Foreign. Some of you may might know, I started this podcast, purely AI Podcast, to learn myself about AI. And at a certain point I got so many pictures from people who were really great wanting to be interviewed on the podcast. And as you can't survive as an AI only podcast, this is my belief. I had to change something and I got some additional interviews. And that's nearly two years ago since I started that things changed since then. Two years ago it was more like what's AI and how can I implement it in a basic sense? And now is more the question, are we using AI? Do we use it right? What are great use cases? And how, yeah, still do we fight the resistances? But the resistance is lower and most of the people use AI. There's no need to explain the need for AI. So. So things change from focus. But anyway, I wanted to talk about the podcast in itself and not about the topic AI and AI beginners. So some fun Facts about the podcast. So, as you might have realized, there are still AI generated podcast episodes on the podcast, mostly on the weekends when there's not so much audience listening. But the funny thing is, the AI generated episodes are more or less as successful as the interviews. So you, dear listeners, you don't really care if I interview a person or if I have Professor Gebhard talking about a topic that's interesting for you. You still listen, and that's quite interesting. This is surprising and an interesting find. And it speaks to the idea that this podcast is about teaching AI in different formats and different ways. As long as the teachings are good as the. As the. In the content is good, it makes sense for you. Another funny thing that goes in the same direction is that the interviews with the big guys are not more successful than interviews with the hobbyists. So I interviewed Matt Hicks from Redhead, 19,000 employees. Or Chris Ramini from Fireflies just made it to becoming a unicorn with his firm. But I also had other people just like listeners who do something with AI who said, oh, let's talk. And yeah, the episodes. One of my successful, most successful episodes is not the big guys, but the small ones that just do something. So it doesn't depend on this either because you can learn from both sides and that's actually how you feel about it. Yeah. The third thing would be if I don't publish every second day, my numbers fall. It's hard to keep the pace because the beginner's guide is still half a hobby project. I'm starting with ads, as you probably know, and sponsorships. And yeah, so has to be. Yeah, there's money to be paid and they have to get that from somewhere. But anyway, the interesting thing is it's the algorithms that rain, not anything else. It's if I don't publish in this rhythm, the Spotify or the Apple itunes algorithm punishes me. This is really podcasts. This is mostly rented land. I would say there's really, really a small portion of people that are independent from the algorithm. So those gatekeepers are also here in control with podcasting. Another fun fact would be I advertised a free webinar where I wanted to talk about AI a while ago, some months ago. And like about five to ten episodes I featured the webinar and I had exactly zero participants in the webinar. So that doesn't seem to work for you out there. You learn here and you don't have time to take webinars. Other pitches that I did like for my digital marketing agency or web services in Cuba also didn't get any leads. This is why we have ads now. So people, if you would have booked me, I would have spared you the ads. But anyway, that's like it is, but anyway, let's try another thing. Webmaster services. It's a new thing we offer because we think that's really important and you should listen now if you have a WordPress website. We personally, our agency and our depending websites. We got hacked in September with a really mean hack and we fixed it. Yeah, it took some time, but. And it was no problem. But there are casualties, collateral damages. With my newsletter, I got like 20 subscribers a day before the hack. And after the hack it's two to three subscribers. I can't explain it, I try to eliminate all the sources, I change domains and whatever, but I don't get back to the high numbers of people subscribing. It's broken and I can't fix it anymore. And this is actually directly connected to the hack. So wow. So those things can definitely ruin your day. And this means to for you, if you don't have a webmaster, if you don't have someone that secures your WordPress website, you're in real danger because. And you can see that everywhere attacks are about quadrupling, I would say, since the advent of AI, because people can buy tools for hacking now. It's not that they have to do anything. They don't have to know programming language, they can buy in a shop, they can buy a tool for hacking websites and you realize the consequences. So hacking attacks, security. I mean we had some, some people interviewed, some people here about AI security and AI and security. So the, the point is it's really a danger nowadays with AI. So if you don't have a webmaster, give me a shout. It's podcastrgo Berlin A R G O Berlin. I can set up something for you because we really need security with your website. There's no joking about this, no joking with this. Let's come to another thing. The pitches I told you that I now and get pitches for people that want to talk on the podcast. And it's so fascinating. There's no lack of interesting people out there. I get about one, maybe two pitches every day with people where it's. Where would say, oh yeah, great, I want to have them. A podcast I obviously have to select because it's about two interviews a week that appear. I cannot have too many people that I interview. But it's so fascinating how many great people do stuff with AI just now. Really a great Time. Also interesting, I don't get spammed with stupid pitches. Most of the pitches, I would say 99% are related to the topic are not spammy. Pitches are like, like some, some. There was one guy who is like trying to get on as many podcasts as possible and then tries to make the podcaster do the work and so get his clients everything automated with AI. He had that whole thing on his website and when I found it was like okay, I put you on the spam folder. But this is really the exception. Most of the pitches are great and are real and with real people, with interesting people. Although I have to say most of the pitches are AI generated. So the emails I get, they all follow the same format and making an AI podcast cast. I think I deserve to get those AI pitches because I promote AI. But on the other and those pitches have a clear structure, all the information I need while handwritten ones mostly lack something I want to know. So the AI pitches are okay for me. I know what they are. And if things don't get out of control, sometimes I interview the person and then still get 10 invites later, 10 emails because everything is out of control for the same person. So mostly it works. And last thing talking about the pitches, the thing I see is women seem to have a self promotion problem. I mostly get pitches for guys who want to be on the podcast. I personally chose to take more women or make the bar lower because I know there's still a kind of, I don't know, not cultural problem. But they are afraid to get out there and talk the women. So I mostly take women so to see that they also work a lot with AI. They just don't pitch so much. So it's a typical thing. The guy, yeah, I do something with AI letting mean 5% of my work is AI, 95% not still I can go on I podcast a woman would carefully consider if that matches and not pitch. But yeah, I think that's a thing I have to do show that there's a diversity of people working with AI, men, women and SEO. Also also see like we have people from a lot of different countries here. So there's, there's AIs around the world and this is actually what the podcast also wants to represent. Different perspectives on AI, different features from different countries and different backgrounds, different genders and everything is here because you need to get the whole picture. Now let's come to some stats. I changed the hosts from Spotify to acast, which doesn't mean that Spotify is not good But I didn't reach the goal to commercially use Spotify to make ads for me. I needed to have 10,000 hours a month on Spotify. They didn't have that. So I changed to acast. Downloads fell then a little bit because I also can't publish video now and probably Spotify doesn't really like to push other systems more than the own ones. So I have like 60,000 downloads by now, which is quite good a month. So before it was like 80,000. But anyway, it's the price one has to pay. All in all, there's 335 episodes now in two and a half years. Some of them are reposts as you might have figured out, because the reposts don't get so much traffic. But anyway, 335 episodes and still running. I'm quite proud of myself with this. And if you listen to more than one, like five or 10 or 20, I seem to make something right. And I thank you for being my trusted listeners. Another thing from the stats is mostly guys listening about 70%, 45 years and this is in average so there's a lot Ola kind of a picture of myself. And it's also if I interview people, I see many people looking like me, bald head, beard. And it's like yeah, seems to be I kind of reflect the audience. What I don't reflect is I'm here in Berlin, Germany. I was born in the British sector, so it might count. But now in general the podcast is listen to an Anglo American world and India, not in Germany, which is okay because frankly the innovation is not where I live. It's in US Bay Area, India, but not here. Interestingly, my whole downloads went down from 80 to 60,000 like I said. But the downloads for each episode went up. So it's two and a half to 3,000 downloads each episode. So an interview gets quite a lot of people. If you think about it would be a huge room where you as a guest would talk to. That's kind of interesting. The interviews are one or the interviews of the new episodes of the total are one part of the podcast. The other is. This is kind of separately separate and really interested. Interesting. The most successful episodes are the first three episodes. This is introductionary topics and it seems to be that the people search for topics like introduction to AI in the podcast player and then they start listening. So there's two different formats. One is a podcast format and other is more like a learning or a course format in one podcast. Quite interesting. And yeah surprised me as well. Then let's come to the networks. How does it work with the podcast? I already told you, Spotify, Apple, that's where the people come from. 50, 50 more or less. And let's say 45, 45 and 10% independent players. But anyway, the growth comes from the algorithms, not from guest sharing episodes, not from indie independent podcasting apps, not from newsletters. If I do more, the algorithms of the podcast players give me more traffic, more leads to more. I could go to one episode each day, but it's a little bit too much. But then I would get even more reach and the algorithm. But it's not just because my episodes, but because also the algorithm then features those podcasts more. So if you want to be. Want to become a successful podcaster, just publish as much as possible. Which is hard obviously, but the algorithms, they favor those shows. YouTube, I publish on YouTube. And YouTube says, who's DMA? We don't know know him. And yeah, I don't get traffic. There is this thing, it's everything recorded in video and we cut it nicely and it looks not too bad, I would say. But it's an audio podcast. I'm an audio podcast guy and I think one realizes this because somehow I don't get traction there. And we try different things. We change the covers, we made the. We cut the podcast differently to try to make. Make it more interesting. Still doesn't work. It's like stick to what you're good at and it's audio podcasting and I should do that. So YouTube is still a plan, but it doesn't work. And actually if you look at your podcasters you listen to. Not mine, the others. And look what they do on YouTube. And they have also like 50 to 100 downloads for an episode where they get thousands on the audio networks. So I'm not the only one who has problems to figure it out. YouTube, I think you have to focus wholly on YouTube and do it differently. But then it wouldn't be a traditional podcast anymore. Yeah, one last thing for those networks thing is the statistics of the podcast networks. And if you look at what you get for data there, it's more like a 1999 web analytics tool. You don't get much data and that's really sad because they have more data internally, like they have ads and somehow they have to deliver the ads to the right people and whatever. This is all data they have, but they don't publish it. So you don't get much data in the podcasting world, just rudimentary stuff. And this is not Like a Google Analytics 4 or whatever, where you have lots of things. You would imagine that once you look in, there would be a button to go into advanced analytics, but there's nothing. So, yeah, it's. It's rudimentary, which is not the best for making ads.
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