What the heck is the point of my podcast?
Vol. 3 - It's the season of change and NEWS! Plus, Dan Misener, Noam Chomsky, and Coffee With My Ma.
Hihi!! Happy Pod the North Tuesday! It’s a new season and there’s LOTS to talk about, so throw on a cozy sweater and pour yourself a cup of something warm and delicious.
In this issue:
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Fall is here: what that means for your podcast.
Dan Misener thinks the era of one-size-fits-all podcast growth is over.
Indie feature: Darts and Letters, featuring Noam Chomsky.
True North feature: Coffee With My Ma.
LOTS OF NEWS.
First and foremost,
Last Friday wasn’t just International Podcast Day.
More importantly, it was National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, a.k.a Orange Shirt Day.
If you listen to any Indigenous podcasts these days you’ll likely hear the same sentiment echo’d over and over again: reconciliation is dead.
This is for good reason.
Here in Canada there are currently 32 long-term drinking water advisories in 28 First Nations communities. That means thousands of people do not have access to clean drinking water - a basic human right. Some of these advisories have been in place for decades.
It’s common for a lot of people to assume these water advisories mostly exist in rural and remote communities where it might be more difficult to impliment the proper infrastucture, but that’s not true. Just 15 minutes away from my own house in Brantford, Ontario, and as of August 30th of this year, more than 2,000 households are living without drinking water on Six Nations of the Grand River reserve.
Check out this map to find out how close water advisories are to you too.
Let’s face it, it’s 2022 and it’s pretty freakin’ pathetic that Canada hasn’t solved for it’s water crisis already.
And don’t even get me started on the lack of access to high-speed internet which is essentially gatekeeping the podcasting space from Indigenous peoples in Canada with important perspectives to share.
There’s a lot of work to be done to make amends with First Nations people in Canada and making sure everyone has access to clean water is just one of the places to start.
So what can we do as a collective of podcast-lovers in Canada? Here are a couple of options:
Seek out and support Indigenous-made podcasts by subscribing, rating them five stars, and sharing episodes that make an impact on you with a friend.
Here some shows to follow:
- Media Indigena: Indigenous current affairs
- Indigenous 150+
- CBC Podcasts: Kuper Island (limited run)Learn more about Canada’s drinking water advisories here.
Send a letter to Justin Trudeau and call your provincial government to let them know about your concerns and demand change.
Donate to organizations like Water First who are working tirelessly to create sustainable access to safe, clean water in partnership with Indigenous communities.
Read books like “21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act" — pick them up from your local library or book store!
Have some more thoughts on how podcasters can support Truth and Reconciliation in Canada? Please share them!
Fall is here: what that means for your podcast.
Autumn always feels like the new year to me. Maybe it’s the back-to-school vibe that September brings, or the fact that I just donated all my unworn summer clothes and unpacked my wardrobe of sweaters, demin, and variety of toques.
This is a time of year where I typically feel a sort of “reset” and get pretty reflective.
The fall is considered the season of change after all. As one blogger explained it, it’s “a time to acknowledge growth and expansion as a natural evolution”.
Lately, I've been listening to a lot of “anything and everything” podcasts — more to come on that in a future newsletter.
But while I was listening to one, suddenly I found myself 10 minutes deep in an infommercial-style interview with two airbrush tattoo artists based in Las Vegas. I couldn’t understand why I was listening to it in the first place (other than for the sole purpose of listening to an “anything and everything podcast”). I wondered what this host really thought they were providing to their listeners.
What the heck was the point of this show?
Seeing as it’s the season of “growth and natural evolution”, “what the heck is the point of this show?” is something that every podcast should be thinking about right now. Especially since this is also the time of year when new series and seasons are launching en-masse. For long-term indie podcasts it can be especially difficult to stand out from the crowd right now.
It is the perfect time to revisit what makes your podcast as fresh and satisfying as stepping on a crunchy leaf.
Something I learned back in my early days of podcasting was from Girl In Space creator and Podcast Pro, Sarah Werner, about the power of a podcasts “Mission Statement”.
I generally dislike using this term because it feels so dang corporate but in essence, your podcast should always have a clear purpose. This should be something that every episode aims to prove, or do. This will ultimately help you develop episode concepts, decide on the right guests, and shape how you script a show.
Your podcasts purpose can evolve over time too, especially as your style and interests change and your show grows along with you.
Sometime your niche will force you to shift your focus too. This happened with my own show, Alpaca My Bags, when the pandemic hit. Erin and I took a whole weekend to reflect on how to make a travel show when no one could even travel.
Luckily, the podcasting space can be very malluable and typically there is a lot of room for shows to flex different muscles and experiment. As a podcast listener, I love to feel like an insider as I witness a show evolving into it’s truest form. It’s exiting for audiences to witness creative and cleaver development!
Why not use the season of change to your advantage?
If your show has hit a plateau, feels a little dull, or simply isn’t fun to make anymore, it’s time to spend some quality time with your podcast.
Here are some questions to reflect on this month, along with how we’ve approached it with Alpaca My Bags for some context:
What are the main values of your podcast?
Think about the morals that shape the content you’re most proud of.
ie, Social responsibility, inclusion, learning.What are you using your podcast to do?
”Entertain” or “educate” isn’t good enough. Be specific.
ie, Encourage people to think about travel through a responsible and critical lens.What does success look like to you?
Avoid measuring success with download numbers and vanity metrics. Think about your big dreams for the show.
ie, Success is knowing that we’ve had some sort of positive impact - small or large.
Carefully considering these questions eventually led Erin and I to a tagline for our podcast that has also made it really easy for us to market and plan episodes around: a podcast about traveling in a way that’s better for people and the planet.
So, is your podcasts purpose in need of a reset?
Finally, in a market that’s so saturated and a period of time filled with new content, there’s another question to ask yourself:
Is there a market for your podcast? If so, how do you know?
More on that from Dan Misener…
Thoughts from the ecosystem:
Dan Misener thinks the era of one-size-fits-all podcast growth is over.
Dan Misener is the Audience Development King of Canada (in my humble opinion) and has made his mark through many of the heavyweights in the Canadian podcasting ecosystem, from CBC Radio to Pacific Content and now, to co-founding Bumper, a podcast growth agency.
He’s also the creator of the national-treasure podcast, Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids.
Over the last few years, Dan’s been doing a ton of fascinating and time-consuming research into the landscape of podcast audiences.
I talked to him to get his insights on finding your podcasts market, how to understand your “podcast neighbourhood”, and the reality of growing your show in today’s podcasting environment.
In true Canadian fashion, Dan is also a very, very, very nice person, and I’m grateful that he answered my very laymen questions with such grace.
This conversation has been condensed for brevity.
Congratulations on launching Bumper this summer! Where’s your head at these days in terms of audience growth?
The era of one-size-fits-all podcast growth advice is over. I have spent the last month talking to independent podcasters, some of the largest networks on planet earth and many people in between, and they are frustrated by one-size-fits-all growth advice.
This frustration that I have seen industry wide with tips, tricks, vague or overly generic advice has really strengthened this belief that I have that podcast strategy or audience development work should be an increasingly important part of what podcasters are thinking about.
Your path to 10 million downloads is gonna be very different than somebody else's path to 10 million downloads. If you're gonna grow an audience, you need to put together a customized plan.
Take into account your show, your intended audiences, the kinds of stories and guests that you want to focus on, and your constraints — whether those be time or finances or who you have on your team.
Researching “podcast neighbourhoods” is something that you've been working on.
From what I understand, podcast neighbourhoods are based on how podcast audiences are connected to eachother. Like what is recommended when you scroll down on a show on Apple Podcasts for example, and see “You Might Also Like”. Am I missing any pieces here?
A couple. You're absolutely right that a podcast neighborhood is a very specialized kind of map that shows clusters of podcasts — individual shows grouped together by common audiences.
But beyond the clusters of shows or “neighborhoods of shows” as I like to call them, there's so much information that you can layer on top.
So for example, if we were to look at shows in the technology category, there are very clear neighborhoods based on broad subject areas. Technology shows for gadget enthusiasts, technology shows for crypto enthusiasts, technology shows for software developers, technology shows for cybersecurity professionals.
There are all of these different constituent audiences. Once you've got these clusters of shows or neighborhoods of shows, you can then layer on additional information. Things like audience reach — which ones have the biggest audiences?
You can layer on some of the technological capabilities — which ones have the Chartable or the pod sites prefix installed on them?
You can take a list of shows or a neighborhood of shows and you can layer on demographic information, right? So is there a gender skew?
A podcast neighborhood in some ways raises more questions than it answers, but it's a great jumping off point for research into the specific audience you want to reach or the cohort of shows that you think you're competing with.
I was wondering about my own show and where it sits in a neighborhood. I noticed on both Apple Podcasts and Spotify that even though the show is four years old, it didn't have any other shows that were being recommended around it.
Is my podcast just sitting in the ether on both of these platforms where it's not connected to any community?
I think there are a few things worth calling out here. The first one is that, in Apple Podcasts, if you scroll to the bottom of a podcast page sometimes, but not always, you will get a list of shows called, “You Might Also Like”. It's a recommendation system, but it's also built on actual listener behaviors. Those lists are different country to country.
So if you're looking at the list of recommended shows in Australia, it's different than Canada. There's a territorial lens on this.
And when I've done big research projects into this in the past, one of the things I learned is that not all shows have those connections displayed. It doesn't mean your show is sitting in the ether.
My suspicion is that there's some threshold of audience size that you need to hit in order for Apple to feel confident in recommending other shows based on your show.
You’ve reported that the big four podcast neighbourhoods in Canada were in sports podcasts, French language podcasts, personal finance podcasts, and news and current affairs podcasts. Are you seeing any new trends in terms of neighbourhoods that are growing?
It's been a while since I last looked at the Canadian landscape, but one thing I will point out is that with this kind of neighborhood analysis that is regional or broken down country by country, territory by territory, there are inevitable factors related to seasonality. Sports is a really good example of this. Similarly with news and current affairs; are we in an election?
Podcast neighborhoods are a tool that are really useful for making decisions, but they tend to be a representation of where the ecosystem is at any moment in time. It's a snapshot and you can compare snapshots over time.
Just because these neighborhoods are so giant doesn't mean that everyone needs to rush to make podcasts within these neighborhoods.
One of the most useful ways I've used podcast neighborhoods has been on new show development. You could build a neighborhood of the most popular shows within the technology category and while that might help you understand how audiences are currently served, looking at what's not on the map is maybe more important. Who are the audiences who are underserved?
It's not hard to find large groups of popular [technology] shows mostly hosted by dudes. When you look at what's not there; not a lot of storytelling shows. Not a lot of historically focused shows. Not a lot of game shows.
When you're developing a new show or you're trying to build a show format for a particular audience, I've found podcast neighborhoods are useful in part by looking at what's on the map, but maybe more useful is what's missing.
Catch Dan’s talk about Canada’s home grown hits and podcast neighbourhoods in more detail from Radio Active 2022 below.
Check out this Canadian Indie: Darts and Letters
A left podcast about arts & letters, but for folks who might hack a dart.
Darts and Letters does a wonderful job making intellectual, political, and highly-nerdy concepts super digestible. They even feel cool.
This is especially the case when it comes to the first episode of their new three-part series about Technocracy, featuring THE (93-year-old!) “Father of Modern Linguistics”, Noam Chomsky.
The first half of the first episode is a super engaging, documentary-style look at the history of Technocracy and its influence on our political landscapes. The second half is a suprisingly light-hearted interview with Chomsky as he explains how Technocracy has been addressed across all political parties, and why its so important to him to be an accessible resource to everyone, from college activist groups to indie podcasts.
True North Podcast Feature: Coffee With My Ma
Radical activist mother, Kahentinetha Horn, tells stories of her very long adventurous life.
We can learn so much about the world and the people in it by hearing about someone’s lived experience. Coffee With My Ma is the best opportunity to understand what it was like growing up as a young Indigenous woman in Canada through the mid-to-late 20th century.
Each episode, hear Kaniehtiio Horn (Letterkenny, and Diggstown Actor) sit down in her Ma, Kahentinetha Horn, as she recounts a story that shaped her. Typically they’re pretty hilarious, like the time she took the bus to Ottawa to see Elvis in 1957, or what happened when she went to Europe for the first time on exchange (my personal fav).
The show is also produced is a beautifully intimate way: recorded straight from her Ma’s living room, sometimes from a creeky chair, and usually with Kaniehtiio butting in to remind her Ma where she is in the story. It feels like you’re right there with them.
As Kaniehtiio poetically put it in one episode, her mom is the “Female Native Forrest Gump”. This podcast is, in the most humble, enjoyable, and low-key sense, an experience.
Opportunities:
The 4th annual Afros and Audio Podcast Festival is October 22-23! The conference is being hosted in Philadelphia, PA, but good news for Canadians: you can get virtual tickets too! More info here.
If you've ever made a trailer for a podcast that never came to fruition, it now has a home at the Trailer Park Podcast (launching soon). Submit it here.
Looking for support in your cross-promotion efforts? Don’t forget to submit your podcast to Tink Media’s incredible Podcast Promo Swap database! Find countless shows along with their contact info and download stats who are open to opportunties to collaborate.
Submit for the Podcast Spotlight Series with Discover Pods! Discover Pods is highlighting podcasts and the people behind them on their blog. Heads up, there is a fee to submit! Submit here.
What’s going on in Canada’s podcast ecosystem:
MUST LISTEN: Remember Jodi Krangle from the last issue? Well, one of her recent episodes of Audio Branding is for anyone who wants to be a guest on another podcast — especially if you’re actively working on some cross-over campaigns with fellow pods. Listen to “Sounding Your Best As A Podcast Guest” here.
MUST LISTEN: Can AI make a high-quality podcast? Stacey Copeland, Supervising Producer at Amplify Podcast Network and Ph.D. Candidate at Simon Fraser University, recently appeared on Podfly’s new six-episode series, How Does Tomorrow Sound?, to discuss the intersection of AI and podcasting.
NEW SHOW ALERT: Freelance journalist and national bad-ass, Nora Loreto, has a new podcast, 30 Wood. The podcast features Fernwood authors, their ideas, and why Canada needs radical publishing. It launches October 5th, tomorrow! Catch the trailer now!
CANADIAN INDUSTRY NEWS: The Quill/CoHost team has released the podcast industry’s first State of Branded Podcasts Report. The team analyzed over 400 branded podcasts, and in the report they compare B2B vs. B2C branded shows, what kinds of formats and lengths perform best, and provide plenty more fascinating insights.
CANADIAN INDUSTRY NEWS: A collective of Canadian podcasters including myself, JAR Audio, Vocal Fry Studios, CBC Podcasts, Pacific Content, Pod News, Signal Hill Insights, and Pattison Media have come together to request that International Podcast Day, which falls on the same day as Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (September 30th), be moved to a different day. I chatted with Dave and Steve, the kind folks at IPD, about this before my presentation on Friday and they were pretty receptive to it but we need all hands on deck! Email or tweet them and hopefully we can get next year’s celebration moved to a day that works for Canada.
GLOBAL INDUSTRY NEWS: Everyone’s talking about Nick Quah’s latest article on Vulture, Podcasting Is Just Radio Now, because it brought up a lot of bold statements about whether podcasts can produce a “blockbuster” anymore. Me, Skye Pillsbury, and a number of other podcasting people think that “podcast blockbusters” is a tone-deaf idea. I’m curious to hear what you think!
GLOBAL INDUSTRY NEWS: American Podcast journalist, Ashley Carman, reported that podcast companies, iHeart in particular, are buying millions of listens by auto-playing episodes in free mobile game ads. How the heck can indies compete with that? And, as many of us at Vocal Fry Studios were pondering on Slack: isn’t this fraud???
WATCH: Last week, I presented No More Mr. Nice Pod on behalf of Canada for International Podcast Day! Incase you missed it, you can check out the replay on YouTube, where I unpack why I believe Canada is on it’s way to becoming a global leader in podcasting and the things we need to take of in order to truly get there.
LIVE SHOW: Canada’s very own breaking true crime news icons, Angelina and Aurora of Murder Murder News, are doing their first ever live show at the Pacific Northwest True Crime Fest in Seattle on October 9th at 10:45am! Congratulations friends! They also have a code for 15% off festival tickets: MM15
In personal news, I turn 30 this month! Yes, your girl is a Libra.
One of my favourite things to do is find all the free birthday give-aways as I can. So please send your very Canadian (and probably very Ontarian) free-birthday-item tips so I can start planning my day accordingly! Mainly, where can I get free ice cream?
I’m also trying to find an organization that supports under-funded podcasters in Canada for a birthday fundraiser. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!
Finally, a word from Joe…
Thanks for supporting Pod the North, I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks!
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Kattie @podkatt
Hadn’t heard or thought about podcast neighbourhoods before.
Thanks for the great interview (and newsletter) Kattie. And happy birthday month!!