Neilsen/NetRatings has released a report on podcasting which has left a lot of prominent podcasters, myself included, scratching their heads and makes me wonder where they got their sample data from. A company in Cupertino by any chance?
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.
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."
You might remember around the time of Vloggercon Scoble mentioned that Rocketboom was making “$85,000 a week” from advertising. That had me scurrying to their show to see who was running ads but I couldn’t see anything! And then last week we had Heather Green suggesting Amanda left because they weren’t making any money. Scoble clears things up a bit today:
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.
The first podcast in this series is with the CEO of the new podcast directory Pluggd.com, Alexander Castro. Alexander, based in Seattle, tells us a little about his career at Microsoft and Amazon and the vision behind starting Pluggd.com. Then we talk about the state of the podcasting industry, the size of the market today and in the future, the business model behind pluggd, and so forth.
[audio:http://podcastingapb.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_podcastingapb_20060710_001.mp3]
Many people have been criticizing Podshow’s new directory over the last 24 hours, mostly when it was discovered that Podshow had commandeered everyone’s RSS feeds and replaced them with their own, but it looks like Podshow has already begun to fix some of the the problems. Read more on Michael Geoghegan’s blog.
What happens to the advertisers who had bought long-term contracts with Rocketboom?
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.Â
Todd Cochrane has launched Blubrry, which they call a community site for podcasters. According to PodcastingNews:
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.
Steve Coulson, the guy behind Podguide.TV, one of the leading directories for video podcasts, sent out an email today announcing he is stopping work on it. From his blog post:
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.
From Ben Barren’s blog. I stopped listening to Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington when it went paid. Are any of you listening to it and, if so, can you fill us in? Is it funny? What is it about it that makes you pay when there is so much free stuff? I thought the original free series got pretty tired after the first few. And I’m a big fan of Gervais/Merchant.
In the time I can listen to an average podcast, I could have caught up on my 50 favorite blogs, or read a chapter in a book, or read the latest issue of Red Herring magazine.
What interests me most about this post, and the amount of coverage it is getting on places like techmeme and Scoble’s blog, is that we used to hear this kind of argument a lot more 12 – 18 months ago but I haven’t heard it for ages. I had assumed most people now realized that comparing podcasts to blogs was like comparing radio to a newspaper. They are different mediums servicing different needs. And yet you never hear people arguing that radio is inefficient and we should all just read newspapers. Maybe there were people making that argument back in 1920, when Westinghouse’s KDKA-Pittsburgh broadcast the Harding-Cox election returns and began their daily schedule of radio programs?
A new podcast directory, Pluggd, has launched. According to their site:
What is Pluggd?
Discover podcasts based on your interests and the interests of others.
Listen to podcasts online, download them to your PC and listen to them, or download them to your MP3 player (e.g. iPod, Creative Zen).
Share your opinions on podcasts by rating and reviewing them. Share your favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
What makes it different to the other directories out there already? I’m not sure yet. but the interface is clean and it allows voting, has an in-built flash player and is already pre-populated with TPN’s casts. I didn’t even have to submit them. I love that action.
