Podcast Pontifications

Call me being too woke, P.C., a social justice warrior, a part of cancel culture, or whatever you like. But I think it’s high time we podcasters started taking some responsibility for the hate speech that’s littered around our podcasting playground. And make the decision to be a part of the cleanup process.

But when it comes to hate speech, I’m not really interested in the “how do we identify what is truly hate speech” discussions. Anyone entering that argument with a dictionary in hand is just a [beep] trying to hide behind words. 

This isn’t a free speech issue. I’m a big fan of free speech. In the United States of America and many, many other countries, we have the right to free speech. But that right extends only to governmental restrictions on our free speech. Uncle Sam can’t stop someone from saying hateful shit. But individuals and corporations can show that same asshole the door.

I have an idea on how we can start to make a dent in the problem unique to podcasting. The concept isn’t difficult to grasp. And, frankly, not all that controversial to anyone without “Esq.” on their business card. Here it is:

Podcast hosting companies need to state -- loudly and succinctly -- that they will not stand for hate speech on their platforms.

That’s it. Because the question of “Do we want to support hate speech on our platform?” really has only one reasonable answer.

Purveyors of hate speech know what they’re peddling and are always on the lookout for places that seem welcoming to their hate. Podcast media hosting companies that make a clear and concise statement will see those purveyors of hate to move on, hopefully occupying smaller and smaller portions of the internet.

For our part, we can -- and should -- report hate content to the hosting companies when we find it. It’s not hard to figure out which hosting company serves the media file. 

And if the hosting company fails to respond to our complaint or hides behind a legal shield, refusing to take action, we can show that hosting company the door ourselves. It’s really, really easy to move podcast hosting platforms.

I assure you I’m not taking vague aim at any one hosting platform. This is a systemic problem that every podcasting hosting company needs to address. Chances are, every single podcast hosting company is unknowingly hosting hate speech on their platform. So every podcast hosting company needs to take action.

Let’s ignore the slippery slope for now. Because right now, we need to crawl up to the top of the slope and strongly encourage our podcast media hosting companies to take a stand against hate. And that’s not a stance any reasonable, rational person should be afraid of taking.

(Except, maybe, for lawyers. But that’s their problem. And job, as a matter of fact.)

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/fighting-against-the-hateful-side-of-podcasting

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit SimplerMedia.pro to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

How do you justify working with a charity who needs your valuable podcasting skills…  but can’t pay you the rate that you deserve?

I firmly believe that we working podcasters should be compensated for our efforts. We’ve invested in ourselves to develop skillsets, and we should not devalue that or ourselves by giving away our services for free. Nor should we undercharge.

But there are worthy organizations out there that could use your professional podcasting help. It’s just unlikely that those worthy organizations can afford to pay you the same rate as you’re able to charge commercial entities. Let’s examine a few ways around that challenge, shall we?

You could “tithe” your time. 10% of a 40-hour week is four hours. Can you carve out a morning or an afternoon once a week?

My preference is to invoice the charitable organization at the same rate I invoice my other clients. But I add a discount line item (much, much more than 10%) to bring the final invoice amount down to a number that fits within the charity’s modest operating budget. This shows the true value of what they’re getting, and makes the conversation easier when one of the founders or funders askes for a podcasting proposal for their business.

Bonus: There might be positive tax ramifications when working with charities. So definitely check with your tax pro and/or your bookkeeper about the possible tax implications of providing your valuable professional services either at a significant discount or for free.

Maybe you need some help to do this? If this idea of doing some podcasting for good appeals to you, you might need to build out a small (or large) team of other working podcasters who complement your skillset. It’s important to find people you like working with as much as it is important to find organizations you can all get behind. Imagine what good you could do if you could talk 10 other skilled podcasters to tithe 10% of their time for a worthy cause you can all work on.

You could also buy me a virtual coffee at BuyMeACoffee.com/EvoTerra. It’s an inexpensive way to donate to the cause of making podcasting better. No, your donation isn’t tax-deductible. 

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/podcasting-for-goodness-sake

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit SimplerMedia.pro to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Spotify and Pandora are coming to podcasting with more than just bags of money. They're coming with teams of data scientists and fiduciary responsibility to make money. That's going to upset the Apple cart.

For 16 years, we’ve had only the most tenuous of grasps on the actions and desires of our audience. Advertisers know our understanding is incomplete, so they make us use special coupon code unique to our show.

But at least we owned those direct relationships, right?

That model may be on its last legs, thanks to Spotify and Pandora. Until now, the “keep people listening” incentive hasn’t been a big factor in any of the podcast listening apps/services/directories. But with Spotify and Pandora, “keep people listening” is directly tied to their bottom line. They are financially incentivized to suggest different content to you depending on location, time of day, interests, even your current mood. 

You could argue that we podcasters have been trying to keep people listening to our shows all along. And I’d argue that we’ve largely failed at those attempts. 

Barring the occasional binge-listen (which I’ve certainly done), we just don’t get much support from the current app offerings. Yes, we can (and do) create compelling content our listeners want to keep consuming. But ultimately, it’s up to the listener to decide if we’ve succeeded in our efforts.

Every aspect of that power dynamic will be impacted once the data scientists from Spotify and Pandora dig into actual, real consumption of podcast content. Because they’ll own the entire stack from hosting, to directory, to listening app; their data scientists will have unique insight into the behavior of listeners -- actual listeners -- across a myriad of podcasts and episodes. 

The power of that extensive graph should not be underestimated. 

It’s an inevitability that a significant portion of podcast consumption on Spotify and Pandora will not require a conscious choice from the listener. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if choice-less listening is how most listening happens on those platforms. 

Isn’t that a scary thought?

There are lot of ways this could go bad, as I’m sure many people will soon tell me about on Twitter. But what they see as bad might actually be seen as good by the choice-less listener.

But painting an inevitable future as good or bad isn’t helpful. It’s still coming. And it will be different than what we have today. 

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/the-end-of-podcastings-direct-relationship-model-is-in-sight

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit SimplerMedia.pro to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

A trend towards disintermediation in podcasting has been quietly developing for years. It leaves me wondering when, not if, the big apps, namely Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and Google Podcasts, will disintermediate a mainstay of podcasting; podcast media hosting companies.

Just today, Apple released a new exclusive podcast called Apple News Today. That this new show isn’t being published to other apps/directories isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that Apple isn’t using a podcast media hosting company to host this podcast. (Thanks for tracking that down, Dan!)

Which means that, at least in part, Apple had to build their own podcast media hosting service to make this happen.

And if they dedicated precious developer resources to do this, they must have designs on hosting more podcast audio content directly.

Hosting content directly gives apps/directories a lot more flexibility than relying on media files hosted elsewhere. We already see that here: Apple News Today is pushed out to the Apple News app. And it might make sense to be made available in other Apple-owned destinations -- apps, operating systems, etc. -- in the future.

Spotify is marching quickly down the exclusive path. And as with Apple, Spotify isn’t going to spend the development resources to build a podcast media hosting service unless they plan on doing more.

The cost of hosting and serving podcast media files and is, at least for these power players, pretty low. And having exclusive shows on their respective platforms is nice, but it’s just the start of what they can do when they host and serve podcasts directly. 

Imagine for a moment, a different world without podcast hosting companies. In this alternate universe, podcasters would log into Apple Podcasts Connect and upload the media file directly to Apple, filling out a form and supplying additional content Apple could use to publish the episode across Apple’s ecosystem.

Then the podcaster would do the same for Spotify, Pandora, Amazon and whoever else shows up, probably filling out a similar form and supplying different additional content to each, because they each do things slightly differently.

But before you say, “No one would do that!” I suggest you look at ebook publishing. Because what I just described is exactly what independent publishers have to deal with. That rigamarole hasn’t slowed down ebook publishing. 

Right now, all the apps and directories are forced to accept the standard RSS feed. Sure, they can (and have) extended RSS feeds to accommodate special needs, like the and tags that Apple Podcasts convinced podcast hosting companies to include a few years ago.

But that’s an inefficient path. Why convince the third-party to spend dev resources when you could just ask the second-party -- that’s you and me, working podcaster -- to give you additional info?

Spend some quality time with the Apple Podcasts app (or web app), and you’ll realize there are often show-specific graphics of different sizes and formats than just the square artwork. Again, those aren’t coming from the feed. They come from direct input from the show owner.

I can’t look at these recent moves and see any future where each of the big apps/directories doesn’t start hosing and serving media files on their own. That sure does seem to be the direction they’re all headed right now.

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/the-inevitable-dismantling-of-podcast-directories

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit SimplerMedia.pro to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Jones v Gimlet could be a landmark case and possibly a turning point for the disability community’s long-standing struggles for acceptance in podcasting. In short, the class action lawsuit claims that Gimlet Media is violating provisions of the American’s With Disability Act by not providing closed captioning services for content the podcasting company produces.

Te future triggered if this class action suit prevails is of interest to everyone who listens to podcasts. Not just the 10 - 13% of the population with hearing loss.

But let's talk about the elephant in the room: Podcasting is audio, not video. So exactly where would these closed captions for podcasts appear? In a podcast listening app, of course. Perhaps not Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or Google Podcasts. Although they might quickly follow, I think it takes someone creating a podcast listening app that is designed for people with hearing loss -- even those who are completely deaf. 

Before you get too twisted up in tech hurdles, I remind you that captions already appear on our TV screens for live sporting events, local news programs, or a national broadcast from the Rose Garden. It should be a straightforward process to replicate those same processes and technologies to work in a dedicated podcast app on your phone. 

Spoiler: Descript has already implemented the technology to do this. When you hit “play” in a Descript transcript, the words highlight along with the audio, as you can see in this video: https://www.loom.com/share/efd2b1428b2f49eaad347aa6df59a992

With captions that dramatic pause you put in for effect in your audio delivery is effective in text. And it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out how text treatment, like bold, italics. or emoji 💩 could be used to better communicate emphasis, subtly, or tone. 

Not all podcasts require “on the fly” captioning. Some of the most popular podcasts have a months-long development cycle per episode. For those, it’s not terribly arduous to imagine the development of an “official” subtitle track as part of the post-production process. For those shows, they can layer in the text treatments I mentioned to make sure they nail the tone they were looking for. 

But why stop there?

Since someone is already designing a visual interface layered on top of the audio for consumption in a dedicated app, why not add more than just rich text and add in images and other content that both enhances the audio experience and benefits those with hearing loss?

If that reminds of you of enhanced podcasting, it should. And if you’re remembering all the times that enhanced podcasting has been re-invented and failed many, many times over, you are smart to do so.

But keep this in mind: One of the many reasons most of those attempts failed because the end-user -- the everyday podcast listener -- didn’t find the “enhanced” experience compelling enough to change their behavior. 

Unlike every other podcast app, this podcast app I’m imagining  ould be designed for a specific user base. And 10 - 13% of the population sure sounds like an addressable market to me.

Again, much of the inventing necessary to enable this has been done. Though I’m not the guy who's not going to do any of the work, it seems a straightforward process to assembling those prior inventions in a way to make closed captions for podcasts a very real thing.

Regardless of the outcome of the current lawsuit, it’s good to have this conversation. Anything we can do to make podcasts more accessible is a Very Good Thing, every rational person would agree. You don’t have to be an activist in the disability community to think so.

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/the-future-of-closed-captions-may-look-like-podcast-karaoke

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit SimplerMedia.pro to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

“There is no such thing as selling out; only the chance of selling out top cheaply.” That's a quote I first heard from Dave Slusher, one of the original OG podcasters with the Evil Genius Chronicles. 

Acquisitions and mergers have been a part of podcasting since nearly the beginning. In recent years, with an ever-increasing portion of ad spend allocated to podcasts and the continued increase in podcasting listenership, the pace has accelerated. It’s not out of the question that you might be approached with a money-bag-holder in the near future. 

Historically, podcast networks have been the entity responsible for most acquisitions, and it’s generally considered a Good Thing to at least be approached by a network. And if they’re offering to pay; even better!

I think we’ll see more ad rep firms start their own networks as they start commissioning and acquiring shows that make their business model work better by appeasing the needs of their customers -- the advertisers with money to spend. If they can build an owned-network of 10 different podcasts that get 1000 downloads a month, that's 10,000 downloads. Run multiple ad placements and that’s starting to approach viability.

Brands might also be interested in acquiring existing podcasts, especially if there’s a hyper-focused podcast that’s a perfect match to the niche the brand occupies. While the price tag to make a big-budget branded podcast is out of the cards for most small brands, they might find benefit owning a stake of an existing, popular podcast rather than trying to build something completely original on their own from scratch. 

Even a show that’s been “dead” for years might be attractive. I once joined and rebooted a show that hadn’t released an episode in six years but was still seeing 2,000 - 3,000 downloads of old episodes each month. Clearly, there was an audience hungry for the content! Luckily the owner continued to pay his hosting bill each month, else we’d have missed the opportunity.

There are now well over 1 million podcasts, and even though podcasting titles aren’t like domain names (there can be more than one), having a unique title is key to discovery. Would you consider a name-change to your show, knowing that your existing subscribers wouldn’t be impacted at all, if you were paid to give up your prior name?

Talent is another scarcity, and one that doesn’t scale. What do you do if someone wants to acquire you? What do you do if the offer is extended to a valued member of your team? 

.And then there’s the nuclear option, where someone wants to buy your show… and not you. What sort of price tag would it take for you to hand over everything about your podcast to someone else and never look back?

While some may actively seek out acquisition, others will be hit with a request out of the blue. Regardless, both of these paths start from the same place: Getting your ducks in a row. Ownership is the big question, so have an honest conversation with all of the stakeholders of your show so everyone understands who owns what.

But the bigger question is this: What’s it worth? If someone approaches you out of the blue, you’re in a great position of leverage, so don't jump at the offer. If you don't need it (or want it), then you don't need it (or want it). 

Because like Dave says, there's no such thing as selling out; only the possibility of selling too cheaply. 

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/improving-your-podcasts-acquired-taste

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit SimplerMedia.pro to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

MarketWatch tells us SiriusXM (which means Pandora) is going to spend $265 million in cash to buy E. W. Scripps (which means Stitcher). Pandora will kick in up to $60 million of additional payments if Stitcher can achieve certain financial goals in 2020 and 2021.

The Verge tells us the deal is for all the podcasting bits of the company: Stitcher, the podcast listening app and directory; Stitcher, the podcast network, which has some exclusive content and some windowed shows, which is content that comes out first exclusively on Stitcher and then days and or weeks later everywhere else; and Earwolf, the production arm of the network that makes some rather big and popular podcasts; and Midroll, the podcast advertising service. 

On the surface, this seems like a pretty obvious play to maintain parity with their bitter rival Spotify. But to me, it seems a bit disjointed.

Finances are problematic. E. W. Scripps’ (parent company to Stitcher) share price is struggling this year, according to MarketWatch, with a drop of 43% this year. SiriusXM’s market performance isn’t much better, with a stock value down 20% thus far in 2020. 

And there’s a lot of overlap. Pandora already has their own advertising company and ad tech in AdsWhizz. And Stitcher’s Midroll all but lost their identity in 2018 under a Stitcher-first branding redux in 2018.  Earwolf is Stitcher’s production company making high-quality content. But Pandora also has original podcasts and exclusive deals, much as they announced in partnership with Marvel in 2019. 

Leaving those unknowns aside, this acquisition is good news for all of us. Even with the uncertainty of the economy right now, it still shows podcasting is worthy of large investments and acquisitions. Even better: If SiriusXM takes a similar approach taken by iHeartRadio and starts using their remnant advertising inventory to drive listeners to and awareness of podcasts in their app, all podcasters win. Assuming your shows are listed on Pandora, obviously. Hopefully, this new acquisition will mean the approval process of six weeks or more shrinks to a realistic number. But we’ll see.

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/is-pandora-stitchering-a-sirius-podcasting-strategy

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit SimplerMedia.pro to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

We podcasters have come to rely quite heavily on Facebook. From podcaster-ran support groups to the ability to quickly build a Facebook community for the listeners of your podcast to the comment sections on our websites are powered by a plugin that uses Facebook, we podcasters relegate a lot of what we do to Facebook. 

So what happens when Facebook goes away? 

I know that sounds very alarmist. But hen's the last time you updated your MySpace profile? 

On a long enough time scale, everything disappears or changes into something unrecognizable from its origins. 

July 2020 is only nine days old as of this writing, and Facebook is taking a very public beating. It failed its own civil rights audit, a two-year endeavor where Facebook-selected independent auditors struggled to find good evidence that Facebook actually wants to fix the rot happening from within. 

Representatives from the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, ad Color of Change met via conference call with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and other top Facebook officials this week. Those reps left the call angrier than they were at the start, citing little in the way of substantive change and an abundance of oft-repeated platitudes from Facebook rather than actually responding to the group’s demands.

Along with those PR nightmares, Facebook’s taking a financial hit this month from the #StopHateForProfit campaign as several big-ticket advertisers have stopped their ad spend on Facebook for the month. 

Facebook’s brand is being tarnished. And that tarnishment will spill over to people - and podcasts -- who actively use Facebook. It’s only a matter of when. I’m mostly concerned with the spill-over that tarnishes the reputations of the companies and organizations that continue to rely on and actively promote the use of Facebook. A lot of podcasts and podcasters fit that bill.

The steps podcasters can take to protect themselves from the coming blowback are a little unclear to me, to be really honest with you. 

One option is to diversify. That's always a good idea. Never put your eggs in one basket. It’s why we podcasters distribute our shows to every single listening app, directory, or platform. So yes, you should diversify your social media presence as a podcaster and for your podcast(s). 

Some podcasts are trying to own the relationship with their listeners directly, reducing their reliance on social media platforms as the center of their community. This is problematic because it’s important for all podcasts and podcasters to meet people where the people are. Don’t assume that people will switch to your owned property just because you’ve made the decision to shut down your shows’ Facebook group. If you build it, they probably won’t come. 

But there is one thing you can do immediately: stop pushing people to Facebook.

Even if you have a thriving, active community on Facebook right now, you can keep it and you can stop pushing new people to it. That’s my approach. Even though my community is neither very large nor very active, I still push out episodes of Podcast Pontifications to Facebook. I’ll continue to occasionally share information on Facebook, but I do it via Buffer as I’m sharing that same content on other social platforms as well. To me, Facebook has become a little-to-no-effort publishing destination 

But I'm certainly not asking anybody to join me over on Facebook. And if Facebook’s reputation continues to be torn to shreds, maybe you shouldn't either.

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/its-time-to-address-podcastings-facebook-problem

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit SimplerMedia.pro to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

My thinking on advertising in the podcasting space is shifting. In the last few days, I’ve landed two ad deals for two clients, and one other client somehow found six different advertisers. Which means we need a strategy do deal with this windfall. So do you, probably.

Your relationship with your advertisers or sponsors is fleeting. Your relationship with your audience is not. And remember: it’s your audience the advertisers want to reach. Jeopardize the relationship with your audience at your own peril. 

One natural place to run ads is during the natural breaks within your episode. Most shows are constructed in segments, and each segment, even on short programs like this one, could accommodate an ad.

But only if it were planned. Without planning, ad drops can sound clunky and weird. And we don’t want our episodes to sound clunky or weird, do we? To avoid that, we probably need to change how we structure the various segments of our show so that our listeners aren’t wondering what the hell just happened. 

To make the least clunky and weird episode as possible, you need to plan it out before you plop down behind the mic or crack open your DAW. Get a whiteboard, a collaborative online document, or a piece of paper out and figure out where ads not only make sense, but where they can fit nicely. No, you don’t have to script out your entire show if you don’t want to. But you should script out the entire structure of an episode if you want to be strategic.

Also: make sure your episode doesn’t sound clunky and weird when no ad or sponsor message runs. Don’t bake in “We’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors.” into your episode content to mark where you plan ads to run. Likewise, don’t bake in “And we’re back!” when you resume regular episode content. That’s an old broadcast ripoff that we really don't need in podcasting. 

If you're having difficulty conceptualizing how you would do this for the episodes of your podcast, I understand. So move it from concept to practice, and start “running ads” for some cause or organization that you feel is worthy of mentioning on your program. I'm recording this in late 2020, and there are a great number of worthy causes struggling to get their message out. Pick one with the values, ideals, and ambitions you can get behind… and get behind it! Not only is it a Good Thing, it’s good practice for you for when advertisers come knocking at your door.

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Read the full article and share with a friend: https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/restructuring-your-podcast-to-be-advertising-friendly

Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Follow Evo on Twitter for more podcasting insights as they come.

And if you need a professional in your podcasting corner, please visit SimplerMedia.pro to see how Simpler Media Productions can help you reach your business objectives with podcasting.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.

Humans tend to seek out digital content in one (or more) of three ways:

1. They trust a trusted source: People are happy to let others do the sorting for them, so long as those doing the sorting are trustworthy. The audience trusts that every day, week, month, or whatever the frequency, quality content will be delivered. This trust gives the provider a lot of latitude. A trusting audience is often a forgiving audience.

Many podcasts (like mine) clearly are trying to be seen as a trusted source. We generate content not because someone specifically asked for it. Our listeners (and readers) trust us to generate the content they need to hear. 

2. They seek out timely data: Even though we’re subscribed to our trusted sources, we often have immediate needs. Luckily, we all have search engines at our fingertips. 

But even with Google trying to insert podcast episodes in search results, this space is problematic for podcasts, especially if the nugget of information someone is looking for is buried deep inside a 45-minute episode. 

3. They look for infotainment: Some knowledge requires more than a glancing exposure, and a lot of it needs a full-on deep-dive. And most of all, we humans love a good story. Properly presented, informative deep-dives can be quite entertaining.

This is where podcasting can (and often does) shine, especially when it’s presented as a series of well-crafted episodes. If we make the story compelling, we can hook people into listening to a dozen episodes. 

But where does your podcast fit? 

Developing trust is easy if you already have a big following elsewhere, or are well-respected in another medium, or happen to be a celebrity. But for the rest of us without a big name or a big organization behind us, asking people to listen to or subscribe to our podcast is a very big ask.\

Producing timely data requires a great deal of effort for podcasters trying to stay in-step with the news cycle. And if you force someone to slog through your non-sequiturs or meanders before you deliver the goods 45 minutes later, then listening to your podcast is too big of an ask for someone who's looking for something very specific.

Figuring out a multi-episode, seasonal arc that digs deep, with compelling storytelling at every turn until the story is fully told is really, really hard. Can you find a worthy story and make it interesting enough to keep someone listening to a dozen episodes? Because if the story isn’t that compelling, or if you cannot pull off great storytelling with every episode, then it's too big of an ask to get people to sit through all of it.

Think about the kind of content you produce. Or the content you want to produce. Or the content you think you’re producing. Now think about which of the three scenarios above you’re trying to work toward with your content with one question in mind:

How big is your ask?

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Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.