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Future of Podcasts
What do you think the future of podcasts is, and what will their impact be?
My theory is that FM and satellite radio are in trouble. Satellite radio is in trouble because wi-fi radio is not far away. Basically, those multi-million dollar satellites are about to become useless since the content can just be sent over wi-fi.
FM radio will have a hard time competing with the IPod, especially now that automobiles are being wired for mp3 players. Why would you put up with the crap they play on the radio when you can just plug in your IPod? Radio's problem is that it depends on advertisements which are freaking annoying. Who wants to listen to those?
As for podcasts, I see them thriving well into the future. What troubles me, though, is that I see them becoming more and more commercial. I don't know if that will squeeze out the non-commercial podcasts, but there will be much more commercial content. Let's face it, the distribution is quite cheap - it certainly beats buying a radio license. Companies are going to figure this out very quickly. The question is whether or not podcast listeners will put up with commercial content, or if there will be sufficient competition from non-commercial sources. I personally can't stand listening to ads, so as long as there is something decent that is non-commercial, I'll listen to that.
What are your thoughts?
My theory is that FM and satellite radio are in trouble. Satellite radio is in trouble because wi-fi radio is not far away. Basically, those multi-million dollar satellites are about to become useless since the content can just be sent over wi-fi.
FM radio will have a hard time competing with the IPod, especially now that automobiles are being wired for mp3 players. Why would you put up with the crap they play on the radio when you can just plug in your IPod? Radio's problem is that it depends on advertisements which are freaking annoying. Who wants to listen to those?
As for podcasts, I see them thriving well into the future. What troubles me, though, is that I see them becoming more and more commercial. I don't know if that will squeeze out the non-commercial podcasts, but there will be much more commercial content. Let's face it, the distribution is quite cheap - it certainly beats buying a radio license. Companies are going to figure this out very quickly. The question is whether or not podcast listeners will put up with commercial content, or if there will be sufficient competition from non-commercial sources. I personally can't stand listening to ads, so as long as there is something decent that is non-commercial, I'll listen to that.
What are your thoughts?
Comments
Take us, for example. We would NEVER allow advertising on the show itself, and not likely on the website even. If we ever made money, it would be on merchandise, side projects, extra content, etc... We have the cash to continue producing the show out of pocket practically forever, so we don't even really care if we're ever profitable.
Money would be a bonus, but it's not our motivation. I have a feeling that many of us out there feel the same way.
The problem with the future of podcasts is that it may become harder to find the good ones, just like with blogs you have to shuffle through the crap to find the good ones. Maybe as more people get into podcasting we will have to do the same thing.
Based off of this circumstance, I have to wonder: this may be a stupid question but if GeekNights becomes as big as Rym and Scott want it to be, won't they have the same kind of risk or is Libsyn more lenient in their contractual terms in regards to bandwidth? Will there ever come a time when GeekNights establishes such a large presence (from recruitment at cons, word-of-mouth, iTunes) that advertisements before the Things of the Day segment may become a necessity?
There comes a certain point where your own popularity requires you stop being free.
I have a blog on my website and I sell some software. My bandwidth tends to be about 3GB per month and I have a limit of 50GB per month before I have to start paying extra. My costs are quite low and the small trickle of money I make on Google ads is enough to offset the cost of my server. It's no where near the amount I would need to be a full-time blogger/programmer but it is enough to offset the cost.
I do not *need* the Google ads on my site but I added them about a year ago as an experiment. I don't care much if visitors block the ads as advertising is not the reason behind what I do. If, however, something were to change and I saw my monthly bandwidth exceeding that which is included in my base hosting service then I would need to see an increase in advertising income.
I do not know if the subscription numbers have ever been released in regards to GeekNights but, there must be a certain point where "too many listeners" is hit and you have to take on advertising or you start losing money.
Libsyn is equipped to handle stupid amounts of bandwidth. Feedburner takes the beating for us on the RSS side. The web site could be fairly readily migrated to beefier hosting if need be, and furthermore is set up to withstand some downtime. We have a lot of redundancy, and the badwidth requirements are spread out.
Hosting, even fairly powerful hosting, is quite cheap. Also, not to brag, but Scott and I have fairly substantial financial resources, especially if you look at how we handle our money. We could readily handle even an extreme influx of new listeners: the only bandwidth we'd have to purchase would be for the web site.
Only a fraction of our listeners will ever bother with the site or the forums. In fact, iTunes listeners who don't visit the site don't ever use ANY of our bandwidth. No matter how big we get, we could pay out-of-pocket for site hosting. Even the higher-end hosting costs would be trivial to cover.
While we'd very likely try to make some money through various means or side projects, we would never put advertisements in the show itself.
As an aside, the phrase "hiring semi-professional bloggers to add... content" is hilarious to me
The feeds you all subscribe to are hosted by Feedburner. The mp3 files you listen to are hosted by Libsyn. At no point do you draw any bandwidth from our personal hosting in listening to the show. The "real" feeds are read ONLY by Feedburner.
The only time you use our personal bandwidth is when you visit the site or these forums. We have substantial bandwidth for the site and many options to increase it cheaply if need be.
As I listen to the problems other podcasters seem to have as they grow, I get the impression that a lot of them either lack technical knowledge or didn't plan properly. We planned everything from the start, including how to manage increased listenership. We long ago enacted our first "oh shit" plan, bringing on Libsyn as our media host. We have several other "oh shit" plans ready for any possible issue.
We distributed our bandwidth and hosting intelligently to minimize the impact of increased listenership. We run our own hosting (that Scott administers), greatly reducing our costs. We keep an eye on the stats and usage. We're always scanning the horizon for possible issues and ways to deal with them.
Their prices are very low, and you get unmetered bandwidth. They offer all sorts of other services we don't need. You could host an entire podcast, including the site and RSS, with them if you wanted, and it wouldn't cost any more. They have a massive distribution network and an incredible account management system.
All they get in return is your money.
Thing is, the plan itself has no bearing on the bandwidth. Even if we got ten times the listers we have now, Libsyn would cover us. We'd only ever need to upgrade if we wanted to provide even more content.
The Linode is the only part of our system for which bandwidth is limited. Currently it has a limit of 200 gibibytes of transfer per month. This month is almost over, and so far we've used 24.1 gibibytes of transfer. That means GeekNights can probably grow 10 fold before we would run into any trouble. Even at that point, we would still be able to pay the costs with the money from our day jobs.
Another factor I just realized is that we use GMail for domains to handle our e-mail. The lack of e-mail traffic on the Linode is a significant bandwidth cut.
I can understand putting ads in your show because you want to quit your other job. I can understand students, the unemployed and the poor people putting ads in their show to pay the hosting bill. I can understand professional and corporate podcasts putting up ads to pay for their insane hosting costs, e.g: TwiT. I can even understand when someone openly states they just want to make a profit. What I can't understand is people who have decent paying jobs and relatively low listenerships(less than TwiT level) saying they can't afford to keep podcasting without ads.
Thanks to the existence of services like Libsyn, you could put on a show like GeekNights for a mere $360 a year. If we were weekly podcasters, our show could cost a mere $120 a year. We just like to be all fancy, so GeekNights currently costs $1320 a year. If somehow we multiplied our listenership by 20, I estimate that cost would jump up to somewhere between $2500 and $3000. That's a conservative estimate too. We could probably save a lot of money in the long run buy paying a one-time fee of under $5000 to buy a wicked awesome server and then co-locating it for less than $150 a month. That would bring our yearly cost to under $2160. That's well within the price range of anyone who has a decent job.
Another significant factor is that I am the absolute administrator of all our hosting. We don't have to get a managed hosting solution where we pay someone else to do work for us. The advantage of this is that we can do whatever we want with our server. Any software we want will work guaranteed, because I know what I'm doing. Another advantage is that we run a Linux distribution which is heavily optimized. Thus, our much weaker hardware can support a higher level of listener activity.
In summary. Other podcasters pay more than we do because we know what we're doing.
You also have the benefit of being two single guys with good jobs and no families to support.
-ahem-
We use Linode. The majority of the Front Row Crew is this way. It's like a giant safety net. We all support one another fully, both financially and otherwise.
Another big factor is that we're actually very careful with our money, but not to the point of penny-pinching. I'll drop several hundred dollars on a convention at a whim, but I have the freedom to do so by having eliminated many extraneous expenses. We have no phone line, cable TV, newspaper/magazine subscriptions, pools, yachts, smoking habits, drug habits, etc... We make capital investments in our lives carefully, and take on recurring costs only after a great deal of deliberation.
I don't really plan to ever have children and, as odd as it might sound to you, the Front Row Crew is essentially a family. We're just a family of like-minded awesome people who can all pull our own weight financially. Imagine if you had a husband, wife, two children, and a dog who each cleared $50k a year. That's a family that can get things done. ^_~
I'm leery of anything in the world that could tie me down or limit my potential for awesome.
I used to have those intentions myself. Purchase big Victorian home with ten or more bedrooms on a large piece of land. Have many friends join in the "community" of it all to help pay the bills and otherwise make life better and easier...
10 people making $50K-$100K a year can do a lot with that amount of money. Even if some of the members of the "family" wanted to have kids it could still work out if everyone chipped in time and effort on raising the kids.
That dream has passed... I was never able to find the right mixture of people to pull it off.
Besides, there are many benefits to be a married man with kids.
You basically have to decide in your life whether you are going to be someone who does awesome things, or if you are going to make a family. Yes, many people have done both, but that is ludicrously rare and difficult. Even if it is possible to do both, having a spouse and children greatly hinders your ability to do other awesome things.
Unlike Rym, I do not rule out the possibility of doing the family thing sometime in the future. However, I will not tie myself down with a spouse who will hinder my awesome any more than necessary. Ideally I will find a spouse who is also interested in being awesome, and that will simply double our awesomeness with the power of teamwork. Either way, I will definitely avoid having children to take care of before I've had my share of awesome.
Take Penn Jillette as an example. He became an ultra-famous magician and awesome guy. Then, in his 50's he finally sat down to have kids. Not only that, but he still does his show in Vegas, and a radio show, and makes many other appearances. If he had started the family 20 years ago, he probably would not have become the awesome that he is today.
What I'm really trying to say is that nobody can use "I have a family to take care of." as an excuse for not being awesome. People decide to have families, they don't get familied by accident. People know full well that doing the family thing will dominate their lives at the expense of other awesomeness. It is not OK to say "I'm not awesome because I have a family." It is OK to say "I decided when I started this family that I was going to sacrifice my awesome." I'm not going to say one decision is better than the other. The answer for each person is different. I just don't like it when people place blame on sacrifices they made knowingly.
Giving up something to benefit your wife and/or children is not a bad thing. Only a hedonist would feel it was. What's so wrong with helping others, even if it means some sacrifice? It's that ability that makes humanity the great thing that it is.
We all realized that what we had at university was a wonderful thing. The lives we led there were exactly what we wanted them to be. We won't give that up. We won't compromise with the world.
You'd really have to meet the FRC to understand how different we are from most people. I use the word "family" to describe it in a very real and direct sense. The bonds between us are no less strong than bonds of blood. We're closer to one another than many blood relatives are.
I won't give anything up to be with the woman I love because there's nothing to give up. I've had to make no sacrifice. Being with her wasn't a compromise.
There's nothing wrong with having children. I'm just saying that I don't terribly desire to have them myself, as such a thing would drastically alter my ability to live the kind of life I want to live. Having them is a fine thing, but it comes with associated drawbacks, drawbacks I wish to avoid.
Also, to show Steve how to make a pedantic argument, I never said that I'd never have children. I said that I "don't really plan to ever have children." I'm projecting (planning) to not have kids. Plans can change based on situations. I didn't exclude the possibility, I simply put forth what course I'm currently planning to take.