According to The Economics of Podcasting, a new report issued by Nielsen Analytics, about 6 percent of U.S. adults have downloaded at least one podcast in the past 30 days. Yet that small percentage appears to be enough for Sony Pictures, Shell Oil, Earthlink, HP and HBO to consider this new medium a viable advertising outlet.

The Nielsen report also notes that the most popular podcasts are drawing 2 million downloads a month, around 1-2 podcasts a week, from 9 million web useres. Most podcast downloaders are male (75%). Thirty-eight percent of those downloaders note that as a result of the downloads they are listening less to radio.

One popular podcast, the Mommycast Podcast Series, with content directed specifically at women, inked an advertising deal this year with the Dixie Paper Company worth more than $100,000. Advertisements on Mommycast are embedded in the podcast, a strategy that advertisers may need in order to keep listeners from fast-forwarding over their messages. The survey notes that 60% of listeners fast-forward over commericals.

JD Lasica points to a podcast interview between Bill Densmore (Media Giraffe Project, Action Coalition for Media Education) and Nick Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Reville explains what the Participatory Culture Foundation is up to: "We are working to develop a software platform, a set of tools, that are free and open source and that let people distribute and watch video on line. . . We want to make sure that what's worked really well for blogs and websites also happens for video, which seems to be one of the next big frontiers online."

Jeff Jarvis on a speech given by Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian at the Royal Society of Arts in London last Thursday: "I recommend that every American journalist and news executive listen to this speech on newspapers in the age of blogs by Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, who I think is a rare and likely singular visionary in the newspaper industry. He also is the editor I know who has the most courage to face and embrace the future..."

See Jeff's post for particularly meaty quotes from the talk as well as Jeff's follow-on commentary. The full podcast of Rusbridger's lecture is available at the Royal Academy of Arts podcast archive.