Progress toward monetizing podcasts Lots of people are trying to figure out how to make money with podcasting, a medium that has some structural barriers to audience tracking. Media Post's excellent OMMA Magazine notes a couple of interesting efforts in the latest issue.

Kiptronic has a service that connects podcasters with advertisers interested in reaching their audience. The service inserts a short ad at the beginning and/or end of a podcast at download time. The podcaster doesn't have to do anything and the actual podcast file isn't altered. The service is only four months old, so the company isn't referencing customers yet, but it's an interesting approach to making audio advertising as Adsense-like as possible.

Perhaps an even more intriguing idea comes from Podbridge, which claims to have technology that can tell who has actually listened to a podcast, not just who has downloaded it. Users provide demographic information (anonymously) when they first sign up for the service and then the Podbridge software tracks which podcasts they listen to and shoots that information back to the advertisers.

If Podbridge has really solved the problem of monitoring which podcasts get heard, then it has achieved a major breakthrough. However, the site has no detail that I could find on how this game-changing technology works. Not to mention why users would choose to sign up for a service, the main purpose of which is to devliver ads to them. The company is brand new, so it'll be a while before we know whether its delivery matches up to its promises.  ¶ 3:41 PM