Podcasting 101: The Terms Every Podcaster Needs to Understand – PCI 476

0:00 Welcome back to Podcast Insider. I'm Mike Dell, the VP of customer relations here at Blueberry. And I'm Mackenzie Bennett, director of marketing at Blueberry. And today, we're gonna talk about something that confuses a lot of people, podcast terminology. It has its own language, RSS feeds, enclosures, CPMs, hosting, distribution. It goes on and on. And if you're new, it can feel like everyone assumes you already know what these things mean. So we're gonna break them down for you. Some of the most common podcasting terms, what they actually mean, and why they matter. No jargon, no complicated explanations, just plain English. Well, I will try. How about that? I'm gonna I'm gonna hold you to that as as best I can. There we go. You're listening to Podcast Insider, hosted by Mike Dell, Mackenzie Bennett, and Dave Clements.

0:53 We're bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting, all with the support of your team here at Blueberry. Welcome. Let's dive in. Alright. And I'll take this first section here since I I wrote it. That was your little rant. Yeah. It's not a rant. It's, you know, working in support, I answer the phone, and a lot of times, I will get something to the effect of, my podcast didn't go out today, or my podcast feed on Apple isn't updated, or, you know, some basic thing. So I just wanted to define some of the basic terms, you know, just the the right down to the bare bones. So a podcast, and there's a technical definition that drives everybody nuts. That's not what I'm talking about.

1:52 A podcast is an episodic show, which is mostly delivered by RSS, but, you know, there are stuff on other platforms called podcasts that are episodics. They fit that definition. That term can also be interchangeable with the word show. You have a show. Okay. I'm gonna age myself here. Oh, I can go on and on about show and episode and that whole thing. Right. But I'm gonna age myself here. The TV show MASH, I'm sure even even the younger ones in this, in this audience know what the show MASH was. Okay? MASH was the title of the show, just like your podcast will have a title.

2:37 It's a show. And then individual episodes may have other titles. So in MASH, there was probably an episode named something. I don't know what their names were because that's not popular on TV. But the idea is that when you say you have a podcast, you have a show. When you have an episode, it that's the end of it it's an individual entry. You know, I can't it's hard to done it define episode without saying the word episode. But, basically, you know, I I I hear podcasters, say, I did a podcast about that.

3:18 No. You did a podcast episode about that. Yes. That's different. And, personally, I hate the word pod, but I guess that's a thing now too. But, I did a I did a pod. Okay. Good. Great. That, yeah, that just, irks me in ways. Yeah. But, yeah. No. My biggest one is definitely podcast show episode, that whole debacle. Think of it the way that you think of TV shows. It's just that simple. I mean, I've been having this conversation with my mother since I have been, like, nine years old where she's describing a TV episode about a show that we have watched forever, and she calls it a a movie.

4:06 Or she she will describe a movie for, you know, an entire day. And she's like, yeah. No. But it's a show. Like, it's it goes back and forth. And I have explained it to her countless times, and she just could not care. And it drives me insane, because I care about media and I care about words, and, that one I'm just never gonna get over. Yeah. And that's one of the things that we get a lot as well in support is, you know, people will say your, say, feed. Well, when when you're talking about a podcast, the feed is the RSS feed.

4:48 It's not your listing on Apple. It's not your listing on Spotify. It's not your YouTube channel. It's it's the specific technical thing that makes your podcast work. We're gonna go into what RSS is all about a little bit later, so I won't beat that dead horse. But, basically, you know, there's no such thing as a YouTube feed. There's a YouTube channel Right. And that's cool. The feed is the function. Yeah. That's why there's that's why the it exists in only podcasting, and you don't really hear it used in anything else. Right. And, you know, and that's becoming less important, you know, as far as the listeners are concerned or viewers.

5:32 You know, they don't care if it's an RSS feed or not. You know? That's that's one of the reasons why reason for them to. But there is no feed out of YouTube. Yeah. They they can take your feed in in certain instances, but there's no feed on YouTube, and there's no feed coming out of YouTube. Anyway, it's not true with Spotify, but that's a whole another thing. So and then the term upload really confuses people. And I don't specifically know why, but I guess I get it. But, in publishing an episode, when you upload, you're uploading your episode to your podcast host or server or whatever you use. Hopefully, it's Blueberry.

6:14 But, that's you know, you do not upload your podcast to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever. You syndicate to them through your RSS feed, blah blah blah, you know, all the technical garbage. Alright. I'll I'll try to speak English from here on out. Well, if you wanna speak English, I don't know if we should really describe an RSS feed then because it might be called really simple syndication, but it's not that simple. Well, if you're using the right tools, it's really simple. But that's the key. If you're gonna go in there and handwrite it yourself, then, no, that's complicated.

6:57 So you just confuse more people by saying handwriting it. Okay. Well, back in the day, back you know, I'll use my old man voice. When podcasting first started, that's basically, we had to make a text file and write a whole bunch of gobbledygook in the text file to get RSS to work. Now we don't have to do that anymore. Yeah. We have tools for that such as Blueberry Podcasting, PowerPress, or, you know, there's 100 ways of making an RSS feed that don't involve you learning XML code. You know, just like a web page. Okay. A web page on the back end is HTML code, but you don't see that. And when you're building web pages nowadays, you just type what you want in there, put some pictures in there, hit hit publish, and you don't care what the code says.

7:50 You know? Same thing with RSS. It's to the point now where it disappears, really, for most people. It is in the background, but it does contain your episode title, your show title, the descriptions for your episodes, the audio files for video files for set episodes. Yeah. And links to them. It's Right. But, yeah, not the the file itself stays wherever you uploaded it to. See previous section. And the, I guess, the date associated to that because, you know, it'll go in whatever order. Yeah. And there's a whole bunch of other things in RSS that nobody cares about. But, you know, there's there's what we call tags, or features, you know, extra things that can be added in there. But for the most part, the tool you're using, if you're using Blueberry especially, all that stuff disappears and you just fill in boxes.

8:46 So pretty cool. Yeah. All of that can be managed with Blueberry or wherever you are hosting your show. And speaking of podcast hosting, that's a that that kind of is a harder one to to understand sometimes, but what a podcast hosting company does is two things, really. We help you generate your RSS feed, and we store the files for you. And, you know, with us, at least, we give you pretty good statistics on how your files are being used, which is nice. We've been tracking that info since day one. Yep. And so, basically, you know, a podcast hosting, you know, it doesn't have to be a company. It could be a server that you own. You know? It's not recommended most of the time for various reasons, but, you know, a a podcast host such as Blueberry Podcast, you know, we store the audio. We gen help you generate the RSS feed either via PowerPress or or on our dashboard.

9:51 And it, we help you distribute it so that, you know, when Apple pulls your RSS feed in and new episode shows to all your listeners or viewers depending on audio video. I I I've got a I'm having a little trouble here because this this year, video is exploding. There there there's gonna be lots of new things coming. And so, you know, listener and or viewer, you know, it's like like when they change the term subscribe to follow Follow. That took me the longest time to get, get subscribe out of my head Yeah. Even though that's what you're doing. Anyway, enough But it's it's you know, if you really are, like, having trouble wrapping your head around it, it's just whenever you were listening to whatever show in Apple Podcasts or Overcast or wherever, those episodes don't actually live at that place.

10:54 They live somewhere else. They are being made available through the app. Yeah. Well, that's and that's you know, podcasting is exactly opposite of pretty much everything else on the Internet. I I mean, you upload a video to YouTube, and as soon as they're done processing it, it's available on YouTube. Boom. Done. That's all there is to it. Right. You upload your show to your podcast host, put it in your RSS feed, which, like I said, you don't have to do anything special to do that. It just the tools do it. Then Right. And then you have to wait a little bit of time for Apple and Spotify and Amazon and all the 135 other apps out there that you can listen to podcasts on, get it because it's syndicated, not not you're not directly uploading it to Apple and Spotify. So But I I think some people definitely get confused because they hear these big big big shows and celebrities say we're hosted on Spotify.

11:55 They are. Yeah. There are so many making millions of dollars. Yeah. This is a different scenario. You know, Spotify as well as a listening app is also a podcast host. Yeah. So so for the most part, normal everyday podcasters and people are not hosting, are not using Apple and Spotify and Amazon and these places for their podcast hosting. These celebrities and big shows, they are. Those are exclusive. Those are different deals. Yeah. They may be. Yeah. Yeah. Apple, not so much. Spotify, definitely. Spotify also has another hosting company that is associated with them that a lot you know, like Joe Rogan's on I don't even remember the name of it, but it's their enterprise level, at Spotify.

12:45 So Premium. Totally different thing. Is he really like, if you have free Spotify, you can't get The Rogan Show? No. No. You can get The Rogan Show. What I'm talking about is where his feed comes from is from Megaphone. That's Oh, oh, okay. Got it. Which is owned by Spotify. Anyway, so we're inside baseball here. I'm like, when did this change happen? Okay. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but and now here's one that confuses a lot of people, in their stats. Downloads versus listens. Yeah. That one is a that changed, I mean, six, seven years ago where it started, like, really changing because people started having good Internet.

13:36 Yeah. And that's that's the thing. The the the party trick of podcasting has always been that you download the entire episode to your device, whatever you're using. You know, back in the day, it was an iPad or something similar, and now it's phones. But it downloaded the actual file to your phone. So then when you jumped on an airplane or gotten bad Internet, you could still listen to the stuff you had downloaded on your device, and it did that automatically. Mhmm. And, you know, now there's a lot of streaming going on in podcasting. Not that it's bad. You still have the option to download, but you don't absolutely have to download anymore like you used to. I'm typically still downloading, but if it's less than ten minutes, I don't do that anymore. I just hit listen.

14:29 Right. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that at all. Yeah. You know, it's it's the thing is is we we want podcasting to be everywhere people are and make it as convenient as possible. So for the listener side, you know, it could you could listen to a YouTube channel. You could download a podcast video. You can download a podcast audio. You can stream it. You know, the all the options. That's that's good. And it doesn't matter on the creator side. Like Right. We're gonna collect that information. Right. Right. And count it as, you know Yeah. Downloads versus listens in this case, though, IAB, which is who certifies our podcast statistics and a lot of other companies.

15:18 It's the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Right. Right. Right. I always thought it was Internet Advertising Bureau, but I guess they changed. Yeah. But, anyway, the the the gist of it is is they changed the term from downloads to listens. Not that there's any difference between the two, really. You know, like, in our stats, we have we we can tell how much of the file got downloaded. Yeah. We assume that's somebody streaming it as they're, you know, downloading as they're listening. It's not really a true stream, but that's a whole other geeky thing.

16:01 Anyway so, basically, you know, the the the listen versus download, in our stats, yes, you could have some partial listens because it's partially downloaded. But a lot of times, people have their phones set to download the entire file, so we pick that up as a download. We have to call it a listen because IAB says so, but we can't guarantee that they listened. We just know they downloaded it. It was yeah. The file was accessed. That's the long and short of it. Yeah. Like I said, try not to get too geeky. Thanks for for not.

16:41 Yeah. I tend to do that. Alright. Let's see. CPM. I'll let you explain that one. Let's Yeah. The this is for advertising. So it's cost per million, basically, which means the cost per thousand downloads Yeah. Doesn't really make sense. Yeah. Literally. Because it doesn't really make sense so much. But it is the yeah. It is the common pricing model used in, podcast advertising a lot of the time in in most content advertising. So if you are getting 5,000 downloads, you are getting $20 CPM.

17:24 And No. If you're getting $20 CPM and you get 5,000 downloads, you get roughly a $100 for that advertisement. Correct. Yeah. Correct. So we can estimate, you know, based on your down like, based on your downloads and listens, how much you could make. With with advertising that we do here at Blueberry, our programmatic, that ranges from 5 to 20 or 25, usually, CPM. Yeah. 15 is, you know, between 10 and 15 is a good target. Yeah. But it can be as low as 5. You could hear a GEICO ad in your thing. It's mostly a $5 ad.

18:04 Yeah. So it's kind of a you get what you pay for type thing. But, yeah, overall, it's it's pretty easy to calculate and figure out, like, what your possibilities are. But especially nowadays with AI, you literally just ask it. There are a million and one CPM calculators on the Internet. Yep. So it's not really something you have to, like, figure out yourself, but it's that's generally the terms that you're gonna be looking at. Alright. And sticking with ads here, pre roll, mid roll, and post roll.

18:44 And, basically, this just describes where the advertisement appears in an episode. So if you're doing ad insertion, and you're putting in dynamic ads or whatever, or even if you're doing host threads, you know, you could record an ad that goes at the beginning of the episode, and that's called a pre roll. Yeah. You can place it at the end of the episode, call it a post roll. And then anywhere in between is known as a mid roll, and mid rolls pay better. They also have to be done better. Yes. Yeah. They well, because, you know, some automated systems, I'm sure you guys, if you watch YouTube without being a subscriber to YouTube, you know, paying them Mhmm.

19:30 You'll be, you know, mid sentence, they'll pop in an ad. Right? Mid sentence. So you you don't wanna do that. If you're gonna do mid rolls, place them properly. Yeah. You know, I was listening to, a podcast the other day that I had listened to for the first time because the guest on there was someone that I wanted to listen to. And he and this guest was in the middle of, like, this, you know, heartfelt sentence, literally, like, a GEICO ad in the middle of the sentence. And I was like, you are making how much money off of this podcast? And you have also split up the interview into two episodes, which I am not a fan of. And now in the middle of a sentence, I have to listen to this prerecorded ad for GEICO.

20:16 Mhmm. Not great. One, I I just, like, what the podcast is whatever. And two, I got annoyed with that, and I'm like, okay. I I will just, I'll look up the interview. I don't need to listen to it. I'm done with that podcast forever. Yep. And, you know, that's you know, poorly placed ads will run, you know, run your listeners off, believe me. Because, you know, I I detest ads. That's why I pay YouTube because, you know, they yeah. They have yeah. And, you know, I guess, I don't know if we cover this term, but, there's also a thing called host read endorsements or host read ads.

20:57 And those are and I'm gonna age myself again. Paul Harvey. Remember him? Mhmm. Okay. He was the master at host red endorsements. He'd be, you know, right in the middle of a news story, and then he would stop and start talking about his sponsor, you know, in in a cool way. And that's, you know, that that's what's known as a host read endorsement. Anyway, those those pay really well, by the way, if you can get a deal. Yeah. I'd say, if you wanna get paid really well, you have to do like, one, you have to have the listeners a lot of the time. But, but two have an awesome audience.

21:38 But you have to do them well. Yeah. Okay. Here's another term we touched on, dynamic ad insertion. Basically, what that does is, you record your episode. And then if you have dynamic ad insertion, you can run a campaign that inserts a pre roll, post roll, mid roll ad where you want them to be placed. And then when that campaign's over, it takes those ads out of that episode. And if you have another campaign, it puts new ads in. So people that download your episode later will get new ads or no ads depending on what campaign is running.

22:18 Very convenient. Yeah. It's it's pretty handy. You know, not a lot of people use it, because it is a little bit more manual. Of course, we have a programmatic ad, system at Blueberry where we sell the ads for you, and you just if you want mid rolls, you put a mid roll tag in your yeah. Anyway, geeky. But you can specify where they go in the in the in the episode. Yes. So that it doesn't enter in the middle of a sentence. Exactly. So there is, you know, there it's more manual, but it is definitely a better experience on the, the listener end. Yeah. And you don't have to do a thing, and you can get pre roll and post rolls because we don't have to worry about cutting off somebody's sentence. Yeah.

23:04 So but, let's see. Episode artwork. That was something that's, I I would say, relatively new to podcasting. At least a lot of the apps now or I'd say all of them now support episodic images, which is And not just, you know, for the show overall. It's per episode. Right. Your main podcast artwork will be the default. And then if you have a episode image for that specific episode in a lot of the directories and apps, it'll show that image instead of your overall show image. Yeah. And, you know, I I do that with, you know, I have I do a daily show, on the weekdays, and I let AI generate the artwork for that episode. Our our AI system in Blueberry will do that as well.

24:00 Yeah. That's what we use for the show for each episode. Right. And, you know, that just it's kinda cool and, you know, I I know of podcaster, very famous podcaster, that changes his overall artwork every episode. That's a little neurotic. Yeah. It's a little weird. But, he's been at it a while. He's coming up on 2,000 episodes. So I guess it's working for him. Yeah. Apparently so. Yeah. So, let's see. Podcast landing page. And that's a term that that's kinda recent, especially within Blueberry.

24:46 So, essentially, what we're what we're getting at here is it's like a very simple web page that will list all of your podcast episodes, and have the ability to listen to them, you know, with, with an audio player, just all in the same place. It'll have your artwork, your list, the player, and ways that people can subscribe or follow, on the apps that you are available in because your distribution. We we have podcast landing page. That's the title that we landed on here at Blueberry for, you know, essentially, what we offer every hosting customer. Right. And they're simple simple web pages that, you know, if you don't have your own web page, this is a really good option to send people to.

25:37 That's kind of the idea. You know? And, also, within a lot of the podcast apps, when you look at a show listing, they'll have a button there that that says, podcast podcaster website or something similar to that, and that's where that gets sent to, you know, is that landing page. And, you know, if you're using PowerPress, you just your WordPress site's your landing page, so that works. But, you know, like this one. You know, if you go to our landing page, it's it's actually just podcastinsider.com, or it will be later this afternoon. A whole another story. But All is well, just not right now.

26:18 As as of this recording, it doesn't work. But Correct. It will by the time you hear this. But, anyway, that's that's just, you know, a landing page, kind of your home base for your show. Yeah. There's, you know, websites, for your own show have gone up and down in in usage and popularity, just because a lot of people have taken to just listing, you know, here's my profile. Like, here's my Instagram. Here's my Twitch. Here's my YouTube channel. All that type of stuff as opposed to kinda having, like, one central website.

27:02 Mhmm. So there's pros and cons there of not having, like, a home base. But also there there is some legitimacy to people don't really go to websites like that anymore. So it's really just, you know, come here. Not as much. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. They're just like a fully fledged, like, flushed out, you know, website is not as popular anymore. So Yeah. But but a simple thing like this is good. Sure. But one one caveat there is I still suggest that you have some sort of website.

27:42 And the only reason for that is, okay, there are glitches in the system. It just happens. So say Apple's having a problem, and your episodes don't go to Apple for a couple of episodes. Well, people that are subscribed to you on Apple won't have any idea where to find you. You just disappeared for them. So in your show, if you're saying, well, I got a website and, you know, in this case, podcastinsider.com for this show. If we ever disappear, you can go there to see what happened. So that that's one good thing, about it, but it's not as necessary as it once was.

28:24 I would never tell someone to not have a pod or not have a website for their podcast. Right. But I have told people, you know, just make sure it's there, but you don't have to spend the time and effort that you did on it before. Again, not as important as it once was. Yeah. So publishing versus distribution. That's kinda your push and pull sometimes. Yeah. So, again, when you publish a YouTube video on YouTube, it's available immediately on YouTube. But with podcasting, you publish it to your RSS feed or your podcast hosting company, whatever, and it just sits there until the directories and the apps pull it in. So it's not instantaneous, but it's there's nothing wrong. This is kinda how it always worked.

29:26 It just it feels kinda wrong. Yeah. It's it but I I say it's it's a feature, not a bug, because the feature of it is the source of truth is your RSS feed, and all these other places, you know, can display it, but you're still in control of that RSS feed. I know that gets geeky again. But the whole idea is when you publish an episode, it goes to your RSS feed. When it gets distributed, might be sometime later. Now some are faster than others. Apple's getting it down to about two hours is is about average, I've seen lately, but it can be quicker.

30:09 A lot of the podcast two point o apps do it nearly instantly because of another geeky technology that we implemented. And but, yeah, basically, the nice thing about it is you publish it once, you walk away, it goes everywhere. That is the, the benefit of the RSS feed because that's not how other platforms or other, like, content mediums work. Yeah. If you wanna do video, you gotta upload it to Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch. Yep. Can you upload stuff to Twitch, or is that only live? I don't know. I have no idea. But you get what I'm saying. I have no idea. Never even looked at Twitch.

30:49 It's not really my thing. I'll tune in every once in a while for about five minutes, and then I'm done. Yeah. My, my nephew is 16 years old. I swear he's on Twitch twenty hours a day watching gamers. Yeah. Not my thing, but, but, you know, for for some people, it is. Yeah. For sure. For sure. So I guess the big takeaway is, you know, podcast terminology is complicated, but most of the stuff describe pretty well what it is.

31:30 And, you know, like, personally, if you're talking to support, at least know the basics. You know? And and I'm sorry we probably made this way overcomplicated, but it's alright. Yeah. I think there's some due diligence. You know? Just make sure you're clear on some stuff because you're gonna have a much harder time figuring out how to manage your podcast if you don't have at least some grasp of these technical terms. Yeah. For sure. That's just, you know, good for you to have. You don't need to share your information or knowledge with other people.

32:13 You just need to know what you're talking about. Mhmm. For sure. So I think we can wrap this up. Yes. So we hope that this did help a lot of people. All of us had to learn these words at some point or another, so you're definitely not alone in the confusion. Yeah. Every every podcaster learns this language over time. I mean, the longer you do it, the more you're gonna hear these things. And, you know you know, glad you you we can help you understand them a little better, hopefully. Yes. We were we, kinda feel that these are the ones that are fundamental to understanding how the whole system works, but, you'll be fine.

32:54 Just remember that. Yeah. Well, thanks for listening to Podcast Insider. We'll catch you next week. Thanks for joining us. Let's meet up next week. And in the meantime, for more information, to subscribe, share, or follow, check out the show notes at podcastinsider.com. To check out our latest suite of services and help Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast, visit blueberry.com. That's Blueberry without the e's.