In a bid to reach the early adopter crowd, Internet service provider EarthLink is sponsoring Washingtonpost.com’s video podcasts for a month, reports Pamela Parker for ClickZ News. While they wouldn’t provide financial information regarding the deal, they said it was priced on a flat fee basis.

The ISP will run :15 video spots ahead of Washingtonpost.com video content. New clips, which consist of features, rather than news, are released several times a week. Viewers initially see a video slide that tells them the Washingtonpost.com video will play after the commercial message. Then the ad plays, followed by the content. People can see the video podcasts either on their Video iPods, or on the Web.

Video podcasting technology is even newer than audio podcasting. There currently is no way an ad can be dynamically inserted into the podcast yet. This is also one of the pilot advertising placed on a video podcast.

There is no information about the size Washingtonpost.com video podcast, but audio podcasts for Slate and Newsweek get around 400,000 downloads a month. Video podcast audience should be far less than that.

We surely hope there will be more stories like this, hopefully with more information about the results.

Video podcasting still requires a lot of development for marketers to really take it as a serious advertising medium. For instance, although publishers can track how many downloads, still they can’t measure actual viewership.

Source: ClickZ News.
Also read: Video Podcasting Guide.

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