Adam Curry – “at least 50,000 listeners”

Are you kidding me?! That was pretty much the reaction of the BBC reporter when he dropped that number in an interview.

Let’s put that in context. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the fourth largest media market in the US, the leading radio station, KCBS 740AM, has approximately 650,000 listeners. And a listener is someone who tunes in for “at least five minutes, once a week.” To build that audience takes radio personalities, reporters, meteorologists, helicopters, producers, studios, transmitters and so forth.

And to PodCast? A thousand dollars worth of equipment, access to a broadband line and a bunch of bandwidth. Who has even heard of PodCasting? It has been around for three months.

It will not take much sponsorship to turn this into a profitable business. And think of the upside – your reach is not limited by your FCC license. In one of his hard edged businessman moments, he drops a few other data points – 592 PodCasters in his directory, 6 million iPods sold, and soon 600 million MP3 capable mobile phones all looking for content. Then he moved on to the tap-dancing PodCaster news.

So consider that before you get caught up in the latest speculative radio frenzy.