Content Producers: Respect Your Audience

As a content producer, you will quickly learn to respect your audience in terms of what content you publish, the quality and tactics for consumption.

How Large Is Too Large?

As a content consumer, I subscribe to dozens of podcasts (i.e. marketing, technology, Mac-centric, parenting, TV/movie fans). Audio files for a 15-45 minute show are generally in the 12-50MB range, depending on compression and format.

It’s great that content producers are discovering the ease of publishing video. But I’m noticing an increasing trend by producers to push out files over 150MB on their feeds. Over the past week I got several ‘ginormous’ screencasts and a 628MB presentation. These files are passively downloading in the background while I’m working. But that kind of bandwidth consumption can clobber users like myself who regularly find themselves moving to various access points and connection speeds throughout the week.

Rather than publishing a heavy video file on the feed, how about posting a smaller audio file version? Better yet, edit that video down to a three minute highlights video. Then notify listeners that they can watch a streaming optimized version of the full length video at the publisher’s website.

Respect Your Audience

While content quality is important, it’s about time for content producers to seriously evaluate what they’re publishing.

• Edit for length — Invest a bit of time to the key points across.
• Choose the right format — Is video of a one-hour presentation really necessary? Or, simply a nice-to-have when audio will suffice?
• Is it really important? — I’m becoming increasingly annoyed by short videos that are just not really useful. (i.e. “I’m messing around with new screencasting software.” or “I’m trying out my new Flip video camera and thought you’d like to see my dog.”)

I enjoy being a podcaster (mainly audio) and I tend to be very sensitive to the file sizes I publish. I’ll noodle with compression options to balance audio quality against reasonable file size. I don’t always succeed, but nevertheless I do try before I hit ‘publish.’

So don’t let your enthusiasm get the best of you. Try to always put your best foot forward. It’s more respectful to the audience that’s investing their time with you.

What are your thoughts on that? Please comment and answer the poll below. Thanks in advance.
-Roland

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