"Something About YouTube"
What was the vibe at the On Air Fest Business Summit? Ask the coat check guy.
Welcome to Dispatch #74 of The Audio Insurgent.
If you harbor some fear about many among podcasting’s leadership having lost their way, this dispatch probably won’t help you feel better. I’m sorry for that.
Last week I attended the Business Summit that precedes On Air Fest at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn. Unlike the distinctive creator and super-fan focus of On Air Fest itself, the Business Summit is a gathering of 200 people running networks, media organizations, production companies, and other top dogs working on the spreadsheet side of the podcast industry.
My moment of Zen that day came right before the lunch break: talking to the coat check guy.
The Wythe had placed a hotel employee in the back of the room to deal with all the coats. He probably did not know nor care at all about what was happening in the rest of that room. After the morning’s 3.5 hours of presentations, talks, panel discussions, and banter about “podcasting,” I asked him, “What do you think these people were talking about all morning?”
He shrugged and said, “I don’t know…something about YouTube?”
Something about YouTube.
And the weirdest part was…he was absolutely right. More in a moment.
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[TODAY’S MAIN THING: SOMETHING ABOUT YOUTUBE] When I look at my notes from the On Air Fest Business Summit, an invite-only gathering of those leading the business-side of podcasting, there was one sentence I wrote that captured the event for me so well I underlined it twice: “I’d rather hear creatives talk about business than hear business people talk about creativity.”
But let me back up a bit.
I have a real love/hate relationship with these kinds of industry gatherings, so much so that I don’t attend very many. This Business Summit has its origins in a semi-annual off the record gathering that Hotpod founder Nick Quah would host for about 30 people to discuss some of the bigger issues in the earlier years of podcasting. But then podcasting exploded…and so did the list of companies and voices who should be represented in that room.
For me, when it got big, that’s when the love/hate thing started, but perhaps not for the reasons you might assume. I liked the small, clubby aspect of the original gatherings, but knew even then that it was too small. The best part of the new larger gatherings was meeting people I didn’t know and learning about their work. I often found inspiring people who really challenged my thinking or led me to see things in a different way (including this year). The hate part was how dull, sterile, and safe much of the conversation became and the insight-to-utter-bullshit ratio of those speaking.
When friends accuse me of being grumbly about this, I invite them to go back and look at the agenda for these gatherings just 2 or 3 years ago. How many of those featured speakers and panelists still even work in podcasting today? How many of their companies are still in business? Let alone how little of what they said actually happened or proved to be true?
Plus, the start-up techno gobbledigook is so generic, they could be talking about anything. But here the lack of specificity reflects that many are speaking about nothing.
I kept a running list of words and phrases I kept hearing during the day that would be candidates for a Business Summit bingo card, including “persona-driven IP,” “extensions,” “product opportunity,” “data,” “templatized,” and “brand affinity.”
There is nothing wrong with any of these concepts, of course. But so many throw these terms around without any real ideas behind them. One friend came up to me at a break and said, “I bet you didn’t have ‘eye-tracking’ on your bingo card for a podcasting summit.” And yes, one panel discussion included a revelation that one podcast production company uses eye-tracking software to select episode art.
There was no single company mentioned more that day than YouTube. None. Not even a close second, including only scant references to Apple and Spotify (and many of those were about video on Spotify). And worst of all, almost no references to “listening.”
There were a few exceptions, three in fact. The day’s agenda included three creators and they were all fantastic: John “Mr Ballen” Allen, Recho Omondi, and Shawn Ryan. All three shared impressive and relatable stories of struggle with growth. And they’ve all been very successful, clearly several of them have been WILDLY successful. There were lessons and insights in every one of their experiences and I could have listened to each of them speak for twice the time they were allotted. Most interesting, all three clearly fall under even a more conservative definition of “podcaster,” yet all three seemed much more focused on their community and the ecosystem they’ve built across multiple platforms. They were all living embodiments of figuring out what they did, connecting to the people who love that thing, and building from there. Sure, they are podcasters, but the podcast is an anchor for an entire universe of activity. It’s impressive, healthy, and makes a lot of business sense. And best of all, their stories lacked the gobbledigook of the rest of the day because their work was focused on their passion. Each works pretty tirelessly, but they are driven by doing something they love. That is hard to quantify, but it's the key to almost every success story you’ll ever find in podcasting: media driven by passion and connection to those who share that passion. And that is exactly the thing that the “templatized persona-driven IP” crowd never seems to understand.
And what made their presentations so compelling is that they were honest and vulnerable. They were less concerned with dropping the right buzzwords and all seemed focused on sharing that their success comes from a lot of struggle, hard work, false starts, and time. Yes, time. John “Mr Ballen” Allen shared an unintentionally striking story about his struggles to find his voice and figure out what he was doing, often putting out a lot (as in hundreds) of cringey flops until, almost on a lark, he just looked at the camera and told a story. And bam, it all fell into place. When asked about the key to his success, he responded with one word, “Authenticity.” I think it was lost on many in the crowd that the lesson here is that the great idea (and the authenticity that birthed it) came after hundreds of rounds of humbling trial and error, then the good idea came. Today’s podcasting networks and organizations just want to be lemmings: copying someone else’s good idea that came after all that time and effort. But what they don’t realize is that if they want their company to succeed, the part they should be imitating is making the space and time for the trial and error part.
If you’d like some more detailed coverage of the day, here is a gift link to read Ashley Carman’s excellent summary.
[TODAY’S OTHER THING: A FOLLOW-UP OF SORTS] Since Yoseka, arguably New York’s best stationery store and definitely the largest collection of inks in the city, was just a 10-minute walk from the Wythe Hotel, I skipped lunch and a few of the break-out sessions, but I did pop into one hosted by my colleague Dan Misener of Bumper about measurement. It, as you would expect from Dan, was really insightful and interesting, as was the conversation among the attendees.
At one point Dan asked the group what they thought the industry should be measuring and wasn’t. There was some silence for a bit, but eventually someone spoke to podcasting’s lack of ability to do A/B testing and others agreed. For those who may not be familiar with the term, it is technology that allows you to give one version of something to a group of people and another version of that thing to a different group so you can see which performed better. You are completely unaware of this, but this is so common that almost everyone who interacts with the digital world has unknowingly participated in an A/B test for something you visited online.
I spoke up and said there are ways that you can approximate A/B tests in podcasting. One is to set up a listener panel, where you curate a group of people (often hundreds or thousands of people) willing to listen or look at something and answer questions about it. Assembling such a group takes some effort, but isn’t that hard to do for almost anyone and can be scaled down as well as up. You can A/B test with that group. There is also a really rough and kludgey way you can do A/B testing by uploading a replacement audio file into Apple Podcasts so you can compare Spotify versus Apple listeners as an A/B test.
A/B tests can be done in podcasting, just not broadly in public.
For anyone who is looking for crafty and frugal solutions to figure things like this out, my friend Ben Robins has recently put out a shingle and is doing independent audience and content research that is pretty amazing. When I went to Audible to launch Audible Originals, Ben was the first person I hired. Yes, I hired a researcher before I hired my first content maker.
Ben is someone who is incredibly crafty and frugal at learning about audience profiles and their responses to what we make (or might make). If you are interested in learning more about Ben’s work and his new company, Sound Insights, you can find them here.
Okay, that’s it for today.
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Make great things. I’ll be listening.
--Eric