Posted December 1st, 2007, in: New Media| Technology| Web 2.0

A recent post on Mashable was talking about the reasons that podcasting hasn’t really caught on.

Some theory along the lines of

“There’s no real monetization model yet”

meets

“Only people that would podcast whether or not they make any money doing it are bothering to, aside from the mainstream (Old Media) entities, which are now taking over and killing the democracy of the platform, only the ‘Hippies’ are doing it.”

Is the basic gist of it.

I have thought about this a lot. Here’s what I posted as a comment over there:

I think one of the biggest challenges to the adoption of podcasting by the mainstream is the name “podcasting” and other misleading terminology about the technology.

It seems to me that to the average joe, podcasting is something you have to have an iPod in order to take advantage of. And if you do have an iPod, it’s scary to go to the “iTunes Store” and “Subscribe” to things. And of course, where on earth are people supposed to learn about non-apple podcast directories? It doesn’t help matters much that as mainstream radio programs increasingly plug their own podcasted versions of their shows, they generally default to using the same counterproductive lingo: “you can download our show to your ipod…” (which means you need to have an Apple mp3 player) or “Look for us in the iTunes Store” (which sounds like you’d have to pay for the content)

The average not-too-savvy user has no idea what a “feed” is.

While working with a fairly successful video podcast, it was really striking to me to find out that the majority of our regular viewers were actually “checking back” to the site for updates rather than sitting back and letting RSS do all the work for them. Seems like the public’s general lack of understanding about RSS/Atom, how podcasting works, along with a general cynicism about the Web and fear of having things download automatically (thanks to PC virus riffraff), has kept podcasting in the closet.

A feed-awareness campaign is needed if public perception is going to change. The lingo needs to change.

updated: the importance of apple and ipods or mp3 players in general needs to be separated from the idea of what Feed-Subscription is all about … So maybe calling it something other than podcasting would be a good idea!

I think this is problem for all feeds, not just ones that serve up media files via Enclosures (podcasts).

I’d love to see some real data on RSS/Atom adoption in general (mashable?). I assume feed subscription adoption in general is not distributed along with the presence of broadband connections. I would bet that mostly, feedreaders and podcast aggregators are being used by people in major cities. It’s a cultural thing. Some people know about it, most people don’t.
If you live in the suburbs, you’re less likely to use ‘live bookmarks’ subscribe to podcasts or use a feedreader than you are if you live in the city.

Am I wrong? Numbers, please.

What I was trying to say is,

I’m pretty sure nobody knows what podcasting is still!