Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

Raise your hand if you kind of forgot where the word podcast comes from. The now-catchall term for digital audio shows goes back to the Apple iPod. And it’s been almost two decades now since Apple helped bring podcasts mainstream by adding them to iTunes.“We’re going to list thousands of podcasts and you’ll be able to click on them, download them for free, and subscribe to them right in iTunes,” said then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference.So, what was the business of podcasting like at the beginning, and where might it go from here? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty asked Nicholas Quah, podcast critic for Vulture and New York Magazine. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation:Nicholas Quah: My understanding is that there wasn’t really a business model. A lot of the early podcasts were just people making stuff and posting stuff around. And the analogy of the blog that rose with the rise of Google AdSense, these spam ads that you see on the internet, that was the ear