Now we come to the serious part of the equation. It takes a bit more money
to produce a really quality product, especially if you’re offering music, and
that’s what listeners expect. You’ll need editing software, voice and sound
processing, higher quality microphones, perhaps some CD of MP3 players,
licensing agreement fees with the likes of ASCAP and BMI, signing up with a
bandwidth company, etc. This can run into the hundreds if not thousands of
dollars – a rather expensive hobby. And then there’s the time involved to
produce what people want to hear. But it can be worth it. The last time your
author looked at Shoutcast (one of the many websites that lists podcasters),
the most popular podcaster was generating 8,000 simultaneous listeners. And
your bandwidth provider can easily handle that and much more, perhaps up to
60,000 people tuning in at one time. That’s major! But so is just 1,000
listeners as you’ll see.
What to Charge
The major search engines such as Google and Yahoo and major websites charge
an advertiser between .05 and $100 per “hit” – meaning someone has locked into
a website page. It is also known as a “click-through.” The correct advertising
terminology is a CPC (Cost Per Click). A website such as Playboy is
usually valued at the high end of the price range so unless you’re going to
concentrate on offering a sex-oriented website, you can forget charging
anything like that. But let’s take even the low-end price of just .05 CPC. That
means if 1000 people are listening to your podcast at a given time you can
realistically charge $50. And you don’t have to just settle for one single
advertiser. You might be able to accommodate several in say an hour’s time. If
you overdo it, however, you’ll lose people.
Money from Other Sources
Besides selling commercials yourself you can also contract with the major
search engines. Google, for instance, offers AdSense. They pay you a commission
on an ad they place on your website. Again it’s based on the number of
click-throughs as described above. One podcaster interviewed said he couldn’t
believe how much money he made for what he thought was just a “throw-away
idea.”