Kent’s Official Blog

Mark is right, podcasting is full of hippies.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it doesn’t really work when trying to setup a business or try to integrate with one of the oldest industries in the world, advertising.

It’s not an accident that Ask A Ninja signed with an advertising company and not a podcasting company (although we tried). The advertising world has it’s own language, it’s own way of closing deals, different from both Hollywood and the Valley.

Using Mark’s framework, podcasting is a philosophy, a community, and a technology. I think to understand where we are today in terms of all of these things we need to step back in the wayback machine to June of 2006.

That’s when the community was at it’s prime with Vloggercon. We descended on the Swedish American Hall and the future was ours.

This was Hippie central, when the philosophy of raging against the mainstream media was at it’s peak — and mainstream includes anything that was making money, or wasn’t aggressively fucking with tenets of Aristotelian storytelling was being a part of the man.

The night before VloggerCon, I participated in what has become known as the worst episode of “This Week In Tech“. That night I met Andrew Baron, Patrick Norton, Leo, Scoble, Amber Mac, and Jason Calacanis, among many others. During that show Andrew claimed he want to be the next Rupert Murdoch (or maybe it was Sumner Redstone) and everyone on the panel rolled their eyes and chuckled. These were the guys that survived the first bubble and now were here for the second. Jason and Andrew got into a very uncomfortable nerd fight, boiling down to Andrew calling Jason out for not knowing how to run a business.

During VloggerCon, Rocketboom was the anointed success story. The ones who had figured it all out. Sure they sold some advertising ($40k for one week on ebay!) but they were mostly about the community and about being independent.

The day after the Rocketboom keynote, there was a small panel on creating characters for podcasts. I was there (and debuted HopeIsEmo.com), Tim Street was there, and a couple of guys from The Pan were there.

I just remember being glad that Tim Street was in the room. Everyone hated him, in a big way. Because he was just so unapologetically crass and commercial about his podcast. He was a little sexist and crude and that just riled everyone up.

And there was me, talking about the ninja and our big audience and whatnot. And there was just a real sense of frustration in the packed room at why we had gotten so big and why shows like the PAN weren’t getting more audience.

After the panel, I remember a few voices of support (I’m talking about you Fritz Grobe ), but mostly it was awkward, very turd in the punch bowl vibe.

Then two weeks later the Rocketboom divorce happened.

I still don’t know exactly what happened. I’ve never gotten both sides from the actual players. What I do know is that I saw a show that had a similar setup as mine and I freaked. I was planning on just doing as they did. Go to ebay, sell some ads after 18 months, done and done.

But upon further analysis, $40k isn’t that much considering how much work they put into the show. They only did that initial sponsorship, there was only sporatic follow-up campaigns. What Rocketboom had in spades was cache, not cash.

At the time, we were in a similar position. Tons of viewers, but no real revenue streams. We were paying the rent from the small amount of capital from my friends and family, but we were barely scraping by, and we couldn’t sustain that for much longer.

I realized that we had a problem, we had been pushing off the business angle for too long. We were being hippies.

“Hey man we can worry about that later, man,” said my inner hippie.

Well, later suddenly became now. We needed grown ups to help us sort through the deals we had on the table and then move forward.

So that’s what we did. We signed with Agents and managers and lawyers and business managers.

We stopped being hippies, and we really got serious about working for ourselves and supporting us through advertising and merchandising.

(As a side note, months later I found out why Andrew and Rocketboom were less concerned about making money with his podcast. He’s the son of Fred Baron, a wealthy Texas lawyer and Democratic fundraiser (who personally donated $90k in 2007). And Andrew lives in a great apartment in Manhattan. He was already a financial success without Rocketboom.)

The community also reacted, losing some of it’s innocence.

And now the ADM has formed (and I’m on the board). That act alone should really help those that want to use the technology of podcasting/personal media to create businesses. The ADM will allow us as an industry to learn what the advertisers need from us in order to spend their billions of dollars on this space.

It will also give you a clear choice when you’re a podcaster, it will allow you to either go down the path of being a hippie, or go down the path being a producer and business person. Or if you’re like me, a little of both.

Eighteen months after VloggerCon, I think the core community to try and recapture the magic of that weekend. PodCamps, The Winnies, etc. All try and keep that torch alive, but the bigger questions are mostly solved. Most of the people at PodCamp AZ wanted to know how to build a big audience, how to make money, how to copy the Ninja’s success.

And we’ve also seen the rise and fall of several early podcasting companies.  These companies were savvy enough to see the opportunities to make money in the space, but didn’t bring in the relationships with ad agencies that would actually bring in the cash.

Some of the early companies treated indie producers bumpkins that would never read the contracts they offered.  They promised big, and under delivered.

Now we’re seeing more and more established advertising companies starting to come into the space and sell bigger and bigger sponsorships (most notably Federated Media, our ad selling partner).

We still have a long way to go, both as an industry and as a community. We need to do a better job of reaching out to the YouTubers and let them know about the wonders of RSS. We need to to do a better job of realizing that anyone that not a part of the huge media congloms is an ally.

And we need to get past the what’s and how’s of the technology and just create new and amazing things.