Is a Narrative Podcast a Good Idea

Speaker 1 (00:02)

Hello and welcome to Podcasting Anything and ask me anything for all things podcasting. I'm your host Ben CLOY, and I'm joined here in the studio with Mathew Passy, the podcast control Matt and I wanted to move the conversation beyond the Podcasting 101 topics and move into the intermediate to advance Podcasting strategy.

Speaker 2 (00:18)

To reach your goals.

Speaker 1 (00:19)

To interact with the show, submit your questions to be answered live, book a podcast audible with Matthew, or find the notes from today's show. Head on over to Podcastnathing.com.

Speaker 2 (00:31)

Welcome back to another Podcast Anything. I am here. Join with Matthew Passy. How are you doing tonight, Matthew?

Speaker 3 (00:37)

Breathing, which is a step up from how I felt last week after getting nasal passage widening surgery and having my nose taped up and gauze up for a week. So it's the little things that I really look forward to, like, but still a little sniffly, still a little out of it after undergoing surgery. But here, breathing and feeling good. How are you, sir?

Speaker 2 (01:03)

I am doing better.

Speaker 3 (01:04)

Good.

Speaker 2 (01:04)

Although we get smacked in the face with I woke up this morning and so it is April 18 this morning when we record this and I woke up and there was three inches of snow on the ground. And I'm like, oh, my God, what the heck is this? I mean, I knew it was me flurries, but according to my AccuWeather app, it said not measurable, it just said snow. And I'm like, this is measurable. The grass is gone. And so other than that, although we're going to be at tomorrow.

Speaker 3 (01:29)

It was cold here.

Speaker 2 (01:35)

It's been cold here. Well, the one question that I was going to also say is now you're ready to hire your voice coach.

Speaker 3 (01:48)

Well, stick with my vocal coach.

Speaker 2 (01:54)

Well, the episode that we got for you today has a couple of different things. We're going to go in a couple of different areas, but we're going to talk about. One is we're going to give you some fascinating news items and one right out of Apple, which is something we're always been talking about here in Podcast Anything. And Apple re upgraded their analytics, but they also finally, in my opinion, delivered what they've been talking about for over a year since they talked about all these revamp things. And so when you logged in there, Matthew, how excited were you to actually see some of the followers on your clients, on your own podcast? You kind of just get a sigh of relief.

Speaker 3 (02:27)

Like, yeah, I mean, we had seen this news pop in March and they said it would be next month. So like starting April 1, I've been checking the analytics board to see when is it there, when is it there? And finally, sometime last week, I don't remember exactly when I saw people starting to post. So they see their followers checked out my board. And sure enough, there you go, right there. If you hit your analytics tab, or if you go into any of your specific shows and Podcast Connect, you now have a followers number from Apple. And literally that's just the number of people who hit follow on your show. It was formally the subscribe button. So very useful, good information to have. What I found to be super interesting about that follower number is that oftentimes the follower number for shows that we've been looking at and talking to our clients about the follower number tends to be higher even than the number of downloads in Apple. I guess that's not that surprising. But with some shows that have a smaller footprint that are very niche, it's folks who are really using this just as a brand storefront kind of, hey, we're very cool and we have a podcast.

Speaker 3 (03:35)

I was impressed with how many more followers they had when looking at what their total down the numbers were like and whatnot. So go to your Podcast Connect account, check out the analytics tab, see your followers go in your show. Take a look at the graphs. You can see where you're getting these new followers when more of them are popping in. If you're losing any, which for bigger shows, you're probably seeing that kind of number, right? You're seeing like a net gain as you go month by month across the board there. The other thing I thought was cool was Apple has really been getting better just about connecting with us. Like, Apple sent out this email on the 13th Apple podcast for creators and they were there touting their subscriptions and making sure that this is how you can use it. Check out your follower data. They actually previewed a show. So they said here's so and so podcast, check it out. They gave you a little bit of how to grow your podcast. They even gave you a link that said four tips for a perfect pitch. Get your show featured on Apple podcasts and you click on that.

Speaker 3 (04:46)

And it's a nice little called a blog post, but more like an FAQ article with not only a bunch of tips and advice that Apple thinks will help you make your show stand out. In our experience, the one show that we got featured on there, they reached out to us. I'm going to call these somewhat requirements for getting featured on Apple, but in there is actually a link to what they call their promotional request form. And so you can actually submit a form, say to Apple, hey, we think we have a show that is noteworthy, that is interesting, that it's fresh and we'd like you to possibly promote it. So very cool stuff coming from Apple this month.

Speaker 2 (05:26)

And it left you with that feeling like we care. And it wasn't like just your big company care. Like they probably spent a week typing that email because they did it in a great Apple fashion of connecting with it. The right words. They didn't make you feel like they were talking down to you and it was actionable. It wasn't just like a fluff email that like, oh here by the latest and greatest whatever. No, it was actually connecting like, yeah, we want to help you get what you want to get out of your podcast. And I also was inspired, as you were talking about that, showing us the followers. I almost wonder how far away we are from us getting YouTube subscriber type numbers visible when people visit podcast apps of them showing the followers that are visible on this actual podcast like people do on YouTube subscribers. And I don't really know any like psychology or marketing position that might like other than you don't want to say how small you are, but at the same time it's a pretty straightforward thing and it doesn't matter whether you're a small YouTube channel, they still show you that you have two subscribers.

Speaker 2 (06:28)

So I was wondering if that is something leading up to us getting used to it so that they put it in the front of the user to say, hey, this person is followed by 100 other people, which is a lot easier to get than reviews because it's just kind of less trackable and less of a headache to try to collect reviews to say this person has 200 reviews as well.

Speaker 3 (06:48)

That's an interesting thought. As you were saying that I was wondering what happens in their App Store, right? What happens when you go to download an app? And I was curious because I don't really pay attention to those metrics all that off. What do they show you there? And even there I thought all of a sudden I saw a big number for I was like, what's at the top of the App Store right now? Snapchat. Which is strange that that's at the top, right? It shows this number, 993,000. It's like, oh, 993,000 downloads and it's ratings. So even the App Store doesn't exactly tell you how many people are downloading apps through Apple. So my sense is that number is not coming up anytime soon for the podcasting space. My fear is that you will have lots and lots of shows with big numbers and a much greater amount, probably 5% to 95% with a much smaller number. That's not going to be a very compelling argument to people coming along and be like, oh, I should download that show and it's like less than 100 followers. Like maybe I shouldn't download that show. So I actually don't think that number is really going to be helpful.

Speaker 3 (07:53)

But I think the fact that you have these numbers in Apple with followers is a little bit more legit. You can screenshot and show people and things like that. I think that is going to be encouraging and helpful for people who are trying to tout their popularity and monetize and something we had a chance to talk about with Apple.

Speaker 2 (08:12)

Apple finally did something first that they weren't playing catch up on. Really? Can you do followers on Spotify in the back end?

Speaker 3 (08:19)

Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 (08:20)

So Spotify does it. So they're catching up to Spotify, but it's not like something that everybody else has already started doing it. Now they're playing catch up, which has usually been the case when podcasting. So don't give them full credit, but at least they're staying on track with Spotify now and realizing we can't just completely ignore what Spotify is doing for podcasters these days.

Speaker 3 (08:38)

Yeah, and I mean, there's some other platforms that have been showing even front facing what they will call subscriber or follower numbers. Like, I want to say maybe it's like Good Pods or Cast Pods or some of these other distribution apps that frankly, they don't command the same audience size. But still, the fact that they show those numbers can be somewhat helpful and somewhat telling of what the if you're getting 1000 downloads on, let's call it a Good pods app, right? That's got to mean that this person has a pretty large following on some of the legacy podcasting apps where they tend to see 60% of their traffic versus Good Pods, which is probably fighting for about less than 5% of their total traffic. So it's been out there. I think you have to take a lot of those numbers with a grain of salt. But once you see those numbers in Apple, it does feel pretty legit. Although truth be told, there are still a lot of people who are looking at their downloads, comparing it to what they're seeing on their hosting platform, wondering why aren't these really reconciling? And I'm sure we'll get lots of deep dives and interesting takes from folks who are better analytics nerds than I am to kind of explain what's going on and maybe why we have those changes.

Speaker 3 (09:47)

Like I said earlier, before we started having to I'll be excited to see when Apple comes out with the report that says if you have more than 5000 followers, you're in the top 20% of all podcasts, whereas right now we kind of rely on getting that data from the hosting companies individually. Most notably, Libson puts that out pretty regularly. And so it'll be nice to kind of see when Apple is kind of looking at all the data they have and maybe putting out some reports that give us a better scope of what podcasting landscape really looks like on what is right now still the largest place to consume them.

Speaker 2 (10:22)

Unfortunately, yes. But I agree with your sentiment there about the future. I want to go to a different article that you read this week about copycatting, and this is something that I don't think a lot of podcasters know getting in they don't really think about, or they don't even really concern themselves with this idea that you're going to create a bunch of content and someone's just going to spend the energy to copy it but it happens far more often than we think, and it can happen pretty easily as well. There's pretty good tech tools to just copy RSS feeds into a different place because it's just an RSS feed with all the information they need available. So when you first read this article about Soldier of Misfortune, what did you kind of think about when you were reading about this copycat article that was figuring out and redoing someone else's work?

Speaker 3 (11:08)

Well. So the interesting thing was even before the article appeared in Pod News the next day, I actually got this Twitter thread served up to me in my time. I don't remember who liked it or who retweeted or whatnot, but I started seeing this thing. It was a tweet from a guy named Brendan. I Conor. I apologize. I'm probably butchering his last name as I do that, so my apologies. Brendan. He's a writer for The Atlantic, and he tweets back on April 11, this podcast series is a shameless ripoff of my Atlantic story from last April. No credit is given, and the creator did zero original reporting. He even mispronounces the main characters name through all eight episodes. So apparently someone basically was reading this guy's well researched, indepth article and turning that into a podcast, basically retelling the story that this guy did all the leg work on to procure and publish in a very well respected media location, which is The Atlantic. And so in this case, Brendan is like, I did all the work. You're ripping me off. You're not giving me credit. And even if you were giving me credit, like, how are you allowed to monetize this when you're literally just reading my words to you?

Speaker 3 (12:20)

Now, this happens if you actually look through the thread and we'll make sure we post a link to his thread here about what's going on. If you go through the thread, it's not the first time it's even happened to Brendan, which, dude, sorry, that is horrible. And I'm sorry that you're dealing with this, but it certainly has happened in other places where people are basically going out there claiming to be doing really good journalistic podcasting efforts or even just doing a podcast and basically just reading somebody else's book or passing off somebody else's work on their own, and they're able to monetize and they're able to grow, and it's going to be a little bit of a problem. Now, it's not unique to podcasting, right? This happens on YouTube, it happens on blogging, it happens in a lot of different places, but it's just kind of a shame to see it here. Now, most of our listeners, most of the people that we tend to interact with and work with, they're probably not going to be subject to a lot of this kind of stealing and copycatting. What you're probably going to see more often are people who are trying to copy maybe your name, your brand.

Speaker 3 (13:34)

That happens a little bit folks who might steal your closing questions. I've seen that happen a couple of times where it's like, no, this person kind of came up with that closing question, like they own the niche on that, like you need to move on. But truthfully, what we really have to look out for is independent podcasters are folks who are literally copying our RSS feed, publishing it through a different platform, and then turning on ads. And the real concern there is that literally you would go and search for, let's say somebody took podcast me anything, went over to anchor, imported our show, or did something where basically all of our episodes just kind of automatically published to this anchor feed. Now, if this person is doing a little bit of work and is marketing it and is hacking it so that when you search for the show, you get his feed first, he'll be getting higher numbers than us and he'll be making money off what is essentially our content. Not even someone who is passing the content off, just literally our content. Now, it has been cracked down on a little bit, but it is still definitely happening and something we definitely have to watch out for and something even the industry is trying to do some things about, namely the really good platforms won't let you import a show without emailing.

Speaker 3 (15:00)

Whoever's email address is in the RSS feed to kind of confirm, like, do you own the show or did you do this? Let us know. But there's even some talks of some other tools and techniques to make sure you cannot just steal RSS feed content without actually getting it unlocked by the original owner and creator.

Speaker 2 (15:19)

And you feel like that would be something in 2022 that technology could be able to be solved and maybe even something actually, to say this out loud, I bet the NFT tech, which is a digitalized wallet connection with uniqueness and content creation, would be somehow baked into this. I mean, NFC is by definition are almost in a very early form giving legitimate licenses to digital content that no one can duplicate and exist as a one of a kind. I bet there's some future version maybe a few years from now where podcasting is NFT as these are one of a kind creations and NFTs keep track of legitimacy to prevent it from being copied and you can quickly verify if it's a copy or if it's the original.

Speaker 3 (16:02)

Yeah. I mean, you're already starting to see some folks who are talking about podcasts on the blockchain and NFT audio content and things like that. I don't know if we're quite there yet. And I think for some reason this medium is glacial in its ability to it does have a hammer.

Speaker 2 (16:22)

People just like the old feeling of it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:26)

I don't understand why when video tends to be more complicated, more takes, more bandwidth, more power, more memory. Right. Everything about video is harder. And yet video seems to move and adapt and pivot and change and evolve much quicker than audio. It's a little fascinating to me, but yeah, that's where we're at right now.

Speaker 2 (16:50)

I'm sure it has something to do with the Genesis of YouTube and its timing, and it's probably a focus on being that content creation or maybe something that was instantly more tied to the search engine. And podcast was a separate sidecar that had to integrate into the mainstream when YouTube was kind of just especially when they bought by Google, essentially became something in the ecosystem that everybody was already driving around in.

Speaker 3 (17:14)

Yeah, but even look at how Snapchat turned dissolving video into a thing that everybody quickly adopted and then Tik Tok turn short video reels into something that Instagram and Facebook adopted. It just seems that video is so quick to find new ways to innovate, and maybe it's because it is bigger, it does draw more attention, it can earn more money. It does get more engagement on these platforms. So maybe more people are just focused on it, and that's kind of what's happening. But why is Facebook and Twitter now starting to think about podcasting 20 years later? Whereas after TikTok came out, they were creating their own versions of those within three to six months? Right. It's just a very fascinating difference of how our spaces work.

Speaker 2 (18:09)

I don't know whether this is normal or if it's connected, but I was almost wondering because radio has more of an old guard because it's been around for so long. I was wondering if there is a stubbornness attached to radio, which then inherently connects to podcasting, which then weighs the process down, and there's less cool kids inventing things in podcasting then like in TikTok and Instagram and all those places where the cool kids can crap things out and be a coded platform in a few weeks and start changing the world.

Speaker 3 (18:37)

I mean, I will definitely give you that radio has been run by dinosaurs for a long time. It's starting to change a little bit. But I was working at a station shortly after I was at the Journal before I really got serious with this business. I was working at a station doing some freelance hours, basically helping them with bartered time so people would come in, basically be like, yeah, I'll buy an hour each week, record what I want, I'll sell my own ads. And the rest of the time, these Studios were running syndicated content off a computer. So the studio itself was literally just sitting there collecting dust. And I'm fascinated by podcast me anything to grow this business. And I turned to the guy who came in to be the head of this station that was also, like vice President of the entire radio group for a pretty large radio group. So I got to talk with him. I was like, listen, I have this idea, and I think it could be a big money maker. Instead of selling just the 24 hours that is available in a day through syndicated time, why don't we sell podcasting?

Speaker 3 (19:43)

You've got Studios here that are literally collecting dust. You've got promotions, people who have nothing to promote. You've got advertising, people who could be selling more content beyond just, again, the 24 hours that's available in a day. This could be a thing and I kind of made a network. This could be a thing. Like truthfully, this would have been like my original home podcasting studio idea. But I made this great presentation. The guy's like, oh, I love the way you're thinking. I can see the dollar signs. I can see the potential. Blah, blah, blah. Let me tweak this a little bit. I'll come back to you over the weekend and we'll talk about it and then we'll present it to some of my colleagues and he came back. He's basically I love what you're saying. So we're basically going to do that, but it's going to be the radio. Like, you just wasted my time. Totally missed the boat on exactly what I was saying. The one piece of this that you are not understanding is we don't need to be limited by the 24 hours that are in a day. You can only jam so much content into 24 hours in a day on a radio station with podcast.

Speaker 3 (20:43)

I could fill those 24 hours an infinite number of times. And you are just not understanding that.

Speaker 2 (20:51)

Now that vice President has that thought of man, he was ahead of his time.

Speaker 3 (20:55)

He probably doesn't even remember me talking about it. I doubt he's even in radio. If I had to guess, I would think he's gone. And that station is out of business. But that's the world we live in. So I'll build my own Studios and we'll do it. We'll do it live, damn it.

Speaker 2 (21:17)

Well, I want to open up something that before this podcast hit season two, Mathew and I talked about it for a good six months and we had several ideas of we wanted to turn podcast, anything back on. We had this idea of doing co host and host, but we had no idea what we were going to talk about it. We wanted a format. We wanted something different. But we really didn't have a good baked idea. And what we want to deep dive on today is getting through that thick and focusing on one particular one today. And that is a narrative podcast. Because when you design these podcasts, it's not always easy on coming up with a format and it can be difficult. As I said, we just spent six months talking about how to get this podcast and what the right format. And even in the end, the three things we focus on was news. Deep dive in the question. Very simplistic, but six months to get there, how do you help people get there and focus on even when they tried to decide if they want to do a narrative or even help them understand.

Speaker 2 (22:13)

You know, what you really are talking about is a narrative podcast. I'm not sure if you've heard of these before, but they could be a perfect fit for what you're looking for. And I think there's probably a very difficult thing for you to sell and even help them understand. But then also even maybe to implement as well.

Speaker 3 (22:28)

Yeah. The truth is we've actually fielded a couple of calls in the last few weeks from folks who are excited about doing a podcast and launching, and their emails are, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? We're like, yeah, we handle all that stuff. That's great. When we get on the phone with them, we start to talk to them a little bit more and they start going deep into what it is they want. And most of them are saying we want it to sound like NPR or this American Life or maybe Crooked Media, not a Crooked Media, A Gambler Media podcast, or the Daily from the New York Times. And as I'm hearing these people talking, I'm like, I see you looked up podcast, narrative or narrative podcasting. You were taken to one of these companies and these companies were like, yeah, we could do that, but it cost like $100,000 an episode. And you're like, well, but why is Mathew able to do this stuff for only a few hundred dollars an episode? And the reason is because you have no idea what goes into this. You have no idea the amount of work that goes into this.

Speaker 3 (23:29)

So the difference between what we do and truthfully, after these couple of calls, I kind of looked at our co, Sean. I was like, it's not really worth our time. We are so busy that we don't have the capacity to spend 40 hours a week on one episode. When we are working 40 hours a week on 40 episodes, 80 episodes, our business model is just not the same. But after fielding a few of these calls, I'm not going to show them. I'm like, are we doing this wrong? Like, should we kind of flip the script and think about this a little bit? And maybe we'll entertain that notion. But let's talk about what kind of goes into a real narrative podcast. Right? When someone says to you, I want this to be the tightest 20 minutes podcast that I can get, it's like, all right, do a tight 20 minutes interview. That's never going to happen. Right? Because most guests are not trained to interview that quickly. Or I want to do this and I want this music and I want this other voice and I want to bring in a sound effect. And you still want us to do this for what is essentially going to be like $0.12 an hour.

Speaker 3 (24:34)

When we pull up the amount of hours it's going to take to produce this.

(24:36)

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:36)

That's just not what we're here for. So why is it so difficult? Why is it so different from what we traditionally do or what most podcasts are doing, which is basically interviewing maybe some light content edits, plenty of quality edits, smashing all your stuff together and putting it out there. Because when you're doing a narrative podcast, you really are dedicating almost 40 and in many cases, like 40 to 80 hours of person time into producing this. Because let's take, for example, cereal, right? Cereal, the original narrative podcast following the story of Adnan said this kid from Maryland who gets accused and convicted of murder. And it just doesn't sit right with his friends, his family. They bring it to the producer and they're looking at the story like, yeah, it doesn't sit right with us either. Let's go find out what happens. One, it takes hours just to research this topic. You first have to kind of know, I guess the reason why it takes so long is because what you're really doing is you're kind of making a movie, right? You are drafting an idea. You are scripting out what the arc of your story is going to be or where you think the story is going to go.

Speaker 3 (25:58)

Obviously, answers coming a little bit different. And then you got to go out there and you got to shoot. And when you film a movie, you don't get 90 minutes of tape, call it a day and then put it out there. When they are filming for movies that are an hour long, they're probably capturing 100 hours of film. When we're talking about documentaries, same thing, right? They are sitting down with people for hours and hours and asking the tons of questions and having them repeat their answers because they didn't quite get it in the way that they wanted to get it. And now somebody's got to go through all of that content. Somebody's got to find all the juicy bits in there. They've got to pull that stuff out. They've got to put it onto this timeline. They've got to make sure it tells the story. In many cases, if we're talking about journalistic narrative storytelling, we've got to fact check all of this work, right. It's not enough just to ask somebody, hey, what did you see that day? And they say this and you just print it as is like, you've got to make sure that what you are putting out there is really what you think it is.

Speaker 3 (27:03)

So let's just assume vocal content alone for a 30 minutes podcast, you probably are going to want to collect at least at least two to 10 hours worth of content, maybe not nearly that much. If you think if you're not quite the journalistic narrative storytelling. Right, maybe you just want to interview someone and Whittle that down. But even whittling down an hour interview into a tight 20 minutes takes time. You've got to listen to that content, listen to it again, pull the pieces, put it in the right order. And now what you probably have to do after that is you probably have to go back and you have to re script your questions or in what many people are calling kind of like narrate this podcast, because when you're doing an interview, you have the luxury of being able to hear the previous context, the last answer, the long form of your question. But when you're doing a narrative podcast, you're trying to move these pieces along. So you have to set it up like tell us the cut, tell us who this person is, play that piece of audio, come back, and now kind of move the story along.

Speaker 3 (28:17)

So one, you've recorded a ton of raw content, then you've listened to that content over and over again. You've pulled out the relevant stuff, you've put it into an order. Now you're sitting there scripting all the narration that's going to fill the gap. That's going to kind of help move the story along. In the meantime, while you're doing that, you're probably editing it all one more time, right? It's usually you have like an actual producer who is kind of like the hands working the audio. But then you probably have a series of either writers or copywriters or specific Editors who are the ones who are kind of going through that content and making sure that this is a coherent story, which is not easy to do. So let's just kind of speed this along a little bit. Let's assume you've put in a solid ten to 20 hours of work just to take that recorded content and put it into the story that you want to put it. That's not to mention the several hours of pre show research, several hours of sourcing your guests, scheduling their time, doing your research on them. Let's just assume 10 hours you've recorded your audio, you've pulled out what you want, you've rearranged it, and now you've added your narration.

Speaker 3 (29:33)

Now you still have another challenge, which is bringing in additional sound elements to move that story along, right? Really good narrative podcasts from the likes of an NPR or this American Life or whomever. They don't just tell you the story, they give you a feeling for the story. And they do that with sound effects. They do that with. And not just sound effects. Like that's not what I mean, but like so and so is walking through the woods and you kind of hear the crunching on the leaves. This is what often I want to say, is it Gaffers or the guys who go out and pick up that kind of stuff or Foley? I think it's fully the word that I'm looking for. I'm sorry, my brain's a little foggy. So I know I'm getting that wrong and apologies that I did. And people who do this work are awesome. So sorry for the disrespect. It's not you, it's me. But. Right. You might want to be including a little bit of environmental noise to kind of help move that story along. But more importantly, you want to add music in between the different elements.

Speaker 3 (30:36)

Sometimes for drama, sometimes to stress a point. Sometimes you just want to put it in there to fill the silence. Right. Sometimes you use music to stop, to give the audience a chance to really think about what you just said before. You want to move on to the next piece of it. And people who do that well, these sound designers, honestly, I'll call them a musical magician. That is not an easy skill. Right. How much do the guys get paid to score the Star Wars movies and the Marvel movies and all those different things? This is something that people who do this well are literally artists and magicians. And so if you think you're just going to kind of roll through these royalty free libraries for a few hours and pick up some music here and there, you could probably be doing more damage to all this work that you've put forward than not. That is an entirely different skill set on top of everything. And that person, if they're going to do it well, they're not going to come cheap. So no, you can't want to go out there, do hours of research on your topic.

Speaker 3 (31:49)

Spend hours of time interviewing the person. Spend hours of time listening back to find the things that are important. Spend hours of time scripting the pieces that need to go in between your newly collated cuts that you think are the gold of what you've been grabbing. You need to spend hours of time finding the right environmental noise and music noise and putting it all together. And then you probably need a few hours of time to go through it and listen again, because there's a good chance something is in there that didn't belong or something doesn't work. Or like we said earlier, maybe there's a fact check or listen. They're like, we can't use this. It's not true. And right now you got to kind of go back and rejigger that whole thing. So somebody who's thinking about a real narrative podcast, right? Anybody who calls or anybody who emails, it's like, I want to sound like NPR and they're talking to us. What I'm really hearing is I don't want to spend money. But that's also the reason why the people who do this kind of work command typically earn so much for it. Because if I'm a Wondery, if I'm a Gimlet, if I'm an NPR, if I'm a New York Times, whatever, I am not investing that kind of human capital into something that's not going to give me a return on my investment.

Speaker 3 (33:09)

And so if I have just spent 80 hours of people's time and assuming even at a low discount rate of $20, per hour for these people time, which what I'm telling you is not anywhere near what they deserve or what they're worth. You're probably tripling quadrupling or whatever that number to get there. But.

(33:32)

Right.

Speaker 3 (33:32)

Like with 80 hours, if you have 80 hours from someone, $20 an hour, that's $1,600 right there for that one person. And we've probably brought up, what, about five or six different people. So right there, you've spent about $10,000 to put out this podcast. And that doesn't include all the time you have to spend with marketing and website and equipment and all those different things. So I don't say that I discourage people from getting into narrative podcasting. If you've got the right assets, if you've got the right story, you should absolutely do it. But know that you cannot do it very well cheaply. There are some people who do it really well cheaply. But you will probably see that that person is spending their entire life doing it and it is draining from them. And if they are not successful, it is that much more frustrating. So you have to have a real sense of what you're trying to do, why you're doing it, why it's important. And how are you going to make that return on this investment? Because it is a massive investment of human capital, actual capital, blood, sweat and tears, all that different stuff.

Speaker 3 (34:43)

And I'll stop here because I'm sure I've created a few questions in your mind.

Speaker 2 (34:48)

You definitely have. But I wasn't expecting to wind it up and let them go moment. I'm really thinking, like, you had a lot to say for a long time on this, and I'm really glad that we had a chance to get it out there because now you're going to sleep a little bit better.

Speaker 3 (35:00)

I imagine if I had planned this like a narrative podcast, I could have told that whole story in about three minutes. And yeah, even before you're like when you brought this up, I was like, I don't know how much I could do on this, but yeah, once you start talking, you're like, this is a lot it was an excellent riff.

Speaker 2 (35:12)

Not a rant riff.

Speaker 3 (35:14)

It's a lot of work, right. Npr has teams of people when they are hiring for their staff, they are hiring a sound designer whose entire job it is to listen to podcasts and create that music. That's all they do. Or there are people who do this.

Speaker 2 (35:35)

The higher 15 instruments, probably. They're like the guy from Mary Poppins, I can't think of his name.

Speaker 3 (35:42)

Yeah. Dick Van Dyke with the drama on his back and the symbol.

Speaker 2 (35:46)

That's what a sound designer is. That's what they are in their head at least.

Speaker 3 (35:50)

Yeah. I mean, or you're bringing in a gun for hire and you're talking thousands and thousands of dollars. I mean, just to score a podcast intro, if you are really going to some talented people to get podcast interest created sure you can go to Fiverr and some other places and get them for $30, here $100, here $250, there. The first time we ever reached out to a commercial music writer, somebody whose job it is to make music for advertising and said, we were thinking about hiring you to do music for our podcast. He wanted $10,000. What it is? Yeah, it's $10,000. And I'm just like, I have $10 now. It wasn't my $10, it was my clients $10 when I went back to them and I was like, yeah, he wants 10,000. Like, yeah, we're never going to make that back.

Speaker 2 (36:38)

No.

Speaker 3 (36:39)

So let's try something else.

Speaker 2 (36:41)

So a couple of things popped in my head. One is it's not impossible, but the one thing and I was thinking of like a smell test of like, what's the smell test for a narrative. The first one that came to mind was, Are you an indie podcaster? If you are, you probably failed to smell test because in any podcast you're going right towards a narrative. There's still a steep learning curve in podcast. Even use your own voice, understanding how to ask good questions as an indie podcast. Or you're better off just starting at podcasts, getting good at interviews, and then realizing, you know what, I really want to juice up my life with a narrative podcast. It should be a part two, not a part one if you're an indie podcaster. The second one is I was also seeing it as it would be extremely difficult to do it as a weekly episode. You would burn yourself out if you don't get $100,000 to throw at people's salaries to solve these problems. And you would almost do it as a year long life project. Like, this would be a project you would do all year, prepare like ten episodes and it would launch altogether.

Speaker 2 (37:39)

You would not just do this on a weekly basis. When I think of even what you're talking about and 20,000 Hz and thinking they do that engineering on a weekly basis, the preparatory, the reading, the research, all of that in itself kind of just stressed me out. Thinking about it is those podcasters that were cutting edge at the time because they were doing narrative indie style and they made it and they got through and now they've essentially made it to the Golden Area Podcast and we got sponsorships to help support all those different things. But going from those basic smell tests, like, to me, it was, you don't create a serial podcast of one right after another. It's intentional. It's almost like a docuseries. You make sure that you have the skill set already to make sure your time is valuable. You don't go into narrative to learn the skill. I mean, you may, but no one's going to listen to it if you're just trying to do it for that. And I think you're going to sharpen it a lot better and understand and meet new people that maybe could help you along your way if you did an interview show before you decided to start your podcast.

Speaker 2 (38:39)

And there was also one I didn't connect it when we first started this. But have you ever seen the Hulu series Murder in the Building.

Speaker 3 (38:47)

Only Murders in the Building?

Speaker 2 (38:49)

Yes. And it reminded me of what we just talked about and how these three idiots essentially create this docu series, narrative podcast without any help. They just do this recording on a microphone and carrying this crap around makes it look easy for anybody. But I'm sure it's a magic of Hollywood.

Speaker 3 (39:06)

Well, even though they don't make it easy, right? They've got a producer, they've got a voice, and they've got a researcher.

Speaker 2 (39:10)

Right.

Speaker 3 (39:11)

You've got Martin Short, who is acting like he's producing it. He's got to get everything together. He's coaching Steve Martin, who's doing the narration, and then you've got Selena Gomez, who is kind of really doing the investigative work, which has got a personal interest in the story. I'm not going to ruin it. But yes, even they make it look easy when it probably wouldn't be. But I want to go back to your first point about independent podcasters, because there actually are some really talented independent podcasters who can do this kind of podcast work. But what I have found in many of those cases is that they are not doing interview based shows. So one of the first, what I'll call a narrative type podcast that I listened to was a show called Time Suck with Dan Commons.

Speaker 2 (39:57)

Absolutely. Dan Common show.

Speaker 3 (39:59)

Oh, it's phenomenal. Dan Commons is basically doing the comedic version of Hardcore History with Chris Carlin. He takes topics that are a little bit more pop culture, a little bit more like fun and interesting or weird. And he talks about them for like an hour to an hour and a half, and there's no interviews. He's not bringing anybody else on. He has basically scripted this entire thing and he's basically reading it. And he's got help.

Speaker 2 (40:32)

Right.

Speaker 3 (40:32)

Even when he was just starting out, like maybe when he was first starting out, he was doing most of it as on his own. But even in the early run of the show, as it was getting bigger and better, he had lots of volunteers who are helping him source material and do research for it. He had a producer who was helping him record and cut it out, like edit his mistakes and stuff like that. And on top of all that, he was constantly complaining that he was running at a time each and every week to get it done. And what made him really crazy was that what he would do is for every 1000 reviews that the show got, he would do a bonus episode. He did that for, like, I don't know, I can't listen to the show anymore because I just don't have the time. It's still a great show. Yeah. When I was traveling to New York regularly, like, that was my jam. But pandemic, I stopped really going anywhere. But he probably was doing a bonus show, like once a month. Not to mention he's a stand up comedian. And so he at least had the ease of being able to get an audience because he was going out on the road every week and telling people, hey, I'm funny.

Speaker 3 (41:45)

You like me, by the way. I have a podcast. Like, he was building his audience. Don't get me wrong. His podcast helped his comedy profile and his comedy profile helped his podcast. But still, he was a marketing machine even before the podcast because he was out there being a professional comedian. And again, now again, I haven't listened in a while. But betcha if I listen, he's got a ton of people helping him out. And he's been monetizing it early on. Right. He sells a ton of merchandise. He does affiliate stuff. He had sponsors. There was no joke to this. It went from him being an indie podcaster with a leg up, again, because of that comedic exposure to turning this into a real media organization and company, another show. And I think we've talked about this guy before on the show. It's a podcast I started listening to kind of recently called The Doomsday Podcast. And it's this guy, I want to say he's Canadian. Not that that's a good thing or a bad thing or anything like that, but he's a guy who basically does that.

Speaker 2 (42:49)

No, mine or is that a friend's line?

Speaker 3 (42:51)

No, that's a sign up there's. Anything wrong with that? Right. So he does the show Doomsday Podcast, kind of similar to what Dan Comes was doing was he finds these, like, not well talked about or not well known tragedies, these horrible, really quirky tragedies. And he talks about them for about 20 to 30 minutes. And he does it with this amazing deadpan delivery. And he does it. It's just great if you're into whatever. He's got a great show, but it's the same thing, right? He writes the script, he reads it. He adds in some sound effects here and there. He adds a little bit of ambience. He's got a few fun, like production elements that make it sound really cool. But it's all him. And because it's all him, the frequency at which the show comes out very easily suffers. Right. I think it was like every other week when he was doing it at his best. But he also had to stop and take a few months off because of an illness or because of a family thing or because of a work thing. And even now, when I get to listen to the show, he's monetizing it.

Speaker 3 (44:01)

Right. You're hearing ads and I guess they're dynamically inserted ads. I hope he's making enough revenue and I hope people are supporting him in the show. And he's got a Patreon. But even now when I listen to the show, it's just him and he'll sometimes post on Instagram like what his audio edit looks like, this big dog with like tons of clips and stuff moving around. It's a very complicated thing going on. But it is not uncommon to hear a mistake in his show, but because it's one guy and it's so much work for one guy to do. Yeah, that is going to happen.

Speaker 2 (44:35)

So how do you pressure test these? What you're also pointing out is there's almost always a way, but almost the straight way is not the way, which is almost where we like asking, hey, Matthew, can you create an NPR style podcast for me? No, but then finding an alternative way that goes around NPR, recreate something that's already happening in a cheaper way. How do you navigate as a consultant to me that seems like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube, trying to figure out how do we take this person's desire and make it something that plugs in and doesn't just completely walk by and pop their balloon, but also faces reality of sometimes it's really expensive and it's not possible.

Speaker 3 (45:20)

What I'll tell you is that we're not the right people for it right now. I don't proclaim to be somebody who could do it. I've done a few what we will call narrative style podcast in my day, mostly at my work at the Journal. But that was also because we were scripting it. We were pulling clips. We had several people who could help us with it, and they were specials. Right. We did a four part series on the original crash of the market during the financial collapse. That took us a week to put that together. And there were like four episodes. They were each about eight minutes long. And it took a lot of work for us to do that. And it was great. It was invigorating, it was fun. But the business that I run is just not what we specialize in. There are plenty of people who specialize in this. But again, going back to something I said earlier, if this is what you want to do, you're basically going to hire someone to do 40 hours a week for one episode, whereas we're more likely to do 40 episodes in an hour.

Speaker 3 (46:26)

That's a little bit of an exaggeration. But you get the idea we're a little bit more about churning out more episodes because I think for the kinds of folks that we work with, the amount of work that they expect that this requires, most of them are not going to see that return on investment that they're looking for.

(46:47)

Right.

Speaker 3 (46:48)

If your whole thing for your podcast is, oh, I want to raise my stature. I want a little bit more brand recognition. I want this to be the lead of my sales funnel. Well, if every time you get a client, it earns you $100, it's going to take way too many people for you to make up the expenses of spending $10,000 on an episode to produce it. So it's just not right for you. But if you are that person and what I'll say in the case of like Time Suck or 20 0 Hz or Doomsday or Serial or NPR. Right. Like all those different people is it's not about the ROI, it's about the passion like Doomsday podcast. This guy just loves doing it. Dallas from 20,000 Hz. We've had the guy in the PEC a couple of times. The dude is just super passionate about what he's doing now to him, I'm not sure how many people he had starting on the show, but even now he has a team of people that help him put this together. And I'm sure he's still working his butt off and stretching the limit every time they drop an episode.

Speaker 3 (47:56)

So it's just a matter of if you really want this, if this is what you want to do, then this is going to have to become your full time job and you're going to have to be very well either funded or have a very solid plan for how you are going to recoup the investment that you're making on this. And maybe it's a subscription. Right. Let's go back to our early story. Let's say Brendan over The Atlantic decided he's going to turn this story at The Atlantic into a podcast. My guess is that The Atlantic would charge people to listen to it or they would run a bunch of ads for people to listen to it. That's what happens at Wandering, right? Wondery puts out these shows and if you are paying one dear for the privilege of listening to their content, you get the show early and you get an ad free. If you were trying to check out their content for free, no problem. You get it later than everybody else. And we're going to throw some ads at you because they've got to make up the money because they are laying out a lot to create this stuff.

Speaker 3 (49:02)

So the question becomes, if you are a business that's using podcasting, it's probably not right for you. But if podcasting is your business, just know this is a full time job creating narrative podcasting. And it is not just one. It is a lot of people's full time job to put out one podcast, listen to the credits of any high quality show. It's why Cereal doesn't put out episodes every week. They put out, like I said earlier, ten episodes once a year, if that. I don't even know the last time they put out a season of cereal. But right. It's not like they're dropping those every week. They're doing years worth of work to put out a story.

Speaker 2 (49:41)

I agree. And actually reminded of to inspire some other people out there to do a documentary or narrative is the connection where we did the podcast that we also commonly worked on where it was about the epidemic of loneliness. And I want to say it was the connected or I'm actually missing the name of it in my head as I think about it. But it was a simple ten document episode that they worked on for over like six months during the panemic when we had a bundet of time and they created and talked to different interviews and they pieced it together. And I do know from that case there was one particular podcast producer that he was the guy that did it all, but it was expensive, but they did put their time together and it was something that was worth it and it came out quality on the other end. So I think expectations is another word that I would add to all this as well. I'm sure all the people that came to you, they thought, like, we could have this thing up and running in three weeks. Like other podcasts. Like, no.

Speaker 3 (50:39)

Well, so one person who called me, they said, we do video, but we've never explored podcasting. They're explaining what they want to do in podcast. I'm like, you have the infrastructure to do this because you've done it in video. You just need to do it minus the video component of it. And then if you're still confused about how to distribute it via podcast. Yeah, give us a call. We'll help you with that piece of it. Another person called me up. He's like, I own the rights to all these old whatever shows or stories or books, like all these things that are really good stories that could be very good fictional podcasts. And I think you get off a stone. I was like, I would love to, but I can't. And if you've got this background in media, you're better off talking to your media friends and going through that process to create this. And then once you've got it created, if you need help with how to distribute it, yeah, we'll help you with the podcasting aspects of it. But it's a production, right? We clean up, we produce episodes. Most people, they clean up, they produce episodes.

Speaker 3 (51:43)

A lot of people, they just read stuff or they just talk on the microphone and let it fly. That's okay, I'm not knocking it, but it's fine. This medium doesn't have restrictions on it. But if you want to be that top one to 5% of podcasts that everybody's talking about that are getting interviewed on the late night shows that are getting spoofed on SNL that are on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, that are being converted into television shows on Hulu and Amazon and all the other nonsense, that's a massive investment. And for most of the people listening to this, your investment is in your actual business.

Speaker 2 (52:25)

Buying a podcast.

Speaker 3 (52:27)

Most of these people are going to have a better chance of self publishing a book, too. But the point is, you have a business and you're going to use a podcast to help your business. You are not in the business of podcasting. It's a little bit different now. Plenty of people start that way. They grow a show, it becomes successful. Now they become in the business of podcasting. And now they have teams and other people, and maybe then they can start to explore this kind of stuff. We have one client who every other year or so decides to do a big special where he interviews a bunch of people. He goes through, he reads all these transcripts, he highlights the clips he wants to do. Then he comes back and he reads a whole bunch of narration to go in between the different clips that he's pulled. But it takes him hours and hours and hours. It takes us hours and hours to help him. And I'll tell you, we probably have to go through about eight to ten versions until they feel like it's right, because there's a lot of editing and reediting and more editing.

Speaker 3 (53:26)

So, yeah, I would say it's fun to think that you're going to do narrative podcasting, but if that's your game, one go work for somebody else first, see what it takes. Get that kind of inside baseball look at it, and then if you're going to do it, be prepared to invest a lot of time, a lot of money and have a plan for how you're going to recoup on that or know that you better be selling that before it even launches.

Speaker 2 (53:55)

I'm going to selfishly ask a question before we go into the question for this episode. If I gave you $100,000, what narrative podcast would you want to create? I feel like you have one if you had $100,000, like, I have this one on my heart that I would just dump that money into to create.

Speaker 3 (54:13)

No, honestly, I don't. I mean, I've listened to a couple of fiction podcasts that I think are interesting, and I wish I had time to listen to more of them.

Speaker 2 (54:27)

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (54:27)

I don't really know what I would do with that $100,000 right now. There are people who are better at finding those stories and searching them up. I like interesting stories, but I'm not sure which one I'd want to tell today. Why you have one?

Speaker 2 (54:44)

Well, other than those news podcasts that I hinted at last week about how did we get here and what was the other one? How did we get here and have we been here before? I think those two narrative podcasts will be really good, and I would put my $100,000 on those because I think people would really understand the thread through time of what were all the sequence of events that got us here.

Speaker 3 (55:08)

My problem is that I'm one of those guys who everyone's like, life is a journey, not the destination. I'm like, I want the destination. Right. I want to be able to say that I'm doing a podcast show, like a 42nd podcast production montage, and then see the results ten minutes later. I don't know if I have the patience for all that, but I wish more, like part of me wants to see Podcasting be more successful so that we can get more good storytelling, more better storytelling. My kind of like Pie in the sky dream one day is that someone is able to use dynamic insertion technology to kind of create, like a Choose Your Own Adventure podcast one day. I think that idea would be kind of fun and cool, but I think we still got some time on that.

Speaker 2 (55:56)

True. You would have to take the $100,000 and start investing in a couple of coders to figure out how to take that tech and probably blend it with some AI and create a few babies with it as well to create some new technology that probably doesn't already exist.

Speaker 3 (56:09)

Yeah. I mean, I have other ideas for $100,000, but none of them are narrative podcasting. It true.

Speaker 2 (56:14)

Well, the question I want to ask you is a selfish one. So we did not have a question submitted. If you would like to submit one for Matthew to answer live. If you've got a podcasting, itch like you're losing sleep over this. Head over to Podcastvening.com. There's a microphone on the side of the website submit your question. We will answer it here live.

Speaker 3 (56:30)

And I'm going to just jump on the Facebook group and post it there. We've had a bunch of new people sign up for the Facebook group and happy to see your questions right there. We'll check them out. We'll include them in the show.

Speaker 2 (56:41)

True. It is 2022. There are all multiple channels where we can reach Podcast. Anything. The question I want to ask and it was a selfish one that I've been thinking about, and we've never talked about it, which could be a deep dive in the future, depending on where you go with it. Have you ever seen people use Podcast RSS feeds for course distribution? If they have a course or something like Elearning platform and they use Podcasting to put the audio of a course inside their listeners or the students hand to be able to consume it quicker on the go. Is that something you've ever seen done or considered being done of using it as like lesson one is now in this episode and something like that?

Speaker 3 (57:20)

Yeah, I think we've definitely seen people play around the edges of that or create that kind of stuff. My guess is that, though, you don't see a lot of that on the public facing podcast, because again, we're talking about a course that's usually something people have to register for or pay for or get credits for. And so there's probably a little bit more restriction on that. That's the kind of thing that you would probably want to put on, like a Supercast or a Patreon or even like the back end the new subscription tools from Apple that people can pay for it so that it's available as a podcast. It can be released in a subscribable format and you can get a notification every time there is a new lesson or course or something like that in there. But I'm sure there's plenty of it out there, but I suspect a lot of it is behind Paywalls and other guards so that it's not just going out there for anybody to steal and use.

Speaker 2 (58:17)

My original thought was thinking of like even how to captivate have the nice beautiful links that when you put it in a browser, it pops up with the embedded player of even something like not even worry about distributing it or publishing it, like just using the captivate type system for storing it and including a link into an email that sends it on Monday. And this is your content, you click this and it cooks play of putting that content because I've always liked the crux of online courses is no one creates a time to sit in front of the computer to listen to it. And I know within my coaching I always deliver audio within the program, so that way I know they're busy my clients. So I'm putting the content in the places where they could listen to it, like at the gym. And I'm thinking in my household, some of the other things that I've had is using it as a lead magnet, like creating like a three episode specific podcast as a lead magnet because different things that I've done is like doing a Freedad course.com is my URL on different podcasts and pumping that right to a specific podcast.

Speaker 2 (59:14)

Like, hey, check out this free dad course. It's three episodes that walks you through boom, boom, boom and using it as like a specific way to provide quick content. Because the biggest thing with any content delivery is people are extremely busy and that has not gotten any easier in their life in the modern world of trying to sell things as well now.

Speaker 3 (59:34)

And I guess again, the other reason why I think the public facing doesn't work is there's no tracking, there's no accountability. I know some folks who have actually reached out about hey, we want to do this is like credits for a certification or whatever. And the problem is how do we ensure that the person actually listened? And right now it's usually in the form of a follow up quiz or something like that, unless you're using an internal closed off card in the system where you can actually track the plays and the progress and things like that. But yeah, there are lots of ways to use this medium. We are only limited by our imaginations.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16)

Agreed. And I also have something I bought from hanging around you too much. Because what is the company that does all the different trials when the company products just always launch? You have an addiction to it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30)

Appsumo, AppSumo.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31)

There was an app, Sumo for this new podcast host company where it was like audio subscriptions, where they have a specific app and you load all your audio in there and it delivers the kind of in a drip content. And that's essentially where Freedad course.com, is sitting right now. But it was this way of like, I want something that someone can just sit in their truck and listen to on the way to work and be able to consume some type of free content. But then also being able to get their email address was kind of a key requirement in there because if I just went to the podcast player, I wouldn't get their email to be able to communicate with them. So my Bryan has been going on this for three years now. So I was really curious, where is your mind gone? But you answered the question. So if you want to do a deep dive on it in the future, you let me know. And we can go even more into that. And I can expand my thoughts on what I see is some of the things that I often think about with that context.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19)

Well, maybe I'll turn the tables and see how your experiment is done.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22)

That always works. I did offer that. As a result, I've turned the tables. And you picking my brain for a little bit here. Well, that does it for another podcast, meaning we did some pretty good riffs. We wound up Matthew. We got some pretty good content for Narrating, and hopefully we didn't discourage you from it. And the biggest message I want you to take away from Matthew is, well, Matthew may not be the perfect podcast company for narrative. He also wants to recognize that they are making sure you pick the right podcast company to edit your podcast, because making sure you pick the right one is also going to make whether your idea lands and finds success or it turns into Titanic. And if you remember, we did a few episodes a while back about picking the right podcast company and editing. And to me, this is one of those core questions is what is their primary niche and format? And are they going to help you walk through that format? Or is this going to be something that they're learning with you, which is not a good sign of a good podcast editor if they're learning with you?

Speaker 3 (01:02:19)

Amen to that. We're happy to help you find the right one if we are not them.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22)

Exactly. And that's almost important part of having those questions is asking them talking to different people like Mathew, because getting those thoughts outside your head, you might actually think you have a narrative podcast in your head. You talk to Matthew, and Matthew is like, you know what? What you really got is like this podcast. And then you see that you're like, oh, my gosh, that's what I'm talking about. I just don't know what to call it. So it's definitely worth the conversation and I've said it before this friendship and me being so started because I had a conversation with Matthew so you never actually know Matthew's got up his sleeve or how he's going to incorporate you into real life. But thank you for everyone for listening to this episode and we'll be back again next week and thank you to Ben.

Speaker 3 (01:03:00)

Who'S going to take this hour long recording to turn it into 15 minutes.

Speaker 2 (01:03:03)

Enjoy them and not make $10,000.