Otaku no Podcast has its first sponsor!

Greetings, and Happy New Year! We hope everyone had a great (insert name of particular holiday variant you celebrate), and we wish you all the best for a happy, safe, prosperous and fun-filled 2012!

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve just published our first episode of the year. And you probably noticed something different about it: we now have a sponsor! The various podcast networks we publish through have begun offering advertiser opportunities to us.

But, before you get the wrong ideas and think we’ve gone all commercial and sold out on you, let me (hopefully) reassure you with the following three promises. Whenever I decide to put an ad in an episode, I promise that…

1. It will be short and sweet.
   If you’ve listened to other tech podcasts, such as those on Leo Laporte’s TWiT network, they’ll operate similar to the ads he does: a brief “This podcast sponsored by X” message during the intro, and a short ad read sometime during the middle of the episode. By “short,” I mean 1-2 minute tops. And there may be an extra ad banner on the website. But that’s it. No ginormous background image plastered all over the home page, no over 9,000 hour long testimonials, none of that.

2. There will be only one ad per episode.
   Unlike some of Leo’s podcasts (which sometimes have 2, 3 or even more ads per episode) I’ve decided to only put out 1 ad per episode. MAYBE, if the episode is really really long, I might put a second ad in it. But absolutely, positively no more than 2 ads per episode, and in 99% of the cases, there’ll be just 1 ad.

3. I will only accept advertisements from companies and products that I believe in, and that I believe offer a product or service of interest to you, the listener.
   Ideally I’d love to offer ads from anime-related businesses (stores that sell DVDs/Blu-rays, figures, etc.); if you happen to work at such a company and are looking for a place to advertise, please get in touch ;-). But until such a glorious occasion presents itself, you’ll probably be seeing and hearing ads for various tech related products and services, since most anime fans I know fall rather squarely in the geek/tech enthusiast mold.

Finally, lest you get the wrong idea that I’ll suddenly be “rolling in it” and buying yachts and taking trips to Tahiti or something like that, we’re not talking about a whole lot of money here. Again it’ll basically amount to just a little extra “something” to help keep the bills paid around here. (Besides if I were to take a trip, it would be to Japan, and not Tahiti or anywhere boring like that. 😉 )

Anyway, if you have any comments or concerns about all of this, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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