#167 - A Huge Opportunity Us Artists Are Missing Out On
Maybe the next image-based social media platform should have this.(open ArtPodPlay in separate page)
made this online podcast player, ArtPodPlay. It takes excellent podcasts and composes random new playlists every day. I wrote here about why that works. You just press play, and you listen to an amazing podcast episode while drawing. You don’t need to waste time looking for something to listen to anymore; you can just start to draw. When collecting Podcasts for my online podcast player, I discovered that some podcast creators “lock” their podcasts, meaning they don’t want other services, like ArtPodPlay, to play their episodes.
I respect their wishes, of course.
But I don’t understand it.
You see, most podcast episodes have ads. They may be ads from the streaming platform they use, and they may get money from that. The ads may be theirs where they promote their products and services. In both cases, it benefits them if their episodes get played on ArtPodPlay. When you listen to their podcast through ArtPodPlay, your browser connects directly to their servers, so they see it in their statistics. They don’t “lose traffic.”
For example: ArtPodPlay lined up one of the Draftsmen podcasts for the day recently. Draftsmen is an amazing podcast about art with Stan Prokopenko and Marshall Vandruff. As it happens, Marshall Vandruff’s perspective course was about to start, and the podcast episode contained an ad for that. Which meant my audience, consisting of people who want to become better artists, got to hear this ad that promoted their perspective drawing course.
This got me thinking: Shouldn’t we artists be making things for others to share? It would be free promotion.
A human promoting your work is way more valuable—as it is social proof—than a dumb algorithm sharing your work, yet we do design posts for the algorithms. We work for free for “exposure” for the algorithms, with no guarantees that anyone will see the posts we make for them for free.
I am not arguing for working for “exposure”, of course! But collaborations can be beneficial to both parties if you find someone with a similar audience. Like Marshall Vandruff and Stan Prokopenko did. Both being legendary art teachers, they brought their audiences together for the perspective course, created by Marshall Vandruff and hosted on Stan Prokopenko’s servers. Stan said it was the most successful course launch on Proko ever.
We could be creating guest posts, cross-posting on each other’s accounts or blogs or newsletters, or interview or be interviewed on podcasts and in each other’s blogs and newsletters and be exposed to each other’s audiences. Instead, we’re designing posts for social media, and letting algorithms determine if new people see our work.