thanks all for the great comments and emails on the previous post, let me expand on my thoughts a bit more…

First off, I AM NOT AGAINST MONETIZATION OF PODCASTS. I am, however tired of the discussion, because it’s not relevant to building the SKILL of creating good content. If I told you that you could make $xxx/month podcasting, and all you had to do was produce an interesting, informative, well-written, well paced, well produced show with a big audience, several times a week. Most of us (and I include myself in there) couldn’t do it.

Why? Is it because we’re not good? No, it’s because no one wants your god damned podcast. What they want, is your big audience. Notice how audience comes at the end of the list, if many of the previous criteria aren’t met, you can forget about the audience.

Even “how do I build an audience?” is a much more interesting conversation than “How do I make money”.

Why?

It’s a skill! All the things I listed above are skills. Skills are fun/meant to be taught/shared. How to make money isn’t a skill, well, at least not a podcasting skill – thus it’s irrelevance to me at podcamp’s & such..

If you agree with me on skills, then you may also agree that (most of the time) you need to build the skills before you can think of revenue. And that’s where I get discouraged, probably because I expose myself to too many people who think they can short circuit the process.

I’m not saying that turning a skill into money shouldn’t be talked about. What I’m saying is this is 2008. We need to move on. Any method for making money via podcasting (or blogging, or twittering, or whatever) is documented. We are no longer at the days when googling “podcast” gave us 100 hits.  If you really want to make money at something, you have two choices :

A- Copy what’s been done before  (here is where Google is your friend)

B- Do something completely unique where the uniqueness of it is what will make people give you money. (if it’s such a great idea, keeping it to yourself might be a good thing too)

Both of these approaches need at least some skill. I don’t see a third choice, maybe I’m just not seeing it right now.. do you see a third option?

Disclosure: No red-markers were supplied or injured in the writing of this blog

Posted by Bob on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 1:11 am.