A number of service providers are lining up to match podcasters with advertisers. This is nothing new. PodShow announced their intentions to months ago. PodTrac showed up at the Podcast Expo. Audible has a plan that's a big question mark at this point due the their use of proprietary file formats and other related guffaws. Castfire is seldom heard from. But who's got the edge in the market?

I say it's LibSyn. They've already got over 2000 users along with a system that gets more solid everyday. And now they've sent an email to users announcing a partnership with Kiptronic that will allow podcast producers to get together with folks who want to advertise. The program seems pretty straightforward and flexible without a lot of restrictions. Sponsorships are based on agreements rather than random insertions which I think are a bad idea. So you agree to a sponsorship and then you agree on how the sponsor will be included in your podcast. Good move. Nothing will sink a podcast faster than irrelevant sponsor announcements that don't match the flow and attitude of the podcast. The ads are inserted when the file is downloaded so the podcast producer can rotate ads. I like that feature.

It's still early so I'm not declaring LibSyn the winner by any means. There's always big room for error and disappointment between the talk and actual implementation. The LibSyn folks have come through with some cool stuff to date so I'm going to keep a close eye on this horse race.