A Rant About Feed Drops - May 25th, 2024

Author

Fancy Anne
May 25, 2024

This week, I listened to 28 hours and 26 minutes of podcasts.

I know I said in the last (first) issue that they wouldn’t typically be this long, but first I want to talk about doing feed drops, and how to do them tastefully.

I work in marketing for podcasts, so feed drops are something I am extremely familiar with for both my clients AND for my own podcasts. And the key bit of knowledge I am always imparting on others about them is to make sure they are:

  1. A perfect fit for your audience.

  2. Not done too frequently.

  3. Set up right for your listeners.

Feed drops aren’t like ads. They aren’t a 30 to 60 second snippet of a promotion for another podcast. They’re a whole episode of another podcast in your podcast’s feed. So you want to be respectful of your audience and give them a nice recorded introduction to the episode explaining WHY it’s showing up in this podcast feed and why they would also enjoy this show if you want them to actually listen to this other podcast and if you want them to not unsubscribe to your podcast.

If you’d like to learn more about how to execute a feed drop well, check out this article from Lauren Passell in Podcast Marketing Magic!

And now on to the shows I enjoyed this week!

Table of Contents

Listening Stats

For May 13th - May 25th, 2024…

  • Listening Time: 28 hours, 26 minutes

  • Number of Episodes: 47

  • Average Episode Length: 36 minutes

Weekly Playlist

My Brother, My Brother and Me

“Face 2 Face: Pay the Mustard Forward”

Episodes of MBMBaM have been pretty hit or miss, and live shows are usually skips for me, but I figured I’d give this one a chance. I’m glad I did, because I had a pretty fun time with this one! It’s the Brothers McElroy’s second show in Vancouver—their first was 10 years ago!—and the energy from the crowd was just really good.

Highlights for me include making everyone in the audience say “DONKEY!” in a Shrek accent (Shreccent?), a Munch Squad about the Grimace Shake, and the terribly genius idea of hand sanitizer key chains instead filled with condiments for on the go.

Wanna Hear Something Weird?

“Haunted Dolls”

BOOP BA BOOP BOOP BA BOOP-

Welcome to Haunted Doll Watch!

Everyone’s grandma had a room full of dolls, right? It can’t just have been my grandmother. I also found it endlessly funny that the Doll Room was the guest room she always made my parents sleep in. 😂 Enjoy being surrounded by dozens of eerily realistic babies as you sleep! Really makes it feel like a home away from home!

Wanna Hear Something Weird? dives into unsolved mysteries and just the most bizarre and weird events hosts Lauren Anderson and Tom Reynolds can find. This week brought them to La Isla de las Muñecas a.k.a. The Island of Dolls and explored some of the more famous haunted dolls in history—including my favorite haunted buddy Robert the Doll!

Photo of Robert the Doll I took on my 2009 Key West trip. Loving the “Chiller” font on his plaque.

Excluding the haunted dolls at grandma’s house, I’ve always found the paranormal to be fascinating ever since I went on a family trip to Key West, Florida in 2009. We took a ghost tour around the island, visited Robert at the museum, and I had so much fun that now one of the top things I try to do everywhere I travel is go on a haunted tour. Learning about a place’s paranormal past tells you so much about the people who lived there and it’s just such a fun way to explore history.

Better Offline

“We’re Watching Facebook Die”

I’ve never felt more validated than I did while listening to an episode all about how fucked up Facebook has become in the past few years. I joined Facebook in 2009 and have always had my account. In the beginning, it was a replacement for MySpace and I used it the same way… now I mostly using it to communicate with family and share things with relatives who don’t live close by. I’m also a part of a few community groups for my local area and some of my interests.

But even more recently, using Facebook has become untenable with the introduction of “Meta AI”. It’s been added into the search function of Facebook AND Instagram, and surprise surprise, you CAN’T DISABLE IT. There’s no way to disable or avoid this thing that overrides the search function unless you’re paying close attention while looking up something. It makes me so mad every time I see that spinning blue circle that I can feel my anger levels rising like Stitch’s “Badness Level”.

It’s unusually high for someone my size.

That’s not the only thing Facebook is up to. (Should I be calling it Meta since that’s really what’s being destroyed here? 🤷) There’s nothing to stop Mark Zuckerberg from driving the Meta Train off the side of a mountain, so now’s the time to familiarize yourself with everything that’s happening and what the likely fallout will be.

Fur & Loathing

the entire series so far, okay? just listen to all of it

Fur & Loathing is a new show from Brazen and investigative reporter Nicky Woolf. And I think the best way to pitch it is using its own description:

“It’s early December 2014, and at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, an unusual gathering is taking place. It’s the final night of Midwest Furfest, the world’s largest convention for a subculture known as Furries.

The party is in full swing when, just after midnight, attendees suddenly find themselves struggling to breathe. Something terrible has happened: poisonous levels of chlorine gas are sweeping through the hotel corridors.

Nineteen people are hospitalized and hundreds are evacuated into the freezing cold, many still wearing their colorful anthropomorphic animal costumes, or fursuits. Hazmat teams trace the gas to a stairwell, where they find the remains of a chemical bomb. This was an intentional attack.

But almost a decade later, the identity of the perpetrator remains a mystery. In Fur and Loathing, investigative reporter Nicky Woolf takes on the unsolved case, working closely with Furries to find answers. It’s a journey that will bring him face-to-face with the challenges this vibrant, often misunderstood subculture faces – including the far-right extremists looking to wreck the community from within.”

HELLO? There’s so much to unpack here. And I guess that’s why there’s now a podcast! I remember being on Tumblr when this happened and seeing everyone make jokes about it, and it turns out so was everyone else in the media world. Luckily no one was killed, but there could have been some serious injuries and even deaths given the severity of this incident and it seemed like no one was taking it seriously.

I’ve been recommending this podcast all month, even before listening myself. I finally sat down this week and queued up all of the episodes because once I started I found myself unable to stop.

Listen to the trailer. Catch up on the episodes released so far. And be prepared for some wild revelations and reveals about a case that should have been solved a decade ago.

What were the stand-out episodes that you listened to this week? Know of a podcast you think would make it on to my list of favorites? Let me know in the comments or a reply to this issue in your inbox!

And if you happened upon this on the web, make sure you subscribe to get weekly updates on my listening habits!

See you all next week!

- Fancy Anne

P.S. Next week (well, starting tomorrow) I’m going to be traveling to visit one of my dear friends for their birthday! I’ll have a lot of drive time, so let’s see just how high I can get the listen counter for the next issue. 👀👂🎧