Podcasting and Mobile Technology

The question of whether podcasting has a great future has long been hanging in the air, harassing Internet entrepreneurs who are suffering from searching for explosive technologies and making money on them. Someone predicted audio broadcasts on the Internet fabulous prospects, and someone in his calculations and research found a hopelessly small market, which does not allow building any effective business model on it.

But with the new marketing research company eMarketer , it seems, everything fell into place. The podcasting market does not just exist, it continues to grow every day, increasingly attracting advertisers who are greedy to the potential audience. It turns out that in the United States 10 million people are active listeners to podcasts. At the same time, the company predicts that this figure will reach 25 million by 2012. At the end of 2008, advertisers will spend $ 240 million to ensure that the podcast listeners were delivered their messages. In five years, this amount will double.

There is a similar dynamic in Russia: today, the podcast listeners are about five million people, in the past year there were no more than 2.5 million.
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We have not yet witnessed any major deals in this market. Indeed, investors are not so confident in podcasting, as in the same social networks, video hosting and mobile services.

Despite the hype around social networks, investor interest in mobile technology is perhaps the highest. And for good reason. First, mobile device users are a whole army of potential customers around the world. Even in Russia, according to statistics, there is more than one apparatus for each resident. And the size of this audience is an order of magnitude larger than the number of users on the desktop Internet. Secondly, the practice of mobile and web services shows the viability of a model based on micropayments conducted through mobile operators. This can not but inspire optimism in the developers of such services, especially in the face of the crisis of business models in Web 2.0.

In this regard, it is quite natural that the idea is born of following two trends simultaneously: creating audio-broadcast services for mobile users. In this case, when evaluating the audience, your formulas will feature much more attractive numbers, minimally tied to the still growing market of podcasts.

As an illustration, we can mention a number of Western services that followed this path: Gabcast , which allows you to create and download a podcast directly from a mobile phone, MobileCast - to subscribe to and listen to podcasts via a phone or Stitcher , with which you can receive audio from popular IT headlines -blogs to your iPhone.

There are also interesting representatives in the domestic market of mobile audio services. Wap. short number.

- via Techhh!