Who made podcasting big?

Podcasting has its own digital infrastructures, for example in hosting them. Let’s look at how podcasting has grown, and what made it take off anyway? Many actors influence each other here, and the state of the art of the technology also has an impact on growth rates.

Suppose a hundred people get told by an enthusiastic friend to try podcasting. Of these, ten don’t have any hardware on which they can play the podcasts. So the rest goes online, and tries to find interesting content, but only 50 people can find a directory in which they can even start to look for podcasts that they like. Only 40 people then find content that they sufficiently like. Ten people drop out because they find loading the content too complicated. Of these, another ten find out that the files are too big for the hardware they have (for example in 2005, they just had a simple MP3 player, no iPod or similar). Of the ones left, another five don’t have the patience for the downloads (we are talking dial-up internet access for a lot of people here, still). If you have been keeping tabs: we are down to 25 people who are capable and willing to regularly listen to podcasts. Now suppose each of these tells four friends, on the average. That means we are back to a hundred.

Now suppose that all those numbers are a little worse than I have guessed. In that case, any enthusiasm will soon sizzle out. Now suppose that the numbers are just a little better, so that at the end of the week we have 110 people that are going to try subscribing to podcasting. The week after, it will be 121 people trying, and so on. This represents a growth rate of 10% per week, which amounts to more than a hundred fold increase in a year (12,913 people to be exact).

In fact, all these numbers have been getting better gradually over many several years. Both the technology and the content were existing as early as 1997. Yet, the gradual increase took until about 2005 to reach what Malcolm Gladwell calls: “The tipping point”. This is when a development, epidemic, or trend just seems to explode. Obviously, technology has improved, in particular once the iPod was launched, which could store 1000 songs. But something more was going on.

I checked these numbers with Adam Curry, who is regarded by many as the father of podcasting, or ‘podfather’. I found out that he has made a conscious effort to improve the numbers. For example, he developed ‘ipodder’, which started as a piece of software to make the mechanics of subscribing to podcasts and getting them on your player easier. Ipodder was a directory to help people find content that is interesting for them. Curry also ran “The Daily Source Code”, a regular podcast, as a tool for podcast software developers to test their software.

There is also a tipping point for creators of podcasts, which works in tandem with the tipping point for listeners. But I will leave you to figure out the details of that yourself.

We can’t really say that one person had the power to force podcasting upon the world, but there was definitely somebody with the insight and the opportunity.