Advertising: Fruitcast

I am dipping my toes into the world of advertising on our Lost show. The service I am trying out is called Fruitcast and they launched last week. They pay 5 cents per download and the ads are right at the top of the show and are really quick.

Right now I am finding that they don't play an ad with every download.. I think this is because the few advertisers that they have, have setup daily dollar limits. So my show continues to download, but the ad is not inserted.

This could also be a nice service for people looking for free MP3 hosting to look into. In order for Fruitcast to count your downloads; they have to serve the file. Not a bad trade off, they pay you to host your show with them.

Deciding to run ads was an easy choice for me. Our LOST show gets a ton of traffic (we started using Fruitcast with episode 6, but our archives are now downloading there too) and it's a short, minimal effort type affair.. We have less of a connection to our Lost listeners and it was always considered to be an advertisement for our main show anyway.

Running ads on our main DPP show is really not an option. First off, it gets a fraction of the traffic of the Lost show, so the payment wouldn't really out weigh the tarnish factor of running an ad. And I think running an ad on that show might turn-off some of our listeners.

If you do try out Fruitcast.. make sure you are using Feedburner or something similar to send out your feed. This way you can always shut off the ads without making your subscribers resubscribe to a different feed.. You just have to switch the source feed you are giving Feedburner. If that is confusing it is explained better here..

Anyway... I will be checking this service out and report back what I find.