Scoble points out that there's a huge measurement problem for podcasting:

Speaking of which, I wish I had better metrics at PodTech.net. I wish I knew how many listeners we REALLY have. Or, whether the people who download a file actually listen to it. Or, whether they listen to the whole file, or just part of it.

Podcasting and video podcasting won’t be taken seriously as businesses until we figure this stuff out. Advertisers want proof that their money is spent well.

I'd say that it's a general web problem - heck, I'd say that it's been a general TV and radio issue for awhile too. Advertisers trust the Nielson ratings, but how good are they, really? I have no idea, and I doubt that you do, either. "Everyone" decided to trust them, and that was that.

The web makes that kind of rating system difficult - heck, the proliferation of cables services made that difficult for TV. The theory is, you can find a (relatively small) segment of representative viewers, and translate their habits to the entire market. That's very different than measuring sales - at the end of the month, Frito-Lay (to take an example) knows exactly how many bags of what they've sold (and where). We have nothing like that. I listen to podcasts while jogging now, and I have a pretty low "bored now" threshold. I've bailed on more than one podcast, and I'm sure others have as well.

It's worse than that though. In the old days, there were a handful of TV choices - so if you polled a decent sample as to what they watched, it translated up pretty well. TV has gone narrowcast now - I have over 500 channels now, and what we watch is all over the map (the DVRs only make it more fragmentary). The web started out as a narrowcast service, and it's getting more and more that way all the time. I don't even know that we can get reliable numbers that mean much.

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