Does Anyone Know of Somebody...

No hard evidence, but I don't get the impression advertising's particularly lucrative. Maybe if you've got a huge audience it would work, of course.

From what I can gather listening to what's said on the podcasts, most seem to go with various takes on voluntary contributions or a pay-to-listen / paid 'membership' option that provides additional conent - all in addition to selling advertising.

The Bugle has a voluntary contributions model that seems to work pretty well - it replaced News Corp's funding and they still hire two studios - one in NY and one in London - and a producer/sound engineer at each end. Must be some cash left over to make it worth John Oliver spending so much time on it - I'm guessing he does OK from the Daily Show and the Smurfs movies.

Jimmy Pardo does the first 20 minutes (or something) of his pod as a free download but charges for the full version. When he made the switch (after a year or two building his audience) he gave the impression that it was actually more successful than he'd expected. Of course, I don't know what his expectations were

The pod is still running and he started paying his guest, so I guess it's doing OK.

The British History Podcast does entire episodes for free (to bring in an audience, I guess) but also a monthly paid 'membership' that provides additional podcasts the freetards (like myself) don't get. The guy running it managed to quit his day job to only do podcasting so I guess it works pretty well for him. Obviously, he built the membership before he quit the job

I would agree - very few people seem to be able to do it as anything other than a hobby and the best any income can do is offsets a small portion of the costs.

BWRpota said:

...whose making some real dough selling air-time on their podcasts?

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I know of two that have apparently made it work, TWiT and Revision3. And that's it.

Home | TWiT.TV
Revision3 > Revision3: The Best TV Shows on the Internet

They're both long established, are profitable, and are NOT running on venture capital.

BWRpota said:

"There's gollddd in them thar' hills! Do you think the owners of livery stables, supply stores, hotels, saloons, brothels, etc. readily admitted that all the gold was gone? Is the internet any different? Watch a movie and your static IP is stored somewhere with millions of others...a form of "gold" in themselves, available to the highest bidder. Your information

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huh?

IP addresses aren't really a reliable way of identifying a person. And I think selling end user data is a pretty different thing than selling ad space/air time on a podcast.

But I don't know of anyone making money doing that, but I'm not huge on podcasts either..... :/

BWRpota said:

...whose making some real dough selling air-time on their podcasts?

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Yes. Enough to make a better than pretty nice life.

You need viewrs just like a magazine needs readers and a TV show needs viewers.

This AM I was reading wired Magazine and the piece spoke of fake viewers. You can get views, hits, likes and so forth with nothing more than a credit card payment.

Before I buy air time, you must have legitinmate viewers or it is a no go.

Bob Maxey said:

Before I buy air time, you must have legitinmate viewers or it is a no go.

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Exactly. That's the reason that advertising is probably not going to be a major money spinner until your audience is huge: the people buying have no easy and reliable way of checking that their advertising $$ are getting the mesage to the appropriate number of listeners.

Most of the podcasts I listen to - and I listen to quite a few - have advertisers who only pay when the customer either signs up for an offer or buys something via a link from the podcaster's site. That's verifiable.