Holland Cooke has quite possibly the most amateurish website I've seen and buried within that website is a Power Point presentation on podcasting that's equally garish. If you can get past the lounge-singer flashy things and glitzy fonts, though - the presentation has some pretty good thoughts in it.
Some of the information that I found interesting was:
- Yet another validation of my thoughts that 50% or less of listeners use any kind of podcatcher
- Another validation of my feelings that audience is pretty much impossible to measure with any kind of accuracy
- a great quote "Content is King" (not that one, I've been saying that for years) "Portability of content is King Kong". So true.
And lastly, the concept of the Long Tail. The Long Tail is a pretty well established statistical concept that is used, amongst other places, as a retail sales model. If you ran a store and put a graph together with your sales on the vertical axis and your products on the horizontal axis, you would likely end up with a big peak on the left and a long lowering line going away to the right. In essence, you would (hopefully) see that something like 20% of your products are doing 80% of your sales and the other 80% of your products are doing the last 20%. This "long tail" to the right is considered undesirable in brick-and-mortar stores because shelf space costs money. Internet commerce made the pursuit of the long tail affordable because stock is stored in someone's basement instead of on expensive shelves.
I never considered this model in the context of podcasting. If the vertical axis were replaced by listeners and the horizontal axis replaced by time, you would end up with a long tail. The older the show, the less listeners it generally has and is therefore less desirable to advertisers. But perhaps not completely undesirable.
Maybe those older shows can become part of the revenue model for smaller or entry-level advertisers. Maybe the long tail can be pursued in podvertising as well.
It was worth all the blinky fonts to weed that gem out. The presentation is here.
Tags: long tail, podvertising
Jon,
'Amateurish???"
In Jack Benny voice: "Well!!!"
Seen Matt Drudge's site?
You've heard the expression "When in Rome...?"
My lounge-act site is FOR lounge acts! Talk Radio people. Fewer right angles than yours, by design.
Further discussion of volume-of-content-vs.-form aside: In appreciation of your well-buried compliments, this freebie, for your readers: http://members.aol.com/ntrideas/podcastingresearch.pdf
At the risk of your critiquing my MSWord format too, this is a summary of what I believe to be the first-ever national survey of non-music topics iPod owners say they would download. In effect, "a podcasting playlist."
You yourself would seem to benefit from the top-testing topic, eh?
Peace,
HC
Posted by: Holland Cooke | May 26, 2006 5:28 AM | Permalink to Comment