Tech Goes Boom

Podcasting: What Don't You Get?

As the Scoblemeister is talking about over at his blog, there is a lot of head-scratching going on about Podcasting, mostly of the dismissive sort. People want to know how it will make money, how can people listen to more than a couple a day, how will they pay for bandwidth?

These questions often indicate a common failure with people: The inability to apply existing precedents to new developments. There's nothing shockingly new going on with podcasting. It's simply a different distribution chain. While there may be some changes that are necessary as a result of the particulars of that chain, the rest of the scenario isn't that different from radio. If you ask the same questions about Radio that you do about Podcasting, you're going to get a lot of the same answers. How do you make money off of radio? Does listening to only a couple of radio shows a day make radio a silly, inconsequential format? Of course, the distribution chain isn't like radio, but it's just like any internet resource. How does any website offering large media files deal with bandwidth issues?

Why must we immediately ask how we're going to re-invent the wheel when change the blinkers on a car?

There are better questions to be asked, and the people getting answers to them will be the ones capitalizing on this emerging phenomenon.

Podcasting has a lot of very interesting features for producers, consumers and advertisers. It's cheap to produce content, the markets are very specific and the format is extremely attractive for consumers. Right now, the technology is in its infant stages, so the knowledge investment is high both for producers and consumers. But those technologies are rapidly progressing, and soon will be much simpler.

Podcasting can certainly support an advertising model. Because Podcasting can support smaller, more specific shows targeted advertising becomes a lot easier. What tech company wouldn't want to stick an add in the engadget audio show? It's the perfect audience.

But there's no reason radio couldn't go this same way. Like Leo Laporte is already doing over at KFI. Keep the normal radio ads and just dump the show to MP3 for people to download. Sure people could cut the ads out and redistribute them, but they could just tape the show off of radio and do the same. Embedded advertising contained in the narrative of the show would go a long way to cut this back, but could alienate listeners. Personally, as long as the ads are short, I don't mind them and wouldn't bother to even fast forward them.

Many Podcast consumers are attracted to the format because it does away with many of the perceived shortcomings of radio. When exploring business cases for Podcasting, you have to make sure you're balancing the positive aspects of the format with the necessary evils of business.

Scoble says, do what you love and let the business get figured out by others. I say to the others who are figuring it out, "Apply what you already know in a way that preserves what's best about the format".