YouTube: When the going gets weird…

Each day I aspire to have what I call a YouTube miracle. It’s my own kind of religious experience, when I’m able to find, quite unexpectedly, footage that I thought could not possibly exist, never existed, or was long lost to the ravages of time. Examples: in the past week I have been able to find Iggy Pop interviewing the mysterious man of the electric violin, the late Nash the Slash, on an unidentified cable access show from the early 1980s . And if that wasn’t enough I then happened upon a video that consisted of nothing more than a still image of council housing, located somewhere in London, accompanied by the sounds of a pirate radio station that once emanated from the area in the 1990s.

Such videos have maybe a few hundred or a few thousand views. There’s no business model, in the conventional sense of the term, in this stuff. Just the wonders of living in a world where somewhere, it seems, someone has everything you could ever imagine. On Betamax, VHS, cassette, reel to reel, or whatever format. And for no reason other than they can, people are digitizing and uploading these gems. With any luck they will be found one day, by a grateful searcher such as myself. Is YouTube overflowing with this kind of bizarre material, with limited appeal, of middling audio or video quality, and possibly without rights clearances? Indeed it is. And that’s the miracle of it all. That though it’s owned by Google, a company with more power and resources than some countries, YouTube is still able to accommodate these artifacts from the margins, when the company could easily initiate a policy that anything that nets less than, say, 1,000 views within a year of being posted gets pulled from the pipeline. The YouTube that hasn’t done this is the YouTube I love.

On the other hand there’s a YouTube that desperately needs to steal advertising dollars from the world of broadcast television. The other week I caught wind of news that YouTube is starting to promote some of its personalities via traditional media, such as television, magazines, billboards, and subway ads. Of course there’s nothing wrong with this, nothing at all. Why not take some born on YouTube success stories, put some marketing dollars into them, and see if you can notch up the audience level from X to Y. Makes sense to me.

So, you may wonder, which YouTubers were chosen for this inaugural outside of YouTube marketing campaign? Did they choose the YouTubers with the most subscribers, or the most views? No, because that would be this guy, 24 year old Swede Felix Kjellberg, who goes by the moniker PewDiePie and does play by play of himself playing video games, puts the video up on YouTube and at present is averaging about 10 million views per day has 4.5 billion views in total, and is reported to be earning $4 million per year. Instead, they went further down to the view list, to people with a fraction of the views of PewDiePie, to a trio of young female YouTubers whose video landscapes cover food, fashion, hair, and makeup.

I speak of these people:

Beauty blogger Michelle Phan, who boasts 6.4 million subscribers, close to a billion views, and is also a spokesperson for L’Oreal and has her own line of makeup with them, called Em Cosmetics.

Food blogger Rosanna Pansino, with 2 million subscribers and over 300 million views for her videos that show you how to make things like Rubik Cube brownies and Captain America birthday cakes.

And the third YouTuber that's part of the current advertising-outside-of-YouTube campaign is self-described “fashion/beauty/fun” blogger Bethany Mota, with six million subscribers and about 500 million views. She's sort of a teenage/DIY version of Ladies Home Journal, with videos on topics like Easter food and fashion tips.

Outdoor ad for select YouTube channels 

According to this article, ads for these YouTube channels are appearing on television channels with strong youth audiences, such as the CW, and magazines that appeal to young women, such as Allure and Seventeen. Subway stations in NYC and Chicago are also carrying ads for these YouTube channels that skew heavily to a female youth demographic.

All of this got me thinking about how there is a huge chasm between the mainstream and the magical moments on YouTube. The former being videos on makeup, food, and decorating, which are really just five minute versions of the thirty minute TV shows we already know. The latter being things like the deep archival material that lives on the platform -- as referenced a few paragraphs ago -- and the bounty of fringe and outsider culture which for the first time has a chance to reach a global audience. Perhaps not a huge audience, in mainstream terms, but a worldwide one nonetheless.

I’ve been tracking some of this data on spreadsheets for a while now, so I see the prolific activity that is happening in strange and still largely unknown corners of YouTube. Material that has unmistakably found a consistent audience of, say, tens to hundreds of thousands views per day, maybe not millions per day, but not a trivial amount. With the right systems in place could these slim niches become fatter niches, or perhaps break out beyond the category of niche and into something more substantial, though still shy of blockbuster status? This is not a problem of the inherent appeal or quality of the content but, rather, a problem of matching the right content to the right people. There are undoubtedly people, who, if they knew YouTube channel X existed would be likely to enjoy what is has to offer. But at present there is no perfect system for bringing audiences and viewers together.

Broadcasting is an imperfect system, but a powerful one. What will YouTube’s television, magazine, and billboard promotion of already popular YouTubers tell us? Most likely that middle of the road content that is already popular at the level of a few billion aggregate views can become even more popular. From a business point of view this may well solve some of YouTube’s immediate concerns, such as the ability to charge television-like prices for its ads. But what a shame that YouTube didn’t extend (or hasn’t yet, to give them the benefit of the doubt) its current experiment to its cornucopia of less obvious, less mainstream material.

As Internet and legal scholar Tim Wu has put it, the titans of the Internet era, such as Amazon, Google, YouTube (owned by Google), and eBay are “big dogs with long tails”, meaning that their businesses are predicated on, and depend on, a proliferation of both the big markets at one end of the spectrum and the niche markets that are able to exist in these digital, small incremental cost, times. So, while YouTube’s current experiment, of promoting already popular, mainstream-appeal content creators is likely to make this form of popular culture even more popular the boat that’s being missed, I believe, is the creation of a system that brings more of the platform’s ‘unpopular culture’, for want of a better term, to the surface. This could, in turn, transform thousands and thousands of slim niches into thousands of thousands of mid-sized ones. And who knows, hidden in that haystack could be the next Vice, whose journey from the absolute margins of popular culture to billion dollar media empire is told in this earlier blog post. With fewer way stations than ever between audiences and creators the unlikely is now more likely to happen. The question now becomes, will the unlikely ever get the helping hand of marketing dollars, to bump it up from unpopular culture to somewhat popular culture? And how much does that matter? With small enough production budgets can big enough audiences be just that, big enough? And maybe, just maybe, this opportunity lies not within YouTube/Google but within the entrepreneurial community, who may see a future in thousands of small sparks, not just a few massive bonfires.

Bonus plug section: For those interested in learning more about YouTube's challenges in attracting TV dollars and big name brands I recently co-authored a business school case on the topic, which can be found here.






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Social media and its positive effects on negative charisma

I have been thinking lately about this thing called negative charisma. It sounds like a contradiction of terms because you might think, and rightly so, that the negative would cancel out the charisma. One is a positive, the other is a negative, therefore we end up back where we started. But it turns out that’s not always the case. So, one wonders, what exactly is this negative charisma, this paradoxical thing that can so blatantly defy the rules of mathematics?

Negative charisma is a quality that explains how people who are physically, psychologically, and/or ideologically unattractive still manage to capture our attention. Think Larry David’s character in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David: Patron saint of negative charisma?

...Or people who can walk into a room and magically tick off half the people in it, without uttering a word.  And don't pretend you haven't encountered such folks. I have thought about such qualities a fair bit as for as long as I can remember have held an interest in the things that fall just outside of the defined categories. The things that don’t quite make it, either because they are too provocative and boundary-pushing, or aren’t provocative in the right way, or simply aren’t deemed good enough…however ‘good’ is defined at that particular time by the person doing the defining.

In a world of few broadcast networks and mass and largely undifferentiated audiences, negative charisma was pretty much the kiss of death. It didn’t look good, it didn’t make people feel good, and generally was something most people did not want to be associated with. Sure, there were exceptions, but for the most part there wasn’t much of a career to build on the ability to turn people off. I think this is a fine example of where and how Internet-distributed content differs. You may have heard the phrase “made for social media” used, to describe people who, regardless of their actions, have a gift for garnering attention. 

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford would be a prime example of such a talent. Though repeatedly under attack in the media and often captured in stills and video in states of inebriation and intoxication related to a variety of substances, he never shied away from the camera. Ford kept on posing for ‘selfies’ with seemingly everyone he encountered, his image circulating almost non-stop on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Whether it was election season or not Mr. Ford kept on putting his arm around people he’d just met and mugging for their smartphone, and in turn putting the image into the orbit of everyone in their social networks.

 But not everybody has a career in politics on their mind. Some just want to get attention, and to see if they can turn whatever talents they possess, even if it’s a talent for making people alternately think such thoughts as ‘what a despicable character’ or ‘this guy is nuts’. Which brings us to 20 year old Michael Kittrell of Grayson, Georgia⁠, population 2700. Kitrell, whose YouTube channel is called CopperCab, is one foul-mouthed and angry young man. He is a defiant and, if you don’t mind me saying so, kind of doughy redhead. In his videos he delivers monologues to the camera, in which we see him flying into some pretty extreme rages, screaming and spitting and sometimes issuing threats to commenters. It feels like the spectacle of wrestling meets your loudmouth neighbor.

And as they are inclined to do, the crew at South Park jumped into the ring by incorporating the ranting redhead from the Internet into one of their own story lines.

And those autotune the news guys the Gregory Brothers then immortalized the angry ginger in song and in video, creating an iTunes hit and a video that’s received over 6 million views

Kittrell himself has four YouTube channels and close to 150 million views across them. And view counters don’t lie. There’s an audience for what he’s putting out there. He himself revealed that he has earned a lot of money from his YouTube videos.

The phenomenon of the angry ginger on YouTube, which started in early 2010, eventually became big enough to get noticed by reality TV show producer David Weintraub (Celebrity Rehab, Sober House). Hoping that things do indeed happen in threes Weintraub likely figured Honey Boo Boo, that’s one, Duck Dynasty, that’s two, and YouTube’s CopperCab aka Michael Kittrell for the trifecta. And just like that, Kittrell, along with his Grandma Mema, his Uncle John, and his Aunt Dee Dee, were offered their own reality show. The posse packed their bags and headed to Los Angeles with the goal of capitalizing on Kittrell’s YouTube fame and seeing how far things could go. Hollywood Hillbillies debuted on the U.S. cable channel Reelz in January 2014 and after an initial brief run received an order for ten new episodes to be broadcast in the summer of 2014.

The angry ginger's grandma: happy to have hot water

The Los Angeles Times called the show “…at once celebratory and dismissive of both rural Georgia and Los Angeles. Still, Grandma Mema’s wants are modest. “I didn’t have heat in this house till I got this show!”, she exclaimed. “I had a hot water heater put in…I was really in a mess until I got this show.”⁠

Will Hollywood Hillbillies become a TV classic? Or have a ten year run? Probably not, but in the example of this journey from the CopperCab channel on YouTube to the Hollywood Hillbillies reality show we see the ability of YouTube to provide a viable platform for talent scouting. What began on the margins with no budget and probably no plan was given a shot at mainstream success just a few years later. And yes, the concept has been significantly retooled in the hands of television producers and we meet quite a different version of the angry ginger in front of the Hollywood cameras than we met in front of his own camera, or possibly phone, in small town Georgia. But the fact remains that a product and a market were created in a way that no one would have expected. And both were able to be developed and tested in an environment that had zero cost to the uploader and zero cost to the broadcaster. (The Internet bandwidth and streaming costs are borne by Google-owned YouTube, so while YouTube may still not be turning a profit, having a parent company with annual revenues in excess of $50 billion makes it all possible.) Still, there was no guarantee that what worked in the environment of YouTube — i.e. short, on demand clips that are viewed and re-viewed, publicly commented upon, and then shared on social media — would work in the environment of television, but the risk is greatly reduced with the level of awareness that comes with 150 million views. And don’t forget the bonus bumps that come from the references and parodies on South Park and from the Gregory Brothers. Both contain the most vital ingredient in the social media secret sauce, and that’s the currency derived from talking about and sharing a piece of content.

Kittrell may have been made for social media, where the laughing at, not laughing with, ‘car crash’ quotient goes a long way, but that doesn’t necessarily mean his fifteen minutes end there. I guess we’ll have to stay tuned for this summer’s run of Hollywood Hillbillies and keep our eyes open for any future appearances from the guy who took his ranting in the backyard, negative charisma game all the way to the big city. And with more than just a little showbiz grooming along the way. 

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Remembering ROFLcon, or when the weird ruled the Internet

Remembering ROFLcon, or when the weird ruled the Internet

Spring brings with it many things. And in even numbered years, since 2008, it has meant ROFLcon. What’s ROFLcon, you ask? 

Yes, you read that correctly, it's a convention, as in an actual conference, with panels and schedules and speakers and booths, and it is devoted to the bizarre world of the anti-celebrities of the Internet. The people from viral videos, but before they were called that. The people who unknowingly launched catchphrases, facial expressions, and other minutiae later that were later picked up by other YouTubers, Facebookers, tweeters, or just regular folk. Sadly I could not make it to the inaugural ROFLcon, held in 2008, but was fortunate enough to be in Boston for both the 2010 and 2012 editions. And yes, there are pictures.

ROFLcon panel. That's Moot, founder of 4chan, the anything goes image bulletin board, on the left

ROFLcon participants: not shy about getting into the conference spirit

Wayfinding sign on MIT campus, ROFLcon 2012

And now here we are and it’s Spring 2014. After a punishing winter it has only recently occurred to me that the seasons are in fact turning, and it's an even-numbered year, so it follows to reason that it must be time for ROFLcon. I went to the website at www.roflcon.org and saw that the 2012 schedule was still up. Well…this isn’t very promising, I thought. So I did some additional searching and it looks like…well it looks like the party may actually be over. No ROFLcon this year and who knows, maybe no more ROFLcons at all. (insert dejected emoticon here). 

This is distressing on a number of levels. First of all ROFLcon was the greatest gathering of weirdos, and I say that in the most complimentary way possible, I have ever attended. It was a coming together of the gifted, the obsessive, the strange, and the completely accidental 'stars', and that's stars with a decidedly, and proudly, small 's'. And what all these people and things had in common was that they became this thing called “Internet famous”. A new category unto itself. There's famous, the old kind of Tom Cruise or Jennifer Aniston famous, and there's Internet famous, where you don't need anyone to green light your project, and conventional good looks and charms can actually work against you.

"Bear" aka the double rainbow guy in the hall at ROFLcon 2012

ROFLcon was a parallel universe of insider knowledge. It was a magical place where one could see people and things it was hard to believe were real, like the David after dentist kid, Antoine Dodson of ‘hide your kids, hide your wife’ fame, and the Double Rainbow guy. It was like cable access on a global scale and it was a cavalcade of stars more exciting, to me at least, than any Hollywood red carpet. 

'David after dentist' and his family, ROFLcon 2012

This post is therefore dedicated to those more naïve days of Internet culture, before viral videos were engineered, before content was heavily search engine optimized, and before YouTubers and bloggers were pursued as spokespeople for brands. It was a time when expectations were low to nil, and when completely unpredictable things could happen. In other words, when the Internet was a wild west, a place where corporate entities dared not tread. It was a time when broadcasters, studios, and major labels were still largely in charge and the gulf between those worlds was a welcome moat. It separated, and maybe even protected, the true geeks of the Internet, the wonderfully weird and wholly non-commercial, from the forces of industry. Now, things are changing. There's still a sublime randomness that can be found online but we are also seeing the arrival of mainstream market players. Bedroom beauty bloggers can become the face of a major cosmetics company and get their own line of makeup. A network of YouTube channels can be so attractive to traditional industry that Disney acquires them in a deal worth close to a billion dollars. And I think it's worth mentioning that this acquistion took place 2 weeks after Disney let go 700 employees from its own interactive division, which suggests to me that their in house way of doing interactive wasn’t working as well 50,000+ people with their own YouTube channels, doing their own thing -- whether it's comedy, cartoons, how to videos, or gaming tips -- and then turning the logistics and monetization over to a company called Maker Studios. The result: in excess of 5 billion views per month. And that acquisition by Disney.

But before considerations of millions of dollars and billions of views came into the picture there was another culture of the Internet. And now let us embark together on a look at the early days of unfettered YouTubing and LOLcat’ing with the ROFLcon 2012 opening keynote, delivered by Jonathan Zittrain. This guy is a force. Not only because he teaches at Harvard Law School and in the Harvard Dept. of Computer Science and has been on The Colbert Report a few times. But because he completely identifies with this audience and this audience completely identifies with. JZ, as he is affectionately known, was and is a net culture guy, okay ‘geek’, decades before that term got co-opted by the cool kids. The talk is on memes & society and it was honestly one of the most poignant conference talks I have ever seen (I see your TED talks and I raise you this keynote). 

I don’t expect you to watch all 53 minutes of the talk (though it would undoubtedly enrich your life) but I do encourage you to move the arrow around a bit so you can get the flavor of the talk. From the opening salvo, directed at the room of about 1,000 ROFLcon’ers, of "this is what makes the Internet sing…on all the off key notes" to insights such as “we look for pathos in the world and try to capture it” and we “act out against the unfunny cynicism of our mainstream institutions”, JZ’s talk is a manifesto for a world in which decisions about what is good, important, or funny, are increasingly not made by executives in offices but by everyday people. 

Now, we have additional complexities, such as a surge on the supply side and the challenge of getting noticed in a vast sea of options. The invisible hand of the Internet may not be what it once was, now that it is getting nudged and tugged by more conventional market forces, but there is still ample reason to remain optimistic about the new creative-industrial complex of the 21st century. And if you don't believe me, just keep reading this blog.

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Vice: The billions in bro culture

Remember when Dennis Rodman went to North Korea for a personal appearance at the birthday celebrations for Kim Jong Un?

Or when software magnate and the world’s oldest 'dude' John McAfee went on the lam, sneaking out of Belize and into Guatemala after being bizarrely slapped with murder charges? 

Who was there for both of these wild walkabouts? Why, it was Vice, also referred to as “America's coolest counterculture brand and millennial marketing vehicle.”

About a week ago around the office coffee maker I was having a conversation with one of the bosses, about a project I’m currently working on, and he said to me..."oh, you might find this interesting", referring to an interview with one of the founders of Vice he had listened to in the car that morning. We were talking about how much content production and broadcasting had changed over the years and he said "then you have to find the interview with the Vice guy." And so I did.

“We stumbled upwards” is what Suroosh Alvi, Vice co-founder explained in the interview, and that phrase stuck with me. Indeed they did. Alvi was fresh out of heroin rehab when he and a group of friends started the company that seemed like little more than a middle finger to mainstream society. I remember Vice from its earliest incarnation in the mid-90s, when the then new Montreal-based alterna-paper filled the free racks at coffee places, record stores (yes, those existed then), and boutique-y skate shop slash art gallery places of my old hometown of Vancouver. I’ll give any free paper a try or two and so I did with Vice. And wa wa wee wa, as Borat would say. I felt almost embarrassed for the ink on the page. Sexist, juvenile, homophobic, racist, idiotic, and across the board offensive. Am I missing anything? No, I don’t think so.

I didn’t really think about Vice too much after that. I had heard rumblings that they had moved from Montreal to NYC and didn’t really have the need to pay much attention to them. A few little blips on the radar screen here and there, but that's it. And that makes perfect sense, as I’m not an 18-34 year old male of the bro persuasion, therefore their stuff really shouldn’t be reaching me. 

Until the John McAfee and Dennis Rodman incidents. Then everything changed. Vice was getting tons of attention. Because they were doing something truly different. And not just different in the offensive and boundary-pushing way that I remember. This was different in the I can't believe they're getting cameras into those places way. It was also around this time that media mogul Rupert Murdoch invested $70 million in the company, bringing Vice’s valuation to $1.4 billion. 

Also last week I came across a story about the new, reinvented Vice and posted it on Facebook. The torrent of comments that followed were illuminating. A sampling follows here. Meet Melissa, a Montrealer in her late 20s, Bill, a Vancouver-based writer and filmmaker, and Jesse, a television writer and producer now based in Los Angeles, with whom I used to hang out when we were neighbors and he was 10 or so. He was the absolute coolest kid. He wrote a screenplay when he was 11, he was into David Cronenberg movies, and I remember going to an all ages gig with him around the same time. I was so happy he chimed in on this post as Jesse would have been a teenager around the time that Vice showed up on the floors of indie retail in the mid 90s. Though I had lost touch with him when he was around 12, all these years later Jesse is an ideal commentator on the Vice phenomenon from back in the day (to use the overused bro term).

Click to enlarge

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Great data from the field. "It seemed like it should be illegal". What more could kids want? And in the case of Vice they stayed in the game long enough for the world to catch up with them.

Obviously I had missed a huge chunk of their history. You don’t just go from being bad boys with a sex and drugs and rock and roll tabloid paper you give away for free to getting investment from Rupert Murdoch and a billion dollar plus valuation. You just don't. In addition to being a magazine and a website they are also record label, book publisher, TV and film production company, family of YouTube channels with hundreds of millions views, and live event producer. Their content and event partnerships include some of the world's biggest companies --  Intel, Time Warner, and Google, to name just three. By 2007 their revenues were reported to be $28 million (which just happens to work out to .02% of their billion dollar plus valuation, just six years later).

So how did they do it? As is often the case, it wasn’t just one thing. At a time when everyone else was putting money into platforms that produced no original content, they placed their bet on original content. And content that nobody else was touching. Their terrain was almost exclusively the stuff way out on the periphery. And they had grown up, moving from misogynistic and racist jokes alongside the underbelly of rock and roll culture to 'extreme journalism' and travelogues of some of the world's weirdest and most dangerous places.

Their timing and choice of place was also good. When they left Montreal in 1999 they relocated to Brooklyn, and not just anywhere in Brooklyn, but Williamsburg, the neighbourhood we can thank for all things hipster, including the word itself. But in 1999 it was proto-hipster and the Vice crew got in on the ground floor. 

Also on the rise at this time was what I’ll call ‘bro culture’. Beavis and Butthead and Tom Green paved the way for Jackass' Johnny Knoxville Jackass, which paved the way for Tosh.0, Epic MealTime, Man. Vs. Food, Riff Raff, and before we knew it we were surrounded by all things 'epic' and 'fail'.

And as all this was happening media executives were watching. One in particular, Tom Freston, one of the creators of MTV and former CEO of Viacom was watching particularly closely. He completely got what the Vice crew were doing and helped open doors that led to a a round of investment estimated to be between $50 and $100 million in 2011. Global advertising giant WPP and media merchant bank The Raine Group were behind the cash infusion, along with Freston himself. Later that year Vice surpassed $100 million in revenue for the first time. 

Fast forward three more years, to today, and Vice has 35 foreign bureaus, with a stable of more than 4,000 contributors. The company is expected to make $500 million in revenue this year, with a profit margin of 25 to 30%, unusually high for a media company. Is this mostly advertising revenue, which we always hear is the magic bullet for online and media companies? No it isn't. Vice's revenue base is extremely diversified. Sure there is some revenue from advertising, but they make most of their money  from licensing their content, for TV, film, mobile, and online, as well as through sponsorships and partnerships with the likes of Sony, Nike, Google, Intel, Dell, and Microsoft (even though the relationship with Microsoft didn't quite work out.) 

Yes, the one time dictionary definition of underground culture is in demand with the most deep-pocketed and straight-laced of corporate entities. Vice proved that they know how to talk to a demographic that had either given up on mainstream media, or had tuned out entirely. They made out of control and bad for you their brand. They went everywhere kids were. Not to the safe center, but to the margins. And in the end the safe center ended up coming to them.


Blog Bonus Section Part 1: Oral History of Vice, from Jesse Brown's Canadaland...Listen here.




Blog Bonus Section Part 2: See David Carr of the New York Times give the boys from Vice a bit of a verbal beatdown.

Podcasting: Art, Craft, or Reaching the Niches?

I spent this weekend at an event called Podcamp held on the campus of Ryerson in Toronto. Despite the name, Podcamp is about more than podcasting, but I’ve been thinking a lot about podcasting lately, so most of the sessions I attended had something to do with that. 

So…what do we know about podcasting, generally speaking? At its most basic it’s an audio file, that can be recorded on a laptop, a tablet, or even a phone, then uploaded to the web, and made available to anyone and everyone via aggregator sites such as Podcast Alley  and Castroller and sold or given away for free on iTunes. Globally there are about 250,000 podcasts available via iTunes (and a small number that don’t use the iTunes store). Most podcasts are free and last summer iTunes reached the milestone of 1 billion podcast subscriptions. For comparison purposes, there are reported to be over 150 million blogs on the Internet, so do with those numbers what you will. (Ed. Note: The fast math: there are 1/4 of 1 million podcasts and 150 million blogs, so the proportion of podcasts to blogs is something like .0016%, though I urge you to check my calculation and decimal points. I'm a blogger, not a statistician dammit).

So, you ask, and rightly so, is podcasting radio, but on a platform that is available to anyone? Is it for amateurs who maybe have their eye on becoming professional one day? Is it for hobbyists? Are podcasts the ‘zines of audio, there to capture the nooks and crannies of culture not mainstream enough to warrant coverage in the world of broadcast or commercial publishing? It depends who you ask, but to me the great podcasting hope is that it can deliver to listeners the things otherwise not available, for reasons of geography, for reasons of subject matter, or for reasons of style or format.

At one time we were limited in our listening by geography, and that changed first, in a limited way, with shortwave radio, and on a larger scale when radio stations began streaming their broadcasts on the Internet. At other times we were limited in our listening according to what was deemed popular enough, or ‘good enough’, to attract a large audience. This was the law of the land as broadcasting infrastructures cost a lot to operate and there was a fixed amount of space on the radio dial. Podcasting removes not just the infrastructure cost but the dial is well. Welcome to the world of infinite air time and space.

Go ahead, touch that dial, you now have choices. Lots of choices.

Which brings up back to the Podcamp event. One of the sessions was led by two guys who, for 25 years, helmed morning radio shows in one of the biggest markets in North America. In such jobs it is not uncommon to have a good run of anywhere from a few to 10 years, only to get let go due to a change in station format or the less precise “change in direction”, often used at the uncomfortable meeting in the program director’s office. They either get picked up by a competing station, change markets/cities….or become realtors.

Seriously, that’s what usually happens. Nonetheless, morning shows are prestigious jobs with pay rates, according to some googling and asking around that I’ve done, that tend to be in the $300,000 - $500,000 per year range, with the rate of pay going higher, even into the 7 figure range for those deemed to be star talent. If they can bring in the numbers aka listeners it translates to ad dollars and that's what radio is ultimately selling. As someone enlightened me during my first commercial radio job in the 1980s: Music? That's what we play in between the ads.

Anyway, this is the professional merry go round that the morning radio guys on the panel had been on for years, getting hired, getting let go, getting wooed back, getting offered new perks, that’s just how it goes. And then in their mid 50s they got let go again and that time seemed scarier than previous times. But this time they had another way to be on the air, so to speak, without being on the air at a radio station, and that was via podcasting. So that’s what they did. They set up a basic studio and did their show and made it available online. It was basically the same thing they did on their radio show, but with more swearing. That’s one of the ways they described it.  At the Podcamp panel one audience member asked them what their podcast is about, what its values are. The response: “We’re trying not to starve.”*

And this is the point at which part of me wanted to scream “Please!!!” Instead, I took my time collecting my things and eventually left the room, in search of something more illuminating. Jump cut to the session I attended today, hosted by a guy who works as a teacher and does six different podcast series, which you can check out here. In all he’s done about 1000 podcast episodes over a 6 year period. Some series have 100 to 200 episodes,  another has about 500 episodes.  

And why does he do them? “I do all the podcasts I do because I love doing them”, he said. “I don’t take ads, I don’t do marketing, To me podcasting is not a marketing tool, it’s an artistic process.” This was quite different from much of the rhetoric heard over the weekend – about finding your authentic voice, becoming a marketing affiliate, optimizing for search, etc -- so I started jotting down quotes verbatim. He continued: “If what you’re doing brings you joy, feedback doesn’t matter,  page views don’t matter, uniques don’t matter, page rank doesn’t matter, SEO (search engine optimization) doesn’t matter…even listeners don’t matter…much."

"People aren’t used to hearing the word ‘joy’ any more", he pointed out. "They think it makes you vulnerable. But as far as I’m concerned, f!@# it. Podcasting brings me joy. Press record, press publish, nothing else is necessary for a podcast to exist…any hurdles beyond this are fixable or fictional. Regardless of how many people hear it the week you put it out…your podcast is always there. Your potential refreshes constantly. If I talk about Mork & Mindy on my podcast and somebody searches on that, they might find my podcast."

And to those who might be a bit podcast-shy, his advice: “You’re not that great but you’re not as bad as you think.  And you want to know what ‘authentic’ is…it’s stumbling the first couple of times. Podcasting is not radio…it is its own medium.”

As an example he points to the podcast of a guy named Mark who does the Mark. My Words. podcast a few times a week. He records it on his phone, during his walk to work, which, judging on the length of the podcast, seems to be a six to eight minute walk. That’s the whole podcast. A guy walking to work and talking about things that are on his mind. 

One of the most successful podcasts out there, Marc Maron’s WTF, started in a not dissimilar fashion. After 25+ years as a comedian, the attendant drug and alcohol problems, and on the brink of a second divorce and the financial ruin that can accompany such life milestones, his manager informed him he was ‘unbookable’. Maron then retreated to his garage, where he set up his laptop and a mike and a small table and started doing a combination of monologues and interviews, with friends famous and not so famous. The whole thing was often a therapy session for all involved. And that included listeners. Downloads grew exponentially. Maron started doing the podcast in September 2009. By January 2011 he was getting 230,000 downloads per week, by January 2012 the weekly number had jumped to almost 700,000 downloads. At the end of 2013 WTF hit 100 million total downloads.

I believe the enormous popularity of Maron’s podcast comes from how unlike it is to what people are used to hearing. Whether it was on radio shows, TV shows, at live comedy shows, or even on podcasts. And that is what podcasting, in my mind, is purpose built for. The personalities, the topics, and more abstractly, the textures, that don’t fit into other mediums. In a word, difference. 

Commercial radio, in a word, is about sameness. Why? Because mainstream media is built to hit the middle of the bullseye. The point of doing so is to capture the largest possible chunk of the market, and then getting to charge the highest prices for advertising. That’s how the system works, and understanding that is important for people wondering why they can’t crack it. It’s largely a system based on common denominator (you can add the word ‘lowest’ in front of the phrase if you’d like, it’s up to you) and not offending people. And that’s how the Black Eyed Peas end up holding the record for the top selling digital single. 

And here’s where things get challenging. For all the amazing podcasts out there, for the time being at least, most of us will hear about only a handful of them. The logjam seems to be on the marketing and promo side, and marketing and promotion for independently produced podcasts is usually done on a low budget or no budget basis. Word of mouth and social media curation are a start, but we still have a list of top podcasts that is primarily an on demand version of popular radio shows, and a few star podcasters, like Adam Carolla and Joe Rogan, both of whom come from broadcast and comedy backgrounds. Not exactly cottage industries. Still, a better situation than the old model of broadcast for the many, but, admittedly, an imperfect system.

If you're wondering about what the listenership numbers look like for podcasts, a spokesperson for the largest podcast hosting company revealed the following: As of Fall 2013 a single podcast episode that been available online for 30 days averaged 141 downloads. If you're getting 3,400 downloads you're in the top 10%, with 9,000 downloads you're in the top 5% and if you're getting 50,000 downloads or more per episode, congratulations, you're a 1 percenter of the podcast world. And this is despite the fact that a recent study by the Pew Research Center reported that 27% of U.S. Internet users aged 18 and over have downloaded podcasts.

But in between the guy who records his podcast into his phone while walking to work and the one percenters is a cornucopia of audio splendor. The Fogelnest Files, Overthinking It, Harmontown, The Mental Illness Happy Hour and who knows how many more that I've never heard. Shows that would probably never get onto 'real' radio, for reasons that don't even matter any more, and are there for your pod pleasure. Just remember to tell people when you hear something good. For now that's probably one of the most effective things we can do.

Until then, I'll point you to some of the best networks for podcasts:

• PRX's Radiotopia
• Earwolf for comedy podcasts
• 5x5, one of the pioneering podcast networks

* An interesting loop...these guys went from success in traditional broadcasting to staying ‘on the air’ via podcasting. They then ended up getting back on the air, ‘terrestrial radio’ as it’s called in industry circles, and now their podcast is an edit of their nightly radio show.



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