Castfire

Yesterday, iTunes published their Best of 2007 Podcast, ranked, we assume, by the number of subscribers to the feed. As iTunes is pretty stingy with their stats, one must assume they used that metric as there is no mention of editorial selection.

They broke the list into two categories, New This Year and Classics, with sub categories of audio and video. I agree completely with Chris Albrecht in his commentary at NewTeeVee:

It’s amusing to think of The Onion as “new” and Ask a Ninja as “classic,” but whatever, both make me laugh. And while it’s obvious that both of those podcasts carry an established audience, it’d be nice to know how Apple’s editorial choices match up with the popular choice, but the company’s pretty stingy with stats, listing only the top podcast of the day.

I am a details guy and was intrigued to do further analysis.

Classics: Video

*While Vintage Toon Cast is Indie, their content is public domain cartoon classics. A bit of a mix!

Production reflects Main Stream Media, "Professional" production (Revision 3, DECA, Next New Networks, etc), or Independent.  This is not to say that an Indie property is not professional, rather, it still maintains the 2 people and a camcorder upbringing!  Ads are reported as Online, Offline (downloadable media), Both or None. Hosting is my best guess (after some digging) as to what company, if any, is hosting/publishing the content (hey - we’re a publishing company and I’m interested).

My analysis of ads is only from the past couple of episodes and not over the past year. It does not take into account any of use of non video ads (banners, text, etc) or associated monetization (DVD sales, t-shirts, etc).

For hosting, there are sometimes multiple entries.  For instance, Cool Hunting Video is hosted by Brightcove for flash delivery (online) and on Amazon’s S3 for their downloadable media. I am not wizard enough to tell if there is an additional CMS or publishing system for the self hosted and left it as ‘Self’.

For the Classics, there is quite a spread between Indie, MSM and Pro productions, with Indie pulling a 50% share. 70% of the top ten are using advertising, in one way or another, to support the property. What is interesting in this breakdown, however, is that this is generated by iTunes and only capturing downloadable media and not online plays. Therefore, the monetization for this ranking drops to 50% for the properties.

New This Year: Video

Definitions from Classics apply to the New category.

What is interesting is the definite shift of Indie production to Pro/MSM for new properties. It dropped from 50% in the Classics to 10% in the New category. One conclusion can be that the "Classics" (I guess that is something over a year old!), were founded with a couple of people, a passion and a camcorder. 2007 is the year that production companies and MSM have gone after this segment.  It also makes sense that the newer properties are not monetized as well as the Classics as they are still building audiences and developing ad strategies.

Most important, and not reflected in the analysis above, content is still king. After seeing some of the episodes, I immediately subscribed and look forward to catching up with back episodes. There is a ton of funny, insightful and educational content in these 20 properties. Kudos to everyone involved.

Sampling this content makes me question my Comcast bill for cable that I pay every month!

Many sites worry about the Digg effect — their traffic can be overwhelming. We have always built with the mindset of having all of customers getting Dugg at the same time and it has worked like a charm. Yesterday, however, we got the true Digg effect: Federated Media is running video ads through Castfire ON Digg. Instantly, our system monitors alerted all of us that the system was starting to perform slowly under the increased load. Uh oh…feels scary!

It was at that moment that I was happy I followed the lead of our friends at Dogster and had retained Laine Campbell from Palomino DB. In our hurried conference call, with everyone throwing out suggestions, she calmly identified the issue and suggested a simple, elegant solution. With her assistance, we had the fix in 30 minutes later and the all of the servers were back to no load and humming along. Laine has quickly become a part of the Castfire team and works with us not as a consultant, but a full member of the team.

If you are a startup looking at growth and scaling, I pass on the same recommendation that Dogster did: contact Laine! She is uber responsible and quite the wizard. Thanks to Dogster and Laine!

Sometimes it is shockingly evident to me that Castfire is able to move forward only because of the highly skilled members of the team. I have to publicly thank Christoph, Leo and David for each owning their part and getting this release into production. This week alone has seen 5 AM mornings — that’s finish, not start — three times!

To Christoph: yet again you amaze me, my friend. Castfire would not be here without the super human efforts you continually extend. As always, let’s keep moving on to the next release.

Dave Winer and Doc Searls spoke today at the Public Media Conference. I listened to the live stream and appreciate Dave for posting the mp3. At around 1:01:49, there was an excellent comment regarding the audience relationship within podcasting:

“The main differnce [between podcasting and broadcasting] … Probably it’s that the relationship you have with the audience is very, very different from the relationship you have with the broadcast audience. Maybe because the internet that brings the programing to you is the same tool you can use to get back to somebody. You hear from your audience immediatly. They are engaged in something that is much more like a conversation.”

While we have been involved with podcasting for over 2 years and agree with this statement, it was fantastic to hear it summarized so eloquently. The same tool that brings the program to the listener allows the listener to communicate back. What innovations can take place to enhance and encourage this?