Podcast sponsorship (free hosting) for new podcasters
If you're just starting out with podcasting - would you be interested in free hosting for up to 6 months?
I love listening to great podcasts and I know how hard it can be when you're just starting out, not knowing if you'll get enough audience to secure a sponsorship, etc. I'm building a podcast hosting service that will allow you to host unlimited number of podcasts for a fixed monthly price (the price depends on number of episode downloads) where you can experiment with different show concepts to see what works best.
I got this idea that I could offer a sponsorship to new podcasters - free hosting for up to 6 months or 5k downloads, whichever comes first, in exchange for a mention of my service. Let me know what you think - should I go forward with this?
Not sure how to ask this politely without sounding gloomy, but I am genuinely curious about your reasoning, so I'd have to ask anyway - why build yet another hosting service?
Anchor.fm is killing it. They used to host something like 30% of all new podcasts a year ago, and now I swear the number is closer to 50%. They are free, have all the analytics, upload, call-in ...etc features.
The general rule of thumb is to go either up-market or down, so either premium features that cost a lot, or free. I would genuinely love to know if you have a plan to compete because it would be good for everyone to have multiple offerings, but it's also really hard to compete with a black hole with infinite funding.