20 Feb 2006

Cashing In On Karl

The world’s most popular Monkey-News-featuring podcast switching to paid-for episodes is a huge move for podcasting. If it succeeds, expect to see an unseemly gold rush, if it fails it’ll bolster the advertising-supported model most have opted for.

I reckon it’s perhaps too soon and too abrupt; if they continued with short free episodes and offered a much longer, feature-rich show for paid subscribers then it’d seem less cynical and greedy while keeping in touch with new and tight-fisted listeners. And I don’t think iTunes allows for subscription payments yet, so users will have to manually purchase each episode and not get any kind of automatic notification (or is that all in there now?).

Hopefully some figures’ll be release in a month or two so we can get a rough idea of what conversion rate a podcast can currently achieve in near-ideal circumstances (broad appeal, loyal fans, huge listener base, lots of press). How many subscribers do you think’ll cough up? 1%? 5%? 10%?