Speaking of podcasts
The All Marketers are Liars blog book tour continues today, but with a twist… a podcast! My one and only podcast, actually. Church of the Customer: Podcast: Are all marketers really liars? A chat with Seth Godin.
Two more thoughts about podcasting
that last post caused a minor firestorm, so I want to riff just a bit here.
1. I didn’t say I don’t like podcasts. In fact, I think they’re terrific. The user experience (take authentic, honest, informative audio with you when you do the rest of your life) is a great idea. It’s not going to go away.
2. I am fascinated by the math of the situation from the creator’s point of view.
What would have happened to radio if
a. it was really cheap to start a station
and
b. the dial could hold a million stations, not forty?
We certainly wouldn’t see the huge profits and high production values of radio today, would we? If there were thousands and thousands of stations to compete with, it would be an amateur medium, with nobody making enough to invest.
Podcasting feels a little like that. There will be millions of listeners… and there might be millions of podcasts.
But, then I think about A lists. Inevitably, a few podcasts will become like boingboing, the default channel for people getting started listening, or for people who want to listen to what everyone else listens to. (and of course there will be vertical A listers… like the Variety showbiz journal, but someone’s podcasted version)
Is it possible to build a podcast with a million subscribers? Why not? And if you did, would it be profitable enough to invest in and dedicate time to? No doubt.
So, I guess I see a much steeper pyramid for podcasts than I do for blogs. Not 10,000,000 podcasts at the bottom the way there is for blogs, but maybe 1% of that. And a few (a dozen, a hundred, a thousand?) at the top with big subscriber numbers and either subscriber revenue or ad revenue to make it worth the investment.
If your goal is to be an A list podcaster, today’s the day to start. And invest. And persist.
Thinking about podcasting
A few times a day, people ask when I’m going to have a podcast. My answer is probably not too soon.
The good news for podcasters is that users’ ability to hear podcasts is dramatically increasing. It’ll soon be built into itunes, and as awareness spreads, the number of listeners has to increase.
There’s a bunch of bad news, though.
First, you can’t browse a podcast. Which means that you won’t know what you like until you get it. That means subscribing in many cases. This is, of course, good news, cause subscribers are better than browsers. But it’s mostly bad news because it means that very few podcasts are going to be heard by large numbers of people.
Example: if there are 1,000 blogs and 1,000 readers, sooner or later every blog will get sampled by every reader.
BUT, if there are 1,000 podcasts and 1,000 people, it’s unlikely that you’ll be sampled by more than ten or twenty listeners. Why? Because the cost of sampling (in time) is too high. Once you’ve got your needs met, you’ll stop listening.
Problem two is that listening is a real time commitment. I can surf 300 blogs in the time I can listen to just one podcast. That doesn’t mean podcasts are bad… in fact, they’re far more powerful than blogs in selling emotion. It does mean that it’s going to be harder to get a big audience.
Which leads to the last bit of bad news: you can put up a blog post in two minutes, but it takes an hour to make a podcast. So, creators will want either big audiences or money if they’re going to really do it. And both are hard to see coming any time soon.
My two cents.
55,000,000
I’m not one for stories and screeds about how many people live in Asia and how we better get ready.
But this one is sticking in my head and won’t leave:
There are fifty five million Chinese kids that take piano lessons.
On the other hand
Almost every single time I use Google, I marvel at what a powerful tool it is. Search plus billions of pages equals an enormous number of opportunities. Opportunities for education, for commerce, for new ways of spreading ideas and for new businesses.
How can you redefine what you do in terms of a nearly infinite world that might find you?
Web pages are so ugly!
Maybe I’m just in a beauty mood, but I was struck as I surfed around today at how ugly many web pages are (eBay). Typefaces that fight instead of work together. Flashing things that flash for no reason. Hierarchies of size and color that are irrational.
Milton Glaser talks about why the supermarket is the way the supermarket is. Why is Tide in that multi-colored box? It turns out that the original boxes evolved when you still had to ask for what you wanted from the guy behind the counter. The boxes needed to be bright in order to attract your attention from a ways away. Once the vernacular was set for the early winners, everyone else followed.
I wonder if we’re about to get stuck here as well? As we enter a broadband world, with better browsers and all sorts of tools to improve the experience, is everyone going to be stuck emulating what succeeded in 1999?
Search is lousy
Two years from now, people are going look back at Google and Yahoo and marvel at just how primitive they were.
A quick glance at a new search engine (Exalead) demonstrates that while it’s a long long way from perfect, the areas where existing engines can get better are legion.
All Marketers...
Organic cigarettes?
Not just organic, but “all natural” and not tested on animals and certified “cruelty free” by PETA. Did I mention that there’s a native American on the box?
This is brilliant niche storytelling. There’s a percentage of smokers who are able to get by the internal inconsistency (I won’t say oxymoron because the word police say I’m misusing the term) of the term “organic cigarettes” and love the story. No, the Marlboro man isn’t going to switch. But there’s no way this little company would ever get him to switch… not enough money, not enough time.
But for smokers with the worldview that they want to be careful what they smoke, that they want a gourmet product, this is a great flash of insight.
No, I’d never be a tobacco marketer. I won’t even do speaking gigs for them. But once a little company has decided to take that moral leap, the idea of upselling affluent smokers with this story is both hysterically funny and apparently quite effective.
Do you know Rich…
Apparently, the ellipsis is part of his name.
Anyway, the blog book tour continues on his site: "Hello_World": Business Blog Book Tour: Seth "Pinocchio" Godin. The rest of his stuff is worth a read as well.
The Marketplace Radio Interview
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