Talkr has just launched a new service that takes a sites articles or blog posts and converts them into a spoken word audio podcast. While I think this is an innovative service I found the voice that does the podcast reading to sound very much like a robot in some of its pronunciations. However, I have still decided to sample the service and have offered audio links for all of my posts.
When I was setting up an account I got to the terms of service I found some interesting incentives for bloggers, though I think adoption of the service might be slow until a few improvements are made on the audio voice sound and quality to make it sound less robotic.
Check out these revenue share options from Talkr's terms of service:
"Talkr will provide the publisher with a link that the publisher may use to link to Talkr. If the publisher implements this link, and one of the publisher's readers follows the link and becomes a paying subscriber to Talkr, Talkr will provide a revenue share back to the publisher.
Talkr will pay the publisher a base commission of $7 for each subscriber that maintains their Talkr subscription for at least 30 days.
In addition, Talkr will pay the following incentives for publishers that refer subscribers in volume:
o Greater than or equal to 10 subscribers in a month: +10% ($7.70 per subscriber)
o From 11 to 29 subscribers a month: +20% ($8.40 per subscriber)
o 30+ subscribers a month: +30% ($9.10 per subscriber)
If the publisher agrees to include audio advertisements in the audio files that Talkr generates, Talkr will share the revenue generated from those advertisements with the publisher: 50% to the publisher, 50% to Talkr. Talkr will cover its costs to generate and host those audio files from its share of the revenue."
For another perspective on Talkr check out Lee Odden's post.