Getting Your Podcasts Some Ads

When Steve Jobs says there are 160 thousand podcasts, it has to be a thriving business, right?  Well for some it certainly is, but those are few and far apart.  Basically, podcasts are recurring video shows, served on-site and through RSS.  Recurring should mean weekly, but now daily is the new weekly, so the more the merrier.  The ad carrot for podcasts is far more enticing as it can be north of $50 per cpm.  That ad is sold as a sponsorship and has a list of prerequisites a mile long.  More realistic are bulk ads which come in form of pre/post-roll or banners that pay $1-8 per cpm, which is still a lot.

How do you get to that carrot?  Well, you have a few factors to work with: viewer-ship, content type, your brand, and infrastructure.  The general rule of thumb is 100k views a month.  This is measured by actual downloads from various sources, and is the minimum bar to sign a real ad campaign.  Now, that number is skewed up if your content isn’t clearly related to a market, and more so if it is concerning for advertisers (like sex or cursing).  One method completely at your disposal is your brand, which lowers the viewer bar greatly or raises it, depending on where you land.  So, if you’re not Sony, it’s time to get building and make your show a property and community.

The best first step is your own destination site, which will usually directly handle 30% of your viewer-ship.  Your infrastructure is adjustable by you but at great cost, as this is principally hiring ad sales, management, and staff.  Today, internal infrastructure better maximizes ad value, but outsourced infrastructure at least gets you in the game.

We have a number of highly successful podcast communities built out in Squarespace — Break-a-Leg, and Dad-Labs for starters.  Many use Blip.tv for their streaming service, and they’re highly recommended for a good experience.  To sum up our advice: focus your energy where you can on a good show, a brand, guerilla marketing and outsource as much infrastructure as you can until you reach your magic viewer number.

Also, check out our manual guide for posting audio podcasts in your journal entries here.

Comments

[Kris Black]

Any chance that a future feature of SquareSpace would offer a (Flash.swf) play button in posts that link to podcast (MP3) files? Similar to how PodPress (http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/) works on a WordPress blog like another site of mine, the Dollar Bin (http://www.thedollarbin.net)?

This was a great insightful article. Thanks for posting it.

[Team Squarespace]

It's possible to include your own, if you've got one you prefer. This sort of change is something that will occur when we overhaul our WYSIWYG interface in a month or so.

[katie~]

um. well im pretty new at this, but i'm a 17 year old in high school. I get pretty bored, so i figured i would make a website, where girls or guys my age can talk about their feelings & what upsets them. I don't know. I just decided all this about 25 minutes ago. I'm an independent person, & i figured I would create something like this for the less independent people, that need someone to lean on.
check it out.
I think it's pretty cool.

[Chloe Prams]

Apple have produced some top quality designs latly but i think they, along with microsoft should be more open about their current development to encourage more beta testing. Firefox..etc has nightly builds, yet appls and ms only release beta 's unexpedly every now and then. Nightly builds would allow bugs to be caught quickly and improve user communication.