Originally published January 4 2006
Study finds many podcasters are in it for the money
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The study of primarily U.S.-based podcasters and videobloggers found that almost 40 percent were producing their content with commercial motives. However, most producers probably don't expect a substantial amount.
The study, based on two surveys of 351 mostly US-based podcasters and videobloggers, found that nearly 40 per cent were producing the content with an explicitly or quasi-commercial motive in mind.
Dr Peter Chen, an assistant lecturer in media at Monash University and author of the Podcasting and Videoblogging: A Production-Side Analysis study, says that while he found the result surprising, it should be qualified in the sense that most producers probably didn't expect the podcasts or videoblogs to provide a substantial income.
The survey found most of the 307 podcasters and 69 videobloggers (25 respondents produced in both formats) were relatively well-educated English-speaking males aged in their mid-30s.
Most spent between two and three hours developing a single episode of their shows, and while the average podcast was about 30 minutes, videoblogs were 13 minutes on average.
"Now, you've got to think vegans as a proportion of the population (would be) very small," Dr Chen says.
"So we're talking way less than 1 per cent of the population - maybe 0.1 per cent of Australians are vegan, yet there are quite a number of podcasters out there."
A show called In Yarraville Tonight - by a couple of inner-city Melburnians - is another example.
"They review a different beer each week supplied by the local bottle shop, they talk about movies and books and they talk about local politics - they had a series of interviews with people running in the local council elections just recently.
So that's narrowcasting, but very different from the vegan thing," Dr Chen says.
Most podcast and videoblog "episodes" covered a couple of genre, such as news or music or a panel discussion, he says.
While the use of experts and guests was common in both videoblogs and podcasts, Dr Chen says most shows are produced by people working alone.
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