Why Facebook is About to Shake Up the Podcast Industry | Ft. Jordan Harbinger & Travis Chappell

thanks for having me on i'm i'm stoked because there's so much going on in the podcasting space this this week seemingly yeah like literally in the last 24 hours like i saw a press release last night about apple podcasts and i pulled up my phone to start reading the article about uh you know apple podcast is basically doing their own patreon premium content subscription stuff now um and then like almost immediately after that i got someone sent me an article about facebook releasing um audio rooms and messenger chats for like for their facebook groups and for their messenger uh group chats and then also that they're gonna have podcast discovery and podcast um uh players inside of the actual facebook app so lots of stuff going on i'm curious what you think that might do to the quality of the shows that are out there um yeah cause i know you have some thoughts on that i do i mean look where to start i mean if we start with the facebook thing that's the one i know probably the least about but i've seen things like this before but i will say as much as i distrust facebook i will say that anything that helps podcast discovery is awesome because the one place that the one place that podcasting is truly broken is in discovery because the only thing the only way to find new shows is is basically word of mouth and then they say the second largest vector is social media which is just word of mouth but online and so i don't even see those as like different you know when someone says yeah it's not like an online thing like uh like you saw a viral clip of somebody's podcast and decided to go listen to it it's like oh my friend my friend asked everybody what your favorite podcasts are and i went through the comments and found this one that seemed interesting so i gave it a shot you know there's no predictable way of growing right there's not not really and and you can do like ad spends but they add up so much i mean you can spend a thousand dollars a day and you can be like okay that moved the needle but it's not like making its money back in the first year even of the spend so then it's like do you take on investors for a freaking podcast not really so there's a big gap that facebook could fill for discovery the problem is now i don't even know how many people of our generation are still using facebook i mean i'm sure it's millions but it's also kind of got a rep now as like my parents social network so we'll see yeah i think i think uh from the last data that i've been looking at they're really pushing groups a bunch and uh basically finding that the majority of their users are staying active in groups which for me is true uh the majority of my user activity is inside of facebook groups now and i think that that'll be an interesting uh feature that they bring up because i from what i from i understand they're like really trying to tackle a lot of problems in the space so like they'll have podcast discovery um and then you can follow podcasts on the platform which probably means that you'll be able to do probably some sort of premium subscription tier through facebook or some sort of gated content or premium content you know behind a paywall or something like that which makes things really interesting because you know what do you know the latest stats on podcast listeners was like a quarter billion or something like that podcast listeners 250 300 million i honestly don't know how many listeners there are i know they're like 200 uh sorry they're two million podcasts which doesn't tell us much because most the vast majority of podcasts are like one episode three episodes those are two years old each they're not active there's like a quarter million active shows which means an episode that came out in the last let's say 90 days right so maybe close to 300 000. but for for facebook itself it's going to be i mean it fragments the space because they're probably not going to use rss feeds but you'll probably put your rss feed into facebook and have it chomp on your show and and then make it playable in in the in the app hopefully yeah and and hopefully they continue to bring in you know ability to advertise your show to people that are searching for shows because that's one thing i was i've always been shocked that apple's never done it's like why wouldn't you have some sort of an advertising model where you could pay to put your show in like a visible spot in apple podcasts to get it in front of listeners it doesn't make any sense to me um and uh it seems like apple's like almost a little like too little too late coming into the game now that spotify is making huge moves and they have been for the past like three years you know apple's like oh maybe we should do something with that thing we invented like 12 years ago totally i mean yeah the the the paid subscription thing as exciting as it is should have been in the app probably like a decade ago yeah literally i mean you could buy how long ago did you start 2006 so yeah pre-pre-first generation iphone yeah pre-iphone yeah the iphone came out like a year and change or something later on or a year after and i remember when they were like you can buy music in itunes for a doll you know it was like a buck a song i'm like oh when do they average when do they do this for podcasts so that we can have premium podcasts and then literally like 10 years later they're like hey let's do this and i'm thinking wow i mean patreon is a multi-billion dollar company that was founded sorted to do this you know for for not just podcasts but still and there's all of these other companies and startups that are doing this that are now kind of screwed but what the hell i mean they could have been taking 30 percent of a dollar per episode for for yeah for 10 years yeah they could have made hundreds of millions of dollars off this by now yeah and they're losing market share they don't have to be losing is the weird thing like like you guys literally invented this form of of content it didn't exist you and that's why it's called a podcast like you invented this form of media and now other people are beating you at this game that that's just negligence like you just didn't see opportunity like how did you not how did you miss this yeah i mean some of it is it's such a big company they saw it as it didn't drive any revenue because they didn't build in the premium thing so then they assigned three people to freaking work there or like five to work in all of podcasting globally pretty much you know like there's nobody there it's also from insiders that i know at apple i don't know if this is still true and i don't want a bad mouth apple because i mean they gave us this opportunity as negligent as they were sure you know it's kind of like if you love your mom but she's like always at work and never does anything for you and you're like well still my mom right like i kind of feel that way about apple um my mom's great but the the idea here that they missed the boat on this from insiders at apple i know that until recently and again it might still be that way if you worked in podcasting at apple you were not going anywhere in the company it was like you were given that job because you were new you were given that job because they didn't know what else to do with you and now i know people that have done things at apple for years that are offered things like decent sounding positions in podcasting and i'm like oh my god are you gonna take it and they're like no this is like everybody at apple's like dude don't take anything in podcast this is where you go to die yeah it's where you go to die and i'm not again i'm trying not to be insulting here but like let's look at the people who were sort of the face of podcasting for apple did they move up at apple no they work for like a podcast startup now yeah you know and then they got replaced by somebody else and that was a guy who loved podcasting steve wilson nice guy but like he didn't move up at apple and everybody else i know that's had a position in podcasting has either gotten out of it as soon as they could or left the company that's not a great sign so no it seems like such an oversight as i know it's such a giant company but they sit on so much cash it would not have taken much to make like if if they if they if they would have put as much effort into that as google put into youtube because this is around the same time period right like podcasts came out and then youtube came out and just destroyed any podcast sense of life yeah right like like youtube creators became the thing but podcasts could have easily been something very very similar to that if apple would have like done something else with it um yeah it just didn't didn't it just it's so confusing to me bro it is confusing like look i understand the allure of video but and i don't know what the revenue for youtube was it was probably like 13 billion or something last year i i actually have no idea we should look that up but the entire industry of podcasting was 1 billion wow so what the hell happened there right like and and that's just the revenue from youtube but it doesn't mean what all the creators made the revenue the industry figures for podcasting include what creators made because that's the total amount of sales from all the ad networks put together so there's not really much outside of that maybe there's a couple stray million dollars from like all of the patreon subscriptions for every podcaster added together or like the merch sales but there's nothing more than that so yeah in a way though i think i'm lucky that that happened that way because if podcasting had become youtube would i have be would i be david dobrik or would i be the forgotten person who like got there early but never made anything happen i don't know like podcasting charlie bit my finger type video yeah yeah remember that yeah that guy oh david at the dentist like am i that because luckily since podcasting is a moving at an absolutely glacial pace i've been able to build a really nice business off the back of that um but had it moved faster i might have just gotten eclipsed by like some gen z david dobrik type who's like nah man you got to blow up and i'm like damn it you know like i didn't think about that i didn't think about doing science projects in my backyard yeah like like instead i just built slow skills over a long ass period of time 14 years and now i'm like oh i'm really entrenched it's hard to knock me out of the position that i'm in um but yeah facebook coming into it it's gonna open up new areas for new players just like facebook watch does like every big youtuber that i know they also have their stuff on facebook watch and they'll make like five or ten grand a month from facebook or 20 grand a month from facebook but they'll make like 80 grand a month from youtube so it's always like a smaller platform that requires separate management and separate everything and that may happen with podcasting but i'm more excited about the idea that maybe there will be a way to drive people who are on facebook like you said searching for shows like hey plays podcast great show them an ad for the jordan harbinger show i'm bidding three bucks uh for new listeners and i'll get new listeners there all day every day yep because i tried facebook ads and then pushing them to like my website to listen to the podcast or pushing them to a podcast app and i was getting conversion for like seven bucks i was like nope pull the cord on that not worth it but if they don't have to leave the platform and then they've got like facebook now boasts 20 million podcast plays per day it's like okay now if 30 million people are playing podcasts on facebook you just got five percent whatever market share overnight now i want to advertise in that app and that app just happens to be facebook because that's the thing to me is that uh people who have been opposed to podcasting in terms of listenership in the past usually it's because they just don't understand what it is or how to access it or like they don't understand that there's literally a pre-loaded app on their phone you know right well you know i'll talk to some people like oh yeah well you know how do i find podcasts it's like well you know the app on your phone that's called podcasts you just open that up but they again never did any sort of education or teaching around the fact that they that everybody has that in the palm of their hand sure and so now i think what's going to happen is you know i i don't know the actual stat i want to say it's close to like 250 300 million uh podcast listeners currently but when you open that up to a platform that has over two billion users on it that has to increase the total number of podcast listeners over the course of the next two three four five years especially if they make it an integral part of their platform you know what i mean which to me presents a really interesting opportunity where uh that's why i'm encouraging people like hey if you if you've been thinking about it for a couple of years you probably shouldn't wait too much longer because i think it's about to become extremely mainstream and uh and you like you think it's saturated now but you know there's there's there's less than a million active podcasts there's 35 million youtube channels there's like half a billion blogs you know what i mean there's there's there's 12 million users on clubhouse and it came out a year ago you know like instagram 2 billion facebook 2 billion youtube you know there's just so so much saturation on every other platform so that can't be your excuse what's next you know not enough people listen to podcasts well not anymore because the number one social media app in the entire world is going to make sure that people can discover podcasts so now you don't have to open a podcast app or figure out how to use stitcher or spotify or find podcasts in those areas you go to the place where you get all your content anyway and it happens to be a feature that's in there as well yeah i'm excited about it i want to see where it goes you know i i don't do a lot of videos so i don't even mess with facebook watch or any of that stuff but like i said you know if it's 20 10 of the market for youtubers what happens i mean if it gets a similar market share for audio then that's fantastic that's really really good you know ten percent market share in poc nobody there are apps that have millions of dollars in funding that have like point one percent market share and podcasting it's impossible to get so if you've got an entrenched competitor or sorry if you've got an entrenched player in the social media space and they're like hey we're doing podcasts that's great news for the ecosystem it's going to bring in a lot of junk but that wave is going to sort of wash over and then people especially when they go oh why don't we just do what we do which is your friends also liked and then it's like hey 300 of your friends are listening to the jordan harbinger show they don't really talk about it but we see this you know in their preferences and we're showing them this and they're following it there and if they can add things to the user experience then great you know that whole thing is going to just be so great