The Knockout Formula: What Podcasters Can Learn from a Netflix-Breaking Event

Today on episode number 958 of the school of Podcasting, we're going to talk about Spotify's big announcement.

And I'm going to talk about a program that was so big it broke Netflix.

And why was it big and what podcasters can learn from it.

Let's start the show, the School of.

Podcasting with Dave Jackson.

Podcasting since 2005, I am your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson.

Thanking you so much for tuning in.

If you're new to the show, welcome aboard.

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This is why I help you plan, launch and grow your podcast.

Today we're going to talk about what makes really good content.

We're going to talk a little bit about Spotify's big announcement.

My website, school of podcasting.com use the coupon code LISTENER.

That's L A S T E N E R when you sign up for either a monthly or yearly subscription.

And of course that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

And so I thought about this today, like, is this a good topic?

And it is because it will be somewhat evergreen and I'm going to kind of play in traffic because a lot of people are talking about this particular program.

Well, what was the program?

And that is Jake Paul, who's this social media MMA fighter guy who's trying to be a professional boxer.

He's 27 years old.

He took on one of the most explosive, well known boxers of his time.

He was the youngest heavyweight boxer ever at 20 years old.

And that of course is Mike Tyson.

And what was interesting about this is myself, I did not have a Netflix subscription.

I do the thing where I will have Peacock for a month or two and then I'll turn it off and then I'll go get Max and then I'll watch whatever I want to watch and I'll turn it off because I, I found myself having all these different programs.

I was watching like one program on each platform and I was like, that's kind of dumb.

And so what I do now is I will be on like now I'm on Netflix and so I will watch everything I want to watch on Netflix.

And when I find myself going, well, I guess I could watch this one, I will cancel it and go to another one where there's probably some programs that I want to watch.

And for the record, I think sometime in the next year I would not be surprised if these platforms make you sign up for a year or more than a month.

I don't think they're Going to make it so easy to cancel?

Hopefully not.

But let's stick to the topic here.

It was Jake Balm and Mike Tyson.

And from what I saw on this, the Netflix reported that 60 million households globally turned in to watch the fight.

The viewership peaked at 65 million concurrent streams during the main event.

And so there was what they call a monolith of an audience.

This doesn't happen except for, like, the super bowl, because we are all watching whatever we want, whenever we want.

That's the beauty of podcasting.

You can listen wherever you want to, whatever you want, whenever you want.

But this was the thing that even though most of us work from home these days, if there was an actual corporate headquarters, there was going to be a lot of talk around the water cooler about this fight.

And so I was like, well, I don't want to have that.

I don't want to be the guy missing out that's not talking about this, even though I work from home.

And so I put out my.

Whatever it was, 17 bucks to watch.

And so here are a couple of things that we can learn, because this was an event that got a lot of attention, and it had some ingredients that we can use in our podcast.

So, number one, if you want to do something really big, maybe you're doing a webinar or a meetup or something like that, you have to have plenty of notification.

And I don't mean, like two weeks.

The fight was announced in March of 2024.

Now, it was originally supposed to happen in July, so that's March.

All right.

So we got April, May, June, July.

That's four months.

So you can't announce something three weeks and expect to get a big draw.

Now, it didn't happen in July because Mike had some sort of physical thing happen.

And so it turned out that was announced in March.

It had eight months of promotion.

And so if you look at people like Chris Komitzos and from Podfest and Podcast Movement, these people are doing tours, they're doing all sorts of stuff to keep that event in front of you.

So you have to.

Again, it's months in advance if you want to really drum up some information and get some tickets sold.

Now, it did have a lot of play on social media because Jake Paul has, like, 27 million people following him on that.

But it did get some play on the mainstream as well, because it's like, hey, remember Mike Tyson?

You know, well, he's.

He's coming back.

And so that kind of exposure would be hard to deliver as a podcaster.

But you should start to build up that anticipation months to tease the audience so that once it arrives, they feel like they have to consume the content to feel it left out.

Back in the day of podcasting, there was a show called the Podcast Brothers, and there was an event that changed its name about every other year, but it was at one point the Podcast and Portable Media Expo.

But they did a podcast year round, and when they got a new sponsor or they got a speaker or something, they just made it sound like if you're not at this event, you're missing it out.

So keep that in mind.

You have to leave people plenty of time and you have to build it up.

Now, the other thing that was, I went, hmm, we can learn from that.

It was ease of content.

It was easy to get this.

It was simple.

Now, if you're like, well, I don't have a Netflix account, Dave.

Well, it's not that hard to download an app.

It was easy to pay and then easy to sign in.

So by offering this event live on its platform at no additional cost to subscribers.

So if you had Netflix, you got it.

And Netflix made the flight, the fight, easily accessible to a vast global audience, and they basically contributed to the that high viewership.

So I don't know if people were staying up in England or not, but it was easy to get.

And so for me, I personally subscribe now.

What was kind of cool of this is I've had Netflix in the past, and even though I canceled my subscription when I logged in, gave my credit card, they remembered exactly where I was the last time I logged in.

So ease of content.

So for podcasters, you should be in all the apps.

I've never.

I kind of scratch my head and look, you be you, but you should be in Apple and Spotify and Amazon and I heart, in any other place that is supporting people listening to content or watching content.

Why?

Because there are people there that listen to content on those apps.

I know right now Samsung closed down their podcast directory, and you're probably going, wait, Samson has a podcast directory?

Yes, exactly.

And now you know why they're closing it.

But I put my show there.

Why?

Because there might be somebody over there listening to content.

And it took all of, I don't know, four minutes to submit my show.

And I think we've seen when podcasters go exclusive on a platform, be it, you know, Joe Rogan only on Spotify, and there are a couple other people that were only on this platform, and usually that's Spotify, because they are the walled garden and we'll talk about them later.

But it doesn't work in the long run.

Look at how many people.

Dax Shepard, Joe Rogan.

I forget the one.

There's a female kind of self improvement author who is.

Her name is escaping me.

Great show, prep Dave.

But, you know, all of them were exclusive and none of them are now, so that, to me, is not a great strategy.

Look, I'm not a huge fan of Spotify as a podcast platform, but my show is still there.

Why?

Because.

Cause I don't know, 8% of my audience is there and I don't wanna have to make them move because that would be a bummer.

So you need to meet your audience where they are if you wanna make it easy.

Remember we were talking about ease of content.

And the beauty of podcasting is it's an open format, meaning the power of choice is in the audience's hands.

You don't have to listen to me on Amazon or iHeart or Overcast or Castamatic or podcast guru.

You can listen to me wherever you want.

And I just want to make it easy for you to do that because that's what Netflix did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And another thing we can learn is it's information you can't get anyplace else.

If you wanted to see Mike Tyson box, you couldn't get it.

In fact, it had been 19 years since Mike had been in.

Like, if we put up quotation marks here, even though it's not really.

It's.

It's the truth.

But official boxing match.

So this was something that you couldn't get anyplace else.

He did an exhibition match in 2020, but one where he's still trying to, like, knock the head off the guy.

Yeah, it had been almost 20 years.

So this was information that you can't get anyplace else, which is why everybody was like, wait, who's fighting?

Oh, I'll be there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then there was an emotional side of the story, and it dawned on me as I was putting this together.

I always say you need to make your content, either make people laugh, cry, think, groan, educate, or entertain.

And that is still true.

But there's another thing, and I need to come up with a way of saying this.

When you can tie into someone's emotions, or in this case, nostalgia, that is something that will motivate people to tune in.

And so Mike Tyson, even after losing, he is, if somebody says the baddest man on the planet, if you know anything about boxing, people are going to go, oh, man.

You know That's Mike Tyson.

If you say the greatest of all time, you'd be like, oh, it's Muhammad Ali, right?

They all have their little nicknames and stuff.

And so those that loved Mike Tyson were excited to see him get back in the ring because it felt like it was, you know, 2020, actually, not 2020.

That was the pandemic.

But you get the idea.

It was like back in the day of watching Iron Mike, here he is, he's getting back in the ring, and for some people, like, Mike was your hero.

This is the guy.

Because this was a guy, literally, if you're not familiar with Mike Tyson, so many of his fights would make millions of dollars.

He would show up and knock the guy out in the first round.

Like, you're like, all right, here it goes.

And you'd pay like 30, $40 for this pay per view thing, and it would last 2 minutes and 12 seconds, and that would be it.

So people actually loved to watch him, and they hated to watch him because you're like, well, now what are we going to do?

We made all these nachos and the thing's already over.

So Jake Paul is known as the problem child and a little bit full of himself.

Right.

So all the men that were over 50 wanted to see if Mike could do it.

So there was that emotional edge to the story.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the next thing that made people tune in and this is huge, when you can somehow do this and orchestrate it, people will not just listen to the beginning of your show, but they'll listen to the whole thing.

And I call it the WHN effect.

Now, what is that?

That is what happens next.

And with Mike Tyson, he's a little cuckoo at times.

Yeah, he is famous.

There was one fight where the fighter kept kind of headbutting him, and his name was Evander Holofield.

And Mike just took a big old chunk of his ear and bit it off.

That's not something you see every day.

And again, he's seen as a little bit of a loose cannon.

And at the weigh in, we're like, all right, here comes Mike.

And this guy's like 3 inches taller than him.

And they're.

They're doing the.

You know, they're staring into each other.

And Jake Paul did something where he kind of stood up and got pretty close to Mike, and for whatever reason, Mike smacked him pretty hard in the face.

So Mike is highly unpredictable.

We're like, is he going to bite off his ear?

What's he going to do?

And even when it was obvious, spoiler alert, that Mike was not going to win.

For me, as a guy who has seen, you know, on YouTube, there are all sorts of clips of watching Mike just.

It would be just one punch.

In some cases, it looked like he wasn't doing very well.

And then Mike would come up and just hit the guy, and it was lights out.

And you're like, oh, my gosh, I think he killed him.

Right.

He's just out on the mat.

And so for me, I remember when Mike was in trouble, all it took was one punch.

So even after, say, round two, you're like, oh, this.

This is not going to end well.

There was a part of you that goes, yeah, but it just takes one punch.

And so there was part of you that's like, okay, I know this is looking this way, but won't this be surprising?

If Mike comes up one punch, Jake goes down.

I want to see what's going to happen next.

And I really think that is why sports, live sports especially, will always kind of have a place in media.

Yeah.

And I thought this was cool.

There was a well thought out ending.

And in podcasting, you need some sort of hook to get people to click play whether that's your title.

And I'm here to tell you, I still get kind of sad when I see somebody put the full phrase episode 18 at the beginning of their name.

I feel you're wasting that space that is beachfront property right there.

And only you care what episode it is.

Yes.

It makes it easier to find.

It just.

I could go on and on.

But nonetheless, you need a good intro to hook people.

And then if you conclude with something that makes people go, oh, yeah, and things like that, that's where I always say, if you do an interview and you've just made somebody look good, that's great.

But if the goal of your podcast is to make you look good, you need to do what I call the Jerry Springer.

For those of you that remember Jerry Springer, it's like a 2000 themed show today.

But Jerry Springer was this guy that would have people throwing chairs at each other.

And at the end, Jerry would go, what did we learn today?

Look in the camera, Things like that.

So a good ending is another way to have people going, hey, that was valuable.

And so Jake Paul, this guy who's way younger, way taller, better fit, was kind of in a no win situation.

If he knocked Mike out, he would have beaten up a much older man who was an icon.

And from what I'm seeing, many people, including me, felt that Jake could have knocked him out.

I think he kind of took his foot off the gas a little bit, which is always scary because again, it just takes one punch from Mike.

But I thought this was really classy.

In the last seconds of the last round, Jake put up his arms and kind of like a we're not worthy, we're not worthy kind of motion, and then put his.

His hands down, like, down by his.

His belly button, and bowed to Mike Tyson.

This is like, with 10 seconds left to go, it's just a kind of a nod of like, hey, you know what?

I'm in the ring with Mike Tyson.

Thank you for the honor of letting me look at you.

And for me, that was a classy move, and it gave again, people, something to talk about.

And again, what does that do?

It pulls on people's heartstrings.

We're like, hey, you know what?

Jake Paul could be a jerk.

He's the bad boy.

He's beaten up on this old man.

But at the last final second to kind of go, it was an honor to be in the ring with you.

And again, it's like, oh, he's not such a jerk.

Look at him.

He could have beaten the snot out of Mike and didn't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And some other things that we could kind of talk about here is I said, you want to make it easy for people to find your show, but the other thing is Netflix had some problems streaming it, causing the broadcast to buffer over and over, which I cannot tell you because I had that happen at my house.

And when the process of consuming your content is frustrating, there's a really good chance people aren't going to do it.

And so what I did, I'm like, in the second round, and I'd watch like a minute and a half, and then it would, like, go up 25%, 27%, 29%, 34%.

And it just kept going on.

And so I thought, huh, I'm watching on my big screen TV in the living room.

I've got cable.

I've got.

What do you call it, fiber.

So I definitely don't have slow Internet.

And I'm like, well, this is a Netflix problem.

So I picked up my phone and went to Netflix to watch it there.

And I was in the second round on my tv, waiting for it to finish buffering.

I pull up my phone, I'm in the last round.

I'm in the eighth round.

And I was like, wait, what?

And that's when I realized, wow, this is.

I don't realize how much.

I'm buffering here.

But it was horrible, and it really ruined the experience because you're like, oh, come on.

Come on.

Oh.

Oh, it's back.

Okay.

Hey.

Ooh, that could be.

Ooh.

Oh.

Oh.

And then it buffered.

Oh, it was so annoying.

And so we don't want the actual process of listening to your show to be something that annoys people.

I was driving back from Pot Indy, and I listened to a show that ironically talks about the importance of audio.

They talk about audio ads all the time.

They're an agency, and I'm here.

I'm like, if I'm lying, I'm dying.

They had, like, one guy was a very polite British guy, and he would talk like this, and in a very polite British kind of way, right?

And then he had somebody who was a female American, and she talked like this.

This what I learned.

And I'm riding the volume knob because I want to hear what these people say and realize there comes a time that when your audio is so annoying, people will not just grab the volume knob.

They will swipe left and say unfollow.

Because it's no fun.

There is a show I listen to about marketing, and I have contacted the host and said, dude, you got a buzz.

What's going on?

And I actually sent him a audio clip saying, you could just remove this if you used Hindenburg.

And what I mean by that is when he's not talking, you hear in the background.

So he's talking, and you can hear what he's understanding, but every time he stops.

And I was like, this is ridiculous.

And it's so easy to fix.

So you don't want the actual process of consuming your content to be annoying.

That is definitely a lesson we could learn from Netflix.

And the question will be, because think about it.

This is Netflix.

As far as I know, second or third time, I think they live streamed a Chris Rock performance.

I think they live streamed a Kevin Hart performance, and now they're doing live sports.

And if the next time they do something live, if it's buffering, there's going to be a lot of people going, yeah, that's.

Nope.

I don't believe you.

You asked me to trust you, and I paid my money, and you're giving me subpar reports.

So realize you have.

With podcasting, this is so huge.

You have trust and you have integrity.

And so when you say, I'm doing this and then you don't provide what you said you're going to do, your integrity comes up for inspection, shall we say and people may go, yeah, I don't think that guy's telling the truth.

I think she's kind of fibbing a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I often hear people say, well, Dave, when can I monetize?

When's the right time?

When's the right time to monetize my podcast?

You do not monetize a podcast.

You monetize an audience.

And Jake, working with Netflix, working with media, working with social media, knew they were going to have an audience.

And according to a press conference, Jake Paul said he made $40 million for whatever, two times eight.

That would be 16 minutes of work.

Not a bad day at the office.

It's been estimated that Tyson made 20 million, and neither of these numbers have been confirmed.

So that could be complete smoke thanks to the Internet.

But if you think about it, with months of promotion, an event that you couldn't get anyplace else that you know people are going to talk about, had an interesting story that pulled on your heartstrings, pulled on your nostalgia, and had you wondering what was going to happen.

If you can take some of those ingredients and put them into your episode.

Obviously, if you're doing a weekly show, you can't promote that for months and months and months.

But can you pull at people's heartstrings?

Can you tell a story with your show?

Can you maybe pull on some nostalgia?

If you've got enough, you know, years under your belt to do that?

These are all things we can do to make our content better.

And remember, it's the content.

It's not the media host, it's not the microphone, it's not the website.

It's the content that people are talking about that helps you grow your audience.

We're going to talk about Spotify's big announcement right after this.

All right.

Since we're talking about integrity, I am not a fan of Spotify for podcasters.

And the first thing is, well, number one, I don't think they really like podcasters because of the open availability of it.

If you kick me off of Spotify, I don't care.

I can go.

You can still listen to me on Overcast or Amazon Music or whatever.

And I look, I am a paying customer of Spotify for their music.

I think they do that just amazing, right?

I love the suggestions I get, but as a podcasting service, they kind of get on my nerves.

And I have noticed over the years that they like to make big announcements that either a aren't entirely accurate when it comes to the reality, and they often Quietly remove those features, or in some cases, never do them.

So let me give you an example of this.

So I'm saying right now, Spotify has come out and said, we're going to start paying creators.

Sounds great, right?

Everybody's like, where does the line form?

Wait, it's free media host.

And I get paid.

I'm coming there.

All right?

To which I go, easy, easy now.

And look, I used to say stuff like this before, and people go, oh, you say that because you work for Libsyn.

Why don't work for Libsyn anymore?

I got no dog in the media host hunt.

I'm just saying, not a great choice.

So here's the thing.

You can make money with Spotify for creators.

Yeah.

So they got the word podcast out of their name.

You know, to that I say exhibit A.

But anyway, eligibility for the Spotify partner program requires you to use Spotify for creators previously known as anchor to host your podcast, or if you're on megaphone in some cases, and you need at least 12 episodes.

So all those people that are like, check, test, test, check, test, and they quit after two episodes.

Nope.

And those people that don't make it past seven.

Nope.

And it says 2000 unique.

Now why is that important?

2000 unique Spotify users in the last month.

So unique means you can't have your cousin and your uncle and your brother and your mom.

Just keep going to Spotify because that's going to.

What did I say?

Uncle, cousin, sister, brother.

Right.

That's like four or five people.

You need 2,000 of those.

And if you're wondering, wait, 2,000amonth?

Yeah.

So if we.

It's time for fun with math.

That's always great.

It is 2000 divided by.

Let's go 30.

Just to keep the number nice and simple.

If you divide that by 30, you end up with 67 people a day that are.

That are different.

So two classrooms of people come through, listen to your stuff, and then the next day, another two classrooms of people.

Okay, got it.

All right, so that's that.

2,000 unique Spotify users in the last month and 10,000 streamed hours in the last month.

And you're like, huh?

Well, what's YouTube?

YouTube?

You need 1,000 all time, not monthly, all time subscribers and 4,000 streamed hours in the last year.

So what does that mean?

That means if you don't have a very large show, you're not making a dime.

So keep that in mind.

They also announced that it's now possible to upload video clips and video thumbnails for every episode.

So let's say I have Libsyn and I submit my show to Spotify and I go in and upload a video.

Spotify is no longer.

They are now the host.

You've basically cut Libsyn out of the hosting business for that episode.

So when all of a sudden your numbers in Libsyn, and this could be Buzz, Proud or captivate or whoever, those numbers aren't going to go up anymore because Spotify is now the host for that episode.

And so I say this because we don't know how much you're going to get paid now.

I highly doubt that they're going to be paying you.

Although it is going to be, you know, the big people, the super duper popular people.

Are they going to get the $20 per 1000 downloads I'm going to put my money on?

No, but I could be wrong.

But I'm just here to say we don't know when they say we're going to pay creators, they're not saying how much.

And if you want an idea of what musicians are making, if you listen to a song on Spotify, that musician is making somewhere between.003 all the way up to 0.005 cents per stream, which means you gotta have a ton.

So, yes, this could be a potential revenue stream.

But as always, I'm waiting to hear the details from Spotify because in the past, they said, hey, you can play music in your podcast.

And we're like, what?

I can play AC DC as my opening music.

And they went, well.

And again, this is where the asterisks come in.

Asterisks.

You can't listen on the Spotify website.

It has to be in the app.

And you're like, oh, okay, oh, wait, asterisks.

But only if you're a paying member of Spotify and you're listening in the app and you're like, oh, well, okay, all right, fine.

Oh, wait, hold on.

And we have to approve every episode.

And you're like, really?

Oh, well, okay.

And so I tried that.

And yeah.

And then I don't know.

I don't know how many months it was.

I don't know that it made it a year.

They went, yeah, that thing we're doing where you can play.

Yeah.

But it did get a bunch of people to sign up at Spotify, which makes our stock go up.

So I hope they prove me wrong.

And this is a great financial thing.

But also keep in mind that what they're doing is based on advertising.

And when you base your income on advertising advertisers love.

Now we're going to start into that whole brand safe stuff.

And to me, how do you spell boring?

Brand safe.

And that doesn't mean you have to be some sort of pirate radio.

That's, you know, crazy.

And Sam, I'm just saying that so far, the brand safety experiment has been horrible, of flagging things that aren't remotely close to being unsafe because they don't understand slang and they don't understand, I don't know, common sense.

So my thought on Spotify at this point, before you go leaving your media host to go get some big bucks over at Spotify, I'm like, let's give it a second and see what the asterisk is, are when they actually roll this out.

Hey, you are still here.

Which means you are a, an avid listener, and I appreciate that and I build this show for you.

And so one of the cool things that happened over at POD Page is we released a listener survey tool.

And what's phenomenal about this?

And it's so cool.

I've talked a lot about the book, you know, the Audience Is Listening by Tom Webster.

And we approached Tom and said, hey, you've got these really cool questions about making a survey in your book.

Can we use them?

And Tom said, yes.

And so how this works in POD Page is you basically go over, you say, I want to make a survey.

And there are, I believe, 19 questions.

Now, I don't know that I would use all 19, but you be you, but you choose the ones that you want and then what's.

You can name it whatever you want.

So I'm going to call mine survey 24, because it's 2024 and it's a survey.

And whatever your website is, if you're using POD Page, you can go to yourwebsite.com survey and it will direct to whatever survey you have.

So what happens if it's 2026 and you're doing another survey?

Well, you just go to your website, dot com 2026 and it will go to the latest survey that you have that is open to taking, you know, results and taking feedback.

And so in the end, and you'll hear me talk about this in the future, it all comes down to understanding your audience.

It really does.

Everything starts there.

Yes, you have to know why you're doing it and things like that.

But the one thing you have to really know, and I have things at the school of podcasting that kind of show you how you can get some insights but the easiest insight, the easiest way to get feedback and understand and quit guessing about what your audience thinks is to simply ask them.

Now, I realize that's kind of scary.

I mean, what if they say, david, that show's terrible, Bobby.

Right.

So that's no fun to hear.

But on the other hand, what is the purpose of putting out content if it's not resonating with people?

We're going to talk about this.

I was going to do the topic of working with a coach and receiving advice and how to use advice and how to ask for advice.

And then the Tyson thing came up and I was like, hey, let's talk about that now and we'll talk about advice maybe in the future.

But I wanted to let you know that I am welcoming all feedback, good and bad.

If you go to school of podcasting.com survey and I'm going to run this now, which is halfway through November 2024 through the end of December 2024, and someone will get a free year at the School of Podcasting.

How cool is that?

So if you want to help me make this show better, help me make this show more tailored to what you want and deliver more value, Simply go to schoolofpodcasting.com survey.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We will also be talking content bravery in the future because I, I've been looking at kind of a year end kind of thing, my completion rate in Apple podcast, and I have one episode that just tanked and I was like, hmm, maybe I should try that again with a different format.

And so sometimes you try something and it doesn't work.

And as much as we go, oh, that was dumb.

Was it?

It was brave.

You tried something.

Not every chapter has highlights in it.

And so we might talk about that in the future as well.

It's all about making great content, doing smart promotion to get the word out there, to get your show in front of people who don't listen to your show, that don't watch your show, but doggone it, they should.

And I would love to help you with that.

That's what I do.

I help podcasters, whether it's planning, launching, growing, monetizing.

It's all there.

School of Podcasting.com join use the coupon code listener to save on either a monthly or yearly subscription.

And until next week, take care.

God bless.

Class is dismissed.

But should.

Why did I say should there?

I don't know.

It's very weird.

My mouth is, I'm done.

Come on, I'm at the end.

Just hang with me.

Mouth.

We can do this.