Laporte’s Podcast Agenda: Don’t Screw It Up
It's only fitting that Leo Laporte should open this year's Podcast and Portable Media Expo with the first keynote - he's some sort of god among this crowd - the phrase "star-struck" was a steady drumbeat in the pact, and hushed, ballroom.
Laporte is the host of the smash-hit podcast TWiT (This Week in Technology), which is downloaded millions of times each time it is released into cyberspace. But beyond being one of the founders of the medium, Laporte is a 30-year radio and television veteran. Active in building the old media, for which he has few nice things to say, his real passion, he says, is still just a toddler.
His address focused on setting the agenda for the next two years - what he called ‘podcasting's terrible twos." But it's not just that the medium is still wobbly and messy, small and irreverent; Laporte says that for proper development, podcasting will have to outgrow two things: Apple and Old Media.
At first it seems that strange would have a problem with podcasting. Apple's the reason the medium exists. But trademark lawyers are seldom sentimental, and the company has been working to put this newly coined word, formed from the iPod, to rest.
That presents a bit of an identity crisis, which purveyors seek to resolve by throwing around new words like "netcast" and, if for the video iPod or similar devices, "vidcast." It's early enough that the term podcast is hardly common usage, even if that's the only name the medium has known in its infancy.
The conflict with Apple, though, was just an underlying issue in his speech. The main focus was on the culture of podcasting, the spirit of cooperation over competition, and the warning that the culture would be threatened by Old Media.
"Don't copy the mistakes of Old Media," said Laporte. "I've spent 30 years laboring down in the mines of television and radio."
Earlier, Laporte called television and radio a "cesspool," media that exploits its audience for advertising, and bemoaned "three minutes of content for four minutes of ads." Podcasting, he said, is the best advertising medium ever. "But that's not why we're here," he corrected. "New media do not spring up all the time. This is a powerful medium."
The first goal is to expand the audience, not exploit it, and then experiment with different methods of monetizing, several of which would be discussed at the Expo, even if no one is sure yet what exactly works.
Podcasts sponsorships are still sold at a cost per thousand (CPM), which is a method Laporte called "old school." Part of the problem I that we have no real way of measuring the success of a podcast. Though we can count downloads, those numbers "are fuzzy." There's no way to know if those are partial downloads, or repeats.
But the culture, and not damaging it, is first and foremost, in the eyes of Laporte, then settling "the Apple iPod thing," reinventing a new name for it, and not making the same mistakes as Old Media.
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Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
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