Updated: Podcast audiences have been silent mobs where advertisers couldn't count their numbers. Audible plans to change that.Up until now, the audience for Podcasts has been a silent mob, sitting quietly in a darkened theater where advertisers couldn't count their numbers.
Audible Inc. has plans to change that, announcing on Friday the first set of tools to accurately measure discrete users of Podcasting services.
Audible is an online provider of downloadable, spoken-word audio. The company, based in Wayne, N.J., offers audio editions of books, newspapers, magazines, radio programs and original shows. Audible currently offers some 70,000 hours of spoken audio programming from more than 250 different providers.
Its newly unveiled set of Web-based tools, called AudibleWordcast, is the first to measure actual subscribers, as opposed to just measuring file downloads.
David Joseph, vice president of corporation communications and strategy for Audible, told Ziff Davis Internet News that the key thing in today's Podcasting world is that the only thing you can measure is the number of downloads you get. "That does not help an advertiser understand your reach and frequency: how many unique listeners you have and how much of the content they're consuming," he said.
Joseph likened the state of Podcasting to the early days of the Internet, when businesses just measured site hits. It wasn't an accurate measurement, given that one person could sit and click, click, click all day.
The same is true today with Podcasting, it being in a nascent stage, he said. "One subscriber is downloading content and redistributing it to people everywhere," he said. "There's no key measurement that helps people understand the value of Podcasting."
Advertisers will adapt to Podcasting because they have to. Click here to read more.
Audible's tool set comes in two flavors: Wordcast Basic and Wordcast Pro. The key difference is that the Pro edition features Audible's DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology.
DRM prevents files from being forwarded. This ensures that each Podcast download remains unique, thus guaranteeing an accurate count on unique listeners.
Audible's bookmarking technology in Wordcast Pro also enables users to discern how much of the Podcast content has actually been consumed, Joseph said. Thus, users can determine what percentage of a Podcast audience was exposed to the first ad in a Podcast, to the second, and so on—information crucial to building an accurate advertising rate card, he said.
For its part, Wordcast Basic allows users to measure the amount of downloads, but not the amount of unique listeners or the amount of Podcast they've listened to. But both editions still have better functionality and a smaller download size with Audible's .aa format than they would get with mp3, Joseph said.
Audible is offering hosting, archive management and distribution for both editions of Wordcast.
Audible is now keeping Wordcast sequestered in a private beta, although the company gave public demonstrations at the Portable Media Expo in Ontario, Calif., on Friday and Saturday. The products are expected to ship in the first quarter of next year, Joseph said.
According to Audible's press release, the metrics produced by the tool set have been deemed audit-ready by the third-party media auditor ImServices Group.
The AudibleWordcast Podcasting platform will work on the Apple iPod as well as on 160 other devices that run Audible's .aa file format—a format second only in popularity to mp3, according to Audible.
Such a tool will be greeted warmly by advertisers.
Sales of portable audio players are at an all-time high, and online businesses are rushing to greet the surge in Podcasting popularity.
Yahoo, for one, last week introduced a service for searching Podcasts called Yahoo Podcasts. Now in beta testing, Yahoo Podcasts will eventually pick up the ability to provide personalized recommendations and easy-to-use Podcast publishing tools, the company announced at the same time.
But in this rush to Podcasting, the advertising industry has been stuck with extrapolating audience size from download numbers. That's not a good thing in an industry that needs audience measurement that stands up to third-party auditors.
Beyond giving users the ability to measure audience, the Wordcast toolset will also allow users to passively create ads with a dynamic ad insertion and file-assembly technology. Audible's technology allows users to separate Podcast content from advertising content for easy ad rotation and insertion, even within archived content.
Wordcast Pro will cost 5 cents per Podcast download. Advertising insertion will cost half a cent per inserted ad. Wordcast Basic will cost 3 cents per download, as well as half a cent per inserted ad.
Editor's Note: This story was updated throughout to include details from Audible.
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