‘Is podcasting a good business?’ a student asked me in a phone interview
An old friend of mine, Doug Lyon, who now teaches at the University in Brighton called the other day to ask if one of his students could interview me over the phone about podcasting.
‘So… is podcasting a good business to get into?’ asked Tom towards the end of the interview.
Good question, kid.
“No” I replied. “Podcasting as a business is a non-starter. Business owners don’t wake up thinking ‘aha, I need a podcast’. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t loads of ways that the same skill set can’t be put to work solving some real issue or problem…”
The problem with ‘podcasting’ is that its inherently self-obsessed – thinking and talking more about itself than about other peoples’ problems. Why wouldn’t it be when the word, first and foremost, is a marketing device for Apple?
When we talk about ‘podcasting’ we’re playing into a marketing loop, doing the bidding of the genius who connected the concept of sending audio and video over the web to their own particular plastic gizmo.
‘Podcasting’, I can tell you authoritatively (ok, reasonably authoritatively since we’ve been doing it for 2 1/2 years) is a non-starter in business terms.
Get over it.
What is a starter, though, is being free enough from the limiting, Apple-serving label to spot where delivering audio & video online can fit into a business’s marketing strategy.
Don’t get me wrong. The potential for ‘podcasting’ is immense. In fact, if anything what we now call ‘podcasting’ would better be called ‘internet radio’ and what we now call ‘internet radio’ (a thing that too often tries to replicate real-world radio) should be done away with altogether.
Why isn’t everyone using this technology then? Because when we’ve outgrown the silly brand-centric name and the ‘new technology’ introspection we’re still left with a problem that hasn’t changed throughout history – which is that creating content worth consuming is just plain hard to do, and always will be.
