The Industry Standard - Why podcasting is failing - Comments

Chris, thanks for your

Ian Lamont929744 — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:57:49 -0700

Chris, thanks for your contribution here, and I am sorry for the delay in replying. I recognize that one of the weaknesses in my original post was the fact that the Pew data was old -- 18 months old, which is positively ancient in Internet time. The new figures that you cite in your second point are useful, even if the definitions don't quite match.

However, even if 54 million Americans have consumed podcasts, I still have to ask exactly how many are listening on a given day. If we assume that Pew's 12:1 ratio of "ever listened" to "listen daily" still holds for the Edison data, that's means just over four million Americans are listening (or watching) podcasts on a given day. That's encouraging, and almost certainly more than Twitter (which does not make public usage data available) but I would still not call podcasting a mainstream online medium.

I also must politely disagree with your statement that "podcasting is not failing as a monetization model." The ADM guidelines you are working on are a start, but a lot of work needs to be done. More importantly, there needs to be data that clearly quantifies the success of podcasting's monetization potential before myself and many others are convinced that podcasting has a bright future in the advertising arena.

Hi Ian Two things recently

Chris MacDonald445497 — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:41:45 -0700

Hi Ian

Two things recently occurred I would like to point you to to help you build out your assessments. Both took place at ad:tech this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Recent data shows podcasting is actually making a considerably large mainstream impact and that the business model is well underway towards profitability. Nope we are not completely there yet (think banner ads five years into public adoption of the internet) but these recent activities and new data suggest you might want to take a second look at this space.

First The Association for Downloadable Media or ADM just announced best practices guidelines and standards to address some of the real obstacles that exist regarding scaled ad buys in the downloadable media space, particularly in measuring downloads and ad unit standards. They were formulated in tight coordination with the advertising industry through our organization's Ad Council. I hope you find them helpful as an indicator as to where the industry is heading.

The members of our trade group, comprised of RSS media host providers , big and growing content publishers (who are making money now, including my music discovery network IndieFeed, as well as shows that have significantly lower audience counts but with great loyal audiences), ad intermediaries, interactive agencies, and big brands including Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Real Networks, Discovery Networks, Turner Broadcasting, MTV, Arbitron, Neilsen, NPR, PBS, PRI, Comcast, and in total well over 200 members, believe we can help address the clear hurdles to translate to effective, wide-scale ad-supported monetization.

If you take IAB and ad banner development as an example, we believe best practice guidelines have developed far quicker than other technology adoptions in the past. They are the first public step in a coordinated effort to create cross-system apples-to-apples and low friction commerce between publishers and advertisers. We are moving forward to secure funding for primary research to help bear out the power and immediacy of subscribable and downloadable media at the niche level.

Second, The Arbitron Edison Research Internet and Multimedia Survey of 2008 just came out, showing a roughly 39% growth in audio and 45% growth in video podcast consumption from last year. Nearly 54 million Americans have consumed podcasts (more than one in 5), predominantly 25-54 age bracket, 53% male 47% female, consumption occurring predominantly at the desktop. I encourage you to speak to Tom Webster at Edison Media Research for more details, he can be reached at twebster at edisonresearch dawt calm.

We all love Twitter but podcasts dwarf Twitter usage, in substance, unit production, and most importantly, reach. I'm not clear why this comparison needs to be made. Sure they are two emerging user-generated social technologies. Where Twitter is a growing, vibrant micro-blogging medium, primarily link and text based, how it delivers direct revenue generation for twitter publishers remains to be seen. It sure is a great amplification device to an extremely small group of 2.0 influencers. As for commercial viability, the stratification of bloggers to commercially viable bloggers is likely the same as podcasters to commercially viable podcasters. You've seen the graphs, it looks a lot like an iceberg with the sea-level defining the monetization line. Today the focus is on the group above the line. Failure to monetize under the water doesn't mean the model is broken.

I think sometimes these types of discussions confuse the technology with the publisher personality. Podcasting is not failing as a monetization model. Some publishers may never make money if they fail to deliver an opportunity to the advertiser, and vice versa. But many are and will fulfill this objective. It is not that RSS media enclosures are somehow a broken technology, it's tremendously powerful and monetizable. But systems will need to be adopted to accommodate scale and that is what our group is up to.

You make some interesting and useful observations, and hopefully this new data will help to broaden your data set used to arrive at future conclusions. I encourage you to stay in contact so we can provide you with the most recent case studies, where real money has been changing hands between advertisers and monetizing publishers. These recent indicators strongly suggest to our group that podcasting and episodic audio and video media is not only viable but a vibrant and exciting space for advertisers to reach loyal audiences drifting from traditional media.

Chris MacDonald
Chairman
Association for Downloadable Media
Wizzard Media
downloadablemedia.org

Geordon: Despite a few

Ian Lamont929744 — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:52:16 -0700

Geordon: Despite a few success stories and the efforts of an enthusiastic core of producers not motivated by profit, podcasting is failing as a business platform, and it's failing in terms of making a mainstream audience impact. It is not the "transformative, disruptive technology" that MoNickels described, and it will remain a fringe media phenomenon until the issues I noted in my original post are addressed.

chris russell — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:07:55 -0700

You're joking right? As both a podcast listener and producer I can tell you first hand that podcasting is alive and well. Its an on demand medium that will be here for years to come.

And yes I make money from my podcasts.

Ok, maybe I'm just not

Geordon VanTassle Geordon — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:38:10 -0700

Ok, maybe I'm just not seeing it, but could you plainly state what you specifically see podcasting failing at? I think that's a vital part of the conversation that has not been clearly identified as yet.

Sam, Joe, Geordon, and

Ian Lamont929744 — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:24:02 -0700

Sam, Joe, Geordon, and others who note that podcasters may not be in it for business reasons: You're absolutely right. Many, if not most podcasts are started by people for purely personal reasons that fall outside of generating profit or supporting a business. To them, podcasts may be their art or it may be a way to broadcast their thoughts to like-minded enthusiasts.

Such podcasts have a lot in common with blogging. Besides the RSS tie-in, most blogs are also personal in nature -- bloggers want to talk about what interests them, their daily lives, their art, their writing, etc. I've maintained personal blogs for many years, and if making money or attracting throngs of regular visitors were my main motivations, I would have stopped long ago.

But blogging, unlike podcasting, can truly claim mainstream appeal, especially among younger users -- according to a recent Pew report, 20% of teen boys and 35% of teen girls blog. How many produce or even listen to podcasts?

J. Daniel Sawyer: I agree with you that podcasting is great for "format experimentation." I also agree with your observation that many podcasts will never attract more than a handful of listeners (at least, not yet). Both observations support the thesis that podcasting is failing as a mainstream media technology.

Regarding your comment about comparisons with radio, it was Slashdot member MoNickels
who made the original claim about radio and podcasting ("In the radio business, podcasting is utterly huge--a transformative, disruptive technology that is propelling new business models and new integration of old and new medias.") My response made comparisons with Internet technologies ("I ... doubt the idea that podcasting has become a 'disruptive technology' on the same scale as other 'Net-enabled technologies such as Web video or blogging") and my observations about radio are based on the perceptions of advertisers and audiences. What do you think about the fact that the iTunes directory is dominated by programming from the radio world? Are fans of podcasts too quick to see this medium through the "lens of radio"?

The failure of podcasting?

J. Daniel Sawyer — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:34:21 -0700

The failure of podcasting? I think perhaps you are confusing your terms. There is a difference between a medium failing and a medium without a business model. As Seth Harwood recently said in an interview I conduced with him on Google video, as yet there is no business model for podcasting aside from, occasionally, selling ads to defray costs, and (for authors), building enough of a buzz to make a run at Amazon's bestseller rankings and attract big publishing deals. The rest of podcasting is still looking for a business model, no doubt about it.

The problem with your article, Ian, is that you're looking at podcasting through the lens of radio.
Podcasting is not radio - the radio format as it exists today is based around three practical realities:
1) radio production has historically been stratospherically expensive
2) after the advent of television, radio's audience profile changed and long format fiction and similar in-depth long-form interest shows lost audience, while music and short-segment interview and news shows gained audience share.
3) as a consequence of number 2 and an increasingly transient urban population, the programming on radio - particularly talk radio and talk/music hybrid programs - must reflect the rhythm of the workday to remain lucrative.

Because of this, over the last forty to fifty years the radio business has consolidated around the commute rhythm - exciting, ostensibly edgy content in the morning drive time giving way to banal, background-noise content that demands little from its audience for the duration of the workday, and back to a more laid back but engaging format at the end of the day.

But podcasting is not radio, nor should it be. Although it does work as an excellent way to time-shift radio programs, it does something far more useful and important: It provides a platform for a variety of formats and format experimentation, from underground music programming to the miraculous resurrection of the once-dead-in-the-U.S. radio drama, to the innovative loss-leader distribution of fiction innovated by Mark Jeffrey, Tee Morris, and Scott Sigler. There have also been a number of other formats tried with various degrees of success - audio blogging, a'la "Tag in the Seam," business tutorials, a'la The Survivor's Guide to Writing Fantasy and Answers for Freelancers, and, of course, there are a lot of formats and podcasts that simply don't work. The low barrier to entry means many - perhaps most - podcasts will never make it past a few episodes, or attract more than a couple dozen listeners.

Will podcasting find a business model? No. What will more likely happen is that different sorts of podcasts will find different business models that work for their targeted demographic. Some will doubtless be advertiser supported, some will be hobbies, some will be loss-leaders, some will be
maintained by patronage and swag sales, and there will probably be a few more ideas rolled out by innovative podcasters over the coming months.

So, Ian, I think that your thesis is flawed from the beginning. Podcasting is not failing. It is merely failing to be radio.

If you are looking at

P.G. Holyfield — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:20:10 -0700

If you are looking at podcasting solely from a monetization point of view, I would agree that most feel that podcasting should be further along the lifecycle than it is today. But from an end user perspective, as one of the 1%? that download podcasts on a daily basis, I feel that podcasting is a greatly successful application of .rss, and with the growth of video podcasting, hardware such as the iTV, and the emergence of internal corporate podcasts as a medium of communication, podcasting is becoming more mainstream on a daily basis.

Podcasting allows an audience to find audio/video content on the topics they love, and allows a podcaster to find an audience that shares their love of a particular topic or genre, unlike anything ever seen before. The time-shifted nature of podcasting allows for content to be viewed/listened to on our schedule, and just as television is just beginning to comprehend how DVRs and online content is affecting their 'world,' all forms of broadcasting are beginning to understand the power of subscribable, sustainable content.

Due to podcasting I have reconnected with my favorite radio show (The Tony Kornheiser show). Podcasting has given computer gaming magazine writers I love a voice that I can now associate to their writing. Due to podcasting, I have made friends and acquaintances all around the world. I have discovered authors that I love (and have gotten to know personally). And on an even more personal note, nearly 5,000 people have given my own writing a try... so I consider podcasting a success.

Commercial success is a matter of perspective. For writers using podcasting as a marketing and audience building tool, the success stories are just beginning to emerge. As Joe mentioned above, Scott Sigler would certainly consider podcasting a success. Seth Harwood and J.C. Hutchins would certainly consider podcasting a success. How successful? Only time will tell. I hope the funeral dirge won't be sung before we have a chance to find out.

Ian, you pose some

Geordon VanTassle Geordon — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:56:47 -0700

Ian, you pose some interesting suppositions, but don't make the first (and most important) statement:

What is the purpose of podcasting?

I subscribe to several different and varied podcasts. All of them are really niche-"market" in one way or another, and none of them have what I would call "Johnny Nascar" appeal. Listener subscription numbers are nowhere near the volume of even small AM radio stations, let alone NPR, NBC, Fox, etc.

From my (probably flawed) interpretation of your article, it seems that you're looking for a way to "monetize subscribers" which is probably not going to happen with the current reality of podcasting. By that, I mean that a large proportion of podcasts are, to put it bluntly, amateur efforts in the name of something that the producers love. There are podcasts about sex, podcasts about (and by) sex-workers, podcasts by TV show producers, podcasts by TV show fans, podcasts that are a new face to old-time radio drama, podcasts that are about life and death and everything between. I've seen podcasts that are only audio, I've seen slideshows that have a sound-track, and I've seen video podcasts.

Yes, there are some podcasts that are crap production quality, and some that are professional-grade. I've listened to some (briefly) that frankly bored me to tears, because the host(s) just didn't have "it" while on the other side, there are some podcast personalities that have had me hanging on every word, and then there's the vast majority: Regular folk, talking about something that they are passionate about.

To say that "podcasting is failing" is disingenuous at best. Are historical reenactors "failing" just because they don't meet someone's marketing idea of what a success is? Not on your life. We do it because it's an act of love for the subject, and most of us are more than happy to talk about it to no end.

Ian, my experience as a

Sam Whitmore — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:19:14 -0700

Ian, my experience as a personal and professional podcaster is, do it if you love it. Don't expect big numbers. Imagine a single listener, in the abstract. if it's not worth it, don't do it. Search engines aren't good enough yet to reliably pull words out of an audio stream. And RSS only accumulates listening that busy people typically never find time to do. So do it if you love it, and don't if you don't.

Sir I respectfully disagree

joe mieczkowski — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:22:04 -0700

Sir I respectfully disagree with your conclusion that podcasting is failing. You operate under the assumption that podcasting is a business as opposed to an artistic endeavor. While some podcasts are run as businesses, the vast majority that I have found have been started by people with something to say. Many are genre specific and feed a certain niche so the assumption that a podcast about a topic like sci-fi, for instance, would necessarily be as popular as a rebroadcast of an NPR show in podcast form doesn't really hold up. Many podcasters use the medium to showcase their work, novelists come to mind specifically. The writer Scott Sigler has been promoting his fiction work using podcasting in order to reach a larger audience. By doing so he managed to secure a publishing contract with Crown and just released his first novel Infected on 040108. Other podcasters such as Mur Lafferty use podcasting to inform and inspire as she does with her podcast I Should Be Writing. There have recently been several stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post and New York Times about podcasting and podcast novelists, so more attention is being directed toward this new form of communication ever day. My personal opinion is that podcasting is still in its infancy, not that it is failing. The vast majority of people are still not familiar with the concept of podcasting. However as they are made aware that not only is there a vast wealth of content available for them but also that they too can easily add to that reservoir, podcasting will gain further acceptance and then we can have the debate about whether or not it is failing.

Hello everyone, thanks for

Ian Lamont929744 — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:48:00 -0700

Hello everyone, thanks for your thoughtful comments and "comedy" ;-). A few responses:

Robin: You have an interesting idea about ad placement consolidation across multiple podcasts, but unfortunately I think the variety of podcasting tools and audio standards, the lack of quality metrics, and the manual processes involved would still present problems. That said, better tools or technologies could eliminate some of these obstacles.

No Name: Excellent point! Television, the Internet, and radio did not achieve mainstream success in the first few years of operation, yet became runaway successes later. However, I would like to note that other technologies -- most notably, the World Wide Web and the iPod -- did achieve success within a year or two of being introduced to the public. Right now, podcasting is in its fourth or fifth year, and I believe it is failing. On the other hand, podcasting or its descendant will probably succeed on a large scale, once the many hurdles outlined above are overcome, but that may take many years.

Ian, interesting analysis.

Ken Gagne — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:59:53 -0700

Ian, interesting analysis. I hope podcasting catches on, but one reason it may not have yet is the lack of immediacy. With online video, the gratification is instant, whereas podcasts are downloaded to a queue for listening later. Also, ripping a CD is a one-time investment with a nearly infinite return, as songs tend to be listened to over and over; podcasts are much more disposable.

I'm also rather surprised at how few people even know what RSS is.

I agree with the concerns

Abhay Parekh — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:41:38 -0700

I agree with the concerns around business model. Podcasts are also hard to browse. That said, voice communication is inherently different from written and given its huge value there's no question that new modes of communication will evolve to take advantage of voice. These new modes will co-exist with podcasts, and hopefully bring more voice to the web! Here is something new that combines voice with web content...check it out here: http://beta.flowgram.com/go/what_is_a_flowgram/ .

As the producer of an

Stephen Hill — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:18:48 -0700

As the producer of an established music program, I have largely been excluded from podcasting by current licensing restrictions on music downloads. (There are music podcasts, but they are either technically illegal or limited to so-called 'pod-safe' music — a small minority of the overall music catalog.)

Your piece does shine some retrospective light on the gap between the hype and hyperbole and that often accompanies new technical developments and the reality of the marketplace a few years later. I was an early critic of podcasting hype, but I think you've undervalued two of the most important characteristics of the podcast stage of the digital media revolution.

First, podcasting really has helped to democratize media by eliminating the program inventory and bandwidth limitations of conventional broadcasting. This allows not only amateurs but disenfranchised professionals to distribute their programs, and allows service to previously unserved niches. Your points about audience size and business models are less important than the fact of service to and from new constituencies — inarguably, a social good. Thus it makes more sense to evaluate many of these programs from a public service perspective, like public broadcasting.

Sustainable business models are the deeper issue, but there are other benefits to producers that tend to balance the cost/benefit equation. In practice these include intangible, reputational, creative, and indirect financial benefits to the producers, as text blogs demonstrate today. These services have to evolve their own appropriate business models. New kinds of online aggregators like the social networks may eventually provide the business platforms producers need to make their efforts sustainable.

Second, the quality standards and practices of professional mass media do not necessarily apply to small audience niche programming. A more professional sounding and better produced program like Leo Laporte's TWiT may achieve a higher audience share, along with whatever benefits that delivers to the producer, but there are already podcasts that achieve their objectives with limited quality and audiences of less than a thousand. These have to be counted as different criteria of "success."

So podcasting may never succeed in the terms you are using to measure it. Simply put, mass usage paradigms like advertising do not translate into viable business models for niche media. We are still in the early days of the digital media revolution. The beneficiaries of these new distribution technologies, whether streaming or podcasting, licensed or unlicensed, free or paid, are still attempting to find their place in the new media ecology.

Finally, along with many others I believe that podcasting, i.e. distribution of audio media media via RSS subscription downloads, will be largely replaced as a service model by streaming as wireless internet connectivity evolves. In a truly "always on" world, only a link to a given bit of content is needed and it can be delivered to the user on-demand in real time. This is the way some email systems work now; only message headers are delivered to the mail client and the body of the message is pulled from the mail server at viewing time. Another benefit of just-in-time delivery is that the user does not have the responsibility of managing bulky media files on their computer or portable device, which will be an issue for some time to come.

Why podcasting is failing

Ian Lamont — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:36:53 -0700

Last week, I said something in a Slashdot posting that rubbed people the wrong way. I compared Twitter to podcasting, asking whether Twitter's competition and revenue-related challenges would relegate the service to the Internet sidelines, much like podcasting had failed to live up to early hype. I referenced the Twitter profile that was published in The Industry Standard as part of our special feature, "10 'Net services that will succeed, and 10 that will probably fail."

I expected some negativity from die-hard Twitter users, and indeed, there were a fair number of anguished tweets and Web comments that questioned The Standard's review. But what really surprised me were the reactions from the podcasting crowd. Slashdot member MoNickels had this to say:

"Podcasting has hardly been sidelined. In the radio business, podcasting is utterly huge--a transformative, disruptive technology that is propelling new business models and new integration of old and new medias. I host a public radio show myself: our podcasting audience is the equivalent of having a dozen more stations syndicate our show. I'm a convert, too: in 2004 I said podcasting was DOA. Boy, was I wrong. I'm now at the point where podcasts are the main way I get radio an it's true for more and more people. We know because our radio audience tells us so and we see it in the numbers."

I wondered about this comment. It went totally against my own experience with creating audio podcasts, which lasted from late 2005 until the beginning of this year. I produced three serial podcasts for Computerworld, and had a great deal of fun doing them with my colleagues -- they included the Weekly I/O, an NPR-style program about information technology, and Storage This Week, which discussed storage-related technologies. Still, no matter how hard we worked on the content, promotions, and user experience, it was difficult to attract significant numbers of listeners. Part of the reason related to the topics that we covered -- an interview with Ray Kurzweil or a discussion of laptop memory hardly has the same pull as talk about national politics or human-interest topics.

But I also doubt the idea that podcasting has become a "disruptive technology" on the same scale as other 'Net-enabled technologies such as Web video or blogging. Like Twitter, audio podcasts have a dedicated and growing core of users, but podcasting is hardly a mainstream media phenomenon or money-making machine. About 18 months ago, the Pew Internet & American Life Project issued a report on podcasting and found that just 12% of Internet users had ever downloaded a podcast, but just 1% said they downloaded podcasts on a typical day. This compares to Pew survey data released last summer that found 57% of Internet users have ever watched online video and 19% download or watch video from the Internet on a typical day.

This disparity between podcasting and online video says a lot about the appeal of podcast programming and the user experience. Tens of millions of people in this country have iPods or other gadgets which can play digital audio files, yet the primary application is playing music -- files that have been ripped from a CD collection or downloaded from the Internet. Music appeals to nearly everyone, and the processes required to transfer music from the 'Net or a CD collection to a digital music player are relatively simple. Podcast programming is a different story. Most people are unfamiliar with podcasts (with the exception of repurposed radio programs) and downloading, updating, and subscribing to programming involve additional steps. Compared to radio programming, most podcasts sound amateurish and slow-paced, and the ability to find interesting programs is severely limited by the directories, rating systems, and search functions found on iTunes and other podcatchers and podcast-oriented sites. No wonder relatively few people have tried downloading podcasts, and fewer still listen to them on a regular basis.

And then there are the business models. Radio stations getting into the podcasting game have it relatively easy. They already have established brands, audiences, professional hosts and producers, and dedicated sales teams for their on-air programs. Peeling off mp3 files for the Web or podcasts, and tacking on "podcasts" to a sales campaign or sell sheet is not difficult. For the dozens of podcasting startups, text-based publishers, and home enthusiasts, it's a different story. They're starting from scratch in terms of building audiences, programming, and sales. It's especially difficult for small operators who don't have dedicated sales staff -- despite some hopeful buzz about an "AdSense for podcasting," there is no large-scale, automated marketplace for buying, selling, and inserting advertisements into audio podcasts. This forces podcasters to do sales on their own -- a difficult task and one that potentially threatens the integrity of the programming. Vendors wanting to get their advertisements played a certain number of times for a big campaign may also be frustrated by the prospect of dealing with multiple podcasters of varying frequency and reach. Metrics are a mess -- there are different tools for measuring the number of podcast RSS subscribers, but there is no way to precisely determine how many people actually heard an advertisement on a podcast, either online or offline. Contrast that with the granular measurements available to Web-based text, banner, lead-gen, and rich media campaigns. If you were a vendor with a new campaign, where you would concentrate your ad spend?

To be sure, there are some podcasting success stories. Repurposed radio programs and a number of innovative niche audio and video podcasts such as TWiT have loyal followings. But these are exceptions. Tellingly, 22 of the 25 "Top Podcasts" on the front page of iTunes podcast directory are established brands from the mainstream media world, including HBO, NPR, the BBC, ESPN, The Onion, and Oprah Winfrey. In this environment, most new and smaller podcasts have to struggle to be heard. Until the technologies surrounding podcasting are able to improve the user experience and better serve advertisers, podcasting will remain on the fringes.

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