In his latest article for Marketwatch, Frank Barnako refers to a blog post about podcasting written by Mark Cuban, the Internet billionaire who now owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. In it, Mr. Cuban refers to Audionet, the company that he sold for US$6 billion, and mentions that podcasting seems very similar to the original streaming audio content that it and other companies pioneered in the mid-to-late 1990s. Just like many of those audio shows ultimately failed to turn a profit, he thinks that “it will be rare to find anyone making money from originating podcasts.”
Why? Because the Internet is “the ultimate long tail environment,” writes Mr. Cuban, meaning that it’s effective at addressing the needs of niche audiences but not so much the needs of mass media markets. So, “unless you are repurposing content from another medium,” he doesn’t think podcasting will attain any greater success than the Dan & Scott Show and other streaming audio programs from the previous decade.
As for the prospects of selling advertising time during podcasts or finding sponsors, Mr. Cuban says: “Even with Google Adsense for RSS, it’s going to be really tough to do it as a fulltime job and make minimum wage back.” He warns all podcastsers to look at streaming audio content providers from the early days of the Web and remember that “there is a good chance that their history is your future.”
In other podcasting-related news, Mr. Barnako notes that Microsoft employees who create podcasts are calling them “blogcasts,” according to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer column. That column also quotes podcaster Chris Pirillo, whose show features ads for Microsoft’s Windows Media, as saying: “”I still don’t like the word [podcast] as much as I think people who own iPods do.”