I saw recently that Odeo has added Google Adsense links to the sidebar of their pages.

The biggest question that I have about the variety of podcast directories/networks/communities has to do with making money. How do these services propose to make money (and therefore survive) when the content they are presenting is owned by someone else?

PodShow owns some of the content in their network but the vast majority of the content is unavailable to them for advertising. They're current placing banner ads on web pages in order to make a buck of the content they don't own.

Blubrry is avoiding banners or links in favor of working out advertising deals for members of the community.

Pluggd is soliciting advertisters for their site but hasn't pulled the trigger on anything yet.

Podcast Pickle has been selling banner ads for a while now.

PodServe is not doing anything that I can see.

Odeo has started serving up the aforementioned link ads.

The Podcast Network serves up AdSense links and has a deal with Motorola.

Apple and Yahoo simply don't need the cash.

It seems to me that some of these players will either need to start charging for their services or make deals with podcast producers to negotiate ad sales in order to survive. Even then I'm not sure the money will be there to be profitable and keep podcast producers happy.

I tend to think that some kind of a user payment model is necessary to survive in the absence of a techy sugar daddy like Apple, Microsoft, Google, AOL et. al. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think that all these players can survive on the meager cash flow coming their way at the present time.

The $64000 question going around in my head is this. How can a directory significantly add value to a podcast channel such that a producer would be willing to pay them to be listed there?