Brian Conley from Alive in Baghdad, Justin Kownacki from Something to Be Desired, Lala from Tiki Bar TV and a panda.
What happens at the Tiki Lounge stays at the Tiki Lounge...PodCamp Pittsburgh has come and gone, and with it have come and gone several iterations of complete exhaustion, along with my voice. However, I'm not only pleased with the results, I'm excited about the future. I have a feeling a lot of other people are as well, if the blogosphere is any indication.
This event couldn't have happened without the assistance of everyone involved, from the attendees to the sponsors to the volunteers, and everyone who visited
Pittsburgh Filmmakers for PodCamp this past weekend helped make the event better than it would have been without them.
Dave Mansueto from
Libsyn and I may have been the co-organizers, but our 12+ co-planners and volunteers are the reason this event happened at all. If you see any of them between now and next year, please buy them a drink because they earned it.
For more about PodCamp Pittsburgh, check out our
feedback and
media sections -- lots of interesting comments and cool retrospectives on what the weekend meant to some people, including a series of photographs that sum things up much better than any long-winded assessment would.
I also find it interesting that we managed to do something I wasn't expecting to do at PodCamp: polarize the audience. After only two PodCamps, held mere months apart, there's already a rift in the podcasting world, and I think that rift will continue to grow if we don't do something to close it... if we should.
This rift is all about money.
At
PodCamp Boston, one of the questions raised was simple: how do we monetize our podcasts? Not everyone was asking that question, but enough people were interested in the business side of this new medium that the conversation inevitably turned toward matters of the checkbook. What everyone agreed upon by the end was that there was no obvious answer, but it was a necessity for some people to figure out how to develop an economy based around this new medium to ensure its growth (and to allow the creators in this space to do so without going broke).
In Pittsburgh, the monetization issue crept up late -- towards the end of Day One, and almost as an afterthought -- so
Jeff Persch and
Michael Bailey asked me to join them in an open discussion about the issue, with a twist: instead of asking, "How do we monetize our podcasts?" we wanted to round up all the suggestions in the room and see if the assembled participants could agree on a few possibilities to try out themselves, and then report back on later. Think of it like a scientific experiment in which everyone tests a thesis, tracks the procedure and reports back on the results, so the larger group can learn from the successes or failures of the individuals involved. I win, you win.
As expected, this idea caught on with many (necessitating a follow-up session after lunch) and aggravated a few. Although it's nearly impossible to corral a group into agreeing on a few set parameters for something as open-ended as the monetization issue, we did make headway in several directions. Among them: the need for standardized metrics to track audience participation, the understanding that similar approaches to monetization (or promotion, or workflow) can work wonderfully for one person but fail miserably for the next, and the general consensus that, regardless of each person's individual passion for this new medium of podcasting, we all need to pay the bills.
If the bills are already covered, especially by a "real job," then podcasting can be done with zero pressure for financial success. However, if podcasting is what you want to do for a living -- or if you at least want to break even on overhead and operating costs -- you obviously need to find a way to earn that revenue back in some way. Will it work for everyone? No, and it hasn't in the entire history of the world -- only a select few people can actually make a living by creating content in any medium. But that doesn't stop legions of people from trying, and, as TV and radio have proven in the past century, there's more than one way to make a living in a creativity-driven field.
That said, several PodCamp attendees feel very strongly in the other direction. There's a concern that money is becoming the driving force of PodCamp, and, by extension, podcasting. Instead of seeing more sessions dedicated to improving the quality of the content, some people felt that creativity was being overridden by financial concerns -- and, for some attendees, that may actually be the case.
I'm torn on the issue, because I realize that no medium ever advances until the level of quality within the content created by its practitioners improves. As much as YouTube received a negatively biased evaluation from many PodCamp attendees, the fact remains that YouTube is a warehouse for any and all web video, and the median average of any and all web video is not going to be very high. Thus, deserved or not, easily-accessible sites like YouTube and MySpace pay the price for the entry-level skills of their users, and therefore become ghettoized in comparison to sites with more discerning requirements for inclusion.
Thus, I also hosted several discussions on the creative side of the fence, including tips on creating sustainable content and advice for directing and acting on both audio and video podcasts. (Interestingly, it was while hosting these sessions that I realized, as
Alex Lindsay suggested, that 30 to 45 minutes for a session STILL isn't always enough to cover even half the bases.)
On the other hand, I want to make a living in this business, and I'm currently not. This may have to do with the overhead costs involved with creating a show like Something to Be Desired, with an ever-expanding cast and spiraling production costs (travel, locations, food, etc.). Were I a wiser man, I would have begun creating shows with zero overhead and niche appeal, which would earn their money back much faster. In fact, several podcasters reminded me that they're already making money from podcasting, and some are more than covering their costs -- so could I please "shut up about monetizing" and pay attention to the real issues?
Luke Ferdinand, who shepherds an interesting web media experience called the
54 Hour Movie Project, raised
some salient points about the rift between money and creativity in podcasting. In fact, I didn't realize there
was a rift until I noticed his blog, which, among other things, mentions that:
"There is a movement afoot that is trying to shoehorn podcasting, videoblogging and other new media into a format that is palatable to traditional forms of media consumption. This movement is in place partly due to short-sightedness of participants, and partly by the corporate interests that are already consuming far too much mindshare at events like podcamp."
And:
"Corporate sponsorship frames the conversation at these events. From Network2 to Scion, they were everywhere and they all wanted a piece. The smell of money is now in the air, and everyone is grabbing for it. Of course I am partially to blame, as it was an “unconference“- I should have done more to shift the overall discussion."
I find these comments surprising, especially since I was at the
Video on the Net conference in Boston back in September, at which traditional media stood around scratching their heads while trying to figure out what this new media
was, much less what to do with it. As far as I can tell, corporate sponsors barely have podcasting on their radars, and the ones who do see it as a new and exciting medium, rather than a cash cow -- since, obviously, none of us are wearing Armani suits just yet.
Personally, I had always suspected the concept of "sponsors" at PodCamp would create a distraction from the "un-conference" model, but I didn't realize their presence would actually constitute the beginning of the rift we're now discussing. Considering there were other corporate interests that we at PodCamp Pittsburgh turned away, and the fact that the food, transportation and equipment costs weren't going to pay for themselves, I figured involving sponsors who were interested in furthering the new media discussion would be a plus. As with all decisions, this obviously didn't please everyone.
Shawn Smith, who has been our tech guru at STBD for 3 years and now runs an audio podcast called
Geek Riot (via PodCamp sponsor
TalkShoe -- and who interviewed a number of interesting PodCamp attendees for use in future shows) also feels that monetization owned too much of the talkspace at PodCamp. As he mentions on Luke's blog:
"My suggestion is that we shut up about money and sponsors and focus on content, once we get that content to the place we feel it is ready then we can try to do this “for a living”, whatever that really means."
That, I believe, is the sticking point: "for a living." Obviously not everyone in this (or any) space can make a living at it. What we don't yet know about podcasting is what that ceiling is, because so very few people ARE making a living at it -- yet. And, because the barrier to entry is so low -- thanks to services like YouTube and TalkShoe, which allow anyone to begin their media mogul "career" -- there's a lot of interest in seeing where the new medium is going to take those who are entering on the ground floor.
I wasn't expecting the war between content and money to begin so suddenly. I expected at least 10 podcasters would need to be making a publicly recognized living -- i.e., be recognized by the general populace -- before we'd have to cross that bridge. But, as
ZeFrank and
Andrew Baron discovered during the tricky audience metrics discussions of the past few weeks, the battle over podcast mindshare isn't being fought solely by the corporations -- it's being fought by each of us.
As the conversation shifts to San Francisco next weekend for
PodCamp West, and then back to Philadelphia in January for
PodCamp Philly, I'll be interested to see where each side of the story goes. Perhaps this is a false alarm, and we'll all realize that we're creating this new media because we love to be creative, first and foremost, and not because we see an opportunity for astounding riches. Or, perhaps that opportunity for astounding riches is more tangible than some of us realize, and the need to prepare ourselves for its inevitable arrival deserves to take up part of the airspace. I don't believe these points of view are mutually exclusive, but I do think there's a tug-of-war in play that won't necessarily peter out due to the cold weather.
All of this leaves me with some food for thought:
Since Microsoft is one of the sponsors of PodCamp West, does this mean PodCamp has officially jumped the shark?
If sponsorship at PodCamp is a negative element, period, should the concept of catering and location fees be done away with and replaced by house, dorm or outdoor meet-ups to purify the atmosphere?
Are the podcasters who are already making enough money to cover their costs absolved from needing to assist those who aren't, and therefore better prepared to discuss the creativity and content creation side, or does this actually make them better-prepared to discuss monetization in the first place?
Will the monetization conversation, which surely isn't going away anytime soon, evolve between now and Philly, or will the same questions still be in place due to a lack of diligence and shared answers from our most recent discussion?
And, how different will the web media experience be when the PodCamp conversation switches back to Pittsburgh in August for
PodCamp Pittsburgh 2?
Photo by Kimberly Reed
