Bummer. One of my favorite “guilty pleasure” podcasts, LOST: The Transmission is going off the air. Each week, this married Hawaiian couple would recap and dissect each episode of Lost. It was a lot more entertaining than it sounds. Their podcast had gotten incredibly popular and it was taking so much of their lives that they decided to call it quits.

It draws attention to the fact that while folks have figured out a way to monetize blogs, the same can’t be said for podcasts. You can put ads all over a website. You can join a blog network. Ads and content can co-exist easily on a website. On a podcast, you can only have one message at a time. There are only 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day. That’s a lot of noise competing for precious little time with your ears. If you have a minute of advertising, that’s a minute less of ad-free content. Compared to something like AdWords, effective podcast advertising is out of the reach of most businesses which leaves the average mid-sized podcast little chance of income to make the time investment worth it.