Podcasting is still a niche
Paul Colligan announced the separation of Podshow (never heard of them) and Sirius (definitely heard of them) with a post entitled “Podshow And Sirius Part - Satellite Radio Becomes Even Less Important.” The post almost seems angry, as if Sirius did something wrong. In fact, Sirius made a business decision and I’m sure they’ve thought it through. Here’s my take…
First, Sirius is a mainstream brand. Their infrastructure only allows a fixed number of channels. As such, they need to take advantage of every channel to provide mainstream content to their customers. Podcasting has self-defined itself as a niche. That is not a critique of podcasting though. Being a niche is fine. But a niche is not mainstream, by definition. Search Google for “Podshow.” The summary of the first result reads, “Find great podcasts, top podcasts, podsafe music, indie music, fun people and the funniest videos on the PodShow Network.” Immediately, two things popped out to me: the word indie and the continued use of “pod.” Indie suggests counterculture. Pod suggests iPod. Podcasting has succeeded in branding itself as a niche, which can be a good strategy. But Sirius is not going after a niche market. Different business models, different content requirements.
Second, podcasting is inherently limited by the growth of the iPod (in branding and consumer education). The majority of consumers are not tech-saavy. Even my peers and myself (young, educated, early-adopting males), who are supposed to be the target market, are confused. The bewildering array of file formats, media players, DRM restrictions and software bugs are all challenges when introducing new technology and growing beyond an early adopter phase.
Third, awareness is outpacing usage. Look at recent statistics from Edison Media Research. Awareness grew from 22 to 37 percent while usage grew 11 to 13 percent. Tom Webster has some brilliant analysis on the numbers he came up with:
One thing that Podcasters simply have to come to grips with is the difficulty in introducing a new technology or a new medium to the mainstream population… The obvious problem is that far, far more people are interested in podcasting’s central propositions (timeshifting and ad-skipping audio content) than own an iPod–or indeed, will ever own an iPod… For those of you that wonder why a couple hundred million Americans just don’t ‘get’ podcasting, I would humbly counter-propose that you just don’t ‘get’ hundreds of millions of people… Certainly, the mobile phone may be to podcasting what cars are to radio–when it comes installed, standard, on every phone you buy, folks will start to ‘get it.’ Better yet, when all of our radios are equipped with wifi access and RSS readers, few may even realize that they are listening to time-shifted content instead of live radio. That will not happen overnight, this year or even next. But it will happen… Millions of Americans learned about podcasting this year, and the vast majority responded…’meh.’ You can grouse about the numbers, you can grumble about mainstream America’s apparent inability to grasp how great podcasting is, and you can blog about ‘the end of podcasting.’ … Podcasting now teeters at the edge of the chasm on the consumer adoption curve, with mainstream adoption across the other side. The numbers make that clear.
Podcasting has some clear benefit, nobody doubts that. Rich metadata allows targeted content–a valuable proposition to consumers who seem constantly pressed for time. Like Webster says, to move beyond the early adopter phase, podcasters have to focus more on the benefits instead of the technology. Sure it’s cool, but where’s the value? Sell the value (it’s there) and podcasting might break out of its niche.
