It occurs to me that my public positions on podcasting have been widely misconstrued. Earlier last week, David Spark put out a pretty decent post over at Mashable that explained the “Nine Ways To Make Money Podcasting,” which was commented on by James Lewin over at Podcasting News.

Both posts are worth reading, but James tags out the post by talking about Mashable’s apparent shift in how they view podcasting.

Just last year, Mashable was publishing doom and gloom stories about the future of podcasting, and arguing that “we cannot make reliable money from monetizing these downloads“. Now they’ve done a 180 degree turn, and are enumerating the possibilities.

I can explain why the apparent shift happened – I’m no longer with Mashable, and this is the fourth post on podcasting since I left in December of 2008.  It isn’t so much as a shift as an absence of coverage. If the perception was that Mashable was anti-podcasting when I was there, then Mashable has perpetuated that perception by not covering it at all.

I can attest, however, that I am most certainly not anti-podcasting, and I don’t believe that most of the pundits at Mashable are anti-podcasting now, or ever.

So What’s Your Big Problem with Podcasting?

My problem with podcasting now, as much as ever, has been with the monetization angle of podcasting. The post James cites never hates on the power and potential of podcasting, only the state of the podcasting monetization marketplace.

In my Mashable post, I chronicled the travails I went through trying to launch and monetize a podcast for the blog. I took our pitch and audience numbers to every major player in the podcasting market: Federated Media, Wizzard, Mevio, Talkshoe, Podango, Podtrac and Rawvoice. Every group either turned us down outright or offered no compensation worth mentioning for the media we created.

I never said that podcasts sucked. In fact, the last paragraph of my post started:

It’s clear that the world likes audio podcasts, despite the fact that the clients are often somewhat obtuse, and it isn’t the rich media technology with the lowest barrier to entry. The growth of the medium is going strong, and will probably continue to do so. The advertising world needs to catch up to this fact, and actually put some work into making money off it. I’m not the only one facing this problem, too. Of those I’m acquainted with in audio podcasting that are in it to make money, they’ve reported similar experiences.

The problem is that this market still hasn’t changed appreciably since I wrote this post.  I’m still very bearish on online audio monetization. Leo Laporte is the exception to the rule in audio podcasting: audio just doesn’t make money.

In fact, just to drive home the point, we took that very same podcast and turned it into video and made a mint with it at Mashable.  Video continues to be a hot market to make substantial cash with serialized non-text content, but the audio monetization still needs to work to bridge the gap.

As someone who appears on three to six audio podcasts a week, no one wants that gap to be bridged more than I do. But my analysis from almost two years ago still stands.