Wired has a new article up today which talks about one of the down sides to podcasting, known as podfading. Ryan and Jen Ozawa, former producers of the popular Lost-themed podcast The Transmission are the latest example of podfading:
Podcasting has drawn thousands on the premise that anyone can create an audio program, build an audience online and even vault to stardom. Less celebrated is the fact that untold numbers of shows just wink out just as suddenly as they started.
The phenomenon has earned its own label, "podfading," coined by podcaster Scott Fletcher in February 2005 when he gave up on two podcasts of his own.
Podfaders' motives vary wildly, from those discouraged by their lack of listenership to, in the Ozawas' case, a success that overwhelmed them.
This story both saddens and motivates me. Podfading will always exist, but there's no reason it should be any different than blogging, where millions of blogs are abandoned. The difference is that the effort it took to create those blogs in the first place was negligable - not so with a podcast, at least not yet. Brian Reid sums it up:
"There was no money in it and it did nothing to push my career forward. I've got a lot of other things in my life, paying work being one and my family is another. It's not like blogging, where you can do it for 15 minutes at a time and get away with it."
I know it varies quite a bit, but one survey found that the average time spent producing an episode was just over four and half hours! That's a long way from fifteen minutes.
At Paramagnus we don't expect to cut the amount of production time to fifteen minutes, but we do hope to significantly reduce it. The reason we started working on tools and services for podcasters was precisely this problem - the pain involved in creation right now is too great. Too much time, too much effort, too many requirements.
I really wish I had some numbers to share, but we're not quite there yet. We've obviously been doing our own testing, and we've found that it's a lot less work to produce an episode than it used to be (when I was doing BlogosphereRadio "by hand", for example). Podcast Spot really goes a long way to reducing the pain of publishing audio to the web, adding appropriate metadata, generating an RSS feed, promoting the episode, and gathering feedback and statistics. We're working hard on Podcast Wizard too, which we hope will reduce the pain of actually planning, recording, and mixing an episode.
I feel sorry for the Ozawa's - it sounds like they had a great show going (I'm not much of a Lost fan, so I never came across it). Maybe after we've launched they'll find it easier to podcast and who knows, maybe they'll even decide give it another go!