1734 – Making Content more accessible with Disctopia’s Patrick Hill

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0:59with us right now it's Patrick Hill Patrick you are the founder and CEO of Disktopia you're found on the web at Disktopia.com that's D-I-S-C-Topia.com Patrick thanks so much for joining us thank you thanks for having me absolutely all right yeah give us an overview of what Disktopia is Dystopia is a platform where content owners can actually get full transparency of their data. And if they choose to, they can monetize that data. So we give them a full transparency picture and we kind of give them not just data, but pure information on how they can monetize or better grow their audience from a holistic standpoint and not just from a one, two, three, four, five download standpoint.

1:45Yeah. Okay. So specifically, tell me how this works and what kind of content we're talking about. Well, right now, we're definitely focused on audio and video content. And we're definitely talking about looking at true plays. And we've coined that term called a true play. IAB standard is 60 seconds counts as a play or a download. We believe that if your audience is more engaged beyond that, we give you that data. So whether they've at 15%, 50%, or 75 % or more, we believe that those engagements count differently. And we give you that data separated out between what's a regular play and engaged play or true play is what we call it.

2:27We believe that true plays give you more insight. If you're an internal company, you want to know who's more engaged and what's going on internally. And if you're an external network, you want to know where your engaged audience is coming from, because we believe that you should monetize that audience a little differently than your basic audience. Well, with that data, how would you be able to better monetize that? Well, great question. So for average, most podcasters or most content owners, based on streams alone, they get about a thousand streams. That's how they charge. So they'll come to you and say, hey, Josh, I have 1 ,000 engaged plays.

3:06I want to charge you$1 ,000 per month. You as Josh would say, yeah, sure, I give you$1 ,000. But what we do is we kind of break that up so that they can say, hey, 20 % of my audience is regular downloads. So we'll take one buck for that one. But 80 % of my audience is highly engaged, meaning they're listening from beginning to end. And we want to charge around$4 for that. So instead of getting that basic, you know,$1 ,000 just for one play,$1 out, you can actually increase your revenue by going to about$4 ,500, which is actually breaking down your audience. As a royalty method, we do not break down our audience.

3:45We kind of just ship it out. One play equals one pay. Where we have to get past the basic CPM, which is a pure impression, we actually get down to the nitty gritty of data. We have the capability and tools to do that, but no one's slicing and dicing the data that way so that you can actually charge more. Okay, so help me understand, like, maybe an example of a client that you're working with. And if you could maybe just kind of break it down for me of, like, how they use it specifically, you know, if it might maybe a little bit medium-sized company or, like, how they've been able to implement it.

4:20Are you familiar with the old school Jet Magazine? Yes. Yes, I am. Yes, they are actually relaunching using our engagement model. We'll be relaunching in mid-November, so right around the time that everyone will be reintroduced to Jet Magazine. So in the old days, they would just say readership. We have 10 ,000 readers. Now, using our technology, they can say, you know what, out of those 10 ,000 engagement points, 7 ,500 of them are highly engaged. So when they talk to their advertising partners, they can actually increase their revenue by charging different tiers of their audience. Traditional models are in one bucket.

4:58We can actually break down the tiers of their audience so they can charge different models and different actually amounts for each tier of their audience. Hey, this person clicked our email. They listened to our podcast and opened up our mobile app. They're a highly engaged user of our content. Therefore, when they talk to their advertisers and their business partners, they can actually charge more for that bucket, charge a different set for another bucket. And also it gives the advertisers true insight of what they're paying for. A lot of times, as you know, a download is a download. As an advertiser, you're just paying one flat fee for one flat number.

5:37and you really don't know where those downloads are actually coming from. You just know, hey, they're getting a lot. Their audience is big, but is their audience engaged? And that's where we try to slice and dice those numbers and give them to you. Well, here's the thing, too, and I know this. You know this, right? So if you produce content, if you've got an audience, and if you want to work with advertisers or if you want to advertise, it used to be a lot more of the wild west today you know especially when we're thinking about digital content or working with influencers influencers of any kind or if you've got platform of any kind you work with advertise advertisers are going to expect better data if you can deliver them better data they're much more likely to work with you you should expect this from the brands and i think that all of us who have paid for advertising before have been burned you know especially, you know, if you're talking about working with, I don't want to use the word influencer, but it could be influencer content creators.

6:39Anyone's got an audience and you want to be a part of that. You know, there's nothing more frustrating than making a big spend and getting nothing. And they are not able to tell you why. Exactly. Yeah. This boy, this is going to help you content creators sell a lot more advertisers. This is going to be exceptionally valuable. So you know for sure that, in fact, you might, I would imagine you're going to run into situations where advertisers might come across a content creator and the content creator is like, wow, this is our rate. And the advertiser is just going to expect, Patrick, that they're going to be using a solution like what you provide so they can get more 2020 vision on what's going on.

7:19Exactly. Exactly. That's what we're actually trying to help both sides of the table here. We want content owners to get their fair value. We also want the advertisers, sponsors, to get their fair value, whatever that may be or fall in line. We want that to happen. I see that you recently announced that you are doing some stuff with SEMrush. You want to share a little bit about that? Yeah. So what we've done is we've gotten on, so we do have a patent application out on our engagement patent and how we do Trueplay. So we partner with SEMrush to understand what keywords that are in transcriptions to increase your SEO and your website, to make sure that your podcast or your video, anything that you're distributing out on the stream side matches the keywords that you're actually putting out on your website.

8:08So for instance, if you have a hardware company and you write a blog about buckets and shovels, we want to make sure that those keywords are relevant on your website and relevant within in your podcast transcription. A lot of times, loss leaders do not do that. So they don't know how to manipulate those keywords that are coming from their transcript and then run those keywords in SimRush, which shows you are your competitors, what are the trending keywords going on for this week, this month. So it actually can help you with podcast topics, podcast description writing, so on and so forth. As the world becomes more connected between Web 2.0 and 3.0, we want to make sure that we're giving them all the tools that you can use for as keywords insights and keyword research.

8:56Now, with that being said, that integration allows you to get those keywords directly right in SEMrush. So from now, you can actually upload your podcast directly in SEMrush, Extract the keywords and then hit another tab. Put those keywords right into SEMrush and SEMrush gives you all the data based on these keywords. You don't have to go from hosting platform, wherever you're hosting at, do your data there, do your data mining there, and then open up another tab and go to SEMrush, paste it in, go from there. Our hosting platform is 100 % integrated directly into SEMrush. one payment, one login, and you can do your podcast hosting and your keyword research all in one tool.

9:40Yeah. One of the applications I see that you've been moving into is education. Would you mind maybe talk about that and or other enterprise applications where this is going to be pretty valuable? Sure. Education is key when it comes to actually communication. Just think about when COVID hit or snow days, how teachers get their lesson plans out. Going forward, we call it the death of the tri-board. When I was coming up, I had to do a tri-board. I had to place all my pictures on one end and the middle on the end. But now kids can actually create podcasts about volcanoes. They can create podcasts about climate change and so on and so forth.

10:20And I actually turned that in and they learned communication skills. They learned audio editing skills. They learn tech skills. And the flip side is teachers now have a way to communicate quickly to their parent audience, their school audience, and their administration very quickly through podcasting. And so that's what we're really trying to do. We're really trying to give education the tools that corporate America and the entertainment world has been using for the last decade to disseminate communication faster and easier. Because everybody's on the move. I hate parent newsletters because they're too long.

10:56I don't read the whole newsletter. I try to find the nuggets or I try to ask my son, like, hey, what's going on in school? But if the teacher would just send me a weekly 15, 20-minute podcast, I'll definitely digest that one day while I'm at work, lunch, driving to work, or whatever. So we're just trying to change the way we communicate. Yeah, excellent. So are you working with a school system that, how are you able to implement? Because I'm wondering if a school system sounds great, but this seems well, they might be afraid that implementation is going to be a nightmare. Well, that's the greatest thing about it.

11:32So schools that have signed up and we signed up a couple already, one of our POC program and one who actually is a client. What we do is we actually ship them mobile podcast kits and they actually set up podcast kits in a room for students and for teachers. So essentially, we give them a mobile podcast studio on campus or on site for anyone to record at any time. Typically, they set it up in the library or the media center for students to access. And of course, every student gets a dystopia account and they can upload their content from there. It's easier than what it really sounds. We just have to get schools in there off cycle because, as you know, schools have a long billing cycle.

12:12So Patrick, you know, one thing too, I'm thinking of, you know, independent creators. Do you mind just talking a bit about pricing both for, you know, kind of the independent SMB audience, but then the larger applications like, you know, a larger enterprise company or school system, et cetera. For the independent creators and content owners, we're very competitive. We actually give free 30 days. It's nine bucks for just audio. If you want to go up to video and integrate some merch with that. It's 19 bucks a month, canceling time. But if you are actually a school system, definitely contact us. And if you're an enterprise company who essentially wants their own network, you'll essentially get your own Spotify and Netflix internal for your internal employees, then contact as soon as possible.

12:59We integrate directly into Microsoft, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, your intranet, as some people call it, to help you disseminate information, podcasts, and videos across your organization. Awesome. All right, Patrick, your website, Disktopia.com, who should be reaching out and connecting with you? First and foremost, if you own content, you should reach out. I don't care if you own four podcast episodes or you've got 2 ,000 SEC documents, which we're actually working with a bank to convert their SEC documents, which are PDFs into podcasts. We actually have PDF to podcast technology where corporations can upload multiple PDFs at once and we convert them to podcast episodes so that everyone can listen to them.

13:48It hits a lot of boxes, especially the ADA compliance box. Corporations are still trying to check to this day. So we check those boxes. So if you are a content owner and you want to get it out to as few as three people or as few as 3 ,000 people of the world, you should contact us and let us know how we can help. Yeah. You know, I've always been bullish on, you know, for internal communications, what a huge opportunity it is to format your content in a YouTube type, you know, as long as you don't mind that also being exposed. Well, and you can even keep it private. It's just, yeah. So you could choose whether you want to keep that internal and people need to have private access to that.

14:30But in terms of distribution, how wonderful would that be if I could just use my regular podcast app to subscribe to a private feed that only pertains to me? Like what a huge opportunity. Internal communications people, please go to where your employees are. Don't make them have to log in and then they got to go into their internet and then they got to do this. And then they have to stream on a webpage on their phone. That's, you know, go to where they are, make it insanely easy for them. And your consumption rate's going to go through the roof. And it sounds like Patrick, you can assist with that, which that in and of itself is an exceptionally valuable skill to have a conversation about.

15:11Exactly. And we're definitely helping organizations do that. Like I said, we're helping a local bank here convert their processes and procedures from PDFs to podcasts just to make sure that one, Did you really assimilate the information? And you know, we can tell that based on the data, the engagement data. Did you listen to the whole podcast? Did you watch the whole video? They'll know that data instantly in their dashboard. Awesome. All right, Patrick Hill, thank you so much for joining us. Founder and CEO of Disktopia, found on the web at disktopia.com. Patrick, thanks so much for joining us.

15:46Thank you.

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