Thanks mainly to iPad lust, I've been on a Leo Laporte binge lately. To my surprise, he isn't burning through his life savings (Hat tip to Mashable). According to Laporte in this video, his podcast is actually quite lucrative: $1 150 000 per year (Revenu of 1.5M - 350,000).He also explains that being a member of a podcast audience is "hard". You have to find the content, download it and then transfer it to your media player (or listen it on your computer).
Watching TV or listening to the radio is easy: you just turn it on. If you like a challenge, you might change the channel. Hence, his live feed on his web site: http://live.twit.tv. You "turn it on", and if you don't like what is on, you might add a bit of difficulty by clicking on the "on demand" video or audio feeds.
Also interesting, he describes his audience as geeks who are home alone and lonely. "Guys will make the screen bigger when there is a pretty girl that appears". That would certainly explain the sometimes long-winded nature of his shows. They aren't short burst of information like CNET does, they are sometimes 90 minute marathons.
Laporte is also quite aware of the serious advertising limitations of the current podcast/netcast format (video and audio). Google and Facebook can target different advertising for the same content. There is an ad for Nova-Scotia on London's The Guardien web site, for example, that I'm pretty sure Brits don't see. On a recent podcast, a guest from Vancouver asked Leo if the product he was pushing was available in Canada. "I don't know", Leo was forced to admit. When you are charging advertisers a CPM of $70, that kind of stuff matters.
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