Pro-Podcasters

BitPass have announced a service for helping PodCasters charge for their work via a subscription – enabling a new wave of professional podcasters to hit the airwaves:

‘BitPass Unplugged is a patent-pending, powerful new service that will allow podcasters ranging from hobbyists to mainstream media organizations to introduce à-la-carte and subscription pricing to podcasts.  The service leverages the loyalty of a growing number of listeners who prefer to download music, audio blogs, radio shows and other content and have it transferred automatically to portable media devices for listening at the user’s convenience.’ 

Do you think people will be willing to pay to listen to a podcast?  I seem to remember a lot of talk about subscription based blogging a year or two back and the general consensus being that people wouldn’t be willing to pay to read a blog as there were so many other options out there to read. 

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Too early for most shows to charge, maybe for the long-tail of your achive or a “best of” show.  I wonder how http://www.podshows.com is doing, they started changing right away. 

The best model seems to be product placement (Senseo coffee machine anyone?)  or striking deals with bands to promote music or traditional NPR ads. 

Bandwidth is will be expensive if you’re popular, I’m mean really expensive.  Adam Curry has 80k-100k downloads of his shows at 20MB or more each, that’s a lot of expensive bandwidth. 

But people are getting more used to paying for content online, as a blogger and now a podcaster, I have to say podcasting is way, way more difficult.  My shows take about 2-4 hours each not including a week’s worth of prep for each show. 

I’m thinking of producing a podcast just for kids…maybe someone would pay for family-oriented shows like that.  We’ll see. 

For individual podcasters, I can’t see revenue from advertising or paid for subscription paying for more than hosting.  For the vast majority it’s simply never going to be profitable in any real sense. 

Podcasting networks may become larger revenue generators, but then in my personal opinion the lion’s share of profits seems likely to go to the network which is unlikely to be run on a co-operative, all podcasts are equal basis. 

Nobody’s worked out how to make serious money from blogging, as far as I know, and podcasitng faces even greater challenges when it comes to commercialisation.