Net radio ads are on their way to becoming “premium inventory”, as they follow the growth and evolution of online search engines and the search ads that have rocketed to fame (and fortune) in recent years. That’s the prediction TargetSpot CEO Doug Perlson lays out in the Forbes article, “The Coming Online Radio Ad Boom.” Perlson maintains that Internet radio advertising — with its visual/audible elements, geo-targeting capabilities, growing audience, immediate feedback, and low cost — could very well follow the search inventory ad trajectory to become the next big thing in Internet monetization. That said, driving online radio consumption will be a key component to helping propel online radio towards Perlson’s predicted advertising boom.

Advertisers want the assurance of a growing, targetable listener base. As such, Radio companies will need to keep established listeners coming back for fresh, quality content while simultaneously driving new traffic to expand their online audience. Online radio currently has more than 80 million listeners in the U.S. and trends point to continued growth. According to a J.P. Morgan survey, Internet radio’s listener base has grown 27% annually since 2000. Consumers are spending increasingly more time on the Web in search of premium content, and radio broadcast content repurposed for online listening is clearly in demand.

“Internet radio advertising offers a unique ability to cut through the noise and deliver a message that is both literally and figuratively heard. It’s a high-impact medium that has only recently opened up to the advertising masses through advanced technology solutions.”

Perlson believes that if we look to “the history of the monetization of the Internet, the direction in which online radio must go is clear”; online radio must be positioned to highlight: its association with major media companies and trusted brands, the premium nature of its content, and the high-impact of the audio medium. Yet there is a major distinction between the search advertising success story Perlson says Internet radio advertising is set to emulate. And that difference is text.

Search ads successfully took off creating a “search economy” in which the primary currency is text; thus far this has proven somewhat problematic for media companies. To play the game radio companies need to drive traffic through the search engines as listeners want an easy way to search and access radio programming online. However most of the value of online radio content is trapped inside of the clip, out of view of the large search engines. Plugging radio into the online search economy via text is a great way to solve this currency problem, propelling Internet radio into the search economy at full throttle and bringing the coming boom within more certain reach.