Monday, July 16, 2007

msb-0175 Uh? What Happened To The News?

msb-0175 Uh? What Happened To The News?

intro


---- "Ill Buy That For A Dollar " by: "Casket Salesmen" http://www.myspace.com/casketsalesmen

Feedback comes first, so...

There is none from you.

Well none directly. ;-)

My word! My numbers are climbing (good thing I know its because people can pickup my old shows. I don't kid myself that its because of actual popularity.)

I'm closing on 18,000, if I haven't passed it by the time this gets posted (never-mind when I've podcast this episode.)

Even with a $30 CPM, that means that if some advertiser had been with me since day one, (that means their reminder would have run 175 times since January 2006 for only $540.00. Not tens of thousands, only $540.00!)

The cost of the actual ad would have depended on how popular the product was. If it wasn't, it would have cost the advertiser nothing more that the initial development costs.

And I fully expect this transmission rate, and download growth rate, to settle down once new listeners get caught up. Now I have to work on getting more new listeners. A depressing prospect at best.

---- "50 Dollar Wig" by: "Doug Macleod" http://www.black-and-tan.com/

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop me an email: charles at MSBPodcast.com

---- "100 Dollar Hangover " by: "Lords of the Highway" http://www.lordsofthehighway.com/

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: charles (at) MSBPodcast.com

---- "Bottom Dollar Baby" by: "Nathan Wiley" http://nathanwiley.com/

Main Topic: "Uh? What Happened To The News?"

I just watched the news and I can tell you that we're "never" going to get any coverage there.

ABC evening news only has 30 minutes to cover an entire planet.

Their coverage is limited to recounting that something occurred here and there but there is absolutely no depth and no time for depth, no time for any analysis.

Its merely a recounting of events without a whisper as to why, as to the reason behind the events.

There was a leak of radio active water into the ocean after the latest quake to hit Japan, but not a peep about why anyone would want to build a N-plant there or about the way they chose to construct the plant. (Remember, this was "only" a 6.6 quake on the Richter scale. They have a potential for much, much worse.)

And they only report on things with major foot prints.

Discovering cures for things don't make the news unless a large enough number of people are afflicted.

The common cold gets far more coverage (read "air time") than MS because of that.

Heck, avian flu gets more coverage than MS because of the potential for contracting it.

Never mind that, world-wide, there are five million people with MS, as opposed to less than 500 people who have contracted the H5N1 virus.

I guess people aren't much good at comparing orders of magnitude.

That's 5x10^6 or so actual cases versus 5x10^2 or so actual cases. (I guess they think "Its just a bunch of zeros, so what difference could it possibly make?")

Don't get me wrong, I think that its admirable that all the health organizations are working on preventing an outbreak, but when is the last time research on MS raised that kind of media ruckus? (There's 5 million of us with crap on our faces and none of those mothers even wants to come over with their "do gooder" hankies and give our chins a "spit-wipe".)

---- "Last Two Dollars " by: "Root Doctor" http://www.rootdoctorband.com/


Main Topic, part deux:

On so many facets, one person's news is another's advertising, and vice versa.

Apart from unplanned and/or uncontrolled events, like natural disasters, (not terrorist attacks [there are those who would profit from terrorist attacks, {Al Queda and the D.H.S. (Department of Homeland Security,) benefit, each in their own way,}]) basically, everything, and I mean everything, is fodder for commerce.

Therein lies the strength of commerce and of human ingenuity.

(I must be in a merchant mode; don't mind me; its residual effect of working on a business plan.)

The ambivalence that we all feel toward commerce stems from the very ambivalence of the activities carried out in the name of commerce.

Somethings seem noble and easy to get behind. (Podcasting is wonderful and great, but really, until it becomes a remunerated profession, its just a hobby, the province of amateurs.)

Somethings are just shitty jobs and nobody does them willingly.

Sadly those jobs are actually necessary so some form of incentive is necessary to make it, uh, worth doing. In this the lowest common denominator world, that means money.

The world of commerce dictates that somethings must be remunerated.

The more they are worth, like having a podcast with a specific purpose and a specific audience, like this podcast, the more they must be remunerated; compared to someone else who has an audience of people who just aren't affected/afflicted and who just don't care. (Hey I'm not blaming them, they don't have to.)

That's just the tyranny of demographics.

It affects the sellers as well the buyers. (And the cash register went "cha-ching" :-)

---- "Five Dollar Hat" by: "The Glare Of Day" http://myspace.com/theglareofday

Outro

4 comments:

Miss Chris said...

Regarding the media and it's inability (or unwillingness) to address us, I often wonder this: When Katie Couric was on the Today Show, colon cancer was mentioned all the time. It was the "cause du jour" for many years. Now the Today Show has Meredith Veiera, who's husband has MS. I think I heard maybe one thing about it. Shame on her for not using her position as Katie Couric used hers.

mouse said...

MS made headlines back when Tysabri got recalled due to it's potential relationship to PML deaths. Death is news these days.

Charles-A. Rovira said...

Hello Ms. Mouse, yes, death makes the news, (though I have to listen to Weaponry on WBAI for the complete casualty reports from the "Wars on the Far Side of the World".)

Charles-A. Rovira said...

I actually read "Blindsided: Lifting A Life Above Illness", the book by Richard Cohen, the MSer husband of Meredith Veiera, and you're undeniably right.

It was a book and it faded from view, if it ever was in our faces, when she got her job as anchor.

But I'm not blaming her in anyway for what she did or didn't do.

As I wrote, the mass media is the mass media and we MSers don't represent the mass in any way, shape or form.

That's why MSBPodcast is so important.

Nobody else is positioned to bring MSers news that matters to them, and on only to them.

(Yes, I'll get around to doing more interviews.

I did it once through Skype to prove it could work.

Then I recorded a podcamp session with my remote to prove it could work.

I then started two international multi-lingual collaborations to show how far we could reach.

Believe me, I know that I've got a tiger by the tail. :-)

This is a model for the rest of all time on how do media on the internet for heretofore ignored niches.