Wizzard Media: 1 Billion Downloads in 2007, Podcasting Far from Dead
Wizzard Media, owners of the Libsyn, Switchpod and Blast Podcast networks, will announce tomorrow that it passed the 1 billion download mark in 2007. While online media consumption numbers are notoriously hard to verify, Wizzard's have some serious merit.
Context & Ripple Effects
Wizzard Media's billion-download claim is the payoff of a deliberate roll-up: its March 2007 acquisition of Libsyn, layered with the Switchpod and Blast Podcast networks, turned three separate hosting properties into a single measured audience. ReadWriteWeb treats the figure as credible despite the general unreliability of online consumption numbers, which matters because verifiable scale is exactly what podcasting has lacked when pitching advertisers.
The 'far from dead' framing is pointed: the announcement lands as a rebuttal to the recurring obituary cycle around podcasting, and it does so with a business metric rather than a cultural one. With no syndicated pickups or public reaction recorded at this date, the story's significance rests on whether the roll-up-and-measure model gets copied.
First-order effects
- Advertisers evaluating Wizzard's Libsyn, Switchpod and Blast Podcast networks now have an aggregate annual download figure to price inventory against, addressing the verification problem ReadWriteWeb highlights for online media generally.
- Podcasters hosted on those networks gain a credibility signal — their shows sit inside the infrastructure behind a claimed billion downloads rather than on unmeasured independent servers.
Second-order effects
- Competing podcast hosting platforms come under pressure either to consolidate into comparable networks or to publish audited download totals of their own, since ad buyers will gravitate to whoever offers defensible scale.
- If Wizzard converts the audience claim into ad contracts, pricing power in podcasting shifts toward aggregators who own both the hosting relationship and the measurement story.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward podcasting maturing from distributed hobbyist hosting into consolidated, ad-supported networks where standardized download measurement — not show counts — determines commercial viability.
- Recurring declarations that podcasting is dead give way to a metrics arms race, in which networks' survival depends on making their numbers independently checkable.
The trend: Podcasting is consolidating around aggregated hosting networks whose defensible download measurement, rather than raw show volume, sets the terms for advertiser money.