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.