Those of us who remember the Web 1.0 world also remember when you could get decent CPM rates for banner ads. Yes, that seems like a lifetime ago, but prior to the Great Recession and the introduction of the iPhone and social media, website owners and bloggers could make decent money on internet advertising.

Tom Webster poses the question as to whether the same thing can happen in the podcasting business:

Great content is expensive to produce, and great advertising native to that content’s form and delivery is well worth a premium. But if several large players in the space start taking poorly executed, irrelevant ads at ultra-low (for podcasting) CPMs, that’s going to have repercussions on the economic feasibility of great audio content.

And that, my friends, is what worries me the most.

Ad delivery technology is progressing rapidly in podcasting, with companies like Megaphone leading the way with dynamic ad insertion and programmatic ads that make it easy to pump ads through tons of podcast episodes. Over time, ad rates for these ads will come down, and then we’ll see if podcasters can still command premium CPMs for host-read ads. So far, the intimacy of podcasting and listener loyalty to hosts has led to excellent performance for these ads. Time will tell . . .