Riverside Adds Podcast Hosting With Publishing & Analytics (Full Transcript)

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: And I am the community lead here at Riverside, and we have a special session for you today. We are going to be talking all about hosting, which is officially ready for you all to use on Riverside. So now you can record, host, and edit, record, edit, and host. I guess that's the usual timeline that you use. But you can now do all of that within Riverside. So do your entire workflow end-to-end. So really exciting new update here. And I'm also very excited because I have Tal with me here from the product team today. Hello, Tal.

[00:00:38] Speaker 2: Hello.

[00:00:39] Speaker 1: And we are, I'm really excited to have you with me because we've gotten a ton of questions about hosting and just because it's kind of a new frontier within Riverside being able to do that entire workflow end-to-end all in one place, we decided that maybe it's about time to do a session and do a full demo of everything that has to do with hosting. So today, we will be going through hosting end-to-end, whether that's a new webinar, a new podcast that you're hosting, or an existing one. So we'll go through both flows, setting up a new one and bring your existing podcast into Riverside. So there is a lot to be getting to, and we'll also be taking your feature requests like I always do at the end of these special sessions, as well as answering some of your questions because Tal here has really helped develop this feature. So there's few people at this company who knows more about hosting than Tal here, who is also dressed as Steve Jobs for the event. It just makes it more official, yeah. So as we go, feel free to leave your questions. I'm going to have Tal give you a demo of it. And I will also say that this session will not be the full hour. We'll probably go about a half hour here because congratulations are needed for Tal and good luck because we have our Riverside Hackathon today, and his team has made the finals. So a round of applause for him in the comments. And also as we're gearing up to start, could you please let me know in the comments, are you already hosting with Riverside? Are you planning on it? Do you want some more information just to get some more ideas about you and what we can show you today for the webinar? So without further ado, we got some planning on it, planning very soon. So yeah, this is the perfect time to join. Tal, are we all ready for our demo? All right. I think so. Amazing. So we're going to have Tal make his debut on Riverside and our new green screen studio. So this is very exciting. Tal, take it away.

[00:02:52] Speaker 2: Okay. Let me share my screen with you. Let's do entire screen. Great. So let me walk you through this new feature that I'm super excited about, which is hosting.

[00:03:08] Speaker 1: Wow.

[00:03:08] Speaker 2: Okay. I'm nervous, but excited. So let's talk about hosting, right? So today in Riverside, you can edit and record, record and edit your episodes. And we recently launched the ability to also host your episodes on Riverside and publish them from Riverside to Apple and Spotify and YouTube. And what I'm going to do with you right now is just create a new podcast together and show you how quickly this can be done. And then I will show you an existing podcast so I can also show you things like analytics. Okay. So let's create a podcast together. It's going to go real fast. We're going to pick a title. We love to call our podcasts for the love of pods. So I'm going to continue. I have a little description ready to go. So we're going to do that. I think this podcast would be about technology and management.

[00:03:57] Speaker 1: I want to quickly just jump in because I want to hear more of this demo. Just for the description part, one thing that I will say as far as hosting for best practices is when you're doing this description, the best thing you can do beforehand is look in to keywords because when you're putting yourself, your content onto Spotify, onto Apple Podcasts, onto YouTube, what you want to do is target the right people. So first step while you're doing this description, I would say is go and research some keywords. I would recommend Keywords Everywhere for that. It's a KeywordsEverywhere.com. I'll put that into the chat. And from there, you can really put the keywords that you think that people are looking for. They can help you get in front of the right audiences. We do have somebody saying that this is too fast. So let's go a little slower.

[00:04:46] Speaker 2: Yeah. Let's go slow. All right. So as you know, I clicked on create a podcast. The first thing you want to do is put in a name for your podcast. So I'm calling mine For the Love of Pod. I'm going to click on continue. The next step is to add a description for your podcast. I had one ready to go. So I sort of copy pasted it in here. As you can see, you can also make things bold, add links, et cetera. Not all platforms support it entirely, but you can go ahead and style it the way you want. Then we'll go and continue. The next step is to pick two categories. This helps platforms like Spotify and Apple surface your podcast in the right context. I'm going to pretend like this one is about management and technology for a second. As you can see, I can pick only about two categories. That's the maximum that platforms would allow us. But you don't have to. You can also stick with just one. That's plenty. I'm going to continue. The next step is to add cover art. I have one ready to go that I made this morning for The Love of Pod by Riverside. Beautiful. Thank you. Of course, you can always delete it and do it again. You can drag and drop. We made it super easy. But as you can see, I have artwork ready to go. It tends to have to be a minimum of 1,400 by 1,400 and a max of 3,000 by 3,000 pixels. But don't worry. If yours is too small or too big, we will automatically resize it for you. If you just want to get started and you have an image lying around and it's not perfectly square, we will square it for you. We really made this as easy as possible, which is why I'm going so fast I have to stop myself. It is truly like five clicks and you're done.

[00:06:27] Speaker 1: And I'll just jump in really quick and say Tal got to this whole screen because we had a question where on Riverside are you setting this up? On the left-hand side of your dashboard, you'll now see hosting. So this is where this is all coming from. So once you click hosting, it'll take you into this flow if you have a new podcast. Right now what we're covering is new podcasts. I'll also say for cover art, what he's describing right now is the cover art for your podcast, not for your episodes, which we'll get to. So just best practice here, if you're new to hosting or new to podcasting or just want some best practices, is that you want this to be as clear as possible. So you don't want to be filling this cover art with pictures and making it hard to read and putting a bunch of words on there. You want it to be clear, concise, eye-catching, and be able to show a little bit of your podcast personality just right from the get-go. So that's what I'd say is best practice here.

[00:07:22] Speaker 2: So I'm going to continue. And now these are the last steps. You can put in an author so people know who's behind the podcast. If you have a website, you can put it here. If you don't, you can just leave it blank. The language, of course, very clear. And then these two things I want to explain. One is whether your content is clean or explicit. This will help platforms sort of give a warning to people who don't like explicit language, for example. And then this one, which can be sometimes a bit confusing, is the type, whether it's serial or episodic. If you don't know for sure, then probably you want to pick episodic. It just means that people can listen to any episode at any time. Your most recent episode will appear at the top. And that's kind of the standard way for podcasts to appear. But every so often, there might be a podcast where it's more like a serial. And there was actually one called Serial, where it's more like a season. And you really want to start on episode one, and then number two, and then number three. If you pick serial, then on Apple, on Spotify, they will make sure to display your episodes per season and also in the right order, sort of the reverse order as the one in episodic, where the most recent one would be at the top, so to speak. If you're unsure about this, of course, we all have these tooltips. You can just click on them. You can learn more. And we will explain to you all of this in more detail. Kendall, if you have anything to add, let me know. And otherwise, I will just click set up.

[00:08:48] Speaker 1: I think we can keep on going. Awesome.

[00:08:51] Speaker 2: So as you can tell, it took three to five steps. I can go back, of course. I can make some other decisions. But as you see, it is extremely simple, extremely quick. So I'm just going to continue through this. Yeah, it looks good. So I'm just going to set up my podcast. Okay, great. So now what we have is the starting point, right? We have a podcast title. We have a podcast description. But in order to publish your podcast to Apple or Spotify, you need at least one episode to submit. So we're just going to do that together. I'm going to click on create new and create an episode together. We're just going to call this the very first episode. And then I'm going to choose a file. I have one lying around. Let's see if it was ready and exported. Yes, it is. Oh, it's still a bit exporting. So what I'm going to do here is pick the one that is the magic episode, which, of course, is a very great choice. And then you can also generate the description. If you have one lying around, of course, you can type it. I haven't clicked this button in a while, but if I click generate, we are basically using AI to generate show notes for you. Wow, okay, that was fast. And so we're basically creating this thing for you. You might just want to like style it a little bit. So I'm just going to do this. I'm going to put a break line here, put some bold. But we basically generate for you a description, some takeaways, even chapters. This is a very short episode, so there's only two chapters. But we're trying to save you as much time as possible and help you get started. Again, as I mentioned, you can put in a season number and an episode number. It is optional. You can also declare if this is a normal episode, which is pretty much everyone, or a trailer or a bonus episode. And then again, Apple and Spotify will sort of label them as such on their platforms. And you can again warn people if there's explicit content in this specific episode. But this looks really ready to go for me. Of course, if I wanted to, I could upload a custom artwork just for this episode, but I really like the one I created today. So I'm just going to click on publish. Wonderful. All right. So now we're basically ready to go live because we created our podcast. We created the first episode, which we need to submit. And now I can basically connect Spotify, Apple and YouTube pretty much in one click. I'm going to show you what it looks like, but I'm not going to actually connect it because I want to show you an existing podcast I made where I already have analytics. And I don't want to publish the same podcast twice to Apple and Spotify. But if you click on Spotify, it will just say, hey, if you're ready to go, you can just click on connect and then we'll connect it. Same thing with Apple. Same thing with YouTube. YouTube, technically, we just need you to log in for a second and sort of tie your account together. But once you've done that, your podcast will be live. It can take a moment. Spotify, usually within the hour. Apple, similarly. YouTube is instant, actually. But usually within the hour, your podcast will be live. And then this episode will show as published rather than ready because it's waiting for you to be connected. I'm going to pause here for a second to see if Kendall wants to add something and then I will show you analytics.

[00:12:12] Speaker 1: Let's continue on to analytics. And then we had a question about showing existing podcasts. Will you be showing analytics on an existing one? Or I assume that's what we're going to do next.

[00:12:22] Speaker 2: Yes, because this one I'm about to create. So you won't have any listeners yet. Yes.

[00:12:27] Speaker 1: So that was creating a new show. So now if we're doing chapters here, which we will because we have AI generated chapters in Riverside. This chapter is now called adding your existing podcast into Riverside hosting.

[00:12:41] Speaker 2: Right. So as you can see in the sidebar, this is where you find hosting. This is a podcast I've already created. You can see the description I put here of connected Spotify and Apple. I can go view it live on Spotify. I can also do the same for Apple. We've given you some quick links here. As you can see, I have a variety of episodes now already at the top level. We will tell you how many streams each episode has gotten. So I want to start.

[00:13:11] Speaker 1: Can I just pause really quick and to say how what were the steps? I know that we already created this podcast. What were the steps that you took to bring in an existing one?

[00:13:22] Speaker 2: Oh, so for importing. Yeah. Let me see how to create. But basically at the very start, when you create a new podcast. So maybe let me. OK, great. Here's something. So at the very beginning, when you click on hosting and you don't have a podcast in that studio yet, you can either create a new podcast from scratch or you can import an existing podcast from anywhere else. There's many other hosting services, even Spotify, but also Buzzsprout, et cetera. And if you're ready to bring everything under one place on Riverside, you can just click on import. We'll look for your show. There's a show I really like, which I'm not going to import right now. But you can just basically search for your show. We find it. And if I click on this button, we're just going to start moving your whole podcast over to Riverside. The last thing you need to do, and of course, we'll take you by the hand, is to set up a redirect on your current hosting solution, which is sort of like forwarding your mail when you move houses so that they will basically redirect the podcast to Riverside. That's pretty much it. It's actually very straightforward. I'm not going to import a podcast right now, but I just wanted to show you how it's done.

[00:14:36] Speaker 1: And so that whole process, like Tal said, for redirecting, we take you step by step through the entire thing. So as you're doing it, you will have all the guidance for how exactly to do that. So once you type in your podcast, once you pick which podcast is yours and you bring it all in, now Tal is going to show you what it looks like to host your podcast on Riverside.

[00:14:58] Speaker 2: Right. So I've had this podcast for a while, as you can tell. I have a bunch of streams. People seem to like this podcast. And what I want to show you now is analytics. We spent a lot of effort to make sure you get a good sense of how your podcast is performing. At the very top, we'll tell you the total streams you have so far in the last seven days, in the last 24 hours. As you can tell, my podcast is pretty recent. People seem to love my podcast in Poland. So we'll just let you know what the top country is. And then we're breaking it down into a few graphs. The first one is basically streams over time. So, you know, in the beginning, not so many streams on Monday was probably my most popular day. Today's Tuesday. You know, we're going up there. I can play with this. I can show the last 30 days, the last six months. I can also do cumulative, which is really fun because then the graph just keeps going up and up. And we just keep adding all the streams you've had so far across time. And you can get a sense of like your growth pretty much. Recent episodes, which is one of the coolest graphs, will actually compare the last five episodes so that you can have a sense of how each one is performing. And especially if your last episode is performing better or worse than usual. And so what you can see here is that I'm comparing these last five episodes that I've published. And you can see that by day one, this episode didn't perform so well. But we clearly have a winner over here. These two are actually very popular. This one had 12 streams on the first day. And as you can tell, it will say this is 87 percent above average. So that's a very good episode. You probably want to think about how to make all your episodes follow the same model. Again, top episodes. This is across all of your episodes. You can look for the top five or across the board. We'll show you basically the most popular episodes you've published so far. Very cool thing. We also tell you where people are listening to your podcast. So the biggest platforms, of course, are Apple, Spotify and YouTube. In this case, I haven't connected YouTube yet. There's a long tail, of course, of smaller apps that we will sort of tell you about if they're meaningful. In this case, I think people listen to it from some very random places. But in general, we'll tell you how many listen to you on pocket casts, on overcast. There's so many podcast apps and we will break it down for you as well. Just so far on mine, people just listen to it on Apple and Spotify. And again, as I mentioned, the top countries will show you the top 10. In my case, there's only like five countries that have listened to me so far. You can see the breakdown. And as usual, I can do it over the last seven days, 12 months, six months, etc. And in doing so, we want to give you a very clear picture of how your podcast is performing. That's pretty much it. There's some little details, of course, like if you click on the plus, you can also connect YouTube if you haven't yet. So you can always add more. If you go here, you can edit the details. If you want to change again the name or anything like that of your podcast. If you want to share the RSS URL with anyone, you can click here. And if you actually change your mind, you can just remove this podcast and we will delete it. I think that's basically it.

[00:18:23] Speaker 1: That is a really great rundown and we have a ton of questions, so I want to make sure that we get to all of them. So I'll go through some of your questions now. The top question that we got for sure was if you have an existing podcast and you bring in your podcast from another host, do the analytics from previous episodes on another hosting platform transfer into Riverside when you bring in an existing one?

[00:18:49] Speaker 2: Right. They don't and we wish they would, but so far this isn't something that happens when you switch between platforms. It's just not supported by all the different hosting solutions. We are really breaking our heads to figure out if there's a creative way we can still figure it out. Some platforms, not all, will let you export the analytics. We might be able to import them, but right now it's not like a one-click import of all your analytics. But it is something we're hearing a lot and we are trying to figure out how to eventually make it possible.

[00:19:25] Speaker 1: But just to be clear, your episodes that you have when you switch over will continue to be published the same way that they are published. You wouldn't lose your episodes, it's just that the analytics will not carry over. So we did get a lot of questions about if you'd lose anything else once you move your podcast over. So quick question, would you plan to extend the hosting to other platforms? For example, Amazon Music, Podcast Index, Podchaser, Deezer?

[00:19:58] Speaker 2: Right. Yes, I've designed this feature, so we had a lot of discussions about that. When you publish your podcast to Apple Podcasts, it actually tends to be distributed to pretty much all other platforms. They tend to use Apple as the index of podcasts. That being said, we've heard a lot of this feedback and we are going to add a lot more of these one-click connections to Amazon Music, Deezer, etc. Generally speaking, if you just connect Apple Podcasts, it will already appear to pretty much all of these. But we are going to add additional ones just so you also feel confident that by connecting Amazon Music, it will absolutely appear there.

[00:20:43] Speaker 1: Great, we have another question. We have over 300 episodes already out. Do we need to manually move each one of them over to Riverside or does your team provide a service that will facilitate this when you transition?

[00:20:55] Speaker 2: Right, no. So it's a one-click process. You basically click on import, find your existing podcast, and we will do the heavy lifting of automatically uploading all of your episodes to Riverside and just basically pre-publish them from there. Your audience won't notice anything. Your podcast remains live just the same way. You don't have to manually bring every episode over. We will do that for you.

[00:21:24] Speaker 1: And we also had a question about publishing video. So I, correct me if I'm wrong, I'll take this one. Right now, when you publish, it's audio to Spotify and Apple Podcasts. When it's YouTube, it's video. We are hoping to have video available soon on Spotify. But the workaround right now is that you can log into your Spotify, you can publish from Riverside, then you can log into your Spotify account and add the video directly into Spotify. Am I right with that, Tal?

[00:21:55] Speaker 2: Correct.

[00:21:56] Speaker 1: OK, awesome. So another question was, can we set it up and publish later on? Can you schedule episodes?

[00:22:12] Speaker 2: Absolutely. Thank you for reminding me. I would love to show you how this works. So let me create a new episode real quick. I'm going to make a scheduled one. I'm just going to, well, lovely title. I'm going to pick a file. It doesn't quite matter. I'll pick even a magic clip. Just a quick description. And then here at the bottom, you see we have scheduling. So if I click on schedule, it's very straightforward. You can just pick the date and the time that you want to publish, the time zone if you want. And then just click on schedule and we'll schedule the episode to go live at the time you've decided. So if you click on save, you will see that your episode is now appearing under scheduled. So here you can see it's scheduled for December 17. Keep in mind that when we publish an episode, it can take up to an hour for Spotify and Apple to notice that there is new content on your podcast. So even if you set it for 9 a.m., it's possible that it won't be live until 10 a.m. We have no control over this. Apple and Spotify basically scrape podcasts about once an hour just to check if there's new content and update their platforms. And so just keep that in mind if you want to be sure it's online by 10 a.m., you know, you could schedule it for 8 a.m. and you'll be very safe.

[00:23:40] Speaker 1: And another question, if I switch over from hosting, speaking of scheduling, will my scheduled episodes move over as well? How does that work?

[00:23:49] Speaker 2: If you come to Riverside from a separate platform where you already have some episodes scheduled.

[00:23:55] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:23:56] Speaker 2: Wow, that's a very good question. I'm going to tell you what I think, but I'm not saying this with high confidence. I don't believe we're I'm pretty sure we're not importing any additional knowledge about what you were doing in that platform. We're actually just looking at the podcast and downloading the content. So the videos, the audio, the titles, the descriptions, the cover art. If you've had a setting in that platform saying please go live on the 17th, I don't think that's something that comes along when we import your podcast. It's just not part of the content we have access to. So I don't think that would be the case.

[00:24:37] Speaker 1: OK, I have a lot more. No, there's already a question. OK, will you have ad inserts that could be changed at the beginning and the end of your podcast? I will answer this one and say not yet. This is our kind of what I'm calling kind of version one of Riverside podcast hosting. And I say this because if anyone's been with us for a long time, you know that the editor, when we first put it out, is a completely different editor than when we first started it. We've just been adding more and more features and really just expanding it as we go. So ad inserts and like we were saying, video, that type of stuff and expanding even to more analytics. All of that is something that I expect will be things that come as we continue onto our path and to Riverside's grand journey into hosting. If somebody chooses explicit because they, quote, drop the occasional F-bomb, will it set an age requirement for your show?

[00:25:43] Speaker 2: Right. Again, I'm not saying this with the highest of confidence, and I think it varies by platform. Generally speaking, it mostly warns of explicit content with like an E in a little box as a label. I know for YouTube, you can sort of specify that this is a minimum of 18 years old. I'm not saying this with the highest confidence, for sure, if you select explicit, it would be labeled as such. But whether it will hide the content from minors is something I would need to double check. And it varies per platform, I believe.

[00:26:26] Speaker 1: We're getting a few questions about, do you get an embed link? Is this something that you can embed in a blog post or a website, for example?

[00:26:32] Speaker 2: Right. We've been getting this request a lot, so it's actually very high on our priorities. You don't currently get an embed link for each episode, but this is indeed very high on our priorities.

[00:26:46] Speaker 1: Awesome. And we just got a question about selecting explicit by episode. And yes, you can do that. When you're uploading a new episode, you can mark if that specific episode is explicit. Is there a time limit on each podcast recorded? I don't believe so.

[00:27:03] Speaker 2: I don't think so.

[00:27:06] Speaker 1: No. I'm running through these because I know that you have your you're going to go try to win your hackathon. And can you edit episodes in Riverside that will then upload to the podcast? I will take this one and say, yes, that is the whole idea. So you're able to edit your episodes and publish them right from the same place. And also, as you saw, it'll generate those timestamps, those show notes. So you can have all of that information already prepared to go. I don't want to keep Tal over time, and I know that you have a lot of questions. I think we've actually gotten to most of them. My last question I want to give to you is, well, we just got a question now. Can we set up pre, mid and post roles as far as ad insertion? That is not available yet with hosting. But if you go into the editor, you're able to split up your timeline and add your ads in that way. So if you're editing on Riverside, you can split your timeline, press the ad button and put in your ads that way, if that's what you'd like to do. So, Tal, I want to say thank you very much for for joining us. It's been great to have this rundown. And congratulations on all of this really hard work that you put into helping create the hosting platform here on Riverside. And I will also say to anyone whose questions have not been answered or for anyone who has any feature requests in the future, as Tal said, the product team is constantly looking at product requests and seeing or feature requests and seeing what we're going to be making next based on what you guys really want. So it doesn't have to be about hosting. I just want to open the floor up right now in the chat for anything that you would like to see in Riverside feature requests. I always download these chats, send them directly to our product team, and then they could see a real rundown of what's important to all of you. So, Tal, I will let you go. Go fight, win, get that hackathon on. Thank you so much.

[00:29:10] Speaker 2: Yeah, I will just let you know, of course, that even afterwards, if you just go to your podcast and click on give feedback, our team reads every single one of them. So feel free to let us know what you'd like us to build next. Thank you very much, Kendall. This has been a pleasure. I'm going to go present my team at the hackathon now.

[00:29:28] Speaker 1: Good luck, Tal.

[00:29:29] Speaker 2: Thank you. Bye bye.

[00:29:32] Speaker 1: And for anyone else who's still joining us live, I will be going through also all of these questions and emailing a few of you back with the answers to your questions, because this is a shortened kind of session that we're having today. But I will try to get some right here. Can we also set up a footer with consistent content that will be included on all episodes? If you're being like a footer, for example, for the like an outro. Yes, you can. So what you can either do is for every one of your episodes, if you're in our Riverside editor, you can press the plus button at the end of your timeline and add an outro. And that way, that'll be already in your podcast, in your episodes. Or if you go into the brand panel, you can actually choose in your branding to have a your your outro already in every time that you create a new episode. So that will set your branding to include. Yes, I have an outro and this is what it should look like. And we at Riverside will be automatically putting that into your episodes when you apply your brand kit. So I can send a little bit more information on the brand kit in the chat. I'll do that right now. There we go. I'll reply in the chat and oh, not the outro at the bottom of the show notes, a footer for links. I will look into that and see if that is possible. You might be able to because we just we just introduced personalizing the co-creator. So you're able to actually tell the co-creator every time I have show notes, please have this as the end. So that is something that I will look into. Otherwise, I see requests for different analytics, I see requests for different features, and I'm going to be sending all of this over to our team. But for now, that wraps up our session. So thank you all for joining. I really appreciate you taking the time. And I hope that you could see that we're really working hard to make Riverside somewhere where you can go end to end with your recording, editing, hosting, because we know that you have so many different tools that you're juggling and there's so many different subscriptions, so many different uploads, downloads, all of that. So we're really trying to centralize everything so that it makes the process easier for you, because when it's easier for you, it helps you get your stories out. And that's what's most important. So thank you all in the chat for joining and for talking to me. I appreciate all of this, guys. All right. See you next time. And I'm going to put in the chat. Oh, yeah, I will. We have a community workshop next week, so I'm putting that in the chat. It is on audience growth and monetization. I'm going to have two people from the community joining, and they're going to be talking all about how to grow your audience and monetize. And I know those are huge topics in this community. So we are really excited for that one. And while I have the stage to myself, I am also going to be putting a link to our community in case you aren't a part of it. There are over 20,000 creators in there that are all extremely supportive, all helping each other grow. And it's also where I announce features first and where I'm constantly looking for the aforementioned feature requests that I was talking about earlier on. So if you want to be part of more conversations and get more of the backstory behind how to use every one of the new features, that is your place to go. With all that said, whoo. Thank you so much for joining. Really appreciate you taking the time. And I can't wait to see you all hosting on Riverside. Bring your podcast on over. It'll be exciting. All right. Bye, everyone.