First off, what would a podcast cost? I know that this is a highly variable value but let's think about it. Let's assume that a $50K a year employee is going to be the talent. Further, let's assume that this is pretty much a one-person show in that this person will design the content and the show itself and that the show is weekly. How much prep time would a show take? A day? Perhaps another half day to produce the show? Let's call it 12 hours for that single person which includes all of the research and pre-production work.
Now we all know organizations and there's no way something like a podcast is going to go off withouth at least one meeting per week. Let's throw 4 people in the meeting and call it an hour. 4 hours.
The host is likely going to need at least one other person to help them setup, record, and tear down so that's another person at...say...2 hours.
The IT people will have to become involved at some point in order to get the show onto the corporate web site. Let's call that 1 hour and outright ignore the cost of putting together the page or portal that's going to hold the podcasts to begin with.
That's 19 hours a week to put together a single podcast. Assuming everyone involves makes an average of $50K, that's $25/hr X 19 = 475 a week to put a show together. $1,900 a month or $24,700 a year.
For many organizations that's a drop in the bucket. For others, however, $2K a month will buy a lot of newspaper and billboard ads.
I know these numbers are ridiculously loose, but I think it's a good little eye opener as to how much a single weekly podcast can cost. And even more importantly, how much 'proven' advertising that can buy from established channels which may be the hard sell factor.
