Jason Van Orden, who I have met a couple of times at the NYC Podcasting Meetups and whose recent book on Podcasting I own, posted about Google AdSense for Podcasts - the rumors are spreading that Google is going to get into stream ads around the podcasts (by doing a semantic analysis of the extracted text from a Podcast). Whew! That was a lot to put in one paragraph!
"The rumors have been buzzing in the blogosphere that, before the end of the year, Google will release an AdSense-like service for podcasts and streaming audio. Right now there’s more speculation than details.
Then Jason gets into my realm, the realm of Metrics - by going into how the podcast advertising will be measured.
"how do you measure performance for an audio ad inserted in a podcast?
Is it pay-per-download? This won’t work since a number of downloads are never listened to. The ideal situation is to measure exactly how many people listened to the ad, not just some portion of the podcast. How will Google measure this? This requires some sort of Digital Rights Management (DRM) wrapper on the audio. This presents two problems:
- MP3 files don’t support this, but MP3 is the universal format for audio podcasts
- Podcast listeners have come to podcasting seeking choice and convenience in their listening. DRM defeats that.
Measurement will be the #1 question for advertisers (since it determines their bill) and a potential headache for Google. Google has enough problems with click fraud.
"Or…will this service only be used in streaming applications fromGoogleTube and other such services? In that case, measurement becomes easier. The podcasting industry has discovered that as much as half of the podcasting audience is listening to podcasts on their computers. It’s feasible to dynamically serve ads to these listeners and measure consumption."
I think that's the way Google will go to begin with.
I know a fair bit about Podcasts - I measure them for IBM. I have personally pulled metrics and developed my own for IBM Investor Podcasts - and supplied this information to Corporate Marketing at IBM. What I ended up settling on, and what I have told others to do, is pull the number of bytes downloaded per MP3 and divide it by the size of the MP3 file - this will give you the cleanest number of downloads you can get right now.
But I also suspect a purchase of FeedBurner by Google is right around the corner - and it seems to me that FeedBurner's technology might help here, as many podcasts are based on subscription services - as are most RSS Feeds.
A critical gap in Google's offerings is feed management and feed measurement - along with FeedBurner's ability to stream ads in RSS Feeds - I see either the acquisition of FeedBurner by Google or Google will develop it's own version of FeedBurner and give it away for free. I think Google will build the metrics around such a package.
But I'm just guessing here ...
Comment Preview