49. When Should My Podcast Be Marked Explicit? Podcasting Tips and Strategies

FAQ Friday answering the question of "When Should My Podcast Be Marked Explicit?"

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Transcript

Welcome to podcasting for solopreneurs and FAQ Friday, where I answer a common podcasting question in 5 minutes or less. Today's question is, when should I rate my podcast as explicit? This question comes from Michelle. Hi, Michelle. Thank you so much for being a listener. Alright. So to answer your question, you should write your content as explicit whenever there's mature content or adult language. And you might be asking, well, okay, what counts as mature content? Everybody has a different definition of this. So usually themes of sex, violence, drugs, etcetera fall into this category.

And don't overthink it. Just think about the things that get a movie rated pg 13 or r. So kind of things that are generally perceived by the masses as mature content even if it's not mature content to you personally. Same thing with adult language. Think about which words make music get rated explicit, or they get bleeped out on a clean show. Basically, just use some common sense. If someone is driving with young kids in the car and your content probably shouldn't be consumed in that moment, mark it as explicit. When you're not sure or it could kinda go either way, I recommend erring on the side of caution and just going ahead and marking it as explicit.

Now you can either mark your entire show as explicit or just mark individual episodes. If every single episode contains mature content and or adult language, then go ahead and mark your whole show as explicit. If it's only certain episodes, then mark your overall show as clean and then just change the rating for individual episodes. You can do this within your podcast hosting platform such as Buzzsprout or Libsyn, etcetera. It is important to know that marking content as explicit will block it from certain countries that censor content. And, also, Apple requires a user to be signed in to their account in order to access explicit content. Now with Apple's new web based player making the platform accessible to a wider audience, many users may not be signed in and therefore, they won't be able to access your content if it's marked as explicit. So you only want to mark explicit what truly is explicit so that your content is accessible to as many people as possible whenever it is appropriate.

Alright. If you have a podcasting question, click the text me your question link in the episode description or email me at Julia at the podcast teacher dot com, and I'll answer it in an upcoming episode. Until next time. Happy podcasting.