Man, I’ve been itching to use that word ever since Tara Thompson, the lead singer from Uncle Seth, used craptastic while explaining something to me as we were hanging out at Podcamp Toronto.
I’m beginning to think more and more that having a set schedule as to when you publish new podcast episodes is the very barrier that discourages people from subscribing to your podcast. Podcast frequency is craptastic.
Here’s why…
Best practices tell us that we need to allow people to sample our podcast. So Susie Q, a podcaster, adds a flash player to her podpage. People click on it and listens to Susie Q’s podcast through their speakers.
Every Monday, Susie Q publishes a new episode. Every Monday evening Bob knows that as he gets home from work, the new episode of Susie Q’s podcast is waiting for him. So, he plugs in the URL into his browser and just clicks on the flash player to listen to Susie Q.
After a while, he realizes that he can download Susie Q’s podcast to his computer and burn it to a CD to listen while on his way to work the next day. Or, his kids gave him an iPod for Christmas and now that he’s gotten the hang of it, he’ll copy the downloaded podcast to his portable player.
Bob still hasn’t subscribed, yet he’s an avid and regular listener of Susie Q’s podcast. And poor Susie Q is getting frustrated wondering why she has killer download statistics in the thousands, but subscribers that are in the 100s.
So, Susie Q decides to change her call to action. Instead of encouraging people to visit her webpage, Susie Q encourages listeners to subscribe to her podcast using iTunes. She even provides step-by-step instructions on a special section on her podcast page. Yet, Bob ignores her call to action. Why? Because why bother subscribing when Susie Q’s podcasts appears every Monday on her podcast page no matter what. Bob is happy and content.
So, Monday after Monday, episode after episode, Bob simply plugs in Susie Q’s URL into a browser, just like he would Hotmail or CNN, then he clicks the triangle on the flash player and gets his weekly fill.
How many Bob’s are there who ignore the whole subscribe thing? Probably alot. And why do they ignore it? Because it sounds hard or confusing or complicated. Or, maybe it’s because Bob is getting what he wants and doesn’t care about any other way.
My suggestion is to throw the frequency thing out the window. Publish regularly, but don’t become married to a set schedule. Then, your call to action becomes:
“You never know when the next episode of my podcast is coming out. So, subscribe for FREE using iTunes et. al. so you never miss an episode.”
I got that paragraph from Tim Street’s French Maid TV. He doesn’t publish on a regular schedule, so he encourages people to add their feed to their feed reader. Clever way to get people to subscribe to your feed.
Remember – podcast frequency is craptastic.
Tags: 
uncle seth, 
french maid tv, 
podcasting, 
tara thompson
glad you are using my vocab for good. unlike me.
I think it all depends on what your end goal is for your podcast.
You want people to come to your website if you have a vested interest in them coming to your website. i.e. You want them to buy your product, click on an advertising banner, post in your forum, etc.
A great deal of podcasters have very little interest in getting listeners to go to their site. The end goal is to get regular listeners and the best way to do that is through subscription.
The rarely visit the website of any of the podcasts I listen to. I usually only go to read their shownotes when they mention a link that I may be interested in.
Ah, but downloading doesn’t guarantee that they’ve listened to it either. It just means it was downloaded. It could be languishing on someone’s hard drive as well.
I have to agree with the top two…as long as they are getting to the podcast, does it matter how they got there?
The audience should be able to use whatever is easiest and most familiar for them, not what the podcaster wishes to impose.
All of that said, feeds offer some great advantages. The podcaster should try to educate their audience about these advantages, but I don’t think they should come up with ways to force their audience to use the feeds.
I agree with you Kelly. I care more about the download numbers than the subscriber numbers.
My show has the largest percentage of subscribers through My Yahoo. Just because they added my RSS feed to their customized web page doesn’t mean they ever looked at it. I suspect that the almost 50% of my downloads that aren’t done with podcatcher software are definitely listened to. The other 50% downloaded with podcatcher software might be languishing on someone’s hard disk without ever being heard.
And yes, I want them visiting the web site, not just collecting mp3 files in their iTunes database.
But who cares about subscriber numbers when your downloads are great? I’ve never paid a whit of attention to subscribership. I want to know how many actually grabbed the Mp3.
And I WANT them on my website!