/Culture/ The business of podcasting

21/11/2006 | Filed under Discover > Culture

We catch up with some of the web’s favourite podcasters to see if the results have lived up to the hype, and what to expect tomorrow

Podcasting. Even the name is almost unique among web trends. Web 2.0, blogging, social networking … all refer to a specific way of doing things, to specific audiences and specific markets. But not podcasting. Where other trends focus on the content, podcasting is exclusively about the delivery mechanism: media files, dropped from an RSS feed straight into your computer, and from there onto portable media devices. The technology couldn’t be simpler, or the idea easier to grasp.

No wonder it’s become one of the most varied sources of entertainment on the net.

One year later…

The basic podcasting concept has been around since 2000, and the tools and technologies since 2003. In 2005, The New Oxford American Dictionary declared ‘podcasting’ the word of the year, and Apple instantly seized much of the fl edgling market with the addition of a dedicated podcasting section to the iTunes Music Store. It may not be fully mainstream yet, but it’s getting there, with everyone from bloggers to the BBC now producing content to subscribe to.

But how exactly is the trend working for those who have adopted it? Can it help your site, your cause, your company, or are you shouting into the darkness?

Currently, there’s no shortage of podcast hubs. They link to the files that can tell you which shows are popular among their users, but this is only on a persite basis. On Yahoo! Podcasts (podcasts.yahoo.com), top billing went to Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech followed by NPR’s all songs considered, and ChinesePod’s Learn Mandarin. Podfeed.net, which pulls its content from Feedburner stats, listed the Digg.com podcast, Diggnation, as the top scorer, with 29,803 listeners, followed by – no, really – 101 Uses For Baby Wipes at 19,337. Even within these numbers, downloads don’t necessarily equate to listeners. Of course, many of the big names are happy to shout about their success, including Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech (www.twit.tv) with over 300,000 listeners, and The Ricky Gervais Show, which ran for one free series, netting three million downloads and turning into the world’s first mainstream paid-for podcast at £3.75 for six episodes.

Interestingly, this model hasn’t caught on. While commercial podcasts do exist, typically reproducing newspaper and magazine content, the overwhelming majority remain gratis, advertising-free, and with the producer soaking up the cost of bandwidth.

Love of the art

But why? If a new podcast is unlikely to draw in any numbers, why pay to entertain the world? For many, entertaining an audience is enough – just look at all the humour sites, or review pages, or blogs out there. For others, there’s no shortage of extra benefits. Podcasting can be advertising your empire, a way to bring what you do to a wider audience.

Few have enjoyed better success than US singer/ songwriter Jonathan Coulton (www.jonathancoulton.com), whose Thing a Week podcast boasts over a year of comedy songs, from bureaucratic zombie ballad Re: Your Brains (“Here’s an FYI: You’re all gonna die screaming”) to the Alvin and the Chipmunks-inspired Podsafe Christmas Song (“Don’t think us rude, we don’t wanna get sued by the thugs at the RIAA”).

“Even though this music is all free, a lot people pay for it anyway, whether through a paid subscription, a donation or actually purchasing the MP3s from my site,” says Coulton. “I think it’s really helped create a community around the people who listen to my music. People suggest song ideas, draw pictures, make videos, and of course leave all sorts of opinions about how good or not good each song is.”

Drawing pictures and making videos is a modest claim. Coulton fans have a dedicated website, the JoCoPro (jocopro.libsyn.com), for videos, with Len of Jawbone Radio supplying a weekly cartoon to go along with everything from a tender love story between Spock and Bigfoot to a creepy doll straight out of The Twilight Zone. For more on that, see When tradition meets tomorrow, today below.

Corporate spin

Business and the indie nature of the net have never particularly gotten along, and podcasting is no different. While Microsoft’s Xbox Live program director quickly became a hero of the next-generation games scene for his personal Xbox Live podcast, Sony found itself pilloried for its over-scripted, overly clean attempt at netting the market. Getting the tone is crucial, but even more important is finding your voice. Stardock (www.stardock.com) offers a perfect example. The company is best known for its Windows skinning tools, office utilities, and the Galactic Civilisations series, which would suggest a fairly dry,

staid podcast. No. Anything but. Under the banner ‘Where unprofessional podcasting sounds better’, every episode of PowerUser.TV (poweruser.tv/index.aspx?c=1) is an hour of banter, arguments, and wind-ups based on the week’s tech news, bouncing seamlessly from in-depth discussions on Windows Vista’s skinning engine, to which member of the team has ‘girl parts’.

“I don’t know if there’s any country or race we haven’t insulted yet,” admits Kristin Hatcher, the show’s host and designated voice of reason. “Stardock has its own sort of feeling, and we wanted the podcast to refl ect that; that we have a sense of humour and make things that are fun.”

After a year of episodes, the show has taken the opportunity to pause and refl ect. Even with 60,000 downloads a week, the team sounds downhearted at the response. “The audience is smaller than we had hoped,” says Hatcher. “We had hoped podcasting would take off a bit more than it has.”

Hatcher’s biggest disappointment isn’t the numbers themselves, so much as the number taken by commercial sources. “As much as I can understand a radio wanting to take what they’ve got and put it out as a podcast, podcasting was this cool, almost underground, pirate media that anyone could get into.” She cites the number of radio programmes monopolising the listings, making it harder for independents to break in – and that’s hard to argue against. At the time of writing, Apple’s Top Podcasts were all from the BBC, Sony Pictures, Disney, Virgin Radio and other giants, with the US dominated by public radio.

The future, downloaded

But numbers are only part of the story. Talking about her experiences, Hatcher says: “We have a small but loyal following. I posted the show, and literally within a second or two, someone in our IRC channel was already saying ‘it’s up, it’s up’!”

It’s true that only a relative handful of podcasts, such as The Dawn and Drew Show, have achieved much from a standing start. However, not everyone has to be the BBC. Where podcasts really take off is as an extra vector for your content – news, interviews, discussions, ideas. The market’s simply too big for the word ‘podcast’ itself to be much of a draw any more, but good content is the great leveller. Focus on what matters to your audience rather than attempting to attract the entire web, and you can enjoy success in areas that the big radio stations don’t touch.

Don’t expect to get rich off podcasting though. While millions are listening to podcasts, the audience is broken up into so many pieces that advertisers have, thus far, been reluctant to get involved. James Archer is the head of Fruitcast (www.fruitcast.com); an attempt to change this. Yet, as he admits: “it’s a slowmoving, tradition-based industry, and we knew getting into it that it would take a while for it to catch up with the demand.”

The demand? Isn’t advertising the devil himself? “There’s been a surprisingly warm response from the podcasters to advertising, much more so than I’ve seen in the past with bloggers – the nearest comparison group,” Archer explains. “As a whole, podcasters are fairly comfortable with the idea of advertising, as long as it’s done in a reasonable way that’s appropriate to the medium.”

Community chest

Of course, advertising is nothing new in podcasting, it just hasn’t usually been for money. Community spirit has been a major part of the boom from the start, with surprisingly few bruised egos and public spats for such rapid growth.

“I don’t view the space as being competitive,” says Andrew Baron, owner of the phenomenally popular video podcast Rocketboom (www.rocketboom.com). “I encourage people to hop onboard and do their thing. Everyone gets inspiration from somewhere.”

And that’s the current face of podcasting in a neat little nutshell. It’s been a busy year. Some projects have failed, others have met with huge success – celebrities have been made, others continue to toil away in relative obscurity. But people’s willingness to take part in the market, to listen and to create, has been proved many times over. No, it’s not Utopia; not everyone is as fast to change as some would like, not all the big promises have been fulfilled.

But the core ideal has. Whether you’ve got a fantastic idea for a dedicated podcast, or are simply looking for a new way of reaching out on a deeper level to the audience you’ve already got, the opportunity is definitely there.

And it’s not going anywhere.

Comments

Aleksandersen / 26/11/2006 / 00:49 / http://bonaveo.net/

Podcasts and vidcasts are great!

The only major drawback is that they are usually made available in non-standard XML feeds with proprietary audio/video files attached. Kinda bitchin' if you're not running Windows or Mac OS X where iTunes is available.

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