Thoughts on small (podcast) producers earning more money
Published by on November 8th, 2007 1 Comment »
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”
Woo.. nice one!
I’ve signed up (and.. er.. pimped the extra 256MB to some of my fellow Mac-using net pals :S) and will start choosing what delights to back up!
Better than a USB stick, I say… (well, harder to drop down the toilet).
Cheers
j
And thanks for using my signup code, James. So far I’ve got an additional 1.25Gig to play with in total now!
Great to see Mozy finally has got their act together about supporting mac folk.
Another new one I’ve been trying out is Ewedrive.com and because they are UK based (which is what I really need) its much faster for me to use. They also don’t provide (or need) any software as backups are done using drag and drop.
I know drag and drop is not ideal for everyone as most people neither have the time or inclination to backup this way but for me it gives me flexibility to be selective about what I need to backup and what I don’t so I save time in backing up and money because I’m using less space.
Just an idle comparision I backed up using Mozy a couple of months ago and ended up storing something like 8GB with them but on Ewedrive managed to halve.
Anyhow if you are in the UK its worth checking them out.
Peter
I found the Mozy service and the Mac OS software great and easy to use … before I signed up for the pay unlimited account. Since then, it stopped working !!! All my backups are in error state. No need to say that the support is helpless. I’m very disappointed about this service. Hopefuly I signed for 1 month, not 1 year.
@John: Download the latest version of the client, 0.6 has just been released. Sounds like you might have the old 1.4.x server error message. Also, check your firewall is allowing Moxy client to get through – usually gets sorted automatically on install, but you never know.
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