I am an extremely avid podcast consumer (see my podcast listening lineup for 2010), and sometime podcast producer. I have completely stopped listening to over-the-air radio, and I now listen to podcasts whenever I can. All except one of my podcasts are free. The podcast I pay for is “Never Not Funny.” It’s a 90-minute podcast. You can get the first 20 minutes for free, or you can pay to get the entire podcast. I like the podcast so much that I pay for the full 90-minute version. To learn more about “Never Not Funny’s” business model, read or listen to my interview with the show producer, Matt Belknap.

Because I pay for the “Never Not Funny” podcast, I make sure that I always watch it (I pay an extra $5 to get the video feed). I’m paying about a dollar per show, but that’s enough to get me invested into the show that I feel compelled to watch it. That’s not the case for any of my other free podcasts.

I feel the same way about watching films I purchase and download from iTunes. Or music I purchase from iTunes. Or listening to music on the paid service MOG for which I also became a paid subscriber ($5/month).

When I pay for content, I’m compelled to consume it before content I can get for free.

But as we all know, even charging a nickel for content can be a barrier for consumption. Some may see this as dealing with two mutually exclusive issues:

• If people pay for content they’ll be compelled to consume it.
• If you charge for content it will be a barrier to consumption.

I see the ability to overtake these conflicting issues is by not scaring people when you charge for content. Instead, get people excited that you’re going to charge for content. And I believe you can do this by creating your own form of scarcity. Give away a portion of content for free that leads people to want to purchase the rest of it.

How do you charge for podcasts?

While iTunes has an app store, a music store, and a movie store, they don’t make it possible for podcasters to sell their podcasts. Podcasts within iTunes must be completely free. That doesn’t mean you can’t sell your podcasts, you just can’t do it completely within the four walls of iTunes. You have to go outside and create a personalized RSS feed that requires a username and password for access. You can manage that through services like Premiumcast (read and listen to my interview with Premiumcast’s founder, Paul Colligan).

The New York Times today has an article about real-time bidding for advertising. The idea is that once people make purchases, their behavior is tracked and auctions start going off to be able to advertise to that user. Real-time bidding has been going on for quite some time, but profiled in the article is a new company, AppNexus which helps advertisers automate the process of analysis and bidding.

This whole discussion got me thinking about the role of advertising as marketing, as content, as helpful, and as a nuisance. The latter is not something anyone strives for, but it’s the way so many people describe advertising.

Why do they do that? Are they just being pests? Do they just like to complain?

Yes, that all may be true, but I think the truth of the matter is that advertising becomes annoying when it’s unwanted. And since it’s so difficult to effectively target advertising on a one-to-one basis, so much of it becomes “annoying.” Yet no one realizes when an ad is targeted well. No one announces, “Wow, that ad was targeted so well to me, I’m so glad they sent it to me at just this time.” Instead, they might say, “Oh, that’s just what I want” and completely not be aware of the wizard behind the curtain moving all the levers to deliver an ad to you at just the opportune moment.

So when advertising comes in at an inopportune moment, which is most of the time, how can we make it more useful? Many advertisers realize this and that’s why we see so many ads that appeal outside of their core audience. A purely entertaining ad, even if it’s not targeted to me, is no longer annoying.

But if we get to the point that we can hyper target every single ad right down to the individual, and perfectly time it, will there be anymore need for creativity? If I know at exactly this moment that you want to get a coffee, I don’t need to be creative, I can just tell you that Starbucks is selling coffee right now. Come on in. I don’t have to do anything else. Maybe I have to give you an incentive like a coupon. But really, what more do I need to do?

Could efficient targeted advertising be the end of creative advertising?

Creative Commons photo attribution to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/autohistorian/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

I started thinking about all the hot water Google got into with regards to the launching their different services, such as Google Street View, Google Books, and Google News. Google worked on each project, appropriated content that may or may not have been theirs to take, and then released the project, only to receive responses, “Hey, you didn’t ask me first if you could take that.”

If Google first asked permission, nothing would actually get done. Just think of the simple process you run into where you send out a question to five people via email and you say, “Hey, could I get your response to this?” And then they don’t respond. So then you have to follow up again with them, this time pushing them, “Hey, I really need your response on this.” With all your pushing, you get four people to respond, but there’s always that one person that doesn’t respond and you have to call them. And when you finally get them on the phone you get some excuse, “I’m so sorry I didn’t respond to you, I’ve been really busy. Sure, I can give you a response.” And then in less than 15 seconds, he gives you the answer.

That’s just a story with five people. Imagine thousands or even millions. It’s simply not possible. So the answer Google goes with, “Let’s just do our next project, take the content we want, and let them complain about it afterwards” or more appropriately, “Let’s just do it, everyone will see the enormous value that they won’t care that we didn’t ask for permission first, and for those who do care, we can remove things after the fact.”

It’s a lot easier to operate like Google and like many other similar companies. Simply take the content without permission, and wait until you receive that cease and desist order. If you deal with the consequences after the fact, it’s an unknown quantity that may or may not be costly. The alternative method, ask permission first, is a well known and expensive option.

Is this the new model of publishing and content online? Just go ahead and do it and deal with the fallout afterwards? Look at Napster. That’s how they built their model. Sure it was a completely illegal platform, but they built a brand on it and people wanted that brand.

Google didn’t ask permission to search your site, but why would they?

Not many people realize this but Google Search operates under the same “do first, deal with consequences later” principle. Google indexes your site and the entire web and they do it all without first asking our permission. If you want, you can set up a robots.txt file to alert Google’s web spiders to pass over your site. Very few people know about this, nor do they employ it, because who wants to be invisible to Google? It would be like wanting to take your company’s name out of the phone book.

That’s kind of a dated analogy (”be like taking your name out of the phone book”) since almost nobody uses a phonebook anymore to find phone numbers. We all rely on Google. So go ahead phone company, take my name out of your book, but Google, please keep me in.

For so long, ecommerce has been defined as “and soon there will be a day when you’re watching ‘Friends’ and you’ll be able to click on Jennifer Aniston’s sweater and buy it.” This idea of “buying Jennifer Aniston’s sweater” T-commerce (a.k.a. television commerce) cropped up around 2001. For some demented reason, we all thought that was the ultimate future of content and commerce. Click an item online and buy. It would be the beginning and end of monetizing content. I heard that scenario played out again and again at conferences. Why specifically Jennifer Aniston? And why her sweater? Prior to those discussions I’ve NEVER heard a single woman ever say, “I want to buy Jennifer Aniston’s sweater. Where did she get it?” Have you? If there’s never been any demand of anyone wanting to buy Jennifer Aniston’s sweater, then why were we all collectively so obsessed with that scenario?

Since then we’ve seen that content doesn’t have to be monetized so directly. That content is used to build brand, build voice, and create associations of your company’s brand with the content’s brand. And in other cases we can see that content can help us sell things directly by giving us the information we need to make a purchase. Then there are the endless variations in between. Have a favorite?