Sponsorships make better sense for supporting content creation

A nice thing about the sponsorship model for B2B podcasts is that you harbor no resentments when another technology resources portal repurposes your content. Now if I were in the page-views-driven Web advertising business, the recent move by ebizQ to aggregate and link through to my BriefingsDirect podcasts might seem a dilution of my means to income.

On the contrary, the more the merrier. The value of the podcasts only grows as more avenues become available for their dissemination. I’m delighted that ebizQ’s large and influential following of IT professionals can now better gain access to these informational podcasts, to listen or read them. I say read because beginning soon I will be posting full transcripts and text highlights of all BriefingsDirect podcasts, along with the audio. Read them or listen, have it your way.

So thanks to ebizQ, and I also look forward to a fruitful relationship. We don’t compete on page-views, so ebizQ is happy to redistribute my podcasts. Because we don’t compete on page-views, I’m happy to have ebizQ redistribute my podcasts. Good relationship.

Incidentally, John Furrier (and soon Robert Scoble, it seems) at PodTech has it right in focusing on the sponsorships model for podcasts, too – and for now obvious reasons. Compelling content made openly available and supported by sponsors encourages those who recognize credible and relevant knowledge to pass it along (like ebizQ) – or not. The value of the content is rated and elevated better outside of a page-view-driven, controlled-link competition model silo. Podcast sponsorships allow for this content to find more friction-free ways to reach those with the most need to know.

Financially supporting content creation up-front and with full disclosure of the sponsors is soon to become the best way to deliver more and more information -- via podcasts, video blogs, or maybe even any digital modality.