The same day news reaches us of the wonderful heights of success that Wizzard has reached, so too does news arrive from another group of folks heavily vested into the podcasting space. VoloMedia, who might be better recognized by podcasting veterans by their former name PodBridge, has just secured $3.5 million in venture financing from Leader Ventures.
Alarm:Clock framed the name change and rebranding as an effort to "get away from the podcast advertising tar pit." While I might disagree with the sentiment there, it is hard to find very many success stories in the podcast advertising network space.
That hasn't stopped VoloMedia from trying. They may not call it podcast advertising any longer, but they're still involved in the space, as members of and frequent contributors to the Association for Downloadable Media, they've long pushed for a move away from CPM based advertisement for the producers, though in their contributions they've been leary to mention other viable alternatives. My guess is that they were alluding to their way of monetization, which is to insert ads dynamically into content owners' iTunes libraries or RSS streams, and pay based on plays rather than downloads.