Quick and Dirty Money?

The PW Daily e-mail subject line “Holtzbrinck Launches Podcasting Business” sure got my attention. After stumbling around for a few years wondering what, if anything, to do with podcasting, at last someone in publishing was taking the plunge. I've been producing podictionary—a podcast for word lovers—for more than two years. I started it to build an audience for a St. Martin's Griffin book that hit stores this summer. If Holtzbrinck is successful, it will likely mean my efforts haven't all been for naught. But will my publisher be able to overcome the challenges I've come up against? Building a podcasting audience is tough, as is tying podcast success to book sales. And when it comes to attracting ad revenue, no one has found a model that works—yet. To Holtzbrinck and other publishers looking to get into the game, I offer one podcaster's view.

Audience

Since 2005, when Apple's iTunes software added the ability to subscribe to 3,000 podcasts, TV and radio broadcasters have repurposed their material, swelling the number of podcasts available. There is lots of competition for audience.

But strangely, iTunes is one of the things standing in the way of building podcast audiences. The software has become the de facto Web portal for podcasts; no one else even comes close. That's great if your audience has the digital media player application; but not all potential listeners do. While there are tens of millions of people who have downloaded iTunes, there are hundreds of millions who have not. Compare this to YouTube—the de facto video portal—where all you need is a Web browser; every computer has one of those. Because of iTunes's limitations, many podcasts have established Web sites where listeners can hear episodes or subscribe by RSS outside of iTunes. The problem with that is that, on the one hand, a Web site visit requires action, which a subscription doesn't and, on the other, most RSS readers deal poorly with audio and video files.

Book Sales

Holtzbrinck has built its podcast business model on the success of Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty. Holtzbrinck says that she and the five other podcasters who make up the Quick and Dirty Tips Network have had 10 million downloads between them. My podcast has had three million downloads, and I've found that the greatest gains in audience for my podcast have come when iTunes has promoted it. Exposure for my podcast in magazines, newspapers, dozens of Web sites and even prominent exposure on the front page of the “Life” section of USA Today showed marginal gains by comparison. It's hard to move an audience from one medium to another, and I'm sure that's true of listeners buying books as well. In April, Grammar Girl's audiobook did well. But guess what: it was selling on iTunes.

Ad Revenue

For podcasting to be profitable in its own right, it will need advertising revenue. Although some podcasts are beginning to make a go of it, ad revenue has been slow in coming to podcasting. YouTube's success may have hurt podcasting not only by supplanting it as the new hot thing, but by being too quirky to support ads. Even though the best podcasts build audiences that listen episode after episode, media buyers haven't yet shown with their spending that they recognize this difference.

Grammar Girl's Web site has not only audio files but a transcript of her podcast. That's because people often Google to find a podcast. Google works great for text, but have you ever found an audio file? I post transcripts for the same reason. So now podcasts are more than just audio or video—they're text-based, too. In essence, they've become blogs. This means added potential for ad revenue, but it also complicates the business model since Google ads are a different market from audio ads.

Before Holtzbrinck revamped Grammar Girl's Web site, Fogarty had included my podcast as one she hoped to draw listeners from. We've talked, and I like and admire her. I really hope that she and Holtzbrinck make this work; for them—and for the rest of us.