A Wiredarticle suggests that podfading is becoming more common as more podcasters either lose interest or quit over concern they don't have enough time to produce a quality podcast. Wired says the word podfading was coined by Scott Fletcher in 2005.
The phenomenon has earned its own label, "podfading," coined by podcaster Scott Fletcher in February 2005 when he gave up on two podcasts of his own.
"I liken it to losing interest in a hobby and then coming up with the reasons you don't have time anymore," said Fletcher, a Peoria, Illinois, computer-program analyst who has since returned to the scene with his monthly Podcheck, a discussion of podcasting news.
Note: Scott Fletcher has a post about the Wired article on his Podcheck Review blog. Podfading even happens to popular podcasts like Ryan and Jen Ozawa's Lost podcast which had 15,000 listeners. The article says that podcasts, unlike blogs, are not easy to produce and take a much greater time investment. Rob Walch, who runs Podcast411, told Wired that 1/5 of podcasters quit before their tenth show.
Although hard figures are elusive, host Rob Walch of the podcaster-interview program Podcast411 estimates at least a fifth of podcasters don't make it to their 10th show; he expects the podcast graveyard to become even more crowded as podcasting becomes easier. Walch instituted a rule that he won't interview a podcaster until the show has at least 10 episodes.
"Podcasting is one of those things that's cheap and easy to begin to do but takes a tremendous amount of time to keep going with no payoff," said freelance writer and blogger Brian Reid of Alexandria, Virginia, former host of the gender-issues program Sex Talk, who quit in August. "There was no money in it and it did nothing to push my career forward. I've got a lot of other things in my life, paying work being one and my family is another. It's not like blogging, where you can do it for 15 minutes at a time and get away with it."
Frank McMahon, who produces or hosts five podcasts, worries that podfading will kill off some of the medium's freshest, most unusual voices. After watching a recent episode of Four-Eyed Monsters, a video podcast in which the hosts spotlighted their own exhaustion and frustration with the craft, McMahon recorded a special audio edition for their RSS stream to encourage them to keep going.
The article also says that Z100, a New York City radio station that was one of the earliest podcasters, has not produced a new podcast since December. What does the future hold for podcasts? There should definitely be a market for quality podcasts but podcasters do have the rapidly developing online video medium to compete with.
