Yes the graphic has been altered by me so calm down. Although the rumor mill seems to be turning pretty hard that Google may be looking to get into the Podcast Advertising space.
The question is will Google want to mess with all the independent podcasters? Or will they introduce a advertising product that will work a lot like Google Adsense were the advertising is complimentary to the podcast displayed on the podcasters site but not in the actual podcast.
My prediction is that Google will start to offer free podcast hosting, and in return they will get to stick ads in front or at the end of the content, and then the publisher and Google will share the revenue with Google taking a big chunk. The question to be asked is can they get, or will they even worry about the CPM rates that the focused content deserves. I am not at all sure how I feel about the possibility of Google joining the party but it could put a lot of companies out of business that have relied completely on ad revenue as there only source of income.
This also hits pretty close to home and I have some pretty strong feeling about the topic, but I would be very surprised if Google talked to anyone outside of Google on this.
I am pretty happy that my team at RawVoice understood early on that advertising would only be a small segment of our earnings, and glad that we have a software product that allows companies to roll their own podcast or videocast media networks with our RawVoice Generator product.
Only time will tell if Google is really getting in the Podcast Advertising business. But I sure would not mind talking to them about leveraging inventory as we now have 800 podcasters that we can negotiate ad deals for. [SeekingAlpha]