React To AudibleWordcast Varies; Not Everyone Is Thrilled

Updated Sunday evening to include more links: Put Mitch Ratcliffe in the “loves it” category; he’s spent much of the day explaining and championing the concept. Not surprising: he helped design and develop the systems Audible is introducing. Mitch does quite a good job of explaining why Audible’s technology actually makes measurement possible and why the $35 CPM for measurement and ad insertion makes economic sense. (Although he undermines his own arguments when he gets personal.) He also takes me and others to task for thinking measurement has to work on an open format like mp3 before it can truly be effective: “Again, the problem is MP3 can’t do what people think it can be stretched to do. Audible, Apple’s Advanced AAC, enhanced Windows Media formats can do this because the formats are architected to handle time-stopped recall, bookmarking, and stateful contact with a content source. Audible has spent 10 years making it easy for people to listen to audioĆ¢

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