A new article on eMarketer.com talks about the growth in advertising in podcasts. They’re looking at the whole issue from a mass consumer standpoint and make it very clear that this is a niche audience channel. What I’d like to see is research on those of us who are specifically using it as a niche vs. mass audience channel. For example, my weekly ZimmCast is usually downloaded somewhere between 50 and 100 times within the week after I first post a new episode. However, if you look at the downloads for programs over the last year I have some programs that have been downloaded as many as 900 times. I haven’t really tried to find an advertiser for it yet although feel free to be the first one! The key here is who those people are. If they’re the top thought leaders in our niche business then I don’t care about the masses do I? Who do you most want to reach? The leaders right?

Here’s an excerpt from the eMarketer.com article:

As a rule, most widely consumed podcasts still have less than 50,000 downloaders, and most have far fewer, but podcast distribution and viewing mechanisms are proliferating and podcast advertising has marketers buzzing.

Even though podcast advertising spending was a mere $3.1 million in 2005, it rose to $80 million in 2006, and eMarketer forecasts that it will grow fivefold in the next five years.

I have no doubts they’re right. There’s seems to be no stopping iPod sales and with the iPhone coming out soon even more people are going to be looking for content to listen to. Are you in the conversation?