Funding

Danny Brown: 00:00:06

It's all about interactivity with a listener and making it a lot easier for the listener to get more involved with your podcast, whatever that looks like for listening, comments or funding. And it could be a buck, it could be five bucks, it could be a thousand bucks, whatever that looks like.

That would be awesome if it was a thousand dollars. But yeah, whatever that looks like. And it ties back to the value for value model.

If they get value from your podcast and they want to support the funding, makes it super easy. No matter what opt they prefer.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:00:35

Welcome Back to Podcasting 2.0 in Practice, one of the first things that attracted me to what Podcasting 2.0 has to offer was the chance to earn some money, a little financial support, or a value for value, which you'll know all about, listener, from my episode with David and Leila Medus. I've asked Danny Brown to explain what the funding feature is and why it's so cool. Hi, Danny, how are you?

Danny Brown: 00:01:04

I'm good, Claire. How are you?

Claire Waite Brown: 00:01:06

I'm very well, thank you. Start by introducing yourself and your podcasting background.

Danny Brown: 00:01:12

Yep, sure. So my name's Danny Brown, and not to be mistaken with the Detroit rapper Danny Brown. Very different people.

ars, and my first podcast was: 2016

We position ourselves as the growth platform for the serious indie podcaster.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:01:46

I love that. The serious indie podcaster. So tell me please, what the funding tag is. We call them tags. You know, listener their features.

We'll get to the technical terms of tags later in this series. Those words are interchangeable. So what is the funding tag and how does it work?

Danny Brown: 00:02:06

Yeah, so as the name suggests, it's a way for listeners or followers to fund your podcast and your ongoing podcasting journey. And there's lots of ways you can do that.

You mentioned value for value, and obviously David and Leila talked about the many ways of value for value and funding.

As I mentioned, it's a way to make it really simple for listeners to support your podcast, whether that's through Value for Value Patreon, or any kind of monetization options you have that make it easy for podcast listeners and followers to support your show.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:02:38

So this is something that, as a podcaster and I'M going to explain as a listener why it's good for a listener as well. But as a podcaster, you going to need to see whether your hosting company supports that and then you can set it up within your hosting company.

Is that correct?

Danny Brown: 00:02:57

It is. You can do it on your own as well. But primarily it's a lot easier if your hosting company does support it.

And I think most of the hosts now do actually support podcasting. 2.0 tags have really got a lift in the last 36 to 12 months by a lot of podcast hosting companies, which is great to see.

So, yeah, if your hosting company supports it, makes it super easy because then you can use the funding tag directly within your podcast RSS feed, then makes it super easy for podcasting apps that support the funding tag to allow listeners to support you on their favorite podcast app. So, yeah, hosting company, super easy. If not, you could essentially create your own link somewhere and use that.

But it's a bit more technical and, you know, if.

If you don't want to do the hard work and have to maintain it and everything like that, and use your own server, which I know David me just talks about a lot of the times, how he had to build his own server, et cetera. If you don't want to do that, then, yeah, look for a hosting company. There's plenty of them out there that support fund tag.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:03:56

Yeah. And I think what that means is the ease for the listener. This is what we want.

We want to put fewer and fewer barriers between the listener and the podcaster so that it's easy to do. So you mentioned there, Patreon.

We've talked with Sarah Ferris about some of the more I do air quotes, traditional monetization, sponsorship adverts, Patreon, buy me a coffee. Which you can still do with all of these other Podcasting 2.0 features.

But what do you think is the advantage of the funding tag being there where you can see it?

Danny Brown: 00:04:39

Yeah, and the main thing is, I mean, Patreon obviously is very well known by podcasters and a lot of listeners now when it first came out. It's a new technology that you have to get used to.

But I feel now when you talked about supporting your favorite podcast, that a lot of people do default to Patreon because it's well known. But the good thing with the funding option is for people that don't know about Patreon or don't have.

There's so people that don't have credit cards, for example, so they can't, you know, support Via Patreon, you have to pay via credit card, via stripe, etc.

So for any payment options where you can't support because you don't have a credit card for whatever reason, or you have a Visa debit that doesn't support online transactions through Stripe, then having a funding option allows you to basically create multiple areas where listeners can support you based on their preference.

So it might be a Patreon, it might be a Buy Me a Coffee, it could be your PayPal mailing, and it could just be, like you say, a really simple way to support financially, no matter what option the listeners prefer. So again, you'd mentioned earlier the tags and features of Podcasting 2.0.

It's all about interactivity with a listener and making it a lot easier for the listener to get more involved with your podcast or whatever that looks like for listening, comments or funding.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:05:52

Yeah, we talked at the very beginning. We introduced those concepts of the problems we have as podcasters with discoverability and interactivity being one of them.

Now I've set up my funding for my show Creativity Found with my host, who isn't Captivate. So when you're talking, Danny, about having other places to go with Captivate, you support funding.

Is that something that the podcast can set up and choose where the money goes?

Danny Brown: 00:06:21

Yeah. So the way that hosting companies work and certainly Captivate, so I'll speak to Captivate, because that's where I am.

And some different hosting companies might have slightly different ways of doing it, but at Captivate, you've got multiple options for monetization, which ties into the funding tag. So we have memberships and tips. So if that's your support Turlink, you can use that as your funding link.

If you use Patreon, you can drop that into the Patreon. There's like a little donation URL within the podcast settings that you can drop a link in.

So that could be Patreon, it could be PayPal, it could be buy me a coffee. Whatever external third party payment option you use, you would drop that in to your donation link and that becomes your funding link.

There's also under the podcast settings, a tag area for funding. So again, you can either leave that blank and if you use Captivate monetization features, we will default that link to that monetization option.

So if it's your memberships where people very similar to Patreon, if people pay your monthly fee, that will be your default funding link.

If you don't have that activated, but you have TIPS activated, which is kind of like buy me a coffee, then that will become your default funding link. So it's all done at hosting level.

And whatever you add as donation links or monetization links on top of what Captivate makes as a default one, that's the options that people can support with when using the funding tag on podcasting apps.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:07:42

Brilliant. Got it.

So this, this one, you can just give some money so the podcaster doesn't have to say, I've given you extra content, I'm giving you ad free content, or whatever it is. It could just be the listener can go, I like this show. I want them to keep going. I'll give them $3 or whatever.

Danny Brown: 00:08:02

Yeah, exactly. And it could be a buck, it could be five bucks, it could be a thousand bucks, whatever that looks like.

That would be awesome if it was a thousand dollars. But, yeah, whatever that looks like. And it ties back to the value for value model.

If they get value from your podcast and they want to support the funding, makes it super easy. No matter what option, they prefer that they can then buy you a coffee or send you some money via PayPal or, you know, direct to stripe, et cetera.

And the cool thing is, if you didn't want to just sort of limit that to one option and you want to make it super easy for your listeners to support you. And Dave is a great example of this, actually. He has a V4V page on his website and that shows you all the different ways you can support the podcast.

So you can do, you know, memberships, you can do Patreon, you can do PayPal, you can send a check, you can do XYZ. So you could actually make that your funding link. And then when someone does press the funding on their podcast app, it goes to that page.

And then they can choose exactly how they want to do things that way.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:08:58

Brilliant. So it's super easy for the listener.

They're there, they're in the app, they're listening to the show, and they click on the funding symbol, whatever it is, because they're all a little bit different. And I talk about that in future episodes. Then they have their choices so they don't have to think about it.

And then remember later to, oh, I was going to do that. They can do it right there where they're listening.

So my only other question, Danny, is whether you have any thoughts or comments or ideas for how podcasters should communicate that their listeners can do this. Because it's all very well there, being a symbol on an app, but if your listener doesn't know what that means.

Or that you're even looking out for some support. So what are your thoughts or ideas on that, really?

Danny Brown: 00:09:47

Yeah, and that's a great point. That's where the funding tag does need more adoption.

And same with many podcasts and 2.0 tags that don't have as much adoption as, say, you know, transcripts or chapters, for example. So, yeah, it does need more adoption and it'd be great if there was one unifying symbol for funding.

And it might just be dollars, you know, maybe a little dollar sign that the US dollar is still the global currency, basically. So that might be the way to make it clearer. But yeah, I mean, as a podcaster, have a call to action both in your show notes and as an audio snippet.

So if your hosting company supports dynamic inserts, record a little audio snippet that tells your listeners, hey, if you enjoy the show and you want to support it in any way, you can do that by clicking a little funding symbol on your podcast app, which might be a dollar, it might be a little square.

Check your analytics and see what podcast apps your listeners are using the most and then see what their funding symbol is and then use that language in the audio call reaction. So you make a little note, a little blurb in your show notes. If you enjoy the show and you want to support it here, you can do that.

And that's a link to the funding link. Same on your audio snippet. Just say you can do that by going to podcastname.com support, whatever that that looks like.

Make it super easy, make it repetitive, so people start to get into the mindset, oh, I could actually support the show. I really enjoyed the episode. I'm going to chuck a couple of bucks, Danny or Claire's way and just tell people about online as well. It's.

It's like anything.

The more you tell people about something, the more likely they are to remember it and then act upon it when they want to actually support you because you've just shared some really cool advice or had an awesome guest on it. They really enjoyed having.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:11:26

Brilliant. Thank you. It's a learning for all of us, podcaster and listener, that this can be done and this would be very useful and helpful.

Thank you so much, Danny. It's been really lovely to talk to you. I really appreciate it.

Danny Brown: 00:11:41

You're very welcome. I enjoyed it too. Thank you, Claire.

Claire Waite Brown: 00:11:45

Visit creativityfound.co.uk podcasting to find out more about my guests and access lots of useful podcast resources.

If you'd like to get in touch you can send a boost, but if you haven't got to that lesson yet, feel free to reach out to me on my Instagram account odcasting 2.0 in practice.