The stress of podcasting

Robert Scoble, judging by his tantrum this weekend, may not be ready for his moment in the spotlight. But the former Microsoft evangelist has a bigger problem. He left the Redmond software giant, where he was a licensed gadfly, to pioneer a new medium, podcasting, even less mature than he. Even the most popular of all independent podcasts, Rocketboom, produced only $247,412 in revenue last year. Podtech, the tech news network which puts out Scoble's show, is too small to register, even, in Comscore, a database of popular sites for advertising buyers; Alexa, where Podtech should score better, shows the tech video site reaching only 100 out of every 1m web users sampled. With no real audience and VC firms such as USVP expecting a return on their $5.5m investment, Podtech has to pump revenues by producing lightly-disguised corporate videos and taking money from sources. Scoble should have stayed at Microsoft.

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