Why PodTech.net’s demise may be imminent
Fake Steve Jobs: Hard to believe PodTech is going under, because they seemed to have such a solid business model. Find people who don’t have much of anything significant or entertaining to say; film them doing this; then sell advertising against the content.
Mashable: PodTech is in the business of taking really important topics and making them as uninteresting as possible. [No wonder, PodTech founder John Furrier has already left the company.]
TechCrunch: 90% of PodTech content is just slightly more entertaining than watching paint dry. [Interestingly, PodTech has received $7.5 million over two rounds led by US Venture Partners and Venrock Associates.]
“We’re going to collect $10 in advertising to pay $28 in bandwidth? Who said video is a great business? We’re losing money… Heck, yesterday’s lunch session had three of us working on it for an hour, then Eddie encoded it, edited it, and published it. That took him four more hours. Let’s assume you can get smart people to work for you for $30 an hour to do video. That right there is $90 just to shoot for an hour, plus another $120 for editing and publishing. $210 in fixed costs just to start, then the bandwidth. And you haven’t even started paying for my camera, my new Mac.” — Robert Scoble, vice president, media development, PodTech (Btw, Scoble is also the author of Naked Conversations)
