Can podcasting ever pay its way?

Sunday Business Post - Media & Marketing pages - 25 March 2007

Everyone’s podcasting now, but when will the service turn a profit for the big broadcasters? Dermot Corrigan reports.

Irish radio stations are turning heavily to podcasting, but profiting from these downloadable broadcasts is proving tricky.

‘‘At present, we don’t sell advertising around the podcasts and all our podcasts are free,” said Aisling McCabe, sales and business development manager of RTE.ie. ‘‘We do plan to introduce an advertising and sponsorship model around relevant podcasts in the near future, but the exact packages haven’t yet been finalised.”

‘‘There are no imminent plans for advertisements in podcasts,” said Michael Markey, marketing director of Newstalk106. ‘‘I think in terms of web, podcasts and live streaming, advertisers are still finding their way around that whole area.”

Despite this lack of a direct revenue stream, the number of podcasts being offered by Irish radio stations is increasing rapidly. RTE, Today FM, Newstalk 106-108 FM, 98FM and FM 104 all offer a variety of their complete radio programmes minus advertisements, or edited highlights, for download as podcasts. The podcasts are accessed either directly from the station’s website, or via a dedicated podcast provider such as iTunes.

The number of programmes being downloaded as podcasts is also growing quickly.

‘‘The number of RTE podcasts for February was almost double the figure for January,” said McCabe.

There is no external audited method of measuring podcast downloads in Ireland. The iTunes chart is the only independent measurement available, but it only count s podcasts subscribed to in the last 24 hours from Irish locations. This makes the chart unreliable, as it heavily favours podcasts that have been made available for download recently.

RTE sources said the total number of podcasts downloaded from its servers in February was about 160,000. The most popular downloads were Morning Ireland, The Weekly Ryan, Conversations With Eamon Dunphy, Liveline, Playback and Drive Time Sport. RTE currently offers around 50 other podcasts covering news, sport, entertainment, education, historical and documentary/features programming.

Newstalk1 06-108 FM figures claimed a current daily figure of 65,000 downloads over their 12 podcasts. The most popular Newstalk podcasts are the sports show Off The Ball and The Breakfast Show.

Today FM’s internal figures showed that the Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show was downloaded approximately 164,000 times in February. The Gift Grub sketches are included in this podcast.

Other Today FM podcasts include The Last Word (30,000 downloads in February), The Sunday Business Show (10,000) and The Tom Dunne Pet Cast (15,000). McCabe said that, while figures were still small compared to radio listenership, RTE was content with how its podcast audience was growing. ‘‘It is difficult to compare with radio listenership,” she said.

‘‘Radio listenership is measured on average daily listeners, whereas podcasts are measured based on downloads over a month. For example, the latest JNLR [Joint National Listenership Research] showed that average daily listenership of Morning Ireland was 442,000, while Morning Ireland achieved approximately 30,000 downloads over the month of February. Listening to a podcast is a proactive choice, whereas to listen to radio is often purely passive reception, so they can’t be measured by the same yardstick.”

McCabe said RTE podcasts were being downloaded from locations all over the globe. ‘‘We know that just under 40 per cent of downloads for RTE podcasts are in the US, another 40 per cent are from Ireland, approximately 10 per cent from Britain and the rest is worldwide,” she said.

Markey said edited podcasts could be a good way for listeners to get the highlights of a programme, even if they could not listen to the whole show live.

‘‘The Breakfast Show podcast summarises everything into a nice, neat package,” said Markey. ‘‘If you want to get your daily hit of Irish news, it is a good way of doing it.”

While most of the podcasts offered by Irish radio stations feature content already broadcast, Newstalk and RTE say they have plans to produce podcast-only content in future.

‘‘Sometimes you never get a chance to play a full interview, or air everything on one of the shows,” said Markey. ‘‘It would be great to podcast exclusive stuff; that would be a real treat for the listeners.”

‘‘The next step for RTE.ie is to produce podcast-only content,” said McCabe.

‘‘It is likely that the content would complement some of RTE’s existing output, and would be made in a style that is particularly suitable to the podcast format, rather than re-purposing existing content.”

Some broadcasters view podcasts as another way to add interactivity to their offerings and respond to their listeners’ demands.

‘‘We have an e-mail address - podcasts@newstalk106.ie - and people are always asking can we get this show put up or if we can do back catalogues, things like that,” said Markey.

McCabe said that, while the technology for video podcasts already existed, issues such as broadcast rights had to be surmounted before RTE TV shows were offered for download.

In Britain, personalities such as comedian Ricky Gervais and football presenter James Richardson have been used to front podcasts and grow interest in the platform.

‘‘The idea of using a personality is, absolutely, a way of looking at it,” said McCabe.

‘‘We could potentially leverage existing RTE personalities, who are known for other things that they do on RTE, but not necessarily using the show they are involved in.”

Irish local radio stations are also offering a selection of their programming to listeners as free podcasts.

WLRFM in Waterford won the award for commercial radio podcasting at the Irish Digital Media Awards in February, while Clare FM and Spin 103.8 also made the shortlist.