Podcasting guru Michael Geoghegan is a partner with three other wine enthusiasts in Grape Radio, a podcast devoted to wine. It costs $1,300 to buy a sponsorship of one of the weekly shows and Grape Radio is almost sold out out. Geoghegan expects the venture to do $55,000 in revenue this year with about $12,000 in expenses. That’s a very respectable gross profit of over 75%.

He breaks out weekly expenses this way:
$300 for audio editing

• $100 for hosting and bandwidth
• $200 for gifts for guests
• $250 for miscellaneous

Grape radio is registered as an S Corporation in California. Capital costs were as follows:

• Professional studio: $25,000 (Geoghegan says a professional-looking studio greatly enhances your sponsorship appeal)
• Portable audio equipment: $2,000
• Miscellaneous studio equipment (sound deadening, microphone booms, etc.): $2,500

The biggest benefit, though, is that Grape Radio is becoming a major influencer in the wine industry. It’s the 7th most popular wine blog and the top wine podcast. The $55K is just a start. The partners can build this franchise into a top media influence in its market with a diversified revenue stream if they choose to do that.

Final comments from Tony Kahn’s talk. Emphasis added:

”People sometimes ask us how they can use podcasting to get into radio broadcasting. My advice is ‘don’t.’ Traditional radio is struggling with how to hold on to its assets. It doesn’t have a disposition to take in a new voice or style. To the extent that you have this conversation with your audience, do that, enjoy the process and let it be as much fun as possible. And then let broadcasting come to you. As a broadcaster, I’m starting to make calls to podcasters to have them come into the fold because we need new blood. Podcasters are doing things that broadcasting stopped doing long ago.”

Tony Kahn, a 35-year radio vetera and host of Morning Stories, a wonderful broadcast and podcast on WGBH public radio in Boston, talks about creating a voice for yourself and the differences between broadcasting and podcasting:

”’Podcasts need to reflect personality and passions of the podcaster.

”Appreciate how big podcasting is, how much bigger it’s going to get. Stand back in awe because it IS a revolution.

”Podcasting audiences are very, very different from broadcast audiences. When it comes to emotional attachment and a desire to participate creatively in what you’re producing, they’re nowhere near what a podcast audience is.

”Podcast audiences aren’t just on your side. They want to get into bed with you. They want to be part of what you’re doing. Ask a podcast listener to do something for you and an amazing number of them will come through for you. Two weeks ago we asked people to write reviews, hopefully favorable ones, to help our visibility on iTunes. Overnight, we got 20 of them, all five-star reviews. And people were saying we had changed their lives.

”There was a survey of 40,000 podcast listeners; I don’t remember who did it but there were forms filled out from links on podcast sites. When asked how much of a podcast they listened to, 88% said they listened to all of it, 11% said they listen to three-quarters of it. Talk about supporting the local team! This is not your average broadcast audience.

”They also said these were the most important attributes of a good podcast:

• 9.3 out of 10 said content was cruicial
• Second most important was the quality of the host
• Third most was audio quality
• Fourth was reliability, meaning that new episodes were available when promised.

”The way I read this is that the audience is interested in the subject and is looking for people who are as passionate about the subject as they are. And they want people to show up. It’s like a dating relationship.

”Podcasting is a community, really a collection of sub-communities built around a topic or an idea. Podcasters feel they’re more part of a movement than a market. It’s more about making connections than making money.”

He said Morning Stories tries to get people to tell stories. They want to capture gasps and sighs and hesitations and the little nuances of speech that make the speaker sound human. They try to keep people from reading and encourage them to associate. Maybe they’ll be telling a story and they’ll mention a red couch. So we’ll ask them to stop and talk about that red couch for a while. What experience do they remember with it?

”We tell stories to make sense of an experience, to give something as an experience to somebody else and to explain ourselves to ourselves. In our interviews, we’ll sometimes have someone tell a story for the first time. They’ll tell that perfect five-minute story out of an hour interview and boy, is that a gift. It doesn’t happen very often.”

I’m at the Podcasting Academy at BU today. Doug Kaye of Conversations Network is talking about podcasting basics and has some harsh words for conventional webcasts.

Paraphrasing:

I don’t like webcasts, not because they’re commercial but because companies make them hard to get to. Typically, they put some executives in front of a camera and give you a little video feed and then ask you for all this information before you can see it. That’s so they can generate leads. So they get 100 people who sign up and maybe 50 who show up when the webcast occurs. And then the salespeople are all over you.

I have a proposition for marketers. Podcasting’s marketing value is, rather than getting 100 or 50 people, put your show out there for free, put it out anonymously and you’ll get magnitudes of people listening to it. Think of it in a marketing context. Would you rather have 50 leads or 10,000 people who have listened to your program and are aware of your product? I think experience is proving that this is a better approach. And don’t interview your CEO, don’t interview your VP of marketing. Get the guy who wrote the code or designed the product to speak of things that they’re passionate about.

I’m a huge fan of Southwest Airlines. Years ago, they surveyed customers and discovered that what they wanted most was on-time departure, on-time arrival, courteous staff, comfortable seating and quick baggage delivery. They built an airline around those principles and they are the envy of the transportation world as a result.

If they keep at it, they will be the envy of the corporate blogging world, too. Because the Southwest Airlines Blog is what a corporate blog should be. Its multiple contributors write about a combination of business and personal topics but they never lose sight of the smart light-heartedness that makes Southwest so delightful to deal with. It meshes completely with the company persona.

It’s still very early, but I hope Southwest can maintain the tone of these initial blog entries. This blog has the potential to serve as an example to other corporations who want to extend their voice into the blogosphere without compromising their corporate culture. Southwest has done it right. Let’s hope it can continue.

From Bridge Ratings’ Audience Erosion study 2005 Q4 Update:

“AM/FM radio listening among 18-34 year olds was significantly off fourth quarter 2005’s pace as its increase in weekly quarter hours to “other media” than radio jumped from 50 to 60 quarter hours affecting the trend for both 12-24 and 25-49 year old metrics.”

” MP3 device usage can consume as much as 80% of a radio user’s audio entertainment during initial ownership weeks and months. This number tends to be generally lower among 30+ women and 35+ men.”

“…music-specific radio stations are vying for the attention of their constituencies as MP3 players continue to be more pervasive than ever (75 million sold). Podcasting is beginning to show evidence of cannibalizing radio’s time-spent-listening.”

If you’re terrestrial RM radio, what do you? All-music format is being eroded by satellite and MP3. Talk is AM’s domain and very competitive. I’d like to see a radio hook up with a podcast network and syndicate the best shows. It would cut their costs to virtually nothing and maybe be a sustainable format. But you can’t make that model work in 20,000 markets.

From CBS MarketWatch:

FeedBurner said it’s now managing feeds for 47,000 podcasts and facilitating delivery of 1.5 million episodes a day. Eighteen months ago, it managed 6,000 podcasts.

The average podcast has 35 subscribers.

“101 Uses for Baby Wipes” has more than 20,000 subscribers. Careful, though, because that show is about a lot more than Baby Wipes.

Podcasting News quotes Feedburner as saying that the number of podcasts it manages “now exceeds the total number of radio stations in the entire world.” (emphasis theirs). That’s a great sound bite but totally an apples and oranges comparison. The cost of launching a podcast is about the same as the cost of a class III radio license. It’s way more difficult to launch a radio station than a podcast.

Cool chart, though:

I met with a team from a major technology company this week to talk about their interest in launching corporate blogs. They’re skeptical and they had some good questions. Here are my responses:

I can’t even read the industy publications I already get. Who’s got time for blogs?
Information overload is a problem for everyone in business. The blogosphere only adds to the crush. The thing to remember is that it’s not how many people read your blog, it’s who reads it. One very important constituency is reporters and analysts. If you’re the head of an influential, publicly held industry company, I guarantee you the press and Wall Street will read your blog. That makes a blog an ideal place to float ideas, spin current events and communicate good news that these influencers might otherwise miss.

There’s also a huge disparity between the great mass of blogs on the Internet and the ones that really get read. There are no definitive numbers, but I’d guess that the vast majority of blogs get daily readership in the double digits. However, the leaders count hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. If you know how to build audience, you can generate tremendous traffic in a fairly short period of time. If you do it right, you actually can put up big numbers.

The people who read blogs are mainly teenagers and people with lots of time on their hands.
I think that was more true a couple of years ago than it is now. The explosion of popularity and media interest in blogging has driven a lot of business people to test the water and I’ve got to believe they like what they see. Again, reliable statistics are hard to come by, but when you look at the number of really busy, influential people who are actively blogging, you have to assume there’s a reason for that.

The blogosphere is still developing its own self-organizing principles but link-popularity engines and RSS feeds are improving and enabling readers to separate wheat from chaff. It takes a few minutes each day to check for new content via RSS and blog content is becoming almost indistinguishable from CNN in the indexing services that people already use. I think blogs will simply become part of the fabric of Web news that people are already monitoring. To the reader, it won’t matter what the source is as long as the content is useful.

Does the CEO have to blog?
Not necessarily. It depends on your strategy. Microsoft clearly chose not to have blogs by Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. That’s because the company was interested in promoting smart employees and actually reducing some of the focus on the company leaders.

At the other end of the spectrum, Bob Parsons at GoDaddy.com has used his blog very effectively. Parsons is a dynamic leader and GoDaddy was very interested in promoting his personality and opinions in a market that is perceived as being bland and undifferentiated. Different strokes.

The one bit of advice I’d offer is that if your CEO is going to blog, he/she has got to be committed to it and has got to have something to say. The worst thing you can do is put out corporate oatmeal or update your blog once a month. You’re actually going to hurt yourself more than help your cause if you do that.

How should we choose company bloggers?
Again, it depends, but the basic rule should be to select people who line up with your company strategy. If you’re trying to expand your partner channel, look to people who manage partner relationships. If your company has a product quality problem, then maybe your developers or engineers should do the talking. If there are rumors that the company is in trouble, the CEO can use the soapbox to demonstrate leadership.

The most important thing, though, is to choose people who have something to say and who can express their opinions persuasively and constructively. Blather and tirades won’t help you. Look for debaters and articulate writers.

Really? What about people who can’t write well?
Oh, you mean the developers! 🙂

Seriously, good writing skills are not a necessity in some fields. People with strong technical skills who can speak the language of their communities can do just fine without having an English degree. However, you do need to match the author to the audience. I’d suggest that a marketer who can’t write is not a good candidate for blogging. On the other hand, a farmer who speaks in plain language and has passion for his work might be just what your company image needs.

Libsyn: Podcast Audience Tops 45 Million

The podcast hosting provider says the most popular podcasts get more than 100,000 daily downloads, but the 3,800 podcasters who work with the network get a total of about 1 million daily impressions, which is an average of less than 30 per program.

The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.

That’s not hyperbole, it’s Technorati’s quarterly blog report. The blogosphere continues to double every six months. Technorati says the number of blogs it monitors has increased more than 16-fold in two years, from 2 million to 34.5 million.

These are impressive numbers, but they aren’t going to continue to go up forever. At some point, in fact, the blogosphere will decline as existing bloggers let their diaries go fallow. That’s when things really get interesting. Growth is exciting, but periods of consolidation are when people and organizations really make sense of something new. Any guesses on when that’s going to happen? My bet is within the next two years.