PodGuides.Net
Somebody will back me up on this, but I had the (pretty obvious) idea of PodGuides (via EirePreneur) about a year and a half ago. In fact, Todd can back me up, because we had a brief email chat about the idea with Larry in July, 2003.
My idea was a user-generated site of MP3 city tours from around the world. People would record them, send in the raw tour, we’d edit it, clean it up and sell them for $8-10 a pop. I actually got pretty close to starting it–I even picked an available URL (the funnest part of any business venture): wandertown.com.
These crazy Dutchmen Belgians are giving this stuff away for free:
All podguides are for free! Yes, you’re reading this correctly, you can download these guides for absolutely no fee at all. Why? Well, honestly, we didn’t have enough resources to make a descent online store. Securing the files against piracy is practically impossible. Everyone would have been able to copy them as many times as they wanted. So why bother.
Why bother? For the cold, hard cash, of course. Building an online store isn’t that difficult (I looked into Audible, but they’ve got the nasty DRM), and I wouldn’t have worried about DRM at all. Better to sell 100 copies and have 10000 copies floating around than only sell 10 because of DRM.
If they want to give this content away for free, good on them. Still, I think there’s a micro-business model there, particularly given the emergence of podcasting.
