Since when do Japanese pornographers pay tech podcasters six figures?
Video-sharing site Stickam — owned and operated by a Japanese porn company — wants to pay some guy named Leo Laporte $100,000 to stream his podcast called This Week in Tech, or TWiT, exclusively for one year. Confused? So are we. And when we did the math, our bewilderment grew.
Our source tells us Laporte gets about 700 to 1,000 simultaneous viewers when TWiT streams over Ustream.tv. TWiT's Ustream profile page says the show has been viewed 647,249 times so far this year, suggesting Stickam plans to pay Laporte a $51 CPM. For a moment, a I felt a jealous twinge typing those numbers. But that passed as soon as I discovered a list of TWiT's regular guests on Wikipedia. They include: "John C. Dvorak, Roger Chang, Patrick Norton, Alex Lindsay, Wil Harris, Jason Calacanis, Veronica Belmont, Molly Wood, and Tom Merritt."