Advertising and Sponsorship Thoughts and Ideas

January 31, 2008 – 11:58 am by cfiles

Almost every podcast/blog/website/whatever has to address the issue of paying for things at some point or another; this is my address.

Hike it all is and always will be freely available. When I started the show that was one of my first pillars. However, as you can guess, creating the content and hosting everything costs money; money I am more than glad to spend :). To help things along though we are adding a few small advertisements to the site. They are in the bottom of the sidebar on the pages. If you really do not want to see them you can always use Firefox and install the Customize Google extension; that works for us.

We are also looking for some sponsors. And by sponsors we mean people/companies that would like to advertise with us on the site and sponsor episodes of the show. With that said, we will not force any sponsors products down the throats of our viewers. We will also use full disclosure of everything we receive from any sponsor.

Since I am throwing all of this out there I need to state that the website does not cost much to operate. All of my camera equipment is stuff that I already own. All of the stuff that we have shown in the episodes, so far, is stuff that we already have. All of the video content is currently hosted for free by Blip.tv (thank you guys, you rock). The only real cost is hosting the site and the investment of time that Ryan and I make. Hosting only costs us $10/per month, thank goodness. Time is another issue all together. Ryan and I have no delusions of grandeur when it comes to making a living doing this. We would love to, but for now our time is freely given without complaint.

Now that all of that is out there I am going to propose something a little revolutionary. Every dollar we spend and receive is going to be logged in the wiki. This will serve several purposes…

1. Ryan and I can track things.
2. Provides a level of disclosure that is rarely seen.
3. Shows anybody interested in creating a podcast how much it costs.
4. Informs our viewers of the effort we are putting in.
5. Create a bidding war between sponsors (just kidding)

We will see how this little experiment goes. As always, please let us know if you have any thoughts, comments, etc. on this topic; good or bad, we want to hear them. We can be contacted by email at advertise@hikeitall.com, or you can make a comment on this post.

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