Stop Chasing CPMs: How Community, Feedback, and Newsletters Future‑Proof Your Podcast

Dave Jackson00:00:00

Maybe the goal was to start a podcast and get some ads, and now you're hearing how CPMs are down and you kind of feel stuck. Well, this episode's gonna help you stop chasing ad dollars and start building something that can't be taken away from you. A loyal community.Hit it, ladies.

SOP Singers00:00:19

The school of podcasting with Dave Jackson.

Dave Jackson00:00:25

Podcasting since 2005, I am your award winning hall of Fame, PODC Dave Jackson. Thanking you so much for tuning in. Super glad that you're here. If you're new to the show, this is what we do.We help you plan, launch, and grow your podcast. My website is schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code listener when you sign up for either a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription.And it's also brought to you by PodPage. Your podcast needs a home, and PodPage makes it easy. I'll tell you more about that later.The first thing I want to talk about is back in January, in my newsletter, which you can find@podcastingobservations.com I put out an article that said, is it the end of ads for podcasting? And I brought up the fact that I compared it to digital ads back in the days of punching the monkey on a website.And I said, you could have a pretty decent ad, you know, some money for that because there weren't that many websites, and then there were, and consequently the price of online ads went down the toilet. And I said, you know, you used to be able to make decent money with programmatic ads because there weren't that many podcasters that could take them.And now there are, and I'm pretty sure the price of ads is going to go down the toilet.And on the Pod Biz show, they were interviewing Rebecca Dalby, who's the VP of demand at Triton Digital, which is one of the hugest, biggest, largest advertising people in the space. And this is what she said. But the CPMs are decreasing.

Rebecca Dalby00:02:10

They're.

Rebecca Dalby00:02:10

They're squeezing. Let's say they're looking for a better price.

Dave Jackson00:02:13

So again, the programmatic ads, these are the you can make money from day one kind of ads are going down. I know I have a show on Libsyn that gets maybe 100 downloads an episode. And the last time I checked, I was making a $1 cpm.And while we're talking pod biz, Norma Jean and John, congratulations on making it one year. I'll have links to all of this out in the show notes. Just go to schoolofpodcasting.com 1045.

SOP Singers00:02:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jackson00:02:46

And I'm not saying all ads are bad. Obviously there are partnerships. We've talked about that with people like Justin Moore and Ray Arnott from around the layout.Justin Moore, the author of the book Sponsor Magnet. So we're talking about those automatic ads and those are typically the ones that people are squeezing in, I don't know, somewhere between 2 and 300.No, I'm kidding. Ads. But one of the ways then that you can make money is ads. We just talked about that.But Adam Curry just said this on podcasting 2.0 and I tend to agree with this.

Adam Curry00:03:20

And there's something about this model that is really attractive and no one complains about it.What this comes down to for me with podcasting, for people who want to make a living in podcasting, the whole idea of grow your show, get more downloads. No, build a community. Build a community and you will be supported forever.

Dave Jones00:03:46

Yeah, I agree with that 100%.

Adam Curry00:03:48

Build a community. That is the trick. That is the absolute key to a successful podcast.No matter what you're doing, no matter what you want, build a community and you will have success in your venture. And you can pretty much determine that success for yourself.

Dave Jackson00:04:07

And then he made another really great point.

Adam Curry00:04:09

A robot with text to speech cannot build a community.

Dave Jackson00:04:13

And what he's saying there, he's not talking about places like Circle and Heartbeat is what I use. School, whatever you want to use to make your community.Sure, you can use technology to help organize the community, but it's the human to human connection. Stevie Ray Vaughan used to call it soul to soul.And this is where if we go back to stats, we kind of do need to always work on growing our audience because I've always said it's about 3% of your audience will take action. And Leo Laporte was on the New Media show with my buddy Rob Greenlee and they were talking about ads. They were talking especially the pricing of ads.And he has a community, he has a club that people can join. And so he's going to start off talking here about just what I was talking about. Banner ads on websites.

Leo Laporte00:05:06

Again, this came from Google's, you know, ad banners and the idea that, you know, in digital you can count it, you can't. It's just as bad as broadcast television. It's no better.And so I think people have this misapprehension that you can be much more precise in your advertising spend. People are learning that's not quite the case. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not an expert on this.Honestly, in a perfect world, I wouldn't have to sell advertising at all. We would have our audience subscribe to our shows, because then the people who get the benefit from the shows are paying from the shows.And I would far prefer that. But we set it up that people got used to the idea that it started in radio.It's free, and it's hard to get somebody to pay for something that's free or it's been free. So we have a club and we have 12,000 people who pay. But 12,000 people is less than 2, the total number of people who listen.

Dave Jackson00:05:56

And there's a weird little glitch there. And I would bet the farm that he was going to say 2%, but unfortunately the recording is a little weird there.

Leo Laporte00:06:06

If we could get that to 5%, which is kind of what the used to be anyway. But PBS said we have 5 or 6%, we would not have to have any advertising that would be sufficient to pay for it.If one person in 20 who listens to our shows subscribed, that would be sufficient to pay for it. And I would far prefer that.

Dave Jackson00:06:25

So if ads and CPMs are shaky, what should we be focusing on? Brian Barletta was on POD News Weekly Review and has a killer take on that ad sales.

Brian Barletta00:06:37

The biggest thing to focus on is that we lament the lack of attribution. We will lament not good enough analytics. We lament all of these different things.We have to ask ourselves at what point we are wasting time fighting for something that we're not going to necessarily get exactly how we want. And if how we push that towards, how do we fund more things, how do we creatively present things, how do we build and grow things?I mean, I would say growth, honestly, if we took all that time talking about measurement and attribution, everything, and put it towards how do we successfully grow podcasts with real technology and knowledge? I think we would not have to have that discussion because we would be able to show that we're getting a bigger audience very easily.

Dave Jackson00:07:16

Man. If you want to keep up with what's going on in podcasting, POD News Weekly Review and of course, just the POD News newsletter is great.Sam and James Kridlin do a great job over there.

SOP Singers00:07:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jackson00:07:29

So if community and trust are the future, how do we actually make a show worthy of that trust? And that's where feedback comes in.And I know I talk a lot about feedback and surveys, but here is Getty Lee from the band Rush, who has been in front of audiences for 50 years, and they still are looking for feedback.

Geddy Lee00:07:55

We kind of like the idea of, like, every four records or so doing a live album for two reasons. One, to update how we sounded live. Yeah. How we were playing. We felt that's important to make note, you know, because you're on stage, you're.You're involved in the notes, you're not listening. And so to do a record and then to listen back, it's really instructive.It's really educational to do a live album every so often so you can actually hear what people are hearing and you can see what you don't like about your playing or what you could improve about your playing. And with a band like us, it was never about being happy with a live album. It was purposeful.We needed to know where we're at and how we can move forward from there. So. So that was intentional.

Dave Jackson00:08:50

It was intentional. And they're always looking to make things better. And I was putting together the podcasting in six weeks.Course that is now done and wrapped up, and we got some great reviews on that.But one of the clips I pulled out for that was from Jack from the Darknet Diaries, and he was talking about when he launched, what he did before he launched talk about the questions that you sent them. I thought this was brilliant.

Jack Rhysider00:09:21

So if you send somebody, like a vague question, what do you think you're going to get? A vague answer. It's great, right? Every time. Every time. So I sent them. What I like is the net promoter score question, which is how likely.On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to tell someone else to listen to this podcast? If it's 9 or 10, that means it's very likely it's going to happen that will tell someone. If it's seven or eight, they're just being nice. They don't.They're not yes or no on that. They're just, oh, yeah, it's eight. Sure. Yeah, of course. But if it's six or below, they're not going to tell someone else.And this is a good rating of how good was the show for this person. Right. If they're. If they're going to rush out and show it to someone, then you've got something, right?You've got something that you know is going to spread and goes places and stuff like that. But if it's not hitting that 9 or 10 mark, you know, you still need to work on it.

Dave Jackson00:10:12

And I know you might be thinking, dave, didn't you just play that, like four episodes or so ago I did. I don't remember exactly what episode, but some things are worth repeating. We should say I love you more. We should say I forgive you more.And we should be getting more feedback from our audience. Dog on it in a second. We're going to talk about the podcaster attitude, and I'm going to reference this from Taylor Sheridan.And if you're not familiar with Taylor Sheridan, he's not a podcaster. He's a guy that's getting paid boatloads of money to write TV shows.And when I heard his attitude, I was like, oh, every podcaster should be thinking this way.

SOP Singers00:12:17

The school of podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Jackson00:12:22

If you've never heard of Taylor Sheridan, the first thing I think I was familiar with is he was in a TV show as an actor called Sons of Anarchy, which was a really great show. But fast forward. He's now the creator and primary creative force behind the TV shows Yellowstone, including the prequels and stuff.1883, 1923, Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa, King with Sylvester Stallone. We'll talk about him in a second. Lioness and Landman, which is a phenomenal show. Now, these are not safe for work in most cases.And if you think about it, all of this only works if you're willing to create for your people. Not for the critics, not for the algorithm. In fact, on the Howard Stern show, Howard couldn't believe that he has not won an Oscar.

Howard Stern00:13:12

This is insane to me.

Howard Stern00:13:14

And you say it doesn't hurt your feelings.

Taylor Sheridan00:13:17

The only way it can hurt your feelings is if that's who you want to impress. Right? If your goal is to impress the people who make a living writing about you and what you do, then do that. It's easy to do.There's easy boxes to check. Pick the issue that they all support and push it, write about it. Right? I don't do that. I'm going to hold a mirror up to the world.I'm going to explore what's interesting to me and in a lot of ways, and this is going to sound selfish, and maybe it is infuriating them to a certain degree, garners a tremendous amount of attention.And most of America despises the people whose job it is to tell them what's good to watch and bad to watch, which is why our rotten tomatoes exist in the first place.

Dave Jackson00:14:01

So I love that he's not interested in impressing those kind of people. And he brings up a great point here, that we don't really trust mainstream media that much.And otherwise, why would there Be a Rotten Tomatoes, right?

Taylor Sheridan00:14:18

There's nobody that you can trust. So you come up with an algorithm that tries to compile a whole bunch of critics together.And then when no one buys that, when enough of those things are getting at 28%, but everyone loves them, then they start to do an audience review. Because whoever owns Rotten Tomatoes is like, well, no one. No one even buys. We add them all together, and they still don't buy it.So let's just start compiling the audience. And that has more weight now with people who are trying to decide what to watch than what the critics said.

Dave Jackson00:14:47

And so I love the fact that he's not writing things for the critics. He's writing things for people that like his stuff. And as you've heard, everything he's writing, his audience goes from one show to the next show.They come for the content, they stay for the host. In this case, they come for the content, and they stay for the writer.

Taylor Sheridan00:15:09

I'm working in a business right now that really doesn't have the same goals that I have as a storyteller, Right.So it allows me to seem more unique in the fact that I'm trying to tell stories in one way, and my business is trying to tell them in an entirely different way. It doesn't mean that some of those ways don't work extremely well. It just means we have completely separate goals.

Dave Jackson00:15:34

And so here's a guy doing his stories the way he wants to do them. And, yeah, it's going to seem way different. It's going to seem way kind of weird.But once your audience finds you and they're like, oh, this is what I've been looking for, it will catch on, and it will start to grow.

SOP Singers00:17:16

The school of podcasting.

Dave Jackson00:17:19

All right, I want to share some of the insights from the podcast Atlas, a map of the creator ecosystem. This is from the lovely people over at Sounds Profitable, and it was a great report.In a nutshell, audio podcasting beats everything everywhere, in whatever thing. I mean, there are a couple places, like, here's a novel idea. When you watch a video, you get more of someone's attention.Duh, I can't drive and watch your video. But they said when they were talking about audio.Audio podcasting builds the deepest trust, the most credible ad environment, and the lowest rates of skepticism and disappointment. I thought that was huge. So here again, people are looking at us, and they trust us. They're not as skeptical.Video podcasting, it takes that trust built by the creator relationship, and it intensifies it through visual attention and it says converting consideration into behavior more efficiently than audio alone. And so it's an activation layer. When they talked about clips, they said clips are the top of the funnel.And this seems to be the way that people are kind of getting discovered. They live inside the social platforms where Reach lives.They capture attention in scroll context and they convert passive awareness into active listening. And so I was kind of like, wait a minute. Huh? Like how many people are actually coming in from clips? Because I watch lots of clips.I rarely then go find the long form video for this. And so on slide 23 they asked that question, when do clips lead someone to watch a specific episode? And they interviewed over 5,000 people.And 5% was always. So that's my, my sliver. I always say there's a trickle of people that will follow you from a clip. But they said there are 25% that said often.So we're looking at 30% that's positive. And they said 51% sometimes and only 3% never. So I might be that 3% guy or rarely 16%. So here again, video is another stage. It's another platform.Some people like to read, some people like to listen, some people like to watch. But it was a very interesting report and Tom Webster did a webinar for it. It's on YouTube. I'll put a link to that in the show notes.But I found it highly. Well, it made me think is what it made me what it did because it said stuff like 73% of people will follow the host from audio to video.Which again goes to. They come for the content, they stay for the host.So I found that to be interesting and being the fact that PodPage just rolled out a feature where there are kind of three different types of people when it comes to newsletters. The first person is I don't want a newsletter, don't want to deal with it, don't have the time for it. Then let's go way far.The other side is the person that's using something like Kit Mailerlite Beehive. There are a ton, and I mean a ton of email lists and they do things like welcome sequences and ab split testing and all sorts of fun stuff.That's a tool because getting your mail delivered is a full time job and what PodPages created is a in between.This is the person that does want to start collecting email addresses, but maybe doesn't have the budget to put out the 30 bucks for a kit account or whatever it is. It's somewhere around that realize kitmail or Lite both have a free version that you can start with.And if you're like, well, why would I want one of those? What's so big about this pod page thing?Well, people sign up and when a new episode comes out, we automatically email them that there's a new episode. That's all we do. What if I want to email them, you know, later about an event? I'm going, nope, all we do, it's that in between thing, right?You're not the person that doesn't want email. You want to have email and, and you'd like to send a nudge to them when a new episode comes out.You're not trying to do ab split testing, you're not doing welcome sequences, you're not doing lead magnets. It's, that's what we do.Because really we're a website tool, but we know that people said we would love if we could send a note to people that want to hear it that our episodes are out.And so I loved in the report from Sounds profitable about newsletters because I've said for years, look, nothing against social media, but if you really want people to go to your episodes, a newsletter works much better. And on slide number whatever slide we're on slide 36, the kind of quote here.Newsletters lead me to listen to an episode 10% always, 1 to 10% bump in your downloads. Start a newsletter 32% often, that's positive. Another 45% sometimes, rarely is 10%, never is 3%. That means it's 87%.If we include sometimes offend and always. Those are all somewhat positive. It's an easy way to nudge your audience.Now, there are send limits currently as I record this, if you're on the Pro plan, it's 500amonth because again, we're not trying to be ConvertKit. If you're on the Elite plan, it's 5,000amonth. And if you need more than 5,000, it's time for you.You've outgrown our little newsletter nudging service and realize that if you're like, I'm not using PodPage, you could set this up with ConvertKit. I believe on their free plan you can do they call it RSS to email. I know Mailerlite has this as well.And you can set it up so that whatever you type into your media host which goes into your feed.Again, this is the power of rss that rss, whatever's in it goes into your email program if they have this tool and it will turn it into an email list. So it's a great feature. It's something that's been asked for a lot at PodPage. Can you please just let people know when a new episode comes out?And so that's what we did.We're not, again, we're not trying to be ConvertKit or Mailerlite or Beehive or any of the other tools out there, but if you're in between that, you're not the person that's like, I don't want to deal with email. And you're not the person looking for split testing lead magnet, you know, welcome sequences. That's not what we do.We nudge your people that have asked for it that there is an episode out. I love that Taylor basically has the attitude of, this is what I want to talk about, this is how I want to talk about it.And I don't care if anybody else likes it. This is what I want to do. I'm a storyteller and this is how I tell my story. And we talked about that with dealing with trolls and things like that.Trolls are not your target audience, and I just thought that was a great attitude. And it just so happened that a lot of people like the way he tells his story.So when it starts off and you hear everybody giving you advice and you know what you want to do, there are many people in entertainment that did not follow the advice of their coaches and their mentors. And in the end, their act, their whatever it was caught on. So keep that in mind. They're definitely best practices that I recommend.But there are times when you're like, nope, this is how I want to do it and this is what I'm going to talk about. Then you do a little practice to keep Getty happy. You get some feedback, you tweak it to make sure that it resonates with your audience.Then you start your newsletter. Then you build your website. Then you just start basically telling everyone you know about your show. But let's start off with one thing.Pick one thing to get closer to your audience. Whether that's asking for specific feedback or starting a tiny newsletter, or just send one honest email to your list. But pick one thing and do it.

Doug Pinnick00:26:47

Hey, this is Doug from King's X. And if you like what you hear, go tell someone. And may the groove be with you.

Dave Jackson00:26:53

May the groove be with you, Mr. Pinnock. Doug Pinnock, by the way. Somewhere around 75 years old. Ty Tabor on guitar. Somewhere around 64, 65. And Jerry Gaskill on drums. Somewhere around 68.They make up the band King's X. I saw them last weekend and those guys absolutely still rock. So if you're thinking I'm too old to start a podcast, as my grandma used to say, poppycock. If you need help with that, you know where to find me.SchoolOfPodcasting.com use the coupon code LISTENER L I S T E N E R When you sign up for either a monthly, quarterly or yearly subscription. And that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee and five hours a month.Me and you sitting down talking about what you need to do to make your podcast better. We got a community of people that are absolutely amazing. We've got listener parties when you're ready for some feedback.We've got step by step courses. It's all there. Schoolofpodcasting.com I'm Dave Jackson. I help podcasters. It's what I do.Been doing it for over 21 years and I can't wait to see what we're gonna do together. Until next week. Take care. God bless. Class is dismissed. If you like the show, please share it with a friend.If you like the show, pretty, pretty please share it with a friend right now. Ah, no bloopers this week. I'm feeling, I guess, melancholy.A friend of mine lost her sister and I'm just here to tell you, you never know when Father Time will call your number. So be kind, be loving, compassionate, maybe patient.And maybe the next time you see two people start to get in a fight, maybe go help them de escalate it instead of pulling out your phone because the number of clicks, the number of views will never fill up your heart like true love and compassion will. There's a great song called Follow youw Soul by a guy named Albert Cummings. And the chorus is live today like it's your last one.Live tomorrow like it's your first. And don't ever let your problems bring out your worst. Don't ever take your mind off whatever is your goal. Be true to yourself and follow your soul.Soul to soul, baby,.

SOP Singers00:29:21

Yeah.