I’ve looked into ‘Audry for Podcasters’ which, from my view, is an lame attempt to aggregate a bunch of low value podcasts whose operators that are incompetent at making their own connections and business.
Why ? So you can to exploit them by spaffing low quality, high volume ads onto their shows while arbitraging the sell/buy rate. Those ads would be placed using programmatic methods ( they claim to have a AI ad spots placement ) so ….. hello Google Adwords spam.
Reminder that professional blogging died when Google decided to increase it’s share of the advertising take. Google found it cheaper and better to deal with a handful of large sites instead of millions of small sites.
I mean even Blubrry stopped bothering with this business model because it doesn’t work.
Nothing new or innovative here. Simply copying a proven competitor – aka Google. This project is an attempting blitz scale Aubry sales growth by spending money to generate demand for their core business.
Podcasters should be hyper-connected inside their market. Having Audry do that is negative value because, as a podcast owner/operator, those relationships are core business value. If you don’t know that that then your podcast will fail soon enough (unless its a passion project).
The principle of cross-promotion of podcasts is a proven losing strategy. You are sending your customers to a competitor. This isn’t a job market or personal networking 101, its a competition find, capture and keeps ears.
So ‘Audry for Podcasters’ is collecting a bunch of not-yet-failed podcasts into a collective pile of failure that might give them some growth. This might give Aubry a chance to attract some of the dumber marketing people (of which there are many) to generate some revenue so they can survive to the next funding round.
Whats worse, podcast owners are wasting their time, preventing their own success and creating false hope by participating. In the last decade, I’ve seen at least a half a dozen startups do something like this (and disappear). I wasted so much time on those failed efforts.
What Do I Want ?
The things podcast owners should be searching for ?
1) better RSS feed managers. Google’s Feedburner is trash, Feed.press is what I pay for but its become unreliable.
2) audio ad injection for your own sales inventory. don’t use a third party for ad sales because they get 90% of money and you get pennies.
3) better analytics platform. Desperate for podcasting analytics that doesn’t suck.
If you have those solutions, then I would be interested. Contact me