Monetizing Podcasts and Videoblogs

And since most people can scratch their itch for both publication and consumption from free sites, it’s an uphill battle to find a way to monetize a blog and yet cover the bandwidth costs that have to get paid somewhere.

Lesson #4: In the End, Everything Gets Aggregated or Co-Opted
There is a tension between the commercial and noprofit proponents in the podcasting/videoblogging movement. But this debate is hardly new. Mainstream media stories, in their analysis of emerging communication technologies, bounce between the dual themes. See if you can remember these discussions of yore:
--"Look how email is changing the culture."/"How can email be used in business?"--"Look how websites are changing the culture."/"How can websites be used in business?"--"Look how instant messaging is changing the culture."/"How can instant messaging be used in business?"--"Look how blogs are changing the culture."/"How can blogs be used in business?"

And so it goes. Eventually, each of these technologies became a tool for business and/or mainstream media, was absorbed into the communication landscape, and is now taken for granted, regardless of what the idealists might insist about the nature of the "true" purpose of those tools.

So how about podcasts and videoblogs? If a new medium is cheap and accessible to anyone, it’s certainly easy for media incumbents to enter. Mainstream news outlets, having embraced a proactive "blogging strategy," were ready for podcasts. Podcasts provide a means for traditionally print-only media, such as The New York Times, to begin producing audio content and extend their brand even farther outside their traditional scope.

Advertisers are also discovering the medium as the ultimate in opt-in messaging. The marketing, positioning, and branding power of podcasts to a fan base of customers is being explored and experimented extensively by mainstream advertisers and agencies. Some understandably crass attempts at co-opting the format have resulted in "flogs" (fake blogs) and "splogs" (spam blogs), but by and large, podcasts with subtle or even overt messaging are producing results.

Getting Signed
One of the most notable business models of videoblogging and podcasting is to "get signed" (or "sell out," for the cynical) to a greater or lesser degree, leveraging blogospheric fame into a mainstream (or at least, more traditional online) media deal.

As mainstream TV distribution technologies add DVRs, interactive TV, and downloadable clips, they move away from a pure channels approach and enable the transactional, one-clip-at-a-time online media consumption experience. Once everyone has a DVR that accepts videoblogs, or one that filters the highly edited "best of online video," online content becomes little more than packing materials for TV-based ads.

Many mobile phones now ship with multimedia features, and mobile content consumption is a big part of most carriers’ future revenue plans. This is quickly creating a market for speech-based audio and short-form video content—just the kinds of content that podcasters specialize in. So another way that podcasters "go mainstream" is by signing a content distribution deal with a mobile phone carrier. The carriers don’t want to pay a lot for the content, and fortunately the content is already being made for next to nothing. It’s a match made in heaven.

An almost identical evolution occurred with website aggregators in the late 1990s and blogs in the early ’00s.