Well, yes:
Podcasting is hot. Podcasting is cheap and easy. Podcasting can be fun.
Creating your own podcast and trying to make a business out of it is a mistake.
Unless you are repurposing content from another medium, it will be rare to find anyone making money from originating podcasts.
Talk Radio Shows repurposed from radio to a podcast. No brainer. It’s cheap and easy. Repurposing industry specific information from tradeshows, speeches, product presentations for employee or customer education or as sales support. No brainer. These are just extensions of existing content into a new low cost medium.
For those who are tying to jump on the podcasting bandwagon and create a “hit” podcast that you plan on selling advertising in, its cheap and easy to do, but even with Google Adsense for RSS its going to be really tough to do it as a fulltime job and make minimum wage back.
Podcasting is right where streaming was about 10 years ago. Before you dive into podcasting as “the next big thing”, you would be wise to do some homework on how the streaming industry evolved.
Try to find any of the many that created original content for PSEUDO.com, TSN, EYADA.com, Broadcast.com and others that I have long forgotten.
There is a good chance that their history is your future.
That's Mark Cuban talking, and he might know a little about audio delivered via the Net.
He's right, of course, and after several weeks of heavy-duty use of an iPod, podcasts, and recorded audio, I can say that the majority of podcasts out there right now are pretty hopeless. The useful ones are mostly ones created by radio pros- Leo LaPorte, for example- or are outright repurposing of commercial or major public radio content. I've listened to some of the vaunted independent podcasts, and, frankly, they're like bad college radio with swearing, kids playing at being what they think Howard Stern is. Others are self-indulgent bores. But that's all OK if they have no illusions that they're doing much more than a vanity production. After all, we don't have to listen. And I can't imagine anyone who would, for a long time, anyway. WHat that means is that they won't draw the kind of critical mass audience that one needs to sell advertising (at a decent rate, anyway) until they get better content, better production- in short, until they sound like the big-time, professional radio some of them aim to subvert.
All I'm sayin' is that for every person who says they listen to the local student-run college station, hundreds of thousands are listening to the Big Bad Clear Channel Infinity Citadel Emmis Bonneville Cumulus Entercom stations. wanna make real money? Gotta get listeners from the commercial operators. And no matter how funny your friends say you are, how clever and how tasteful, if you couldn't get a job in real radio, there might be a reason.
Does that mean podcasting is a dead end? No, and Cuban's not saying that, either. As a hobby, it's great- you can reach more than just your friends with your stuff, and in that way it's a lot like, well, this blog right here, operated not for profit or even break even but just for something some would call "fun." But what works best, other than your own music, on an iPod is timeshifting or even placeshifting regular ol' radio. Replay Radio lets me record streams of stations around the world, and the files go right to the iPod, where they sit ready for me when I want to hear them. I can't wake up at 3 am to hear East Coast morning shows, and I don't want to have to sit at the computer to hear late night shows while I could be soing something else. With the iPod, I can hear the shows while running (when not El Kabonging myself- yes, it still hurts), in the car, at the gym; I can fast-forward through the dull parts and the commercials, too. And I can record and hear shows that are on at the same time, so I can ultimately hear both. Recording, though, is still a little bit of a pain in the ass: if I'm recording, I can't watch TV on the monitor, can't call up a video or audio file on the Net. And that's where podcasting is an ideal transport method. If I could just subscribe to a show instead of recording it, I could get the show in seconds instead of tying the computer up. And I'd probably download more shows; I've downloaded several days' worth of a Minneapolis morning show and I don't really even care much for it, but it's a podcast and it's easy. If all shows were available in podcasts, I'd grab more of them.
And that's what podcasting can ultimately offer: radio on demand. No longer tethered to what my local stations deign to offer, no longer tethered to the clock, I can listen to morning shows later in the morning, in the afternoon, the next day. A podcast menu of shows I'd WANT to hear would be worth a subscription, even. There's a model: go into iTunes and pick from radio shows of which you've actually heard. I'd even put up with a monthly fee AND commercials. There was actually a device that was going to provide this wirelessly through FM subcarriers a few years back, Command Audio, but it didn't make it in that exact form; with a large installed base of "receivers" (iPods and MP3 players) and an easier delivery system (broadband downloads and syncing), maybe the Command Audio time has come. (And the company is still around, it seems, to join in; it's licensed its technology to XM, iBiquity, and Motorola, and it's apparently what the XM receivers use to record and store show content)
This future wouldn't necessarily belong to the tech people. It would, however, belong to the programmers, to the talent. They already have the material, and it costs little or nothing additional to what they presently spend to add podcast delivery to their arsenal. It's just extending existing programming to a new, more convenient form.
Whaddya know? Content may yet be king. Fine with me. Make it easy for me to get that content, and there's your podcast business model.
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