There are multiple ways to monetize a podcast and one of those methods growing in popularity is crowdfunding. Earning an income directly from an audience is nothing new to podcasting. Podcasters have been receiving donations thru systems like PayPal since the early days of the medium. Over the years, new concepts and services have emerged to help make crowdfunding a viable way to earn anything from some extra side money to a full-time living by pooling the collective contributions of an audience.

The latest entrant to the crowd funding space is Castbacker. The Castbacker website says the service is, “Like Kickstarter for podcasts,” and it promises that, “In five minutes, you’ll be ready to receive sweet, sweet recurring income from your listeners.” In its overview video, Castbacker demonstrates that creating a podcaster account is easy, and that when listeners decide to become podcast backers, all they need to do is fill out a simple form and provide their credit card information. Even tho Castbacker uses Stripe to handle its payments, and it will be necessary for podcasters to have Stripe accounts in order to get paid, listeners who’d like to support a podcast thru Castbacker will not need Stripe accounts of their own. (Stripe accounts are free to create but the service does have transaction fees.)

Castbacker gives your podcast a unique page on the Castbacker website where backers can sign up. These unique pages can be customized to help match the theme and branding of a podcaster’s main website.

Castbacker comes at a time when the crowdfunding is busy with many competing services. Regardless, Castbacker is the first service of its kind that’s focused specifically on podcasting. If you’ve been considering a crowdfunding option for your podcast, Castbacker could be the way to go.