There are lots of podcasting businesses and networks emerging out there at the moment. It seems that every day there is another “podcast network” or another directory or another podcatcher. And every day for months, Mick and I get emails from people who want to “add their podcast” to our site, thinking it’s a directory.

So I thought I should try to clarify what The Podcast Network (TPN) is. Or hopes to become, anyway.

As I drove around this morning I was trying to think of a suitable analogy. And this is the best I came up with… I hope it works.

We’re like a publishing house. We’re like the Random House or the Time Warner of podcasting. We’re running around trying to develop relationships with authors (eg producers/hosts) who have the ability to produce high quality content. When we find these people, we co-develop the idea for a show. The business model is to then build that show into a successful property with a large, global audience, and then sell space on that show to sponsors. The network and the host then share in that revenue.

Now, of course, the barriers to entry for podcasting are pretty low. Almost anyone with a PC can put together a show. Why do you need a publishing house?

We see several key advantages in being a member of TPN:

Advantage #1: A Business and Technical Infrastructure.

A Podcasters main job is to give good podcast. If you have to worry about the technology and the business back-end of a successful show, that’s a lot on your plate, especially if you already have a full-time job and a family. Our vision is to provide a common infrastructure for a niche team of professional podcasters. We’ll take care of the bandwidth issues, the hosting issues, the design of the sites, and dealing with advertisers. Sure, these are things you could do yourself. But every minutes you spend dealing with these issues is time you could spend giving good podcast. And while these things are easy to manage when your show is only being listened to by a hundred people, by the time you are reaching 10,000 people, it is no longer trivial. We’ve been there and we can help.

Advantage #2: Getting Discovered.

As of June 2005 there are already something like 6000 podcasts out there. Every genre is getting crowded. If the momentum keeps up, in a year from now there could be 60,000 podcasts. And like many mediums on the net, there is a low signal-to-noise ratio. How do you avoid getting lost in the noise? Conversely, it’s getting harder for audiences to find good programming. Most people are time poor. Even if they have the inclination, they don’t have the time to spend hours surfing through a podcast directory, sampling hundreds of shows to find the couple they want to download and listen to. Our goal is to provide a home for the “best of the best” podcasters, the cream of the crop, bringing only the serious professionals together in one location. Easy to find, easy to be found. All with a common approach to production quality, content quality and ethics in advertising.

Advantage #3: Dealing With Media Buyers.

If you want to profit from your podcasting, selling ad space is one model of monetization. We’re betting that advertisers and their agencies around the world aren’t going to want to negotiate with thousands or hundreds of thousands of podcasters individually to buy media space. As a publisher of shows, we have intimate knowledge of the statistics of each show, the demographics of the audiences of each show, and we can work with the advertisers and the hosts to craft meaningful advertisements to communicate their messages in a respectful and value-added way to our listeners. That’s a service we believe a directory of hundreds or thousands of podcasts will struggle to provide, even if the shows are all genre-related.

Advantage #4: You’re Part Of A Team.

Podcasting is almost a year old as a medium. As an industry, it’s four months old (if you pick the launch of TPN as the world’s first commercial podcasting operation in mid-February as the starting point). Best practices, recording technologies and applications, marketing approaches, format design - all of these are evolving rapidly. At TPN we have an intranet where we encourage our hosts to share tips and tricks on how to solve a lot of these issues. And because TPN has a commercial interest in the success of all of our shows, we’re here to help you continually build your audience and generate revenue.

So there’s the idea. We aren’t a directory. We aren’t a platform play. We’re publishers. We’re the Time Warner of podcasting. Anyone got Steve Case’s number? :-)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 16th, 2005 at 10:46 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.