Wizzard Media announced this Monday their third-quarter results, which continued along their impressive track record of sustained growth for this year. Wizzard, the publicly traded podcast network, is still not in the black but continues to bring in more revenue than most other networks could dream of doing.

The year to date reported revenues that exceeded last year’s by 29% at $4.6 million as of September 30th. The Q3 revenues alone sat at $1.5 million, only a 4% increase year over year, yet still impressive in what has been a generally unimpressive quarter so far for the general economy.

Growth is slowing slightly at Wizzard, but they continue to close the gap towards profitability, and it’s on track to at least match last year’s performance in terms of revenue.

As reports of the economic slow down finally hitting the online advertising sector have surfaced, it’s a good thing that Wizzard has appeared to have significantly cut their costs, with their net losses having outpaced revenue and dropped by 89% since last year.

Enough With the Numbers. What Does it Mean?

As I said last week when Revision3 announced their performance last week, 2009 will show us which business model is superior in terms of online multimedia content providers.

The two companies represent two competing forms of content monetization for today’s podcast only content. Revision3, like other niche outfits such as FunnyOrDie, is primarily a creative force, putting the bulk of their resources into show development, on-air talent and production value. Wizzard represents the other side of the industry, like YouTube and others, who act primarily as a hosting outfit and put their resources into developing unique and innovative ways to monetize the content created by those who aren’t directly employed by the company.

Neither model is particularly cheap, or clearly superior on the face of it, but running a network isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. The aggregation route has the potential to be the superior distance runner, since they’re in the business of developing and utilizing monetization technology for massive amounts of content, which after a point will go down in costs. Meanwhile, independent creative networks will continue to have significant production overhead, since on-air talent, when it’s successful, can only go up in cost.

Logic would then dictate that since content must continue to be created, yet won’t be most efficiently monetized by strictly in-house teams and technology, that the only way creative networks can succeed in the long term would be by either folding into or partnering with larger aggregation networks.

I think that as 2009 rolls in, we’ll see some of this start to happen with the recognizable names in this space. We’re starting to see some of this with the larger heritage studios and labels biting the bullet and partnering with YouTube. This trend will continue and possibly accelerate due to larger economic motivations.

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Two companies I’ve long been fans of have hooked up their platforms to work together: Wizzard and TubeMogul. Wizzard Media is the media giant in the podcasting space, and TubeMogul is a video distribution service with one of the most adept, savvy and aware crews I’ve run into in their space.

In case you haven’t seen our coverage of TubeMogul in the past, their service is one that allows you to upload a video once and distribute it automatically to just about every embedded video site out there. TubeMogul has been furiously striking partnerships with a number of different sites where original video is created, including our video platform of choice Episodic.

For us, after a video is uploaded and tagged on Episodic’s server, it’s simply a one click process to blast the video out to YouTube, Revver, Yahoo’s Video, Google Video, and many others. This is the same functionality that Wizzard seems to now have implimented with the added bonus of integrating the analytics TubeMogul gathers from all these video repository into the stats package on their service.

Record Revenues at Wizzard

This news comes hot on the heels of more good financial news for Wizzard in their second quarter 2008 financial results. Their revenues for Q208 were just shy of $1.5 million, up 3% from Q207, and shaved $868,000 off their quarterly losses year over year, putting them a lot closer to operating in the black.

All the other key indicators for the business grew significantly as well, with total downloaded shows from Wizzard servers topping out at nearly a quarter of a billion downloads for just this quarter.

All in all, Wizzard continues to prove that there is money in podcasting, be it audio or video. Wizzard has always had a reputation for excelling in audio, but with podcasting itself making a comeback in trendiness, and Wizzard making a significant effort in the video side of their business, they should have a bright rest of the year ahead of them, particularly with the increased interest in video from the mainstream advertising community.

[Disclosure: Wizzard Media/LibSyn hosts the audio version of Mashable Conversations]

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