I Want Different Podcast Awards

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The Podcast Awards must be happening. In the past 24 hours, I’ve gotten 12 emails, over 40 bulletins on MySpace, and on virtually every other channel you can reach out to your audience with, I’ve had fellow podcasters begging, pleading, and pimping for votes for the 2007 Podcast Awards.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If my day job podcast, the Financial Aid Podcast, were to win an award, cool. More stuff for the resume, etc. As a prize, you know what I would want?

A PR Newswire US ENT-N1 press release, a promo on every nominated show, AND $500 in Google Adwords credits that I could use to build new audience. Here’s the thing I don’t like about the Podcast Awards – and believe me, it’s no dig on Todd Cochrane or the Podcast Connect folks, who do a great job with the awards – but the Podcast Awards are a fishbowl decoration.

What do I mean? To quote PodCamp co-founder and partner Chris Brogan, they’re an internal thing to the podcasting community, news inside the fishbowl, inside the echo chamber. Show the award to anyone deep inside the podcasting community, and they’ll know of it at the least (particularly if they’re friends of the winner on MySpace and got the same bulletin 6 times in 30 minutes). Show the award to the average passerby on Fifth Avenue or Ghirardelli Square or Faneuil Hall, and they’ll look at you very, very blankly, and probably mutter something polite as they run away from you.

What would be cool is if the Podcast Awards, or an award like it, had some of the values that I think are so essential to new media built right into them, the same values we try to build into PodCamp – transparency, openness, and most of all, outreach to people who are just getting into podcasting or are thinking about jumping in. What would that look like?

Well, for starters, nominees would need to provide a data set to the awards committee – statistics for a minimum of 3 months from two different, unaffiliated data sources. They could be Libsyn stats combined with Feedburner numbers, or Blubrry info combined with Podshow PDN info, or Apache weblogs and Kiptronic data. Whatever the numbers are you’d submit as an award participant, you’d agree to have them published publicly, because transparency is the key to fairness.

What would the judges be looking for?

– Largest audience. That’s a good metric. Measure a 30 day running average based on downloads per unique IP address.
– Most improved audience. A show that went from 10 listeners/viewers to 10,000 listeners in 3 months would be a huge gain. Again, downloads per unique IP address.
– Most diverse audience. Take a look at your web logs. I’d bet you that you don’t have a giant long tail of referrers in it. Suppose a show had referring site links – inbound links – from over 10,000 different web sites? That’d be some definite outreach (for the record, Bum Rush the Charts had about 13,000 referring sites at peak).
– One subjective award to the person or persons who’ve done the most to bring in new listeners to the podcasting community – not to your show, but to podcasting in general.

As part of the award acceptance, the winners would need to provide details on how they achieved their accomplishments, and suggestions for others to help them grow their audiences, too.

Podcasting is practically self-selling – free, legal music, infinite choice in subject matter (and quality), unique perspectives on issues, and everything under the sun. More variety than Clear Channel’s swill, and it keeps the ol’ iPod fresh instead of shuffling the same library over and over again. However, podcasting needs to get people involved into at least one show – and then the listener will likely get curious about what ELSE is available. But you have to get them exposed to that one show first.

Outreach. Distribution. These are what podcasting is missing right now in a systematic fashion, and these are our Dip (Seth Godin, thank you) that we must overcome in order to make this podcasting phenomenon more than a passing fad.

So what do you say? Should we have the Podcasting Outreach Awards?


Comments

14 responses to “I Want Different Podcast Awards”

  1. I kind of cringe at the idea of ANOTHER set awards. (What would that make? 3? 4?)

    While I think it’s an interesting concept, in a way it is also niche. The assumption of these awards would be “good = going after huge numbers.” I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately that obviously have no intention of tracking download logs, but are valid just in the fact that they exist.

    It sounds more like your award could be a “special recognition” award, folded into some other set of awards.

    I still content that the best set of awards would somehow be based on quality — but that is such a hard thing to define. Still, if you could present something that would be equivalent to the Hugo Awards — which is voted on strictly by members of the yearly World Science Fiction Convention, you might have something.

  2. I kind of cringe at the idea of ANOTHER set awards. (What would that make? 3? 4?)

    While I think it’s an interesting concept, in a way it is also niche. The assumption of these awards would be “good = going after huge numbers.” I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately that obviously have no intention of tracking download logs, but are valid just in the fact that they exist.

    It sounds more like your award could be a “special recognition” award, folded into some other set of awards.

    I still content that the best set of awards would somehow be based on quality — but that is such a hard thing to define. Still, if you could present something that would be equivalent to the Hugo Awards — which is voted on strictly by members of the yearly World Science Fiction Convention, you might have something.

  3. Just a quick comment…
    I was nominated for the music award last year, but I did not win.
    However, being nominated has given my show additional exposure and I was asked to speak at the Music 2.0 Conference back in January because my info was on the awards site.
    The system in place is far from perfect, but it has opened doors for me as a 2006 nominee.

  4. Just a quick comment…
    I was nominated for the music award last year, but I did not win.
    However, being nominated has given my show additional exposure and I was asked to speak at the Music 2.0 Conference back in January because my info was on the awards site.
    The system in place is far from perfect, but it has opened doors for me as a 2006 nominee.

  5. This is one of the reasons I’m a fan of the Parsec Awards. First they take place at Dragon*con, a sci-fi/fantasy/pop culture convention in Atlanta, GA. This gives it opportunity to make it a bit more public and coupled with a podcasting discussion track a lot of people were there that were not already podcasters, a few that had never even heard of podcasting before. Also the awards are not a popularity contest. It is open nomination, but final voting is by a select panel, that judges by quality, not page clicks. Which I don’t think should be a voting factor. popularity does not equal quality.
    If you want voting by those qualities, why not just send an award to the top 3 Feedburner casts each year and be done with it.

  6. This is one of the reasons I’m a fan of the Parsec Awards. First they take place at Dragon*con, a sci-fi/fantasy/pop culture convention in Atlanta, GA. This gives it opportunity to make it a bit more public and coupled with a podcasting discussion track a lot of people were there that were not already podcasters, a few that had never even heard of podcasting before. Also the awards are not a popularity contest. It is open nomination, but final voting is by a select panel, that judges by quality, not page clicks. Which I don’t think should be a voting factor. popularity does not equal quality.
    If you want voting by those qualities, why not just send an award to the top 3 Feedburner casts each year and be done with it.

  7. It all sounds good until you put that plan into play, the amount of work to do one of these events is incredible. But one thing you fail to recognize on the podcast awards is that those podcasters that have engaged audiences will have no trouble making the slate.

    The key here is listener podcaster engagement. No amount of begging for someone to nominate you will help unless the audience is engaged in a show. I get well over 200 emails on each and every one of my shows and it is because they are engaged.

    The People’s Choice Podcast Awards are simply that the People’s Choice and while we have a grading process that helps refine the slate we have over 40 people involved in the grading of the shows that will make the final slate of 200+ podcast that will be voted on.

    Having the biggest audience does not make it the biggest if you wanted the biggest audience to win you simply give it to the top 20 itunes shows and be done with it. Just because those shows are big it does not mean they are engaged.

    I dont need some industry leader telling me which shows are great because they all have internal biases that cannot be overcome, I will leave the nominating and voting to the audience aka People’s Choice and if you dont think the award has not helped podcasters in the past go ask past winners.

  8. It all sounds good until you put that plan into play, the amount of work to do one of these events is incredible. But one thing you fail to recognize on the podcast awards is that those podcasters that have engaged audiences will have no trouble making the slate.

    The key here is listener podcaster engagement. No amount of begging for someone to nominate you will help unless the audience is engaged in a show. I get well over 200 emails on each and every one of my shows and it is because they are engaged.

    The People’s Choice Podcast Awards are simply that the People’s Choice and while we have a grading process that helps refine the slate we have over 40 people involved in the grading of the shows that will make the final slate of 200+ podcast that will be voted on.

    Having the biggest audience does not make it the biggest if you wanted the biggest audience to win you simply give it to the top 20 itunes shows and be done with it. Just because those shows are big it does not mean they are engaged.

    I dont need some industry leader telling me which shows are great because they all have internal biases that cannot be overcome, I will leave the nominating and voting to the audience aka People’s Choice and if you dont think the award has not helped podcasters in the past go ask past winners.

  9. Clinton

    The awards are in their 3rd year we were the original and have recognized the largest number of podcasters and to date have awarded over 12,000 in cash and prizes this year I am expecting to give away over 10k in cash and prizes.

    Podcasters that have won have benefited greatly and they are honored at the podcast and new media expo at an awards ceremony in front of all their peers at the biggest podcasting event in the country.

  10. Clinton

    The awards are in their 3rd year we were the original and have recognized the largest number of podcasters and to date have awarded over 12,000 in cash and prizes this year I am expecting to give away over 10k in cash and prizes.

    Podcasters that have won have benefited greatly and they are honored at the podcast and new media expo at an awards ceremony in front of all their peers at the biggest podcasting event in the country.

  11. I think it’s important to note what I see Chris trying to say here.

    He wants to reach people who don’t listen to podcasts. When he related his experience driving back from PAB, a young lady (senior in high school) didn’t know what podcasting is. She is the next generation and the one that new media needs to reach.

    Do you see the fishbowl?

    Rewarding podcasts based on the number of new viewers it pulls in isn’t a popularity contest but reward to those people who do the work in getting podcasting recognized outside of the community. Change is what will bring recognition on a larger scale.

    Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

    Awarding podcasters who open the door to people who don’t know or understand what podcasting is increases your audience. Unless that generation is reached on a larger scale, podcasting will fade. This is where podcasting needs to go in order to sustain itself as a medium.

    Expand the fishbowl. Change. Grow. One has to evolve in order to survive.

  12. I think it’s important to note what I see Chris trying to say here.

    He wants to reach people who don’t listen to podcasts. When he related his experience driving back from PAB, a young lady (senior in high school) didn’t know what podcasting is. She is the next generation and the one that new media needs to reach.

    Do you see the fishbowl?

    Rewarding podcasts based on the number of new viewers it pulls in isn’t a popularity contest but reward to those people who do the work in getting podcasting recognized outside of the community. Change is what will bring recognition on a larger scale.

    Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

    Awarding podcasters who open the door to people who don’t know or understand what podcasting is increases your audience. Unless that generation is reached on a larger scale, podcasting will fade. This is where podcasting needs to go in order to sustain itself as a medium.

    Expand the fishbowl. Change. Grow. One has to evolve in order to survive.

  13. Todd,

    I don’t disagree that the Podcast Awards have done some good things. And I’m there every year at the awards — attending, not winning. 😉

    I was just trying to address Chris’ point about the basis for an entirely new set of awards.

  14. Todd,

    I don’t disagree that the Podcast Awards have done some good things. And I’m there every year at the awards — attending, not winning. 😉

    I was just trying to address Chris’ point about the basis for an entirely new set of awards.

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