Another One Bites the Dust. Remember Podango? Well we can add another free podcast hosting company to the list.
That's right. Another completely free podcast hosting company is closing its doors. In this case its mypodcast.com. This website offered recording software online (kind of like spreaker.com).
Here is their memo:
Hello MyPodcast.com Broadcasters –
We must regretfully inform you that effective December 1, 2011, MyPodcast.com will cease all operations. Due to the current business climate, our current revenues can no longer cover the operational costs associated with hosting and serving the large amount of podcasts available on the site. We would like to thank all our podcasters and listeners for their years of support in making MyPodcast one of the most popular podcast hosting sites on the web.
Effective December 1, 2011, all podcasts currently hosted on the site will become permanently deleted and unavailable for download. For this reason, we strongly encourage all of our podcasters who do not have locally stored copies of their recordings to please take the time to download and save them from the site. Unfortunately, we will not be able to provide ANY recordings on or after December 1, 2011, as they will have been permanently deleted from our storage servers.
Once again, we would like to thank everyone for using the site over the years, and wish you all the best of luck with your podcasts in the future!
—
Regards, MyPodcast Team
If you are not familiar with mypodcast.com they had a platform where you could record your podcast right online. When I went to their site, here are some of the nuggets that I found:
When describing their service, they explained their benefits with this:
The next problem is hosting. You need server to upload your podcasts on. You have to learn about RSS feeds, webpage updates, FTP, backups. And good software does not come cheap.
MyPodcast.com does EVERYTHING for you at absolutely NO COST. That’s right, everything is FREE. Besides, you can earn some money, even if your podcast is not yet popular.
You will start earning when a first Listener will hear your podcast. As your podcast increases its popularity, each podcast will bring you more and more income. Eventually you will receive advertisements offers from individuals interested in your podcast and you will be able to make some exclusive deals.
Apparently, eventually they didn't. In my travels you have to go after the advertisers (they don't come to you).
My favorite is from the FAQ:
Can I turn off the advertisements? I can pay for my podcast bandwidth.
There are plenty of services, which offer podcast hosting for money. The easiest to use is: Mac service from Apple. At the moment we do not provide this kind of subscription.
Maybe they will figure out how to accept money next time.
The company is owned by First Beat Media which (apparently from their website) creates niche dating sites.
Congratulations on showing us that once again a “Free” business plan supported only by advertisements doesn't work (apparently). I just wonder who is going to be next?
Did Your Free Podcast Hosting Save You Any Money Really?
I tried to find out when mypodcast.com started. The earliest report of it was in 2007. With that, let's say it was 1/1/2007. That's 48 months (4 years). If you had a Libsyn.com account for $15 (the one I use) that would be $720 for four years. As they are going out of business you now decide to do what you should've done in the first place, and get a paid podcast hosting solution (libsyn.com or blubrry.com). If you had produced a show every week over the last four years you would have 208 episodes. That's going to take probably an hour to upload all those megabytes of files. Then you are going to have to go to each of those 208 posts and replace the link to your mypodcast.com file to your Libsyn.com if it takes you 5 minutes to do this for each episode you will spend 17.8 hours (remember, you'll have to go through all the pages of posts, then edit, then go to your media, copy, paste, save, rather, rinse, repeat). If we combine that with the hour of uploading and we will round things up and say that it's going to take 19 hours to update your website. This means you are making $37 an hour ($720/19 hours). This is not a “want to” thing, you have to update your website or your podcast will have no media attached to it (at least any live media). The question is, you just lost an entire Saturday with your family. How much is that worth to you?
I didn’t think MyPodcast.com would be around much longer.
Updating the links is actually a much easier and quicker process than many would think. PowerPress has a built-in find-and-replace function designed for replacing old enclosures with new paths.
Or if someone isn’t using PowerPress, they could use MySQL to run a find-and-replace. However, while this is “simple,” it has more steps and can easily be intimidating since editing MySQL databases is beyond most podcasters’ experience.
When I saw the headline I thought it was probably Podango that had gone away.
Sad to see another podcast service go the way of the dinosaur. That is one of the reasons why I feel I must “own” my own content. Even when using free services like BlogTalkRadio or Cinch, I am religious about downloading the audio content. Lesson learned from watching Uttterli aka Utterz go bust suddenly.