Hey, everyone.

I'm Dave Clements, customer relations and media specialist here at Blueberry.

And I'm Mike Dell, the VP of customer relations.

And today, we're gonna be diving into the biggest podcast platforms like Apple and Spotify and some non podcast platforms like YouTube.

I know that's funny, but that's how it is.

What they're doing right and where they might be missing the mark.

Because podcasting is always changing, and there's always something new, whether it's monetization, analytics, discovery, and all of these platforms that we're gonna talk about.

They're actually shaping how creators are reaching their audiences.

Exactly.

Understanding the pros and cons will help you choose where to focus your energy and what tools to trust and what not to worry about.

You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Dave Clements, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting with all the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting.

Welcome.

Let's dive in.

As the podcasting landscape evolves, creators are navigating all the changed things.

There's not a whole lot of new platforms, but but there are the different softwares and everything.

And I like to break it down this way.

There's podcast apps, which their main focus is podcasting, and then there's apps that do other things that added podcasting for whatever reason.

You know, Spotify, even though it's a fairly large platform for podcast listening, is a music service.

So it isn't really a podcast app in the traditional sense, but, again, we include it because it is important just like any of the other ones.

Quick breakdown.

I'll take Apple here.

Apple Podcasts is a classic podcast app Well, it's a directory and has a very wide listener base.

Apple only.

Actually, not so much now.

They do PWA, but that's too geeky.

The analytics that they collect are kinda limited only to people that use Apple Podcasts, so it doesn't show you anything that happens anywhere else like Blueberry does.

And their subscription model is handy, but it it benefits Apple more than every podcaster.

Now there's some that are making some good money there.

And if we talk about Spotify, Mike mentioned it's a good place for discovery, but it's primarily a music app.

So it's it's closed in what you would call a walled garden.

And Spotify has a great algorithm.

So if you're listening to music, you might get suggested podcasts that you may be interested in listening to.

If you're listening to podcasts, you're gonna get recommended other podcasts.

That's one thing Spotify has done very well is their personalized recommendations, and they even have tools that they're developing wrapped and things like that.

Plus, they're also expanding some things.

So they're doing, like, polls and q and a features within their services.

If you were a Spotify podcaster, maybe there are some things you could use there.

But the downside is that when it comes to their stats, it's actually pretty limited.

Apple, they're only measuring what is on their platform, and I'll be honest, a lot of it's inflated.

So can you trust it?

Maybe not.

And some podcasters, when they are exclusive to Spotify, they will have their episodes locked behind Spotify only access.

So if you're listening on Apple or another podcast app and one of your favorite creators drops an exclusive episode for Spotify, it's time for you to go over to Spotify and either use their free app with ads or pay their premium subscription.

Yeah.

And the thing about that also is they do host some podcasts.

They bought Anchor platform, and that was pretty big for a while, not so much anymore.

But they do that.

The problem is that by default, there's no open RSS feed from Spotify for creators is what their new name for it is, and that limits your distribution to just Spotify.

Yeah.

I remember a few years ago, Marvel, because I'm big into comic books and superheroes and that kind of stuff.

Marvel had a partnership or a deal with them where they had a limited run series that was only on Spotify.

And I was like, I don't use Spotify enough to download the app or even visit the website.

I have my listening planned for the day through primarily one app.

I missed out on that until, I think, six to eight months later, you could find it in your actual podcast apps because it was distributed with RSS.

That's the whole thing is you wanna have that RSS feed because that gives you the most control over your podcast.

Let's talk about YouTube.

YouTube is great for video.

That's what they do.

They're a video platform.

There's nothing wrong with having a video of your podcast there.

You don't originate a podcast on YouTube.

Now you could have a YouTube channel and call it a podcast, and that's fine.

The listeners don't care.

The viewers don't care.

Call it a podcast.

We don't care.

But it's not going anywhere.

It's gonna be on YouTube.

But YouTube is they got a massive reach.

There's nothing at all wrong with having a YouTube channel.

It's just in the traditional podcasting realm, that's not what they're doing.

They do have YouTube Music, which a lot of users use to listen to music.

They also have a podcast section, and it's pretty good.

To be honest with you, it's as good as Spotify.

But, you know, the main purpose of that to most hardcore podcast listeners is, hey.

I discovered a podcast when I was listening to some music.

I'm gonna go over to my podcast app and subscribe to it.

I'm not gonna continue listening to it here, but not everybody's the same.

That's and that's the thing.

We don't care where you listen as long as you listen.

Again, I'm torn because I really think that there's a distinction between things that are delivered via RSS and things that are not.

And there's not anything wrong with also distributing non RSS, like on YouTube or television, radio.

All of those are different delivery methods of and it could be the same content.

Your podcast can be a YouTube channel.

Your YouTube channel can be a podcast, and there's no problem with doing both.

Yeah.

I think it just comes down to when you're looking at Spotify and YouTube, there's there are some limitations there.

Like, one thing that we haven't talked about is the fact that if you are an audio only show, you can use your RSS feed and put that audio show onto YouTube.

That's another method.

But, you know, there are pros and cons to at least these last two.

Like, Apple's pretty open because they're using RSS, which is an open I don't wanna say platform.

It's just an Standard.

Open standard.

Yeah.

An open delivery method.

And it's not to say that there's that Spotify or YouTube are bad.

I think, like, Mike and I over the years, we've we've put shows on to Spotify.

We've taken shows off of Spotify.

Just is it doing well?

Or how do we feel about Spotify that week?

You and I spent an awful lot of time being Spotify support.

That's true.

So, yeah, just kinda keep that in mind as you're I think, personally, I think it's good to be everywhere you can be, but don't overextend yourself.

If it's easy to get your RSS feed on Spotify, do that.

If it's easy to do it on YouTube, do that.

And it is.

But don't have the video component unless you have the time.

Yeah.

You know?

Video is huge as far as amount of time extra you're gonna spend doing that.

Boy, do I know that.

Yeah.

Dave Dave's kind of our YouTube guy.

So Yeah.

Yeah.

The cool thing, though, with all of these is that Blueberry hosting integrates seamlessly with all of them.

We give you instructions in Apple and Spotify's cases.

You can submit your show directly from the Blueberry dashboard, and you're still in control of the feed.

So if you ever wanna take it off of a place, you can do that.

Super simple.

Yeah.

And now, you know, let's make a little bit of a distinction between video and audio podcasting.

A video podcasting, and I'm talking about delivering video via RSS feed, will never get to YouTube.

Or I shouldn't say never.

As of currently, YouTube will not take video via RSS feed and neither will Spotify.

So if you want to do a video RSS podcast, then, you know, Blueberry has all the tools to make that happen if you want, That will be of limited distribution.

A lot of the podcasting two point o apps through podcast index show video, and a lot of and Apple itself shows video, and a lot of the apps that also use Apple as a directory do, but they're all the minor apps.

None of the really big ones are gonna take video other than Apple.

But and there's nothing wrong with that.

Just know that if you want full distribution on video, you do the RSS.

You do direct upload to Spotify and direct upload to YouTube.

You got it all covered.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm not against any of that.

It's just know how much extra work that's gonna be.

Yeah.

And like Mike said, Spotify allows video if you're using their service directly.

Same thing with YouTube.

But who knows?

We could record this episode, and three months later, they're like, hey.

Surprise.

Here's a video for everybody.

Yeah.

And we'd be all for it.

Yeah.

So just this is why we're here, to keep you up to date on things like this.

So make sure you're always paying attention.

Last I checked, I I did some a little bit of research to see just how many places out there are there for people to listen to podcasts.

And I'm not counting the web.

I'm just counting apps and device directories, that kind of thing.

It was about a 125 different places that people could find your audio podcast.

And, yeah, it's amazing.

Some of them I've never even heard of.

But the thing is and there's the strategy I say.

When you first start podcasting or or if you've been podcasting forever, make sure you're in three places.

Apple Podcasts, podcast index, which is not super well known, but it powers a lot of apps, and Spotify, unfortunately, because they are the third most used platform out there for podcast listening.

But if you're in those three, you're gonna get about 95% of the potential audience.

And in the Blueberry dashboard in our destinations, there's some that don't use either of those.

IHeart and Pandora and Deezer and some of the Middle East and and India apps.

Those don't use those directories, so you gotta go to them directly.

But there's nothing wrong with being in any of those.

In fact, we encourage you to be in in any of those.

But let me make one caveat there.

If you're doing a video on YouTube, so you have a full blown video channel for your podcast on YouTube, don't submit your RSS feed to YouTube because what'll happen and I'm talking about your audio RSS feed.

What'll happen is each of your videos is gonna have a video version, and then right next to it will be an audio version with just a static image.

That just makes your channel look funny.

All you have to do is make sure you put all your podcast episodes that you upload as video on YouTube in a playlist, and make sure that playlist is designated a podcast.

That way it'll show up in YouTube music as audio.

Kind of a neat way of getting around it.

So you get both best of both worlds that way.

And, anyway so that's just my little soapbox about YouTube and, you know, certain things.

We have a service called Vidapod, which is currently having issues, but it should be back sometime, where it's for video first creators.

And then we create a audio version and put it out in an RSS feed automatically.

That's all great, but then they see in destinations, YouTube.

So then they submit that RSS feed to YouTube, and it causes a giant loop.

Yep.

Yeah.

It's like a bad feedback loop, and we've run it a few times.

So if you're using VidtoPod, don't submit your Blueberry feed to YouTube.

Yeah.

You're already there.

Mess.

Right.

You're already there.

What are they doing right?

Talking about the platforms we're talking about.

But putting podcasting into new audiences, I get that.

Adding video options and interactive tools.

Yeah.

Some of them have video options as we discussed and making listening easier across devices.

Yeah.

That is nice.

Like, especially if you are using YouTube or Spotify as your primary, quote, unquote, podcast app.

Right.

They make it for every device.

So you can download the app, log in to your account, and you're good to go.

I know, like, I love Overcast, which is exclusively iOS.

And so then not that I'm ever not on an Apple device, but there have been moments where I'm just like, man, I I wish I had all of my podcasts here.

Yeah.

I think at some point, you're just gonna be able to grab anything everywhere all the time.

Yeah.

Overcast is my daily driver too, but I I find it, yeah, it's probably not quite as user friendly as Spotify or Apple, but it's powerful in the way you can organize your listening and all that.

But again and then Marco, that that does Overcast, uses both Podcast Index and Apple's directory.

So if you're in either one of those, you're on Overcast.

Yeah.

And and I guess we can talk about what they're doing wrong.

Like, we can't be positive all the time.

Right?

So, like, we mentioned earlier, like, sometimes their stats are confusing.

You might call them inconsistent, especially if you're already using Blueberry stats because you can see one number in Blueberry, and then you go over to your Apple or Spotify, and you're like, wait a minute.

Something seems off.

And I typically get this more from people who have Spotify accounts, and they're checking their Spotify stats.

And they're like, Spotify says I have so many more downloads.

And I'm like, yeah.

They're they're inflated, and they can do that.

We're Blueberry is regulated.

We've got rules to follow to make sure that we're cutting out bots and things like that.

So that's a What happens with Spotify is they say you listen to my show.

You listen to an episode.

You're let's say you're listening to this on Spotify.

By the way, we are back on Spotify.

We were off for a while on purpose, and we're back.

But, anyway, if you're listening to this on Spotify and you hit pause and you go do something and you come back and you hit resume, Spotify will count that as a second download.

And that's how it gets inflated or you know, and I don't know this for sure.

They don't give us their thing, but that's what I suspect is happening.

Apple does the same thing sometimes.

I think they're a little better about it, but what they what Apple shows you for what your downloads in Apple are and versus what we show you, it's probably gonna be more on Apple.

That doesn't mean they're wrong or right.

That just means by our standards, this is what constitutes a download.

Yep.

Yep.

And they're pretty strict rules that we're following to a point where we're constantly checking up on them.

Of course.

Some other things that they may not be doing.

We mentioned this concept of walled gardens, so they're sticking you inside their box.

Blueberry podcasters don't have to worry about this too much because you are operating with an RSS feed.

But podcasters that are using Spotify directly, they have no way to get outside of the Spotify box, and that's rough.

It is optional if you're using Spotify for creators.

You can optionally have an open RSS feed, but it's optional.

So a lot of people don't do that.

I mean, if you're I wouldn't use their platform myself, but if that's what you need to do, make sure you turn that RSS option on and then submit to all these places, because you you want the most distribution as you can get.

Yeah.

And I would say YouTube is probably even more walled in in the fact that if you are video first, you're just kind of stuck because there are not a lot of podcast companies that are doing something similar to what we're doing with VidtoPod, where we can take that, turn it into audio at least, and syndicate it.

I'd love to be able to just do a vid to vid kind of thing to be able to pull the video from YouTube and then syndicate it or distribute it.

And that may happen in the future, of course.

So there's as we said at the beginning, things change all the time.

Yeah.

Super quick.

Think about this.

Apple is adopting yet another podcast two point o namespace tag.

That mean anything to you?

Not really.

But it's a geeky thing.

But they are bringing on chapters, and that's a big deal.

Not that I agree that we need to have chapters.

Some podcasts lend themselves to that, some don't, But they're adding chapters using podcast two point o tags, which is a really good sign.

And once Apple adopts something, a lot of other places adopt those things.

So look at the transcripts.

Transcripts are almost ubiquitous now.

Yeah.

And that was 100% because Apple decided that the podcast two point o way of doing transcripts was the right way, and that's what they're doing.

Yeah.

Another one is the things that they may be doing wrong is monetization.

Spotify puts ads around your show.

I don't think they get right in the middle of it, but they do put it around your show.

YouTube puts it right in the middle even if you're in the middle of a sentence.

And unless you're killing it, you're not on their monetization program, so they keep all the money.

Like, I I watch a lot of YouTube.

I pay the subscription, so I don't get those ads stuffed in the middle.

I also pay for Spotify because I like their music service.

I don't get any ads.

But I'm willing to pay for get not getting those ads.

But for the average listener that doesn't wanna pay, it's a bad experience.

Yeah.

And it's And just yeah.

As a creator, YouTube has a standard before you can be part of their partner program.

I don't know if they still call it that.

But you had to hit a certain amount of subscribers, a certain amount of views for a certain length of time before any of that ad revenue would come to you.

And even then, it's I think it's like a fifty fifty split or something.

But you're you are probably not benefiting from that unless your podcast is doing huge numbers if we're It's that platform, though.

Yes.

You could be doing huge numbers everywhere else and not on that platform and not get anything.

Monetization, there's lots of other ways of doing that.

And, of course, Blueberry has programmatic advertising for everybody.

You may not make a lot of money with it, but at least it's something and you get it.

And that's a lot better than the bad experience of listening to ads that you had no say so as a creator in what ads are showing.

And that's yeah.

Yeah.

Not something I wanna participate in, but, hey, each to their own.

Of course, we have our IAB certified stats.

That's the rules Dave was talking about, and our hosting plans are are pretty reasonable and reliable and all that good stuff.

And, of course, we give you an RSS feed, which is totally open and can be distributed wherever RSS feeds are accepted.

That reminds me of the old Visa commercials.

But, anyway, you can just be everywhere, and you don't have to compromise your ownership of your platform, your platform.

That's the thing.

When you you wanna go a step further, do PowerPress on your own domain.

Your feed comes from your own domain.

Doesn't even involve us other than we track your stats and host your files.

Yep.

Yeah.

We try to put the ownership in your hands because that's super important.

And I don't know that everybody notices that or sees it as such in our current social media era.

Everybody's gotta be on TikTok and Instagram and stuff.

Yeah.

It may not be as important to some people as it might be to others, and and that's fine.

Each to their own.

We're we're open opportunity.

Do what you want.

Yeah.

And I like to say there's no rules in podcasting.

There are some standards, but there's no rules.

Yeah.

And that kinda leads into kind of some final thoughts here, just this concept of staying open and staying in control.

Because, Mike, you've been around since the beginning of podcasting roughly much much longer than I have been.

But I've been in it for a long time too.

Yeah.

And we've watched platforms come and go, and we've watched platforms change a lot and really embrace creators.

But I think it's important as things move so fast that you, as a creator, stay informed of what's going on.

Make sure that you're paying attention to what any of these platforms are doing just so that you're aware that you can ebb and flow with them.

So you're not surprised, like, when Google went from Google Podcasts to YouTube Music, so many people were like, I don't know what's going on, and we were there for you.

That's not even the whole story with Google.

That's true.

That that's old.

They used to have this awesome thing called Google Reader.

Uh-huh.

And as a part of Google Reader, they had a an app, mostly.

I think it was just Android, but an app called Google Listen, and it was powered by Google Reader.

So you could put a podcast app in Google Reader, and your Google Listen would be your podcast app.

That was an awesome thing.

And then they killed Reader, and then they killed Listen.

And then they came back with Google Podcasts.

And so they've tried this three, four times and just haven't succeeded.

Yeah.

So just stay up to date on things.

Learn the ins and outs of these platforms, and you'll be better served for it.

And your podcast is gonna be able to get past these, what could be roadblocks much better and lead to more success, however you decide to define that.

For sure.

That'll wrap it up for today.

Thanks for listening.

Remember that podcasting was built on open distribution, so try not to let any of these platforms take that away from you.

Stand up for yourself.

Yeah.

You use all the tools available, but keep your independence.

Blueberry Podcasters do just that.

You're gonna be able to host, publish, and analyze all on your terms.

Alright.

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Catch you later.

Thanks for joining us.

Come back next week.

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