Normally I cheap out on the Thursday post and brag about the latest episode of Marketing Over Coffee. We had a good discussion yesterday talking about trade shows, amongst other things. The bad news is that my hosting company, Libsyn is having a real run of bad luck. They’ve been having a hard time getting the stats package back up and running and now they are completely dark. This is the only service disruption I have ever had with them in almost 3 years of podcasting 5 different shows.
This is one of those moments where you realize how important it is to have control of your feed. The primary feed for The M Show is http://www.themshow.com/feed which then redirects to my libsyn feed. So if this continues I just redirect to someplace else, or write my own feed and I’m back in business. You need to ask yourself if you are building an audience for yourself, or for your hosting company, or for feedburner, or somebody else.
For $5 a month I really can’t complain since I’m getting unlimited bandwidth, but it is a bummer to be down as Marketing Over Coffee continues to gain momentum. So, this is kind of a lame post but at least it’s not a bunch of compiled twitter updates or bookmarks from del.icio.us
I’m tired, and I’m off to bed…
4 replies on “Silent, but Still Deadly”
You bring up an excellent point.. What about Feedburner?! Just about everybody’s blog feed is to a Feedburner URL, and not one on their own site. I am afraid I am guilty of this too.
Of course my guess is that Google won’t be going dark anytime soon, but if you have your own domain name, why not have your own feed?!
Something to think about other than the flooding here in the US Midwest…
mp/m
Well you could make the case that if you make it big people will follow you wherever you go. But yes, you are giving up leverage, you’re really owned by feedburner.
We had a very popular podcast a while back. We worked hard on getting some sponsorship lined up. Not really a big deal but would have been just fun, not profitable enough to leave our day jobs. (did anyone leave their day jobs when podshow did that promotion?) Then libsyn lost all our stats and we were kicked out of itunes because Steve Jobs does not like us. Libsyn didn’t know where the stats went. It was sad. I still use libsyn for 2 other podcasts because as you said. “Its 5 bucks a month.” Plus I like being loyal to them after they made it easy for alot of us to get started. I rarely look at stats now.
Keep up the good fight.
m
http://www.kivapodcast.com
m
Hey Mike,
Good to hear from you, I think I had already heard about Kiva from VentureVoice? Or was it Podcast 411? And where the hell is venture voice anymore for that matter?
I’m sorry to hear your sponsorship fell through, if you ever have that problem again I’d sell it on clickthroughs – have them give you a URL and pay you on the traffic they get. CPM based on libsyn stats doesn’t mean a damn if it doesn’t drive traffic anyway.
And no, I think the “Quit your day job” thing was a couple of years too early for most people, but perhaps that day will still come….