I recently was very concerned when I saw a video from a company call Glycast.com It stated, ““It’s a new approach to podcast advertising. This is how it works. You give us your podcast feed, and we give you a new one to distribute to your audience. ””
I could tell by the video that the person was more of a podcast listener and not an actual podcaster. I didn't think he was out to hurt podcasters. But I could see where there was a chance for people to get their RSS feed hijacked with now way to get it back if Glycast went out of business. This video explains it all.
So my first reaction was to tell everyone the house was on fire, and to be careful. My second reaction was to contact the company and get their side of the story. I was BLOWN AWAY when I got this response.
My name is José Pablo Fernández, I live in London, I started coding when I was 7 years old, I also started my first business around that time. I worked for Google some years ago. For the past 4 years I been running a startup I co-founded, first as CTO and then as CEO: Carousel Apps. This company is launching Glycast. I co-founded Hear a Blog, a podcasting-related product, some years ago, and we got selected and Seedcamp Paris finalists. In my video for investors I talk more about my background: https://carouselapps.wistia.com/medias/pv06qw6ap5
We have the core tech for Glycast but not everything, so, we'll build whatever is required for both parties to be happy. We want both parties to be happy, so, if you are not and you want to leave us, we won't stop you. If you require us setting up a redirect of your feed to another system, we'll implement that feature and everybody will have it.
I'm thinking of actually recommending people of using Feedburner, so as to have a setup such as this:
main rss -> glycast -> feedburner -> audience
You give the feedburner RSS to your audience and while Glycast is there, then you have ads, if one day you want to move away, then you just switch your Feedburner account to read directly from your main rss like this:
main rss -> feedburner -> audience
and voila. You don't even need the redirect. Nobody will notice any difference at all.
Depending on what systems people are using we may also develop plug ins. For example, we can have a WordPress plug in that makes your feed look like if it was serve from Glycast, with the ads, but on your feed on your own server. That shouldn't be that hard to implement.
About who is on your show? Do you mean about which ads are played and which ones aren't? I'd love to implement something like that. It'll probably be something like this: if you don't approve any ads, then all ads are approved, if you approve enough ads to take care of your inventory, then only those ads will appear. If there are not enough ads, we'll send an email with an alert. Those ads pay for our hosting and bandwidth so we can't run without ads for long periods of time, but I don't want any podcaster ever to be unhappy about the ads they are getting.
About how much money, I don't know yet. The market will define this over time. I could look at the current expenditure in podcasts but since our model is quite different, it doesn't really apply. When you buy ads in a podcast today you are most likely buying that spot forever, while with Glycast, the spot keeps passing around from advertiser to advertiser over time. Eventually, I think we'll have a bidding system, similar to Google's Adsense, so that the pricing adjusts over time automatically.
About the video. I'm not here to harm anyone. I'm here to make a product to help podcasters and advertisers connect, be more efficient. I'm building whatever podcasters will need to be happy. I understand your worry and your desire to warn your audience that might not understand RSS distribution and make a bad decision now that will cost them a chunk of their audience later on. That's not something I want to do and I wouldn't be happy with any company holding an audience hostage like that. I do want to work with you, and other podcasters, to make sure I meet your needs of an excellent platform that will help monetize your podcast, whatever your size is, whatever your topic is, and focus on your craft, on what you love, on podcasting.
I'm an avid podcast listener, consuming more than 20hs per week of podcasts and every time someone announces they are going off the air because they need to focus on other things to pay the bills it makes me sad… and whenever I look at my feed and I see all the podcasts that silently stopped putting out updates it makes me even sadder. If the problem is funding, I want to help.
What amazed me was why this information was not on their website. José has a great resume, and with some insights into who and what I'm looking at, my fears are much less.
For more information go to www.glycast.com
Future Podcast Related Companies: Listen Up
- We've all worked hard to build our audience, and the last thing we want to do is create something that will make them jump through hoops, or damage the quality of our content. It's is ALL about the content. I don't want to put a Home Depot commercial in my “Teen Mom” podcast.
- I want to know who you are and why I should do business with you.
- I want to know WHERE you are, as they may effect support.
- If you anything that adds to my process, I want the ability to leave your service with zero effect to my audience.
- Don't try to charge me $30 for something that takes 5 minutes. We are not stupid. We all talk to each other. You mess with one podcaster, you mess with the community.
- If you mess up, admit it, say your sorry, and explain the steps you've taken so that it won't happen again.
- Lastly, if you are designing a product for podcasters – you might want to talk to us to see if we even want your product.
The $57 Dollar Interview Guy Shares His Story
17:10
When I first heard that Aaron Janx was charging $57 to be interviewed on his show. If you have him on your show then he charges nothing. I thought, “Wait, a guest is bringing their content to YOUR show, if anybody is getting paid it should be the guest. After all, no guests – no show right? Well not completely, but my original reaction was this was a bunch of crap. If you've never read it, there is a great book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Habit 5 is Seek to Understand before being Understood. You can get the book for free when you sign up at Audible.
Aaron got flack for having the word “War” in his title. No his show is the Aaron Jax show.
Aaron's show is about how to win the War of Success. Winning those little battles in your life to be successful. Some people don't want to answer the questions as we get into the nitty gritty. There are some motivational talks on the show as well. Check it out at www.socialspurs.com as well as in iTunes
Here is a Screen Shot From Aaron's Listing on RadioGuestList.com
In the interview we hear that:
Aaron has done hundreds of interviews and had a large amount of people who would not show up (no call, no notification).
He asks people that approach him (people he doesn't have a relationship with) to pay $57. This way they are more than likely to show up. Some might say they have “Some skin in the game.”
He found that people offer to come on the show, and then disappear. This is a tremendous waste of time.
Aaron is not trying to earn a living from his guests, but basically trying to weed out “the men from the boys.”
Aaron shared where John Lee Dumas is charging $700 to appear on his Entrepreneur on Fire podcast, so this is not a “new idea.”
The person who sent out the $57 to be on the show (the ad above) has been sacked.
Cancellations ranged from 30 – 50% of the time
Aaron was also assuming his guests would promote their appearance (and they often don't – Check out Jared Easley's new book Stop Chasing Influencers which explains how Jared had tons of “big” guests – but it didn't turn into subscribers.
Scheduling Tools
Schedule once starts at $5 (but you probably want $9)
Calendly.com is $8/month
Appointlet is $15 a month and allows you to charge
Bookly is $46 (once) it's a WordPress Plugin
Live365 Has Left the Buidling
Live365 (a streaming provider – traditionally for music) tried to get into Podcasting, and stories have now surfaced that they are all but done. This is partly due to fees going up on Licensing music. Full story is here. If you want to create a streaming version of your show, I use Abovecast. I have found people don't listen as long (about 5 minutes) so I make snippets and point people to my website. Much like a podcast has to be listed in directories (iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn) so do streaming channels. Here is a default (boring) default page.
Free Poddcast Editing
If you are done with cutting out “ums” and want to just create content and let someoone else handle the editing, check out www.podcastmechanic.com I'm ready to take on a few clients.
Ready to Start a Podcast?
In today's show you hear how Marcy Rosenbaum had an idea went out and bought some equipment (bought the wrong microphone) and was just lost. She purchased some one-on-one consulting and her show was in iTunes in a few weeks. Schedule your coaching call today. If you'd rather go “Self-paced” check out the School of Podcasting. Join risk free with out 30 day guarantee.
Hello, this is Pablo from Glycast. Thank you Dave for the work in keeping podcasters safe. I often sit down with non technical entrepreneurs and listen to their technical problems or questions and my advice often reflects yours: be careful with this, you don’t want to that because then you are stuck with that provider and so on. I’m now doing this once a week (http://pupeno.com/2016/01/01/happy-new-year/) because it’s fun, it feels good, and I believe it makes the world a better place.
Thanks to your criticism we updated our web site to address this concerns and we’ll include this feedback when we re-make our videos.
If you or anybody else has any questions, comments, feedback, concern, we are very reachable. You can get in touch with my whole company at
or Twitter at @glycast or with me personally at 
.
Thank you.
Great open letter Dave!
On the subject of charging guests, I would love your opinion (and others too of course!)
I produce a podcast for Professional & Aspiring Bartenders and Cocktail & Spirit Enthusists. The show is called Bartender Journey. I believe the demographic is extremely valuable to advertisers, but it has been more difficult to bring on advertisers than I anticipated. I am discovering that liquor companies, (who have enormous marketing budgets), are:
1. A bit old school in their marketing practices.
2. Skittish about legal issues (of course podcasts are available anywhere in the world, and some countries limit or even forbid any type of alcohol advertising).
3. Control freaks – want to approve every syllable of anything they are involved in.
I do sometimes hear from people who have business related to the industry, but are not liquor companies. Sometimes they ask if they can be a guest on my show. I have more than enough guests – finding people to interview is not an issue for me. What is an issue is that after 3 years of putting my heart and soul into this thing, if I don’t start making some money, I may have to stop. So I began offering a package for these situations which includes a 10 minute segment on my show, plus 60 second sponsorship messages on 4 additional show, plus some presence on my web site & some social media.
What do you think? Podcasting is all about “outside the box thinking” right?
Dave – your Calendaly.com link on this page is broken. Here is the correct url: https://calendly.com
Cheers.
Thanks. Fixed
My only worry would be FTC regulations. I believe you have to let your audience know that you are being paid to interview this person.