It is Thursday and I'm the Daily Grateful with Michael Gross. Oh yeah, that's me. On Thursdays, we talk about podcasting. I have no idea why, but we do that.
So let's do that in just a second. I have a newsletter that I publish on Wednesdays at the Tampa Bay Technology Center. It's for people on our mailing list. If you would like to get it, it's all about tech stuff.
It's mostly tech stuff and in it's short, I mean it's usually under a five minute read and I just put it out every Wednesday. If you wanna do that, I will leave a link. I'm going to try and leave a link in the description of this podcast on how to get on that mailing list because in the yesterday's newsletter, excuse me, it's entitled Podcast Killed the Radio Star. And the fun thing about it is I have this AI picture that they created of a young lady like angrily doing a podcast and watching a radio blow up.
It's kind of fun. Anyway, let's see what I had to say. Do I need my readers? I'm doing this off my phone.
Yes, let me stick my readers on here. In the 1980s, MTV famously declared that video killed the radar's radio star. Fast forward to the 2020s and it's clear that podcasts have taken up that mantle with on demand accessibility, diverse content and intimate, conditional tone. Podcast have revolutionized the way we consume audio content.
Am I like reading my newsletter too? Sorry about the cough. I'm not editing it out. That's because we're just going with the flow.
Unlike traditional radio, which adheres to strict schedules and limited formats podcasts offer a buffet of choices. Whether you're into crime, self-improvement, comedy, comedy or in-depth interviews, there's a podcast for every interest. The variety has learned listeners away from the repetitive playlist and ad-heavy broadcast of conventional radio. Podcast allow for a deeper connection between the creators and the audiences.
Host often share personal antidotes. Do I share personal antidotes? I just might be guilty of that. Back to this.
Let's see, where'd I go? Where was it? Engaged with listener feedback and fostered a sense of community that radio with its one too many broadcast style struggles to achieve. All right, let me tell you, there's some differences between podcasts and radio.
In podcasts, you're in this room all by myself. I'm doing everything. I got this man-less, oh, incredible box. It's called a Roadcaster Pro.
It does all my music and it, you know, I can push buttons and it'll say, oh no. Or I can push another button and it'll say. Be reasonable. Yeah, I can play music.
I can do all kinds of stuff with this. And I do all the products. Just like it's a live radio show. Here's the other difference.
In here, it's just me. When I was doing nationally syndicated radio, it was me and the person on the other side of the glass. Be that Paxton Quigley, who is now Jay Quigley. He's a famous realtor in Tampa if you wanna buy a house, look him up.
And if you live in Tampa, you wanna move Tampa. Or there was Robert John Joseph, Billy Gold, Mike Thomas, and Henry Jay Quigley III. And there was a bunch of them. I changed the name of all of my board ops.
So in radio, I had a board op. One was Scotty. Scotty and I did some outrageous radio together. I just outrages radio together.
Here it's just me. It's just me in this little studio. Oh, and I had a publicist. Yeah, the network paid for a publicist.
I had a publicist. And I had an agent named Stu in Chicago. And actually it's the CD part of town in this old building. And when you walk into the hallway, you find Stu's office, which by the way, I never did.
I'd walk in there looking for it. And he wasn't there. The whole place smelled like Marlboro's. I mean, it just reeked out of the things, but Stu was a really great agent.
So I don't have an agent now. And Stu is, last I heard doing 30 years in prison for fraud, but that's another story. Let's see, what else did I have? Oh yeah, here I, like I say, I've got this room.
And I have to publicize this podcast any way that I can. And there I had all kinds of people, there was a whole department that did nothing, but publicized my radio show. And my radio show had very high ratings for a weekend radio show, very, very, very high ratings for a gardening show. And I would walk in there and people would, you know, they would, oh, look, it's the guy that gives us all of our money.
He's here, let's treat him so nicely. Here my cat insists that I change its litter on a regular basis. So yeah, so anyway, furthermore, let's continue with this. Am I missing radio?
Am I actually, no, I'm not missing radio. Furthermore, the integration of podcasting into smartphones and streaming service has made them incredibly convenient. Commuters, joggers, multitaskers, I hate multitaskers, by the way. Like, can tune in whenever they want something radio simply can't match.
You know what I did when I was working in radio and I wanted to quit, but I had a contract that I couldn't get out of, and these people were making 2-day how much money off of me. I did this without telling them. I had a one hour radio show as what it had turned into, and it had four sections to it. And I made each little section out there, before there was a stop, you know, you would do, I don't know, 17 minutes in the first section, then there was a two minute and five second break.
And I would always say, you know, that's the garden, you get continues in two minutes and five seconds, and then it would go to commercial. Anyway, I stopped saying that, and I turned each one of these segments into a individual show by themselves, and then I started releasing them as podcasts. And for some damn reason, it just kind of took off. As a matter of fact, it took off really, really well.
This was in the earlier days of podcasting, and it just took off really, really, really well. I could tell you a story, all right, well I will. My late brother, God bless him, got into the internet marketing business, where he was selling stuff on Amazon. And anyway, he bought a bunch of stuff from China, charm bracelets, all kinds of stuff.
Just tons of stuff he bought. And then he decided he didn't want to do that anymore, so he brings this big box of stuff over my house, hands it to me and says, here's, sell it. Well, I knew that. Okay, so here's what I did.
One week on one segment, one segment only, I went on the radio show and I said, hey, I got this, I tell you what, all you need to do is email me your name and address. I just need your physical address, and I'm gonna send you an envelope full of stuff that includes all of this stuff. I said, who knows what's gonna be in your envelope, but it's gonna be good, it's gonna be good. And all you gotta do is send, you know, just go to my email and give me your name and address.
And next week I'll send stuff up to you. And so off I went that one week on radio, did not do this in the segment that I released as a podcast, just did it on radio, nationally syndicated radio. At that time on supposedly 48 radio stations. Yeah, I had sung from 292 to 48, because of just radio and the network I was working for was anyway.
So I did that and you know how many requests I got? Do you know how many people emailed me their address to get a envelope full of free stuff? One person, one person, I was furious. So the next week I did the same thing, but I only released that on the podcast, not on the radio, on the podcast.
That's all I get in one segment, you know, one podcast, just you know, four podcasts were not that weak. And in a segment in one of them, I just talked a little bit, I said, give me your address, by the way, I can only do this to the United States. I cannot ship these things out of the United States. I'm not dealing with customs, I'm not just in the United States.
And, but I will send them to you. And I spent about, I don't know, two minutes talking about it, that's what I did. I got the shows hit on Saturday. And by Tuesday, I had over 260 requests from all over the United States.
Plus I had requests from France, which I had to say, sorry, I had requests from India, I had requests from China, I had requests from all over the damn place. That podcast was like going every freaking where. So I wish I had thought about this a little bit before I did it, but I did it. So I didn't know how to do this.
So I then gathered up all these things, and I sat here and I started filling up envelopes. And then I figured out, I had this little scale. It was going to cost me $1.80 something, an envelope to mail them. I had everything else to make the mailing labels and all that good type of stuff.
And I had, it was like, create a little database and room to zap them all out. And anyway, by the time it was done, it was like 380 of these things that I wound up mailing out from talking about it for two minutes on a freaking podcast about gardening. So in the early days of podcasting, podcasting was very, very, very popular. And do the math, $1.80 times 300.
Yeah, it was a pricey little lesson. And I remember talking to the boss of the week at the radio network and I told him what I did. He goes, oh, I'm going to request it, you can't. Because he just, he didn't know about the podcast.
I didn't mention that. So I got one, go on, one request. With all these so-called radio stations that I have with you, I got one request. And that was that they later found out what I was doing with the podcast and I got a letter from a law, it's long story.
But you know, podcasts did kill the radio star. Radio has listened to a lot less now than it has been in the past. I enjoyed writing that article. And it goes on more.
Like I say, in the show notes, I will leave a link to the Tampa Bay Technology Center, go to their website, go all the way down to the bottom of it and it'll say sign up for our free newsletter. Do that and you'll get this every Wednesday because our secretary, I have to have them emailed her by Tuesday and she sends them out every Wednesday morning. I will see you tomorrow where we will talk about other joyful and fun stuff.