The 80-20 rule is also called the Pareto principle. It states that "80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes." Does this rule apply to Podcasting?
Our clients are major publishers. Their writers crank out weekly or monthly columns and newsletters of consistently high quality, that focus well on their readers' interests. When these articles are converted into podcasts, using Sonibyte's voiceover system, should they all garner about the same amount of attention (as measured by total downloads). Or, will some podcasts turn out to be home runs?
We studied a set of 185 podcasts created by a selection of our clients during the second and third quarters of 2007. These podcasts came from five different publications and included between six and twenty podcasts from a single "feed." (Most podcast users subscribe to a feed of podcasts that are produced by a particular author on a particular subject. They then automatically receive each new podcast article, when it is published.)
We counted the number of downloads each podcast received during the 180 days after it was published. We then calculated the average number of downloads that each feed generated and examined how each podcast did relative to its average. For instance, say the average number of downloads for a podcast feed over 180 days was 10,000. If a particular podcast in this series had 15,000 downloads, we would give it a score of 1.5. If it had 3,000 downloads, it would get a score of 0.3.
When we broke apart the downloads in this manner, we found they fell into three distinct groups. About 10% of the time, a podcast in particular feed would produce less than 50% of the normal number of downloads. About 5% of the time, a podcast would produce more than 50% as many downloads as normal. (The best performing cast produced more than four times the normal number of downloads.) However, most of the downloads--about 75% of the total--came from the 85% of podcasts that had ordinary performance.
This analysis suggests that the best strategy for podcasting (to stay with the baseball analogy) is "small ball." Don't hope that a podcast will be a home run, and swing away. Instead, develop a core franchise for your articles, and hope to steadily increase your number of subscribers and average number of downloads. We will look more at how to build subscribers, in a future post.
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