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The Guardian's podcasts will be profitable in the next 12 months, the paper's director of digital content has said.

Profit from the site's audio content, which currently boasts 12 podcasts, will depend on the implementation of a new advertising delivery system to place ads in podcasts, Emily Bell, director of digital content for Guardian News and Media, told Journalism.co.uk.

At an industry conference yesterday Matt Wells, head of audio for the Guardian, said a host of blue chip advertisers were in line to take advantage of the new advertising format, which will be introduced later this year.

The podcasts were initially profitable in their first year, said Bell, but this revenue was derived from a sponsorship-based ad model.

“When you have something new there's no difficulty in getting sponsorship and ads against it,” said Bell.

“But the market around new products constantly changes and we have hundreds of thousands of people listening a week and the efficient way to advertise against that is to be able to sell it as audio inventory. If you can sell off 200-300,000 downloads a week that's quite a compelling proposition.”

Despite producing the content at a loss for the last 12 months the paper continued to produce podcasts as part of a long-term strategy towards audio content, Bell said.

“We're very committed to it, because we really think it enhances our core journalism and we've developed a voice and a niche,” she said.

“The cost of the recording infrastructure is much lower than it was and because we are doing big numbers on it we could certainly turn a profit from it.”

According to figures previously given by Wells, Guardian podcasts are downloaded approximately 1.5 million times a month with around 100,000 weekly downloads for its Football Weekly show.

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