Did podcasting…die?

Once upon a time, there was excitement in the Land of the Podcasts. Books were written and flowed through the shipping departments of Amazon, Borders, and Barnes and Noble. Dozens of podcast directories were dotted across the Internet. The technology attracted the attention of large companies such as Yahoo! and Apple. And in a small house on the south side of Chicago, a younger and more innocent author of this site began producing a podcast designed to showcase acoustic musicians he’d recorded himself.

That was many, many years ago, of course. At least three. With my recent reentry into the world of podcasting, I decided to do some research so this time, at least, I could get it right and perhaps build up something of a listener base. I purchased a book, Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, which came highly rated on Amazon.com. Although the book dated to 2006 (there were very few more-recent choices), I though to myself, “How much could things have changed?”

Ha.

I understand that technology changes quickly. But I’d wrongly assumed that, three years on, there would be more interest and greater opportunities in the world of podcasting. Imagine my surprise when I began typing in the addresses of the sites listed in the book, only to find that many had been replaced by those fake links pages (“thebestdoughnuts.com—the best of the internet and more”). Yahoo!’s podcast directory was gone. Many of the sites that remained from “the old days” were loaded with spam or hadn’t seen any updates for months or years.

To be fair, a few are left, but nothing that retains a level of user activity reflective of the kind of vibrant podcasting community that apparently once roamed the Great Plains in numbers that would shock visitors from the East.

Obviously, something had gone fundamentally wrong. So I started to dig a little deeper. I looked at books, I checked out websites, and although hard numbers are hard to come by, I started to put together an image of what must have happened to podcasting as a whole, and it boils down to one fundamental problem: incest.

Many of the references I found regarding podcast promotion focused on promoting your show to other podcasters. On some level, this makes sense. Why promote to people who have no interest? But let’s consider the following scenario:

Timmy produces a podcast about classic motorcycles. Tommy has a podcast about indie bands. Timmy offers Tommy a deal: play a promo from my show on yours, and I’ll play your promo on mine.

Great. So now Timmy listens to Tommy’s show so he can hear his promo played, and Tommy returns the favor. And they’ve both doubled their number of listeners, not counting their moms. Anyone see a problem with this business plan?

The key to successful podcasting, I think, is reaching people who wouldn’t ordinarily listen to podcasts. It’s not enough to target a community of hobbyists content with slapping each other on the back. And there’s the rub.

Now that the podcast community seems to have receded a bit, I humbly suggest that the (non-illusory) opportunities are actually greater than they were a few years ago. For one thing, there is less chaff to get in the way of finding the wheat, meaning that one no longer has to search through 1,000 podcasts to find one worth listening to repeatedly. Perhaps only 100. Still not a great ratio, but an improvement for sure, and that number can probably be reduced further by limiting one’s search to podcasts that have been regularly produced for a certain period of time. We can only assume that practice makes better, at least.

Additionally, Internet access is finally ready to become truly portable. Not only are many phones and laptops capable of grabbing the Internet pretty much anywhere, but the Internet-enabled car stereo is on the horizon, providing a potentially real alternative to satellite and terrestrial radio.

Time-shifting, the practice of listening to or viewing a show at a time other than when it is broadcast, is becoming part of our culture. Arguably, watching movies on videotape was the beginning of this trend, and now we’ve progressed to digital video recorders and on-demand programming. I watch House regularly, but I only recently learned what time it’s on and I have only a vague idea that it’s on Fox—the Tivo grabs it and I don’t sweat the details.

I suspect my situation isn’t uncommon. Listening to podcasts, via digital audio player or an Internet connection, provides the same level of convenience for what we might in the broadest sense call “radio.” I don’t even remember the last time I listened to “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! over the air.

Big-name radio types such as Steve Dahl and Adam Carolla have begun the heavy lifting—promoting podcasting to a whole new audience, i.e. that non-enthusiast gang that needs to get sucked in if the technology is going to become truly mainstream.

I created the Big Noisy Bug Movie Podcast with the goal of getting into the habit of regularly producing a show. It’s grown listeners at about the rate I expected, and although I don’t think it will ever be the most-downloaded podcast, I believe it’s improving over time. I have quite a few ideas for other shows, and over the next year I hope to begin producing several of them. If Internet radio does take off with the public, I plan to be on the ground floor.

In the meantime, want to swap promos?