Do you Like Transcripts?
About a week ago we tried an experiment here on our Podcast Academy site. We posted an entire transcript of one of the hour long presentations from the New Media Expo. No particular reason we picked the one we did, in fact we had already posted it once before, it was just a quick and easy one for the transcriber to pull a copy of. Although we’re all podcast fans, it’s important to keep in mind that making the content available in a variety of formats helps us all reach a broader audience.
I’m curious if anyone has any feedback. Is this a helpful tool if we continued to provide them?
I saw the advantages as:
- You can link to specific quotes on the transcript pages.
- It increases the relevance of content rich presentations for search.
- Allows presenters one more way to provide their presentations.
- All around good resource.
Obviously there is some cost involved (actually a significant cost) if we continue to do this. No big secret, if you see the pages, we deployed some ads. So we’ll continue to monitor our test to see if it is economically viable on a mass scale for all 153 hours of audio.
Meanwhile, if you like the transcript idea I’d appreciate you thoughts. Here’s the link to the transcript post.
Thanks to Paul Colligan for the nudge to test this.
I agree that providing transcripts has many advantages to the publisher and the readers. The best presentation I’ve seen is Grammar Girl’s because they have a link for each episode to read the entire show transcript on its own page. Also, I think Rush probably drives a tremendous amount of traffic to his site because he publishes transcripts for each show. Some sites (like Raw Vegan Radio) sell transcripts in PDF form. It’s an interesting concept and I wonder what their conversion rate is. Personally, I would have bought every year of PNME if transcripts were included. Yes, transcription is costly and time consuming, but I plan on offering it on my site because I believe the advantages will prove to outweigh the costs. The results of your test will be interesting indeed.
I have every episode of my podcast transcribed, and I do know the search engines love them!
I was thinking of trying to monetize it by offering the latest 2 or 3 for free, and charging for the archives.
I was even thinking of offering the latest 2 or 3 for free, and the archives are available to members (free membership, but you have to sign up for our newsletter.
Has anyone explored or tested these models?