Podcasting is an often overlooked corner of the media world [....] The iTunes store from Apple, where about 75 percent of the audience for podcasts looks for fresh material, contains about 150,000 regular shows featuring has-been and up-and-coming comics and sex talk, as well as mainstream fare like NPR and CNN broadcasts. Edison Research estimates that a quarter of all Americans over the age of 12 have listened to or watched at least one.

via Jon Kalish, Leo Laporte Builds Empire With ‘This Week in Tech’ – NYTimes.com.

Rupert knows the ad model of publishing is doomed. Print and broadcast command the heftiest premiums, and both are at risk of price and volume erosion as consumers cut their ties to offline media. In the digital environment, online advertising is highly commoditized: the explosion of content publishers is outpacing the shift in demand, while technologies target audience ever more efficiently. Advertisers have plentiful ways to reach a consumer.

via Ben Elowitz, Rupert Murdoch Is Right About The Daily | paidContent.

Gruber is a great example of the new kind of one-man, self-publishing empire, made possible by the advent of free/cheap publishing tools, inexpensive web hosting, and advertisers that will pay for influence, and not just mass “reach.”

via Dan Frommer, REVEALED: Daring Fireball’s Impressive Traffic Stats | Business Insider.

The most interesting thing we learned is how Flipboard plans to make money. Flipboard plans to actually show more of publishers’ content, advertising against it, and then share revenues. Mike says it will increase publishers’ digital revenues “by a factor of ten from what they’re currently doing with banner ads.”

via Nicholas Carlson, The Inside Story: Flipboard’s Crazy Launch And Its Plan To Save Media | Business Insider.

via Joe Pompeo, Former Newsweek Honcho Mark Edmiston On The Mobile Mini Mags He Plans To Make Profitable | Business Insider.

In 2010, LibreDigital became a preferred content aggregator for Apple’s iBookstore and has risen to become one of the largest providers of book content to Apple. The company also forged deals to provide high-res magazines and newspapers to color reading platforms including NOOKcolor, Sony and others.

via Robin Wauters, LibreDigital Raises $4 Million For Digital Reading Technologies, TechCrunch.

“There’s so much good potential that can come out of just charging people for your good product,” he says. “And it’s a virus. It’s a disease. It’s contagious. It becomes person to person. It takes over. It’s a simplicity of organization. The most important thing is it lets you sleep well at night when you get to say that everything you do is for the benefit of the people, for the user. If you get to say that everything you do, every decision, and every operational thing you do is serving them, there’s a simplicity – and it’s just good for your conscience.”

via Matt, Signal vs. Noise, Scott Heiferman looks back at Meetup’s bet-the-company moment – (37signals).

When M.I.T.’s Technology Review approached Arment with this contention, he responded: “If ads do get removed by the text parser, it’s not as bad as some initially may assume: since each customer saw the complete page on the publisher’s site before clicking Instapaper’s Read Later bookmark, they already viewed the ads on the page,” according to Arment. “I’ve spoken with many publishers about Instapaper, and their reactions have been almost unanimously positive. Many of them have even worked with me to ensure that their content is parsed properly by my text parser, and some have even integrated Instapaper links into their sites.”

via Gillian Reagan, Taking time to read on the web: Instapaper gets ready for the big show | Capital New York.

My outsider’s perception is that the main site gave its business spin off very little editorial real estate. And that it seldom pointed a traffic firehose toward its little brother. And folks who know about this stuff tell me that people inside the company had the same perception.

[...] Ultimately, if the thing didn’t work on its own, it didn’t work on its own. But I’m a pretty regular Slate reader, and I frequently found that I learned about something The Big Money was running from someplace other than Slate.

via Peter Kafka, The Big Money Isn’t Enough. Slate Shuts Down Business Site After Two Years | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.

via David Kaplan, AOL Tries To Seed SXSW With Coverage Of 2,000 Bands | paidContent. Seed’s official launch post.