Podcasting Isn’t Exactly Dead

I agree with Chris Penn. All of these marketing people want everything to pay off now, and most things need to ruminate.

There are many reasons that I podcast (since Dec 2006 – over 100 episodes) but the most significant is the relationships that develop with my brilliant guests (like you Chris, for one). Yes, it takes work. More than blogging, at least for me. But, like blogging it is a discipline, it is in service of a community, and it is an expression of thought.

Just recently I was offered a combo radio promo/podcast sponsorship for Personal Brilliance – Up Close and Practical. That’s nice but isn’t a primary goal for doing it. Find your purpose for making the investment regardless of money and if the money comes treat it as a bonus, would be my advice.

With apologies to Chris who I don’t blame for using a juicy, traffic-friendly headline, I’m so tired of people predicting the death of podcasting. I’ve been a podcaster since October of 2004, and I’ve heard this one before.

Of course, Chris gets to his real point later in the post — that it’s all about content, and that treating podcasting like other forms of distributed media is proving to be misguided, Blubrry’s (always sounds like “blubbery” in my mind’s ear) case notwithstanding.

I’m a champion of podcasting. An evangelist, even. But for four years and counting, I’ve always stressed that a new podcaster should not think of it as a money-making venture in and of itself. Rather, a podcast can be an excellent tool to market whatever it is you want to make money with.

And, of course, podcasting doesn’t have to be about the money at all. It’s a means of expression, a tool through which nearly anyone can communicate one-to-many and one-to-one simultaneously. Jim has it right: the return on investment is in the relationships forged. Any direct monetary benefit through sponsorships or (very, very rare) subscription models is a bonus.

Also: I’m sorry, Artem, but making sweeping generalizations like…

People want to do 2 things on the Internet:
- watch short videos
- read short messages

… is almost as silly as saying something like “Podcasting is dead.” I mean, if you really believed in brevity, you wouldn’t write 800 word blog posts on your own site.

I’ll counter with a sweeping generalization of my own, just for fun:

The Internet — like podcasting — is whatever people want for it to be.

i agree with Whitney, we do video, and for our clients we advise them that it is a tool to help them promote themselves and their business. Same with podcasts, for the people looking for the information, it’s going to be invaluable. it creates more conversation, spur interest, and most importantly make the presenter a source, promote them as an expert in their field.

I think the only way podcasting will become profitable and mainstream is if the delivery method is changed. I’ve always said that when my Dad and his friends (60-70 years old) can watch my show (Beautiful Places) as easily as they can watch Wheel Of Fortune, I will then be a success and be making a ton of money. Right now, podcasting is reachable only by nerds that are willing to load a couple programs, search for a site (that they need to remember), and then wait for a download, hoping nothing goes wrong. That’s too many steps. I have people in my family that love me and love to hear about what I am doing, but they have never seen the show because they can’t even figure out their email.

We need a unified way of viewing content. tv, movies, podcasts, and family photos. Everything needs to be reachable by one remote control. I think AppleTV is moving in this direction, but not fast enough to save a lot of good companies and podcasts.

Tony

As usual, this monetization conversation clouds what’s really happening out there.

Talk to any podcaster who isn’t trying to make money or any avid podcast listener and you’ll know that podcasting is far from dead.

Money?

Just like anything else, if you have the audience numbers then you’ll make money. But, as I’m often reminded by Seth Godin posts, it’s best to focus on who IS listening rather than who isn’t.

Tim Coyne is on the money — as is Seth Godin.

Tony said,

We need a unified way of viewing content. tv, movies, podcasts, and family photos. Everything needs to be reachable by one remote control. I think AppleTV is moving in this direction, but not fast enough to save a lot of good companies and podcasts.

TiVO Series 3 and, to a lesser degree, TiVO Series 2 DVRs are podcast-ready, video or audio. Also, they enable networking with your computer — and yes, you can watch family photos and access the music on your computer as well. Cheaper (I think?) than AppleTV and probably in more homes.

I have a TiVO Series 2 (just got it, late adopter) and I watch several video podcasts right there on the television. I’m someone who never watched regular vidcasts on my computer. Now, I catch iFanboy, Cranky Geeks, and other shows the same way I catch time-shifted episodes of Life and Fringe.

Worth looking into!

Chris,

I don’t think podcasting is dead. I do think it is different than what was originally planned. I feel like this argument is coming from the same people that said blogging is dead. Neither are. There is always going to be a market out there for podcasts and blogs. Some will be professional, some will be corporate and there will always be a grass roots movement that does it for free and some that do it part time for fun. That being said, like in life, things evolve and often we don’t have control over this evolutionary track. We need to constantly be updating our thinking of these Web technologies and how we use them.

Dead, naw. Just different.

Keep up the good work and great blog.

Seth Goldstein
I’m on Twitter as sethgoldstein

Thanks Matthew. Can you get Beautiful Places? That’s what I’m talking about though, an easy and unified way to get and find and watch whatever you want. Tivo version 3 looks like it is moving in the right direction. My parents and friends have Dish and Comcast. Hopefully these companies will go the way Tivo is going.

When this happens, the number of podcast viewers (maybe not so much with audio podcasts) will increase dramatically. When Beautiful Places gets 0.1% of the TV viewers, I’ll be making a living off it. I hope.

Tony

Podcasting is nowhere near dead. It’s one of the fastest growing segments of our business, but we’ve been doing it for awhile (we’re coming up on four years).

The cold reality? It’s not about the length. There is no magic formula; there are immensely successful (tens or hundreds of thousands of listeners) long format and short format ones. The most successful podcast and network (with it’s ad buys completely filled) can run longer than an hour sometimes. It’s a red herring; as usual when it comes to the online space or frankly anything, the “short” meme is from people wanting to apply an engineering-like formula to shortcut around creating good content. It happened when I worked in broadcast TV ten years ago, it’s happening here now. (Everything old is new again, after all).

It’s that we’re getting the wheat from the chaff.

The good stuff will continue to grow; and those who got in, thinking it’s yet-another-get-rich scheme are going to leave, and those who underestimated the work it takes to create quality content will leave, too. There are both ad-supported and service-supporting successful podcasts; so that’s where I’ll have to disagree with you, Chris. But if you’re going to be ad-supported, you better be good and realize that you need to create your content to appeal to the sorts of audience numbers that advertising works for. If you’re a service, you can successfully play the hyper-niche game (assuming you’re looking to have a justifiable, monetary return).

As to Podango, I believe they had some business issues with not being able to deliver for weeks on end for paid contracts due to an unfortunate catastrophic illness of a key player. If anything, from what I understand through the public chatter, the failure of Podango is not of podcasting, but of succession/emergency planning.

Chris,
I don’t believe podcasting is dead. Like others, I’ve heard it before and it’s still around. Podcasting, like most technologies, is evolving, not dying. This evolution is sending it to video and vlogging, but the audio podcast will be around for a long time because there are people that rely on the audio podcast for their running, jogging, exercise time and even commute time. You can’t easily watch a video doing most of those activities.

The main reason that some say podcasting is dead is due to the fact of so many producing no content or meaningless podcasts about nothing in particular. These are the podcasts that die, while the good ones with worthwhile content and a good message will be around as long as there are people wanting hear what is being said!

Hey Chris, what I remember from 2006 is that everyone was just really excited about what podcasting could be. There was very little clarity then even about what podcasting was at that moment, let alone what it was going to be years later. It was a lot of guessing fueled by optimism, experimentation and a handful of advertising/PR “stunt buys” masquerading as case studies pointing to the future of monetization. And then a few guys in Boston put together a weekend “Camp” to get us all in the same room so we could all talk to each other…

Lee and Doug were among the ones out front leading the charge, and I’m sorry to see that it looks like Podango isn’t going to make it.

Our podcast is about NASCAR. It’s funny, informative, useful to race fans, and marries valuable, expert information with entertainment. So we thought, “wow, we’re gonna get rich! Huge market, great content, weekly topics to discuss…what’s not to like?” We’ve been on iTunes for free for three years now, and everyone loves us there. But when we tried to charge for it ($4.95/month), subscriptions immediately dropped by 90%. That experiment lasted about 3 months and probably cost us half our audience.

What we’re doing now is using it to start conversations, as many of you are suggesting. But what’s new is we’re getting paid to include our sponsors in those conversations, providing their product or service a racing context and audience of loyal fans. If we say it’s good, our fans support it. WOM at its best!

We are obviously targeting sponsors who want to be a part of the racing conversation, just like old-time radio did. None of this is that new–I keep saying that the only real changes are to the distribution channels and delivery platforms, not the value system.

Oh, and we produce a 30-40 minute show 6 days a week and get about 60,000 downloads a month, and growing, just from iTunes. I am planning to double or triple that in 2009 if I can. E-me!

Maybe the problem is that we are lumping together Snickers and dinner.
Some audio (and video) original content makes sense as a little snack in the midst of other content. It’s a change of pace from all that damn text. Let’s call this short, focused thing a “podpost”.
Some content is far meatier and deserving of our full attention for a longer period. Informational content aimed at a clearly defined audience tends to be this way. It’s longer and may have some monetary value for the listener. Let’s use the word “podcast” here.
OK? Glad we cleared that up… :)

I think there is a huge element of “this is not new anymore, and therefore not cool anymore” in this whole notion that podcasting is dead. It’s moving toward the mainstream and so some very innovation minded people are looking beyond.

Tony

The Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network (home of Grammar Girl, Money Girl, Modern Manners Guy, Public Speaker, Nutrition Diva, Mighty Mommy, etc) had a fantastic 2008, and our business is exactly what we thought it would be when we launched it in 2006.

We support our network on advertising, so you can’t say the model doesn’t work.

We also make sure we’re diversified with products and other services. It would be bad business to rely on any one revenue stream.

Although I greatly prefer short podcasts, I don’t think success is about length. There are long podcasts that are successful too. TWiT is over an hour, for example.

I believe having a strong brand, consistently delivering high-quality content, and treating your podcast or network like a business (if you intend it to be a business) are the keys to success.

Absolutely, podcasting is not dead if you define it as means of inspiring, engaging, enrolling and educating someone around an idea, a product, a service or an event.

Knowledge is power and audio is a highly effective means of drawing someone into a concept. I personally feel it is less about the device and more about the server.

Login to whatever device you are on whether it be an ipod, a phone, a TV, a computer, a car radio or a kiosk, go to your bookmark and continue to listen. As long as the device is connected you are engaged.

Yes, I know we are not that wired yet but someday soon.

Want to read more about what you are listening to, then click on related articles. Interested in the product, then click on the related product intro video then click purchase.

Or browse through testimonials before you commit.

Then (here is an idea) go ahead and give the rep a call and start to build a relationship just like the old days.

But now you are armed with knowledge which now puts you in the driver seat. Not the rep.

Audio will continue to grow with social media. Podcasting won’t once everything is wired.

@Mignon there are always exceptions. Q&D Network is a success yes. But my question is this – after 2 years why don’t we have more examples besides your network to look at? Maybe the network itself is the answer… Or the how-to content… Or it could be that you are just really good at what you do. But most podcasters haven’t had the success that you and a very select few have had.

- Joel Mark Witt

@JoelMarkWitt- Mignon has done a great job of co-branding the podcasts on her site- they hang together both visually and to an extent, topically. I think if we start thinking of podcasting networks as more like multimedia magazines, as logically put together, it will make both attracting advertisers and listeners easier. We have to start thinking of podcast networks as for like the Food Network, Bravo or DIY channel- things that have a fit, rather than a mishmash together because the producers all know each other. :)

@Frankie Johnson

That “damned text” you speak of drives everything online. Text is the best compression technology of info. Text is scannable – searchable – and can be consumed offline after being printed on actual paper. Text was here before podcasting and will be here after.

I do see your point about snack vs dinner though – and I agree.

- Joel Mark Witt

Joel Mark Witt,

Text doesn’t hold up so well in the car, when you are working out or when you are walking around at home or even in the office.(Which can add up to a large portion of a day)

When I think of audio I think of the days of families gathering around the radio to listen together. Print was for dad reading the paper and telling the kids to get lost.

Obviously text has many, many applications but audio has plenty of room for growth.

Audio can already be searched and is as portable as any piece of paper if you have the right device.

But it is definitely not good bullet points and quick overviews.

Oh no, I didn’t mean to start a text vs. audio war. Maybe it was video that I needed to show my tongue firmly in my cheek when I was damning text. Words are wonderful, in print or in the air. Sometimes we read, sometimes we listen, sometimes we mix it up.
Ain’t life grand?

@Frankie Johnson

No war – just comments. I see that tongue – and you’re right it is firmly placed in the side of your cheek. :-)

- Joel Mark Witt

By the way – how do I get a nifty photo on here like all the rest of the cool people?

- Joel Mark Witt