doing with VidtoPod,
where we can take that, turn it into
audio at least, and syndicate it. I'd love
to be able to just do a vid
to vid kind of thing to be able
to pull the video from YouTube and then
syndicate it or distribute it.
And that may happen in the future, of
course. So there's as we said at the
beginning, things change all the time. Yeah. Super
quick.
Think about this. Apple
is adopting yet another podcast two point o
namespace tag.
That mean anything to you? Not really. But
it's a geeky thing. But they are
bringing on chapters,
and
that's a big deal.
Not that I agree that we need to
have chapters.
Some podcasts
lend themselves to that, some don't,
But
they're adding chapters using podcast two point o
tags,
which is a really good sign. And once
Apple adopts something, a lot of other places
adopt those things. So look at the transcripts.
Transcripts are almost ubiquitous now.
Yeah. And that was 100%
because Apple decided that the podcast two point
o way of doing transcripts was the right
way, and that's what they're doing. Yeah. Another
one is the things that they may be
doing wrong is monetization.
Spotify
puts
ads around your show. I don't think they
get right in the middle of it, but
they do put it around your show.
YouTube puts it right in the middle even
if you're in the middle of a sentence.
And unless you're killing it, you're not on
their monetization program, so they keep all the
money.
Like, I I watch a lot of YouTube.
I pay the subscription, so I don't get
those ads stuffed in the middle.
I also pay for Spotify because I like
their music service.
I don't get any ads. But I'm willing
to pay for get not getting those ads.
But for the average listener that doesn't wanna
pay,
it's a bad experience.
Yeah. And it's And just
yeah. As a creator,
YouTube has a standard before you can be
part of their partner program. I don't know
if they still call it that. But you
had to hit a certain amount of subscribers,
a certain amount of views for a certain
length of time
before any of that ad revenue would come
to you. And even then, it's
I think it's like a fifty fifty split
or something. But
you're you are probably not benefiting from that
unless your podcast
is doing huge
numbers
if we're It's that platform, though. Yes. You
could be doing huge numbers everywhere else and
not on that platform and not get anything.
Monetization, there's lots of other ways of doing
that. And, of course, Blueberry
has programmatic
advertising for everybody. You may not make a
lot of money with it, but at least
it's something and you get it.
And that's a lot better than the bad
experience of listening to ads
that you had no
say so as a creator
in what ads are showing.
And
that's
yeah. Yeah.
Not something I wanna participate in, but, hey,
each to their own. Of course, we have
our IAB certified stats. That's the rules Dave
was talking about, and
our hosting plans are are pretty reasonable and
reliable and all that good stuff. And, of
course, we give you an RSS feed, which
is totally open and can be distributed wherever
RSS feeds are accepted. That reminds me of
the old Visa commercials.
But,
anyway,
you can just be everywhere, and you don't
have to compromise your ownership of your
platform, your platform. That's the thing. When you
you wanna go a step further, do PowerPress
on your own domain. Your feed comes from
your own domain. Doesn't even involve us other
than we track your stats and host your
files.
Yep. Yeah. We try to put the ownership
in your hands because that's super important.
And I don't know that everybody
notices that or sees it as such in
our current social media era. Everybody's gotta
be on TikTok and Instagram
and stuff. Yeah. It may not be as
important to some people as it might be
to others, and and that's fine. Each to
their own.
We're we're open opportunity. Do what you want.
Yeah. And I like to say there's no
rules in podcasting. There are some standards, but
there's no rules.
Yeah. And that kinda leads into
kind of some final
thoughts here, just this concept of staying open
and staying in control.
Because,
Mike, you've been around since the beginning of
podcasting roughly
much much longer than I have been. But
I've been in it for a long time
too. Yeah. And we've watched
platforms come and go, and we've watched platforms
change a lot
and really embrace
creators.
But I think it's important
as things move so fast
that you, as a creator, stay informed of
what's going on. Make sure that you're paying
attention to what any of these platforms are
doing
just so that you're aware that you can
ebb and flow with them. So you're not
surprised, like, when Google went from Google Podcasts
to YouTube Music,
so many people were like, I don't know
what's going on, and
we were there for you. That's
not even the whole story with Google. That's
true.
That that's old. They
used to have this awesome thing called Google
Reader.
Uh-huh. And as a part of Google Reader,
they had a an app,
mostly. I think it was just Android,
but an app called Google Listen,
and it was powered by Google Reader. So
you could put a podcast app in Google
Reader,
and your Google Listen would be your podcast
app.
That was an awesome thing. And then they
killed Reader, and then they killed
Listen.
And then they came back with Google Podcasts.
And so they've tried this three, four times
and just haven't
succeeded.
Yeah. So just stay up to date on
things. Learn the ins and outs of these
platforms, and you'll be better served for it.
And your podcast is gonna be able to
get past these,
what could be roadblocks
much better and lead to more success, however
you decide to define that. For sure. That'll
wrap it up for today. Thanks for listening.
Remember that podcasting was built on open distribution,
so try not to let any of these
platforms take that away from you. Stand up
for yourself.
Yeah. You use all the tools available,
but keep your independence.
Blueberry Podcasters do just that. You're gonna be
able to host, publish, and analyze
all on your terms.
Alright. You can subscribe to Podcast Insider or
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But if for more insights,
make sure you drop over to podcastinsider.com.
And if we happen to disappear from the
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always find us there as well.
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