I was listening to podcast 411 while I walked into work this morning. It was all about advertising on podcasts. In particular there is a company called Kiptronic that will dynamically insert ads into your podcast when it is being downloaded. It sounds like the service is in its infancy but I think it has huge potential. It has the potential to allow any podcaster to easily generate advertising revenue from their podcast and also to allow advertisers to easily advertise on a large number of podcasts.

At the moment the advertiser can target the ads based on geography. I presume this is done using the IP address of the person downloading the podcast. If other demographic information can be collected then the ads could be even more targeted. This is not unlike Google Adwords and Adsense - where I am shown ads that are not only relevant to my search term or content I’m reading but also to my location.

I saw Google recently got into the radio ad business with the purchase of dMarc Broadcasting for somewhere between $102 million and $1.1 billion. I’m not sure whether this technology could be applied to podcasts or not - but I’m sure Google are keeping an eye on what Kiptronics are dong.

Audio ads are more difficult to track than web based ads so it will be difficult to get the same performance measures as you have for web based advertising but I can see the future where advertisers are bidding on audio ads for podcasts/radio in much the same was as the do for web ads now. The result will be more relevant ads for the listener and better returns for the advertisers.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 1:01 pm PST and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.