Marketwatch's
Internet Daily reports on an online auction for advertising space on
Rocketboom, the quirky vlog (video blog) that features
Amanda Congdon
presenting a daily collection of odd news and video clips. An eBay
auction for a week's worth of ads closed with a high bid of $40,000.
Not bad (assuming this turns out to be legitimate)!
The winner will get a short video ad played at the end of each daily
segment. Rocketboom claims 200,000 daily viewings, so the auction
package included about 1 million viewings.
Rocketboom gets mixed reviews from critics, and it's not even one of
the biggest podcasts. (At the top of the iTunes podcasts chart today is
The Onion Radio News,
which has an ad tacked on the end for Chili's restaurants.) So $40,000
is a good indicator of the potential for podcast advertising.
There's certainly potential for money to be made in podcasting. Earlier this week my blogging colleague
Steffen Fjaervik mentioned the
Ricky Gervais Show,
an odd and hilariously funny (well, I think so) podcast that hit the
top of the podcast charts. The first dozen episodes of the show have no
paying sponsor, but since the podcast surpassed 2 million downloads
already, it's safe to bet that Gervais and Co. could turn this into a
tidy revenue source.
The Gervais podcast also is intriguing because it was published by
The Guardian. A growing number of newspapers are experimenting with podcasting, but bravo to
The Guardian for looking outside the box for podcast content. Other traditional news organizations should do likewise.
