Podcast Business Model / Numbers

I’m glad to say that Storynory finally broke through 4000 daily subscribers for its feed.  The website is currently doing about 1,100 uniques a day.   It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that iTunes etc is about 4 X as important as the traditional website for this type of audio podcast.

Downloads are at around 140,000 a month.  This is of course the key metric, as sponsorship is generally sold per thousand downloads.  I’m told that finding a serious sponsor will be much easier when we get into the 400,000 to 600,000 range.   Storynory has a big advantage over topical podcasts, because people come back and download several stories from the archives, especially when they are about to go on holiday, where I think a more newsy podcast probably has to rely mostly on downloads of the latest show.

Then I think we can expect $25 -$30 per thousand downloads if we split the revenue with a media broker.  Or perhaps more if we find the sponsor ourselves.

We have always received approaches from potential partners on a regular basis, but recently the quality has been noticeibly higher and some interesting  discussions go on.    There are some people who have imaginative ideas about making money out of podcasts in various ways, but I’ve sworn to keep them under wraps.

On thing I can say which is no secret is that Wizzard Media, which is part of the same group that owns podcast hosts Libsyn and Switchpod,  is actively raising advertising deals for podcasts that can be neatly inserted before and after the show by the webhost.   As they host most of the major podcasts,  Wizzard look set to become the market leader in this field.  Of course when Google /  Feedburner get going that will be pretty serious too, as they are in an ideal position to auction podcasts ads via AdSense and to insert them onto the feeds.

What this all ads up to is that podcasting is starting to shape itself into a business.

Right now our strategy is to concentrate really hard on the content and find partners to do the business side.  In the end, you have to concentrate on what you are best at.

This entry was posted on July 18th, 2007 and is filed under Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.