Excerpt:

There’s also this;

Quote:

PodShow may at its discretion place advertising before or after the Programming at its discretion.

This is interesting. Is there justification for PS to add adverts to your podcast just because you’ve got it listed on your personal page? If they were, for example, hosting the podcast files without charge to you as a the producer, then fair enough. But I pay for my podcast hosting. So are podshow caching my podcast on their servers, then when someone plays my podcast via my personal PS+ page it’s taken from their server and ads are auto-inserted?

In the interests of disclosure I should tell you that Mark used to be a Podshow host and is now a TPN host. But I think this is an important issue to clarify. If TPN’s shows are listed in Podshow’s directory, does this clause mean they think they can sell advertising on it and not share it with us?

For example, they claim that the primary browser for podcasters (not podcast listeners) is Safari. Now, I know that if I take TPN’s hosts as a sample, about 10% of them are Mac users. And if I look at our server logs for June 2006, I know that 83.7% of our audience are Windows users, compared to 9.1% using a Mac. So, although I admit my sample is also pretty small, it doesn’t correlate with Neilsen’s.

Frank Barnako spoke to the analyst behind the report and has picked up some other issues with it as well. But, as Frank says,

When firms like Nielsen/NetRatings and Forrester Research  pay attention to podcasts, that’s good.  By studying podcasting they’re saying, "There’s interest here. People willing to pay for our reports want to know what’s going on."

Hmmm, I thought I accurately reported what Andrew had told me and others at VLoggerCon, but Chuck says that the $85,000 amount was just the top line in their ad sheet and didn’t represent any ads sold. Demonstrated that I should have gotten more facts before I reported that they had sold ads for $85,000 a week. Looks like the highest they got was about $40,000 for a week, but they were struggling to close more ad deals.

….
I can’t believe that with an audience of 250,000 per day they couldn’t find some advertising, though. I know people who are making $10,000 per month in Google ad revenue with less traffic than what Rocketboom was getting.

Update: Andrew just wrote me and said they did close a deal for $80,000 and that he just got paid for that a few days ago.

So there is some advertising to be had. I wonder over what term that $80,000 is for? Getting a sales team together to sell that kind of money each month is going to cost big money as well. Perhaps there is a better model. Perhaps we need an open marketplace, like AdBrite, for podcasting. And what’s wrong with Ebay? Rocketboom famously sold about $40,000 of advertising through Ebay. I sold some adveritsing on G’Day World to Frank Arrigo via Ebay back in Jan 2005! There has to be a better model that the old media model of hiring a bunch of sales jocks.

1. New media brands can come and go quickly.
2. What happens to the advertisers who had bought long-term contracts with Rocketboom?
3. Who is representing the new talent? Is there an agency yet set up to represent their interests? We need standard contracts, etc. Think Creative Commons for the talent.

Whoever picks up Amanda will have the same burst of attention that PodTech got when they hired Scoble (check out the pretty graph). Snapping her up and offering her something big was clever. I think. But although she is a huge property today, will she be huge tomorrow? I don’t know yet how much stock to put in the idea of talent in this world. In the days of yore, big names were partially big because their employers controlled the airwaves and could limit how many talents got a guernsey. It was limited supply. Carson was Carson, partly because he was a huge talent, but partly because he didn’t have much competition. Today competition is limitless. Talent? Well I’ve known lots of people in my time who were talented but didn’t have distribution. Today they can all have distribution if they want it. It’ll be fascinating to see how this all pans out over the next decade. 

UPDATE: Andrew Baron’s (her partner) statement on why she left.

The site blends elements from a variety of types of podcasting sites; it’s part directory, part network and part community. The site intends to use social networking to help podcast fans find new podcasts while helping podcasters get listeners, and potentially earn revenue from their podcast.

This was a hard decision to make, and I want to thank everyone who supported me over the months. I started writing reviews soon after the video iPod became available last year, and have devoted 15-20 hrs a week of my life to it since then. But it became increasingly clear that the effort involved was not going to bring the rewards, either personally or financially, to make it preferable to spending that extra 2 hrs a day with my family. Despite my best efforts, traffic has stayed flat, potential investors have pulled me in multiple directions but leaving me with only thousands of dollars in legal fees, and it just became too much to carry on with alone.

I can feel his pain. Having spent the last 16 months of my life (and hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money) building TPN, wondering if it will end up as a real business or a footnote in Wikipedia, the life of a start-up entrepreneur is dicey. Being ahead of the curve is very exciting, very liberating as you find your literally inventing an industry with a handful of other people from around the globe… but it’s also extremely risky and takes an enormous toll on your life, your bank account and your family. I’d like to congratulate Steve on all he has achieved and wish him the best in the future. I’m sure his experience putting Podguide.TV together will stand him in good stead in the employment markets. I wish I was in a situation to help him out. If any of you work for a company who should be getting their head around video podcasts, Steve would be a great resource to pick up in a hurry.