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Media The Internet

A Tool to Tally Podcast Listeners 99

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the marketdriods-need-something-to-count dept.
Carl Bialik writes "The company Audible is making an effort to measure podcast audience, which could make the audio shows more attractive to advertisers. From the article: 'Currently in podcasts, "there's no measurability," says Matt Feinberg, a senior vice president for radio at Publicis Groupe SA's ZenithOptimedia. Advertisers have no idea if people are actually listening to podcasts, or if they're just downloading them and never playing them back, so there's no guidance for pricing the accompanying ads. "Prices -- people have been making them up," he says.' The service will cost podcasters: 'The company will charge three cents per downloaded podcast to report whether a downloader listened, and for how long. Audible will also offer tools that will stop the podcast from being emailed to others. It will charge five cents per download to track listening and attach the access restrictions. For half a cent per download, Audible will insert an ad relevant to the podcast.'"
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A Tool to Tally Podcast Listeners More

A Tool to Tally Podcast Listeners

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  • And for zero cents, (Score:5, Insightful)

    by n0dalus ( 807994 ) on Saturday November 12, 2005 @11:45PM (#14018655) Journal
    I will simply not download that podcast. I have better things to do with my time than listen to DRM'd podcasts, and I'll let the podcaster know that.

    • Exactly. Podcast producers already have a far better idea as to what their listener base is doing than radio broadcasters.

      • Podcast producers already have a far better idea as to what their listener base is doing than radio broadcasters.

        In my case, I only tend to download podcasts from ABC Radio National [abc.net.au] in any case - a pragmatic feature that allows the listener to pick where and when he or she wants to listen to good quality free-to-air content. And since it's a taxpayer-funded station, there are no adverts, so they fortunately have little to gain from this kind of DRM crud.

    • Yep. They cannot do what they claim to do without using DRM, and there's no way in hell I am going to accept DRM'd crap.

      -

    • Re:And for zero cents, (Score:4, Insightful)

      by forkazoo ( 138186 ) <wrosecrans AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday November 13, 2005 @12:34AM (#14018779) Homepage
      With this as DRM'd as it apparently is, can you even listen to these podcasts on your iPod? That would sort of be important to a lot of people. Podcasts often make a good substitute for radio while you are out and about. You can catch up on the world of romanian pink dog wrestling while you do your grocery shopping, with any normal MP3 player. If you have to actually sit in front of your computer, you naturally have access to other forms of entertainment, so This Week In Romanian Pink Dog Wrestling (With Yanoush and Steve) suddenly seems less compelling.
    • No kidding. So let me get this straight...they want to DRM the podcast which INCONVENIENCES ME.....so they can measure my listening so people will be more eager to insert ads into the podcast which INCONVENIENCES ME. So where is the benefit to me, the listener?

      • Well, I'd say that the benefit to you is listening to the podcast. You can, of course, decide that the benefit gained isn't worth the inconvenience but that's actually besides the point.

    • Re:And for zero cents, (Score:4, Insightful)

      by shbazjinkens ( 776313 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @01:27AM (#14018907)
      Why is everyone referring to this as digital rights management? This isn't here to stop you from illegally downloading podcasts, but to monitor when and for how long you listen to them. That would be spyware.

      • Re:And for zero cents, (Score:3, Informative)

        by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
        Why is everyone referring to this as digital rights management?

        Because that's what it is. From TFA: "Audible will also offer tools that will stop the podcast from being emailed to others. It will charge five cents per download to track listening and attach the access restrictions."

      • Why is everyone referring to this as digital rights management?

        Because it is - it restricts how you can use the file. The fact that it also monitors listening habits puts it in the DRM and Spyware category and, unfortunately, the two are not mutually exclusive.

  • As a great dead man said... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Phlog ( 154313 ) on Saturday November 12, 2005 @11:48PM (#14018668)
    Reminds me of Bill Hicks. "Oh, God! Please stop turning everything into dollar signs."

  • mental waste companies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Device666 ( 901563 ) on Saturday November 12, 2005 @11:51PM (#14018676)
    Advertisers have no idea if people are actually listening to podcasts, or if they're just downloading them and never playing them back, so there's no guidance for pricing the accompanying ads. "Prices -- people have been making them up," he says.' Let's keep it that way. Now the advertizers know how to feel how it is to be cheated. Please.. Why not just podcasting for the joy of it.. Keep yous shows real and ban out all the advertisement and privacy problem shit. Lets keep up raising the prices for advertisers-> the more we will actually hear and see what we really want to hear and see. This message was sponsered by The Dump-Mental-Waste Company.. Please see our website at http://www.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com]

  • won't fly (Score:4, Insightful)

    by snappy316 ( 781664 ) on Saturday November 12, 2005 @11:51PM (#14018678)
    im sorry, thats a dumb idea. i really dont feel like being "watched" as to which podcasts i listen to and which ones i dont. and who wants to pay?

    i just dont see the draw to this...if there is one, someone point it out to me please.
    • I suppose that advertisers could "measure" the effectiveness of their advertising by how sales are affected. Unless I am not understanding correctly, it sounds to me that advertisers want to verify that folks are listening to their advertisements. Can you imagine if televeision and radio broadcast advertisers wanted to try to find something similar? Measure the sales. That sounds simple enough for me.
    • If I understand right, the advertisers are the ones intended to be doing the paying, though with lots of media, both advertisers and the end user pay, which seems to be double charging in some ways. Cable, satellite and magazines have so many ads that the standard stuff probably should be free.

      I don't think it will work well that way though. The only one I listen to that has ads is Inside Mac Radio, and I think that is a consession to the fact that the main show is a broadcast, and that those involved nee
    • When my ipod broke i had 800mb of unlistend podcasts i eventually just deleted them but it counted as a download for a podcaster so they could say "i'm the #1 most listend to podcast" [twit.tv]

  • iDogs Aplenty (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sunoxen ( 414996 ) <`sunoxen' `at' `hotmail.com'> on Saturday November 12, 2005 @11:59PM (#14018689)
    I'm a podcaster, and this model is not only DRm'ed, it's also behind closed doors, and not open.

    Feedburner seems to have a better tack on it, as it can reliably provide stats for free. Audible's model is a little scummy on the skim job. Feedburner coudl be the source for reliable stats for advertisers in the future.

    As for revenue, I think that people are turned off by ads, but that seems to be where everyone is turning. It seems that listeners support is better, as if people like what you are doing, they might be willing to give you a couple of bucks a month via a Paypal subscribe.

    The whole podcast expo seemed to be about how to sell Preparation H and iDogs in your podcast. If you feel people want to listen to that, go ahead, but podcasting's success is based largely around non-commercial radio and niche.

    If there could be a non-annoying way to advertise, fine. But it seems that a ton of people are going to be begging for corporate dough, and wondering why no one is listening to their show anymore, as it has been changed to the Fibercon iDog Gizmondo Hour, fueled by Dew.

    ---
    http://www.75minutes.com/ [75minutes.com]

  • gaa (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    man it is getting bad so far about the only things they dont make you pay for is breathing and death, man its getting bad

    seems like me raido shows i like are now more adverts that chat
  • I wish Audible the best of luck in this utterly doomed venture.
    • TFA confuses me: "Audible's users pay fees for downloads;
      the Audible version of "The Da Vinci Code" costs $28.97, for example."

      I found (through Amazon) Audible's price [audible.com]
      on the audio version of the (abridged) DVC

      Retail Price: $25.95
      Audible Price: $18.17
      Promotional Price: $9.95
      (available to first-time Audible buyers only.)

      Amazon sells the unabridged audio CD for $30,
      the abridged version for $20

      So.... I conclude that Audible is doing something right because they're linked through Amazon, and Amazon is pretty muc

  • ""Our goal is to reach pet owners, any way that we can." - Newspeak Droid

    Does that include spam and telemarketers, too?

    I'm not entirely sure why they're not using 1 Download = 1 Listener, since Audible requires registration. The *best* thing about free podcasts to me is that they're in a format I can use on anything (MP3s). Any measuring method will require DRM and that's simply not something I'm willing to accept for free files, nor for Audible's overpriced content. The only reason I'd pay them for co

    • Unfortunately talk radio is missing out on this new technology entirely thanks to bumper music agreements with the RIAA and some unions. One of the few to get around it is the well known Rush Limbaugh, but he can do it largely because of his popularity.

      Here in Sweden, talk radio is all public service. The commercial stations only broadscast back-to-back "hit" music. Since I hate the commercial crap music, I never listen to the commercial stations.

      Anyway, even the good shows on public service radio mi

  • Turn in your Geek Badge. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by chris_mahan ( 256577 ) <chris.mahan@gmail.com> on Sunday November 13, 2005 @12:21AM (#14018759) Homepage
    Carl, turn in your geek badge.

    Podcasting is for people who do not want commercials.

    If commercials are put on podcasts, guess what's going to happen to podcasting.

    • Re:Turn in your Geek Badge. (Score:4, Informative)

      by DonGar ( 204570 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @12:45AM (#14018813) Homepage
      Oddly enough, most of the podcasts I listen already have ads. The stranger thing is that most of the ads are for other podcasts or podcast related products. So far, the limit has been 1 blurb per show, and it's usually explained as a way to offset broadband costs.

      However, I've also heard at least one popular podcast state that broadband costs are around $80 a month. At that rate, I think I'd rather sponser a show than have the ad.
      • There are ways to cut down the costs—archive.org [archive.org] (the Internet Archive) will host any file, allow unlimited downloads, and mirror it internationally over reasonably fast connections for free. 6GB of transfer and 400MB of storage space can be had online for $12/month (and I'm guessing plenty of /. readers know better deals than that). This is certainly a lot of storage for some fixed (X)HTML+CSS and an RSS file. If one can reliably get free Internet access whenever one needs to upload files, one cou
      • Oddly enough, most of the podcasts I listen already have ads. The stranger thing is that most of the ads are for other podcasts or podcast related products. So far, the limit has been 1 blurb per show, and it's usually explained as a way to offset broadband costs.

        However, I've also heard at least one popular podcast state that broadband costs are around $80 a month. At that rate, I think I'd rather sponser a show than have the ad.

        I haven't listened to a podcast since slashdot radio went off the air back bef
    • My dad listens to podcasts. They're not a geek thing anymore. Remember how filesharing programs didn't used to have ads?
  • This is slightly off-topic but if you have a your own podcast reply to this thread with the link. It will be interesting to see what the Slashdot crowd has cooked up.

  • a better, free idea (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gcnaddict ( 841664 )
    "'The company will charge three cents per downloaded podcast to report whether a downloader listened, and for how long.'"


    I have a better idea

    How about this: podcast makers tag their podcasts with a special "podcast" mp3 tag (what were they called again? ID3 tags?) which have the podcast site and date. The software which transfers these things to mp3 players then report this data to a central site (heck, apple.com or microsoft.com is fine :P) which processes the data and reports which podcasts had the
    • I imagine that iPods already have a software-readable serial number of some sort.

      The server doesn't know your MAC address inherently, anyway. You'd have to send it to them specifically.

      Just as you say: every program that plays MP3s has to track the MP3 statistics, so you're never going to get complete statistics. On the other hand, TV ratings aren't done by a complete statistic, either.
  • It's called access_log
    it's really easy to read, and gives me tons of info that marketers would need, like where, when, what browser/version you use, what os/version... if I actually cared about where I could run the ips through a location script. Best part is it's free.. :)
     

  • Just track downloads? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by FuryG3 ( 113706 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @12:36AM (#14018791)
    While it's true that some podcast client software just keeps downloading stuff you've pre-selected, I'd say that tracking the downloads of the files themselves is a pretty good way of estimating how many times something is listened to.

    Not to mention, podcasters have a whole lot more statistics than, say, radio broadcasters do. This can even include a profile of the user based on all of the different podcasts he/she is subscribed to.

    I interpreted this announcement as "Hey, instead of free and open podcasts, how about PAYING money for DRMed podcasts so that we can add ADVERTISEMENTS to them!"

    Thanks, but no thanks.
  • DRM for the common man. I was sick of the "big labels" being the only ones that had say in restricting or hindering the usage of my entertainment. I'll take my restrictions indie-style and support the regular Joe's methods of hindrance. Man, I'm so emo.

  • Advertisers are a silly bunch (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheFlyingGoat ( 161967 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @12:42AM (#14018805) Homepage Journal
    Advertisers don't know if people look at their ads in magazines or newspapers, how many people actually look in the direction of their billboard, listen to their radio ad, or don't walk away when their TV commercial is on. Being able to see how many people download a podcast is probably more indicative of people that hear the ad compared to many other media.

    They're just looking for MORE accurate data, but that's totally unnecessary. Ad agencies are very good at tracking usefulness of ad campaigns without specific numbers.
    • I think that most of what's going on in the advertising business is handwaving and black magic. How are they gauging the effectiveness of an ad? By showing it to a test audience? By watching the sales? Those aren't exactly very reliable, or causally linked, respectively.

      It's just that podcasts seem to offer a technological solution to this problem, and that's why they're going after them. Restricting access just so that people can listen to ads is so against the idea of podcasts, however, that I very much d
      • One method that works extremely well to measure response to a particular ad is to use a separate phone number for each ad or campaign. You've probably seen something similar with URLs listed in magazines, where they put a URL such as www.mysite.com/nw in News Week. Granted, it's not perfect, and it only works for a small number of ads/campaigns active at once, but it can give a pretty accurate measurement. Also, for weekly ads in a newspaper, 99% of the calls will be due to that week's ad, not a previous on
    • Advertisers tend to have sales numbers for magazines or newspapers. Billboard salespeople do counts on the average number of people to drive by a particular billboard. Radio stations have ways to estimate their number of listeners (based on call-ins, website traffic, and of course, the number of cars with their bumper stickers on them out on the road.)

      Generally, they're not looking for "actual exposure," they're looking for "potential exposure" when they buy an ad spot. The campaign's usefulness is tracked
  • There are many other sites that you can use to download a podcast. Why risk an ad being inserted by Audible by using Audible.com?

    Just head elsewhere like www.podcastalley.com, or www.podshow.com, etc. Yeah I know they have ads on their sites, but at least they're not trying to insert targeted ads into podcasts.

    For musical experimentation try www.garageband.com.
  • Advertisers have managed to get radio and TV ratings when there was no back channel. It's not hard to figure out how to use equivalent techniques for podcasts.

    Trying to measure podcasts by placing restrictions on them and creating back channels is a recipe for annoying customers, and it mainly shows how unimaginative the companies involved are. Don Katz (CEO of Audible) may rail against "old media", but he sure thinks like them, with his emphasis on DRM and control.

  • Podcasts or Blogs? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder whether fewer people read blogs or listen to podcasts? Both are hyper self-indulgent mediums for whiny, self-absorbed adolescents who actually seem to think that people besides themselves care what they are saying. And both are almost entirely wasted bandwidth.
  • Wouldn't it be cool if podcast hosting were provided for free, with automatic ad placement at the end, like in Revver [revver.com]? Plus, making money would really be nice.
  • ...to create an Audible-DRM'd podcast railing against Audible's DRM and foolish business model?

  • How dumb, just tell them to visit a unique url (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Offwhite98 ( 101400 ) on Sunday November 13, 2005 @02:05AM (#14019018) Homepage
    If you want to know if people are actually paying attention to a new podcast, just reference the show notes and allow people to hit the show notes. You can then use the stats for that web page as a metric for advertisers. It is also a good place to put the logos/links for advertisers.

    Another common approach would be to allow for a discount by providing a code for the discount. The code could be given during the podcast. The number of orders created with the discount code would be a good indicator of the success of the ad.
    • OTOH, not everyone gives a care about the show notes, even if you do mention them. That's going to cut out a significant demographic. As someone trying to sell advertising, I'd rather accent the number that shows the LARGEST number of hits, that being the "downloaded" count.

      If your advertiser was looking for more, you could either put a short survey on the site to "Nielson" some numbers, or you could just find another more willing advertiser.
  • One of the best features of reading rss feeds using your feed reader is the absence of ads. The few podcasts that I listen to are mostly about programming and virtually free of any 'product placements'. I think the popularity of the podcasts come from the fact that it allows people to share their thoughts with someone else, and maybe make a difference in the life of the listener (it may be a small difference, for example talking about a new technique for input filtering when using PHP). Very few people do
  • What about a tool to tally porncast viewers??

  • oi (Score:1)

    by cente ( 785332 )
    Am I the only one who said "how about we NOT give the 'advertisers' ideas about this one" the first time i saw it? :P
  • So, let me get this straight.

    These guys want to measure how often people listen to podcasts.

    Podcasts. As in, things you listen to on an iPod, or other mobile music player.

    Can these things even connect to the Internet at the moment?
  • Why would I waste my time and my bandwidth downloading a podcast if I'm not going to listen to it?
  • Just because sound is coming out of the earphones doesn't mean they are on my ears.

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