I have invested significant time and resources to figuring out exactly that and in a word yes but with limitations till the audience sizes grow. This week checks are delivered to 20 some podcasters over at TechPodcasts.com derived from traditional advertising models with a slight twist.
The line that all podcasters have to balance when taking on advertisements and or sponsors, is the line between becoming annoying and providing a service to the listeners. My personal goal it to make sure that each podcast I produce is added value, that the listener not only gets to hear great content but are offered discounts or product trials that once they use them, they will realize that the product or service can make a positive impact on their lives and jobs.
I am not about to run some ad for some company that wants you to drink their product and kill brain cells it goes against my judgement in promoting child safe educational shows. At the same time I understand that the 48 minutes of content and 12 minutes of advertising is not going to work! My goal has been to limit commercial advertising in my 45 minute shows to 90 seconds, split between 2 advertising spots.
This is were the long tail of podcasting does not have a silver lining, for most investors. We hit ad saturation very quickly, on the other hand I think for the podcaster with a niche audience that advertisers need to be prepared to pay a premium, and also make a realization that podcasting is not radio! (yet)
This has been a tough part of the negotiation process, in which I have had to turn two companies away as I did not agree in the hard sell they were pushing. In addition unless your wildly famous people are not going to pay for the content, and if they do it is going to have to be 100% commercial free, and you are going to have to rock their world each and every show.
I am the first to admit I do not know all of the lingo but in my brief experience dealing with a variety of companies I am finding they are shocked with the frankness of the discussions. I also have had a few advertising firms shocked that a geek is negotiating advertising deals and cutting them out of the loop.
Full disclosure is a word they are not used to. I had a company want to re-sell me an ad they needed to place. I told them I would not place the ad unless they told me how much of a cut they took. They are not used to telling people their fee but my reply was that podcasters are doing the work and podcasters are going to get paid and I understand your need to stay in business but I am not going to be robbed out of the majority of that placement by their heavily padded feed.
Sure their is some money in podcasting but it’s not going to go down the same way it has in the past, were those doing the work end up getting scraps. [Informit]