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Marco Arment, writing on his site marco.org:

This time, I’m not too worried about Pocket Casts and Castro. Well, a little — that instinct never fully leaves a person. But even after Pocket Casts ships their silence skipper and volume booster shortly on iOS and Castro 2 comes out with a far nicer UI than I could ever imagine, they have their users, I have mine, and we’ll all be fine. We have much bigger problems than each other.

Podcasts are hot right now. Big Money is coming.

Big Money isn’t going to sell nicely designed, hand-crafted, RSS-backed podcast players for $2.99 or ask you to pay what you want to support them, because that doesn’t make Big Money.

They’re coming with shitty apps and fantastic business deals to dominate the market, lock down this open medium into proprietary “technology”, and build empires of middlemen to control distribution and take a cut of everyone’s revenue.

That’s how you make Big Money. And it usually works.

I would hate to see the independent and creative world of podcasting crushed by big corporations who would bully great apps like Overcast and fantastic networks like Relay FM out of business. But I have to believe the quality of the content and the passion of the people who run the shows and the company mean something, and that people and advertisers would continue to support them.

With respect to how hot podcasts are right now – this article from Celebrity Net Worth has some estimates on what the top podcasters make per episode, and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber found them to be underestimating: