Hope you all had a good Christmas!

Just before Christmas, I was at a festive podcast do, and people were surprised to hear that we can earn as much $200 a month, and sometimes more, from our Google AdSense clicks on the Storynory website. It’s funny, we thought it wasn’t that much. However, I can’t say that we have done as well as we hoped in December. Despite getting as many as 60 clicks a day, we are currently on $163 for this month, which is not so great at all, considering this is the top time of the year for kids.

What annoyed us was that Google didn’t send us any Christmas gift related ads. We just got a lot of unseasonal low-paying stuff. This contrasted to October when we had all the Halloween ads and good rates per click.

In a huff, I fired off an email to Google AdSense and to my surprise received a very full and personally tailored response. It turns out that you can wrap code around part of your text on your page to tell AdSense which are the key-words you want to use to attract ads. This should help send relevant and seasonal ads - but that you should be aware that it can take 2 weeks for Google to recheck your site. There’s more info here. I’m impressed by their customer service and now have warm Christmassy feelings about Google.

Another thing that amazed people is that you can earn as much as $60 by referring a webhosting contract. I don’t think webhosting that relevant to Storynory’s core audience of 3-11 year olds, but we’ve had a few sales, and it is nice to get that cheque. Most of the webhosting companies, including Dreamhost, Bluehost and Go Daddy have generous affiliate programmes.

The first I heard of the new Digg Podcast directory was when an active digger emailed me last night to say that he had kindly dugg storynory (here). I then stuck another digg in.

Linda of Podcast User Magazine - whose diggs are worth following for podcast news - dropped me a line to say that Storynory is top of the Digg Kids and Family section. Well let’s not get carried away. It only has 4 diggs, and one of them’s mine, but that’s 4 more than any others in the section.

It’s Christmas so the site has been busy anyway, but there do seem to be a few ‘unkowns’ hitting our Feedburner feed, and overall the rate has touched 25 hits in 2 minutes, which is good for us.

I think this Digg Podcast Directory is going to be an important driver for podcasts, but it will probably benefit the techie pods most.

I must admit that I’m quite swayed by the book reviews on Amazon, so I was a little shocked to see this job posted on the Freelance Work Exchange.

Write Online Book Reviews

Must have an amazon.com account and know how to write english well.

Seems like not very good money too!

Time Magazine has named its person of the year as “You” - by which it means “us”, dear readers, or everyone involved in Web 2.0. So congratulations to us - and to Time. It’s a brave move for a magazine that is definately “them’.

P.S.

I think some of the big bloggers are being a bit churlish about Time. If it’s a wheeze to get lots of traffic off bloggers, then they are only doing what most of us do, but don’t like to admit (they are succeeding too, so good for them). More likley it was less calculated, and a generous gesture to a rival form of media. Time’s “Person of the year” is not meant to be news, it’s meant to be a retrospective recognition, and a sign of the times that will be recognised in years to come. Perhaps bloggers don’t always have to be negative….

Google has announced that it’s experimenting with audio ads through its Adsense service. Initially it’s helping advertisers buy space on radio stations, but why not podcasts next? There may also be an opportunity for podcasters to produce audio ads for those advertisers who don’t yet have their audio plug ready. I would have thought selling simple endorsements / sponsorship would be the audio equivalent of a classic Google text ad. All in all, a significant development for the commercial future of audio.

Now that I’m a “Mac User” I thought I had better get round to using Garage Band, Apple’s audio software and part of its iLife set that comes with the computer. It’s particularly good for multi-tracking and mixing in music and sound effects.The first fruit of my long labours with it can be heard over at Storynory.

At first I was baffled by Garage Band, and ended up investing 30 quid in the official Apple Book about it by Mary Plummer. The price of those books really hurts, but at least it told me what to do. Once I got into it, I discovered that there is a really nice collection of high quality music and Sound FX loops. But you can always do with more of a good thing, so I bought a couple of cheap Jingle Bells tracks for Bertie’s Christmas story. In the interests of taste, I used them fairly minimally, so that the episode didn’t sound like a shopping centre.

Apple had a more subtle “holiday bells” loop and some nice cinematic music, giving a Hollywood effect of sorts, along with bird song, footsteps, etc. In places I had four tracks going, including the narrator’s voice.

What I like:

You can master each track separately: so I could choose “female voice” for the narrator, and “jingles” for the music. This seems to make a big difference.

You have very good control of the volume dynamics of each track. Press “a” and you see a blue band beneath it. You can alter its shape to draw a fade in and fade out.

The sound loops that come with it really are top quality.

Once its exported and encoded as an Mp3 in iTunes, it sounds like high quality stuff. Encoding tracks mastered in other software in iTunes has never worked well for me.

What I don’t like:

The sound editor is very hard to use for precision edits. As I’ve said before. SoundForge is way ahead of the game in this respect.

As far as I can tell, you can’t export as a WAV file, which would be nice for making CDs. I think you can only get the project out as compressed MPEG or ACC.

It crashed several times and put my my highish spec Mac into a spin. Don’t believe the enthusiasts who say that Mac never crashes. It does, and I couldn’t even power the damn thing down, and had to pull the battery out.

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You can also make an ‘enhanced’ podcast with different pictures for each chapter showing up in the iTunes / iPod window. This will end up as an MPEG 4 file (.4a). I’m still not sure if this plays on every machine out there, so stuck with MP3 audio only for now.

I was up into the wee hours doing this, and had big christening party for young Misha this weekend, so a very bleary Monday morning. I’m not sure whether I can do this every time, but will certainly be mixing music and sound effects into storynories for special occasions.

WordPress bloggers should beware of spam right now: Akismet, the integrated spam-catcher, appears to be down, or at least is showing “API Key invalid”. The spammers are running rampant. I would be very reluctant to have barriers to commenting, such as moderation or catchpas, so have just installed the very latest versions of Spam Karma 2, and Bad Behaviour. Also been thinking up a long list of dirty words to ban outright over at our kids’ site, Storynory.

P.S. Instead of reinstalling Akismet, I’ve added this plugin within a plugin to Spam Karma 2. SK2 checks comments against Akismet’s blacklist of bad commenters, giving you the best of these two plugins.

Storynory - our podcast for kids - is a year old. Apart from anything, it’s the most enjoyable project that I’ve ever been involved in. I enjoy working with Matthew on the stories about Bertie the Frog - we have a lot of laughs. I enjoy working with Natasha, the actress we hire to read the stories. Creativity is very satisfying. Often I’m up late fiddling with the site or editing the audio, but it never bothers me like a normal job might.

Our aim is to build a children’s brand. It’s a big ambition for a couple of guys with families to feed, but in these days of Web 2.0 almost anything is possible. I think we’ve already succeeded in one way. Storynory is up there with the big Kids and Family brands in iTunes in most parts of the world, and in many territories it’s ahead of them. Of course to become a brand we have to be more than a podcast. We would really like a book deal with a big publishing company to make that first step. This is really what we are hoping for next year. We would also like a sponsor who can understand the sensitivities of speaking to children. These two developments would transform it into a profitable venture.

I believe that the important thing about funding a loss-making business, is at least to have a viable idea about where the revenues might come from in the nearish term. I don’t thing our ambitions are pie-in-the-sky, but we aren’t really the best people at pulling off deals. We might have to get some help with this.

Our syndicated feed, which is basically people downloading our stories from iTunes, is at a record high, with 2,510 subscribers hitting it yesterday. Downloads seem steady at around 75,000 per month. Storynory grows in fits and spurts, and we hope to get an upward lift in December. This is a very targeted and hard-to-reach audience that identifies closely with our product. It’s not hard to see that its value could be huge.

Most people find us in iTunes (thanks Apple!). The website has far fewer listeners than our syndicated feed, but it is growing - and this is important for us, as right now it is our only source of income, bringing us clicks on Google AdSense. We get about 50 to 60 Adsense clicks a day. They are much more valuable to us at times like Easter and Halloween when the Kids and Family ad rates go up. Frustratingly, Google doesn’t seem to be sending us any Christmas ads right now. Bizarrely, it likes to advertise paid-for-audio stories on a site that’s full of free ones.

Matthew points out that last month we had a million hits on the website, and in dotcom days we would have sold it for about $10 million. Unfortunately people are wiser now, and buyers are clued up to the fact that a hit represents one file downloaded - and a webpage is made up of several files including pictures and audio links. Still, it’s a nice sounding stat. Google analytics shows us getting over 800 unique visitors a day this week. Visitors stay with our site for quite a few minutes - up to 20 sometimes - as they listen to stories. They tend to come back too, and they head straight for our archive of over 50 stories.

What makes us different from most of the other indie podcasts is that we’ve invested in talent, namely Natasha Gostwick, a young up-and-coming actress who reads the stories. We aren’t in this because we like the sound of our own voices. We realise that she can read them so much better than we could, and the listeners love her. Strangely I have to reply to emails either addressed to “Natasha” or “Bertie the Frog”.

That’s not to say that we aren’t creative. A lot thought goes into each story. Even the out-of-copyright ones are carefully edited. I enjoy the role of producer, trying to bring out the best in a creative talent, and it’s new and interesting for me to work with an actor, rather than a broadcast journalist. It’s important to keep Natasha stretched to keep her interested. She’s enjoying Alice In Wonderland, which is a demanding text, and she throws herself into the poems like Shock-Headed Peter.

So we’ve invested money as well as time in Storynory. This is why we are really concerned about building an audience, and don’t have the luxury that some podcasters have to say that it doesn’t matter whether or not we please anybody but ourselves.

It’s a long game to build a web presence on a shoestring. We have to manage our costs. Matthew and I think it will take another couple of years to really start hitting the kind of numbers we want. We would like to add some zeros onto the figures quoted above…

There are threats on the horizon. We’ve heard rumours of the director, Sir. Peter Hall, doing some sort of story podcast. I always think that competition is good (for other people). Not so sure about how good it will be for us….

If we can pull this off, I think it will be good for anyone who wants to build a podcast into a business. So please wish us luck.

How iTunes ranks podcasts is a little mysterious, but I think I can confirm that the number of downloads of files - rather than the number of times people check your feed - is what counts. This means, if you want to do well in iTunes, you have to publish regularly, to encourage more downloads. Once a week is probably the minimum.

For a variety of stupid reasons, I was late publishing our latest Storynory episode this week, and we’ve slipped, losing our much prized first ranking in iTunes kids and family in the UK. I hope we will be back up later in the week.

We’ve published regularly every week for a year now, and this is partly why Storynory does reasonably well, and hopefullly will continue to build an audience. So my top tip for iTunes, week in, week out, publish on time.

Problogging.com has sold the Blog Herald to an undisclosed buyer. I used to read it every day when it was edited and partly written by its founder, Duncan Riley, but then it had a really strong voice. It was first with the blog news, and full of rather crude opinions, and I couldn’t help reading it. Under new ownership, it just seemed to lose its personality. I just don’t think that blogs sell well. But despite that, it still claims 20,000 unique visitors a day, and a million unique pageviews a month.

Britscaster’s forum for podcasters has pegged it, but we now have TWO to take its place. Nationalgrid, as mentioned previously, and Tea and Podcasts with a very nice clean and modern interface. Everyone seems to be on their best behaviour at both places, with no bitching as yet, but not many new people that I can see. I’m hovering, looking for a useful conversation to join to show willing….