Graham Brown: Welcome to the age of audio of my name is Graham Brown from the award-winning podcast agency Pikkal & Co.The Age Of Audio a series of conversations with thought leaders and change makers in the world of audio that's podcasts, radio, and social audio converging with big data to create engaging and authentic content for a new generation of listeners.
You go back a hundred years. They said, in the twenties, 1920s, they had the backdrop of pandemic and automation like the Henry Ford model in the 1920s at this surgeon radio it was like audio one, happened to the 1920s because it created this format to connect people and here we are hundred years on almost living out the same timeline, strangely enough, but different people, different technology, so that's the backdrop of it and trying to make sense of it. And so when I had the opportunity to speak to you, I was really excited because when I started podcasting, when I dipped into it, 13, 14 years ago, I was a WordPress user. So, my fuss starting point is right. This is pretty cool Blubrry plugin. And that's how it all started for me is wow, somebody put in the effort to make this thing, right?
Todd Cochrane: Yeah.
Graham Brown: Must've been tell it, I'm really fascinated about your journey. Like you've been in this for the longest time and with all due respect, you were there before anybody was thinking about podcasting, right? So how did that start?
Todd Cochrane: I wasn't at before podcasting, but I had an online presence before podcasting as a blogger, a very poor one. I'd run a bulletin board for years when it was on dial-up and that kind of stuff. But the short answer is I was in Texas in a hotel room,Well doing some stuff with the Navy and heard about podcasting. I heard about Adam Curry and John C. Adam Curry who was [inaudible]while you're doing the daily source code and heard about this thing called podcasting, as an movable type at the time from a CMS. So, the podcast integration was very difficult for WordPress in the early days. And then I just started to show as much better podcasts or than I was a blogger, the show grew and I got a book deal and November of 2004 the book came out in May of five. But in the meantime, a whole bunch of things happened, started building your network June of five, got a sponsor from that came the idea for the business. So, really it was pretty much an eat club at the very early start because it was so difficult to do podcasting from a technical standpoint, but now my God it's completely changed.
Graham Brown: Well yeah, it's so easy now, maybe back then, like even to put together like a hosting platform and our assist fee, these were like technical challenges, not even talking about like editors, right? But even that side, I mean, now it's so easy.
Todd Cochrane: Yeah. And it was the point where in those early days there were no hosting providers. So I had at one time, I think 12 or 13 shared hosting accounts across maybe two or three DreamHost accounts may have a couple of blue hosts, a couple of GoDddy. I had stuff all over the place because I would burn through all my bandwidth on a specific host in three days. So I'd use 500 gigs of traffic and then, what I was doing was uploading the show to the 12 different locations, every episode, so that all I had to do was change the URL, and be able to keep the show online. So it was really difficult in those early days and expensive.
Graham Brown: Right? Yeah. I imagine, because we didn't have AWS then.
Todd Cochrane: No none of that.
Graham Brown: Time-wise as well. What made you sound like this was the right thing to do because back then the resistance, the friction was huge, right? Like a lot of people, even people today think, oh, I'm not sure about podcasts, but could you imagine doing with that kind of mindset 15 years ago?
Todd Cochrane: Yeah. Well, and there's actually 16, so true. So, when I started the show, I was just doing it for fun and I came home back to Hawaii from that trip to Texas. And, Nia told (my wife) [inaudible] some podcasts now, what, and she just kind of looked at me sideways and she pointed her finger at me. She says, you got two years to figure out how to make money on this thing, because you've done other crazy things that just spent a money pit and it was like buying a boat, throw another thousand dollars at it. So, for me from the very beginning I really had to focus on how to make it work, how to commercialize it and at that time, no one else really was thinking that it was for the art and for the, get your word out and being pure and matter of fact, when I announced my book deal, it was on episode 69 of my show. I lost half my audience when I announced that because they saw, it said I sold out, well, I took money. I literally, so it was a whole different mindset. So I figured well the audience has gone, that they were mad at me for making money. So now when I announce the book to the sponsorship in June, then it won't be such a big deal. This thought it's just left is the ones that understand that goal. And when I got the sponsorship, which was one of the very, I don't think it was a first, but it was one of the very, very early. Well I really had no idea what we were doing. I had no idea how much to charge and the number I gave was woefully inadequate. But when we came back to do a renewal, that's part of the story is that they told me how many conversions we'd had for the month. I said, I need to go back and do the math and I went and didn't back, did the math and came to them with a new number. And they agreed immediately and I knew that I had underbid myself already because we had no guidelines. And I threw in a performance component and that really kind is what saved me. And then the crux of the question was asked from that media buyer. She said, Todd, do you know anyone else that wants to do advertising and podcasting? That led to Rob boys, which everybody knows of this blubrry podcasting.
Graham Brown: So when did you realize that there was a proper industry and advertising for podcasting?
Todd Cochrane: It really, we weren't thinking about it until really, about July of 2005 is when I figured out there was a potential business model there. So, I had reached out on my show, which ironically my founders of my company came from my podcast. I said, I need a lawyer, I need a Biz Dev, I need a programmer and I need a graphics guy. Well, from my show, everyone was there except for the programmer, but the graphics guy knew a programmer and that's how we really got going. We had a meeting from a call-out on my shelf, formed a company and jumped in with both feet. So really it's truly the company has an absolute bounding and podcasting because everyone was either listening or doing podcasts that become our founders.
Graham Brown: And here we are. Looking at where we are now, Todd. So much has changed. I think probably one of the biggest parts apart from the size of it is that the people who are now part of this industry, Rarely, you know, obviously Spotify are definitely a major factor now in this industry and now we have people at Facebook who are at the periphery ready to make their play obviously, they've done the boombox deal with Spotify. Google really haven't made, played their hand have they've seen.
Todd Cochrane: Well, I disagree. I think Google, as far as our numbers scale, are doing much better.
Graham Brown: Okay.
Todd Cochrane: Yeah. And I think a lot of its hosts depend upon how well Spotify has done. You know, we're about 8% of the a hundred plus thousand shows we measure 8% are turning to Spotify, but also our focus because we have had the plugin and we have push subscribe on Android for so many years before Google coming in on the seed our pod-casters that use our product and service that kind of been trained to know that they have to promote their shows off so on Android devices, so when Google jumped in, they really gave us a head start. So for us, Google is higher than Google podcasts that's higher than Spotify and blubrry. Yeah.
Graham Brown: It's interesting. Consider you see, like Google's podcast offer on the web, the interface is they haven't really, I mean, but you know, that's Google UI, isn't it? But it's just another thing, isn't it? You can imagine all that data they could potentially gather.
Todd Cochrane: Well, if you look at Google's reach and end devices in the United States is about 50, 50 and [inaudible] iOS, but you get outside in the United States, and it goes to more like 75, 25, 75 % Google, 25% IOS globally. And, you just have that much more reach and Google podcasts, which the app is not necessarily the most important thing in this play is a big part of it can be played on any Android device globally. That's why we're seeing such great growth in Android globally. But if you look at the true value like Google's bringing to the market is Google's now the number one discovery vehicle podcasts and when people discover Podcasts are done from Google, they may end up listening on iOS, but the first exposure may be in the browser.
Graham Brown: That's an underwriter as well. I feel that it is made in terms of the SEO potential. We don't want to let it out, but that's stuff that I've been experimenting with.
Todd Cochrane: Now, what it really boils down to is those that don't understand it.
Graham Brown: Yeah.
Todd Cochrane: You do, because you've been using WordPress for many years, but those that understand it. If you think about finding a podcast title by search? It's no big deal. That's easy, but finding an episode is now where you win the game. So, I always tell people you don't record for, you record for your audience, you write for Google. And when people finally understand that and their individual episodes start ranking 1, 2, 3, that's where they really get a huge discovery and it's a long play. But people that don't have their own websites are hosted on some third party.com. If you know, if you're, if you're hosted on a hosting provider's website and you have all your posts over there, we'll, you're intermixed with everyone else on that site. So guess what? You're now doing? Your, your fight, your have a hard enough time getting page rank by yourself. Let alone having to deal with people that are not understanding this value. So this is why in blubrry we say when you own .com on your own IP this is a big part of this and, and our customers are winning and they are the longest live shows of any podcast hosting customer out there because their shows have grown.
Graham Brown: Is a big part of that because they own their own websites or are there on demand?
Todd Cochrane: Yeah.
Graham Brown: Discovery a major problem right now isn't it?
Todd Cochrane: No, It's not for those that are using WordPress.
Graham Brown: There you go. I ended that conversation.
Todd Cochrane: Well, you know, it is a problem, but the majority of podcasters that our brand news space right now let's speak, Frank. A lot of them are going over and using free options. Free is fantastic but you, when you are in a pool of 1.1million dead shows around maybe a couple of hundred, 300,000 active shows, how do you rank with that stack, but that dead content, but when you're on your own.com, you are in charge of your destiny. So, I got scoped for years, people would blast on me for talking about having your showing, you're on.com having [inaudible].
Graham Brown: While laughing long now.
Todd Cochrane: Oh happened for years.
Graham Brown: It's like finally, yes. Come around. Well, let's think about that, so I'll confess I graduated with an AI degree in 1995, because I thought I was the bees knees like AI. This is the future, but in 1995. So I have learnt if you're going to be ahead of the market, just to make sure you can stay solvent long enough and telling everybody, cause that's the challenge right now, I'm ahead of everybody. So, I have been doing a lot of work looking at data and you know, like how, for example, the algorithms are working, Spotify is evolving, apple's search algorithm, I've been doing a lot of experiments looking at on store SEO, looking at what's working and trying to understand what Spotify's game is as well with search. And, we know up until this point that on store discovery's been lousy for all the apps, right? I mean, it's just terrible, really, at the end of the day, as an app, as a discovery experience, that really hasn't been conducive to finding what you want, even you can't go onto the store and just search for podcasts in the way that you could like on Google. So I've been looking at that and trying to understand what's going on, and it'd be great to get your ideas on this. And I've noticed a few things and we'd like to hear your thoughts on these. One thing I'm really noticed generally with people, podcasting is, hosts have relied on for the longest time sharing so Todd comes on my show and he shares it with his network and then all Todd's fans come and listen to the episodes, but they don't give a crap about John's episode. Like they weren't listening to him. So that sort of sharing model is becoming less effective and what's becoming more effective is, or firstly, like good content, obviously. But what's happening on store. So people are discovering, for example, if I'm tight typing in, like garden furniture podcasts, and mine comes up, number one, I know that guy is interested in garden furniture it's going to stick around. So I'm noticing with the audience curve that the organic audience growth approach seems to be almost like going back to the old days of the web becoming increasingly more important. I don't know what you're seeing from your numbers, whether that sort of corroborates your experience.
Todd Cochrane: Well, nothing's going to be. First of all, number one, we know that we've already talked about it. Number one discovery vehicle of podcasts right now is Google. Number two is still word of mouth. If i say, tell somebody and list, and I talk about four or five shows all the time, the people that's number two. And if you look at you know, if you want to dig down a little deeper in the weeds and how you discover shows, I think that my endorsement of another show, not an interview, my endorsement it's a podcast or endorsing another show carries a lot of weight for my audience as well. So, if you're part of a network and doing cross endorsement of other shows on the network, there's nothing more valuable than that, that's probably number three. And then obviously what's left then how are people looking for content? And I contend they're not looking in the app. I just don't think they are. They've been trying to solve this. People keep saying there's discovery issues and the app said really, when was the last time you searched for show our search for content in the app of your choice. I don't remember ever doing it. Right.
And again, if I'm looking for a topic sometimes I'm not necessarily looking for a topic for a podcast, but I may discover a podcast again, going back to Google. So I'm listening to, and again, I'm not, I don't use Spotify at all personally I don't. That's it's certain age group I think that likes to use that app and I've got co-workers and team members that do, and then they love it. I think it really boils down to the individuals and really, not necessarily how tech savvy they are, but what their goal is. And if you're trying to listen to a specific genre of content, maybe you'll be trying to become a business, better business leader or a marketer, of course, you're going to search out for or five, ten marketing shows and that's where maybe you'll go to the app and find a specific line of content, but you really have no idea if those shows are any good until you listen. So, I think oftentimes too, is you've gotta be able to keep listeners once they find you've gotta be able to get them engaged and I don't think that always happens in shows.
Graham Brown: Yeah, there's a lot to learn from radio in terms of engagement isn't that? The radio seemed to have learnt that over a hundred years, how to speak to people, how to involve people. I know we're not doing phone ins these days and mail bags. But those elements should work like talking to the audience and involving them. We don't really do a lot of that. Do we? In podcasts, it seems to be, this is what I want to talk about.
Todd Cochrane: Yeah. And I think too, the apps, Spotify is, and other apps goals is to keep you in the app. Just like Amazon they want you on their website, shopping for stuff, when you're on YouTube, they want you to keep an eye on YouTube, listening to content. Spotify wants you to keep listening to music or podcasts. They want that time on app or as an individual customer to go up because number one, if they make more money against it, they can raise more money, if they have to raise more money by saying they've got more Listener time listening, all these things and also people then get maybe sick and tired of us in the ads, so they pay for premium. So it's in the app's benefits to become better presenters of content they think we may be interested in. For me it hasn't worked because I don't use their app, but potentially someone that's using the Spotify app are discovering, Spotify would be the one to answer that question.
Graham Brown: Absolutely. Where do we go from here top in sense of what you've seen from beginning to the end, I'll say the end. So there's the first chapter, second chapter. What's the next part of where you think we're going with podcasting next?
Todd Cochrane: Well, where we have to go as growth, we have to grow shows, we have to grow audiences, we have to monetize those 97% of shows that are not monetized. So how do you do that? Well, either grow big audiences or you have niche content, or you get money for maybe dinner money, depending on how big your show is. So I think what we have to do, and you know, a big focus of ours is really, what can we do to help podcasters grow their shows. Now there's an agenda there. If they're growing a show and you are becoming more successful, that's what they do. They continue to pay for their hosting though. They continue to stay subscribers of the service. So for us, I think we're really focused internally on helping independent podcasters grow their shows at the same time, there's going to be potentially more consolidation, which can be more acquisitions. A lot of companies are trying to position themselves to be acquired in and and it's really building up bottom lines for us. We're self-funded, we don't owe anybody any money, we're a profitable company. So I think that until someone comes to us with a big enough cheque with enough zeros and the right attitudes, I think we're going to continue to be focused on helping content creators, but I think in the end, the space really has to start paying attention to these partners to grow their show.
Graham Brown: Absolutely. So somebody put me on to a podcast that I had to check out that had the highest patron subscriptions there's was a podcast called Dungeons and daddies, which was a podcast won by five, I think may lights, Dungeons and dragons players and the funny light, there was four guys and one woman doing that and these guys do 170,000 a month in patron donations, 12,000 subscribers. What was really interesting is that community, they just really involved the community in everything that they did with their life elements and they really grew from all of that from literally 20 listeners in the beginning to where they are now. And then I saw I was sort of doing the research for this and I was saying, that's really interesting, like this whole sort of tabletop gaming moving into podcasting. Because it was like tabletop gaming has really boomed in the last 18 months because of the pandemic. Right, And then it's a certain age group as well. And then I was looking around and I saw Jeff Goldblum has inked a deal with. I don't know the production company, but they're doing at Dungeons and Dragons podcast where he's going to be a character and these are live acts. It's all edited down.
Todd Cochrane: Right. Right.
Graham Brown: And then I thought, well, isn't that interesting. Now you've got this situation where, let's tell you to take all sorts of role-playing podcasts. There's loads of them. And they're all very amateur and they're there the 97% you talk about they're just doing it for the love of it and if they get a hundred listeners, 200 listens, it's fantastic. And yet now you've got these big entities coming in with money, and then you're getting Jeff Goldblum, actors, Hollywood actors into this space. And then to my question to you is then doesn't that make audience growth even harder because you know, how do you grow a podcast when you don't have Jeff Goldblum?
Todd Cochrane: All ships rise together. It's more exposure than more mainstream folks are doing podcasting. They're not, not going to own all the audience in, in the example I like to give is I'll take us back to the beginning. In 2005, there were 13 shows and we formed a tech network that still exists, Tech podcasts.com and what we agreed to do was we knew we were doing family safe content, we all had, we all liked each other. We like each other's content. We all did. Some of us did something similar, some of us did something well different, but we basically cross promoted each other to the point where our audiences really merged and there was just this tight cohesiveness and we had some people were listening two or three shows and network, some are listening to four, some people left my show to go to their show, but some people left their show to come to mine. You know, it was a good mix and we grew the show and we all rose together and grew that to about 11 million downloads a month now in today's math, because we really had rudimentary measurement skills, then they were probably more like 5 million. But I think podcasters have to learn to use every trick in the book to be able to go along with this tide that is happening of growth and you just can't podcast, you just can't record a show and be done. That's not sufficient today to build a show. And I think I've got 13 or 15 things that I typically try to train over, a period of time to podcasters and what they have to do.
Graham Brown: I'm not going to do all 13 or 15. Just give us a handful of them because I think people don't realize they have to do something after that. They think they've done the work with production, right?
Todd Cochrane: Let's say they've hit episode 50 and depending on where they are in the country, they might be able to call their local television station and say, Hey, I just set up so 50, would you like to feature me? And if you have four or five stations in a community, call them all if one bites, which happened to me when I was in Hawaii. One bit, they come out, spend time at the house, they did three hours worth of videotaping for a two minute segment. And that was a little boost going out and doing interviews at conventions and meeting people got me on the BBC call list. So, now I get called at two o'clock in the morning and they still call me for BBC Asia. You want to talk, can you talk about this topic for three minutes? You know, shake the cobwebs out of my head and say, yes, I can talk about it and Google the topic, even if I don't know anything about it's that kind of stuff and putting yourself out there to get exposure and building authority. So again, these big names when Larry King I think, he's passed away when, when he was promoting and if he hasn't I apologize, but when he was doing podcasts as part of his television, he was talking about it every episode. And what did that do? Like it raised awareness of podcasting, and we have a whole world of people that have not experienced podcasting yet. So, I think there's huge growth. There's three point some million podcasts in the podcast directory, but only about 400 or 500,000 of those are active. So the ability to compete is really low, it's really easy to succeed if you put your mind to it.
Graham Brown: If you hustle.
Todd Cochrane: Oh, you got to hustle. I call it grind.
Graham Brown: Yeah. It's a good name for a podcast itself. You know, it's like writing a book as well. Isn't it? It's one of those things where it's such a, there's so much energy that goes into the content creation that you can easily be seduced into thinking you've done your work once it's published,
Todd Cochrane: But if a podcast can turn into a book, that's another thing too. This thing we're doing here, this could end up in a book that is the process on which you know, what do you do to write a book, right? Not line what's your ideal outline? The book is raw because you wrote the outline, you know what you're going to talk about? It's easy right? But what you do is the outline, this is the outline. So it is, but again, it's what you have in some shows. Let's also recognize that 50% of shows don't care. They're just hanging out, having a beer with a buddy or having a glass of wine with their girlfriend.
Graham Brown: And that's cool. Yeah.
Todd Cochrane: Yeah. That's cool. There's no rules.
Graham Brown: I love it. I think it's really exciting and I think it's been great to see this surge in the last couple of years, because it's been indication in many ways. I wasn't there in 2000, 2005, six on the commercial side, hustling it like you. You know, it was just the consumer. So, if it didn't work out, it didn't work out. But for you, you kind of like, you bet yourself on it as well. So I think it must've been for you. It must be great now seeing, I know the US has pretty much already hit that curve some years ago, but seeing other markets now, people are talking about it. It must be good for you to see that.
Todd Cochrane: You know, I think what we've seen is podcasting grow very steady with some inflection points. Obviously, the introduction of podcasts into apple, into iTunes in 2005. The introduction of the iPhone, the introduction of the podcast app on the iPhone, Spotify, and not, I mean, serial and all these things to help boost the podcast space. Now the pandemic it's going to play an interesting role because, and it could ultimately be negative in the short term, it has been fantastic. Cause you know, we haven't slept since March of last year. It's been great. We've been busy because everyone's doing two, three shows, but everyone has all this time on their hands because they've been locked down right. They've been in their house, can't go anywhere, got to have something creative to do, let's do a couple more podcasts. Well soon, with the vaccines going around soon, gymnastics is going to be open ball games, softball, afterschool programs, life is going to be back on and you're going to be spending time in your car again. So we'll that extra time we had those two, three hours of extra time we had every day now be gone because of life and will people abandoned podcasts, they started during the pandemic because they had extra time. Time will tell them, maybe they won't post as frequently. So this will be the challenge when life, as we know, it starts to get back to normal.
Graham Brown: Yeah. I think the genie's out the bottle, so we're not going back.
Todd Cochrane: Well, we're not going back, but I'm just wondering if the space is going to slow down.
Graham Brown: It was that, you know, I'm not sure on the consumer side, but certainly on the business side, if you look at podcasting as a business communications tool that, that is only going forward. And I think that's possibly one of the most underestimated aspects. Cause it's, If you're talking about a hundred billion dollars spent on communications a year, press releases effectively and everything that calms people do, reports, white papers, breakfast analysts lunches, all that kind of stuff, which is shifting very slowly into podcasting. And that's going to be very interesting because, everybody talks about podcasting as an advertising play, which is fine because that really is essential for consumers. But there's this other area as well, which we have already fully realized the potential of, but that's going to be interesting as well and maybe, the pandemic just expedites everything.
Todd Cochrane: Definitely seen a huge increase of companies wanting to do private internal communications. Now some people have VPNs and everything and they already have a platform. But what they're finding is they want, you know, once they leave the office or walk away from their desk, it gets more difficult to consume content that companies put out. So private podcasting has become a bigger thing since the pandemic, because they want a secure way of communicating with their team members. Everything from financial reports to CPL messages, to HR training, all that stuff can be done. You remember podcasting as the video component as well, most people forget that. And so we're seeing a lot of companies that are doing audio and video podcasts privately and making those available either through Oahu or a standard username login.
Graham Brown: Yeah, this is really interesting. It's the less sexy stuff, but the money isn't.
Todd Cochrane: Its back to the nerdy stuff.
Graham Brown: Yeah, it is. It's the fireside, it's the water cooler, you know, that the amount of money companies waste on these sort of offsites and training days. This is a better way of doing things. Hey Todd, it's been a real pleasure speaking to you. I've really enjoyed this chat and it's great to see a legend in the industry.
Todd Cochrane: I appreciate that.
Graham Brown: Well, I imagine there was a time when it wasn't so big when you know, like your wife has beaten you for what the hell are you doing with this podcasting thing, Todd, so, right. Don't worry. It's going to come around. You know, you can enjoy it. You make your hay, as they say,
Todd Cochrane: Well, you know, it's fun as the venture continues and we're always trying to work hard, but thanks for having me on definitely appreciate the time.
Graham Brown: You've been listening to the age of audio with me Graham Brown from the award-winning podcast agency Pikkal & Co. To get access to all the audio conversations and book content for The Age of Audio, go to www.theageofaudio.com. One more time. The age of audio.com .