Podcasts Growing
Podcasting as a medium suitable for ads is struggling. So did radio, so did Television.
Charlene Li, Forrester Analyst, says
“A Forrester Research consumer poll found that 25 percent of online consumers expressed interest in podcasts, citing the ability to listen to programming on their own schedule. Just 1 percent of households, however, said they regularly listened to podcasts and only 2 percent had sampled them.”
One of the difficulties is the ability to appropriately allocate costs. When podcasts are pooled by a network, there isn’t presently a simple way to decide how much to charge to broadcast an ad. But that will get worked out. Radio did. TV did.
Another is the fact that for nearly twenty years, the Internet has been primarily a text-based medium. Oh sure, there are graphics popping up in your face all over the place. And today there are so many animated ads it’s almost impossible to read the text on some sites. But pop-up blockers are pretty effective these days and some browsers can filter those annoying ads out.
Which leaves the field open for audio.
Audio is very easy to control. You turn the speaker on, you turn the speaker off. You want to hear and read, or just want to hear or read… easy.
That means your message may not reach as wide an audience. But, as with double opt-in email, your audience will be smaller, but more interested.
Naturally, affiliate marketers want to know first and foremost how to make money from a podcast. After all, it isn’t as if you can click on one while listening.
Here are a few ways, by analogy to other forms of income generating content.
1) It’s content. Common wisdom says that good content creates traffic and traffic leads to conversions.
2) Pay per action programs can pay on download of a podcast as easily as they can the download of an eBook.
3) You can create a podcast to advertise your merchants products, just as you have created a site with graphics and text. That podcast can reside on your site or others. The podcast can send them to your site to clickthrough for a sale.
Here are some numbers that suggest the effort may be worthwhile.
“Forrester projects that just 700,000 households in the US in 2006 will use podcasting, but that it will grow to 12.3 million households in the US by 2010.” (Charlene Li’s blog.)
Bridge Ratings thinks it will be even higher.
(Pew has yet different numbers.)
Since Yahoo! added podcast search, and others have technology that even allow searching within a podcast, I’m betting with Bridge.