As I was looking through TPN’s November stats last night I remembered a question that a VC in SF asked me last month that I couldn’t answer. The question was: how many hours of programming does The Podcast Network have up on its servers today?
Calculating the amount of hours involves some slight guesswork but here’s how I did it.
The first question I asked myself is “How many shows do we have up on our servers currently?”. That’s also a hard question to answer without getting my IT guys to write some sort of script, but an easy way to estimate it is to see how many media files were downloaded from our servers in the month of November. The answer: 3298. That means that in one month, people listened to 3298 TPN shows.
Now, if we assume that each show is, on average, about 30 minutes in duration, that would mean that in November alone we served up 1649 hours of new and archived programming. If you listened to TPN’s archives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it would take you 69 days to get through it all. And by then, we’d have added hundreds of hours of new programming.
It’s hard for me right now to figure out exactly how many of those shows were brand new in November versus how many are old, archived shows, but some simple math would give a guesstimate. Let’s say we have about 50 podcasts currently producing new content and, on average, each podcast does a new episode once a week. That would mean that in November, about 200 new podcast episodes were produced. So, out of the 3298 files we sent out, about 6% of them were new and the other 94% were archived shows that someone out there still found interesting enough to download. The Long Tail of The Podcast Network.
Okay so why does any of this matter?
It seems to be trendy at the moment to say that content businesses do not scale and that the future is all about aggregation. I wholeheartedly disagree. I think aggregation and platform plays are great, there is no denying YouTube and MySpace’s success. However, what happens when the latest and greatest platform or aggregator comes along? How do you maintain your audience? Stickiness is a real problem if you don’t own the content. Does Metcalfe’s Law apply to platform businesses when something cooler appears on the scene? And if it’s one thing we know about the innernet, it’s that there is *always* something cooler just around the corner.
Here’s a question – what was the #1 blogging platform in 2001? What was the #1 online music site in 2001? Can anyone remember back that far?
I’m going to take some wild guesses. I’d say that LiveJournal was the top blogging platform and that either MP3.com or eMusic were the top music sites.
The second question is this – are those sites still #1 or even highly ranked today in their respective fields? Are they the sites everyone is flocking to? Or were they eclipsed by newer, cooler sites? As they didn’t control the content on their sites, they had few options to stop their audience departing for newer destinations. If you don’t own the content, how do you get people to stick around?
Of course that isn’t to say it can’t be done. Yahoo made it work. MSN made it work. Very expensive plays though.
I think the content business has a lot of upside and will continue to scale. However, the models that we are used to from the 20th century have to change. As audience fragmentation occurs, scale means having lots of shows with a small audience and fewer shows with a large audience. Getting that model right is going to take a whole new way of thinking, something I’ve been working on for the last couple of years.
But to say that content businesses can’t scale any more is just wrong. TPN is owned, operated and financed by one guy at the moment – me. I have a great team of about 50 collaborators who produce content and a couple of part-time IT guys. Between us we served up over 1600 hours of content last month that we created. Who says content doesn’t scale?
Just on a tangent here… wasn’t mp3.com radically different back in ’01?
For example, I vividly remember having band entries, and songs from my own bands up on mp3.com “back in the day”, but then oneday they just nerfed all that content (and I lost some of the only digital copies I had of some material when that happened, but I digress), and the whole business model changed.
Yeah I think they were all about indy stuff back then. Again – they didn’t own the content. So the monetization of it was hard.
Good points Cam. I think it’s only going to get harder for newer aggregators to gain stickiness too. New entrants will need to make themselves and their services more portable and universal to have any hope of taking a bite out of the myspaces and youtubes. This will make them appealing at first but severely reduce their stickiness when subsequent generations come knocking.
I agree that content businesses can scale. I think that VCs just looking at the scale factor are going to be poor guys soon.
But let’s look at the term ‘scale’. What does this *need* to mean – 500,000 users or 50 million users of the content? It’s myopic to use the term ‘scale’ for an all purpose exercise because ‘scale’ is only going to be relevant to the business model attached to the content delivery.
For example, Cam could have a great delivery model and content and scale to another 100 collaborators (providers of content) and the advertising revenue from this could be (only using this an example btw and I don’t know Cam’s figures) substantial enough with 10,000 constant listeners to drive TPN forward for a long time coming.
Or…’scale’ could mean 2 million hits a day because the advertising revenue model means that 0.000001 per cent of all users are going to click thru and create revenue for the site.
Tagging and bagging terms with models is very dangerous…
Conversely, I’m not sure that I agree on the fewer shows/larger audience model.
Myself, I am tending to lean more toward the pre/post produced cleaner and engaging content (in the podcast and vidcast space in particular) regardless of numbers and audience size – I don’t think that that can be defined in any shape or form. But the quality will define it. And I’m not talking SuperBowl quality and over production but something that has its own consistent brand attached to it.
And that brand can be ‘folksy’ as well; it just needs to be internally established as a content ‘brand’.
I think that will be the consistent winner in the content space over time.
People are becoming more and more attached to content and its original source. Content delivery, just like any medium, can have a brand attachment. And the brand attachment will be the driver, not the scale.
That math isn’t right. Put it like this: if I had a 30 minute podcast that was downloaded 3298 times last month how many hours of programming do I have? It sure isn’t 1649…
“a guy”, we had 3298 SEPARATE PODCASTS downloaded in November. I’m saying, if each podcast is, on average, 30 minutes in duration, that’s 1649 hours of programming.