Podcasting – Business vs. Consumer

Podcasting is on fire. Audio podcasts are relatively easy to create and number in the tens of thousands. Video podcasts number in the tens or maybe hundreds. However, given time we can expect the market to drive both demand and content creation for both the audio and video versions of this communication tool.

Consumers love their podcasts and business people are also starting to use podcasting. But there are some very significant issues with podcasting that need to be addressed before this tool enjoys success in the business community. Let’s start by understanding a consumer podcast.

Consumer Podcasting

In a consumer podcast, content is created and the content owner looks for the largest possible audience. The content owner hopes to draw a huge audience, sell advertising and make money. This is, more or less, a shotgun approach and it has some serious flaws.

• Bandwidth. When a consumer subscribes to a podcast feed, the typical experience is that the consumer automatically receives each new podcast file from the content creator to whom the consumer subscribed. The consumer gets this file even if they do not want it, thus the delivery of the file uses bandwidth which is charged to the content creator. More than one content creator has had to increase their hosting plan and pay for excess bandwidth due to becoming “popular”.
• Tracking. Advertisers currently have no way to track who watches a given podcast so they are unable to calculate a return on their advertising dollar investment. This is similar to the old days of web advertising where banners were sold by the impressions (now days they are sold by the click and each click is tracked and evaluated).

As a result of spiraling bandwidth costs and no real advertising tracking, may content creators are feeling the financial pain of becoming too popular. However, necessity is the mother of invention so I have no doubt that a solution will arise soon that will make the tracking of a podcast more palatable to advertisers, and thereby remove the barrier keeping many companies from advertsing inside of a podcast.

Business Podcasts

Business communication is all about delivering a message to a targeted audience (prospect, client, employee, stock holder, etc.). Business communication is all about creating sales leads, training, informing and gather data. The current podcasting method which offers no tracking and unlimited bandwidth (and cost) is not going to be very attractive to the marketing savvy business person.

We at WGI have come up with an elegant, simple and effective solution for the business podcaster. Our new business podcast service creates a system that gives business owners a way to gather data on each viewer while offering the viewer the ability to download a podcast or watch a streaming version in real time.

• Registration and reporting. We have created a podcast delivery system that adds a registration system in front of each download. This lets business owners gather data prior to spending money on download bandwidth.
• Bandwidth control. We built our system to allow for podcasts to be hosted on our servers, our clients servers or any server. This separates the bandwidth cost from the data gathering and reporting activities. Our clients are able to shop for the lowest cost download bandwidth while still enjoying our data gathering and reporting service.
• Reports. We provide detailed reports (based upon reg form data). These reports are updated in real time and are available 24 hours a day.

So, there you have a brief overview of business podcasting versus consumer podcasting. Like always feel free to comment.