Introduction to Podcasting: Is There a Real Market?

The iTune store welcomes you with a very interesting statement:

The iTunes Store offers over 100,000 podcast episodes from independent creators and big names like HBO, NPR, ESPN, The Onion, CBS Sports, and The New York Times.

You probably know what a podcast is, and if you don’t there is a whole page dedicated to it at the Wikipedia where there is more theory than you really need. So I am not going to redefine podcasts and podcasting here. My purpose is different. As you could see at the beginning of the article, there is an offer of podcasts. Now, would there be an offer without a market? Experience has taught me that not.

The market is there, thought not as “ready” as one may expect from a technology that develops fast and grows in popularity more and more each day. And the market is actually not ready not necessarily because the public is not ready but because the offer is still low.

There is a slow movement towards a different approach to marketing – and it takes a skilled eye to observe the trend – but the reality is there: the way companies approach the public is changing. They become more open, more focused on the actual needs of the people and more entertaining. Huge corporations like for instance Nivea and Nike are already moving towards a Web 3.0 approach – connecting to customers directly, becoming more transparent about their services and products, engaging customers through their own online media networks rather than by paying for TV ads no one really likes to watch. So you see, if the big players already dive into the new media it makes perfect sense for small companies to test the waters too.

The online media is no longer reduced to static HTML web pages. The modern sites are now dynamic, allowing for user-company communication (either in the form of comments, forums, contact forms, etc). The new websites are enriched with videos and sound. Professional podcasts are very effective and catchy. It’s relatively easy to implement them into a web page and let the users choose whether to listen or to download and save for later reference.

The ideal podcast is informative and entertaining, aside professional. Usually the purpose of the podcast is to complete the information on a site, to add a plus of usability (let’s say the users don’t have time to read the information, so they will download the podcast and listen to it on their way to work, on their iPods) and interactivity. The only problem is that, aside some businessmen and the teenagers who always look for something trendy there are not enough iPod owners to talk about podcasting for the offline media.

But there are other important advantages to professional podcasts and this is a topic of tomorrow’s entry.