Podcasts chegam à maturidade?

excerto da notícia «Podcasts Coming Of Age», March 31, 2006, Antony Bruno, Billboard

«A year ago podcasting was just a fad with a cool name. In recent weeks, the format has taken several steps toward becoming big business. The audio blog phenomenon that began as free, grass-roots rantings is being commercialized through advertising and subscription fees. In early March, for instance, the creator of the British sitcom “The Office” began charging $2 a pop for his comedy-themed podcast after generating 250,000 downloads per week from Apple’s iTunes Music Store.
Media companies like NPR and Clear Channel now sell 10- to 30-second commercials for their podcasts, prompting the emergence of startups formed to insert ads into amateur podcasts whose creators are unable to sell the ads themselves. The trend has even expanded into the mobile space. On March 27, Mobile podcasting service Pod2Mobile introduced an automated advertising program that inserts 20-second audio ads at the beginning of participating podcasts. The motivation is clear. A recent eMarketer report predicted that podcast advertising spending will increase from an estimated $80 million this year to $300 million by 2010. Venture capitalists at Sequoia Capital—which participated in the $8.85 million funding of podcasting pioneer PodShow—say the market could grow to as much as $2 billion in the next five years. Of course, to reach these figures, podcasts need listeners. According to Bridge Research, there are about 9 million podcast listeners today. Conservative analyst projections peg that the audience will reach around 12 million in the United States alone by 2010.  The “corportization” of podcasts is contributing somewhat to this growth, as the big media brands take over the format from the geek fringe. But almost every pundit agrees the biggest killer app for the format is the one most difficult to obtain—music.»