This year I wanted to kick it up a notch and refine the categories on the Podcast Awards website. The final list is posted and you will notice that we have listed a “Best Podcast Directory” and a “Best Mobile Podcast” a large number of people are now listening to Podcast on their mobile phones and many of the Podcasters are creating short format shows for those audiences.
You will also see that we have worked very hard to make sure that there is no duplication in categories and that we covered as wide a base as possible without adding another 10 categories to the listing. We are pretty excited about this years event and even though Silver sponsors have been slow to come on we found this to be the case last year that a bunch of companies jumped on board.
We did a lot of advertising last year, and when we went back to some of the same sites they were asking ridiculous amounts of money for short advertising runs, these were podcasting sites and even though we explained this was a non money maker for us and that everything goes back to the podcaster most sites were not willing to cut us a break. Some where asking for banner ad CPM rates as high as $25.00 per 1000 impressions, I wanted independent verification of their impression numbers and most sites would not allow us to run our own tracking code on the site, so we have opted to not run ads on many podcasting sites. If they want their sites nominated they are going to have to promote the event on their own. [www.podcastawards.com]