Should a podcast be narrowly focused or can it benefit from having varied content? Well, as I am often fond of saying — and frustrating the heck out of people — yes. Your podcast can, and should be, niche focused. Perhaps you talk about voiceover or comics or gardening — like I do — or careers or technology or whatever. Gaming is another big, big podcast niche right now. If you’re really interest in that, sure, focus very, very narrowly on that niche. Now, that said, you’re going to find some podcasts out there which have much more akin (in common) to the “morning zoo” show like you’d hear on terrestrial radio these days — the 2 DJs making jokes, having fun and playing music in-between, maybe interviewing some people and often those shows will range quite widely.
Douglas answers questions from students in Janet Wilcox’s online Voiceover class at UCLA Extension.
Transcript:
Should a podcast be narrowly focused or can it benefit from having varied content? Well, as I am often fond of saying — and frustrating the heck out of people — yes. Your podcast can, and should be, niche focused. Perhaps you talk about voiceover or comics or gardening — like I do — or careers or technology or whatever. Gaming is another big, big podcast niche right now. If you’re really interest in that, sure, focus very, very narrowly on that niche. Now, that said, you’re going to find some podcasts out there which have much more akin (in common) to the “morning zoo” show like you’d hear on terrestrial radio these days — the 2 DJs making jokes, having fun and playing music in-between, maybe interviewing some people and often those shows will range quite widely.
New Media Interchange is a podcast spotlighting various developments in New Media & focusing on the media world beyond mainstream television and radio, including podcasting, YouTube, live streaming, gaming and more. Hosted by Douglas E. Welch , pioneer podcaster, blogger and new media consultant.
New Media Interchange is part of the 3rd Pass Media Network which is launching a series of shows this week including Mindul(l) Media, The Render Break Report, New Media Interchange and More. You’ll find more information about 3rd Pass Media at http://3rdPass.Media.
This is New Media Interchange where we talk about the media world beyond mainstream television and radio, including podcasting, YouTube, live streaming, gaming and more. I’m Douglas E. Welch, pioneer podcaster, blogger and writer.
In today’ show…
Nintendo wants a piece of that YouTube Money and plans on taking it out of the pockets of Let’s Play video makers, Netflix plans on spending over $5 billion on programming in 2016, and Tubefilter explains the best times to post your YouTube videos for maximum impact.
Will round out the show with some words about “Attracting Attention to Yourself” and end up with the first entry in my Subscribed series, highlighting the podcasts, blogs and YouTube Channels I am subscribed to.
More after this…
Today’s show is brought to you by Audible.com. I love New Media like podcasting and YouTube, but I also love all types of books. If you love audio books you can support New Media Interchange and 3rdPass Media by starting your free 30-day trial with Audible today. Choose from over 100,000 books. Including one of my favorites, The Hobbit..
Gaming is the #2 category on YouTube, behind music, and you can find a wide variety of gaming reviews, recaps and a growing number of Let’s Play video series, where a gamer walks you through their experience of game from beginning to end. Some of these Let’s Play series can go on for 30 or 40 episodes as the gamer hacks and slashes their way through the zombies of Dying Light, works to save the fictional country of Kyrat from a crazed dictator or performs speed runs of amazing dexterity in Zelda or Mario Brothers. While many game manufacturers have a good relationship with Let’s Play producers — even providing them explicit license to play the game on video — the aged “big boy” of the gaming world — Nintendo hasn’t been playing nice of late.
Back in mid-2013, Nintendo starting claiming all YouTube revenue from many videos that included Nintendo Copyrighted content, like Let’s Play footage. They eventually backed off this wholesale money grab and last month created a “licensing” program that allows YouTube producers to continue sharing YouTube videos of Nintendo games in exchange for 30%-40% of the revenue according to articles from Game Informer. com.
While this certainly is a better deal than taking 100% of the revenue, I always look suspiciously at large companies taking money away from some of their biggest fans — turning off many of these fans from ever playing or sharing a company’s products in the future. Is this a sign that Nintendo is struggling overall and looking for a quick way to gain a quick cash boost? The company has been struggling of late, but I think trying to level out their balance sheet on the backs of fans might not be the way to do it.
What do you think? Are YouTuber’s getting a free ride on Nintendo gaming content? Is Nintendo making a desperate money grab? What does this mean for the thousands of hours of Nintendo gaming already available on YouTube and its creators? I’d love to know what you think. Send along a comment on the blog or via Twitter to @NMIPodcast.
I often comment to people how I am amazed to took so long for large, Internet companies like Netflix, Google and Amazon to get into content creation for their services. Living here in Hollywood itself, I have seen the production companies — those entities that do the actual nitty-gritty work producing a television show — don’t really care who pays the bills, as long as there is money to be made. I knew it was only a matter of time before they started to see services like Netflix, Google Play and Amazon as potential partners in content creation.
Therefore I see no surprise at all that Netflix is going to be spending even more in the future creating exclusive content. With critically acclaimed series like House of Cards, I think they can see a great potential for content beyond the traditional, mainstream, broadcast networks. I would expect to see even more players enter this market, both in the existing ranks of high-tech businesses as well as new startups focused on becoming the next, great, content network.
You can read the complete story using the link in the show notes.
Finally, for all you incipient content creators out there, TubeFilter provides a detailed article on the best days and times to post your videos for maximum viewership. If you are looking to turn your content into an on-going moneymaker, information like this can be critical. Moving the number of views 5% upwards could result in a significant boost in advertising earnings. As a fairly casual producer of YouTube content myself, I tend to post videos whenever I have time and whenever they are complete. After reading this article, though, I think I am going to spend a bit more time and consideration on my video release schedule. All the detailed tables and charts are available in the TubeFilter link in the show notes.
Ever since I first heard George Carlin’s comedy album, Class Clown, a certain phrase has always stuck with me… (paraphrasing) The job of a class clown is…ATTRACTING ATTENTION TO YOURSELF! I call this “Carlin’s Law of Attraction!” Replace class clown with any other profession and you will see the universal truth of that statement. Replace class clown with “podcaster” and you can probably see where I am headed.
Podcasting offers anyone the ability to “attract attention to yourself”, your business, your cause, whatever is important to you. Sure, it can be difficult to rise above all the other folks who have already discovered podcasting, but the odds are certainly much better than they ever were in the traditional media.
Carlin’s Law of Attraction, also dictates that you want your media spread as far and wide as possible. This means posting your videos to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and any other spots where your audience might stumble across them. That said, each piece MUST have some links driving people back to your home site where they can subscribe to your content directly.
Everything depends on your ability to attract attention to your content. Scripts and books don’t sell themselves in your drawer (or trapped in your computer), art does sell when it sits in a closet and your podcast doesn’t attract an audience if no one ever gets to see it.
Apply Carlin’s Law of Attraction to everything you do, podcasting, writing, office work, whatever, and you will find that things just start to happen for you.
That’s it for this episode of New Media Interchange where I talk about the media world beyond mainstream television and radio, including podcasting, YouTube, live streaming, gaming and more.
New Media Interchange is part of the 3rd Pass Media network. For more information, visit 3rdPass.media. Do you have questions or comments? Send them along to NMI@3rdpass.media or via Twitter at @NMIPodcast .
I’m Douglas E. Welch and I’ll be back next week with more New Media news on New Media Interchange..
I want to caution you, though. Podcasting is not what we might consider a mass media. It’s a niche media. Your audience is not going to be 8 million people like it would be for NCIS on CSBS on Tuesday night, but it could be 1, 2, 4, 10,000 rabid, raving fans of your work who will support you and assist you and basically give you some great feedback about the work you’re doing as well as, perhaps, supporting you financially, through a Patreon fundraiser or through affiliate income — and we’ll talk about that a little but later. So, get the word out in any way you can.
Douglas answers questions from students in Janet Wilcox’s online Voiceover class at UCLA Extension.
Transcript:
I want to caution you, though. Podcasting is not what we might consider a mass media. It’s a niche media. Your audience is not going to be 8 million people like it would be for NCIS on CSBS on Tuesday night, but it could be 1, 2, 4, 10,000 rabid, raving fans of your work who will support you and assist you and basically give you some great feedback about the work you’re doing as well as, perhaps, supporting you financially, through a Patreon fundraiser or through affiliate income — and we’ll talk about that a little but later. So, get the word out in any way you can.
Now, what Janet does for these online courses is she solicits questions from her students and emails them over to me and that’s what I have here on my handy. dandy phone. And so, we’re just going to jump in to some of the questions. First questions was, once you start podcasting, what are the ways to promote them? — to promote podcasts? Well, the fact is, podcasts are best promoted, of course, online. Because ou can link people right over to whatever show you’ve created. You can also share your podcasts via all your different social media accounts — whether it’s Facebook, or Twitter or Tumblr or whatever social media network is your home base. Now, it’s important to remember, too, that YouTube is a social network in itself, so don’t forget, that even if you’re just doing voiceover work it might be helpful to do a video, even if it’s just a static picture and put that up on YouTube as well to gain the benefit of that social media network, too. Of course, for podcasts, one of the biggest places you want to be these days is in the iTunes Podcast Directory. That’s very simple to do. You only need to set up a blog — which you can do for free at WordPress.com or Blogger.com or a variety of other sources — and then you submit that blog to the iTunes Podcast Directory. It will see the shows you’ve put there, slurp them up and suddenly you’re now in the iTunes Podcast Directory, categorized and searchable by anyone who might be interested in whatever you’re talking about.
Douglas answers questions from students in Janet Wilcox’s online Voiceover class at UCLA Extension.
Transcript:
Now, what Janet does for these online courses is she solicits questions from her students and emails them over to me and that’s what I have here on my handy. dandy phone. And so, we’re just going to jump in to some of the questions. First questions was, once you start podcasting, what are the ways to promote them? — to promote podcasts? Well, the fact is, podcasts are best promoted, of course, online. Because ou can link people right over to whatever show you’ve created. You can also share your podcasts via all your different social media accounts — whether it’s Facebook, or Twitter or Tumblr or whatever social media network is your home base. Now, it’s important to remember, too, that YouTube is a social network in itself, so don’t forget, that even if you’re just doing voiceover work it might be helpful to do a video, even if it’s just a static picture and put that up on YouTube as well to gain the benefit of that social media network, too. Of course, for podcasts, one of the biggest places you want to be these days is in the iTunes Podcast Directory. That’s very simple to do. You only need to set up a blog — which you can do for free at WordPress.com or Blogger.com or a variety of other sources — and then you submit that blog to the iTunes Podcast Directory. It will see the shows you’ve put there, slurp them up and suddenly you’re now in the iTunes Podcast Directory, categorized and searchable by anyone who might be interested in whatever you’re talking about.
Imagine — in the past — when you had to go through a television network or a radio station or a music company or a music producer to get your creativity seen and heard. Today, you can take your creativity from the very beginning and share it with the world. That’s what podcasting, new media, YouTube, and all that is all about. Sharing what you do and how well you do it. Now, I can’t stress enough the need for you to do your own projects. Especially in the entertainment industry. We became convinced over the the years that the only way to have an entertainment career was to have an agent and a manager and a variety of all these people doing things for you. Promotion people and so on and so forth. The fact is, today, it’s much more your own career and a lot of the responsibility for your career falls on you. Yeah, I know, it’s a lot of work and it can be tough at times, but the fact is, no one can care about your career as much as you do. So, why shouldn’t you be the one doing the blogging, the video-ing, the podcasting, the recording of your own music, whatever.
Douglas answers questions from students in Janet Wilcox’s online Voiceover class at UCLA Extension.
Transcript:
Imagine — in the past — when you had to go through a television network or a radio station or a music company or a music producer to get your creativity seen and heard. Today, you can take your creativity from the very beginning and share it with the world. That’s what podcasting, new media, YouTube, and all that is all about. Sharing what you do and how well you do it. Now, I can’t stress enough the need for you to do your own projects. Especially in the entertainment industry. We became convinced over the the years that the only way to have an entertainment career was to have an agent and a manager and a variety of all these people doing things for you. Promotion people and so on and so forth. The fact is, today, it’s much more your own career and a lot of the responsibility for your career falls on you. Yeah, I know, it’s a lot of work and it can be tough at times, but the fact is, no one can care about your career as much as you do. So, why shouldn’t you be the one doing the blogging, the video-ing, the podcasting, the recording of your own music, whatever.
Last week I sat down with Frank Castaneda of the Struggling Entrepreneur to talk podcasting, being a pioneer podcaster and more. It’s always great to talk about podcasting, especially the exciting early days.
Baby Boomer Douglas E. Welch of the very first podcasters in the podosphere (since September, 2004) was also one of the very first New Media content producers who standardized in (1) repurposing content from a written column or blog: and (2) using screencasts to provide additional value to all 6 of his early podcast shows; and (3) taking a lead in organizing virtual events in the Bar-Camp style of un-conferences.
Douglas had his first podcast, Career Opportunities, and then added 5 more shows to become a prolific podcaster in multiple genres — from business, careers, gardening, finance, and high-tech discussions.
His current podcasts are available for subscription at www.DouglasEWelch.com.
His background is creative and not conventional — he was a THEATER major in college, but he was successful as an Entrepreneur for many years with his freelance computer-and-LAN installation-and-support business.
As you will hear in this audio episode, crawling under tables and desks to install or unclog the coils of cable that grow in IT locations was something less than desirable. So he decided to go into helping others with counsel, advice, public speaking, presentations and consulting for New Media, including screencasting, podcasting, video, blogging and other New Media areas. In addition, he is the author of 5 published books on amazon.com and other publishers.
What I will say, though, and I have to deal with this with podcasters and video a lot, is that the “P” word comes up — Perfection. They want it to be perfect before it ever sees the light of day. it will never be perfect. We all know, perfect does not exist. It is a great goal. It is a great brass ring out there that we constantly keep grabbing for. We are never going to get there. And unfortunately, what happens is, in reaching for that brass ring all the time, they never do anything. They totally abandon all the benefits they might get from all forms of new media — whether its blogging or podcasting, whatever — waiting for perfection. And I always say — I have a theater degree, that’s the degree I graduated college with. I worked in the costume shop as part of my theater degree. And we had a costume designer who was very fond of saying, “Perfect is good. Done is better! The actor has to go on stage wearing something. So if that stitch isn’t quite right, you know what? We’ll pin it. They have to go out there now.” That is something I took to heart back in the early 80’s when I was in college. Yeah, perfection is something we reach for, knowing we’ll never get there, but up until the point — we search for perfection up until the point where it prevents us from actually doing something. So, that is the balance you have to strike. You have to find that balance of “it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. It presents my ideas clearly enough and to just try to avoid the analysis paralysis of “it’s not good enough. It’s not good enough,” and work around that because that is a very common problem that we run into.
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The other thing you can do with blogging, too, is blogs give you — is anyone familiar with George Carlin — they give you “a place for your stuff.” Too often, with our web sites, it’s like “Oh, I want to put up these photos but I have to figure out how to a make a gallery page and I’ve got to format all the pictures and …” Now, you don’t. With a blog, a blog gives you a ready-made place — and by typing to other services on the Internet like Flickr for photo sharing, and YouTube for video sharing, whatever — you suddenly now have the ability to put something up on YouTube — a little short video you took. You take that little embed code that they give you. How many people have seen the embed code there? You hop over to your blog and go, paste. Publish. That video is now on your web site. It’s now on your blog and everybody can read it. It’s not that hard. This is what I try to reinforce with people all the time. It’s not that difficult. It’s not that hard and I hope that if you dive into this, I hope that you will see that, by using these others services. The Internet world has become so much simpler over the last even 5 years compared to what we had to face early on of — I mentioned ftp and command lines — Oh, I need to upload this so ftp (space) login and ok — it was, if not difficult, it was cumbersome. Nowadays, especially with the advent of blogs, it is so much easier, because all these sites exist. YouTube and Flickr and Picasa and other sites that simply say, “Oh, ok, you sent your content up to us, that’s great. Where do you want to use that?” I want to us it there and I want to use it here and I want to use it here and I want to use it on Facebook and…you can put it everywhere from that one source.
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The other thing that is great about blogs — you should be reading other blogs as well, which a lot of you probably are, whether you realize you’re reading a blog or not, you probably are. One of the great things you can do is, what we call, reblog and that doesn’t simply putting that blog post on your blog and saying, “Hey, isn’t this net!” I don’t care necessarily about that blog post you’re putting up there. Yes, the information is interesting — the reason you put it on your blog is to give me your take on that information — taking a news story of the day and giving me your, unique thoughts and ideas about that topic. If you look at my blog, you’ll often see I do tend to reblog fairly frequently, but I try to my darndest to make sure I have a good paragraph up top that explains my thoughts about why this was important and interesting to me and what my thoughts are about that particular topic. Why it caught my eye and why I put it in my blog to share with all my readers.
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A lot of the pushback I get on blogging from people is “It’s too much work. I can’t add all that work. Oh my god, I’ve got to update every day. I can’t do that. That’s too much extra work” And I tell them, it isn’t extra work. Your goal is to simply capture what you are already doing. The fact is, each and every one of us creates content every single hour of every single day. The trouble is, for most of that content, we throw it away. We don’t capture it. We dont’ sit down and write a 4, 5 sentence paragraph of “Wow. I had this problem and this is how I solved it” — and post that to the blog. It just evaporates. This is why people think, “Oh gosh, it’s so much extra work. I have to sit down and look at the blank page and write.” Which is probably secondary to standing up in front of people as one of the biggest fears that a lot of people have. “What do you mean I’ve go to write? I’ve got to write a paragraph. Oh my god, I can’t do that.” The fact is you’re already doing it. What you need to do is capture it. And that means, capturing a 4 to 5 to 6 sentence paragraph of how you solved a particular problem you were faced with today. How you addressed a particular issue for a client.
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