First of May
3
Happy Beltane, everyone!
I hope that everyone celebrated today by listening to the Jonathan Coulton song (MP3). It contains the wisdom of our age. 1
That’s my hope. Of course I know that most podcasters celebrated, as they celebrate the beginning of every month, by asking/begging/cajoling/bribing/menacing their listeners/colleagues/henchmen/old-ladies-in-the-street to vote for them at Podcast freakin’ Alley.
I know I’m a heretic on this issue. I’m fine with that. I’ll keep bitching because the PA voting system was obsolete, useless, and annoying a year ago, and by this point it’s got all the relevance of an indigenous people dancing and singing around a Coca-Cola bottle praying for cargo. 2 It’s not just annoying any more to have people spend five to ten minutes on their podcasts begging for votes. It’s embarrassing.
It embarrasses the whole medium, and it loses listeners because it distracts from content. We want to go up against broadcasting? You don’t see the whole cast of Lost lining up on the beach once every episode to shout, “Don’t forget to vote for us at TVGuide.com!”
Does it work? Hell if I know. I’ve always gotten a few hits from Podcast Alley, albeit not that many, and I’ve always been ranked somewhere around 100 even though I’ve never once asked for a vote. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t begrudge the people who voted for Escape Pod there on their own initiative, or who left comments. The comments especially are valuable. My problem isn’t with the voting, it’s with the asking for votes. It’s bloody annoying, and whatever audience gains your podcast gets from being higher-ranked could surely be dwarfed by spending the same time talking about your podcast in places where people who are interested in your subject matter hang out.
Market yourself outside of podcasting, and spend your listeners’ time on good content, and you’re taken seriously. Podcasting is taken as a serious form with serious ambitions. Everybody wins. Spend your listeners’ time hoping to rope them into status games with other podcasters, games that the listeners don’t care about, and we look like a bunch of kids wrestling over King of the Sandbox.
Either way — enjoy the weather!
The water’s not cold, baby, dip in your big toe…
