Past the Podorati?

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’ve been going off the whole podcast thing recently, giving my ‘walk time’ to alternative forms of distraction.

However, I’m not off it completely and so decided to kill five minutes and see if there was anything new on the iTunes Podcast page since I last looked (two weeks ago).

There were a number of new things or at least things that have been there for ages but have recently been featured.

The biggest thing to hit me though was the fact that for an independent medium there wasn’t a single home made podcast in the UK top 20 - in fac tthere wasn’t a single home made podcast featured on the index at all.

Number one is what it’s been for about two years, Ricky Gervais and co. Number two is Amnesty International and the only over non media company produced podcast is the Jamie Oliver one that his team produces themselves.

Other than that the third, fourth and fifth spots are BBC podcasts as well as the eighth (for a podcast with no content), eleventh, twelth and twentieth. So basically the BBC makes up seven of the top twenty shows.

Other than the BBC the National Geographic Channel has two shows in the top twenty, the Guardian has one as does Virgin Radio and Comedy Central and the rest is made up of magazines and promo podcasts for new TV shows or films.

So this big media revolution that was going to give everybody the opportunity to broadcast the the entire world seems to be dominated by the BBC, newspapers and other media organisations.

Then when an individual does make it into the upper echelons of the Podorati they tend to already be celebrities.

There are a few exceptions to this, Leo Laporte (not really a celeb in the UK) and the Revision 3 team but you have to hunt for anything not made by a major organisation.

Just having another quick glance and Ricky Gervais is actually in the top twenty twice. Once at the top with the video podcast he produced and then at number eighteen with the Audible promo.

I’ve been toying with the idea of launching an Up Your Ego podcast, using the few broadcasting and interview skills I have to put together a weekly tech show with interviews and comment, that and I’ve been asked by a few people to re-launch the Jaffa Cake Podcast (heaven knows why!).

To be honest though, I’m not sure it’s worth it. To get past the podorati and actually be featured on the iTunes index (the only place that really matters when it comes to podcast promotion) you’d have to have a major media company behind you, which sort of goes against the point of democratic media production.

Maybe, instead of going ahead and creating podcasts on our own, and media companies trying to do the same thing, we, the podcast and blogging community should be approaching media companies with our ideas and a pilot and seeing if they’ll back it as the distributor.

This IS more democratic than the old method of trying to get something on to radio or TV where there’s a limited amount of time as all the company has to do is say - The Jaffa Cake podcast is brought to you by McVities!

It could be a newspaper, a radio station or even a biscuit company. As long as it’s a well established brand it will get featured on iTunes, mentioned in the mainstream media (and on well known blogs) and basically heard.

And THAT is the crux of the democratization of media - yes everyone will be able to make their own content and publish it but the only ones that will get a substantial audience beyond friends, family and a few dedicated followers (now that the initial everyone in phase is over) are the ones tied to a big name brand.

Leo Laporte and his TWiT crew are OK because he started earlier enough to build a brand (and he had a radio show of his own to kick things off), Diggnation and Revision 3 will work because they’ve got the tech mecca that is Digg tied in and Ricky Gervais and Jamie Oliver are… well Ricky Gervais and Jamie Oliver.

(I’ll add links tomorrow).

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