Ads coming to online radio
Now that enough people are listening to radio on their PCs, ads are soon going to come to the online channel of your choice according to this New York Times story (registration required):
According to a report by Arbitron, a media ratings service, 20 million Americans aged 12 and older listen to Webcasts at least once a week, and about 39 million do so at least once a month.
...Yahoo's radio service, Launch, reached 1.05 million listeners for that week. It offers 50 stations, with another 80 available for a monthly fee of $4. Yahoo's users have also created more than 10 million custom stations in two years.
...Yahoo's vice president for music, Dave Goldberg, said that based on the current number of Yahoo listeners and the average price attracted for terrestrial radio ads - about $5 per thousand listeners reached - the potential revenue is roughly $2.4 million a month. "So it's a big enough business for us to worry about how to sell it," Mr. Goldberg said.