December 2006
Attack of the Pod People: Delayed
Podcasts are supposed to be the next Next Big Thing, but can they deliver on the hype?
By Ian Miller
This article is the first of a series about the state of audio online.
As broadband continues to proliferate in the United States and overseas, media companies are finally realizing the rosy predictions of streaming rich content over the Web. With more than 56 million broadband connections in U.S. homes and businesses, TV networks can finally stream entire episodes of our favorite programs (along with its attendant advertising, of course). Bands can host videos on their MySpace pages, and anyone who can operate a video camera can upload their “content” to YouTube.
Online video is coming into its own, but where does that leave online video’s country cousin, audio? Podcasts are supposed to be the next Next Big Thing, but podcast hype doesn’t track to podcast adoption. Earlier this year Forrester released a report that said just 1 percent of U.S. households regularly download and listen to podcasts, while Frank Barnako revealed that the average Feedburner podcast had just 70 subscribers. YouTube sells for $1.65 billion, but the average podcaster can’t get 100 people to listen to her podcast.
But shouldn’t more bandwidth plus widespread iPod adoption add up to wildly successful podcasting? Why can’t anyone seem to crack it—and monetize it? Here are some of the impediments.
Play It by Ear?
First, the Web is primarily a visual medium. Television is primarily a visual medium too, of course, but listening to dialogue is an integral part of watching TV. Not so online; viral YouTube clips aside, most of us still use the Web to read. Besides, you can usually get away with reading email, news, weblogs, and other “poor media” content at work without disturbing your coworkers (or alerting your boss).
Secondly, there’s no easy way to search audio content. If you’re presented with a 30-minute video clip and need to view a 5-minute portion, it’s fairly easy to grab the cursor and “scrub” around until you find the section you want. If someone sent you an abstract of the same 30-minute presentation, you could scroll through and find the pertinent information. But with audio there’s no way to see where you are relative to where you need to be (other than the timeline). If you’re not told where to find the 5-minute chunk you need, you might be stuck listening to the entire presentation.
"The biggest win for podcasts, as it was for blogs, will be the continuing democratization of the Internet."
Time Isn't on Your Side
And the length of the average podcast works against it. I can’t think of any continuous 30-minute block of time in any average day to which I could commit to listening to and assimilating the information from a podcast. And at the risk of contradicting myself, we don’t really read on the Web—we browse. So whereas news headlines and a 2-minute "Saturday Night Live" excerpt are perfectly suited to the Internet, a 30-minute lecture is decidedly not.
Does this mean that podcasts will fail? Absolutely not—depending on your criteria for success. Podcast adoption will continue to grow as mp3-player use increases and as people get comfortable with the idea of podcasts. But no one will “crack” podcasting any more than blogs were cracked.
Podcasts Do Make Talkers of Us All
The biggest win for podcasts, as it was for blogs, will be the continuing democratization of the Internet. Broadcasting is no longer the sole province of Clear Channel and Westwood One; now anyone with a mic, a laptop, and a fast connection can broadcast across the globe. And as with blogs, democratization will inevitably lead to lots of very, very bad content; but the law of averages predicts that there will be some good stuff too. The cream will eventually rise to the top, and ‘Net denizens will benefit.
Today blogs are a small but important part of many companies’ overall communication strategies, and I predict that podcasts will evolve in much the same way. Many companies already have a wealth of recorded audio content—such as conference calls, presentations, and trainings sessions—so offering them as podcasts to customers and employees is a no-brainer. Your podcasting efforts will succeed to the extent that you make them easy to navigate and digest: Keep ‘em short and sweet, offer a table of contents (timeline), and don’t look now, but I think your boss is coming your way…
About the author:
Managing editor Ian Miller promises to listen to—or browse through—your feedback.
