Buzzsprout

While social media hides your voice beneath a flood of ads, influencers, and trending distractions, podcasting cuts through the noise. No algorithms. Just your content, reaching the audience who chose to hear it.

Podcasts may not go viral like TikTok posts, but they’re unbeatable in audience retention. Seeing episodes with an average consumption well above 80% is common in podcasting, but that’s unheard of on social media or YouTube. Use social media to grow your audience and podcasts to keep them.

We're bringing something new to Podcast Movement this year!

Extremely interesting test on effectiveness of mid-roll vs post-roll ads!

Post-rolls! I know, I know, you probably hate post-rolls. Hear me out, I think they get a bad rap and they are a sneaky steal and way too cheap? (But I am new to the podcast game! So someone please tell me where I am getting this wrong!) Three reasons to NOT run post-rolls, and then what I have observed first-hand: *But first, a quick note on “impressions” as I understand them* Basically you get impressions in two ways: 1) someone downloads the episode to their phone. The podcast hosting platform then does not “know” if they actually hear the ad, so they count these hard downloads as an impression. 2) someone streams the episode, and the impression counts after they have listened to the ad (that is, pre-rolls get the most impressions, then mid-rolls, then post-rolls). 1) You are just paying for automatic downloads. Sure, some people don't finish the episode (or even listen to it). As Apple rolled out updates last fall to make it so less people have automatic downloads on, this has reduced everyone’s downloads to a truer number. And looking at our past month of downloads by time of day, we see 14.4% of our downloads (streamed or hard downloads) in the first two hours of publishing. Assuming those are all hard downloads… 85%+ of our listeners are actually streaming. So sure, you overpay on some of those 14.4% that don’t actually listen to it. But, that is a pretty small cohort, right? 2) Post-rolls are a bad listener experience. If you’re embarrassed by your sponsors, yeah. We love our sponsors and believe that they contribute to our content and audience’s experience, so this does not bother me. (Anecdotally, I will queue up a handful of podcasts when I go on some longer runs. In between shows, I don’t really care whether it is a post-roll or pre-roll for the next episode, it is just a small break.) 3) Most importantly, they don’t see results. Ok, so, we ran mid-rolls and post-rolls on the Compelled Podcast (shoutout Paul Hastings! He’s a stud.). Paul is smarter than me and set up tracking since we both use Megaphone and Chartable. Podcast conversion data is tough, but since we were just advertising a different show published by the same platform, tracking is actually clean. The results? See the attached screenshots. Ignoring costs, the mid-rolls outperformed the post-roll by ~19% for new conversions. Including costs? Assuming mid-rolls cost 3x post-rolls (any disputes here?), the post-rolls outperformed by 252%. TL;DR - majority of impressions are now streamed (and more likely real), it’s not intrusive to the audience (pre-rolls are arguably worse), and they convert better on a ROAS basis (because they are so mispriced!). What did I get wrong here?

5 benefits I got from podcasting that have nothing to do with money: 1️⃣ Found a creative outlet 2️⃣ Increased my confidence 3️⃣ Made friends in my industry 4️⃣ Learned more about my subject 5️⃣ Improved my communication skills What else would you add?

We're two weeks away from Podcast Movement in DC! Who else is going to be there?

This new podcast app automatically detects and skips podcast ads. Would you use this app? Does it change your mind when you learn that it's $4/month for 50 ad-skips?

Today on Happy to Help, I am joined by Sarah Caminiti to discuss the power of kindness and its impact on your support team and customers. You won't want to miss this encouraging discussion! 🙌 Listen on Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts! 🎧 #kindness #customersupport #customerexperience #leadership Listen to the full episode: https://lnkd.in/eqwAwUVZ

Buzzcast has an empty spot on our Podroll recommendations. What podcast should we put here?