Podcasting started taking off about 2.5 years ago. Back then nobody expected it to make it big. In 2007, Businessweek famously told podcasters to not give up their day jobs.

Some podcasts like Grammar girls (about er, English grammar), a podcast about training dogs and other weird and esoteric podcasts have done quite well for themselves (the former made it to Oprah and a book deal)

But those were the early ones. What's happened since then?

It looks like there've been a few failures along the way but also a lot of successes. Leo Laporte apparently makes $1.5 million a year from podcasting. Wired suggests that podcasting killed the web i.e. it jumped into bed with P2P and video to account for the bulk of today's internet. Podcasting audiences have increased ver fast (faster than advertising which suggests advertising may play catch up - good for future podcasters).

Some make their money from taking their programme to TV/Radio, others have landed big contracts with advertisers and some show a part of the podcast for free and get people to subscribe for the rest. Voices has an article on taking payment for podcasts and includes the obvious solution - Paypal - and mentions the Amazon Honor System. Mashable has a nice article on the different ways to make money from podcasting, and here's another one.

Have you tried podcasting to make money? Do you reckon it's worth a shot?

Do you regularly listen to a particular podcast? How does it make a profit?