If you’ve been hearing about this Podcasting 2.0 thing over the last few years — or even few months — you might be wrestling to wrap your head around it.

Terms like: V4V, Sats, boosts, and bitcoin might even scare you away from wanting to go deeper. I don’t blame you.

Podcasting is already hard enough. There were 90,000+ episodes published in the last 72 hours according to the podcast index. The thought of jumping into a pool that size to carve out your own audience can be overwhelming.

There there’s producing the show, editing, promoting, outreach — now we’re going to ask you to roll up your sleeves (even higher) and learn some of podcasting’s most bleeding edge technologies, at least where RSS is considered.

Say hello to TrueFans, a platform that is building the Graphical User Interface (GUI) around Podcasting 2.0.

TrueFans: The Content Consumption & Monetization Platform

I’m old enough to remember when it was called PodFans.

The brainchild of Sam Sethi, veteran in the radio and podcast space, co-host of PodNews Weekly with James Cridland.

A transition that really shows you that Podcasting 2.0 is a lot more than a podcasting technology. Backed with the core concept of Value-4-Value, Sam and his team aren’t just on the bleeding edge, but hanging on for dear life at the tip of the rocket ship as propels off the launch pad.

The TrueFans progressive web app has evolved so much, that the top navigation menu items now includes more than podcasts. You can also browse music with audiobooks & courses coming soon.

If you thought the team was iterating at break neck speed with the supporting Podcasting 2.0 tags — I’m anxious to see what else Sam can enable V4V on in the future.

In the interest of time, I’ll focus on the top 3 areas I think you can jump into with TrueFans to get a sense of Podcasting 2.0 without overcommitting yourself or changing your daily habit of a new podcast app.

Though, I do encourage you to try a new podcast app, more on that in a future video.

Boosting/Streaming Payments to Podcasters

The best thing about Podcasting 2.0 is its support for instant micro-payments to podcasters.

You can pay your favorite podcast hosts by the minute as you listen to their show or send them one off “boosts” to show your support. A mix of money and messaging. It’s a fantastic route of podcast monetization with a unique layer of interactivity between the audience and the podcaster. Nothing like this exists on mainstream media platforms.

The worst thing about it? Payments are made using Bitcoin’s smallest denomination of payments called Satoshi, passed over the Lightning Network, with users needing their own digital wallet to convert fiat to digital tokens.

If you have no idea what I just said, therein lies the issue.

I’m not here to debate Bitcoin versus Dollars, Programmatic ads vs V4V Boosts — the concept most of the industry is trying to solve, be it ad tech or the Podcasting 2.0 boardroom is: How to get podcasters paid.

One of the first steps when joining the TrueFans platform is to set up your profile with an Alby Wallet.

From a fifty-thousand foot view, you can think of Alby as like your PayPal account. They broker the conversion of your dollars into Bitcoin, and store it in your wallet.

It’s like when you go to an arcade, you no longer drop coins into the games, but you swipe a pre-paid card with your funds on it. Swipe, and the game lights up.

Now you’re ready to experience the boosting and streaming to your favorite podcasters — all while managing it in the TrueFans app. TrueFans even gives you some free sats to kick things off. The more you setup your account, the more you earn.

There’s very little at risk, sans the learning curve.

Get the Experience LIVE!

“Did you hear me on the radio?!”

Remember how excited people would get when they called in to a live show? I still have newspaper clippings from articles I was featured in. Oh how the times have changed.

Another advantage TrueFans has for newcomers exploring the space is the fact that you don’t have to swap your favorite podcast app — yet.

I totally get it, I still use PocketCasts for some podcasts that I listen to, and I dabble in a mix of other Podcasting 2.0 apps — including TrueFans — when I’m listening to shows that support the new tags.

A great way to experience this new relationship between you the listener, and the podcast host, is to listen to a show live with a boost.

Every Friday, the Podcasting 2.0 guys stream their show live, and it’s a great way to test this interaction. If you want to experience it yourself, tune in and boost them to let them know you’re listening.

They do a great job of dynamically interacting with the audience.

The bigger the boost, the bigger the reaction. Like that “hey, I’m on the radio!” Reaction I mentioned earlier. It’s a small window into the experience you can forge with your own audience.

TruFans gives you the ability to do the boosting, write your message, and they even keep a history of your actions. With an additional layer of gamification, you can “Foursquare” your way to the top of the leaderboard.

I’m really dating myself with that one…

There are social podcast apps like GoodPods that build groups and community over comments, but I don’t know any other platform that fuses the Podcasting 2.0 methodologies to a social interaction layer.

Load up your wallet with $20 and experiment. See how you might apply this with your own podcast.

Music and So Much More

There’s still so much more to cover that TrueFans unlocks for both the listener and the podcaster — even musicians.

With TrueFans, you can browse V4V enabled music artists and interact with them, just like your favorite podcasters.

Imagine if you could do that on Spotify or Apple Music?!

It’s easy to joke about the Bitcoin fanatics, but imagine how far your $1 Dollar donation would go in the “real world?”

After payment gateways, merchant fees, and platform taxes you’d be lucky if your favorite artist received twenty-cents. With micro-payments using Bitcoin in Podcasting 2.0, the trade-off is doing the math to convert sats to dollars and a branding issue.

The exciting part is Sam Sethi and his team are seeing this future and making a big bet that this is where the market is headed. Apple Podcasts just supported the transcript tag for their podcast player, imagine if you could buy Bitcoin in your Bank Of America account.

My next tip is to spend some time exploring what else the app can do. Browse into a single podcast episode and see the features, buttons, and dials you play with including:

• Boosts
• Recommendations
• Leaderboards
• Soundbites
• Chapters
• Clips
• Transcripts
• and more

If you’ve been shrugging off Podcasting 2.0 because you think it’s just a wild fantasy — well, isn’t that how all tech starts?

No one ever thought they’d have electricity running to their homes, a computer on their desk, a computer in their hand, or a computer strapped to their face.

Okay, maybe that last one is still a tough sell, but Podcasting 2.0 isn’t a tough sell and TrueFans is doing its part to make it a reality.

Start an account today and see what you’ve been missing inside the future of podcasting!