The Podcast Pedant

A simple thread about cheap microphones on the Alley disintegrated into a multi-front debate about elitism, personal finance, and exactly what price range for recommendations constitutes an unacceptable barrier for starting podcasters. It’s all too tedious for me to trouble you with.

But from the flames emerged this old bugbear, with a throaty growl and singed fur:

Michel: I know you mention content a few lines later, so don’t think I’m ignoring that, but content is so much more important that sound quality. Good job if you have fantastic sound quality and a boring show. It’s the best sounding crap out there.

Sigh. You know what? I’m getting tired of that whole argument. People keep bringing it up as an excuse to ignore the technical aspects of their craft. It’s like arguing that roots are more important to a tree than leaves. Yes, you need to start with content. No content, no show. But if you don’t eventually open up and sprout some production quality on the outside, that tree is gonna die.

The ideal podcaster is constructively dissatisfied with everything. We should all want better content next week than we’ve got this week. And we should want better sound quality, too. That doesn’t mean spending a lot of money. I’ve given lectures on how to get better sound out of free tools. Eventually you do hit a threshold where you need to scale up to better equipment — but not for a while. That’s fine. In fact it’s probably better than starting expensive, because getting good sound out of cheap gear will give you the skills to use the good gear properly.

But you need to care. You need to listen to your show, pay attention to what’s good and bad about it, and strive to make the whole thing better. If you’re apathetic about any part of the experience you present to your audience, your audience will be apathetic too.

Via Podcasting News: another hosting service for the mathematically challenged. This one’s called PodshowCreator.com.

The name is a striking example of audacity — or perhaps the scarcity of podcast-related domains now. I’m no fan of Podshow, but I suspect they’d be entirely justified in nailing these guys to protect their trademark. I hope they won’t have to, however, as I sincerely hope there aren’t too many people who’d sign onto a podcasting plan offering 2 GB of transfer for $14.95 a month.

I’m saying this not specifically to embarrass PodshowCreator.com (they don’t need my help there) but because they’re exemplary of an entire class of hosting providers that consider themselves “podcast friendly.” The main problems with these providers needs to be made obvious and conspicuous, for the benefit of newbies Googling for a podcast host.

In PSC.c’s case, the long division is easy. At their cheapest level you get 200 MB of disk space and 2 GB of bandwidth. Let’s say you run a twice weekly music podcast, and your files are all 20 MB each. 2000 MB / 20 MB = 100 downloads. If you’ve posted ten shows in a month, you can afford a maximum of ten subscribers before you get hit for extra bandwidth charges. At $14.95 a month you’re paying a buck fifty per subscriber. And you’d best hope no one ever downloads twice, and your MP3s don’t get crawled by engines like Podscope, Podzinger, etc.

“Ah, but you can upgrade!” the provider would probably say. That’s just shoveling money into the fire. Their highest level, at $97/month for 20 GB, boggles the mind. You could get a dedicated server with unmetered transfer for just a bit more than that.¹

So what should you do? I’ll have a post about that shortly. For now, the significant takeaway is that any hosting plan you ever consider for podcasting should be measured at least in the hundreds of gigabytes, if not unlimited. That will give you room to grow. High-bandwidth and unlimited plans are available for much cheaper than $14.95 a month — they’re even available for free. That doesn’t mean that “free unlimited” is the right answer for everyone, but getting less than you need for more than you need to pay isn’t the right answer for anyone.

1. Believe me, I’ve thought about it. ↩

Huzzah! It looks like at least one of my goals with this site is already in motion — we’re initiating dialogue and getting responses and ideas back from the people making news in podcasting.

In this case, Gretchen from Mommycast read and commented on my post on their deal with Dixie. First off, thanks very much for coming by and taking the time. My wife and I have both listened to your show before. You’ve got an engaging style, and the topics you hit on are real ones. I can see why your show is popular.

Now. You said:

This is actually going to be a partnership. MommyCast is going to be included in their print and television advertising throughout all of the campaigns this year. Hmmm…millions of dollars of advertising with MommyCast included….millions of potential listeners being introduced to MommyCast….I’ll let you do that math!

Congratulations! That sounds like a terrific opportunity, and I wish you the best with it. However, I think this only reinforces my point that your compensation is undervalued. Millions of dollars invested in messages connected to your show… Exposure to a potential audience of millions… And you guys only get $40,000 at the bottom end of that deal?

What you’re saying is that Dixie recognizes that your show matters. You’re worth a lot to them. And you’re clearly worth a lot to Podshow. You should be worth more to yourselves, too. You deserve a lot more than you’re getting from this. A flat-rate year-long deal means that even if you get those millions of listeners, the payoff to you doesn’t change. It’s too low now, and if you’re superstars in eleven months then it’s really too low.

Perhaps it will pay off for you in secondary advertising, or in new deals after the year is over, and I sincerely hope it does. But as “a standard for others to follow,” I think this dilutes the perceived value of podcast content. Dixie and Podshow are getting far more from your hard work than you are. And as another hardworking podcaster, that bothers me quite a bit, even if it doesn’t bother you.

Finally:

Now, as for the comment that we don’t have day jobs…KaPOW! On behalf of all of the moms around the world…shame on you!

I think you misunderstood me here. My wife and I have an eleven-month-old son. I’d never insult moms — I prefer to keep breathing, thanks. That wasn’t a dig at you, that was a dig at Curry and Podshow’s “Quit Your Day Job” campaign. And the irony in the footnote was meant to be sympathetic irony.

Moms? Big fan. Podshow? Not so much. My mom did get exclusivity from me for a very long time, it’s true — but she never asked me for 60%.

(REVISED: Wednesday, February 22, 12:05 AM. I initially had a much stronger indictment of Audible here, but it was pointed out to me that my technical understanding of Audible’s distribution model was completely incorrect. For those who read my earlier mistake, my sincere apologies.)

I heard the news yesterday, but I was skeptical about it until I saw confirmation outside Audible’s site: the world’s #1 podcast, The Ricky Gervais Show, is being moved over to Audible on a pay model of $1.95 per show. ¹

For Gervais, of course, this seems like a great short-term move. His podcast’s 12-week run averaged out to 250,000 an episode. If 20% of his audience follows him, he’s pulling $50K to $100K per week. That’s a pretty decent return for a half hour of two guys making fun of a third guy. Of course there’s got to be other staff involved, and a chain of middlemen taking their cuts, but at the end of the day Gervais, Merchant and Pilkington have got to be smiling.²

And frankly, although it pains me to say this, they probably could not have done as well giving their show away for free. Not in the short run, anyway. In theory a quarter-million listeners should mean incredible ad money, but in practice the infrastructure just isn’t there yet for podcasting. They’d be spending more time trying to set up deals than they spent in the studio, and I can’t blame them at all for signing onto an easy pre-built solution. The payment barrier and the distribution barrier are going to knock their audience down to a fraction, but I have the impression from listening that they’re doing it for a lark anyway. They probably don’t care about long term growth limits; they’ll keep doing it until there’s a better opportunity or until it’s not fun anymore, and then they’ll stop. Cash in the meantime? Good for them.

What does it mean for podcasting as a whole? Very little. Because once they move over to Audible, they’re going to be identified more as an “Audible show” rather than a podcast. For Audible that branding is sort of a mixed blessing: they’d love to be synonymous with podcasting, but even with an RSS-based distribution model they’ve still got their site as a highly opaque gateway between the content and the listener. That’s completely unavoidable. Somebody’s got to take the credit cards, and everyone who approaches that gateway is going to look at the cost and the hassle and make a value judgment for themselves whether the ride is worth it.

For Gervais, even if a fairly small percentage of the people say yes, he wins. Because a few percent of 250,000 is still a lot, and because his content has created a genuine pop culture wave. You and me? I don’t think we can afford to cut our audiences by 90%.

So what Gervais does doesn’t matter to the rest of us, I believe. If you have a successful podcast and you think you can follow him down that path, and maintain long-term audience and/or revenue growth, you’re probably making a mistake. You’re placing technical and monetary barriers between yourself and your audience; and by divorcing yourself from the common one-click path to podcasting, just as audiences are beginning to grok that “Subscribe” button, you’re removing yourself from the surface of the excitement bubble that’s still building.

All this is true for Gervais too, of course. Two years from now, if his show’s still going at all, you won’t know about it unless you’re one of his hardcore fans. The only reason I don’t call this a mistake is because I doubt he cares. He’s got The Office, and Pilkington will probably land a million-dollar book deal for his diary.

1. Or $6.95 for “the season,” but it sounds like this is a season in the BBC sense, where I believe the number of episodes is determined by rolling two dice on a craps table. ↩
2. Or whatever Pilkington does instead of smile. ↩

Mr. Nice Guy, on the Yahoo! list:

‘Seems like, much too often, the most analytical comments coming about the medium from within are, more or less, “Oh wow, man, that’s so cool.”

Amen, brother! I’m all for patting each other on the back, but let’s make sure there was a clear reason for patting, and stop before the point where the hand lingers just a moment too long and then gets taken away while both people look away from the other in an embarrassing silence.

(What? I can’t be the only person that happens to!)

(This rant began life as a post at Podcast Alley.)

So the advertising deal that Mommycast has with the Dixie brand¹ is back in the news again, thanks to an article this week in USA Today. The article, about parenting podcasts in general, is actually decent reading and presents a good list of pointers (even if they get the name of 101 Uses for Baby Wipes wrong.) But of course the “Oh, wow” part, the one that caused excitement at the Alley, is this:

Vogelzang and Paige Heninger combine coffee-klatch banter about their families and interviews with parenting experts. Vogelzang estimates the show attracts more than 300,000 downloads a week. In March, the twice-a-week Mommycast begins a one-year, $100,000 sponsorship deal² with Dixie, making the paper-goods company the first major corporate advertiser of an independently produced podcast that’s not about technology, says radio industry researcher Tom Webster of Edison Research in New Jersey.

Ferg (of the unusually spiffy couplecast Air Ferg) put up the pointer to that news and said “Cha-ching!” And I can understand the reaction. Six figures is a lot of figures. If you write it on a check you have to write the numerals pretty small to fit them in the box. But does the cha really ching?

Let’s do the math…

• Mommycast is with Podshow, and their 60% commission is notorious in the community. It’s always possible Mommycast has a different deal with them, but I’ve never heard of any exceptions to this part of the Podshow contract, and I have heard about major podcasters who were told it was non-negotiable. If you take it as a given, then Mommycast’s cut of the deal is actually $40,000. Hmmm. Okay… Let’s say cha-ching.
• Mommycast has two hosts. $40,000 over the course of a year is $770 per week. Income per host, before taxes, comes to $385 per week. Cha-ching?
• The article says Mommycast does two shows a week. That’s 104 shows a year, but let’s be generous and give them a couple weeks off, simplifying to 100 shows. That’s $400 per episode. The article also says they do 300,000 downloads per week… Splitting that evenly and assuming archive exposures also even out, that comes to 150,000 downloads per episode.³
• Advertising rates are generally quoted as CPM, which means “cost per thousand exposures.” There are no standard rates in the industry yet, but Kiptronic is pitching CPM rates to advertisers of around $50. Podtrac is pushing to raise rates into the vicinity of $100 to $150 for brand awareness campaigns. Even the Tech Podcast Network, who’s been doing ads longer than just about anyone, sets rates around a $10 to $15 CPM, or so I’ve heard anecdotally. And Rocketboom’s recent EBay sale for a single week’s ads at $40,000 comes out to a $40 CPM for them.⁴ Mommycast’s effective CPM rate for their cut of the Dixie deal? $400 / 150 = $2.67. Even if you assume they’re keeping all the money, it still comes out to only 6 bucks and change. And if they grow their show over the course of the year then the per-listener revenue plummets. (That’s why a year is way too long for a contract like this. Your show’s value goes up, but you can’t capitalize on that.)

“Cha-ching” my delicately scented posterior. It sounds good on the surface, but compared to what a show of their audience size should be doing, the hosts are getting royally shafted in this deal. A talk radio host with a couple hundred thousand listeners can make a very good living. This is one of Podshow’s signature shows, and the highest-profile deal Podshow’s been talking about. If any of the numbers here are close to accurate, then these podcast superstars could “quit their day jobs” for salaries equivalent to gas station attendants.⁵

Think carefully about your role models and business models in the podcast community, folks. That’s all I have to say. Do the math, and think carefully.

1. A division of Georgia-Pacific, which is now a division of Koch Industries, which is owned by the richest family you’ve probably never heard of. ↩
2. According to this one article. Other press on the same news has said “North of six figures” and other such vagaries, but you know it can’t be much more than $100K. If it was, they’d have said “More than $120,000″ or “Nearly $200,000″ or whatever sounds more impressive. ↩
3. Although other stories about them as recently as November indicated downloads of half million a month. So either the USA Today story is overshooting or they’ve had incredible growth in three months. Still, it is the most recent source, so let’s take it as correct. ↩
4. People have pointed out that the Rocketboom sale represents a single high-profile incident, and that they’re unlikely to sustain it. Good point. But that’s still the math for that week. And I like Rocketboom. ↩
5. Yeah, I know they don’t have day jobs. Lucky, lucky them. ↩

Because I’m tired, that’s why. Because I had a bitch of a day at work, and it’s finally occurring to me that 50 hours at a stultifying day job hacking at finance databases and 30 hours working on a very elaborate podcast and a wife and infant son are reducing me to a pool of very thin gruel. I’m up until 2 or 3 AM every frigging day. Hell, just look at the time I’m posting this.

The wife and child are non-negotiable. I will spend time with them no matter what. That leaves my podcast and my job. Something’s gotta give. Ten years from now, which will I be more proud of having worked on?

Right. So I need an exit plan. I need a way to make a living, or at least most of a living, doing podcast-related things. That’s the goal.

Why a blog, then? To vent. To get my name out. To have a single place to put all the smartassed stuff I’m always hurling at the walls in other communities. And because it might get help. Isn’t writing shit and giving it away for free the way people get rich these days? That’s what Wired says. It must be true.

And if not, it should be. So we’ll make it so. Who’s with me?