I’m interested in doing a podcast for my company, but I need some figures (most popular podcasts, downloads, etc.) to give my boss to see if the project is worth the effort.
You can look at top25.podcast.com to find out what types of podcasts are popular or not. News, sex, sports, and business rank highly among general audiences; if you cultivate a niche audience, your numbers will probably be lower with the strong possibility of a higher level of engagement with your customers.
Podcasts are distributed all over the Web. To find out how often the most popular podcasts are downloaded, listened to, and watched, you’d have to collect numbers from everywhere a podcast is distributed. A company that hosts and distributes podcasts for people (EG www.blip.tv) or a company that makes podcast feeds for people (EG www.feedburner.com) would have this type of information, as the sources. But the nature of podcasting is such that you’ll never know if someone who downloads a podcast will listen to or watch it later. To use a songwriting analogy, thinking about your potential podcast in terms of existing numbers of an established podcast is similar to looking at how many albums U2 sells when deciding if it’s worth it for you to write a song.
In short, you’ll have a few things to consider here when considering whether or not to produce your own podcast: how much visibility your company Web site and company has, how you promote the podcast on your site and in your marketing materials, how receptive your audience is to consuming audio/video content in a podcast, how good your content is, and how you promote your site through podcast search engines and aggregators (Podcast.com, iTunes, etc.), to name the most obvious. Of course, you’ll probably want numbers if you want to sell this to your boss, but you aren’t going to get any relevant numbers until you start doing it — this is a common misconception among bosses, believe me — if you think your customers would be interested and would benefit from something like this, then it’s worth your time. Regardless of how much production time you want to put into it, it will take some time on your part. If you have carte blanche, I would say read up on best practices, “just do it!” and see how it works for you.
