The Largest Category of Podcast Content with Libsyn’s Rob Walch | Episode 24
Tune in to this the most recent episode of our Future.Bible Podcast with our special guest, Rob Walch.Rob is the Vice President of Podcaster Relations. He was inducted into the Podcasting Hall of Fame in 2016. Rob is the Vice President of Podcaster Relations for Libsyn (LSYN) having joined Libsyn in 2007, Prior to joining Libsyn he founded podCast411, Inc in 2004. Rob is Co-Author of the book “Tricks of the Podcasting Masters” He has consulted on Podcasting for Joyce Meyers, Dave Ramsey, Jack Welch, eBay and many others.
The NRB International Christian Media Convention is a jam-packed, four-day event that connects, equips, and edifies thousands of Christian communicators. And the NRB Digital Media Summit is a one-day summit where you will get to hear from experts presenting on the latest trends and strategies in digital media and ministry, as well as have the opportunity to interact and connect with other digital ministry leaders.
Rob will be speaking at NRB’s PROCLAIM 2019 Digital Media Summit this year on Friday, March 29, 2019. Get more details and register online at http://nrbconvention.org/digital-media-summit/
Organization name: LibsynPro
Organization website: https://www.libsynpro.com
Contact details:
https://www.facebook.com/podcast411
https://www.linkedin.com/in/podcast411/
Website: Podcast411.com
TRANSCRIPTION:
Kenny Jahng: Hey, welcome friends to the podcast. This is Kenny Jahng co-host of the Future.Bible show with Dj Chuang. Welcome. How are you doing today?
Dj Chuang: I’m doing great and I’m so excited for our guests today because we’re going to peak out podcasting.
Kenny Jahng: Yes. What we like to do in the show. If you’re new here for the first time it was, it like to bring on interview leaders and innovators and entrepreneurs, people, all the people that are relevant to the intersection of Bible and technology. We love to look ahead but we also like to see what’s happening right now in the space. And so, Dj and I like to have fun traveling across the globe as we say, meaning our friends across the internet of highway. Yoday we’ve got a really special guest. I think this is one of those things where we are looking at the, the plumbing of the technology and the things that we’re doing to make things happen and expose more people to the Bible and scripture. Rob, thank you so much for joining us from Libsyn. How are you doing today?
Rob Walch: Gentlemen, thank you so much for having me on.
Kenny Jahng: Before we get started, why don’t you just do the baseball card stats, tell us who you are, what you’re doing, what your role is over at Libsyn. What is Libsyn for those maybe 2% of the world that hasn’t heard of you guys yet?
Rob Walch: I am VP of podcaster relations at Libsyn. I’m a podcaster. I’ve been podcasting since the late in 2004, so I’ve been doing this over 14 years and Libsyn is a podcasting hosting company in the largest podcast hosting company. We look at number of downloads and active and episodes that are out there and we’ve been doing it. Libsyn has been hosting podcasts since also late 2004, the first podcast hosting company. And we host a lot of the big names that you may be familiar with. We have Joyce Meyer, we host, Kenneth Copeland, Dave Ramsey, or just some of the ones that host with us that your audience would know of. And host of the church, I go to Lifepoint church. Pastors podcasts there too.
Kenny Jahng: Did you have anything to do with that or was he podcasting before you got there?
Rob Walch: No, no, no, no. I bugged him to do podcasts trying to get him to go. Yes. No, no. One year, even for Christmas, I bought him a Yeti mic, you know, so, blue snowball way back when. But yes, I had a little bit to help pushing him that way.
Kenny Jahng: Because it’s always good to hear. You know, we are Dj and I are champions of podcasts being involved with multiple podcasts over the years. And let’s just talk about the podcast and relevance to the church in itself. I think a lot of people are surprised to hear that I, and correct me if I’m wrong, that Christianity, religion, spirituality, faith, that is actually the largest category of contents that you guys are hosting or iTunes is host that are coming out there,
Rob Walch: We have over 50,000 shows that are hosted with us active and of that over 15% or right around 15% are faith based. And it’s every faith you can think of, but Christianity’s by far the biggest of the faith based. And many of them are just repurposed sermons. But there’s nothing wrong with that. But then there’s a lot of religion, or original content or faith based, there’s a comedy podcast, um, you know, the bad Christian podcast where they talk about faith, but they maybe drop a few f bombs here, there. And there’s others like that, but there’s quite a few big names as I mentioned earlier, Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland, have their content out there as well so that they get obviously some good numbers.
Kenny Jahng: That’s amazing. And then I guess the first step that I recommend to most churches is just if you’re recording your sermons to get it out there on the platform and just see what happens, is that typically the first step if a church comes to you and say, “Hey, we are interested in podcasts” and what’s the first suggestion that you might have in terms of category content or the genre or?
Rob Walch: I’ll ask them what they’re going to do. Are you repurposing? If they are, you know, why didn’t you just put it in the main category in Christianity, if it’s a church, and have it in that way. But sometimes, you know, we have some churches that will have multiple podcasts so that what they have is they have, one is this sermon and then the next one they’ll have another series is the youth group. And they’ll have the youth group record each Wednesday when they get together. And then they have another one for a Bible group that gets together and talks about the Bible and they record that. So we’ll have maybe three different podcasts going that are on different. Sometimes they’ll combine them all in the same feed. Sometimes they’ll have different feeds for them, each one.
Rob Walch: So it just depends really what you were looking to do. The beauty about having the sermons repurposed is people go, “Oh, you know what? I make the sermon. It streams live.” Well, one, it’s happening. Well, if they’re not there, there’s a good chance they’re not there because they couldn’t watch or go to it. You see it live as it is. They had something else coming up. It could be a kid’s soccer game is scheduled for that time, you know, or kid’s basketball game, whatever it is. They might have a sporting event. They couldn’t make it to church because of whatever the event was, or they’re out of town. Now, they can listen to it while at their leisure, the sermon they missed during the week. It’s on demand. I think that’s the beauty of podcasting.
Dj Chuang: Yes. What I find amazing about podcasting has also not just amplifying the voices that already have a big platform through conferences and books and larger churches. But it’s also opened up this huge opportunity for what might be called narrow casting that people can find a voice with just a small audience of a couple hundred. And have you seen that being a big part of your Libsyn?
Rob Walch: Oh yeah. We’ve got some really narrow cast opportunities podcasts. There’s one called the chameleon breeders podcast, which is not for people that own chameleons, but for the people that are breeding the chameleons that you’re going to go then by. There’s one called the swine cast for professional pig raisers. There is a bird call radio podcast for learn about bird calls. There are very niche topics. If you won’t have a niche, you will be able to find probably a podcast or two or three on that niche. And that’s the beauty I mean, a podcast for chameleon breeders actually gets 800 downloads per episode, which is a huge number. I mean how many chameleon breeders do you think there are in the world? I can’t imagine there’s that many. But this guy’s got an audience of about 800, and actually monetizes it because of that. But not everybody, you know, it’s not always about monetizing. That’s the beauty of podcasting. You don’t have to monetize. You can just be doing a podcast to get the word out that you want to spread.
Kenny Jahng: Well, I love the fact that the economics work out, right? The, you’ll get Libsyn fees, they’re affordable. Almost anybody who wants to start publishing and start to build a tribe and audience and community can do it. And I love that fact that you’ve basically democratize the technology and the access to publishing so that it, right. And the thing is, people still think there is some magic or some huge production on the backend that’s needed. Or you need to invest in, you know, million dollars setups for studios, etc as it gets started. But really, you and I can start a podcast today on the streets with our smartphone, right? And, it’s accessible to everybody.
Rob Walch: And you don’t have to spend much, I mean, with Libsyn it starts at $5 a month and it goes, you know, 75 to 75 on our libsyn.com service. And we’ve been presenting at NRB or an exhibitor there for many years and I was asking someone last year, I noticed some of these radio station folks get mad at me, us here, why is that? And they go, “oh, well there’s some radio stations out there that they make their money off of churches charging them exorbitant fees” and these people are now realizing they can get their message out to a wider audience as a podcast than they were paying a radio station for one month. They can do 10 years of podcasting. So, yes, I can see how some people that have these for profit, quote unquote religious stations that are really just taking money onerous way from people they’re just trying to get the word out. And podcasting definitely breaks that down.
Kenny Jahng: Let me just ask that one question about that type of model of publishing. So technology has democratized everything on both sides. You know, and one, one question is, is a mass media channel kind of like radio or television, is that just going to die? Is radio going to die? Because at some point streaming media is going to be available and present in every single device that we have. And then the other question I have is what do you do with live experiences? Because I think shared experiences is still something that people want and crave in terms of our human nature, right? This just having some shared experiences, is Libsyn going that way? Are you going to ever or is there a capability to have some type of live broadcasting over the?
Rob Walch: We have no plans for live and in what we see, and I’ll tell you why, and what we see in live is people not do a live show and also have it available as a podcast. They will get 200 downloads after the fact for every one person that’s there alive and everybody that’s there alive, 100% of the people there live with listen to it after the fact anyway. So for the podcast, it doesn’t, in podcasting world doesn’t make a lot of sense to have that live. Now, most people can’t do a good show live and they need editing. I think a mistaken norm out there is that you can just go out and do a live show and be good at it. They see Adam Curry or they see some people that are real professional folks doing these live shows.
Rob Walch: Hit record it, stop and done. They are really, really talented. Most people don’t have that talent and it takes a little bit of editing to make yourself look good. And why not do the editing to make yourself look good, right? Why look bad when you can make yourself look better. But there are times to have live, so don’t get me wrong, there are still times have live sporting events. Make a lot of sense for live for local and radio stations in local markets. They make a lot of sense because of local advertisers. Local advertisers work well with the local radio station, not so well with a podcast that’s going out globally. And then you have to try to aggregate local ads into that. It’s a little bit more difficult. So there are places where radio stations will still continue to flourish. Sports events obviously being one live sporting events, having that live event covering the local basketball team, a local college football team or major league baseball team and talking about it after the win or loss, usually more talking after a loss in a win, but having that available, that’s still a place for, for radio.
Rob Walch: So don’t, I’m not trying to say podcasting will kill radio, it won’t, but there are definitely places where podcasting is better than radio. And that is where if you were trying to get a global message out, if you go try to buy airspace in every market in the US and see how much that’ll cost you, right? You could take tens and tens of thousands of dollars, probably a lot more than that, to get into each market, whereas you can spend $5 and now you have a global audience available to you.
Dj Chuang: Now podcasting has really taken off in recent years or so it seems. That you use the Libsyn since 2007 and you’ve seen the growth of podcasting and it, what has brought so much recent attention versus being kind of unknown in the past and more of a hobbyist kind of thing.
Rob Walch: A lot of the growth that we’ve seen in the last few years, and especially n growth, in number of articles written about it, it has been around the mobile area. Mobile smartphones have become, you know, your smartphone has become ubiquitous. Everybody has a smartphone and this is now a mobile device we can get those podcasts. On top of the mold, the smart phone becoming ubiquitous, Spotify, now Pandora have come into the space. So now it’s really to the point where any place you listen to audio, you can now listen to a podcast.
Rob Walch: So having a smartphone really helped a lot, but it’s still very skewed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s usually skewed iOS to Android, about a five to one ratio, iOS to Android. An Apple podcast is still the majority of where people listen. 60 plus percent listen to Apple podcasts in iTunes. So that is by far number one. Spotify as number two, but they’re are less than 10% there around 9% at number two. And then Overcast is third around three and a half percent. Those are the top three places where people consume podcasts. But mobile, 86% of consumption is mobile devices.
Kenny Jahng: Okay. So we’re a new podcast we launched last October and we’re trying to reach a broader audience, but that Apple podcast, a little directory, has a very small window for new shows to be discovered. So not just for us, but for others that are trying to reach a broader audience, how do they get themselves to be more easily discovered? Cause I find it difficult to navigate that whole Apple podcast tree?
Rob Walch: Right. So I always say the, you’ll hear people say there’s a discoverability in podcasting and what that really is is a podcast and myself, yourself saying, my podcast isn’t getting discovered. The consumers are finding podcasts through word of mouth. So word of mouth marketing is really how people discover other podcasts. The example I use is in the movies, the Sixth Sense in Lone Ranger. Both of those movies were by Disney. Both had the Disney marketing team behind it. Sixth Sense had a $40 million budget. Lone Ranger had $195 million budget. That 195 million, almost all of that went to marketing the movie. At the end of the day, Lone Ranger did 95 million in ticket sales. Sixth Sense 625 million worldwide ticket sales. Why? Because people told their friends, go see this. And then on one movie and the other one that said, don’t go see this, right?
Rob Walch: Word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool out there. So discoverability and podcasts really comes down to you as a podcaster initially kicking it off by finding your audience and then interacting with your audience and getting your audience to tell their friends and other folks about it. A good tricks to do on kicking it off is go to forum boards. Go to message groups that are in your niche and come in and contribute to them. Don’t go in and say, “Hey, I have a podcast”, that doesn’t help. That’s spamming. Go in and say, “Hey, answer questions”. And more importantly, find out who runs those communities, interview them. Find out who the community guy is that runs, you know, the WFX community as an example and say, “hey, you know, we’re going to be talking about Bible and technology and that’s what you guys, you’re covering your magazine, we’d love to have you come on the show” and interview them and get to be friends with the people that run those different communities. That’s a great way to help grow your show. But as far as you know, just making sure you have the right name and your show is so important because Apple podcasts is all about searching a result are all about that. What’s in the title of your show? So don’t try to be cute. There was a podcast once called the cheese doodle podcast. My name is still be out there. It didn’t tell you anything about what the podcasts was about. Hey, if you are into cheese doodles, that would be the one you look for and you’d be disappointed because it wasn’t even about that. It was about a totally different subject. Don’t be coy with your name. If your podcast is going to be about Bible and technology make sure Bible and technology are in the title of your podcast, you know, any other podcasts out there. What are the three words that you think people would search for Google Adsense, make them the title of your show. And if that’s not your title of your show, now change it. It doesn’t take much to change it.
Dj Chuang: Yes, that’s great. And the thing is, as podcasting is becoming more mainstream and it popularized as a smart phones are showing up in everybody’s pockets. There’s other brands that are starting to enter the space, like you said, Spotify, Spreaker, Soundcloud, Anchor, and in that kind of space, do podcast need to be everywhere or, does it brings confusion to people?
Rob Walch: Okay. So there’s where you host your podcast. So Libsyn’s going to a place where you would host your podcast and then you want to distribute it out everywhere. So you want to get it out first and foremost to apple podcasts by getting into apple podcast. Not, doesn’t only do you get to 60% from there, but then you also get Overcast, Shifty, Jellycast, Pocket Cast, Podcast Addict, Castbox, oh, and a bunch of other podcasts apps that pull from Apple’s directory.
Rob Walch: That’s about 80% of downloads. Then there’s Spotify, then there Stitcher, which is about 2%. And then tune in and iHeartRadio. But if you host it lives in these, some of these are destinations you just publish right out to them. On Spotify, you submit right into Spotify from inside your lips and account. I saw someone that signed up to an account the other day last week and they signed up and we’re live in Spotify with their show within 90 minutes. So from 90 minutes signing up for an account, they had their show live in Spotify. Now Apple podcast takes a little bit longer to get live. You gotta go submit to them. But the point is it doesn’t take long. There’s not a lot of places you have to submit. Overall four or five really are going to cover you for the majority of the consumption, but you should be everywhere and you definitely. As Pandora is not fully open yet.
Rob Walch: When Pandora opens up more, you want to be in Pandora as well. Spotify when we work with Spotify and we helped them launch podcasts and initially we were giving them the initial group of shows and I was like 300 shows and one of the ones they put in there, it was Joyce Meyer and they’re like, oh no, we don’t see that. I’m like, no, trust me. Joyce is going to do good for you. And when we launched and Joyce did well the first show, they came back category that came back after seeing Joyce’s number is good. You have more than just chose. Yes, because they were very surprised. They didn’t think that the millennials would be entering. I’m like, no, there’s a lot of evangelical millennials like trust me on this. She’s going to do really well for you. And she did. She was one of their biggest shows launch. I mean she was up there with Joe Rogan, that’s actually, sorry Joseline and there was another one that was up there, I’m trying remember. Then another comedy podcast that was really big up there. Mark Maron, that’s what it was. And she was like, right, neck and neck with Mark Maron. As far as numbers go when Spotify launched.
Kenny Jahng: Now, Spotify has gone even further in their commitment. They just announced this past week, right? The half $1 billion of investments in this category. What does that mean? I put out on my daily Vlog, little mini editorial reflection on that. I just, I think it’s gonna do wonders for the industry and we’re not going to, that’s the tip of the iceberg. What are your thoughts on that?
Rob Walch: My thoughts are this, Spotify is already did a lot to get to number two. I mean, there hasn’t been a number two in podcasting since Zune and that really isn’t, who remembers Zune? That’s how long ago it was. We had a number two in podcasting. So Spotify has already done a lot, did two acquisitions, they did last week, Gimlet and anchor are going to mean absolutely nothing to the average everyday podcaster. Gimlet is not that big. It’s 24 shows overall, one of which is a recap show. And then they haven’t released new episodes in the last year. So we really looking at a dozen shows. They get about 12 million downloads a year. I’ve got individual shows that host on Libsyn. They get more downloads per month than Gimlet gets per month for those 12 shows. They get 12 million a month, not a year, sorry, about 12 million a month. So we have individual shows that are getting more downloads than all of the Gimlet shows combined. So overall,
Kenny Jahng: Right. So you’re saying you’re on the other side of the fence, I guess then, but don’t you think the, I mean there’s a lot of attention that was brought to that news and the fact that they’re signaling and they’re not done yet. And just a half a billion dollars, I think is a big number. Don’t you think that there’s going to be other people in that space and also it’s going to lead to at least even on Spotify as platform lead to user experienced innovation and discovering and cataloging and presenting the shows and titles, etc?
Rob Walch: I think the bigger news is that they’re committed to stick with podcasting. So it’s not like, hey, we got an antelope, but you know, they’ve been around, and maybe I’m biased because I’ve been working with Spotify for, you know, a couple of years before they even launched. So I’ve seen the Spotify is commitment for the last four or five years into podcasting space. So I know that they were committed and I’ve talked with the folks and I know the folks they are committed and they have podcasts. I think Gimlet is going to be more important to them longer term in creating original content that will probably just be on Spotify, not so much the Gimlet content they got. Anchor doesn’t really get them all that much. It doesn’t get me anything in the way of content. Most of the shows on Anchor aren’t even, the majority of shows on Anchor actually are dead shows, not producing new content, which is well known. And, and most, there’s none of the shows, matter of fact, none of the shows of the Anchor shows are in the top 200 episodes or top 200 podcasts in iTunes. And matter of fact, none of the Gimlet episodes where even at the top 100 episodes, when you look in the top 100 episodes.
Kenny Jahng: Anchor just recently shifted to that podcasting thing too, right? So it’s not like, they’re not a behemoth in the podcasting. They’re a newbie in the industry per se.
Rob Walch: Right. They make it easy for people to create a podcast in. But the problem with podcasting has never been about creating a podcast. I think the hard part of podcasting isn’t getting an RSS feed and creating their file. The hard part about podcasting is creating something interesting to say. And I think what, you know, Anchor is a technology play. But it doesn’t make it easier for podcasters to create good content. Creating good content takes work. And that’s shown by the number of dead Anchor shows that there are, I mean, they have more dead shows from Anchor in iTunes and any other hosts out there.
Kenny Jahng: Good. Now, in terms of churches and ministries and individuals that are looking at this is a channel to adopt in terms of either remixing, repurposing their existing content or creating new content in the podcast form factor. What would you say to that audience that’s listening here today? Because we’re trying to figure out on the edge, you know, people are always trying to prioritize and sequence they’re limited bandwidth and limited budget, the limited energies as an advocate for podcasting, how would you positions that a champion that for someone who has that decision in front of them?
Rob Walch: First of all I ask, you know, are you trying to grow or are you trying to just make it a convenience factor for the audience? Right. So if it’s just about, hey, I want to make what we have available, it’s already easy. You know, you record your Sunday sermon and it can be as simple as putting a recorder on the pulpit and recording that. Right? Hopefully you have an audio board you can plug into and pull the audio out of that. But it just depends on the set up of the church. Most, you know, just have recordings any, most people are recording their sermons as it goes. Now you just make it available as an MP3 file. You got to be careful though on the music that you have. You can’t be repurposing music. Some people will have music that they play in the sermon.
Rob Walch: You can’t put that on a podcast if you don’t have the rights to that music. Now, if you’re trying to grow, your Sunday sermon isn’t usually going to be your best opportunity to grow. It might be, it depends on who you are. But you may want to look at original content and again, that might be something where you have a series, maybe you go more in depth than you would have in your Sunday sermon on a specific topic. Maybe you’re going to talk about mental health or issues with internet porn or whatever it is that you, the subject that you were getting into that you might want to go a little bit deeper, that may bring some attention to back to you as the pastor and your church and maybe even that your own congregation wanted to hear more of that. You just didn’t want to hold them over because you know, it was football season and you had to get them out the door before 11:30. All right. Cause the chiefs were playing on at noon. So there are time limits that you have on Sunday. Realistic time limits, right? This gives you an opportunity to go a little bit further than, you know, you don’t want everybody nod off.
Kenny Jahng: Now we see some Youtube vlogger pastors out there, I know Trey Van Camp as a friend and we’ve seen him use that vlog medium to actually gain the awareness of people in this community and beyond. There’s Justin Co, there’s a bunch of other Christian vloggers out there. Do you know of any podcasters out there that are explicitly using it as a growth engine or trying to explicitly from a church planting point of view or even a nonprofit ministry point of view, if they’re not a church to grow their audience, their donor base or things like that?
Rob Walch: There are, well, you know, Hillsong is one. There’s, trying to remember the name of the, Elevation is another one that’s doing a lot of podcasts and you know, what does Elevation have? Like 15 satellite campuses around Charlotte or something like that. So yeah, I mean they’re using the podcast as a way, as a communication device to get out, wear it out in their market and beyond. So there are definitely are churches have been very aggressive with their podcast strategy and when you see that it’s not about just repurpose and content. It’s a growth strategy.
Kenny Jahng: Gotcha. Last question I guess would be, you know, couple of years down the line, I feel I’ve want to say 5, 10 years, but we are living in dog years cycles for technology innovation these days it’s only getting faster. But what do you think the next, I guess evolution of, is podcast always going to be the form factor that it is today? Or is it, is there something that’s gonna break in terms of innovation to get to something new, fresh, something that’s different?
Rob Walch: Well, I think one thing to note about podcasting is most podcasts, the majority are audio. There’s more time in the day to consume audio than video. And when we see someone that has both an audio and a video podcast, it’s going to get 10 times more downloads on the audio than the video. And it’s more time when you walk in the dog walk, working out, driving the car to work, go walk into the grocery store. You can be listening to a podcast. So I don’t see that changing. I am anything, people’s lives gets busier and busier. And I think the audio, because it hasn’t even been a better opportunity because you get, you get to fill those small pieces of the day where they have opportunity to only listen to audio and not do anything. And we still see more downloads during the week when people are going to and from work and that work.
Rob Walch: So I don’t see that changing now what I do see something changing it in a growth point of view is right now iOS, Android ratio is five to one, iOS, Android. But there’s five times more Android devices than iOS. That means typical iPhone gets 25 time more consumption of podcasts and the typical Android device. And that’s where there’s an opportunity in podcasts for growth in the next five years is on the Android side with Android releasing a native app, hopefully event at some point in the future. That’s where we’ve seen Spotify help out, and now Pandora coming on board. So we’re going to see more growth in the next few years in podcasting from Androids perspective because it’s just the low hanging fruit and it just, we haven’t seen it anything there. I can’t imagine that only people that are interested in podcasts are those that on an iPhone. I have to imagine that it’s going to, we’re going to see the same amount of interest of eventually on the Android side.
Kenny Jahng: Yes. It’s not only fanboys, Apple fan boys who listens podcasts.
Rob Walch: Because it covers every topic. I mean there’s even podcasts about Android. So Android central has a really good one. If you have any Android feature. If you’re on the iPhone today and iOS, I just have to put a plug in there that, that will, you don’t want to listen to that though if you’re on an Android because I’m not nice to Android phones.
Dj Chuang: Well, I am just awe struck sitting here listening to you talk, Rob because your podcast, that trend and it’s obvious in your voice and your experience that you have a lot of depth and breadth in your understand podcasting. And you know how to think on your toes. I guess you’re very interesting person. To create interesting content, we need interesting people. So thank you for making time to chat with us. And you gave us some really nuggets there in terms of how, not just launched the podcast, how to better engage with our audience. So thank you Rob, and look forward to seeing you at NRB this year.
Rob Walch: John, thank you so much for having me on. And please come by the booth. I look forward to taking your hands and saying hi and share some chocolate with you that we always have on the booth.
Kenny Jahng: You always have a great booth. Do you know your booth number yet? They always tell us to say our booth. I don’t know.
Rob Walch: Yes, it’s, oh and I don’t remember now. l start promoting it here in the next, next few weeks. I think we were like 550 something.
Kenny Jahng: We’ll put us in the show notes for everybody, but definitely I think you make a game out of it. Come see Robin, the Libsyn booth and come see us over at American Bible Society .Bible booth.
Dj Chuang: 348 and NRB is the National Religious Broadcasters convention. This year it’s called Proclaim. It’s an Anaheim, California right across from the street from Disneyland and March 26th and 29th we would love to meet you in person as well. So thank you listeners for listening and watching Future.Bible. And we are always looking for more interesting people to talk with because we want to be the place where you can be innovators, ready to talk about how we can apply to the always evolving world of technology to the never changing message, found it in the Bible off for real life change. So until next time, be blessed and remember to be a blessing.
HIGHLIGHTS:
04:22 I’ll ask them what they’re going to do. Are you repurposing? If they are, you know, why didn’t you just put it in the main category in Christianity, if it’s a church, and have it in that way. But sometimes, you know, we have some churches that will have multiple podcasts so that what they have is they have, one is this sermon and then the next one they’ll have another series is the youth group. And they’ll have the youth group record each Wednesday when they get together. And then they have another one for a Bible group that gets together and talks about the Bible and they record that. So we’ll have maybe three different podcasts going that are on different. Sometimes they’ll combine them all in the same feed. Sometimes they’ll have different feeds for them, each one.
09:40 We have no plans for live and in what we see, and I’ll tell you why, and what we see in live is people not do a live show and also have it available as a podcast. They will get 200 downloads after the fact for every one person that’s there alive and everybody that’s there alive, 100% of the people there live with listen to it after the fact anyway. So for the podcast, it doesn’t, in podcasting world doesn’t make a lot of sense to have that live. Now, most people can’t do a good show live and they need editing. I think a mistaken norm out there is that you can just go out and do a live show and be good at it. They see Adam Curry or they see some people that are real professional folks doing these live shows.
12:20 A lot of the growth that we’ve seen in the last few years, and especially n growth, in number of articles written about it, it has been around the mobile area. Mobile smartphones have become, you know, your smartphone has become ubiquitous. Everybody has a smartphone and this is now a mobile device we can get those podcasts. On top of the mold, the smart phone becoming ubiquitous, Spotify, now Pandora have come into the space. So now it’s really to the point where any place you listen to audio, you can now listen to a podcast.
14:05 The consumers are finding podcasts through word of mouth. So word of mouth marketing is really how people discover other podcasts. The example I use is in the movies, the Sixth Sense in Lone Ranger. Both of those movies were by Disney. Both had the Disney marketing team behind it. Sixth Sense had a $40 million budget. Lone Ranger had $195 million budget. That 195 million, almost all of that went to marketing the movie. At the end of the day, Lone Ranger did 95 million in ticket sales. Sixth Sense 625 million worldwide ticket sales. Why? Because people told their friends, go see this. And then on one movie and the other one that said, don’t go see this, right?
Word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool out there. So discoverability and podcasts really comes down to you as a podcaster initially kicking it off by finding your audience and then interacting with your audience and getting your audience to tell their friends and other folks about it.
15:43 But as far as you know, just making sure you have the right name and your show is so important because Apple podcasts is all about searching a result are all about that. What’s in the title of your show? So don’t try to be cute. There was a podcast once called the cheese doodle podcast. My name is still be out there. It didn’t tell you anything about what the podcasts was about. Hey, if you are into cheese doodles, that would be the one you look for and you’d be disappointed because it wasn’t even about that. It was about a totally different subject. Don’t be coy with your name. If your podcast is going to be about Bible and technology make sure Bible and technology are in the title of your podcast, you know, any other podcasts out there. What are the three words that you think people would search for Google Adsense, make them the title of your show. And if that’s not your title of your show, now change it. It doesn’t take much to change it.
18:16 Spotify when we work with Spotify and we helped them launch podcasts and initially we were giving them the initial group of shows and I was like 300 shows and one of the ones they put in there, it was Joyce Meyer and they’re like, oh no, we don’t see that. I’m like, no, trust me. Joyce is going to do good for you. And when we launched and Joyce did well the first show, they came back category that came back after seeing Joyce’s number is good. You have more than just chose. Yes, because they were very surprised. They didn’t think that the millennials would be entering. I’m like, no, there’s a lot of evangelical millennials like trust me on this. She’s going to do really well for you. And she did. She was one of their biggest shows launch. I mean she was up there with Joe Rogan, that’s actually, sorry Joseline and there was another one that was up there, I’m trying remember. Then another comedy podcast that was really big up there. Mark Maron, that’s what it was. And she was like, right, neck and neck with Mark Maron. As far as numbers go when Spotify launched.
19:35 Spotify is already did a lot to get to number two. I mean, there hasn’t been a number two in podcasting since Zune and that really isn’t, who remembers Zune? That’s how long ago it was. We had a number two in podcasting. So Spotify has already done a lot, did two acquisitions, they did last week, Gimlet and anchor are going to mean absolutely nothing to the average everyday podcaster. Gimlet is not that big. It’s 24 shows overall, one of which is a recap show. And then they haven’t released new episodes in the last year. So we really looking at a dozen shows. They get about 12 million downloads a year. I’ve got individual shows that host on Libsyn. They get more downloads per month than Gimlet gets per month for those 12 shows. They get 12 million a month, not a year, sorry, about 12 million a month. So we have individual shows that are getting more downloads than all of the Gimlet shows combined
22:20 But the problem with podcasting has never been about creating a podcast. I think the hard part of podcasting isn’t getting an RSS feed and creating their file. The hard part about podcasting is creating something interesting to say.
23:40 are you trying to grow or are you trying to just make it a convenience factor for the audience? Right. So if it’s just about, hey, I want to make what we have available, it’s already easy. You know, you record your Sunday sermon and it can be as simple as putting a recorder on the pulpit and recording that. Right? Hopefully you have an audio board you can plug into and pull the audio out of that. But it just depends on the set up of the church. Most, you know, just have recordings any, most people are recording their sermons as it goes. Now you just make it available as an MP3 file.
27:28 Well, I think one thing to note about podcasting is most podcasts, the majority are audio. There’s more time in the day to consume audio than video. And when we see someone that has both an audio and a video podcast, it’s going to get 10 times more downloads on the audio than the video.
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