The goal of the company, according to co-founder Gary Connolly, is to give advertisers a central place to find podcasts relevant to their product, as well as increase the audience base for podcast producers. Through the SexyCasts.com portal, advertisers can create audio and video advertising that the company embeds in whatever podcasts the advertiser chooses.
“We write, voice and produce custom ads for our advertising clients,” Connolly said. “We want the ad to fit their personal style so we create a series of questions for the client to answer so [everyone] knows exactly what they would like in their spot and how they would like it presented to the listeners and viewers.”
Initially, SexyCasts only will host podcasts submitted directly to the engine. As the service grows, however, Connolly said it also would crawl the Internet in search of additional adult podcasts.
“As a starting point the crawler will have results from a few specific online directories that already have a good number of podcasts indexed,” he said. “We will [then] look for the RSS feeds with audio and video media types and run our algorithm to search for adult material in those feeds.”
The “sevybot,” as the crawler has been named, is expected to launch in the next couple of months, Connolly said.
Every podcast on the site will be embedded with search and comment tags both producers and listeners can create for the podcasts, “indicating their opinions and personal descriptions, which will help other users find the type of podcast they are looking for much more accurately,” co-founder Bruno MacKay said.
The company model is banking on the notion that podcast listeners will listen to a podcast straight through and not “flip channels,” as is often the case in the traditional radio and TV space.
“Unlike conventional radio advertising, podcast listeners don't tend to flip from station to station when they hear commercials,” Connolly said. “Most podcasts are listened to straight through, from beginning to end, without interruption, which means the ads get the exposure they deserve.”
Connolly said the company’s advertising model would split revenue 50/50 with the podcast producer. Advertisers pay one flat fee to insert their ad into the podcast of their choice, he said.