Arbitron recently used its Portable People Meter technology to measure podcast listenership. In mid-July, the measurement company encoded some podcasts from Clear Channel’s Z100 which listeners using PPM-enabled headsets downloaded and played. Arbitron’s Portable People Meter President Pierre Bouvard said, “Podcasting is a very different distribution system for traditional radio and the successful test of the PPM should further build confidence in how well it works with all types of audio programming. The state-of-the-art encoding system used in the PPM does a better job of identifying alternate distribution platforms and time-shifted audio content than any other approach to portable electronic audience measurement that we’ve seen.” Inevitably, just as is now happening with television spots, podcast ads will be tagged and measured as well.
