Learn how to master Value for Value, turn your audience into a highly-engaged community of supporters and earn Bitcoin from your podcast.
Join Fountain Co-Founder Nick Malster for an interactive webinar for both new and experienced podcasters who are interested in Value for Value and seeking practical guidance on how to harness it’s true potential.
We were joined by special guest and podcasting veteran Chris Fisher, who hosts some of the most listener supported shows on Fountain.
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📝 Webinar Transcript
Nick: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this webinar on Value for Value. My name is Nick. I’m the co-founder of Fountain podcasts. Fountain is a podcasting 2.0 app that helps podcasters turn their biggest fans into supporters and generate more valuable engagement with their audience. And all of this is powered by the Bitcoin Lightning Network.
This content is going to be tailored towards both new and existing kinds of experienced podcasters who are interested in Value for Value and are really looking for practical guidance on how to harness its true potential. Some of you might have just ticked the box on the RSS.com website that says enable Value for Value for my show. Some of you may have already started experimenting with Value for Value. But hopefully, there’s going to be stuff in this presentation which all of you guys can learn from.
There’s a lot of terminology thrown around Podcasting 2.0, Value for Value, Bitcoin Lightning Network. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with these terms, you soon will be by the end of this presentation.
So I’ll just give a quick rundown of what we’re going to cover today. So in the first part, we’re just going to do an introduction to Podcasting 2.0 and Value for Value, how these things have come into existence, what problems they’re solving, and also how they work on a practical level.
In part two, which is the main section, this is where we’re going to be learning from some of the podcasters who have already started integrating Value for Value into their show and sharing some actionable guidance and success stories from them that we can learn from.
And in the final part, I’ll be joined by Chris, who is one of the hosts on Jupiter Broadcasting. He has many different podcasts, which are kind of Value for Value enabled, and they’re doing really, really well. So there’s lots we can learn from him.
So let’s get into part one, which is the introduction to podcasting 2.0 and Value for Value. I’m just going to start with a clip featuring the late Steve Jobs from the launch of Apple Podcasts back in 2005, which sets the tone quite nicely, I think.
Adam Curry is one of the guys that invented podcasting, and he has a podcast called The Daily Source. Let me go ahead and subscribe to that, and we can go listen to his latest one. Just click on it.
I’ve actually had to restart the show three times. My Mac has been acting up like crazy.
I don’t know what’s going on. I think it’s something to do with the file system.
Okay. How do you control, say, dirty stuff?
Podcasting Hasn’t Really Protected Free Speech
So a very poignant question, and it kind of takes us onto the point of podcasting hasn’t really protected free speech. And this is really why podcasting 2.0 began. So if we look back, ever since Apple introduced podcasts to iTunes, their centralized index of podcasts has become widely used by many other podcast apps that rely on its directory of podcasts to populate their apps with content. This made it really easy for new podcast apps to launch, and in this time, podcasting soared in popularity, reached mainstream audiences. All podcasts had to do was publish their content to an RSS feed, usually through a podcast hosting provider like RSS.com, and it’ll be listed in Apple’s index and can be fetched by podcast apps. And the RSS feed is just an XML file. It contains tags that provide the podcast apps with information for that feed and properties, so it can be organized when new episodes are updated and published.
And so I think, yeah, the simplicity of the RSS protocol really helps that widespread adoption. And RSS works just as well today as it did back then, but the independent open kind of podcasting ecosystem is increasingly under attack. And problems began to arise when Apple started exerting control over which podcasts they deemed to be suitable and which were not. And they had the power to censor, deplatform, and demonetize podcasts that they didn’t agree with or didn’t meet their content guidelines, not only on their platform, but on all the other podcast apps that relied on their index. So free speech and podcasting was suddenly under threat.
And in recent years, we’ve seen major technology companies like Spotify, Google, Amazon, all enter the podcasting arena to compete with Apple. And needless to say, Apple wasn’t just going to let them use their kind of index of podcasts. Spotify certainly wasn’t going to rely on Apple for that. So they decided to launch their own. And as a result, podcasting is now made up of several closed proprietary systems, which are all in competition with each other. And that takes us on to the second problem podcasting faces, which is that the level of innovation in podcasting has really failed to keep up with its growing popularity. Now most podcast apps today have the same basic set of features that they did when the first mobile apps and podcasts launched over a decade ago. And why is that?
You know, why are the features that are offered by YouTube, things like chapters, transcripts, comments, live chat, not possible in podcast apps? Well, YouTube doesn’t rely on the RSS protocol. It’s really doing its own thing.
So what is the problem with the RSS protocol as things stand? Well, until now, there’s not really been a common language for writing and reading RSS tags in podcasts. So if a podcast has chapters, that feature needs to be supported by the podcast hosting provider in a way that’s also recognized by the podcast listening apps like Spotify. And with large technology companies like Spotify investing heavily in building walls around their ecosystem, there’s really no incentive to cooperate on common standards.
And the result is a highly fragmented podcasting ecosystem, which is really lacking in innovation. You’ve got thousands of competing hosting providers and podcast apps that are actually unable to communicate with each other and share information, which is really where podcasting comes in.
What is Podcasting 2.0?
It’s essentially an initiative spearheaded by Adam Curry and Dave Jones. And his mission is to preserve, protect and extend the open independent podcasting ecosystem. And it does this primarily through two flagship projects. Firstly, the podcast index. Now, this is an open censorship resistant directory of podcasts launched to preserve podcasting as a platform of free speech. Anyone can add a podcast to the index by submitting an RSS feed and choosing podcast index to populate its app with their content.
And that’s why on podcasting 2.0 apps like Fountain, we use this index. So we actually have a broader range of podcasts than you might find on say Apple.
And the second thing is the podcasting 2.0 namespace. And a namespace is basically just used to define and organize a set of objects contained in a program. In this case, podcasting 2.0, it’s a framework that the independent podcast community needs to deliver new functionality across the ecosystem. It’s essentially the common language that we’ve been missing.
So the namespace is comprised of a set of simple tags that can be added to your RSS feed. Anyone in the podcasting 2.0 community can propose a tag and it could be adopted into the namespace. So let’s just have a look at some of these tags in action in Fountain.
We’ve got a podcast person so you can now label hosts and guests so they can easily be searched for in podcast apps. You’ve probably had this experience before when you’re searching for every single podcast episode that a certain person has featured in and it’s really hard to find. We’ve also got the chapter tags so you can now navigate podcast chapters with custom artwork and links. And there are many other different tags like transcript, live, music, video, all of which Fountain is going to be adopting soon.
But the one tag that’s really come to define podcasts in 2.0 and Fountain is Value for Value.
What Exactly is Value for Value?
Now this I think can be over complicated but there’s a really simple way of explaining it and fundamentally it allows listeners to support any podcast directly from their app as they’re listening by sending payments over the Bitcoin Lightning network and they can do so pretty much instantaneously and with no fees.
But Value for Value is not a new thing. It’s actually been around for centuries and it’s not exclusive to podcasting either. And this excerpt from an article by Der Gigi, the freedom of value, sums it up pretty nicely.
So he says, the idea is simple but it sounds radical. You provide your content for free for everyone without access restrictions. If people enjoy it, if people get value out of it, you make it easy for people to give value back.
It might sound outrageous in this day and age but this model has worked for over a thousand years. It is the model of street performers, the model of buskers, the model of voluntary giving. The Value for Value model flips the traditional payment model on its head. Traditionally, enjoyment follows payment. In the Value for Value approach, payment follows enjoyment voluntarily.
Now you’re free to listen to the street musician and walk on but if you want the music to continue, you throw a couple of coins into the app.
So that explains it pretty well but Value for Value is not just something for street performers and it’s not charity. It’s actually been adopted by some of the most successful creators in modern times. Some of you might remember Radiohead’s album back in 2007 in Rainbows. They gave away the album for free on the internet and allowed their fans to pay whatever they wanted. And 12 weeks later, they launched the CD and digital album. And in those 12 weeks, they actually made more money from the Value for Value approach than they did from the entire sales in their previous album. So this just kind of really shows that Value for Value actually makes economic sense in mainstream media.
Now bringing it back to podcasting, I’m sure many of you here will have heard of Adam Curry and No Agenda. So Adam along with John Dvorak – they were the original pioneers of Value for Value in podcasting. Their show has been 100% audience funded since 2005. No ads, no sponsors, just contributions from listeners. They call the contributions time, talent and treasure.
So treasure is obviously money, but what is time and talent? And this artwork here is a really great example of that. They actually have a website where fans can submit episode artwork for upcoming episodes and they choose the episode artwork from their fans. So in that sense, all of their listeners are kind of producers and active participants in the creation of the content, which is pretty cool.
How Exactly Does Fountain Deliver Value for Value for Listeners?
So firstly, the listener tops up a wallet with small units of Bitcoin called Sats. So if you’re not familiar, there are 100 million Sats in one Bitcoin. $10 today is worth about 35,000 Sats just as a frame of reference. And all listeners need to get started is a bank card. You can buy Sats in the Fountain app really easily.
And once they have funded their wallet, they can either stream Sats to the podcaster for every minute they listen or they can send a message with a payment, which we call a boost. And the value tag in the RSS feed essentially tells us how to distribute the money that listeners are sending. So these are called splits, the podcaster can set them up. So when I pay [money to] a podcast, the money gets divided between the host, the guest, the producer, anyone who is involved in the creation of that podcast.
But actually, Value for Value can be much more than just payments. Like it doesn’t just help creators get rewarded for their work. It’s great for discovery too. So when you support a podcast in Fountain, it actually signals to your friends and other listeners that it’s worth listening to. We display the boost messages as comments in the app so you can reply to them. You can hit the like button and actually send the person who sent the comments some Sats to thank them. And we also list the most supported podcasts on Fountain in charts. So it’s a great way to see which content is actually worth listening to.
And these are just a few examples of the type of features we’re building in Fountain. So why does it work?
Firstly, it’s fully integrated into the listener experience. Unlike Patreon and Apple, there’s that friction. You have to pay like a monthly subscription.
It’s a direct debit charged to your bank account, whether you listen to the podcast or not.
And in Fountain, once you hear something you like, you can pay the podcaster straight away with no friction.
Secondly, as we’ve demonstrated, it’s really easy for listeners to get started. All they need is a bank card. They don’t need to have Bitcoin already or have any Bitcoin experience.
And thirdly, it’s complementary to your existing monetization channels. So if you have ads or sponsors, or you already have a premium subscription offering, Value for Value works on top of that.
Cool. So that’s kind of the basics of Value for Value and Podcasting 2.0. Now we’ll kind of get into the main content of the presentation, which is essentially a collection of different clips from podcasters who are using Fountain and have integrated Value for Value into their show to learn some like tried and tested techniques that have allowed them to like go from having zero supporters to having, you know, several hundred and thousands of supporters.
Asking Your Listeners to Support Your Show
So starting with this, asking your listeners to support the show. Now it seems quite obvious, but you’d be surprised how many podcasters have enabled Value for Value for their show, but haven’t told their listeners. And it’s important to find a way to do this that really makes sense for you. And it’s important to do it very regularly. So you constantly remind your listeners and create this idea that this is what you’re supposed to do when you listen and get value from the show.
And this clip from Adam Curry is a really great way of explaining the right way to get your pitch right.
Hardest part for someone who comes from the mainstream. Here’s a bunch of money, you just do the show, we own your perspective. Asking someone to send you money is like a defeat. It’s like, “oh my God.”
And you know, in the beginning, when we were pioneering this, before Patreon, all this stuff, people would make jokes about us say, “Oh, you’re begging for money again.” Or, “There they go. Begging for money. Beggars!”
It was really hard.
So to get that pitch right. It’s not just “Send me money.” That doesn’t work. You’ve got to ask the right question anytime at the right time. But you have to ask it in the right way. And it’s really that John always has good examples. You know, there’s this butcher shop up in Fort Angeles, Washington. And he really loved the butcher shop, but he didn’t go very often. He’s like, I’ll go next time. I’ll go next time. He never went and then one day was gone.
And, you know, he said that really taught him that he regretted that. And when you tell this story, lots of people have stories just like this. So if there’s something you really like, you support it. You should do that in everything in your life. You know, so I think Value for Value, it can be for music, it can be for books, it can be for anything. And you kind of get the beauty of the old system, which is, you want to have as many people see, read, hear your art as possible. Every artist wants that now. You know, it’s all within your own grasp. You determine how you send the message across. And it’s completely open, you can do anything you want. It’s just you have to get over that hump, and you have to say, “Hey, help me out.”
Cool. So that was Adam Curry, talking about, you know, finding the right way to ask your listeners is definitely uncomfortable. At first, it doesn’t feel like a natural thing to ask people for money. But I think what he’s getting at is if you really put the importance on why you’re supporting, like why you would do that, like, that really kind of makes sense in the listener’s mind, you know, they get the idea that, okay, if I don’t support, you know, the show might not continue. And seeing as I get such great enjoyment from listening to it, I want it to continue. So I’m going to support.
And I would really suggest like, you know, practicing this pitch on your own, trying out a few different versions and each new episode that you publish, and just see which gets the best response from your listeners, you know, you’ll probably notice it in the data you get back and the amount of money you’re getting or the number of boosts you’re getting, you’ll get to a point where it will suddenly click, and it will really start to resonate with your audience. But you have to do it consistently. And you have to be patient with it. Because just like anything you know, you’re doing on YouTube, or whatever channel you’re on, these things take time to like, really kind of get traction and settle in with listeners.
Don’t Ask for Tips
But whatever you do, don’t ask for tips. This clip from James Cridland explains why:
It’s great to see and I think Kevin Rook would see even more if he stopped calling them tips. If you ask for a tip, you get 20% of what you should be getting. If you ask for value, if you ask for somebody to pay you the value that they think that something is worth, then you will get more money. And I think one of the things that you know, and I’ve heard Adam Curry saying this a long time, I think one of the things that we need to be a little bit cleverer about is to get the right wording, to get the right talk up around this so that it isn’t seen as a way of tipping people. It’s a way of paying for the podcasts that you really enjoy, which is a different conversation.
Yeah, so I think this is really good advice. Whenever I hear people asking for tips, I’m like, you know, like, it sounds like you’re busking, or it sounds like, you know, it’s going to be a small amount of change you’re giving on top of a coffee you bought in a shop. Asking for people to send value or return the value that they got from the show, like, makes such a massive difference. So that’s definitely worth taking into account.
How Jordan Harbinger Asks for Support with Fountain
I think the other thing here is like, it helps to really be specific about how people actually do this new action. You know, people won’t be familiar with phrases like streaming and boosts, or like Sats, you know, what are Sats, like, maybe you need to explain that as well. And this clip from Jordan Harbinger really kind of makes it simple and easy to get on board with.
By the way, if you’re a regular listener of the show, and you get some value from me or the guests we have on the show, there’s a really easy way to show your support. Download the Fountain app on iOS or Android, follow the Jordan Harbinger show and start listening over there.
You can share your thoughts on this episode with me by sending a boost, which is like a little payment with a message and see what other listeners have to say. Getting started is easy. You can top up your Fountain wallet with a bank card and you can also earn money just by listening to the show on Fountain as well. It’s a no brainer. I donate this money to charity, by the way. Visit Fountain.fm to learn more.
Yeah, so I think that like what Jordan does here particularly well is he actually explains how to get started and get some Sats in your Fountain wallet and makes it clear that all you need is a bank card. He actually doesn’t mention the word Bitcoin or Sats once, which I think if you have an audience which is not necessarily native or familiar
By the way, if you’re a regular listener of the show, and you get some value from me or the guests we have on the show, there’s a really easy way to show your support. Download the Fountain app on iOS or Android, follow the Jordan Harbinger show and start listening over there. You can share your thoughts on this episode with me by sending a boost, which is like a little payment with a message and see what other listeners have to say. Getting started is easy. You can top up your Fountain wallet with a bank card and you can also earn money just by listening to the show on Fountain as well. It’s a no brainer. I donate this money to charity, by the way. Visit Fountain.fm to learn more.
Yeah, so I think that like what Jordan does here particularly well is he actually explains how to get started and get some Sats in your Fountain wallet and makes it clear that all you need is a bank card. He actually doesn’t mention the word Bitcoin or Sats once, which I think if you have an audience which is not necessarily native or familiar with Bitcoin, that’s a great way to get them in.
The other thing to mention too is that like, you know, given that you’re asking your listeners to send you money, you need to try and find a way of making that exciting for them. You know, they’re parting with their cash. That’s cash they could keep themselves. So what is it about Fountain and Value for Value and your show that’s really going to get them interested to do so?
Value for Value means you determine how much value you’re getting out of a podcast and you stream it back using a Podcasting 2.0 app from newpodcastapps.com.
All these apps are free by the way. Check out the cool awesome features like images, chapters, and your ability to stream Satoshi’s aka micro payments to Podcasting 2.0 shows versus something like Patreon or a monthly subscription service. Like what if you don’t listen to the show? You’re still going to get charged the $5 for example, but you get to decide as you listen to the show how much you want to give back to that podcaster. It’s a new way to support creators. Musicians will be releasing albums kind of like podcasts where as you listen, you can stream different amounts to the singer, to the bassist, to the guitarist, or to the whole band. Live streams on YouTube and Twitch and all that stuff. They’re totally going to go this way. These are exciting times.
So I think the thing that Kyle does really well here is he kind of gives a glimpse of the future of what’s coming in Podcasting 2.0 and Value for Value in a way that his listeners are going to be able to relate to, which I think is really important. And then just the final one in this section is a clip from Odell from the host of Citadel Dispatch. And he is very good at really showing how grateful he is from his listeners from the contributions that he’s getting and kind of really explains how much it means to him personally, which I think makes a massive difference.
Before I get started, just another huge shout out to all the freaks who continue to support the show with Bitcoin. Dispatch is audience funded without ads or sponsors. It would not be possible without all of your generous donations. So thank you for supporting the show. It truly means a lot.
You can support the show via Podcasting 2.0 apps like Fountain Podcast. There’s a lot of apps that support it. They work like a regular podcasting app. You search Citadel Dispatch, you click that subscribe button. You choose how much Bitcoin per minute you think the show is worth. And those stats are streamed directly to my node. It is incredibly cool seeing stats streamed directly to my node.
With Podcasting 2.0, you can also do something called a Boostagram. You can think of that as a global message board where you’re able to put a comment and then attach a certain amount of stats to it, a certain amount of Bitcoin to it. I read the top four Boostagrams from the previous show every episode.
Yeah, so just the end of that clip sets us up nicely for the next tip, which is to actually read and respond to the messages from your supporters. The podcasters who do this tend to see much better engagement and earn more money than the ones who don’t. And it’s a really great way to give your fans their 15 seconds of fame and really make them feel part of the community. It also creates a sense of FOMO for all the other listeners and makes them more likely to send a boost in the future.
It’s also a great source of content and discussion. People will often read out boosts from the previous episode and you can revisit some of the conversation or discussion from that episode. And again, it’s a great way to tease or highlight the previous episode that other listeners might have missed. They go back and watch it again later.
So this piece of advice here from Chris, I think is having a consistent and dedicated format. This is something that Chris does really well with Linux and Plugged and his other shows on Value for Value. Most podcasters tend to read out the boosts regularly at the start or the end of the episode. They’ll read out the top three or five boosts by value.
They will acknowledge the person who sent it and also tell them the amount. In this example, you’ll also see Chris is also using kind of music and jingles to, I guess, mark this section or the area of the podcast and really make it more fun. So I’ll play this one.
Well, we got some fantastic support from the audience this week to celebrate episode 500 and to say we blew the charts up is an understatement. We are number one by a mile on the Fountain FM charts. Extremely humbling. Thank you, everyone. So let’s get into it.
And now it is time for the boost.
Eric D. Boosted in with 1,000,009,529 Sats. He writes, congratulations on the big milestone. I started listening when Self-Hosted began back in 2019. And then I found the rest of Jupiter broadcasting from there. Unplugged has inspired me to try so many things in the world of Linux. And I’ve learned a lot along the way. Thank you for the fantastic content. Week after week. Here’s something for Jupiter broadcasting Stake Fund and the next 500 episodes.
Yeah, so that’s a really nice example. I think, you know, particularly large amounts given they were celebrating 500 episodes of the show. But you can see that it really kind of brings out the strong emotional connections that listeners have to your show. And by surfacing those you kind of really, I guess by osmosis, make the rest of your audience feel that way. And it’s rare that, you know, podcast listeners can have that direct interaction or acknowledgement from the podcast host, which is, it tends to be, you know, the podcast host of people that you really respect and look up to and have followed for many years. So having that direct recognition from them, and even kind of contact or interaction with them, really makes a massive, massive difference.
This is an example from Podcasting 2.0, which is the weekly show that Adam and Dave run, which essentially recaps all the things happening in podcasting 2.0 new developments. People who donate to podcasting 2.0 are donating with a really clear intention to help kind of extend what the initiative is achieving to invest in their costs, such as hosting, all the things that they’re doing.
And we tend to see really large amounts being sent to podcasting 2.0 for that reason. What they’ve done quite cleverly is they’ve gamified this. So they have a leaderboard, which they keep up to date over time. And whenever someone sends a boost that takes them to the top of the charts, they will celebrate that moment. And they’ll give them some exclusive prizes or some merch. So here’s an example of that happening.
502,377 stats from Dreb Scott. Holy crap. He gets a good baller. Okay, he needs his own jingle now. Okay, we have to have a leaderboard now. This is getting ridiculous. Dreb. Okay, 502,377. His messages topping Aerostatica’s record boost by one sat. Happy New Year. Go podcasting.
Thank you, Dreb. You might as well start a hosting company with this level of support, Dreb. Or join one.
Or join one. Yeah, there you go. Well, he’s got the chapter service. He must be doing eight or nine different podcasts. He’s doing chapters for him. And he’s just taking a split from the value from the value block. And apparently sending it right back to us.
I’m going to begin to refer to him as high roller Dreb Scott or independently wealthy Dreb Scott.
Nice, the independently wealthy Dreb Scott. The Bruce Wayne of podcasting. Still kind of works for me.
That’s, that’s a better one. Let’s do Bruce Wayne of podcasts.
So I think yeah, just to summarize, definitely consider reading out and responding to, you know, messages from your supporters, it really makes a massive difference. Like I mentioned as well, you can also reply to the boost messages in the Fountain app. This is a really great way to show your listeners that you’re active and you’re contactable, and just allows them to reach out and make that connection with you.
So the third point, which kind of Adam touched upon in that clip, was splits and splits are basically a way to share income from your podcast with other people.
So you could, for example: Add your top supporter from your last episode to the splits for your latest episode. And you can actually set the default splits for your show, which is really useful for adding your co-hosts, your producer, the person who created the artwork for your show, anyone who’s a regular contributor to your show, or you can set the splits for each episode.
How Splits Work in Fountain
So let’s just take a quick look at how splits work in Fountain. You will simply go to your show or your episode page, you’ll hit the splits button. And there’s two ways of adding a split. The easiest way is just to add another Fountain user. So the example I’m going to show you in a minute is about how to add a guest to your episode splits. Now, all you would do in that case is once you have recorded with the guest, you would ask them to create a Fountain account. And then when the episode gets published live, all you would do is just edit the splits for that episode, look for their user account and add them. And it’s that easy.
So you can see a couple of examples here up on this page. You can see the splits here for what Bitcoin did. He’s listed out a few of the members of his team. He’s also got a 20% split that goes to a charity for open source projects. And on the far right, you can see Kevin Rook splits. You can see that he’s actually added one of his guests to get 49% of the revenue for that episode.
Just to mention Kevin already then, what he did was added guests as a split. And this is a really great way to incentivize your audience to support the show. And it also incentivizes your guests to tell their followers to listen to the episode and support it on Fountain. So here’s an example of that in action.
Now, this is the part of the show where I usually ask you to send in stats and comments and questions over the Lightning Network. But today we’ve unlocked a brand new use case for Lightning payments on this show. Yesterday, I asked Lynn to send me her Fountain username.
And today, Fountain released an update that allows me to put any username into the show splits so that that user gets a portion of the stats that are sent in. So right now, you should be able to see in the show splits, if you’re using any podcasting 2.0 app, any stats you send in, any comments and questions as well will be split 50-50 between Lynn and I. So we’ll both be able to see the comments and questions and half the stats will go to me, half the stats will go to Lynn.
This is also Lynn’s first experience with podcasting 2.0. So if you enjoy this show, if you learn something new, send in a comment, send in a question, send in some Sats and let Lynn know that you appreciate the episode.
Cool. And the great thing about adding a guest as a split is that once you’ve added them in Fountain, they will start to see once the episode goes live, all the engagement and all the income from the episode goes straight into their Fountain wallet. So it’s a really seamless experience for your guests, really easy to get started. And like I said, it makes a massive difference because as a listener, if you know that the money is going to go to the person you’re listening to, which is more often than not the guest, it just really gives them another reason to support the show.
I already mentioned contributing to good causes. A lot of podcasters are really happy to share their income with causes that are close to their heart. And I think that having a worthy cause is also a great incentive for listeners to support because they know exactly what they’re contributing to and where the money’s going. So here’s a clip from Odell speaking about that.
So if you support dispatch via podcasting 2.0 through streaming Sats, 5% automatically goes directly to the open Sats node. And I forgot to mention it to you, Marty, before we came on air, but like how cool would it be? Like I would love if RHR does it too, but like how cool would it be if we had like thousands of podcasts, like millions of podcast listeners, and there’s constantly every minute streaming Sats to open source contributors in addition to the content creators? It seems really powerful.”
Cool. So onto the next point, which is driving discovery of your podcast with clips. You know, clips are a really great way to get your podcast discovered and attract new listeners.
We’ll just talk a bit briefly here about how clips work in Fountain. As a listener, all you do is hit the clip button, you get presented with a transcript for that episode. You can just select the speech blocks and publish your clip and your clip will be published in Fountain. It will be seen there. It will be seen on the episode page. It will be seen in the activity feed for other users who follow you and other listeners and also the podcast hosts will be able to like your clip and send you some Sats for it and also send a reply.
And you can also share your clips on Twitter, TikTok, WhatsApp, whatever channels you’re using as well. So clips are a really great way to drive discovery. And if you’re not going to create clips yourself, you should definitely ask your listeners to. And here’s just a little clip from my co-founder Oscar featuring on Anthony Pompliano’s podcast. He talks a little bit more about explaining the benefit of clips to, you know, for your listeners and for you. Exactly. And think about the biggest podcaster in the world, Joe Rogan. How did he grow? He grew through his clips on YouTube.
What you can actually do in Fountain is you can create clips from episodes and then podcasters and other Fountain users can boost the clip. So you can actually, one, earn from creating clips or the podcaster can incentivize their audience to create clips, which is ultimately going to lead to growth. And what I think is so fascinating about this is take an hour and a half episode of a podcast. The moment that you think as the podcaster is the best moment to create as a clip might not be the same moment as me. It might not be the same moment as the third person that listens. And so by taking that power of clipping, giving it to the listener, incentivizing it financially, I think we’re going to see massive growth for podcasters that can jump on this and actually do it effectively.
Yeah. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen. That clip was from just before we launched clips. We had no idea or, you know, the paid clips, we had no idea how well they were going to perform, but we are seeing, you know, if you’re creating clips for your podcast or asking your listeners to, those clips just get distributed far and wide throughout the app and end up, you know, appearing in front of another listener who hasn’t heard the show before. And they’re going to give it a go because, you know, it’s only one or two minutes of their time versus, you know, an hour long investment of their time to try out a show for the first time.
Another great suggestion from Jack Spearco, who hosts the survival podcast is to like clip from your listeners and he’ll explain why in this clip.
You’re taking the Fountain clips model into like a YouTube universe right there, right?
So right now, I know you just got on Fountain, but like, so people will listen to the show and they’re like, okay, that was awesome. And they’ll hit transcribe and it will take the entire podcast and turn it into text in text blocks. You then go in there and you just click the blocks you want. You trim out what you don’t want and you click, you add the title and a hashtag, you get published. So people are doing that with my show right now. What will happen is I’ll see one come up in popular clips. Well, that person just took their time, made a clip of my show for their own use. That’s probably why they did it because they wanted that piece. But I’m like, okay, I’m on popular clips now. So when you like somebody’s clip on Fountain, the creator doesn’t get the money. The person who made the clip does and it falls to 10 Sats alike, but you can go in your settings and change it. So I went and changed mine to 25 and whenever I see one of my clips get in popular clips that somebody else made, I hit it four times and I give them a hundred Sats. And it takes me two seconds to do that. And so one, I’m rewarding the action, but two, now I’m forming a higher level relationship with that listener who took their time to help themselves, but help me at the same time.
Oh yeah. So some really great insights from Jack there on how to beat the Fountain algorithm and like clips. So they get seen by more people in their feed and throughout the other places in the app.
The last area of the steps that we’re going to give you here is about Fountain promotions. So you might not be familiar with Fountain promotions. Essentially on the homepage of the Fountain app, you can promote your show or an episode of your podcast and actually stream money to listeners to incentivize them to try it out for the first time. Now this is a really cost-effective growth hack for getting new supporters for your podcast. You can decide how much you want to pay every listener. And you can also get the metrics from your promotion in the app and see how it’s performing.
A few screenshots here just to show it in action. Once you’ve claimed your show on Fountain, you can just go to your show page. You’ll see an area for promotions. You can check, you can choose whether you want to promote the episode or the show. Like I mentioned, you can just kind of put in your promotion budget, like how much you want to spend overall and also the max earnings for anyone who’s going to listen to that full episode. And then you can purchase your promotion using Apple Pay, using a bank card. And within 24 hours, your podcast will start appearing on the homepage in the app.
We’ve seen podcasters get some really great results through this. There’s not really anything else like this out there. Like if you’ve ever considered investing in paid media to promote your podcast, you know, you can’t exactly take listeners directly to your audio. You know, you have to send them to your website or to a page on Spotify or whatever it might be, or just have a more generic ad about your podcast. And it just doesn’t work so well.
Invest in Podcast Ads with Fountain to Get More Listeners
The other alternative, if you’re trying to promote your show is to invest in podcast ads on another podcast and cross promote. But again, like people are so used to skipping past the ads. And it kind of feels like a bit of an invasion of like, okay, I’m listening to this podcast. And now they’re trying to tell me about this other one. I just want to listen to this podcast that I started playing, right? So incentivizing users having a financial incentive and making it opt in so they can choose to listen to this podcast if they want to is a great model.
And I’ll just share a few metrics here from a podcast that users of Fountain called high hash rate. It’s a Bitcoin podcast. They’ve done four campaigns since the end of December, they spent a total of $200. And in that period, they increased their downloads by 1300%. They achieved over 20,000 impressions overall and almost 5000 listens. And if you break that down by, you know, the cost per CPM for impressions, just under $10, the CPM for listens, so 1000 listens is $44. That’s pretty good value. And actually, they could have got it cheaper. They had their, you know, their maximum payout for listeners originally set at 500 sets. And they realize actually, we can bring it down to 300 sets or 200 sets and people are still going to listen to it.
So we see that if you’re a podcaster, and you say, okay, I’m going to promote my podcast, and it’s going to be 100 sets maximum, you know, that equates to 1000 listeners for, you know, roughly $20, which is a really great investment of your money if you’re looking to get started with, you know, Value for Value and get more supporters. And just the final point, you know, some of the features and benefits I’ve talked about in Value for Value are things that are only going to be possible if you claim your show on the Fountain app.
Benefits of Claiming Your Podcast on Fountain for Value for Value Activation
Now, if you have activated Value for Value for your podcast on RSS.com, you will actually have an Alby wallet, which means that whenever someone sends money to your podcast, it will go to your Alby wallet versus your Fountain wallet. And actually claiming your podcast on Fountain has some benefits.
Firstly, you can actually read and respond to boost sent from all Podcasting 2.0 apps. The splits we discussed earlier as well, you can actually manage those really easily in the Fountain app. Otherwise, you’re going to have to go to a separate website and do it that way, which is a bit more funky.
You also get support stats for your show in the Fountain app. And we’re building new tools for this all the time to give you more insights on who your supporters are, you know, how much of your content they’re listening to, which episodes have gotten the most support.
And then lastly, you’re also able to promote your show and Fountain. So anyone who is excited by some of the stuff that I’ve shared today, I would definitely recommend doing that. It’s really, really easy. What you’ll need to do is actually log into your podcast, the wallet.com and delete your current value block.
Then all you have to do is just follow the claim process, which is really straightforward. You find your show in the app, you hit the claim button, you put in the email address and your RSS feed will send you an email to verify that you’re the owner of that feed. And then suddenly, you’ll, you know, your podcast will be claimed on Fountain and you’ll be able to, you know, manage and control all your Value for Value activity within the Fountain app, you’ll be able to receive your boost into Fountain, respond to them in Fountain. And it kind of just puts everything in one place.
Chatting with Chris From Jupiter Broadcasting
Nick: Cool. So that brings me to the end of section two. We’ve got about 15 minutes now where we’re just going to have a quick chat with our special guest, Chris Fisher. So I’m going to stop sharing my screen now and invite him up to say hello.
Chris: Well hello. Thanks for having me.
Nick: Thank you for joining us. It would be great if you could introduce yourself to everyone here who doesn’t know you already.
Chris: Sure. Yeah. So I’m Chris from Jupiter broadcasting. We really focus on Linux and open source podcasts and software development. We’re going on about 16 years now and we’ve been experimenting with different Value for Value models for several years now and really just sort of perfectly as we were experimenting with discovered boosts and have taken to it. It’s been just over a year since we’ve been accepting boosts from our audience and I absolutely love it. I’m a huge fan of it out of all the years that I’ve been doing this. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more connected to the audience and I don’t think I’ve ever had what feels like a more tangible relationship with them.
Nick: When was the first time that you first learned about podcasting 2.0 and Value for Value and what were your initial impressions?
Chris: Yeah, that’s a good question. Oh gosh. I remember over the years hearing Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak kind of develop the idea around Value for Value. I think one of the things that you touched on is one of the things that I really took to as well as making sure you don’t call it tips. And I remember hearing them talk about that and kind of thinking about it in terms of host incentives. And that’s really when it clicked for me because so far we’ve been going for about 16 years and 13 of those, maybe 14 of those years were sponsor funded. And so I did add sales to the ad relationship to the ad reads and all of that. And you know you end up spending a lot of time thinking about the sponsor and what the sponsor wants and you don’t spend as much time thinking about what the listener wants.
That I think was the big change when I started really kind of appreciating what Value for Value meant. And I meant that to me at least it meant that it turns the listener into my biggest customer. So if you look at it from a business standpoint, because I’m a small business, my listener is now the most important customer I have and I want to do whatever I can do to make the listener happy because they’re the ones supporting us. They’re the largest source of income for us. When I started thinking about it that way and I started thinking how that could fundamentally change content creation on YouTube, it could change a lot of the way podcasts are created, I realized it was a really big deal and I started communicating it with my audience a few years ago.
And not only have we seen tremendous adoption of the booths but our website and a bunch of other things but a great example is our website jupiterbroadcasting.com entirely created by our community. I did not write a single line of code. I did not stand up a single server for that. It’s all running on my infrastructure. I have all access to all the code. It’s all open source. But our audience contributed jupiterbroadcasting.com as another source of value they could give back beyond just monetary. They give back time and talent as well.
That has been, I think, a huge accelerator for us because we’re a small team and we’re really focused on the shows and making the shows is really all I got time for. And so I don’t have time to learn Hugo and go build all that out but the audience, there were already experts in that. There were people out there who already knew how to do it. And so they were able to contribute to that as well. And so that has just been a game changer for us. Just kind of still even really incorporating the way Value for Value will change the way we do business. And I think it means you can do more with less. I don’t have to have a full time web dev. I don’t have to have or even a contractor necessarily. Maybe one day. But as a small business that means I save a little bit of money and I stay focused on the product.
Nick: And we’ve obviously seen your revenue for the shows that you are a part of grow significantly over the last 12 months or so. But I assume you also have revenue coming from other places. So it’d be good to understand from you – what your different revenue sources are and how they compare to Fountain. I would say as well that like anyone who’s coming to Value for Value thinking it’s going to be like a direct substitute for the money they’re getting from ads or sponsors or anywhere else is probably going to be disappointed at first. Chris will attest to this. It takes time for these things to build up. But it’d be great to hear about what those other revenue sources are and how they work for you.
Chris: Okay. Yeah. And just to your latter point there, I participate in some podcasts that aren’t on my network and there are weeks that those podcasts make more revenue with Value for Value than my podcasts that maybe have 10x the listener downloads. So it’s remarkable when the audience is supporting. It means a lot smaller content creators can compete with larger content creators. So I think that is an interesting element. But you’re right.
And you touched on this in your presentation as well. It is complementary to existing business models. So we have a business that’s been around for 16 years. So we have sponsor relationships.
We also have a Fiat membership program. And those don’t necessarily get replaced by the boosts. And as somebody who’s been just collecting audience feedback for years, there’s something special about the boosts. And I like them a lot. But they don’t necessarily replace other avenues. We have a matrix chat room and we have email. So it’s complementary in that regard. But I hope over time it grows to be one of our primary resources of funding.
Like right now, I think it probably brings in about as much money as a sponsor would for a couple of shows. So that’s good, right? It means that’s one less sponsor now the business needs. And that’s remarkable for one year. That’s about where we’re at right now. So it’s a third, maybe it’s one leg of the stool, if you will. But it’s a very important leg that I can see growing and continue to grow. And as we kind of learn how to do it better too, it’ll also just grow with that. It’s just kind of getting better at the practice.
Nick: Yeah. And I imagine also that your audiences, they’re fairly technical audiences just because of the nature of your show and your content. Maybe some crossover between the technical audience and the Bitcoin audience. But how did you kind of bridge that gap between, you know, not talking about Value for Value and Bitcoin at all to suddenly introducing that to your listeners for the first time?
Chris: I think it depends on your audience. It probably is smart to deemphasize the Sats point. But, you know, if you think about it, I think the way to really communicate it clearly to your audience is to get your head around it. And at the end of the day, if I get a Sat, I don’t care today if it’s one, you know, it’s a sat, it’s a sat is a sat. Where we are accounting for the boost in Sats, not dollars. And so that those become their own unique value. Like we have a lot of memes in our community that have been self created.
A row of ducks is 2222 Sats. Another really popular meme that’s taken off right now, even as we’re doing this, I have boost coming in and the boost amount is individual zip codes. People are boosting their zip code so other listeners know where other listeners are at. And they just started doing that on their own. So there is sort of like this, if you just kind of nurture and get your head around it and figure out how to talk about it in a way that is genuine with what you really believe and your audience connects with that. I think that’s really the key to it.
There is the whole issue of oh, it’s Bitcoin or it’s kind of complicated. But, you know, Fountain has made that a lot easier with integrating MoonPay. Alby’s made that a lot easier with integrating MoonPay. That process solves itself. Those are technological application layer problems. Totally solvable.
It’s a UI issue. It’ll get worked out. I don’t mean to diminish what you guys have to do. But that will get sorted out. In the meantime, I just have to get the audience thinking about value in terms of Sats and communicating it. And it’s, you know, depending on your audience, you can talk about it like it’s fun podcasting money. You know, it doesn’t have to be like this alternative financial system that’s going to overthrow like the fiat system of the central banking overlords. It can just be like it’s fun podcasting Sats. It’s internet coins.
If you like what we do send some internet coins and you want to keep it going. You got to send some internet coins. Or you can have an audience that does truly understand the power of a sound distributed money that’s open source, which my community, a lot of them do appreciate open source and you can lean on that. It’s just sort of, you kind of got to read the room and then just speak genuinely to that.
Nick: Yeah, there’s been a lot of interesting discussion around, you know, because all the values in Value for Value are denominated in Satoshis and Sats, you know, whether that means you send more money or less money than you would do if you were sending dollars or pounds. Like, do you think that if you were asking people to send dollars, they would actually send less than Sats because Sats don’t really feel like real money in a sense. And their value changes on a daily basis.
Chris: Huh, you know, maybe I bet some might, I bet it would, I bet you could make an argument.
For both cases, right? The way I explain it is that the Sats that you send today are going to go to work forever. So if, and unlike you, fiat, us dollars, like if you sent me $25 to read a message, that $25 would probably be spent in seven days, right? It’s gone.
Like the business will just consume that and spend that. If you send me $25 of Sats, I’m going to sit on that. And I’m going to use that to open up other channels to other nodes to other listeners, to podcasting apps like Fountain to wallets like Alby. So I put those Sats to work immediately when they come in. And so that immediately means that they’re not just sitting around, they’re actually doing something. But, let’s just say we all got lucky and Bitcoin did go to a million one day. Well, that means the boost that the listener sent in four years ago is still working for them today. That boost is still paying off and gaining value and doing more and more for the podcaster as time goes on. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing either.
So I think there is actually something kind of powerful about the idea that if you send me a million sets, you’re essentially investing in the business in a low key kind of non-traditional way. But it is because the way I’m managing those sets, I’m putting them to work in the lightning channel. So I’m getting immediate value from them today. And then long term, the business will probably sit on them for a while and then decide what to do with them five, six, seven, eight, 10 years down the road potentially. And I could then at that point, sell that million sats for a lot more potentially than when it came in at the time. And that listener’s contribution just goes further. And I think that’s a really powerful thing. Unlike traditional fiat, where you can send me $25 today, I absolutely appreciate it, I will spend it. But if I hold on to that for five years, it’s going to be worth a lot less. It’s not going to do nearly as much for you as it would if I spent it today.
Nick: It’s a great point. I never really thought about it that way. Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining us. I’ve certainly got a lot just out of this 10 minutes conversation we’ve had. I’d love to keep talking, but I know we’ve got five minutes left. I want to just give the opportunity for anyone who’s dialed in to have any questions that they’ve kind of thought up in the last hour or so. Anything for me or Chris that you’d like to ask, or indeed Brian from the RSS.com team, any questions you have, the meeting is yours
Audience Q&A
Jennifer Navarrete: Hey, I’m Jennifer Navarrete, ePodcaster. And one of the things I think that this is super helpful with is its education, right? We’ve got to educate our audience, we have to educate fellow podcasters, we have to educate the public at large. And it isn’t a set it and forget it. You don’t just educate once and go, well, that’s done. Everybody understands. It’s this ongoing thing that all of us as Value for Value podcast index Podcasting 2.0 evangelists, because that’s what we are, have to continue to do.
So when I saw that you were doing this, I was like, yes, we need more of this because each one of us is doing this in our own way. I’m an ePodcaster on web two and web three. And so I’m talking about Fountain. I’m talking about Value for Value. I’m talking about podcast index and Podcasting 2.0 all the time in addition to web three. And I know everyone else is doing it too. So the more that we do this, the better it is for us overall. But it’s going to take repetition and repetition and repetition.
So I’m sharing this because I want folks who are like, Oh, I shared that and nobody did anything. It’s not a set it and forget it. It’s a repetition and an ongoing education. So thank you, everyone who put this together and everyone who showed up and everyone who watched the replay because we’re the early adopters were the folks blazing that trail so that others can come behind us and have an easier way. So stay the course, my friends stay the course.
Nick: Yeah, great point. Well said. Well said. Yeah, we are very early. And you know, I remember back in the days when we just started Fountain, and we had like a handful of podcasters using it, maybe 50 or 100. There’s now like almost 12,000 podcasters using Value for Value and that number is growing every week, but it does take time. And it’s definitely worth investing your time into learning. And I think – go and listen to some Adam Curry podcasts. That’s a great place to pick up some of his knowledge as like the originator of this whole thing. He really does explain it in a nice clear way.
Chris: I would like to add just really quickly to that Jennifer too. I think I totally want to underscore your point because it’s a rising tide for all boats, especially with Value for Value and Podcasting 2.0. What I’ve noticed is listeners that we’ve onboarded are now boosting other Podcasting 2.0 compatible podcasts and Value for Value podcasts. And so as we kind of educate people through our community, we’re increasing the support that other podcasters are getting and vice versa people that signed up to boost the podcasting 2.0 podcasts are now boosting my shows. And it creates a legitimate network effect. And even though we’re all doing our own thing, we’re all working towards our own incentives. We’re actually raising each other up at the same time. And, you know, I think that’s a huge deal because podcasting has never had that before. We have basically now the fabric for a really low key community that’s building here. And I’ve been doing this for 16 years. I’ve never felt anything like that before.
Nick: Yeah, that’s a great point. We’ve got time for probably a couple more questions. So if anyone has one, please shoot.
Marcia: I have a question. So my name is Marcia. I am the marketing coordinator at next door lending. Our owner, CEO has a podcast called the Early Bird podcast. And it’s just about like, you know, waking up early and the importance of it. So it’s a newer podcast I started. And I was just wondering if there is any advice that you often give to us as far as, you know, getting more subscribers and getting that organic audience.
Chris: I mean, I yeah, Nick, I actually I’m going to say the part that you would probably like to say, but you’re probably too humble to say it is featuring and sponsoring your podcast in Fountain, I can attest, will generate the most downloads you’ve had since you started your podcast, most likely. I’ve had the great fortune of doing Linux unplugged for 500 plus episodes. And we just recently had some of our absolute best growth 30% over each month for three months in a row through October, November and December, the show grew 30% each month. And this shows 500 episodes about Linux, right? Like it’s those are incredible numbers. And it’s because we are at the top charts. And if you’re not on the top charts, another thing that is absolutely very useful and worth money and time is sponsoring your show in Fountain because you will drive listeners, absolutely. And their listeners that are already kind of pre charged with probably Sats in a wallet, they kind of already get the ecosystem, they already kind of get the Value for Value model. So not only will you pick up a good chunk of users, but they’re like a really high value type of user as well.
So you know, if you’re just trying to get started and get discovered, that’s something to consider. And they’re not paying me to say that. I’m not I’m not getting paid to say that I really just believe that.
Nick: Yeah, it’s a good point. If you go to Fountain.fm/charts, you can see the top 50 most supported shows and episodes from the last seven days. We update them daily. If your show is essentially trending and getting more support, it will be featured there. It definitely has a massive difference. And you can also find out more about promotions on our website as well.
We’re just at six o’clock now, I think we’ve got probably time for one more question. I’ll also kind of leave my email address and details at the end of this. You can also just reach out to us directly on Twitter at @Fountain_app, or to me directly @NickMalster. One more question, who’s it going to be?
Serena: I actually have a lot of good questions. Like to piggy back what she was saying about viewership. How do I continue, now that I’m growing my YouTube, how do I continue to get followers to listen to the podcast as well, but also gaining revenue from each streamer from there and bring traffic to both sites? How do I do that?
Chris: That’s a tricky question. So the way I think about it is I think about each podcast as a product. And so for it to be a competitive product in a highly competitive market, because there’s a lot of podcasts, I think about what do the show notes look like? What does the album art look like? What’s the audio quality sound like? How fast are the downloads? What’s the presentation like on the website? Because each at each individual show I do is a product that needs to stand on its own merits in a very packed marketplace.
And so I try to check all those boxes, because there’s probably going to be other people doing what I’m doing. So I want to do the best version of that. I want to make it sound the best. I want to have the most engaging conversation. I want to do the most in-depth research. I want to go more technical than anybody else goes. And then I want to have the best show notes. I want to have links to everything I talk about. I want to have good album art. I want to have my guests there.
This is part of why I want to do podcasting 2.0 is because podcasting 2.0 makes my podcast more competitive, because I’ll have transcripts, I’ll have chapters, I’ll have features that the other podcasts don’t have. And when I’m trying to stand up from the pack, I want to have these kind of value ads that the other guys just frankly haven’t gotten around to yet. And that I’m willing to spend the time on and make my podcast a little bit better. And so I think it’s kind of a long way of saying, make the most competitive products you can, the audience will come. But I think you then also have to kind of be savvy about engaging the right guests. So that way they’ll draw some attention and leverage resources like Fountain advertising.
Of course, social media to a degree. But I would, my years of experience could depend on your community, but my years of experience would tell me social media matters, but they’re all those other things I just talked about matter 10x more than anything you’re going to do on Twitter or any other social platform.
Nick: Cool. All right, guys. We’ve just gone past the hour. I think it’s probably a good time to wrap it up. We will email everyone after the presentation, probably sometime in the next week or so with a recording of the presentation and be posting it on rss.com and Fountain.fm.
Like I said, you can reach out to myself and Chris directly if you like to. I’m @NickMalster on Twitter. I think Chris is @ChrisLAS on Twitter. So if you have any questions, please hit us up. I want to thank everyone again for joining today. It’s been a great pleasure to speak to you all and share some of this wisdom. And yeah, good luck. If you’re new to this, like we said, just be patient, experiment, and don’t give up too soon. And we’re really excited about the future of Value for Value, what it brings.
Definitely kind of keep following us and check out some of the new features and things we’re going to be bringing through the pipeline in the next year. So thank you, everyone.
