Podcasting Blockbuster Opens Today
Ok, maybe I made the blockbuster part up. Nonetheless, Feedburner has now obligingly provided additional data for the claim that podcasting is growing exponentially. I predict it will soon reach the proverbial tipping point. (By soon, I mean within the next three years.)
[Note: A tipping point, the phrase popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, describes a time or set of circumstances that produce a sudden increase in the popularity of some social phenomenon.]
According to the Burning Door blog, Feedburner alone now manages more broadcasts than there are radio stations worldwide.
Also, they say, “Podcast directories are growing, and driving activity back to podcasters’ originating Web sites. As we saw with text feeds, distribution begins as a mechanism to drive traffic back to the originating source and then evolves to become its own consumption medium.”
If that’s true, and there’s good reason to believe it is, podcasting will soon (see above) become an excellent addition to the SEO toolbox. With traffic comes sales. (That’s the whole reason for caring, after all.)
And people, despite reports of (currently) low listening rates, are tuning in. 60 million feed requests and a subscriber base of 11 million must be going into ears somewhere.
Humans have learned to read (and a darn good thing for me, too), but they evolved to listen and look. That means eyeballs and auditory canals are ready to be filled with content.
That content can be crud or it can be quality. That’s up to any one of the 168,000 publishers producing them. But even crud sometimes gets a message across. And if that message is “Buy this ’cause it’s cool or useful” then money is eventually going to change hands.
Let those hands be yours.