As a podcast consultant I should be telling everyone to start a podcast. I do. I believe there is a lot to be learned from starting a podcast. You learn to:

Organize your thoughts
Prioritize your goals
Speak with confidence
Work with people from different cultures
As much as podcasting is about talking, I think the top podcasters are at the top because they learned how to listen.

We Predicated Disgruntled Podcasters in December 2013
There was a time when it seemed every podcast had the term "on fire" tacked on at the end. In December of 2012 myself, Daniel J Lewis, Ray Ortega, Steve Stewart, and John Lee Dumas had a roundtable to discuss what Steve coined "The John Lee Dumas effect." People were starting a podcast, following a formula, and expecting the same six figure result as John. Part of that roundtbale was to point out the hard work, dedication, and insane work ethics that John has (and they being John Lee Dumas comes very naturally to him).  John has always been super transparent about his life, his business, and his workflow, and how long his runway was when he jump into the unknown waters of podcasting (that's why I like the guy). John is an original. Here is the income from the eofire.com website

 
Here Comes the Next Wave of "Podcasting is Dead."
Comedian Brock Wilbur made a post and said, "“Podcasts are pointless. Anyone who tells you otherwise is the literal devil. No one is going to get rich or famous or gain any level of following from this medium ever again, because it is hilariously dead. Your idea to share caustic observations about an ongoing TV show? Pointless. Your idea to interview interesting people? Laughably misguided. Your idea to discuss each individual episode of a decade-old CW show? Well… shockingly successful.”
I went and listened to his podcast.
Brock has around 125 downloads per episode (13,767 downloads divided by 110 episodes). If you were a teacher, that would be 5 classrooms of 20.
I’m three minutes into it, and I am now finally getting into the content. You played a song with no teaser. You are hoping that people sit through some song hoping that they make it to the content. As a first time listener, I have no idea who you are, or your guests.
Your audio is right on the edge of distracting. I get it. One microphone with four people, you’re going to get room noise. It's YOUR show. You can record it any way you want.
At 5 minutes you finally introduce your guests. Nobody waits for 5 minutes for someone to get to the point. You then had one of your guests introduce themselves. The average attention span is around 8 seconds now (or something ridiculous like that).
In my opinion 97% of the time improv blows.
Brock typed a whopping 32 words that is not a huge target for Google to find. The Yoast SEO plugin recommends 300 words per post. It's YOUR show, do what you want.
Nothing screams “great content” like four people talking over each other. Who am I to judge, it works for THE VIEW.
In the article you say, “two years ago we started setting aside Thursday nights to have fun people get drunk around microphones in my living room.” It sounds like you’ve achieved your goal.
The one thing that really confused me, is Brock has a great looking website, but instead of adding the podcast to YOUR WEBSITE, you send people to a bad Podbean site that looks like a throw back to bad MySpace page.
A Farewell To Podcasting
Donovan Adkisson was on my show a while ago after completing his first year. He had written a book about it, and was excited about podcasting. Three years later he had created Adkisson Digital, four podcasts and a fair amount of frustration. If you listen to his episode titled "My Farewell to Podcasting" he states the following:
I'm not saying I'm ceasing my podcasting endeavors because I don't get any feedback, but its part of it.
I've realized that it's not interesting. I don't really bring anything of value to the listener. All I do is rant about the things that are happening in the worl