63. Everything you need to know about Podcasting 2.0 with Daniel J. Lewis

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There are generally four distinct groups of people that form around different technology types, whether it's an existing or new technology. I mean, we're seeing it play out right now with AI. So we have the first group of people, those who understand the underlying technology and how it works and why. This group are usually technologists, they're researchers, the developers. Then we have the next group of people who understand it from an application or commercial perspective, how the technology can actually be applied to particular situations or use cases.

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And this group are usually the early adopters and they're the evangelists of the technology. And once the technology becomes a little more mainstream, we then have the group of people who are trying to get up the curve to learn more about how they could use the technology in their own lives. And then we have the last group who are either indifferent, they don't care, or maybe they haven't even heard about the thing yet. Now, for someone who is relatively good across the board with emerging technologies, I mean, I started learning about blockchain and AI over six years ago. I have been woefully ignorant of a new technology development in this industry.

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The podcasting industry. Yep. Until about two weeks ago. Even though I'd heard this quote, podcasting 2.0 term being bandied about, I was very much in that fourth group of people who was quite ignorant about what it was and what it actually meant. And I knew that I had to change that and learn about it.

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And honestly, who better to learn from than someone who is spearheading some of the Podcasting 20 initiatives? So I got in touch with my friend Daniel J. Lewis to find out what the big deal was with 20. And once he enlightened me on what was happening and how we could leverage these developments to grow our podcast audience and more effectively monetize them, well, I couldn't keep that to myself. I had to have him share with you too.

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So if you've never heard about this thing called Podcasting 20, or maybe you've seen the term but had no idea what it referred to, then this is suddenly the episode for you. My name is Deirdre Tshien, CEO and co founder of Capsho, the fastest way to market and grow your podcast. And this is the Grow my podcast show. Yay.

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People will often think of me as, are you Daniel J. Lewis? And I say no. If I hear one more Daniel J. Lewis joke, there will be blood. Instead, I'm Daniel J. Lewis.

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I help podcasters. I've been podcasting myself since 2007, and my business that emerged from that is helping podcasters. And I work as a developer in building my own products. Like my Podcast Reviews is a service that gathers reviews for podcasters. And I have a podcast about podcasting.

00:02:52
So you can tell I'm really passionate about the podcasting industry, its future and its potential. And so that's what I do is help podcasters make great podcasts. Daniel had started his dream job back in his early 20s, which unfortunately, or fortunately for us, meant he had a 90 minutes commute each way. Once he had exhausted the radio, talk shows, audiobooks, and his entire music collection, Daniel stumbled upon itunes and he fell in love. He fell in love because here was a place where he could find exactly the things he wanted to listen to.

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Whether that be a geeky podcast for Christians or a podcast about grammar. Daniel had finally found his outlet. And after a few years of sitting on the sidelines, Daniel decided to finally go all in on figuring this RSS thing out and creating his own podcast. And then after a few years of podcasting, I really found that there were things that I wanted to share in the podcasting space and just some extra opinions and experience I thought I could add. So I started the Audacity to Podcast, a podcast about podcasting in 2010 and that's what really took over for me and helped me discover a business model of helping podcasters.

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But it's all just started with I felt like I had something to contribute and to give that I wanted to share. And I promise you that Daniel keeps giving. In fact, he has been full on immersing himself into Podcasting 2.0 and helping it, helping to really bring it to life. And I was curious to know, before we get into what 2.0 even is, I was curious to know why, why 2.0 and what even prompted it into being. When you look at the history of podcasting, the technology to make a podcast possible actually existed since 2000 with the RSS feeds, RSS 2.0 spec and such, and Adam Curry's inspiration there with Dave Weiner, who adam Curry inspired the podcast abilities.

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Dave Weiner created RSS, so that was back in 2000. No one really did anything with it for a while. And then when Apple came along with itunes 4.9, they standardized a bunch of features. That's how we get stuff like our cover art, our description, all this other information that goes along with your podcast. So Apple created this standard of technical details that go into an RSS feed that really make it an effective podcast RSS feed.

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And for many years that was the only standard and there were all kinds of other features that podcasters wanted and that audiences would benefit from. But Apple wasn't really innovating. In some more recent years. They did finally update the spec to add things like an episode number to add the feature, for you to have seasons with your podcast, and some of these other things that they've added in addition to expanding how many categories there were. But it was still predominantly controlled by one company and other apps couldn't really influence what Apple would do.

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Apple moves very slowly and very intentionally. The podcasting industry moves a lot faster than that. So adam Curry, as the father of podcasting, really saw that he basically had enough. A couple of things were happening at that time a couple of years ago. One was censorship was starting to come to podcasting in an interesting and challenging way.

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And this isn't about whether you're far left, far right, far center, or far out. It's just this is an issue that people are facing and it can really affect your connection with your audience wherever you are on the spectrum. So, for one thing, he wanted to create a system that was free of corporate censorship and political censorship and all of that, but also along the way, thinking about, there are all of these improvements we want in podcasting, ways that we can connect better with our audiences, and it's just not existing because everyone's looking to Apple to make these changes. And we do owe a lot of thanks to Apple for how they led and cut the trail for us, but they're just not really innovating in what podcasting can do or some of the things that they're doing are. Starting to become more proprietary, similar to what Spotify is doing, where many of their innovations are also proprietary.

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Whereas RSS as a technology is extensible so you can build on top of it. So we started building into what would Podcasting 2.0 be, and that is adding these features and benefits to the technical back end that give a podcaster new benefits and give audiences new benefits. And actually, I would say it benefits everyone, podcasters audiences, developers on all sides of the RSS feed and even advertisers. So everyone stands to benefit from Podcasting 20. Wow, so fascinating.

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Okay, so I know what you might be thinking. How can Podcasting 20 genuinely help us if we can't get the big podcast app players like itunes and Spotify to move the dial on it? Yep, that's exactly what I was wondering. So I asked Daniel this very question, and he has some really insightful viewpoints on this that I've created into a bonus clip for you. So all you have to do to get that is head over to the description of this episode in your player, click on the link, and that will take you to the podcast website where you'll be able to access all the resources, including this bonus clip.

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Because what I wanted us to get into as quickly as possible is why should we care? Why should we, as podcast hosts, personally be caring about what's coming with podcast digging 20? What's in it for us? And I know that's what you're thinking, because that's exactly what I'm thinking too. Well, I think most podcast hosts would say that the things they want most are a bigger audience.

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Money is probably somewhere in there too. Some people don't care about the money, and that's fine if you don't care about the money, but a lot of people do want to earn money from their podcast, and they want to engage their audience in some way or have some kind of fun doing what they're doing. And that usually involves some kind of engagement with their audience. So growth, profit and engagement, those are the top things that people tend to want. Podcasting 20 has features that can serve each of those areas.

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Like for example, with growth it can provide you opportunities to make it easier for your audience to help spread your podcast. Like we have the whole waveforms or audiograms things, snippets, that kind of stuff that we can make, our audiences can make, we can make it manually. Well, Podcasting 2.0 has a feature where you can suggest a particular specific section of your episode as a snippet. So then podcast apps can read that and automatically suggest that as, hey, you might want to share this part. Just like I'm not sure if you've read a popular ebook on a Kindle, but you get to a section, you'll see little underlines of something and that's a section that a lot of people have highlighted.

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I'm not sure about you, but when I see that I think, oh, I should pay attention to this because a lot of other people thought this was really important and now that I've read it, I see why it's really important. I'm going to highlight that section too. So you are inspiring that virality in the growth of your podcast by doing that kind of thing as well as those exact same snippets that you've indicated in your episode. Could also be a way that people can sample your podcast to see what do they talk about, what is some of the value I can get from this? So you can more quickly hook people into your podcast.

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And there are lots of ways that apps can use this and that's just one feature. So that's a way that hosts can benefit from this. Just one of the ways you look at the monetization aspect as well. And there are some simple straightforward features where you can indicate this is my PayPal address, or this is where you can go to donate to the podcast page, a website payment platform, anything like that, that you can have. So then the apps can expose that link very easily with a dollar sign, pound sign, whatever currency sign.

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But there are also new ways that audiences can support a podcast financially through what's called the Value for value model, which is basically I'm giving you value in the podcast. You can give value back to me in either the way that Adam Curry puts this is time talent or treasure time, like helping volunteering in some way. Like that talent is using your own talents to make something, contribute something. Or treasure is finances of some sort. So the Value for Value system is built around Bitcoin as a most popular cryptocurrency because that makes it easy to transfer things.

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And there are some technical things that happen in the background that we don't have to really get into, but it makes it really easy to send micro payments. I've done a whole episode of the Audacity to podcast about, do micro payments actually matter? Are they worth it? And I think they are, because when you look at a traditional CPM sponsorship, cost per mill, you are making each member of your audience worth a tiny fraction. Like, let's take $25 CPM for example.

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That's a typical average. If you get all of that $25, which usually you don't, but if you do, then you are essentially making each person in your audience worth 2.5 cents per episode they listen to. So what if your audience, if you could get only 5% of your audience to give you twenty five cents per episode, a mere $0.25, which is possible in this valued for value ecosystem, you can't accept a 25 cent donation through PayPal. They take $0.50 just right off the top, plus their percentage fee. But in the value for value model, you can receive these tiny, tiny payments.

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So at $0.25, with only 5% of your audience giving twenty five cents per episode, you would be making as much as you would with a $25 CPM sponsor. But you are engaging your audience. You're giving your audience the opportunity to engage and give back to you, which turns them into more loyal fans of your podcast, helps them feel more part of your podcast, especially if you give them shoutouts in your podcast instead of mentioning a sponsor. That kind of thing is more tightly integrating a community and helping you to monetize your podcast without having to grow your audience. Because if you're at $25 CPM and you have an audience of only 100 people, the only way to get more money is either accept more ads or grow your audience.

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But with a value for value model, you can earn more money by engaging your audience more, by providing more value for them, providing the value that they want and expect from your podcast, and they can choose whatever that is worth to them, which could be a lot more than a $25 CPM would be worth. This stuff is really cool. My mind is just whirring with all of the possibilities and what this could mean for all of us here, and we're actually going to go through those possibilities and what it is that we could be doing right now to start preparing ourselves for Podcasting 20. Okay, let's first dive straight into transcripts. There have been many debates among podcasters about the usefulness of the transcript.

00:14:14
Do they actually help with SEO? Does anyone even read transcripts? Well, 20 will solve the debate for you because transcripts are going to become a bigger and bigger deal with Podcasting 2.0. So let's talk about how exactly they will finally be useful. Yeah, so I have said for a while, because a lot of people would say, oh, you need to get a transcript for your podcast because it helps with search engine optimization and accessibility.

00:14:38
And the accessibility aspect of a transcript is true, the SEO aspect, it's better than nothing. But what I've often said is that transcripts are a lazy podcaster's way to get poor quality, poor performing show notes for their podcast. But with Podcasting 20, there is now a specific transcript feature. So when you get your transcript from Capsho or you make it yourself or whatever you use, then you can put it in this special feature field for your podcast. So you are then exposing the transcript in a way that apps can understand it.

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So it's not just a transcript on a web page, but the apps can actually understand it. And what's really neat with this is if it's a time based transcript, then, like closed captioning on a TV show or a movie, people can be listening to the podcast and look down at their device. And if they enable the transcripts. They can see the words that you're saying, which that's beautiful for accessibility, even for people who can't hear but want to know exactly what you said, which is great, especially if your podcast just doesn't read very well, or if it's an audio drama or something like that. But it also helps with maybe someone wants to just review what did they just say?

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It also helps with some of the social sharing. Like if someone decides I want to share this snippet, then the tool could automatically pull the text from the transcript for that specific timecode to build a tweet from that. So your tweet can contain the text you're quoting from the podcast, making the podcast episode more shareable. Or if you're the type of person who likes to take notes on podcasts, you could do something like share this to my Notes app and it automatically copies the text from that portion of the podcast into your notes for you as the listener. And all of this is making it systematically more accessible because it's built into a data structure that apps can understand and developers can do stuff with, but it's also making it more user friendly than merely a page that has your transcript that people have to follow along or else they'll lose their place.

00:16:48
There's so much more potential now simply by exposing the transcript in a computer friendly way than just the way that people have done it in the past, trying to do cheap stuff, really. Okay, wow, this is sounding so powerful and quite a bit of fun, right? So I was curious because I want to make this as tangible as possible for us. What are the top four features of Podcasting 20? From Daniel's perspective?

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In my opinion, the four features that I think are the most important. Number one, transcripts now that they're actually legitimately helpful and not just lazy. Number two, I would say if you want to monetize your podcast or you want to give your audience the opportunity to give back to you, look into supporting value for value that is a little bit more technical and has a bit more of a hurdle to entry, but if you can get on now, that's great. Or if you want to wait until it's easier, that's fine. Number three would be chapters.

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And we've had Chapters in podcasting for many, many years and many years ago, even before Chapters, we had enhanced podcasts which were chapters in a podcast but in a different media format. A chapter is a way that people can see like a table of contents, or they can jump to a particular section or jump back to something to be able to review it, or even just to see a quick outline of what you cover in your podcast. That's a very easy thing to do. And Chapters can be great for your audience to be able to follow along. And there are extended abilities coming in the future of things that Chapters could do too.

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It's not formalized yet, but some other things like being able to see your quick links that you're mentioning for a section, or if you've got a whole gallery of images that you want to share that your audience could then see that gallery in their podcast app and swipe through the images at their own pace. If you have a photography podcast or you just have anything that you want to share, whatever it is and other things, even in the future of being able to share a portion of your income for people based on a particular chapter point in your audio, like for a song that you played, maybe you want to give a sort of royalty to someone who licensed that song for you or anything like that. So the Chapters are the number three feature and then the number four feature, and this one is so fringe that it's still only a concept. And I'm taking point on how to make this possible lately is what we call cross app comments. This is the thing I said a moment ago that I'm going to mention this no matter what we talk about, because this is something that I think can really benefit the podcasters and be really fun for the audience right now.

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If you want to comment on an episode you're listening to, you have feedback, you want to agree with something, disagree with something, respond, whatever, for whatever reason, where do you do that? There are all of these places you can do it, but none of those places are inside the podcast app itself. You have to leave the podcast app in order to comment on it. Whether you're going to the website, you're going to Twitter to a Facebook group, anything like that. You have to leave the podcast app in order to engage with the podcaster through comments.

00:19:59
So cross app comments would be comments on the episodes that work in different apps, across apps, so what app do you use for listening to podcasts? I currently use a mix of Spotify, Nitunes and Apple podcasts. Okay, so if now those being the big guys, they'll be the last ones probably to implement this. But imagine this, that you're listening to a podcast in Apple podcasts and you comment on it from Apple podcasts. Then someone who is listening through Overcast can see that comment.

00:20:32
They can respond to you or they can add their own comment. Then someone else listening with Pocketcast can also add to the conversation. Someone else listening on podcast Addict can add to the conversation. So it's the same comment thread all across these different apps. But all right there inside the podcast app and there are the potentials here for kind of like on Twitch and YouTube Live, you have super chats where something could be highlighted because maybe someone gave a donation in association with that comment.

00:21:04
So it maybe gets a little extra prominence in the thread or anything like that. This is a way that you can directly engage with your audience inside the podcast app. They don't have to leave to comment and your audience can engage with each other, which is key to building a loyal community is letting your audience connect with each other. Then it's not just a me to you relationship, but it's you to them relationship. And that community feel also helps build loyalty, which helps you grow your podcast because people will say things like, oh, you got to listen to this podcast and you got to meet these other community members and it's really fun to participate in this community.

00:21:47
That's what cross app comments enable. And it's my new favorite feature. It's very cutting edge. We don't have it worked out yet, but I say yet and that's as of near the end of April 2023 when we're recording this. So maybe by the time you're hearing this episode we've worked it out, then maybe we've got some things that could very potentially be worked out by then.

00:22:10
But those four things are where I think you should focus the easiest one, especially since you're listening to this podcast and I hope you're a customer of Capsho. I'm not being paid to say that transcripts would be the easy thing to do. You could get your transcript from Capsho, put it in your Podcasting 2.0 transcript feature, if your publishing tool provides it, then the other things as you're able to or interested in adding them. But the transcripts, that's an easy one to start using. Yes.

00:22:38
If you're listening to this right now, you're a captchobian, right? Right. Okay. So put up your hand. If you've been struggling to figure out how to build a community around your podcast, how cool is it that we're going to be able to start doing some of this stuff inside podcast playing apps?

00:22:55
This is really some pretty powerful stuff, but let's bring it back to the here and now, what do we need to be doing to take advantage of the features of 20 that are available to us right now? So to take advantage of this right now, what you need to do is look at whatever tool you're using to create your podcast RSS feed, because that's where these Podcasting 2.0 features live primarily, is in your RSS feed. So whether you're using WordPress or PowerPress or anything like that to generate your feed or you're using a podcast hosting provider blueberry, Libson, Captivate, any of those companies, ask them, or maybe you see right on their site what kind of Podcasting 2.0 features they offer. And these companies are developing at their own paces. Like Captivate, for example, didn't support hardly any of these features until just recently.

00:23:45
They dumped a whole load of new support on features, and there are other things they don't support yet, but what you want to see is the company already supports some features and is committed to supporting more. And here's the thing I say that's kind of a litmus test for this is if your publishing tool does not support any Podcasting 2.0 features by now, I think you should switch. And that's drawing a line in the sand. And I'm not afraid to draw that line because this is the innovation happening in podcasting that benefits everyone. And there's a feature that will benefit listeners, especially that we haven't even touched on yet, which I'm going to make sure we get to it no matter what you say.

00:24:26
But it's so much potential here. And it's not like a couple of years ago, we had this thing of IAB standard measurement guidelines for podcasting downloads. And that's a nice thing to know, that one company measures your download stats the same as another. But does that benefit your audience? No, it doesn't.

00:24:46
The accuracy of your stats don't really matter to your audience, but these Podcasting 2.0 features and benefits do matter to your audience. So I think this is far more important than how you measure your downloads, but it's about how you engage your audience and how you make your podcast accessible, how you make it fun, how you make it profitable for you and your audience, and all of these features that benefit everyone. Who else is fired up about this? I'd love to know which aspect of Podcasting 2.0 you're most excited about for you and your audience. If you head over to the description for this episode, click on the link and scroll down until you see the leave me a message link.

00:25:27
I'd love for you to leave me a message. And while you're on my podcast website page leaving a message, well, you may as well grab that bonus clip as well where Daniel shares his thoughts on how Podcasting 20 can genuinely help us if we can't get the big podcast player apps like itunes and Spotify to really adopt it. And of course, if you want to learn more about Podcasting 20, here's how you can do it. So if you're interested in taking advantage of some of this and learning more, there are several places you go now. Right now it is mostly the nerdy geeky talk going on in some places, but if you want to kind of get an idea of what's going on, a couple podcasts that I recommend you check out.

00:26:08
One is podcasting. 2.0 that's hosted by the two guys leading the charge on this and making the decisions, adam Curry and Dave Jones. That is a podcast. Podcasting 2.0. It's in your podcast app.

00:26:21
You can find it. Now. That one's very nerdy and techy. So if you want something that's a bit more down to earth, then I suggest you listen to Dave Jackson and myself in the Future of Podcasting, where we talk about many of these things, Podcasting 2.0, as well as other things involved in the future of podcasting. Like we're going to have an episode soon about transcripts, an episode about using AI in podcasting.

00:26:45
I know Capsho will get a mention in that episode and where we're just talking the overall future, so that's a good place to go. Also, I've covered Podcasting 2.0 here and there in my own podcast, the Audacity to Podcast@theodacitytopodcast.com, and you can reach out to me on Twitter easily at theDanielJLewis or contact me through my website as well if you're interested in working directly with me or any of my products or services. I am so excited to see how Podcasting 20 unfolds and honestly, to be a part of this moment in history. That's kind of what it feels like right now. I hope you're excited to come along for the ride too.

00:27:22
My name is Deirdre Tshien. Stay awesome.