The Amazing $5000 Podcast 
September 15th, 2006
Interesting email came in this morning. The OpenAjax alliance had been invited (to our greatest surprise and dismay) to take part in a podcast series about Ajax with the analyst firm ZapThink. At first thought it seems very reasonable. However, when you actually read the small print (ok it wasn’t that small) they wanted people to pay $5000 for the chance to talk on their podcast! Of course they are gracious enough to give people referred by IBM - who are a driving force behind OpenAjax - a whopping $1000 discount. Well sign me up!
They try to sell the idea to us by saying that they have literally _hundreds_ of downloads per podcast! I mean come on. Even the no good useless pukes that are Dave, Andre and Alexei were able to quickly pass the century download mark with our little audio recording about Ajax.
The real icing on the cake comes when they try to justify the price by saying:
There is a cost involved - in part to defray the costs of producing and distributing the podcast, and in part because as sponsors they get marketing visibility and leads.
Oh that’s right - the large costs associated with podcasting like that $29.95 for the headset and maybe some sort of opensource recording software. If it weren’t for the high cost I am sure that more people would be flocking to podcasts … It reminds me of the talk we had with ZapThink a while back. No wonder so many people are happy to talk to Redmonk. The greatest part about them is that we did a podcast with Cote (granted it was the podcast from hell) and we didn’t have to pay with anything but our time!
I think we will try charging the next people that come on our podcast 
technorati tags:ajax, podcast, redmonk, zapthink
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This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 5:14 am and is filed under AJAX, Business, Podcast, Fun, Redmonk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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and
September 16th, 2006 at 12:19 am
In all fairness to ZapThink, they should charge for services, and its not uncommon to overcharge for marketing and product placement. Just look at what it costs to advertize on TheServerSide. The difference here, as I see it is that
a) they lied about where the cost comes from.. an outrageous lie at that. They should have let sleeping dogs lie and said nothing. If you have to go way out of your way to justify your price, people will probably take notice.
b) they are overcharging for something that actually benefits them more than it does the customer. They get: great content and they get paid too. Also, did I see in that email that they had literally HUNDREDS of listeners? How many of those are just iTunes people automatically downloading the podcast to their ipods? Word to the wise: its probably a good percentage. So what are people paying per listener?
Let’s say they have a generous 500 listeners.. assuming aaaaalll of them are active listeners and not just iTunes subscribers to the feed, that’s $10 per lead. You know your conversions.. do the math and see how poor you will be after its all over.
Finally, I would like to offer a spot or two on our podcast for nothing. If you’re a developer and have an Ajax-based product (not one of our competitors, but anybody else) and would like to be on the nitobi podcast one of these weeks, drop me a line and if its a good fit we’ll have you on for free to talk about Ajax development - and plug your service/product to boot. [email protected]