I haven’t done much podcasting, only several experimental comedy shows. The free service I was using, called ClickCaster, is going to stop being free next month. Obviously their business model of offering free disk space and bandwidth just didn’t work, and I’m not sure why it would. The point is that I’ll have to either find some other free podcasting hosting service out there or host them on my own website. I wouldn’t much like paying for the bandwidth myself, but with my podcasts’ unpopularity, that probably wouldn’t be a problem. I’m certainly not going to pay ClickCaster anything!
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2 Comments
Scott Converse · April 21, 2007 at 4:17 AM
Sorry to hear you don’t like ClickCaster enough to pay for it. If you’re interested in trying the new service though, let me know and I’ll send you an invite to our private beta (in progress now).
Scott
ClickCaster Inc.
http://www.clickcaster.com
Sean Hannifin · April 24, 2007 at 5:17 AM
Thanks for your message! Unfortunately if the choice is between paying for the service or hosting them myself at no extra cost, the latter is more feasible (and less costly). I don’t know how YouTube does what they do, they’ve got to have a big stash of money somewhere.
Other free video sites seem to involve ad revenues that are shared with the content providers, but this would probably be difficult to cross-over into podcasts. To use this idea in podcasting, I guess you’d have to use a 15 or 30 second audio ad with some button on the player that will take you to the advertiser’s site, and then share revenue from that with the content providers.
You had the right thing going with the embedded player though, that definitely was what helped YouTube become so popular. Unfortunately podcasting also suffers from being far less popular than online videos…
Although you could perhaps target music composers. On the music forums I go to there are often members who search for places to upload and host their music for free… if it were possible to keep unlimited bandwidth and hosting services free, there might be a market in that… especially if you could get them embedding the players all over the place.
But I’m just blathering out loud!
Many thanks for your message, maybe if I get time this week I’ll send an email about that private beta, it would definitely be interesting to try!