Podcast Marketing with Google Ventures Partner Rick Klau

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This is a fascinating conversation about podcast marketing in the early days with Rick Klau, the Senior Operating Partner at Google Ventures. But when I recorded this interview, Rick was VP at FeedBurner.

We spoke at length about podcast measurement, building a business case for podcasting, valuing an audience, and the future of podcast marketing.

Rick was responsible for cultivating and managing relationships with large media companies, entertainment networks, newspapers, and various other commercial publishers.

Before FeedBurner, he held the role at Socialtext, the first enterprise social software company.

Before that, Rick was vice president of Vertical Markets at Interface Software, now part of the Lexis-Nexis family, where he was company spokesperson.

An accomplished public speaker, moderator, panelist, and author of a popular blog, Rick has received extensive coverage in various publications, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CIO, InfoWorld, Inc. Magazine, Internet World, The Washington Post, and others.

He has published several books and columns covering the topics of technology, law, ecommerce, and online security and was a member of the Editorial Board for Podcasting Magazine.

Podcast Marketing Insights

6:35 – Rick Klau talks about what FeedBurner is and how it works. 

7:52 – Klau on why measurement statistics may vary from company to company.

8:50 – Klau talks about how to measure how many people are subscribing to a feed.

11:08 – Klau discusses how to measure the number of downloads.

13:43 – Klau on valuing an audience.

15:07 – Klau talks about the CPM model versus that of Cost Per Click, “With respect to feeds, whether they are podcasts or text, I think CPM tends to be a much better model because it rewards the audience and the delivery of the content…”

18:27 – Klau offers his perspective on the influence of Nielsen and Arbitron, “…The Nielsen numbers matter less because people are shifting their consumption beyond the broadcast time to a time shifted time, or they’re going online.”

19:35 – Klau talks about cashing feeds.

20:31 – Klau explains how iTunes works and talks about measuring podcast downloads. 

21:14 – Klau on how iTunes determines the top 100 podcasts list. 

22:52 – Klau answers a question on whether FeedBurner is the next Nielsen or Arbitron, “Our goal is to work explicitly on behalf of the publisher to make sure that anything that can be discovered or told about the consumption of their content, that we not only measure it, but then make it easily reported for them as well.”

24:39 – Klau on what surprises him about the emergence of blogs, podcasts and social media, “Today, the number of blogs is into the tens of millions, some of whom who have tremendously high traffic…you have a tremendous opportunity as the publisher to reach an audience that before was held in the hands of just a few organizations.”

26:10 – Klau talks about how new technology is empowering the consumer to exert more influence over the producers of the content.

27:34 – Klau answers a question on FeedBurner’s standardized metrics and establishing metrics for podcasting.

29:04 – Klau offers his generalizations on the adoption of video versus audio podcasts.

30:45 – Klau shares his final thoughts on podcasting, “As with everything, this stuff is so new, podcasts themselves didn’t exist 25 months ago, but it’s exciting to be in the middle of it.  The only truism here is that what we know today will be probably rather useless in about six months.”

33:01 – End.

Photo by TechCrunch

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