Thursday, April 20, 2006

Podcasts Outnumber Radio Stations

2 comments :
According to this article on Publish.com (a Ziff Davis company) Feedburner claims they now distribute more podcasts than there are radio stations on the planet. Feedburner was only founded in 2003- while the invention of the radio was in the late 1880's. I wonder if XMS and others count in the numbers as well. Either way it is yet another example of how media is changing at the speed of light.

I kinda feed bad for product development folks in the industry who not only need to keep up- but need to find that next big thing. I know we are constantly bombarded with requested from customers for inclusion of new media whatever the flavor of the month it is. I even tend to be a big mouth about what i want to see in our products (me a big mouth you ask ;-)...I was recently speaking to a new colleague about the fact that over the last year and a half i have been extremely impressed with our product release cycles (i have been at Factiva for 7 yrs)- we delivered RSS very early on, we are monitoring blogs and other web content and are now looking at other types of media- very exciting

2 comments :

Jeremiah Owyang said...

Are you familiar with the 'long tail' concept? It and Seth Godin's 'Small is the new big' will really help to put this podcast growth in perspective.

This is just the start, expect more and more consumer created text, audio, and video creation to ramp up over the next few years.

daniela barbosa said...

I have followed Chris Anderson's Long Tail conversation for a while (http://www.thelongtail.com and looking forward to the forthcoming book) and am familiar with Seth Godin as well. In the industry that i am in, conversations around commoditization of content have of course been prevalent over the last few years and the long tail theory is definite of interest as we look at our long term product and services strategy.

I will give you an example- for over 5 years i have worked with clients implementing web services to integrate external content into users workflow. If I look back a few years ago only our biggest clients were using those technologies-today it is assessable to everyone and not really as cost prohibited. With RSS delivery however-it wasn't the big guys that adopted it first- it was the individual user/consumer along with the smaller mid-tier customer base. The 'niche' market in RSS readers/aggregators allowed this delivery mechanism- we are going along for the ride.

I agree it is just the start- isn't it exciting!

Note: If you are reading these comments and do not know of the Long Tail-Wikipedia does a good job explaining and linking to references here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail

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