Podango

» see podango.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Podango was running at podango.com by February 2006, out of Bountiful, Utah, under a chief executive named Lee Gibbons. The offer was the one every podcast company has made since: free hosting for your show, in exchange for the right to sell advertising around it. Podango's particular version organized everything into themed stations, so a listener was supposed to arrive looking for a subject and find a shelf of shows about it rather than one podcast at a time.

For a while the numbers moved the right way. By September 2007 Podango was hosting 1,300 podcasters across 250 stations, and shows on it were being downloaded two million times a month, up from twenty thousand a month only half a year earlier. That autumn it bought a content management system called GigaVox Audio Lite from GigaVox Media, software that automated the stitching of advertisements and other program material into an episode, and the shows on the roster included MommyCast and Duct Tape Marketing Radio.

The arithmetic underneath never closed. Storage and bandwidth for several hundred shows is a fixed monthly cost that arrives whether or not anyone sells an advertisement, and two million downloads spread across 250 stations is an audience too thin per show to price. When the advertising market seized up at the end of 2008, there was nothing holding the company up.

~ the record ~

~ the stations ~

The station idea deserves a word, because it was a real attempt at a problem podcasting still has not solved. A directory gives you a list and a search box, which works if you already know the name of the thing you want. Podango's stations tried to make the network itself the unit of discovery, grouping shows so that advertisers could buy a subject rather than an audience, and so that a listener browsing one show would fall into four more.

It needed scale that podcasting in 2007 did not have. The whole medium ran to a few million regular listeners, mostly American, and splitting that across 250 shelves left each shelf nearly empty. One of the podcasters hosted there wrote afterward that Podango had forgotten that content is king. The arithmetic points somewhere duller: at two million downloads a month spread across 250 stations, the average show on the network was too small to price an advertisement against.

~ five days over christmas ~

The notice went out during the holidays. Podango told its podcasters that given the worsening economy it could not be sure of continuing, and that they should find other hosting, and it gave them five days to do it. Todd Cochrane at Blubrry, a competitor, spelled out why that timing was brutal: moving a podcast properly takes three or four weeks, because the audience has to be told and because iTunes and every other directory need time to pick up a new feed URL. Blubrry offered Podango's refugees thirty days of free hosting on 28 December, the same day the novelist J.C. Hutchins posted about what he called Podango's apparent demise.

On 1 January 2009 Blubrry reported the plug pulled. The website was offline and the media files could no longer be downloaded, which is the part that mattered, because for several hundred shows those files were the archive. The only thing still working was feed redirection, and only for the people who had managed to move their feeds before the year ended. The Internet Archive's last capture of a working Podango homepage is 16 December 2008; by 29 January the address answered with a redirect, and podango.com today is an Indonesian gambling site.

None of this reached me, and the reason is a date rather than a border. Turkish-language podcasting barely existed in 2008 and did not become a category until streaming apps carried it in years later. I had TTNet broadband from around 2006 and spent it on files I could keep rather than on subscriptions to feeds of people talking. Podango needed that second habit to be common somewhere, and in 2008 it was common almost nowhere.

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