Why Indie Podcasts Deserve a Fair Shot Against the Giants

James: 00:00:38

And at the end of the day, the most amazing thing about podcasting, and it's the thing that I think we forget quite a lot, is that it's such a level playing field. You are in the same.

This podcast is in the same podcast directories and the same podcast apps as some of the biggest podcasts out there, as, you know, Smartless and this American Life and the New York Times Daily. You. You are in that same directory, you're in that same podcast app. You can't say that about any other medium.

It's almost impossible to launch a magazine that gets placed in the same place as every other magazine or a newspaper, or getting a TV channel up and running and making sure that you're carried on all of the networks and blah, blah, blah. We've got all of that in podcasting, and I think that's a fantastically exciting thing.

Danny: 00:01:32

Now, that actually takes me nicely onto your question. This is the interactive part of the episode I mentioned on a Twitter community. I'm on that.

I was chatting with you today and there was a couple of questions came up, if that's okay. But one of them speaks perfectly to that point. No, get off. One of them speaks perfectly to that point, actually, James.

And it's from Jeff Townsend, who's podcast father on Twitter, and he was questioning, what do you think about indie podcasts or should they be judged differently from the big shows, like a serial war, this American Life, from, say, production value, content value, that kind of stuff? Or should we all. Should we not being given excuses, so to speak, for.

For podcasting because we have the opportunity to do post production and all that kind of stuff?

James: 00:02:15

Yeah, I mean, from, from my point of view, I have a real problem with the word indie. I know what it's supposed to mean, but it, it does quite often to me sound like an excuse. Oh, it's an indie podcast.

So therefore, you know, therefore I'm going to sound as if I'm on the moon and all of that kind of stuff. I don't think that that's particularly helpful. I'll be honest.

I think being an indie podcaster, yes, it's a badge of honor that you can launch something as good as the big Ihearts and Spotify's and Pushkins and Q codes of this world. That, that's a fantastic thing.

But I don't think we should necessarily be trying to back indie podcasters into some form of protected silo or, you know, anything else. GoodPods, for example, has a chart which I'm all in favor of Because POD News is very high in the chart.

But it's a chart of, you know, where you can flick a button and you only see indie podcasts.

And at the end of the day, I'm not convinced that anyone turns around tomorrow and says, oh, I don't think I'm going to listen to that because I think it's funded by iHeartradio. I don't think that that's the way that normal people think.

So, yeah, so I'm kind of, you know, I don't think necessarily that we should be giving ourselves any excuse. Make great content that works fantastically, that sounds as good as you possibly can be.

And you will, you know, you will compete with any, anybody else out there. That's the beauty of this industry that we're in.

Danny: 00:03:48

Do you think we should maybe start to remove the whole indie, not misnomer, that's wrong, the whole indie front end prefix from podcast and just be. We're just purely podcasters. That's it.

James: 00:04:02

Yeah, I mean, I don't know what indie means and no one can really give me a good definition of what indie means.

I mean, you know, at the end of the day, you know, who, who pays your wages might be part of that, you know, but, you know, if, if you're an indie podcaster, but you happen to be on acast, does that stop you from being indie? You know, all of this kind of stuff. I'm not quite sure what indie is supposed to mean.

I know what it kind of means emotionally, but once you start trying to define it on paper, it gets quite difficult. And so, you know, I mean, I guess on the other side, when you look at podcast awards, for example, I don't want to see.

I'm very against the idea of an indie podcast award that goes alongside the others. Because what you're saying there is you're saying that indie podcasts aren't good enough to win the main podcast awards.

And so that's why we need an indie category. And I think that that's 100% wrong. So I think, yeah, we should be proud of what we do.

And yeah, and I'm not sure that the word indie really helps us, to be honest.

Danny: 00:05:25

Interesting. I like it. Now, the Reporter's Notebook.

I'm not sure whose name this is, the podcast title, but an interesting question actually, and that's around ad tech.

And he or she seems that he feels that most ad tech is geared towards weekly and bi weekly episodic shows, as opposed to, say, podcasters that create bingeable seasons where they're sort of building the audience up in the long term. And as someone that's, you know, works with brands and businesses and on the ad side and obviously, you know, Brian, over it sounds profitable.

Do you find that art partners are maybe missing an opportunity with the kind of shows are going after, or is this more done to the podcaster and what they should be going for?

James: 00:06:07

Yeah, I wonder whether it's a issue actually with advertisers, the ads. Yeah, yeah, I, I wonder whether it's an issue with the advertisers who are buying into these particular shows.

So I binged, for example, recently I binged the Trojan Horse Affair and I heard the same ad probably six or seven times and it was really annoying. Yes. Ezra Klein, I'm very now very familiar with your podcast.

No, I'm still not going to listen, but yes, I'm very familiar with your podcast, but that is, that should be controllable in terms of opportunity to hear, in terms of, you know, total frequency, all of that kind of stuff.

I think, you know, the real benefit that we have with DAI and with ad tech generally is that it should enable us to be a bit cleverer in terms of what we do in around advertising and making sure that, you know, people don't hear the same ad 10 times and making sure that people do actually hear.

I mean, you know, the other thing around the, the Trojan Horse Affair was listening to it, hearing them going into a commercial break and then there being a beat, second pause and then it was welcome back because they hadn't bothered selling any ads down down here in Australia, you know, and so, you know, I do wonder whether some of the perceived issues that there are around dynamic programmatic advertising isn't necessarily a problem with the technology. It's more a problem with the fact that it's not been booked properly into the system.

And there should be a frequency cap and that frequency cap should be kept relatively low. It'd be really nice to get some research about how low the frequency cap should be. But, but there should be a frequency cap there.

There should be cleverer tools in terms of how you buy this kind of stuff.

But I do think that DAI and that sort of thing should really help if you're producing a fiction podcast, which is an evergreen piece of audio that can live on a podcast directory for years and years and years, then then using dynamic ad insertion, which Captivate offers, but which many other podcast hosts now offer, using that sort of tool will still allow you to keep making money from your great content in the future, and that's an important thing.

Danny: 00:08:42

And speaking of cool tools like this morning's. This morning, this evening, yesterday evening, time's all over the place.

The latest episode of POD News shared a pretty cool tool called Spooler, which looks to be using dynamic insertion, dynamic content pretty cleverly. I'm wondering what's.

Apart from stuff like that, what's got you most excited about podcasting and where tech could take us and dynamic insertion could take us?

James: 00:09:11

Yeah, I think there are real opportunities in terms of dynamic ad insertion and dynamic audio insertion, and I think we probably shouldn't call it dynamic ad insertion. That's the wrong thing. But, yeah, I mean, I ended up playing around for April Fools last year.

I ended up playing around with a pod, a podcast, which I launched in a blaze of excitement on April 1st and said, you know, it's a podcast for our time. And, you know, and it's. You can, you know, listen. It's our complicated relationship with the clock.

And literally all the podcast was, was me telling you what the time was. But of course, all of that was dynamic ad, Dynamic audio insertion produced automatically whenever you downloaded that podcast.

It was just clips of me reading out what the time was. Just as a little bit of fun. I think that there are things that we can do that we can, you know, that we can do some very, very clever things.

There's a brilliant company out there, for example, called A Million Ads. And I know this is about ads, but you can do this in terms of content as well, where they have loads of different bits that produce a great advert.

So you can, for example, if it's an ad for Starbucks, then if it's a cold day, you can advertise a nice warming latte. If it's a. If it's a boiling hot day, then you can advertise, you know, an iced, you know, Frappuccino or whatever it is that they call them.

And you can, for example, if you know the name of the person who is listening, then they have the barista in the background shouting latte for Danny and that sort of thing. You know, some very clever little tricks and tools.

And you can also obviously advertise caffeine drinks in the morning, advertise something else in the afternoon. You know, you can do some very, very clever pieces of work.

And I know that's around advertising, but, you know, in terms of, you know, content as well, in terms of normal podcast content, then you can do some fascinating things there as well, I think so, you know, I'm very excited about what that future might be.

And the, you know, what Spooler announced recently around, they've basically made a, they've made a podcast without any of the drawbacks of a podcast, which is once it's recorded, it's there, it's done.

And so being able to go back and change the story order, change one of the stories out to a new story which is just broken, you know, produce all of that and have the technology producing essentially a news bulletin for you at the time that you press the play button is really exciting. And you then wonder to yourself, well, why aren't radio stations doing that? You know, why isn't the Local Rogers News 680 or whatever it is?

Why aren't they doing that sort of technology? Why aren't they building their entire radio station out of those building blocks of individual pieces of audio?

Why do they stick on producing live radio where actually they could probably produce a better product if they were producing lots of different pieces of audio that they could then schedule properly? You know, so there's all kinds of really exciting things I think there on the horizon.

Danny: 00:14:32

Yeah, I love to check out million ads. That sounds really cool.

I mean, I could picture it sounds like you can, as you mentioned, you can schedule it off for morning, afternoon, evening, depending on where the IP is for the listener, based on the time of playback and guessing.

Because it'd be pretty cool if you could go pick your kids up from school and you could put in your interest to your podcast app and they'll know that, okay, it's almost 4:00pm Danny's going to pick up kids up. We're going to put this podcast episode, or this dynamic content, sorry.

Into the favorite episode and talk about the soccer results for my kids for my son, or like gymnastics and cheerleading results from, you know, various competitions for my daughter. That kind of stuff that, that taps into, you know, based on time and location. That's really cool.

James: 00:15:14

Yeah, yeah.

And, and you know, you know, there is so much stuff that you can do, particularly if you're doing this on a logged in platform like Spotify, for example. You, you know, in most podcast apps, the only thing that they know about you is an IP address.

And the IP address doesn't instantly go back to you as a person, although you can do that if you add additional data. Whereas of course, if you're listening on Spotify, it knows everything about you.

It knows how old you are, whether you're a boy or a girl, you know, what your interests are, what your music choice is and everything else. And so you can begin to do some very clever things with that.

Now, of course there are privacy issues there as well, but I think, you know, worthwhile thinking about this in terms of, you know, in terms of it's a, it's a pretty well one way street. They don't know that you're called Danny. They don't know.

Or they, they might know that you're called Danny, but they don't necessarily know exactly where you live, exactly what you're, you know, who you are, et cetera, et cetera. They can still divine a lot of information, you know, out of that. And yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a good balancing act.

But I, but I think the opportunities are, are really good.

You know, if, you know, for example, that I have kids in the car or I have, you know, a nine year old daughter and it's, you know, and it's, you know, drop off time, then probably you might want to feed me the version of the podcast where you've edited out the, you know, the naughty words, for example. You know, that might be a really simple, straightforward thing. So, yeah, real opportunities, I think in.

Danny: 00:16:57

The future, and especially when dynamic content and dynamic, dynamic audio absolves, it's still fairly new, at least for the mainstream, for the amount of podcasters that, you know, got access to it. So it will be pretty cool to see where that's like revisiting even a year down the road, never mind like five. Just the way it changes so quickly.

months from now. March: 2023

James: 00:17:18

Yes, no, indeed.

I think that there will be an awful lot of really interesting ways of thinking about how to use dynamic audio insertion that we've not thought about in the past.

And I think Spooler is a great example of that, of actually taking something and going what would happen if and producing something which could potentially turn the world of news podcasts on its head. That you can all of a sudden produce these shows which are up to the minute. And I love the fact that they call it a live. It's a live podcast.

It's continually updated between 6 in the morning and midday. Well, that's very clever, Very, very smart. So, yeah, really interesting to see what happens there.

Danny: 00:18:08

So James, I could talk to you already and continue to pick your brain because I'm a podcasting geek and I love speaking with good folks like yourself. But I know you've got another episode of Pod News to get prepping up together and a whole bunch of other sites feeds to go over.

So for people that want to know more about pod news, the newsletter, the site, the podcast, etc. Or yourself, where's the best place to connect and check all that cool stuff out?

James: 00:18:33

Yeah, so you'll find all of that@podnews.net I know that we've talked about the podcast, but the newsletter's better. So grabbing. That is a good plan because, you know, the newsletter links to all of the stories that I'm talking about.

So that's kind of the point there. So, yeah. And you'll also find in there things like events and job opportunities and stuff like that. So all of that is there.

And if you want to follow me personally on Twitter, then I'm James Critland.

Danny: 00:19:05

And I will be sure to obviously drop all the links into the show notes, speaking about links, so that if you're listening on your favorite podcast app or you're visiting the podchat website, all the links will be there, linking out.

And it's a test, a request for you, I should say a quest for any reader of the newsletter to spot when James is being sarcastic or got a little sort of funny bone kicking off on about a news story, because you can kind of tell when he is. But it's fun trying to see that little piece of copy that says, yep.

James: 00:19:35

This just occasionally, just occasionally spoke to.

Danny: 00:19:37

James the wrong way.

So, again, James, I really appreciate that, and I recommend anybody that likes podcasts or interested in podcasting, whether you're a listener or a podcaster yourself, to subscribe to the podnews.net newsletter. It's a really amazing resource, so well worth getting in your inbox each morning. So, again, James, thank you so much for your time today.

James: 00:19:56

Oh, thank you.

Danny: 00:20:02

All righty. Good stuff, mate.

James: 00:20:05

Super.