Entrepreneurship

The slow adoption of podcasting

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ March 28, 2007 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

I have just recently run across the first and, so far, only content-based reason to listen to podcasts. Up until now, podcasting has just been a moderately convenient method to get time-delay radio content.

In other words, there’s never been anything in the podcasting universe of content that has only been available via podcast that I think is worth listening to regularly. Right now in my podcast library I have a number of public radio programs, like This American Life, Marketplace, and To The Best of Our Knowledge. Interesting that I gravitate towards Public Radio International (PRI) content over National Public Radio (NPR) when left to my own devices, isn’t it? I wonder what that says about my politics…

At any rate, without further ado, the only podcast worth downloading that isn’t also available on the radio is the John Calacanis Podcast, which is actually video based (although I just listen to it on my sorry little G3 ‘pod).

I started subscribing last week after listening to John’s interview with Ted Murphy, the CEO of PayPerPost, which I just recently began playing with personally.

For what it’s worth, after listening to Calacanis, I’m going to voluntarily place a disclaimer at the top of any post on this blog that is sponsored by PayPerPost. Don’t worry folks, I’ve only done 3 or 4 of them so far, and most of them did have disclaimers somewhere (albeit usually at the bottom).

What is interesting, at least in terms of user (as in my) habits, is that I’ve opted to hit up PayPerPost only when I feel the urge to blog but don’t have anything I’m particularly passionate about at the moment. I feel like my lack of passion shows when I try to force the creative cycle, and if I’m going to force it anyway, why not make a few guaranteed dollars for it? I figure the PayPerPost earnings rate is somewhere around $20 an hour, which is (ahem) quite a bit lower than I’ve made for an hour’s work in a long, long time (especially with very little hope to grow that rate through the PayPerPost platform alone), but it has been interesting to explore.

(It should be noted, of course, that if my PageRank were higher, the PayPerPost hourly rate would grow significantly. It looks like it’s a logarithmic curve in earnings, not unlike how each PageRank increment seems to require 10 times the amount of link love.)