► Tell us about you and your podcast
My name is Karston Keel, and I am the founder, writer, director, producer, and lead host of the Crossover Across Time podcast. All of those titles are a fancy way to say I started a podcast without much knowledge of podcasting because I felt I had a quality knowledge base and angle to discuss the NBA both past and present. My co-hosts, Wyatt Fullmer and Justin Bailey, are good friends of mine who have been foundational in my NBA fandom and whose perspectives help ensure we offer multiple takes on key events.
We cover the NBA season to season, preseason to Finals, week to week. We discuss the best teams and best players at any given point in a season, while also discussing players and teams of the past that help us contextualize modern stats and performances. We like to give awards to players and teams, such as our Weekly MVP, and we play a number of game type segments that we hope showcase our knowledge while also challenging us to grow our insights even further.
Our podcast is not only relatively new, but we are also still working hard to foster a sizable fanbase. As such, we don't have extensive analytics into our audience metrics and demographics. However, what we have seen early is most of our audience is unsurprisingly based out of the United States. We have also seen a surprising number of downloads/listens outside of the U.S., even in countries where English is not the predominant language. In terms of a broader scope of who our listeners are, I imagine our listeners are people who aren't satisfied with viewing the NBA in an isolated, past-five-years type of lens. When discussing older players, it's easy to say that many early stars wouldn't have a chance of competing against modern stars. However, that eliminates all types of nuance or understanding of how early figures have been pivotal to the evolution of the game. Our listening audience is likely composed of individuals who welcome this holistic approach to the NBA and the game of basketball.
► Why & how did you start this podcast?
Podcasting seemed like the natural avenue for someone like me who was eager to share my angle on the NBA both past and present. Those who know me well know I'm most often fairly quiet and reserved in day-to-day life. This much is true, but those same individuals would likely add that on subjects I'm passionate about I'm more than willing to share my thoughts and ideas. I have listened to a handful of sports podcasts, most often the Rich Eisen Show, whose even-keeled host I find very personally inspiring. However, another motivator for creating the Crossover Across Time podcast was to provide more focus on the history of the game, whereas quality podcasts focusing solely on the modern league are more than plentiful.
We founded the podcast in October of 2022, immediately at the beginning of the 2022-2023 NBA season. Like most everyone who has the desire to start a podcast, myself and my co-hosts hoped to get our foot in the door, build consistency with our uploading schedule, and hopefully build an audience. From the decision to create a podcast to the uploading of our very first episode, the timeline couldn't have been more than a week or so. Not knowing a lot about better production values, we simply hit record and got started gabbing about opening night. From there we found consistency with our uploads and have never really looked back.
► How'd you find the time and funding to do this podcast?
This season we primarily focused on a three episode-per-week timeline, after finding that an episode every weekday schedule during last season was not only a bigger time commitment than was truly viable, but also was not conducive to well balanced episode lengths. After covering Friday-Sunday on the Monday episode in a two hour episode, the next day would almost invariably end up being a 30 minute Tuesday episode covering only Monday's games. With our Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, we've been able to create a much more consistent 1-1.5 hour expectation for most every episode.
Since myself and my co-hosts work day jobs and are still working on generating podcast revenue, efficient production timelines and costs are paramount to us being able to continue producing the show. We've both increased production values and made recording easier by figuring out how to insert audio cues and music at the time of recording rather than in post production. From scripting to an episode being uploaded, we can have everything completed in as little as 2.5 hours for an hour long episode. It's still a commitment of 8-10 hours a week, but we find the time to do it simply because we love basketball and follow the world's highest level of competition in the sport.
I've been the executive producer for the show, again simply meaning I have funded the podcast on my own. Our monthly costs hover around ~$20, which just includes our monthly costs to host the podcast on more than a dozen platforms. We have had other supplemental costs, including audio equipment and computer interfaces, but those are like the monthly hosting costs and have been funded by my own money.
► What do you gain from podcasting?
We have done preliminary searches into gaining sponsorships, but unfortunately have not found the right partnerships. We have not generated any revenue yet as a result.
Some part of this has been a result of the opportunities available to us on the sponsorship platform we've been using not being great fits brand-wise for us or the podcast. Another part though has been our relatively lower audience numbers. All-time across about a year and a half we've had an estimated 2.5K downloads. However, our numbers have jumped tremendously compared to the first season of the podcast, especially in our peak performing months from October 2023-February 2024.
As we continue to work on growing our audience, we're still genuinely motivated by our own love of NBA basketball first and foremost. We love talking about it, and our continued discussion has helped us continue to grow our knowledge of the game and its history.
► How does your podcasting process look like?
We entered podcasting without much knowledge of the best tools and practices for producing the show, and I'm fairly certain our production process is still somewhat roundabout and unconventional. We've used Zoom for our recording purposes because of our familiarity with the platform and the ease of using it for multiple hosts. We've also been able to insert our audio for the show live during recording with Zoom, so we've had no reason to change so far.
For audio editing, we've used Audacity again for its simplicity and our own familiarity with the application. Outside of a semi-decent microphone and audio interface I personally purchased for my end of our recording, there's not much sophistication or cutting-edge production in our process. However, we've continually worked on improving the show where possible, and our production quality at the moment is much improved compared to where we started.
► How do you market your show?
There's likely much more we can be doing to market the show, but we've stuck with two simple methods that have at least helped us gain a handful of new followers here and there. Firstly we've ensured the podcast is being hosted on as many different platforms as possible, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, RSS.com, iHeartRadio, YouTube, and more. Secondly, we've done promotions on our social media platforms: Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
On those platforms, we've been able to provide well made graphics for our shows' segments that all tie into a coherent visual identity. We share Weekly MVP winners, Power Rankings, updates on the playoff brackets, and more in a visually compelling way. We've started focusing on utilizing hashtags to increase engagement, but we admittedly still have a lot of work to do in that regard.
► What advice would you share with aspiring (new) podcasters?
If we were in a position of calling ourselves experts, our simple advice would be to find something you both enjoy talking about and have valuable and unique insights to offer on that subject. I've personally found RSS.com has been a great starting point. There's a monthly cost tied to it, but they help guide you through a lot of the steps and they link to a ton of top-notch platforms. Outside of that, in this age of podcasting being more prominent than ever there are hundreds of tips, tricks, tutorials, and resources from numerous creators much more informed than myself and my co-hosts.