I hope podcasting keeps growing. It's unique in some important ways, from other "new media" mediums.
It's decentralized & private. No one owns podcasting. Being protocol-centric rather than service-centric (eg youtube) has left it relatively free (as in speech). Being subscriber-centric has made the medium resistant to clickbait and spam and encouraged quality... Some of these are qualities remind me of the web circa 1998 or blogging circa 2004.
That doesn't mean there aren't problems. Discovery is poor, for example.
Turning popular into profitable... that's always been tough for online content. Same goes for youtube, blogging, etc.
Personally, I'm hoping it evolves into a youtube alternative.
It's interesting how podcasting has evolved as this very decentralized medium. At least part of it is that hosting and serving audio is a lot cheaper than video. Not that my occasional podcast has a huge number of listeners but my S3 bill is trivial.
But, yeah, podcasting looks a lot like blogging--especially earlier on. Very easy to get into but hard to discover and hard to directly monetize. Those who keep doing it are mostly doing so because 1.) It's a fun hobby and/or 2.) It supports and is subsidized by some other activity. Which is often the case with a lot of things including writing technical books for example.
Back in 2005 (when iTunes added podcasting), a group of high school drama friends and I used to do a weekly video podcast with a similar format to Screensavers on TechTV. I did a segment on a different "emerging" web technology each week (WordPress, FaceBook, Asp.Net, etc), one friend did one on the latest gadgets, another do something about Macs/iDevices. It lasted about 3 months before we all got burned out.
It was fun, and I wish it could have lasted, but after a few months our viewership was still under 100 per episode, and we all had to go jobs and/or school still.
It's decentralized & private. No one owns podcasting. Being protocol-centric rather than service-centric (eg youtube) has left it relatively free (as in speech). Being subscriber-centric has made the medium resistant to clickbait and spam and encouraged quality... Some of these are qualities remind me of the web circa 1998 or blogging circa 2004.
That doesn't mean there aren't problems. Discovery is poor, for example.
Turning popular into profitable... that's always been tough for online content. Same goes for youtube, blogging, etc.
Personally, I'm hoping it evolves into a youtube alternative.