Podcasting and The Value of Scarcity

With all of the recent kerfuffle surrounding Chris Anderson’s new book Free, it’s worth noting that one basic economics lesson continues to hold true: scarcity creates value. In fact, economics is essentially the study of scarcity, and when a good or service becomes common, it becomes devalued.

I was reminded of this crucial distinction when I perused the results of RAJAR’s latest MIDAS research. RAJAR, the UK’s radio measurement entity, publishes a semiannual look at British consumption of Internet-delivered audio that examines trends in digital radio, streaming and podcasting akin to our own Internet and Multimedia Research Series here in the States, and I am always interested to see how the behavior of UK digital consumers agrees and differs from our own here in the US.

I’ll have more to say about the podcasting statistics in a later post (they show continued growth in uptake, from 7.2 million podcast consumers in October 2008 to 7.8 million today,) but for now I wanted to focus on this telling statistic: while 4.2 million say they listen to podcasts at least once a week, only 28% find time to listen to all the podcasts they download (the typical user reported subscribing to 5.2 podcasts per week.)

I freely admit that I rarely listen to everything in my queue, and often weeks will go by before I will listen to an episode. Some subscriptions I have never caught up with, and others remain weekly staples. The vast stew of unlistened-to podcast episodes in my iTunes folder is very reminiscent of my TiVo “Now Playing” page, which also contains dozens of shows (and one entire series) that I’ve never watched. I suspect, if you own a DVR, that you have had a similar experience.

It’s easy to subscribe to episodic content–less so to find time to fit it all in. If you are a podcaster with a program centered on information or news content in a given niche, you know that listeners have multiple ways to get the content you offer (after all, you also got it somewhere.) What keeps listeners coming back, week after week, is you–character development, roles, trust, and your story. Even the most compelling podcasts, however, can pile up in someone’s feed reader amidst the plethora of audio and video available on the Internet.

Finally real iTunes metrics, free via Google Analytics

I founded VoloMedia in 2005 to bring Analytics and Advertising technology to episodic media delivery, “Podcasting”.  As the years have rolled by,  Podcasting has grown from user generated audio to professionally produced video, from mainly an audio iPod  media, to consumption on a variety of screens – increasingly the iPhone. VoloMedia has had tremendous success signing up many of the major TV shows as customers – ABC, NBC, G4TV, How Stuff Works, etc. Today we manage over 45 million monthly media requests, 75% of which is video and the volumes are growing, we had nearly 2 million media requests yesterday. With all of these downloads over all of these years, one fact has remained stubborn -a vast majority of the traffic originates from Apple’s iTunes Media player. This should not be very surprising given that the iTunes store hosts 140,000 podcast feeds – and this is where most consumers are discovering podcast shows.

I helped ADM standardize the measurement specs around downloads, and the process was contentious around the metrics question, “download requests” or “completed downloads”?  The most final of all metrics , “plays”, was not considered because it simply was not feasible. During the current economic downturn, the need for the best metrics has become even more important for publishers and advertisers.

Over a year ago our engineers decided to resolve this issue in the most practical way we could – connecting iTunes to Google Analytics. We are announcing this product today. Before I go into the specifics, I would like to emphasize one important point – this free service does not require any relationship, contractual or otherwise, with VoloMedia.

VoloMedia’s Bridge-to-Google Analytics is a plug-in to the iTunes Media player, now installed with over 100 thousand iTunes consumers in the US – precisely 94,296 iTunes plug-ins were active over the last 5 days. Publishers are free to use this free service if it meets their needs, i.e. collect annonymous usage statistics regarding usage of their content on iTunes and to analyze them using Google Analyics: a free and robust industry-standard platform. If you have ever used Google Analytics, then you are familiar with “GA_ID – Google Analytics ID”. With a simple modification of the RSS feed to incorporate the GA-ID the publisher can start flowing aggregated play and download data to their Google Analytics account.  More information is on our website: http://www.volomedia.com

Commercial Radio’s Podcasting Myth

Mark Ramsey had an interesting post on his blog Hear2.0 and graciously allowed me to repost it hear. Mark is a thought leader in the radio space and is a strong advocate for the integration of new media tools by the broadcast medium. He makes some interesting points regarding different types of radio podcasts.

In addition to his thoughts below, I would advocate online or podcast only content made available by radio stations. Whether it be the long unedited version of an on-air interview, the 4th hour of a 3 hour morning show, episodes featuring character’s from the station,  or anything else you can imagine.

Mark also references the measurement of podcast plays and downloads that warrants some discussion, especially as it pertains to iTunes, but that’s for another time. Here’s Mark…

When it comes to radio station podcasts, we’re generally talking about two flavors:

One is the Public Radio kind, usually weekly shows with beginnings, middles, and ends or clips of information updates or highlights.

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How Much Money Do You Want?

I attend a lot of old media, social media and web video events. From The Streamy Awards to NATPE to NAB to BlogWorldExpo I go to as many events as I can. Some are more social than others but almost everyone has something to do with monetizing online video or social media. While I’m there people often ask me what I’m working on, when the next episode of French Maid TV will be coming out, and they ask how they can make money with online video. My question to them is, How much money do you want to make?

You would be surprised at the looks that come over their faces as if I had just asked them to show me their underwear or something. It amazes me that people don’t know how much money they want. Why would you make something that you want to sell and not know how much you want to charge for it? Would a farmer grow fruits and vegetables and not know how much they are going to sell them for? I don’t think so.

So why do people stumble on what they are going to charge to advertise or sponsor their video or audio podcast? There are several reasons.

Reasons People Don’t Know How Much Money They Want for Their Content

1. Most independent producers are not sales people.

Social Media Lessons From My Friends Who Are On Top of Social Media Trends

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group’s founder Charlene Li, and Peter Kim, an enterprise social-technology researcher are all over the social media trends. This post on their talk yesterday at Web 2.0 Expo is right on the money. Ironically, I was giving a talk to top brands in LA that morning and many of my core points are echoed in the post by Lauren McKay that talks about the failures of social media that we can learn from.

Here are the top points on the barriers that are preventing corporate success of Social Media. Jeremiah, Charlene, and Peter (everyone should be following their blog and here if you want to keep up to date on the trends in social media) points are worth repeating:

1. Social media doesn’t match up with our corporate culture.
2. My social media marketing campaigns aren’t working
3. I don’t know how to measure this stuff.
4. I’m not sure social media matters, anyway.

In fact, Owyang pointed out Dell’s tremendous success now in social media, which essentially sprouted from many failed attempts. It’s been a similar strategy for mega-brand Wal-Mart, as well, Li added. Wal-Mart, she said, has kept at it for years, picking itself up after failures and coming ahead stronger with its buyer blogs and mom communities. Kim summed it up by saying that social media might not have the implications on a brand that one would expect — but it will — and soon.

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