Jon Watson, of GNU/Linux User Show and Jak Attack! renown, and about a thousand other things on the web and print, recently introduced an unusual idea for monetizing podcasts: The 1-Penny Podcast Project. Simply, the idea is for the podcaster to mention the advertiser during the show, usually a pretty short ad, and for the advertiser to pay a flat fee based around the podcast’s download levels. Watson is setting ads for his show at roughly one penny per download, hence the 1-Penny title.
Now, advertising within the podcasts isn’t particularly revolutionary, but the Watson’s price point is. Most podcasts are a bit amateurish or on niche topics, which doesn’t bring in a herd of advertisers willing to part with large wads of cash. Podcasting takes a lot of work, especially everything done before and after recording, so podcasters aren’t that excited about giving super-low advertising rates. Watson’s idea offers a nice middle ground:
- Provides the advertiser a very low cost message
- Provides the advertiser the opportunity to advertise on multiple podcasts due to the low investment
- Is a permanent ad on the user’s computer once downloaded, even if the podcaster edits the hosted version later
- Allows the podcaster to have multiple ads within a podcast as advertising space is incredibly limited
- Provides another revenue stream to help compensate for the hard work of show prep and post production.
Watson mentions that this is a great opportunity for niche podcasting, as it connects the advertiser with some highly targeted potential traffic. Getting traffic is pretty easy, but getting high quality, pre-qualified traffic is the real Holy Grail of the web. In fact, if there were a podcast in an even tangentially related field to my employer’s products, I would really push to advertise on it. We’ve got traffic out the wazoo, but I want buyers, not lookey-loos.
I have my doubts about how this will work for podcasts that I would label as personality driven or in fairly general areas. What possible market could I target with, for example, an ad purchase on a show like Evil Genius Chronicles or even Jak Attack!? How could I possibly determine any kind of ad audience for something like this? The product or service would have to be so general that it seems unlikely the advertiser would really value placing an ad, even at the single cent price. Maybe if a general show had a download level of a Ricky Gervais it would be worth advertising a product or service oriented towards a general public audience, but at that level we’re talking massive expense for any ad time.
Despite my doubts, I think the 1-Penny Podcast idea is perfect for matching niche advertisers with niche advertisees. I hope to see a little more of it popping up to support those hard-working podcasters.