August 15th, 2005
Gillmor Gang dissects the emerging podshow
On the most recent Gillmor Gang podcast, Steve Gillmor gathered myself, Doc Searls, Sam Whitmore, Dana Gardner, Robert Scoble and one of Podshow.com’s/Boku Communications‘ founders along with Adam Curry, Ron Bloom, to talk about the future of podcasting and a few other choice topics (such as whether CNET/ZDNet is incumbent media and Google’s freeze-out of CNET reporters). Bloom was quite articulate on the business opportunities for his company, citing the $25 to $30 billion of advertising currently spent on what he termed "tired" radio advertising that will provide a capital reserve for making podcasting a business.
The emerging blogosphere will have a tougher time, he said, in that there’s only about $8 billion of ad spending online currently. Of course, there’s plenty of TV and print ad money that will move online over time, but that has been a relatively slow process so far. Bloom also said that his podcasting model is different than blogs–he isn’t looking for 100 million content creators. Instead, he prefers 15,000 content creators and 100 million listeners, and demand driven programming. On the other hand, the market will get hundreds of thousands of content creators vying for attention, which doesn’t obviate Bloom’s model, which aims to cultivate and pick the cream of the crop and monetize it.
He claimed that podcasting is past the proof of concept phase. His proof: top VC firms investing money, stablizing infrastructure, vital partnerships emerging, mainstream media jumping on board (with crappy content, he noted), the sorting out of formats and listening devices and making it easier to produce content and cheaper to listen to it. There might be a perfect storm brewing here, withBloom and Curry at the forefront, eyeing the big pool of radio money. Get deeper into the dialog–listen to the Gang podcast…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
