#195 - This Is WAY MORE Common Than I Realized And You Need To Avoid It

0:00Any time there is something of value, there is always going to be somebody out there trying to convince you that they can get you more value for a very low fee. And unfortunately, that is not real. And not only is that not real, it is actually hurting you way more than you think. Hey podcast people, welcome to Podcast Growth University. I am your host, Kevin Paul Mary. For the last five years and thousand episodes that I have been on, I have learned a lot about podcasting, what to do, what not to do, and the common mistakes that people, including myself, have made. This weekly podcast is focused on helping you grow, scale, and monetize your show. Every single episode will be focused on that. Let's do it. Podcast Growth Nation. Today for episode of a 195, this is way more calm than I realized, and you need to avoid

1:00it at all costs. I was talking to a client the other day, and we were going through their YouTube channel. And I said, yeah, we had a client recently who they got some quote unquote promotion in the past, and it's really messed up their algorithm. And now we're working on rebuilding their algorithm. And they said, what do you mean? And I said, well, they, somebody reached out to them and said, I can promote your podcast or YouTube channel and get you X amount of views for X amount of dollars, and they thought that would be a good idea. So they did it. And they didn't realize that it's just bots, it's not real people. And they watched for like five seconds, and then they, you know, it, it tanks the algorithm. It tanks your watch time, it tanks your average view duration, but most people don't look at the analytics. So they see more views and they think that equals more success. And this person said, oh, I, did you know, I did that? And I said, no, I didn't know you did that. When did you do that? And they said, well, before we started working together. And I said, well, I need to know that because if I don't know that, I can't make accurate

2:02decisions. I can't lead effectively. So we went back and I unlisted all of those videos. And she said, why are you unlisting them? And I said, because right now they are affecting your recommendations. They're affecting your channel because the mode, the 10 most successful videos you have are all fake views. So the watch time and the average view duration is all wonky. It doesn't, it just doesn't work, right? It just doesn't work. And I have over the last like six months, I have been exposed to a bunch of people that have are either doing this intentionally or unintentionally, and they don't understand. We started working with a channel, it's a podcast, but it's also a YouTube channel. And they, they did the same thing. They were paying for views, again, they didn't know, though, somebody reached out and said they could help them promote their podcast, quote unquote. And when I started working with them, I sent them a message and said, hey, you might hate me for telling you this, but all of your views are bought, like they're not real.

3:04And they said, well, how do you know when I showed them the graphs, and I said, I don't know 100%, but I'm 99.9% sure. And one way to do it is to fire the person that is promoting, quote unquote, and then see what happens. And they did, and then they went down to a normal view point, right? But we did a video every day for like six months, maybe, and unlisted all the old ones to get to the point where those videos were gone, and we just had all organic data. And they're still rebuilding their channel for lack of better phrasing. I had a, somebody I went on their podcast a while ago, I'm always checking in with people and seeing how they're doing. Hey, long time no talk. What's going on? What's new? And they sent over their podcast and said, oh, it's doing really well. I have, I'm getting 30,000 downloads among, and you know, this, this, this, this, this. And they said, I got thousands of reviews on Spotify, and that immediately to me immediately

4:07is a red flag immediately. You have thousands of reviews just on Spotify. There's something sketchy about that. What about Apple? If you have 10 reviews on Apple and you have 3000 reviews on Spotify, something's up, right? Something's probably not, something's probably not aligned. So I went and looked and they're all five star reviews, and you can buy those. The best podcasts in the world, the best movies in the world, they all have negative ratings. They all have negative reviews. That's not real, most likely. But so this is the interesting thing. This person most likely believes they are going to turn their podcast into some level of business. All they have right now is perception. They do not have an audience. They're not getting, there's no way they're getting 30,000 views a month. There's no way. There's no way. I work with shows that are getting that for sure. We've, you know, we've gotten that like, I'm telling you, it's a different, it's different. My belief is one of two things, either this person is intentionally paying for views or somebody is taking advantage of them, and they just don't realize it.

5:08There have been, I won't say competitors of ours in the past. They're in a similar space. They're like podcast production companies and stuff like that. But one of the best ways for them to grow was to pay for views and pay for reviews. And I could always, you can always tell if you know what to look for. And there's a ton of YouTube channels doing this. There's a ton of podcasts doing this. There's a ton of people that are paying for reviews. There's a ton of people that are paying for social media engagement. It is way more rampant than you think. To the point where some of the people I looked up to, I stopped following after I looked into their data. It was like, you're getting 500,000 views on your YouTube video or you're getting six comments. There's no way. No, it's not real because everything is a percentage, everything like we've gone through the conversion rate from 500,000 views to buyers in the past, right? It's just that it's a relatively scalable number. It changes plus or minus, but not to that degree, right? Not to that degree.

6:08That's not real, but nobody else really knows. That is the problem. So this is way more common than I realized and you need to avoid it. Is any of these shortcuts that aren't real? This is the shit that's going to tank your channel. This is the shit that there's, I'm not saying there's no coming back from this. It's like, like, kind of not. If you're paying for views and you're paying for likes and you're paying for follows and you're paying for comments and reviews, you're literally like, you're hurting yourself because it's all downhill from there. I've had clients who say, I just want to try it from a month. Don't. It is going to screw with your psychology so bad. You're going to go from 30,000 listens to your normal 4,000 and you're going to think you're doing terrible. And even if we go from 4,000 to 5,000 to 6,000 to 7,000, it's going to take a long time to get back up to that 30. That was never real in the first place. That. Don't do that.

7:10You can't do that. That's the same, like, that's like photoshopping your pictures and you feel really good, but that's not helping you. That's not really helping you in the real world. That's what people are doing. They want the podcast to look successful, but buy that rationale and buy the strategy. It's never actually going to be because if you can throw money at getting views, you're not going to invest more in it. You're not going to invest in the skills. You're not going to get better at it. And one of the reasons this fires me up so much is so many people are taking advantage of it. They don't know. If you're new to this and somebody reaches out to you and says, hey, I can help you get X amount of views for X amount of dollars, you don't immediately think, okay, they're going to be fake. Like, it makes sense that you might think they know what they're doing. Every person that tries to connect with me on LinkedIn that's a podcast promoter, not interested every time, every time I know what I know what the scam is, I understand. I know how you do this.

8:11I understand. That's not it. The way to grow, it's different on Apple and Spotify is different on audio versus video, but on audio, it's to get your listeners to self identify through consistent, reliable and trustworthy content. That's a big piece. How do you grow your audio base? You choose really good topics, trending topics, stuff that's happening in the real world, choose really good titles, go on other shows, like all that stuff, obviously, but you have to produce really good content and get your audience to self identify and then pour more into their lives. That's not an issue of, for most people, the reason they don't have enough listens is not what they think. It's because the other things aren't really working. So again, an influx of 30,000 people, quote unquote, that aren't real is not going to do anything for you. It might make you look good.

9:12It might make you look good from a perception place. It might make you, I don't know if it's going to make you feel good. I don't know. I think if anything, it's going to hurt you. You have to avoid this at all costs. You have to. You have to because it, honestly, there really is no going back from it. I've gone on so many podcasts where like, they'll say, oh, my goodness, you have, you know, X amount of episodes and down awesome, amazing, yeah, I'm getting like 50,000 downloads from on to. It's like, I know you're not, I can, you can just tell, you have, you have four reviews. You're not getting that many. No way. I can tell. I can tell. You can just tell, right? When you've been doing it long enough, just like you, if you're in a certain industry and somebody comes to you and says, yeah, I've done 75 real estate deals this year. It's like, I don't, I don't think so. You can just tell there are tells, right? So maybe this is, I don't know. Maybe I was more naive to this in the beginning, but there are so many people that are lying

10:14about all of their results. And it sucks. It sucks. And it makes me sad because a lot of you out there, maybe you're newer to this and you haven't had the time to like really understand the industry and realize how many people are BSN, so many people. And the problem is most people don't know. So there is like apps you can use, like social, I think there's one called social blade where you can literally think you have to pay unfortunately, but you can see somebody's follower count on like Instagram and their platforms. And you can see that some people, you know, they buy like 50,000 a month and it'll go up 50,000 every month, but you start to see the pattern. It's a drastic uptick and then it flattens out, drastic uptick and it flattens out. That's not necessarily conducive to human behavior. It's not really the way it works. Just like when I see a retention graph on a YouTube video and it just jumps immediately

11:20goes down to zero, that's not that's not the way it works. There's ups and downs and peaks and valleys. There's always a trend line, yes, but not the way it is when a video is bought it. So now there's a whole nother conversation around ads and I can spend 50 bucks on YouTube and YouTube will promote my my episode. That's different. That is different, but it depends on what the metrics you're looking for are, right? Because if your videos or episodes are getting shown to people that don't know you like you trust you, some of them might convert. That's great, right? Some of them might and some of them might not. And depending on the behavior of those people, it might hurt your channel short term. It hurt your podcast short term, but it's it's worth taking a chance at it's worth risking it's worth investing, it's worth learning.

12:21As long as it's going to be a short term hit, but like the the bonding views and stuff like that, it's really hard to come back from that because you create so much inorganic data that drastically outweighs all of your organic data. If somebody is averaging 50 views slash listens. And again, the algorithm is different on Apple or the algorithm is different on audio versus video, right? So it's not apples to apples, but just hypothetically, you're getting 50 listens slash views on a normal episode. You bought something and you get, let's say you get a thousand, right? So 50, so 20 times, you're getting 20 times the normal views, but everybody watches it 99% less. The numbers do not work in your favor, it's it's it's not a net positive. That's the issue. The issue is it's a net negative, but psychologically, it feels like a positive because we got X amount of views, but views are not indicative of success.

13:26That's like one of the things I wish I knew sooner views are not indicative of success. No way, no, they are an a good idea of potentially what's working, but it's not everything. Look, for us, here's here's a simple math. If we have 2000, I don't know how many episodes, 2,390 or something as of today, if somebody decides to subscribe to next level university and they want to download all, we get 2,392 downloads right then. Is that indicative of success? Is that indicative of the fact that maybe we have somebody who likes the content and wants to binge it? Yes. Are they going to listen to all of those episodes? No, there's no, there's no chance. You'd have to listen to eight a day for a year. There's just not enough time, there's no, there's no way, there's no way you could listen to all of that content. To me, it's more indicative of somebody found the show and really likes it, but it's not necessarily apples to apples.

14:30And I think that's an important thing to understand for all of us, right? If you're paying for, here's the reason it's, here's the reason it's important. I'm working with a client right now who is probably spending, oh man, $50,000 a month on ads for their business. They can spend $50,000 a month on ads because there's a positive return on an investment. Because they have a product and they have a service and they have margin and they're making money, right? Like they're making money with their business. If you're paying for fake views, that is not going to help your business unless your business is helping other people grow, but you don't actually know how to do it. So it's not going to work. That's part one, part two, you're kind, you're sleazy. For sure, that's like photoshopping all your pictures and telling people you're a fitness trainer. There's people that do that too.

15:31It's crazy. It's crazy. This is way more rampant than I ever thought. So I'll get off of it because I know tangenting, tangential, is that a word? All over the place, but my point is this is in every industry, this is in every niche. The problem is, when it comes to podcasting, so many of us start this because we love it. It's like, oh, if only I could get more people to hear this, if only I could help more people. Well, yeah, I'll throw 50 bucks, I'll throw 100 bucks, whatever, right? And then we get this big boost in views and we think it's working. And then the next month or when we stop paying for it, we don't think it's working anymore. We think we're doing something wrong. When in reality, the data was never real to begin with. That is the issue is it's just not going to help you. I think it's going to hurt you more than anything. Yeah. I do. And just from a comparison perspective, there's a lot of people doing this that you would

16:33never guess. You would never guess. And if you're comparing to them, you're going to feel bad. You're going to feel really, really bad. And I don't want that. I don't want that for you. As somebody who has been surprised at this stuff like this and meeting people that are not the people that they claim to be, this is out there. So I just want to make sure you're not falling victim to this because I've seen a handful of this over the last few months where it's like, wait, you did that too? How, how, how did that happen? How did you get taken advantage of? Like what? I don't understand. How did that happen? You got to do more research and you got to go, there has to be a step lower, right? So okay, we got X amount of views, but what happened after that? How many of those viewers actually watched a majority of the episode or listened to the majority of the episode? Oh my goodness, it's way less than usual. Well, a thousand people is going to dilute the data anyway, right?

17:34So like, what's a good example? If we have a video, if we have an episode that has a thousand views, slash listens versus an episode that has a hundred thousand views, slash listens, the one that has a hundred thousand is most likely going to have way more watch time, but the average view duration will be lower just because it's finding a larger audience and the larger the audience, you find the less probability that everybody's going to like it, no matter how good the algorithm is. So like, there is a delusion in at scale, right? The more views you get, the lower the average view duration will probably be just because that's just kind of the way it works. So that's a piece of it, right? With the goal is understanding that if you're looking at all of your episodes and there is just outliers, you got to take a deeper dive to see, you got to take a deeper dive to see. All right, cool. That's my jam for this episode. If you need help with stuff like this, whether it's like finding a sustainable strategy

18:37for this, right? Like, I'm not against ads. If you want to run ads, run ads, I just want to make sure that you have a way to make the money back. Obviously, that's super important. So if you want to go over stuff like this, I will have my link below for free 30 minute podcast break through session. You can email me, you can message me on WhatsApp or Facebook, whatever, wherever you have my contact information, just reach out and I'll have to answer any questions. I appreciate you and I just want to make sure that you don't get taken advantage of because if there is an industry that is growing and there is opportunity, there is also an industry within that industry of scamming people, unfortunately. All right, cool. Until next week, keep on crushing it. Keep on podcasting. Don't get taken advantage of it. And I will talk to you all then. Thank you for listening to another episode of podcast growth university. If you found value in this episode, please take a couple of seconds and leave a review in the link below and you can always reach out to me on Instagram. My handle is at NeverQuickKid.

19:39I am happy to answer any and all questions you have. We'll talk to you on the next episode.