Welcome back to Podcast Insider. I'm Mike Dell,
the VP of customer relations here at Blueberry.
And I'm Mackenzie Bennett, director of marketing at
Blueberry.
And today, we're gonna talk about something that
confuses a lot of people,
podcast
terminology.
It has its own language, RSS feeds, enclosures,
CPMs, hosting, distribution. It goes on and on.
And if you're new, it can feel like
everyone assumes you already know what these things
mean.
So we're gonna break them down for you.
Some of the most common podcasting terms, what
they actually mean, and why they matter. No
jargon, no complicated explanations, just plain English. Well,
I will try. How about that? I'm gonna
I'm gonna hold you to that as as
best I can. There we
go. You're listening to Podcast Insider,
hosted by Mike Dell, Mackenzie Bennett, and Dave
Clements.
We're bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider
tips and tricks to help you start, grow,
and thrive through podcasting,
all with the support of your team here
at Blueberry.
Welcome. Let's dive in.
Alright. And I'll take this first section here
since I
I wrote
it.
That was your little rant.
Yeah. It's not a rant. It's, you know,
working in support, I answer the phone, and
a lot of times, I will get something
to the effect of,
my podcast
didn't go out today, or my podcast
feed on Apple isn't
updated, or, you know, some
basic thing. So I just wanted to define
some of the basic
terms,
you know, just the the right down to
the bare bones. So a podcast,
and there's a technical definition that drives everybody
nuts. That's not what I'm talking about.
A podcast is an episodic
show,
which is mostly delivered by RSS, but, you
know, there are stuff on other platforms called
podcasts that are episodics.
They fit that definition.
That term can also be interchangeable with the
word show. You have a show.
Okay. I'm gonna age myself here. Oh, I
can go on and on about show and
episode and that whole thing. Right. But I'm
gonna age myself here.
The TV show MASH, I'm sure even even
the younger ones in this, in this audience
know what the show MASH was.
Okay? MASH was the title of the show,
just like your podcast will have a title.
It's a show.
And then individual
episodes may have other titles.
So in MASH, there was probably an episode
named something. I don't know what their names
were because that's not popular on TV. But
the idea is that when you say you
have a podcast,
you have a show.
When you have an episode,
it that's the end of it it's an
individual entry.
You know, I can't it's hard to done
it define episode without saying the word episode.
But, basically,
you know, I I I hear
podcasters,
say, I did a podcast about that.
No. You did a podcast episode
about that.
Yes.
That's different. And, personally, I hate the word
pod, but I guess that's a thing now
too. But,
I did a I did a pod.
Okay. Good. Great.
That, yeah, that just,
irks me in ways.
Yeah. But,
yeah. No. My biggest one is definitely
podcast
show
episode,
that whole debacle.
Think of it the way that you think
of
TV shows. It's just that simple. I mean,
I've been having this conversation with my mother
since I
have been, like, nine years old
where she's describing
a TV episode
about a show that we have watched forever,
and she calls it a a movie.
Or she she will describe a movie for,
you know, an entire day. And she's like,
yeah. No. But it's a show. Like,
it's it goes back and forth. And I
have explained it to her countless times, and
she just could not care.
And it drives me insane,
because I care about media and I care
about words, and,
that one I'm just never gonna get over.
Yeah. And that's
one of the things that we get a
lot as well in support is, you know,
people will say your,
say, feed. Well,
when when you're talking about a podcast,
the feed is the RSS feed.
It's not your listing on Apple. It's not
your listing on Spotify.
It's not your YouTube channel. It's
it's
the specific
technical thing that makes your podcast work. We're
gonna go into what RSS is all about
a little bit later,
so I won't beat that dead horse. But,
basically,
you know, there's no such thing as a
YouTube
feed. There's a YouTube
channel Right. And that's cool. The feed is
the function.
Yeah. That's why there's that's why the it
exists in only podcasting, and you don't really
hear it used in anything else. Right. And,
you know, and that's becoming less important, you
know, as far as the listeners are concerned
or viewers.
You know, they don't care if it's an
RSS feed or not. You know? That's that's
one of the reasons why reason for them
to. But there is no feed
out
of YouTube.
Yeah. They they can take your feed in
in certain instances,
but there's no feed on YouTube, and there's
no feed coming out of YouTube. Anyway,
it's not true with Spotify, but that's a
whole another thing.
So and then the term upload really confuses
people.
And I don't
specifically know why, but I guess I get
it.
But, in publishing an episode, when you upload,
you're uploading your episode to your podcast host
or server or whatever you use. Hopefully, it's
Blueberry.
But, that's you know, you do not upload
your podcast to Apple Podcasts or Spotify
or wherever.
You
syndicate
to them through your RSS feed, blah blah
blah, you know, all the technical garbage. Alright.
I'll I'll try to speak English from here
on out.
Well, if you wanna speak English, I don't
know if we should really describe an RSS
feed then because it might be called really
simple syndication, but
it's not
that simple.
Well,
if you're using the right tools, it's really
simple.
But that's the key. If you're gonna go
in there and handwrite it yourself, then, no,
that's complicated.
So you just confuse more people by saying
handwriting
it. Okay. Well,
back in the day, back you know, I'll
use my old man voice.
When podcasting
first started, that's basically, we had to make
a text file and write a whole bunch
of gobbledygook in the text file to get
RSS to work.
Now we don't have to do that anymore.
Yeah. We have tools for that such as
Blueberry Podcasting,
PowerPress,
or,
you know, there's
100 ways of making an RSS feed that
don't involve you learning
XML code.
You know, just like a web page. Okay.
A web page on the back end is
HTML code,
but you don't see that. And when you're
building web pages nowadays, you just type what
you want in there, put some pictures in
there, hit hit publish, and you don't care
what the code says.
You know? Same thing with RSS.
It's to the point now where it disappears,
really, for most people. It is in the
background, but it does contain
your episode title, your show title, the descriptions
for your episodes, the audio files for video
files for set episodes.
Yeah. And links to them. It's Right.
But, yeah, not the the file itself stays
wherever you uploaded it to. See previous section.
And
the, I guess, the date associated to that
because, you know, it'll go in whatever order.
Yeah. And there's a whole bunch of other
things in RSS that nobody cares about. But,
you know, there's there's what we call tags,
or features, you know, extra things that can
be added in there. But for the most
part, the tool you're using, if you're using
Blueberry especially, all that stuff disappears and you
just fill in boxes.
So
pretty cool. Yeah. All of that can be
managed with Blueberry or wherever you are hosting
your show. And speaking of podcast hosting,
that's a that that kind of is a
harder one to to
understand sometimes, but what a podcast hosting
company does
is
two things, really. We help you generate your
RSS feed,
and we store the files for you. And,
you know, with us, at least, we give
you pretty good statistics on how your files
are being used,
which is nice. We've been tracking that info
since day one. Yep. And so, basically, you
know, a podcast hosting, you know, it doesn't
have to be a company. It could be
a server that you own. You know? It's
not recommended most of the time for various
reasons, but,
you know, a a podcast host such as
Blueberry Podcast,
you know, we store the audio. We gen
help you generate the RSS feed either via
PowerPress or or on our dashboard.
And it, we help you distribute
it so that,
you know, when
Apple
pulls your RSS feed in and new episode
shows to all your listeners
or viewers depending on audio video.
I I I've got a
I'm having a little trouble here because this
this year,
video is exploding.
There there there's gonna be lots of new
things coming.
And so, you know, listener and or viewer,
you know, it's like like when they change
the term subscribe to follow Follow.
That took me the longest time to get,
get subscribe out of my head Yeah. Even
though that's what you're doing. Anyway,
enough But it's it's you know,
if you really are, like, having trouble wrapping
your head around it, it's just whenever
you were listening to whatever show in Apple
Podcasts or Overcast or wherever,
those episodes don't actually live at that place.
They live somewhere else. They are being
made available
through
the app. Yeah. Well, that's and that's you
know, podcasting is exactly opposite
of pretty much everything else on the Internet.
I I mean, you upload a video to
YouTube, and as soon as they're done processing
it, it's available on YouTube. Boom. Done. That's
all there is to it. Right. You upload
your show to your podcast host, put it
in your RSS feed, which, like I said,
you don't have to do anything special to
do that. It just the tools do it.
Then Right. And then you have to wait
a little bit of time
for Apple and Spotify and Amazon and all
the 135
other apps out there that you can listen
to podcasts on,
get it because it's syndicated,
not
not you're not directly uploading it to Apple
and Spotify. So But I I think some
people definitely get confused because they hear these
big big big shows and celebrities say we're
hosted on Spotify.
They are. Yeah. There are so many making
millions of dollars.
Yeah. This is a different scenario. You know,
Spotify as well as a listening app is
also
a podcast host. Yeah. So
so for the most part, normal everyday podcasters
and people are not
hosting,
are not using Apple and Spotify and Amazon
and these places for their podcast hosting.
These celebrities and big shows, they are. Those
are exclusive. Those are different deals.
Yeah. They may be. Yeah. Yeah. Apple, not
so much. Spotify,
definitely.
Spotify also has another hosting company that is
associated with them
that a lot you know, like Joe Rogan's
on
I don't even remember the name of it,
but it's their enterprise level,
at Spotify.
So Premium.
Totally different thing. Is he really like, if
you have free Spotify, you can't get The
Rogan Show?
No. No. You can get The Rogan Show.
What I'm talking about is where his feed
comes from
is from Megaphone.
That's Oh, oh, okay. Got it. Which is
owned by Spotify. Anyway, so we're inside baseball
here.
I'm like, when did this change happen? Okay.
Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but
and now here's one that
confuses a lot of people, in their stats.
Downloads versus
listens.
Yeah. That one is
a
that changed, I mean,
six, seven years ago where it started, like,
really changing because
people started having good Internet.
Yeah. And that's that's the thing. The the
the party trick of podcasting has always been
that you download
the entire episode to your device, whatever you're
using. You know, back in the day, it
was an iPad or something similar, and now
it's phones.
But it downloaded the actual file to your
phone. So then when you jumped on an
airplane or gotten bad Internet,
you could still listen to the stuff you
had downloaded on your device, and it did
that automatically.
Mhmm. And,
you know, now there's a lot of streaming
going on in podcasting. Not that it's bad.
You still have the option to download, but
you don't absolutely have to download anymore like
you used to. I'm typically still downloading, but
if it's less than ten minutes, I don't
do that anymore. I just hit listen.
Right. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with
that at all. Yeah. You know, it's it's
the thing is is we we want podcasting
to be everywhere people are
and make it as convenient as possible. So
for the listener side,
you know, it could you could listen to
a YouTube channel. You could
download a podcast video. You can download a
podcast audio. You can stream it. You know,
the all the options. That's that's good. And
it doesn't
matter on the creator side. Like Right. We're
gonna collect that information.
Right. Right. And count it as, you know
Yeah. Downloads
versus listens in this case, though,
IAB, which is who certifies our podcast statistics
and a lot of other companies.
It's the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Right. Right. Right.
I always thought it was Internet Advertising Bureau,
but I guess they changed.
Yeah. But, anyway,
the
the the gist of it is is they
changed the term
from downloads to listens.
Not that there's any difference between the two,
really.
You know,
like, in our stats, we have we we
can tell how much of the file got
downloaded.
Yeah. We assume that's somebody streaming it as
they're, you know, downloading as they're listening. It's
not really a true stream, but that's a
whole other geeky
thing.
Anyway
so, basically,
you know, the the the listen versus download,
in our stats, yes, you could have some
partial listens
because it's partially downloaded.
But a lot of times, people have their
phones set to download the entire file, so
we pick that up as a download. We
have to call it a listen because IAB
says so, but we can't guarantee that they
listened. We just know they downloaded it.
It was yeah. The file was
accessed. That's
the long and short of it. Yeah. Like
I said, try not to get too geeky.
Thanks for for not.
Yeah. I tend to do that.
Alright. Let's see.
CPM. I'll let you explain that one. Let's
Yeah. The
this is for
advertising.
So it's cost per million, basically, which means
the cost per
thousand downloads Yeah. Doesn't really make sense. Yeah.
Literally.
Because it doesn't really make sense so much.
But it is the yeah. It is the
common pricing model used in, podcast advertising a
lot of the time in in most content
advertising.
So
if you are getting 5,000 downloads,
you are getting $20
CPM.
And
No. If you're getting $20 CPM and you
get 5,000 downloads,
you get roughly a $100 for that advertisement.
Correct. Yeah. Correct. So we can estimate,
you know, based on your down like, based
on your downloads and listens, how much you
could make.
With
with advertising that we do here at Blueberry,
our programmatic,
that ranges from 5 to 20 or 25,
usually, CPM.
Yeah. 15
is, you know, between 10 and 15 is
a good target.
Yeah. But it can be as low as
5. You could hear a GEICO ad in
your thing. It's mostly a $5 ad.
Yeah.
So it's kind of a you get what
you pay for type thing. But,
yeah, overall,
it's it's pretty easy to calculate and figure
out, like, what your
possibilities are.
But especially nowadays
with
AI, you literally just ask it. There are
a million and one CPM calculators on the
Internet. Yep.
So it's not really something you have to,
like, figure out yourself,
but
it's that's generally the terms that you're gonna
be looking at.
Alright. And sticking with ads here,
pre roll, mid roll, and post roll.
And, basically, this just describes where the advertisement
appears in an episode. So if you're doing
ad insertion,
and you're putting in dynamic ads or whatever,
or even if you're doing
host threads,
you know, you could record an ad that
goes at the beginning of the episode, and
that's called a pre roll.
Yeah. You can place it at the end
of the episode, call it a post roll.
And then anywhere in between
is known as a mid roll,
and mid rolls pay better.
They also have to be done better.
Yes. Yeah. They
well, because, you know, some automated systems, I'm
sure you guys, if you watch YouTube without
being a subscriber to YouTube, you know, paying
them Mhmm.
You'll be, you know, mid sentence, they'll pop
in an ad. Right? Mid sentence. So you
you don't wanna do that. If you're gonna
do mid rolls, place them properly.
Yeah. You know, I was listening to,
a podcast the other day that I had
listened to for the first time because the
guest on there was someone that I wanted
to listen to.
And he and this guest was in the
middle of, like, this, you know, heartfelt sentence,
literally, like, a GEICO ad
in the middle of the sentence. And I
was like, you are making how much money
off of this podcast?
And you have also split up the interview
into two episodes, which I am not a
fan of.
And now in the middle of a sentence,
I have to listen to this prerecorded
ad for
GEICO.
Mhmm. Not great.
One,
I I just, like,
what the podcast is whatever. And two, I
got annoyed with that, and I'm like, okay.
I I will just, I'll look up the
interview. I don't need to listen to it.
I'm done with that podcast forever.
Yep. And, you know, that's
you know, poorly placed ads will run, you
know, run your listeners off, believe me.
Because, you know, I I detest ads. That's
why I pay YouTube
because, you know, they yeah. They have yeah.
And, you know, I guess, I don't know
if we cover this term,
but, there's also a thing called host read
endorsements
or host read ads.
And those are
and I'm gonna age myself again.
Paul Harvey.
Remember him?
Mhmm.
Okay. He was the master at host red
endorsements.
He'd be, you know, right in the middle
of a news story, and then he would
stop and start talking about his sponsor, you
know, in in a cool way.
And that's, you know, that that's what's known
as a host read endorsement. Anyway, those those
pay really well, by the way, if you
can get a deal.
Yeah. I'd say,
if you wanna get paid really well,
you have to do like, one, you have
to have the listeners a lot of the
time. But,
but two have an awesome audience.
But you have to do them well.
Yeah.
Okay. Here's another term we touched on, dynamic
ad insertion.
Basically, what that does is,
you record your episode. And then if you
have dynamic ad insertion, you can run a
campaign
that inserts a pre roll, post roll, mid
roll ad
where you want them to be placed. And
then when that campaign's over, it takes those
ads out of that episode. And if you
have another campaign, it puts new ads in.
So people that download your episode later
will get new ads or no ads depending
on what campaign is running.
Very convenient.
Yeah. It's it's pretty handy. You know, not
a lot of people use it,
because it is a little bit more manual.
Of course, we have a programmatic
ad,
system at Blueberry where we sell the ads
for you, and you just if you want
mid rolls, you put a mid roll tag
in your
yeah. Anyway,
geeky.
But you can specify where they go in
the in the in the episode. Yes. So
that it doesn't enter in the middle of
a sentence. Exactly.
So there is, you know, there it's more
manual, but it is
definitely a better experience
on the, the listener end. Yeah. And you
don't have to do a thing, and you
can get pre roll and post rolls because
we don't have to worry about cutting off
somebody's sentence. Yeah.
So
but,
let's see. Episode
artwork. That was something that's, I I would
say, relatively
new to
podcasting.
At least a lot of the apps now
or I'd say all of them
now support
episodic images,
which is And not just, you know, for
the show overall. It's per episode.
Right. Your main podcast artwork will be the
default.
And then
if you have
a episode
image for that specific episode in a lot
of the directories and apps, it'll show that
image instead of your overall show image.
Yeah. And, you know, I I do that
with, you know, I have I do a
daily show,
on the weekdays, and
I let AI generate the artwork
for that episode. Our our AI system in
Blueberry will do that as well.
Yeah. That's what we use for the show
for each episode.
Right. And, you know, that just it's kinda
cool and,
you know, I I know of podcaster,
very famous podcaster,
that changes his
overall artwork every episode.
That's a little neurotic.
Yeah. It's a little weird. But,
he's been at it a while. He's
coming up on 2,000 episodes. So
I guess it's working for him. Yeah. Apparently
so.
Yeah. So,
let's see. Podcast landing
page.
And
that's
a term that that's
kinda recent,
especially within Blueberry.
So,
essentially, what we're what we're getting at here
is it's like a very simple web page
that will
list all of your podcast episodes,
and have the ability to listen to them,
you know, with, with an audio player,
just all in the same place.
It'll have your artwork, your list, the player,
and ways that people can subscribe or follow,
on the apps that you are available in
because your distribution.
We we have podcast landing page. That's the
title that we landed on here at Blueberry
for, you know,
essentially, what we offer every hosting customer.
Right.
And they're simple simple web pages that, you
know, if you don't have your own web
page, this is a really good
option
to send people to.
That's kind of the idea. You know? And,
also, within a lot of the podcast apps,
when you look at a show listing, they'll
have a button there that that says,
podcast podcaster website or something similar to that,
and that's
where that gets sent to, you know,
is that landing page. And,
you know, if you're using PowerPress, you just
your WordPress site's your landing page, so that
works. But, you know, like this one. You
know, if you go to our landing page,
it's it's actually just podcastinsider.com,
or it will be later this afternoon.
A whole another story.
But
All is well,
just not right now.
As as of this recording, it doesn't work.
But Correct. It will by the time you
hear this.
But, anyway, that's that's just, you know, a
landing page, kind of your home base for
your show.
Yeah. There's,
you know,
websites,
for your own show have gone up and
down
in in usage and popularity,
just because
a lot of people have taken to
just listing,
you know, here's my profile. Like, here's my
Instagram. Here's my Twitch. Here's my YouTube channel.
All that type of stuff as opposed to
kinda having, like, one central website.
Mhmm.
So there's pros and cons there
of
not having, like, a home base.
But also
there there is some legitimacy
to people don't really go to websites like
that anymore. So it's really just, you know,
come here. Not as much. Yeah. Yeah. For
sure. Yeah. They're just like a fully fledged,
like, flushed out,
you know,
website is not as popular anymore. So Yeah.
But but a simple thing like this is
good. Sure. But one
one caveat there is I still suggest
that you have some sort of website.
And the only reason for that is, okay,
there are glitches in the system.
It just happens.
So say Apple's having a problem,
and your episodes don't go to Apple for
a couple of episodes.
Well, people that are subscribed to you on
Apple won't have any idea where to find
you.
You just disappeared for them.
So in your show, if you're saying, well,
I got a website and, you know, in
this case, podcastinsider.com
for this show. If we ever disappear,
you can go there to see what happened.
So that that's one good thing,
about it, but it's not as necessary as
it once was.
I would never tell someone to not have
a pod or not have a website for
their podcast.
Right. But I have
told people,
you know,
just make sure it's there, but you don't
have to spend the time and effort
that you did on it before. Again, not
as important as it once was. Yeah.
So publishing versus distribution.
That's kinda your push and pull sometimes.
Yeah. So,
again, when you publish a YouTube video on
YouTube,
it's available immediately
on YouTube.
But with podcasting,
you publish it to your RSS feed or
your podcast hosting company, whatever,
and it just sits there until
the directories
and the apps
pull it in. So it's not instantaneous,
but it's
there's nothing wrong. This is kinda how it
always worked.
It just it feels kinda wrong. Yeah. It's
it but I I say it's it's a
feature, not a bug,
because the feature of it is
the source of truth
is your RSS feed, and all these other
places,
you know, can display it,
but you're still in control of that RSS
feed.
I know that gets geeky again. But
the whole idea is when you publish an
episode, it goes to your RSS feed.
When it gets distributed, might be sometime later.
Now some are faster than others. Apple's getting
it down to about
two hours is is about average, I've seen
lately,
but it can be quicker.
A lot of the podcast two point o
apps do it nearly instantly because of another
geeky technology that we implemented.
And but, yeah, basically,
the nice thing about it is you publish
it once, you walk away, it goes everywhere.
That is the,
the benefit of the RSS feed because that's
not how other platforms or other, like, content
mediums work.
Yeah. If you wanna do video, you gotta
upload it to Instagram, YouTube, TikTok,
Twitch.
Yep. Can you upload stuff to Twitch, or
is that only live? I don't know. I
have no idea. But you get what I'm
saying.
I have no idea. Never even looked at
Twitch.
It's
not really my thing. I'll tune in every
once in a while for about five minutes,
and then I'm done. Yeah. My,
my nephew is 16 years old.
I swear he's on Twitch
twenty hours a day
watching
gamers.
Yeah.
Not my thing,
but, but, you know, for for some people,
it is.
Yeah. For sure. For sure. So I guess
the big takeaway is, you know, podcast terminology
is complicated,
but most of the stuff describe
pretty well what it is.
And,
you know, like,
personally, if you're talking to support, at least
know the basics.
You know?
And and I'm sorry we probably made this
way overcomplicated,
but
it's alright.
Yeah.
I think
there's some due diligence. You know? Just make
sure you're clear on some stuff because you're
gonna have a much harder time figuring out
how to manage your podcast if you don't
have
at least some grasp
of these technical terms.
Yeah. For sure. That's just, you know, good
for you to have. You don't need to
share your information or knowledge with other people.
You just need to know what you're talking
about.
Mhmm.
For sure. So I think we can wrap
this up.
Yes. So we hope that this did help
a lot of people.
All of us had to learn these words
at some point or another, so you're definitely
not alone in the confusion.
Yeah. Every every podcaster learns this language over
time. I mean, the longer you do it,
the more you're gonna hear these things. And,
you know
you know, glad you you we can help
you understand them a little better, hopefully.
Yes.
We were we, kinda feel that these are
the ones that are fundamental to understanding how
the whole system works, but, you'll be fine.
Just remember that. Yeah. Well, thanks for listening
to Podcast Insider. We'll catch you next week.
Thanks for joining us. Let's meet up next
week. And in the meantime, for more information,
to subscribe, share, or follow, check out the
show notes at podcastinsider.com.
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