Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

Pick a Peck of Podcasts: Are Networks Still Relevant?

My friend, mentor (the goddamn whippersnapper), colleague, and former boss Marco Arment wrote three posts about producing podcasts and the value of podcast networks over the last month, two in the last day, that I think warrant a response that is milder than you might imagine. He and I have gone hammer and tongs on Twitter about this at times, but his latest posts come closer to what I believe the statistics show it's all about. (His posts are about Mule Radio shrinking [May 29], "Podcast Networks Are The Wrong Model" [June 22], and "The Elephant In the Podcast Studio" [June 23].)

Podcast networks rose, as Marco notes, when things were hard. He made two main points yesterday related to blogging that he says are now true for podcasting:

Writers don’t need blog networks to be successful today because of two major shifts since blogging began:

The tools required

Financial

NeXT Beats Beats

Apple's acquisition of Beats was already analyzed to death before today's announcement because the news of negotiations leaked weeks ago. The final price is $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in stock. However, the New York Times' Brian X. Chen, a long-time Apple reporter and sensible person, paraphrased or asserted the oddest statement relative to Apple's 1996 acquisition of NeXT:

Still, some other analysts, like Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein, were puzzled by the acquisition, especially the high price. After all, in 1996, Apple paid much less -- about $400 million -- to acquire the computer company NeXT, which brought Mr. Jobs back to the company.

This sounded rather peculiar. Was $400 million "much less" by any reasonable measure except in absolute cash terms, a comparison that makes little sense without taking into account the size of a company's business? I did a

Financial

Kickstarter Post-Mortem with Facts and Figures

I wrote a long analysis of the budget, planning, profit, and other factors in The Magazine: The Book's crowdfunding campaign, which I posted over at Medium.

Medical

An Insurer's "Cheap" Pharmacy Partner? Ha

Years ago, my insurance company offered a small prescription drug benefit on the plan we had as a family — $250 per year with lots of provisos about brand names and such and no co-pays. Over time, the plans changed and even the modest benefit disappeared. However, the insurer partnered with a mail-order pharmacy that, originally, offered significant discounts by using them for 90-day supplies of recurring drugs, and had negotiated deals with retail pharmacies to reduce cost for ones you had to get on the spot.

I knew the discounts weren't great, but some drugs I needed were brand name (Lipitor) and others were very cheap. I didn't price check that often, but I thought I was paying reasonable prices. Lipitor went off-patent, and the generic was much cheaper. I turned to Canada for one drug before it also went off-patent. But then I hit the wall when I had

Technology

For What Shall It Profit…

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?
—Mark 8:36, New American Standard Bible translation

An article in the Verge titled "Inside Pocket: how a startup beat its rivals to build the 'DVR for everything'" prompted me to think about the notion of scale, revenue, and sustainability over my nearly 20 years of work on the commercial Internet.

Way Back in the Long Ago, Children

In 1994, I co-founded a Web development company called Point of Presence Company (POPCO). We funded it ourselves from credit cards and payments from three early clients (Peachpit Press, Faucet Outlet, and Atlas Model Railroad). I brought the first client in; my partner, Todd Haedrich, brought the others (a client of his father's and his uncle's hobbyist company, respectively).

We never really gave a thought to outside funding. I was 26; Todd was 21 or