Thoughts on small (podcast) producers earning more money
Published by on November 8th, 2007
There’s a golden fleece in the podcasting world which has been eluding pretty much everyone : monetising the vast majority of shows which have smaller audiences and less focused niche.
If your show is pulling half a million media requests/downloads or more a month, securing some sponsorship or advertising is pretty straightforward. Those numbers are a no-brainer. Advertisers have a psychological barrier at “100 thousand downloads” where all of a sudden your property will appear as a real potential for them to reach their target market. Below that barrier, unless you are very niche and focused, you are going to struggle, at least to create an opportunity which provides you with more than beer money. The vast majority of shows out there pull in significantly less than 100k per month, which is why networks of shows have a greater potential of generating advertising opportunities by aggregating the audiences of many smaller shows into a larger and more viable advertising proposal. But even this has proven no mean feat to develop strong income streams for the smallest shows.
What is needed is another way to aggregate the potential power of the masses. If we look closely at a media property (a podcast in the context of this text), it has potential value in the internet marketplace far broader than merely the direct relationship between content/host and audience. There must be a means to leverage this additional scope in how a media property not only interacts with its audience directly, but also how it connects with others outside its audience.
Initially this might feel like a step backwards by a more “traditional” use of the strengths of the internet and its users. But just because all this media has the word “new” tagged onto it, does not mean we should ignore the techniques and tools which held develop the internet as a commercial tool in the first place: the thirst for revolution sometimes buries the natural and stable growth of evolution. And yes, I’m heavily involved in a project designed to realise this idea right now.
One Response to “Thoughts on small (podcast) producers earning more money”
November 9th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Good post
I’ve been podcasting since I heard the word and had been operating as an on demand internet radio show for a year before that and I’ve always profited from it - though my topic IS very focused which is your point of course!
I’ve never exceeded 1400 downloads in a week’s time, so I’m small potatoes in the podcasting world, but those 1400 listeners are very targeted and there are a lot of people who want to reach them with their message.
We are also growing a nice network of related programs to be able to bundle up and offer advertising across the family of shows. (http://www.momstalkradio.com) I look forward to seeing what happens there