Podcast Hosting: Buzzsprout vs Libsyn

Misbah Haque  00:00

Hey everybody, what’s going on? My name is Misbah Haque. And welcome back to another episode of Pod Mahal. I’m really excited to be doing this today. Because one, it’s Cyber Monday. That’s always a cool thing, right? But two, it’s my birthday. And it’s always a good time for me to kind of reflect on the past year and more. So jump ahead and think about what I would like to do over the next year. It’s kind of like, a nice time to get a head start on New Year’s resolutions in a way. And one of the things that I had been exploring was software.

And so in today’s episode, what I wanted to do is dive into hosting software, which is something that you’re going to need if you are starting a podcast, just like for websites, you’ve got Squarespace, you’ve got Wix, you’ve got Google domains, you’ve got all GoDaddy, all these different places that actually host the name that you buy, you need to do the same, to basically have a podcast and distribute it to all the different directories out there. 

Everything from Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Samsung, Google Play, you name it. So before we dive into that, though, I want to let that I am doing a New Year’s sale, and honor of my birthday, and Cyber Monday, it is 50% off pod fit, which is our course, it’s a self-paced course that has everything you need from start to finish, it’s regularly updated with information. 

As you know, things change in the industry, or as our viewpoint changes on certain things, as we’re testing and we find new information, we make sure to keep that course up to date. But you can get access to that lifetime access, and you get a 100% money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with it. But the code is, letsgo50.  let’sgo50, you can go to podmahal.com/podfit to check that out. And at checkout, make sure to enter Let’sgo50. Does that code expire at the end of the new year? I think so. Make sure to go ahead and check that out.  

But one of the things that I do in that course, I use Libsyn for a very, very long time. Because I did that for my personal accounts. I did it for a lot of client accounts that I worked on. And it was just kind of the industry standard for quite a long time. One of the things that frustrated me about it, which is the reason that I actually ended up making the switch or looking into it.  One of the big reasons is that Libsyn basically arranges their plans based on the number of megabytes that you use. So everything is based on storage.

And if you think about a 60-minute episode that you record, if it’s super high quality, for example, let’s say it’s a WAV file, which usually takes up a lot more storage. Mp3, you sacrifice a tiny bit of quality, but sometimes not even that noticeable. And you save some space, but even with that, like I had a client who just did an episode that was an hour and four minutes or something like that, and his total megabytes that it consumed was about 175. 

The plans in Libsyn are 400 megabytes 500 600. And you can keep upgrading as you need it. The frustrating thing is that, if you think about 175 megabytes that’s already consuming like 30% of your quota. And that’s you paying probably like we just had to upgrade him to the $50 per month tear, right? So if you think about it, Libsyn is costing $50 per month for like 100 megabytes, or something like that.  

And when you look at Buzzsprout, it’s got basically the plans there here, let me actually pull it up there. The first one starts at like 12 bucks a month, right? And the one that’s 12 bucks a month, you get about three hours of content per month. So this is a major differentiator in terms of how it would help your workflow, Buzzsprout is actually charging you based on the time that you upload. Right so Let’s say, I have a client that I work on their podcast and their episodes are regularly close to two hours, every episode. Now, if I was to look at the file size for that a lot. And if I upload into Libsyn, it would be costing us a lot of money to just do one a week, right? 

But because they use Buzzsprout, and it’s based on the amount of hours you get per cycle, I find it to be very reasonable, because $12 per month for three hours of content. And let’s say that you did four-hour episodes per week, for example, a total of that, and you did four hours of content. Okay, now you can pay up to $4 in an additional $4 per hour. So let’s say 16 bucks an hour, for four hours of content, the next tier is 18 bucks, for 18 bucks, you get about six hours. 

That’s pretty amazing right there. Because that covers mostly everybody who does an hour, it goes a little bit over the hour, and you still have some time left over. So 18 bucks, on average, is what you’re paying on Buzzsprout. And you’d pay an additional $2 per hour for anything that falls beyond that six-hour quota, right. And then the final tier, I believe, is $24 per month, and that includes about 12 hours, per month. Now, that is really great.  If you’re somebody who does a daily podcast, or you’re trying to do really frequent ones, and really uploading a lot of content to your podcast feed, you’re going to need something like that. But my point is even at the max at about $24 per month on Buzzsprout. It’s way cheaper, then we immediately save 50% for our client, because he’s at that $50 per month tier. In Libsyn it was like, (hey what, we can actually transfer this pretty easily). So we went ahead and tested this with our accounts, first all our internal podcasts we’ve actually transferred over. 

And so I would like it’s something that I recommend. Another thing I really love about this is they have an affiliate program thing, right. So because I talk about podcasts, I recommend this stuff all the time. It was kind of weird that like I didn’t have Libsyn didn’t have a referral code that I could easily pass on to people where they got a discount, and I got some type of bonus. And I would regularly plug their stuff into all my clients. So anyways, Buzzsprout has that. And they have some interesting things in the monetization section already, which is like,  you can have certain partnerships with sponsors and things like that, for example, Instacart, I can get an affiliate code for Instacart. And I get $12 Per sign-up or something like that there, right. So anyway, I’ve also included that link in the description. So if you are going to start, click through this link, because you’ll get a $20 Amazon gift card if you do it through this link, but I was so surprised at how easy it was to transfer an existing podcast over to Buzzsprout. 

This was just a great example of them anticipating what a very highly used function and feature of their product or service is going to be. And it’s going to be a lot of people transferring over from other stuff. They made it so seamless for every episode to get transferred over. In the mean, like the instructions they give you. The only other thing that you’ll want to know is basically, you need to set up a redirect, which will guide you how to do that super easy. You go into kind of your settings and Libsyn for example, or whatever you’re using already, if you don’t have one set up and hit redirects, and then you’ll paste this link into the feed URL and let it run basically for the next four weeks. 

So that’s something to keep in mind when you’re making this transfer is like, I made transfers, let’s say today, it’s I’m gonna let be I’m gonna have two hosting accounts basically for now for the next four weeks, and then I cancel it out at the end of that, so and then I keep Buzzsprout from there.  

But anyways, highly recommend after getting to use it get familiar with it for quite a while before making this decision. I think that their pricing is just on point their strategy of keeping charging you based on the time is really cool.  And they are doing some work to set you up with monetization options that some other directories aren’t the Other fear that I really had was that uh, it would not be, it would be harder to get listed on all the other platforms like Libsyn very easy to list yourself on,  new directories that come out.

But they have, they’re not lacking in that department, they have everything there. And basically, if you have a directory that is not in this in this option, for example, it’s super easy to basically just go, for example, a client asked me if we were on Pocket Casts or something, and we weren’t, and I was like, (Oh, thanks for bringing that up, I will add ourselves to it). 

And so I want to pocket Pocket Casts, usually, you just need your RSS Feed URL that you can find in your settings or destinations section. And once you have that, you’re good, you can submit your show. So anything you don’t see in the directory section here, don’t be worried, because you still get the RSS Feed URL. And that’s basically used to get yourself in all the other directories. So hope this helps if you are considering starting a podcast or you already have one and you’re looking to make the switch over to something that’s a little bit more affordable. I also love just the interface and how brighter, it’s just brighter and more user-friendly. You kind of feel-good publishing stuff here. Versus Libysn had a very kind of archaic look to it. 

You got used to it, but it’s just, it’s a little added bonus, I would say  But anyways, this was me just checking in. Dropping a tip that hopefully helps you out today. If this was useful make sure you rate review and subscribe to Apple podcasts. And feel free to reach out and hit us up on Instagram @PodMahal. And remember, check out our website for tons and tons of free resources. I got a free podcast launch checklist, a budget book if you’re looking at podcast equipment, a workbook if you’re trying to get your thoughts together and shape your ideas into something that’s ready to launch. All that stuff is for free at pod mahal.com But hey, thanks again for tuning in. And I will talk to you soon!