Sunday, September 30, 2007
Podcasting Losing Steam to Streams?
Yahoo is euthanizing another one of its many losing media services by closing down the
Podcast directory at the end of October. Yahoo has been swinging and missing in many of its media plays (TV, music, etc.). Axing podcasting is part of a housecleaning as the company tries to
turn around its sagging revenue. A directory about podcasting is even less likely than creating podcasts to make money.
That hasn't stopped MacBroadcast LLC, which relaunched MacRadio.com as a podcast directory and community site for the Macintosh community. Converting a radio program has the disadvantages on the publisher site of not being interactive (something advertisers increasingly will want) and reducing traffic to the website. An RSS feed that downloads your podcasts is convenient if you want to take your music/spoken word podcast with you, but it doesn't help your
ability to entice advertisers.
Streaming audio, with its superior capability to be tracked and dynamic interaction, will always have higher CPM potential than offline listening. If you own the rights to the content (aka no royalty payments to the music industry), then streaming is the way to go.
Video advertising is in the process of steamrolling past podcasting as a more exciting and targeted mechanism. Generating money from audio will be getting more difficult as YouTube et al. suck up the interactive media buys.
By John Gartner at 06:00 PM
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(1) Thoughts on Podcasting Losing Steam to Streams?
The Yahoo effort failed because it was terribly executed and another failed walled garden. People are smart enough to know this is portable media.
And I am not having any trouble at all selling sponsorships to my podcasts - in fact, streaming is not nearly as popular with the audience and no matter what advertisers say they want, if they don't have an audience, they can't sell anything. My show called the Apple Phone Show can deliver four times the downloads the average streaming site can in a period of 30 days.
Streaming is the old model. It's based on interruption. Like TV ads and anything else that interrupts the audience, it's a dying breed.
Comments by Scott Bourne : Monday, October 01, 2007 at 10:59 AM
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