Well, for the moment very few people podcast for money. I think people have dreams of podcasting for money or to increase their business traffic, but that’s not why the bulk of podcasters are doing it.

Podcasting is an art. Some people are very very good at it, and they make a decent living from it. Some people are not so good at it and they make a decent living at it. But the people who are making a decent living at it represent perhaps a percent of a percent of a percent (or .0001% in laymans terms) of the total people doing it and it in no way represents what it really means to be an artist.

There are some absolutely fantastic podcasts out there that absolutely nobody knows about, and in most cases the hosts probably don’t even really care. Podcaster’s podcast because they want to. They are passionate about something and they want to talk about it, its as simple as that.

How do I know this? I know from experience that it is very difficult to make a podcast that will generate revenue. But lately I’ve been getting some new insights into the average joe podcaster’s mind. I’ve been talking to a lot of them. You can find a lot of the interviews we’ve been doing on the podcast guide on Tuesdays.

I haven’t been approaching the money makers yet, but I have approached a number of vetran podcasters. Hosts of podcasts like 100 Word Stories (the podcast with the most episodes out there) and History According to Bob (soon to have 1000 high quality history lessons under his podcast belt). These guys don’t care if they ever make a dime. Lawrence from 100 Word Stories says “I’m going to do a podcast every day until the day I die, so when I miss one you can check the papers.” That pretty much sums up the vibe I get from almost everyone I talk to.

Of course, I also get the vibe from most of these guys that if they did get a big advertising offer they wouldnt hestitate to snach it up… but so would any artist who’d been painting pictures and storing them in his basement. The point is, if those paitings were to stay in the basement their entire lives the artist would just keep adding to the pile, and so will podcasters.

Tags: podcasting motivation

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Random Postings. 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.