News of podcasting’s death has been greatly debated
Posted on January 12, 2008
Filed Under Opinion, Podcasting |
It always amazes me how much time people have for arguing about whether podcasting is dead. The news that Wizzard had achieved an amazing 1 billion podcast downloads, provoked a post over at Mashable called The Problem with Podcasting Isn’t Downloads. The point of that post was that getting paid for podcasting via advertising from podcasting networks just doesn’t pay well.
Then the reaction kicked into gear, argue, argue, argue, argue, argue, respond. Just an amazing amount of energy expended, and from my perspective pretty needlessly.
People should quit trying to put other people into neat little definition boxes. If people want to podcast, they can and should. Why they do it is no one else’s business, unless the podcaster makes it our business.
If people want to make a living producing downloadable media and distributing them as podcasts, then they need to figure out a business model to make it work. There are lots of ways to make money in this world, mostly limited only by our own lack of creativity, effort and persistence.
Quit debating, and get back to creating.
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About The Bitt
My name is Alex Nesbitt. This is my blog. I publish Digital Podcast where I evangelize new media and marketing innovation, with a focus on digital media, social media, social networks, social analytics and influencer marketing.
I help companies with strategy, operational effectiveness and the new economics of media. I am in the market for consulting and employment opportunities
You can contact me at alex (at) digitalpodcast (dot) com
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I’d love to get back to creating.
Unfortunately, I have a family to feed. Until the rich media monetization world gets it right, I’ll continue to fight for a system that understands the business of advertising as applied to audio content.
For the record - I don’t believe podcasting is dead. I do believe it’s still struggling for business legitimacy as it was the day it was created. Being as that’s almost five years now, that’s pretty sad in my opinion.
Unfortunately, this debate pops up in earnest at least once every 4 months. Typically when someone is looking for traffic to their blog or podcast. Somewhere around April or May, this will pop up again. So, people will continue to debate and will create at the same time.
Downloadable media is an important element in the media mix, and it will be monetized.
I guess the question is do you have to wait for “rich media monetization world” to figure it out for you or can you figure out something now that moves you in the right direction.
Advertising is one way to do it, selling CDs with podcasts and CD only content to people might be another, funny podcasts that are really viral ads is another, podcasts that include a Cost Per Action Payout is another. I could go on and on with the list. All of these things people can do right now without waiting for The Podcast Man to do it for them.
My major point is that if the same amount of energy is devoted to monetization that gets devoted to arguing and debating about whether podcasting is alive or dead or what it means to be a podcaster or whatever else we can find to debate we might be much further along in monetizing downloadable content.
[...] has been tough for some, so I think the list of business models is great, particularly for those who might not have exhausted their imaginations for ideas on how to monetize media. However, I think that the immediate focus on business models is like [...]