Is It a Podcast Without an RSS Feed? The Great Debate

Dave Jackson:
Ask the podcast coach for December 20, 2025. Let's get ready to podcast. There it is. It's that music that means it is Saturday morning, it's time for Ask the Podcast Coach, where you get your podcast questions answered live. I'm Dave Jackson from theschoolofpodcasting.com and joining me right over there, podcasting, Jolly Green Giant from the new media show, the one, the only, Rob Greenlee. Rob, how's it going this morning, buddy?

Rob Greenlee:
It's going fantastic, fantastic. Dave, it's great to be back on your show. I've been on a couple times over the years, but it's always good to be on Ask the Podcast Coach with Dave.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, Rob was podcasting before podcasting was podcasting, so he's been around.

Rob Greenlee:
Right.

Dave Jackson:
So if you're new to the show, we always start off with a bit of we get our ads out of the way. Not that that sounds bad. Ah, silly advertisers. But we'll get them out of the way. If you have your questions and you're watching live. There you go. Chris Stone. He summed it up for all of us.

Dave Jackson:
Rob Greenlee is a Christmas podcast miracle.

Rob Greenlee:
There you go.

Dave Jackson:
So excellent.

Rob Greenlee:
Thank you so much for that.

Dave Jackson:
But today's show, Jim, is out on special assignments. What I like to say, and today's show is brought to you by our good friend Mark over at Podcast Branding. Because look, if you got to remember, they're gonna see you before they hear you and you want to make a good first impression. And I've used Mark for multiple artworks and if you need more than artwork, he'll do your whole website. The beautiful part of Mark is the fact that he is an award winning graphic artist and he's a podcaster. So the whole thing where you're like, well, it's kind of like a radio show, but it's not. And yada yada, yada, yada, he's going to sit down with you one on one. And look, let him do the marketing part, you're the podcast part.

Dave Jackson:
So let him know what the vibe of the show is, kind of what you're going for, who your audience is, and he's going to come up with a great piece of artwork or a website, whatever you need, and it's going to match your brand. And you're just not going to get that from some, oh, I'll just say person on Fiverr. I won't be negative today, but he's a great guy. I highly recommend him. And the other thing I should probably Point out he's much better than AI. Again, you're not going to get that from ChatGPT. Check him out. Podcast branding company.

Dave Jackson:
And then, last but not least, Rob, have you ever been to the movies and the screen goes black and a title comes up and it says based on a True Story? Yeah. And you always have. You ever wondered, I wonder how much of this is based and how much of this is just made up? Well, there's a podcast for that. It's called Based on a True Story podcast from our buddy Dan, and it's what I think. To me, this is brilliant, because if you like history, it's kind of a history podcast. If you like a movie podcast, it's kind of a movie show. You put them together. It's like the Reese's cup of podcasting based on a truestory.

Dave Jackson:
Podcast.com. thank you, Dan, for your sponsorship. Yeah, so it's the last. The last Ask the Podcast Coach of. Well, let's see. Not of the year. We'll do one next week post Christmas so we can all talk about what Santa brought us. So there you go.

Dave Jackson:
Brad turned 60 yesterday. You know, they say 60 is the new 40. Is still looking for a free cup of. Well, the problem with the free cup from McDonald's is they'll dump it in your lap, and then you get to sue them. That's always fun.

Rob Greenlee:
You know, that's the path to your retirement. Getting spilled by coffee.

Dave Jackson:
That's it. And, well, Ralph has fed us up a question. How do you feel about the idea that podcasting is in a. Oh, boy. He's gonna. He's gonna poke the bear right out of it.

Rob Greenlee:
Couldn't wait.

Dave Jackson:
Well, here's. Here's my thing. What he's talking about is a post by. And here's the thing. I respect Steve Goldstein. He's got a past in radio, but he has this blog post where there was the episode or era number one, which always sounds like I'm trying to imitate jfk. Era. Era one was the Me Undies era.

Dave Jackson:
Era number two, that's actually me imitating Howard Stern imitating jfk. There you go. And then he said, era two was the Spaghetti against the Wall era. I get it. Era 3. What is the podcast era? I want to. Here's the one I want to ask about. Why did that era exist? I don't get.

Dave Jackson:
Because if you think about it, if you mix yellow and blue together, it makes green. That's a fact. If you add one plus one, it equals two, and we've all agreed on that. I don't understand. Especially people like, I think it's Dan again over at Oxford Road has spent most of this year asking, what is the podcast? And I heard Cliff Ravenscraft on the new media show, and Cliff and I are on the same page. No RSS feed, no podcast. And when Steve again, was the guy that stood up with the other guy at podcast movement that said, hey, you gotta go to YouTube, because that's a podcast. And I was one of the.

Dave Jackson:
I feel like the few that said, hey, that's not a podcast, it's a YouTube. And that's going to really mess up our stats in the future. And I wonder sometimes, especially with Spotify and YouTube, really big megaphones, really big marketing budgets that they just crammed that down our throat. And I'm like, yeah, but why didn't we push back? And the reason I asked that is because Steve is the. He's talking about the Liquid Content era. And again, with love and respect, this is absolute horse pucky. Why? Because he says, and yes, the debate is still very much alive. Is podcast a format, a platform, a show? Where's the one where he talks about, it's a newsletter.

Dave Jackson:
Here we go. A podcast can be a YouTube show, vertical clip newsletter, short episodes, live streams, or even a live event. And it turns out this, this bottle of medicine is now a podcast. This fly swatter is now a podcast. I'm like, come on, kids. So, Rob, why do you think we didn't push back when they said because. And again, I know the audience doesn't care. I don't really care, but I hated this whole.

Dave Jackson:
What is a podcast? I don't understand why people didn't push back on that. To me in. I'll let you speak in a second. Honestly, I swear. I think this is why podcasting via RSS was not growing very. It was growing, okay, 3 to 5% a year. And they wanted it to grow much faster so that we could say, look, we have X amount of advertising dollars. Do you think that was the biggest driving force or what? Do you think the reason why people didn't go, hey, that's, you know, YouTube isn't a podcast?

Rob Greenlee:
Well, Dave, I mean, as I back up and I look at it from the, the, the, the 20 years that I've been in this medium is that it's, it's always been a cloudy issue. And this whole thing of what's a podcast has been a, a question mark that many different groups that have had a relationship with podcasting have been asking as well, because in the early years of podcasting we had a lot of video, so, you know, and that kind of faded away. And then we saw serial blow up. And then we, you know, we started thinking of ourselves as an audio only medium. But the common thread across all this, Dave, and I think you would agree with this, is that podcasting has been known for having an RSS feed. Right. And I think as I think about this, the RSS feed is still very much a part of the picture. And, and it's very important, but it's very important for the audio part of this conversation.

Rob Greenlee:
Right. And because the video part we kind of abandoned, you know, a few years ago, people migrated over to YouTube and started publishing what they were doing with, with their podcast over onto YouTube and it was just a YouTube channel. And so now YouTube has decided that, you know, what that is going, you know, what that is happening or what has happened with that over the years is now all of a sudden a podcast. And I think what they are trying to do is link these Mediums together, which YouTube and podcasting have been a parallel track for many years. And so this, this conversation that's happening with Steve is really kind of a splitting hairs of sorts because I think most people would say that podcasting is the audio side now and the video side is really a YouTube channel. I think, you know, in people's perceptions. Yeah. But oftentimes it is the same content, so people are linking those things together.

Rob Greenlee:
And then what Steve. I've been pushing back against Steve for a couple years on this topic of his eras.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
Because he's had articles like this out about the eras of podcasting for a couple years now. And I push back because I think that first era that he has in there doesn't reflect the first five to seven years of the podcast medium. It's kind of like fast forwarding and saying that the medium started in like 2009 or 2010, when it actually started much earlier.

Dave Jackson:
Mark Marin invented podcasting.

Rob Greenlee:
Right, right. That's the same thing that I heart said for a long time is that podcasting really started when we decided to.

Dave Jackson:
Get involved, of course, because we' where Iheart and we're number one in podcasting.

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah. That's their brand. Right. Is they have to be the first that with everything but that. That's very reflective of what's been going on here with this, this era thing. And I push back against. See, even my counter is that there was era zero.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
Which was the first five years. But that's not really addressing that core liquid content thing, I think the core liquid content part of this is that I think all of us would agree that what. What podcasters are doing with their content now is putting it out in all sorts of different formats and all sorts of different mediums now shorts, full episodes on. On YouTube, as well as the audio podcasts, and they're. They're creating derivative content and all this kind of stuff. And I think that's what the. The message at the bottom line of all this is that it's acknowledging what all of us have been kind of seeing and doing for many years now actually is repurposing redistribution, all this kind of stuff. And that's where that liquid concept comes from.

Rob Greenlee:
So, you know, he's. I think it is accurate to say that, that if you're going to call this a podcast, it really has to have an RSS feed that's part of the syndication strategy for the content. So. So it's really hard to call a piece of content a podcast if it doesn't have an RSS feed, because that is part of that. Spoke of distribution, that really is part of the model of a podcast. Right?

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. Well, and the other thing, people go, well, what's the big deal? And the big deal is with an RSS feed, like on YouTube, right? If we say booger too many times, they'll kick us off YouTube or if we start whatever, right? And if you get kicked off YouTube and you're primarily a YouTuber, you're kind of in a world of hurt. You got rumble. But, you know, so with rss, if I get kicked off of Spotify, I mean, look, love him or hate him, Alex Jones got deplatformed. He got kicked off of everything, but he still had an RSS feed. And if you wanted to, and you were kind of nerdy, you could still get his content. That's the beauty of an RSS feed. And everybody's like, well, I'm not talking about anything controversial, so why do we care? And I'm like, okay, you say that now, but what was controversial five years ago is not contra.

Dave Jackson:
Like, back then, there were things we weren't saying because there's a lot of cancellation going on and things like that. And that pendulum is going to swing back eventually. Daniel has a great point. It's Oprah. You're a podcast and you're a podcast. Everything's a podcast. And Dan lefebvre based on a True Story podcast. If RSS doesn't define a podcast, then literally every single streaming platform is a podcast.

Dave Jackson:
Netflix, Disney, Hulu, tv, radio, books. Books are now a podcast. So it's kind of one of those things where I've never understood why people didn't push back. And you said you did. I know I have been, but it just seems like everybody. The one that really just made no sense to me, and I'm not even sure what study it was, but they said they asked the audience, and the audience said, well, anything with a microphone in the shot, so I need to move mine closer or up was a podcast. And I'm like, why are we letting the audience decide? And again, this is considered the source for me. I think everything can be fixed with education.

Dave Jackson:
Like, inflation's too high. Well, we need to educate people about how to. So for me, I was like, we just need to train the audience. Because for me, what we're missing is had we pushed back and we. Like Tom's report that he just did about the creators or whatever it was called. There was a part where it's like, some are audio only, some are doing both, and some are doing video only. And I'm like, but what if he had said, are they a YouTuber or a podcast? And I'm not sure. Again, we'd have to educate the audience, but, like, our stats would be better because we could say 35% are doing YouTube only.

Dave Jackson:
You know, 30% are doing audio only, and 35% or whatever are doing both. And then I think, like, I know Hernan Lopez from, well, formerly Wondery. He went out and did another report and included international, which we should. But he also included YouTube. And that's how I think we got to. Finally got to the 2 billion number. And it just. It just sounds like it reminds me a lot of country music.

Dave Jackson:
I wish I could play it. I found a song that I swear I'm gonna write a blog post about this, but I found a song and it's something like things we learned in a bar. And when you hit play on that, it does not sound country. It sounds very much like pop. They're definitely. Because I went to Spotify and, like, looked at their top 25 of 25, you know, and some of them definitely had that steel guitar, the wampa wap wamp wamp. And it was definitely country. But there are a lot that I'm like, that doesn't sound like country.

Dave Jackson:
And yet now country is one of the highest selling genres. Why? Because they changed the definition. Like, what's country isn't country anymore. It sounds a lot like pop.

Rob Greenlee:
And so for many years now, there's been a blending where pop stars have been creating country music because they're trying to reach a larger audience. Because right there's a, that's a huge market. Country music is a huge.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. And so consequently, yeah, I remember Steven Tyler from Aerosmith kind of went country a little bit, you know, and it's like. Because country wasn't country anymore, but lo and behold, now it's the biggest selling thing. Well, if we change the definition of a podcast to be everything, well then, then podcasting is this huge market. And I'm like, yeah, but that's, I don't know. To me, I'm just like, can't we just, you know, like one plus one is two. Blue and yellow make green. No RSS feed, no podcast.

Rob Greenlee:
I mean, you have to think about where this, this conversation is really coming from. And I think it's coming from two, two elements in the, in the ecosystem. It's coming from the advertising side because the brands are, are increasingly looking at all this, all, all the forms of distribution for the content that is seen as a podcast, as something that they want to buy. And if they can consolidate the perception of this and, and roll up. And I know that the IAB is working on this project as well, is trying to come up with a standard measurement model across all these various derivative content kind of experiences that are out there, from vertical video to audio podcasts to, to YouTube. And they're trying to aggregate those and to come up with a common standard so they can more, more easily sell them. Right. So that's the other motivation here, and that's why you're seeing a Dan Granger start to really address this, is because that's the, the desire that they're.

Rob Greenlee:
Their brands, that they are, are their customers are pushing for is a, is a better way and a better way to look at this industry, this media industry that we have now in a more consolidated way. And, and that's what's driving this. And then there's the influence, like you just said, of the audience. The audience side has a perception that is different than the, the desired perception that we would like to have as content creators. Right, right. So, so we have this various approach that people are coming into the medium, whether they're coming into creating video first or they're coming into creating audio first. And then there's increasing numbers of people. This is based on what the audiences are looking for that are doing a hybrid model where they're coming in, trying, trying to be.

Rob Greenlee:
Whether or not they're successful at this is the big question of being a hybrid model. Right. Where you're coming in and creating content that can be successful on the audio and video side. And that's kind of at the cutting edge of where are in the industry right now. And it's also professionalizing, which means that this medium that, that you and I, Dave, have loved for many years has become the media. It's become the replacement for legacy media.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, that's the part that drives me nuts is James Cridland made a great point because Demi Lovato, who I'm really bummed is married because I was going to marry her, but she's a, she's an amazing singer and she's doing something on TikTok and they're calling it a podcast. And I'm sure that's sponsored by somebody. And so the question is, when it comes time to do that company's taxes, does that count as a podcast spend or a new media spend? And my guess would be that's going to be in the new media bucket. And now we wonder, well, why doesn't, why can't we get over the $2 billion mark? Because we keep calling things that are a podcast, not a podcast. But the accountants are like, that's not. Who knows? We'll see. But that's another one that I think is kind of odd, is it can. And I think that's, I think part of the reason why they're trying to expand the definition so that no matter if anybody spends any ad money on anything, it goes towards podcasting.

Dave Jackson:
And I'm like, yeah, right.

Rob Greenlee:
And that includes pretty much everything that's online media. Right. So there's a danger that there's kind of be a dilution of the perception of what a podcast is and it's shifting more towards it's a format now it's not. Or a form of content. Right. Or it's a type of content now. It's not necessarily singularly seen by all these influential interests out there as primarily just an RSS based syndication approach. It includes that and it's very important part of it.

Rob Greenlee:
And it's probably where the vast majority of the audience is, is still on the RSS side. So. So they still have to deal with this download model and that, that all that also is driving this conversation about trying to add HLS streaming. You know, kind of like what we're doing with this show is probably an HLS stream. Yeah. To drive that more into the media landscape so they can get deeper metrics and data out of the audience consumption. Of the content.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. And that again, I always get worried when major. I don't know. Major is the right word. But anyway, significant decisions are made, not based on the listener, not based on the podcaster, but based on the advertiser. That's when I'm like, wait a minute. Because I'm like, I don't know, a lot of people like, I wish podcasting had hls. And I'm like, and I don't know, a lot of podcasters are like, I wish we had hls, but the advertisers would definitely benefit because then we could see exactly how far people watched.

Dave Jackson:
And I think, not that I want to turn this into a prediction show, but I think in 2026, how far people watch or listen is going to become a lot more important than it is, say, last year or this year. It's on the horizons. Have you played with podanalyst yet? I'm playing with POD Analyst. That one's free. And then I'm playing with POD SEO. And all these are. It's really like, what's the difference between podcasting SEO and regular SEO? The answer is nothing. It's the same thing.

Dave Jackson:
See what your competitor's doing. And if they're putting the word in podcast consultant four times, your next episode should have it five. And then, because in the end, I watched a thing from. I finally figured out how to say this. It's osha, because it looks like osha. A U S H A. It's a podcast hosting company out of France, which is great because everyone there has an outrageous French accent, and I love accents, so I love that. But I watched their presentation, and at the end, and there's nothing wrong with this, I guess, but I was really looking for the secret sauce.

Dave Jackson:
And in the end, they showed a slide where someone in the episode was more or less keyword stuffing. They were like, hope you enjoyed this topic. Other topics we cover are making money with your podcast, podcast strategy, blah. And I was like, well, that's not new. And then they're like, if you like this interview with Rob Greenlee, you might also like Cliff Ravenscraft, John Lee Dumas, Abraham Lincoln, whatever. And I was like, well, that's just. That's nothing new. That's keyword stuffing.

Dave Jackson:
But because Apple is now searching, and this is where I can't get a true answer. I was in a presentation of podcast movement where a company said, Apple is searching the description of the episodes, and I'm standing next to a guy from Apple, and I go, is that true? And he goes, no. And I go. He go. Then he goes, well, not right now. Yeah. He kind of hinted that it might be, but not really. But at that point, he said no.

Dave Jackson:
And so that's when I was like, you know, so even keyword stuff in your episode may not be a lot. You mentioned Period zero or ERA zero. Daniel says, I used to watch a lot of video podcasts so much that my itunes would crash the network at my job back then, and they had to block itunes during business hours. Shame on you, daniel. Podcast chapter, podchapters.com but that's one of those things. I think you make a great point. A lot of people when they go, oh, videos. Coming to podcasting.

Dave Jackson:
We remember Rocket Boom and Ask a Ninja. Ask a Ninja ended up on Netflix for a little while. Cali Lewis had whatever geek brief, I think, back then. Or it went through a couple different.

Rob Greenlee:
Right.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
To be on the. The Revision three platform.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. So there were a lot of. Because you got to remember, ERA zero were all the nerds people often look at the Hollow. Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah. Like, Aaliyah Laporte was a classy example of this.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. I mean, Rob's involved with the podcast hall of Fame, and there was talk at the beginning like, hey, why is the podcast hall of Fame all old, white nerdy dudes? And I'm like, because at the beginning of podcasting, it was young, white, nerdy dudes that were getting into it. So. Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah, we all got old because of the. Of the development and the growth of the medium. It's been 20 years, you know.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. And so there was video back then. The problem is, as it's still the case, hosting a video file takes a lot more money to. If you're on Libsyn or Blubrry or Podbean, I think are the only three that actually let you host a video. And I did find out Podbean has this weird $29. And I was like, what's the catch? And the catch is they're gonna put a watermark on your video. And I was like, oh, that's because I'm like, 29 bucks for. Yeah, I asked them at.

Dave Jackson:
I think it was podcast movement, which was interesting because all the people I knew at Podbean are no longer at Podbean, so I don't know what.

Rob Greenlee:
They basically let everybody go. Yeah.

Dave Jackson:
I was like, well, that's different. They had some salespeople there. And so I was even there for a while. Yeah. Well, that's a question I could ask you because you've worked At Microsoft. You've worked at Podcast one. You've worked at some big. I mean, you were podcasting at Microsoft.

Dave Jackson:
So if anybody's like, hey, who is Rob Greenlee? Yes, he's the new media show. But back in the days, if you know what a Microsoft Zune is, then that was Rob Greenlee. And I. I used to freak out when Rob. Oh, wait, does he have one? Here we go. Ah, there it is. Is that the one with the. Oh, that one's got a nice case.

Dave Jackson:
I remember when it had, like, a wood paneling kind of look to it.

Rob Greenlee:
But, yeah, this is the Zun hd. Yeah. If you look at the tombstone. Because this. This device died. I mean, not. Not physically died. This.

Rob Greenlee:
This device still works, but. Yeah, but Microsoft killed. It killed the platform.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
And that's when I left in 2014 to go to work for podcast one.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. Because I used to.

Rob Greenlee:
On this platform for seven years. So.

Dave Jackson:
Well, the thing that got me was, like, here is Rob, like, Mr. Microsoft Podcast. And you would just give out your email address. And I was like, holy cow, that's got to be insane to do. But was. Was the Zune before or after the ipod?

Rob Greenlee:
It came a few years after the ipod.

Dave Jackson:
Okay. So I couldn't remember who.

Rob Greenlee:
It didn't survive because it couldn't really compete with the. With the momentum of the ipod platform. So. So that's why eventually it. It kind of faded away. But. But it didn't help that there was a lot of bad PR around the Brown first Zune.

Dave Jackson:
Yes.

Rob Greenlee:
A lot of the tech evangelists kind of gave it a. Gave it a black eye in the early years, and then a lot of. And then Microsoft kind of lost their momentum behind it. And, And. But we did capture probably 30% of the market as far as podcasting at the time. I mean, my catalog. This kind of gives you kind of a perspective on how far we've grown. Is.

Rob Greenlee:
Is that my. My catalog at zune was about 35, 000 podcasts.

Dave Jackson:
That's amazing.

Rob Greenlee:
Look at what's happening right now. You know, there's like 5 million total ever published, of which about 500,000 are active on a monthly basis right now. But it's, you know, you can just see the scale of this medium, and that's from 2014 to today. So about, what, about 11 years or so? Yeah, we've grown that much on the content side. So it's, It's. I mean, it was a great experience. I mean, I took that Zune platform and put it onto Windows Phone. And also built a whole Zoom video podcast kind of apparent inside a Windows Media center at the time, which was the platform that Microsoft had to.

Rob Greenlee:
To enable you to watch online content on your television.

Dave Jackson:
So, yeah, let's. Let's play podcast trivia. This would be fun. There was a platform back then, this is before, I think even Apple, because there was a Yahoo Directory, but one of the ones that was really popular was called Odio. And we'll ask the chat room, does anybody know Odio went away and then they came back as another company that you might be familiar with. Does anybody know what Odeo came back? Yeah, Craig says, I remember sending an email to Rob so that he can manually add my podcast to Zoom. Yes. For an assistant.

Dave Jackson:
Eddie, we'll add that. We have another question coming.

Rob Greenlee:
There's a whole story behind that too, Dave, if you want to go into it, but I don't know if you want to.

Dave Jackson:
What? Adding. Adding. Adding people manually.

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. Well, let's hear it. And in the meantime, that'll give. There we go. We have a winner. Of course, Randy being the giant geek he is, Odeo came back as Twitter because Odeo had this whole thing where you could follow your friends and see what podcast they were doing. Yeah. Dan has a good guess.

Dave Jackson:
Was it Real Player? I remember making 32 kilobit finals to be streamed on Real Player back in the day. Yes. Now everybody's coming in. It's always interesting seeing how, how long the delay is on YouTube to get that out. So we have a winner. But yeah. What was the, what was the fun part of doing it manually?

Rob Greenlee:
Well, the, the submission process at. At Microsoft wasn't really designed very well, so people could enter into the submission field in the, in the app pretty much anything they wanted to. So it didn't have a filter against it requiring it to be an RSS feed. So people would, would submit, you know, like links to their MP3 files or they would upload, like, links to their web page, all sorts of stuff. So my, my database of submissions was so polluted with non RSS feeds that it made it essentially unusable. I couldn't actually spend all day going through this database, the RSS feeds. So, yeah, that could be manually. I had to go around the Microsoft platform that was built to get really authentic RSS feeds into the catalog.

Rob Greenlee:
And that's why I had to put my email out and people had to send it directly to me.

Dave Jackson:
Oh, that's crazy. I'm trying to find somebody asked about it was Ray from around the layout he says, I'm getting no hits in my search for an assistant editor, and I'm trying to find the link. Steve Stewart from stevestewart. Me has. He runs the Podcast Editors Academy. And I'm trying. I thought it was going to be in my history, but it's not on his front page, unfortunately. You could reach out to Steve and he could send you the link.

Dave Jackson:
I need to put that into my. I use like a keyboard shortcut tool. And he could. You could basically go to Steve and say, this is what I'm looking for in an editor. They have to do audio or video or whatever, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And he has a giant list of people. You're basically throwing chum in the water. So when you do this, you're going to get a lot of replies.

Dave Jackson:
But, you know, that's a good thing if you want it. But I thought it'd be on his page and let me go to the very bottom. No, there's nothing on that. It's kind of a secret link, I guess, maybe. So he doesn't get in dated, but I will. I know he mentioned it on an episode of the School of Podcasting. I was trying to go back and find it, but you could also try. Well, you could try Fiverr, you know, but Fiverr, I know people that have found absolutely brilliant people on Fiverr.

Dave Jackson:
I know other people that. My favorite was the guy that would make a podcast opening for you. And in kind of his sizzle reel, he had you. You could listen to him doing an opening using Cool in the Gang. And I'm like, that. That can't be any more illegal than that. So I was like, so be careful on Fiverr. I know Daniel.

Dave Jackson:
Back when Daniel J. Lewis was doing podcast artwork, not only did they steal his artwork, they stole his exact copy. They just went over and grabbed his stuff and said, this is mine. And what was kind of sad about that is Dan, Daniel would go over to Fiverr and go, hey, like, they stole my stuff. And they would whack them and they would go away and then they would come right back. It was like a bad game of Whack a Mole. It's like the era. For a while, PodPage had a free account.

Dave Jackson:
You could sign up for free and it would work. And I don't think you could use a custom domain with it. There were some limitations to it. And then bad people on the Internet did bad things. Especially people would go in with their cameras and record a movie and then sell bootlegs on the Website. And so it started to tarnish. Like podpage started to be known as. Oh yeah, the bootleg movie people.

Dave Jackson:
And we're like, no, no, no, no. So we had to. You now have a 14 day free trial and after. And that's a long, a fairly long time to really kick the tires and figure out if you want it or not. And even after that, you can still play with it. It's just not public anymore. We had to pull it off the Internet, so that's how we handled that. But I know, of course, I'm drawing a blank on all the different places.

Dave Jackson:
Any place you look for a job, like, I know I'm drawing a total blank, but any place you would search for like an HR role or I'm a marketer or whatever.

Rob Greenlee:
Indeed.

Dave Jackson:
Or something. Indeed. There we go. Yeah, if you go to indeed and type in podcaster or podcasting or something, I was surprised because I always thought podcasting was this weird niche, geeky thing that not everybody. And I went over there and it's like, oh, wow, there are people looking for producers. And so that might be a place to look. And then if you really want to just get hounded, there's like, the podcast movement has a Facebook group and half the people in there are podcast consultants. PodFest has a Facebook group and just say, hey, I'm looking for an editor.

Dave Jackson:
And it'll be interesting to see. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how many comments come in before the admins tonight go, okay, we're gonna pause this because it will just be a flood of stuff. So it's kind of tricky and it's, it's always hard too to find because I know people like Ralph over@askralph.com he's in the chat room, he uses a team. Well, the, their, their head honcho is based in America, but the, the actual people that are doing the work are in the Philippines. So it's really affordable. And so that might be something to look into. Stephanie says, hey, did you say pod analyst? I did. And while I've been talking, let me move some things out of the way.

Dave Jackson:
And what this does is you can go into your Apple podcast and you can add people to just view your stats. And you can do the same thing in Spotify. And so what you can do is I've gone in and played with this. And so you can see, as you might imagine, the purple are Apple and the green are Spotify. And so you can come in and then see, like here, this is not good. A bunch of These red ones. And what it's showing you is the retention rate at 25 and 69%, 56%. I'm like, yeah, I'm not happy with that.

Dave Jackson:
And so it shows me the average. But the average, like down here, we've got a couple that are 103. And when they're blue, like this one, 81, 76, 64, you know, shows you your kind of completion percentage. But I can actually go. I think if I click on these, I am by no means. Yeah, I can click on these and dig deeper into this. And here you can see where, for whatever reason, you know, people dropped off here in Spotify, but not so much, you know, in Apple. It's.

Dave Jackson:
It's down here where I start to say, hey, the show's over, that it falls off like a. But what's interesting about this is there are other tools like Pod SEO, which I think I'm using for 20 bucks a month. But you can go in here. Let me see if I go into episodes. Yeah, this is kind of showing how. How things are doing. I can go into keywords, and this is where you can go in. So here, grow a podcast.

Dave Jackson:
How to podcast, Learn to podcast. And I can see if I'm going up or down. And if I remember right, yes, of course we have to have charts, because. Let's see. No chart rank. Yeah, you just have to. You can pull in your reviews, unless you want to use podgagement for that, of course. So you can pull in your reviews.

Dave Jackson:
So it's an interesting way to kind of come in and obsess over your stats. But I can see here that for podcasting, I'm ranking third. Podcast tips number 73. And how to podcast, I'm at 94. And you can. So it's. And right now, I think the deal is because I can see unique listeners. I'm at 9:26 for the school of podcasting.

Dave Jackson:
The minute I go over a thousand, I gotta start paying for it. So if you're up to a thousand, you can get this for free. And then I think it's $49. I heard him on. I forget what podcast. And the. The guy behind it was saying that, you know, he's gonna have a couple plans. Most of them were gonna be around 50 bucks.

Dave Jackson:
And I was like, interesting, but it. I mean, the difference is if I use something like Answer the Public, which is an SEO tool that's a little more affordable. Another one is. I think it's answer. I always laugh because it's Socrates, but I still, because of Steve Martin, want to call it so crates. Steve Martin once, oh, I read all the big people. I read so. And so I read so crates when it's Socrates.

Dave Jackson:
Answersocrates.com is another slightly affordable SEO tool. And all you're doing with SEO is you're saying, hey, I need to find a keyword that people are looking for, so I want to go play in traffic. But I want it so that it's not so popular that everybody's trying to rank for it, but I want it to have where some people are ranking for it, but not a lot of competition. That's your sweet spot.

Rob Greenlee:
Your sweet spot. Yeah.

Dave Jackson:
And so that's easy to do with tools like I mentioned, answer Socrates and answer the public, and then you get into the real expensive stuff like hrefs and all these other ones that people, agencies use. But all these SEO tools for podcasting, all they're doing, it's the same thing. You can now see how many times you can say, oh, this per. You know, Courtney Elmer and David Hooper and, you know, all these other people. Rob Greenlee is my competition. Daniel J. Lewis is. I could, I could monitor your stuff.

Dave Jackson:
I don't know that you can do that in this tool. POD Analytics. I think it's more about looking at your stuff. But it's one of those things where I'm like, it's interesting. I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep this. It's nice to know I'm ranking number three for something. But my show is called the School of Podcasting, so it's not surprising that podcasting is something I rank for well.

Rob Greenlee:
And you can also get some of these tools as a plugin for WordPress too. So if you happen to be hosting a website with WordPress, you know, there's some pretty advanced SEO tools that you can leverage to help your keywords and your. And your placement of, of certain types of alt text and things like that behind images and stuff. If you happen to have a website that can help you with the rankings. And increasingly, AI is becoming a place where people are finding content too. And I think over the next couple years, AI is going to be probably one of the primary places that people subscribe to shows and get content, I think is where it's going to go. You know, the big question is whether or not it's going to be human created content or clone created content or, you know, that's the big, big debate in the AI world right now is, is what's the future of Human created content. I happen to think that the human created content side is going to be strong, but.

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah, is it. It's not going to be the complete landscape of content. It's going to be a blending of the two.

Dave Jackson:
Now, going forward, the thing I was surprised with that. I'm with you. I think, yes, you know, there's going to be a lot of AI content with AI voices. But I went over to Audible and went to kind of browse around, and I was amazed at if we. How many of these we'll see here, because it used to be, if you could get one narrated by the actual author, that was brilliant. But if I come down. So I'm@Audible.com and it might be different, but I know the last time I was over here because I was trying to find business. And the fun thing about ecamm is they throw like 50 little windows up, and so it's block.

Dave Jackson:
Here we go, Business and careers. So if I click here. But I was surprised at how many of these. If we get out of. You know, I just want to click on the. Here we go, Business development. Okay, so there's. Here we Go, careers and success.

Dave Jackson:
24,000 books here. And I want the one we just saw the list where. Here we go, Business. Recurrent conflict. Public speaking. That might be helpful. 441 episodes. See, I want a big giant list, not the best seller.

Dave Jackson:
Here we go. See all in public speaking. Because when I did this before, like, here's one narrated by a person. Narrated by a person. Of course, these are the ones at the top of the list. But, yeah, here's one virtual voice. And then you come down here, there's a person. But the one time I was over here, it seemed like they were all virtual voice.

Dave Jackson:
And I was like, I don't want. This one's really good, by the way. Secrets of Dynamic Communication. It's about public speaking. But that's a keeper right there. That's the one I use a lot because his whole thing is your episode should be able to be boiled down to one sentence. I remember once I did a talk at Podcast Movement. Every podcast can benefit from editing.

Dave Jackson:
That was my core sentence. And then every slide reinforced that. So if you're a public speaker, that's a good one. And of course, now these all have people on them. But I swear I came over here and, like, you know, 40% of them were virtual speaker. And I was like, okay, because I really. I'm like, is it going to be a case where going forward, like, just having anybody because there are the times when, you know, it's a super. It's an A list celebrity.

Dave Jackson:
They're not going to read their book and they let somebody else like. Well, and then you have people like Ozzy. Ozzy probably couldn't read his last book because he, you know, he had his kind of stammering and such. So they had somebody else. But it just seemed like anything I was interested in, or especially if it's kind of an independent author, and nothing wrong with that. I'm an independent author. But it was a case where, I don't know that they wanted to go through the hassle of doing an audiobook because I've done that. It is not a lot of fun.

Dave Jackson:
I know it's your voice and you think it would be a piece of cake. It's not. Every time I messed up, these are my words and I can't get them to come out of my mouth. But it just seemed like everybody was doing the. Let the virtual reader and then I listened to one and they would do like it was okay, but every now and then it would just have a weird word that would just the. Or it would make it a question. When it wasn't a question. It was just some weird tone stuff that I was like, okay, we're close, because you can do this now.

Dave Jackson:
This has been around for years. You can ask the woman in the tube from Amazon if you have a, you know, if you've bought a Kindle book, you can say, hey, you know, Lexi read and then say the title of the book and she'll read it to you. And at first you're like, oh, this is horrible. And then after about two minutes, you kind of get used to her voice and you're like, yeah, I can put up with this. So that's going to be the thing I think we're going to see is who's. I think that's 2026's cage match. AI voices versus human. And so who do you.

Rob Greenlee:
So we're starting to see a lot of kind of like cloned avatar videos on YouTube now that are fully AI. The. The voice is AI. I think there's a series out from Mr. Wonderful. I don't know if you, you know, from the Shark Tank.

Dave Jackson:
Shark Tank, yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
Who's got a whole series now of. Of his clone avatar actually doing. Doing episodes now. You know, it shows him like he. He would be sitting there, you know, like he's done in the past with himself, but now he's replicated himself and there's little Gesture things that are slightly off with the video and they're usually related to hand gestures is what I've known.

Dave Jackson:
Right.

Rob Greenlee:
You know, the cadence of his voice and his mouth movements and stuff tend to be pretty good, but it's the other body movements that seem to be out of sync with his gestures. And so there's still kind of a element here that is. It still communicates in office in authentic kind of kind of visual experiences with this too, even though the audio is pretty good. So there's still artifacts in here that are limiting the. The trust level. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of people consuming AI content now, and a lot of it is. People don't realize that it's AI content.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
And that's where we're at right now. Is it going to have to be labeled at some point or is it going to get so good that it's not going to matter anymore?

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. My worry is not so much the current batch of listeners and not even the next generation, it's the next generation after that. Two generations from now, are they going to care that it's not a human when they've only seen AI stuff? That's when I'm like, that's going to be. I know, I've talked about this on the show. Are you familiar with Joe Polizi by chance? The guy used to run Content. His podcast is Content Inc. But he had a big conference for content creators and he said, we got about three years before we're all going to be replaced. I'm like, no.

Dave Jackson:
And then I heard where The Washington Post. Now, from what I saw from the story, you can go to the Washington Post and say, give me a seven minute podcast about, I don't know, pigs in the pig market, read by Janie, and it will go, okay, here's your seven minute podcast read by Janie. Here's all the news about the pig market, whatever. And the fun part is they're wrong. They got called out like, hey, this just said this. And they're like, well, this is how you build stuff. Like, we're working out the kinks. And I'm like, call me weird.

Dave Jackson:
I think you would work out the kinks before you go public. But I was just. When I first heard that, then when people say, well, in the future you can just dial up whatever show you want. And I was like, okay, well, we got three years. And then I read that, oh, no, that's now. And I went, oh, I was very happy to hear that it was bad. But I was like, yeah, but it's here kind of. So that's.

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah. I keep hearing that the future really is going to look like you can basically dynamically request content. Yeah. And it will automatically generate it for you on a personalized basis. So if I create, let's say a clone of myself that would be part of my, my profile in, in AI, that a user could go in and, and ask me a question and it would spin up an answer in a, in a video presentation that would be reflective of AI's knowledge about my knowledge. Right. And, and it would have my likeness in there and it would have my, my voice and it would be, it would look and sound just like me. It's just that it would be like a, a on demand type of a request.

Rob Greenlee:
So you could offer consulting services or something like that. But you have to train the AI to understand you and understand your knowledge and all that stuff for it to be seen as authentic. And I think that's the, that's the line that you were talking about. It's like maybe two or three or four generations here in the future. Yeah. That we will get to that point where everything is going to come out of AI. So all of these platforms that we use as apps on our phone will be integrated into the, the AI and it will be part of workflows. Right.

Rob Greenlee:
So if you want to take a, a trip to go somewhere, that back end agent of sorts will, will. It'll still be connected to all these different airlines, hotels, all this kind of stuff will be built into the AI. And so, so you'll be able to, to do things. Right. And that's what the future looks like. And that's also what content's going to look like too. So all of us are going to have to build at some point kind of our, our existence inside of the AI to be able to play into this new world. Because all of our devices are not going to have a screen that's going to be filled with a sea of icons of apps that's going to eventually go away.

Dave Jackson:
The. I live in Akron, Ohio. The Akron Police Department now when you call, I believe it's 911 has an AI person that helps you get to where you need to go, which sounds ridiculous, but I also have a friend that's an emt and there are a lot of people that are using 911, like a taxi, like I need a trip to the doctor. And they're like, wait, you're not like, you didn't lose an arm or having a Heart attack. And he's like, there's a lot of people that really abuse 911. Also from the chat room, the one and only Jody Kringle says, hello, Rob. So, yes, it's great to have Rob here. Dan makes a great point about AI stuff.

Dave Jackson:
I think the type of content matters too, a lot. Audiobooks that are informative can get away with more AI voices instead of a very narrative driven story where voice acting helps a lot. So that's true. Yeah. And Chris says, oh my Gosh, there are two Mr. Wonderfuls now. Yes, that's what we needed.

Rob Greenlee:
Virtual Mr. Wonderful and the real Mr. Wonderful.

Dave Jackson:
And we've got another. Oh, Rob's going to, Rob Ralph is going to send us into another fun rabbit hole in a second. Aren't you supposed to indicate at least on YouTube that the video, that the audio in the video was produced by AI? You're supposed to. I've seen that checkbox, you know, so it'll be interesting to see. But. And then Craig from AI goes to college. Keep that in mind. ChatGPT went public just over three years ago.

Dave Jackson:
Although there will be fits and starts, the capabilities are going to increase rapidly. What's impossible today will be routine one day. We'll take a quick tangent on that one, Rob. A podcast company goes public. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Or because it's a podcast question. Is it just the ever popular. It depends. I don't know.

Dave Jackson:
But what are your thoughts?

Rob Greenlee:
I think it does depend.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
I'm not sure that going public has really anything to do with how good the company is necessarily. I think going public puts it in a better position to be well funded and probably a more reliable company potentially because it's accountable to its shareholders. So, so that's the upside of it. The downside of it is that it becomes a, you know, a larger corporation that has a lot more power and influence in the market. And so it can go either way. I mean, I think a good example of this is Spotify. Right? You know, is Spotify and Acast and those are both public companies. And you contrast those two companies with.

Rob Greenlee:
Well, and Apple's a public company too, but you know, with the smaller startup companies that are, you know, not playing in that, that type of a market, they're, they can be very good companies too. So I don't know. I mean, I think it's, I think it's just a business model difference.

Dave Jackson:
That's it. Ray says, wait a minute, there's AI content out there. You don't Mean, Bob Barker didn't do the Price is Right. Drunk. Yeah. My favorite. Here's the thing, and I think this is what's going to happen. We're going to end up with algorithms serving us so much AI that it's going to be hard to find the real stuff, because I made the mistake on Facebook.

Dave Jackson:
I'll get lost in reels way too often than I should. And somehow I clicked on a video of a gorilla at a zoo, and then somebody did something and it smashed the glass, you know, but it didn't break it completely. And I was like, wait a minute, that's fake. Because if that had happened, it would have made the news. Or that. And then I. And. But now Facebook, like, ooh, Dave's.

Dave Jackson:
Dave likes gorillas. And like, there was one where there's gorillas. Yeah. And there was one where a woman's in there and they're. They're hitting a boxing bag, and she's standing right next to. And we're not talking, like, orangutan, although they could rape your. Or rip your face off. It's like the big gray, you know, silver top gorilla or whatever it is, and she's hitting it, then just stands there.

Dave Jackson:
And then the gorilla comes over and. And he hits it once and knocks it off the chain, and it goes flying out of the cage. And I'm like, yeah, I don't think she'd be in there. I'm like. And I was like, yeah, but it's like every. There was that, and then for a while, it thought I wanted killer whale stuff. So when I go to Facebook now, instead of seeing my friends, it's just AI stuff. And I'm like, I have to scroll way to the right to finally see somebody from someone I know besides, oh, here's another giant whale eating a.

Dave Jackson:
You know, like, whatever it is. Or the porch pirate thing. Like, that used to be fun. People would. I know there's a guy on YouTube that had a whole thing where if you picked up a box off of his porch, it would blow glitter in your face. Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
It would explode. Right.

Dave Jackson:
And now there's all sorts of fake ones. And I'm like, well, so. But you know who's not fake, Rob? The awesome supporters that support this show. And you can be an awesome supporter by Simply going to AskThePodcastCoach.com and these are people like, there he is. Craig from AI Goes to College, or Ralph's in the chat room. You know, content creators, accountant.com lionden.com, i am salt Lake Boy, that guy's been podcasting. There's another guy that's been podcasting forever and you can be again an awesome supporter by going to askthepodcastcoach.com awesome. And the show is brought to you by the school of podcasting where you get courses, coaching and community.

Dave Jackson:
Use the coupon code coach. And don't forget that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee and five hours of one on one coaching each month with you and me. And if you want some feedback on your show, I should just take this screen out because you know what? I don't think any podcasters want feedback on their show. I just, I've come to that conclusion. But I know Ralph will say they do it every Thursday on the whatever show he's now on. Mark Roenick does a show. They do reviews every Thursday but they don't want. Well, I could be wrong.

Dave Jackson:
Maybe people just don't want reviews from me. That's it. If you go to askthepodcastcoach.com, that is on podpage and if you want to try podpage, well check out trypodpage.com and Jim is not here. But if you want some Jim Collison, you could go to TheAverageGuy TV and of course Rob Greenlee is right there. And if you're like, hey, I like this Rob guy, well just go over to new media show dot com. He's got a rotating, what would you call it? A rotating staff of co host now? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
Guest co host kind of thing. Or you know, a rotating, you know, it's almost like an interview show currently. But I'm looking at some other types of models for that show that can just get more people involved in that show.

Dave Jackson:
So there you go. And I don't know, did we do the Wheel of Names the last time you were here, Rob, because it is time.

Rob Greenlee:
I believe you did.

Dave Jackson:
Okay, it's time for the Wheel of Names. This is where we have our $20 supporters on the Wheel of Names. Some people more than once because they are supporting more than once. So could it be soniccupcake.com or AI goes to college or the financially confident Christian or castahead.net we will find out when we spin the wheel and the survey says it is Greg maybe. Oh, it's gonna be close. No, Shane is the devil. He really is. I don't know.

Dave Jackson:
Shane has some sort of weird voodoo on the Wheel of name. Shane comes up a lot. Spybrary.com if you are into like real spy stuff not that James Bond is not a real spy, but if you want, like, real spy stuff, Shane is the guy to go talk to over at spybrary. And he is such a spy guy that he actually got to go on. I think it was BBC2 or something. There was something going on with spies, and his podcast made him seen as an expert. So thank you, Shane, for being an awesome supporter. And again, you can be an awesome supporter by going over to askthepodcastcoach.com awesome.

Dave Jackson:
Because you might be asking yourself, hey, did these guys save me time or money or a headache? Or maybe we kept you educated or we gave you a good history lesson today. Well, then go over to ask the podcastcoach.com awesome. And keep in mind, if you just want to donate once, there's a button for that too. So Ralph asked a question and I was like, oh, here's another fun one. But I would love your intake on this. He says, where'd it go? I had it. It's about. He asked about paying for promoting your show.

Dave Jackson:
And so he says, I've been using Overcast to promote my show. And that shows in his stats, he can see where a big chunk of his audiences come from. Overcast. What do you think about other services like Audience Lift? So that would include things like Mopod and there are a bunch of those. And most. Here's the typical. This is what it sounds like. We will take your show.

Dave Jackson:
We will place it among. We will place it on related articles on major websites like People and Yahoo, to which I kind of go. Yahoo is a major website. Okay. Is that still here?

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah, it is, but yeah.

Dave Jackson:
And then they don't use your media host player, they use their player. And then you have to be careful because they'll say, and then people can sign up to be notified that there's a new episode, but that's via text and you don't own that. They do. So if you want to keep notifying people, you have to keep buying the service. So, Rob, have you seen. I know you worked at. When you worked with me over at Libsyn for a while, you were involved a little bit with some of the advertising. And I know you've, you know, obviously you're a consultant.

Dave Jackson:
You worked with people. What are your thoughts on these kind of sites? Because I know when you turn them on, your numbers go up and when you turn off the campaign, numbers go down.

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess that's a good sign. I mean, at least the numbers went up when you use these. But oftentimes I kind of caution people to some degree because some of them can be rather expensive to participate in. And so to think that that's your magic bullet that you have or some sort of competitive advantage is, may only work if you have a lot of money to potentially spend against these type of things to kind of essentially kind of hack the, the natural process of growing a podcast. So, but increasingly people are buying Facebook ads or they're buying campaigns on the social platforms. And increasingly we're seeing these, these social platforms shift their models. You know, like, like what we've seen with some of these social platforms actually limiting how many external links that you can post in your posts now and saying, well, we're only going to allow you two external links in your post now. And once you get beyond that, you're gonna have to pay us to, to post external links.

Rob Greenlee:
So all these platforms are trying to keep content siloed on their, their platform. And that's, that's increasingly challenging, but it's also increasingly requiring that if you want to get exposure on these platforms that you're going to have to boost your posts or you're going to have to pay to have visibility. And even, even YouTube is doing this now. So, I mean, they, they will guarantee me like 5000 views on my video if I pay 10 bucks or 15 bucks to give a boost where they will actually say in the interface that we will give you 6 to 8,000 views for $10 or something like that. So there are methods that you can play this game. The question get back to. You get back to. But are, are you really in a position with your show to, if you boost it like that, are you going to pick up a loyal audience if the show's not probably, you know, of the quality that will retain audience once you boost it, you may be wasting money.

Rob Greenlee:
So, yeah, so that's the, that's the tension that's in this. But that applies to any advertising, right? If you have a company or a business, that product that you're selling needs to convert, right? And so you have to have a product or a show that's, that's going to retain audience that has value, that is worth investing and boosting it. So I don't know what, you know, give us your thought.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. And when you go through, if we do fun with math, right? If, let's say, you know, whatever it was for 6,000 views, okay, so 5%, let's go. And that's kind of high. So if we go Times that by 0.05, that means that of that 6,000 people, 300 of them will click on your ad or whatever it is. And if we times that by how many people? Let's go 5% again, we'll actually click play. So that's 15. And now the question is, how many of those 15 people are going to come back for episode number two? So, you know, depending on. And there's so many things that are dependent on that, right? Like, number one would be, how many people? Like, are you in front of the right audience? I was in a Mastermind this week, and they were talking about pod roll.

Dave Jackson:
Not the podcasting 2.0 pod roll, but this thing where you end up like a promo for your show is episode two. And they said, well, they did get some people, but they don't know where they came from. And they don't know, like, if it's a good match for their audience. They're like, but we got more people. And I'm like, that's not my favorite kind of marketing. So it's. But with marketing, you have a Getting it in front of people that should be listening to your stuff. That's really the key to growing your show, finding those people who should be listening to your show, but aren't.

Dave Jackson:
And then there's the material. So the actual pitch, the actual title, the actual artwork that says, come listen to the show, because you want that to resonate with people. And then you have the landing page. And so is it easy to click play? Is it easy to click follow? There's so many things that can lead to that, and that's why there's a joke. But it's not really a joke. And it's like 50% of my marketing works. I just don't know which one. And so it's.

Rob Greenlee:
It's like a funnel, right? This whole concept that's been around online media marketing for years is creating a, you know, a funnel of people that will vet people into becoming a customer. Right? And that's essentially what you're doing with this, is that you're funneling potential audience into a commitment to be a fan of the show, right? So, yeah, what's that conversion ratio? And then you have to calculate, well, what's the cost to get that five new listeners? Right? So let's say you paid $1,000, but you only really obtained five new listeners. Was it worth it? Right. Or should you do it more organically?

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, and it's. It's tricky because on one hand, advertising and overcast Spotify is pretty expensive, Ralph. If you go to Ralph's a member of the school of podcasting. If you go into the docs in the library, there's a thing about different how much it costs. And Gary Arndt was on my show from the Everything Everywhere Daily. And he's a guy that was getting a million downloads a month. And he does a daily show, he writes it and records it all in the same day. And he was like, man, I can't keep up with my social media posting.

Dave Jackson:
And so he just quit, like cold turkey quit his social media. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, what happened to your numbers? And he's like, absolutely nothing. And that's where you're like, okay. So sometimes I use a tool called Switchy that it's just a link shortener, but it also lets me track like, okay, how many people clicked on this and how many people clicked on that. And then it's like you said, Rob, it's kind of math. So I've advertised in POD News because a lot of podcasters read that, but it's all about my podcast auditing service. I'm not sure wannabe podcasters are reading Pod News. They might be.

Dave Jackson:
But the great thing about that is James lets you see how many people saw it, how many people clicked on it. And then I can go in and see, okay, how many people signed up for my service from that. And then you can say, okay, well, I paid, you know, whatever, 90 bucks for the ad and I made 120. Okay, so I made $30 profit on that. So it's one of those things. You just have to again, run it. Like, but I don't know. The thing that everybody wants is the 10,000 download switch.

Dave Jackson:
Like, what can I do to get 10,000 downloads in six months? And it's like. And the answer is. And it swings both ways. I've really been like the past six months trying to figure out why do people share stuff? And I always say a show is good if it makes people laugh, cry, think grown, educate, or entertain. And then I added save some time or saves them money. But I also have to throw in there how it makes them feel. Because I was watching. I've been binge watching the Big Bang Theory.

Dave Jackson:
This is one of the shows I watch off and on, but never really watched it from start to finish. And I love it because a, it shows you how much of TV is commercials, because an episode is 20 minutes long for a 30 minute show. But there was one. And the whole thing is, by the way, every story is about transition. And this whole show we're watching Sheldon, who's this giant robot, like, super nerdy guy. And by the end of the season, by the end of the actual series, he's a little more personable, and his roommate is kind of a super nerdy guy. He comes out of his shell. So it's all these transitions going on, but there was one, and it literally made me smile.

Dave Jackson:
It was so warm and fuzzy. It just felt like a warm blanket. And I was like, oh, that was a really cool episode. And I was like, ah, why? Because it's making me feel. Feel something. So that's something you might look into. It's like, how does this show make you feel now again? So that could be angry. A lot of people love to play the angry card or the scare card.

Dave Jackson:
This week on Dave's Power Hour.

Rob Greenlee:
Powerful. I mean, if you can create fear in your audience, it's a powerful connection. And if you're a resource to them to feed that fear attraction, then they'll come back. Right?

Dave Jackson:
Well, you. Weren't you doing a series. Yeah. Weren't you doing a series for a while on how. How much trust? What was it? Something about trust? Trust agents or trust?

Rob Greenlee:
It was trust factor.

Dave Jackson:
Trust factor. And the fact that people just don't. I mean, you said it earlier, we kind of now are the media. That was the one thing we learned this year. And that drives me nuts. Going back to, again, the advertising. I'm like, look, if we are the. The better.

Dave Jackson:
Like, instead of getting these $5 CPM ads, why don't we all just band together, hold hands, let's do a hands across America 2026. And I'll say, we're not gonna take crap for ads anymore on a podcast because we have the audience. It's kind of crazy on that. Let me see here. Yes. Talking about those companies. And again, the people at Mopod are great. Boy, if you want to have a good time at an event, hang out with the Mopod people.

Dave Jackson:
They are just. They are a hoot. I say a hoot. And I know Travis from Buzzsprout is now at Audience Lift. You know, it's just. Even in this Mastermind, we all kind of went. Are those real downloads? And we all kind of went technically kind of, you know, and so Stephanie says, boo. No one reads that stuff about, you know, advertising in these different places.

Dave Jackson:
You know, a PR company could do that.

Rob Greenlee:
That.

Dave Jackson:
It's interesting. I know. What are your thoughts on. I know. Whatever. Four years ago, podcast guesting would. Would be a fun way to grow your audience. Do you think that's still effective, Rob?

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah, I think it is. I think if you get really kind of strategic or whatever. I know I'm personally, I'm very open to being a guest on pretty much any show out there, large or small, myself personally. But. But I think a lot of people that are trying to grow their podcasts need to drill into their, their particular niche area of their topic and try and be on other shows that are kind of derivative of their topic or whatever. Maybe not directly competitive, but though they could be. But it's also really key if you're going to be a guest on another podcast, is to really add a lot of unique value to whatever show that you're going to be on. And, and that takes additional thinking.

Rob Greenlee:
And sometimes the host of the show that's inviting you to be a guest doesn't always think through that, that thought process. So I think if you're a guest on a show, the guest needs to take a fair amount of responsibility to, to not just say the same things that they've said over the last 10 times they've been a guest is to paint different pictures and to tell different stories and to add value. Yeah, Like, I've been a guest on like a design podcast before or. Yeah, on a EV podcast or on a, you know, you know, in like a technology, other technology shows. And you just have to bring other types of knowledge to those shows that you have or experiences and not just tell the same pitch.

Dave Jackson:
Right. Yeah. Well, speaking of shows, the new media show, how many years did you do that with Todd?

Rob Greenlee:
13 years.

Dave Jackson:
13 years. You and Todd arguing over that video is not a podcast.

Rob Greenlee:
That's only been the last couple years.

Dave Jackson:
And it's weird because I used to do a Todd Cochran imitation and it was always funny, and now it makes everyone sad. And I'm like, okay, I'm not going to do that anymore. But he's duly missed. He passed away last September. Suddenly how like, you've now brought that show back. What kind of went through your brain on am I going to continue doing it? How hard of a. Because half the fun of that was. And this is where I think we talked about this when Todd passed away.

Dave Jackson:
Like, you should have a list somewhere of all your passwords and stuff like that. So can you kind of give us the behind the scenes of resurrecting that show?

Rob Greenlee:
Well, it was one of those things, I mean, the shock of losing Todd, like, so suddenly, like, that just kind of put a, put a, a real kind of cloud over, over that show about what the future is. And, and how. How Todd really controlled that show from a technology standpoint. I was just kind of like a guest co host kind of a concept.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
For most of its existence. And so Todd was really the guy that was behind the scenes, you know, making it happen. I just was, you know, calling in via, you know, all sorts of different platforms, whether it be Skype or Zoom or, or Streamyard or whatever platform we happen to be using into his studio. And he was producing it. So he had all of the access codes to get into all the platform kind of elements of the show. And, and there was a little bit of a scramble during, just after his death that the family really didn't know how to get into, you know, his platforms and stuff. They didn't know where his, you know, his passwords were or whatever to. Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
Log into. And his kids, of which he has four kids. I mean, a couple of his kids are actively involved in the podcasting space. And so they, a couple of his sons came over and kind of brought back to life the Geek New Central podcast too. So as part of that process, they started digging deeper and eventually they found some access to the, the platform that had been created for the new media show. But I worked with Mike Dell over at Blueberry and we recreated the, the website over on another, you know, hosting platform.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
And basically we're able to migrate all the content over to this new instance. So I want, I'm no longer on Todd's kind of Geek New Central and tech podcast network platform that he had built on WordPress. Right. So this is in a new instance. And so it was really, it took some time for us to work through all the details to get. Be able to migrate all the content and all this stuff. And then, then it was really kind of a choice that I had to make about whether or not I was going to bring it back. You know, I, you know, it was one of those shows that was really driven by, by Todd and, and so did I want to take it over and kind of be the leader going forward of that show.

Dave Jackson:
And you kind of go from color commentary to being the. You're the guy that's bringing up the topic, sharing your things and then asking somebody else. So. Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
Yeah. And so, well, what was that format that I wanted to do? You know, and I think I'm still wrestling with that right now. I've just been bringing on a bunch of co hosts here in the early first couple of episodes. I think I've done four episodes now. And. But I'm thinking about another format that I might do that might be more, you know, substantial in the medium, but we'll see how it shapes up. You know, I've been doing a lot of different kinds of shows for a while now. I mentioned the Trust Factor show and, and a lot of that stuff has been done on YouTube.

Rob Greenlee:
And then some of the stuff that I've done on YouTube I've made available as an audio podcast too. But there's series that I have on, on YouTube that never made it over to audio podcasting. So I've been playing in all of these, you know, these sandboxes of sorts to learn and to, to figure out how the. All these mediums work. And I know you play around with a lot of different tools and a lot of different platforms to keep you up to date with what, what's going on in this medium. And it's very complex medium now.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, my problem is I'll go over and sign up for something like POD Analyst or POD SEO or whatever, and then I forget to cancel. Like, okay, I see what it does. And I've been doing that because I'm kind of doing an end of year. Let's, let's see how the school of podcasting is doing. I'm like, oh, I don't need that. I don't need this. I don't need this. I have so many.

Dave Jackson:
I have like hundreds of domains that are just gone in, like, just this month I went in and canceled 10 of them. I'm like, I don't really need, you know, this and that. And so that's always kind of. So, yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
But yeah, I'm doing that show, the new media show, live every Wednesday at 6pm Eastern is, is the current schedule at this point. So. So I've got some great guests coming up over the next few weeks. You know, we're going through the holidays. There's probably gonna be a few weeks that I don't have episodes. But. But yeah, and then eventually, probably in the new year, it'll be a completely different format of show.

Dave Jackson:
So now as you've been, and you're. You're doing this intelligently by tweaking it a little here and a little here. Have you gotten any kind of negative feedback from people like, what do you. You can't do the show without Todd. Have you gotten any kind of negative feedback like that?

Rob Greenlee:
No, I think it's been actually quite the opposite, I'm gonna say.

Dave Jackson:
I would think it would be the opposite, but, you know, it's the Internet, so there's always that one oddball.

Rob Greenlee:
Since Todd's death, there's been a lot of questions that I've, I fielded coming in about whether or not I'm going to keep the new media show going. And so that's what prompted me to think, well, you know, I've invested 13 years in that show, right? And it's got, you know, some, some brand awareness and some name awareness and, and why not bring it back? It's going to be on stage again at podfest. So I'm going to be doing a live, live in person recording of the, of the new media show at that event, like Todd and I used to do. So I'm, I'm trying to bring back some of the elements of that and. But I think it needs a different format. I think it needs a format that is more inclusive of the totality of the podcasting space now, not just a interview concept.

Dave Jackson:
Right? Well, for me, the thing I liked about that show is, you know, you have two, like, OGs, like capital O, underscore GS. You had you and Todd, and it was commenting on not just the news, but the space of how does this tie in, how does it affect the space? So one of the reasons I tuned in is just because there was whatever, 45 years of experience behind the microphone and it wasn't so many of the bright, shiny stories that show up. Sometimes people that don't have that history of like, oh, we've seen this before. You know, I remember one guy contacted me, wanted my opinion on something, and it was a little thing that made little clips and you could share it and blah, blah, blah. And I said, oh, this is like, clamor. And he's like, what's a clamor? I go, it's a business that came on that did whatever you did. I said, there was no way to monetize it. And shockingly, they went through all their VC money and they went out of business.

Dave Jackson:
I go, so you might want to look at a way to monetize this. And I go, and they had a lot of integrations. They integrated with PowerPoint, WordPress and, you know, and it was great. It was cool. I started a podcast because you could go in and see what clips had been shared the most. And so I did the clamor top 20. And I remember because Jason Bryant had something where he was like, clamor on Dave. You know, it was so funny.

Dave Jackson:
But that was one of the advantages of that show is you guys had seen a lot of things and you're like, okay, here we go again. You know, that's like, I'm. I'm amazed that we haven't seen one in a while. I actually take that back. Nope. I was going to say RSS.com just came out with a free version of their hosting, but they're not a solely free media host. We haven't seen one of those in a while where it's like, nope, we don't charge. We're never going to charge.

Dave Jackson:
And then my favorite is they'll say, well, we'll help you build an audience and then will get advertisers for you. And then we'll split the money on the advertiser. And the podcaster goes, sounds like a great idea. And they podcast for years. They get enough to get advertisers, and they leave and they're like, and now I'll take my audience with me and I'll get my own advertisers and keep the money. And the free media host goes out of business. I got a list of about 10 of those. So as we start to wrap up.

Dave Jackson:
Any predictions? I should have warned you about this ahead of time, but it's, It's. We're going top off the. Off the top of my head. Any predictions for 2026?

Rob Greenlee:
I mean, as always, this, this medium is an evolution, not a revolution. Though if you total it up over the last probably three or four years, it has been a rather a revolution of sorts, and not necessarily in a good way, but. But I think in the next year, you know, AI is going to continue to have a outsized influence over podcasters and new media creators, and we've got some tough decisions that we need to make over the next two years about how far each one of us wants to go down this AI path. Right. And think about maybe like Paul Colligan created a virtual Paul. Right?

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Rob Greenlee:
And. And so you start thinking about, well, do we need to clone ourselves to be able to take advantage of, you know, the opportunities that maybe are coming with AI and to create a version of us? And I've been working on a. On a whole new show concept called Spoken Human, which is a. Basically a show that will be an example for how we kind of transcend this, this evolution around AI content.