Video Killed It

As a veteran of the podcasting era, I cannot believe how much more effective Youtube is. Podcasting, including Internet radio, is a complete joke. I was wrong to think it was going to take off.

I stuck a silly 38-second Marvin video up on Youtube, and today it has had 596 views, with my "SteveHGraham.com" logo displaying the whole time. I created my last Blogtalkradio podcast ten days ago, and so far it has attracted 132 measly listeners. By the time the Marv thing has been up ten days, at least 5,000 people will have seen it.

If you think that's a big contrast, look at Talkshoe. So far I've had 6 listeners.

Podcasting is dead. Even interactive podcasting with callers. Case closed. End of discussion. For that matter, compared to video, blogging is dead.

I know some podcasters get good numbers. I think I know why that is. It has nothing to do with talent. People listen for one of two reasons. Either the podcasts are so old they started back when attracting an audience was easy, OR the people making the podcasts are already established bloggers or celebrities, so they can drive traffic to their recordings.

One of the very biggest podcasts belongs to a prominent conservative blogger, whom I will not mention, because he seems like a decent guy. It's like listening to paint dry. All he does is read aloud. The copy is bad. The stories are boring. The delivery is wooden. He has no personality. But he gets an audience, because he's already well-known. I think this is a great example of the second type of podcast I mentioned above.

I would guess that with RSS included, maybe 2000 people read my blog. I can therefore send maybe a hundred people to hear a podcast, tops. If I had 50,000 people, I could send maybe 2-3000. That seems to be how it works.

Youtube, on the other hand...the viewers fall from trees. I have 596 Marv viewers in 17 hours, and almost all of them are new. They're total strangers. Youtube watchers subscribe and make nice comments on my work...it's a completely fresh market. A new start. I could shut this blog down today and be better-known in a week, from Youtube, than I am from four years of blogging.

I'm already getting half as many viewers as readers. That's going to increase. Very soon I'm going to have a ton of Youtube viewers and a comparatively small number of blog readers, unless Youtube drives viewers to my blog. How about THAT? I got over a thousand views this weekend, and my blog got about twice that number of visits, and a lot of the blog visits were crap, because they were Google visits and people coming to read a counterproductive quasi-political piece I had no business posting. On the whole, it looks like my Youtube weekend was superior to my blog weekend. And in a week on Youtube, I'll dwarf the number of listeners I got in over a year of podcasting.

The only sad part about Youtube is that you have to keep things short. I think the short Marv clips will always outdo the longer ones that take work. But no matter how you slice it, it's the biggest bargain on the web.

I used to think promotion was what Internet radio needed. None of the big providers are doing an even minimally competent job of promoting their sites. Blogspot, lame as it is, blows them away. That's about to change, but I don't think it will matter. Video is way easier to package and sell, and people just plain like it better. Radio is something people like when they can't have a screen in front of them. In the car, for example. When they have a choice, they'll always pick video.

Wow, that stupid Marv video has 3 Youtube honors already. And I'm checking my Sitemeter...yes, my site is getting Youtube traffic. Not much, but that will increase.

I knew I should do this 6 months ago, and I wrote about it at the time, but I just could not get the damn camera to work.

I think Internet radio is great practice for people like me who know they'll have to be on the air from time to time, and it can help you make connections. But as a means of getting exposure it's like yodeling into a septic tank. I can't even get my blog readers to listen.

I'm taking down my Blogtalkradio sidebar link. It's a waste of space. I'm replacing it with a Youtube link.