#212: Dan Misener – How to ACTUALLY grow your podcast (and measure its success)

Jay Clouse [00:00:00]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Today's episode might just change the way you look at podcasting. From your goals to how you measure success, this is a completely different perspective that I find myself completely buying into. My guest is Dan Meisner, the cofounder of the podcast growth agency, Bumper. Prior to cofounding Bumper, Dan served as Director of Audience Development at Pacific Content, where he worked with brands like Slack, Adobe, Charles Schwab, Ford, Dell Technologies, Morgan Stanley, Red Hat, and Atlassian. This is actually where I first saw Dan's work because he is one of the most thoughtful writers on podcasting on the planet, and he was writing to the Pacific Content Blog years ago. Prior to that, he spent a decade working in public radio at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he was involved in their earliest podcasting efforts.

Jay Clouse [00:00:48]:
And he's also the host and producer of the independent live event and podcast series, Grown Ups Read Things They Wrote As Kids. If you haven't listened to this, you should really give it a listen. It has won several industry awards and been downloaded more than 10,000,000 times. But this episode is not about podcast downloads at all. Dan is a big time data nerd. And with podcast analytics being so challenging to wrap your head around, this was exactly the type of conversation I was hoping to have. Dan and his team at Bumper have built an internal tool at Bumper called the Bumper Dashboard that doesn't emphasize downloads, but verified listeners and consumption time. Basically, instead of looking at the most inflated number in Podcast Analytics, downloads, they look at the verifiable impact in the form of real people spending real time listening to your podcast.

Jay Clouse [00:01:34]:
This has completely changed the way that I think about the impact of this show. It's given me newfound enthusiasm for the show as a whole. So I encourage you to keep listening. And if you like what you hear, tag me at jklaus on any social platform and let me know. We'll get to that interview with Dan right after this. Alright, Dan. So excited to have you here. Been reading your content all the way back to the Pacific Content days when I was just getting started as a podcaster, has always struck me as the most thoughtful, nuanced, and unique writing in the space.

Jay Clouse [00:02:06]:
And I mean that sincerely. So thank you for spending some time here today. I would love to hear right now with Bumper.

Dan Misener [00:02:12]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:02:12]:
Just to set a baseline, can you describe the type of podcasts or teams that you typically work

Dan Misener [00:02:19]:
with? Yeah. We talk about Bumper as a podcast growth agency and the common denominator across all of the teams that we work with is that they are looking for more of something. Often that is more of people's time and attention, but sometimes it's more revenue. Sometimes it's more influence. Sometimes it's more impact. Sometimes it's lots of other things. And so we call ourselves a podcast growth agency, and we tend to work with what we would describe as enterprise podcasters. And what I mean when I say enterprise podcaster is there's a business behind the show or shows or networks.

Dan Misener [00:03:05]:
Not to say that hobbyists, enthusiasts, passion podcasters couldn't benefit from working with us, but we really want to work with people who are going to get back what they're putting into working with us. And so we work with a number of fairly large networks, the Ihearts, the Sirius XMs of the world. We do a bunch of work with the Australian Radio Network, ARN. We work with a handful of production companies. So work for hire podcast production studios, places like Magnificent Noise, which is Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom's company. They don't have an in house podcast growth team. They don't have an audience development team. I'm not sure they want an in house podcast growth or audience development team.

Dan Misener [00:03:53]:
So we partner with them on some of the projects that they are producing and we advise on the podcast growth strategy. And then we also work with a handful of independents who for one reason or another are not affiliated with a big network, but have genuine businesses behind their shows and are often doing really high volume in terms of downloads, but also in terms of people, time spent, etcetera, etcetera. So enterprise podcasters who want larger audiences, our bread and butter is helping them come up with plans to get more of what they're after, which is more people's time, more people's attention.

Jay Clouse [00:04:34]:
I'm gonna make some assumptions and tell me if I'm incorrect here. I'm glad you defined enterprise because in some ways that tracks as what I expect when I hear the word enterprise. But when you define it as there's a business behind this that would apply to all of our listeners here for the most part but when I hear enterprise I think bigger probably has bigger budgets and in the podcast growth space budgets might be necessary if you're doing media buys or paid growth efforts which in my experience are a lot of the ways that podcasts are growing. I'd love to hear your perspective on this whether if you want to kind of pull a growth lever does that require that I put money into the system?

Dan Misener [00:05:15]:
I think it depends on who you are and what other channels or avenues you have available to you. I often think about paid media for podcasts, and we're talking about a really thin slice of paid media in podcasting here. We're talking about essentially tune in campaigns, advertising a podcast on another podcast. That is not the totality of where dollars are spent in podcast buys. I think of paid media for podcast tune in campaigns as something that is best deployed when you have exhausted all of your owned channels, all of your internal channels and all of the earned opportunities. It is the sort of tactic of last resort, and I only ever recommend spending money on trying to acquire or reach new listeners when we have no other way of getting in front of those listeners. It is possible. It is very possible because I've seen it done to build genuine audiences, to reach more people, to get your show in front of more of the right kinds of qualified listeners by spending money.

Dan Misener [00:06:29]:
I've seen it happen. And I'm not talking about just boosting downloads or buying downloads. I'm talking about actually reaching people. I've seen it happen. It is by far the most expensive way to do it. So we're often looking at what are some creative approaches to our own channels? What are some creative approaches to partnerships, collaborations, earned opportunities, pitching all of the editorial teams at platforms? All of that stuff. I would rather spend my time on the stuff that doesn't cost as much as paying market rate CPMs for tune it campaigns.

Jay Clouse [00:07:07]:
Can we touch on some of those? And maybe Yeah. Maybe the top few strategies that somebody comes to you, they're an indie podcaster, they pull on your heartstrings, and you're like, listen, here's what you need to do. We can't take you on as a client yet, but here, if you want to reach real listeners, get in front of real people, here are the things that I would do first in this order. What are those things?

Dan Misener [00:07:26]:
I think the first thing, and this is not so much tactical, but it's more on the overall podcast growth strategy side, is to really deeply understand the audiences that you were trying to reach. To not just have a vague already? What are they already reading? What are they already listening to? What are they already watching? Who are they already following? We have a tool at Bumper. We've built, we call it podcast neighborhoods. It's a way to visually map existing affinities in podcast listenership, sort of a network graph approach to identifying cohorts of listeners. And it is one of the most useful tools that we have to try and understand listener motivations, right? You can take a category like technology, and you can say, oh, I want to reach an audience of technology enthusiasts. That is so broad as to be unhelpful.

Jay Clouse [00:08:39]:
Super broad.

Dan Misener [00:08:40]:
Right? But using something like a Podcast Neighborhood tool or some of the free tools that are out there, you can break down a gigantic category like technology into cohorts of listeners. You can, when you do this, suddenly identify here's a cluster of shows that seem to appeal to cybersecurity people. Here's a cluster of shows that are way more geared towards consumer technology, gadgets, reviews. Here's another entirely different corner of the technology space that is focused on accessibility or is focused on crypto or is focused on any number of other facets around technology. And so when we do this work with clients before we ever make a show or before we ever put together a marketing plan for a show job, number 1 is listen to what is already out there. I think so many people create podcasts without actually first understanding the other shows that somebody might listen to instead of theirs. And so I would say like before any tactical elements, naming the audiences you want to get in front of, understanding the existing affinities within those cohorts, that's where I would start. And that very naturally leads into show development questions.

Dan Misener [00:10:06]:
How are we gonna make something that sets ourselves apart from everything that's already out there? But it also leads to opportunities to collaborate, opportunities to do cross promo, opportunities to do guesting, opportunities to work together in community with other podcasters. And this is, I think why so many podcasters lean on promo swaps, feed drops, guesting, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It's because it works. And I think there's a scattershot approach to doing that. And then there's a really thoughtful dialed in approach to doing that. And I'm an advocate of the dialed in approach to doing that.

Jay Clouse [00:10:44]:
When I think about where my audience already hangs out

Dan Misener [00:10:46]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:10:46]:
There are these podcast neighborhoods. Yeah. Great phrase, by the way. There are forums. There are newsletters or YouTube channels. If I had a 100% effort that I could direct towards all of these different places audiences are hanging out, what percentage of that 100% would you direct towards the audio efforts things like cross promos working with other shows versus non audio

Dan Misener [00:11:11]:
I think it needs to be both you're right to talk about percentages and not to go exclusively down the audio route. We have seen survey after survey when people ask this question, where do you find new shows? At or near the top of the list is recommendations from a trusted source, Friend, family member, or a podcaster who I may not know, but whose voice I recognize, voice I trust, somebody I spend time with. And so I think it makes a ton of sense to focus on audio to audio, podcast to podcast marketing, whether that is guesting or feed drops or promo swaps or paid advertising, that audio to audio space. When we do paid, it's nearly a 100% of the paid marketing spend because it is the most effective and it's the most measurable. We know it works, right? When it comes to earned opportunities or unpaid opportunities, I think it should be in the mix, probably not half, but somewhere between 0 and half.

Jay Clouse [00:12:14]:
Okay. When we talk about growth, there are shows that are ready for growth and can take to growth efforts and there are shows that are not ready for growth and would not actually take those efforts no matter how much money I'm spending. Even if I get people to click play, they might not come back. And so what's the point of growth at that point? How do you diagnose whether a show is at a point where growth efforts are even the problem to solve?

Dan Misener [00:12:38]:
I love that you're asking this because when a show isn't growing, it's often interesting to hear the responses to a show not growing. Sometimes people call us because they feel like they've hit a plateau. We picked all the low hanging fruit in our first season. Now what? And when a show isn't growing and there is a need to grow the show, the people responsible for the editorial, the content, often blame the marketers. And the marketers often blame the editorial team.

Jay Clouse [00:13:13]:
Of course.

Dan Misener [00:13:14]:
And in my opinion, both are usually right to some degree. Right. And I really love making the distinction between marketing and marketability. And I really love making the distinction between marketing and marketability. Sometimes your show has an editorial problem. Sometimes your episodes are not performing, and we can talk a little bit more about what that even means or how we would measure that. No amount of marketing is going to make somebody love a show that's kind of crummy. No amount of paid spend is going to force someone to fall in love with a mediocre show.

Dan Misener [00:13:51]:
And so I tend to think about marketing and marketability. Other people talk about sort of the trade offs between engagement and reach, which I think is a classic trade off in a lot of media properties, not just podcasting. And when we first start working with a new client and the show that they're working on already exists, we will do what we call a podcast health check, which is designed to get at exactly this question. Do you have a marketing problem or do you have a marketability problem? And the signs that we are looking for when we're trying to assess editorial quality are things like time spent. Average time spent. Sometimes people talk about like episodic retention or completion rates. There's all sorts of synonyms for this same basic idea. But if you're putting out hour long episodes and people are on average spending 5 minutes with those episodes, maybe you have an editorial problem that no amount of marketing is gonna help.

Dan Misener [00:14:56]:
But if you've got evidence, clear evidence of time spent real traction, real human beings hitting play and making it all the way through to the end. If your cookies taste good, maybe you need to market your cookies a little bit better. But if your cookies, people take one bite and leave it on the table. I don't think you need to invest in podcast marketing at that point.

Jay Clouse [00:15:19]:
Love this. So if we look at these health signals

Dan Misener [00:15:22]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:15:23]:
If I go into Apple Podcast Connect, if I go into Spotify for podcasters Yeah. We'll leave YouTube to a different part of the conversation

Dan Misener [00:15:29]:
for now.

Jay Clouse [00:15:30]:
I can look at episode by episode performance and see this consumption data and when you're looking at a healthy show is that a extremely flat graph for everyone who starts finishes or I guess what I'm looking for is what are the benchmarks or what leeway do you have to see what percentage of people need to finish to signal that this is a good cookie?

Dan Misener [00:15:51]:
Yeah. One of the trickiest things about podcasting when we talk about comparing episodes to episodes is most shows episodes are not the same duration. So it's hard to talk about this in terms of absolute minutes and seconds, because some episodes are 45 minutes and some are an hour 10 and some are 35 and some are really quick off the cuff emergency episodes and they might just be a few minutes long. And so we tend to look at what we would call listen time, which is roughly analogous to YouTube's watch time, right? YouTube talks about watch time and they talk about average view duration for audio first platforms like Apple and Spotify, which we've been talking about. We would talk about total listen time. So total number of hours spent with an episode or with a show over time. And we would tend to look at average listen time. The average amount of time somebody is spending with an episode.

Dan Misener [00:16:47]:
You can express that as minutes and seconds, which can be really helpful for most people because human beings, I think, are pretty good at understanding minutes and seconds. If we release an hour long episode and the average listen time is 55 minutes, that's pretty good. That is evidence that people are sticking around for all or most of the episode. So we can talk about absolute minutes and seconds, but we can also talk about the percentage average listen time. So that's the average amount of time spent divided into the duration of the episode. And what we have seen across the board, across tens of thousands of episodes that we have access to, we know what the sort of, what that midpoint is. The median for episodes that we have measurement access to is about 80% plus or minus 10. For average consumption.

Dan Misener [00:17:43]:
For average consumption on Apple Podcasts.

Jay Clouse [00:17:46]:
Yeah. Wow. That's a high percentage.

Dan Misener [00:17:48]:
It is a high percentage. And you mentioned YouTube. It's significantly higher than the kinds of average view durations we would see on a video platform. And I think that is one of the hugely powerful things about audio is where else are you getting an hour of somebody's time every episode, every week, every season, every year? When you compare the time spent either total or on average of a podcast episode that is well made that has really found a fit with an audience, that blows time spent on-site for most websites out of the water. It blows most YouTube average view durations way out of the water. And so, yeah, we tend to see stuff 80% plus or minus 10. That's sort of in the range with most of the the clients that we're working with right now.

Jay Clouse [00:18:47]:
After a quick break, Dan and I get into the tactical ways that you can increase the engagement and marketability of your podcast. We'll be right back. And now back to my conversation with Dan Meisner. So let's say hypothetically, you had a client called Creator Science and they're seeing in real time that their average consumption is 60 to 70%. Mhmm. A little bit below that. Yep. That signals a marketability problem.

Jay Clouse [00:19:13]:
What do you tell that client they need to focus on? Is it shortening the episodes? Is it changing the editorial?

Dan Misener [00:19:20]:
So far we've been talking about the average across an entire episode. This is where, if we had some hypothetical creator science client, we would say we need to 0 in on some more detailed information. And so in addition to that sort of summary number, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, we can zoom in and on an episode by episode basis, we can look at minute by minute, second by second, where are we losing people? Where are we holding people's attention? And so this is often represented as kind of a retention curve or a drop off chart where you can almost always see sharp drop off within the first minute. Sharp drop off towards the end of an episode where the goodbyes are happening, maybe the theme music comes up. It sounds like the end of the episode, so people bail. You can probably see evidence of ad avoidance. Right. And the depth of that ad avoidance or the shallowness of that ad avoidance.

Dan Misener [00:20:22]:
Right. And so we tend to look at those curves and use that information to identify opportunities within an episode to lose fewer people. Often the sharpest drop off that we see in our clients episodes happens in the first minute or so. Right. And if you think about the listener experience, it's that first 30, 60, 90 seconds. Maybe I have my phone in my hand. Maybe my screen is on. I just started playing the episode, but I could bail.

Dan Misener [00:20:55]:
Right? People see that sharp drop off within the first minute or so of their episode and they ask, What did we do to turn people off? What did we do that caused people to leave? Did we have a sound effect of a baby crying? Did we have a poorly chosen music cue? Did we have an ad that wasn't to everybody's taste in that pre roll position? People ask, what did we do to turn people off? And I don't always find that an especially helpful question. I like to think about the inverse of that question, which is what did we fail to do in the first minute of our episode? What did we fail to tee up? What question did we not plant? What reason did we fail to give somebody to stick around for the next 30 seconds and the next 30 seconds and the next 30 seconds and the next 30 seconds? And I mean, I came up before I was doing any podcasting work in the world of broadcast. I worked in public radio for about 10 years at the beginning of my career. There's an entire radio playbook of get people to listen longer. But I think the podcast version of that is slightly different because everybody or nearly everybody starts at minute 0. I tend not to dive into episodes at the 46 minute mark. Right. Maybe somebody sends me a link to a clip, but by and large, everybody starts at the beginning.

Dan Misener [00:22:16]:
And I think we forget that the first 30, 60, 90 seconds of our episodes, we forget that that is the most precious real estate we have in our episodes. We forget that at our peril. And so often when you zoom in and you look at the episodic performance, you can identify what did we do to turn people off or more importantly, what did we fail to do to give people a reason to keep listening? And we've often found that slightly tweaking the beginnings, the tops of episodes can have a very significant difference in what happens every minute thereafter. And we've seen people completely tank their average time spent listening by running a maybe a mismatched pre roll ad that was completely out of left field and not relevant to the audience. We've seen that time and time again.

Jay Clouse [00:23:06]:
It's so interesting and it's so obvious in retrospect. We went through this same process on YouTube. But on YouTube since it's a discovery platform and a lot of your viewers are brand new to you. It's even a bigger issue because the performance of that video will dictate how many people will see it in total and the more people you keep immediately the better that video performs over the long term which is an exponential thing rather than a linear thing but I didn't think about it in podcasting too much because these just seem like well if you're here like I've already got you you know you're here because you already like what we're doing and so you might be okay with these ads and for a show that is monetizing does have ads. Do you see that there's any consistent correlation between the ads being literally the beginning of the audio file versus being within the first, you know, 60, a 120 seconds?

Dan Misener [00:24:06]:
Yeah. In terms of the number of impressions you could deliver and sell, we see very little difference. In terms of how many people stay and how many people leave, we see a massive between what I would call a true pre roll that runs at second 0 versus what I would call an early mid roll, which could be as early as 30, 60, 90 seconds after we've planted the hook. Right? But I am incredibly protective of that first minute or so of most episodes because that is where the decision is made when somebody's phone is in their hand and they could bail and listen to something else.

Jay Clouse [00:24:46]:
I feel like I'm in a uniquely receptive place to hear this feedback right now and maybe at a different point in my life I wouldn't have given as much mind to this but what I've come to really appreciate and understand is that tiny incremental improvements add up day after day week after week month after month year after year and these are real people. So like one experiment we've been running on our show in our show notes for every episode we have a recommended next episode to listen to which doesn't get a ton of clicks by track. I know how many clicks are happening and that is turning 1 session into more than 1 session. Yes. And it's pushing the needle ever so slightly forward. And I feel like these types of things where you say, you know what, I'm gonna be hyper protective in my first 30 seconds. Yes. I'll have pre roll ads, but I'm going to plant the hook before those ads.

Jay Clouse [00:25:31]:
That's a change I'm probably gonna take away from this conversation and do pretty much immediately. I'm curious when we talk about retention. Yeah. Something else I've been looking at as probably something I've undervalued if I look at Chartable and I see device retention week after week episode after episode it's a pretty sad picture or has been historically

Dan Misener [00:25:52]:
and

Jay Clouse [00:25:53]:
as I pay more attention to it it's gotten a little bit better I'm curious what you think about that type of device retention data and if you pay close attention to it.

Dan Misener [00:26:02]:
I wish we had better information about listener retention over time. Dan listened to his favorite podcast on Monday. Did he listen again on Friday? Did he listen again the following Monday? Though there are platforms that purport to report on this, they don't know. They don't actually know for real. So you mentioned Chartable and I'm not trying to pick on Chartable here, but a lot of how Chartable works is based on downloads, which are not consumption. All Chartable knows is was a file delivered to the same device, not whether anybody actually listened to it. Moreover, Chartable trades in downloads. That's one of the base measures that they use to calculate all of these other derived measures.

Dan Misener [00:26:53]:
And those are in turn based on combinations of user agents and IP addresses. Jay, I don't know about you. My phone's IP address changed many times over the past couple of weeks. I did a little bit of traveling. In a single day, my phone probably had 8 or 10 different IP addresses depending on where I was connected and where I was in the airport. Right? The wider the time range you are looking at, the fuzzier that gets because people's IP addresses change. And so I wouldn't spend a lot of time fretting over listener retention over time because the platforms don't actually know and podcast listeners are not uniquely addressable in the way that people might like them to be. That is not to say that you can't get at some of those same ideas.

Dan Misener [00:27:47]:
We tend to call this sort of stickiness over time. And this I think is one of the most under used signals for podcasters who are considering the volume of content they produce and release. So I've worked on shows that were 5 day a week shows, daily, weekday shows, and they've wondered, well, we publish 5 episodes per week. How many of those are getting listened to? We've worked on shows that are 3 days a week and they've contemplated going to daily. Or they've been once every 2 weeks and they're contemplating going weekly. For anybody who is considering a change in the release cadence of their show or is considering increasing or decreasing the output of their show, I'm gonna strongly recommend looking at some of these derived measures that I'll describe in just a moment to help them make that decision. You talked about Apple Podcasts Connect. You talked about Spotify for Podcasters.

Dan Misener [00:28:47]:
The wonderful thing about those platforms is they don't deal in delivery. They are not measuring downloads. You will not find the word download in the Spotify dashboard or the Apple Podcasts dashboard. They will instead talk about listeners. And in Spotify and Apple's worlds, a listener corresponds to a device or a user account that actually hit play. Didn't just have a file downloaded to their phone in the middle of the night through automatic downloads.

Jay Clouse [00:29:14]:
Which is all that matters. For people listening to this show, they're gonna relate to this. Yeah. Like, do we care Yeah. That a file is on somebody's phone or do we care that they interacted with the thing and were impacted by

Dan Misener [00:29:25]:
it? Yeah. And so I am such a big fan of using those numbers that appear on Apple and Spotify and YouTube's dashboards because they correspond more or less one to one to people. And that's what I'm interested in is reaching people and having them spend time. And so if you deal with those listener numbers that show up in those dashboards, you can look at things like average number of episodes per listener per week. Average number of episodes per listener per month. If I release 5 episodes a week, what is the average number of episodes that my average listener actually spends? If it's close to 5, maybe we should be releasing more episodes. And if it's 1, we might be overproducing. I worked with a team who had very expensive talent.

Dan Misener [00:30:15]:
The biggest expense for the show were the talent fees. And they looked at the average number of episodes consumed per listener per week or per month, and they realized they were over producing. They were making more stuff than their audience seemed to have an appetite or a tolerance for. They reduced the number of episodes that they produced and saved themselves a boatload of money. And the audience size went in the direction they want it. There are ways to find efficiencies. There are ways to be smarter about how you allocate resources when you focus on the consumption of the stuff that you make and not the delivery of the stuff that you make. And I think our industry, the podcast industry specifically, does a really poor job of distinguishing the delivery of an audio file from the consumption of an audio file.

Jay Clouse [00:31:15]:
So Let me repeat some of this back just to highlight it and make sure I'm hearing it correctly. You know, historically, if you're trading in downloads, if you're thinking about downloads, a really easy way to increase downloads is increase the number of episodes you publish. And what you're saying here is that does not equate to more consumption more people having a positive experience of what you're doing now if you're trying to get to these numbers of number of episodes per listener per time period You have to derive that with some math or process you guys are doing. These are not out of the box shown metrics in any of these dashboards.

Dan Misener [00:31:49]:
No. Correct? I wish they were because they're really useful. You could do this by hand. I mean, you can go and export a zillion CSV files out of Apple Podcasts Connect or Spotify for Podcasters, and you can do it by hand. Here at Bumper, we were doing this frequently enough by hand that we built some tools that help us automate that process. I wish that some of those numbers, the sort of stickiness over time metrics were made more readily available by the platforms. But as far as I'm aware right now, they're not showing up anywhere.

Jay Clouse [00:32:23]:
How do you think about follower numbers? Because both Apple Podcasts and Spotify Podcasters show following numbers. Do you do some sort of calculation to show followers to listeners?

Dan Misener [00:32:33]:
Followers, in our experience, and we work on new shows, some shows that launched just this year. We work on shows that have been around for a decade or more. The follower number over time drifts farther and farther away from the number of active daily listeners, weekly listeners, monthly listeners. They just drift away from each other. And our working hypothesis there is that unfollowing a show, particularly on Apple Podcasts, is just not a common occurrence. Maybe once a year when I'm on a flight, I will go through and cull the shows that I'm no longer actively listening to from my podcast follow list, my queue, my subscriptions, whatever. But unfollowing tends not to be a common occurrence. And so the follower number in our experience really only ever goes up, and that just falls out of sync with daily active listeners, weekly active listeners, monthly active listeners.

Dan Misener [00:33:31]:
The reason that I think a lot of people tend to focus on followers is platform specific. Apple Podcasts has charts. Some people are glued to those charts and some argue that it's a vanity metric. Who really cares? Others argue there's real discovery value to being at the tippity top of those charts. We know that the Apple Podcasts charting algorithm is incredibly sensitive to the velocity of new followers. And people ask, how do you get to the top of the charts? You get to the top of the charts by getting a large number of people to hit the follow button in a short amount of time. When you do that, you go up. When you fail to do that, you fall down the charts.

Dan Misener [00:34:14]:
So followers, I think some people treat as sort of a means by which they can increase their chart position. The other reason that recently people have become really interested in followers is Spotify made these numbers public. So for a long time, the follower count on Spotify was something that was made available to the publisher or the creator behind a login and it was not publicly available. And then I think earlier this year, they made that number publicly visible. And so for just about any show on Spotify, you can tap on a little badge and see the follower count. And as a public signal of maybe a poor proxy for audience size or at least a relative ranking of shows by follower count, I think a lot of people got excited about that. But there's definitely a time factor here, And I think it's unfair to compare the number of followers that a very tenured show that's been in market for a decade has. If you compare that to your show that launched last month, you're probably not going to find that comparison very favorable.

Jay Clouse [00:35:24]:
After one last quick break, Dan shares what makes a successful podcast, and it might not be what you think. And some hot takes that you're gonna wanna hear. So stick around. We'll be right back. And now, please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Dan Meisner. I was listening to a conversation with Scott Galloway recently. Mhmm. He called podcasting income inequality gone berserk.

Dan Misener [00:35:46]:
Yes.

Jay Clouse [00:35:47]:
And said that your odds at success in podcasting are relatively similar to your odds at becoming a professional athlete. I think the NBA which is like one of the hardest sports to become professional in What's your take on that statement?

Dan Misener [00:36:01]:
I think if you qualify what Scott Galloway called success as financial success for a podcast business that needs to stand on its own. I largely agree with that sentiment.

Jay Clouse [00:36:13]:
And probably from advertising?

Dan Misener [00:36:15]:
Advertising, direct patronage, supporters, downstream business, lots of other things, right? That lots of different ways to monetize your show, which I know you've covered many, many times on this show. If we're talking about financial success, yeah, it's the tippity top that I think a lot of the money goes towards. But I bristle a little bit when I hear the idea that financial success is the only way to measure success in podcasting. We work with a number of nonprofits and not for profits. They don't have ad revenue coming in as a result of their shows. They're interested in impact and influence, changing the way that people think, exposing people to new perspectives. It's hard to translate that into dollars, but I don't think that's less successful. And so revenue or the monetization factor, I think is one flavor of success in podcasting, but I don't think it's the only way to be successful.

Dan Misener [00:37:16]:
And I worry a little bit for creators who are new to the medium of podcasting, maybe just getting going early on in their journey. I worry when people get locked into a singular definition of success, especially when that singular definition of success shows up on a balance sheet.

Jay Clouse [00:37:36]:
Yeah. The struggle with success is you have to define what the goal is. Yeah. And a lot of people don't define it. And so they just kind of accept what someone else's goal is. And so this is an opportunity to say, well, what is the goal with this thing? Yeah. That's something I ask podcasters who come to me and say or would be podcasters say should I do a podcast I actually try to talk most people out of it because it's the hardest publishing platform to grow an audience which I assume is what most people are trying to do that I've experienced and I need people to tell me well screw you I'm gonna do it anyway in order for them to even have the sustainability to do it but I agree with you that this is one definition this financial side of things. It seems like a lot of the advertising dollars flow to the largest shows because it's the most efficient way to deploy those advertising dollars.

Jay Clouse [00:38:29]:
And so if you are expecting that your show is going to capture some of the advertising money in podcasting, that is a pretty steep road. And if we stare that in the face, it begs the question, well, what if that wasn't my goal? What could my goal be? And if I just released that as what I'm trying to do and you know maybe 4 years 5 years down the road I actually beat the odds and I am in the opportunity to do that. That's great. But what if we started from a place of assuming that's not going to be what my version of success on this podcast is? What could other versions of success be in your mind?

Dan Misener [00:39:03]:
I'll just walk you through a couple that come to mind. These are shows and networks that I am most familiar with. We work with, an organization called understood.org. They are going for impact. They are looking to help people with thinking and learning differences. They make a show called ADHD. It is about the moment when people, that moment when it clicked. Right.

Dan Misener [00:39:29]:
How do they measure that success? It's in people and time. How many human beings have we reached? How much time have they spent and those kinds of listener feedback? Right. So like, if your goal is impact, if your goal is changing people's lives, I think there are proxies for that, that you can measure. We've recently wrapped up a project with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. They make a show called Immaterial. It's a beautiful show. It's a documentary storytelling show. Doesn't contain any ads.

Dan Misener [00:39:59]:
This is not about driving traffic to the met. I think if you're a tourist in New York city, it's often on many people's list of destinations. This is not about driving ticket sales or attendance at the met. That's a nice thing to have, but this is about engagement with museum goers. This is about engagement with the community of artists and craftspeople. This is about increasing the profile of the Met in the minds of people who may never go to New York City and may never set foot in the Met. Right. There are ways to measure that downstream.

Dan Misener [00:40:35]:
Right. Again, a lot of it comes down to people and time. How many people did we reach with our show? How much time did they spend with us in total and on average? And are we reaching net new people? Are we reaching people who may not have thought of us before may not have been aware of us before? So those are a couple sort of examples from the non revenue focused side. And I also think it's interesting to think about different monetization schemes that might be downstream businesses or it could be something other than direct advertising.

Jay Clouse [00:41:09]:
Well, on that front, I ran an experiment recently where I recorded an ad for one of my digital products and I put it in the pre roll position and based on my current CPM rate that internal ad was 3 times more profitable than an external campaign. And so I'm looking at that. I'm like, well, even if I didn't wanna increase revenue, I could remove 2 ad spots potentially increase retention listener satisfaction make a more marketable show and not have a trade off in revenue or if I just wanted to say how do I make more revenue for my show I could just make that one of those advertising spots so there's a lot of levers to pull here that I don't think a lot of people play and experiment with enough at the risk of putting a giant topic into about 10 minutes of time I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about YouTube. Yeah. Because we've been doing YouTube now for 2 years and this podcast is an audio show has existed for 4. Mhmm. And YouTube is now reaching far more people Yeah. For us.

Jay Clouse [00:42:12]:
But I think about them as distinct platforms and distinct artifacts, actually. Yeah. And so I'd love to hear how you think about YouTube for your enterprise clients and when that makes sense in their strategy and how you go about it.

Dan Misener [00:42:26]:
We see incredibly different consumption patterns on YouTube as compared to what I would call audio first platforms like Apple, Spotify, where the predominant verb is listen rather than watch.

Jay Clouse [00:42:42]:
And this is shows submitted through RSS to YouTube.

Dan Misener [00:42:46]:
This is podcasting broadly on YouTube. Because to talk about what even is a podcast on YouTube is probably more than 10 minutes worth of, conversation. We see day to day for the same episode or roughly the same could be video version, audio version could be audio version and bouncing waveform quasi video version. Doesn't really matter. I think the core trade off with podcasting on YouTube is reach and engagement. There are just so many more people on YouTube than any audio first platform. They have significantly better algorithmic discovery features and ways to surface episodes to people that, I mean, Spotify and Apple don't have yet, maybe ever. Right.

Dan Misener [00:43:41]:
And so way more people on YouTube, but those measures that we talked about earlier, the average time spent listening, the average time spent watching or in YouTube parlance, the average view duration. Way smaller and the retention curves way sharper, especially at the beginning of an episode. And so we've worked with a number of teams who have started to publish to YouTube, sometimes entirely video products, sometimes audio products jammed into a video sized hole. We've seen it sliced and diced every which way. And they go gaga for the reach numbers. Look at our view counts. Aren't they amazing? Look at our total number of viewers per day, per week, per month. They often dwarf any kind of verified listener number you would get from Apple or Spotify.

Dan Misener [00:44:37]:
And so people get really excited about the reach of YouTube. And then they look at how much time is spent per person, per episode, per video. And they look at that retention curve. And I think you said this really, really well off the top. They're just it's a different thing. YouTube is a different thing. And I think we're still pretty early on in sort of measuring the impact of an episode published to an audio first platform and an episode published to YouTube. But everything we see suggests that there are different audience consumption patterns, different expectations, and we're increasingly seeing examples where just taking the hour long audio file, adding a bouncing waveform and publishing it to YouTube is not yielding anywhere near the results that people would want, expect, or hope for.

Dan Misener [00:45:34]:
I think it's an engagement and reach trade off, and I don't want people to be too excited about the reach because who cares if you've reached a 100000 people and they all left within the first minute?

Jay Clouse [00:45:46]:
So for us, we have this wonky setup where due to resource constraints as a very small team, we do not publish every episode we record for the audio show in video. Sometimes it's a packaging problem. I don't know how to package this for a YouTube audience. Yep. Or it's I wanna dedicate more resources to the videos we think could work well as videos on YouTube because we have just found that YouTube is a video platform. You need to make videos that will perform on YouTube. The reach advantage there is because YouTube has a discovery mechanism. Podcasting, most of you I don't know about everybody.

Jay Clouse [00:46:22]:
But for us, literally 80% of our podcast listeners are subscribed to the show. They have already listened to an episode. Their expectations, their tolerance, their patience, much higher. Whereas for somebody discovering you for the first time, that first 30 seconds you're talking about earlier matters a whole heck of a lot. Yep. And I just would not expect that the waveform audio in a video wrapper would be worthwhile.

Dan Misener [00:46:51]:
Yes. And the details matter a lot here. One of the most insightful things I've ever heard about podcasting on YouTube came from Steve McClendon, who I think leads up product for podcasting at YouTube. He said just a couple of months ago that the fastest growing source of watch time for podcasting on YouTube is what they call YouTube living room. Right? Connected TVs. I didn't grow up in a household where the TV was on all the time, but I am aware of this phenomenon. Steve McLennan said people have been using their televisions as radios for 70 years. And that really struck me.

Dan Misener [00:47:34]:
There is a use case for very long episodes playing on a laptop, on a connected TV, on a smart speaker screen that people aren't watching. They could watch, but they're probably not watching. You could, but needn't use any of your visual attention. And I am really interested in the opportunities there. I could be watching. I'm not necessarily watching. And my expectation is that this is on a screen. Maybe not even in the same room.

Dan Misener [00:48:09]:
When you look at all the survey data about where podcasts are consumed, a staggering amount is at home. Right. That is playing through some kind of device. I think this idea of YouTube as the new TV and TV really being for some people, a radio that is playing audio, but they might not be looking at, I think that is an underappreciated facet of the YouTube experience and the technical detail of how you set your show up on YouTube, whether you actually take YouTube's advice and put all of your episodes into a playlist and mark that playlist as a podcast. YouTube, Kai, Chuck, and Steve McClendon have said this very publicly. When you do that, when you put your episodes into a playlist and you mark that playlist as a podcast, you jump through those couple of hoops to actually get your show to be a podcast on YouTube. You are significantly changing what you're instructing the YouTube discovery algorithms to do. Because by default YouTube is you finished a video.

Dan Misener [00:49:08]:
I'm going to play you the next thing that I think is going to get you to keep watching. But when you mark your show as a podcast, you're putting your thumb on the scale a little bit and YouTube is maybe doing something that is against what it is naturally inclined to do. And it's going to prioritize the next episode of your show over what it might otherwise ordinarily recommend or autoplay. So there's like a technical aspect to this, and then there's just a, what should we be publishing to YouTube Long form, short form, or do we want consumption to happen on YouTube or do we wanna treat this as marketing collateral for an audio product that lives somewhere else? And I don't think there's a wrong answer to any of that. And I think we've been in a world where YouTube has had quasi first class support for podcasting for about a year. Like, it still feels really early, and a lot of people are figuring this stuff out.

Jay Clouse [00:50:03]:
I may need to do a part 2 of this episode sometime just to talk about this. I've got 2 really quick wrap up questions I just wanna get your hot takes on. First one being, have you seen any compelling evidence to show that short form video clips lead to audio listeners?

Dan Misener [00:50:22]:
I would love to see evidence of that. I've not. I'm not convinced that it can't work. I've yet to see compelling evidence at scale that it works or works reliably. And I think the platform's desire to have you not leave is a huge part of that story. There's just so much friction that is introduced when you try and drive from nearly anywhere else into a dedicated podcast listening app.

Jay Clouse [00:50:51]:
That has been my experience anecdotally as well. So I'm glad to have that corroborated. And my last question, which I'd love to ask people like you, especially people like you, is there anything you believe to be true but don't yet have the data to support, but it is impacting how you're operating as an individual or at bumper?

Dan Misener [00:51:08]:
I love this question. This is such a good question, and I am,

Jay Clouse [00:51:12]:
It's a bit like asking somebody what's your favorite movie. It's a little on the spot. It's a little Yeah. Confronting. I know.

Dan Misener [00:51:18]:
I believe, and maybe this is audacious, that the way we buy and sell and transact in podcasting, the units of measure and the signs of success are fundamentally broken. I believe that there is a better way to transact, a better way to sell against people's time and attention that is based on real people listening, real people spending time, real people coming back episode after episode. And that if the ad sales apparatus in the podcasting industry could move away from the volatile and easy to juke lowest common denominator measure of downloads. If the ad sales apparatus could move off of that and move more towards people, time and selling against that, I think there's more money out there. Like, I can't prove that right now because the status quo is we sell against downloads, we sell against impressions that are inserted into downloads. And I very strongly believe that if buyers could say, I am actually reaching people and I know they listened, there'd be more money to make.

Jay Clouse [00:52:38]:
If you wanna learn more about Dan, you can follow him on Twitter at Miser, that's miserorvisitwearebumper.com. Links to both are in the show notes. And one small request while I have you, if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That helps our chart position and helps us grow the show. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next week.