The Problem with Podcasting Isn’t Downloads

The Problem with Podcasting Isn’t Downloads

January 10, 2008 — 11:01 AM PST — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Share This

That Wizzard Media has hit a billion download requests in 2007 is the news on everyone’s lips these last couple of days. Indeed it is a milestone for Wizzard Media, and is probably worthy of note for those of us in the podcasting world to remember that people do indeed love to download podcasts, and that it is a sharply growing medium.

Unfortunately, the fact that people download podcasts isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, ever in dispute. The problem that we cannot make reliable money from monetizing these downloads is the issue that keeps cropping up and preventing the rest of the world from taking it seriously. I primarily speak of audio podcasting, since thanks to the online video revolution, the video portion of podcasting has been swept up into respectability.

The last year I’ve spent in podcasting has been a cautionary tale on all the pitfalls there are in the business.

Personal Problems with Podcasting
My journey in podcasting, this time around, began with TalkShoe. My buddy and I revived our old politics and technology show, which gained traction quickly, and within a matter of months, we were accounting for around a third of all downloads to the system on TalkShoe.com. They paid respectably for a while, but ended up pulling a bait and switch on us, and wound up reducing our CPM payment to around $6 CPM.

After a couple nasty issues of censorship of my wife’s podcast, Art and I moved on to Podango, and also struck up a partnership with RawVoice. The partnerships couldn’t have come at a better time, as Podango and the TechPodcast network both found us advertisers right as we were breaking major news on the hot story of the moment, the gPhone.

Our already high download numbers shot through the roof, blasting through the 30,000 downloads a day mark for several days.

Unfortunately, though, we found that Podango was unable to find further advertisers for our show after the contract with Overstock ended due to reorganization in their sales department, and RawVoice did not pay on the contract as agreed either. The contract with RawVoice ran twice as long as the contract Podango had arranged with Overstock, and had a slightly higher CPM, yet Todd Cochrane’s company saw fit to send us a payment for $176, whereas the check for a same pay period from Podango would have been over a thousand.

The reason cited for the discrepancy was that the statistics engine favored the advertiser, and not the podcaster.

Search for New Podcast Representation
Art and I since put our politics and tech podcast on hiatus. If we couldn’t make dime one with it, while it was a blast to do, we had better ways to spend a couple hours a day, especially since I had come on at Mashable, which grew to fill all available time in my day. Still, the podcasting bug was still in my system, and I clung to the hope that we could create quality audio podcast under the Mashable brand, find a good audience for it, and have ads sold for it.

I set about creating some concepts for a couple of podcasts for Mashable, which frankly is the easy part. I spoke to Pete about them, and he gave them tentative approval, provided I could find sponsorship for the podcast at the onset. I gave everyone a call in the business I could think of to find a suitable sponsor.

Unfortunately, it was a pretty short list. Podango’s sales department was still in flux. Federated Media didn’t work with audio podcasts. TalkShoe’s monetization scheme was no longer suitable for podcasts that didn’t take live calls. RawVoice had shown they wouldn’t pay appropriately for downloads. I’d been signed up with PodTrac for around a year without a single advertising offer.

I gave Adam Curry’s folks over at PodShow a call, and at first they seemed fairly interested in helping us out, after I played phone tag with one of the ‘talent recruitment’ fellows for a week or two. We spoke for about 15 minutes or so, and things sounded interesting, but I’d have to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement to further talks with the company. The NDA never arrived, so after a week or so, I gave LibSyn a ring to see if they’d help us with finding some sponsors for the show.

I spoke to Jim Else, a Vice President at Wizzard Media, and described the situation to him to see if he could help us out. He at first attempted to give me a primer on the basics of podcasting as if I had no idea how the business operated. I stopped him and re-iterated that I was fairly experienced in the business, and described again that we were looking for sponsorship and advertising representation for some Mashable branded podcasts, and he told me that the business simply didn’t work like that, and I’d have to host the podcast with LibSyn for a substantial amount of time before finding any advertisers for us, and that they would more than likely be affiliate based ads as opposed to CPM ads.

You See My Dilemma
It’s clear that the world likes audio podcasts, despite the fact that the clients are often somewhat obtuse, and it isn’t the rich media technology with the lowest barrier to entry. The growth of the medium is going strong, and will probably continue to do so. The advertising world needs to catch up to this fact, and actually put some work into making money off it. I’m not the only one facing this problem, too. Of those I’m acquainted with in audio podcasting that are in it to make money, they’ve reported similar experiences.

Sure, it is exciting that another download milestone has been passed. Let’s work on getting some milestones in monetization passed, and then you’ll see me getting excited about podcasting again.