There Is Hope For DJs: Podcasting
Sep 6th, 2009 | By James Lewin | Category: Audio Podcasting, General, PodcastingMarketing guru Mitch Joel addresses radio DJ’s in his latest post, saying that there’s hope for people displaced by turmoil in the radio industry – podcasting:
You do not need a radio station or any other mass media channel to give you permission to broadcast your talk-radio show to the world. It is called, “Podcasting” and you can do it for free (or close to it), and your loyal audience can now (finally) extend well beyond the borders of your previous employers limitations.
If you love what you do, and you do not know what your next professional move is, there is no reason not to keep your show going in Podcast format (people like Adam Corolla and Kevin Pollak are doing it). You’ll suddenly have a global audience, you can do your show for as long as you like and release it as frequently as you wish. All of the content you will now create will be findable, searchable and listenable… forever (unlike radio where what you say is forever lost in the ether the moment it comes out of your mouth).
Joel makes some great points.
What you don’t have with podcasting (or video podcasting or even blogging), is clear answers about where things are going or how quickly we’ll get there.
Do you really want to wait around until this is all settled, though?
Yep,
as “ALL“ad supported media wake to the fact that they’re achieving terminal velocity in free-fall because their old clients have gone on-line and discovered that they could use it to gather stats, process orders, track shipments and handle customer complaints/requests, in addition to letting Google find the site for free, they’re not looking back.
While “perfect is the enemy of good enough“, “better” is also the enemy of the status quo.
That unfortunately means keeping a presence and surviving long enough for it to be all “settled” though. I’m not particularly worried about Adam Carolla, Adam Curry or even me, its going to shake out a lot of people looking for a fast return.
There will be NO ROI for podcasting for at least 5 years.
When a major network goes down by 30%, that’s when podcasting will be seen as a proper niche advertising medium.
Until then, read the media web sites and wait for that shoe to drop. It will be rapidly followed by the other shoes of everybody else sitting on the edge of that particular bed.
It is still early days for podcasting. It is growing at a steady pace, though slower then some would like. The major media companies could learn a lot from the experimentation going on in podcasting today. It appears that streaming is back in the drivers seat again, but my prediction is that automated download delivery based on a subscription is the model that will win long-term as wireless networks will never prove to be reliable enough to stream and people want to take possession of the media for high quality playback.
Hi Rob,
the major media companies are faced with obsolescence.
They have been living a lie for 75 years, since advertising became the prime supporter of mass media.
An old style manger used to quote the adage “Perfect is the enemy of good enough“, just before he’d pull out “At some point you have to shoot the engineer and ship the product..
While he was right, the fact is that “Better” is death to the “Status Quo.”
In this case, better is the N:M connectedness of the internet.The fact that its dirt cheap and trending towards free is just market expanding icing on business’ cake.
The status quo is the 1:N connectedness of broadcasting. It can’t be scaled to do anything but what it does.
Even if it did it for free, it’s still outclassed by the internet’s packet-switched N:M connectivity.
Instead, its extremely expensive.
Sadly for all ad supported media, their customer base is rapidly vanishing as the transition to the internet and its better model of interactivity.
While I would hate to be working for the FCC, (the switch to digital was the last time we will ever have that kind of a transition,) it actually bodes well for the actual producers of the types of IP as their customer base will expand from the big boys who could afford to “pay and play” to “Mom-N-Pop” outfits who want their websites to look nice.
Video and Audio podcast producers are going to be in real demand. đ