Details of a new eMarketer report on Podcasting have surfaced in Media Week (via Frank Barnako’s blog)

Highlights:

• Spending on podcasting advertising will quintuple over the next five years, from a paltry $80 million base in 2006 to a $400 million market in 2011.
• eMarketer analyst James Belcher expects that by 2008, (Google) will develop a version of AdSense that can be easily adapted to podcasts, theoretically allowing any podcaster to add advertising.
• Market size: some 90,000 podcasts are available on the Web and there are close to 90 million iPods in the market
• Just 12% of Americans report having ever consumed a podcast and just 1% do so regularly, which translates to roughly 3 million people.
• Despite the small base of users, podcasting represents an attractive medium, given its targeting, its low cost and its obsessive/passionate user base but podcasting is thought of as a supplemental medium by advertisers.
• Several major brands have jumped into the medium. Podtrac, a startup that’s building a podcasting network, has run podcast campaigns for Warner Bros., Paramount, Dell, T-Mobile, HBO, Honda and others, with most coming in the second half of last year.
• A common complaint among buyers and sellers: it’s very difficult to measure exactly how many people actually listen to or view individual podcasts right now.

What it means: based on that information, podcasting is still very much a niche market. The winner will probably be the company that manages to aggregate enough ears or eyeballs to create critical mass. Standard measurements will also be key if pro podcasters want this to become a true media. Would love to know what my friend Mitch Joel, a pro podcaster with 38 “Six Pixels of Separation” podcasts under his belt, thinks of this new report.