I’ve been podcasting for about 21 years now. That’s a strange sentence to write, mostly because when I started, I certainly didn’t imagine I’d still be involved with this stuff more than two decades later.
My first podcast was The Benzoid Report, which I started around 2005.
The setup was about as sophisticated as you’d expect for 2005. I sat on the front porch of my house in Lake Ann, Michigan, with one of those cheap stick microphones that came with a Dell laptop, plugged it in, hit record, and talked.
That was podcasting.
And in a lot of ways, I think it still is.
Somewhere, Episode #1 Might Still Exist
Unfortunately, I’m missing roughly the first 30 episodes of The Benzoid Report.
The original site was BenzoidReport.com, and the show made its way into some of the early podcast directories and services of the time, including Podcast Pickle, Podshow, and GarageBand.com.
I think my naming convention for those early files would have made the first episode something like:
BRP001.mp3
I’ve searched around online and poked through the Internet Archive, but so far I haven’t found it. There is one last place that gives me some hope. I have several old IDE hard drives sitting out in my garage.
One of those drives could very well have those original MP3 files on it. At some point, I’m going to have to get an IDE adapter, hook those things up, image them if they’ll still spin, and go digging. I’d especially like to find episode #1.The funny thing is, I have absolutely no idea what I talked about.
I remember sitting on the porch. I remember the microphone. I remember making the show. But I don’t remember what I actually said in that first episode.Hearing it again would be like opening a little time capsule from 2005.
The Early Podcasting World
Podcasting was a much smaller world then.
I was listed on Podcast Pickle, which was created by Gary Leland, who I came to know personally. There were all sorts of little directories, communities, forums, and services springing up as everybody tried to figure out exactly what this new thing was going to become.
And, of course, there was Todd Cochrane. Founder of Blubrry Podcasting
Todd was my friend and business partner, and our connection went beyond podcasting. We both came from military aviation backgrounds. Todd had worked with Navy aircraft avionics and radar, while I had been in the Air Force working on fighter-type aircraft.
We were both airplane guys. We were both technology guys. And we were both fascinated by podcasting.
Todd unexpectedly passed away in September.
I’m not going to replace Todd. Nobody really could, and trying to duplicate his very visible role in the podcasting industry wouldn’t make much sense anyway.
What I can do is continue advocating for some of the things Todd and I believed were important from the beginning.
One of the biggest is open podcasting.
Podcasting Is Not a Genre
This is something I think gets confused more and more:
Podcasting is a technology and a method of distribution.
You can put almost anything in a podcast.
It can be two people talking. It can be a highly produced documentary. It can be news, comedy, music, education, a business show, somebody rambling from their basement — or somebody sitting on their front porch in Lake Ann with a cheap microphone.
And yes, it can include video.
Audio remains incredibly important to podcasting, but I don’t buy the argument that adding video somehow automatically makes something “not a podcast.”
What matters to me is the open, episodic distribution mechanism behind it.
I think that’s an important distinction because the modern image of “a podcast” can actually discourage people from becoming podcasters.
Look around online and you see studios with four cameras, expensive microphones, lighting rigs, producers, editors, sound treatment, advertising departments and giant audiences.
That’s fine. But none of it is required. You can still turn on a microphone and talk.
Podcasting Was Supposed to Be Free
*Freedom, not free as in free beer*
There was a certain attitude in early podcasting that could probably be summarized as:
“Fuck the FCC”
That wasn’t necessarily about swearing on your podcast. It was about freedom. Traditional radio had licenses, regulations, program directors, station owners and all sorts of gatekeepers deciding what could get on the air. Podcasting didn’t. If you wanted to make a show, you made one. You put an MP3 on a server, added it to an RSS feed and anybody in the world could subscribe to it.
You didn’t have to ask permission. That freedom wasn’t some accidental side effect of podcasting.
It was one of the features.
As podcasting becomes a bigger and increasingly commercial industry, I think we need to be careful that we don’t engineer that freedom out of it.
Advertising Is Part of Podcasting — Not All of It!
I have nothing against companies building large advertising-supported podcast businesses. Advertising companies want better measurement. They want attribution. They want to know whether somebody heard an ad and whether that advertising worked.
That’s understandable.
Blubrry participates in that world too. We support industry measurement standards and are IAB podcast measurement certified. But advertising is only one use case for podcasting.
There are hobby podcasters. There are people building communities. There are experts sharing what they know. There are businesses using podcasts to talk directly to customers. There are independent creators making shows because they simply enjoy doing it.
And there are people like me who sometimes just feel like turning on a microphone and talking about whatever happens to be interesting that day.
Not every podcast needs to maximize impressions, CPMs, attribution or revenue. The podcasting ecosystem needs to work for the giant commercial publisher and the person sitting at home with a microphone.
AMP, Measurement and Privacy
That brings me to the emerging AMP Accords.
There are parts of AMP’s thinking that I find interesting. In particular, I think there’s value in trying to define what actually constitutes a podcast. Some of that definition makes sense to me, including recognizing that podcasting can encompass both audio and video.
Where I become more cautious is around measurement and client-side listener data. A lot of the organizations involved in these discussions naturally come from advertising, ad technology and other commercial parts of the industry. Their priorities aren’t necessarily wrong. But they’re not necessarily the same priorities as an independent podcaster — or a listener.
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about podcasting as a listener is that it is relatively anonymous. I download an episode and listen to it.
The podcaster doesn’t need to know everything about me. As someone who has spent a good portion of my career working in the podcasting industry, I value that too.
Better analytics can certainly be useful. But requiring podcast applications to provide increasingly detailed client-side listener information changes the relationship between podcasters and their audiences. That’s something we should think very carefully about before deciding it’s automatically “progress.”
Keep Podcasting Permissionless
After 21 years, I keep coming back to one basic principle:
Podcasting should remain open and permissionless.
There should absolutely be room for huge commercial podcast operations.
There should be advertising, analytics, video studios, professional production teams, sophisticated technology and people making very good money doing this. That’s all part of the ecosystem.
But there also needs to be room for somebody who wakes up tomorrow morning with an idea, finds a microphone and decides they have something they want to say. No permission. No gatekeeper. No million-dollar studio. No requirement that it become a business.
Just make a podcast.
Twenty-one years ago, I sat on a porch in Lake Ann, Michigan, plugged a cheap stick microphone into a Dell laptop and recorded The Benzoid Report.
Somewhere in my garage, episode #1 may still be sitting on an old IDE hard drive.
I hope I find it.
But whether I do or not, the thing that allowed me to create it in the first place is still here. And that’s the part of podcasting I want to make sure we don’t lose.