by Joshua Brauer on August 23, 2005
A few months back I wrote about a few podcasts I still listened to. One was Career Opportunities. Until today that is. The show is great and they are short, but when the short 4-5 minute twice-weekly podcast started putting a commercial in the middle I quickly had to find the fast-forward button. Funny thing is I'd listened to bunches of commercials in the podcast at the start and end of the show without complaint. Now that I have to reach for a remote to get through a short podcast it looses its value.
One unfortunate example of indy podcasts trying to do the big media game. If that's what we wanted we'd tune in to big media.
2 Comments
Advertisements
I am sorry that the advertisements hae caused you to stop listening to Career Opportunities. The ads are not an attempt to be "big media" but rather one way of trying to cover some of my costs of production and hosting.
This current set of ads is a 3 month commitment on my part and an experiment to see if there is a way to support the podcast through advertising. So far, I have been unsuccessful in finding alternative methods of financing. Unfortunately, advertising is one of the most intrusive methods and not my favorite, to say the least.
I hope you continue to use the fast forward button when necessary, as the main goal of Career-Op is to provide good information to those who need it. If not, please re-visit us in November when we will be re-evaluating the advertising situation.
Douglas
I will check it out again in November
Thanks for your comments. I completely support the need for shows to use ads and other creative means for making a living, paying the costs of distribution etc. I had much the same reaction years ago when Car Talk went to having two sets of mid-program ads instead of just one. There, though, there was still twenty or so minutes of content between ads. I am very fond both of the specific content of Career Opportunities and the form of some shorter content that I can assemble independent of somebody feeding me a 30-40 minute show. The former makes great mixes with music throughout the day. The later does not.
I'm sure there will be a good balance in the long term. In the short term I'll miss Career Opportunities and will look forward to seeing what may come in November. The venue of Podcasting with good ads will work, at least if consumers are at all like me. I've already used ads from both Career Opportunities and IT Conversations to pursue new purchases or new vendors that were not on my list before.