One would like to think that the internet helps the best content reach the attention of the world. Ira Glass was recently interviewed by Jesse Brown who does an internet-centric radio programme called Search Engine. There I learned several interesting things (in no particular order)

• A promo spot to reach 1.8 million radio listeners to This American Life costs advertisers $5-8000. A similar spot to reach just over a half million podcast listeners, many of which may be from overseas and therefore not of interest to a US advertiser, costs $20,000. Is this just the glamour of a new medium in action?
• TAL is America’s most listened-to podcast even though it has not done any significant amount of marketing. (I think this says something about the demographics of public radio listeners as well as about the superb quality of the programming but it is still impressive).
• It follows that even most popular podcast in America is only listened to by .1% of the US population.
• The average listening time to TAL on the radio is 48 minutes - who said that people can’t concentrate in the new media age?
• The US Federal government only covers 4-7 percent of public broadcasting’s costs

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 3:21 pm and is filed under mass media, political economy of the Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.