Podcasting 101, Blubrry Pro Hosting - PCI 386

Speaker 1 00:00:05 You are listening to Podcast Insider, hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochrane, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow and thrive through podcast, all with the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting. Welcome. Let's dive in.

Speaker 2 00:00:26 I'm Mike Dell, the VP of Customer Relations here at Blueberry.

Speaker 1 00:00:30 This is Todd Cochrane, CEO and Co-founder of Blueberry.

Speaker 3 00:00:34 And I'm Mackenzie Bennett, marketing specialist here at Blueberry.

Speaker 2 00:00:37 And today we're gonna zero in on podcast hosting for those who may need a little more, we call them pro podcasters,

Speaker 1 00:00:46 I think. I think all of our podcasters are pro podcasters, aren't they?

Speaker 2 00:00:51 ? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're talking more specifically about our, uh, professional level hosting plans. Now, our, our normal level hosting plans have a lot of professional users and, and all the features, but our prohost adds a few things.

Speaker 3 00:01:08 There's just a little bit more there that's offered to them that make it easier for their business, their business or their very, very large audience, their monetization goals, or even just the scale of their network.

Speaker 1 00:01:22 I think we see that a lot with, uh, networks coming in and taking advantage. It's cost, it's a little more cost effective for, uh, for networks as well. When you get up there to that 3, 4, 5, 6 show range, uh, definitely is a little more effective in, uh, in having a hosting plan that, uh, locks you in at a, a little higher rate initially, but a much lower rate when it comes to, uh, to newer to additional shows. Yeah, the

Speaker 2 00:01:49 More more shows you have on the network, the more cost effective it gets, which is kind of cool. Uh, you know, like we've, we've had people come in with 10 shows and we're like, well, you could do it this way at, uh, $40 a pop for each show, or, you know, we can do it at the pro level and you'll pay this amount of money per month. And really, you know, it gives you a few extra goodies, you know, like you get, uh, unlimited hosting, so, you know, you can upload whatever you want as much as you want.

Speaker 1 00:02:19 Well, unlimited storage,

Speaker 2 00:02:21 That's what I mean, you know, as far as you know, what you can upload, but we flip it a little bit and you have to pay for bandwidth over a terabyte,

Speaker 3 00:02:29 Essentially, with the pro level, you're paying for your success. Yeah,

Speaker 2 00:02:33 That's a good problem to have.

Speaker 3 00:02:35 Yes, it's a, it is a problem that, um, some people are a little confused by at the beginning, but we just tell them, you know, this is, this is good. Uh, this is happening because you are engaging with a larger audience and or you have video files that just take up more bandwidth. That's how it works.

Speaker 1 00:02:57 So just for those that don't know, the Prohost plan is a hundred dollars a month for, and you get one show with that. Each additional show is an additional $10 not episode. So each additional show, and then as Mackenzie and Mike mentioned, you get a terabyte of traffic. And then once you go above the terabyte, now terabyte of traffic, and, and I do kind of this rough math, it's typically like 33,000 plays or downloads of a show that's about, uh, 30 minutes long. So 33,000 downloads is, you know, basically that is what you get with, uh, for free. And then any gigabyte above the thousand gigabytes that we give you for free is, uh, is a penny and, uh, a penny a gig. Um, so most shows that are in our pro plan very rarely go over, uh, their a hundred dollars a month, even if they have 3, 4, 5 shows.

Speaker 1 00:04:01 But there are, or what, it would be like one 40 if you had five shows, obviously. But there are some shows that move a, um, a significant amount, uh, in terabytes, , and actually not terabytes, even petabytes of data a month. And they do incur, uh, a significant bill for the bandwidth, but at the same time, um, 99% of those shows are already monetized. Um, have advertisers have support, have listener support. So again, uh, you're paying for the success of your show and you're, you're moving a, a, an amazing amount of traffic that's, uh, you know, that most podcasters would, uh, salivate for.

Speaker 2 00:04:43 Right? And, you know, and one of the things we do to help you monetize is we have dynamic ad insertion that's a available, the pre-roll comes with the pro account. So you can add pre-rolls to all your back episodes and change them out at will, all that stuff. But, you know, for an extra fee, we, uh, also allow you to do mids and post-roll. And, you know, some of those campaigns can, uh, you know, bring in some good money. You get two, two or three mids and you get a, a post-roll. Plus, you could do a pre-roll to advertise anything you want, you know, as far as what's going on with your show or an advertiser. Maybe they want the pre-roll area. And, uh, you know, that, uh, that's one of the things that's only available to our pro customers.

Speaker 1 00:05:28 Now, one thing to think about is, and we're, we're extremely competitive in this regard, is that if you have, um, you know, a handful of shows, um, you don't have to pay for the, um, the mid role and post role for each show. It's a one, it's a one fee covers all shows, $49 a month, and all your shows in your network are there covered under digital audio insertion. And, uh, then there's a charge for rebuilds 10 cents per rebuild. In other words, you rebuild a file within the, uh, within, within a campaign, you re you rebuild a hundred files to be run advertising, then it's additional $10 that's added to your bill at the end of the month. So, um, again, that would, uh, you know, using the ai, uh, you're already monetized. So this overhead cost is, is negligible.

Speaker 3 00:06:26 So along with all the hosting that you get, we're obviously including all of our, like we're including our advanced stats, you're getting a website for every show that you want under the account, um, as if you would wanna use that. Everything works with Power Press as well. One of those things that works with Power Press is a really cool network showcasing tool. Um, this is really great for, for shows that might not have their other, you know, compadre, uh, shows alongside them under blueberry. Like that's one of the great things is that you can have all of these shows under the same website and create a united front, but you're not moving around to different hosting companies. We realize that, you know, some people are locked into where they are, um, for a variety of reasons, contracts, whatever. And this just makes it easier to create that outside United Front.

Speaker 1 00:07:30 One of the examples we have, as you go over to tech podcast.com, you'll see about a hundred shows on the front page of the website. You click on those and it basically is a summary page of the podcast. The subscription points be able to play or subscribe to the podcast right there on that page. The analogy, or I don't know if that's the right word, but the example that I like to give is, if you think about going to CBS or NBC or any national, uh, broadcaster that has, uh, uh, Disney or whoever, that they are gonna have a United front on their website that is gonna show you all the different programming that they have. And basically you have the same ability to showcase your shows on a, could even be on a separate website. It could be a network website where none of the shows are hosted, but where you wanna showcase. So it's a great tool that not a lot of the networks take fully advantage of. It's something there that we built that's pretty fantastic itself. Maintaining, um, it runs on what's called short codes. So if you're on WordPress already and, uh, you're a pro user and you have more than one show and you have some partner shows, uh, definitely talk to us because we wanna show you how to use that network showcasing tool. And again, example of that is over@techpodcast.com.

Speaker 2 00:08:49 Yeah, and the cool thing about Tech Podcast Network is that started, you know, long time ago and it's still going, and a lot of those shows are hosted on other providers. It's not all blueberry shows, right? It's shows on Spreaker and Lipson and God knows what, and they, but it's a loose affiliation, which is not, you know, like a, but if you have like a dedicated network, you could make it a make it, uh, you could even publish on that same website and still have that network showcasing tool.

Speaker 1 00:09:21 One thing that's interesting is that it, the stack is dynamic every three hours we update the stack so that the shows with the newest episodes are at the top of the stack so that, you know, if you're somewhere down in the middle and you haven't published in a week, as soon as you publish your show, you go up to the top left hand corner of the, so it's a dynamic view of all the shows and how they're updating. And then the shows that have updated, basically they're the longest in two and a tech podcast. We've got some shows they haven't updated in a year. They're all the way to the bottom of the listing. So those shows that update on a more regular basis are definitely showcased and no one, and you basically are able to showcase all those shows that are fresh.

Speaker 2 00:10:05 Another thing that was a popular ask and delivered was Subaccounts. What's nice about that is say you have five different podcasters using your, your, uh, pro account. You can give them access to their show to publish or to, you know, if you're using WordPress, you can do it through WordPress, but if you're, you know, doing it right on Blueberry, or you want them to be able to look at their stats directly without you having to report, you can give them access to stats for just their show. And, uh, like I said, that's been a really popular feature for our network, uh, people and pro accounts. So, uh, that's actually available on our other accounts, but limited compared to what's available on Pro.

Speaker 3 00:10:50 Yeah, overall that one was a no brainer. , we, we just kinda never really, uh, thought about it too much. 'cause we could all just, you know, handle it ourselves in our backend, and then we realized, oh, people actually need this. They would request it and it was just a one day, we just need to sit around and do it. And I, I think it's really made a big change to a lot of users

Speaker 1 00:11:11 Because, you know, there's some accounts that will have one person's, the producer, another person is the editor, another person takes care of the production. So you could actually have three sub-accounts, or one show plus stats for two hosts. So you could have, you know, four or five people that are doing management of, of one show. And within a network it might be four or five people or a mix of people for each show. We have a Stats customer right now that's got the same type of a situation. They have well over 500 shows and one manager, then that manager's able to give distribution and access to stats and administrative stuff, uh, basically on a show by show basis. And it really makes it easy for them then to allow people to have access to what they need to have access to and not much more. In other words, if you don't want someone to have a ability to turn a show off, you don't give them that access within the platform. Only the main administrator has some of those key features that could, uh, could sync a network if someone tried to be mischievous.

Speaker 2 00:12:15 The pro level hosting kind of takes a lot of the limits away, you know, whereas, you know, a, a regular account, which is perfectly good for one show, this kind of spreads it out so that you can have multiple shows. You could set up your network however you want to. You could have each show have its own individual website. You could have all the shows, uh, published from a certain, you know, from web website, or you could just have a website landing page and have all the shows published at Blueberry. We've, we've, we've got it all covered. And, you know, we've even known, been known to make custom, uh, custom, uh, setups for people.

Speaker 1 00:12:55 And it can not only custom setups, but if a network is big enough and using enough bandwidth, we can even go into custom, uh, custom deals. And I've done that a few times to, uh, sway someone to move and migrate from another network that might be very close in cost, but, uh, save 'em a little money on that bandwidth, make them, uh, to make the jump.

Speaker 3 00:13:18 You know, along with that, um, custom plan that we've provided to some people is just, Mike, you are the reason why , we are able to migrate over so many of the customers that we have is that we have free tech support and we have free migration. That's with every plan that we have. However, we understand moving a network over or moving your website along with your show or, you know, a couple shows, um, there's just a lot that can go into it with a ProLevel account like this. And one of the things that we are happy to offer is not only like the free tech support, but we can do this for like, your entire network of helping you move over for free. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 00:14:05 And sometimes, yeah, we usually set up Zoom calls and whatnot, and we, uh, share screens and, uh, get it done.

Speaker 1 00:14:10 And as networks mature, oftentimes what they will do is initially they'll start out kinda loose and they'll have, you know, 10 shows on 10 different hosts. But as networks grow, oftentimes they wanna consolidate that into one bill. And, uh, this makes it easy to do that, um, allows the, uh, the, the network manager to have, um, a little more control while at the same time allowing the shows to continue to stay independent and build their brands on their dot coms. So the plans are scalable. Um, we set up to do automatic payments. You actually get a discount if you actually set up to do automated payments. And, uh, there's, of course we can set up up FTP access as well. That's a benefit. Uh, we've already talked a little bit about the pricing here, but, uh, the pro hosting plan also offers access into our add-ons. Uh, so that's available as far as media mastering goes, transcripts, the Thrive Plan, uh, all those additional add-ons are available. And there are some benefits in some instances to being a pro hosting customer and getting some of those plans because, uh, we priced it in a way that, uh, again, you, you essentially pay for what you use, and although you do get some minimums, uh, so there's some advantages in adding some add-ons, uh, that maybe the individual shows, uh, do not have.

Speaker 2 00:15:34 Yeah. Another, another thing that we should bring up along with Prohost. We have our partners over at, uh, blueberry Pro production, and they can, uh, also help you launch a network as far as the ideas and, and, you know, maybe figuring out the show format and editing and publishing and all that stuff for you. Uh, they're, they're a good bunch over there. They do this show, so something that, uh, you know, we, we, we don't push really hard, but, uh, they, they work really hard over there and, uh, they uh, they do a really good job. I think, uh,

Speaker 1 00:16:14 They, you know, to be honest with you, they have great launch plans and they also have great sustaining plans. And as people are busier and trying to, you know, in my opinion, time is money here. Uh, it might be a good look to go over there and look at the pro team@blueberrypro.com and definitely check them out. And again, it's, uh, it's just, it's something where, you know, keeping the back of your mind if you're looking to optimize, uh, maybe your business or your, you've become successful in monetizing your show, especially on the pro plan, this makes a lot of sense to maybe actually add a pro production team. You know, we've been working with that team now for, what is it, three or four years at least. And, uh, they've got a great team. And obviously if you're listening to the show, it's that this show has been edited by the Blueberry Pro team. So you get a little bit of an idea of the sound and feel of the show, even though we kinda have a routine here. I, I think they make us sound better, better than we are. So I

Speaker 2 00:17:16 Always, I always tell 'em that they make me sound smarter .

Speaker 1 00:17:20 So, uh, definitely check out the pro team@blueberrypro.com.

Speaker 2 00:17:24 Yes. So, well, I, I think we've covered pro hosting. Uh, you know, this is kind of part of our 1 0 1 series, uh, 'cause a lot of people don't know what, what's available. And, uh, we're, we're kind of going through some of the features here that, uh, you know, that you might want to consider depending on, uh, your plans.

Speaker 1 00:17:48 One thing I will tease is that we're heavy into testing of our AI system, and some of you will hear about this after it's been launched, and some of you, uh, may listen to this before it's been launched, but it's gonna be part of our Thrive Pan. We're very, very excited about it. We're gonna talk about it more here in the very near future on some episodes. And, uh, I, I, I know that for my application, um, it's, it's producing me a much better show result, uh, from a metadata standpoint. I'm, I'm just blown away and, uh, very, very excited to bring this to our community.

Speaker 2 00:18:28 Yeah, I think you'll, uh, you, you'll enjoy that if you've been using some third party stuff and cutting and pasting and whatnot, this may eliminate all or most of that for you for a lot cheaper.

Speaker 1 00:18:41 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 00:18:42 Yeah. We're looking forward to seeing how it integrates with all of our different plans of people on any type of level of podcast hosting that we offer

Speaker 1 00:18:51 More soon. Thanks for joining us. Come back next week, and in the meantime, head to podcast insider.com for more information to subscribe, share, and read our show notes. Check out the latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast. Visit blueberry.com. That's blueberry without the ease because they can't afford the ease.