Podcasting Carnage

Remember the dotcom boom? A time when cool Web designers spent most of their time off snowboarding while the rest of us "who just didn't get it" were stuck behind our desks. A time when we'd by trying on our T-shirts "virtually" and all sorts of other weird things.

Turned out the Internet was just another channel for MOST businesses and not a source of competitive advantage. The Internet was available to all firms (as is a telephone).

It also transpired that it wasn't people in the more traditional jobs that didn't get it, but the investors and employees in these start-up companies. They were way off the mark.

So what happened to all these firms? To cut a long story short, these firms' business models were unsustainable. These firms were subsidized: first by investors' money, then advertisers. When these two things were out of the equation, their inability to turn a profit from operations was exposed to all. Sure enough, they collapsed.

Are we going to see a repeat performance with Podcasts? I suspect that many of the high-profile podcasts we hear about now in the media will be history in a few years, just like the likes of Boo.com.

I guess I am just a canny Scot. If you are in any way interested in Internet business models, read Michael Porter's (2001) paper, Strategy and the Internet.