The Last Podcast

Mike Shield cites some ‘analysts’ who assume podcasting could reach 400$ million in advertising revenue by 2011. This is based ont he assumption that Google is going to release a version of AdSense/AdWords for inclusion in podcasts.

Interesting idea, but if that happens (and I think it is a big if), will advertisers flock to marketing on podcasts? Here is my beef:

• adsense/adwords is extremely easy for even the lowest end advertiser to get into
• podcastings barrier of entry is high because audio production is far more technically involved and time consuming than blogging

I think blogging is a good comparison here. Advertisers would need to be able to produce good, radio-style ads to make a mark on a podcast and podcasters will want those ads to at least match their own production values so that there is no cringeworthy ad that will turn listeners off. Besides, when hiring a production company for the spot, the costs suddenly rise exponentially when compared to just writing five lines for an AdWords campaign.

So just like there is an almost natural cap on the number of people doing podcasts, there will be a cap on the number of businesses interested in running ads on podcasts through an AdSense type system.

Update:Mark Evans points out the ridiculousness of this prediction, given that the advertising market for blogs is ‘only’ supposed to be $300 million by 2010.

Riddle me this: in a new report, eMarketer expects podcast advertising (aka pod-vertising) to grow to $400-million by 2011 from $80-million in 2006. Sure, it’s a drop in the overall bucket but $400-million will still be more a bigger market than blog-vertising, which is expected to be about $300-million in 2010, according to PQ Media.

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