Raising a Glass to Todd Cochran: Podcasting Pioneer

Hey there, podcaster or future podcaster?

I have some bad news.

Yesterday I learned that my friend of 21 years, Todd Cochran, died suddenly.

This is the man who wrote the very first book on podcasting.

And what's interesting is I went looking for a picture of Todd and I, and there isn't one.

Why now there's a picture of us in a group?

Because you always think that person is there and I'll see Todd at the next event and you know, I'll do it then.

But 21 years, I never took a picture with a guy.

You see Todd.

Todd was a character, like, straight up, like, character.

So unique.

And there will never be another Todd Cochrane.

And at every event I went to, I would end up at a table with Todd and the Robs.

By that I mean Rob Greenlee and Rob Walch and other OGs, as they say.

And it was always great to catch up with Todd and we would all share our insights with the goal of making sure the podcast space not our own companies.

But is podcasting going to be okay?

And I will remember Todd as a super courageous advocate for the independent podcaster.

At one point, he would get deals like actual sponsors by grouping a bunch of shows together.

So he'd get a bunch of golfing shows together or a bunch of women's shows together because he wanted to see the indies, as he called them, make some money.

And I was one of those indies.

And it was one of the first times I ever made money with a podcast.

But the thing that most people don't realize, that was a huge nightmare of paperwork, and that wouldn't have happened without Todd.

In fact, on a recent show, he talked about how he wouldn't do a deal where podcasters made less than 70% of the revenue, where other companies are taking deals of 50% or less.

And not Todd the podcaster must be paid.

I love the fact that he had a wider view of the podcast space as the CEO of BluBrry, and he was always willing to share what he saw.

My favorite phrase to hear from Todd.

Was, well, I probably shouldn't say this.

But because you knew whatever was coming was going to be a doozy.

He was great.

He was kind of horrible at keeping secrets in a way.

But when you hear that stat, most podcasters don't make it past episode seven.

That was first delivered at some sort of Ohio meetup thing.

And that was Todd Cochran that shared that.

And he would go back and check every now and then, but he was always willing to share.

He was always open to share.

If there was a problem so that we could all solve it together.

Todd was the man behind the podcast Awards.

Now the full name of that is the People's Choice Podcast Awards.

And when some shows didn't win, and I'm not making this up about a podcast award, he received death threats.

Yeah.

Did it stop him from holding the awards next year?

No.

And Todd earned next to nothing for doing those awards.

But he did it again.

Noticing a pattern yet he did it for the indies.

Lots of work again for next to no pay, as long as the indie podcaster would benefit.

One of my favorite memories of Todd was way back at the New Media Expo.

So this is, I don't know, 10 years ago.

I was the head of that, the podcast track back then and there was an off site party at a bar.

Well, I was running the track, so I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

I got there late and the way this bar was, it was kind of almost on a hill.

And so you walked up this hill, that was the parking lot, and then there were like two or three cement steps and then there was a door.

And so as I walked up, Todd came barreling out of the bar.

And I believe the old sailor had had a spirit or two.

And he was standing on those steps.

I'm standing down in the parking lot.

So Todd looks like he's 10ft tall.

And they had been talking about bigger companies getting into podcasting.

And before I could even say hello, Todd raised his fist in the air and shouted, there's a fox in the henhouse, boys.

Viva la levolution.

So there was Todd, larger than life, fist in the air, up against the dark Vegas sky, fighting for the indies.

There will never be another Todd Cochran.

So rest in peace, my friend.

And what I found because I was the head of podcasting at the New Media Expo is Todd did a talk about his then 10 years in the podcasting space.

And in honor of Todd, I'm going to play this unedited.

Good morning everyone.

And I've got a little bit of a horse throat.

Partied a little too hard last night, but we'll get through.

I wanted to take you guys today on a journey.

10 years, 1,000 episodes, and really kind of everything in between.

I'm going to be sharing with you today a couple things that I have never in 10 years of podcasting revealed, so you get a treat.

I do ask when we get to the financial slides that you don't take a picture of them.

And there's to be some stuff up there that you'll understand why when we get there.

Other than that, I'm sure probably these slides are going to become available at some point.

But if you want these slides, you can email me as well.

Those of you don't know me, again, my name is Todd Cochran.

EekNews is my Twitter account.

CEOAWO.com is the email address that you can email me at.

Do a couple shows geeknewcentral.com is the flagship show I started in October 2004, and newmediashow.com is the show I do with my co host Rob Greenlee.

We do that every week when I'm home in Hawaii.

And of course I'm the guy behind raw voice and blueberry.com and of course with my team as well.

So currently where the stats sit, I'm at 1024 episodes, 82 new media show interviews, 640 video interviews.

And I've been at this 10 years, 6 months and 19 days.

So I think I am the oldest podcaster at New Media show.

So I don't know if anyone else is.

There's only a few left in the space that started when I did.

So what does that all equal to?

That equals to a lot of work, 7,291 hours in my studio, which equals to 303 days of my life creating content.

Do you think so if you think about that over 10 years and you think about your wives or your spouses or your significant others, that's a lot of time to be in the studio.

I do this Monday, Thursday, Saturday at 6:00am Hawaiian Standard Time.

But the thing I want to point out here is as you're going to be doing your shows, you got to get cooperation of your spouses or significant others.

We do not put anything on the calendar for Monday and Thursday night.

We have not done put anything on the calendar for 10 years for Monday and Thursday night.

Now I had a graduation I had to go to exception, death in a family exception.

But other than that, very few others.

So I just want to give you some perspective.

Over 10 years I've had over 28,000 listener comments, plus 800 audio comments.

This is going to lead into the stuff I'm going to talk about here in a few minutes about engagement and my family.

And we'll talk about that in detail.

That's the number one of the numbers that I haven't publicly talked about too much.

That's how many downloads my creative shows have received over 10 years.

So I started with zero, just like everyone else.

And over Time built that up.

And I'm going to share today some strategies with you to build that kind of a number over 10 years.

And it is possible.

And I'm going to say this a couple times today.

I walk the walk and I talk the talk.

Most people don't know this, but I do not take a salary from Raw Voice.

I live in Hawaii on my military retirement and my podcast.

And I do that for one reason only.

If I'm going to be in this space helping podcasters succeed in this space, if I can't do it, nobody can with the resources I have available.

So today I'm going to talk about that journey, talk about the relationships I've had, talk about the engagement, going to talk about the mistakes, because there's been some of those.

I'm going to talk about the money.

I think that's important.

And a lot of people talk about money and talk about money over the years, but they say, oh, I made this much money, but I put some sheet on a website and say that their financial advisor has signed it off.

But very few people have actually shown you a check.

So today I'm going to show you a couple of checks.

And I'm not doing this to brag.

I want to do this specifically for you guys to understand what is possible.

I've never done this before.

I've actually consoled with my mom on this.

I said, should I talk about the money?

She said, don't talk about the money.

She said, it'll come across arrogant.

But I think it's important at this stage in the podcasting sphere for those of you that are doing this, to understand what is potential.

So we'll get into that in a little bit.

I want to talk about the presentation and the future, so the history.

In 2004, I got hurt pretty bad in Bahrain.

I'm prior military.

I spent 24 years in the US Navy, and I sustained an injury in Bahrain that was of my own doing, not because of a military action.

Spent 13 days in the hospital, could no longer fly an airplane or in an airplane and was grounded.

And I was sent to Waco, Texas to babysit some airplanes.

I was the contract liaison that was there to protect your taxpayer dollars from being spent unwisely, which often happens.

And I was stuck in a hotel room because I was wearing a clamshell.

And if you've ever seen somebody wearing one of Those, when it's 105 degrees, it's not cool, it's hot.

And so I had nothing better to do but sit in my hotel room and surf the net.

I was a blogger, not a great blogger.

And I heard Dave Winder and Adam Curry on their podcast talking about this thing called podcasting.

Three days later, I was a podcaster again in that hotel room.

Recorded my first few episodes there using a lab tech headset.

Really not knowing what to do.

Made a bunch of mistakes by playing some.

All right, I used AC DC in my intro.

Had a great time.

Those episodes have been since edited.

But what happened was incredible.

I had essentially, again, being a bad blogger, maybe 300 people come to my website a day.

Really, within about 60 days, we went from zero to 45,000 listeners.

And at the time, there was no Blueberry podcast hosting.

There was no Libsyn.

We had to find bandwidth.

And what we did was we slapped our credit card down and bought multiple economy hosting plans.

And every show, I would publish the media on one, burn the bandwidth, move the media file to another one, and do that consecutively for 30 days.

I think at one time I had like 50, 15 shared hosting accounts just to deliver the bandwidth.

That continued to grow.

And In December of 2014, 2004, I got this email from this group called Wiley Publishing asking, hey, we want you to write a book on podcasting.

And I said, well, my reply was, granted, I'm not a good blogger.

You've got to be beeping me.

They replied back, no, we're not beeping you.

We want you to write a book.

And that really kind of set the stage for the book I wrote on podcasting, which is now really long in a tooth.

But I announced that book on show 69.

And I want to talk about the dynamics of podcasting.

At that time, there was the anti money crowd.

If you took money, if you did anything for this, you were evil.

It was this pure.

This is supposed to be this pure content.

You weren't supposed to make money off this.

And I got paid by Wiley to do this book.

Show 69, announced it to my audience.

And because I had a lot of podcasters following me, my audience at the time was probably close to 75 or 80,000.

And those people are so pissed off that I lost 50% of my audience on show 69.

That was a turning point for me because I got to thinking a little bit about the audience.

Well, you don't talk about that publicly on the show.

You just kind of figure that out.

There was no one to consult with, so I consulted with myself and said, fine, I can do it without him.

Let's go.

In Hawaii, we have this word called, ohana, And I'm going to talk about this word a lot because I need you guys to really think about your audience.

Ohana is family.

And when I'm talking to my audience and sharing with them the topics that I do, I in my mind use the analogy that they are sitting right across from me in a table and we're having a one on one conversation.

Well, obviously it's not, it's me talking to them, but the ohana factor, the family factor, has played a big part in my show's growth.

I treat and respect my audience as if they were very close family members.

Sister, a brother, a mother, grandfather.

That's the way I think about my audience.

At the same time, at a certain point, I even love my audience.

I still do.

I shouldn't say at some point, I do love my audience.

And that has helped through the rough times when you're, you know, you haven't had enough sleep, you do the show when you've had a propensity to destroy the English language.

The ohana loves you, they laugh with you, they move on, and just like good friends do, they laugh with you and they bust you on email.

So that was part of that engagement factor.

But something big happened in July of 2005.

My wife had given me a two year old, a two year timeline.

I had done a couple of businesses before the podcasting thing.

Any of you ever owned a boat?

Okay, you put a lot of money in a boat, right?

It's a money pit, right?

Well, I had some money pit hobbies.

And when I told my wife after I came back from Texas that time, hey, honey, I got a new thing going to do this podcasting thing and she does this.

You got two years for what?

To make this work and make money.

Because I asked her for Monday and Thursday every single week.

So what does a good husband do?

Yes, dear, two years.

So I was saved.

In July 2005, GoDaddy called me and said, we want to sponsor your show.

And from that, this company, without this company, I firmly believe, and without Adam Curry and Dave Weiner, without that those three elements, this podcasting space today would not be what it is today.

GoDaddy is still my sponsor.

But what really set things in motion, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on my business.

That's not we're here to talk about, but I want to just talk about the dynamic of that.

She called me a month into the campaign.

She says, todd, do you know anyone else will do advertising with us?

I was an electronics technician I wasn't a business guy and I said, hmm, yeah, I do.

Business was born.

So on my show, into my ohana, I said, I need a lawyer, I need a graphics guy, I need a programmer.

And what else?

Dev.

From that call, nine people got on a phone call.

Four people dropped off after.

Five people dropped off that call after asked for money because I wanted people to commit cash.

And then Raw Voice was born from a question that was asked.

So my point here to you in this particular slide, do not ever allow an opportunity to pass in which could further enhance your bottom line or affect your show.

Be listening for those signals because they will come and they'll come at the most crazy time in your life.

You have to listen for them and if you do, it could change the outcome of what your show is about and whether or not you quit your day job.

So got a sponsor, got to build an audience.

So I went into audience building mode.

So I'm doing this podcast on tech and I'm sorry, I think I'm blowing on this mic.

I said, what can I do to reach more people in my category?

A good friend, Andy McCaskey, at the time, we'd started a network called tech podcast together.

13 guys trying to figure out how to work together.

And he said, tom, let's go to the Consumer Electronics Show.

Let's go there and talk to the people we talk about.

So from that point, I started going to CES and NAB every year, reaching down deep into my pocket in my credit card when I didn't necessarily have the budget to do it to go to where the people I talk about were.

And over 10 years, I have developed a relationship with almost every top secret level name in the space.

And I have a reputation for giving them fair coverage, honest feedback.

If I see something I don't like, I tell them.

And over that time, because I have these relationships with these folks that are at these events, doors open up.

So whatever your topic of your content may be, takeaway here is that you need to find a way to build your audience.

And the way I was building my audience was bringing, whoa, way cool stuff to them that they couldn't go otherwise.

So if you're doing basket weaving, your audience can't go to the Basking Basket Weaving trade show, but you are the basket weaving expert.

So you go to the basket weaving trade show and you talk to all these vendors and you make relationships and you bring that content back to your audience because they couldn't be there for you or they couldn't be there themselves.

And you're going to build audience.

And this is what I use as one of my primary building audience tools is I go to get content and I go, I don't make them come to me, I go get it and I make relationships.

So this building is going on.

On the anniversary of my 200 show, I'm sitting at work.

I was still active duty Navy at the time, and the phone rang.

Now that evening I'm supposed to be recording episode 200 phone rang and I picked it up.

It was my mom.

And she informed me my father had died in an automobile accident.

So kind of ironic.

Show 200 dad dies.

We're not going to do a show, obviously going to get on an airplane and go home.

But when I went to the house, I told my mom, I told my wife, I said, I got to tell the ohana.

So I recorded a five minute short video explaining what was going on, told them there would be no show for 10 days and what's up?

Remember, I have a relationship with my audience.

I share my life, I share what I do.

We have this relationship right along with the content.

A lot of people don't do that.

I got 2,800 condolence emails.

I didn't read any of them until I got back after 10 days, but I read and responded to every last one of them.

That was therapy for losing a father.

And having an ohana that worried about you or enough to send 2,800 emails told me that we were doing something right in the relationship we had with the audience.

So I'm just going to tell you guys, this relationship you guys have with your audience is going to be the most important, important thing you ever do in your podcast.

You know, you have the guest, they're going to come on and talk to you, but don't forget about them.

You have to always remember about, you know, think about your family again, ohana.

So oftentimes podcasters are speaking into the mic, but they forget and maybe all of you don't.

But just remember you are right here, you're right between, you know, you're plugged into them.

So respect their time and know that, you know, you are talking to them in their head.

I think often as we just talk, and I'm guilty that sometimes I just talk.

Don't talk, talk to them and remember that you're talking to them.

Some of the best radio broadcasters in the world, when they're talking on the radio, you think they're talking to me.

So try to keep that in there.

Several books out and I'M sorry I don't have any references for you, but there's some books out there from the radio broadcasting industry that helps you develop skills to be able to get into their head and be in their head.

Trust Gode was my sponsor, right?

I always told the bad things about GoDaddy.

If GoDaddy did something bad, Bill Parsons shot an elephant, went on the Internet.

GoDaddy was exploiting women on their commercials.

GoDaddy was doing some other things with some legislation.

I never held back.

I did it in a respectful way and they understood my opinion.

At the same time, I would get the VP on the phone, they would be on my show, we'd talk about the issue and we work through it.

So even though my sponsor was doing a couple of things I did not like, we dealt with that trust issue from a sponsorship standpoint while at the same time we dealt with other issues.

If there was a product I didn't like, I told it the way it was.

I had many, many, many C level executives call me and say, why did you just tear my product apart?

I said, well it sucks, you know, and that built trust.

Even with those C level relationships I had.

Well, for some crazy reason I decided to do video too.

And this video thing almost destroyed me.

I've talked about this two, three years ago.

Have any of you get into one of my sessions before?

So two or three years ago?

Well, when I started video, I started talking to the camera and talking to the screen.

Started saying, talking about, hey, hey, look at what I'm showing you guys right now.

I'm showing a website, talking about a product, I'm talking to the screen and like I forgot they were listening.

70% were listening, 30% were watching.

And all of a sudden, guess what I saw?

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, down with the numbers.

Because I was no longer talking to them.

I was showing them.

And how could the audio audience be shown?

They were listening.

So if you do video, don't forget, for God's sake, don't forget that the audio audience is listening.

I catch myself even today and it's a fine line you have to play if you're going to add video to your show to remember to talk to the audio listeners.

This goes by I don't have the ball.

That's basically kind of a Navy jargon.

When the guy's coming in to fly into a carrier, he's on approach, he says, I've got the ball.

That means he's on glide path, he's on glidescope and he's going to be able to land well, I lost the ball for a while and it hurt me.

So this is one of the mistakes I made.

I don't want you guys to make, but video made me a better podcaster.

I've.

I don't edit, start, stop.

I do a little processing, I encode the mp3, mp4, I'm done.

I don't edit ums, has, who's, has, what's, farts, burps, whatever, they stay in.

But because I was doing video, it made me prepare more.

So you don't have to put your video online, but turn on your webcam and record yourself while you're doing your audio podcast.

And if you're conscious of that, what you're going to find is in two to three months, you're going to be a much, much better podcaster because you're more conscious of what you're saying because you're assuming someone's watching you.

I went in full head.

I just went live immediately and I just said, okay, let's go.

And I got the comments from the audiences that sucked.

That was bad.

What did you do that for?

You know, so it made me a better podcaster over time, and I truly believe it was probably what allowed me to take my show to the next level of listenership.

Back up a little bit.

I made a verbal commitment to my audience that I was quitting my day job while I was being forced to retire from the Navy.

So I had no choice.

I had a.

Had a line set out there by Uncle Sam and.

But I decided at that point I was gonna go full time.

So retire from the Navy, be a full time podcaster.

And I verbally told the audience, this is what we're gonna do.

And my wife's like, are you crazy?

You know, she's like, looking at the checks.

Are you crazy?

We're leaving Hawaii, dude.

We gonna go full time.

I'm like, yes, we are.

And I quit my day job and I made my goal, but because I verbalized it.

And this is just a common thing that all of us can do to improve ourselves.

But once you make the commitment to the audience, you just do not want to be that guy, to say, well, I have to go get a job, you know, at least I didn't.

My pride was too big.

All right, let's talk a little bit about the sponsors hate love relationship.

They'll make you try to do stuff that you don't want to do.

You have to negotiate everything that you do with sponsors.

It can be tough at times.

I've had knock em, drag them out fights with advertisers.

When I change media buyers and they want to change stuff up.

And I've held to my guns on some, many instances, not all.

Sometimes I've lost.

Lost.

But that sponsor relationship has to be healthy, just like any other family relationship.

And I treat it as such.

So again, I said I talk the talk and walk the walk.

And then again, the reason why I've done this is to make you guys understand that you can do it too.

So this is where we're going to start talking about money.

And again, I'm just being.

I'm just wanting you guys to know that I'm trying to show to you what is possible.

This is not to brag, but this is to give you an indication of what can be done over 10 years of hard work.

But I want to set the story.

GoDaddy became a sponsor in July of 2005.

I had additional sponsors like Citrix, GoToMeeting and just a variety, maybe 20, 30 different sponsors over the years.

And GoDaddy was there month after month.

Now you think, okay, after 10 years, Todd, how is it possible that you're still getting enough results for the advertiser for them to continue to pay you?

I've gotten a base from godaddy from the very beginning.

They pay me a base amount if I don't deliver them a customer one.

But they know that I'm gonna deliver customers.

I on average deliver 350 to 400 brand new customers to GoDaddy every month.

Okay.

I told that to the dreamhost guy the other day and he about flipped out.

So you do that over 10 years and there's a relationship that can become very healthy.

They listen to you when they do a product rollout.

That's bad.

But there was a thing that changed recently.

They weren't giving me renewal codes, so I couldn't.

The folks that were already customers of mine, I couldn't give them renewal codes.

And we're still battling over that.

But here's my lifetime podcast earnings.

Okay, so this is multiple sponsors.

Some years have been higher than others.

Now, I told you about that longevity, right?

That longevity of keeping a sponsor after 10 years.

That was what the last six months looked like.

Now, people throw numbers up on the wall all the time.

So I'm going to very quickly.

No pictures on the next two slides, please.

There's a check, 6150 Podcast Connect.

That's the company I do business under.

There's a second check, 7950 for that was for whatever month it was.

But it was two of those months, of those six.

So that is possible.

Doing this business.

I have never in 10 years ever told anyone how much money I've ever made on podcasting.

You guys are the first.

But I want you to understand it's possible.

A couple months ago, I told my wife I wanna retire when I'm 60.

And she goes with this.

Podcasting doesn't work out.

You have plan B?

Hmm, no.

So you need to make a plan B.

So I've been over the past 60 days looking at making sure that I can take myself out to retirement.

I'm not telling you, go quit your day job, but I'm going to tell you that you have the potential to supplement your income in such a way, if you continue to do your show, that you can increase your happiness at retirement.

Time just takes a lot of hard work.

If you have a show that you've been doing for two or three years and it's not working, it is time to change what you're doing and try something else in the podcasting space.

Change, experiment, adjust.

You have to do something.

You got to keep that ball rolling.

Success is never guaranteed, but you guys saw that number earlier.

How much do you think I've reinvested into my show?

So your reinvestment can be 10% of what you bring in a year?

My reinvestment every year is probably 20 to $40,000.

I reinvest into my show.

Where does that money go?

I take a team of 15 to CES to cover the show.

That's a 20 or $25,000 bill to do that.

I take a studio.

You guys come down the escalators where They've got the NAB Bookstore right outside of North Hall.

I have that 10 by 30 space.

I have a studio set up there.

I interview all these C level executives.

How did I start off?

I walked with a microphone in the hall.

Can I have an interview, sir?

That's how I started.

I built over time.

But I invest in my show because I know that I have to continue to bring content to my audience.

How am I doing for time?

12 o'.

Clock.

What time do I have to.

I got.

We can go long.

No one's coming after us.

But I'll.

I'll hurry this up.

Success isn't guaranteed, but you can really do a lot to make yourself successful.

And the sustainability is.

Is big.

You have to continue to work hard to build your audience.

I think all of you already know that as well.

And you have to Stay relevant.

I try to learn everything I can about the space.

If you get in the rut of just doing your show and not keeping abreast, so what's going on, that changes.

You have to embrace everything that's new.

Try it, throw it up against the wall and see if it works.

And you have to stay motivated.

Sometimes that's jumping jacks before a show.

Sometimes that's a Red Bull.

Sometimes that's a couple cups of coffee.

Whatever it is, when you sit down in the chair to do that show, it's time to be on your A game.

And I get crap when I'm not.

The audience says, hey, obviously you didn't get enough sleep, you know, but it's like a family member.

We talked about that ohana thing.

Have that relationship, and I expect that feedback from them.

And if I don't deliver a good show, I apologize.

They'll accept.

A family member will accept an apology.

But you have to have that relationship with the ohana or with your family of listeners to do that.

Now, I'm into experimenting.

Experimenting can be dangerous.

I had a rule that I would not change anything in my show.

In the format, I don't do one change every three months.

Well, I'm kind of rolled back in that a little bit.

I'm now experimenting a little bit more.

I'll do, like, one change for a month, and I'll see if it's caused an uptick.

So don't be afraid to experiment a little bit.

I did a segment on mobile devices.

The audience really didn't react to it that well.

So you have to experiment, try whatever it takes to make the show grow.

All right, I want to change hats just a little bit.

If you came to the state of the podcasting space yesterday, you heard, you know, saw some charts, got a few questions out, but I'm lucky I got this 100,000 votes view of the space.

And I'm often privy to things that never make the news stuff that the providers have to deal with.

And right now, I think we're looking pretty good, with a couple of exceptions.

We need 100,000 serials.

And who's going to create 100,000 serials?

Well, they're not out there, but there are 250,000 podcasters.

That's what's in the itunes directory, the serial podcast.

You didn't hear about serial.

Wow.

Not to call you out.

Serial is a podcast that was done that.

13 episodes, 72 million listeners.

Yeah.

So obviously I didn't listen to it, but I know a lot of people did.

But with those 250,000 podcasters, probably half of those are active, you know.

But we have a problem right now in the podcasting space.

Most of them are small shows.

And it troubles me when we have 5% of the 250,000 shows that are big.

Everyone really in this space today needs to start hunkering down and honing their trade.

That means investing in good audio equipment.

Even I have started editing a little bit, doing things to up the game of our overall production value.

And we got to grow these small shows, not necessarily into serials, but we need to grow the volume.

And the only way you can, guys can do that.

And I'm going to say that again, it's nothing to be ashamed of, having a small show, you know, because if you, if you work your day job, how many of you work for a boss that talks to more than 500 people?

Thousand people?

Most of us have bosses.

They don't talk to very many people.

We get to talk to a lot of people, even the small shows.

So don't again that respect and in their ears, don't forget that.

And with that, you can build upon it.

So we got to build those small shows.

We got to grow the space.

I'm going to talk about some problem areas.

If any of you are subscribed, if any of you are listed@blueberry.com you get our newsletter.

If any of you are subscribed to the Pottertainment magazine, it's available on the iPad.

Gary Leland puts together.

You have heard some of this stuff, but I'm going to share a couple of things with you that I have deep concerns on and there is a battle afoot.

I'll talk about that.

We are at the verge of potentially losing the trust of the media buyers.

And I'm going to say this frankly.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever lie about your numbers to a media buyer.

If you do, you're part of the problem.

If you're not using a reputable statistics service, and by reputable, in my opinion, Libsyn, podtrak and Bluberry, I trust those three, and I'm one of those.

As a disclaimer, I trust those three explicitly.

Other everyone else, nope, I don't.

And I have incidental evidence that I can't go into details on without potentially getting sued.

But I'm going to tell you, if you're bumping your numbers, you're part of the problem.

Don't ever do that.

It's causing the CPM rates in the podcasting space to plummet.

We have at least two Bad players in the space.

They're inflating their numbers to ridiculous levels, which is driving the ROI down, which is causing a ripple effect.

I reduced the number of podcasting campaigns I have doing with podcasters by 75% because I'm getting calls today from advertisers saying, I got a $6 cpm deal for you.

And I'm like, what?

Who are you getting that from?

And they tell me, okay, figured.

Click.

We went to an ieb.

Rob Voice is part of the Internet Interactive Advertising Bureau meeting this week, where the tech heads got a room.

And it wasn't a knife fight, but it was pretty close.

And there's a lot of discussion in the space.

We're trying to self police some of these bad characters and it's going to resolve itself, but we can't lose media buyers trust.

And I'll come back to that topic in just a second.

Another thing we got to do is we got to fix the Android growth issue.

Every one of you needs to be promoting Android on your show every episode, telling your iOS audience how to tell those Android listeners how to subscribe to podcasts.

And I don't want to make this a self promotion, but if you guys heard about what we announced on One Click, if you want details on that, I'll give you my card.

I'll be happy to email you the press release.

We think we've solved this.

We just need to get the developers on board.

My goal this year is to move the bar on Android by at least 5%.

IOS owns 87% of space right now.

We got to move that.

If we don't, we're not going to grow as a space.

This is a big one.

The corporations are coming.

They're going to be working with radio and the biggest shows.

And I might be wrong, they might eat my words, but frankly, I don't think they give a crap about the 95%.

That kind of sounds like a movement issue, right?

But it's not.

I don't think those corporations care about the 95%.

I may be wrong, but we have to be careful.

We have to.

We have to circle the wagons and make sure that we're reporting correctly, that we're not jumping on the new shiny thing because, oh, it might give me a higher reporting count.

I'm a corporation, so I guess I'm one of those.

But I've been here and I'm a podcaster and I love this space and I don't want anything to happen to it.

I don't want the media buyers to lose faith in the space.

I think there's real risk.

There's also every cycle there's opportunist.

If you hear someone that says something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Ask for proof for anyone that you work with or willing to write a check.

I had a slide in here I removed because it was a little bit inflammatory.

But if you're paying someone an annual or monthly fee to get advice, you better be getting your money's worth out of that advice.

And if you're not doing or making progress in what they say that they're intended to make you, in other words, if they have a plan for you and that plan is executing, you're not going where you need to go.

Then you need to think about changing ships.

Cheaters.

It goes back to the numbers.

Cheaters were again, a group of people trying to bump their numbers to sell themselves or their product by making themselves look bigger than they were, making false claims.

We just shut them down.

We shut them down at the Twitter bombing and some stuff that was going on.

We put filters in place.

Those cheaters have moved on to other systems and they are going to continue to say, oh, I got a million downloads this month, so it's not all doom and gloom.

So I'm almost done here.

The future.

Create rich, vibrant media.

Work on it very hard.

Work on your content.

Boost it up, make it better, make it sound good.

Invest in a mic.

Have a good preamp in front of it.

Don't always jump on the hundred dollar microphone.

You want something that makes you sound good.

Okay, sample mics.

Go into, you know, guitar center.

Play around with some mics.

Listen to the difference.

There is a difference in audio chains.

When you've actually invested in some gear.

Network, you got to network.

Can't do it by yourself no more.

You need 20 or 25 shows that you can wrap your arms around and work together as a team to move yourself forward.

Network of as many shows as you possibly can.

Make friends in every possible way.

Promote them.

They'll promote you because we build audience members by word of mouth.

And if you help them, they'll help you.

Network, network, network and protect your brand.

How many of you in here have your own.com?

oh, thank God it wasn't always that way.

So maybe my harping for 10 years has had some effect.

Protect your brand.

Have your own dot com, you know, and build it out.

If someone's intruding on your brand, doing a copycat thing, have a nice discussion with them.

You can't Nest if they, you know, you can't necessarily stop them, but sometimes you can protect your brand by just having a gentle conversation with a content creator and again, bring the content to your audience.

I go and I get content from other sources and I bring to it that I don't normally cover in my show.

So I've done 10, 24 episodes of my regular content, but I've also went out and got 600 additional pieces of content to bring to them for them to consume and stay on the site.

That's not part of my regular content.

I call that my special media events.

So bring special media to them.

That keeps them engaged, brings new people in, and use good metadata in your Google search in your blog post to be able to get Google to come in and build your audience.

I get about 30 to 50,000 Google search hits into my site every day.

Every place they land on my website, they can subscribe.

So If I have 30 to 50,000 people coming into the site every day and it's just 1% click, subscribe over 10 years, that gives you an idea what you can build.

But you got to get Google to your site and you're not going to do that without rich show notes, I think.

Finally, here.

Love your family.

Talk to them in their ears, have respect, and bring value.

Questions?

Go ahead.

I'm Kathy Stover with kathystover.com and I just want to thank you for being real and authentic with us here today.

A lot of times you go to events and meetings like this and not everybody speaks from their heart or tells truth.

And you did that.

Thank you very well today.

So I want to thank you for that.

Next question.

And we're all family here, so don't be afraid to come up and get the mic and.

Hi, Craig from Ingles Podcast.

I don't get why a podcaster would record live to hard drive when podcasting gives you the possibility to improve the products by editing.

Wouldn't that be better for the podcast and for the.

For the sponsors?

Yes.

If you're editing, it's better for the listeners and for the audience.

But in my situation, I bought gear that made me sound really good at the end.

So I invested in the hardware to help me limit the number of editing sessions I would have to do.

Should I edit?

Absolutely.

So maybe I'm not eating my own advice here completely, but I'm married, I have three kids.

You saw the number of hours I'm staying in the studio.

Sometimes there's a trade off.

I tried to offset that by putting in enough gear that when went in the mic and went on the recorder, it was as close to perfect as possible.

Next question.

Linda.

I'm Linda P. Jones from Be Wealthy and Smart, and I've had my podcast about a year.

I just learned here at the conference that none of the description words that we use show up in search engines.

It's only in the title.

So when you say rich show notes, are those showing up on Google Search is what you're saying?

And is that the show notes that we put on Libsyn, if Libsyn is our host?

Or are you saying on our website for.

First of all, you should just be using Libsyn only to host your media.

You shouldn't be on their site for your brand.

Well, no, I mean.

Oh, you have them hosting.

So in your blog, in your blog, your title and your description should not be a cut and paste.

You can have a couple things in there.

It's cut and paste, maybe a link to the media.

But everything else that's above and that talks about your show, you need to describe to Google what's in that content.

If that takes two paragraphs or three, do that.

Because Google is my friend, I've gotten impacted by doing some stuff at times.

I used to put 30 links in my blog link to every article I talked about.

I got penalized by Google because they thought I was building a link farm.

So now I added what's called a no follow tag to each of those links, and I've regained some of the lost Google traffic.

But at the top of that page where I put my show notes, I put as much detail as possible.

And Google's going to index that.

And over time, when you build people sending inbound stuff to you, it's just going to build that Google traffic, and a certain number of those folks are going to subscribe.

They should be able to subscribe from any page on your website.

Okay, great.

And my other question is to get started with advertisers.

I don't have a. I mean, I have a financial site, but I don't have something directly that I sell.

Yeah, I'd love to have a Fidelity or somebody sponsor me.

How would you suggest I approach them for that?

Okay, so they don't have an affiliate program.

Those relationships I made with vendors by going to them have led to a lot of sponsorships on my show.

So if you're interviewing those people, nurture those relationships.

And oftentimes they'll say, I want to be in her.

I want, I want us to advertise in her show.

That's what you can do yourself.

Financial products are tough.

You have to have all kinds of disclaimers, but it's possible.

But, you know, most of my sponsorships that I've done personally have been through the relationships I developed by reaching out and going to the content.

Does that answer your question?

And then you can, you know, you can use us, you can use Libsyn, you can use PodTrack, but we're dealing with a lot of people.

I like protecting my own bottom line, so do as much as you can on your own.

Anyone else?

Hang on one second.

I'll take it back.

I'm running around with it.

Okay?

Okay, thanks.

I came in a little bit late, so maybe you covered this.

If you did, I apologize.

No worries.

Did you cover your downloads, your numbers?

I saw the money part, so I wanted to do some calculations.

Awesome, thank you.

Okay, now I'll go back.

One more slide.

There's the episode count.

Got it.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

And I had a comment, actually, for the woman that was just speaking.

So I used to work at Wells Fargo and in the social media team, and we work very closely with the sponsorship group.

And I can tell you that to get anything done at a big company like that.

Right.

Requires hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and sign off of a lot of people who are paid a lot of money.

And so, you know, if it's not 50 or $100,000 deal, at least to them, it's not worth their time.

So that's just a comment.

This is where you need a network with 25 or 30 shows, and collectively, you may have enough money for her to write a check.

Companies like writing big checks.

I like big checks, you know, but they don't like writing small checks.

That's right.

Because it takes me as much time to put together a $1,000 deal.

Almost exactly the same amount of time to put together a $1,000 deal as it does $100,000 deal.

So we all like those $100,000 deals.

Matter of fact, we want them every week.

Go ahead.

Excuse me if this is a rehash, but if you could just do a couple sentences on what RawVoice.com is.

RawVoice is the parent company of Blueberry.com Blueberry.com is a community of podcasters.

We provide podcast hosting, podcast statistics, and tools for podcasters, including the PowerPress Podcasting Plugin.

Thanks.

So I hope you guys had a good time.

And we have more questions.

You want to stop?

Did we have any more?

Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm coming to him because no one's coming, so we can hang all the time.

I have two actual questions, if I could, and I'm John Sextro.

I have a couple of podcasts this Agile Life and iOS.

The first question is about the analytics and collecting your download numbers.

And you mentioned three that were trustworthy in your mind, can we trust Google and can we trust feedburner?

Feedburner's a page hit counter.

They haven't invested in feedburner analytics.

It's good for your RSS data, it's not good for your podcast data.

Google Analytics will give you good web data.

It'll show you the number of times that media file has been touched.

But unequivocally, it is absolutely not good to give you your download numbers.

Now, you might be able to do the math, how much bandwidth used, divide that into your show file size and you can maybe come up with a rough number.

But there's so many bots I think we have, just for the Twitter bombing alone, we implemented 140 filters.

It's insane.

It's the biggest filter set we've ever had to put in place.

And it was because every bot Apple indexes Twitter.

Why?

We don't know.

But their bot would touch, they would touch that media file.

Now, that one wasn't necessarily downloading it, but some bots, because they were using bitly codes, they were actually going out and downloading the media file, thinking it was a web page, trying to index it.

So some of the bots were stupid.

So it was actually costing people bandwidth.

Spreaker went to the point of actually throttling the Twitter, the Twitter spammers.

So, and also the way media is delivered, sometimes you could see 11 entries in a log file, which was on for someone that was not really used to looking at log data, that was actually one, even though there was 11 entries from the same IP.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Again and again and again.

And to the untrained eye, it looks like 11 and was actually 1.

So believe me, I want the numbers to be as big as they can be.

But I've had one saying for 10 years, I don't care what the number is, as long as I know what the number is.

And it may hurt people's egos.

We have people come our system all the time, and the first email I get after two weeks is, my numbers went down.

What did you guys do?

And it's like hate mail, you know, cussing at me over email.

What did you you guys are just broke.

No, it's not broke.

It's just you haven't been calculating correctly before.

I'm sorry, but your numbers aren't what they were.

Doesn't always happen.

But you know, I just.

And if you're not doing media buys, you don't need stuff stats.

Matter of fact, if you're not doing advertising, don't look at your stats.

Spend that time improving your trade, getting that content rich and vibrant.

You focus on the content and as the audience grows, the money will come.

Thank you.

So my second question is about cpm.

And CPM comes to us from television, it comes to us from radio, which are inherently flawed because you cannot actually collect the true number of people that are listening to a radio program or watching a TV show.

And I just wonder if we as podcasters have now inherited this flawed commercial sales model which isn't really based around value, it's based around numbers.

And if, you know, I don't like cpm.

When I sell commercials for my show, I don't typically sell cpm.

I have a low number of listeners and low being 2,000, 3,000 listeners per show.

But I don't sell them on CPM.

I sell them a value.

I sell them the expert voice that I have.

And we don't talk cpm.

And I think if you calculated it back into cpm you would see that I'm getting a lot more money for.

I'm sure you are the commercials than if I was taking a CPM approach.

So I just wanted to get your.

If the alignment is good with the sponsor, flat rate's great.

I think, I think flat rate is fantastic if you can get it.

My goal in having GoDaddy for 10 years was I didn't care about the 90 day run, I cared about the 10 year run.

I want them there for, you know, they've been with us for 10 years.

So we worked on the GoDaddy model was flat N CPA.

So based on the number of sales we got additional money for the CPA run.

Other deals we've done has been CPM deals.

We've done flat rate.

I think if you're a small podcaster and you get a flat rate with a vendor that directly aligns with your show, you should be able to demand a premium on that and that may back into a 40 or $45 CPM in the end.

CPM, CPA, flat rate.

The only thing that counts is at the end of the month when they look at the number of sales or if you've upticked their numbers, what they were expecting.

If you hit that metric, they'll renew every, every, every month.

So you know, that strategy is good for small podcaster go after that flat rate.

But you're going to have to really narrow and align perfectly with who you're going to be sponsoring.

And it's a product that will help you.

Now, one thing, I'll give you guys a little trick on.

For every sponsor, I create a dedicated landing page on my website.

Why Google?

Because I'm talking about that sponsor.

I've written some content in there about what I think.

So not only do I tell my ohanaglegeeknewcentral.com GoDaddy but GoDaddy goes to that page too.

I mean, Google goes to that page too.

So there could be some arbitrary traffic you're getting from Google.

Yeah, actually everything we do with the sponsors has a tracking code.

All the banners, all the links have.

And they can tell, believe me, they know that traffic came from a search engine because it came in and they can see how that path went.

These vendors, they know where that traffic's coming from.

And the folks that actually use the promo code in the actual page, that's the best.

That's the ones I want.

Because then they know there was a direct response.

I send them my site first.

That's where I tell my audience to go.

I have a link on the show notes to go now.

And here's the key to that, is that this is a long.

You know, my goal is to keep the sponsor for a long time, so oftentimes they'll tell me, all right, harrys.com todd or whatever.

Well, I want them to go to geeknowcentral.com Harry's and read about the product as well.

They can go direct, but some people catch it in their eyes, some people hear it in their ear, some people see it visually.

So I have banners, text, I have.

I get them all three ways.

Go ahead.

Hello, Todd, Am I on?

Yeah, thanks for being here.

Can you tell me your website?

Because I found a geeksnews.net There you go.

Okay, got it.

Geeksnews central.com Geek geek.

Geek geek.

I have one other question, if I may be so bold.

Sure.

Because I'm shopping for a podcast hosting site and of course I saw Libsyn and Blueberry over there.

Can you tell me why I would be swayed by Blueberry?

I mean, can I ask that question?

Are you guys okay with me answering this question?

Okay.

We believe that podcasters should control everything.

If I go out of business tomorrow.

PowerPress will still work.

Your website will still be up.

If my competitor goes out of business tomorrow, you know, how do you recover from that?

That site has had the same rss feed for 10 years.

I don't use feedburner.

I have incredible amount of traffic to that.

They'll say, oh, don't host your own RSS feed because it may not load.

They want you locked into their vertical.

Once you're in their system, they know you're.

It's a pain in the.

To leave.

So I say build your brand.

Use whatever.

There's other plugins.

You don't have to use ours.

Use whatever plugin.

Use whatever host you want.

But I'm just saying build your dot com from the ground up.

I think that's the best way.

Then syndicate everywhere.

Syndicate on SoundCloud, syndicate on all the other sites.

I'm on Stitcher, I'm on Spreaker, but I syndicate over there.

I don't host with them.

I have my primary location.

So you want to be able to grow your show over time.

I'm not saying anybody's going out of business, so don't write that down.

But I'm just saying that we believe that a podcaster should be able to control his own destiny.

It's a.

It's a part of our company.

DNA.

It's my DNA.

So my DNA focused into that.

It's a little more work.

I think she's going to go, hi.

Very informative session.

Thank you.

You mentioned cereals.

Cereal.

The cereal podcast.

Cereal podcast, yeah.

What area do you think the industry.

Is looking for more information in?

Is it more exercise, more business?

People love to listen to stories.

Stories.

Syria was a story.

It was Classic Journalism 101.

It was investigative journalism.

They went out and built a series of investigative reports that was very intriguing.

So people love a story.

So you have to be a storyteller in your shows.

I tell stories all the time in my show.

I stop halfway through the tech content.

I get on a tangent, talk about something.

You know, I blast the people I'm talking about.

I praise them.

But if we can become good storytellers and do good investigative work on the content that we're putting on.

People love that kind of stuff.

How many.

You know, see, what was this show?

I'm showing my age here.

There was a television show that was.

I think it was on cbs.

Dan Rat was a.

Who was it that did that?

It was an investigative reporter television show.

48 Hours is one.

But there's a.

It was.

There Was one.

Oh, my God.

It was famous for many years and it kind of fallen by the wayside.

Irregardless.

Investigative journalism and telling stories on TV doesn't happen anymore.

What do we hear on tv?

You know, how many times you hear about a plane crash?

A thousand times.

We don't really hear what's happening in the world.

So tell stories.

I think we all like to hear stories.

That's what cereal did.

Is that it?

Go ahead.

Okay.

Let other people hear you.

How do you market your podcast and how many times a week do you air your podcast?

Do you put up episodes?

I podcast twice a week.

If you're not in your listener's ears once a week, they don't build you into their lives.

So I say you have to be in there weekly.

At least I'm in twice.

Marketing my ohana market for me, my website markets for me because I pick up listeners.

I. I say welcome to the new listeners on every episode.

And I use social media.

I don't do a lot of extreme marketing.

But what I have done is I went and get content for them that is unique that no one else is bringing.

And I tell them the truth.

There's no rocket form circuit, secret rocket formula here.

You just have to bring them content.

That's what they want.

Go ahead.

My name is Martin.

I'm from the Philippines.

Podcast Phaboute.

Thank you.

I've been going back to NAB for four years and I'd like to tell you that this is one of the best sessions that I've attended.

Todd, you mentioned about syndicating that you syndicate with Spreaker and others.

Does it mean you have to upload it in different.

I signed up for Spreaker's $49 plan and they just pull it.

You know, they just pull it.

But hey, guess what?

A listener's a listener.

I don't care where they come from, but when they listen, they know where to come back to.

They know to come back to Geek News Central because they know there's going to be fresh content there on a daily basis.

I didn't mention this, but I also be now, for the first five years, I did a blog article every day.

There's 13,000 blog articles on my website.

But now I pay writers to do that writing for me because I can, because I don't have time to do it.

But if you're going to grow your audience, you got to build that website traffic.

You got to write stuff about your topic on off blog days.

You got to keep coming back.

That's the only way you build the.

The inbound traffic, in my opinion.

And there's, you know, you can buy, you know, advertising stuff that gets expensive, you know, and minimal results.

Did I answer your question?

Does it mean that you have to pay every podcast platform for them to.

No, I think I'm the only one I pay is Spreaker.

Everything else, Stitcher takes it automatically.

Most of them just pull it.

So I think Spreakers, the only one I pay for, and there's not that many.

If you were at the state of the podcasting speech, iOS is 87% of this.

So those other sites are the 13% of the remaining distribution.

So, you know, Is it worth 13% up tick to be in everywhere else?

Yeah, it is, if you want to be.

Well, I would say.

You want to be in Spreaker.

You want me to Stitcher.

Anyone else?

You guys are.

Where else are you guys at?

Roku.

I've got a.

We got a Roku channel.

And if you're on some of the networks, like if you're on Blueberry, you're automatically in the Roku channel.

Iheartradio.

Yep.

So you can apply to be there.

Be careful on how you do that with them.

You have to apply.

But I think.

I think Pandora is going to have podcasting soon.

I think.

What was one other.

Huh.

Spotify.

Probably Spotify as well.

So, you know, I'm just firm believer.

Be anywhere you can be so that they can find you.

Some companies only want everything still piped.

I don't believe in still piping, so.

That's right, because you gotta, you know, for me, it's like, gotta keep the machine running, you know, gotta keep the wheel greased here.

So.

All right.

Yes, go ahead.

We're probably close to 70.

They didn't know that.

They had no idea.

They.

She called me, she said, you want to hear a funny story?

She called me, she says, how's 300 bucks a month sound?

Yes, let's do it.

So they made a mistake the first month after they called me back and they said, this is how many new customers you had.

I worked the math for a couple of hours, spreadsheeted it out.

She made a mistake of telling me how many domain customers and how many hosting customer it was.

And I just kind of did some basic plans and I went back and I said, here's the new number.

And I should have put a bigger number on it because she said, okay.

Didn't even blink.

You know, it's one of those you miss, you know, you should have put a little more on but that base number that I agreed to 10 years ago is my base number today.

So be careful of that first negotiation because you may be stuck with that base for a while, you know.

So go ahead.

Yeah, it's like herding cats.

So one thing I will tell you this on building a network, don't ever do it co op style.

There has to be a boss.

Someone has to be the boss.

I built tech podcast as a co op that lasted two years.

You know who all did all the work?

Me.

But everyone's getting equal amount of money back.

So when I decided that wasn't working, I bought the network back.

I paid cash, I paid the stock and some cash to the 12 other initial.

Was that what it was?

Okay, you can stay there.

So if you're going to build a network, got a people you can trust.

You have to have clauses to get them out.

You can't own their content but you have to have minimum time periods.

I have a small number of shows at Geek New Central that I work with very tightly.

It's people that I really trust.

Worked with for a long time.

We signed two year deal, two year commitment.

They own their show, they can take their show with them when they leave.

They keep their branding because they already had established shows.

I only brought in established shows, two year commitment.

After that two years it's on a month to month after that and we either one of us with the 60 days of discussion can get it out even in that two years.

But I've never had anyone leave so.

And then we agree to cross promote.

But the networking I was talking about was not building a network.

Have a friend network of like minded shows.

You don't have to formally sign contracts.

It could be you reaching out to your show that you love that's in your space or you hate that's in your space because he's maybe bigger than you or small, you know.

But you got to make those relationships and you know do that Olive Garden say let's you know both boats rise to the top at the same time.

So yeah, when we were building the tech podcast network with well I was about to step on it, wasn't I?

The it was crazy because are you going to do the graphics this week?

And yeah, there has to be a boss.

If you build a formal network and get use a lawyer.

I don't want to talk disparagingly about anyone but there's been a recent breakup of a big tech network.

I don't know the legal deals behind that but they had a brand that was incredibly valuable.

It's done because of some sort of disagreement.

I own 51% of everything I do, except for Rob Ways.

We're a partnership.

We have five partners that have equal, equal value in the company.

But everything else, I own 51% in, because I don't want someone to say, we're shutting this down and be forced out.

So if you have a co host, same type of deal, you need to make some sort.

There's someone in the.

In the co host deal has to be the boss, and that has.

And that usually if.

But if you take on 51%, that means you have to do probably 70% of the work.

Yeah.

Or more.

So that co host thing's tough.

How many have co host.

How many of you have had fights with your co host?

Oh, okay.

It will come.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, thanks, folks.

I remember, and I owe this to Todd.

Todd was one of the people when Rick Calvert said, who should we get to head up the podcast space?

Because the guy had been doing it, had stepped down, and he had called Todd.

And Todd was one of three people that said, why don't you get Dave Jackson?

So thank you, Todd.

But here's the official release here from POD News.

Todd Cochran, the CEO Blueberry Podcasting and an independent podcaster, has died.

He was 61.

61, man.

In a statement from the company Blueberries, Barry Kantz said his leadership passion and belief in independent creators guided Blueberry from day one.

Todd's impact on our company, our team, and the entire podcasting community is immeasurable.

And I realize there's a big brain gap here.

Everybody's like, how, what, what, how did he die?

He had a heart attack.

And that's the part that's so scary.

He's one year older than I am, and the last time I saw him, he had dropped 30 pounds, was looking great, got a great bill of health from his doctor, was super proud of him for dropping the weight.

And then, you know, you get a blood clot that goes to your heart and you're done.

I just.

My brain cannot process this at the moment.

POD News ran a full obituary that I will link to in the show notes.

But I just wanted to remind you that when it's your time, it's your time.

And my heart goes out to his family, his children, his friends, to everyone at Blood Blueberry.

It's.

There's a hole in the podcasting space today and some very, very big shoes to fill.

And hug your kids, hug your spouse, because you just never know.

You just never know.

I will see you on.