Speaker 1: All right, I'm not gonna make you wait. I think the best podcast host that you can sign up for today is Red Circle, and I'm gonna take you through why I think that is, but before we do that, let's take a look at some of the other options that you might wanna consider as well. And first, we're gonna start with Simplecast. All right, so I've been using Simplecast actually myself for many years, I think since 2016 or 2017. My personal podcast is still on there. We have 45 plus other clients on there, and you're like, Ryan, well, why didn't you tell me you should go with Red Circle then? We'll get to that later, I promise, but I think Simplecast is still a really solid option, and I'll kind of explain some of the features that you can look at in terms of Simplecast. So we'll come look at their features and pricing. You'll see here they have three tiers. I'm gonna stay here on this independent podcaster tab here because that's probably what most of you guys are. So starting at 15 bucks a month, that's gonna be the entry to get in here. You got unlimited storage and uploads. We're gonna see analytics on all these different platforms, and truth be told, they're all pretty much the same. So analytics are analytics, and the rest of this stuff down here is pretty basic. They do cap you at 20,000 downloads per month on the basic plan, so if you're getting more than that, they possibly could bump you up to the essential, which is 35 per month. I will say that we've had clients doing more than 20,000 per month on this basic plan, so I do think that this is a manual review process unless you're maybe doing 100, 150,000 a month, they're probably not gonna notice and not gonna say anything to you. They never have to ask. So this is what I'm on, this is what I would say of the 45 plus clients that we have, I'd say 95% of them are on this basic plan. If you move up to the essential plan, really you're just gonna get more of the embeddable web players for your blog and stuff, more team member seats, and then more monthly downloads. And on the stats, they do say you get more advanced features down to the city level and device type and stuff like this. To me, that stuff's kind of, for a small independent podcaster, it's kind of worthless. What do I care if somebody's living, listening in a subset of Austin, Texas or Atlanta, Georgia or whatever it is? As long as I know it's in Texas, I'm cool with that. I don't need that granular detail. That's not gonna really tell me anything that changes the game on how I do my podcast. So this is kind of the entry to get into Simplecast. You could pay up to 85 per month. I'd say you need a really, really big show and a really, really big team. So you have these team member seats. So one of the things, and you'll see as we look at like Transistor later on, where you can add multiple podcasts. Here, this is for one podcast, and you can invite two team members to it. But also if you have, if you're like me and you're like an agency and you have clients, our clients actually just use one of these team member seats to add us to the plan so we can actually see all 45 plus of those shows in our single dashboard. So that's just something to consider, but this is for one podcast. So again, I think Simplecast is a great option. I use it, but let's take a look at some of the others and ultimately why I think Red Circle is the best. The next one we're gonna check out is Libsyn. So first let's head over to the features here. So Libsyn is the OG in the space. They've been around forever. And because they've been around forever, they've been able to do some really interesting things. So first, they're IAB certified. Most of these platforms are that we're looking at. That is essentially just saying that they're, the backend and how they measure downloads has been verified and that they are tracking in accordance to standards. So if we scroll down here, what I meant by, they've been around for a while and they're doing cool things. So they have, again, a web player, a website, Simplecast has this as well. So yeah, custom will show website. So this is something we're gonna see across the board. I do like Libsyn's a little bit better than Simplecast. But what I wanted to show you was these monetization option here. So if we scroll down, Libsyn has acquired Glow and AdvertiseCast. So AdvertiseCast is just a marketplace, something similar to what we're gonna see on Red Circle later on. But this was a independent company that Libsyn acquired. So you can use this even if you're not on Libsyn. So don't think you have to sign up for Libsyn to use AdvertiseCast. But this is essentially just a marketplace of podcasts that want to run ads and then advertisers that wanna advertise on podcasts. So you can come here. If you've never used this, one of the things that I think is interesting is you can come to Podcasters and then we'll scroll down here and we'll do Try Our Calculator. And then say you get 1,000 downloads per month, you do an episode every week, you have one ad slot on there, you get the industry standard CPM, cost per 1,000 downloads is 18, you'd only make $655 per year. It goes up, let's say we did 10,000, you'd make $6,500. So unless you're getting a lot of downloads, the traditional sponsorship route really isn't a smart way to go. It's either better to have a very niche show where you're talking to advertisers and they're not worried about CPM because your niche is so, so specific. We have several clients like this. Trust me, it works and you'll make 10x, 20x the amount of money that you will with this CPM model. And then the other option is to sell your own products and services. But I'm not here to tell you how to monetize your podcast. The other option is Glow. And this is kind of like a membership type of platform. So there's a lot of membership builders out there. This is one specifically built for podcast creators. And you pay like an amount per member and then they take a percentage fee off of each of those monthly billings that happen. So that's their model. So you pay extra for both of these outside of just Libsyn itself. So Libsyn, that's the gist of it. It does the basics. If we look over on plans and pricing. So different than the Simplecast pricing, they do it based on number of hours. So if we're looking at a three hours of upload, that's essentially four 45 minute episodes. So if you're doing 60 minute episodes, hour, 50 minute, whatever it is, and you're releasing weekly, you're immediately gonna be up on this $15 a month tier. And another thing that Libsyn does that I'm not a big fan of, I'm sure it works out great from a business standpoint, but they have storage limits on here. So it's hours plus storage limit. So if your file size varies, then that can impact how much you pay as well. Like we've had several clients that they're fine from like an hour standpoint, but they actually just run out of storage in their account. So they have to upgrade for that month simply because they hit their storage limit. So that's something that I don't like. So your file type could matter here. Again, like stats, they have their, I guess you would call this like their rudimentary stats, right, because their basic stats are actually on this mid-tier plan. But this will probably just show you like your number of downloads and stuff. And then as you move here, this is gonna get you a little bit more detailed. Again, typically the basic is gonna be just fine. So unlimited bandwidth, all this stuff is gonna be the typical stuff that you're gonna see on all the other podcast hosting platforms out there. So that is Libsyn. Let's take a look at Buzzsprout. So Buzzsprout is another OG in the space. They do a ton of YouTube content as well. Chances are if you're Googling something about podcasting, you've ran across their videos before. Let's take a look at their features. So again, it's gonna be similar to all the others. They get your podcast out to all the different players. They give you stats, very similar to all the other platforms. They do offer magic mastering, which essentially like they say, it like sweetens your audio files. If you're doing post-production already on your episodes to clean it up and running EQs on it, then this really isn't going to add much value to you. But if you're just uploading like raw episodes, you could use their magic mastering feature for a fee and it could make you sound a little bit better. So essentially just adds an EQ onto your episodes. And we'll talk more about that in a second. So they have automatic episode optimization. I think this is just like marketing. I don't think this really does anything of value for you. Dynamic content though, however, is pretty cool. And this is different than dynamic ad insertion, which we'll look at in a minute. This is dynamic content where you can add a pre-roll, meaning before the episode starts, or a post-roll, meaning after the episode starts. And this could be an ad. It could be honestly whatever you want. It could just be like, hey, thanks for listening. You could upload one for every month if you want. Like, hey, it's July 2022, or August, or December, or whatever. You could change that every month. You could change it however much you want. So this is pretty cool. Different than dynamic ad insertion in that they don't collect any data on your listeners. So they're not in this for like big advertising with like big corporations and stuff like that, which would want some like demographic type information on your audience. So this is purely for you, and it's pretty cool. You can upload dynamic content. They do have this transcription service, which just simply because I've used it before, I know this is just Timmy. They just have an API into Timmy, T-E-M-M-I. So you could either use it through Buzzsprout or Timmy.com and check that out. They have web players, which I do think look good. And yeah, manage multiple podcasts. So awesome. This is, let's look at the pricing. So they have a free plan or a free tier, however you want to say it, which is cool. But actually I think their free tier is absolutely worthless. Let me tell you why. So you get two hours each month, which if you're doing a weekly show and it's 30 minutes, you're good. That's two hours of content. What makes it worthless is this line right here. They only host your episodes for 90 days. So every month and a half, your catalog falls off the face of the earth and is no longer listable from your audience. So for this reason, I think this tier actually doesn't exist. And hopefully people aren't signing up for it and not realizing their catalog is dropping off. So for Buzzsprout's conversation, we're gonna say that it starts at $12 per month. And you get three hours of content, which similar to Libsyn is four 45 minute episodes. So if you need to upload more, they do $4 per hour. So you would get a prompt when you're trying to upload content that goes over that. You can add their magic mastering for an additional $6 a month. So you could be, if you wanted, if you had more than three hours and you wanted magic mastering, I don't like doing public math, but that's $22 a month. So you'd be somewhere in between these two tiers. As you move up, again, there's just the hours increase. So if you really like Buzzsprout, you just wanna look at how much content you're putting out in terms of hours per month. And that'll tell you about how much you're gonna pay. But similar in terms of stats, storage, team members, that type of stuff, you get unlimited team members. So those are little things to consider, right? If that factors into how you run your podcast and your content business. So that's Buzzsprout. Again, they've been around for a while, really solid and dependable platform, just not the biggest fan of their pricing, which I've said in videos before. Now let's take a look at Transistor. So Transistor is a cool platform. They have the standard stuff, podcast hosting. One of the cool things about their hosting model is that you can have a limited podcast. So like if you're on, like you put on here, like Simplecast, Buzzsprout, Podbean, Lipson, any of these others, if you are creating a new podcast, they're gonna charge you more for that. Whereas Transistor does not. So whether you have one podcast, five podcasts, or 10 podcasts, it would still be 19 bucks per month. Whereas if you're on like Simplecast, the price would scale as you add more shows. Now, like you remember earlier, I said that we have 45 plus shows on there. So what we're actually getting to do because I have a content marketing agency focused on podcasting, we get our clients to create the accounts and add us as one of the two team members, and then it shows up in our dashboard. So that's how we have access to that many shows, but we're not actually creating them on our side. So that's something to consider. Each podcast will get its own login. So that's good. And then if we come up here and we look at, so analytics, this is gonna be pretty much the same across all the hosts. Like I said, distribution, pretty much the same. Private podcasting is a cool feature though. This is like, if you wanna offer exclusive content to your listeners, or maybe you're like run a company and you wanna have like an internal podcast, some type of exclusive content that not everyone would have access to, you have the ability to do that in Transistor. So you could have your public podcast, and because we just looked at, you can add multiple podcasts for no additional cost. Then you could add private ones or ones that have exclusive type content as well, and send that link to your listeners, and they can add that podcast in their podcast app as well. It's typically done by just providing RSS URL. So let's take a look at their pricing here. So podcast pricing is 19 bucks per month. Again, you can create unlimited podcasts, you can create private podcasts, so that's awesome. They've been known to have great support as well. Again, analytics, website, all that stuff's gonna be the same. As you move up to their professional, which is 50 bucks a month, the big things that change, if we can look at the numbers and the check marks, which we can, is you get additional team members here, and you get access to their dynamic ad insertion. So this is similar to what we were looking at on Buzzsprout's dynamic content, but this is dynamic ad insertion. And here you can also insert mid-roll ads as well, where over on Buzzsprout, you can only do pre-roll and post-roll. They do have this dynamic show notes feature, which I think is quite option, not option, awesome, where you can actually change the show notes template across all your episodes as well. So if you wanna have like a call to action that changes, similar to like an audio ad, you can change that across the board on the professional and the business plan. So awesome stuff. They have monthly download limits similar to Simplecast, and I would imagine they would operate similar to Simplecast as well, where if you go over just a little bit, not a big deal, but if you're crossing the 100,000 mark and you're on this plan, they're probably gonna ping you about bumping up. So that's Transistor. And then the last one that we're gonna look at is actually the one that I'm recommending now that we're switching all of our clients to, which is Red Circle. So on Red Circle, some of the cool things are, and actually let's just go to podcasters. Let's look at some of the features. So they have an ad platform. So this is similar to Advertise Cast, like we looked at before, where it's a little marketplace where you can find ads to put on your show, advertisers, companies, things like that, that are wanting to advertise on podcast. They have cross promos, which cross promos, whether you use something like Red Circle or not, are one of the best ways to grow your podcast. Essentially what you're doing is you're reaching out, say I'm Ryan, you're Jim. I would say, hey Jim, I've got a podcast about X, Y, and Z. I'd love it if we could do a collab. And what I have in mind is you talk about my show for 30 seconds on your show, and I'll do the same. I'll talk about your show for 30 seconds on mine. So you're cross promoting each other's show. It has a high conversion rate, one of the highest conversion rates for adding new followers and subscribers onto a show. They also have the subscriptions feature. So this is gonna be similar to like a Patreon or that Lips and Glow feature that we looked at earlier. They have donations, which is similar to like a buy me a coffee type feature. And obviously the hosting and distribution stuff that we talked about earlier. If we look at their pricing, so they do have a free tier as well, which unlimited hosting and distribution. You get access to the subscription stuff, the donation stuff, the wrap that you see here, here, and here, which is essentially like red circle content. So not your own stuff. So you get access to like the red circle programmatic ads, host red ads, and you can dynamically insert that ad content. You wouldn't be able to insert, dynamically insert your own ad. So if you wanna do that, you'd wanna upgrade to the growth plan, which is I recommend, and actually I'm gonna switch back over the monthly here. So 12 bucks per month, unlimited podcast, similar to Transistor. You get access to the cross promo marketplace, the dynamic ad insertions, which to be honest is that's one of the main reasons that we moved from Simplecast to Red Circle. I reached out to Simplecast like enterprise sales team, and we couldn't really come up with something that financially made sense. They wanted like, it was like either 80 or $120 per month to get access to their dynamic ad insertion tool. And here I can get it for $12. Like that's a no brainer. And it's been a pretty steady, solid platform for us. We've been using it for about six months now. You get access to video, obviously the payouts from the different monetization options that they have, 12 bucks a month. You move up to the pro plan, it really just changes the number of seats. So Red Circle has been a great option and is the one that we're moving all of our clients to. And if you're looking to start a podcast, I'd recommend that you use Red Circle to start your show, or if you're looking to do dynamic ad insertion, maybe you wanna switch from something like a Libsyn or a Simplecast to Red Circle. All right, hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight into the different options that you have out there and gives you some clarity on which one you want to move forward with. Again, Red Circle is the one I'm recommending, but at the same time, I've been using Simplecast for a long time personally. I will have links to everything down below. If you wanna sign up for Red Circle, check right below the video, you'll see a link for that. And if you're a podcaster and you don't like spending time writing podcast show notes, check out my other company, Melville.app, which automatically writes podcast show notes for you. Hope you got some value from this video. I'm Ryan Helms. Peace.