Forbes for Jan. 9, 2006 had an article entitled "Consumer Spy: Do you have quirky tastes in mail-order shopping? Chances are Abacus knows all about you" by Helen Coster.  While it shouldn’t be too much of new news that companies like Abacus are out there collecting, meshing, and correlating consumer data, what was interesting at least to me was the "hook" for doing it.

In summary (from the first two paragraphs):

• Patagonia has a new surf-catalog they want to send out.
• They want to send out 400,000 catalogs @ a cost of $1 per recipient.
• They want it the catalogs to go to "water lovers."
• They go to Abacus to get the mailing list.
• Abacus sells them the 400, 000 names & addresses for $70 per 1,000 names.

So … focused "messages" to a known demographic is at least in this case worth $70 per 1000 which I think is very similar to the podcasting marketplace that have very focused podcasting topics.

I’m pretty sure the demographics of TechNewsRadio.com  = Information Technology (IT) professional.  The demographics of JerseyBoysPodcast = Playbill.com?

Of course CPM models might not be at all appropriate to podcasts, but this is better ($70) then tradition radio CPM models (under $10) that are being proposed by current "legacy" marketing firms.