Lots of so-called gurus are encouraging their faithful followers to churn out webcast products — short audio or audio-video recordings. For the producer they are cheap and quick to make — so much so that every day hundreds of new free ones become available, not to mention the high-priced ‘products’ guaranteed to make you rich.

But look at it from the client-side perspective. Most of these, like most of what is written in eBooks and reports, is just junk. That is the nature of the business. But while we can skim through an eBook in two or three minutes and tell if it has anything of interest, you don’t really have that option with the webcast. You watch the beginning, which is full of promises, and 20 minutes later you are wondering when the speaker is going to begin delivering on those promises. Maybe half-way through you give up in disgust, or maybe you hang on, hoping there will be some crumb of useful information you can salvage from the thing.

In the end, each crappy video has wasted about half an hour or more of my time. If it was free that is infuriating, if it cost money, it is doubly so. Time is the most precious commodity we have, and to let some jerk steal it is worse than mere theft of money. It robs us of our very life — for life is made up of only so much time, and each wasted moment is gone forever.

Now of course I’m not saying all the webcasts are crap — just most of them. And it is certainly not worth my time to search out the good ones at the cost of listening to hours of mindless drivel. Before you waste your time on the next six-hour webcast, demand to see a written transcript first. It would be easy to tell from that how much value the presentation has for you — but preparing such a transcript is too much work for your ‘work one hour a month’ guru. If they don’t respect their clients enough to pay for producing such a transcript, I’d suggests their claims of huge profits are probably not worth the airwaves their written on.