Chasing the Numbers with Trent Anderson

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Trent Anderson: And

it's something like 360, 000 business podcasts that have ever been produced are now no longer producing new episodes. That number is up almost 150, 000 since this report we did last year.

Chris Hill: Welcome to We Build This Brand. I'm your host, Chris Hill. And today we're talking with Trent Anderson, the head of growth and strategy at PodChaser.

Now this subject is very near and dear to my heart. If you know, I run a company called HumblePod. We are a podcast production company. We actually rely on Podchaser for a lot of data and analytics and reporting for our clients. They've been really useful over the years in helping us strategize on how to approach markets, approach new shows, and what other shows already exist in the industry to get us a feel for.

The potential for a show, the size of a show, or what other folks are doing in the industry. They are essentially the IMDB of podcasting, or at least that's, that's their stated goal. And I love that goal because you can go and put your own profile up. [00:01:00] And get credit for all the work that you do on podcasting.

So if you're a producer, if you're an editor, if you're a host listening to this, or if you've even guested on a show, go check them out. And you can actually go and list yourself wherever you've been a guest on other podcasts and get yourself registered into their system. Today we talked about the business of podcasting, a lot around the growth of Podchaser itself.

We really got into a deep dive on what's happening within the podcast industry right now. So I think you'll get a lot out of this one. It's a really insightful conversation. They had some really interesting data that they were able to present. Some things that actually surprised me. I actually learned a lot through this interview with Trent and I think you will too.

So without further ado, let's get into it. My interview with Trent Anderson of Podchaser.

Welcome back to We Built This Brand. I'm your host, Chris Hill. Today with me, I have Trent Anderson from [00:02:00] Podchaser. Trent, welcome.

I like to start these conversations off just getting to know a little bit about you, a little bit about your background, and then we'll talk a little bit about Podchaser and the work you've done there and the brand you've helped to build, very honestly.

With that said, I'll let you take it away. Tell me a little bit about your background. Where are you from and what led you to Podchaser?

Trent Anderson: Yeah, so my role at Podchaser, I'm the head of growth and strategy. What does that mean? I do a lot of the marketing efforts as well as a lot of our data strategy and identifying which user groups are going to be our most impactful.

And it didn't always start out that way. I actually came to Podchaser as head of RevOps. So I got to see all parts of the business, including sales, marketing, customer success. And what we really tried to identify is Figure out what kind of through line existed between our customers and how can we best serve them?

My background actually is in the agency world. So I spent about a decade in the agency landscape before I made the move over to Podchaser. I'd always worked kind of on the periphery of the podcast industry. And when I. Join Podchaser. It was like a full [00:03:00] fledged baptism into all things podcasts. So with that, I think there's a lot of interesting things that are happening in the space today.

And it's certainly undergone quite a few changes since I jumped in, but there's one thing that remains constant and that's how many different ways brands, agencies, advertisers earn media opportunities can, can exist and win in the podcast landscape. So looking forward to unpacking some of those learnings with you.

Chris Hill: Yeah, excited to hear more because I know a lot of our audience are going to be marketing professionals and advertising agencies and folks like that. Learning how to dive into the world of podcasting, especially the podcast advertising side, I think is really challenging for most folks because it just seems like such an anomalous area and you don't know what to pay people.

You don't know how much revenue could be generated from doing a deal and it's just risky for a lot of people. So I think a lot of the. Smaller organizations typically keep their distance, but I've seen just on our side of the business, like I've seen a lot with marketing and advertising and paid ads, especially with, with [00:04:00] our clients be really successful on both sides of the aisle.

So it's, it's really cool. And yeah, really excited to dive into that. So let's, let's do dive into that a little bit. So tell me about Podchaser. What, what was it's Origin story basically tell me

Trent Anderson: the origin story as all good origin stories, uh, start happened on reddit of all places, right?

Chris Hill: Really?

Trent Anderson: Yeah. So one of our founders, Bradley Davis was trying to find a podcast database and he couldn't find one.

So he took to reddit and. Just started messaging random subs saying, Hey, is there anything that exists? That's kind of like an IMDB, but for podcasts. And the answer was no, but this kind gentleman in Australia named Ben ended up becoming our CTO and actually building this alongside Bradley. And then we had a couple more casts of characters, including Cole Raven, one of our co founders and Ryan Stock, who's our chief brand officer, kind of, you Build this thing from, from soup [00:05:00] to nuts and effectively that's, that's what we set out to do is build a database that was going to allow podcast listeners to find their next favorite podcast in a concise, clean way, which we all know databases can do.

So that's how it all jumped off was from a Reddit inquiry.

Chris Hill: That is crazy. And so it was really more of an IMDB database to begin with. So what does that, what does that mean for podcasters? Am I on there as a celebrity basically?

Trent Anderson: Of course. Well, you, Chris, of course, are a celebrity. No, but you know, we, we took into account a couple of different things, right?

So as, as we all know, the podcast industry is notoriously difficult from a discovery perspective. And why is that? Well, it's a highly fragmented industry with relatively low NPS or net promoter score. What do I mean by that? From a fragmentation perspective, of course, you've got your four major platforms in the Apples, Amazon, Spotify, and then Google slash YouTube.

And from the NPS perspective, I'll take myself as an example. When I'm at the gym, I'm listening to [00:06:00] podcasts on Spotify, but when something catches my ear or tickles my brain, I pop over to YouTube to go deeper into that. That episode. So you've got a lot of context switching between different platforms and different devices.

And what that means is there's no central aggregated place to get all of this podcast information in one fell swoop. That's effectively where Podchaser began is. Almost as like an aggregator across the entirety of the industry. So we take information from here, pull it up from there, and then dump it all into this one central database, which is, which is Podchaser and then Podchaser Pro, which became our first commercial utility product from a brand perspective as well.

Yeah, it's, it's, uh, really solving for the discovery issue within podcast landscape.

Chris Hill: That's really cool. And, um, I mean, I've seen some of it myself as, Just full disclosure for anyone listening. I am a customer of Podchaser and we've done work with you all for quite a number of years now and love being able to use your back end analytics and data to understand [00:07:00] things deeper about the audience and about about everything that goes on within the podcasting world. There's just so much perspective that you all have because you are starting to aggregate, more and more of that data, to that point, like, where, I'm probably getting ahead of myself by asking this at this point, so this is contingent, this is a bit of a tangent I guess, As we think about that data and that technology, that's another big part of what you're doing too, because it's not just taking all this information and putting it places like on the back in the pro, like I can see estimates for download numbers and they're verifiably relatively accurate.

So, what is all that about?

Trent Anderson: Again, when we were first starting, To build a database product that's going to have commercial utility, you have to do something a little bit more than just being an IMDB for podcasts, right? And we go the route of raising venture capital, which, which we're able to do. And of course, VCs want to see, well, how the heck are you going to make money off of this thing outside of being just IMDB? That's when we started to add different layers [00:08:00] of discovery.

And the first one that we brought in was reach. So how many people are listening to a podcast on a monthly basis? We had a couple of different means of doing this. We had data partnerships with podcast player apps, with hosting providers, with, with verified publishers as well. And that was a really good first, first step.

And what was interesting to us is that first kind of. Product market fit deal that we got was actually from PR agencies that were looking for earned media opportunities for, for their clients. So we took the reach information plus the publicly available RSS feeds. So for anyone who don't know the underlying tech that kind of powers the podcast industry is this RSS feed and Apple had an email address that was associated with every RSS feed, right?

So we initially scraped those emails and then added the reach information. So now PR agencies were using the database to find earned media opportunities for their clients by pitching the contacts that were associated with it as well. So that was kind of like that first foray. And then we started to add [00:09:00] additional data layers.

So you talked about audience insights. That's one of the kind of bigger features that our pro users enjoy and deploy on a daily basis. So what we do from an audience perspective is we pull in the social handles for the podcast and now actually the podcast hosts as well. And that, what that allows us to do across YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter is essentially create a social graph.

And the social graph is going to show us things like age and gender splits, household income, marital status, parental status, interests, affinities, and even geographies. So now in a, in a, Kind of like a commercial utility sense. We know how big a show is. We know who's likely listening to a show and we now know how to get in contact with the show.

This earned media landscape kind of starts to evolve into more. Utility for advertisers as well. And that's where we introduced that next layer of data, which is our brand sponsor data, which we collect by transcribing every episode in the top 5, 000 shows and through equal parts, [00:10:00] AI and ML, we're able to identify.

Brand sponsors identify who's spending, how much they've been spending and how long they've been spending. Again, for the top 5, 000 shows. So again, if you're familiar with tools like Zoom Info from a B2B perspective, they're providing contact information, org charts, revenue estimates, news, scoops, that sort of thing.

A lot of ways. Podtracer Pro is kind of like a Zoom info, but for the podcast industry as well. Then you layer in some of these additional, um, kind of features and our, our PR use case often call us like a scission or a muck rack, but purpose built for podcasts as well. So in any case, data is king in our world and we're always striving to, uh, get more data points.

And I think for the last time I checked, we're up to like 1. 7 billion data points and that's across 5. 4 million podcasts. So

Chris Hill: That's crazy.

Trent Anderson: The podcast has a pulse. Uh, we've got data on it.

Chris Hill: I, I'm sure your data goes a lot deeper than what you all even disclosed in the research and things, the estimates and [00:11:00] things you could probably get a lot closer to just because I don't know how all that legalese works.

I won't bait you into something there about telling me something you shouldn't about the algorithm. But I am curious, like, or I'm surprised when you said, Hey, we just use transcripts for the advertisers. I figured it was more like, If you had to strategically have a partnership and all that, but you did the obvious.

I mean, you're already pulling in all this data. Why not use ai, auto transcribe it and pull out the advertiser names? That's really interesting to know that, that y'all are doing that. And of course, for people that want to advertise on shows, it helps them figure out where, where they're similar advertisers are, right?

Or their competitors are at the very least. That's a really useful tool in that respect.

Where are you finding benefit to like, because all of what we're talking about is in the pro package, right? Like someone who just has a free account wouldn't have access to this. Where does someone get started with the pro package?

Or more importantly, I guess, is like, who are the people that are finding the most value out of the pro package right now?

Trent Anderson: I think there's a couple of different use cases. Of course, there's going to be the earned media use [00:12:00] case, which is where we see a lot of our PR professionals and agencies, and even brands directly, using the pro package.

Pro to find podcast opportunities for their key opinion leaders, their clients, their thought leaders to go out and what I like to call evangelize their market at scale or evangelize their category at scale. And we've seen some pretty interesting research and insights from what we've looked at. So even looking at like the Some of the top VC backed B2B SaaS organizations, they typically enjoy a greater level of product market fit.

And their biggest goal is to be able to say, we built this product for this reason, for this user group, for this use case, and we now we need to go out and evangelize kind of this, this. Thought or this idea or this process or this product at scale. And that's, what's really interesting about podcasts is, you know, Chris, so many years have gone by where if you wanted to gain audience from a speaking perspective, you had to fly out to a trade show and you had to sit [00:13:00] in a dusty motel in Reno, Nevada with 50, a hundred, 250 of your peers.

But with podcasts. Depending on the show, of course, and depending on the audience and that sort of thing, you can have that same level of engagement and have that same kind of like public speaking element, but you can scale it almost infinitum. I think that's one of the really interesting things for organizations that have prioritized thought leadership is using like this podcast guest speaking circuit, if you will, to reach the audience.

They're target buyers in the place where they're consuming information, which oh, by the way, has undergone a seismic shift in the last 10 years, partly pandemic related, but also just consumer preferences have changed considerably and where we're getting our information and news has changed. And, uh, actually we.

participated in a Pew Research study last year, and some of the data from Pew's research suggested that 87 percent of podcast listeners tune in to learn something new, and 77 percent of podcast listeners tune in specifically to hear other [00:14:00] people's opinions. When you talk about peer review, when you talk about getting information and insights and kind of this uh, double layer of, of authenticity and thought leadership.

It makes a pretty compelling case that if you're not doing any sort of guest speaking on podcasts, what are you doing? And where are you spending that money instead? That's always going to be in play for this earned media use case. And then with the paid media use case, you mentioned this at the top.

There's a lot of brands that are hesitant to throw money into the podcast advertising landscape. And for good reason, we've been better or worse brainwashed into thinking that if we can't track something in Google Analytics or Google AdWords, then it probably isn't moving the needle for us whatsoever.

And with podcasts, of course, it's not really a Click based attribution system. It's an auditory system. And as much as we want to throw links into show notes and that sort of thing, I mean, I'm sure you've seen this, the data suggests like a lot of people just aren't clicking. There's this on [00:15:00] trackability in some ways that I think prevents a lot of brands from, from moving forward.

But we actually just did a pretty interesting research study and looking at our audience data, specifically looking at senior executives and how they're consuming podcasts. And this was inspired by Signal Hill Insights. So Jeff Fidler and his team did a survey based study on about 12, 000 senior executives and how they listen to podcasts.

And then we kind of came over the top and layered in some of our data. And what's really interesting is the senior executive, which, you know, most B2B brands are trying to reach in one way, shape, or form. They love podcasts even more than the general consumer does. And I think that spells some. Pretty significant ramifications for how folks are going to reach their, their, their target audiences.

So more to come. Definitely check back with me when that, that research is published, which should be in the next couple of weeks here too.

Chris Hill: Do send that my way so I can include it in the show notes for folks because that, that's the stuff I nerd out on is like seeing how that influences people [00:16:00] and seeing the effectiveness of podcasting really play out, I think is really cool to be able to, to witness. But yeah, you don't know a lot of times it does feel like that, like you said, the black box of advertising where we have found and help clients or guide clients on advertising is if you're getting an advertiser, they need to go into it, at least right now, mainly knowing it's a branding and awareness play, they're going to make people aware about their product and their service.

It may be a very small audience, but you've got the person, but with the microphone endorsing it, and that's going to have a lot of value. That's going to have a lot of weight. Well, I've got a small audience here, but if I were to endorse something, it would be something that people would say, Hey, you talked about this.

I would at least get a one on one. Hey, you recommended that I go and get a Harry's razor. Should I really do that? And I was like, yeah, of course you should. Or people will come to me and say, well, you recommended we do this, or I've even had from podcasts I've worked on in the past. Well, we went there because you talked about it on your podcast.

So, anecdotally it works, you know, it's finding that actual hard data, um, [00:17:00] that people are always dying and looking for, but I think you all are on the right path with how you're structuring it and helping people think about it. If only we could just track people down to the nth degree and figure out where their eyesight goes and nobody would freak out about that, right?

Trent Anderson: Right. Not at all.

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the thing with the deprecation of third party cookies and this behavior based targeting that that's going away in all respects. Now, Google's kind of punted this a couple times, but it's still going to happen. And I think consumer privacy is only going to increase, not decrease.

And what's interesting is in working with some of these Madison Avenue types of agencies, the cream of the crop, they're looking for ways to kind of revert back to what we would. Typically call like the classical or traditional marketing and advertising. Think about like Don Draper, Mad Men era, right?

They, they didn't have click based attribution there. And I think in a lot of ways, brands, organizations have been kind of lulled to sleep with. Well, if I [00:18:00] can't click it, if I can't track it, then it just doesn't exist. And really that that's not the case. So we've, we've advised, especially clients in the B2B space to put what we call self-reported attribution on high intent landing pages on their website.

And it's, it's quite simple and seems so rudimentary, but you just ask how they hear about you. And you'd be shocked with how specific some folks can get. And I mean, there are, there are a few agencies in this world, like Refine Labs and Chris Walker that have kind of evangelized. Uh, this, but he can say confidently that 60 percent of his agency's revenue comes from people listening to his podcast.

And again, like they're saying, I listened to 67 episodes before I actually raised my hand and requested a demo. Obviously the results not typical, but if you're not collecting these qualitative insights absent the quantitative insights from podcasts specifically. really kind of shooting in the dark.

Let's, let's revert back to some of those, those classical marketing principles that really are. Um, you know, first order impact.

Chris Hill: Yeah, I mean, similarly and we [00:19:00] have a client who's talked about this publicly on his podcast, so I'm not saying anything that's proprietary, but they had a client where They had an advertiser with them, and they had stopped advertising with them.

And then they came back, and they asked them, Why did you come back? And they said, Well, we noticed sales dropped off, and we did a survey of all our recent sales over the past year, and we realized how many of them were coming from your podcast. So we're back, and we're going to put money into this.

Definitely requires a little more due diligence, but it definitely has a lot of benefits.

Something else I've noticed, On the site is this thing called a power score. What is a power score aside from, I know if I'm at 100, I'm like the best podcast ever, and I'm beating Joe Rogan.

Trent Anderson: Our industry is really dominated by the north star metric of downloads and Especially for most podcasts, if you're obsessing over the download number, you're probably measuring the wrong thing.

We definitely think reach and downloads are important, but our power score is comprised of 30 different data points, which are all kind of unique to what we do. [00:20:00] And we'll take into account things like popularity over time, velocity of popularity, engagement across some of the major platforms as well. And really, this power score aims to be like a popularity metric as opposed to just a pure Reach number.

And this also is, is inclusive of things like chart positions. A lot of people look at podcast chart positions and think it's only a measure of reach. It's actually not, it's also looking at the velocity of growth and popularity over time as well. This power score really aims to be more of more of a signal for, is this podcast popular?

And, and if so, how can I as a brand or an agency tap into it, whether it's from an earned perspective or a paid perspective, in short, Power score is a popular popularity metric that aims to kind of be a more inclusive metric as opposed to just a pure download number.

Chris Hill: Yeah, I think that's really helpful.

We've used it as we've guided clients on how they build their shows and what shows even compare themselves against. Because one thing I've found interesting, and [00:21:00] maybe you can help shed some light on this, is that sometimes I'll see a power score that's really high and their show isn't doing that great in terms of total show.

So it sounds like, Some of that popularity score has a lot of weight in that number that may not translate to total show audience.

Trent Anderson: Definitely. Yeah. That's a really good insight. And if I'm a brand or if I'm a PR person and I'm trying to judge a portfolio of shows, and let's say two out of the three have 10, 000 plus downloads a month, but have 50 to 60 power scores versus another show that might only have 5, 000 downloads a month, but has a power score and close to the 70 range.

I'm always going to prioritize that smaller show, but higher power score, because it's going to be more indicative of engagement. It's going to be more indicative of velocity of popularity. It's going to be more indicative of potentially reaching the audience that I want to reach as well. You're always going to want to pair this data with the audience data and kind of build a more kind of comprehensive.

View of a podcast as well. It's not [00:22:00] ubiquitous within the industry quite yet, but we definitely think it's well on its way.

Chris Hill: So we've talked a bit about Podchaser and the nuts and bolts there. Part of We Built This Brand is talking to the people behind the brand. So I want to talk about you for a little bit if that's okay.

Trent Anderson: Yeah.

Chris Hill: And we'd just love to get into more about about your role as, you know, head of growth and strategy there at Podchaser. We'd just like to know, like, what, what do you do on a daily basis? I know that's kind of a basic question, but I would love to know, like, what is your day in, day out like there at Podchaser?

Trent Anderson: We're a data company first and foremost, so it's kind of incumbent upon me to find data and trends that are going to be interesting and actionable for the entirety of our user base. What will this look like? We've got data on which podcasts are active versus idle. And a couple weeks ago, we published some data talking about the number of business podcasts that have gone inactive.

And it's something like 360, 000. Business podcasts that have ever been produced are now no longer producing new episodes. That number is up [00:23:00] almost 150, 000 since this report we did last year. Make no mistake, there's obviously huge opportunity in the podcast landscape, but if you go in with the wrong intentions for why you want to start a branded podcast and use this as part of your own media strategy, the podcast graveyard is littered with These podcasts that don't make it past six episodes or, or even fewer in some cases.

Chris Hill: Well, that's when "pod fade" hits is about six or seven, right?

Trent Anderson: That's right. We'll use that kind of data and information to help guide our clients or prospects thoughts and decisions on, am I getting into this field? for the right reason. Is this something that I can create as a bankable kind of content pillar for my organization?

So that's, that's one example. Another recent one that we did is in looking at some of the podcast advertising landscape. We like to segment it by different category types as well. So we just released some data on reality TV podcasts. Now, hand up. I've Probably watch more Bravo than I care to admit. I'm my wife's [00:24:00] companion for, for Bravo watch alongs, of course.

What was interesting is I started to realize like a lot of these reality shows have these pseudo influencers, celebrities as, as quote unquote talent within the show and one way, shape or form, they're all promoting some sort of product kind of on the backend. So we wanted to do a deep dive to see. In the reality TV space, how many of these influencers have their own products and how many of them kind of utilizing this as a channel?

And then, oh, by the way, they're also standing up their own podcasts in conjunction with their appearances on these reality TV programs, right? And so we took a look at, of all the reality TV shows, how many reality TV podcasts exist, and there's thousands. And then we'll look at what the overall audience Composition looks like across the whole spectrum of reality TV podcasts.

And some interesting things that we pulled out of that is, yeah, of course, 70 percent of the reality TV podcast audiences identify as female. [00:25:00] So not necessarily surprising, but 20 percent identify as male hand up. That's me. And then, uh, another 10 percent are about mixed. Then we'll also layer in things like, what is the average income of these listeners to reality TV podcasts?

And we're framing all of this up contextually. So advertisers that are spending money on reality TV, whether it's through cable or connected TV or, or other digital channels can see that they probably are missing out on a significant opportunity in the reality TV podcast space. Lo and behold, we looked at some sponsors and yeah, they were putting in six, seven figures into TV and then.

Maybe 25, 000 in reality TV podcasts, when in fact those same fans that they're trying to reach can be reached at a significantly lower cost through the podcast advertising medium. In any case, we're always doing data stories like this as an aforementioned senior exec data story as well, uh, which is under embargo.

[00:26:00] But, uh, You know, this is what I do day in and day out. Try to read the cultural zeitgeist and figure out what's going to be of importance and how can we build some insights and actionable ideas off of the data that we provide.

Chris Hill: You mentioned, you know, you've, you've been in this industry for a while now.

What changes have you seen just in the time you've been with Podchaser? What changes have you seen in trends in podcasting?

Trent Anderson: The biggest difference is the era of minimum guarantees, or what we call MGs in this space, has gone away, which is, I think, is largely a good thing, and look no further than some of the Spotify exclusives, which effectively Spotify paid Trader's Top Dollar to be exclusive on the Spotify platform.

And of course, Joe Rogan is one of them, Alex Cooper of Caller Daddy is another one of them. And recently we've seen Spotify doing about face on this kind of closed podcast ecosystem to now opening up their content to all platforms and channels as well. And what happened with [00:27:00] that kind of closed ecosystem is that Spotify's of the world tried to Basically be the single source of truth for very, very popular content creators.

And this also included like, uh, Harry and Meghan and some of the Royals, which, you know, I'm butchering. In any case, these minimum guarantees got a lot of big tech companies in hot water. And even some of the podcast production companies probably, you know, no greater example of this in cast media who got into significant hot water for not paying out.

They're creators and comedians like Theo Vaughn took to Twitter and other places and said, Hey, I'm driving significant value for these organizations, but I haven't been paid on a single thing that I've done. I think now as we're exiting kind of that minimum guarantee world. What you're going to continue to see is just like talented creators are going to be able to effectively write their own checks by having this more open podcast ecosystem.

So that's really from like a macro level. Now on a more SMB mid market [00:28:00] side of things, you see a lot more podcasts start and then. Don't see through to the finish line, whatever that finish line might be. And obviously that, that data that I just referenced with the number of business podcasts that have gone idle, uh, in the last year, those are some staggering numbers.

So I think if, if you're starting a branded show or want to have this podcast be part of your content pillar, you really have to answer in with the right intentions. And it's not a sales channel. It's maybe not even a marketing channel. And in many ways, I think people should view podcasts as like the platform, which they can.

Kind of share their secret sauce. And that's going to have some of the added benefit of attracting the right kinds of customers. If they tap in, it's going to have the added benefit of serving as a sales enablement function. So sales teams across the globe can understand what's most important to the CEO, whoever is the host of the podcast.

I do think that there's significant. Opportunity that still exists for brands that enter the podcast space from an own perspective when they enter it in with the right [00:29:00] intentions. These are some of the things that I see, try to approach it from a macro and a micro perspective.

Chris Hill: I think when I see all these businesses failing to, or not businesses specifically, but podcasts in the business space, failing to succeed, I see a lot of that as folks that didn't come into it, like you said, with the right intentions.

I see that same thing all the time. If you just want a podcast to have a podcast, you're going to end up in a place where you're almost guaranteed to fail. If you just want to have one, you just want to do it. What's worse in a business setting is when the marketing team wants the CEO to have a podcast and the CEO just is going to be drug tooth and nail through it to do it.

And then five episodes in the marketing team is exhausted because they realized, Oh, shoot, I've got to edit all this. And that took an entire day. And on top of the interviews and the editing, we had other things we had to set up and then running through all that, I think is a big, is a big challenge. I would say, I would question like podcasting as a sales channel though, because I've seen a lot of success.

at a smaller level, [00:30:00] at a much smaller level with podcasting on a one on one basis, being a relationship development tool, being a business tool on some level for, for businesses, even personally, and then with clients that we've seen. So, just anecdotally again, a lot of this is right now, but like, we've definitely seen some benefit for folks in that area.

Totally. Is it going to be your sales pitch? No. But is it going to be a tool you can use? A marketing tool you can use? Like I've definitely seen a lot of people use it to success. And even like specifically like medical field folks were really helpful. We had a plastic surgeon client for a little while.

He was using his podcast to talk about different types of surgeries because he knew people would search for those surgeries and want to know if there was any additional information out there and try to draw people in that way. Now that led to some of the most interesting podcast titles I've ever created.

Things I won't even repeat on this episode, but they're just some very fascinating things that we've done and seen in that market. So I just wanted to point that out. But I do understand like if you go into it thinking this is [00:31:00] going to make me a lot of money or I'm going to get a ton of downloads. Like, it's a long game.

Podcasting is a marathon. The podcasts that are real successful, you probably have a lot better data than I do on this, but I'm sure the podcasts that are most successful are the ones that are sticking with it consistently for at least six months to a year before they start to gain any sort of traction.

So, just my two cents.

Trent Anderson: At least. No, and I don't disagree with you. I think it's, it's more so the podcast that gets started up and it's under the guise of, we're going to do account based marketing and we're going to invite our key prospects onto the podcast and basically use that as the discovery call and then have our SDR team follow up with the guests for the next 12 months until something happens.

I've seen a lot of that, unfortunately. And again, it's really, it's a brand building. Exercise as, as you know, so well. And by, by proxy, like, yes, sales opportunities are probably going to come. You're going to entice the right people to [00:32:00] dig deeper into your content and uh, understand who you, who you are and why you do the things you do, et cetera.

Yeah, definitely all aboard with that. I think, uh, again, the ones that are doing it from this kind of, uh, backhanded view are the ones that, that have the wrong intentions.

Chris Hill: Yeah, the ones that are going after purely for profit, basically, and scheming and scamming, if you will, to try and draw people in. Yeah, that's, that's definitely, definitely not going to bring you success.

I mean, because also, like, at some point people are going to go, how big is your show? And if you don't have numbers to back that up, you don't have an audience to back that up. At some point, that's going to get people going, well, either I won't guest on it or they'll start to realize, well, that went out to two people.

Why did I do that? It takes time. Like all things, small podcasts are small podcasts too. They need time to grow and they need guests, so there's always, always that balance you're facing. But yeah, I hear what you're saying there. I mean, it sounds like you've got a lot on your plate. Yeah, that's awesome. [00:33:00] Um, well, what

would you say, as far as Podchaser goes, where are you kind of like focused at the moment?

Where do you kind of see the future of Podchaser going? Is there anything new and exciting you can share with me? If not, it's okay.

Trent Anderson: Yeah, no, we're really excited about our recent update to the Podcast Charts hub. So,

Chris Hill: Right. Yeah.

Trent Anderson: A couple years ago, we had acquired a company called PodCharts and it really stood as a standalone platform.

And it was just a way for folks to find which podcasts are charting in any given day, across any category or any country or platform. And now that we've brought that into the full fledged kind of Podchaser suite The adoption has been great and it's just another means of discovery. And whether you're an advertiser or an owned podcast, or you're looking for earned media opportunities and podcasts, being able to understand kind of where a podcast charts, especially over time is really important because the example I always give is.

[00:34:00] Man, if you were a brand that was trying to tap into the podcast space and you knew that the Kelsey brothers, Jason and Travis, had a podcast and it was interesting and it was aligned with kind of your target audience, but then you started sponsoring them before, Taylor Swiftamania, you would have had this kind of parabolic rise in your brand's exposure to certain audiences.

I think that is something that is going to be a game changer for a lot of advertisers and or, you know, earned media. Opportunities too. So really excited about that in that same sort of vein, how we've got a proprietary metric with the power score, and now we've got the charts kind of all full fledged into the product as well, stands to reason that we should probably come up with our own.

Charts methodology and use that as an, as an additional indicator. And we already do something like that, uh, with what we call our podchaser 25, which comes out every month. And we look at which podcasts have hit [00:35:00] the charts for the first time and are rising significantly in terms of popularity. Just a little teaser, a podchaser charts, which will be a full inclusive.

Kind of a data set. That'll be something coming down the road as well. Other things we're looking at, how do we continue to enable time to value moments for our users? This is one of the things that a lot of folks who don't have intimate knowledge of the podcast industry don't understand, is we've, we have no Control over a production cycle of a podcast, you know this, and for a lot of brands and agencies that are tapping podcasts for the first time, they think their client's story is most important.

It should be published today. And they don't understand how much goes on in the background and how much batch recording gets done and that sort of thing. In an effort to help these folks satiate some of their, their hunger for the podcast landscape, how do we build these time to value moments? So they are.

Enjoying the medium and enjoying the platform in between some of these episode release dates. So we've got a couple of things in the works when it comes to that as well. Yeah, just a little [00:36:00] teaser for what's coming down the pike.

Chris Hill: That, that is really, I'm intrigued by the time to value stuff and what you're doing there.

So maybe that's an offline conversation. I'm really, I'm really nerdy about that because yeah, I have a lot of opinions, as you can imagine, being in podcast production and everything. But yeah, that's really neat. That's really exciting. I've been through this whole conversation and I have neglected to ask this question.

We may filter this back in, or we may just leave it here. You know, what the heck. But I am curious to know, this is a branding podcast, why the name PodChaser?

Trent Anderson: That would be a better question for Bradley Davis, our CEO and founder. But from what I know about the origin story, there are probably six or seven different podcasters.

Brand names that were thrown out there in some of the early use cases with our users or prospective beta testers, that sort of thing, they always felt like they were chasing numbers when it came to podcasts because they didn't exist. There was no place to get them outside of going directly to, to a podcast themselves.

So [00:37:00] we're going to take the pod from podcasts and use that. And then we're going to chase the numbers with the chaser. That's the trend spin on the pod chaser brand name.

Chris Hill: Again, that's, that's really cool. Um, I mean, the name does make sense in that regard. And I have always kind of thought about it in those terms of like, Oh yeah, I'm chasing after information on podcasts.

Where can I go? Podchaser. Chase the podcast. It's a very comprehensive platform. I think if folks on here haven't checked it out, I think they absolutely should. Definitely want to make sure people go do that.

Before we get into asking where people can find you and get connected and all that, I always ask one last question.

Of course, this is a branding podcast. I'd like to ask the question, what brand are you loving right now or what brand do you really admire most at the moment?

Trent Anderson: Yeah, great question. There's one brand that I think is really interesting in the, uh, CPG or food and Bev space, and that's Supergut. Full disclosure, Supergut was a client of ours for [00:38:00] a while, and I think what's really interesting about them is they're a gut health company.

When you think about the name Supergut, that implies We're going to take our guts to, you know, the, the ultimate level. And I think what's interesting about what they do is they're marrying kind of the CPG space with like some rigorous academic work. They're one of the only gut health brands that have done very significant clinical studies about their product.

And you see that play out through their content, through their branding, through how they're approaching media writ large, but very specifically podcasts. And they've got a chief academic officer and a medical officer who was part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's gut health initiative. So many fitness and health and wellness products.

It's probably some guy who's got this great idea for a new protein bar sitting in his basement. He's going to make a ton of money off of gym bros doing it. But I think the way that they've approached the science. of gut health and really backed it up with some [00:39:00] significant bona fides in the clinical trials is something that's really interesting.

They're no stranger to podcasts either because one of their investors is actually one of the hosts of the all in podcast. So if folks are familiar with the all in podcast, which is on business and society and that sort of thing, I think that's a really interesting kind of foray for, for that brand too.

Chris Hill: Sounds like an interesting brand and gut health is near and dear to my heart for reasons that I don't need to get into on this episode. But that's, that's really neat. I'll have to, I have not heard, I think I've heard the name. I've not dove into them very much, so we'll have to check them out and see more about them.

So that's really neat. That's always great to hear what people are passionate about in the world of brands. Awesome.

Well, Trent, it has been a pleasure talking to you today. Learned a lot. And we'd just like to know before we wrap up, is there any way people can connect with you? I mean, where can they learn more about Podchaser?

All that good stuff.

Trent Anderson: Yeah. So I'll point you to two directions. One is Podchaser's LinkedIn page. So we're publishing all of our data stories [00:40:00] there. If you crave more of that sort of content, so unique data stories and podcast discovery, you can't get anywhere else. We also have a newsletter. which is called Podchaser Pulse.

We publish through Beehive, and that's where, one of the places where we do some of this long form content, breaking down podcast data. Go to LinkedIn, Podchaser, and then the Podchaser Pulse newsletter.

Chris Hill: Righty, well Trent, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Trent Anderson: Cheers Chris, thanks so much.