The Future of Podcasting: Mark Ramsey

Day 3 of the Exclusive Feature, The Future of Podcasting!  Today's writing is from Mark Ramsey, Founder and President of Mercury Radio Research and writer of his blog, Radio Marketing Nexus.

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Podcasting is a fancy name for personal broadcasting.  I create my content and it drifts out to an audience who passively elects to receive it.  If it were called "personal broadcasting" instead of "podcasting" it would catch on must faster.  Because don't kid yourself, most folks have no idea what podcasting is - they're still pissed that nobody got them an iPod for Christmas.

The difficulty here, as in everything else on the net, is in developing a critical mass of interest, a "hit".

With a zillion podcasts out there on a zillion different topics there are few broad-based "programs" worth listening to.  A wide range of special interest tech-focused programs is not nearly sufficient.

I have read that corporations can use the technology to get financial analyst reports to stockholders, but this is not the type of application that will have folks running to sign up for podcasts.  Like Radio, podcasting will be driven by entertainment.  But where is that entertainment supposed to come from and how is it supposed to get noticed?

I would like to say there will be more entertainment-oriented podcast programs in the future, but I don't really know.  Just because you can create a great show from your basement studio doesn't mean folks will listen to it.  Quality and attention have NEVER been correlated - that's why a small cabal of international media conglomerates want to own everything - they're buying access - distribution - to eyes and ears.  And once they own it, you can't.

There's also the problem of rights management.  If I'm, say, Howard Stern, what is my incentive to create a podcast?  Very little.  Now if Howard wants to grow his audience through word of mouth he could conceivably make certain segments or bits available via podcast, but he is heavily incentivized to do no more than that, lest he cannibalize his own money machine.

If Podcasting is to reach beyond the technorati, first of all, the technology to create and receive such casts must be vastly simplified.  My blog provider doesn't currently support the coding required to send podcasts.  Until this technology is push-button simple on both the sending side (where it isn't nearly) and the receiving one (where it almost is) then this is going to be hype-only.

Second, if there are 10 or 20 million iPods in the US that's not nearly enough.  There must be universal access - just as you can access any web page from any web-enabled computer.  Every mp3 player should work - every computer should come with the software that enables podcasting.  Until this happens, the dream will be far off.

Finally, Joe and Jane Doe's podcasts will, in the long run, be swamped by podcasts produced by and for the entertainment conglomerates, just as their websites tend to swamp yours.  Sure there will be exceptions, but few that most folks can name.

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tags: podcasting | ipod | radio | howard stern

Comments

[Jason]

Of all the "Future of Podcating" 'articles', this one seems to be the smartest. When I first discovered podcasting a few years ago (sorry, Adam Curry, yours wasn't the first) I fell in love and couldn't wait for 'the masses' to catch on. Now that the techno-masses (not the overall masses) have caught on I'm even more excited... and more realistic. Much of what I'm hearing is poorly produced ramblings that, believe it or not, could learn a thing or two from the oft-battered FM radio. I'm hearing 30 minute movie reviews that could be done in 5 minutes; I'm hearing husbands and wives bitching and moaning about the condition of their couch while explaining how they would better handle the war in Iraq; and I'm hearing broadcasts (sorry, 'podcasts') that sound as if they were recorded in the world's largest echo chamber.

It's all fun stuff right now, but what podcasting needs are some mass-appeal 'it' shows... the types of shows that make the soccer mom on the treadmill want to turn off her Norah Jones mp3s.

It's all cool, this podcasting thing, and it's here to stay, I'm sure. But until the rookies learn something from the pros we're going to be seeing a lot of podcasters packing up their microphones because they're not getting the tens of thousands of downloads they had hoped for.