How do you generate lots of traffic, and get people talking about you? You state in a conference from a podium that “Podcasting is Dead,” or you make a blog post that “Podcasting is Over” etc. Then all the podcasters get bent out of shape (and I count myself in that category) and we all stand up and say “NO IT's NOT.” So here I am saying “No it's not.”
The interesting thing is Leo Laporte stated he was getting $70 CPM on this week in tech. Hello? Can you show a better example of how valuable podcasting is in selling to a niche? Radio is getting $15 – $40 cpm.
One can see that Leo is talking about a new network he wants to launch like CNN.
I would agree that more people will be streaming podcasts in the future. I am working on an iPhone application for the School of Podcasting. So yes, more people will be handling podcasts on their phones.
What I hate is when people hear that “Podcasting is Dead” they think “Well I'm not going to start one.” NEW MEDIA is not dead, and how we receive it is going to change. Much in the same way we have evolved in the way we receive television. But people have not stopped making shows. People aren't going, “TV is Dead.”
Leo said that Podcasting is too hard. BS. Go to www.schoolofpodcasting.com/itunes and click subscribe. Was that really so hard? Will Grandma be hip enough to have iTunes installed? Don't know, but I'm not worried about Grandma. She's is not in my demographic. She can sign up for newsletter reminders.
Has podcasting growth slowed? While it was easy to see the spike of listeners when you had no competition, this is not the case in 2009. You need to promote your podcast to keep the listeners going up and up. I spoke about this in my last podcast. Feedburner reports the number of subscribers to podcasts, for which his company is managing feeds, is growing 20-30% a month.
Podcasting is not dead, and shame on all who use it as a publicity stunt. There are headlines that say Leo is trying to trademark the phrase “netcasting.” Could this be another reason why Leo wants to phrase “podcasting” to go away?
Cool RSS Reader
When it comes to show prep an RSS reader can go out and bring you back all the latest news from your favorite blogs. I previously used feed demon, but they “updated” their software to synchronize with Google reader (and in the process lost some of their key features). I am now using Great News RSS reader. It allows me to tag and save individual blog posts (which makes organizing information for your next podcast a snap). The only downside is it is a desktop application, and if you want to read your blogs at work, at home, on the laptop, you need to install the software three times. If you are interested in a web-based RSS reader then you might try Bloglines.com which allows you to make “Clippings” of blogs and put them in folders (where each folder could be a podcast or topic).
Thanks for listening to episode 196
Just a helpful (i hope) observation: The link you created to itunes to show that it isn’t hard to subscribe to a podcast doesn’t work, probably because the word “podcasting” in the link was misspelled. Some might interpret that as proving the point that podcasting is too hard, although I am not one of them.
I like your show.
L