Monetizing Podcasts and Videoblogs

Just like the definition of "streaming" (which once meant something technical and now simply means "online media"): "podcast" sort of means anything now. If you have some audio clips embedded in a Flash player on your web page, which happens to have a blog on it, you have an audioblog in the loose sense, even if a user isn’t able to transfer it to her iPod.

The loose definition doesn’t really matter now, because for a lot of audio and video, people simply consume it online. Sure, MP3s can go onto the iPod, but that doesn’t mean they will. YouTube isn’t even a blog, and it certainly doesn’t allow you to download video. MySpace is littered with "messages" that embed videos hosted elsewhere. The point is, once the technology got easy enough, it became just another variation on internet multimedia.

So how do you monetize a podcast? How do you monetize a blog? While some tools might not be relevant for larger blogs, the usual suspects are all the same: tip jars (PayPal donation boxes), AdSense, and other affiliate programs, opt-in email lists, and merchandising. In fact, while you can search for articles on "monetize podcast" in your favorite search engine, "monetize blog" will give you far more insight—most of it just as applicable.

Lesson #3: Bandwidth Is Free For Everyone But You
One of the cruelest lessons in life for a media-based internet startup is bandwidth costs. And one of the even crueler ironies is how poorly the dot-coms that tried to—gasp!—charge for online hosting did compared to those that gave it away for free.

A recent article on mediapost.com estimated that YouTube spends more than a million dollars a month on bandwidth, but that it could bring in several million dollars with ads if it placed enough of them. So just to add to the injustice, YouTube can host it all for free—and pay for the bandwidth with VC dollars and Google stock—just because they proved that they can create ad inventory. They don’t even have to sell the inventory yet—there’s plenty of time for Google to figure out what it would like to do with it.

For years and years, there was this mystery: What would happen when the bandwidth prices for hosting finally went low enough that anyone could upload their content? Would all that brilliant, overlooked, unsigned talent suddenly flourish in a content world with no barriers?

Well, as long as you don’t want to make money on your content, the answer is yes. Anyone who has a cell phone camera or a webcam—or, for that matter, an old VHS tape and the right hardware and software—can create and upload a video that will be hosted completely free by one of the dozens of video hosting services.

But if you want to control the look and feel of your site (if you are a content producer) or if you want to syndicate content (if you are a content aggregator), you will find that you still have to pay for the bandwidth.