Todd Cochrane: One Last Listen

Matt Cundill  0:00  
Todd, the unexpected death of blueberry CEO, Todd Cochrane has shaken the podcast community. Every week since 2015 I would go searching for a new episode of the new media show, the long standing show that discusses all things media and podcast. When it was on Saturdays, I would cook lunch and listen to it live, and if it ran during the week, I would listen to it live if I could, or maybe later that night. Todd said that if you listen to the show long enough, you could get a PhD in podcasting. I started this podcast in 2016 the same way many do by myself as a creator staff of one, which became a staff of two by episode four, a staff of three by episode 50, and then there were four of us by episode 256, it was largely the advice that came from Todd Cochran and co host Rob Greenlee, who pointed this show, and later the sound out Podcast Network, into the space that it is Today. One of the things I learned from them is that a good podcast has a way of building trust. And over the years, I came to believe a lot of the things that Todd advocated for were good, good for creators, good for podcasting and good for the audience. Since 2019 Todd has made three appearances on the sound off podcast. He was always willing to talk to other creators in our network too, about podcasting. He even let some of them try out some of the innovations and tools that they were working on at blueberry. He loved helping out new creators, and always wanted to find a way to make life easier for them when it came to his products and also attending conferences. My last conversation with him was over a few pints in London at the podcast show where we talked about the same thing we did every year the future of podcasting. I spent the day after Todd passed away, listening back to the audio we had recorded together. I made various notes and highlights on the transcripts, and then I clipped them by hand so you can listen to Todd share his thoughts with you one more time. My heartfelt condolences to Todd's family his new media show co host Rob Greenlee, Mackenzie and Mike and the team at blueberry podcasting and to everyone grieving the loss of the 2015, podcast Hall of Fame Inductee Todd Cochran, he will be missed.

Todd Cochrane  2:37  
2004 I had gotten hurt pretty bad recreation injury in a swimming pool in Bahrain. And so I was laid out in the hospital 13 days in a back injury. Couldn't fly anymore. As I was in convalescent leave. I was looking for a job, really, and I heard about this contract overseer, essentially, at the time I was spent a lot of time on the internet, and lo and behold, I ran into Adam curry and Dave Winer daily source code about three or four episodes in from them, I'm like, Man, I could do this. Ran over to Walmart, was literally across the highway from where I was at, and bought a lab tech microphone and recorded the first four or five episodes. We were hand jamming feeds. From there, it really turned into, you know, trying to stay ahead of the bandwidth game and trying to keep the show online the media, because I'd blown through 500 gigs of data, you know, a month and a half later, and said, Hey, I'm, I'm a podcaster. And when Wiley Publishing came calling in November that, hey, we want you to write a book on podcasting. I signed a contract, and by mid January was mid process is writing the first book on podcasting. This is pre iTunes. The book came out in June of oh five, and GoDaddy called and said, Hey, we want to sponsor your show. And from there, it's pretty much history.

Todd Cochrane  4:15  
How the space is shaped out. We're definitely the masters of folks owning their own dot coms and powering their sites with power press. And that's what I think the majority of our customers, probably 90% of our customers, use our service through their own websites. And they use our plugin. They publish through us. Get stats through us. We have a percentage of customers obviously use our on site publisher@blueberry.com so really, our delta is, is and what we've always been and what the company's mantra has always been about, from really day one, was to allow content creators to build their sites on their.com controlling their IPs, controlling their feed, building their brand, and that's providing tools and services. And frankly. Just getting out of the way. You know, we're podcasters first, so we understand the value in building our brands on our websites, versus going to a vertical being locked into a website. So having your own.com and having your own brand is more valuable than ever. I've always been poo pooed saying, Oh, you don't have to have your own website. And the rooster comes back to roost in that you do, and if you don't, you better hope all your neighbors on the site that you're on are good neighbors, and if they're not, you you know you're going to be impacted you.

Todd Cochrane  5:46  
These radio groups starting to come around, starting to see the value of number one, creating new independent content, letting their staff budget out and do unique shows, and also breaking out this content that is very valuable to the local community, because, you know, radio is local, I heart is number one in their own minds. Let's quantify number one. Are they number one in downloads? Are they number one in audience size? Are they number one in the number of podcasts? You know, they, at times, be on top of some charts, being number one for having the most number of downloads for their network. But again, that's only a small segment those, those are the publicly available charts of the content being created out there. But if you say it long enough, it's true, but they are far, far, far away from being number one in almost all categories, maybe one, maybe maybe a number of total downloads for their network. Maybe they can use that claim the thing. But I think that's where it's limited

Matt Cundill  6:50  
to I heart conducts the first Podcast Awards.

Todd Cochrane  6:54  
That's funny, because I conducted the first Podcast Awards in 2005 so no,

Todd Cochrane  7:14  
free podcast hosts have come and gone. The most recent one that was saved as they were on their last legs of their financing was, of course, anchor Spotify bought them, so I think they're pretty safe. What we find is those that use free podcast hosts generally are not as serious. There may be experimenting, and there's plenty of room for people that are looking to experiment and see if podcasting is for them. We often find those shows that graduate into paid services, just like any business, there has to be some sort of true financial model in order to keep the lights on, keep the employees paid. Free is a difficult model. It's not impossible, and we're starting to see more folks come in and try the free model. We'll see what happens.

Matt Cundill  7:55  
Tech company launches the Netflix of podcasting.

Todd Cochrane  7:59  
We'll see how long they survive. I think content creators, largely are the hobbyists. There's another 20% out there that want to make some money, and then there's 15% that are truly hardcore business. Those shows are always looking for opportunities, and if they are given an opportunity to come on one of these networks that has a paid model, I always tell them, hey, take the check. Always retain rights to your show. Have a have an exit strategy if that company doesn't survive. I think it's a very uphill battle for anyone that is trying to create a 695 or 1195 model per month to get access to a select number of shows that maybe they have other alternative options somewhere else.

Todd Cochrane  8:57  
Discoverability issue is truly, oftentimes the failure of a podcast host to do the things that they need to be discovered if you are online, if you are living in the world of the web, you have to have the ability for the Googles of the world to index your content to be able to be found. And if you number going back to what I said earlier, you don't have your own.com you don't have the ability to write extensive show notes to have some context for Google to figure out who you are. Your number one discoverability is going to really suck from just someone searching for topic about your show. You're going to be they're going to find someone else's show, I think still word of mouth being able to be found online, running concise titles to your episodes, potentially having indexing the transcripts of shows, so that it even raises the availability of being. Down even higher. So I think it really worked. Really is about content creators focusing on the metadata and at the same time you know, telling your audience to share your show with their friends and family and people that you know, and that seven degrees of separation to definitely get the word out you

Todd Cochrane  10:30  
I don't think there's a threat to RSS. You know, the only true threat there is, and it really isn't a threat. It's podcasters who have decided to go behind a paywall, but those shows are still being pulled in, probably by a private, undisclosed RSS feed somewhere, so the underlying technology, I think, is still there. So I think the risk, and the thing I've been talking about is, let's make sure that we remain gatekeeper free, and that's just being diligent and talking and being publicly vocal about podcasting and how it's an open medium, and how to remain an open medium. I've always said I don't care where people consume the content, long as they consume it. They want to consume on YouTube. Great. They want to consume on Facebook, great. I do a live stream with my show, and it's, you know, the live stream is up on YouTube. I get a handful of post views. You know, if you're just doing audio, it's not super compelling on YouTube. But again, I don't care where people listen, YouTube's a strange animal, and if you've been successful on YouTube before, you probably have a higher probability of being found is a podcaster on YouTube as well. But I guess we'll just see. We'll see what happened.

Todd Cochrane  11:59  
Well, it's a situation where I believe very, very strongly, and blueberry has adopted GDPR globally or CCPA compliant. We believe very strongly in listener privacy. We don't want listeners remarketed to they're already they've already opted in all over the place. Why add podcasting to that piece? The difference is, when I go to Amazon or if I go to Google, I opt into their terms of service. I say, Yes, I'm drained to buy stuff on your platform. In exchange, you're going to track what I search for and look for, and you're going to present ads to me that that is part of the deal we do and we sign up for. We may not know that in the 800 pages of print, but that's essentially what we've assigned for. We've agreed to those terms of services. When a podcast listener subscribes or follows a show, there's no such transaction that says, hey, we're going to track you, and we're going to and use that information to market to you. It's about the data. What are they going to do with that data? How they're going to market that data? What are the data that's being collected? What are they going to do with it? So as a podcaster like you said, you have to weigh the decision is the value I'm giving these platforms about my listeners, is it worth the exchange, and am I okay with potentially my listeners being now, I'm saying this is going to happen. I'm just to use an example. Is it worth the exchange of my listeners potentially being re marketed to?

Speaker 1  13:40  
I we

Todd Cochrane  13:54  
have to remember, as a podcasting space that 90% of the space is made up of independent content creators that are at their kitchen table, in their garage, at their friend's house, in a closet, in their spare office, creating content. And they are the ones that make up the core of this community. They don't have commercial support, they don't have producers. They don't have a team. Those are the ones that we want to help Bridge and Tom Webster wrote a great article about this and sounds profitable a couple of weeks ago about programmatic advertising being the bridge. I've always said that small content creators just need something, whether it be email from their listeners giving them support, saying, Thank you for the content, to a little bit of money coming in to show value for their time, and you bridge them to the point where they can afford to hire someone to help the producer, show some edit, someone to do social I've been lucky enough that I've recruited people within my audience to. Do some of those jobs.

Todd Cochrane  15:14  
Blueberry attracts content creators that are in this for the long haul businesses. Our persona of listeners is really people that are truly focused on building a long, sustainable show. The shows that started blueberry are at blueberry a long, long time. We still have a lot of failures out the gate, just like everyone else does, but those that get started and go stay with us a long, long time, our churn rate is very, very low. I Yeah,

Todd Cochrane  15:52  
there's a lot of choices out there. There's a lot of tools, and people are spending a lot of money on those tools, you know, I kind of chuckle, you know, 10 years ago, maybe a little more. You know, the biggest complaint we had was the cost of hosting. Oh, my God, you're 12 or $20 a month. Well, now we're not even the majority of expenses for most podcasters. We're now the least amount of expense if you're using the script, if you're using any AI tools, if you're you know, all of a sudden you got $100 worth of additional charges you're hosting, which has stayed the same for literally the last 15 years. Is the minor expense in the end, though, we know that podcasters quit because it's too expensive, because the cumulative total of all the tools they're using, you know, 100 $150 a month. And if you're doing this as a hobby, and you have a partner that is wondering, you know, where this expense is. So again, trying to fill holes with stuff that we don't have, so that folks can keep the cost down, and also just, you know, help in the overall production of people's podcasts have better output. You

Todd Cochrane  17:13  
so, you know, by His essence, producing video, and I've been producing video on YouTube for years, so I'm, you know, I'm just stating here, but you basically now are basically selling your audience to be re marketed to. So if they listen to your episode, they're going to know that they particularly like something about podcasting. So they're going to remarket podcasts, tools, services, features, and make money off your audience, and you'll get zero. And not only that same thing with Spotify, with video is they have said, Okay, if you put video up there, we're going to play that versus your audio file. So audio has been on pass through, so you get in this metric data for advertisers, back through pass through, on Spotify. Now, if you put video up there that replaces it, sits on top of audio, and they listen, they get video first, which, again, Spotify, then can monetize against and or resell to your audience. So I think people just need realize this is what you're giving up. And at the same time, remember that there's a whole new ecosystem of advancement and podcasting tools that is, you know, part of, I think we're year three on this podcasting 2.0 journey of introducing new features that are not being carried by Apple or YouTube or by Spotify. You know, podcasting 2.0 is primary reason transcripts happened, and that's something Apple did adopt. So there are other options, and RSS is still open, so that when you say something you shouldn't, your episode gets axed by either Spotify or by YouTube or worse. Yet, your channel gets taken down. You still have the ability to podcast with open RSS. Yeah,

Todd Cochrane  19:07  
there's a whole list of great tools out there. And here's the thing I think people need to understand about the podcasting 2.0 piece. It's often forgot. If you participate in the value for value ecosystem, everyone gets a piece of the pie. The app developer does the index, does podcaster does your co host you can set up. And some splits happen automatically through fees. So those shows, those apps, are actually earning money when you are using app and providing value for value by streaming SATs. And there's some challenges right now with SATs and the way things are working with wallets. And I think within the next six months, we're going to have it completely on Fiat. So basically, someone comes in and and basically says, For 20 bucks, you know, divvy this out at so much a minute. And those will happen. And people. Will not know that there is a link to crypto that's basically getting from your cash wallet with us, dollars, or whatever it may be, to the podcaster that a podcaster can get, it goes through crypto, then it comes back on the other side of the podcasters and dollars, so that in the end, it's transparent, and it makes more sense. But again, the valley, Valley for peace, is just one of many, many, many, many features, and it's a whole different mindset. So I think it's an education piece.

Todd Cochrane  20:36  
The beauty about podcasting is, is that you have people that at some point, decide that they want to talk about something, and it's a medium that's easy to get into. There's, again, there's no gatekeepers. You don't have to ask permission. You can create content. I think that's an own it to the level that you want. And you know, if I look back to 2004 you know, there was nothing but gatekeepers. If we wanted to be online and get somewhere you had asked permission, and that's what made the whole podcasting thing so evolutionary and maybe even revolutionary. At the time. It was kind of like outlaw radio, almost. It was refreshing, and I think that still exists to an extent. So I don't think the podcasting space is going to slow down anytime soon. Lots of big players out there, but there's still room for the guy that wants to record on his kitchen Table. And I think that's the beauty of it.

Matt Cundill  21:42  
thanks for listening. This has been a production of the sound off media company.