Quote Originally Posted by deer_in_the_headlights View Post
Hi all, had an idea for a podcast business model, wanted to see what you thought.

It seems to me from reading and listening to podcasters that you can't charge listeners for your show. Otherwise you won't grow, or you may shrink.
So the fallback is advertising or merchandise.

My idea is around advertising.
What if there was a site you can upload your podcast to and when you upload you specify one or more timing points where an ad can be inserted.
Whenever the podcast is downloaded it inserts the latest ad into the given timing points, creating a custom mp3 on the fly, and selects the add based on the down-loaders location or other info the down loader gives when signing up.

The distributor and the content originator split the advertising income in some way based on number of downloads, or if there was a special app, perhaps number of listens.

That's basically it. Someone may already be doing it.
It's a good idea in principle. The complicated part is how to create that mp3 on the fly with the XML aggregates still able to grab the show, like iTunes. They take a VERY long time to update their XML and show listings. I suppose you could do it on the server side, but the podcast gets pinged so quick that on the fly may not work. If you can figure out a program that would rotate the ads on the mp3 files, THAT would be amazing and you should charge for that. That would work great for people who host on their own servers... BUT if a podcast hosts on Libsyn, then you might have problems with that.