Internetting Better
- Create a role of tastemaker for the network. They’re the evangelist for the entire network of shows large and small. They themselves release a regular podcast but are also actively blogging and social media creating about episodes and shows. They’re the network’s number one fan and advocate.
- Serve the niches to an extreme. Look for the small, weird, wonderful communities and interests. Niche passions are infectious, interesting, and lead to great audiences. Think Francis Bourgeois.
- Serve local extremely well. The ABC already does this so well on every other medium, but the town of Esperance deserves a local daily podcast, as much as the region of Greater Sydney does along with Penrith. Every Australian should have a local podcast they MUST listen to, like it’s the gospel.
- Up the metadata game. In radio we called the 1% of ultra-mad fans P1 fans, I was told it was because they had our station on preset one. P1 fans love the metadata that makes podcasts so more enjoyable, things like chapters for skipping to topics, unique and captivating album art per episode, and also album art to visually explain chapters. Like if a chart is mentioned, the chart is that album’s artwork. Metadata includes utilising all of the podcast specifications like categories, episode and season numbers, trailer identifiers, podcast:person tags, and show notes with links to things and people mentioned. Look at Podnews' How-To articles and podcasting2.org and get your CMS or software developers to build support for all the apps.
- Album art like Mr Beast. YouTuber Mr Beast knows that the thumbnail of a video is almost more important than the content, it’s what brings people into the episode. Album art is a neglected wasteland in podcasting, up your game.
- Unearthed for podcasting. I can still remember when Triple J Unearthed came to Mackay - my friend Leah even has video of me at the event {screen grab of the video to prove I was young once}. Over the past thirty years Unearthed has provided an amazing platform for the up and coming musical acts of Australia. I’m dreaming of a similar program for podcasters. An on ramping exercise to the wider network, developing talent, encouraging it, providing resources and assistance.
- Success, how do we measure it? The Triton Digital Australian Podcast Ranker provides a nice big list of podcast success, but I would sincerely ask all stakeholders whether that listing defines our success or not. I just think of my own podcasting efforts as a wedding celebrant. I would have one of the least successful podcasts in the universe but I’m probably a top 1% earner because everyone that listens to my podcast books me to be their celebrant. No podcaster is getting that kind of return from each listener.
- Expanding what audio on demand means. We all know what a podcast is supposed to look like today. A regular release, either daily, weekly, monthly, of a drop of audio. But if we look at audio like we do video, there’s feature films, short films, miniseries, documentaries, anthology series, reality TV, ‘straight to home video’ films. How can some of those storytelling mediums be transposed to audio, and could they be released from the “release date” that immediately dates a podcast when released?
- Embracing the open web and our own platform. Anil Dash recently wrote this great piece, “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement, and I agree, and will wholeheartedly fight for the open web. The simple fact that you or I can publish a website or a podcast without needing permission from Zuckerberg, whoever is running Spotify, or Tim Cook. But then it also makes a lot of sense for a publisher to own its platform, like the ABC does with ABC Listen. So find the balance between the two.
- Drop introductions for audio logos. Think of the Netflix Tudum or the Apple Macintosh or Windows XP startup sound. Instead of wasting precious seconds at the start and end of a podcast, employ an audio logo. The first seconds of a podcast are where the decisions to keep on listening are made, don’t waste it with lots of fancy talk about how we’re listening to another ABC Podcast.
- Debate what we’re calling this. Before Ben Hammersly mashed together the words iPod and broadcast it was called audioblogging. Today we’re playing with the term “audio on-demand” but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. My gripe is that people call videos on Youtube a podcast. The terminology is messy, and potentially there’s no fix, but somehow everyone agreed on what radio meant. Maybe the same can happen with recorded audio delivered on RSS or the web at your leisure?
- Spread it far and wide with the wheel of content. I’m not going to make out like this is a Josh original, but I’ve been banging on about this since I worked at Southern Cross Austereo, 96five, 4BC and Fairfax radio, and everyone there looked at me like I was crazy. It’s my “Wheel of Content” idea. The simple idea is that a story enters the wheel at the hub (the middle), and then it works itself out through the different channels, audio, video, text, short form, longform, infographics, social media posts, all of it. Record the podcast, break it out into a number of blog posts, into smaller podcast episodes, into videos, tweets, posts, toots, whatever. Make that content work not just double time but 10x its usability. Get the story out of the mp3 file and run it far and wide.
- Cross-guest. Introduce hosts and personalities from across the network as guests on other podcasts. Pretend like you’re not the only podcast in the network.
- A big head with a long tail. This is my final thought that encapsulates all of them. Any one network can most likely only afford the social capital to market ten shows a year well. We’re talking large-scale marketing campaigns. But that same network should have 10x (at least) that number shows it is actively producing. This is not a new idea, Netflix and many streaming apps work the same way. Evangelism is a costly exercise, so evangelise the hits, and let the rest of the network ride off that network-effect of getting listeners interested in the rest of the shows. Build a big fat visible head of up to ten shows, and let that tail grow as long as you can resource.
- Firstly it shares my stories with my micro.blog community, and they’re a great bunch of people. A good portion of them are people who - like me - backed Manton’s Kickstarter for the whole idea, and the rest are people who went searching for a cool glass of water in the internet desert.
- Secondly, my micro blogs actually post to my own blog, which is hosted by micro.blog but if I ever took issue with the service, the fee, the community, the leadership, or whatever may happen - I can very easily take my content to my own hosting. I could in fact do that today and still remain part of the micro.blog community and use the micro.blog tools. This is the power and the beauty of the open web and decentralised internet services.
- Finally, micro.blog pushes my content out to a number of other social networks, with the number always growing. Linkedin, Twitter, Mastodon, Medium, and Bluesky, all social networks that I look active on because of micro.blog.
- IRC
- Vine
- iMessage
- LiveJournal
- Myspace
- MSN Messenger
- ICQ
- Usenet/Google Groups
- Blogrolls
- Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web (OG Yahoo!)
- phpBB
- Friendster
- micro.blog
- FourSquare
- Digg (version 1 and 2)
- Path
- Threads
- Apple eWorld
- Hi5
- Mastodon
- Flickr
- Tumblr
- ActivityPub
- Blogger
- WordPress
- SixDegrees
- Orkut
- Google Wave, Buzz, Shoelace, Friend Connect
- BBS/Bulletin Board Systems
- Meerkat
- AOL Messenger
- Twitch
- BlueSky
- Snapchat
- YouTube
- Wavelength
- BeReal
- T2
- iTunes Ping
- Orkut
- Google+
- Yahoo! Messenger
- FriendFeed
- App.net
- Periscope
- Fidonet
- Pixelfed
- Discourse
- Nostr
- Hive
- Telegram
- Plurk
- Musical.ly
- Bolt
- Bebo
- Yik Yak
- Signal
- Diaspora
- TikTok
- Green bubbles on iMessage
- Post
- Discord
- Swarm
- Pownce
- RenRen
- Parlar
- Truth Social
- The Frequent Travellers Society, because I like to talk about travel.
- The Celebrant Institute, you wouldn’t believe it but it’s for celebrants.
- The Apple Nation because I follow Apple like a sport, it’s my favourite hobby.
14 ideas to build and grow a podcast network today
I recently had the opportunity to express my interest in a field I’ve never officially worked in, for a company I’d never worked for, in an industry I’ve been out of for over a decade: audio, more specifically, audio on-demand, or as we’ve called it for twenty years, podcasting.
I didn’t make it past expressing interest for the position but my application - in the form of audio on demand - was “one of the most creative submissions I’ve seen/heard” said an ABC executive, which I sincerely appreciate, but my fire and passion for podcasting/audio on-demand has now been given oxygen - after over a decade of self-employment I applied for the job intending to get it.
So, I wanted to at least document my thoughts here on my blog, and then open source them, release my thoughts to the greater podcasting public.
May these gathered thoughts help or inspire you to succeed in the field, even if you got the job as Head of Audio on Demand for the ABC ;)
What I would do if I was the ABC’s Head of Audio on Demand
So much credit to friends for hearing me talk about podcasts and this job in particular so much, but also credit to industry leaders I’ve either been lucky enough to call friend, or have watched esnrestly from afar, like Cameron Reilly, James Cridland, and Scotty McDonald, and then Marco Arment with Overcast and ATP, plus Myke and Stephen of Relay FM who have been doing lots of this for a while already.
Listen to Really Specific Stories
Linking to, sharing, telling people about podcasts is a hard problem to solve. If only because I personally do most of my listening while driving.
So I was reminded this morning to link to a project and podcast I’ve been really enjoying, @martinfeld’s Really Specific Stories.
Really Specific Stories is a part of a broader PhD project, in collaboration with Dr. Kate Bowles and Dr. Christopher Moore at the University of Wollongong. Each episode includes an interview with a producer or listener from a selected tech podcast case study and uses the qualitative method of narrative enquiry to uncover their experiences. Down the line, responses from each interview will be included in a final PhD thesis.
They’re all good, and this probably speaks more to my specific brand of nerdery than the quality of the episode, but I’ve personally enjoyed @gruber’s episode, Marco Arment’s, john Siracusa’s, Stephen Hackett’s, Casey Liss’s, Manton Reece’s, Daniel Jalkut’s, Jean Macdonald’s, and Andrew Canion’s episodes .. that said, they’re all great recordings about a very specific time in history, the time that tech podcasts became a thing.
Imagine being the butt of this line in a news report “The launch of the eye-scanning cryptocurrency project Worldcoin” and you’re also the guy standing behind the main brand name related to a technology the world is shit scared of, and just thinking everything is fine.
Advice I read recently said “Social networks: choose two” and I can’t drop the feeling that it’s quite sage. In the overwhelm and the overbearing influx of social media content and the greater network of services there I’ve almost chosen zero instead of two, which isn’t any better than the fifteen or so you can choose from today.
I feel like today I live in between the rock of exposure and engagement and the hard place of privacy. I’ve moved so far away from Google and Meta properties to avoid the leakage of private data and my contribution to their share price, and moved toward the open web, privacy-respecting social media, and I feel really good about it - but barely anyone else in my network cares. I’m still surprised when I see intelligent friends using Twitter as if it’s the kind of bar people like us would show our faces.
Seeing the launch of Instagram/Meta’s new Twitter doppelganger, Threads, is encouraging this week as the project lead, Adam Mosseri is seemingly committed to open-web philosophies:
“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming. If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
Being open also enables you to “choose two.”
Here’s how I currently “social media” (Spoiler: this is more media and less social):
Anything I want to share with the world starts here on my micro.blog, which serves a few purposes.
I’ve had broadcasting in my genes for twenty years so that model serves me well. I craft a story, tell the story, and it shares to a few places. Today I’ll then get that story and also take it where micro.blog can’t (because of lack of API), like Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads.
And on a regular day, that’s where it stops. Opening those apps for anything other than broadcasting is such an overwhelming action. I’ve unfollowed thousands of people, but it’s still too much.
But if I had to pick two today, I’d go where I get the most interaction, and that would be the Meta properties and micro.blog. Mastodon, Bluesky. T2, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all graveyards as far as community, for me at least.
I open all the apps on a daily basis and it’s just so rare to feel seen or heard in there. I get more feedback and encouragement via emails from subscribers to my weekly blog email or text messages and conversations with people I love. You can actually publicly see how many people read my blog, and the odd post breaks out, but mostly it’s a group of 10-15 people.
Maybe that’s just the way it’s supposed to be? Maybe we’re not supposed to be on every single social network in existence? It’s just a strange thing for me to come to terms with, the gradual decline from talking to thousands of people a day on the radio, and on stages, through to being on breakfast TV and reality TV, to just being a dad who gets 10 likes on his Facebook post and calls his wife to let her know he’s going viral.
If you’re interested in reading more about micro.blog and the wider open web movement, Manton Reece’s book is great, or at least, will be great when he publishes it and takes it out of draft.
Long live Threads, maybe there’s a chance for a second breath of Twitter-like-wind there.
Social media tier list - July 6, 2023, update
🎂 This is the official tier list of social networks, all of them, from the beginning of time to July 6, 2023. This list is not to be questioned and is wholly correct, trust me.
👼🏻 God Tier
👑 Royalty Tier
😶 Adam Sandler Tier (Could take it or leave it)
🫤 Pleb Tier
🤮 Would rather eat cat vomit tier
Shoutout to Bruno Bouchet for the tier grading methodology. All other Tier grades (like the S, A, B, C, F make no sense to me)
Threads, a thread
🧵 Decentralisocial networks are cool, but you know what’s also cool? Talking to your existing friends group, and having your content enjoyed by people.
Unlike most of my late-2022 and 2023 content which hasn’t been seen by more than 10 to 15 eyes.
Prediction: Threads will win; T2, Bluesky, the others will falter; ActivityPub and Mastodon will be a fun place for niche communities.
The news is incentivised to be broken and terrible
I was a media and news man for over a decade, I loved being - what I considered to be - an important part of the community, telling its stories and keeping the community informed, safe, and entertained.
But the industry isn’t doing well.
The second story on news.com.au today is about a Fox News story about a recent TikTok that went viral, which the newsdesk found out about through a Twitter user sharing the TikTok in three parts, and the TikTok was just a replay of a Youtube clip from a radio show four years ago.
Serendipitously the original clip and radio show was broadcast about one kilometre from where I type this in Franklin, Tennessee, but there’s no good reason for Australia’s national news website - news.com.au - to publish this as a second story today. That the second most important story in Australia today is a four year old viral video is an insult to the wealth of stories Australia has to tell, and the global stories it could engage with.
Yes, it gets the clicks. Yes, it’s actually an important story inside the video, be debt free. But from a professional storytelling point of view it’s embarrassing for the news.com.au staff. Even the actual article is poorly written and just lazy.
This is the downfall of society, our storytellers are poorly incentivised to do good work, and over incentivised to do work that gets clicks that advertisers want even though no-one is clicking the ads.
I’m feeling bullish on the new group-messaging app and platform, Wavelength, After reading John Gruber’s review, then using it and joining a group, I think it could replace group chats in other places, but also serve as a platform for new conversations.
If you’re interested, I’ve started a few group chats:
Jump onboard if you’re interested!
The future of creating is damned
My greatest fear for my kids and for future generations is what it means to create within and around such specific analytics being available.
I (unfortunately) have precise readings of how many people read and view my work. Where they come from and where they don’t. How many followers, likes, and shares each social network allows me.
Honestly, it’s depressing and it is the biggest impediment to my creative work.
Efforts to remove the signals from my life have been mostly meaningless and sometimes even have adversely affected business, revenue, and our family’s supply.
I am most aware of this because my career as a creator started when its audience was measured by handwritten diaries, radio-listening diaries completed at the end of the day where the surveyed people would report on which radio stations they listened to - in quarter-hour blocks - throughout the day, usually reporting at the end of the day. Somehow entire industries and careers like mine were built on the back of less than 0.1% of the population writing in a book for a few weeks a year was representative of the entire local population, and we all took this as gospel.
Now I know exactly that one person watched one of my YouTube videos of me talking about a chapter of my book, and they didn’t even finish, and I also know that my silly Instagram Reel of my four-year-old daughter with a wavy video effect has been seen by over 100,000 people.
And even if we think that 100,000 people is a great reach, it’s only 0.00125% of the global population. Is 0.001% reach within our content goals this month?
With the slightest margin of error, we can tell you that somewhere between 25 to 35 visit our business website every day, but somehow we make enough bookings to provide for our family.
I think about the New York Times article recently published where I was quoted and our websites linked to, and it looks like pretty much zero of the article’s readers clicked those links. I wonder how many people actually read the article which had taken many hours of at least one journalist’s and one editor’s time to research, write, and publish. The most promotion I witnessed of the article itself was a small text link at the bottom of the NY Times front page. Do people read that far down? Do they click those links? Did anyone even read that article?
Things aren’t bad, but there was a mysterious time only recently when you could broadcast a radio program and have no idea how many people heard it. You could print a newspaper, and obviously, you would have some idea of how many papers were printed, but who read which articles? You never knew! It was beautiful. You could write an article you thought was worth writing, that the editor thought was worth publishing, and you would just send it off to the printer along with the headline news about that scandal and the other story about how politicians are terrible.
Do we still create beautiful things if we believe that no one will see them?
George Berkeley wrote in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,
The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden… no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.
If you suppose that no one might perceive your creation, do you even create it in the first place?
Are we ok with being unpopular? Are our kids ok with it?
If you asked me I’d say I am ok with it, if only because it’s my reality. But the truth is that this reality also affects my ability to create. I second-guess myself, wondering if it’s even worth clicking the shutter button or opening up the laptop to write a chapter of a book that will most likely be purchased by only my close friends and read by even fewer.
As I’ve published this piece, and added a featured image of me trying to figure out why Morgan’s Nikon camera wasn’t working (if you know, you know) I’ve realised that all of these thoughts of mine are before and almost exclusionary of artificial intelligence and large language models.
Creating really is doomed isn’t it …