Announcement: Marketing Against the Grain

Because it actually has a better distribution engine than Apple, Spotify, any of these other platforms for podcasts, which is search. Because the death of most podcasts is there is zero long-tail equity. You listen to a show and then it disappears.

Kieran, I'm fascinated by what you just said. I wanna break it down a little bit more for the listeners before we even go down this. If you think about this first segment of the show, Kieran is dropping some knowledge on YouTube and its advantage in the podcast space. The reason for that is YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world after Google. And if you're a business and you've got a podcast, or if you're an individual, you've got a podcast, basically how you attract people is through word of mouth and people knowing about the name of your show and looking for the name of your show, listening, subscribing, because they basically have that branded search term. They know what your show is called, what it's about. There's very little traffic that comes from people looking for topics, right, that they want to just listen to a bunch of different podcasts on. And that latter part is what YouTube nails, right? You can look at specific topics, specific guests, much better YouTube search than you can in Spotify search or Apple Podcast search, because those traditional podcast platforms are anchored around the hosts and the name of the show versus the content of the show itself. Right. And I think we are gonna move to a world longer term where the content is more important or just as important as the host. And so that means if you are a business or individual doing a podcast, you can't ignore YouTube. And the fact that YouTube is now gonna start giving you money to make a version of your show, which takes some of the video production and editing expense away, That is just a no-brainer, 'cause then you're gonna see growth, and that growth is gonna allow you to fund better and better investment into the work you're doing on YouTube. So I think it's a huge opportunity for creators, and I think we're gonna see the rise of podcasting on YouTube really take off over the next 12 to 18 months.

Some of it will come from search, but a lot of it actually comes from recommended videos.

And all podcast discovery engines are predicated on, "Here are other podcasts you like because you listen to this podcast." They all miss out on, "Here are other podcasts you like 'cause you enjoyed this guest." Yes. Right? And I think YouTube can do those things much, much better.

Let me talk you through a great example that Matt and I were talking about Web3. There's an app called STEPN. Mm-hmm. And STEPN is so dope, right? It is a, basically it combines like fitness with a play-to-earn game. So what they've done is they've built the actual app like a MapMyRun or Strava where you can log in and you can actually do your exercise and it tracks you. But the thing you can actually do is you can go and buy an NFT within their app. So you can buy these different NFTs, a different kind of sneakers.

A walk sneaker, a jog sneaker, a run sneaker. Each NFT then comes with ranges that you need to stay within. When you are either walking, running, or jogging. And when you stay within those range, for each 10 minutes of activity, you earn $30 through the Solana blockchain. That to me, people look for tangible examples of why Web3 companies will be able to win and disrupt Web2 companies. That is an example of a company that actually is using Web3 mechanics to do something differentiated and better, right? It's differentiated and better.

But this is a really important point for everybody listening. So I want to slow it down a second. So when you're listening to the news or you're on Twitter and people are talking about NFTs and Web3, it seems like really abstract and futuristic and stupid. And like, it's really easy to like naysay all of it. I get that a lot of it is going to be crap and a lot of it's going to fall away. But at its core, when you think about the difference between the last generation of the internet and the next generation of the internet, Understand that it is a massive change in incentives and the ability to incentivize. Exactly. And that the last version of the internet, your whole job was to make a product or value proposition 10 times better than it was before. In the next generation of the internet, it is making something somebody thought was impossible possible. Hmm. Did you ever think it was going to be possible to get paid to exercise? Exactly. That's what you just said. Yeah. Somebody gets paid to exercise.

Exactly.

So I think in the future, really understanding incentives is going to be a marketer's core skillset to acquire customers within the future, right? Really understanding how to incentivize your community. And so I went down a rabbit hole as always, Kip. I didn't just stop it and go, that was cool. That's a real good example of an app incentivizing and how you could actually disrupt these players and do great marketing and get people using your app versus these apps. I went into other incentives that are cool for marketers to know about. I want to run some of these by you. Please. Learn to earn. So let me bring the listeners through learn-to-earn. Exchanges use learn-to-earn to get you to actually use the exchange and start to trade coins. And if you do those things and complete exercises, they will actually deposit free coins into your account. What a great incentive to get someone to actually start to use your product. There are other sites out there. I think Rabbit Hole is an example of a site that aggregate all these tutorials together. And the reason they're doing that is they're acquiring traffic to their site and then they're able to get brands to pay them money to run these tutorials through their site to promote those products and those Brands actually give people free coins to start to learn about their products, use their products. So I think learn-to-earn is another example of in the future you could go from the impossible to the possible, which is I could incentivize people within a freemium product to do the core actions that I know translate to that person probably becoming a customer, probably to retain them better. Mm-hmm. And I can incentivize them through a token. And again, I think it's just a really clever— it will be a really clever incentive in the future to actually help get people to learn, use your product, and incentivize a community around that product.

Look, again, people right now are going into debt for education in the world we live in right now. We are going to move to a world where you're gonna get paid to learn. Like, that is a massive societal change. And if you're a marketer and you can make that change in the little part of the world that you're involved with sooner rather than later, that is an unfair competitive advantage that will last for years.