Monday, February 26, 2007
Podcasting's Limited Future
Podcast advertising grew substantially in 2006, but it will remain a niche for the foreseeable future, according to an eMarketer report quoted in
MediaPost.
"Podvertising" will grow five-fold during the next five years according to eMarketer, but the company says podcasts will always have a limited audience. "Despite an incessant buzz about the medium, regular podcast users are still rare," according to James Belcher, eMarketer senior analyst.
Many folks were very upset with me when in December
I wrote that podcasting as a source of revenue is over-hyped and will never be an impact media. The folks at eMarketer seem to be agreeing with me to some degree.
Podcasting generated $80 million in ad revenue last year. With more than 90,000 podcasts available, that means the average podcast generated less than $900 for the year in ad revenue. Is that a business model? By comparison XM Radio has revenue of nearly one billion dollars for the year. So I stand by my statement that satellite radio is more of an impact medium.
At least I'm not alone in feeling that way.
Posted By John Gartner at 10:26 AM
Permanent Link: Podcasting's Limited Future
|
(3) Comments on Podcasting's Limited Future
Satellite radio will have a hard time being an impact medium if it collapses under a mountain of debt. And collapse it will if the FCC doesn't approve the Sirius/XM merger.
Satellite radio has been around for a decade and the two companies have only managed to grab an audience of about 15 million people. Conservative estimates put the current audience for podcasts at around 17 million worldwide.
You also fail to address the issue of revenue vs. production costs when you reference sustainability. A podcast with $900 revenue in a year can still make a profit. Contrast that with Howard Stern's show that requires 1 million subscribers just to break even.
Comments by Rob Safuto : Monday, February 26, 2007 at 09:35 PM
Hi John,
Just wanted to point out that your numbers are a little flawed. Yes there are about 90,000 feeds out there, but over half of them are dead (podcasting is a lot more work than blogging - so Podfading is rather common). Also most people in podcasting are not trying to or wanting to put ad's into their podcast (Mine is one of the more popular ones, and I will never have advertising). At best there are about 9,000 podcasts that are intersted in generating revenue. And that number is actually high. But lets make it easy on the math and say it is 9,000 - that means the average revenue per podcast is about $9,000. Which is not bad considering most of those people are just doing it as a hobby.
Just because you found one broken survey that if looked at from a certain persepective agrees with you - does not make you right. It might just mean you both are clueless.
Comments by Rob Walch : Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 04:35 PM
I try not to think of myself as clueless, but opinions vary.
What I do know is that we didn't base our podcast ad spend numbers on the number of feeds. We just presented Podnova's numbers as an indicator that there are a lot of shows from which to choose.
We also recognize that a lot of podcasts are labor of love. As a New Yorker who's regularly pelted with more ads than any human needs, believe me when I say I'm not rooting for ads to become part of every last podcast or medium.
The bottom line is that although a number of things are making podcast ads more attractive to advertisers (measurement, access to targeted audience), this is not a mass marketing media.
Moreover, the term "podcast" itself is likely doomed, as pods become less important to how these shows are heard and viewed.
Comments by James Belcher : Friday, March 02, 2007 at 01:07 PM
Post a Comment
Subscribe to The MarketingShift Feed