Radio unceremoniously booted Adam Carolla out the door, but with his podcast finding success and technology spreading the medium at a time when advertisers want in, he’s not looking back

When “King of all Media” Howard Stern, abdicated his radio throne in 2006, his former bosses divided this kingdom, bestowing the West Coast affiliates upon Adam “Ace Man” Carolla. And for three years, the former Man Show host kept his head above water, building a loyal following while CBS Radio tossed aside the other Stern replacements, including former Van Halen front man David Lee Roth. But in February of this year, it was finally Carolla’s turn to be walked toward the chopping block, as CBS axed Stern’s lone remaining stand-in.

Although Carolla no longer had a morning show, he planned to keep talking. Like Stern, he wanted to take his fans along to a burgeoning media platform, but unlike Stern there wouldn’t be $500 million payday waiting for him. On his next-to-last show, Adam announced his venture into the nascent land of podcasting, telling his listeners “they haven’t really figured out how to make money yet,” so he would do the show for free.

Carolla was making a bet on the future of the medium, pinning his hopes to its spread via advancing technology and an influx of ad dollars to make it profitable. “They’re going to have the internet in cars and they are going to have it very soon and I do think this is going to be the way of the future,” said the Ace Man. “If you get ears and eyeballs on whatever you’re doing, somebody will quickly find a way to make money on it, that’s all advertising is.”

Five months later, the former Loveline host looks prescient, with companies like Microsoft and Ford fulfilling the “internet in cars” portion of his theory, and others, like Subway, proving advertisers will throw money behind podcasts. And Carolla has fulfilled his end of the bargain, getting his legion of fans to download the show, shooting him consistently to the top of the charts on iTunes and putting himself at the vanguard of an emerging media.

You’re probably thinking to yourself, how could the host of the sophomoric Man Show, a guy who just got shitcanned from his radio gig be at the forefront of anything? Well, his firing wasn’t due to a lack of listeners. Although Carolla never matched Stern, the Los Angeles-based talk radio host’s numbers gained ground in all 13 of his markets, including first-place ratings in Seattle and Las Vegas. Unfortunately for Carolla, CBS deemed the high overhead of a talk radio station untenable in the throes of the country’s economic meltdown, so to cut costs it switched his home station KLSX to top 40, summarily firing everyone on the air.

And to judge Carolla by The Man Show alone is like judging Louis Armstrong by how well he plays sheet music. Yes, they’re both capable of executing a script, but that’s not where the genius happens. The best of these men occurs in the improvisation, when the music or words just flow from them in a blustering string of consciousness. On his radio show, the Ace Man could be off script, and from subjects including celebrities run amok and his hatred of L.A.’s mayor to topics as banal as his love of his label maker, Carolla hilariously riffed on nearly every subject each weekday morning. I say this all as a guy who hated him before hearing the radio show. I found his humor to be a little too fratboy for my tastes—even during my fratboy days.

More than a year into his run, hearing two of my friends incessantly drone on about Carolla convinced me to put aside my preconceived notions and give him a chance. I went to iTunes, downloaded the podcast version of the radio show and I was hooked. Many others followed the same path, getting the show not from radio, but from the internet. Sitting in the studio each morning, Carolla realized the podcast version of his show provided him a fan base far beyond the reach of his terrestrial radio stations. “Half the calls we get are from cities we aren’t even syndicated in, so this is the future and if it hasn’t arrived yet, it’s coming. So I’d like to be on the vanguard of this,” Adam said as the sun set on his radio show.

On Friday February 20, as his on-air sidekick Teresa Strasser wiped away tears and Carolla said his final goodbyes, he let the listeners know the new show would begin in earnest the following Monday. Because of his CBS buyout, Carolla would do the podcast unpaid, eschewing any offers of sponsorship until his contract ran out—a minor hiccup he explained. “I love talking, I love the sound of my own nasally drone and I’d do the show for free if that’s all they offered,” he said.

He had an air of optimism uncommon to a person just handed a pink slip. The podcast offered a utopian vision of the type of show he always wanted to do, but couldn’t on radio. “We will not have to listen to the program directors and we won’t have to take advice from guys in suits from New York who don’t know what the f they’re talking about. We can build our own audience and we can own our own show. “

So Carolla left behind radio and ventured headlong into a new medium that carried no promise of ever delivering a payday. All he had was faith that fans would follow him, sponsors would take notice, and technology would evolve to make the podcast ubiquitous.

A few months after Carolla’s show debuted in 2006, Microsoft and Ford inked a deal that poured the foundation for Adam’s podcast theory. But computers and internet in cars? It seems like the last thing you’d want is some asshole in the lane next to you going 75 with a keyboard on his lap. Software developers had to find a way make it safe with “eyes on the road and hands on the wheel,” says Velle Kolde of Microsoft Auto.

For more than a decade, Microsoft has been toiling away in the suburbs outside Seattle, looking for opportunities to integrate software into cars. As cell phones and mp3 players became omnipresent, its consumer research showed people wanted those devices seamlessly integrated into their vehicles, giving Microsoft Auto the opening it needed.

Unlike some of the products of its past (I’m looking at you, Vista), Microsoft emphasized a simple, user-friendly interface where you could easily operate your phone or mp3 player. To accomplish that, while keeping safety in mind, the development team co-opted voice activation technology already in the works elsewhere at Microsoft. For once, the Redmond-based software giant created something undeniably cool. You could answer calls, change playlists and have text messages read aloud to you in your car, all with the press of a button and a simple voice command. And this wasn’t some temperamental, finicky system either, Microsoft carefully crafted it to feature “noise and echo cancellation in the software,” and “optimizations that reconcile voice changes and 70,000 intonations in the voice,” says Kolde. Simply put, “you say Beyonce and it’ll play Beyonce.”

Armed with its own consumer research that mirrored Microsoft’s, and impressed by the technology, Ford got onboard. The automaker “saw what Microsoft’s software was capable of delivering and we made a commitment,” says Alan Hall, a Ford spokesman. With that, Ford Sync powered by Microsoft was born.

Since the first models hit showroom floors in 2007, Fords equipped with the $395 Sync have outsold unequipped models two-to-one, proving the two companies’ research and intuition correct. However, their endgame was bigger than just integrating phones and iPods. Since that original version, Sync added 911 emergency assist and this year’s update includes traffic, directions and business search. Driving around an unfamiliar city you could press a button, say, “search near me, Starbucks,” and Sync would give you directions to the closest one. Combine this with a service to deliver news and weather and “it’s the first crack at getting internet-like data into the car,” says Hall.

The Microsoft-Ford partnership shows technology trending toward the Ace Man’s prediction. The key to fully realizing connectivity in cars, allowing you to download podcasts while you drive is already with you every day: your phone. As wireless networks like 3G improve and will soon make way for 4G, they’ll be the conduit through which the internet will flow into automobiles. You won’t have to buy a separate connection for your car, your Blackberry or iPhone will act as your link to the net.

It’s not some far-fetched fantasy to imagine sitting in your car someday soon, pressing a button, saying “Download Adam Carolla Podcast” and the stereo obliging your command. In this world, Carolla would no longer need radio to reach the captive audience of commuters. Drivers would only need a cell phone linked to a powerful enough network and Carolla’s podcast could be plucked from the ether to play in their car in a matter of moments.

With the accessibility Sync offers, Podcasts will continue to grow, but even without this leap in technology, the medium is coming into its own. According to a study released late last year by Pew Research, 19 percent of internet users had downloaded a podcast, up from only 7 percent in early 2006. And the future of the medium looks even brighter, with the study showing young demographics are adopting the technology even faster than the public at large, meaning the podcast is gaining traction among Madison Avenue’s most coveted cohort.

Despite the promising jump in popularity of the form, without the ability to make money, the podcast could go the way of BetaMax, MiniDisc and the dinosaurs: quaint but extinct. Adam’s severance package affords him some time to develop the show while people try to figure out how to make a nickel via podcast, but it ain’t cheap. Bandwidth alone costs Carolla $10,000 per month and he’s not alone. Another top performer on iTunes, This American Life, asks listeners for donations to offset its over $100,000 in fees. Podcasting needs advertising, not just to turn a profit, but to stay afloat.

Carolla can be optimistic about finding a sponsor—he only needs to look toward his good friend ESPN’s The Sports Guy Bill Simmons to see a podcaster who’s secured one. For a couple years, Simmons has produced his show, The BS Report, and in February Subway put its money behind the podcast. The Worldwide Leader in Sports gives the home of the $5 foot long exclusive marketing rights and integrates the brand messaging right into the show, with Simmons conducting interviews on the “Subway Fresh Take Hotline.” This incorporation of advertising makes the medium intriguing to marketers because of the “low level of clutter and high degrees of listener engagement,” says Nic Covey, an analyst for Nielsen. Without competing messages from other advertisers, the marketer’s ads will be “stickier.” Additionally, marketers may value podcasts because they “offer the routine, appointment—even if self regulated—consumption that advertisers crave and lately fear is fading,” says Covey. It’s a bunch of marketing speak that means podcasting is alright by advertisers.

Tony Pace, Subway’s chief marketing officer, says after a healthy internal debate, the company moved forward with an ad buy on ESPN podcasts, betting that medium will be an advertising platform of the future and integral to any digital marketing strategy. “The world is changing pretty rapidly, so to some degree we making hopefully an intelligent decision that this will be continuing format,” says Pace. “I think podcasts are going to continue to grow.”

While The Sports Guy’s show garnered a sponsor, his ratings pale in comparison to Carolla’s podcast, which Apple calls “one of the fastest growing and most popular in history.” When his CBS contract expires, advertisers will pound down Carolla’s door to access his large pool of male listeners. Even more enticing to potential sponsors is Carolla’s willingness to play ball with them. “Hopefully, just like the radio, they’ll be live reads incorporated into the show and we’ll have some fun with it.”

But for now, the money flows out of, not into, the Adam Carolla Podcast. Yet Carolla continues to perch himself on his L-shaped orange couch, spewing unfiltered rants, and discussing random topics with guests ranging from actors and comedians to his gaggle of lifelong friends. He remains steadfast in the belief that he is at the forefront of a movement, a new media, and it bothers him little that the podcast fails to fill his pockets.

“I have done well in my career with a deferred or delayed gratification. I understand very well the concept of doing something free for a while for a payday down the road.”