Welcome Apple & Spotify

Welcome Apple & Spotify
Audience
Welcome Apple & Spotify

May 06 2021 | 00:32:19

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Episode 0 May 06, 2021 00:32:19

Hosted By

Stuart Barefoot

Show Notes

On this episode of the Audience podcast, Craig and Matt do a deep dive into the Apple and Spotify announcements about private podcasts, and discuss how it might affect the industry and the podcast creator economy. How will it affect creators? Would you rather “rent land” or “own your own property”? What does this mean for the future of podcasting? What are the pros and cons to monetization with a big company like Apple or Spotify?

If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to Castos.com/podcast. If you have any comments or questions about private podcasting and the recent news in the podcasting community, shoot us a message at  hello@castos.com or Matt directly at Matt@castos.com

And as always, if you’re enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at castos.com/subscribe.

Today you’ll learn about:

  • Platform risk with podcasting
  • The importance of having control over your content
  • The announcements from Apple and Spotify
    • What this means for podcasters
    • The “easy button” to podcasting and monetization
    • The caveat to the Apple and Spotify private podcasts
  • “Renting land” versus “Owning your own property”
  • What is a content entrepreneur?
  • What podcasters should be wary of when they sign contracts with Apple or Spotify
  • How Craig and Matt would approach private podcasts and premium content for subscribers
  • Where you and your audience are located, and why it matters
  • The future of podcasting: private podcasts

Resources/Links:

3 Clips Podcast: https://3clipspodcast.com/ 

3 Clips Episode, “Content Inc: Inside a Short-Form Monologue Podcast”: https://3clipspodcast.com/content-inc-inside-a-short-form-monologue-podcast/ 

Castos Academy: https://academy.castos.com/ 

Castos, private podcast: https://academy.castos.com/private/ 

Castos, website: Castos.com/

Castos, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/castos  

Clubhouse video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8729ZpWpmIw

View Full Transcript

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 00:00:05 Private podcasting is the new, old phenomenon ripping through the industry. Airwaves this week from Apple going all in with podcasts, you can subscribe to Spotify rebutting with their alternative in Facebook. Well, launching something you might be wondering, how does a not trillion dollar podcast company like Casos feel about at all? Surprisingly delighted for creators. That's how you're listening to the audience podcast, your home to stories and lessons for podcasters, looking to take their show to the next level for people just getting started with podcasting to brands and celebrities monetizing their audio experience. The audience podcast has it all, never missed another show by subscribing at castles.com/subscribe that's <inaudible> dot com slash subscribe in today's episode, Craig and I go deeper on Apple and Spotify as an announcement and how we feel castles fits in to the larger podcast creator Connie, especially for those of you who are looking to earn a living through podcasting. Okay. Let's Speaker 0 00:01:00 Yeah. Speaker 1 00:01:03 Back to the audience podcast. I'm your host, Matt joined again by Craig Craig. Welcome back. Hey Matt. Thanks for having me. Oh man. Things have changed in the podcasting landscape since the last time you've been on your own show. Uh, we're going to talk about some of that stuff today. If you're a secret podcast listener of the Academy, which you can find out@academydotcastles.com, you heard me talk about some of this stuff today, which is a lot about the private podcasting in Apple space in Spotify space podcasts at large, we're going to talk about our stance on it today, but, um, yeah, Craig, lot's happening like some of the, some people's podcasts still don't work in Apple. Uh, so I heard today still 10, 11 days into this fiasco. Speaker 2 00:01:46 Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's a whole another topic that maybe we should kind of tackle first is, is there has always been what we think of as like a platform risk with podcasting from a business end from a POS podcast or perspective is your exposure to potential audience has largely been based in one place and that's Apple podcast up until now. And you know, for us as a company, Apple deciding, Hey, we're going to go do this thing like paid subscriptions or, Hey, we're going to change the way an RSS feed is, is ingested in and displayed and not tell anybody is, is kind of a thing where we're kind of sitting back after the announcement last week and saying, Oh my gosh, we have to do this thing to change how Apple displays RSS feeds is. You know, without any notice is, is kind of a, a big thing for us to take care of because we want our customers to be able to be visible when all the bright, proper information and everything, but from a pod-casters perspective too, I think that the announcements last week and Apple basically shutting down podcasts connect, you know, for all intents and purposes for most of a week is maybe a bit of a wake-up call to people say, wow, Speaker 1 00:02:51 Like, do I really want a lot Speaker 2 00:02:54 Of the availability and access to this asset that I'm creating in my, to be based on a place that you really have no control over? You have no, you can't, you know, email or call somebody and have them get back to you. They'll fix it when they want to fix it. You know, the kind of single point of failure to your show is that really what you want to do while balancing at the same time between Apple and Spotify, they make up the vast majority of exposure and ability for you to get new listeners. So I think you've got to balance those two things of saying like, Hey, you know, podcasting is kind of a platform based thing where people find shows and listen in a place, whether it's Apple podcasts or Spotify or podcast index or whatever it is with, you know, being able to control and own where your show comes from and how people can, can get access to it. So it, yeah, it was a pretty big wake up call, both from our perspective and us as podcasters Speaker 1 00:03:46 And to be fair, which, you know, I don't really like to be fair all the time to these massive billion dollar, you know, the way I see it, Craig is I see billion dollar businesses, and then let's not forget Facebook is, is now getting into the quote unquote podcasting game. I think they also announced a partnership with Spotify to have the player embedded in Spotify. Can you imagine those discussions of the most simple, probably three lines of code that they'd have to add to make this work, but the mega million dollar deal that it potentially is. I see these billion dollar companies taking on trillion dollar companies, you know, Spotify, Facebook taking on trillion dollar Apple, right? And, and the creators, the people who make up the bulk, the majority of podcasting, just sitting on the sidelines, watching this stuff go and play out is pretty tremendous. Speaker 1 00:04:32 But to give Apple credit, I guess, creating a podcast membership system, a payment system to do this kind of private podcasting, it's no easy feat, especially at Apple size. We know because we've been building it now for what the last couple of years, right. In our, in our own ecosystem. And there's a lot of things to consider for folks like us. And I can only imagine what it's like to roll this stuff out for Apple and well, I guess we'll start with what Apple is doing and kind of defining at the end of the day. Like we're kind of okay with the announcement, right? Like we're not running, we're not scared. We actually think that this is a good thing. Cause now people will have the opportunity to be, to either monetize their own podcast and then conditions people to say, Oh, I can actually pay for a podcast. I can get this extended content. I can get ad-free content. That's a thing. And that'll sort of condition the market for other creators, like folks who host here at camp. Speaker 2 00:05:26 Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the things that, that I chatted with Jay about in the, the kind of announcement episode of the three clips podcast. So as an aside, anyone who didn't hear Castillo's acquired the three clips podcast by Jay McKinsey. So three clips, podcasts.com, check it out if you like this show and you are really wanting to kind of up your game and the craft of podcasting and how to really make great content, check out three clips. It's fantastic. But, but Jay and I were chatting about why Castro's acquired three clips and kind of what we see in the, in the podcasting space in, and it is exactly that bat that you now are able to kind of raise your hand and say, I make really freaking great content and I deserve to be paid for it directly. Not this, Hey, I'm going to have a course that I sell on the side and all these weird marketing drip things that you might like if you're a true, like, I just want to be a podcaster. Speaker 2 00:06:17 You can do that really easily now. And I think that when we talk about like, absolutely kudos to Apple and to Spotify here in a few months for saying like, Hey, they're going to support creators. That just want to very simply and purely on their platform granted. And maybe they don't have the relationship with, with their paying customers or paid listeners that they could have with, with a platform like ours, but for people who just want to get paid to create content. Yeah. Kudos to Apple for investing in the podcasting ecosystem to support creators like that. Because I think it's absolutely fantastic. Speaker 1 00:06:51 Yeah. And that's the way, you know, at least again, Apple, while at the time of this recording, it's, it's not live just yet the, the paying, uh, to actually go in and pay for a podcast and, and get that private subscription. You can start to build, I think if you can lock into a podcast connect and it doesn't crash on you, you can start to build out your private podcasts there. However, it's not going to be done through your existing RSS feed. Right. That's the big caveat with Apple and Spotify too when they roll it out. But you're not gonna able to just say, Hey, here's my cast, those private podcast feed or a private podcast feeds from another vendor and loaded into Apple because it's only on their platform. You have to then upload and manage your private podcasts to Apple, which yeah. I mean, it sounds okay from the surface until you're starting to manage many, many different places to manage your podcasts. Speaker 1 00:07:48 And then one would say, well, I'll just do it on Apple. Well, yes you could. But then you're just stuck on distributing to Apple, which goes back to that whole rented land thing that we talk about all the time is these are the, these are the concessions that you make. You either choose an open RSS powered podcast, hosts like cast those to do your private podcasts and your public podcasts, and then just send them over to Apple and Spotify, or you decide, you know what? I don't want to do that. I just want to take the easier route and go to Apple and just do it there. But then the trade-off, there is only on Apple and you don't really quote unquote, own that relationship with the customer. Now I've heard some people say that that's okay. Question Mark. I don't really like it as a creator. Speaker 1 00:08:31 I want to be portable. Right? I don't want to be beholden to what Apple just Apple does. I mean, look what they've done with podcast connect. I don't want to be beholden to what Spotify just does because I don't know Spotify again, billion-dollar companies I platform plays not really my thing. I like to own that land as much as possible. And it's not even really just like that. The desire to say I own it, but from a business perspective, it's like I can move things. It's easier to adjust than picking out one of these, these other platforms that you're really locked into. And then there's no flexibility, which we can talk about what we do at castles, but there's no flexibility in that ownership either. For instance, like if you wanted to connect your MailChimp list to your private podcast on Apple, good luck. It's not going to happen, but you can do it with us, which is a great thing, not to turn this into a sales pitch, but it's just like the flexibility, the infrastructure that we could provide, or another podcast host, I guess that flexibility is very important to me from all senses of the business marketing sales, you know, recurring revenue, et cetera. Speaker 2 00:09:35 Yeah. I mean, I think our goal with this conversation is to talk about our feelings about this. Cause I think that hopefully to some degree we're kind of representative of, or we're considering all the various, uh, kind of angles and interests that our audience and our customer base has. And I think that with that, there definitely is a group that again, just in air quotes wants to sell access to their content. And there is nothing small about that. That is, that is to some degrees kind of the purest form of, of this art. I think there is another really big group out there that is this kind of maker crowd that we talk about a lot. It's, you know, Hey, I have a membership site, Hey, I have an online course. Hey, I have an exclusive part of my audience that, that receives special content already. Speaker 2 00:10:18 And then people are increasingly coming to cast us and saying, Hey, I know you have this integration with member space. Hey, I know you have a Zapier integration. Can I connect my Ontraport account to cast us private podcasting to where I, when I apply a tag in Ontraport, it fires a zap in Zapier, and then that person gets added to a private podcast. And we say, yup, it's like this and this and this. And it takes about three minutes. I think increasingly that group of podcasters will be bigger and bigger. And I think the cool thing is they will be, I don't know if powerful is the right word, Matt, that that seems like a little dramatic, but, but I think that they will be more and more powerful in the market because a lot of those folks are already extremely savvy content, creators and business people. Speaker 2 00:11:04 They have the ability to, to create the content, to attract the audience, to have them buy their course or their membership site or whatever, you know, think about someone like PatFlynn right. Pat has made a bunch of his money selling digital products. And a lot of that is creating content that people like and for people to trust him enough, to, to either take his recommendation and make an affiliate purchase or to buy by one of his digital products. And I think that more and more, you know, here in 2021, that kind of demographic of the maker crowd is going to be more and more kind of the power players of this space, I think. And for them to have the ability to, we say bolt on private podcasting, to other things they're already doing is just a great way to extend how they can reach their customers. Speaker 2 00:11:48 I'm actually really excited about it. And then Apple saying, Hey, if you just want to someone pay you for access to this, for me really validates this concept that you and I've been talking about for years now, like not live on the show, but you and I've been talking, you know, one-on-one about this concept of restricted access to podcast content, whether it's a standalone thing or part of your membership site or community or whatever for a long time. And I think that the biggest player in the space coming in doing this is, is a great sign for, for this as you know, a thing Speaker 1 00:12:20 On the three clips podcast hosted by Jay, at least the episode that went out today was with Joe PoliSci and he runs content Inc. And he coined the term. Well, I think he coined the term content marketing some years ago, but now he's sort of pushing to coin the term content entrepreneur, right? Somebody who is making money through content, through content creation, fascinating episode, we'll link it up in the show notes. You should definitely listen to it. If, I mean, you should be a podcast or listening to this, this episode. So if you are a podcast or listen to this episode, you would definitely not want to miss it. But he and Jay, they talk about like the middle-class of content creators, right? Folks who are not these, I know we always use Joe Rogan, Mark Marin, like these shows that get tens of millions of downloads, you know, people who are just trying to earn a living, doing content and content in many places, either multiple podcasts, YouTube channels, writing newsletters, right. Speaker 1 00:13:16 People who are just like really giving it a concerted effort to pay the bills. And, you know, that's where I think, like you said, if you want to just try that easy route of trying to monetize a show. Sure. Maybe Apple makes sense. Right? So you don't care about that first 30% that they take for the, you know, year one, you don't care about the 15% that they take year two and you just don't want to deal with anything else. You just want to try to get something up there and tell somebody to go pay for my podcast. Sure. Sounds like a great way to go about it. But if you're trying to do all the things of a successful media company, right? Like newsletters, blogging, social media, the podcast, YouTube channel, like you're trying to do all of these things, set up all of these pillars, you know, of course I'm bias because we're here and we're building the tools that when people do this kind of thing, but I think you'd be hard pressed to be able to just give it all up to Apple and just hope that all these other things happen. Speaker 1 00:14:10 You know, I think for that middle-class content creator as Jay and, and Joe talk about like, you're going to have to put in an effort and again, at least have that flexibility in your platform and try not to do it on, on rented land as much as all of these platforms want us to do so. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, I do agree that great solution for that easy button of trying to monetize. But if you're really trying to take it serious, I think you then graduate, which is funny to say, I think you graduate from Apple back to castles, like in, in like a year, like, yeah, you've got your time to take a serious. Okay. Now you come to castles and then we'll help you connect all those other. Speaker 2 00:14:45 Yeah. I mean, it'd be interesting to see. I think that there probably would be very few people that just use Apple or Spotify, even as a distribution channel to sell their content. I think that what we'll see is it's, it's a place and maybe it's 25 or 50% or something maybe even, but I think that a lot of these savvy content creators are going to say like, Hey, yeah, I need, you know, I want to do other stuff too. I want to sell a paid email newsletter. I want to have a course. I want to have a membership site that where I have videos or newsletters or training or something like that. And I think that's just, that is so much more common than I just want to sell access to my podcasts as a standalone thing, only on Apple. Speaker 1 00:15:22 And then if you're on Spotify, you know, again, a lot of this stuff is still early. We heard about the Spotify announcement last week, but in terms of how they've positioned it so far, same thing, you know, you'll be able to upload your private podcasts or Spotify, but it's going to actually be a lot more complex because it'll only, still be distributed on Spotify as far as I know, but hosted on anchor. And you know, you really have to start to like wonder about the terms of service, uh, you know, ownership of content and like what you can, and can't do even an Apple's own terms of service for the, uh, or the legal, the contract that you'd have to assign the ULA, uh, to accept private podcasting. There, there is a line that says it's okay to, this is funny. It's okay that you, you can also promote your private podcast or your show in other places, they ask that the price is the same. Speaker 1 00:16:14 So it's already like the underpinnings of, of just legal jargon where it's like, yeah, you can, you can say your shows nine 99 a year on Apple, but you can't say it's seven 99 on Spotify. It's against the terms of service. It's just like, well, this is, you know, here's where we start to really weigh the things. And again, for that, I think for a lot of folks who are that, you know, middle-class content creator and nobody pays attention, but then as soon as you start to, you know, grow or have some kind of substantial audience and you do start to really become a creator, who's making a lot of money. That's when all the eyes are on you and they start to really find, Oh, you know, we had this in our agreement and this is not part of your, or they see it somewhere else on a website. And it's like, you can get a discount if you buy it directly from my website and that's against terms. And that's the stuff I don't like. I don't want to get into on the legal side of things. And we don't pretend to be lawyers here. No, for sure not. Speaker 2 00:17:06 I think it might be interesting to kind of chat through how we would approach if you're already a kind of conventional podcasts or you have a show like this, that's public for everyone to, to kind of find out about, and you're saying, okay, you know, some kind of private podcasting, whether it's going to be through Apple's, you know, paid subscriptions or you want to build your own thing and use an existing platform like member space or, or any kind of, you know, email tool to, to connect through Zapier or something like that, how you might think about from a content perspective, okay, have this podcast here, how can I kind of parse off part of this or create an extra thing that's really valuable for people to be able to pay me money for? So like Matt, maybe we can use this show as example and kind of brainstorm live on there. None of we didn't talk about any of this ahead of time. So I'm putting you on the spot here. I have some ideas, but if we were going to make a, an audience premium podcast, how would you approach it Speaker 1 00:18:00 For the audience premium? I kind of feel like I already have it going with the Academy. So academy.castles.com, you can get connected up to the private podcast that way. And for me, it's having those insights almost like I don't want to say breaking news because I don't do it nearly as often on that private podcast. But when Apple and Spotify announced that stuff, I jumped on there pretty early to share our thoughts and get people prime to thinking about like where the industry is going. And it's just, I literally hit record and I record it and I upload it like there's no, you know, sometimes I thought, well, maybe I should have edited that one, that one segment or that one section. Um, but it's largely just really raw crude kind of thing where it's, it's not overly produced. You know, it doesn't go to castles productions, our productions team, you know, there's no show notes or anything like that. It's just, it's quick, it's, you know, five to eight minutes of, of audio. And it's almost a quote unquote direct message, right? I'm just sending this message out to this particular set of people who, who want that real inside baseball of what we have, you know, brewing here. That's how I kind of do it and how I would like to do it more for this particular podcast. Speaker 2 00:19:10 Yes. Yeah. I think that's spot on. And I think that the other few ways that, that people might think about it is if you have say you have a podcast that goes out every week, maybe make one of those weeks. So three out of four episodes are going to be public for everybody. And just to keep with your regular production schedule and say, Hey, the last one of the month is paid. So, you know, Hey, if you're interested, go over here to, you know, my site.com/premium and, you know, pay for access to the podcast there that's one way I think about it. I think this kind of like insider episode is really interesting. So a lot of people that have interview-based shows all the time where it's the same two people, they could have a, Hey, you know, behind the scenes, this is what we're talking about when, you know, quote the mic isn't on. Speaker 2 00:19:51 I think some of those are interesting. And I think the other one is if you have really exceptional content that just saying like, Hey, I interviewed, you know, Mark Marin or Tim Ferriss or whatever, and you got to pay to get access to it. You know, like I think that's a little more touchy and I don't know exactly how I would kind of propose that to an audience. But, um, I know some people that have done that say like, Hey, we try to provide, provide as much value as we can here on the show every week. But sometimes we get nuggets that are so good, we gotta pay the bills and this is probably the best way to do it. And I think that if you really are showing up every week and providing that value for the kind of standard free show that you can do that, and people will say, Hey, that's cool. Speaker 2 00:20:33 I appreciate that. You know, Matt has really gone out and found this person to interview and that the content is so great. I think typically the person has to be kind of well-known in your space to, for someone to pony up, to pay for it on a kind of one-off for an basis. But that's the other way I would think about it. And then the other one is it is something we talked, talked about and kind of alluded to before is if you have other content already part of an ecosystem, like a community, or you're doing webinars that are paid or something like that, to just repurpose those as audio content and have it as part of a private feed, we're working with a pretty big customer in the e-commerce space. Now that is doing that. They have paid webinars and they're repurposed them as podcasts and they're making them private to just a subsection of their email list. Speaker 2 00:21:18 And so I just think that a lot of those, again, whether it's paid or whether it's just private, I think that any kind of just like slight deviation from what you're doing with your public content to where you can say, Hey, you know, for people that have raised their hand and say, Hey, I really like what these guys are doing. These gals are doing. I want more either just put it behind an email wall. Like we do with the Academy, put it behind a paywall, like a membership site, or use something like Apple podcasters, you know, Spotify is whatever they're going to call it. Um, you know, paid subscriptions, done the line, ah, Speaker 1 00:21:50 All you're doing is jogging all kinds of memories for, or ideas for casts, those private podcasting and why it's so great, because like, I'm thinking about like all of these little other products, when you were talking about, Hey, having other products and you want to repurpose those into, into a private feed, not really going to want to do that on Apple, right. You're not going to, you're not going to create like this little section to repurpose your audio book because the audience, like not, everyone's going to be on Apple to purchase that. And you're making the same. You're, you're, you're going to do the same effort to try to sell that piece of content on Apple, as you would selling it directly on your website and owning that platform and owning that, that checkout process. You gotta sell a lot of audio on Apple to make money, especially since they're taking 30% that first year, and then 15% the next year. Speaker 1 00:22:43 Now granted the payment button is right there. That's like their huge case to all of this stuff is you pay in the iOS app in the podcast app. So that's a, that's a win from, for ease of use for the end user, but still you have to sell. I mean, again, they're taking that 30% and you're still doing the same effort to promote it, to market it and to support it over time. So I would still rather just do it on my own. So I'd rather do it right here. Ad free is another thing. Uh, we have, uh, uh, a customer Joe Casabona friend of the show and he'll actually have a course inside the Academy fairly soon. He has a private podcast, which is just ad free and you just go to his website and you pay a small amount of money and you get it at free. Speaker 1 00:23:26 And that's the thing with like, at least when you're doing it here on Castro's is it's all of these things. If you're, if you're this content entrepreneur, that again, they were talking about in the three clips podcasts, okay, you might not get rich from that, that private podcast, but it's that private podcast, plus your newsletter and plus your membership and plus your YouTube channel. And then you start to collect the sum of that effort. And that's where things really start to add up no pun intended to a real revenue stream, you know, for you as a content creator or just as a media and media business. And you're sharing less dollars with the big platforms when you're doing it here and you own that private feed, Speaker 2 00:24:04 Something else too, to really consider. And I think this is a little individual based on kind of where, where you're located, where your audience is located and kind of some of the demographics of your audience. But I think it's worth talking about, and we'll link up to some data from James Cridland and pod news about the kind of market share percentage of Apple podcasts. These days I've been podcasting for almost seven years. Gosh, and it was 99% or one 90% when I started now, it's, it's like 50% depending on kind of where you are outside of North America. It's much bigger with a younger demographic. It's much bigger. And so I think folks looking at this and saying, Oh, I can just put, just put a podcast on Apple podcast and get paid for it. You might be talking about like, twenty-five percent of your, your target audience and, you know yeah. Speaker 2 00:24:55 So you throw a Spotify in there and then that covers a lot more of it. But, but I think that's just something for folks to consider is like to be able to put this in front of everybody who you think might be interested, maybe a little more complicated than, than we think. So it's just something to keep an eye on as this is an interesting thing for you and something you want to pursue is like, okay, how, how can I actually do this to everybody, to where I'm not leaving a big chunk of my, my audience or my potential, like customer base, um, kind of out in the cold by, by kind of selecting out that group based on the platform that I offer my stuff on Speaker 1 00:25:29 And Spotify from all the announcements and everything that I've seen so far, this private podcasting feature is just going to be US-based. So you can't even have it, you know, you, you can't have it in any of their other, you know, country locations. It's just going to be US-based, you know, for however long they, they run the initial pilot for, I guess, I don't know, but all of the announcements now is you can't even do this outside of the U S which there's a lot of podcasters outside of the U S last time I checked, you know, w you know, there's not many options, uh, for you, uh, I guess for that, for that side of it, if you're not in the U S which is unfortunate, Speaker 2 00:26:05 One of the really interesting things about this is the, the attention on this, that, that it's getting in the news and the media and the podcasting space in general, man, I feel like we've been the ones wearing, like the baby blue tuxedo to wedding or something for a while, talking about private podcasting, as much as we have. And in the week and a half, since the announcement, I see the concept of private podcasting everywhere. And I think it's fantastic because, you know, we have it on the homepage of our site. We have it within our dashboard now that this is the future of podcasting. And we really do believe that. And I think we're we're as a company kind of pretty firmly putting our stake in the ground and saying like, we believe this is a thing we believe this is as that content entrepreneur, this is a way for you to make money, uh, whether it's a standalone thing or, or on a platform like ours. Speaker 2 00:26:53 And I believe that the, the way that we will see this play out is that the really savvy content creators, whether you're already doing it, or you're just becoming a more savvy content, creators will see that doing this on a platform only is just not enough. I mean, I think we have a, we have kind of a hypothesis that people just selling access to their podcast as their only business model is exceedingly difficult. And there will be very few people who are able to sell enough to make, you know, to pay rent or to pay the car payment or something like that. Cause you think about, yeah, if you're going to charge nine bucks a year, you need, and you're giving 30% of that away, you're going to pay six bucks. You're going to get six bucks at the end of the day, maybe seven bucks. You need a lot of those two to make a dense style. Speaker 1 00:27:40 It's too hard to do that right now on the fly Speaker 2 00:27:43 You need. I mean, you just need a lot of, of, of people paying you six bucks a year. And I think that what we'll see is that, yeah, this is cool. And it's interesting, and it shines the light on private podcasting as a concept, but that a lot of all these really smart people who are content entrepreneurs and want to find a way to monetize their passion are going to not do this only on one platform where they take a big cut and you don't have access to your, Hey, who is this person that I want to, I know they're subscribed to my private podcast, but I want to tell them about this course I'm creating, or I want to meet up with them in person, cause I'm going to be in Austin next week. Like you can't do any of that stuff. And, and, and I think that you're right, man, maybe it is that people are going to get started with this. Speaker 2 00:28:23 And then they're going to say, in an episode, Hey, we're graduating from Apple podcasts. We're going to cast us because they integrate with this other thing where I'm building this course, or I have my membership site or, you know, I manage my email list through, you know, drip and they integrate directly with those guys. And so I'm able to offer a lot more value to you as a community member of, you know, my podcasts, we're moving our private podcast over there, check them out. So I do think that's where this will go because I hate to say it. But I think that just getting paid to podcast is a lot harder than a lot of people think with the, with the economics of, of, you know, Apple taking a big cut and, and not being able to distribute it to everybody you want to, here's a pro. Speaker 1 00:29:05 If you want somebody who's going to go to Apple and start your private podcasts there. And you do have the ambition and the vision to really grow your media company, save backups of your episode because God only knows if you can actually pull down those private podcasts from Apple, once you're ready to create another private podcast here at caseloads or something like that. Because again, you're uploading directly to Apple, same thing with Spotify. You're going to anchor who knows if there's an easy export process right later on down the road, because remember these are not RSS driven private podcasts there, you're only listening to them on an Apple's player or Spotify player. So there's no need to subscribe an RSS feed. That's what keeps it closed into their, uh, into their ecosystem. So backups, backups, backups, backups of your hard earned content. Greg, I know I'm excited to where we're going with private podcasting over the next couple of months over the next year. Uh, so it's, it's, it's great to it's, it's a great feeling to have been ahead of the curve to have it validated by these trillion and billion dollar companies and really excited to where we're, where we're going with it. So, uh, appreciate all of the efforts you've put into the company and all the thought leadership on that product. I think we're good. Uh, anything else you want the listeners to know today? Speaker 2 00:30:18 No, no, I just, it's, it's really great to, to chat through this again. I think that, you know, there definitely is a great use case for this, for folks out there that just want to make money from, from their content. I think what Apple and Spotify are doing is great for the ecosystem to kind of shine a light on this concept of private podcasting. And I'm just really excited to see what the creators do with this opportunity now. Like what, what do people come up with? How do they, how do they position this with their other content and all the, all the things that we will see evolve from this opening up is going to be really interesting just in the space in general. So I think for folks out there listening, you know, if you're starting a private podcast or thinking about a private podcast, whether you're going to use Apple subscriptions or something else, we'd love to hear how you're thinking about it. Speaker 2 00:31:01 You know, I think that that kind of ideation process that Matt and I went through, I'd love to, you know, we'd love to hear from, from some of you shoot us a message, hello, at <inaudible> dot com or just Matt directly, Matt at Castro's dot com. And just tell us about it. We'd love to be able to share some of that on an upcoming episode. Cause I think that sharing this kind of community knowledge is, is a great way to, it's going to enable other creators to be successful. So share what you're doing. We'd love to hear from you and give you a shout out on an upcoming episode. Speaker 1 00:31:27 Yeah. And I know one thing you won't be able to do on Apple and Spotify is connect up like a Shopify store and a WooCommerce store. We have customers already doing that, right? You sell a product and you get a private podcast along with it. I mean, I've seen furniture companies sell a piece of like high-end furniture that has like a backstory behind it, a caring process, right? Like you didn't care for this piece of furniture. And then, uh, like how to put it together. You could deliver that if you're selling that on Shopify, if you were selling something like that, a product, you connect up the castles for the private podcast and send that as a nice little add on to your customer. Not going to do that on Apple and Spotify only going to do it here. We're only going to do it here. Send me an email, Manoj castles.com. If you want to talk about any of that stuff. All right, Greg. See you in the next episode. Speaker 2 00:32:10 Thanks Matt.

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