Paying $30 CPM for Podcast Tracking is Insane
KeithandtheGirl.com podcast 5 times a week for an hour - His (real) night job/passion is as a comedian, She's a singer, their day job is clowns for Hampton NY families, but their podcasting asset is regularly the Number 1 Podcaster (acc'g to PodcastAlley still the major ratings source) Now Im guessing Adam Curry may have more subs for Daily Source Code, but that doesnt matter for my point (nor is there a ratings body/source) : Keithandthegirl this week mentioned here they had 2 goals for Podcasting Expo : Get a free ipod nano and pay less than $30 a month for libsyn.com for ALL their podcasting hosting and USER STATS. Which makes Dave Winer right. They said the $30 is the only outgoing cash expenditure for their podcast. OK, lets be a bit McKinsey here. Imagine you launch a new product (format conversion to proprietary format and user statistics) and imagine how much you cannibalise with your new product from competitive and substitute products. Basically there is no problem Audible is solving and no real demand, other than for their dream to own podcasting (oops "wordcasting" forget about H-264) due to their boring "audio books"- Really, Who would steal an audible product ? OK back to economic rationalism.
Keith and the Girl spend a TOTAL of $30 per month on their podcast in outgoing cashflow. They would never likely in next 12 months spend a cent on Audible's current solution. Debate over. If it was free might be more interesting : "Desert MP3 and get all these great advertising metrics !" In reality, with charging at 3c per listener, I wouldnt expect audible to take more than 0.5% to 1.5% of a tiny tiny market in year 1. Better to build customers ala Skype for their free version, or like AudioHijackPro does for their basic version. Heck, podcasters dont spend on researach yet. The advertiser market isnt big enough etc. If its big enough a market Feedburner will give it away too. Circular.
Back to the $30. Chemda (the girl) mentioned last week they had 500,000 listeners. Remember they have no advertising. Yet, Their Own Choice. They're not even sure what Adam Curry does or what his business model is. Listen to their other LA episodes this week : Here and here. Times that by 3 cents per listen for the charge audible want for tracking stats and .AA conversion I assume : That equals $15,000 for one episode of Keith and Hurl. Times that by 5 shows per week. $75,000 a week. Lots of vig there. Ill give audible benefit of doubt and say 4 weeks per month. That's $300,000 or $3.6 million per year for K+TG to get stats on listeners. (and remember you can listen to podcasts on your PC and not enter any user details so im not sure how audible really think they will get comprehensive user details) Im sure you can run your discount factors, non-active subscriber numbers, monthly churn rates, % of those that dont listen to the whole podcast - to get to a total KeithandtheGirl monthly usage number, but if you want my opinion, Audible just spent $35K on a Wordcast Sponsorship for the "Portable Media Expo" to build "negative brand equity" as they used to say in my DDB ad agency days.
Currently Keith and Girl pay Libsyn $30 per month for hosting and basic user stats (which satisfy Fred Wilson btw, not to mention its farely basic to run user surveys as thepodcastnetwork.com does which can be third party verified) and STILL want to move to a CHEAPER/BETTER SOLUTION : At the same time Audible want an indicative $3.6M from them for minor traffic information (i wont even ask if they could cannibalise total user traffic by moving to .aa format). Further, this WILL NOT be the DECIDING FACTOR in whether they or any podcaster wants to take advertising, or whether the advertiser does.
Someone please tell me where my stats are wrong. 3c per listener according to Audible, and Jeff Jarvis also questioned the $30 CPM or cost per Thousand (a standard metric in all media) Jeff said : "Look at the Audible economics: They’re charging 3 cents just for measuring listenership. That, in ad math (if I have enough fingers and toes) is a $30 CPM just for measurement — $35 for inserting ad ad. That’s a high rate for advertising online these days — very high. So there’s no profit. That won’t work." To buy RSS Ads for example is 3-10 times cheaper than podcast stats on .AA format from Audible. Om doesnt disagree with the issues.
Im in Australia. I must be missing something. I just hope the failure of .AA format isnt blamed on the blogosphere and "not getting it" - that would really suck.
Keith and the Girl spend a TOTAL of $30 per month on their podcast in outgoing cashflow. They would never likely in next 12 months spend a cent on Audible's current solution. Debate over. If it was free might be more interesting : "Desert MP3 and get all these great advertising metrics !" In reality, with charging at 3c per listener, I wouldnt expect audible to take more than 0.5% to 1.5% of a tiny tiny market in year 1. Better to build customers ala Skype for their free version, or like AudioHijackPro does for their basic version. Heck, podcasters dont spend on researach yet. The advertiser market isnt big enough etc. If its big enough a market Feedburner will give it away too. Circular.
Back to the $30. Chemda (the girl) mentioned last week they had 500,000 listeners. Remember they have no advertising. Yet, Their Own Choice. They're not even sure what Adam Curry does or what his business model is. Listen to their other LA episodes this week : Here and here. Times that by 3 cents per listen for the charge audible want for tracking stats and .AA conversion I assume : That equals $15,000 for one episode of Keith and Hurl. Times that by 5 shows per week. $75,000 a week. Lots of vig there. Ill give audible benefit of doubt and say 4 weeks per month. That's $300,000 or $3.6 million per year for K+TG to get stats on listeners. (and remember you can listen to podcasts on your PC and not enter any user details so im not sure how audible really think they will get comprehensive user details) Im sure you can run your discount factors, non-active subscriber numbers, monthly churn rates, % of those that dont listen to the whole podcast - to get to a total KeithandtheGirl monthly usage number, but if you want my opinion, Audible just spent $35K on a Wordcast Sponsorship for the "Portable Media Expo" to build "negative brand equity" as they used to say in my DDB ad agency days.
Currently Keith and Girl pay Libsyn $30 per month for hosting and basic user stats (which satisfy Fred Wilson btw, not to mention its farely basic to run user surveys as thepodcastnetwork.com does which can be third party verified) and STILL want to move to a CHEAPER/BETTER SOLUTION : At the same time Audible want an indicative $3.6M from them for minor traffic information (i wont even ask if they could cannibalise total user traffic by moving to .aa format). Further, this WILL NOT be the DECIDING FACTOR in whether they or any podcaster wants to take advertising, or whether the advertiser does.
Someone please tell me where my stats are wrong. 3c per listener according to Audible, and Jeff Jarvis also questioned the $30 CPM or cost per Thousand (a standard metric in all media) Jeff said : "Look at the Audible economics: They’re charging 3 cents just for measuring listenership. That, in ad math (if I have enough fingers and toes) is a $30 CPM just for measurement — $35 for inserting ad ad. That’s a high rate for advertising online these days — very high. So there’s no profit. That won’t work." To buy RSS Ads for example is 3-10 times cheaper than podcast stats on .AA format from Audible. Om doesnt disagree with the issues.
Im in Australia. I must be missing something. I just hope the failure of .AA format isnt blamed on the blogosphere and "not getting it" - that would really suck.
From Jarvis : Let’s say that MP3s could ping their creators when they are played — at the creator’s option, with full transparency for the listeners. Then the creators could count and control their own stats without having to pay someone to do it via a proprietary system, and report those stats to sponsors. That’s the sort of thing I want to see. Same with RSS; I like Feedburner telling me how many are reading even cached feeds of mine and I’m grateful to them for telling me that — without charging me three cents a read as Audible is; without charging me anything — but I also wish I could get those stats directly so I could do my own analysing of them.
posted by redbarren at 3:53 PM
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